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Cold War II: The USA war for "Full Specturm Dominance" on the globe

Skepticism > Political Skeptic > Fifth Column of Neoliberal Globalization > Color revolutions

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The second Cold War is the war of the USA against Russia and China for "Full spectrum Dominance" on the globe.  Anatol Lieven's recent piece, How the west lost, describes well the current situation of global crisis of neoliberalism which happened just after 40 years after the USA dubious 'victory' in the Cold War I -- the dissolution of the USSR. Which to a certain extent was facilitated by mediocre and subservant  to the West of Michael Gorbachov and his close "neoliberal" entourage of reformersas well as ascendance of neoliberalism and the level of degradation of the USSR Bolsheviks elite -- the level that reminds the level of degradation of the current USA neoliberal elite (Hillary Clinton, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, Kamala Harris, etc) ):

As Alexander Zevin has written at the Economist, the house journal of Anglo-American elites, the revolutions in Eastern Europe “turbocharged the neoliberal dynamic, and seemed to stamp it with an almost providential seal.” In retrospect, the magazine’s 1990s covers have a tragicomic appearance, reflecting a degree of faith in the rightness and righteousness of neoliberal capitalism more appropriate to a religious cult.

These beliefs interacted to produce a dominant atmosphere of “there is no alternative,” which made it impossible and often in effect forbidden to conduct a proper public debate on the merits of the big western presumptions, policies or plans of the era. As a German official told me when I expressed some doubt about the wisdom of rapid EU enlargement, “In my ministry we are not even allowed to think about that.”

This was a sentiment I encountered again and again (if not often so frankly expressed) in western establishment institutions in that era: in economic journals if it was suggested that rapid privatisation in the former USSR would lead to massive corruption, social resentment and political reaction; in security circles, if anyone dared to question the logic of Nato expansion; and almost anywhere if it was pointed out that the looting of former Soviet republics was being assiduously encouraged and profited from by western banks, and regarded with benign indifference by western governments.

... ... ...

Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history. This was summed up in the memorandum on “Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999,” drawn up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media. Its central message was:

“The US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests… We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role…”

By claiming for the US the right of unilateral intervention anywhere in the world and denying other major powers a greater role in their regions, this strategy essentially extended the Monroe Doctrine (which effectively defined the “western hemisphere” as the US sphere of influence) to the entire planet: an ambition greater than that of any previous power. The British Empire at its height knew that it could never intervene unilaterally on the continent of Europe or in Central America. The most megalomaniac of European rulers understood that other great powers with influence in their own areas of the world would always exist.

While that 1992 Washington paper spoke of the “legitimate interests” of other states, it clearly implied that it would be Washington that would define what interests were legitimate, and how they could be pursued. And once again, though never formally adopted, this “doctrine” became in effect the standard operating procedure of subsequent administrations. In the early 2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites would couch it in the terms of “full spectrum dominance.” As the younger President Bush declared in his State of the Union address in January 2002, which put the US on the road to the invasion of Iraq: “By the grace of God, America won the Cold War… A world once divided into two armed camps now recognises one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America.”

Global crisis of neoliberalism put the USA world dominance pretentions into question. At the same time  the USA elite can't abandon this ideology without complete and utter loss of face.  The first state of this crisis was the 2008 financial crisis and now  we entered the second  stage due to the COVID-19 pandemic and inept reaction to it by the USA government.

Triumphalism led US policymakers, and their transatlantic followers, to forget one cardinal truth about geopolitical and military power: that in the end it is not global and absolute, but local and relative. It is the amount of force or influence a state wants to bring to bear in a particular place and on a -particular issue, relative to the power that a rival state is willing and able to bring to bear. The truth of this has been shown repeatedly over the past generation. For all America’s overwhelming superiority on paper, it has turned out that many countries have greater strength than the US in particular places: Russia in Georgia and Ukraine, Russia and Iran in Syria, China in the South China Sea, and even Pakistan in southern Afghanistan.

American over-confidence, accepted by many Europeans and many Britons especially, left the US in a severely weakened condition to conduct what should have been clear as far back as the 1990s to be the great competition of the future—that between Washington and Beijing.

On the one hand, American moves to extend Nato to the Baltics and then (abortively) on to Ukraine and Georgia, and to abolish Russian influence and destroy Russian allies in the Middle East, inevitably produced a fierce and largely successful Russian nationalist reaction. Within Russia, the US threat to its national interests helped to consolidate and legitimise Putin’s control. Internationally, it ensured that Russia would swallow its deep-seated fears of China and become a valuable partner of Beijing.

While the war is called "cold" (attempt to strangulate the opponent via sanctions and dollar hegemony in the world financial system; see USA-Russia Gas War for detail)  the distance from the hot war is really small, especially in Syria, where the USA support jihadists (financed by the USA proxies such as Saudi Arabia and Gulf states) , while Russians support Assad government.

On the level of "political class" the Russian and US perceptions of war are totally different: for a Russian politician the war is a fight for survival as an individual and as a nation, for a US politician war and killing are just another day in the office. Most USA politicians seem to be unable to grasp the simple truth that the WWIII will be the end of the USA as a country (as well as the end of Russia as a country -- mutual assured destruction). They love to balance of the edge. But most probably the level of destruction will be such that those who stay alive in those two countries will envy dead.  It looks like they blindly subscribe to the quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”

A classic example of this kind of people are and  the current Secretary of state "Pompous Pompeo" and Michael Morell  served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2010 to 2013 and twice as its acting director, first in 2011 and then from 2012 to 2013. The latter is probably representative of the whole CIA "anti-Russian"  stratum.

And that includes perception of the risks of "Cold War" turning into hot.  Jingoism of the current US elite is really crazy: ‘Kill Russians and Iranians, threaten Assad,’ says ex-CIA chief backing Clinton. And this is not some drunk schmuck in the pub.  This is a  top CIA official, who twice served as the acting director of the agency

In an interview with Charlie Rose in August 2016, Morell blamed Syrian President Assad, Russia, and Iran for the death toll in Syria.[28] He called on the moderate opposition in Syria to make Russia and Iran "pay a price" for their involvement in Syria, in part by targeting their military personnel in the country.[29] He also called on the US to begin bombing Syrian government targets in order to bring Assad to the negotiating table.[30] Regarding President Bashar al-Assad, Morell argued "I want to go after those things that Assad sees as his personal power base. I want to scare Assad."[29]

You would think that this guys is a crazy psychopath (thanks God he retired form CIA in 2013). But his views reflect the views of a large swat of Washington political establishment. And President Trump actually fulfilled Hillary bidding and attacked Assad's military installations, the action  which Morell argued for.   Which opened a new chapter in Cold War II history.

Key events of Cold War II

Generally we can think about Cold War II as consisting of several phases, signified by particular events:

  1. Phase I
    1. Prehistory (1991-1999). The USA, especially Bill Clinton administration,  wanted to weaken, isolate and subdue Russia since the dissolution of the USSR (using corrupt regime of drunk Yeltsin as a puppet and Harvard mafia as economic advisors; Russian neoliberals who came to power in Russia after the dissolution of the USSR  allowed fox to guard the chickens and faced consequences )  and encouraged efforts to dismember it (via support of Chechen radicals and islamists, in general).
    2. 1999: War against Yugoslavia as the demonstration of Russia neo-colonial status.  Primakov flight U-turn over Athlantic
    3. 2000: Putin ascendance to power as a reaction to Yeltsin regime failings and neo-colonization of Russia.  Kursk submarile disaster CBS news then broke the story that the United States had three ships in the vicinity observing the naval exercise that Kursk was taking part in. Two of the three ships were submarines, later determined to be USS Memphis and USS Toledo, type 688 Los Angeles class fast attack submarines which are often used for covert intelligence gathering.  USS Memphis, reported by Norway to be undergoing repairs at a Norwegian naval yard.
    4. 2001: Neocons get full power in Bush II administration and started to implement PNAC agenda. September 11, 2001 events. Invasion of Afghanistan with Russian support (via North Alliance) with large supplies of Russian arms.
    5. 2003: Colin Powell lies to UN in his speech about Iraq weapons of mass destruction(full text) falsely accusing Iraq regime of producing chemical weapons. Subsequent invasion of Iraq under false evidence and occupation of Iraq. The USA uses events in Afghanistan to establish military bases in former Soviet republics starting the operation of "encirclement" of Russia. For some period of time Russia allowed transport of military cargo via its territory. this stopped only after "NATO sanctions" were introduced in 2014.
    6. 2008: In august 2008 Georgia staged invasion of north Ossetia which resulted in Russian military operation against Georgia (called the war with Georgia). This was the first time Russia opposed US sanctioned actions of US allies. And did it militarily.
    7. 2011: "We say, we came, he died". The USA fooled Russian President Medvedev into supporting "no-fly zones" which were interpreted by West as the cart blanche for full scale bombing of Gaddafi regime. American and British naval forces fired over 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles,[20] the French Air Force, British Royal Air Force, and Royal Canadian Air Force[21] undertaking sorties across Libya and a naval blockade by Coalition forces. French jets launched air strikes against Libyan Army tanks and vehicles. The Libyan government response to the campaign was totally ineffectual. Regime soon fell and Gaddafi was brutally murdered.
    8. 2011-2012 attempt to stage a color revolution in Russia by Obama administration (with Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State), using the power of NGOs and neoliberal fifth column to prevent return of Putin to power ("white revolution" of 2012)
  2. Phase II
    1. 2014: Anti-Russian hysteria during Sochi Olympics, Ukrainian coup d'état and introduction of sanctions. Malaysian flight MH17  tragegy that points to a false flag operation
    2. 2015: Russian involvement in Syria and Ambush of Russian Su-24 bomber by Turkey facilitated by US intelligence.  
    3. 2016: US deploy offensive and dangerous to Russian strategic forces "missile shield" in Poland and Romania, continuing the policy of encirclement of Russia. On May 12, 2016 US missile shield in Romania goes live to Russian fury
    4. 2016: Anti-Russian hysteria during and after Presidential elections.
    5. 2016 -- the start of Russiagate hysteria and Neo-McCarthyism campaign Democratic Pary turns into the second War party in Washington and the level of jingoism and anti-Russian hysteria reached unprecedented level. Matt Taibbi (Mar 23, 2019, this is chapter of his book Hate Inc. ) aptly called Russiagate this generation's Iraq WMD story.
    6. 2017: Neo-Mccratyism campaign against Russia was launched as a reaction to Hillary loss in 2016 election fierce  , with the level of demonization of Russia justifiable only if the USA is reading population for a war.  The Congress starts the investigation of Russian meddling into the US Presidential Elections.
    7. April 2017: Hopes about Trump more reasonable approach to foreign policy and detente with Russia vanished. Under relentless attacks of neocons, which actually resemble a color revolution" (called Purple revolution) Trump folded. Attack on Syrian airbase followed, which actually signify direct attack on Russian involvement (and policy) in Syria. It was masked as a reaction on Khan Sheikhoun gas attack (which, most probably, was a false flag operation)
    8. March 2018, Skripal poisoning false flag by (most probably) the UK intelligence services with full support of the USA and weker support of other NATO countries.
    9. March 2018 Mike Pompeo, the CIA director nominated to be secretary of state boasted that the U.S. killed up to 200 Russians in airstrikes conducted against forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in February.
    10. December 2019 -- Ukrainegate -- attempt to depose President Trump attempted by Clinton democrats who fear revelations of their dirty dealings in Ukraine during EuroMaidan coup d'état, including corrupt dealings of Vice-President Biden
    11. August 2020. The USA attempt to block North Stream and organization by unknown actors (some suspicions are that it was MI6 via her person in Navalny close circle ) of "Navalny poisoning" provocation to derail the project.

Sanction as official start of Cold War II

What is called "sanctions" is essentially the "official" start of Cold War II. Not everybody  understand this. Russians tend to obscure this fact with bravado. "Sanctions is not only a challenge, but also can serve as a useful resource for our country economic development" -- said the first deputy head of the Presidential Administration Vyacheslav Volodin, in his address to the seminar meeting with officials of the government of subjects of the Russian Federation and representatives of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation which took place Dec 1-3.

"Today, the state conducts an internal policy that really reflects the interests and enjoys the support of the absolute majority of the Russian people. For example, the reunification of the Crimea and Sevastopol to Russia has supported more than 93% of Russian citizens" noted Vyacheslav Volodin. "But the highest level of support for government policy - not a reason to calm down and relax. This is the issue of preversing this huge level of credibility, great expectations of people. It is important to use this social energy for development of the country, addressing major social and economic problems. "

"The current economic situation is today is an inflected on us stress test for the government, for the economy, for the country as a whole," - said Vyacheslav Volodin.

"This is an opportunity to see who is who. World leaders of the 20th century took place at different times this path - the path of development in the face of opposition of the environment, trade wars, sanctions and restrictions. Some of the countries, such as China, have been able, in spite of the sanctions regime, to build one of the strongest economies in the world and dramatically improve the quality of life of its citizens. Such an opportunity does exist for us too. "

According to Vyacheslav Volodin, economic recovery should be a continuing priority for the country. Sanctions - this is an additional opportunity to resolve overdue to restructure the domestic market, provided support for domestic manufactures.

"Import substitution and new industrialization, which we discussed back in the pre-election articles and messages of the President of the Russian Federation in 2012 and 2013 - a key aspect of state sovereignty,"

I would recommend Volodin to listen famous Russian song, almost a hymn of Russian navy Varyag.  Russia now faces the whole NATO alliance, which is by oprder or magnitute is more powerful economically.  

Putin assessed situation in more sober way (From 28 min Putin discuss sanctions), but still I think underestimated the capabilities of the "collective West" led by the USA to wreck Russian economy. And while Biden is a regular neocon chickenhawk (essentially Hillary in pants), behind him  like an aircraft carriers stand 500 largest US companies and the whole US military industrial complex which wants war: 

The U.S. and the European Union imposed sanctions on people and companies close to President Vladimir Putin after Russia annexed the Black Sea Crimea peninsula in March. Ukraine has accused Russia of supplying weapons, military vehicles and mercenaries to separatists, which Russia denies. The two nations are also in conflict over gas, with Russia cutting off supplies this week because of unpaid bills.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said Putin's government faces the threat of further economic sanctions if it doesn’t do more “to exercise its influence among the separatists to lay down their weapons and renounce violence, both of which Russia has thus far failed to do,” according to a statement released by the White House yesterday.

And it is not accidental that  the World Bank, one of the cornerstones of world neoliberal economic order,  has designed two scenarios for the growth of the Russian economy in 2014 taking into account increased risks over the Crimean crisis (MOSCOW, March 26 (RIA Novosti)

The first variant is based on short-term influences of the events in Ukraine on Russia's economy, and the second, threats of a serious shock and downturn of the gross domestic product (GDP).

"The scenario with a low level of risk presupposes that actions over the Crimean crisis will be limited and short-term and with a prognosis of a slowing economic growth to 1.1 percent in 2014 and a slight increase to 1.3 percent in 2015,"

according to a World Bank report on the Russian economy published on Wednesday.

French politician Philippe de Villiers Without Russia Europe has no future by Viacheslav

Q: What do you think about the "war of sanctions" that Russia waged against the West?

Philippe de Villiers: I will answer you as a person, seriously studied history. It was not even a single case where sanctions would lead to the desired result. Moreover, they give the opposite result.

Country against which an embargo is introduced, usually finds the hidden reserves and becomes stronger. Sanctions by themselves - it is an act of war, they hurt the pride of the people, and those mobilized, concentrated, what is happening now in Russia. In French, one of the meanings of the word "sanctions" refers to a school dictionary. Teacher allowed to punish the student to apply to it "sanctions." But as far as I know, Mr. Putin is not a disciple of Mr Barroso. Sanctions lead to retaliatory sanctions to a dangerous chain of mutual blows.

Cooperation between countries - it is an act of peace. Our joint project of theme parks in Russia and indeed this is. Support him, President Putin has committed an act of peace. I appeal to all the French entrepreneurs to follow suit in order to strengthen ties and friendship between France and Russia.

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William Bonner


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[Jul 29, 2021] Yeltsin role in Russian history

Jul 29, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Max21c 12 hours ago (Edited) remove link

When has Russia not been ruled by an autocrat?

From Peter the Great to Catherine the Great to Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III and Nicholas II in 1917, Romanov czars ruled Russia. After 1917 came Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.

Pat was doing so well up until this set of sentences... when Pat Buchanan horribly erred in including the shifty and ne'er-do-well Boris Yeltsin as such person was an idiot & a crook so much more so than an autocrat... He was too dumb, crooked, naive, drunken, and out of touch with reality to be an autocrat... Yeltsin was just a fool, a lost fool, a forlorn fool, and a weakling... Much like the Czar that came under the spell of Rasputin... Yeltsin bought into all the Western Elites malarkey and foolishness about economic reforms that came close to ruining Russian civilization and destroying Russia as a society and a nation...

Thereafter God upon feeling guilty for having allowed the worthless Yeltsin onto power... then God sent the Angel St. Vladimir to save Russian civilization from destruction and to save the Russian people... and the Holy Putin worked his magic and Russia was not destroyed, the Russians were saved, and Russian civilization preserved for the future and spared its demise...

CovidBannedTard 12 hours ago (Edited) remove link

The CCP loving corporate western bankers who sold American manufacturing to the CCP almost had Russia on its knees with Yeltsin.They were asset stripping it.

Then Putin slammed their tally whackers in a door.

And booted them out.

The same CCP loving corporate bankers are still asset stripping America 21 years and counting since Putin kicked them out.

[Jul 24, 2021] Steele Dossier Peddlers Confirm Its Substance With New Forgeries

Jul 16, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Today the Guardian published another fake 'Russiagate' story:

Kremlin papers appear to show Putin's plot to put Trump in White House

Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a "mentally unstable" Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia's national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.
...
Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.

Yaawwwnn ...

We know, without reading it, that the story is fake because its main author is Luke Harding. Harding also authored the story which claimed that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manaford met Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. That story was proven to be false but the Guardian , to its shame, still has it up on its website .

In 2017 Luke Harding abruptly ended an interview with Aaron Maté after Harding was challenged over false claims he had made in his book about 'Russiagate'. The last five minutes of that video are quite amusing .

The Guardian story claims that the 'leaked' nonsense paper was discussed in high level Kremlin meeting in January 2016. It was then decided, it alleges, to support Trump. But in January 2016 there was no one, not even Donald Trump himself, who thought that he would win the Republican primary or even the presidency. But the Kremlin is supposed to have discussed him at the highest level well before anyone thought he could win?

Various people make interesting remarks about the new Guardian fakery:

Tara McCormack @McCormack_Tara - 12:13 UTC · Jul 15, 2021

I am seriously coming to the conclusion that Luke Harding is a Russian operative who has been put in place as part of a long term dastardly plan to make British journalism appear ridiculous.

---
Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg - 12:02 UTC · 15 Jul 2021

The next Luke Harding MI6 hoax.
Passing off forged Kremlin minutes saying things like "It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump's] election to the post of US president."
Hilarious
theguardian.com/world/2021/jul"¦

---
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald - 12:07 UTC · 15 Jul 2021

The part of the media that feigns anger at misinformation is uncritically promoting a story today by Luke Harding that Russia was blackmailing Trump -- the same Harding who has published many false stories, championed the Steele Dossier and claimed Trump was long a Russian agent.
...
Now suddenly, Harding claims he obtained leaked, highly sensitive Kremlin documents that just so happen to prove all the lies he's been peddling for years, that not even Mueller's huge team found. Because it advances liberals' interests, journalists are uncritically spreading it.
...
I will once use this shabby behavior to against highlight 2 points:

1) The contempt and loss of trust people harbor for the corporate media is completely justified and well-earned.

2) These outlets are by far the most prolific and destructive disseminators of disinformation.

Even people who are typically inclined to promote all kinds of anti-Russian nonsense are cautious on this item.

Thomas Rid @RidT - 12:38 UTC · 15 Jul 2021

This Guardian story is likely to make big waves. I would remain somewhat cautious for now, however. For a "leak" of this magnitude, we need at least some details on the chain of custody. Also note the Guardian's own hedging ("papers appear to show") theguardian.com/world/2021/jul"¦

---
Pwn All The Things @pwnallthethings - 14:40 UTC · 15 Jul 2021

Also, just putting this out there, if the US had this and thought it was real, how likely is it that it would have survived the waterfall of leaks of the past few years? And yet, here we are, with this as exclusive by the UK's Guardian, and conspicuously not, say, WaPo or NYT.

Christopher Steele, the 'former' British intelligence officer who peddle the fake dossier about alleged Russian Trump kompromat on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, worked and still works for Orbis Intelligence, a British private outlet run by 'former' British spies.

They are still at it ...

Orbis Business Intelligence @OrbisBIOfficial - 10:48 UTC · Jul 15, 2021

Great reporting on an important story.

Luke Harding @lukeharding1968 - 10:02 UTC · Jul 15, 2021

Exclusive: Leaked Putin papers appear to show #Russia's plot to put a "mentally unstable" Donald Trump into the White House "" my story with @julianborger in Washington and @dansabbagh in London
Kremlin papers appear to show Putin's plot to put Trump in White House

"Great reporting.. " "..important story"

Yeah. Sure. Whatever.

Posted by b on July 15, 2021 at 15:20 UTC | Permalink


Bemildred , Jul 15 2021 15:31 utc | 1


They embarass us all with this sort of stupidity. And being British, of course, they double down on it.

" REVEALED: Iran plotted to kidnap Iranian-American journalist from Brooklyn, transport her by speedboat to Venezuela and then fly her to the Islamic republic because she criticized regime, FBI say"

You just cannot get much more ludicrous than that.

Bemildred , Jul 15 2021 15:33 utc | 2
And lots of projection too, we all know who lies and indulges in all sorts of chicanery to silence critics (like Assange, say).
james , Jul 15 2021 15:50 utc | 3
damn you gottlieb! look what you started, lol...

thanks b... these intel agencies running the "free press" sure are getting boring really fast....

james , Jul 15 2021 15:52 utc | 4
@ 1 bemildred.... i knew it was a lie when i heard it on the cbc radio yesterday... if the cbc is running with it - it is an outright made up lie... accept everything on the surface and never question anything!!! be a good citizen, lol...
Bigben , Jul 15 2021 16:00 utc | 5
The articles from The Guardian and all don't prove anything about Russia's plans. The cite the January 26 meeting of the Security Council as Proof of Putin's plans. If I were in Putin's place, I would also have been happy with Trump's election and its likely socioeconomic impact on the US society.
Tuyzentfloot , Jul 15 2021 16:12 utc | 6
Harding strikes me as someone who's completely into the business of selling stories. He senses where the money is , looks at his sales numbers and concludes he's doing great because that is how he measures things. No concept of 'truth' other than financial success in the market of ideas. I suspect he makes a lot of money.
the pair , Jul 15 2021 16:18 utc | 7
damn, i wish i had it in me to be a cult leader...i'd make a beeline to the guardian office and have an army of kool-aid drinking simps at my disposal. when they aren't harrassing and firing women writers for calling out "female identifying" sex offenders in dresses or stirring up imaginary "anti-semitism" they're peddling this delusional nonsense and LARPing as MI6 spooks. truly in their own little world. i'll guess some LSD in the water cooler and a decent powerpoint presentation is all it would take to be the limey jim jones.
Ð"жММ , Jul 15 2021 16:35 utc | 8
The chunks of the supposed document that the Guardian included with its article really give it away. The text - supposedly from an internal Kremlin communication - reads as no more or less than a chunk of English passed through Google Translate. Idiomatically, it is chock full of awkwardness and simple ridiculous phrasings. There are even grammatical errors! "..во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾..." is simply incorrect. In Russian, the last two words are reversed in order.

It recalls the recent Putin's Palace story, with the "комната грÑзи".

It's just shameful how little pride the propagandists take in their work. I understand that they hold their audience in only the lowest of regard (not without cause, to be fair), but it's not like there is any shortage of Russian-speakers in the west they could go to for proofreading, if not copy writing.

vk , Jul 15 2021 16:55 utc | 9
Kremlin's response came out:

Peskov called the article by The Guardian about the authorities of Russia and Trump a fiction

"Of course, this is such a continuation of absolutely low-quality publications. Either the newspaper is trying to somehow increase its popularity, or the newspaper continues such a frenzied Russophobic line. Of course, all this does not and cannot correspond to the truth. This, in fact, is not true ... This is a continuation of the exercises on total demonization of Russia and Putin, which The Guardian sometimes likes to do, or is it a desperate attempt to attract some new readers by publishing such tales, "Peskov said.
Stonebird , Jul 15 2021 17:18 utc | 10
"REVEALED: Iran plotted to kidnap Iranian-American journalist from Brooklyn, transport her by speedboat to Venezuela and then fly her to the Islamic republic because she criticized regime, FBI say", Bemildred | Jul 15 2021 15:31 utc | 1

I TOLD you all that the FBI needed new script writers. Either that or they have so little imagination that they have to use up all the scripts from a couple of years back, as they cannot afford new ones.

******

Don't underestimate stupidity

pnyx , Jul 15 2021 17:18 utc | 11
Luke 'Skywalker' Harding defeats the evil empire. Part 13.
Citizen621 , Jul 15 2021 17:58 utc | 12
Doesn't matter - the MSNBC watchers will never accept this. I still try to punch through the armor of confirmation bias now and then. My last jab was: "I think Russiagate is every bit as much evidence-free bullshit as Quanon!". No effect whatsoever. Willing to agree with half of what I said - just like Fox watchers.

Unfortunately, I don't think my fellow citizens here in the heart of Pindostan will pay attention until things get bad enough that they know actual hunger - and then they will serve the elites by fighting each other.

Sorry for the pessimism, the one positive thing I do think I can do is tend my vegetable garden!

jo6pac , Jul 15 2021 18:07 utc | 13
Amerikan intel agrees it fake but they will walk it back soon I'm sure

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/trump-and-kremlin/

QA , Jul 15 2021 18:53 utc | 14
Ð"жММ:

"во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾", maybe awkward but semikosher, many examples can be found Googling it ---like during stay of his vs. during his stay (e.g. kamchatka.mid.ru can be found to say: "ÑвÑÐ·Ð°Ð½Ð½Ñ‹Ñ Ñ Ð´ÐµÐ¹ÑтвиÑми и поÑтупками пригÐ"ашаемого во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾ в РФ, в том чиÑÐ"е, в ÑÐ"учае депортации").

Thomas , Jul 15 2021 20:22 utc | 15
Jeez, it just gets worse-as soon as I saw the name Luke harding, I knew it was a pile of trash; really, who in the hell reads this without a sense to vomit.

Well, there there is Orbis: "great reporting."

MI6 and prob cia has this clown on the payroll; I tried to watch the last 5 minutes of the video but could not get past the first minute; the guy is absolutely repulsive and they continue to double down on this garbage.

Cadence calls , Jul 15 2021 20:28 utc | 16
Headlines on Democratic Underground and Daily KOS:
"Explosive evidence that Putin supported a Trump Presidency"

Commenters: "I knew it!"

Thomas , Jul 15 2021 20:30 utc | 17
Ð"жММ-8

I think you really nailed it; we see it every day, with this latest pail of s___, that these purveyors absolutely have no shame or embarrassment, but believe their audience, the sheeple, are complete idiots or stupid. The question is who is stupid as this level of stupidity cannot be fixed or underestimated.

librul , Jul 15 2021 21:41 utc | 18
I remember the scene in the movie "The Big Short" where Steve Carell
was saying, "they knew all along!".

Goldman Sachs, et al, had over-leveraged the housing mortgages and "they knew all along"
if and when it all crumbled the government would cover Wall Street's bad bets with taxpayer debt.

They knew all along it was bs but they did it anyway.

The MSM is a different arena but has the same arrogant attitude towards average joe citizen.

The MSM knows it is selling bs but they don't care.

What I see is they are counting on the "Reiteration Effect" (look it up, it is a real thing).
"Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad".

There have been a steady stream of "Russia bad" stories and "Russia helped Trump" stories, and over time
the fact that these stories are one by one debunked does not matter. The "Reiteration Effect" is what matters.
"Say something a million times and it becomes true" is not a mere cynical phrase, it actually works - the "Reiteration Effect".

Keep putting out these "Russia bad" stories and "Russia helped Trump" stories and over time people will accept the basic message as true.

The MSM has known all along they were selling bs, but they don't care.

vk , Jul 15 2021 22:11 utc | 19
@ Posted by: librul | Jul 15 2021 21:41 utc | 18

They definitely didn't know 2008 would happen. On the contrary: they thought they had discovered the elixir of immortality for capitalism.

The USA was caught completely off-guard in September 2008. You have to search with a magnifying glass to find the ten people who predicted the crisis would happen in its nature and more or less its timing - but even then, most of them were Marxists, i.e. outside the commanding heights of the USG.

librul , Jul 15 2021 22:23 utc | 20
@Posted by: vk | Jul 15 2021 22:11 utc | 19

Goldman Sachs began to short mortgage bonds and like instruments before the crash of 2008.

Regardless, they *knew* their bets were covered by the government.

---

Were you aware that Henry Paulson began to ready a coup in 2008?

Tuyzentfloot , Jul 15 2021 22:41 utc | 21
I like the idea of the makers of this thing deciding that it's a shoddy job which only Harding will take. Also Harding gets all the attention but let's not forget the honourable mentions in this story: Julian Borger and Dan Sabbagh.
librul , Jul 15 2021 22:49 utc | 22
@Posted by: librul | Jul 15 2021 22:23 utc | 20 ....continued

I saved this from somewhere (?) years ago. Doesn't matter, you can read Paulson's coup document for yourself.
The WSJ link still works but you hit a pay wall. You can put the following url at http://web.archive.org/
and read the original WSJ publication and Paulson's coup document dated Sept 20, 2008 at the WSJ.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/09/20/treasurys-financial-bailout-proposal-to-congress/


**** "shall not be subject to judicial review" ****

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/09/20/treasurys-financial-bailout-proposal-to-congress/

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

Did you catch that? Paulson went further. Not just the courts are cut out but "any adminstrative agency" as well.

Paulson also was giving to Himself the authority to APPROPRIATE any funds He wished.

"Any funds expended for actions authorized by this Act, including the payment of administrative expenses, shall be deemed appropriated at the time of such expenditure."

HE could pass ANY legislation He wanted to:

"(5) issuing such regulations and other guidance as may be necessary or appropriate to define terms or carry out the authorities of this Act."

The word "term" has a duel meaning. It also refers to TIME, as in length of a term.

Give powers to anyone and hire anyone He wished to:

"(1) appointing such employees as may be required to carry out the authorities in this Act and defining their duties;"

What miscellaneous authorities did G-d Paulson give Himself? Answer: Authority over the police and the military.

"In exercising the authorities granted in this Act, the Secretary shall take into consideration means for""

(1) providing stability or preventing disruption to the financial markets or banking system; and

"providing stability OR". That OR makes for confusion (intentional confusion). Stability is a word used often in the context of economics but it is also used in the context of police action. Get it? He wants to create his own SS. See the very next word: "protecting", as in "We Serve and Protect".

(2) protecting the taxpayer."

The last one is my favorite. Who is a *taxpayer*? Hmmm, is not everyone, even candy purchasing kids liable to pay tax? Corporations are also taxpayers...

G-d Paulson covered all his bases.

Even the one about being G-d Forever:

"Sec. 9. Termination of Authority.

The authorities under this Act, with the exception of authorities granted in sections 2(b)(5), 5 and 7, shall terminate two years from the date of enactment of this Act."

Paulson wants you to believe this terminates in two years. However, 2(b)(5) does NOT terminate and that one says he can just place the crown back on His own head:

"(5) issuing such regulations and other guidance as may be necessary or appropriate to define terms or carry out the authorities of this Act."

Cheers

A coup! A massive scandal that has been totally missed.

Michael888 , Jul 15 2021 23:01 utc | 23
@Posted by: librul | Jul 15 2021 21:41 utc | 18

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."-- Joseph Goebbels (Luke Harding's Father?)

corvo , Jul 15 2021 23:16 utc | 24
@ Cadence calls | Jul 15 2021 20:28 utc | 16:

We can take some comfort in the fact that Daily Kos readership has fallen precipitously over the last few years. Nobody takes it seriously anymore.

Dim sim , Jul 15 2021 23:31 utc | 25
In 2017 Luke Harding abruptly ended an interview with Aaron Maté after Harding was challenged over false claims he had made in his book about 'Russiagate'. The last five minutes of that video are quite amusing.

I'm not normally a follower of this topic even though one of our sleazers, Downer, was involved but needing something to smile at while in our CV lockdown I watched the link.

What an understatement! It's a hilarious 28m:51s train wreck interview with a complete dick. Thanks b for sharing it.

mismatch , Jul 15 2021 23:49 utc | 26
@Vk, I'm sorry to contradict you but if you pick up a copy of the Financial Times in 2008 before the crash, everyone was predicting it. I checked recently, and sure enough, it was all over the paper.
TEP , Jul 16 2021 0:18 utc | 27
Luke Harding. Nuff said.
TEP.
Erelis , Jul 16 2021 0:22 utc | 28
Once again super duper evil genius ex-KGB spy cannot keep state secrets secret.
Christian J. Chuba , Jul 16 2021 0:24 utc | 29
Painful video to watch. Harding is using the Hitler argument.

'My evidence that Trump colluded with Putin (Saddam has WMD) is that Putin is Hitler. If you don't believe me, you are supporting Adolf Hitler'.

Harding is Satan's minion, and Jesus said, 'Satan is a liar and a murderer, when he lies, he speaks his native language'

Lies kill.

vk , Jul 16 2021 0:39 utc | 30
@ Posted by: mismatch | Jul 15 2021 23:49 utc | 26

By 2007, the financial elite already knew something would happen - but not a structural crisis. In fact, they predicted nothing: the chain of bankruptcies started at the end of 2006; September 2008 was just the date it "leaked" to the "real economy".

Not every crisis is bad for capitalism. Cyclical crisis are natural and beneficial to capitalism. The crisis of 2008 was not a cyclical crisis, but a structural one. They probably thought it was either a cyclical crisis (a la Dotcom crisis of 2000) or, if something more serious, something the free market would easily be able to "self-regulate" out of.

[Jul 21, 2021] Civilized nations' efforts to deter Russia and China are starting to add up

Jul 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Lysander , Jul 17 2021 11:31 utc | 2

...WaPo columnist George Will then asserts:

Henry Kissinger has said, not unreasonably, that we are in "the foothills" of a cold war with China. And Vladimir Putin, who nurses an unassuageable grudge about the way the Cold War ended, seems uninterested in Russia reconciling itself to a role as a normal nation without gratuitous resorts to mendacity. It is, therefore, well to notice how, day by day, in all of the globe's time zones, civilized nations are, in word and deed, taking small but cumulatively consequential measures that serve deterrence.

If arrogance were a deadly disease, George Will would be dead.

George Will has been an ass clown since I first had the displeasure of watching him in the 1970s. Age has not brought an ounce of wisdom. Nevertheless, this total lack of self reflection and ability to project American sins on others is unfortunately not unique to our man George. It seems a habit throughout the entire US political spectrum. The ability to view, for example, the invasion of Iraq as perfectly normal behavior, while viewing any resistance to US/Israeli dominance as beyond the pale is the character of the decaying American superpower. George Will is but one manifestation of it. It was once infuriating. But now it's simply like listening to the ravings of a schizophrenic. More pathetic than anything else.

Dao Gen , Jul 17 2021 11:35 utc | 3

What do you expect from George Swill? He is a pathetic, disoriented refugee from his home in Victorian England, when barbarism never set for a single instant on the British Empire.
Donbass Lives Matter , Jul 17 2021 11:45 utc | 4
There's a way to get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from the mainstream news media. Just look at their propaganda and ask yourself, "Why do they want me to believe this particular lie?" If you can figure that you, you will have the truth.
alaff , Jul 17 2021 11:52 utc | 5
Well, you know, the white man's burden...
The funny thing is that they seriously consider themselves a "superior race", while behaving like wild barbarians.
Such opinions/articles of "Western civilized people" cause only a condescending smile, nothing more. So let's let George Will entertain us.
Midville , Jul 17 2021 11:57 utc | 7

I find it pretty bizzarre how western media obsessively try to portray the Defender incident as a some sort of "victory" for "civilized nations".
What exactly is the victory here? The fact that Russia only resorted to warning fire and didn't blow up the ship?

Perimetr , Jul 17 2021 12:16 utc | 11

Decades of propaganda masquerading as news has led most "educated" Americans into a Matrix of false narratives. Should you dare mention election fraud or question the safety of COVID vaccines in the presences of anyone who considers the NY Times and Wash Post as the "papers of record", they will be happy to inform you that you are "captured" by false news. Dialogue with these true believers has become almost impossible. We are the indispensable, civilized nation, don't you understand basic facts?

My sister, who is truly a good-hearted person, unfortunately keeps CNN and MSNBC on most of the day in her small apartment, and lives for The NY Times, which she pours over, especially the weekend edition. She knows that Putin is evil and Russia is a bad place to live, etc etc. I got rid of my TV ten years ago and started looking elsewhere for my information. I live in a rural area of a Red state, she lives in Manhattan. We have to stick to topics that revolve around museums, gardening, and food.

Ayatoilet , Jul 17 2021 12:50 utc | 16

This is precisely the type of arrogance that has led to US leaving Afghanistan with their pants down - having spent untold Trillions of dollars and having nothing to show for it. And soon, leaving Iraq and Syria too. It reminds me of how the US left Vietnam and Cambodia.

The 'White' establishment in Washington and across the US military industrial complex, has an air of superiority and always seem to feel that they can subjugate via throwing money at people! This in effect turns everyone they deal with into Whores (yes, prostitutes). Its fundamentally humiliating, and sews the seeds of corruption - both economic and moral. Then, they are shocked that there's a back clash!

The Taliban succeeded not with arms - but by projecting a completely different narrative of "Morality (i.e. non-corruption), honor, and even intermingled nationalism with their narrative". They projected a story that suggested that new Afghan daughters would not turn into Britney Spears or porn stars.

And, believe it or not, the Chinese see themselves as having been fundamentally humiliated by the West and couch their efforts as a struggle for their civilization (its not ideological or even economic) - they are fighting for honor and respect.

Western Civilization (and western elite) on the left and right are fundamentally materialistic. They worship money, and simply don't understand it when others don't. When they talk about superiority, they are basically saying the worship of money rules supreme. You sort of become dignified in the west if you have a lot of wealth. They want to turn the whole world into prostitutes. Policy and laws are driven by material considerations.

Now, I am not saying that spirituality or religion is good; and in fact, the Chinese are not driven by religious zeal (they are, on the whole, non-religious). What I am saying is that - no matter how its expressed - be it through religion, through culture, through rhetoric, etc. - all this back clash is really a struggle for respect, 'honor' and thus a push back to Western Arrogance, and the humiliation it has caused. The West simply doesn't understand that there are societies - especially in the east, that value honor over other things.

When Trump calls other people losers, he is basically saying he is richer, they are poorer. In his mind, winning, is all about money. When people write articles about the superiority of a civilization - they are implicitly putting other people down. That's not just arrogant, its rude and disrespectful. Its basically like a teenager judging their parents. How dare a newly formed nation (the US), judge or differentiate or even pretend to be superior to the Chinese, Persians etc.?

Our foreign policy (and rhetoric) in the West has to completely change. We have to be really careful, because, (honestly), it won't be very long before these other (inferior) civilizations actually take over global leadership. Then how will we want to be treated? Don't for a second think these folks can't build great gadgets that go to Mars! Oh, did China just do that? Does Iran have a space program? Did they just make their own vaccines? Once they start trading among themselves without using the USD greenback, we are finished.

We need them, they don't need us.

Et Tu , Jul 17 2021 13:07 utc | 18

Some notable recent achievements of 'civilised' nations include:

-Illegal invasion and bombing of multiple non-aggressor nations
-Overthrowing of democratically elected Governments
-Support of extremist and oppressive regimes
-Sponsoring of terrorism, including weapon sales to ISIS
-Corruption of once trusted institutions like the UN and OPCW

Oh, the civility...

Petri Krohn , Jul 17 2021 14:05 utc | 26

HOW DID RUSSIA BECOME THE ENEMY?

...when all she did was offer slight resistance to Western aggression? The key event was the August 2013 false-flag gas attack and massacre of hostages in Ghouta in Damascus.

What really angered the West was the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean that prevented the NATO attack on Syria. (You will not find a single word of this in Western media.) This is why Crimea needed to be captured by the West. As revenge and deterrence against the Russian agression.

I wrote about these events in 2016:

The standoff was first described by Israel Shamir in October 2013:

"The most dramatic event of September 2013 was the high-noon stand-off near the Levantine shore, with five US destroyers pointing their Tomahawks towards Damascus and facing them - the Russian flotilla of eleven ships led by the carrier-killer Missile Cruiser Moskva and supported by Chinese warships.

Apparently, two missiles were launched towards the Syrian coast, and both failed to reach their destination."

A longer description was published by Australianvoice in 2015:

"So why didn't the US and France attack Syria? It seems obvious that the Russians and Chinese simply explained that an attack on Syria by US and French forces would be met by a Russian/Chinese attack on US and French warships. Obama wisely decided not to start WW III in September 2013." Can Russia Block Regime Change In Syria Again?

In my own comments from 2013 I tried to understand the mission of the Russian fleet. This is what I believed Putin's orders to the fleet were:

  1. To sink any NATO ship involved in illegal aggression against Syria.
  2. You have the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons in self-defense.

I am sure NATO admirals understood the situation the same way. I am not sure of the American leadership in Washington.

Billb , Jul 17 2021 14:15 utc | 28

Insulting language aside, the narrative they are trying to create is that there is an anti-Russia, anti-China trend developing and that those sitting on the fence would be wise to join the bandwagon.

This will be particularly effective on the majority of folks who barely scan headlines and skim articles. Falun Gong/CIA mouthpiece Epoch Times is on board with this, based on recent headlines.

Petri Krohn , Jul 17 2021 14:44 utc | 33

Democracy grows in darkness

Wikipedia has a list of reliable and unreliable sources . "Reliable" are those sources that are under the direct control of the US regime. Any degree of independence from the regime makes the source "unreliable." WaPo and NYT are at the top of the list of reliable sources.

This is the diametric opposite of how Wikispooks defines reliability. Reliability of sources is directly proportional to their distance *from* power.

At A Closer Look on Syria (ACLOS) we only trust primary sources.

Andres , Jul 17 2021 14:58 utc | 35
Civilization vs Uncivilization

Makes me remember the cornerstone work from former Argentine president DF Sarmiento, who dealt with "Civilization or Barbarism" in his book "Facundo". Of course, his position was the "civilized" one.

Those "civilized" succeeded in creating a country submitted to the British rule, selling cheap crops and getting expensive manufactures, with a privileged minority living lavishly and a great majority, in misery.

Also, their "civilized" methods to impose their project was the bloody "Police War"

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerra_entre_la_Confederaci%C3%B3n_Argentina_y_el_Estado_de_Buenos_Aires#Segunda_guerra_contra_el_Chacho

Same language used now, for the same undisclosed intentions.

lysias , Jul 17 2021 15:10 utc | 36
In Russian, to be uncivilized (nekulturny) is a bad thing.
Mar man , Jul 17 2021 16:14 utc | 44

This article is fundamentally about propaganda and "soft power".

Soft power in foreign policy is usually defined when other countries defer to your judgement without threat of punishment or promise of gain.

In other words, if other countries support your country without a "carrot or stick" approach, you have soft power.

For years, the US simply assumed other "civilized" of the western world would dutifully follow along in US footsteps due to unshakeable trust in America's moral authority. The western media played a crucial role by suppressing news regarding any atrocities the western powers committed and amplifying any perceived threats or aggressions from "enemies".

Now, with the age of the internet, western audiences can read news from all over the world and that has been a catastrophe for western powers. We can now see real-time debunking of propaganda.

In the past, the British would have easily passed off the recent destroyer provocation as pure Russian aggression and could expect outrage from all western aligned countries. The EU and US populations could have easily been whipped into a frenzy and DEMANDED reprisals against Russia if not outright war. Something similar to a "Gulf of Tonkin" moment.

But, that did not happen. People all over the world now know NOTHING from the US or British press is to be trusted. People also now know NATO routinely try to stir up trouble and provoke Russia.

So, Americans and even British citizens displayed no widespread outrage because they simply did not believe their own government's and compliant media's side of the story.

US and British "soft power" are long gone. No one trusts them. No one wants to follow them into anymore disastrous wars of aggression.

Western media still do not understand this and cannot figure out why so many refuse western vaccines or support the newest color revolutions.

We simply do not believe it.

librul , Jul 17 2021 17:04 utc | 55

This site appears to be the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deceiving-the-public


They cast Germany as a victim or potential victim of foreign aggressors, as a peace-loving nation forced to take up arms to protect its populace or defend European civilization against Communism.

I remember a tv history program that had interviews with German soldiers.
I recall one who had seen/participated in going from village to village in the USSR
hanging local communist leaders. He said they had been taught that by doing this
they were "protecting civilization".

fx , Jul 17 2021 19:01 utc | 68

Arrogance is not a deadly disease or even a hindrance for mainstream presstitutes; it is a job qualification, making them all the more manipulable and manipulative. And so, as with Michael Gordon, Judith Miller, Brett Stephens and David Sanger (essentially all of them pulling double duty for the apartheid state), people will die from their propaganda, but they will advance.

Max , Jul 17 2021 19:48 utc | 72

Name a democracy that isn't a suzerainty.

Name a leader with moral courage and integrity among suzerainties (private plantations). Nations without integrity and filled with Orcs (individuals without conscience), can't be civilized. They're EVIL vassals of Saruman & Sauron, manipulated by Wormtongue.

"The true equation is 'democracy' = government by world financiers."
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Henry Kissinger, in his interview with Chatham House stated, "the United States is in a CRISIS of confidence... America has committed great moral wrongs." What are U$A's core values?

According to a CFR member :
"How lucky I am that my mother studied with JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and WH Auden and that she passed on to me a command of language that permits me to "tell the story" of the world economy in plain English. She would have been delighted that I managed to show that the evil Gollum from Tolkien's tales lives above the doorway in the Oval Office, which he certainly does. I saw him there myself. He may have found a new perch over at The Federal Reserve Bank as well."
– Excerpt From, Signals: The Breakdown of the Social Contract and the Rise of Geopolitics by Dr Philippa Malmgren

The Financial Empire has ran out of LUCK. "In God We Trust"

Why Mordor Failed... Sauron's hegemonic collapse holds potent lessons

"A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims but accomplices."

Tuyzentfloot , Jul 17 2021 21:08 utc | 78

I thought moral superiority was the official position of NATO. The explicit intent is to weaponize human rights and democracy . So it is not merely the mundane 'our group is better' or the somewhat nostalgic western form of moral superiority, it's weaponized moral superiority.

Erelis , Jul 17 2021 21:27 utc | 79

George Will looking good I tellya. Anybody know who does his embalming?

Doesn't Will's article reek of Nazi propaganda against the Russians as a mongrel Asiatic uncivilized people? Of course to attack the Chinese as uncivilized? China uncivilized? 5,000 years of continuous culture? The Russians and Chinese must join up with civilization. Unfortunately at least in the West race is only about skin color. It certainly wasn't the case with the original Nazis. Will's piece is blatantly racist out of the tradition of Nazism.

Rob , Jul 17 2021 22:41 utc | 83

American exceptionalism's finest spokesman -- George F. Will

circumspect , Jul 18 2021 1:38 utc | 88

Oxford and the Ivy League. The training grounds for the Anglo American deep state and the cheerleaders of the empire. Expect nothing more of these deeply under educated sudo intellectuals.

Tom_Q_Collins , Jul 18 2021 5:00 utc | 95

Posted by: Ayatoilet | Jul 17 2021 12:50 utc | 16

Plenty of people who work for the MIC and in various policy circles/think tanks have plenty "to show for it" where all these wars are concerned. Many billions of dollars were siphoned upwards and outwards into the bank accounts and expensive homes of the managerial and executive classes (even the hazard pay folks who actually went to the places "we" were bombing) not just at Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen, etc. but plenty of lesser known "socioeconomically disadvantaged" Small Businesses (proper noun in this context) companies who utilized the services of an army of consultants to glom onto the war machine. In most cases of the larger firms, Wall Street handled the IPOs long ago, and these companies have entire (much less profitable) divisions dedicated to state and local governments to "diversify" their business portfolios in case the people finally get sick of war. But that rarely happens in any real sense because the corporate establishment "legacy media" makes sure that there's always an uncivilized country to bomb or threaten....and that means the "defense" department needs loads of services, weapons, and process improvement consultants all the time. War is a racket; always has been, always will be.

Tom_Q_Collins , Jul 18 2021 5:03 utc | 96

In what ways is the USA like Darth Vader's Galactic Empire in Star Wars?

Constantine , Jul 18 2021 7:33 utc | 98
Posted by: Mar man | Jul 17 2021 16:14 utc | 44

Unfortunately, it seems that truly large segments of the population in the developed western countries and especially in the Anglo-sphere believe the propaganda emanating from the imperial mouthpieces. The US citizenry is a case study in manipulating the public.

Indeed, the DNC liberals are effectively the vanguard of the pro-war movement, espouse racist Rusophobia and conitnue Trump's hostility to China. The so-cslled conservatives follow their own tradition of imperial mobilization behind the Washington regime: Chin,Latin America, the very people who berated the 'Deep State' now paise its subversive activities against the targeted left-wing governments.

As for the moribund left - it would be better described as leftovers - it is often taken for a ride as long as the imperial messaging is promoted by the liberal media. The excuses for imperialism are a constant for many of them (even as they call themselves anti-imperialists) and the beleaguered voicesfor the truth are far and few. The latter often face silencing campaigns not just from the establishment hacks, but from their own supposed ideological comrades, who are, of course, in truth nothing of the sort.

All in all, despite the consistent record of manipulative propaganda and utter criminality the imperial regime never loses the support of the critical masss of the citizenry.

Bemildred , Jul 18 2021 7:48 utc | 99
All in all, despite the consistent record of manipulative propaganda and utter criminality the imperial regime never loses the support of the critical masss of the citizenry.

Posted by: Constantine | Jul 18 2021 7:33 utc | 98

Maybe 50% of the people here bother to vote, in IMPORTANT elections. Can be a lot less if the election is not important. The only people still engaged politically here at all are the people with good jobs. The American people have given up. And there are a lot of angry people running around, with guns. Claiming the citizenry here support the government is imperial propaganda. Why do you think they like mercenaries and proxies so much? And this is all in great contrast to when I was young 50 years ago.

[Jul 14, 2021] It s now revealed that OPCW sent its team to Germany before Navalny made it to the hospital in Omsk:

Jul 13, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jul 10 2021 23:29 utc | 41

Speaking of always blaming Russia regardless the facts, it's now revealed that OPCW sent its team to Germany before Navalny made it to the hospital in Omsk:

"'How is it even possible?' Russia asks OPCW after report claims team was sent to Germany the same day Navalny fell ill in Siberia"!!!!

"[T]he OPCW states [Link at Original] that its secretariat 'deployed a team to perform a technical assistance visit' related to the suspected poisoning of a 'Russian citizen' at Germany's request on August 20. The problem is that on that day, Navalny was only flying from the Russian Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow. It was on that flight that he first felt ill and was then rushed to a hospital in another Siberian city, Omsk, following the plane's emergency landing ." [My Emphasis]

OOPS!!!! Someone must have put the Brits in charge. It will be very interesting to see how this gaff is spun.

[Jul 05, 2021] I admit to some amusement over the suspension of the female American sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson by WADA

Jul 05, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Erelis , Jul 4 2021 14:53 utc | 4

I admit to some amusement over the suspension of the female American sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson by WADA. Imagine if she were Russian. WADA has waged a political war against Russian Olympians ruling against the entire national team most of whom never used performance enhancing drugs according to independent testing. And now the expected cries of racism against a blood test for a banned drug. Sort of ironic I suppose, but watched a clips of several African American sports pundits and they all agreed that rules are rules and must be followed. It has been mostly white pundits who have virtue signaled that her suspension must be lifted due to racism.

[Jul 04, 2021] After Putin?

Jul 03, 2021 | www.unz.com

Anonymous [130] Disclaimer , says: July 3, 2021 at 7:05 am GMT • 20.1 hours ago

Russia under Putin stewardship has been doing more than just good given the disaster of Yeltsin period. That's said. Russia now is just a one-man-Putin show. It's not the "Russian system of governance."
So, the question is what would happen after Putin?
Given the fact that several "oligarchies" are pulling their strings around Putin, another-Yeltsin is waiting at the gate of Kremlin is very likely. I hope I am wrong for the Russians' best interests!

[Jul 01, 2021] Putin Signs Law Forcing Foreign Social Media Giants To Open Russian Offices

Comments are mostly idiotic/uninformed/biased as typical for Slashdot on topics related to Russia
Jul 01, 2021 | tech.slashdot.org
Putin Signs Law Forcing Foreign Social Media Giants To Open Russian Offices (reuters.com) 47 Posted by msmash on Thursday July 01, 2021 @12:45PM from the how-about-that dept. President Vladimir Putin has signed a law that obliges foreign social media giants to open offices in Russia , a document published by the government on Thursday showed, the latest move by Moscow to exert greater control over Big Tech. From a report: The Russian authorities are keen to strengthen their control of the internet and to reduce their dependence on foreign companies and countries. In particular, they have objected in the past to political opponents of the Kremlin using foreign social media platforms to organise what they say are illegal protests and to publicise politically-tinged investigations into alleged corruption. Moscow has fined firms for failing to delete content it says is illegal, slowing down the speed of Twitter as punishment, and on Wednesday opened a new case against Alphabet subsidiary Google for breaching personal data legislation. by Vlijmen Fileer ( 120268 ) on Thursday July 01, 2021 @12:47PM ( #61540686 )

Other countries do the same. But somehow get less media attention for it

[Jun 26, 2021] So Much Of What The CIA Used To Do Covertly It Now Does Overtly - ZeroHedge

Jun 22, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

In the later years of an abusive relationship I was in, my abuser had become so confident in how mentally caged he had me that he'd start overtly telling me what he is and what he was doing. He flat-out told me he was a sociopath and a manipulator, trusting that I was so submitted to his will by that point that I'd gaslight myself into reframing those statements in a sympathetic light. Toward the end one time he told me "I am going to rape you," and then he did, and then he talked about it to some friends trusting that I'd run perception management on it for him.

The better he got at psychologically twisting me up in knots and the more submitted I became, the more open he'd be about it. He seemed to enjoy doing this, taking a kind of exhibitionistic delight in showing off his accomplishments at crushing me as a person, both to others and to me. Like it was his art, and he wanted it to have an audience to appreciate it.

me title=

Close 168.1K Pfizer CEO on mRNA Vaccine Creation, R&D, Drug Costs

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I was reminded of this while watching a recent Fox News appearance by Glenn Greenwald where he made an observation we've discussed here previously about the way the CIA used to have to infiltrate the media, but now just openly has US intelligence veterans in mainstream media punditry positions managing public perception.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jU58mrEpPvU

"If you go and Google, and I hope your viewers do, Operation Mockingbird, what you will find is that during the Cold War these agencies used to plot how to clandestinely manipulate the news media to disseminate propaganda to the American population," Greenwald said .

"They used to try to do it secretly. They don't even do it secretly anymore. They don't need Operation Mockingbird. They literally put John Brennan who works for NBC and James Clapper who works for CNN and tons of FBI agents right on the payroll of these news organizations. They now shape the news openly to manipulate and to deceive the American population."

In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled " The CIA and the Media " reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America's most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird . It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media are meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.

Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and the public is too brainwashed and gaslit to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits . The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor , and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC's Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.

They're just rubbing it in our faces now. Like they're showing off.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=879036821954539520&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fso-much-what-cia-used-do-covertly-it-now-does-overtly&sessionId=f90acd7ceb3bc7675f43696376e59f5ebdc79571&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px

And that's just the media. We also see this flaunting behavior exhibited in the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a propaganda operation geared at sabotaging foreign governments not aligned with the US which according to its own founding officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. The late author and commentator William Blum makes this clear :

[I]n 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the "nongovernmental"" part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.

"We should not have to do this kind of work covertly," said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60's, and that's why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that's why the endowment was created."

And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."

In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

We see NED's fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang to the imperial propaganda operation known as Bellingcat.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1278456656305643521&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fso-much-what-cia-used-do-covertly-it-now-does-overtly&sessionId=f90acd7ceb3bc7675f43696376e59f5ebdc79571&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1337063301113581568&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fso-much-what-cia-used-do-covertly-it-now-does-overtly&sessionId=f90acd7ceb3bc7675f43696376e59f5ebdc79571&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px

Hell, intelligence insiders are just openly running for office now. In an article titled " The CIA Democrats in the 2020 elections ", World Socialist Website documented the many veterans of the US intelligence cartel who ran in elections across America in 2018 and 2020:

"In the course of the 2018 elections, a large group of former military-intelligence operatives entered capitalist politics as candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 50 congressional seats" nearly half the seats where the Democrats were targeting Republican incumbents or open seats created by Republican retirements. Some 30 of these candidates won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018 election, and 11 of them won the general election, more than one quarter of the 40 previously Republican-held seats captured by the Democrats as they took control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, the intervention of the CIA Democrats continues on what is arguably an equally significant scale."

So they're just getting more and more brazen the more confident they feel about how propaganda-addled and submissive the population has become. They're laying more and more of their cards on the table. Soon the CIA will just be openly selling narcotics door to door like Girl Scout cookies.

Or maybe not. I said my ex got more and more overt about his abuses in the later years of our relationship because those were the later years. I did eventually expand my own consciousness of my own inner workings enough to clear the fears and unexamined beliefs I had that he was using as hooks to manipulate me. Maybe, as humanity's consciousness continues to expand , the same will happen for the people and their abusive relationship with the CIA.

* * *

The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook , Twitter , Soundcloud or YouTube , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi , Patreon or Paypal . If you want to read more you can buy my books . Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I've written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I'm trying to do with this platform, click here .

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[Jun 26, 2021] Late Stage Globalism- When Anything That Is Not Censored Is A Lie

Money quote: " Zerohedge has more traffic than Huffington Post, Vox, Vice, The Atlantic and pretty well any of the other bluecheck day camps for aspiring establishment shills."
Jun 23, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

Late Stage Globalism Is A Tale of Narratives vs Networks

Over the past few weeks in my weekly #AxisOfEasy newsletter I've been covering how Big Tech and the corporate media tried, unsuccessfully, to keep a lid on the Wuhan Lab origin narrative. At one point I half-joked "I'll shut up about this when it's safe to talk about Ivermectin" . This week, I did end up writing a piece about Ivermectin, namely how doctors can't even mention it in their videos or podcast appearances without being penalized by social media platforms.

Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist who has studied bats (from which COVID-19 purportedly originated) was recently on Triggernometry , the UK based podcast that my company, easyDNS , has been sponsoring since mid-2020. It turns out that neither Weinstein nor Triggernometry can say the word "Ivermectin" in their shows. If they do they'll get an automatic takedown by YouTube and a strike on Facebook for violating community standards.

Matt Taibbi recently posed the question " Why has "˜Ivermectin' become a dirty word? " He cites Dr. Pierre Kory in his testimony to a US Senate Committee hearing on medical responses to COVID-19 in December 2020. Kory was referring to an existing medicine that was already FDA approved that he was describing as a "wonder drug" in treating COVID-19, that drug was Ivermectin.

This Senate testimony was televised and viewed by approximately 8 million people. YouTube removed the video of this exchange. They later suspended the account of the United States senator who invited Dr. Kory to speak. (Kory also appeared on Brett Weinstein's show and they took down that as well).

Associated Press for their part "fact checked" the senate testimony, and because, in their words "there is no evidence that Ivermectin is a "˜miracle drug' against COVID", they labeled it as false:

CLAIM: The antiparasitic drug ivermectin "has a miraculous effectiveness that obliterates" the transmission of COVID-19 and will prevent people from getting sick.

AP'S ASSESSMENT: False. There's no evidence ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.

... ... ...

But I'm looking beyond that, outside of network TV. The hottest news outlets are fast becoming independent journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald , self-publishing via their Substack. That's mainly email.

Joe Rogan has a larger audience than Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon combined. So too does Steve Bannon, btw. The few times I've been on his Warroom I was astounded at the reach of his audience. According to company sources he's doing between 2.5 and 3.5 million downloads per day. The last people I would ever expect to be tuning into Bannon are telling me "I saw you on Warroom". (It's mind-blowing).

Zerohedge has more traffic than Huffington Post, Vox, Vice, The Atlantic and pretty well any of the other bluecheck day camps for aspiring establishment shills.

It's because of independent, renegade journalists and people writing outside of major outlets that these stories are starting go mainstream despite the best efforts of Big Tech, enforcing whatever canon the corporate press deems to be truth, or the establishment anointed "fact checkers" who try to step in whenever something looks to gain traction:

The Wuhan lab origin was suspected for over a year (and the Fauci emails prove it). Zerohedge was on it almost immediately and got deplatformed for their troubles. It was finally pushed over the line in a Medium post by Nicholas Wade over a year later.

Ivermectin may be next round and it looks like if it gets anywhere it will be thanks to people like Matt Taibbi and Bret Weinstein.

What is the common thread here? It's the power of decentralized networks and open source protocols vs narrative control that is promulgated from global governments, amplified by the corporate media, and enforced by technocratic platforms.

... ... ...

It may seem like the censorship is absolute and that the narrative and the spin is overwhelming. But take solace that it only appears that way because the facade is breaking.

As more people realize that the centralized technocratic system is failing, those who's privilege and position are premised on it have to double down, triple down. They have to burn the boats.

They're fully committed now and because they have no other choice they have to overstep and overreach. Too much, too soon. Too late.

[Jun 21, 2021] Why china is not helping syrian goverment

Jun 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Keith McClary , Jun 21 2021 21:08 utc | 27

@dh:
The US is cozying up to Mohammad al-Jolani of AQ, re-branded as Hay-at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/06/09/washington-positioning-syrian-al-qaeda-mohammad-jolani-asset/

Ian2 , Jun 21 2021 21:17 utc | 28

"For some reason, China provides almost no humanitarian support for Syria...China should at the very least donate $1 billion a year in humanitarian assistance to Syria. It's hard to understand China's indifference considering the extent it affects their security. Sometimes I wonder who wastes more money on the military in relation to otehr spending on foreign affairs. China's $250 billion military budget in 2020 or America's $800 billion military spending last year?"<\blockquote>

posternnn | Jun 21 2021 19:32 utc | 7:

From what I gather China sees Syria as a national interests of Israel, Iran, Russia and Turkey. The last thing they want is to step on their toes especially when some of them are their allies and or in the process of being lobbied to switch sides.

dh , Jun 21 2021 21:26 utc | 29

@26 I don't put Syria and Afghanistan in the same bag. The US is in Syria to protect Israel from Iran and Hezbullah. Going into Afghanistan was a reaction to the Twin Towers bombing.....Bin Laden, Bush, we must do something etc.. I could be wrong but I see the Taliban as quite pragmatic. Of course the MSM wants us to think they are just a bunch of bloodthirsty muslim fanatics.

A.L. , Jun 21 2021 22:49 utc | 38

Posted by: posternnn | Jun 21 2021 19:32 utc | 7

It almost seems like China is under some kind of pressure not to help Syria even with humanitarian help.

China has given political cover to Syria at the UN. It is also probable that its been agreed between putin and xi that Syria is to be a Russian show. For China to fly in vaccines now would not make Russia look good.

Additionally there aren't much military nor political ties between Syria and Chinese in the past like there were between Syria and Russia. To do much more uninvited would breach Chinese's own policy of non-interference of others internal affairs. Remember this whole Syria saga is dressed up and still designated as a civil war by the UN...

In any case there's much we don't know, what's not to say China isn't bankrolling something behind the scenes with Russia as the frontman?

Assad have said those who have helped Syria in its hour of need will be rewarded in its reconstruction. When that time comes and the contracts doled out we'll know for certain.

[Jun 21, 2021] All War is for economic reasons

Jun 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

VetinLA , Jun 21 2021 19:25 utc | 6

Red Rider @ 2 said; "All War is for economic reasons."

Always has been, always will be. No matter the reasons given to the peons.

Max , Jun 21 2021 20:11 utc | 13

What is the fastest way to create lots of DEBT (money)? Wars, civil war, technological waves, credit bubbles (speculative, housing,...), infrastructures...

What is the real purpose of war? To capture & control more areas for EXPLOITATION? War is the fastest way to create lots of debt for all parties.

"the real value of a conflict, the true value, is in the debt it creates. You control the debt, you control everything."

Money Power = Land x Lives x Loans

Putting Afghanistan in further debt, enables it to be exploited... What are its revenue sources? Who pays for its security and infrastructure? Will NATO leave by September?

Who wants to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals, slaves to debt?

[Jun 20, 2021] Why Big Business Ends Up Supporting The Regime

In reality big tech is the part of neoliberal elite that control the politics and politician (the USA politics and politicians were privatized during Reagan and nothing changed since that period). They also has strong ties with intelligence community often emerging from some some intelligence agency plan and DAPRA or CIA funds. So it is strange to be suprozed that they will always take the side of the government -- they control the goverment...
Jun 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

The Democrats in Congress want comprehensive regulation of social media which will ultimately allow regime regulators to decide what is and what is not "disinformation." This has become very clear as Congress has held a series of Congressional hearings designed to pressure tech leaders into doing even more to silence critics of the regime and its preferred center-left narratives.

Back in February, for instance, Glen Greenwald reported:

For the third time in less than five months , the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.

House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert control over the content on these online platforms. "Industry self-regulation has failed," they said, and therefore "we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation." In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.

(The February hearing wasn't even the end of it. Big Tech was summoned yet again on March 25 .)

Greenwald is probably right. The end game here is likely to create a permanent "partnership" between big tech in which government regulators will ultimately decide just how much these platforms will deplatform user and delete content that run afoul of the regime's messaging.

It might strike many readers as odd that this should even be necessary. It's already become quite clear that Big Social Media is hardly an enemy of mainstream proregime forces in Washington. Quite the opposite.

Jack Dorsey, for instance, is exactly the sort of partisan regime apparatchik one expects out of today's Silicon Valley. For example, during October of last year , Twitter locked down the account of the New York Post , because the Post reported a story on Hunter Biden that threatened to hurt Biden's chances for election. Over 90 percent of political donation money coming out of Facebook and Twitter goes to Democrats.

Yet, it's important to keep in mind that this isn't going to be enough to convince politicians to pack up and decide to leave social media companies alone. The regime is unlikely to be satisfied with anything other than full state control of social media through permanent regulatory bodies that can ultimately bring the industry to heel. Regardless of the ideological leanings of the industry players involved, they're likely to see the writing on the wall. As with any regime where the regulators and legislators hold immense power -- as is the case in Washington today -- the regime will generally be able to win the "cooperation" of industry leaders who will end up taking a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" position.

Silicon Valley Is Ideologically Allied with the Regime. But That's Not Enough.

It's been abundantly clear for at least a decade that ideologically speaking, Silicon Valley is as politically mainstream as it gets. The old early-2000s notion that Silicon Valley harbors secret libertarian, antiestablishment leanings has been disproven dozens of times over.

Moreover, Washington has a long history of co-opting tech "geniuses" to serve the whims of the regime. Even back in 2013 Julian Assange already saw the "ever closer union" between government agents and Silicon Valley. Assange saw how federal agencies were hiring Silicon Valley workers as "consultants" and saw where the "partnership" was headed. He concluded "The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism."

But even if Silicon Valley is packed full of stooges for the NSA -- as appears to be the case -- this still doesn't mean that Silicon Valley firms are willing to happily hand over their property to the federal government. After all, Silicon Valley CEOs, managers, and stockholders are all still at least partly in it for the money. All else being equal, they prefer profit to loss, and they want freedom to make decisions free of regulatory control. They probably don't care about freedom in the abstract, but they care about it for themselves.

The Threat of Regulation Creates Support for the Regime

On the other hand, once federal policymakers and regulators start making threats, the game changes entirely. All of a sudden, it makes a lot of sense to pursue "friendly" relations with the state as a matter of self-preservation. If Washington has the ability to destroy your business -- and if it has become impossible to "fly under the radar" -- then it makes a lot of sense to make Washington your friend.

Under these circumstances, there's little to be gained from blanket opposition to federal regulation, and a lot to be gained from embracing regulation while merely working to ensure that regulation benefits you and your friends.

Big Business versus Small Business

So, it should never surprise us when big business ultimately ends up siding with the regime. It would be folly not to, especially if one has the means to hire lobbyists, attorneys, and PR consultants which can help Big Business negotiate effectively with regulators. Needless to say, the outcomes of these negotiations are likely to end up helping the big players at the expense of smaller ones who aren't even present at the negotiating table.

For small firms that have little hope of influencing federal policy, it still makes sense to simply oppose federal activism altogether and hope for the best. But if your firm manages to get a seat "at the table" it's best to seize the opportunity. To quote an old saying among lobbyists: "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."

But let us not forget that even when private firms can bring immense amounts of resources to bear for purposes of influencing public policy and negotiating with bureaucrats: the regime itself ultimately holds the advantage. No private firm in the world has the resources to ignore or veto the wishes of the regime's army of regulatory, prosecutors, and tax collectors. No private firm enjoys anything approaching the coercive monopoly power of the state.

But this doesn't mean those firms can't share in this power. And that's very often what happens. Faced with a "join us or be destroyed" ultimatum from federal regulators or lawmakers, most private firms choose the "join us" option. Of course, many smaller firms aren't even offered the choice.


Tillyoudrop 9 minutes ago (Edited)

Wwwwrong.

BIG BUSINESS is the Regime, they own this fxxxing place, and they control you by the balls.

AriusArmenian 3 minutes ago remove link

All the major social media companies in the US were funded and controlled by the CIA from startup.

There is not a future end-game - it has been the CIA's agenda from the beginning.

The CIA along with Watt Street and the MIC owns and controls the US from top to bottom - and they intend for the lumpen white people to fall on their swords. This is all to the interests of the rich and powerful button pushers. I pity the young people like idiots so easily used by the elites.

freedommusic 10 minutes ago

Well when DARPA, the DOD, CIA, et al, created your company what choice do you have?

What did you think this company is YOURS Mr Z?

We created LifeLog with The Peoples money, handed it over to you so there is plausible deniability, and are now weaponizing this data against the very people who have funded it.

Welcome to the MO of monolithic government.

bunnyswanson 1 minute ago

Big Business is the regime. Unfair competition is the name of their game. Monopolizing their industry is their goal. Oversight committees should have stopped them but simple men who define themselves by what they own sell out eagerly.

[Jun 18, 2021] PATRICK LAWRENCE- The US-Russia Summit

Jun 15, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

C urious it was to read that the Russian judiciary ruled last Wednesday that Alexei Navalny's political network is an extremist movement. Its members should be grateful that the courts recognized it as a movement, given Navalny's nationwide support has never exceeded 3 percent or so, but on paper they are now liable to arrest and prosecution and, if convicted of one or another charge, could be fined or imprisoned.

There have been no arrests, so far as has been reported. But think of all those chances Western intel agencies and their clerks in the press may now have to lionize a new cohort of oppositionists as Navalny's heroic followers. Let us not forget, a kooky poseur journalist named Oleg Kashin had the nerve to call Navalny "Russia's true leader" in a recent New York Times opinion piece .

There is no limit to the silliness in all matters Russian, it seems. At least not at the Times .

I say "curious" because, in the ordinary conduct of statecraft as we have had it for the past seven decades, the Moscow's court's ruling, exactly a week prior to President Joe Biden's first summit with President Vladimir Putin, would have to be counted obtuse. Wouldn't minding one's manners -- especially given that the Navalny network's significance resides solely in the minds and news pages of Western propagandists -- be the wise course?

I don't think so. I have no clue as to the independence or otherwise of the Russian judiciary, but it is unthinkable the Russian leader did not know in advance of what the courts were about to determine. I think Russia was indeed minding its manners -- a different and altogether more honorable set of manners than American pols and diplomats have exhibited lo these many decades.

In a sensible read, the court ruling was a calculated gesture in response to Biden's commitment, announced during a Memorial Day speech, to confront Putin in Geneva on June 16 with the question of human rights in the Russian Federation. "We will not stand by and let him abuse those rights," saith the man from Scranton.

We will not stand by, Moscow replied in so many words, as you grandstand at Russia's expense. Recall in this connection, Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, has lately made it a habit to note that Moscow is monitoring human rights in the U.S. since the Jan. 6 protests at the Capitol. "We have no taboo topics," Lavrov said in evident response to Biden's speech. "We will discuss whatever we think is necessary."

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, left, and President Vladimir Putin meeting with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi, 2017. (President of Russia)

It would be very wrong to take this matter as a passing spat as the Russian and American presidents find their feet with one another. In my view, the court judgment last week and Lavrov's remarks on human rights as a two-way street make the Geneva encounter far more important than it may have otherwise turned out to be.

Five Principles

To understand this, we must go back and back and back some more until we reach the early 1950s, when newly independent India and newly socialist China were working out how two very large neighbors ought best to conduct their relations. It was while negotiating a bilateral agreement on this question in 1953 that Zhou Enlai, Mao's cultured, subtle, farsighted premier, first articulated his Five Principles, the ethical code by which the People's Republic would conduct its relations with all nations.

These were incorporated into the Sino–Indian Agreement of 1954 and have been justifiably well-known since. Note that four of the five have to do with respectful conduct and parity:

– Mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty;

– Mutual nonaggression;

– Noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations;

– Equality and mutual benefit among nations;

– Peaceful coexistence.

A year after New Delhi and Beijing signed their accord, Zhou's principles were reiterated at the historically monumental conference of nonaligned nations Sukarno hosted at an Indonesian hill station called Bandung. When the Non–Aligned Movement was formally constituted six years after that, the Five Principles effectively became the non–West's statement -- of aspiration, of intent -- to the West: This is what we have to offer the postcolonial world, the NAM said in so many words. This is our contribution to a new and peaceable world order. This is how we will manage our relations with others.

The Grand Mosque of Bandung, Indonesia, with its twin minarets, adjacent to the city square in Asia-Afrika Street, 2008. (Prayudi Setiadharma, Wikimedia Commons)

The United States never had any time for the NAM. As readers of a certain age will recall, it dismissed the movement, with-us-or-against-us style, as a badly dressed bunch of crypto–Communists or Soviet dupes. The decades since are an easy lesson in why Washington took this utterly awful position: It has not once, not in any given year, observed even one of Zhou's principles. It has always, in any given year, abused all five.

Vladimir Putin

One may admire or detest Vladimir Putin, but he is undeniably possessed of an excellent grasp of history, as many of his speeches attest. I doubt he thinks very specifically about the NAM or Zhou's principles, but, without naming them, these are what he will have on the table when he meets Joe Biden.

This is the meaning of the oddly timed court judgment against Navalny's apparatus and the message Lavrov conveyed in response to Biden's Memorial Day speech: Internal affairs are to be resolved internally.

Geneva will mark the start of a long and welcome process. Its importance will lie in its formalization of a stance Russia -- and China, too -- have adopted since those two catastrophically stupid mistakes Biden and Secretary of State Blinken made last March, when Biden called Putin a murderer and tin-eared Blinken hollowly lectured the Chinese about human rights and democracy.

President Joe Biden in Oval Office, April 27. (White House, Adam Schultz)

Beijing and Moscow have ever since stiffened their backs toward the U.S., giving as good as they get on all the questions with which Washington customarily browbeats others.

If we have begun a process, where will it lead? In my read to an excellent place, where nations mind the better set of manners noted above -- Zhou Enlai's manners, let us say.

Before this century is out, and very possibly before the midway mark, Zhou's Five Principles stand to become the norm in international relations. Zhou's true topic was parity between West and non–West. This will be achieved, and strange it is that the opening months of the Biden administration have opened us to this salutary prospect. The U.S. will otherwise lead us all into an egregiously messy period of history, and I do not think rising powers -- Russia, China, India, others -- will find this acceptable.

One other matter must be clarified as Geneva approaches.

I do not know the merits of the case against Navalny or, since last week, the ruling against his followers. But I have always found it curious that The New York Times and the other major dailies recite as rote that Navalny and his people consider the two charges of embezzlement (and the two convictions) that put him in jail in the first place to be "trumped up" or "politically motivated." Why doesn't the Times ' Moscow bureau do the gumshoe work and inform readers whether or not this is so?

True, Times ' Moscow correspondents are among the worst in my lifetime, but this kind of kabuki requires one to consider carefully whether the charges are indeed legitimate. My read: The legal case against Navalny probably holds water, and the American press uses the power of omission to avoid acknowledging this.

Pitiful, if this is the case.

The larger point here: We must learn to put all such questions aside in contexts such as we have now in U.S.–Russia relations. Anyone who has ever been in a Marxist reading group knows the importance of distinguishing between primary and secondary contradictions. Let us not forget the essential lesson, no matter anyone's political stripe.

What is the primary contradiction here? It is Washington's refusal to observe the principles of noninterference and sovereignty, and it is vital far, far beyond bilateral relations that Russia defends these. The Navalny case and the associated matter of human rights are, plainly and simply, a secondary contradiction -- and one it is imperative to leave to Russians to resolve.

Geneva in June, a rather nice place to be. Let us see if Biden and Putin mind their manners -- and whose manners these turn out to be.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century . Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via his Patreon site .

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News .

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Tags: Alexei Navalny Bandung Conference Non Aligned Movement Patrick Lawrence Sergei Lavrov


[Jun 14, 2021] Jessica Ashooh- The Taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant Tabbed to Do It

Jun 14, 2021 | www.mintpressnews.com

Reddit is one of the world's most influential news and social media platforms. The website attracted over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United States' eighth most visited site, ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more established news sites, garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times .

That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the company's decision to appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the position of Director of Policy in 2017, at which time it was also the eight most visited site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle East foreign policy wonk at NATO's think tank the Atlantic Council, was appointed at around the same time that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was demanding more control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being used to spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she oversees all government relations and public policy for the company, in addition to managing content, product and advertising. Yet a Google search for "Jessica Ashooh Reddit" filtered between late 2016 and early 2017 (after she was appointed) elicits zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even mentioned the questionable appointment.

This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state official -- all of which raises serious questions about the extent of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the national security state.

A hawk's talons on Syria

The Atlantic Council is the de-facto brains of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and takes funding from the military alliance, as well as from the U.S. government, the U.S. military, Middle Eastern dictatorships, other Western governments, big tech companies, and weapons manufacturers. Its board of directors has been and continues to be a who's who of high U.S. statespeople like Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, as well as senior military commanders such as retired generals Wesley Clark, David Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, James "Mad Dog" Mattis, the late Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and Admiral James Stavridis. At least seven former CIA directors are also on the board. As such, the council chooses to represent both political wings of the national security state.

Jessica Ashooh Resume

Ashooh's LinkedIn resume epitomizes the troubling relantionship between think tanks and big tech

Between 2015 and 2017, Ashooh was Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council's Middle East Strategy Task Force, working directly with and under Madeline Albright and Stephen Hadley. This is particularly noteworthy, given both these individuals' roles in the region. As Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Albright oversaw the Iraq sanctions and the Oil for Food Program, denounced as "genocide" by the successive United Nations diplomats charged with carrying them out. In an infamous interview with 60 Minutes , Albright casually brushed off a question about her role in the killing of half a million children, stating "the price is worth it." Meanwhile, Hadley was deputy or senior national security advisor to the government of George W. Bush throughout the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, surely the greatest crimes against humanity thus far in the 21st century.

Ashooh appears to be as hawkish as her bosses. Her particular area of expertise is the war in Syria, regarding which she has been among the most belligerent voices, constantly calling for more American intervention to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. In a 2015 interview with Al Jazeera , she praised the U.K. government's decision to bomb the country, claiming that the British public was "coming around" to the idea of war. A shocked interviewer asked "how will the British airstrikes [on] Syria make the British public any safer?" Ashooh replied that it was "generally a positive decision" because "it goes a long way in improving international consensus on the way forward on Syria," although she lamented that there wouldn't be "much improvement in the situation without ground troops." There will be "no political solution without a military element," she predicted, essentially making the pitch for war.

https://cdn.jwplayer.com/players/bhFBUukP-YuKiCfZc.html


Ashooh has also constantly praised and supported Syria's opposition forces. In 2016, she said that she was very happy that "fighters on the ground from a number of key factions" were uniting against the "Assad regime." She condemned Russia for claiming these opposition forces were members of terrorist groups like Al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam or ISIS, insisting that these were "moderate" rebels.

Of course, the idea that there was still any measurable distance between "moderate" rebels and outright militant jihadists by 2016 was hard to maintain . Even The Washington Post by this time was admitting as much, noting that so-called moderates were now so "intermingled" with al-Nusra that it was difficult to tell them apart.

Nevertheless, the New Hampshire native took to the pages of The New York Times to demand that the U.S. arm the opposition. Of course, it was already doing so, the CIA spending $1 billion per year fielding rebel mercenary armies in the conflict -- with one in every 15 dollars the agency spent going to this endeavor. All of this Ashooh surely knew, yet she maintained that the West must continue to "jack up the price" of Russia defending Assad. "As long as [Assad] remains in power and remains the figurehead of the Syrian government this conflict won't end," she said , laying out her regime-change-or-bust position. Just weeks before unexpectedly taking over at Reddit, Ashooh seemed to still be in full foreign-policy-hawk mode, condemning Obama in the pages of The Washington Post for his apparent softness on Syria and demanding that Trump "restore U.S. credibility" by "order[ing] targeted, punitive strikes against the Assad regime."

Jessica Ashooh

Ashooh attends British Polo Day at Abu Dhabi's Ghantoot Racing and Polo Club. Photo | Ahlan Dirty war, dirty warrior

Ashooh is actually even more involved in the Syrian conflict than one might realize from her hawkish opinions alone. Between 2011 and 2015, she worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, in her own words , "[p]rovid[ing] senior decision makers with policy analysis and strategic advice, with a particular focus on Syria."

At that time the UAE was using its enormous financial clout to arm and fund a myriad of jihadist groups attempting to overthow the secular strongman Assad and establish some kind of Islamic state. Far from a conspiracy theory, this comes straight from the horse's mouth, as then-Vice President Joe Biden revealed in a Q&A session in 2014. The future president frankly stated :

The Saudis, the Emiratis, what were they doing? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world. "

Under pressure, he later apologized for his loose lips.

MintPress News asked the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs to comment on precisely what Ashooh's role was, but they failed to respond.

Jessica Ashooh Kurdistan

Ashooh is pictured during her time as a "consultant" in Iraqi Kurdistan. Photo | Academyalumni

Ashooh herself appears to have been a relatively major player in the Syrian Civil War. In her previously mentioned Washington Post article , she notes that her boss was a former Emirati Air Force General and that she was flown to Istanbul in 2013 to attend an emergency meeting with leaders of the Syrian opposition, as well as ambassadors from unnamed Arab and Western states, in order to plan a response to a reported chemical weapons attack and to help the U.S. "coordinate with the Syrian opposition."

At the same time as she was advising the nation on Middle Eastern affairs, the UAE was widely accused of flying ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders into Yemen to help them intensify the Saudi-led onslaught on the impoverished nation and of smuggling U.S.-made weaponry -- including small arms, TOW missiles and Oshkosh fighting vehicles -- to the jihadist groups. While Ashooh's writing is careful to maintain a distinction between the "moderate" rebels she supports and the fundamentalist radicals she does not, it certainly is noteworthy that the entities she worked for consistently seem to end up in league with the most regressive forces in the region. MintPress also reached out to Reddit for comment on why they appointed Ashooh, given her past history, and on the wider phenomenon of government penetration of social media. The company initially promised to issue a response to the inquiry but has not followed through with it.

An Unholy Alliance: Did the US-Backed UAE Fly ISIS Leaders into Yemen's Killing Fields? The US-allied United Arab Emirates (UAE stands accused of flying ISIS leaders from Syria into Yemen to use in the Saudi-led Coalition war. MintPress News | Alexander Rubinstein | Mar 6, 2019 Opposing some dictatorships, supporting others

Regime change is on the table for more than just one Middle Eastern nation. In a 2017 paper for the Center for the National Interest -- a think tank established by former Republican President Richard Nixon and the "Godfather of Neoconservatism," Irving Kristol -- Ashooh explores the different options for forcing regime change in Iran, but concludes that overthrowing the "odious regime" is an impossible task right now, and criticizes the idea as a quixotic dream.

Nevertheless, she is far from an Iran dove. An Atlantic Council report she co-wrote insists that "Iranian interference in the Arab world must be deterred," and that "America's friends and partners must be reassured that the U.S. opposes Iranian hegemony and will work with them to prevent it."

Ashooh's commitment to fighting against Middle Eastern dictatorships might seem more principled if she did not appear so enamored of the least democratic one of them all. In 2016, she accompanied Albright and Hadley to Saudi Arabia and praised the monarchy's dynamic leadership on the economy and its nurturing of a new generation. "It was really really exciting to see that level of energy and the level of government support for these young people who were interested in shaping their own futures it was just wonderful," she said . In an article about her experience for business news website Market Watch , she waxed lyrical about how forward-thinking the Saudi government is and how the country has become "a hub for the dynamic and positive change that is swelling up throughout the region." Presumably, this excludes Yemen, a nation they were bombing relentlessly . In a 2020 interview , Ashooh revealed that her dream job would be U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. One of her earliest comments on her public Reddit page (made before she began working there) is deflecting the Kingdom from criticism of its dreadful treatment of women.

Jessica Ashooh Reddit profile

Ashooh's Reddit account, which doesn't identify her real identity, uses the moniker, arabscarab

As part of the Atlantic Council, Ashooh was tasked with envisaging a new Middle East for the 21st century. Given her output , it seems that she advocates for a transition towards a more privatized, free-market economic setup, not completely unlike the shock therapy tried in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. "We have to "encourage states to make the reforms that move economies from state-based to ones that support entrepreneurship, because the age of state-based economies is over," she said at a talk at New York University in 2015, adding:

You've got to move to support entrepreneurship in the region and let people take advantage of the natural industrial tendencies of people in the Middle East. My God, if you've ever been to a Turkish bazaar or a market in Cairo you know that these countries are perfectly capable of having functioning market economies. But the state has gotten in the way.

Ashooh's LinkedIn profile also notes that in 2010, she worked as an advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Planning "on a variety of strategic and economic development issues," but does not go into any more detail about what those issues were. A further biography merely states that her consultancy agency "provid[ed] strategic and management consulting services to the Ministry of Planning of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq." Unsurprisingly, the organization has links to the U.S. military; the agency's lead partner being a former Army captain.

Think Tankie

Ashooh comes from a relatively prominent New Hampshire family of Lebanese descent, the most notable of which is probably her uncle Richard . Richard Ashooh was Donald Trump's Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration and a former executive at weapons manufacturer BAE Systems. Unlike her uncle, Jessica appears to lean more Democratic, having donated money to a number of local politicians, as well as to anti-Trump Republican groups aimed at convincing them to vote blue, such as Right Side PAC and the now infamous Lincoln Project. However, she also appears to have great respect for many Republicans, having written her doctoral thesis at Oxford University on the Middle East policy of the George W. Bush administration. She also stated that the person she would have most liked to have met was 41st President George Bush Senior, describing him as possessing "incredible amounts of strategy, finesse and restraint." Thus, her political views appear to be exactly in the center of the neoliberal " blob " in Washington.

Ashooh also worked for the right-wing think tank the CATO Institute and is a Term Member of the more Democratic-aligned Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR's term member program is intended to, in its own words, "cultivate the next generation of foreign policy leaders."

Surveillance Valley

How and why, then, did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite universities and in the halls of state power end up an executive at an anarchic messageboard site with an anti-establishment reputation? Virtually everyone else in senior roles at Reddit has relevant backgrounds in marketing or tech, having worked with comparable companies such as Yelp, Expedia and Snapchat.

Tom Secker -- a journalist, podcaster and researcher who runs SpyCulture.com , an online archive about government involvement in the entertainment industry -- was deeply skeptical. "That someone whose entire career has been in international relations and foreign affairs is now the senior policy wonk at Reddit is simply bizarre. Given her ties to the CFR, Atlantic Council and the like, it's downright suspicious," Secker told MintPress .

Underneath the surface, however, the Atlantic Council has been rapidly expanding its influence and control over big social media companies. In 2018, it announced that it would be partnering with Facebook to promote trustworthy sources and derank, demote and even delete low quality or fake news, thus effectively curating what the platform's 2.85 billion worldwide users see in their news feeds. But the effect of recent algorithmic changes has been to throttle alternative media traffic in favor of establishment sources such as CNN , Fox News and The New York Times . Even such more mainstream liberal sites as Mother Jones have seen their numbers crater. Facebook later admitted that they were directly targeting Mother Jones because of its left-leaning content, raising the question that if such a middle-of-the-road liberal outlet was being penalized, wasn't the collapse in traffic to more radical publications surely deliberate? Given the Atlantic Council's funding and the identities of those on its board , their control over social media is tantamount to state censorship on a global level.

Earlier this year, Facebook also hired NATO press officer Ben Nimmo to be its intelligence chief, in another move that dismayed free-speech advocates. In the past, Nimmo has identified a Welsh pensioner and an internationally known Ukranian pianist as Russian bots, raising more questions about the suitability of the Atlantic Council to be an arbiter of truth online.

The Facebook-Atlantic Council link mirrors that of Microsoft with NewsGuard , a new piece of software purportedly trying to fight fake news by placing either green shields or red warning logos, corresponding to an outlet's credibility, beside all links in its browser, Microsoft Edge -- this credibility being decided entirely by NewsGuard itself. Newsguard pushed Microsoft to install the software on all its products as standard. Again, however, NewsGuard's system rated establishment websites like Fox News and CNN as trustworthy but independent media as suspect. And again, a glance at its advisory board makes it clear that this is a state operation. Those in key positions included George W. Bush's Secretary of Homeland Security and former NSA and CIA Director General Michael Hayden; ex-White House Communications Director Don Baer; and former Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Worse still, NewsGuard is also linked to a PR agency employed in whitewashing the Saudi government's human-rights record and its role in the carnage in Yemen.

Twitter, too, has some extremely troubling links with state power. In 2019 Gordon MacMillan, a senior Twitter executive responsible for the Middle East region, was outed as an active duty officer in the British Army's 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to online operations and psychological warfare. Far from causing a scandal, only one major U.S. outlet even mentioned the story, and the journalist in question resigned from the profession weeks later, claiming the existence of a network of top-down state censors who quash stories that threaten the power and prestige of the national security state. To this day, MacMillan remains in his post at Twitter, strongly suggesting the social media company knew of his role before he was hired.

Over the past few years, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook have announced the deletion of hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to sources in Russia, Iran, China and other enemy states, often on the recommendation of Western governments or state-sponsored intelligence organizations. However, they never seem willing or able to find any manipulation of their platforms by Western governments. Thus, the upshot of this has been to slowly dissuade critics of Western foreign policy from using their services.

"The mainstream media-politik establishment has managed to get a hold over Twitter, Facebook and Instagram -- shadow-banning and downrating posts considered 'Russian propaganda' or whatever other excuse they use to marginalize perspectives and content outside of the mainstream," Secker told MintPress . "Audiences for this sort of content are increasingly pissed off and alienated by the major social media sites."

Facebook, Social Media Giants Admit to Silencing Palestinian Voices Online Social media companies including Facebook have admitted to MintPress that pro-Palestinian posts were removed, blaming mistakes in the algorithm. MintPress News | Jessica Buxbaum | May 14

Increasingly, unwelcome political voices are either brushed off by centrist pundits as repeating Russian talking points or smeared as being amplified by Kremlin-based bot farms. The popularity of movements on the left like Black Lives Matter or the Bernie Sanders' campaign were written off as partially linked to Russia, while others suggested that the January 6 insurrection in Washington was essentially a Russian operation.

The irony is that many of the wildest accusations against Putin that have fed this climate of suspicion began life in Atlantic Council documents. For example, the organization has published a series of studies that suggest that virtually every European political party challenging the neoliberal status quo in some way -- from Labour and UKIP in the U.K. to Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece and PODEMOS and Vox in Spain -- are secretly controlled by Russia, functioning as the "Kremlin's Trojan Horses," in its words.

The Atlantic Council is also deeply intertwined with a U.K. government-funded organization called the Integrity Initiative, something that purports to be a group defending democracy from disinformation. However, in practice, it appears to be doing the opposite: planting disinformation about politicians' supposed links to Russia in order to undermine them. The Integrity Initiative is a government-backed cluster of journalists who operate in unison to conduct propaganda blitzes on unsuspecting publics. In 2018, it launched a successful operation to prevent Colonel Pedro Baños being appointed Spain's head of national security. Considering Baños too soft on Russia for the Atlantic Council and other hawks' liking, the initiative sprung into action, creating a storm of protest that led to another individual being chosen.

New Documents Reveal Covert UK Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In US Politics With the help of John Rendon and the State Department's Global Engagement Center, the Integrity Initiative brings its disinformation campaign to the US. MintPress News | Mark Ames | Jan 9, 2019

Reddit actually played a key role in a 2019 propaganda blitz against anti-war Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. A few days before the U.K.'s general election, Corbyn promoted documents leaked on the platform that showed that Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson was negotiating with American companies, putting much of the country's National Health Service up for sale. With just days to go before polls opened, it could have proved a game changer. Reddit quickly came to Johnson's rescue, however, asserting that the documents were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The story in the pliant British press switched from "Boris Johnson is selling off the NHS" to "Corbyn promotes Russian disinfo," thus greasing the skids for an easy victory for the hardline anti-Russia Conservative Party, an outcome the hawks at the Atlantic Council were no doubt relieved by, given Corbyn's open skepticism about war, empire and nuclear weapons. The veracity of the documents was not challenged.

For a while

Founded in 2005, Reddit has grown to become one of the world's largest and most influential websites. However, it began life as an anarchistic messageboard whose culture was profoundly libertarian and anti-establishment. For years, the company's administrators took a near free speech absolutist position. Aaron Swartz, Reddit's co-founder, was an open source hacktivist and even attempted to download and publish the entirety of academic publisher Jstor's library. When authorities got wind of what he was doing, they threatened him with 40 years in prison, an action that caused him to take his own life in 2013.

Reddit's own position on free information and free speech was often so extreme it caused huge controversy. The site became the internet's largest source of child pornography. It was only after CNN began reporting on it to a nationwide audience that things began to change. Other, grossly offensive communities like /r/BeatingWomen and /r/CoonTown were also protected.

Nevertheless, the culture established by anarchistic tech bros remained for some years, with the site resembling darker corners of the internet like 4Chan and 8Chan as much as more family-friendly mainstream social media like Facebook.

Ashooh's arrival in 2017 coincided with a new era in the site's history. Gone were the days of protecting communities that would bring in bad publicity. Her team quickly brought in a new content policy and began to delete communities that violated it. Last year, she oversaw the banning of over 2,000 communities in a single day, including /r/The_Donald, the main Donald Trump subreddit, and /r/ChapoTrapHouse, the most active left-wing community. These decisions have helped the money flow in; since 2017 revenue has more than tripled .

However, what has been lost across the internet is the liberatory potential of these technologies. In the 1990s and 2000s, many predicted that the internet would usher in a new era of egalitarianism and genuine democracy, helping even to reduce barriers and tensions between nations. For a while, the new medium allowed political actors to challenge the status quo and gain huge followings quickly. Alternative media was easily outperforming legacy media, and challenging the status quo when it came to news. Seeing that, the reaction since 2016 has been swift, as the elite have moved to retighten their grip over the means of communication. Ashooh's jump from national security state official to Reddit Director of Policy is just one more point of reference on that chart.

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent , as well as a number of academic articles . He has also contributed to FAIR.org , The Guardian , Salon , The Grayzone , Jacobin Magazine , and Common Dreams .

[Jun 12, 2021] Putin Reveals Personal Thoughts On Trump Biden In Rare NBC Interview

NBC pushed regular neocon garbage, so it is not very interesting interview. We saw better executed similar attempts to attack Putin in the past. The guy is really second rate: too pushy, too opinioned to be a good interviewer. He really is not interested in Putin opinions, he need to push the agenda of his handlers. He demonstrated zero respect as if Russia is a US vassal (it was in 1990 under alcoholic Yeltsin) . In other words he is a regular Pressitute. This neocon pushed the label killer on Putin, while this label is appropritate to any recent US presendent to much greater measure. Just look at how many people were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in attempt to achive "full spectrum Dominance" and enhance andcement global neoliberal empire. But some moments when Putin destroyed neocon agenda are pretty educational.
Jun 12, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Russian President Vladimir Putin this week sat down for an interview with a US media outlet for the first time in nearly three years . NBC's Keir Simmons talked to Putin for about 90 minutes, and released a teaser segment Friday night.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation centered on the Russian leader's perspective on American politics and his personal thoughts and comparison of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Putin called the former president "extraordinary" and "talented" while noting that Biden is "radically different" and is a quintessential "career man" in politics .

https://www.youtube.com/embed/oh_obIUJ7HA

"Well even now, I believe that former U.S. president Mr. Trump is an extraordinary individual, talented individual, otherwise he would not have become U.S. President," Putin told Simmons.

" He is a colorful individual. You may like him or not. And, but he didn't come from the US establishment, he had not been part of big time politics before , and some like it some don't like it but that is a fact."

In contrast, he said of President Biden :

"...President Biden is a career man. He has spent virtually his entire adulthood in politics," Putin said in part.

"That's a different kind of person, and it is my great hope that yes, there are some advantages, some disadvantages, but there will not be any impulse-based movements, on behalf of the sitting U.S. president."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1403486131132506119&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fputin-reveals-personal-thoughts-trump-biden-rare-us-media-interview&sessionId=1e2973eddbbb4bb3a4de25e2928af1d7e080705f&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px

Also interesting is Putin's response to the March George Stephanopoulos interview with Biden wherein the US President dubbed Putin a "killer" with "no soul". Putin responded in this new NBC clip:

"Over my tenure, I've gotten used to attacks from all kinds of angles and from all kinds of areas under all kinds of pretext, and reasons and of different caliber and fierceness and none of it surprises me."

Putin called the "killer" label "Hollywood macho."

Putin also took aim at a recent Washington Post report over Russia-Iranian military relations and the transfer of advanced satellite systems. "It's just fake news," Putin dismissed. "At the very least, I don't know anything about this kind of thing. Those who are speaking about it probably will maybe know more about it. It's just nonsense, garbage."


activisor 2 hours ago

Funny how Putin has become leader of the free world! He and Lavrov are streets ahead of the rest, and have massive support outside Russia based on their common sense approach to world events. He will be hard to replace.

yerfej 2 hours ago

EVERYONE with common sense realize Putin is the ONLY current leader who gives a **** about his country and people and is willing to cooperate with any country that isn't wandering around the globe looking to tell everyone else what they can say or do or think.

No_Pretzel_Logic 2 hours ago

How fascinating that you speak for "everyone" with common sense. That's quite a skill.

Do tell us about the responses from people you've polled in the Scandinavian countries, Poland, UK, France, etc.?

George Bush League 2 hours ago

You can start by not being such an pathetic condescending azzhole.

smellmyfingers 54 minutes ago

Putin, articulate, intelligent, answers without a teleprompter and without babbling or stumbling.

Is he perfect? Obviously not nor is he a messiah. But I'd bet people have more confidence in him out in front than the corruption and lies the USA and many other western nations have that are completely compromised.

chunga 2 hours ago remove link

Dmitry Orlov has got some interesting translations from Putin at the thing in St. Petersburg.

https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/

Here's the money shot.

"The United States are making sure-footed strides directly along the path of the Soviet Union."

Orlov concludes.

If there is anything at all that you can do to prepare, your time is short. This is not a drill.

[Jun 12, 2021] Putin warns US may regret using dollar as sanctions weapon - Nation - postguam.com

Jun 10, 2021 | www.postguam.com

President Vladimir Putin said Russia doesn't want to stop using the dollar as he accused the U.S. of exploiting the currency's dominance for sanctions and warned the policy may rebound on Washington.

Russia has to adopt other payment methods because the U.S. "uses its national currency for various kinds of sanctions," Putin said late Friday in St. Petersburg at a videoconference with representatives of international media organizations. "We don't do this deliberately, we are forced to do it."

Settlements in national currencies with other countries in areas such as defense sales and reductions in foreign-exchange reserves held in dollars eventually will damage the U.S. as the greenback's dominance declines, Putin said. "Why do U.S. political authorities do this? They're sawing the branch on which they sit," he said.

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Putin spoke a day after Russia announced it will eliminate the dollar from its oil fund to reduce vulnerability to sanctions, a largely symbolic move as the switch in holdings will take place within the central bank's reserves. Russia has tried with limited success to shift away from the dollar for years amid international sanctions over Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, as well as for alleged cyber attacks, election meddling and espionage operations.

The Russian leader's comments came ahead of his first summit meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in Geneva on June 16. While he praised Biden as one of the world's most experienced leaders, Putin said he expects no breakthrough in relations with the U.S. at the talks.

And he offered a warning at Friday's meeting for the U.S., based on what he said was his own experiences "as a former citizen of the former Soviet Union."

"The problem with empires is that they think they can afford small errors and mistakes," which gradually accumulate, Putin said. "There comes a time when they can no longer be dealt with. And the U.S., with a confident step, a confident gait, a firm step, is walking straight along the path of the Soviet Union."

[Jun 12, 2021] Scrap Sanctions Warfare! by Oliver Boyd

Looks like UNZ commenters are not fans of the US government :-)
Jun 09, 2021 | www.unz.com

Sanctions are the "gentlemanly" neo-imperial language of gunboat diplomacy, never better expressed than the attempts of the British government in the early 1950s to discipline a newly democratic Iran. First the British Labour Government, then a Conservative government under a splenetic Churchill, tried to put a halt to the runaway popularity of Mohammed Mossadegh, prime minister of Iran, and his policy to shut down the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and nationalize Iran's own oil. The British sabotaged their own company, refused to distribute the oil, and did everything else they could to impoverish Iran. This was only after the AIOC had refused to budge from its insistence on taking practically all of the profits and to refrain from treating Iranian oil workers as subhuman. Ironically, the British needed AIOC money to finance their own program of industrial nationalization and the welfare state. As is so often the case, the "sanctions" merely hardened anti-imperial sentiment, and were succeeded by a joint US-UK directed regime-change coup d'etat

None of this need suggest a diminution in the importance of national sovereignty. Sovereign nations should be free to trade with whomsoever they choose, to protect which domestic industries they consider worthy of protection. That is their right. They also have the right to enter into trade agreements with others for the purpose of regulating the conditions of trade between them, provided that they enter into such agreements without duress, bribery or punishment.

Questions of Definition

The Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) explains that sanctions have become one of the most favored tools for governments to respond to foreign policy challenges. The term sanctions can refer to travel bans, asset freezes, arms embargoes, capital restraints, foreign aid reductions, and trade restrictions, and represent efforts to coerce, deter, punish, or shame entities that are considered by those who wield them to endanger their interests. They are generally viewed as a lower-cost, lower-risk course of action in calculations that balance diplomacy against war. Yet sanctions can be just as devasting in terms of loss of human life. They may be particularly attractive in the case of policy responses to foreign crises in which national interest is considered less than vital, or where military action is not feasible.

Sanctions that blanket entire populations generally do most damage to poorer and more vulnerable social strata, who lack the means to avoid or compensate for their consequences. The USA has more than two dozen sanctions regimes. Some target specific countries such as Cuba and Iran, others target specific categories of person or institution or even specific named individuals. Sanctions have been used in efforts of counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, nonproliferation, democracy and human rights promotion, conflict resolution, and cybersecurity. They are frequently applied as a form of punishment or reprisal for behavior in which it is alleged that the target has engaged and of which the applying entity disapproves.

In the case of the UN Security Council sanctions resolutions must pass the fifteen-member council by a majority vote and without a veto from any of the five permanent members: the United States, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom. The most common types of UN sanctions, binding for all member states, are asset freezes, travel bans, and arms embargoes. The UN relies on member states for enforcement, with all the idiosyncrasies and abuses that this entails. The council-imposed sanctions against Southern Rhodesia in 1966 were intended to undermine Ian Smith's white supremacist regime and were followed in 1977 by another set of comprehensive UN sanctions against apartheid South Africa. They have been applied more than twenty times since 1990 against targeting parties to an intrastate conflict, as in Somalia, Liberia, and Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The European Union imposes sanctions as part of its Common Foreign and Security Policy. They must receive unanimous consent from member states in the Council of the European Union, the body that represents EU leaders. The EU has levied its sanctions more than thirty times. Individual EU states may also impose harsher sanctions independently within their national jurisdiction.

The USA resorts to economic and financial sanctions more than any other country. Presidents may issue an executive order that declares a national emergency and invokes special powers to regulate commerce for a period of one year, unless extended by the president or terminated by a joint resolution of Congress. Most of the more than fifty states of emergency declared by Congress remain in effect today. Congress may pass legislation imposing new sanctions or modifying existing ones.

In 2019, the United States had comprehensive sanctions regimes on Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Sudan, and Syria, as well as more than a dozen other programs targeting individuals and entities (currently some 6,000). Existing U.S. sanctions programs are administered by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), while other departments, including State, Commerce, Homeland Security, and Justice, may also play an integral role. The secretary of state can designate a group a foreign terrorist organization or label a country a state sponsor of terrorism, both of which have sanctions implications. State and local authorities may also contribute to enforcement efforts.

The practice of sanctions received a significant boost with the formation of the World Trade Organization, which recognizes the legitimacy of sanctions as a response to the failure of parties in a trade dispute to reach agreement on satisfactory compensation. A complainant may ask the Dispute Settlement Body for permission to impose trade sanctions against the respondent that has failed to implement. The complainant's retaliatory response may not go beyond the level of the harm caused by the respondent. The complainant should first seek to suspend obligations in the same sector as that in which the violation or other nullification or impairment was found, unless the complainant considers it impracticable or ineffective to remain within the same sector The complainant is allowed countermeasures that are in effect and would in other circumstances be inconsistent with the WTO Agreement. In other words, the result is that a complainant responds to one trade barrier with another trade barrier, contrary to the liberalization philosophy underlying the WTO. Such measures are nearly always harmful for both the complainant and the target. Although such retaliation requires prior approval by the DSB 1, the countermeasures are applied selectively by one Member against another. The suspension of obligations is temporary and the DSB is obligated to maintain a review of the situation for as long as there is no implementation. The suspension must be revoked once the Member concerned has fully complied with the DSB's recommendations and rulings.

In a 2019 decision the WTO allowed China to impose trade sanctions on $3.6 billion of American goods on the grounds that the USA had not followed WTO rules in the way it imposed duties on what it regarded as unfairly cheap Chinese goods. The ruling concluded a case that China brought against the USA in 2013 that stemmed from levies placed on more than 40 Chinese goods. At issue were subsidies that the USA accused China of providing to its companies so that they can sell goods more cheaply overseas.

The case touched on some of the deep politics of neoliberalism for which the WTO is supreme icon, and which make the very notion of sanctions problematic as evidenced in frequent criticisms of the WTO . These are that free trade benefits developed countries more than developing countries; that countries should trade without discrimination means a local firm is not allowed to favor local contractors, giving an unfair advantage to multinational companies and imposing costs for local firms; ; it is important that nations be allowed to assist in the diversification of their economies and not be penalized for favoring emerging industries; free trade is not equally sought across different industries "" notably, both the US and EU retain high tariffs on agriculture, which hurts farmers in developing economies; principles of free trade often ignore environmental considerations, considerations of labor equity and cultural diversity.

After 9/11 "" still one of the least understood events in modern history "" and amidst the subsequent US invasions of the sovereign countries of Afghanistan and Iraq, and de-stabilization of many others (including Libya, Syria, Ukraine), the USA set about disrupting what it deemed the financial infrastructure supporting terrorists and international criminals, (but not including the USA itself). The Patriot Act awarded Treasury Department officials far-reaching authority to freeze the assets and financial transactions of individuals and other entities suspected of supporting terrorism, and broad powers to designate foreign jurisdictions and financial institutions as "primary money laundering concerns." Treasury needs only a reasonable suspicion""not necessarily any evidence""to target entities under these laws. The centrality of New York and the dollar to the global financial system means these U.S. policies are felt globally. Penalties for sanctions violations can be huge in terms of fines, loss of business, and reputational damage. Sanctions regimes today increasingly impact not merely the primary targeted countries or entities but also those who would do business with such countries or entities.

Questions of Effectiveness

Sanctions have a poor track record, registering a modest 20-30 percent success rate at best, according to one source, Emily Cashen, writing for World Finance in 2017. According to leading empirical analyses, between 1915 and 2006, comprehensive sanctions were successful, at best, just 30 percent of the time. The longer sanctions are in place, the less likely they are to be effective, as the targeted state tends to adapt to its new economic circumstances instead of changing its behavior.

Examples of "successful" applications of sanctions (always judged from the very partial viewpoint of those who impose them) are said to include their role in persuading the Iranian leadership to comply with limits to its uranium enrichment program. But if this was "success," why then did the USA break its agreement with Iran in 2018? And why was there an agreement in the first place if Iran had never had nuclear weapons nor was likely to produce them on its own account without serious provocation. Sanctions are also said to have pressured Gadaffi in handing over the Lockerbie suspects for trial, renouncing the nation's weapons of mass destruction and ending its support for terrorist activities. But then, if that was "success," why did NATO bomb Libya back to the stone age in 2011?

Sanctions that are effective in one setting may fail in another . Context is everything. Sanctions programs with relatively limited objectives are generally more likely to succeed than those with major political ambitions. Furthermore, sanctions may achieve their desired economic effect but fail to change behavior. Only correlations, not causal relationships, can be determined. The central question is one of comparative utility: Is the imposition of sanctions better or worse than not imposing sanctions, from whose viewpoint, and why? Best practices are said to combine punitive measures with positive inducements; set attainable goals; build multilateral support; be credible and flexible: and give the target reason to believe that sanctions will be increased or reduced based on its behavior.

In cases where the targeted country has other trading options unilateral measures have no real impact or may be counterproductive. Sanctions against Russia over Ukraine may have simply helped to push Russia closer to its eastern neighbors, notably China. To bypass sanctions Russia has shifted its trade focus towards Asia. Asian non-cooperation with the sanctions helps explain why Russia was expecting to grow its trade with China to $200bn by 2020. For several countries in western Europe, the sanctions had a double-edged sword. Russia is the European Union's third largest commercial partner, and the EU, reciprocally, is Russia's chief trade partner, accounting for almost 41 percent of the nation's trade prior to the sanctions. In 2012, before the Ukrainian crisis began, the EU exported a record €267.5bn ($285bn) of goods to Russia. Further, US sanctions against Russia increasingly and patently had nothing to do with Ukraine and everything to do with US interest in exploiting its imperial relationship with West European vassal states to grow its LNG (liquefied natural gas) market in competition with Russia, and by doing everything possible to obstruct "" and to coerce European nations into helping it obstruct "" Russia's Nord Stream 2 oil and gas pipeline that will bring cheap Russian oil to Europe without passing through Ukraine. The very opposite of principles of globalization and free trade.

The USA can afford to be aggressive in sanctions policies largely because (for the time being, and that time is getting shorter by the day) there is no alternative to the dollar and because there is no single country export market quite as attractive (for now and even then, one must wonder about China) as the USA. Sanctions that are effective in one setting may fail in another. Context is everything. Sanctions programs with relatively limited objectives are generally more likely to succeed than those with major political ambitions. Furthermore, sanctions may achieve their desired economic effect but fail to change behavior. Only correlations, not causal relationships, can be determined. The central question is one of comparative utility: Is the imposition of sanctions better or worse than not imposing sanctions, from whose viewpoint, and why? Best practices are said to combine punitive measures with positive inducements; set attainable goals; build multilateral support; be credible and flexible: and give the target reason to believe that sanctions will be increased or reduced based on its behavior.

Sanctions and Human Misery

Since the early 1990s, the US, Europe and other developed economies have employed sanctions on other nations more than 500 times , seeking to assert their influence on the global stage without resorting to military interventions. Yet military interventions tend to happen in any case suggesting that in some cases the sanctions are intended to "soften up" the target prior to armed conflict). The economic stranglehold of stringent sanctions on Iraq after the successful allied invasion of 1991 caused widescale malnutrition and prolonged suffering, and a lack of medical supplies and a shortage of clean water led to one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern history. Sanctions all but completely cut off the oil trade. Iraq lost up to $130 billion in oil revenues during the 1990s, causing intense poverty to many Iraqi civilians. Prior to the embargo, Iraq had relied on imports for two thirds of its food supply. With this source suddenly cut off, the price of basic commodities rose 1,000 percent between 1990 and 1995. Infant mortality increased 150 percent, according to a report by Save the Children, with researchers estimating that between 670,000 and 880,000 children under five died because of the impoverished conditions caused by the sanctions. Then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright notoriously excused this horrendous slaughter as "worth the price ." During the Gulf War, almost all of Iraq's essential infrastructure was bombed by a US-led coalition, leaving the country without water treatment plants or sewage treatment facilities, prompting extended outbreaks of cholera and typhoid.

Targeted sanctions can be equally devastating. The de facto boycott on Congolese minerals, for example, has led to the loss of more than 750,000 jobs in the nation's mining sector. The loss of income resulting from this mass redundancy has had a severe impact on child health in the nation, with conservative estimates recording a 143 percent increase in infant mortality. Despite an international shift away from comprehensive sanctions, this Congolese suffering indicates targeted measures are still not free from ethical quandaries.

Application of sanctions became more popular at the end of the first cold war because previously targeted nations could negotiate for relief with the oppositional superpower. In the succeeding era of greater enthusiasm for sanctions it became clear that they could have dire consequences for civilian populations, and this helps account for increased popularity of targeted sanctions.

Sanctions of Spite: Syria and the Caesar Act

There are many current examples of the murderous horror of the impact of sanctions by "civilized," usually western powers, especially when their targets are poorer countries such as Venezuela and Syria. Not untypically, some of the behaviors that the imperialists seek to change are themselves the consequence of past imperial aggression.

The secular regime of Bashar Assad in Syria has faced a ten-year existential threat from the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda affiliates, ISIS and other jihadist entities supported by an array of global and regional actors including the USA, UK, and other NATO members, Israel, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the UAE. Whatever the regime's defects they are at the very least comparable and in some cases dwarfed by those of many of Syria's opponents in the Arab world. The significance of genuine popular support for Assad , demonstrated in numerous polls, has been marginalized by western mainstream media. The regime's survival, with air support from Russia and ground support from Hezbollah and Iran, is extraordinary by any measure. Yet the USA has continued to interfere in the affairs of Syria with a view to its continuing impoverishment and destabilization by allowing Turkey to occupy large areas of the north west and populate these with jihadist emigrees; funding Kurdish forces to secure Syria's oil resources on behalf of the USA, and for maintaining prisons and camps for ISIS supporters, by maintaining its own military bases; and permitting a constant succession of Israeli bombing attacks on what Israel claims are Iranian-backed militia or Syrian Arab Army militia working in collaboration with Iran; and approving further Israeli incursions into the Golan Heights.

Defeat of ISIS and recovery of non-Kurdish areas outside of Idlib by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) took place in conditions of considerable economic challenge, exacerbated by US-imposed sanctions against both Syria and its neighbor Lebanon. This had a corrosive impact on relations among top regime figures. Bashar al-Assad's billionaire first cousin and richest man in Syria, Rami Makhlouf, complained in early 2020 of regime harassment and arrests of employees. Until then, the Makhlouf family enjoyed exclusive access to business opportunities and monopolies on hotels, tobacco, and communications, partly camouflaged by a philanthropic empire that assisted many Syrians through the conflict . Some $30 billion of the country's wealth, representing 20% of all deposits in Lebanese banks, was trapped by Beirut's financial implosion, exacerbated by the unprecedented explosion "" possibly accidental, possibly sabotage "" in the city's harbor area on August 4. Syrian businessmen needed Beirut's banks to conduct business abroad, and to evade sanctions. A regime crackdown on money transfer companies made matters worse by creating a dollar shortage , depriving thousands of families who were dependent on foreign remittances. Before the explosion, purchasing power of the Syrian pound was already worth 27 times less than before the start of the conflict.

Deteriorating economic conditions ravaged Syria's surviving pretensions to socialist principle. In the first decade of Bashar's rule, there had been big gains in healthcare in terms of available beds, hospitals, and nursing staff. But by now there were 50% fewer doctors, 30% fewer hospitals. Before the conflict, 90% of pharmaceutical needs were filled by Syrian factories. By 2018 those factories which remained had trouble getting raw materials and replacement parts for equipment because of sanctions. Before the conflict there was improved land irrigation and food security. In 2011, abject poverty stood at less than one percent, rising to 35 percent by 2015. The percentage of those facing food insecurity had fallen from 2.2% in 1999 to 1.1% in 2010. Now, 33% lacked food security. One third of homes were damaged or destroyed, 380,000 killed and 11 million displaced since 2011.

Economic conditions were worsened by ever tightening economic sanctions and US enforcement of the so-called Caesar Act from June 2020 (named after a faked human rights scandal in 2015). The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act sanctioned the Syrian government, including President Bashar al-Assad, for alleged war crimes. The purposes were to cripple Syria for the purposes of regime change, while luring Russia further into the Syrian quagmire. The Act targeted 39 individuals and entities, including the president's wife, Asma. Anyone doing business with the regime, no matter where, was potentially vulnerable to travel restrictions and financial sanctions. The Caesar Act smeared the Syria Central Bank as a "˜money laundering' institution and sought to render it impossible for Syrian companies to export and import from Lebanon. It made it difficult or impossible for Syrians abroad to transfer money to family members. The Act contributed to devaluation of the Syrian pound which tumbled from 650 Syrian pounds to one US dollar in October 2019 to 2600 to the US dollar in summer 2020.

The Caesar Act (alongside legal initiatives in Europe designed to charge senior administration officials with war crimes) were designed to stymie reconstruction, hit the construction, electricity, and oil sectors, and cripple the Lebanese private companies that would otherwise lead reconstruction efforts. Sanctions prevented non-U.S. aid organizations from assisting reconstruction. An opposition leader predicted it would result in " even greater levels of destitution, famine, and worsening criminality and predatory behavior " and would precipitate regime change, migratory flight, excess deaths, and youth deprivation. In a climate of regulatory confusion, sanctions often encourage over-compliance. Prospects of reconstruction investment funds from Russian companies were negatively impacted . Blumenthal ascribed responsibility for the Caesar sanctions initiative to a "years-long lobbying campaign carried out by a network of regime-change operatives working under cover of shadowy international NGOs and Syrian-American diaspora groups." The country had already suffered severe US and EU economic sanctions. A 2016 UNESCO report found that sanctions had brought an end to humanitarian aid because sanctions regulations, licenses, and penalties made it so difficult and risky (Sterling 2020). In 2018, United Nations Special Rapporteur, Idriss Jazairy, observed that sanctions impacted negatively on

"agricultural inputs and outputs, medicines, on many dual use items related to water and sanitation, public electricity and transportation, and eventually on rebuilding schools, hospitals and other public buildings and services, are increasingly difficult to justify, if they ever were justifiable "

After 500,000 civilians returned to Aleppo following its liberation in 2016, US sanctions and UN rules prohibited reconstruction. Returnees were allowed "shelter kits" with plastic but rebuilding with glass and cement walls was not allowed because "˜reconstruction' was prohibited.

In brazen acknowledgment of US support for the HTS terrorists of Idlib, the Caesar Act exempted Idlib province, as well as the northeast areas controlled by US troops and the SDF. It designated $50 million for "˜humanitarian aid' to these areas. Other US allies pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars more in aid, further exacerbating pressure on the Syrian pound and substantially increasing prices for all commodities in regime-controlled areas.

Syria experts Joshua Landis and Steven Simon critiqued the logic of US sanctions policy, arguing that the:

"best-designed sanctions can be self-defeating, strengthening the regimes they were designed to hurt and punishing the societies they were supposed to protect."

They recalled the destruction of Iraq's middle class in the 1990s, when US sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis:

"Their effect was gendered, disproportionately punishing women and children. The notion that sanctions work is a pitiless illusion." .

Several European nations (Italy, Poland, Austria, Greece, Hungary) indicating unease with the continuing stagnation of US and EU sanctions policy, restored tacit contacts with Damascus. While the EU was an important source of humanitarian aid for internally displaced people in Syria and for displaced Syrians abroad, it continued to refrain from dealing directly with Damascus or from support for reconstruction efforts, on the grounds of continuing instability.

Conclusion

Under indubitably wise international leadership, acting within a framework of equitable political power among nation states whose sovereignty is sacrosanct, then perhaps sanctions policies might sometimes be strategically appropriate. These conditions clearly do not apply. The increasing weaponization of sanctions is a powerful contribution to a crumbling world order, one that invokes the grave danger of over-reaction by an aggrieved victim, in a context of intense economic and military competition between rival nuclear powers.

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is an expert on international media, news, and propaganda. His writings can be accessed by subscription at Substack at https://oliverboydbarrett.substack.com.


MarkU , says: June 8, 2021 at 11:44 am GMT "¢ 1.6 days ago

A comprehensive roundup of the sanctions-based aggression being imposed on the world by the bankster dominated west. I really don't think the majority of citizens have a clue what is being done by their rulers, nor any idea of the sheer hatred being fostered by those actions. The time for waking up is well overdue, the west has been sucked dry by those same policies (especially the US) and the fall is imminent.

onebornfree , says: "¢ Website June 8, 2021 at 4:40 pm GMT "¢ 1.4 days ago

"The increasing weaponization of sanctions is a powerful contribution to a crumbling world order, one that invokes the grave danger of over-reaction by an aggrieved victim, in a context of intense economic and military competition between rival nuclear powers."

Fact: "War is the health of the state" [Randolph Bourne]- meaning, the "business" of governments is always war- war on its citizens, war on other nations, it never ends.

Tom Marvolo Riddle , says: June 9, 2021 at 6:56 am GMT "¢ 18.8 hours ago

Invade the world, invite the world. Economic cold war vs. 1/3 of the world's landmass and population. Seemingly purposeful hollowing out of it's middle class, the abolition of educational/societal standards to placate the demands of wokeness and the replacement of it's historical population with an eclectic mix of third world strivers, corrupt east asians and south american day laborers. Oh, and an increasingly debt centric economy.

The USA is obviously a very prudent country which focuses on it's own long term survival first and foremost. I expect it to do quite well in the coming years.

GMC , says: June 9, 2021 at 7:19 am GMT "¢ 18.5 hours ago
@beavertales

My good friend in Canada says that it seems to be a "BioSecurity Fascist State" forming also. And it's not against Cuba , it's against the populace of Canada. Worse than anything in the US.

V. K. Ovelund , says: June 9, 2021 at 1:04 pm GMT "¢ 12.7 hours ago

Sanctions strike hard at the very essence of positive international relationship "" trade.

U.S. economic sanctions are insulting, provocative, corrosive and largely ineffective. However, trade is hardly the essence of positive international relationship.

Claude Frédéric Bastiat was simply wrong. If instead of his special pleading, he had said, "When soldiers cross borders, goods will not," then he might have come nearer the truth; but Bastiat instead reversed cause and effect, which is why ideologically committed free traders continue to celebrate his ill-supported, ahistorical epigram to this day: "When goods do not cross borders, soldier will."

Britain traded massively with Germany right up until Britain attacked Germany in 1914. Germany traded even more massively with the Soviet Union right up until Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. Were it not for Japanese trade with China, the Mukden Incident that, in 1931, opened the conflict that developed into World War II in Asia""well, it probably would not have occurred. In short, the trade premise that underlies your article needs to be revisited.

bayviking , says: June 9, 2021 at 2:49 pm GMT "¢ 11.0 hours ago

Sanctions is war. US wars are always cloaked behind our alleged love for democracy and freedom, but alleged friends beginning with Saudi Arabia and impacting every country South of our border, prove we are liars, interested only in preserving the best interests of our wealthiest citizens.

The purpose of US foreign policy is to enhance the profits of global US Corporations regardless what the consequences are to local targeted populations. The US has extraordinary power over the EU, but the Russian pipeline is evidence that EU support is cracking.

Shame on the USA for failing to respect the national sovereignty of other nations big and small. Our constitutional form of government is not a model example of the fruits of democracy and freedom, as both are crippled by original design, for profit prisons and schools, toll roads, and the moral hazards imposed by misguided religious fanatics who impose their will on a disinterested public.

Rev. Spooner , says: June 9, 2021 at 4:21 pm GMT "¢ 9.4 hours ago

Winston Churchill was a great one for blockades. Churchill, the MoFker is responsible for 5 million deaths. During the 2nd World War he shipped grain from India to Britain and left the Indians to starve. Five million Bengalis and east Indians died of starvation. Let's hope when the tide turns all this is forgotten and forgiven.
The war against Japan was instigated by blocades.
The war against Iran is the next.

Blade , says: June 9, 2021 at 5:46 pm GMT "¢ 8.0 hours ago

Syria policy has nothing to do with oil or Assad being a dictator. It is a continuation of Israel's policies. The whole purpose of these wars is to establish an independent Kurdish state so that the pressure on Israel could be reduced and states in the region could be destabilized. While the US was busy trying to fight Israel's wars in ME, China has become a strategic threat with no signs of slowing down the process of overtaking the US as the dominant superpower of the world. Despite all the damage these policies have caused, even the so-called conservatives in the US keep repeating nonsensical ideas like "Kurds deserve a state." Not realizing that there is no such thing as "deserving a state" or that this just a zionist project that offers nothing to the US.

Regarding China, sanctions should be used more not less, unless the US wants to be the secondary power. However, they are not needed with other countries. In ME, the US should wash its hands off Israel and let the most moral army of the world protect their own country. That country is a huge liability and problem for the US, it offered the US nothing other than selling American military secrets and earning 1.5 billion Muslims' disdain. To counter Russia and Iran, the US should double down on cooperating with Turkey, increase investments and military support so that Turks can be more active in Central Asia and Afghanistan as well. This is the smartest and the most efficient way for the US to achieve its goals in Asia and ME. Which would be slowing China's growth, Russia's creeping in the South, and Iranian activity in Arab ME.

However, the US basically does the opposite of everything it should. Turning neutral/unfriendly with Turkey is one of the dumbest things the US foreign service could do, considering the fact that Turks are the historical enemies of all three of China, Russia, and Iran, and they did exactly that? Why? For Israel whose feelings were hurt by Erdogan of course. Currently, the US government is a hostage to vocal minorities and interest groups. Therefore, its relative decline will not stop unless actual Americans with no double allegiances step up and take back their government.

nsa , says: June 9, 2021 at 8:44 pm GMT "¢ 5.0 hours ago
@beavertales

Canada is a pathetic American colony, selling their resources cheap in return for being allowed to have a few crappy hockey teams and access to degenerate American entertainment. The Brits tell them to murder white Germans, they do it. The Americans tell them to murder Afghans, they do it...

Zina , says: June 9, 2021 at 10:50 pm GMT "¢ 2.9 hours ago

The US government is a menace to all, including the US population. All US presidents are war criminals, and sanctions are only one aspect of their endless criminality.

Beagle , says: June 9, 2021 at 11:31 pm GMT "¢ 2.3 hours ago

Sanctions are the modern day adaptation of siege warfare. It's essentially a "˜starve them out' approach to foreign policy. Theoretically, one presumes, the goal is to cause enough instability to harm the targeted regime. But I can't think of a single time they have succeeded at anything but causing mass suffering to those at the bottom of the power pyramid.

In the case of sanctions on Iraq and the subsequent corrupt Oil-For-Food Program, the sanctions became a vehicle to transfer billions of dollars to oligarchs and their pet politicians" as usual.

[Jun 12, 2021] Latest Novichok Poisoning Originates From UK Lab, Authorities Say

Jun 12, 2021 | newspunch.com


The latest Novichok victims were exposed to the deadly agent as a result of a leak from a nearby UK laboratory, authorities have confirmed.

Charlie Rowley, 45, and Dawn Sturgess, 44, fell ill at a house in Amesbury on Saturday, after being exposed to Novichok "" the same nerve agent that poisoned ex-Russian spy Sergei Skirpal.

Rt.com reports: Two people, this time a British couple in their 40s with no link to Russian intelligence, were affected by a chemical substance on Saturday. Four days later, the UK's counter-terrorism chief said the chemical that hit them was the same that sent former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, into a coma in early March.

Back then, it took mere hours for the UK government to pin the blame on Moscow and unleash a massive diplomatic offensive together with its allies. Moscow, still waiting for compelling evidence to be produced, has been shut out of the investigation, and it has raised a number of questions about the poisoning "" none of which have been answered.

Linking the two poisonings "is clearly a line of enquiry" for UK investigators, but the new incident doesn't look likely to answer any of those concerns either.

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Location, location, location

The new victims, 45-year-old Charlie Rowley and his 44-year-old girlfriend Dawn Sturgess were discovered in Amesbury, some 12 km (7 miles) north of Salisbury. Both scenes, though, are located around Porton Down, which houses a secretive government chemical lab.

Porton Down has been a crucial part of the Skripal case investigation. It was there that the chemical agent was identified as Novichok in both cases. Back in March, UK officials cited this as proof that the substance came from Russia "" only to later be contradicted by the lab's chief executive, who said they weren't really able to verify the agent's origins.

As for the location of the new scene relative to the old one, 12 km doesn't seem like an improbably large distance. Plus, a friend of the victims said the couple had been to Salisbury before they fell ill. The UK Home Secretary's working theory is that the exposure was accidental, which begs the question: how would that be possible after four months and a massive clean-up operation? Also, why were there only two random people in the whole 12km radius that were affected?

Curious timing

Investigators say it's unclear if the supposed Novichok came from the same batch that poisoned the Skripals in March. But, according to experts, the nerve agents of the Novichok family lose their potency very quickly, which makes it unlikely that a trace powerful enough had survived for four months to strike again at this particular moment.

And the moment is significant for two reasons "" two events key to Russia's international image. One is the hugely successful FIFA World Cup, where the English team just secured a quarter-final spot. British fans seem to be enjoying themselves in Russia, and berating British politicians and media for their efforts to scare them away from the event.

The other is the preparations for a summit between US President Donald Trump and Russia's Vladimir Putin. A date and a place for the meeting "" Helsinki, Finland, July 16 "" were set just last week, and a possible rapprochement between the two rival superpowers seems to be keeping British officials up at night.

Nobody died, again

One of the key questions asked back in March was: why did the Skripals survive if they were indeed exposed to a military-grade nerve agent? While UK officials peddle Novichok as a deadly nerve agent manufactured by the Soviets, claiming its recent use was the first chemical attack in Europe since World War Two, it appears to have a surprisingly low lethality rate.

A friend of the couple described Rowley becoming increasingly ill over the course of the day, before finally being taken to the hospital. There, the supposedly deadly Novichok gave doctors enough time to treat the couple for a completely different diagnosis: the medics initially believed that the couple had taken contaminated drugs (Rowley is a registered heroin addict). Samples from the two were only sent to Porton Down on Monday, two days after they were admitted.

Back in March, the Skripals were similarly discovered slipping in and out of consciousness on a park bench. They were also treated for an opioid overdose at first, before the diagnosis switched to nerve agent poisoning. Both ultimately survived and have now been discharged from the hospital.

Analysts have repeatedly questioned the apparent low lethality of the supposed "military-grade nerve agent." Russian officials, as well, have said that if such a deadly substance had indeed been used, survival would be impossible.

British officials are still investigating the incident. However, this time "" now that Novichok has been brought up "" they seem less inclined to point fingers, even as England fans frolic in Russia and Theresa May's handling of Brexit continues to divide the public.

[Jun 06, 2021] US Troops Die for World Domination, Not Freedom Consortiumnews

Notable quotes:
"... CaitlinJohnstone.com ..."
"... Please Support Our Spring Fund Drive! ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... War is a Racket ..."
"... Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix ..."
"... Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone ..."
"... Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers ..."
"... This article was re-published with permission. ..."
"... The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of ..."
Jun 06, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

US Troops Die for World Domination, Not Freedom May 31, 2021 Save

On Memorial Day, Caitlin Johnstone says it's important to block the propaganda that helps feed a steady supply of teenagers into the imperial war machine.

Airman placing U.S. flags at military graves, May 27. (Arlington National Cemetery, Flickr)

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

V ice President Kamala Harris spent the weekend under fire from Republicans, which of course means that Kamala Harris spent the weekend being criticized for the most silly, vapid reason you could possibly criticize Kamala Harris for.

Apparently the likely future president tweeted "Enjoy the long weekend," a reference to the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, instead of gushing about fallen troops and sacrifice.

That's it, that's the whole entire story. That silly, irrelevant offense by one of the sleaziest people in the single most corrupt and murderous government on earth is the whole entire basis for histrionic headlines from conservative media outlets like this :

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1398784636193488897&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F05%2F31%2Fus-troops-die-for-world-domination-not-freedom%2F&sessionId=8c4db816a251b9ec8a405c5ae95098e3aa132642&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px

Harris, the born politician, was quick to course correct.

"Throughout our history our service men and women have risked everything to defend our freedoms and our country," the veep tweeted . "As we prepare to honor them on Memorial Day, we remember their service and their sacrifice."

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1059031867&show_artwork=true&maxwidth=860&maxheight=1000&dnt=1&utm_campaign=wtshare&utm_medium=widget&utm_content=https%25253A%25252F%25252Fsoundcloud.com%25252Fgoing_rogue%25252Fus-troops-die-for-world-domination-not-freedom&utm_source=caitlinjohnstone.com

Listen to this article.

Which is of course complete bullshit. It has been generations since any member of the U.S. military could be said to have served or sacrificed defending America or its freedoms, and that has been the case throughout almost the entirety of its history. If you are reading this it is statistically unlikely that you are of an age where any U.S. military personnel died for any other reason than corporate profit and global domination, and if you are it's almost certain you weren't old enough to have had mature thoughts about it at the time.

Please Support Our Spring Fund Drive!

Whenever you criticize the U.S. war machine online within earshot of anyone who's sufficiently propagandized, you will invariably be lectured about the second World War and how we'd all be speaking German or Japanese without the brave men who died for our freedom. This makes my point for me: the fact that apologists for U.S. imperialism always need to reach all the way back through history to the cusp of living memory to find even one single example of the American military being used for purposes that weren't evil proves that it most certainly is evil.

But this is one of the main reasons there are so very many movies and history documentaries made about World War II: it's an opportunity to portray U.S. servicemen bravely fighting and dying for a noble cause without having to bend the truth beyond recognition. The other major reason is that focusing on the second World War allows members of the U.S. empire to escape into a time when the Big Bad Guy on the world stage was someone else.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1399109694334046211&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F05%2F31%2Fus-troops-die-for-world-domination-not-freedom%2F&sessionId=8c4db816a251b9ec8a405c5ae95098e3aa132642&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px

From the end of World War II to the fall of the U.S.S.R., the U.S. military was used to smash the spread of communism and secure geostrategic interests toward the ultimate end of engineering the collapse of the Soviet Union. After this was accomplished in 1991, U.S. foreign policy officially shifted to preserving a unipolar world order by preventing the rise of any other superpower which could rival its might.

A 1992 article by The New York Times titled " U.S. Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No Rivals Develop ," reporting on a leaked document which describes a policy known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine after then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, reads as follows:

"In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting stage, the Defense Department asserts that America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union.

A 46-page document that has been circulating at the highest levels of the Pentagon for weeks, and which Defense Secretary Dick Cheney expects to release later this month, states that part of the American mission will be 'convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.'

The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy."

This is all U.S. troops have been fighting and dying for since the Berlin Wall came down. Not "freedom", not "democracy" and certainly not the American people. Just continual uncontested domination of this planet at all cost: domination of its resources, its trade routes, its seas, its air, and its humans, no matter how many lives need to risked and snuffed out in order to achieve it. The U.S. has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century in the reckless pursuit of that goal.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/26O-2SVcrw0?enablejsapi=1&autoplay=0&cc_load_policy=0&iv_load_policy=1&loop=0&modestbranding=1&fs=1&playsinline=0&controls=1&color=red&rel=0&autohide=2&theme=dark&

And, as Smedley Butler spelled out 86 years ago in his still-relevant book War is a Racket , U.S. military personnel have been dying for profit.

Nothing gets the gears of industry turning like war, and nothing better creates chaotic Wild West environments of shock and confusion during which more wealth and power can be grabbed. War profiteers pour immense resources into lobbying , think tanks and campaign donations to manipulate and bribe policy makers into making decisions which promote war and military expansionism, with astounding success . This is all entirely legal.

It's important to spread awareness that this is all U.S. troops have been dying for, because the fairy tale that they fight for freedom and for their countrymen is a major propaganda narrative used in military recruitment. While poverty plays a significant role in driving up enlistments as predatory recruiters target poor and middle class youth promising them a future in the nation with the worst income inequality in the industrialized world, the fact that the aggressively propagandized glorification of military "service" makes it a more esteemed career path than working at a restaurant or a grocery store means people are more likely to enlist.

Without all that propaganda deceiving people into believing that military work is something virtuous, military service would be the most shameful job anyone could possibly have; other stigmatized jobs like sex work would be regarded as far more noble. You'd be less reluctant to tell your extended family over Christmas that you're a janitor at a seedy massage parlor than that you've enlisted in the U.S. military, because instead of congratulating and praising you, your Uncle Murray would look at you and say, "So you're gonna be killing kids for crude oil?"

And that's exactly how it should be. Continuing to uphold the lie that U.S. troops fight and die for a good cause is helping to ensure a steady supply of teenagers to feed into the gears of the imperial war machine. Stop feeding into the lie that the war machine is worth killing and being killed for. Not out of disrespect for the dead, but out of reverence for the living.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Her work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook , following her antics on Twitter , checking out her podcast on either Youtube , soundcloud , Apple podcasts or Spotify , following her on Steemit , throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of her sweet merchandise , buying her books Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix , Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

This article was re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News .



Em , June 1, 2021 at 09:52

Instead of annually memorializing those dead youth, who were, in one way or the other, coerced to go off to foreign lands to kill or be killed, by other youth, in the name of a piece of dead symbolic cloth, wouldn't it be a better idea to honor them, while alive in the prime of living (the world over) by affording them the means to learn, leading by example, to discover for themselves – how to think critically as to what the real options are, collectively as well as individually, for survival and thriving.

CNfan , June 1, 2021 at 04:06

"Global domination" for the benefit of a predatory financial oligarchy.

Peter Loeb , June 1, 2021 at 09:11

Read William Hartung's "Prophets of War " to understand the dynamics.

Peter in Boston

Thom Williams , May 31, 2021 at 20:12

Re: CorsortiumNews, Joe Lauria, Caitlin Johnstone, Realist, & Rael Nidess, M.D.

Thank you all for speaking your truth in this dystopian human universe so apparently lacking human reason and understanding. As is so wisely introduced and recognized herein, the murderous depravity of the "Wolfwitz Doctrine" being and remaining the public policy formulation of our national governance, both foreign and domestic, is a fact that every U.S. citizen should consider and understand on this Memorial Day.
As Usual,
EA

Realist , May 31, 2021 at 17:27

Well stated, perfectly logical again on this subject as always, Caitlin. You out the warmongers for their game to fleece the public and rape the world all so a handful of already fat, lazyass but enormously wealthy and influential people can acquire, without the slightest bit of shame, yet more, more and more of everything there is to be had. You and General Butler.

Will this message get through, this time? Maybe the billionth time is the charm, eh? Can the scales suddenly fall from the eyes of the 330 million Americans who will then demand an immediate end to the madness? On the merits, it's the only conclusion that might realise any actual justice for our country and the rest of the world upon whose throat it keeps a knee firmly planted.

Sorry, nothing of the sort shall ever happen, not as long as the entire mercenary mass media obeys its corporate ownership and speaks nothing but false narratives every minute of every day. Not as long as the educational system is really nothing more than a propaganda indoctrination experience for every child born in the glorious USA! Not as long as every politician occupying any given office is just a bought and paid for tool of the Matrix with great talents for convincing the masses that 2 + 2 = 3, or 5, or whatever is convenient at the time to benefit the ledgers of their plutocrat masters.

What better illustrates the reality of my last assertion than the occupancy of the White House by Sleepy/Creepy Joe Biden who, through age alone, has been reduced to nothing more than a sack of unresponsive meat firmly trussed up with ropes and pulleys that his handlers pull this way or that to create an animatronic effect apparently perfectly convincing to the majority of the American public? Or so they say, based upon some putative election results.

Truly, thanks for the effort, Caitlin. I do appreciate that some have a grasp on the truth. I look forward to its recapitulation by yourself and many others to no effect on every Memorial Day in the USA. It would be unrealistic of me to say otherwise.

Rael Nidess, M.D. , May 31, 2021 at 12:54

Kudos for being one of a very few to mention the central driving ethic behind U.S. foreign policy since the demise of the USSR: The Wolfowitz Doctrine. As central today as it was when first published.

[Jun 04, 2021] Multi-Domain Operations- A Developing Doctrine - TTG - TurcopolierTurcopolier

Jun 04, 2021 | turcopolier.com

"HUNTSVILLE: The Army's experimental Multi-Domain Task Force is a "game changer" that's turned the tide in "at least 10 wargames," the commander of US Army Pacific says. "Plans are already changing at the combatant command level because of this." The key: the unit cracked the Anti-Access, Area Denial (A2/AD) conundrum, Russia and China's dense layered defenses of long-range missiles, sensors, and networks to coordinate them. "Before, we couldn't penetrate A2/AD. With it, we could," Gen. Robert Brown said of the task force's performance in "at least 10 exercises and wargames. With the Multi-Domain Task Force," he told me after his remarks to the AUSA Global conference here, "we could impact their long-range systems and have a much greater success against an adversary. If I go into any more, it'd be classified."

"In the future, Brown said here last week, "all formations will have to become multi-domain or they'll be irrelevant, [but] it's going to be years before it can happen." The Army's goal is modernize enough forces to wage multi-domain warfare against either China or Russia -- but not both at once -- by 2028." (Breaking Defense)

Comment: I was intrigued when, in April, SecDef Austin announced he was sending two units with about 500 personnel to Germany. The units are a multi-domain task force and a theater fires command. Sounded like a mere symbolic move. But there's nothing symbolic about these particular units. They are an early implementation of the Pentagon's new multi-domain operations doctrine which focuses on theater level operations. That doesn't mean mass divisions and corps. It means theater level employment of global assets across the entire spectrum of conflict. It's still billed as a concept rather than a full blown doctrine, but it's getting there and is already being implemented in the Pacific theater.

In an Army Chief of Staff paper, "Army Multi-Domain Transformation Ready to Win in Competition and Conflict" dated 16 March 2021, the multi-domain task force (MDTF) is described as "theater-level maneuver elements designed to synchronize precision effects and precision fires in all domains against adversary anti-access/ area denial (A2/AD) networks in all domains, enabling joint forces to execute their operational plan (OPLAN) directed roles." The MDTF's purpose is during competition, to "gain and maintain contact with our adversaries to support the rapid transition to crisis or conflict"; during a crisis, to "deter adversaries and shape the environment by providing flexible response options to the combatant commander"; and if conflict arises, to "neutralize adversary A2/AD networks to enable joint freedom of action."

Russia has been modernizing their doctrine, force structure and equipment in earnest for at least the last decade. Surely China has been moving in the same direction. It's about time we do the same. It will be several years, at least, before this doctrine can be fully implemented with the necessary force structure and equipment. In many ways, our military has atrophied terribly due to two decades of brigade level, at best, counterinsurgency operations. However, we should, and apparently are, implementing this new doctrine now with the minimal force structure changes of the MDTF and the inclusion of EW within cyber. Our current equipment can be employed more effectively especially if land, sea, air and space systems are better integrated. It's an evolution, not a revolution.

TTG

https://breakingdefense.com/2019/04/armys-multi-domain-unit-a-game-changer-in-future-war/

https://breakingdefense.com/2021/04/breaking-new-army-long-range-units-coming-to-germany/

Eol says: June 1, 2021 at 4:23 pm

A2/AD is just modern defense IMO – is it really necessary to have a doctrine that demands superiority over Russia or China at – lets say – 200 km from their border? And at which point do we just call this outright agressive posturing ? DougDiggler says: June 3, 2021 at 1:42 pm

Is this more Pentagon wishful thinking, like their exercise that involved firing a still nonexistent hypersonic from a B-52? I get the feeling that NATO's ID Pol army would not fare well in attacking the military professionals of Russia, not even in these proposed multi-front "crumbling" attacks. However, it is nice that they're finally getting around to studying Operation Bagration. However I think the operational heirs to that offensive have probably improved on it and have also spent much time considering being on the receiving end of such a nightmare. They play chess while we play Nintendo. Christian J. Chuba says: June 1, 2021 at 5:32 pm

Wow. We've been pushing our navy up Russia and China's nose today and doing the same with NATO war games on land and air patrols. I hope this doesn't give us a false sense of confidence to be outright reckless.

For some reason we have become obsessed with depriving the Russians control of their arctic coastline. I'm not saying we are control freaks (actually we are control freaks) but I can easily see a situation developing up their if we think we have some technology edge. That is one place Russia wants to be secure and for some reason, if there is water, we must have our navy just outside that 12 nautical mile limit.

What kills me is that we do this in the name of 'freedom of navigation' but that route is going to be mostly transporting Chinese stuff to Europe and only because the Russians are paying for the necessary ice breakers and rescue stations. In other words, we are waving our wand over waters that are only navigable because of Russian investment.

Anyway, so they were able to develop a simulation? That's impressive. Patrick Armstrong says: June 1, 2021 at 7:32 pm

Can the MIC make anything other than cost over-runs these days? d74 says: June 1, 2021 at 11:38 pm

The answer is too easy: no.
Not only are the costs insane, but the functionality is insufficient. Simply put, it doesn't work or seem unfit for fighting. Stacking technologies is a dream that does not stand up to warfare realities. 'Keep it simple' seems out of reach.

I followed the adoption of the 120mm mortar by USMC. They started with a good weapon, with confirmed potential. The end point was tactical paralysis.
This is (was) a very small issue, and an old one. It is significant. blue peacock says: June 2, 2021 at 9:42 am

Washington would be easy to spot in a game of chess. It's the player with no plan beyond an aggressive opening. That is no strategy at all. The failure to think several moves ahead matters.

https://wulfstein.org/2021/05/11/washington-is-playing-a-game-with-no-strategy/

While I don't agree with everything many pundits including Chas Freeman say about our behavior with respect to China, I do see the point that Chas makes in the quote above. Iraq and Afghanistan are great examples. Our political and governmental leadership have no sense of "smarts", all they've known for decades is bully behavior under both Democrats and Republicans, especially towards those they perceive as weak, like our "invasion" of Grenada. How would we actually perform against a serious military rival like China or Russia? What would be the reporting at hysterical CNN, MSNBC and Fox when a few carrier strike elements are sunk? Would they be shrieking to unleash nuclear-tipped ICBMs? How would a "mission accomplished" George Bush/Dick Cheney type with all their hubristic swagger react? The continental US has not been attacked like ever. What happens when Seattle, Los Angeles and even DC are under actual missile fire? How would contemporary woke Americans who have no tolerance for "sacrifice" react?

Do we have the force that reflects good value for money considering that we spend more than Russia & China combined on the military? What type of military do we actually have relative to the tens of trillions of dollars spent over the last decade on the credit card? What are the metrics to evaluate actual effectiveness of a military beyond graphics and tables on Powerpoint slides?

What would an actual strategic plan to crush the CCP look like? IMO, it begins with insuring no dependence on a Chinese supply chain. Would the Party of Davos even allow that?

[Jun 03, 2021] Multi-Domain Operations- A Developing Doctrine - TTG - TurcopolierTurcopolier

Jun 03, 2021 | turcopolier.com

"HUNTSVILLE: The Army's experimental Multi-Domain Task Force is a "game changer" that's turned the tide in "at least 10 wargames," the commander of US Army Pacific says. "Plans are already changing at the combatant command level because of this." The key: the unit cracked the Anti-Access, Area Denial (A2/AD) conundrum, Russia and China's dense layered defenses of long-range missiles, sensors, and networks to coordinate them. "Before, we couldn't penetrate A2/AD. With it, we could," Gen. Robert Brown said of the task force's performance in "at least 10 exercises and wargames. With the Multi-Domain Task Force," he told me after his remarks to the AUSA Global conference here, "we could impact their long-range systems and have a much greater success against an adversary. If I go into any more, it'd be classified."

"In the future, Brown said here last week, "all formations will have to become multi-domain or they'll be irrelevant, [but] it's going to be years before it can happen." The Army's goal is modernize enough forces to wage multi-domain warfare against either China or Russia -- but not both at once -- by 2028." (Breaking Defense)

Comment: I was intrigued when, in April, SecDef Austin announced he was sending two units with about 500 personnel to Germany. The units are a multi-domain task force and a theater fires command. Sounded like a mere symbolic move. But there's nothing symbolic about these particular units. They are an early implementation of the Pentagon's new multi-domain operations doctrine which focuses on theater level operations. That doesn't mean mass divisions and corps. It means theater level employment of global assets across the entire spectrum of conflict. It's still billed as a concept rather than a full blown doctrine, but it's getting there and is already being implemented in the Pacific theater.

In an Army Chief of Staff paper, "Army Multi-Domain Transformation Ready to Win in Competition and Conflict" dated 16 March 2021, the multi-domain task force (MDTF) is described as "theater-level maneuver elements designed to synchronize precision effects and precision fires in all domains against adversary anti-access/ area denial (A2/AD) networks in all domains, enabling joint forces to execute their operational plan (OPLAN) directed roles." The MDTF's purpose is during competition, to "gain and maintain contact with our adversaries to support the rapid transition to crisis or conflict"; during a crisis, to "deter adversaries and shape the environment by providing flexible response options to the combatant commander"; and if conflict arises, to "neutralize adversary A2/AD networks to enable joint freedom of action."

Russia has been modernizing their doctrine, force structure and equipment in earnest for at least the last decade. Surely China has been moving in the same direction. It's about time we do the same. It will be several years, at least, before this doctrine can be fully implemented with the necessary force structure and equipment. In many ways, our military has atrophied terribly due to two decades of brigade level, at best, counterinsurgency operations. However, we should, and apparently are, implementing this new doctrine now with the minimal force structure changes of the MDTF and the inclusion of EW within cyber. Our current equipment can be employed more effectively especially if land, sea, air and space systems are better integrated. It's an evolution, not a revolution.

TTG

https://breakingdefense.com/2019/04/armys-multi-domain-unit-a-game-changer-in-future-war/

https://breakingdefense.com/2021/04/breaking-new-army-long-range-units-coming-to-germany/

Eol says: June 1, 2021 at 4:23 pm

A2/AD is just modern defense IMO – is it really necessary to have a doctrine that demands superiority over Russia or China at – lets say – 200 km from their border? And at which point do we just call this outright agressive posturing ? DougDiggler says: June 3, 2021 at 1:42 pm

Is this more Pentagon wishful thinking, like their exercise that involved firing a still nonexistent hypersonic from a B-52? I get the feeling that NATO's ID Pol army would not fare well in attacking the military professionals of Russia, not even in these proposed multi-front "crumbling" attacks. However, it is nice that they're finally getting around to studying Operation Bagration. However I think the operational heirs to that offensive have probably improved on it and have also spent much time considering being on the receiving end of such a nightmare. They play chess while we play Nintendo. Christian J. Chuba says: June 1, 2021 at 5:32 pm

Wow. We've been pushing our navy up Russia and China's nose today and doing the same with NATO war games on land and air patrols. I hope this doesn't give us a false sense of confidence to be outright reckless.

For some reason we have become obsessed with depriving the Russians control of their arctic coastline. I'm not saying we are control freaks (actually we are control freaks) but I can easily see a situation developing up their if we think we have some technology edge. That is one place Russia wants to be secure and for some reason, if there is water, we must have our navy just outside that 12 nautical mile limit.

What kills me is that we do this in the name of 'freedom of navigation' but that route is going to be mostly transporting Chinese stuff to Europe and only because the Russians are paying for the necessary ice breakers and rescue stations. In other words, we are waving our wand over waters that are only navigable because of Russian investment.

Anyway, so they were able to develop a simulation? That's impressive.

[Jun 01, 2021] Shades of dementia: Bidden claims that human rights R us.

May 31, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Don Bacon , May 31 2021 0:12 utc | 29

Believe it or not, the president says that human rights R us.

Hear that, BLM? Women? Asian Americans? Hispanics? homeless? heavily indebted students? . . the list goes on.

Biden said so, May 30, 2021

"I had a long conversation -- for two hours -- recently with President Xi, making it clear to him that we could do nothing but speak out for human rights around the world because that's who we are. I'll be meeting with President Putin in a couple of weeks in Geneva, making it clear that we will not -- we will not stand by and let him abuse those rights." . . here

..reminds me of Aeschylus: "In war, truth is the first casualty."

[May 30, 2021] Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

The author is a very fuzzy way comes to the idea that neoliberalism is in essence a Trotskyism for the rich and that neoliberals want to use strong state to enforce the type of markets they want from above. That included free movement of capital goods and people across national borders. All this talk about "small government" is just a smoke screen for naive fools.
Similar to 1930th contemporary right-wing populism in Germany and Austria emerged from within neoliberalism, not in opposition to it. They essentially convert neoliberalism in "national liberalism": Yes to free trade by only on bilateral basis with a strict control of trade deficits. No to free migration, multilateralism
Notable quotes:
"... The second explanation was that neoliberal globalization made a small number of people very rich, and it was in the interest of those people to promote a self-serving ideology using their substantial means by funding think tanks and academic departments, lobbying congress, fighting what the Heritage Foundation calls "the war of ideas." Neoliberalism, then, was a restoration of class power after the odd, anomalous interval of the mid-century welfare state. ..."
"... Here one is free to choose but only within a limited range of options left after responding to the global forces of the market. ..."
"... Neoliberal globalism can be thought of in its own terms as a negative theology, contending that the world economy is sublime and ineffable with a small number of people having special insight and ability to craft institutions that will, as I put it, encase the sublime world economy. ..."
"... One of the big goals of my book is to show neoliberalism is one form of regulation among many rather than the big Other of regulation as such. ..."
"... I build here on the work of other historians and show how the demands in the United Nations by African, Asian, and Latin American nations for things like the Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, i.e. the right to nationalize foreign-owned companies, often dismissed as merely rhetorical, were actually existentially frightening to global businesspeople. ..."
"... They drafted neoliberal intellectuals to do things like craft agreements that gave foreign corporations more rights than domestic actors and tried to figure out how to lock in what I call the "human right of capital flight" into binding international codes. I show how we can see the development of the WTO as largely a response to the fear of a planned -- and equal -- planet that many saw in the aspirations of the decolonizing world. ..."
"... The neoliberal insight of the 1930s was that the market would not take care of itself: what Wilhelm Röpke called a market police was an ongoing need in a world where people, whether out of atavistic drives or admirable humanitarian motives, kept trying to make the earth a more equal and just place. ..."
"... The culmination of these processes by the 1990s is a world economy that is less like a laissez-faire marketplace and more like a fortress, as ever more of the world's resources and ideas are regulated through transnational legal instruments. ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.amazon.com

Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 16, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674979524
ISBN-13: 978-0674979529

From introduction

...The second explanation was that neoliberal globalization made a small number of people very rich, and it was in the interest of those people to promote a self-serving ideology using their substantial means by funding think tanks and academic departments, lobbying congress, fighting what the Heritage Foundation calls "the war of ideas." Neoliberalism, then, was a restoration of class power after the odd, anomalous interval of the mid-century welfare state.

There is truth to both of these explanations. Both presuppose a kind of materialist explanation of history with which I have no problem. In my book, though, I take another approach. What I found is that we could not understand the inner logic of something like the WTO without considering the whole history of the twentieth century. What I also discovered is that some of the members of the neoliberal movement from the 1930s onward, including Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, did not use either of the explanations I just mentioned. They actually didn't say that economic growth excuses everything. One of the peculiar things about Hayek, in particular, is that he didn't believe in using aggregates like GDP -- the very measurements that we need to even say what growth is.

What I found is that neoliberalism as a philosophy is less a doctrine of economics than a doctrine of ordering -- of creating the institutions that provide for the reproduction of the totality [of financial elite control of the state]. At the core of the strain I describe is not the idea that we can quantify, count, price, buy and sell every last aspect of human existence. Actually, here it gets quite mystical. The Austrian and German School of neoliberals in particular believe in a kind of invisible world economy that cannot be captured in numbers and figures but always escapes human comprehension.

After all, if you can see something, you can plan it. Because of the very limits to our knowledge, we have to default to ironclad rules and not try to pursue something as radical as social justice, redistribution, or collective transformation. In a globalized world, we must give ourselves over to the forces of the market, or the whole thing will stop working.

So this is quite a different version of neoliberal thought than the one we usually have, premised on the abstract of individual liberty or the freedom to choose. Here one is free to choose but only within a limited range of options left after responding to the global forces of the market.

One of the core arguments of my book is that we can only understand the internal coherence of neoliberalism if we see it as a doctrine as concerned with the whole as the individual. Neoliberal globalism can be thought of in its own terms as a negative theology, contending that the world economy is sublime and ineffable with a small number of people having special insight and ability to craft institutions that will, as I put it, encase the sublime world economy.

To me, the metaphor of encasement makes much more sense than the usual idea of markets set free, liberated or unfettered. How can it be that in an era of proliferating third party arbitration courts, international investment law, trade treaties and regulation that we talk about "unfettered markets"? One of the big goals of my book is to show neoliberalism is one form of regulation among many rather than the big Other of regulation as such.

What I explore in Globalists is how we can think of the WTO as the latest in a long series of institutional fixes proposed for the problem of emergent nationalism and what neoliberals see as the confusion between sovereignty -- ruling a country -- and ownership -- owning the property within it.

I build here on the work of other historians and show how the demands in the United Nations by African, Asian, and Latin American nations for things like the Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, i.e. the right to nationalize foreign-owned companies, often dismissed as merely rhetorical, were actually existentially frightening to global businesspeople.

They drafted neoliberal intellectuals to do things like craft agreements that gave foreign corporations more rights than domestic actors and tried to figure out how to lock in what I call the "human right of capital flight" into binding international codes. I show how we can see the development of the WTO as largely a response to the fear of a planned -- and equal -- planet that many saw in the aspirations of the decolonizing world.

Perhaps the lasting image of globalization that the book leaves is that world capitalism has produced a doubled world -- a world of imperium (the world of states) and a world of dominium (the world of property). The best way to understand neoliberal globalism as a project is that it sees its task as the never-ending maintenance of this division. The neoliberal insight of the 1930s was that the market would not take care of itself: what Wilhelm Röpke called a market police was an ongoing need in a world where people, whether out of atavistic drives or admirable humanitarian motives, kept trying to make the earth a more equal and just place.

The culmination of these processes by the 1990s is a world economy that is less like a laissez-faire marketplace and more like a fortress, as ever more of the world's resources and ideas are regulated through transnational legal instruments. The book acts as a kind of field guide to these institutions and, in the process, hopefully recasts the 20th century that produced them.


Mark bennett 3.0 out of 5 stars One half of a decent book May 14, 2018 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

This is a rather interesting look at the political and economic ideas of a circle of important economists, including Hayek and von Mises, over the course of the last century. He shows rather convincingly that conventional narratives concerning their idea are wrong. That they didn't believe in a weak state, didn't believe in the laissez-faire capitalism or believe in the power of the market. That they saw mass democracy as a threat to vested economic interests.

The core beliefs of these people was in a world where money, labor and products could flow across borders without any limit. Their vision was to remove these subjects (tariffs, immigration and controls on the movement of money) from the control of the democracy-based nation-state and instead vesting them in international organizations. International organizations which were by their nature undemocratic and beyond the influence of democracy. That rather than rejecting government power, what they rejected was national government power. They wanted weak national governments but at the same time strong undemocratic international organizations which would gain the powers taken from the state.

The other thing that characterized many of these people was a rather general rejection of economics. While some of them are (at least in theory) economists, they rejected the basic ideas of economic analysis and economic policy. The economy, to them, was a mystical thing beyond any human understanding or ability to influence in a positive way. Their only real belief was in "bigness". The larger the market for labor and goods, the more economically prosperous everyone would become. A unregulated "global" market with specialization across borders and free migration of labor being the ultimate system.

The author shows how, over a period extending from the 1920s to the 1990s, these ideas evolved from marginal academic ideas to being dominant ideas internationally. Ideas that are reflected today in the structure of the European Union, the WTO (World Trade Organization) and the policies of most national governments. These ideas, which the author calls "neoliberalism", have today become almost assumptions beyond challenge. And even more strangely, the dominating ideas of the political left in most of the west.

The author makes the point, though in a weak way, that the "fathers" of neoliberalism saw themselves as "restoring" a lost golden age. That golden age being (roughly) the age of the original industrial revolution (the second half of the 1800s). And to the extent that they have been successful they have done that. But at the same time, they have brought back all the political and economic questions of that era as well.

In reading it, I started to wonder about the differences between modern neoliberalism and the liberal political movement during the industrial revolution. I really began to wonder about the actual motives of "reform" liberals in that era. Were they genuinely interested in reforms during that era or were all the reforms just cynical politics designed to enhance business power at the expense of other vested interests. Was, in particular, the liberal interest in political reform and franchise expansion a genuine move toward political democracy or simply a temporary ploy to increase their political power. If one assumes that the true principles of classic liberalism were always free trade, free migration of labor and removing the power to governments to impact business, perhaps its collapse around the time of the first world war is easier to understand.

He also makes a good point about the EEC and the organizations that came before the EU. Those organizations were as much about protecting trade between Europe and former European colonial possessions as they were anything to do with trade within Europe.

To me at least, the analysis of the author was rather original. In particular, he did an excellent job of showing how the ideas of Hayek and von Mises have been distorted and misunderstood in the mainstream. He was able to show what their ideas were and how they relate to contemporary problems of government and democracy.

But there are some strong negatives in the book. The author offers up a complete virtue signaling chapter to prove how the neoliberals are racists. He brings up things, like the John Birch Society, that have nothing to do with the book. He unleashes a whole lot of venom directed at American conservatives and republicans mostly set against a 1960s backdrop. He does all this in a bad purpose: to claim that the Kennedy Administration was somehow a continuation of the new deal rather than a step toward neoliberalism. His blindness and modern political partisanship extended backward into history does substantial damage to his argument in the book. He also spends an inordinate amount of time on the political issues of South Africa which also adds nothing to the argument of the book. His whole chapter on racism is an elaborate strawman all held together by Ropke. He also spends a large amount of time grinding some sort of Ax with regard to the National Review and William F. Buckley.

He keeps resorting to the simple formula of finding something racist said or written by Ropke....and then inferring that anyone who quoted or had anything to do with Ropke shared his ideas and was also a racist. The whole point of the exercise seems to be to avoid any analysis of how the democratic party (and the political left) drifted over the decades from the politics of the New Deal to neoliberal Clintonism.

Then after that, he diverts further off the path by spending many pages on the greatness of the "global south", the G77 and the New International Economic Order (NIEO) promoted by the UN in the 1970s. And whatever many faults of neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian ends up standing for a worse set of ideas: International Price controls, economic "reparations", nationalization, international trade subsidies and a five-year plan for the world (socialist style economic planning at a global level). In attaching himself to these particular ideas, he kills his own book. The premise of the book and his argument was very strong at first. But by around p. 220, its become a throwback political tract in favor of the garbage economic and political ideas of the so-called third world circa 1974 complete with 70's style extensive quotations from "Senegalese jurists"

Once the political agenda comes out, he just can't help himself. He opens the conclusion to the book taking another cheap shot for no clear reason at William F. Buckley. He spends alot of time on the Seattle anti-WTO protests from the 1990s. But he has NOTHING to say about BIll Clinton or Tony Blair or EU expansion or Obama or even the 2008 economic crisis for that matter. Inexplicably for a book written in 2018, the content of the book seems to end in the year 2000.

I'm giving it three stars for the first 150 pages which was decent work. The second half rates zero stars. Though it could have been far better if he had written his history of neoliberalism in the context of the counter-narrative of Keynesian economics and its decline. It would have been better yet if the author had the courage to talk about the transformation of the parties of the left and their complicity in the rise of neoliberalism. The author also tends to waste lots of pages repeating himself or worse telling you what he is going to say next. One would have expected a better standard of editing by the Harvard Press. Read less 69 people found this helpful Helpful Comment Report abuse

Jesper Doepping 5.0 out of 5 stars A concise definition of neoliberalism and its historical influence November 14, 2018

Anybody interested in global trade, business, human rights or democracy today should read this book.

The book follow the Austrians from the beginning in the Habsburgischer empire to the beginning rebellion against the WTO. However, most importantly it follows the thinking and the thoughts behind the building of a global empire of capitalism with free trade, capital and rights. All the way to the new "human right" to trade. It narrows down what neoliberal thought really consist of and indirectly make a differentiation to the neoclassical economic tradition.

What I found most interesting is the turn from economics to law - and the conceptual distinctions between the genes, tradition, reason, which are translated into a quest for a rational and reason based protection of dominium (the rule of property) against the overreach of imperium (the rule of states/people). This distinction speaks directly to the issues that EU is currently facing.

[May 30, 2021] How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... No other book out there has the level of breadth on the history of US imperialism that this work provides. Even though it packs 400 pages of text (which might seem like a turnoff for non-academic readers), "How to Hide an Empire" is highly readable given Immerwhar's skills as a writer. Also, its length is part of what makes it awesome because it gives it the right amount of detail and scope. ..."
"... Alleging that US imperialism in its long evolution (which this book deciphers with poignancy) has had no bearing on the destinies of its once conquered populations is as fallacious as saying that the US is to blame for every single thing that happens in Native American communities, or in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, etc. Not everything that happens in these locations and among these populations is directly connected to US expansionism, but a great deal is. ..."
"... This is exactly the kind of book that drives the "My country, right or wrong" crowd crazy. Yes, slavery and genocide and ghastly scientific experiments existed before Europeans colonized the Americas, but it's also fair and accurate to say that Europeans made those forms of destruction into a bloody artform. Nobody did mass slaughter better. ..."
Feb 19, 2019 | www.amazon.com
4.6 out of 5 stars 50 customer reviews Reviews

Jose I. Fuste, February 25, 2019

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive yet highly readable. A necessary and highly useful update.

I'm a professor at the University of California San Diego and I'm assigning this for a graduate class.

No other book out there has the level of breadth on the history of US imperialism that this work provides. Even though it packs 400 pages of text (which might seem like a turnoff for non-academic readers), "How to Hide an Empire" is highly readable given Immerwhar's skills as a writer. Also, its length is part of what makes it awesome because it gives it the right amount of detail and scope.

I could not disagree more with the person who gave this book one star. Take it from me: I've taught hundreds of college students who graduate among the best in their high school classes and they know close to nothing about the history of US settler colonialism, overseas imperialism, or US interventionism around the world. If you give University of California college students a quiz on where the US' overseas territories are, most who take it will fail (trust me, I've done it). And this is not their fault. Instead, it's a product of the US education system that fails to give students a nuanced and geographically comprehensive understanding of the oversized effect that their country has around our planet.

Alleging that US imperialism in its long evolution (which this book deciphers with poignancy) has had no bearing on the destinies of its once conquered populations is as fallacious as saying that the US is to blame for every single thing that happens in Native American communities, or in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, etc. Not everything that happens in these locations and among these populations is directly connected to US expansionism, but a great deal is.

A case in point is Puerto Rico's current fiscal and economic crisis. The island's political class share part of the blame for Puerto Rico's present rut. A lot of it is also due to unnatural (i.e. "natural" but human-exacerbated) disasters such as Hurricane María. However, there is no denying that the evolution of Puerto Rico's territorial status has generated a host of adverse economic conditions that US states (including an island state such as Hawaii) do not have to contend with. An association with the US has undoubtedly raised the floor of material conditions in these places, but it has also imposed an unjust glass ceiling that most people around the US either do not know about or continue to ignore.

To add to those unfair economic limitations, there are political injustices regarding the lack of representation in Congress, and in the case of Am. Samoa, their lack of US citizenship. The fact that the populations in the overseas territories can't make up their mind about what status they prefer is: a) understandable given the way they have been mistreated by the US government, and b) irrelevant because what really matters is what Congress decides to do with the US' far-flung colonies, and there is no indication that Congress wants to either fully annex them or let them go because neither would be convenient to the 50 states and the political parties that run them. Instead, the status quo of modern colonial indeterminacy is what works best for the most potent political and economic groups in the US mainland. Would

This book is about much more than that though. It's also a history of how and why the United States got to control so much of what happens around the world without creating additional formal colonies like the "territories" that exist in this legal limbo. Part of its goal is to show how precisely how US imperialism has been made to be more cost-effective and also more invisible.

Read Immerwhar's book, and don't listen to the apologists of US imperialism which is still an active force that contradicts the US' professed values and that needs to be actively dismantled. Their attempts at discrediting this important reflect a denialism of the US' imperial realities that has endured throughout the history that this book summarizes.

"How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States" is a great starting point for making the US public aware of the US' contradictions as an "empire of liberty" (a phrase once used by Thomas Jefferson to describe the US as it expanded westward beyond the original 13 colonies). It is also a necessary update to other books on this topic that are already out there, and it is likely to hold the reader's attention more given its crafty narrative prose and structure Read less 194 people found this helpful Helpful Comment Report abuse

David Robson, February 26, 2019
Why So Sensitive?

5.0 out of 5 stars Why So Sensitive?

This is exactly the kind of book that drives the "My country, right or wrong" crowd crazy. Yes, slavery and genocide and ghastly scientific experiments existed before Europeans colonized the Americas, but it's also fair and accurate to say that Europeans made those forms of destruction into a bloody artform. Nobody did mass slaughter better.

The author of this compelling book reveals a history unknown to many readers, and does so with first-hand accounts and deep historical analyses. You might ask why we can't put such things behind us. The simple answer: we've never fully grappled with these events before in an honest and open way. This book does the nation a service by peering behind the curtain and facing the sobering truth of how we came to be what we are.

Thomas W. Moloney, April 9, 2019
This is a stunning book, not to be missed.

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a stunning book, not to be missed.

This is a stunning book, not to be missed. If you finished Sapiens with the feeling your world view had greatly enlarged, you're likely to have the same experience of your view of the US from reading this engaging work. And like Sapiens, it's an entirely enjoyable read, full of delightful surprises, future dinner party gems.

The further you get into the book the more interesting and unexpected it becomes. You'll look at the US in ways you likely never considered before. This is not a 'political' book with an ax to grind or a single-party agenda. It's refreshingly insightful, beautifully written, fun to read.

This is a gift I'll give to many a good friend, I've just started with my wife. I rarely write reviews and have never met the author (now my only regret). 3 people found this helpful

P , May 17, 2019
Content is A+. Never gets boring/tedious; never lingers; well written. It is perfect. 10/10

4.0 out of 5 stars Content is A+. Never gets boring/tedious; never lingers; well written. It is perfect. 10/10

This book is an absolutely powerhouse, a must-read, and should be a part of every student's curriculum in this God forsaken country.

Strictly speaking, this brilliant read is focused on America's relationship with Empire. But like with nearly everything America, one cannot discuss it without discussing race and injustice.

If you read this book, you will learn a lot of new things about subjects that you thought you knew everything about. You will have your eyes opened. You will be exposed to the dark underbelly of racism, corruption, greed and exploitation that undergird American ambition.

I don't know exactly what else to say other than to say you MUST READ THIS BOOK. This isn't a partisan statement -- it's not like Democrats are any better than Republicans in this book.

This is one of the best books I've ever read, and I am a voracious reader. The content is A+. It never gets boring. It never gets tedious. It never lingers on narratives. It's extremely well written. It is, in short, perfect. And as such, 10/10.

Sunny May 11, 2019
Excellent and thoughtful discussion regarding the state of our union

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and thoughtful discussion regarding the state of our union

I heard an interview of Daniel Immerwahr on NPR news / WDET radio regarding this book.

I'm am quite conservative and only listen to NPR news when it doesn't lean too far to the left.

However, the interview piqued my interest. I am so glad I purchased this ebook. What a phenomenal and informative read!!! WOW!! It's a "I never knew that" kind of read. Certainly not anything I was taught in school. This is thoughtful, well written and an easy read. Highly recommend!!

[May 28, 2021] Is The Pentagon's UFO PsyOps Fueling Russia, China War Risk by Finian Cunningham

May 22, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

There are reasons to be skeptical. After decades of stonewalling on the issue, suddenly American military chiefs appear to be giving credence to claims of UFOs invading Earth.

Several viral video clips purporting to show extraordinary flying technology have been "confirmed" by the Pentagon as authentic. The Pentagon move is unprecedented.

The videos of the Unidentified Flying Objects were taken by U.S. air force flight crews or by naval surveillance and subsequently "leaked" to the public. The question is: were the "leaks" authorized by Pentagon spooks to stoke the public imagination of visitors from space? The Pentagon doesn't actually say what it believes the UFOs are, only that the videos are "authentic".

A Senate intelligence committee is to receive a report from the Department of Defense's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force next month. That has also raised public interest in the possibility of alien life breaching our skies equipped with physics-defying technology far superior to existing supersonic jets and surveillance systems.

Several other questions come to mind that beg skepticism. Why does the phenomenon of UFOs or UAP only seem to be associated with the American military? This goes back decades to the speculation during the 1950s about aliens crashing at Roswell in New Mexico. Why is it that only the American military seems privy to such strange encounters? Why not the Russian or Chinese military which would have comparable detection technology to the Americans but they don't seem to have made any public disclosures on alien encounters? Such a discrepancy is implausible unless we believe that life-forms from lightyears away have a fixation solely on the United States. That's intergalactic American "exceptionalism" for you!

Also, the alleged sightings of UFOs invariably are associated with U.S. military training grounds or high-security areas.

Moreover, the released videos that have spurred renewed public interest in UFOs are always suspiciously of poor quality, grainy and low resolution. Several researchers, such as Mick West, have cogently debunked the videos as optical illusions. That's not to say that the U.S. air force or naval personnel were fabricating the images. They may genuinely believe that they were witnessing something extraordinary. But as rational optics experts have pointed out there are mundane explanations for seeming unusual aerial observations, such as drones or balloons drifting at high speed in differential wind conditions, or by the crew mistaking a far-off aircraft dipping over the horizon for an object they believe to be much closer.

The military people who take the videos in good – albeit misplaced – faith about what they are witnessing are not the same as the military or intelligence people who see an opportunity with the videos to exploit the public in a psychological operation.

Fomenting public anxieties, or even just curiosity, about aliens and super-technology is an expedient way to exert control over the population. At a time when governing authorities are being questioned by a distrustful public and when military-intelligence establishments are viewed as having lost a sense of purpose, what better way to realign public respect by getting them to fret over alien marauders from whom they need protection?

There is here a close analogy to the way foreign nations are portrayed as adversaries and enemies in order to marshal public support or least deference to the governing establishment and its military. We see this ploy played over and over again with regard to the U.S. and Western demonization of Russia and China as somehow conveying a malign intent towards Western societies. In other words, it's a case of Cold War and UFOs from the same ideological launchpad, so to speak, in order to distract public attention from internal problems.

However, more worrying still is that there is a dangerous reinforcing crossover of the two propaganda realms. The fueling of UFO speculation is feeding directly into speculation that U.S. airspace is being invaded by high-tech weapons developed by Russia or China.

U.S. lawmakers are demanding answers from the Pentagon about whether the aerial "encounters" are advanced weaponry from foreign enemies who are surveilling the American homeland at will. Some U.S. air force aviators have recently expressed to the media a feeling of helplessness in the face of seeming superior technology.

At a time of heightened animosity towards Russia and China and febrile talk among Pentagon chiefs about the possibility of all-out war, it is not difficult to imagine, indeed it is disturbingly easy to imagine, how optical illusions about alien phenomena could trigger false alarms attributed to Russian or Chinese military incursions.

The stoking of UFO controversy appears to be a classic psyops perpetrated by U.S. military intelligence for the objective of population control. Its aim is to corral the citizenry under the authority of the state and for them to accept the protector function of "our" military. The big trouble is that the psyops with aliens are, in turn, risking the exacerbation of fears and tensions with Russia and China.

With all the Pentagon-assisted chatter, it is more likely that an F-18 squadron could mistake an errant weather balloon on the horizon for an alien spacecraft. And amid our new Cold War tensions, it is but a small conceptual step to further imagine that the UFO is not from outer space but rather is a Russian or Chinese hypersonic cruise missile heading towards the U.S. mainland.

[May 28, 2021] Biden aministsration is building a coalition to challenge China. It wants to neutralize Russia. Nord Stream 2 is an element of contention

May 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Max , May 19 2021 21:16 utc | 26

@ Old man of the sea | May 19 2021 20:46 utc | 22

One can't blame everything on Israel. Yes, it is part of five eyes, more like SIX eyes.

Biden (JB) is building a coalition to challenge China. JB's administration wants to neutralize Russia. Nord Stream 2 is an element of contention and by making a concession JB is making Germany and Russia happy. Agree, that its completion will be a "huge geopolitical win for Putin". Let's see when Nord Stream 2 becomes fully operational. Time will tell.

Russia's main focus is De-Dollarization, stability in Russia and in its neighborhood.

China's announcement about Bitcoin led to it dropping by 30%. What will China, Russia, Turkey and Iran announcement about the U$A dollar do to its value and the market? When will China become the #1 ECONOMY?

THE MOST DANGEROUS DECADE: 2018-2028

Stonebird , May 19 2021 21:42 utc | 29

Old man of the sea | May 19 2021 20:46 utc | 22

The US is now the largest provider of LNG, so there is relatively little more financial advantage to be gained from a direct confrontation with Germany or Russia. Political maybe, but the dedollarisation is starting to take hold. (Aside; even Israel depends on the strength of the dollar to continue, like musical chairs, when the music stops there will be precious few chairs left ). The Gas/Oil lobbies in the US who are behind the sanctions may have some other trick up their sleeve, but the deflation of Zelensky in Ukraine, and the opening up of a steal-fest of Ukrainian assets might compensate.

***
Note that the West has closed Syrian Embassies so as to stop Syrians voting for Assad. They steal it's oil, and Syria is still next to Israel and doing relatively well in spite of tanker bombings, and missiles. It is also possible that, as you say, there is a price for non-interference in Israel itself.

[May 28, 2021] Attorney General Bill Barr threatened to quit last year over Trump's attempts to fire FBI Director Chris Wray

Once Deep State always Deep State... So Barr was essentially Trump handler from the Deep State.
May 09, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

play_arrow
CheapBastard 39 minutes ago (Edited) remove link

(Coward) Attorney General Bill Barr threatened to quit last year over Trump's attempts to fire FBI Director Chris Wray

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/attorney-general-bill-barr-threatened-to-quit-last-year-over-trump-s-attempts-to-fire-fbi-director-chris-wray/ar-BB1gxWEQ?li=BB141NW3&ocid=mailsignout

Should never have appointed these swamp creatures to begin with.

[May 28, 2021] Accused Russiagate Spy Kilimnik Speaks -- and Evidence Backs His No Collusion Account

Highly recommended!
Money quite from comments: " more importantly it is devastating information about the dishonesty of our government. What have we come to? What recourse is available?"
May 24, 2021 | www.realclearinvestigations.com
By Aaron Maté , RealClearInvestigations
May 19, 2021

The man cast as a linchpin of debunked Trump-Russia collusion theories is breaking his silence to vigorously dispute the U.S. government's effort to brand him a Russian spy and put him behind bars.

In an exclusive interview with RealClearInvestigations, Konstantin Kilimnik stated, "I have no relationship whatsoever to any intelligence services, be they Russian or Ukrainian or American, or anyone else."

Konstantin Kilimnik: Decries the U.S. government's "senseless and false accusations." AP Photo

Kilimnik, a longtime employee of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, spoke out in response to an explosive Treasury Department statement declaring that he had "provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy" during the 2016 election. That press release, which announced an array of sanctions on Russian nationals last month, also alleged that Kilimnik is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf."

Treasury 's claim came shortly after two other accusatory U.S. government statements about the dual Ukrainian-Russian national. In March, a U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment accused Kilimnik of being a "Russian influence agent" who meddled in the 2020 campaign to assist Trump's reelection. A month earlier, an FBI alert offered $250,000 for information leading to his arrest over a 2018 witness tampering charge in Manafort's shuttered Ukraine lobbying case, which was unrelated to Russia, collusion, or any elections.

Treasury provided no evidence for its claims, which go beyond the findings of the two most extensive Russiagate investigations: the 448-page report issued in 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the 966-page report issued in August 2020 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Treasury has declined all media requests for elaboration on how it reached conclusions that those probes did not. Two unidentified officials told NBC News that U.S. intelligence "has developed new information" about Kilimnik "that leads them to believe " (emphasis added) that he passed on the polling data to Russia. But these sources "did not identify the source or type of intelligence that had been developed," nor "when or how" it was received.

"Nobody has seen any evidence to support these claims about Kilimnik," a congressional source familiar with the House and Senate's multiple Russia-related investigations told RCI.

Adam Schiff: Treated the Treasury claim about Kilimnik as the Trump-Russia smoking gun. "That's what most people would call collusion," he said. (Al Drago/Pool via AP)

Despite the absence of evidence, the Treasury press release's one-sentence claim about Kilimnik has been widely greeted as the Trump-Russia smoking gun. Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC that Treasury's assertion about Kilimnik proved that Russian intelligence was "involved in trying to help Trump win in that [2016] election. That's what most people would call collusion."

Speaking to RCI in fluent English from his home in Moscow, Kilimnik, 51, described these U.S. government assertions as "senseless and false accusations."

His comments are backed up by documents, some previously unreported, as well as by Rick Gates, a longtime Manafort associate and key Mueller probe cooperating witness. (Gates pleaded guilty to making a false statement and to failing to register as a foreign agent in connection to his lobbying work in Ukraine.) The evidence raises doubts about new efforts to revive the Trump-Kremlin collusion narrative by casting Kilimnik as a central Russian figure.

"They needed a Russian to investigate 'Russia collusion,' and I happened to be that Russian," Kilimnik said.

Highlights from the interview and RCI's related reporting:

Reviving the Polling Data Conspiracy Theory

Kilminik has provided an inviting target for proponents of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories. He was born in 1970 in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, and later worked for Paul Manafort as a translator and aide there. This background makes him one of the few people in the broad Trump 2016 campaign orbit to possess a Russian passport.

To this Mueller and others have added a series of ambiguous and disputed allegations to say that the FBI "assesses" him to "have ties to Russian intelligence." This characterization, first made in a 2017 court filing, quickly transmogrified into a presumed fact of the collusion narrative.

Rather than prosecute Manafort for any crime related to Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, the Mueller team instead pursued him on financial and lobbying charges involving his pre-Trump stint as a political consultant in Ukraine. In 2018, it accused Kilimnik of seeking to pressure two "potential witnesses" by sending them text messages about Manafort's Ukraine lobbying work.

As the Russia probe came to a close without a single indictment related to a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy, the Mueller team used Kilimnik to suggest collusion without formally alleging it.

In January 2019, the Mueller team accused Manafort of breaching their cooperation agreement by lying about his interactions with his Russian employee. Topping the list were alleged false statements about sharing election polling data with Kilimnik in 2016.

Andrew Weissmann: Despite this lead Mueller prosecutor's suggestion otherwise, the Mueller report "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election," as the report itself stated. NYU Law

"This goes to the larger view of what we think is going on, and what we think is the motive here," lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC. "This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel's office is investigating."

Weissmann's musings became collusion fodder. Media pundits and influential Democrats, namely Congressional intelligence leaders Schiff and Mark Warner, speculated that Kilimnik shared Trump campaign polling data with Russian intelligence officers as they allegedly worked to turn the election in Trump's favor. "This appears as the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual collusion," Warner told CNN . "Clearly, Manafort was trying to collude with Russian agents."

But soon after, the Mueller team quietly undercut Weissmann's "larger view" and the conspiratorial innuendo that it had fueled. One month after igniting the frenzy about the polling data, Weissmann submitted a heavily redacted court filing that walked back some of his claims. The following month, the Special Counsel's final report acknowledged that its musings and speculations about Kilimnik could not be corroborated. The Mueller team not only "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election," as the report stated, but also "could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it."

Rick Gates: Ex-Manafort aide says the Mueller team "cherry-picked" his testimony about Kilimnik to spread a misleading, collusion-favorable narrative. AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

"I have no idea who made up the lies about 'detailed' or 'sensitive' polling data, or why they did it," Kilimnik says. "They were mostly quotes of the polls from the media, such as LA Times and others. They would be 'Clinton "" 43, Trump "" 42.' Never anything more detailed. I never got even a page printed out with either polling data or any other info."

This public data was shared, Kilimnik says, with Ukrainian clients of Manafort's as part of both regular political chatter and an effort to encourage future business. "I shared this info with a lot of our clients in Ukraine, who were closely following the race and who were excited about Paul working for [Trump]," Kilimnik says.

If any government official did receive his polling data, Kilimnik adds, they were not Russian but rather from Ukraine or even the United States. "I would share it with our political contacts in Ukraine, basically to keep their interest to Paul and our Ukrainian business alive. Also I shared it with the U.S. and other embassies, basically offering the opinion that the election is not over."

Kilimnik's account is corroborated by Gates, the ex-Manafort associate and Trump campaign official whose testimony was used by the Mueller team "" deceptively, he says "" to suggest a connection between the polling data and possible Trump-Russia collusion. The Special Counsel's office "relied heavily on Mr. Gates for evidence" about the polling data, the New York Times noted in February 2019.

According to Gates, that reliance entailed significant creative license by Mueller's prosecutors, particularly Weissmann. Gates says he told the Special Counsel's Office that the polling data was not sensitive information, but rather publicly available figures taken from media outlets.

"I explained to them, over the course of many interviews, what the polling data was about, and why it was being shared," Gates told RCI. "All that was exchanged was old, topline data from public polls and from some internal polls, but all dated, nothing in real time. So for example, Trump 48, Clinton 46. It was not massive binders full of demographics or deep research. No documents were ever shared or disclosed. And this is part of what Mueller left out of the report. They cherry-picked and built a narrative that really was not true, because they had pre-determined the conclusion."

Happier times: Manafort and colleagues, with Kilimnik far left and the boss seated in white shirt, red tie. AP Photo

Asked why Manafort shared any polling data with clients in Ukraine, Kilimnik and Gates stressed the same reason: money. "The were some outstanding debts, which we were working to get repaid, which never happened," Kilimnik says. "And there was also Paul's reputation. He was very well known to a lot of people in Kiev, and he hoped [he] could generate some new business" by showcasing his work for Trump's campaign.

"This was a way that Paul was using to let people in Ukraine know that he was doing very well in the United States running the election of Donald Trump, and that he was trying to collect the remaining fees that he was owed," for prior work in Ukraine, Gates says. "He was trying to position himself. This is not unlike any other political operative, Republican or Democrat, in politics. They all do it."

The Mueller report itself quietly bolsters Gates' and Kilimnik's converging recollections. "Gates' account about polling data is consistent [redacted]," it states, ""¦ with multiple emails that Kilimnik sent to U.S. associates and press contacts" in the summer of 2016. "Those emails referenced 'internal polling,' described the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort's role in it, and assessed Trump' s prospects for victory." The corresponding footnote cites eight emails from Kilimnik to these "U.S. associates and press contacts." This indicates that the Mueller team obtained direct evidence of the polling data that was shared; how it was discussed; and with whom it was shared.

Rather than highlight the Kilimnik emails that it obtained, and Gates' account that the polling data was shared for financial reasons, the Mueller report mentioned this information only in passing and ultimately concluded that it "could not reliably determine Manafort's purpose in sharing" the information.

Weissmann did not respond to a request for comment.

The Kilimnik Passport Kilimnik's passport from the time in question "" to judge from photos and a video he shared with RCI "" was issued in the standard red ... Konstantin Kilimnik via RealClearInvestigations ... not in the green of the diplomatic corps. Mueller cited a Kilimnik "diplomatic passport" as evidence of "ties to Russian intelligence." Government of Russia/Wikimedia

Although the Mueller report walked back Weissman's innuendo regarding polling data, its assertion that Kilimnik has "ties to Russian intelligence" remains a foundation of the Russia collusion narrative.

Putting aside the fact that the government has never produced any evidence that Kilimnik communicated with Russian intelligence or the Kremlin, RCI has obtained documents that undercut the government's basis for assuming those unspecified "ties."

In Mueller's own telling, Kilimnik's only direct link to the Russian government was his enrollment in a Soviet military academy from 1987 to 1992, where he trained as a linguist. "It's a language school, similar to what you guys have in Fort Monterey," Kilimnik said, referring to the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, in Monterey, California. "It's a university that trains military translators, mostly for the army, not for the intelligence services. Basically it was a military training, for five years, focusing on English and Swedish. In normal circumstances, I would actually go and serve in the army, but because Soviet Union was falling apart, I was able to get a job as the instructor of Swedish at the university. I never served in the real army. If teaching Swedish counts as spying "" that will be very surprising."

To substantiate Kilimnik's alleged Russian intelligence "ties," the Mueller team wrote that Kilimnik "obtained a visa to travel to the United States with a Russian diplomatic passport in 1997." (Intelligence operatives often travel to foreign countries under diplomatic cover.)

Kilimnik's U.S. visa shows an "R" for "regular." (The typo in his last name was corrected on a later visa.) Konstantin Kilimnik via RealClearInvestigations

But Kilimnik's passport from that period "" to judge from the images he shared with RCI via a messaging app "" was issued in the standard red color, not in the green color of the diplomatic corps. The document also contains a regular U.S. visa issued on October 28, 1997 "" the same date the Mueller report claims he traveled to the U.S. "with a Russian diplomatic passport." The U.S. visa to Kilimnik is issued under the category of "R" "" which stands for Regular "" and "B1/B2," the designation for a temporary visa for business and tourism.

The Mueller team's claim that he possessed and travelled on a diplomatic passport is "a blatant lie," Kilimnik told RCI. "I never had a diplomatic passport in my life. It's one of many very sloppy things in the Muller report, which don't make sense."

The Mueller report cites Kilimnik's "travel to the United States with a Russian diplomatic passport." Mueller report, Page 133

Told of the Mueller report's apparent error concerning Kilimnik's passport, a Justice Department spokesperson declined comment. Former Special Counsel Mueller and former lead prosecutor Weissmann did not respond to emailed queries.

Ironically, at the time when Mueller team claims that he visited the U.S. on behalf of the Russian government, Kilimnik was in fact working for the U.S. government at the U.S. Congress-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) in Moscow. As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported , Kilimnik's 10-year IRI tenure is among several substantial Western government connections that have been ignored in amid efforts to accuse him of ties to the Russian government. "I gave IRI my CV which clearly said which school I graduated from, and gave my detailed background," Kilimnik recalls. "I never concealed anything."

Kilimnik: No Madrid Meeting With Manafort

When it comes to his travel history, Kilimnik says that the Special Counsel's Office made another significant error: falsely claiming that he and Manafort held a meeting in Spain .

"I have never been to Madrid in my life," Kilimnik says. Wikimedia

When Manafort denied that he and Kilimnik met in Madrid in 2017, the Mueller team accused him of lying and cited this as one of several alleged breaches of their cooperation agreement. The Mueller report claims that the two met in the Spanish capital on Feb. 26, 2017, "where Kilimnik had flown from Moscow."

It also states that Manafort initially denied the Madrid meeting in his first two interviews with the Special Counsel's office, but then relented "after being confronted with documentary evidence that Kilimnik was in Madrid at the same time as him."

But Kilimnik tells RCI that no such meeting occurred, and that he believes that Manafort was coerced into changing his story.

"I have never been to Madrid in my life," Kilimnik says. The "documentary evidence" referenced in the Mueller report was, he speculates, a flight booking that was ultimately cancelled. "I was thinking about going to Madrid, and I discussed it with Paul," he says. "But it made no sense. And ultimately, it was too expensive. So I didn't go."

Had he actually visited Madrid, Kilimnik says, the Mueller team would have "easily found proof "" tickets, boarding passes, border crossings "" all that stuff. It's not rocket science to get it. The European Union is a pretty disciplined place. There would be at least be a record of me crossing the border somewhere in the EU."

Kilimnik told RCI that the last time he saw Manafort was one month before the alleged Madrid trip, around the time of Trump's inauguration in Janaury 2017. "I did not attend any of the inauguration events myself," he recalls. "But I spent some time to meet with Paul, and to catch up. That was our last meeting in-person, in Alexandria [Virginia]."

Asked why Manafort would have admitted to a Madrid meeting that did not in fact take place, Kilimnik said that his former boss faced heavy pressure while locked up by the Mueller team, which included a long stint in solitary confinement. "I don't know why he said that. I have difficulties to imagine Paul's psychological state when he was jailed. A guy who [had] a very high-level life. Jail is a tough place. I still get the shudders to think what he had to go through."

The allegation that Manafort lied to the Mueller team proved consequential. In February 2019, U.S. District Judge Jackson sided with the Special Counsel and voided Manafort's plea deal. No longer bound to give him a reduced sentence for cooperating, Jackson nearly doubled Manafort's prison term on top of his earlier conviction and excoriated him for telling "lies." President Trump pardoned in Manafort in December 2020.

Told that Kilimnik denies ever visiting Madrid, and asked whether the Special Counsel's office collected concrete evidence to the contrary, both former Special Counsel Mueller and lead prosecutor Weissmann did not respond. A Justice Department spokesperson declined comment.

FBI Alert Contradicts Senate-Treasury Spy Claim

Over one year after Mueller closed up shop, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) unilaterally upgraded Kilimnik's alleged Russian intelligence status. The panel's August 2020 report declared that Kilimnik, far from merely having "ties" to the GRU as Mueller had claimed, is in fact a full-fledged "Russian intelligence officer."

The Senate made the leap despite offering no new public evidence to support its explosive "assessment", and even acknowledging that its "power to investigate" "" as well as "its staffing, resources, and technical capabilities" -- ultimately "falls short of the FBI's."

Richard Burr and Mark Warner, Republican chair and Democratic co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The FBI and Justice Department do not endorse their panel's judgment that Kilimnik is a "Russian intelligence officer." AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

The Senate also labelled Kilimnik a Russian spy despite simultaneously presenting new evidence that he was, in the Committee's own words, a "valuable resource" for officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, with whom he was "in regular contact."

In September 2020, RCI asked the FBI and Justice Department whether it shares the SSCI's judgment that Kilimnik is a "Russian intelligence officer." A DOJ spokesperson replied that "the Mueller report speaks for itself," and advised that the public "defer" to how Kilimnik was characterized in the Mueller report and the Special Counsel Office's indictments. This strongly suggested, RCI reported, that the FBI has not adopted the SSCI's view that Kilimnik is a Russian spy.

The FBI's February "alert" offering $250,000 for information leading to Kilimnik's arrest bolsters this reporting. It once again states that Kilimnik is "assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence" "" shunning the SSCI's spy language and reverting to Mueller's original, ambiguous characterization.

The wording of the FBI alert underscores that while the Senate Intelligence Committee and Treasury Department have declared that Kilimnik is a Russian spy, the nation's top law enforcement agency has never adopted that assessment. When Manafort's legal team asked the Special Counsel's Office for any communication between Manafort and "Russian intelligence officials," they were told that "there are no materials responsive to [those] requests." In unsealed notes from early 2017, Peter Strzok "" the top FBI counterintelligence agent who opened the Trump-Russia investigation "" wrote : "We are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials."

Asked whether the FBI has altered its characterization of Kilimnik in light of Treasury's claim that he is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent", an FBI spokesperson declined comment.

The FBI's alert was also remarkable for the size of the Kilimnik bounty, which is more than double the amount of most members of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. While the bureau is offering $100,000 each for information regarding six alleged murderers, and $200,000 for another, the FBI is offering $250,000 for help nabbing Kilimnik on a lone witness tampering charge in Manafort's Ukraine lobbying case.

The Mueller team accused Kilimnik of sending text messages to two individuals with whom Manafort had worked during his Ukraine lobbying days. Kilimnik's aim, the Special Counsel's Office alleged, was to pressure the pair to attest that their prior work was focused on lobbying officials in Europe, not in the United States. These individuals "" identified in court documents as "Person D1" and "Person D2" "" were not active witnesses for the Mueller probe, but instead, according to the Special Counsel's Office, "potential witnesses."

The 13 Kilimnik messages to these "potential witnesses" cited by Mueller include the following:

Kilimnik says that he was not trying to tamper with anyone. "I do not understand how two messages to our old partners who helped us get out the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted as 'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice,'" he says.

Whether or not Kilimnik sought to tamper with "potential witnesses" in Manafort's Ukraine lobbying case, the alleged 2018 infraction has nothing to do with 2016 Trump-Russia collusion.

The FBI alert from February raises questions about the bombshell Treasury Department claims released two months later. If the U.S. government stands by Treasury's claims about Kilimnik, why is he wanted only on a minor, non-Russia related witness-tampering charge, and not for taking part in alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election? If Kilimnik indeed passed on "sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy" to Russian intelligence while working as a spy, why has he not been indicted alongside the Russian social media company charged by Mueller in February 2018, or the Russian intelligence officers charged by Mueller in July 2018?

To Kilimnik, the answer is found on that same Russian passport that Mueller mischaracterized. "It is clear to me that the indictment of 2018 was pulled out of the thin air, simply to have a Russian face in the mix," he says. "I understand that they needed a Russian to investigate 'Russia collusion,' and I happened to be that Russian," he says.

"The funny thing is that I'm not hiding. And I would have explained the same thing to the FBI or anyone who never reached out to me. They don't because they don't want the truth."

From Russian Spy to "Influence Agent"

In Kilimnik's eyes, his utility as a Russian national for the Trump-Russia collusion narrative also explains his prominent inclusion in the recent U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment , released in March one month after the FBI alert for his arrest.

In yet another new iteration of how Kilimnik is described by the U.S. government, the ICA does not call him a Russian intelligence officer, but instead a "Russian influence agent."

The ICA does not define the term "Russian influence agent," or explain how it reached that new assessment about Kilimnik. Nor does it put forth any evidence for the alleged Russian influence activities ascribed to him .

The report alleges that Kilimnik was part of a "network of Ukraine-linked individuals "¦ connected to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)" who "took steps throughout the [2020] election cycle to damage U.S. ties to Ukraine, denigrate President Biden and his candidacy, and benefit former President Trump's prospects for reelection."

Andriy Derkach: "I have never met him in my life," Kilimnik says of this Ukrainian lawmaker with reputed Kremlin ties. Petro Zhuravel/Wikimedia

As part of this alleged meddling network, the ICA asserts that Kilimnik tried to influence U.S. officials; helped produce a documentary that aired on U.S. television in January 2020; and worked with Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker alleged to have Kremlin ties. "Derkach, Kilimnik, and their associates sought to use prominent U.S. persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to U.S. officials and audiences," the ICA states.

Kilimnik says the U.S. intelligence officials who wrote those words are using their anonymity and power to launder their false narratives about him.

"I have no idea what they're talking about," he says. "I would really love to see at least one confirmation of the things they allege. Pulling me into this report with zero evidence really shows that [U.S. intelligence] people high up do not give a damn about the truth, facts, or anything."

As for Derkach, "I have never met him in my life," Kilimnik says. "I don't know why, or on what basis, they're making claims that he has any relationship to me."

"I had zero meetings with anybody related to the Trump campaign. In fact, I have tried to do my best "" understanding how I've gotten into this mess "" to stay as far as possible from any U.S. politics." If he had held such meetings, Kilimnik adds, "this should be easy to prove."

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to requests for comment.

No Effort to Contact Russiagate's Top Russian

Even though Kilimnik's name fills dozens of pages of the Mueller and Senate Intelligence reports after years of federal scrutiny and he is the target of a $250,000 FBI reward, this seemingly critical Russiagate figure has never been contacted by a single U.S. government official, to judge from the public record as well as Kilimnik's account.

The lack of contact is similar to the way FBI, Mueller, and Senate investigators treated other supposedly central Russiagate figures. When Joseph Mifsud, whose conversations with George Papadopoulos triggered the FBI's Trump-Russia probe, visited the U.S. in early 2017, the FBI subjected him to a light round of questioning and then let him leave the country. The Mueller team later claimed in its final report that Mifsud had lied to FBI agents, yet inexplicably did not indict him. Despite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's central role in publishing the stolen Democratic Party emails supposedly hacked and supplied by Russia, the Mueller team never contacted him and the Senate Intelligence Committee shunned an offer to interview him .

Kilimnik believes that this avoidance is deliberate. "The FBI and others could have had the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv or Moscow, or have any of my numerous contacts in the U.S., reach out and start a conversation, if they wanted info," he says. "But they do not really need it. All they is need is a scarecrow. And as one of the few people within reach of the Trump campaign who has a Russian passport, they picked me."

"They never reached out to me," he adds. "I never had a single contact with FBI or any government official, basically since charges were brought [on] Paul. Nobody ever tried to talk to me because they know the truth. They understood damn well that I will tell them what I'm telling you."

Kilimnik says that he has had only minimal contact with Manafort since the former Trump campaign chairman was released to home confinement in March 2020 and subsequently pardoned by Trump in late December. "We had one short contact after he got out of jail, basically catching up about family and kids and everything," Kilimnik recalls. "I want to give him time to just basically get his life back to normal. We have not spoken on the telephone."

After years in Ukraine working with Manafort, Kilimnik now lives full-time in Moscow with his wife and two children. "I have been pretty open all my life, and have not been hiding from anyone," Kilimnik says. "I would have been happy to answer any questions from the FBI, or whoever. But I refuse to be a toy in bizarre political games and have my life ruined more than it has been because of the senseless and false accusations."

Despite being labeled a Russian spy who meddled in the 2016 election, Kilimnik has no plans to return to the U.S. and try to clear his name. "I am not going to the U.S. on my own dime, with no visa in COVID times only to be crucified by the media, having zero chance of justice," he says. "This is a sad continuation of a deeply wrong story. I thought it would be over with Trump gone and the need to create lies about his 'ties to Russia.' But obviously, I was wrong."

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futbolfan 19 May, 2021 I respect all the dogged investigators who root out the truth of the crimes and corruption of our "justice department", and FBI. I hope they keep up the good work. Personally I have no more faith in anything which was soaked in the hate and insanity of the Obama thug regime...
will.ganness 20 May, 2021 Who is calling the January 6th Protests the biggest threat the the country since the Civil war? The Democratic Party, the MSM, The FBI.... Who produced and directed Russiagate? The same three!! If progressives think they should get on board with Insurrectiongate, they should have more sense! VAPOR 19 May, 2021 The Fake Russian Dossier do it by the book Crossfire Hurricane insurance policy to overturn a presidential election and frame Trump. Where is Professor Misfud and why won't Steele talk to Durham? Call in Mary Jacoby and ask her what she discussed with Obama at the white house.
Justis 20 May, 2021 Why did Horowitz not discover this in his investigation? Was that investigation another coverup, finding just enough to look authentic? Is he too, untrustworthy?

[May 28, 2021] A book on the crimes of the international coalition in Syria was presented in Moscow.

May 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

alaff , May 19 2021 20:13 utc | 16

It is unlikely that you will see this news on CNN or BBC.

A book on the crimes of the international coalition in Syria was presented in Moscow. The book is called 'Crimes of the US-led international coalition in Syria'. The study is based on interviews with over 200 Syrian citizens who witnessed the crimes of the international coalition. They reportedly allowed the authors to use their testimony in legal proceedings, including in international courts. The conference dedicated to the presentation of the book was attended by the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Syrian Arab Republic to the Russian Federation, Riad Haddad.

The presented facts prove that the US-led coalition systematically destroyed Syrian hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, houses of civilians, which, according to international humanitarian law, qualifies as war crimes. Each of the facts is personalized with an accurate indication of the identity of the victim and the circumstances of the crime, and is also accompanied by their requests to use this evidence to appeal to national and international courts.

The book is available for reading online (so far only in Russian).

Btw, earlier, in February, an exhibition of the same name was held, which was visited by Sergey Naryshkin, Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation.

[May 28, 2021] EU Parliament report says regime change needed in Russia, recommends Brussels launch propaganda TV channel to help it happen

Notable quotes:
"... A draft report published online by the assembly's Committee on Foreign Affairs caused consternation in Russian media on Monday, after statements came to light that argued the bloc "should establish with the US a transatlantic alliance to defend democracy globally" and "deter Russia" from supposed aggression in Eastern Europe. ..."
May 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , May 19 2021 22:31 utc | 35

Very aggressive stuff from the EU:

EU Parliament report says regime change needed in Russia, recommends Brussels launch propaganda TV channel to help it happen

A draft report published online by the assembly's Committee on Foreign Affairs caused consternation in Russian media on Monday, after statements came to light that argued the bloc "should establish with the US a transatlantic alliance to defend democracy globally" and "deter Russia" from supposed aggression in Eastern Europe.

As part of its "vision" for future ties with Moscow, the paper concludes that the EU should put forward a number of incentives designed to persuade Russians that a turn to the West would be beneficial, including visa liberalization and "free trade investment."

[...]

At the same time, the committee puts forward a number of extreme steps that it says the bloc should take. It insists that Brussels "must be prepared not to recognize the parliament of Russia and to ask for Russia's suspension from international organizations with parliamentary assemblies if the 2021 parliamentary elections in Russia are recognized as fraudulent."

The success or failure of this operation will depend entirely on the Russian people. Will it fall for the Western European honey trap once again?

After Putin is gone, bets are off. Also, the EU continues to suffer from refugee waves from Syria and Libya, and its economy continues to deteriorate (recession confirmed for Q1 2021). The whole system is so exhausted that they don't talk about even of the absorption of Moldova anymore (the Moldovan president had to bring that up to the Kremlin; good they remembered them).

--//--

US waives sanctions against Nord Stream company and CEO as Blinken & Lavrov meet in Iceland

This looks like Biden had some surge of sanity, but it's not: I read an article on Izvestia some days ago and it seems Russia won the war for the Arctic and has expelled the USA from that sea. That, combined with the fact that Russia has been ramping up investment on the sector, results in the fact that, soon enough, Russia will also have the infrastructure to deliver cheaper LNG by ship to Europe, too.

That means the USA has given up on the NordStream II in order to hurt the Russian LNG investments. Yes, people, that's the insanity of the situation: the USG is completely lost. It still has its ace in the hole, though: the Green Party is set to win the next German general elections, and they're rabid Atlanticists. Like, this would cost Germany dearly and they wouldn't last two years in government, but at least Russian gas to Europe through a non-Ukrainian route would be stopped.

Speaking of the Ukraine, this whole situation makes us reflect: it is patent at this point in time that the EU is a subsidiary of NATO - it expands eastwards after those countries become NATO members. They're the "socioeconomic" version of NATO. This has created a huge problem for the EU, though, because the Ukraine is a massive financial black hole to the American economy (through the IMF) and the USA is pressuring the EU to make it a member quick, so that this black hole goes to European (i.e. German) hands. The thing is Germany obviously doesn't want that, because it needs the Euro to keep at where it is or stronger (you can only enter the EU by entering the EZ nowadays). The Ukraine is salivating to become an EZ member - that's the whole point of the Maidan coup in the first place - so Ukraine entering the EU without entering the EZ is out of the table. The EU must've told the USA that no, the Ukraine must first become a NATO member, then they'll make it an EZ-EU member. The Ukraine is the proverbial hot potato.

All of that coupled with the hard economic fact that, without the Russian gas transit exclusivity, you can't leverage Ukraine's debt, because, after Maidan, all of the public goods and infrastructure were privatized to American capitalists. That means we have the absurd situation where Germany has to give up cheaper gas for itself (which would be essential for its economic recovery) in order to make the Ukraine happy so that it enters the EU, so that it becomes a financial black hole... to the German economy! Germany has to pay the Ukraine for the privilege of having to pay it even more, for eternity.

The price of nation-building has become more and more expensive to the capitalist world. Turns out those Third World shitholes have learned something after all those decades.

--//--

Well, well, well... how the tables have turned:

Iron Curtain reversed? EU agrees to open up to foreign tourists fully vaccinated against Covid-19, but NOT to those who've had Russia's Sputnik V jab

Taiwan is also suffering from a significant brain drain to the Mainland. They're trying to solve the problem by demonizing those people by calling them "traitors".

Interesting times.

--//--

Colonial Pipeline CEO confirms paying $4.4 million ransom to hackers, says he did it for America

This is USSR-of-the-1980s level of propaganda.

Either way, give that man a statue in D.C.!

P.S.: this is the quotation of what the CEO really said, so you don't accusing me of just reading the headline:

"[it was very hard, difficult to me etc. etc.] But it was the right thing to do for the country," Blount, who leads the company since 2017, added.

--//--

No shit, Sherlock:

Russian Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine hasn't been approved by EU due to political pressure from top officials – Moscow's spy chief

[May 28, 2021] More Hacks, More Baseless Accusations Against Russia

May 11, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

More Hacks, More Baseless Accusations Against Russia

In January police in various countries took down the Emotet bot-network that was at that time the basic platform for some 25% of all cybercrimes.

Based on hearsay Wikipedia and other had falsely attributed Emotet to Russian actors. The real people behind it were actually Ukrainians :

The operating center of Emotet was found in the Ukraine. Today the Ukrainian national police took control of it during a raid (video). The police found dozens of computers, some hundred hard drives, about 50 kilogram of gold bars (current price ~$60,000/kg) and large amounts of money in multiple currencies.

bigger

Emotet had nothing to do with Russia.

Now the U.S. is accusing Russia of somehow having part in another cybercrime :

President Joe Biden said Monday that a Russia-based group was behind the ransomware attack that forced the shutdown of the largest oil pipeline in the eastern United States.

The FBI identified the group behind the hack of Colonial Pipeline as DarkSide, a shadowy operation that surfaced last year and attempts to lock up corporate computer systems and force companies to pay to unfreeze them.

"So far there is no evidence ... from our intelligence people that Russia is involved, although there is evidence that actors, ransomware is in Russia," Biden told reporters.

"They have some responsibility to deal with this," he said.

Three days after being forced to halt operations, Colonial said Monday it was moving toward a partial reopening of its 5,500 miles (8,850 kilometers) of pipeline" the largest fuel network between Texas and New York.

Biden however is badly informed. There is no evidence that DarkSide has anything to do with Russia. It is, like Emotet, a commercial 'ransomware-as-a-service' criminal entity that wants to make money and does not care about geopolitics.

Yes, a version of the DarkNet software does exclude itself from running on system with specific language settings :

The DarkSide malware is even built to conduct language checks on targets and to shut down if it detects Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Armenian, Georgian, Kazakh, Turkmen, Romanian, and other languages ...

That is a quite long list of east European languages and Russian is only one of it. Why the authors of DarkNet do not want their software to run on machines with those language settings is unknown. But why would a Russian actor protect machines with Ukrainian or Romanian language settings? Both countries are hostile towards Russia. To claim that this somehow points to Russian actors is therefore baseless.

Russia strongly rejected Biden's accusation:

The Kremlin has once again pointed out the importance of cooperation between Moscow and Washington in tackling cyberthreats amid a cyber-attack on Colonial Pipeline, a US company. "Russia has nothing to do with these hacker attacks, nor with the previous hacker attacks," Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Preskov assured reporters on Tuesday.

"We categorically reject any accusation against us, and we can only regret that the US is refusing to cooperate with us in any way to counter cyber-threats. We believe that such cooperation - both international and bilateral - could indeed contribute to the common struggle against this scourge [known as] cyber-crime," Peskov said.

The U.S. seems notoriously bad at attributing computer hacks. It claims that the recent SolarWinds attack which intruded several government branches was also done by Russia. But that attack required deep insider knowledge and access to SolarWinds' computers and processes :

The recently discovered deep intrusion into U.S. companies and government networks used a manipulated version of the SolarWinds Orion network management software. The Washington borg immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump attributed it to China. But none of those claims were backed up by facts or known evidence.

The hack was extremely complex, well managed and resourced, and likely required insider knowledge. To this IT professional it 'felt' neither Russian nor Chinese. It is far more likely, as Whitney Webb finds, that Israel was behind it .

Indeed - the programmers of an Israeli company, recently bought up by SolarWinds, had all the necessary access for such a hack. However the U.S. sanctioned Russia over the SolarWinds hack without providing any evidence of its involvement.

If the U.S. continues to blame Russia without any evidence for each and every hack there may come a time when Russia stops caring and really starts to hack into or destroy important U.S. systems. The U.S. should fear that day.

Posted by b on May 11, 2021 at 17:31 UTC | Permalink


David G Horsman , May 11 2021 17:48 utc | 1

Thanks b. I don't think Russia is going to escalate destructive attacks any time soon. There's no upside.
They might even be reluctant to reveal their capabilities in the Ukraine.
For the moment, mockery is the best remedy while they up their game.
psychohistorian , May 11 2021 17:56 utc | 2
@ b who ended with
"
If the U.S. continues to blame Russia without any evidence for each and every hack there may come a time when Russia stops caring and really starts to hack into or destroy important U.S. systems.
"

How can you write such assertions that vary from the approach that both Russia and China are taking?....strong defense but no offense.

Now if empire tried to hack into a Russian or Chinese system/network then appropriate takedowns of malicious systems/networks would seem logical....and I expect they know how...but will not do it on the basis of another avenue of empire lies and deceit.

anon48 , May 11 2021 18:20 utc | 3
You should have titled the post "Killing Two Birds With One Stone".
This pipeline is huge, running from Texas through the Southeast and all the way up to New England. It's condition is beyond awful with multiple leaks along the route some of which lose more than a million gallons per month and much more than can be determined since some of the gasoline / jet fuel went into the aquifers. These faults have been well known for decades and although some of the areas are heavily populated no remediation was done. The local outcry recently caught the attention of the press when kids reported a gasoline smell along the pipeline route to the police. The locals demanded the pipeline be closed for repairs and sought answers from state officials and Federal authorities as to why this situation was allowed. To blame the Russians for the closure of the pipeline which results in a surge in prices and limited availability of gas for the summer is an absolute stroke of genius.
https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/ncdeq-colonial-pipeline-spill-huntersville/275-70e16fb6-c945-4634-b933-3975d0573f2e
Ike , May 11 2021 18:27 utc | 4
Great article. Russia must be getting so pissed off with the idiots in Washington.The uninformed and easily manipulated Western people surely get the governments they deserve.
Paul Craig Roberts highlights this with another bit of truth telling from Tucker Carlson
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/05/11/the-proof-is-in-tony-fauci-is-responsible-for-the-creation-of-the-covid-19-virus/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_proof_is_in_tony_fauci_is_responsible_for_the_creation_of_the_covid_19_virus&utm_term=2021-05-11
DG , May 11 2021 18:43 utc | 5
@all

I need to ask this: What do you think about the vaccination of children?

...

Josh , May 11 2021 18:44 utc | 6
It is odd that certain elements of the us intelligence community, along with negative factions within the us political establishment, continue to absolutely refuse to enter into verifiable and mutually binding international agreements on cyber security with exactly the nation states that they accuse (without evidence) of malicious activity in the same sphere, while at the same time operating in this field in an openly declared hostile manner under the secrecy deemed necessary for 'national security'.

[May 28, 2021] More Hacks, More Baseless Accusations Against Russia

May 17, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

librul , May 16 2021 13:24 utc | 1

Related:
- MI6 spy Christopher Steele 'produced second dossier on Donald Trump for FBI' - Telegraph
- Master List Of Official Russia Claims That Proved To Be Bogus - Matt Taibbi
- Secret Sharers: The Hidden Ties Between Private Spies and Journalists - NYT
> In a recent book, Luke Harding, an investigative reporter at The Guardian, described how Mr. Steele had dispatched his "collector" to surreptitiously approach a real estate broker, Sergei Millian, who was a peripheral figure in the Trump/Russia saga. "Millian spoke at length and privately to this person, believing him or her to be trustworthy "" a kindred soul," Mr. Harding wrote.

But the trouble for Mr. Harding, who is close to both Mr. Steele and Mr. Simpson, was that he wrote those lines before the release of the F.B.I. interview of Mr. Danchenko.

In the interview, the collector said that he and Mr. Millian might have spoken briefly over the phone, but that the two had never met.

Mr. Harding did not respond to requests for comment. <

Here are Ten Things We Have Learned During the Covid Coup.

1. Our political system is hopelessly corrupt. Virtually all politicians are hopelessly corrupt. No political party can be trusted. They all can be, and have been, bought.

2. Democracy is a sham. It has been a sham for a very long time. There will never be any real democracy when money and power amount to the same thing.

3. The system will stop at nothing to hold on to its power and, if possible, increase its levels of control and exploitation. It has no scruples. No lie is too outrageous, no hypocrisy too nauseating, no human sacrifice too great.

4. So-called radical movements are usually nothing of the sort. From whatever direction they claim to attack the system, they are just pretending to do so, and serve to channel discontent in directions which are harmless to the power clique and even useful to its agendas.

5. Any "dissident" voice you have ever heard of through corporate media is probably a fake. The system does not hand out free publicity to its actual enemies.

6. Most people in our society are cowards. They will jettison all the fine values and principles which they have been loudly boasting about all their lives merely to avoid the slightest chance of public criticism, inconvenience or even minor financial loss.

7. The mainstream media is nothing but a propaganda machine for the system... ...and those journalists who work for it have sold their sorry souls, placing their (often minimal) writing skills entirely at the disposition of Power.

8. Police are not servants of the public... ...but servants of a powerful and extremely wealthy minority which seeks to control and exploit the public for its own narrow and greedy interests.

9. Scientists cannot be trusted. They will use the hypnotic power of their white coats and authoritative status for the benefit of whoever funds their work and lifestyle. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

10. Progress is a misleading illusion. The "progress" of increasing automation and industrialisation does not go hand in hand with a progress in the quality of human life, but in fact will "progressively" reduce it to the point of complete extinction.


vk , May 16 2021 15:19 utc | 15

Corpses Disposed in India's Rivers, Causing Environmental Experts Grave Concern

Cannot fake that. The pandemic is real.

--//--

The West has created an imaginary, evil China for its people to hate and fear -- and it's working

Irrelevant how much the Western peoples hate China. China is not Iran, Afghanistan, Russia or some other random Third World country, it is above the pay grade of Western public opinion.

However, it is true China is not up to the level achieved by the Soviet Union. It still has a military disproportionately weak compared to its economic might. That problem will still take some three or more decades to solve, but it is being worked on.

--//--

After Years of Quiet, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Exploded. Why Now?

This headline by the NYT (in the upper right corner of the Home Page) reflects the West's frustration with Israel. In the first part, they try to tell the reader that the Israeli are waging a war of equals, and not genociding, the Palestinians (and that the USA has nothing to do with it). In the second part, it laments the bad timing by the Israelis, who interrupted their propaganda warfare operation against China on the "Uighur genocide" campaign.

It urges Israel to clean the mess as quick as possible in order for the anti-China propaganda campaign to resume.

--//--

America Is Failing Its Moral Test on Vaccine [NYT Editorial Board]

Can't lose what you never happened to begin with.

In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, the above statement is literal, as the USA has, so far, exported zero - I repeat, zero (not rounding down) - vaccines so far.

Meanwhile, China has already exported 250 million doses and counting (last time I checked, a week ago) - more than the entire Indian production (India had just exported some 60 million doses).

--//--

Unemployment Pay May Again Require a Job Search. Is It Too Soon?

The inner contradictions of capitalism in plain sight.

On the one side, you have to give people money so they can keep themselves quarantined. On the other side, capitalism requires people to keep working or to keep searching for work in order to pull down wages, thus increasing the rate of surplus value. That's why conservatives are usually in favor of the Christian charity, that gives only food and shelter, but not cash, to the unemployed, but not of wage raises and unemployment benefits - the fact that you're paid in cash and not in kind makes all the difference in the world in the capitalist system.

Unemployment benefits only help capitalism is it is low enough just to keep one physically alive and in constant search for jobs. That way, he/she incorporates the industrial reserve army, which brings wages down. The problem with the USA is that wages were already so low before the pandemic that those USD 600.00 checks made 35% (!!) of its recently unemployed recipients richer than when they were employed. Logically, those 35% don't want to go back to work, as their lives are objectively better now than they were before the pandemic, and that's why the Republican congressmen and senators are pressuring Biden (as they pressured Trump) to outright extinguish those checks.

P.S.: the top rated commentary in the article ("Great generations of Americans came here 100 years ago...") by the time I typed this is hilarious, shows the delusion of the average American towards their own system almost perfectly. The other comments are also very funny. The narrative that "there are a lot of jobs available, but no one is skilled enough/wants it" is used by the capitalists every time there's an economic crisis, just search your favorite newspaper for the years of 1980-1982, 1975 etc. etc. and you'll see the same bullshit being preached over and over again.

--//--

Israel has chosen a two-tiered society. Violence is the inevitable result.

Talks about apartheid as the only possible synthesis between a Jewish theocratic state and a liberal bourgeois state, which I mentioned in the past two threads about the subject.

As I said before, the system is unstable and is doomed to fail. Either Israel abandons its Zionist project and gives up the idea of being an 100% Jewish state and thus becomes a liberal bourgeois state or it will continue to wither and degenerate until it falls to a civil war.

--//--

China Becomes Second Nation to Land on Mars

It would've been the first if not for a providential last grasp effort by NASA, who used the resources it had and didn't have to pull that off, by a few months.

The tendency, however is clear. NASA will soon cease to exist as we know it and essentially become the State façade of SpaceX. The USA's space program will then be entirely dependent on the genius of Elon Musk.

--//--

Cuban vaccines (Abdala and Soberana 02) continue advancing on their trials:

Va Abdala, como marca de vida en los brazos de Cuba (+Video)

Lemming , May 17 2021 4:03 utc | 99

If you had read and understood the Mars 3 link I provided you would have learned that it wasn't a rover either. Which the first rover was has already been told. End of story.

Posted by: Norwegian | May 16 2021 18:37 utc | 37

Yes, but no. Mars 3 actually had a rover on board, PROP-M. To quote Wikipedia:

"The Mars 3 lander, a so called Passability Estimating Vehicle for Mars, was designed and manufactured in Mobile Vehicle Engineering Institute by a team of approximately 150 engineers, led by Alexander Kemurdzhian. The vehicle had a small 'Mars rover' on board, which was planned to move across the surface on skis while connected to the lander with a 15-meter umbilical cable. Two small metal rods were used for autonomous obstacle avoidance, as radio signals from Earth would take too long to drive the rovers using remote control. The rover carried a dynamic penetrometer and a gamma ray densitometer."

... although it seems it never was deployed because of the communication failure, so it cannot count as the first rover to function on Mars.

[May 28, 2021] Was the Colonial Pipeline Co. ransomware attack a false flag operation ?

Probably it was not a false flag. First of all the state of IT security at Colonial Pipeline was so dismal that it was strange that this did not happened before. And there might be some truth that they try to exploit this hack to thier advantage as maintenance of the pipeline is also is dismal shape.
Notable quotes:
"... "As for the money-nobody really knows where it really went." If you are right about the perpetrators, my guess would be that it went into the black-ops fund, two birds one stone. ..."
"... I have become so used to false flags, I am going to be shocked when a real intrusion happens! ..."
"... an in depth article researching solarwinds hack - looks like it was Israel, not a great leap to see that colonial was a false flag https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/01/investigative-reports/another-mega-group-spy-scandal-samanage-sabotage-and-the-solarwinds-hack/ ..."
"... Regarding the ownership of Colonial Pipeline: 'IFM Investors, which is owned by 27 Australian union- and employer-backed industry superannuation funds, owns a 16 per cent stake in Colonial Pipeline, which the infrastructure manager bought in 2007 for $US651 million.' ..."
"... 'The privately held Colonial Pipeline is valued at about $US8 billion, based upon the most recent sale of a 10 per cent stake to a unit of Royal Dutch Shell in 2019.' ..."
May 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Blackhat , May 19 2021 18:51 utc | 6

The Colonial Pipeline Co.,ransomware attack was a false flag. They wanted to blame Russian hackers so they could derail Nordstream II

It is common knowledge that the only real hackers that are able of such sabotage is CIA and Israeli. It's the same attack types they do to Iranian infrastructure on a regular basis.

The Russians are not that stupid to do something they know will be blamed on them and is of no political use to them. And could derail Nordstream2.

As for the money-nobody really knows where it really went. CEO is ultra corrupt. They never ever invested in their infrastructure so when it went down they came up with a profitable excuse. Just look at their financials/balance sheet over the years. No real investment in updating and maintaining infrastructure. Great false flag. Corruption and profiteering.


MarkU , May 19 2021 19:04 utc | 7

@ Blackhat | May 19 2021 18:51 utc | 6

"As for the money-nobody really knows where it really went." If you are right about the perpetrators, my guess would be that it went into the black-ops fund, two birds one stone.

james , May 19 2021 19:08 utc | 9

@ 6 blackhat..

I have become so used to false flags, I am going to be shocked when a real intrusion happens!

abee , May 19 2021 19:21 utc | 10

@ blackhat 6

an in depth article researching solarwinds hack - looks like it was Israel, not a great leap to see that colonial was a false flag https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/01/investigative-reports/another-mega-group-spy-scandal-samanage-sabotage-and-the-solarwinds-hack/

vinnieoh , May 19 2021 20:05 utc | 15

Blackhat | May 19 2021 18:51 utc | 6

I'm not familiar with your handle - hello. IMO, it would be counterproductive for Russia to initiate such a hack. What really affects and debilitates US oil and gas interests is low prices, both at the pump and on the stock exchange. The hack helped jack up prices (which were already being jacked-up despite demand still lagging behind supply) which only HELPS those energy interests. It has long been known, the math isn't complicated, what level crude must trade at for US domestic oil & gas operations to be profitable. Remember that just as the pandemic was emerging Russia and Saudi Arabia once again sent the global crude market into the depths of despair.

I do agree the hack can be interpreted in light of the desperation of US energy interests to try to kill NS2. I have not yet read the recent articles discussing Biden's recent moves in that regard. If these moves are a recognition that US LNG to Europe (and elsewhere) are diametrically opposed to climate responsibility, I'd welcome those moves. As is usually the case though, environmental responsibility is probably the least likely reason.

vk , May 19 2021 22:31 utc | 35

Colonial Pipeline CEO confirms paying $4.4 million ransom to hackers, says he did it for America

This is USSR-of-the-1980s level of propaganda. Either way, give that man a statue in D.C.!

P.S.: this is the quotation of what the CEO really said, so you don't accusing me of just reading the headline:

"[it was very hard, difficult to me etc. etc.] But it was the right thing to do for the country," Blount, who leads the company since 2017, added.

--//--

No shit, Sherlock:

Russian Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine hasn't been approved by EU due to political pressure from top officials – Moscow's spy chief

Paul , May 19 2021 23:42 utc | 42

Posted By Oldhippy @28

Thanks for your comment.

Regarding the ownership of Colonial Pipeline: 'IFM Investors, which is owned by 27 Australian union- and employer-backed industry superannuation funds, owns a 16 per cent stake in Colonial Pipeline, which the infrastructure manager bought in 2007 for $US651 million.'

also

'The privately held Colonial Pipeline is valued at about $US8 billion, based upon the most recent sale of a 10 per cent stake to a unit of Royal Dutch Shell in 2019.'

see Australian Financial Review 6 days ago.

Koch may well own another multi million $ stake.

[May 28, 2021] Nuances of the right to vote and Liz Cheney

Both Liz Cheney and Mitt The Bitch Romney are examples of the filthy neocons...
Notable quotes:
"... [in case of Cheney] The war monger doesn't fall far from the tree. ..."
"... Amazing how the liberal news outlets are now supporting a Cheney. But they know more war equals more rating ..."
May 09, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Mike Rotsch 10 minutes ago

. . . which has caused some GOP leaders to fear alienating female Republican voters, particularly educated suburbanites who will be key votes in the 2022 elections.

When I first met my wife, she told me women shouldn't have the right to vote. It was instant love.

A Girl In Flyover Country 59 minutes ago

[in case of Cheney] The war monger doesn't fall far from the tree.

Rise21 42 minutes ago remove link

Amazing how the liberal news outlets are now supporting a Cheney. But they know more war equals more rating

yochananmichael 51 seconds ago

its time for the republicans to rid itself of chicken hawk warmongers like Cheney.

He father disbanded there Iraqi Army which was supposed to provide security, causing an insurgency and 5000 dead American boys and countless maimed.

vic and blood PREMIUM 4 minutes ago

Cheney's benefactors have erected massive billboards all over the state, 'thanking her for defending the Constitution.'

She has an incredible war chest, and sadly, money and advertising decides a lot of elections.

[May 24, 2021] French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned on Sunday of the risk of "long-lasting apartheid" in Israel

May 24, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Մասիս , May 24 2021 6:59 utc | 124

The Roots of Coincidence

France is was denying any discomfort with Zionism for 52 years. but since yesterday effect of Plate tectonics are perceptible.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned on Sunday of the risk of "long-lasting apartheid" in Israel. The veteran politician [and high rank French official for 40 years with solid connection to French weapons trade] made the remarks in an interview with LCI TV NewsChannel, RTL radio and Le Figaro newspaper [ three major MSM]

https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/jean-yves-le-drian-met-en-garde-israel-contre-un-risque-d-apartheid-envers-ses-populations-arabes-20210523


from Guardian.ng


French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned on Sunday of the risk of "long-lasting apartheid" in Israel in the event the Palestinians fail to obtain their own state.
Le Drian is one of the first senior French officials to use the term "apartheid" in reference to Israel , which has angrily denied any policy of racial discrimination.
The veteran politician made the remarks in an interview with RTL radio and Le Figaro newspaper in reference to the clashes between Jews and Arabs that erupted in several Israeli cities during the latest conflict.
The violence, which revealed simmering anger among Israeli Arabs over the crackdown on Palestinians in Jerusalem, shattered years of peaceful coexistence within Israel.
"It's the first time and it clearly shows that if in the future we had a solution other than the two-state solution, we would have the ingredients of long-lasting apartheid," Le Drian said, using the word for the white supremacist oppression of blacks in South Africa from 1948 to 1991.
Le Drian said the "risk of apartheid is high" if Israel continued to act "according to a single-state logic" but also if it maintained the status quo.
"Even the status quo produces that," he said.
He added that the 11-day conflict between Hamas and Israel had shown the need to revive the moribund Middle East peace process.
https://guardian.ng/news/france-sees-risk-of-apartheid-in-israel-paris-france/
"We have take one step at a time," he said, expressing satisfaction that US President Joe Biden had reiterated support for creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Israel's latest offensive against Hamas killed 248 people in the Gaza Strip, including 66 children, and wounded over 1,900, the Hamas-run health ministry said.
Meanwhile, rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups into Israel killed 12 and wounded around 357 others, Israeli police said.

Long-lasting apartheid usually ends badly

--//--

@ James & al.
Please, enjoy a little more Roots of Coincidence


Grieved , May 24 2021 7:05 utc | 125

@120 m - "Iron Dome system according to Israeli sources..."

The point is not the numbers taken from the sales brochure of the system. The point is, what does the penetration of the fantasy shield do to the Israeli psyche?

Israel initiated the ceasefire, without conditions. After 11 days, it could take no more.

Israel has failed to protect itself from the indigenous population that it was oppressing. Palestine has won a victory that changes the game and changes the world.

The entire regional Resistance now knows that Palestine alone can hold the enemy in check. And all the Palestinians everywhere are completely united with only the Resistance as their leader.

Over at the Saker just now, a speech from Hezbollah acknowledges proudly that Palestine itself is now the leading edge of the struggle to remove Israel from the Middle East, and that Hezbollah yearns for the day when it joins side by side with the Palestinians to drive the oppressor from the land.

Palestine as it says could keep up this barrage against Israel for six months - just Palestine alone. And the damage from such a thing would not be measured in how few or how many individual persons were killed by those rockets. The damage would be measured by the scream of madness and defeat from the Zionist oppressor, thrown down by the indigenous populace and cast out of the land in abject fear.

Paul , May 24 2021 8:02 utc | 126
As barflies can see, There may be an undefined 'ceasefire' but the 100 year old ethnic cleansing project in the rest of Palestine continues:

Israel's Daily Toll on Palestinian Life, Limb, Liberty and Land

(Compiled by Leslie Bravery, Palestine Human Rights Campaign, Auckland, New Zealand)
18 May 2021 {Main source of statistics: Palestinian Monitoring Group (PMG): http://www.nad.ps/ NB:The period covered by this newsletter is taken from the PMG's 24-hour sitrep ending 8am the day after the above date.}
We shall always do our best to verify the accuracy of all items in these IOP newsletters/reports wherever possible [e.g. we often suspect that names of people and places that we see in the PMG sitreps could be typos; also frequently the translation into English seems rather odd ~ but as we do not speak Arabic, we have no alternative but to copy and paste these names from the PMG sitreps!] – please forgive us for any errors or omissions – Leslie and Marian.
206 projectiles
launched from Gaza

82 air strikes (157)

Very many
Israeli attacks

158 Israeli
ceasefire violations

21 raids including
home invasions

11 killed – 261 injured

Economic sabotage

43 taken prisoner

Night peace disruption
and/or home invasions
in 6 towns and villages
Home invasions: 09:20, Nazlet al-Sheikh Zaid - 09:20, al-Arqa - 04:00, Anabta - 03:30, Madama - 03:30, Tel.
Peace disruption raids: 14:40, Beitunya - 16:05, Um Safa village - 03:20, Bir Zeit - dawn, Bil'in - 17:40, Tura village - 18:55, Ya'bad - 19:45, Zububa - 06:30, Tubas - 18:05, Quffin - 04:00, Tulkarem - 20:00, Aqraba - 13:45, al-Azza UN refugee camp - 13:45, Aida UN refugee camp - 18:10, al-Khadr - 18:10, Janata - 20:15, Tuqu - 03:00, al-Ubeidiya - dawn, Husan - dawn, al-Ubeidiya.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Gaza enclave: From 07:00 until 07:00 the following day 206 projectiles were launched towards the Green Line from Northern Gaza, Gaza City, Central Gaza and Khan Yunis.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Gaza enclave: From 07:00 until 07:00 the following day, 206 projectiles were launched towards the Green Line from Northern Gaza, Gaza City, Central Gaza and Khan Yunis.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Northern Gaza – 53 projectiles launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Gaza – 81 projectiles launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Central Gaza – 17 projectiles launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Khan Yunis – 38 projectiles launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Khan Yunis – 17 projectiles launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Gaza enclave – from 07:00 until 07:00 the following day, Israeli warplanes carried out 82 air strikes, launching 157 missiles onto Gaza. There were 7 killed, 50 injured, 35 homes destroyed and much damage caused.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Northern Gaza – Israeli warplanes launched 21 air strikes – 35 missiles: 16 injured and 10 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Gaza – Israeli warplanes launched 17 air strikes – 27 missiles: 6 killed (including a child), 15 injured (including women and children) and 7 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Central Gaza – Israeli warplanes launched 14 air strikes – 20 missiles: 11injured and 6 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Khan Yunis – Israeli warplanes launched 13 air strikes – 46 missiles: 1 killed, 14 injured and 10 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Rafah – Israeli warplanes launched 17 air strikes – 29 missiles. 3 injured and 2 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – Israeli attacks: Gaza enclave: From 07:00 until 07:00 the following day, the Israeli Army and Navy pounded Central Gaza, Khan Yunis and Rafah.
Israeli Army attacks – 18 wounded: Jerusalem – Israeli Occupation forces opened fire, with live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters on protesters in Shuafat, al-Zaim, al-Jib, Beit Ijza, Qalandiya, near the villages of Qatanna and al-Issawiya, as well as in Abu Dis, al-Eizariya and at the entrances to Hizma, al-Sawahrah al-Sharqiya, Anata, the al-Ram road junction, Bab al-Amoud area and al-Wad Street in Jerusalem Old City. 18 protesters were wounded.
Israeli Army attack: Jerusalem – 18:00, Israeli Occupation forces opened fire on Palestinian motor vehicles in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood.
Israeli Army attacks – 3 killed – 72 wounded: Ramallah – Israeli forces in or near al-Bireh, Sinjil, Aboud, Ni'lin, al-Mughayer, Deir Jarir, Kafr Malik, Nabi Salih, Ein Qiniya, Ras Karkar, Kharbatha Bani Harith, Beit Sira, al-Jalazoun refugee camp, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, killing 3 people, Muhammad Mahmoud Hamid (24), Adham Fayez Al-Kashef (20) and Islam Wael Fahmy Barnat, and wounding 72. There were many tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 4 wounded: Jenin – Israeli troops, manning the Jalamah and Dotan checkpoints and at the southern entrance to Silat al-Dahr, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 4 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 7 wounded: Tulkarem – Israeli forces, manning the Einav checkpoint and troops in Tulkarem, Quffin, Zit and at the entrance to Beit Lid, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 7 and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 8 wounded: Qalqiliya – Israeli Occupation forces, at the entrances to Azun, Hajjah, and Kafr Qaddum as well as near Jayus, Hablat and at the Eyal crossing, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 8 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 33 wounded: Nablus – Israeli Army positions, near the Huwara checkpoint, the intersection of Osirin and Sarra villages and near the entrances to Qusra, Beta, Jama'in, Naqoura, Deir Sharaf, Burin, Madama, Asirah al-Qibliya, Yutma, al-Labban al-Sharqiya, Odla, al-Sawiyah and the village of Tal, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 33 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks: Salfit – Israeli troops, near the entrances to Deir Istiya, Qarawat Bani Hassan, al-Zawiya and the northern entrance to Salfit, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters. There were several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 18 wounded: Bethlehem – Israeli forces, present at Bilal Bin Rabah Mosque, the Aida refugee camp, northern entrance to Tuqu', western entrance to Beit Fajar, Um Rakba area of al-Khadr and entrance to Husan, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 18 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 1 killed: Hebron – morning, Israeli Occupation forces, positioned in the Old City, opened fire on and killed a resident: Islam Fayyad Zahida (32).
Israeli Army attacks – 30 wounded: Hebron – the Israeli Army, positioned in the Bab al-Zawiya area of Hebron and in the Old City, as well as near the entrances to Beit Ummar, Bani Naim, Tarqumiya, Khurasa village, the al-Aroub refugee camp and on Halhul Bridge, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 30 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Economic sabotage: Gaza -- the Israeli Navy continues to enforce an arbitrary fishing limit.
Home invasion: Jenin – 09:20, Israeli Occupation forces raided the villages of Nazlet al-Sheikh Zaid and al-Arqa, and invaded a house.
Home invasion – boy (aged 15) abducted : Tulkarem – 04:00, Israeli troops raided Anabta and abducted 15-year-old Muhammad Salam Wajih Rasheed.
Home invasions: Nablus – 03:30, Israeli forces raided Madama and Tel villages and invaded a number of homes.
Israeli police and settlers' mosque violation: 23:00, Israeli Occupation police invaded the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque, filming the Mosque and its facilities.
Israeli Army – 7 wounded – rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters: Tubas – Israeli Occupation forces, manning the Tayasir checkpoint and in the village of Atouf, fired rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 7 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army – 5 wounded – rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters: Jericho – Israeli forces, at the northern and southern entrances to Jericho, as well as outside the Aqbat Jaber refugee camp, fired rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 5 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Occupation settler violence: Jerusalem – 18:00, Israeli settlers stoned a family home, on the outskirts of the village of Beit Ijza.
Occupation road casualties: Bethlehem – 16:40, an Israeli settler drove his motor vehicle over and hospitalised a 19-year-old Abdullah Saqr Saad, near Khalet Iskarya.
Raid: Ramallah – 14:40, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled Beitunya.
Raid: Ramallah – 16:05, Israeli forces raided and patrolled Um Safa village.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Ramallah – 03:20, Israeli troops raided Bir Zeit, taking prisoner one person.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Ramallah – dawn, the Israeli Army raided Bil'in village, taking prisoner one person.
Raid: Jenin – 17:40, Israeli troops raided and patrolled Tura village.
Raid: Jenin – 18:55, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled Ya'bad.
Raid: Jenin – 19:45, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled Zububa village.
Raid: Tubas – 06:30, Israeli forces raided and patrolled Tubas.
Raid: Tulkarem – 18:05, the Israeli Army raided and patrolled Quffin.
Raid: Tulkarem – 04:0 Israeli troops raided Tulkarem.
Raid: Nablus – 20:00, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled Aqraba.
Raid – UN refugee camps: Bethlehem – 13:45, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled the al-Azza and Aida UN refugee camps in Bethlehem.
Raid: Bethlehem – 18:10, Israeli forces raided and patrolled al-Khadr and Janata.
Raid – 2 abductions: Bethlehem – 20:15, Israeli troops raided Tuqu and abducted two 16-year-old youths: Muhammad Khaled Nasrallah and Sind Talal Al-Amor.
Raid: Bethlehem – 03:00, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled al-Ubeidiya.
Raid – 2 taken prisoner: Bethlehem – dawn, the Israeli Army raided Husan village, taking prisoner two people.
Raid – 2 taken prisoner: Bethlehem – dawn, Israeli Occupation forces raided al-Ubeidiya, taking prisoner twopeople.
Restrictions of movement (14): 11:30, entrance to Turmusaya- 11:20, tightened procedures at Huwara - 12:00, tightened procedures at Kifl Haris - 12:50, entrance to al-Zawiya - 11:25-12:30, al-Nashash road junction - 14:10, entrance to al-Walaja village - midnight, entrance to Marah Mualla - 09:15, entrance to the Fahs area, south of Hebron - 18:45, entrance to Sa'ir - Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing closed - al-Mantar-Karni crossing closed - al-Shujaiyeh crossing (Nahal Oz) closed - Sufa crossing closed - al-Awda Port closed.
[NB: Times indicated in Bold Type contribute to the sleep deprivation suffered by Palestinian children]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If any of our subscribers should like to reproduce complete, in full and unedited, these In Occupied Palestine daily newsletters that would be very welcome!
If you no longer wish to receive these emails, please let us know and if you have friends or family who would like to receive them ask them to contact us at [email protected]
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[Message clipped] View entire message

Մասիս , May 24 2021 11:11 utc | 137

@ Paul, "100 year old ethnic cleansing project in the rest of Palestine continues", but
Tectonic plates still moving, collapse of an edifice of complacency

David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
Published a shaking OP ED

Losing the war: The rising cost of Israel's lapsed support for 2-state solution

Must read

"It doesn't matter that Hamas is a repressive, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamist terrorist organization that fires thousands of rockets indiscriminately at innocent civilians all over the State of Israel...
[...]
It doesn't matter...
[...]
Again, it doesn't matter, because we are no longer avowedly seeking, even in principle, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- the currently and foreseeably insoluble Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And since we no longer avowedly aspire to be part of the solution, we are increasingly perceived as part of the problem, as rejectionists.
[...]
Israel still has plenty of friends, and plenty of support, including crucially in the US. Three EU foreign ministers chose to make a solidarity visit to bombed Israeli homes at the height of the conflict. But the ground is shifting dangerously.
Many of us, this writer emphatically included, regard a two-state solution as essential if we are not to lose either our Jewish majority, or our democracy, or both, forever entangled among millions of hostile Palestinians. Many of us, this writer emphatically included, cannot currently see a safe route to such an accommodation.

For the last time, it doesn't matter. So long as Israel does not place itself firmly and distinctly on the side of those seeking a viable framework for long-term peace and security for ourselves and for the Palestinians, we will be regarded as blocking that framework. And even when facing an enemy so patently cynical, amoral and intransigent as Hamas, militarily strong Israel will be held responsible for the loss of life on both sides of the conflict.
We may keep on winning the battles, though they will get harder if fighting spreads to and deepens on other fronts. But we will be gradually losing the war.

[May 20, 2021] Peddlers Of Russiagate Won t Take Truth For An Answer

Notable quotes:
"... What is clear is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion. As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies. ..."
"... And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who, Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice: one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends. ..."
May 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,

The Biden administration is vigorously pursuing key figures from the phony Trump/Russia collusion scandal that roiled the nation for four years. But instead of trying to punish the liars who perpetrated that fraud, it is targeting the truth-tellers who challenged and exposed the conspiracy to negate the 2016 election.

Working from the same playbook used to smear dozens of Trump associates, the administration and its allies are planting stories based on blind quotes in friendly media outlets to seek revenge.

On April 16, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that the Justice Department is investigating Kash Patel – who had worked with Rep. Devin Nunes and later the Trump administration to reveal the Russiagate hoax – for the "possible improper disclosure of classified information." Ignatius said he received the tip from "two knowledgeable sources" who "wouldn't provide additional details."

Violating the bedrock principles of American justice and journalism, this article is an exercise in thuggery as the government uses a powerful media outlet to intimidate and besmirch a citizen without evidence. With nothing to respond to, how can Patel defend himself? If Patel is lucky, the federal government has only placed a sharp sword over his head that may not fall. If not, he might be dragged into a lengthy court battle that could drain his finances and also cost him his freedom.

We don't know if Patel broke the law, but note that the administration has shown no interest in pursuing former FBI leaders such as James Comey and Andrew McCabe , who improperly disclosed information regarding Russiagate.

Trump's former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani is also in the "cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation," according to an April 29 article in New York Times that relied on "people with knowledge of the matter."

At issue, those anonymous sources say, is whether Giuliani was serving two masters when he counseled Trump to remove Marie L. Yovanovitch as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2019. "Did Mr. Giuliani go after Ms. Yovanovitch solely on behalf of Mr. Trump, who was his client at the time?" the Times reports. "Or was he also doing so on behalf of the Ukrainian officials, who wanted her removed for their own reasons?"

I'll leave it to the lawyers to determine the wisdom of bringing a case based on the parsing of tangled motives. What is clear is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion. As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies.

And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who, Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice: one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends.

The targeting of Giuliani looks especially suspect and politically motivated after three main news outlets that have driven much of the false Russiagate coverage – the New York Times, Washington Post and NBC News – were forced to correct a recent story , once again based on anonymous sources, claiming the FBI had warned Giuliani in 2019 "that he was a target of a Russian disinformation campaign during his efforts to dig up unflattering information about then-candidate Joe Biden in 2019." Giuliani was never given such a briefing.

Considering the numerous instances in which the press published bogus information from "informed sources" during Russiagate, one has to ask why they continue to serve as vehicles for falsehoods. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a dozen times and you're not fooling me – we're acting in concert. As RCI editor Tom Kuntz has argued, journalistic integrity demands, at the very least, that these organizations tell their audience who exactly had misled them. Confidentiality agreements should not protect liars.

A third example of the Biden administration's effort to punish Russiagate figures is its renewed effort to put former Manafort associate Konstantin V. Kilimnik behind bars. In an extensive new article for RCI, Aaron Maté reports that the Treasury Department provided no evidence to support its recent claim that Kilimnik is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf." It also refuses to explain how it was able to discover the truth of Kilimnik's identity, which the two most extensive Russiagate investigations – the 448-page Muller report and the 966-page Senate Intelligence report – failed to uncover.

This absence of evidence has not stopped the peddlers of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory from claiming vindication. Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff casts Treasury's unsubstantiated claim as smoking-gun evidence of collusion. The New York Times reports that the claim demonstrates that "there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the [2016] election."

Who needs proof when the government says it's so?

The FBI is also putting the screws to Kilimnik, offering $250,000 for information leading to his arrest on witness-tampering charges involving text messages he sent in 2018 to two people who have only been identified as "potential witnesses" involving Manafort's lobbying work for Ukraine, not Russiagate.

In an exclusive interview, Kilimnik told Maté, "I don't understand how two messages to our old partners who helped us get out the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in [the] EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted as 'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice.'"

Maté also reports that the $250,000 bounty on Kilimnik is more than double the amount the FBI is offering for information leading to the arrest of murder suspects.

The Biden administration's campaigns against Patel, Giuliani and Kilimnik suggest how the winners of the 2020 election are attempting to rewrite the history of Russiagate. Having been debunked and rebuked by their own investigators, the conspiracists are taking a second bite at the poisoned apple. Using anonymous sources to make unsubstantiated charges in the nation's most influential news outlets, they are seeking to punish people for the crime of exposing their malfeasance.

[May 20, 2021] Peddlers Of Russiagate Won t Take Truth For An Answer

Notable quotes:
"... What is clear is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion. As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies. ..."
"... And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who, Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice: one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends. ..."
May 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,

The Biden administration is vigorously pursuing key figures from the phony Trump/Russia collusion scandal that roiled the nation for four years. But instead of trying to punish the liars who perpetrated that fraud, it is targeting the truth-tellers who challenged and exposed the conspiracy to negate the 2016 election.

Working from the same playbook used to smear dozens of Trump associates, the administration and its allies are planting stories based on blind quotes in friendly media outlets to seek revenge.

On April 16, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that the Justice Department is investigating Kash Patel – who had worked with Rep. Devin Nunes and later the Trump administration to reveal the Russiagate hoax – for the "possible improper disclosure of classified information." Ignatius said he received the tip from "two knowledgeable sources" who "wouldn't provide additional details."

Violating the bedrock principles of American justice and journalism, this article is an exercise in thuggery as the government uses a powerful media outlet to intimidate and besmirch a citizen without evidence. With nothing to respond to, how can Patel defend himself? If Patel is lucky, the federal government has only placed a sharp sword over his head that may not fall. If not, he might be dragged into a lengthy court battle that could drain his finances and also cost him his freedom.

We don't know if Patel broke the law, but note that the administration has shown no interest in pursuing former FBI leaders such as James Comey and Andrew McCabe , who improperly disclosed information regarding Russiagate.

Trump's former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani is also in the "cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation," according to an April 29 article in New York Times that relied on "people with knowledge of the matter."

At issue, those anonymous sources say, is whether Giuliani was serving two masters when he counseled Trump to remove Marie L. Yovanovitch as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2019. "Did Mr. Giuliani go after Ms. Yovanovitch solely on behalf of Mr. Trump, who was his client at the time?" the Times reports. "Or was he also doing so on behalf of the Ukrainian officials, who wanted her removed for their own reasons?"

I'll leave it to the lawyers to determine the wisdom of bringing a case based on the parsing of tangled motives. What is clear is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion. As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies.

And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who, Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice: one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends.

The targeting of Giuliani looks especially suspect and politically motivated after three main news outlets that have driven much of the false Russiagate coverage – the New York Times, Washington Post and NBC News – were forced to correct a recent story , once again based on anonymous sources, claiming the FBI had warned Giuliani in 2019 "that he was a target of a Russian disinformation campaign during his efforts to dig up unflattering information about then-candidate Joe Biden in 2019." Giuliani was never given such a briefing.

Considering the numerous instances in which the press published bogus information from "informed sources" during Russiagate, one has to ask why they continue to serve as vehicles for falsehoods. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a dozen times and you're not fooling me – we're acting in concert. As RCI editor Tom Kuntz has argued, journalistic integrity demands, at the very least, that these organizations tell their audience who exactly had misled them. Confidentiality agreements should not protect liars.

A third example of the Biden administration's effort to punish Russiagate figures is its renewed effort to put former Manafort associate Konstantin V. Kilimnik behind bars. In an extensive new article for RCI, Aaron Maté reports that the Treasury Department provided no evidence to support its recent claim that Kilimnik is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf." It also refuses to explain how it was able to discover the truth of Kilimnik's identity, which the two most extensive Russiagate investigations – the 448-page Muller report and the 966-page Senate Intelligence report – failed to uncover.

This absence of evidence has not stopped the peddlers of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory from claiming vindication. Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff casts Treasury's unsubstantiated claim as smoking-gun evidence of collusion. The New York Times reports that the claim demonstrates that "there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the [2016] election."

Who needs proof when the government says it's so?

The FBI is also putting the screws to Kilimnik, offering $250,000 for information leading to his arrest on witness-tampering charges involving text messages he sent in 2018 to two people who have only been identified as "potential witnesses" involving Manafort's lobbying work for Ukraine, not Russiagate.

In an exclusive interview, Kilimnik told Maté, "I don't understand how two messages to our old partners who helped us get out the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in [the] EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted as 'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice.'"

Maté also reports that the $250,000 bounty on Kilimnik is more than double the amount the FBI is offering for information leading to the arrest of murder suspects.

The Biden administration's campaigns against Patel, Giuliani and Kilimnik suggest how the winners of the 2020 election are attempting to rewrite the history of Russiagate. Having been debunked and rebuked by their own investigators, the conspiracists are taking a second bite at the poisoned apple. Using anonymous sources to make unsubstantiated charges in the nation's most influential news outlets, they are seeking to punish people for the crime of exposing their malfeasance.

[May 16, 2021] Liz Cheney Lied About Her Role In Spreading The Discredited CIA -Russian Bounty- Story - ZeroHedge

May 16, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Liz Cheney Lied About Her Role In Spreading The Discredited CIA "Russian Bounty" Story BY TYLER DURDEN SUNDAY, MAY 16, 2021 - 11:30 AM

Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com ,

In an interview with Fox News ' Bret Baier this week, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) denied that she spread the discredited CIA "Russian bounty" story. That CIA tale, claiming Russia was paying Taliban fighters to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, was cooked up by the CIA and then published by The New York Times on June 27 of last year, right as former President Trump announced his plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The Times story, citing anonymous intelligence officials, was then continually invoked by pro-war Republicans and Democrats -- led by Cheney -- to justify their blocking of that troop withdrawal. The story was discredited when the U.S. intelligence community admitted last month that it had only "low to moderate confidence" that any of this even happened.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) speaks to members of the media after she was removed of her leadership role as Conference Chair, following a Republican House caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on on May 12, 2021 in Washington, DC (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

When Baier asked Cheney about her role in spreading this debunked CIA story, Cheney blatantly lied to him, claiming "if you go back and look at what I said -- every single thing I said : I said if those stories are true , we need to know why the President and Vice President were not briefed on them." After Baier pressed her on the fact that she vested this story with credibility, Cheney insisted a second time that she never endorsed the claim but merely spoke conditionally, always using the "if these reports are true" formulation. Watch Cheney deny her role in spreading that story.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fd6u_p0K9aE

Liz Cheney, as she so often does, blatantly lied. That she merely spoke of the Russian bounty story in the conditional -- " every single thing I said: I said if those stories are true" -- is completely and demonstrably false. Indeed, other than Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) , there are few if any members of Congress who did more to spread this Russian bounty story as proven truth, all in order to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. In so doing, she borrowed from a pro-war playbook pioneered by her dad, to whom she owes her career: the former Vice President would leak CIA claims to The New York Times to justify war, then go on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, as he did on September 8, 2002 , and cite those New York Times reports as though they were independent confirmation of his views coming from that paper rather than from him:

MR. RUSSERT: What, specifically, has [Saddam] obtained that you believe would enhance his nuclear development program? ..

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Now, in the case of a nuclear weapon, that means either plutonium or highly enriched uranium. And what we've seen recently that has raised our level of concern to the current state of unrest, if you will, if I can put it in those terms, is that he now is trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs.

MR. RUSSERT: Aluminum tubes.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Specifically aluminum tubes. There's a story in The New York Times this morning this is -- I don't -- and I want to attribute The Times . I don't want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that, in fact, [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge. And the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched uranium, which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.

So having CIA stories leak to the press that fuel the pro-war case, then having pro-war politicians cite those to justify their pro-war position, is a Cheney Family speciality.

On July 1, the House Armed Services Committee, of which Rep. Cheney is a member, debated amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that authorized $740.5 billion in military spending. One of Cheney's top priorities was to align with the Committee's pro-war Democrats, funded by weapons manufacturers, to block Trump's plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020 and to withdraw roughly 1/3 of the 34,000 U.S. troops in Germany.

To justify her opposition, Cheney -- contrary to what she repeatedly insisted to Baier -- cited the CIA's Russian bounty story without skepticism . In a joint statement with Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, that Cheney published on her website on June 27 -- the same day that The New York Times published its first story about the CIA tale -- Cheney pronounced herself "concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces." There was nothing conditional about the statement: they were preparing to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and cited this story as proof that "Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan."

After today's briefing with senior White House officials, we remain concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces. It has been clear for some time that Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan. We believe it is important to vigorously pursue any information related to Russia or any other country targeting our forces. Congress has no more important obligation than providing for the security of our nation and ensuring our forces have the resources they need.

An even more definitive use of this Russia bounty story came when Cheney held a press conference to explain her opposition to Trump's plans to withdraw troops. In this statement, she proclaimed that she "remains concerned about Russian activities in Afghanistan." She then explicitly threatened Russia over the CIA's "bounty" story, warning them that "any targeting of U.S. forces by Russians, by anyone else, will face a very swift and deadly response." She then gloated about the U.S. bombing of Russia-linked troops in Syria in 2018 using what she called "overwhelming and lethal force," and warned that this would happen again if they target U.S. forces in Afghanistan:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_NUXZog_Vf0

Does this sound even remotely like what Cheney claimed to Baier? She denied having played a key role in spreading the Russia bounty story because, as she put it, " every single thing I said, I said: if those stories are true." She also told him that she never referred to that CIA claim except by saying: "if these reports are true." That is false.

The issue is not merely that Cheney lied: that would hardly be news. It is that the entire media narrative about Cheney's removal from her House leadership role is a fraud. Her attacks on Trump and her party leadership were not confined to criticisms of the role played by the former president in contesting the validity of the 2020 election outcome or inciting the January 6 Capitol riot -- because Liz Cheney is such a stalwart defender of the need for truth and adherence to the rule of law in politics.

Cheney played the key role in forming an alliance with pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee to repeatedly defeat the bipartisan anti-war minority [led by Ro Khanna (D-CA), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)] to prevent any meaningful changes promised by Trump during the 2016 campaign to put an end to the U.S. posture of Endless War. As I reported about the House Armed Services Committee hearing last July, the CIA tale was repeatedly cited by Cheney and her allies to justify ongoing U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan.

Cheney is motivated by power, not ethics. In 2016, Trump ran -- and won -- by explicitly inveighing against the Bush/Cheney foreign policy of endless war, militarism and imperialism that Liz Cheney, above all else, still vehemently supports. What she is attempting to do is reclaim the Republican Party and deliver it back to the neocons and warmongers who dominated it under her father's reign. She is waging an ideological battle, not an ethical one, for control of the Republican Party.

That will be a debate for Republican voters to resolve. In the meantime, Liz Cheney cannot be allowed to distance herself from the CIA's fairy tale about Russians in Afghanistan. Along with pro-war Democrats, she used this conveniently leaked CIA story repeatedly to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. And just as her father taught her to do -- by example if not expressly -- she is now lying to distance herself from a pro-war CIA script that she, in fact, explicitly promoted.


For those who have not seen it, I produced a one-hour video report last July on how and why the House Armed Services Committee succeeded in enacting virtually every pro-war amendment they considered and how this was accomplished through an alliance between Liz Cheney and her neocon GOP allies on the one hand, and pro-war, Raytheon-funded Democrats on the other:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ejqYrzEX14E https://youtu.be/ejqYrzEX14E
play_arrow 1


rosalinda 8 hours ago

Circular politics, who knew? Happens all the time. 'Leak' a story to a paper that for sure will publish it, and quote that very same story to push whatever it is you, or more precisely, your backers, want. Nobody wants war, why is the US spending almost $1T on defense? Nobody else is spending that kind of money, the MIC is able to force down whatever it wants on the compliant press, and gullible public

Demologos 7 hours ago

Liz Cheney is carrying daddy's water. This is why there should have been war crimes trials for the fake wars promoted by the neocons for the benefit of the Wall Street/London/MIC complex. If Daddy Darth had swung from a rope we wouldn't be dealing with the current mess.

You can blame the fake news media for the lack of consequences. When they want to, they can take a thimble full of bad behavior and turn it into an Olympic size pool of condemnation and character assassination. They were given an Olympic size pool of outright lies and corruption related to the illegal wars and didn't see anything that offended their sense of human decency and justice. But a thug dies in the street and the fake news machine turns him into the national martyr for systemic racism.

vic and blood PREMIUM 7 hours ago remove link

Look at how many RINOs are swamp creatures who establish residency in lower population states, where campaign cash goes further.

**** Cheney was a swamp creature and fake Wyoming person, just like Liz Cheney.

Pernicious Gold Phallusy 7 hours ago

McCain did that in the 1970s. Abandoned his wheelchair-bound wife and his kids, then married a rich drug addict in a new State.

pndr4495 7 hours ago

As I have repeated many times here on ZH, a politician is not seriously concerned about representing the constituents. The politician is busy with reprenting his/her own interests, especially the financial interest.

vic and blood PREMIUM 7 hours ago remove link

Liz Cheney is a perfect example of how little the neocons differ from the neolibs. They are the same thing with different cynical marketing strategies.

HAL9000rev1 7 hours ago (Edited)

The roots of neocon philosophy is Trotskyism. Neocons are left/right agnostic, they latch on to which ever political party in power.

perpetual war/perpetual revolution is thier stratagy

freedommusic 8 hours ago (Edited)

Language was invented so people can lie.

Politics was invented so people can make a career out of lying.

Paul Bunyan 8 hours ago remove link

Language was invented to communicate, but yes, people take advantage.

Pretty Like an Ugly Girl 7 hours ago

I confess that in 2001, and until about 2008, I was part of the crowd that bought the whole ******* line. Then with Obama I fell for the ******** that it's better to vote for the lesser of two evils.

Then I started watching the countless documentaries on 911 that show the official 911 report is a bigger concoction of horse**** than the Warren Report. Here's the definitive documentary, for any searchers out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DOnAn_PX6M

The thing about Cheney back in the day is that he seemed like the most credible/reasonable man in government. I remember after he debated Joe Lieberman how everybody wished they were both at the tops of their tickets.

Bottom line is we believe what aligns with what we want to believe, and they know it, and they took down the towers knowing the majority of the US would be willing to go to war with the entire world if need be.

Folks who think the covid scam or the stolen election was the beginning of the breakdown haven't been paying attention. The people haven't been in control of their country for a long, long time, if ever.

Ms No PREMIUM 7 hours ago

There are anti-human mimicks born, psychopaths, that literally have to study human emotion, learn it and parrot it. That's why when one watches you, especially at first encounter, it's so intense.

They are analyzing your every facial crease and body language trying to decode the human and what it all means. When they lie they will sometimes pause to do this to see if it's fully taking. They often can't tell if what they are saying is too absurd, they wait for you to show them. They develop this skill over time.

What's even creepier, is that since they don't use empathy capacity and other human tendencies, that brain capacity becomes devoted to their predatory nature, analyzing, imitating and being phony. So they are damn near preternatural at it. They know your weaknesses and needs immediately.

In addition to their dead, intense analyzing stare, they don't recognize that their stare is too intense and that they often get too close. Like if this fatty had halitosis for example, she would always just be at least a little too close to you. They don't understand what it is about people that wants space They don't have that feeling either. When you squirm and try to get away, they won't notice or care, unless they are doing it on purpose to intimidate. They can also lie with ease, because they don't have any of those things that makes people moral. They are simply annoyances to them. It pisses them off that they have to pretend to care.

wellwaddyaknow 7 hours ago

So in other words, the CIA makes sht up, floats it out there in the direction of dumb gullible compromised power hungry members of congress, and then wait to see who picks it up and smells it.

[May 12, 2021] Reds under the bed? Or forgot to take the antipsychotics today?

May 12, 2021 | www.wsj.com

D

Reds under the bed? Or forgot to take the antipsychotics today? D David Keating

For any fairly recent US posters on this site, here is a hint to the wise.

There is a significant Russian presence on the WSJ comments. Basically our Russian visitors dominate these comments - at a ratio perhaps of 8-1 - or even worse.

The best way to get your footing on this site is to understand that these Russians are educated, fluent in English, knowledgeable about us, oftentimes quite funny ( sometimes not. ) And the Russians are seeking to pass as Americans.

In this capacity, the Russians will often be earnest & insightful. As well as say horrible things about Republicans and about Democrats.

They are here to stoke division and conflict. They seek to amplify partisanship and misinformation.

As soon as you understand these essential facts, you will find it quite easy to work the thread.

Reds under the bed? Or forgot to take the antipsychotics today? D David Keating
For any fairly recent US posters on this site, here is a hint to the wise.

There is a significant Russian presence on the WSJ comments. Basically our Russian visitors dominate these comments - at a ratio perhaps of 8-1 - or even worse.

The best way to get your footing on this site is to understand that these Russians are educated, fluent in English, knowledgeable about us, oftentimes quite funny ( sometimes not. ) And the Russians are seeking to pass as Americans.

In this capacity, the Russians will often be earnest & insightful. As well as say horrible things about Republicans and about Democrats.

They are here to stoke division and conflict. They seek to amplify partisanship and misinformation.

As soon as you understand these essential facts, you will find it quite easy to work the thread.

[May 12, 2021] Taibbi- Reporters Once Challenged The Spy State. Now, They're Agents Of It - ZeroHedge

May 12, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Taibbi: Reporters Once Challenged The Spy State. Now, They're Agents Of It BY TYLER DURDEN WEDNESDAY, MAY 12, 2021 - 04:20 PM

Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News ,

What a difference a decade makes.

Former CIA director John Brennan was a media villain, now he's media himself.

Just over ten years ago, on July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released 75,000 secret U.S. military reports involving the war in Afghanistan . The New York Times, The Guardian , and Der Spiegel helped release the documents, which were devastating to America's intelligence community and military, revealing systemic abuses that included civilian massacres and an assassination squad, TF 373, whose existence the United States kept "protected " even from its allies.

The Afghan War logs came out at the beginning of a historic stretch of true oppositional journalism, when outlets like Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, and others partnered with sites like Wikileaks. Official secrets were exposed on a scale not seen since the Church Committee hearings of the seventies, as reporters pored through 250,000 American diplomatic cables, secret files about every detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and hundreds of thousands of additional documents about everything from the Iraq war to coverups of environmental catastrophes, among other things helping trigger the "Arab Spring."

There was an attempt at a response -- companies like Amazon, Master Card, Visa, and Paypal shut Wikileaks off, and the Pentagon flooded the site with a "denial of service" attack -- but leaks continued. One person inspired by the revelations was former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who came forward to unveil an illegal domestic surveillance program, a story that won an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize for documentarian Laura Poitras and reporters Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill. By 2014, members of Congress in both parties were calling for the resignations of CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom had been caught lying to congress.

The culmination of this period came when billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched The Intercept in February 2014. The outlet was devoted to sifting through Snowden's archive of leaked secrets, and its first story described how the NSA and CIA frequently made errors using geolocation to identify and assassinate drone targets. A few months later, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted, "We kill people based on metadata."

Fast forward seven years. Julian Assange is behind bars, and may die there. Snowden is in exile in Russia. Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden have been rehabilitated and are all paid contributors to either MSNBC or CNN, part of a wave of intelligence officers who've flooded the airwaves and op-ed pages in recent years, including the FBI's Asha Rangappa, Clint Watts, Josh Campbell, former counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, the CIA's John Sipher, Phil Mudd, Ned Price, and many others.

Once again, Internet platforms, credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard , and payment processors like PayPal are working to help track down and/or block the activities of "extremists." This time, they're on the same side as the onetime press allies of Wikileaks and Snowden, who began a course reversal after the election of Donald Trump.

Those outlets first began steering attention away from intelligence abuses and toward bugbears like Trumpism, misinformation, and Russian meddling, then entered into partnerships with Langley-approved facsimiles of leak sites like Hamilton 68 , New Knowledge , and especially Bellingcat , a kind of reverse Wikileaks devoted to exposing the misdeeds of regimes in Russia, Syria, and Iran -- less so the United States and its allies. The CIA's former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia, Marc Polymeropolous, said of the group's work, " I don't want to be too dramatic, but we love this ."

After the Capitol riots of January 6th, the War on Terror came home, and "domestic extremists" stepped into the role enemy combatants played before. George Bush once launched an all-out campaign to pacify any safe haven for trrrsts, promising to "smoke 'em out of their holes." The new campaign is aimed at stamping out areas for surveillance-proof communication, which CNN security analyst and former DHS official Juliette Kayyem described as any online network "that lets [domestic extremists] talk amongst themselves."

Reporters pledged assistance, snooping for evidence of wrongness in digital rather than geographical "hidey holes." We've seen The Guardian warning about the perils of podcasts , ProPublica arguing that Apple's lax speech environment contributed to the January 6th riot, and reporters from The Verge and Vice and The New York Times listening in to Clubhouse chats in search of evidence of dangerous thought. In an inspired homage to the lunacy of the War on Terror years, a GQ writer even went on Twitter last week to chat with the author of George Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech about imploring the "authorities" to use the "Fire in a Crowded Theater" argument to shut down Fox News.

Multiple outlets announced plans to track "extremists" in either open or implied cooperation with authorities. Frontline, ProPublica , and Berkley Journalism's Investigative Reporting Program used " high-precision digital forensics " to uncover "evidence" about the Boogaloo Bois, and the Huffington Post worked with the "sedition hunters " at the Twitter activist group "Deep State Dogs" to help identify a suspect later arrested for tasering a Capitol police officer. One of the Huffington Post stories, from February, not only spoke to a willingness of the press to work with law enforcement, but impatience with the slowness of official procedure compared to "sleuthing communities":

The FBI wants photos of Capitol insurrections to go viral , and has published images of more than 200 suspects. But what happens when online sleuthing communities identify suspects and then see weeks go by without any signs of action ? There are hundreds of suspects, thousands of hours of video, hundreds of thousands of tips, and millions of pieces of evidence the FBI's bureaucracy isn't necessarily designed to keep organized.

The Intercept already saw founding members Poitras and Greenwald depart, and shut down the aforementioned Snowden archive to, in their words, "focus on other editorial priorities" -- parent company First Look Media soon after launched a partnership with "PassionFlix," whose motto is, " Turning your favorite romance novels into movies and series ." Last week, they announced a new project in tune with current media trends:

Are there legitimate stories about people with racist or conspiratorial views who for instance shouldn't be working in positions of authority, as cops or elected officials or military officers? Sure, and there's a job for reporters in proving that out, especially if there's a record of complaints or corruption to match. It gets a little weird if the newsworthiness standard is "person with a job has abhorrent private opinions," but it's not like it's impossible that a legit story could be found in something like the Gab archive, especially if it involves a public figure.

But that depends on the media people involved having a coherent standard for outing subjects, which hasn't always (or even often) been the case.

Here The Intercept is announcing it considers QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones "violent white supremacists" -- they're a lot of things, but "violent white supremacists"? In the first piece about "extremists" on Gab, reporter Micah Lee claimed to have found an account belonging to a little-known conservative youth figure; the man's attorney later reached out to deny the account was his, leading to a correction . When asked about his process, Lee responded, sarcastically, that he "certainly wouldn't want to accidentally do investigative journalism about white supremacist domestic terrorists." When asked how he defined a terrorist, and if he'd be naming public figures only, the sarcastic answer this time was, "Of course I won't be naming anyone. Racist white people must be defended at all costs."

Greenwald left the organization among other things after an editor asked that he address the "disinformation issue" in a piece about Hunter Biden's laptop, a reference to a claim made by 50 intelligence officers that the story had "the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign." He found it inappropriate then for a publication with The Intercept's history to be pushing an intelligence narrative, and the Gab project struck him in a similar way.

"The leap from disseminating CIA propaganda to doing the police work of security state agencies is a short one," says Greenwald, "and with its statements about what they are doing with this Gab archive, The Intercept and its trite liberal managers in New York have now taken it."

Read the rest here . .. play_arrow


safelyG 1 hour ago

we need to find a way to keep stories like this from being reported.

lovingly,
rachel maddow's wife

ted41776 1 hour ago remove link

they hate us for our freedumb

was anyone punished for that WMD lie that cause the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and a few thousand US troops?

i mean it is a widely accepted fact now, isn't it? that it was a lie that caused a genocide and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?

where are the nuremberg trials? UN? anyone?

crickets

Lt. Shicekopf 1 hour ago

Operation Mockingbird has paid immense dividends, one of the most successful programs ever.

Maltheus 1 hour ago remove link

I dunno. What's the name of the program to infiltrate the schools? Gives Mockingbird a run for its money.

fishpoem 32 minutes ago

Use the titles of any of the books written by members of the Frankfurt School. Start with Marcuse. How such circular reasoning, boring prose, and patently bogus arguments became mandatory reading material in every college in America is a puzzle future historians will have to unravel.

Well, if the ruling Marxist Democrats allow historians to exist in the future...which they probably won't. Truth, in that era, will be what "art" became in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia: cliched state-worship.

Wait. Isn't that what we've already got?

Argon1 1 hour ago

https://schoolhistory.co.uk/notes/operation-mockingbird/

DesertEagle 37 minutes ago

Most of the "reporters" for the big media cartel were always enemies of the American people.

tedstr 57 minutes ago

News organizations have always been agents of the IC. Just as they are agents of Hollywood and the biz news are agents of corporations. They no longer have the staffs to truely "do news" so they rely on being spoon fed from their sources. they will never bite the hand.

Steve in Greensboro 1 hour ago remove link

Lee Smith on Bannon's Warroom 53 in December 2019.

Lee Smith: " Here's something that boggles me still that there are still people after what we have seen and after I've documented in the book what the press has become what the WaPo what the prestige brands of American journalism have become and nonetheless there are Republicans only blocks from here who are more than happy to treat whether it's the WaPo, NYT, CNN, MSNBC as though these are regular news networks still. Even after three years of seeing them operate exactly like media operatives "

Steve Bannon: "You believe they are the opposition party media. Right?

Lee Smith: "It's not a media, it's a platform for intelligence operations. It's not media at all. This is like the Arab press."

Joe Davola 1 hour ago

Maybe a curious investigative reporter might look into why "financial services" companies jump right in whenever the deep state needs them.

NewMouldy 1 hour ago

Kabuki theatre..

College deans, professors, teachers were all bought and paid for decades ago by the deep state. The very people that educate upcoming politicians, reporters and scientists.

This is how we got to where we are now.

US Banana Republic 6 minutes ago

When media "personalities" like Cuomo, Madcow, and Cooper make more than $10 million dollars a year from corporate sponsors towing the corporate/government line then NOBODY want to be a hard hitting investigative reporter. Everybody wants to be a corporate/government boot licker.

As always, follow the money.

Isn't Life Gland 15 minutes ago

Ali Watkins is my favorite. "Worked" her way all the way up to the pinnacle gig at the New York Crimes..on her back.

[May 11, 2021] Internal emails reveal that the Dutch government suppressed White Helmets' financial fraud what else are they hiding

May 11, 2021 | www.rt.com

By Kit Klarenberg , an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg The epic establishment clean-up operation launched in the wake of James Le Mesurier's apparent suicide was effective in the short term, but determined digging by critical journalists means the scandal definitely isn't over yet.

A Dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant, has published a stunning exclusive based on internal government emails, exposing how officials conspired to prevent a minister publicly raising concerns about fraudulent activity at Mayday Rescue, the now-defunct "humanitarian" organization behind Syria's highly controversial White Helmets.

The internal communications show that, following the ever-mysterious demise of Helmets and Mayday founder James Le Mesurier in November 2019 in Istanbul, Sigrid Kaag, the Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, planned to formally caution parliament about financial impropriety on Le Mesurier's part. Several draft statements were produced over the ensuing Christmas period, in which Mayday was openly named.

ALSO ON RT.COM 'Humanitarian' agency USAID was 'key tool' for Washington undermining the Venezuelan government, official review reveals

Her anxieties were well-founded. On November 8, three days before his death, Le Mesurier openly confessed in an email to his organization's numerous international donors – of which the Netherlands had been but one – that he was guilty of misconduct and fraud, admitting to forging receipts to hide the disappearance of $50,000 in cash, paying himself and his wife Emma Winberg "excessive" salaries, and potential tax evasion, among other malfeasance.

While claiming this wasn't intentional, he took full and sole responsibility, and warned against further investigation into Mayday's financial affairs, fearing that continued probing could expose yet more "mistakes and internal failures."

In the wake of his apparent suicide, Volkskrant reports that donor countries – who'd collectively committed in excess of $100 million to Le Mesurier's cause – convened a crisis meeting at the Dutch consulate in Istanbul, at which diplomats concluded the Netherlands was "extra vulnerable", given all the funding it had provided to Mayday, and the organization having ostensibly been based on its soil, meaning millions in international payments had been processed through Dutch accounts.

Funding from Amsterdam had nonetheless ceased in September 2018, after a Ministry of Foreign Affairs report outlined serious concerns about Mayday's financial practices, including a virtually total lack of oversight over, and even awareness of, how its money entered Syria, and precisely where it eventually ended up.

However, top Netherlands State Department officials strongly disagreed with Kaag's proposal, arguing that if lawmakers were warned at all, it was best done confidentially, as if the allegations weren't in fact true, it could " unjustly harm" Mayday.

ALSO ON RT.COM Bogus story of Iranian interference in Scottish politics shows Western media to be the true election meddler

After some toing and froing, a compromise was struck – Kaag agreed to wait for the results of an independent audit of Mayday by accounting firm Grant Thornton to be published, whereupon a letter would be sent "immediately" to parliament. As the auditors went about their assessment, in February 2020 diplomats again travelled to Istanbul to discuss the organization's possible malpractice. Key considerations for those present were "avoiding political risks" and ensuring "minimal exposure" for Amsterdam in the case.

As luck would have it, Grant Thornton found no evidence of fraud, but did identify major failings in bookkeeping and financial supervision, with many payments untraceable. Kaag opted to keep the report private, and declined after all to apprise parliament of its conclusions. This move would be somewhat inexplicable if the auditor did indeed exonerate Mayday, but the emails unearthed by Volkskrant amply demonstrate that it didn't.

In one missive, a Dutch official states that "it cannot be established with certainty" that the Netherlands' subsidies to Mayday had in fact been provided to the White Helmets. When asked which funds in particular, they responded, " all expenses to the White Helmets."

In other words, fraud on the part of Mayday couldn't be detected only because quite literally no records relating to where any of the sums actually went existed. As such, it's unsurprising that an independent followup probe of the organization's finances was considered to be a waste of time.

The Dutch Central Audit Service, which controls government expenditure, in summer 2020 ruled that €3.6 million should "preferably" be reclaimed from Mayday. However, Grant Thornton's findings were invoked to argue there were "insufficient grounds" to pursue the matter, and Mayday was duly removed from the list of cases to be reported to parliament in July 2020.

Volksrant's seismic revelations will no doubt make extremely uncomfortable reading for a great many powerful people. After all, the mainstream media, and the numerous governments which funded Mayday, have struggled to get their story straight on Le Mesurier, his company, and the group he founded, ever since his fatal plunge. Over the final months of 2020, a concerted campaign was waged to tie up the assorted loose ends.

ALSO ON RT.COM The Syrian government has been blamed for the 2018 Saraqib chemical attack, but this time around India isn't buying it

First, in October, a fawning 6,000 word Guardian hagiography acquitted Le Mesurier on charges of fraud, being an agent of British intelligence, using the Helmets as a Trojan Horse for regime change in Syria, and affiliation with extremist groups.

The next month, a multi-part BBC World Service podcast series amplified this sycophantic apologism globally, while in the process smearing independent journalists and researchers who'd raised questions about the Helmets as agents of the Russian and Syrian governments, who bore significant responsibility for Le Mesurier's suicide by spreading malicious, dangerous "disinformation" .

Both The Guardian and BBC relied exclusively on Grant Thornton's audit to exonerate Le Mesurier of fraud charges, despite not actually having seen the findings – the former firmly contended it was just one example of how "Le Mesurier unravelled under the weight of claims that would later prove to be false."

That this fundamental aspect of the exculpatory mainstream narrative of Le Mesurier and the Helmets has now seemingly been demonstrated to be entirely bogus, one can only wonder what other elements are similarly erroneous, why, and what else Mayday's backers have to hide.

In respect of the latter question, one answer could well be direct or indirect funding of violent terrorist groups in Syria by the Netherlands if not many other Western governments, under the cover of humanitarian payments to Mayday. In December 2020, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte admitted that he blocked a parliamentary request for an independent investigation into this very question.

ALSO ON RT.COM Western media quick to accuse Syria of 'bombing hospitals' - but when TERRORISTS really destroy Syrian hospitals, they are silent

After initially attempting to deny having done so, the previous month he told journalists such a probe may result in "tensions" with Netherlands' allies, and "put the lives of former members of opposition groups at stake."

Evidently, try as the establishment might, the controversy surrounding the White Helmets isn't going anywhere, and, in fact, is gaining significantly in volume and credibility. It's anyone's guess which will be the next domino to fall. Watch this space.

Like this story? Share it with a friend!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.



Stranded 15 hours ago
15 hours ago

The government in the Netherlands used taxpayer money to fund terrorism in Syria. This is what happened and normally if you aid terrorism there is a big price to pay. Not for politicians though its perfectly fine to stir up trouble abroad and then act oblivious when it hits home.
Vincent2000 14 hours ago 14 hours ago
This is truly very old news. We knew all along that the white helmets were financially supported by western governments. All the other intricacies of that support were irrelevant to us. The white helmets were just another tool used by western governments to topple the legitimate government of Syria.
zoombeenie 15 hours ago 15 hours ago
Thank you. I long believed the White Helmets had a connection with shady Western Governments. Did Le Mesurier have an Epstein moment? More probing needs to be done and head role
frankfalseflag 18 hours ago 18 hours ago
The West will soon discover that the Dutch - who invented civilization's first bubble of the tulip bulb - are also responsible for inventing cryptocurrencies and the bubble that will soon engulf the investors who believe in them
CrabbyB 19 hours ago 19 hours ago
Evil is exposing itself.. it's up to us how we handle it. If we get it wrong we will suffer 10 fold.
Vera Narishkin 16 hours ago 16 hours ago
Why am I not surprised? What else are they hiding? The real culprits of the downing of flight MH17, of course!
frankfalseflag 18 hours ago 18 hours ago
It's nice to be hearing about the White Helmets again. One of the CIA's recent, great successes
Roger Hudson 20 hours ago 20 hours ago
Investigate and expose the whole thing, from MI6/SIS onwards.
errovi 21 hours ago 21 hours ago
Sigrid Kaag profiled herself on "new leadership" during the recent elections...

[May 10, 2021] Biden says 'no evidence' Russia responsible for pipeline cyberattack but Russia has 'some responsibility'

May 10, 2021 | www.rt.com

A cyberattack that crippled the US fuel supply wasn't the work of Russia, President Joe Biden said. Confusingly, Biden then said that Russia bears "some responsibility" for the attack.

A ransomware attack on Friday shut down a gasoline and diesel pipeline running 5,500 miles along the entire US East Coast. Operated by the Colonial Pipeline Company, the vital fuel artery normally transits 100 million gallons per day from Texas all the way to New York. The Biden administration responded by invoking emergency powers to enable truckers to transport more fuel, as traders scrambled to import fuel by sea from Europe.

... ... ...

Home USA News Biden says 'no evidence' Russia responsible for pipeline cyberattack but Russia has 'some responsibility' 10 May, 2021 19:52 Get short URL Biden says 'no evidence' Russia responsible for pipeline cyberattack but Russia has 'some responsibility' Joe Biden speaks on the Colonial Pipeline attack as Vice President Kamala Harris stands by at the White House in Washington, DC, May 10, 2021 © Reuters / Kevin Lamarque 14 Follow RT on RT A cyberattack that crippled the US fuel supply wasn't the work of Russia, President Joe Biden said. Confusingly, Biden then said that Russia bears "some responsibility" for the attack.

A ransomware attack on Friday shut down a gasoline and diesel pipeline running 5,500 miles along the entire US East Coast. Operated by the Colonial Pipeline Company, the vital fuel artery normally transits 100 million gallons per day from Texas all the way to New York. The Biden administration responded by invoking emergency powers to enable truckers to transport more fuel, as traders scrambled to import fuel by sea from Europe.

ALSO ON RT.COM Reported cyberattack on major US pipeline sends oil & gasoline prices higher

Addressing the attack on Monday, Biden initially threw cold water on the claims of Russian involvement, instead blaming "transnational criminals."

"So far there's no evidence from our intelligence people that Russia is involved," Biden told reporters. However, he followed that statement by saying that the ransomware used "is in Russia," and Russia therefore has "some responsibility to deal with this."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1391819003560144900&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F523420-biden-colonial-pipeline-russia-responsiblity%2F&sessionId=8bea10ea6256a9d086ef25229613f3d67d97cfb5&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px

Rumors of Russian involvement were stoked by several mainstream media outlets over the weekend, after it emerged that 'DarkSide,' a criminal hacking organization believed by CNN's anonymous sources to be based in "a Russian-speaking country," was responsible for the attack. In a short statement on Monday, the FBI confirmed "that the DarkSide ransomware is responsible for the compromise of the Colonial Pipeline networks."

Other media outlets took the opportunity to link the hackers to the Russian government, "whether they work for the state or not," in the words of one cybersecurity consultant to NBC.

[May 09, 2021] As the world has become more complex, people have relied more and more on stereotypes and simplifications to help them interpret and filter events around them

Notable quotes:
"... As the world has become more complex, people have relied more and more on stereotypes and simplifications to help them interpret and filter events around them. Propaganda manipulates this desire for simplicity – handing people easy answers rather than winning them over with rational arguments. Society then rallies around these stereotypes and squashes dissents with 'herd mentality', an irrational set of psychological behaviors where individuals are swept along with a group, overriding their own rational assessments ..."
May 09, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

psychohistorian , May 5 2021 19:47 utc | 85

Below is a repeat of a Glenn Diesen quote from karlof1 comment # 57

"
"As the world has become more complex, people have relied more and more on stereotypes and simplifications to help them interpret and filter events around them. Propaganda manipulates this desire for simplicity – handing people easy answers rather than winning them over with rational arguments. Society then rallies around these stereotypes and squashes dissents with 'herd mentality', an irrational set of psychological behaviors where individuals are swept along with a group, overriding their own rational assessments."
"

Think about the vaccine situation and what just happened to the medical profession in the West....they got railroaded into agreeing that there was not an off the shelf "ivermectin" to the virus and guaranteed future income to Big Pharma is more important.

Hey docs!!! Do no harm! Your complicity in this war crime against humanity is noted. What are the responsible and humanistic actions to take now and why does the public not see evidence that you are organizing to do them?

karlof1 , May 5 2021 19:50 utc | 86

Until the reality of the CIA--to undermine peaceful relations and promote wars required for Military Keynesianism--is taught in grade school, it will always find recruits. As with the FBI, government sponsored propaganda was and remains required to manufacture the reasons for their existence. Nations that promote an equitable polity have no need for a secret police force, but do need some force to counter attempts from the outside to foment destabilization. For example, today's Russia is freer than at any previous time in its history as only extremist ideologies are banned while Communism--still deemed extremist by the West--is relegated to a normal ideology with status as a normative political party. Indeed, I'd argue that Russia remains the only genuine Liberal Western nation, which is a reality Russophobes are unable to accept or even contemplate. The same also applies to the concept of Communism thanks to the unwillingness to even attempt to understand Marx. And as Western thought gets subsumed by Wokeness, the ideological divide between Neoliberal nations and all others will continue to grow.

[May 09, 2021] Remembering Yuri Gagarin, the First Man in Space

May 09, 2021 | science.slashdot.org

(space.com) 97

Space.com reports: Because no one was certain how weightlessness would affect a pilot, the spherical capsule had little in the way of onboard controls ; the work was done either automatically or from the ground. If an emergency arose, Gagarin was supposed to receive an override code that would allow him to take manual control, but Sergei Korolev, chief designer of the Soviet space program, disregarded protocol and gave the code to the pilot prior to the flight.

Over the course of 108 minutes, Vostok 1 traveled around the Earth once, reaching a maximum height of 203 miles (327 kilometers). The spacecraft carried 10 days' worth of provisions in case the engines failed and Gagarin was required to wait for the orbit to naturally decay. But the supplies were unnecessary. Gagarin re-entered Earth's atmosphere, managing to maintain consciousness as he experienced forces up to eight times the pull of gravity during his descent.
The BBC remembers how on his return to earth, Gagarin parachuted into some farmland several hundred miles from Moscow â€" "much to the surprise of a five-year-old girl who was out in the fields planting potatoes."

60 years later, the BBC tracked down and interviewed Interviewed that woman â€" who still remembered Gagarin's kind voice and smile. (Thanks to Slashdot reader 4wdloop for sharing the article.)

The BBC also published a look at Gagarin's global fame in the years that followed â€" and Phys.org notes that even today, there are few people more universally admired in Russia than Yuri Gagarin : His smiling face adorns murals across the country. He stands, arms at his sides as if zooming into space, on a pedestal 42.5 metres (140 feet) above the traffic flowing on Moscow's Leninsky Avenue. He is even a favourite subject of tattoos... The anniversary of Gagarin's historic flight on April 12, 1961 â€" celebrated every year in Russia as Cosmonautics Day â€" sees Russians of all ages lay flowers at monuments to his accomplishment across the country...

Gagarin, says historian Alexander Zheleznyakov, was a figure who helped fuel the imagination. "He transformed us from a simple biological species to one that could imagine an entire universe beyond Earth."

[May 09, 2021] Wokism and Russiagate

Notable quotes:
"... No, people get their belief systems (religious, political, economic, cultural) from their identity groups. **Then** (if called upon) they apply the intellect to rationalize the beliefs that they **already** hold. ..."
"... Rationalizing the Russiagate nonsense was seemingly inevitable with the 24/7 help of the MSM, and the continuous chirping of Democrat politicians. The intellect was not a lighthouse beacon that led intelligent Democrats through the fog of 24/7/52 issued propaganda, rather; the intellect was the tool that solidified vaporous forms into false-reality. ..."
May 09, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

librul , May 5 2021 18:00 utc | 61

re: Wokism

My two cents. People are mimics. It is fascinating when you realize this.

People don't muse, contemplate and chew over the circumstances and issues in their environment and then resolve - "aha! I have got it." That is not where people get their belief systems. For example, a million and more people didn't all independently study the Bible and then realize that their interpretation was fully consistent with those of the Roman Catholics and therefore they should go join the Catholic Church.

No, people get their belief systems (religious, political, economic, cultural) from their identity groups. **Then** (if called upon) they apply the intellect to rationalize the beliefs that they **already** hold.

The epiphany came to me when I observed intelligent people falling for Russiagate. WTF !! I thought intelligent people would get it. Russiagate would be a flash-in-the-pan that would disappear in a few days (or less!). Boy was I wrong. The intellect does not rule, group identity does. Those that identified Democrat (generalizing here, of course) fell in step with the beliefs common to Democrats, including Russiagate.

Rationalizing the Russiagate nonsense was seemingly inevitable with the 24/7 help of the MSM, and the continuous chirping of Democrat politicians. The intellect was not a lighthouse beacon that led intelligent Democrats through the fog of 24/7/52 issued propaganda, rather; the intellect was the tool that solidified vaporous forms into false-reality.

To find one's identity in groups is deeply human. People are dominated by their need to be group-accepted. It is unsurprising that group acceptance and group identity produce what we call fashion - fashion in style, fashion in vocabulary, fashion in beliefs. This applies to Wokism. People are mimics.

You can even get them to wear Pussy Hats.

[May 09, 2021] Children from Parents Exposed to Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster Show No Genetic Damage

May 09, 2021 | science.slashdot.org

(usnews.com) 80 There's no evidence of genetic damage in the children of parents who were exposed to radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in Ukraine, researchers say.

Several previous studies have examined the risks across generations of radiation exposure from events such as this, but have yielded inconclusive results. In this study, the investigators analyzed the genomes of 130 children and parents from families where one or both parents were exposed to radiation due to the Chernobyl accident, and where children were conceived afterward and born between 1987 and 2002.

There was no increase in gene changes in reproductive cells of study participants, and rates of new germline mutations were similar to those in the general population, according to a team led by Meredith Yeager of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, in Rockville, Md.

[May 08, 2021] US Officials Claim That Iraqi Kurds Helped To Kill Qassam Soleimani

May 08, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Sam F , May 8 2021 16:16 utc | 1

Hardly anything of that - besides the murder of Soleimani - is mentioned in the Yahoo piece. There is not one word on Muhandis, his role in Iraq or the consequences of his death. There is no mention of the Iraqi parliament vote or of the ongoing attacks on U.S. units in Iraq.

Instead the piece prominently emphasizes alleged Kurdish collaboration in the assassination:

In late December 2019, Delta Force operators and other special operations members began filtering into Baghdad in small groups. Kurdish operatives, who played a key role in the killing, had already started infiltrating Baghdad International Airport by that point, going undercover as baggage handlers and other staff members.
...
The three sniper teams positioned themselves 600 to 900 yards away from the "kill zone," the access road from the airfield, setting up to triangulate their target as he left the airport. [...] A member of the Counter Terrorism Group (CTG), an elite Kurdish unit in northern Iraq with deep links to U.S. Special Operations, helped them make the wind call from down range.
...
After the strike, according to two U.S. officials, a Kurdish operative disguised as an Iraqi police officer walked up to the wreckage of Soleimani's vehicle, snapped photographs and quickly obtained a tissue sample for DNA confirmation before walking away and vanishing into the night.

Muhandis and Soleimani were revered by the Shia majority in Iraq. The revelation of Kurdish involvement in Soleimani's death might have harsh consequences for Iraqi Kurds.

If the Kurds were really involved why was this released? Why does it come in a piece that is more or less a recap of already known stuff? What are the motives of those who revealed this?

I for one do not believe those claims.

Who is interested in (re-)launching an ethnic civil war in Iraq?


The Yahoo piece then comes to the consequences of the attack:

Iran reacted with predictable fury to Soleimani's killing, lobbing dozens of ballistic missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq. Though no one was killed, Pentagon officials later said more than 100 service personnel were diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.

But the rocket attack was just a "slap in the face," said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, and did not represent Iran's full retaliation for the killing. U.S. officials and experts believe that Iran may eventually attempt a high-profile assassination of a senior U.S. official or a terrorist attack aimed at a U.S. facility.

The 'U.S. officials and experts' believe that they are way more important than they really are. Iran's Supreme Leader Ajatollah Khamenei, who was extremely near to Soleimani , has let it known that there is no one of Soleimani's caliber in U.S. ranks who could be taken out as revenge. There will be no Iranian assassination campaign of U.S. politicians or military leader.

Fears of such only shows that the former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, one of the initiator of the assassination of Soleimani, is a craven milquetoast :

Tucked into the appropriations bill signed by President Trump in the final days of 2020 was $15 million set aside to provide protective services to "former or retired senior Department of State officials" who "face a serious and credible threat from a foreign power or the agent of a foreign power" because of the work they did while in office.

The real second part of the revenge that is still coming was announced by Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah:

What do we mean by just punishment? Some are saying this must be someone of the same level as Qassem Soleimani - like Chairman of Joint Chiefs, head of @CENTCOM, but there is no one on Soleimani or Muhandis' level. Soleimani's shoe is worth more than Trump's head, so there's no one I can point to to say this is the person we can target.

Just punishment therefore means American military presence in the region, U.S. military bases, U.S. military ships, every American officer and soldier in our countries and regions. The U.S. military is the one who killed Soleimani and Muhandis, and they will pay the price. This is the equation.
...
The response to the blood of Soleimani and Al-Muhandis must be expulsion of all U.S, forces from the region.

General Esmail Qaani, Soleimani's replacement as commander of the Quds Brigade, confirmed Nasrallah's statement:

Going Underground on RT @Underground_RT - 00:14 UTC · Jan 6, 2020

Esmail Qaani, the new leader of Iran's IRGC Quds Force:
"Our promise is to continue the path of martyr Soleimani. Due to the martyrdom of #Soleimani, our promise will be the expulsion of the US from the region in different steps."

These are not empty threats but a military project that will play out over the next years. I would not bet on the U.S. as the winner of that war.

Posted by b on May 8, 2021 at 15:50 UTC | Permalink

The Kurds have long been associated with Israeli secret agencies, and Israeli bribes-from-aid to US politicians are the determinant of US ME policy. So Israel via Yahoo news was likely celebrating to provoke Iran or for similar purposes.


Jen , May 8 2021 20:56 utc | 25

The Yahoo article sure is a real slap in the face to the Kurdish forces working with the West in occupying northern Iraq and NE Syria. No doubt it was written to deflect Iraqi and Iranian anger away from Western interference in the Middle East towards the Kurds to get a sectarian war going to justify continued Western occupation and meddling.

Who are Jack Murphy and Zach Dorfman anyway? From what I could find of Dorfman on search engines, he is a writer employed or associated with the Aspen Institute headquartered in Washington DC writing on cyber-security topics. That might suggest he and the other writer were fed this information or farrago about Kurdish involvement in Soleymani's assassination from the usual anonymous sources.

Jen , May 8 2021 21:16 utc | 27

Question @ 6:

Read that paragraph from the MoA article carefully and understand that such an undertaking means ridding the entire Middle Eastern region of all US military interference. This surely includes forcing the US to leave Saudi Arabia and other ME nations with their heads stuck in the US backside.

Understand also that other Western nations also have forces, mercenaries and "advisors" in the Middle East and their removal from the region is just as much important but less urgent. If the chief bully can be thrown out first, its minions will follow like the craven cowards they are. No doubt the British and the French will try to keep a toehold in the region through proxy forces but whether those govts have the backbone to keep going is another question.

[May 03, 2021] Some other countries of the world just aren't swallowing Bidan and his handlers worshipping of all things non-white..

May 03, 2021 | www.unz.com

Defender , says: April 30, 2021 at 8:51 am GMT • 18.6 hours ago

Some other countries of the world just aren't swallowing Bidan and his handlers worshipping of all things non-white..

https://www.youtube.com/embed/CBS8TYLO_A0?feature=oembed

BorisMay , says: April 30, 2021 at 1:38 pm GMT • 13.8 hours ago
@Chris Moore to eternal servitude as debt slaves.

*** Please Note: Russia is not weak considering that it has the ability to nuke America in to ashes within 30 minutes, or any other bunch of idiots that chooses to step over her red lines. Okay the US has 350 million people compared to 150 million Russians, but the US is irrevocably divided and Russia is fully united even the Muslim minority is united with the State in Russia. A divided house can not stand no man can serve two masters. On top of that the US has no moral values whereas Russia is a Christian country where marriage is between a man and a woman, by State law. Biden can fly all the queer flags he likes but he still leads a divided nation with a corrupt State comprised of dual passport holders, amoral materialists and deluded mentally challenged idiots like Waters and Pelosi.

[May 03, 2021] US new Foreign Malign Influence Center is just official cover for American intelligence interference in domestic politics by Scott Ritter

May 03, 2021 | www.rt.com

Scott Ritter Scott Ritter

is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ' SCORPION KING : America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter 28 Apr, 2021 20:44 Get short URL US’ new Foreign Malign Influence Center is just official cover for American intelligence interference in domestic politics Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines speaks during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing about worldwide threats © Reuters The Director of National Intelligence has ostensibly created a new “center†for the sharing and analysis of information and intelligence about foreign interference in US elections. Its real focus is much more nefarious.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced in a statement on Monday that it was creating a new intelligence “center†focused on tracking so-called “ foreign malign influence, †reported Politico. This new entity, known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, was mandated in the recent intelligence and defense budget authorization acts, representing the reality that the impetus for its creation came from Congress, and not the intelligence community.

For example, the most recent defense expenditure authorization required that the ODNI establish a “ social media data analysis center †to coordinate and track foreign social media influence operations by analyzing data voluntarily shared by US social media companies. Based upon this analysis, the ODNI would report to Congress on a quarterly basis on trends in foreign influence and disinformation operations to the public. As envisioned by Congress, the intelligence community would determine jointly with US social media companies which data and metadata will be made available for analysis.

ALSO ON RT.COM The cynical hypocrisy of the world’s No1 propagandist: US pledges $300mn to fund massive global anti-China media machine

In short, the intelligence community, using data obtained from the social media accounts of American citizens, will report to Congress how this data influences the political decision making of these same American citizens.

If this does not make the most ardent defender of the US Constitution ill, nothing will.

It is not as if the US intelligence community wasn’t trending in this direction on its own volition. The straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was the publication in March 2021 of an intelligence community assessment entitled ‘Foreign Threats to the US 2020 Presidential Election’. In this document, the US intelligence community assessed that “ Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US .â€

But the most damning portion of this assessment came when it delved into the specific methodology employed by Russia to achieve these nefarious aims. “ Throughout the election cycle â€, the assessment declared, “ Russia’s online influence actors sought to affect US public perceptions of the candidates, as well as advance Moscow’s long standing goals of undermining confidence in US election processes and increasing sociopolitical divisions among the American people. During the presidential primaries and dating back to 2019, these actors backed candidates from both major US political parties that Moscow viewed as outsiders, while later claiming that election fraud helped what they called ‘establishment’ candidates. Throughout the election, Russia’s online influence actors sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud. â€

As an American citizen who is politically engaged, I read the intelligence community assessment with a combination of interest, concern, and outrage. The notion of “ Russian online influence actors †affecting “US public perceptions of the candidates†is as intellectually vacuous as it is factually unsustainable. The stupidity encapsulated by such analysis can only be excused by the fact that the intelligence community assessment is a document produced more for the benefit of domestic political consumption than a genuine effort at identifying and quantifying legitimate threats to the US.

The assessment itself is short on hard data. However, the House Intelligence Committee has documented some 3,000 social media ads bought by Russian “troll farms†between 2015-2017, at a cost of some $100,000. These ads were in addition to so-called “organic posts,†some 80,000 of which were published on US social media, free of charge, by alleged Russian “bots†resulting in 126 million “views†by Americans. These ads were crude, unfocused, and simply inane in terms of their content.

ALSO ON RT.COM Putin should refuse Biden’s offer of a summit: Americans will bring only political theatrics & threats, nothing will be achieved

To put the alleged Russian influence campaign into perspective, one need only reflect on the fact that during his short bid for the Democratic nomination, Michael Bloomberg spent nearly $1 billion underwriting the single most sophisticated public relations campaign, including hundreds of millions of targeted social media ads put together by the most brilliant political minds money could buy. All this money, time and effort, however, could not change the reality that, to the American public, Michael Bloomberg was an unattractive candidate â€" in the end his $1 billion bought him exactly two delegates.

The fact is, the political opinions of most American citizens are formed based upon a lifetime of exposure to issues that matter for them the most, whether it be education, right-to-life, gun control, social justice, agriculture, energy, environment, law enforcement, or any other of the multitude of sources of causation that impact the day-to-day existence of the American electorate.

Some of these beliefs are inherited, such as the working-class attachment to unions. Some are driven by current affairs, such as the growing awareness of climate change. But all are derived from the life experience of each American, and the thought that these deeply held beliefs could be bought, changed, or otherwise manipulated by social media posts published by foreign actors, malign or otherwise, is deeply insulting to me, and should be to every other American as well.

The irony is that by creating an intelligence organization whose task it is to help prevent the political Balkanization of America by analyzing the social media accounts of Americans who hold differing political beliefs than “the establishment†the newly minted Foreign Malign Influence Center ostensibly serves, the resulting process will only cause the further political division of the United States.

Some 74 million Americans voted for a candidate, Donald Trump, who has promulgated the very issues that the Democratic-controlled Congress seeks to denigrate and suppress through the work of this new intelligence center. These ideas will not simply disappear because the Democrats in Congress have empowered a “center†within the intelligence community whose sole function is to demonize any political thought that does not conform with the powers that be.

As it is currently focused, the Foreign Malign Influence Center is the living, breathing embodiment of politicized intelligence, two words which, when put together, represent the death knell for any intelligence organization. Worse, the work it will be doing, when turned over to a Democratically controlled Congress desperate to undermine the political viability of those 74 million American citizens, will only further fracture an already divided nation.

ALSO ON RT.COM New York Times ‘bounties’ non-story shows US/UK media has got so used to blaming Russia, it's basically now doing it out of habit

The Foreign Malign Influence Center was specifically mandated to examine the social media influence campaigns operated by Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. It is particularly telling that they were not directed to investigate the two largest foreign sources of political influence in America today, namely the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the Murdoch media empire. President Putin could only dream about being able to buy congressional seats the way AIPAC does, or control what information becomes magnified (and, by extension, suppressed) by the newspapers, television and radio enterprises owned by Rupert Murdoch.

These are the true villains when it comes to foreign corruption of American politics. These foreigners, however, have a seat at the establishment table. Their malign influence will never be labeled as such, and they will never have to withstand the ignominy of having their work scrutinized under the politicized microscope of an intelligence community that has allowed itself to be corrupted by domestic American politics to the point that it no longer serves the American people as a whole, but only a select class of American persons.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


Congozebilu 4 hours ago 4 hours ago

Foreign Malign Influence Center sounds like something out of a cartoon.
AwareAussie2 Congozebilu 4 hours ago 4 hours ago
The catch words "freedom", "democracy" and "terrorism" don't work any more, they need to now use different phrases to con us.

John Titor 4 hours ago
4 hours ago
The Foreign Malign Influence Center is just the latest in the Democrat Government Propaganda machine.
frankfalseflag 4 hours ago 4 hours ago
Does Scott Ritter actually expect Americans to wake up to the fact that they are getting more lies and propaganda than the Germans got from their Reich Chancellery in the 30s and 40s?

[May 03, 2021] US generals to the Director of DNA: Either supply the facts or shut up

May 03, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Stonebird , Apr 28 2021 18:38 utc | 18

These folks have had it with the constant stream of baseless propaganda U.S. intelligence is spilling over the world:

Dear Director of National Intelligence,

we, the the 4-star Generals leading U.S. regional commands all over the world, are increasingly concerned with about the lack of evidence for claims you make about our opponents.

We, as true believers, do not doubt whatever judgment you make about the harmful activities of Russia, Iran and China. However - our allies and partners do not yet subscribe to the bliss of ignorance. They keep asking us for facts that support those judgments

Unfortunately, we have none that we could provide.

You say that Russia thought to manipulate Trump allies and to smear Biden , that Russia and Iran aimed to sway the 2020 election through covert campaigns and that China runs covert operations to influence members of Congress .

Media reports have appeared in which 'intelligence sources' claim that Russia, China and Iran are all paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers. Fortunately no soldier got hurt by those rumors.

Our allies and partners read those and other reports and ask us for evidence. They want to know how exactly Russia, Iran and China are doing these things.

They, of course, hope to learn from our experience to protect their own countries.

Currently we are not able to provide them with such information. Your people keep telling our that all of it is SECRET.

We therefore ask you to declassify the facts that support your judgments. *

Sincerely

The Generals

----
PS: * Either that or shut the fuck up.

Look, The generals and the intelligence agencies haven't won a war for a long time. So now they will fight each other . At least ONE of them will win this time ! Success.

[May 03, 2021] The NYT is simply a propaganda organ of the corporate oligarchy. Whenever the US does something bad, it is always "alleged". When opponents of US hegemony are accused of doing something bad, it is never "alleged"

Apr 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Gerald Smith , Apr 27 2021 9:00 utc | 7

The NYT is simply a propaganda organ of the corporate oligarchy. Whenever the US does something bad, it is always "alleged". When opponents of US hegemony are accused of doing something bad, it is never "alleged" - for example, you won't read about the "alleged Douma chemical attack" in the NYT.

Just a small point about English grammar: "alleged burglar", "alleged miracle" and "alleged conspiracy" are all correct, because "alleged" is being used here as an adjective. "Alleged antique vase", on the other hand, is incorrect because what is being alleged is not that the object is a vase; what is being alleged is that the vase is antique. Because it is being used to describe an adjective (antique), it is being used adverbially: therefore the correct usage is "allegedly antique vase".

This reminds me of John Michael Greer's formulation: the "allegedly smart phone". I use it all the time, to imply that intensive users of mobile devices may not be quite as intelligent as is generally believed. Note that what is being is alleged is not that it's a phone, but that it's smart!

Otter , Apr 27 2021 12:10 utc | 20

NYT does use "alleged" correctly. In the land of truth, one need merely state one's statement. In the land of lies, one must insert "alleged", so that others know the statement is truth.

There was a Soviet aphorism to this effect.

[May 03, 2021] The CIA Used To Infiltrate The Media... Now The CIA Is The Media by Caitlin Johnstone,

Apr 16, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone,

Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.

me data-google-container-id=

Analysis: US blinks first on Russia-Ukraine tensions

Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called “Bountygate†story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan.

“One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,†Greenwald tweeted .

“So media outlets - again - repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.â€

Indeed, NYT’s original story made no mention of CIA involvement in the narrative, citing only “officials,†yet this latest article speaks as though it had been informing its readers of the story’s roots in the lying, torturing , drug-running , warmongering Central Intelligence Agency from the very beginning. The author even writes “The New York Times first reported last summer the existence of the C.I.A.’s assessment,†with the hyperlink leading to the initial article which made no mention of the CIA. It wasn’t until later that The New York Times began reporting that the CIA was looking into the Russian bounties allegations at all.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382793565714153472&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fcia-used-infiltrate-media-now-cia-media&sessionId=77ef0dadbd05c9f3bcb1de7857a624713a43f3d8&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px

This would be the same “Russian bounties†narrative which was discredited all the way back in September when the top US military official in Afghanistan said no satisfactory evidence had surfaced for the allegations, which was further discredited today with a new article by The Daily Beast titled “ U.S. Intel Walks Back Claim Russians Put Bounties on American Troops â€.

The Daily Beast , which has itself uncritically published many articles promoting the CIA “Bountygate†narrative, reports the following:

It was a blockbuster story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great Game†in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.

But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate†confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven â€" and possibly untrue.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382769897420296194&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fcia-used-infiltrate-media-now-cia-media&sessionId=77ef0dadbd05c9f3bcb1de7857a624713a43f3d8&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px

So the mass media aggressively promoted a CIA narrative that none of them ever saw proof of, because there was no proof, because it was an entirely unfounded claim from the very beginning. They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story.

This allowed the CIA to throw shade and inertia on Trump’s proposed troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Germany, and to continue ramping up anti-Russia sentiments on the world stage , and may well have contributed to the fact that the agency will officially be among those who are exempt from Biden’s performative Afghanistan “withdrawal†.

In totalitarian dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In free democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!†and the news media unquestioningly publish it.

In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “ The CIA and the Media †reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird . It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media is meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.

Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits . The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor , and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382777804014641152&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fcia-used-infiltrate-media-now-cia-media&sessionId=77ef0dadbd05c9f3bcb1de7857a624713a43f3d8&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px

This isn’t Operation Mockingbird. It’s so much worse. Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even any pretence of separation, has been dropped.

This is bad. This is very, very bad. Democracy has no meaningful existence if people’s votes aren’t being cast with a clear understanding of what’s happening in their nation and their world, and if their understanding is being shaped to suit the agendas of the very government they’re meant to be influencing with their votes, what you have is the most powerful military and economic force in the history of civilization with no accountability to the electorate whatsoever. It’s just an immense globe-spanning power structure, doing whatever it wants to whoever it wants. A totalitarian dictatorship in disguise.

And the CIA is the very worst institution that could possibly be spearheading the movements of that dictatorship. A little research into the many, many horrific things the CIA has done over the years will quickly show you that this is true; hell, just a glance at what the CIA was up to with the Phoenix Program in Vietnam will.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-3&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382856410443186179&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fcia-used-infiltrate-media-now-cia-media&sessionId=77ef0dadbd05c9f3bcb1de7857a624713a43f3d8&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px

There’s a common delusion in our society that depraved government agencies who are known to have done evil things in the past have simply stopped doing evil things for some reason. This belief is backed by zero evidence, and is contradicted by mountains of evidence to the contrary. It’s believed because it is comfortable, and for literally no other reason.

The CIA should not exist at all, let alone control the news media, much less the movements of the US empire. May we one day know a humanity that is entirely free from the rule of psychopaths, from our total planetary behavior as a collective, all the way down to the thoughts we think in our own heads.

May we extract their horrible fingers from every aspect of our being.

* * *

New book: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix .

The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi , Patreon or Paypal . If you want to read more you can buy my books . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here . Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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19,360 115

[May 03, 2021] US/NATO Troops Patrolling Opium Poppy Fields in Afghanistan

May 03, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Apr 28 2021 22:44 utc | 29

Hoarsewhisperer #10

Ditto. I am sure the CIA will be grinding the generals as we speak. Even the letter in Politico could well be one of their strategies. I posted a piece in the open thread yesterday from The HILL that was pure propaganda.

USA is not alone in losing guerrilla warfare.

Watch for Biden announcing a 'shake up' of the military command in the next few weeks/months.

The US military 2021 retreat from Kabul will result in a slaughter in the USA.

I see the Pentagon pulling the plug on the opium income for the CIA. Now THAT is the real war. So the CIA now has to pay its mercenary army to defend the harvest and extraction. That added cost to the CIA will not be taken lightly.

arby , Apr 28 2021 22:53 utc | 31

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Apr 28 2021 22:44 utc | 29

"So the CIA now has to pay its mercenary army to defend the harvest and extraction."

Seems to me it is the taxpayer that is paying for defending the fields.

US/NATO Troops Patrolling Opium Poppy Fields in Afghanistan

[May 03, 2021] A Lifetime -at War- -

Notable quotes:
"... By Tom Engelhardt. Originally published at TomDispatch ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... I supported the rule of law and human rights, not to mention the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. ..."
"... In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a “voluntary†activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways. ..."
"... “The dislike of government spending, whether on public investment or consumption, is overcome by concentrating government expenditure on armaments†..."
"... “The dislike of government spending, whether on public investment or consumption, is overcome by concentrating government expenditure on armaments†..."
"... “Large-scale armaments are inseparable from the expansion of the armed forces and the preparation of plans for a war of conquest. They also induce competitive rearmament of other countries.†..."
May 03, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

A Lifetime “at War†Posted on April 30, 2021 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Englehardt describes how US war-making has been a continuing exercise starting with World War II. It’s important to recognize that before that, US military budgets were modest both in national and global terms. But with manufacturing less specialized, the US was able to turn a considerable amount of its productive capacity to armaments in fairly short order.

A second point is as someone who was in Manhattan on 9/11, I did not experience the attacks as war. I saw them as very impressive terrorism. However, I was appalled at how quickly individuals in positions of authority pushed sentiment in that direction. The attack was on a Tuesday (I had a blood draw and voted before I even realized Something Bad had happened). I was appalled to see the saber-rattling in Bush’s speech at the National Cathedral on Friday. On Sunday, I decided to go to the Unitarian Church around the corner. I was shocked to hear more martial-speak. And because the church was packed, I had to sit in the front on the floor, which meant I couldn’t duck out.

By Tom Engelhardt. Originally published at TomDispatch

Here’s the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July 1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the atomic obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the most devastating bombs in history up to that moment, given the sweet code names “Little Boy†and “Fat Man.â€

I was the littlest of boys at the time. More than three-quarters of a century has passed since, on September 2, 1945, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the Instrument of Surrender on the battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay, officially ending World War II. That was V-J (for Victory over Japan) Day, but in a sense for me, my whole generation, and this country, war never really ended.

The United States has been at war, or at least in armed conflicts of various sorts, often in distant lands, for more or less my entire life. Yes, for some of those years, that war was “cold†(which often meant that such carnage, regularly sponsored by the CIA, happened largely off-screen and out of sight), but war as a way of life never really ended, not to this very moment.

In fact, as the decades went by, it would become the “infrastructure†in which Americans increasingly invested their tax dollars via aircraft carriers , trillion-dollar jet fighters, drones armed with Hellfire missiles, and the creation and maintenance of hundreds of military garrisons around the globe, rather than roads, bridges, or rail lines (no less the high-speed version of the same) here at home. During those same years, the Pentagon budget would grab an ever-larger percentage of federal discretionary spending and the full-scale annual investment in what has come to be known as the national security state would rise to a staggering $1.2 trillion or more.

In a sense, future V-J Days became inconceivable. There were no longer moments, even as wars ended, when some version of peace might descend and America’s vast military contingents could, as at the end of World War II, be significantly demobilized. The closest equivalent was undoubtedly the moment when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the Cold War officially ended, and the Washington establishment declared itself globally triumphant. But of course, the promised “peace dividend†would never be paid out as the first Gulf War with Iraq occurred that very year and the serious downsizing of the U.S. military (and the CIA) never happened.

Never-Ending War

Consider it typical that, when President Biden recently announced the official ending of the nearly 20-year-old American conflict in Afghanistan with the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from that country by 9/11/21, it would functionally be paired with the news that the Pentagon budget was about to rise yet again from its record heights in the Trump years. “Only in America,†as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore wrote recently, “do wars end and war budgets go up.â€

Buy the Book

Of course, even the ending of that never-ending Afghan War may prove exaggerated. In fact, let’s consider Afghanistan apart from the rest of this country’s war-making history for a moment. After all, if I had told you in 1978 that, of the 42 years to follow, the U.S. would be involved in war in a single country for 30 of them and asked you to identify it, I can guarantee that Afghanistan wouldn’t have been your pick. And yet so it’s been. From 1979 to 1989, there was the CIA-backed Islamist extremist war against the Soviet army there (to the tune of billions and billions of dollars). And yet the obvious lesson the Russians learned from that adventure, as their military limped home in defeat and the Soviet Union imploded not long after â€" that Afghanistan is indeed the “graveyard of empires†â€" clearly had no impact in Washington.

Or how do you explain the 19-plus years of warfare there that followed the 9/11 attacks, themselves committed by a small Islamist outfit, al-Qaeda, born as an American ally in that first Afghan War? Only recently, the invaluable Costs of War Project estimated that America’s second Afghan War has cost this country almost $2.3 trillion (not including the price of lifetime care for its vets) and has left at least 241,000 people dead, including 2,442 American service members. In 1978, after the disaster of the Vietnam War, had I assured you that such a never-ending failure of a conflict was in our future, you would undoubtedly have laughed in my face.

And yet, three decades later, the U.S. military high command still seems not faintly to have grasped the lesson that we “taught†the Russians and then experienced ourselves. As a result, according to recent reports, they have uniformly opposed President Biden’s decision to withdraw all American troops from that country by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. In fact, it’s not even clear that, by September 11, 2021, if the president’s proposal goes according to plan, that war will have truly ended. After all, the same military commanders and intelligence chiefs seem intent on organizing long-distance versions of that conflict or, as the New York Times put it , are determined to “fight from afar†there. They are evidently even considering establishing new bases in neighboring lands to do so.

America’s “forever wars†â€" once known as the Global War on Terror and, when the administration of George W. Bush launched it, proudly aimed at 60 countries â€" do seem to be slowly winding down. Unfortunately, other kinds of potential wars, especially new cold wars with China and Russia (involving new kinds of high-tech weaponry) only seem to be gearing up.

War in Our Time

In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a “voluntary†activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways.

In the years that followed, for instance, the elite Green Berets of the Vietnam era would be incorporated into an ever more expansive set of Special Operations forces, up to 70,000 of them (larger, that is, than the armed forces of many countries). Those special operators would functionally become a second, more secretive American military embedded inside the larger force and largely freed from citizen oversight of any sort. In 2020, as Nick Turse reported, they would be stationed in a staggering 154 countries around the planet, often involved in semi-secret conflicts “in the shadows†that Americans would pay remarkably little attention to.

Since the Vietnam War, which roiled the politics of this nation and was protested in the streets of this country by an antiwar movement that came to include significant numbers of active-duty soldiers and veterans, war has played a remarkably recessive role in American life. Yes, there have been the endless thank-yous offered by citizens and corporations to “the troops.†But that’s where the attentiveness stops, while both political parties, year after endless year, remain remarkably supportive of a growing Pentagon budget and the industrial (that is, weapons-making) part of the military-industrial complex. War, American-style, may be forever, but â€" despite, for instance, the militarization of this country’s police and the way in which those wars came home to the Capitol last January 6th â€" it remains a remarkably distant reality for most Americans.

One explanation: though the U.S. has, as I’ve said, been functionally at war since 1941, there were just two times when this country felt war directly â€" on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and on September 11, 2001, when 19 mostly Saudi hijackers in commercial jets struck New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

And yet, in another sense, war has been and remains us. Let’s just consider some of that war-making for a moment. If you’re of a certain age, you can certainly call to mind the big wars: Korea (1950-1953), Vietnam (1954-1975) â€" and don’t forget the brutal bloodlettings in neighboring Laos and Cambodia as well â€" that first Gulf War of 1991, and the disastrous second one, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then, of course, there was that Global War on Terror that began soon after September 11, 2001, with the invasion of Afghanistan, only to spread to much of the rest of the Greater Middle East, and to significant parts of Africa. In March, for instance, the first 12 American special-ops trainers arrived in embattled Mozambique, just one more small extension of an already widespread American anti-Islamist terror role ( now failing ) across much of that continent.

And then, of course, there were the smaller conflicts (though not necessarily so to the people in the countries involved) that we’ve now generally forgotten about, the ones that I had to search my fading brain to recall. I mean, who today thinks much about President John F. Kennedy’s April 1961 CIA disaster at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba; or President Lyndon Johnson’s sending of 22,000 U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to “restore orderâ€; or President Ronald Reagan’s version of “aggressive self-defense†by U.S. Marines sent to Lebanon who, in October 1983, were attacked in their barracks by a suicide bomber, killing 241 of them; or the anti-Cuban invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada that same month in which 19 Americans were killed and 116 wounded?

And then, define and categorize them as you will, there were the CIA’s endless militarized attempts (sometimes with the help of the U.S. military) to intervene in the affairs of other countries, ranging from taking the nationalist side against Mao Zedong’s communist forces in China from 1945 to 1949 to stoking a small ongoing conflict in Tibet in the 1950s and early 1960s, and overthrowing the governments of Guatemala and Iran, among other places. There were an estimated 72 such interventions from 1947 to 1989, many warlike in nature. There were, for instance, the proxy conflicts in Central America, first in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas and then in El Salvador, bloody events even if few U.S. soldiers or CIA agents died in them. No, these were hardly “wars,†as traditionally defined, not all of them, though they did sometimes involve military coups and the like, but they were generally carnage-producing in the countries they were in. And that only begins to suggest the range of this country’s militarized interventions in the post-1945 era, as journalist William Blum’s “ A Brief History of Interventions †makes all too clear.

Whenever you look for the equivalent of a warless American moment, some reality trips you up. For instance, perhaps you had in mind the brief period between when the Red Army limped home in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, that moment when Washington politicians, initially shocked that the Cold War had ended so unexpectedly, declared themselves triumphant on Planet Earth. That brief period might almost have passed for “peace,†American-style, if the U.S. military under President George H. W. Bush hadn’t, in fact, invaded Panama (“Operation Just Causeâ€) as 1989 ended to get rid of its autocratic leader Manuel Noriega (a former CIA asset, by the way). Up to 3,000 Panamanians (including many civilians) died along with 23 American troops in that episode.

And then, of course, in January 1991 the First Gulf War began . It would result in perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 Iraqi deaths and “only†a few hundred deaths among the U.S.-led coalition of forces. Air strikes against Iraq would follow in the years to come. And let’s not forget that even Europe wasn’t exempt since, in 1999, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, the U.S. Air Force launched a destructive 10-week bombing campaign against the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.

And all of this remains a distinctly incomplete list, especially in this century when something like 2 00,000 U.S. troops have regularly been stationed abroad and U.S. Special Operations forces have deployed to staggering numbers of countries, while American drones regularly attacked “terrorists†in nation after nation and American presidents quite literally became assassins-in-chief . To this day, what scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson called an American “empire of bases†â€" a historically unprecedented 800 or more of them â€" across much of the planet remains untouched and, at any moment, there could be more to come from the country whose military budget at least equals those of the next 10 (yes, that’s 10!) countries combined, including China and Russia.

A Timeline of Carnage

The last three-quarters of this somewhat truncated post-World War II American Century have, in effect, been a timeline of carnage, though few in this country would notice or acknowledge that. After all, since 1945, Americans have only once been “at war†at home, when almost 3,000 civilians died in an attack meant to provoke â€" well, something like the war on terror that also become a war of terror and a spreader of terror movements in our world.

As journalist William Arkin recently argued , the U.S. has created a permanent war state meant to facilitate “endless war.†As he writes, at this very moment, our nation “is killing or bombing in perhaps 10 different countries,†possibly more, and there’s nothing remarkably out of the ordinary about that in our recent past.

The question that Americans seldom even think to ask is this: What if the U.S. were to begin to dismantle its empire of bases, repurpose so many of those militarized taxpayer dollars to our domestic needs, abandon this country’s focus on permanent war, and forsake the Pentagon as our holy church? What if, even briefly, the wars, conflicts, plots, killings, drone assassinations, all of it stopped?

What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?


Hemanth Kumar , April 30, 2021 at 8:11 am

Here in Asia, many people think the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was an act of flaying the dying horse, since Japan was staring at defeat even without the bombs. It was a totally callous act of the USA to drop the bombs just to “test their efficacyâ€.

Why then the bombs could not have dropped on Germany that was still waging war at that time? Asians smirk and say one) the “collateral†damage of radiation etc., to neighbours like France who were Allies and two) they were (and are) ‘whites’; unlike Japan and its neighbours.

NotTimothyGeithner , April 30, 2021 at 9:40 am

The war in Europe was over when the bomb was first tested.

The Rev Kev , April 30, 2021 at 9:43 am

I think that you have the dates mixed up. The war against Germany in Europe ended on May 7th and the testing of the first atom bomb was not until 16th July when the first bomb went off at Alamogordo in New Mexico. The following month the two remaining atom bombs that the US had were dropped on Japan. In short, the bombs arrived too late to use in Europe.

JBird4049 , April 30, 2021 at 3:57 pm

The bomb was built with Berlin being the first target, but because the war ended a year sooner than what everyone thought it would and making the very first bombs took longer than planned, it was used on Japan. It was probably used as a demonstration for the Soviets, but considering that sixty-six other large Japanese cities had already been completely destroyed by “conventional†firebombing, and in Tokyo’s case, with greater casualties than either nuclear bombing, the Bomb wasn’t really needed. The descriptions and the personal accounts of the destruction of Tokyo (or Dresden and Hamburg) are (if that is even possible) worse than of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Honestly, just what new and excitingly horrific ways of killing people the atom bomb used was not clearly understood. They generally thought of it as a bigger kaboom in a smaller package. And honestly, being pre-cremated during an entire night with your family and neighbors in the local bomb-shelter or dying after a few days, weeks, or even a month from radiation poisoning, is not really a difference is it?

WobblyTelomeres , April 30, 2021 at 6:28 pm

“More bang for the buck†is the phrase I heard years ago at Los Alamos.

John Wright , April 30, 2021 at 11:56 am

Another view has the dropping of the atomic bombs was a message, not to Japan, but to the Soviet Union.

From https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/30/books/did-we-need-to-drop-it.html

“FOR 20 years after Harry Truman ordered the atomic bomb dropped on Japan in August 1945, most American scholars and citizens subscribed to the original, official version of the story: the President had acted to avert a horrendous invasion of Japan that could have cost 200,000 to 500,000 American lives. Then a young political economist named Gar Alperovitz published a book of ferocious revisionism, “Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam†(1965). While acknowledging the paucity of evidence available at the time, he argued that dropping the atomic bomb “was not needed to end the war or to save lives†but was Truman’s means of sending a chastening message to the Soviet Union.â€

Timh , April 30, 2021 at 1:32 pm

If we accept that at face value, then certainly the second bombing was unecessary. The threat would have been enough. But the US had a second bomb design to test…

BCD , April 30, 2021 at 4:13 pm

Few things working here. The US needed Japan to surrender quickly before Stalin invaded (which they asked him to do) so he couldn’t get his forces onto the island where the Allies couldn’t stop him. Most Japanese feared Stalin and preferred surrendering to the US but the Japanese government was trying to use talks with the USSR to get better terms than unconditional surrender (little did they know Stalin was licking his chops for more territory under his iron curtain).

The first bomb design (little man) was significantly less ambitious, it was so certain to function they never tested it because a study had proven there was almost no chance it would fail.

Fat boy was the scientific leap in technology needing to be demonstrated. Building little man was mostly a matter of enriching Uranium vs Fat boy Plutonium enrichment harder and detonation mechanism more complicated. However the end result was a bomb that could produce significantly higher yields with smaller amounts of fissionable material where both the size of the bomb could be significantly reduced and the yield of the device could be significantly scaled up at the same time.

Fat boy demonstrated the USA could someday be putting nukes on V2 rockets recently smuggled out of Germany. Even more important Fat boy is a precursor to the mechanism that initiates the H bomb fusion devices that Edward Teller would soon be Dr Strangloving.

Even after Trinity Fat boy still had very high odds of failure. They feared looking like fools if it failed and the USSR ended up with the Plutoniumt. As a result the US Air Force dropped little man first because it was certain to work. After the 1st bomb dropped, the Soviets declared war and began their invasion of Japan which forced Truman’s hand to drop Fat boy too. Even after Fat Boy, war mongers in Japan still refused to surrender where Emperor Hirohito finally overruled them and although there was a military coupe attempted, it failed.

Thus ended the most bloody conflict in the history of human kind.

Harold , April 30, 2021 at 7:52 pm

I’m not saying it isn’t true, but is there any actual evidence that the bombs were dropped as “a message to the Soviet Union†and not to speed the end of the war?

Also, who exactly wanted to send this “message� The US generals were against it, I understand.

Jason , April 30, 2021 at 9:23 pm

An apologia on bomb design, manufacture, and real-world application!

These ones weren’t even atomic:

https://i0.wp.com/wrongkindofgreen.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/libya-before-and-after-1.jpg

And look what they can do. Yay bombs.

Tom Pfotzer , April 30, 2021 at 9:25 am

“What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?â€

a. All those families whose livelihood is based on waging war would have to find a new job. These people will fight tooth and nail to avoid change

b. The resource grabs by the rich people behind the Oz-like curtain would fail. Their fate would be that of the English aristocrats who have to rent out their castles in order to maintain a roof over their head. These people will fight tooth and nail to avoid change

c. The general public would have a fire-hose of newly-available resources to direct toward activities which benefit all the rest of the families outside A and B above

d. Fear-based leverage by the few over the many would be diminished. Attention would be re-directed toward valid problems we all face

=====

There’s an interesting question which I see posed from time to time, and often ask myself. It runs thus:

“Who decides who our “enemies†are, and why they are “enemies�

This is a fundamental question which I believe very few of us can currently answer accurately. Yet this question carries a $1.2T per year consequence. That’s a lot of money to allocate toward something we know nothing about.

One time I asked an acquaintance â€" who spent a career at CIA â€" that question. His reply was “Why, Congress decides who our enemies are, and why. Congress then tells the CIA what to doâ€.

I wasn’t sure if he truly believed that. It’s quite possible he did, of course, and I’m sure many of the people in group A above surely do think they’re doing honorable and patriotic work.

Group B above â€" the people who are actually moving the chess pieces of “the Great Game†â€" they are pretty clear on who defines our “enemies†and why they are “enemiesâ€. And they wisely don’t stand in front of podiums and explain their actions. These people aren’t visible, or explained, or known because it’s better for them not to be.

The way to combat manipulation by these predators is to:

a. Know them by their actions. Predators predate.
b. Don’t participate. In order for them to predate, they need minions. Don’t be a minion. Instead…
c. Be the giver, the creator and the constructor of things that are of no use to predators

NotTimothyGeithner , April 30, 2021 at 10:06 am

It’s not the soldiers but the contractors who live in dumpy overpriced holes like Northern Virginia.

As to your acquaintance, my godfather was in the CIA in the 60’s and a bit into the 70’s, and he might not say Congress as much as the President’s Chief of Staff as threat they choose what the President sees. You have to remember it’s primarily an organization of boring paper pushers looking to get promoted which requires political patronage. Imagine getting the Canada desk. You’ll be at a dead end unless you paint it as a grave threat. Then there is information overload and just the sheer size of the US. They would file reports, he mentioned an incident in Africa in the wake of decolonization when y godfather was stationed there that maybe warranted the President’s attention, but to get information to the President’s CoS took so long, it was in the President’s daily newspaper before the report could be handled. By then, why care, given the size of the US? Who can get to the Chief of Staff? Congress, so everyone else lobbies them. The CIA director is an appendage of the CoS.

When the President wants something, everyone jumps, but when the President doesn’t care, everyone is jockeying get for patronage.

HH , April 30, 2021 at 10:35 am

The war machine is sustained by plutocrats and their sociopathic flunkies in the national security state. How this works is clearly depicted in “The Devil’s Chessboard,†by David Talbot, a deeply depressing chronicle of how Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles did the dirty work of US corporations worldwide. The arrogance, impunity, and irresponsibility of these men established the framework of our secret government, which remains intact to this day.

It would be pleasant to believe that this evil persists because of public ignorance, but like the good Germans of the Nazi era, Americans accept that deception, torture, and murder are routinely practiced on our behalf to maintain our high standard of living and to keep us “safe.†The reverence for the operatives of the US national security state is evident throughout our popular culture, and that is a damning judgment on the American people.

Tom Pfotzer , April 30, 2021 at 11:17 am

Yes. Succinctly stated, and quite correct.

Of course the core problems are stationed at the place hardest to get to: right between our ears. This complicity disease runs deep and wide.

While I often succumb to that same despondency you mentioned, occasionally I interrupt the doom tape to notice that there’s a lot of people who are paddling hard toward a new ethos…like the posters here @ NC, for ex.

So today I’m going to indulge in a little happiness. Plant a tree. Do something good, something durable, something hopeful.

Something that offers no real hope of rent extraction potential.

:)

JBird4049 , April 30, 2021 at 8:53 pm

It was nice being accused of supporting the terrorists because I supported the rule of law and human rights, not to mention the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

WTF do some people think that the Founders wanted an extremely small army, a large organized militia, and passed the Bill of Rights? It was a reaction to what the British Army did to them (using much of the same tactics as the current “justice†system does today.) The ignorance and lack of thinking is really annoying.

Much of what the British military did was not good. Even now some of it would not be allowed in a court of law, but I do not recall them being nearly as violent, brutal, or deadly in their tactics while enforcing the King’s Law as the current regime or the local police are. That the milder British tactics caused a civil war with in a decade, and that the people then had less to fear from an occupying army as we do from “our†police is disturbing to think on.

But wars always come home, don’t they? Faux toughness on the supposed baddies here with claims of treason and insurrections on protests and riots now that often would hardly be in the news fifty years ago, so great was the protests and riots happening then. The cry to use the same tactics that did not work overseas to be used here at home. “To keep us safe.â€

Swamp Yankee , May 1, 2021 at 2:06 am

There’s truth to this, but once the war was really on, British and Tory/Loyalist brutality had decisive effects on public opinion, putting lots of people into the Whig/Patriot camp. Tom Paine makes great efforts to publicize British sexual assaults, looting, and general thugishness as they chase the Continental Army across New Jersey in 1776; the cruelty of backcountry British cavalry officers and Tory rangers in the Carolinas was legendary as the war reaches its latter phases.

And there was brutality on the other side, too, especially for Loyalist elites who faced a kind of “social death.†It was a war, after all, as well as a social revolution. It wasn’t France in 1789 or Russia in 1917, but it was rough, especially given the small population size.

FluffytheObeseCat , April 30, 2021 at 11:36 am

Except as Engelhardt just pointed out, the national security state does not “maintain our high standard of livingâ€. It’s an immense net drain on our standard of living. The only Americans made well-to-do or wealthy by it are those who are directly involved in supplying contract goods and services to the system.

FriarTuck , April 30, 2021 at 3:41 pm

I don’t know if Americans “accept†it as opposed to taking a dim view of being able to affect change.

The levers the average person has to change the behavior of the state is infinitesimal. Add to that the scope of action and Overton window mediated by the hypernormalized press ecosystem just means those in power get to act without restraint.

Hell, Obama literally said “We tortured some folks†and the media and government barely shrugged. To my knowledge, no one went to jail, no one was brought up in the Hague, and some of the same ghouls that perpetrated such crimes got cushy commenter jobs in the media.

Right now, localities can’t even keep their police from regularly killing citizens.

What does the average person do in the face of such things?

Jason , April 30, 2021 at 5:07 pm

Hell, Obama literally said “We tortured some folks†and the media and government barely shrugged. To my knowledge, no one went to jail, no one was brought up in the Hague, and some of the same ghouls that perpetrated such crimes got cushy commenter jobs in the media.

No one went to jail. Certainly no one went before the Hague. No bankers went to jail either. Even during the nutty Reagan administration, people went to jail for financial shenanigans. Some got long sentences. Hell, the Iran-Contra stuff was at least covered and people were indicted, even if they all got pardoned. Not anymore. These shenanigans are the norm and happen right out in the open. I’d imagine some of it’s been given legal cover. It seems like it’s become the expected behavior within these circles. To act otherwise â€" to attempt to be honest, in other words â€" is seen as weak and is mocked as fiercely as a weaker child on the playground might be.

It’s just a continuing regression. And as you note, it’s an excellent career builder:

“Looking for a job in mainstream media? Research has shown that reducing your sense of ethics and morality actually helps you get ahead.â€

John Wright , May 1, 2021 at 1:53 pm

I like to quote a radio advertisement that a local Northern California bail bondsman ran on one local radio station years ago.

“Friends don’t let friends do timeâ€.

LowellHighlander , April 30, 2021 at 10:59 am

Doubtless, Ms. Smith and Ms. Engelhardt have provided a key public service here. And I speak as a veteran, decorated for service in the War Over Oil (a.k.a. the “Persian Gulf Warâ€).

Between the vast economic inequality currently raging in our country, the social stratification enabled by access to colleges and universities accepted as “eliteâ€, the trashing of Constitutional protections (e.g. the 4th Amendment, now thoroughly eviscerated owing to the “PATRIOT ACTâ€), and the rampaging rule by “intelligence agencies†over foreign policy, I see no reason why any father should tell his children that this is a country worth fighting and dying for. [Think: China] Of course, the Empire â€" just as Rome did in its dying days â€" will be able to find enough desperately poor who will take the king’s shilling and don the uniform.

If anyone wishes to prove me wrong, let them work for a substantive “peace dividend†for a 2-3 years. Then we can sit down and talk; I’ll buy the ale.

tegnost , April 30, 2021 at 11:38 am

I think Englehart is a “Mr.†but I don’t want to get myself in trouble with the gender neutralization crowd

LowellHighlander , April 30, 2021 at 12:41 pm

oops; my apologies to all.

Rod , April 30, 2021 at 12:25 pm

And here is a nice companion reading alluding to Media collusion by a CNN colluder:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/29/opinions/lies-told-to-sustain-us-and-uk-mission-in-afghanistan-walsh/index.html

from the above article:

In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a “voluntary†activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways.

Because, imo,

Since the Vietnam War, which roiled the politics of this nation and was protested in the streets of this country by an antiwar movement that came to include significant numbers of active-duty soldiers and veterans, war has played a remarkably recessive role in American life.

Despite having already ‘pledged’ at my Uncles Invitation, with the Draft’s End, I had great hope my future would see the great Peace Dividand rather than 9 more Opportunity Conflicts.
Little did that then 21 year old see the brilliance in that Pentagon Strategy.
I Now firmly support a No Exemption Draft for all post HS.
Military Service being only one, and a restricted one, of many counter-balancing options available for Public Service for that cohort.

Frank Little , April 30, 2021 at 12:42 pm

This article reminded me of one of the best Congressional Research Service reports that I’ve read: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2020 . Despite being just a list of dates and locations with a brief description, it comes in at around 50 pages, which I think is a testament to how important foreign military engagement has been to the growth of the US even before 1945. Between these foreign wars and the genocidal war against the indigenous people of the continent I think it’s fair to say this country has been at war since its founding.

juno mas , April 30, 2021 at 6:16 pm

Correct. Even the so called Louisiana Purchase was not really a purchase of land, but a faux “option†to engage in land treaties with the native Americans;.the US chose Indian Wars and relocation treaties that have been violated repeatedly. (This territory is now known as the Red States.)

The rest of the land extending to the west coast was acquired through conquest with the new nation of Mexico. I guess the only real honest acquisition would be Seward’s Icebox.

JBird4049 , April 30, 2021 at 8:30 pm

>>I guess the only real honest acquisition would be Seward’s Icebox.

Alaska has only been inhabited for a few tens of thousands of years. I would think that the natives should have some say about who “owns†the land even though the Russian Empire did say that they did. The reasons sometimes included the use of guns. As for stealing Mexico’s territory, again that was, and in some areas still is, inhabited by natives who somehow became under the “governance†of New Spain or the country of Mexico despite not being asked about it and often still a majority part of the population in many areas when Mexico lost control.

Often, Europeans or Americans would show up somewhere, plant a flag, and say that they claimed or owned the very inhabited land, sometimes with farms and even entire cities. Rather arrogant, I would say.

Harold , April 30, 2021 at 8:49 pm

“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.â€

juno mas , April 30, 2021 at 9:44 pm

I agree. Seward’s Icebox was not empty at time of sale. My understanding is that Seward thought it was. So faraway, so cold; no one would be living there, right?

As I’ve commented here many times, it was small pox not small bullets that allowed the Old World to take the New. There were estimates of 20 million native Americans living on the land now known as Mexico and the US. 90% were felled by Old World disease before Custer lost his scalp to the northern Plains Indians. In a fair fight the Indians would be enforcing the treaties.

It is amazing how the US continues to engage in war and still lose: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. . .Ukraine?

kgw , April 30, 2021 at 5:58 pm

I remember the words of Patrick Henry in his speech on the floor of the Virginia legislature debating the passing of the new constitution…

In particular, his views on the standing army : “What does a farmer in Virginia have to fear from a farmer in France?â€

Democracy Working , April 30, 2021 at 10:29 pm

For nearly a decade now every time I’ve read about the war in Afghanistan I’ve thought about Tim Kreider’s mordant 2011 cartoon We Could’ve Had The Moon, Instead We Get Afghanistan . Ten years later, that $432 billion has ballooned to $2.3 trillion (and more) and every word he wrote still stands. :-(

The author has retired from cartooning and now focuses on essay writing.

Sound of the Suburbs , May 1, 2021 at 4:37 am

We are going to have to halt the production lines.
The warehouses are full of bombs already, there is no more room.

Biden to the rescue; he’s started dropping bombs already.
When you have a large defence industry, you need war.
The only purpose is to use up the output from the defence industry.

This is what they realised in the 1940s, but we forgot.
http://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf

“The dislike of government spending, whether on public investment or
consumption, is overcome by concentrating government expenditure on
armamentsâ€

Sound of the Suburbs , May 1, 2021 at 4:47 am

Ran out of edit time.
Should be two quotes.

“The dislike of government spending, whether on public investment or consumption, is overcome by concentrating government expenditure on armamentsâ€

“Large-scale armaments are inseparable from the expansion of the armed forces and the preparation of plans for a war of conquest. They also induce competitive rearmament of other countries.â€

These were the lessons they learnt from the 1930s.

Susan the other , May 1, 2021 at 12:18 pm

So now, here we are. And how do we create a peaceful world? Refit the US military for a sustainable world. It will prove to be very useful. We and other advanced nations still have the advantage for prosperity but we should not abuse it. The whole idea back in 1945 was for the world to prosper. So I’ll just suggest my usual hack: Get rid of the profit motive. It’s pure mercantilism. And totally self defeating in a world seeking sustainability for everyone.

Philip Ebersole , May 1, 2021 at 1:35 pm

The Manhattan Project was an enormously expensive enterprise with two components â€" the development of a uranium bomb (Oak Ridge) and a plutonium bomb (Hanford, WA).

If no bomb had been used, the project would have been considered a waste of time, and there would have been a congressional investigation. If only one bomb had been used, half the cost would have been considered a waste.

I’m not saying these were the only reasons for dropping the bombs. The event was, as they say, “overdetermined.â€

[May 03, 2021] Escobar- US, Europe, The Vienna JCPOA 'Shadowplay'

May 03, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Few people, apart from specialists, may have heard of the JCPOA Joint Commission. That’s the group in charge of a Sisyphean task: the attempt to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal through a series of negotiations in Vienna.

The Iranian negotiating team was back in Vienna yesterday, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi. Shadowplay starts with the fact the Iranians negotiate with the other members of the P+1 â€" Russia, China, France, UK and Germany â€" but not directly with the US.

That’s quite something: after all, it was the Trump administration that blew up the JCPOA. There is an American delegation in Vienna, but they only talk with the Europeans.

Shadowplay goes turbo when every Viennese coffee table knows about Tehran’s red lines: either it’s back to the original JCPOA as it was agreed in Vienna in 2015 and then ratified by the UN Security Council, or nothing.

Araghchi, mild-mannered and polite, has had to go on the record once again to stress that Tehran will leave if the talks veer towards “bullyingâ€, time wasting or even a step-by-step ballroom dance, which is time wasting under different terminology.

Neither flat out optimistic nor pessimistic, he remains, let’s say, cautiously upbeat, at least in public: “We are not disappointed and we will do our job. Our positions are very clear and firm. The sanctions must be lifted, verified and then Iran must return to its commitments.â€

So, at least in the thesis, the debate is still on. Araghchi: “There are two types of U.S. sanctions against Iran. First, categorized or so-called divisional sanctions, such as oil, banking and insurance, shipping, petrochemical, building and automobile sanctions, and second, sanctions against real and legal individuals.â€

“Second†is the key issue. There’s absolutely no guarantee the US Congress will lift most or at least a significant part of these sanctions.

Everyone in Washington knows it â€" and the American delegation knows it.

When the Foreign Ministry in Tehran, for instance, says that 60% or 70% has been agreed upon, that’s code for lifting of divisional sanctions. When it comes to “secondâ€, Araghchi has to be evasive: “There are complex issues in this area that we are examiningâ€.

Now compare it with the assessment of informed Iranian insiders in Washington such as nuclear policy expert Seyed Hossein Mousavian : they’re more like pessimistic realists.

That takes into consideration the non-negotiable red lines established by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei himself. Plus non-stop pressure by Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who are all JCPOA-adverse.

But then there’s extra shadowplay. Israeli intel has already notified the security cabinet that a deal most certainly will be reached in Vienna. After all, the narrative of a successful deal is already being constructed as a foreign policy victory by the Biden-Harris administration â€" or, as cynics prefer, Obama-Biden 3.0.

Meanwhile, Iranian diplomacy remains on overdrive. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is visiting Qatar and Iraq, and has already met with the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim al Thani.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, virtually at the end of his term before the June presidential elections, always goes back to the same point: no more US sanctions; Iran’s verification; then Iran will return to its “nuclear obligationsâ€.

The Foreign Ministry has even released a quite detailed fact sheet once again stressing the need to remove “all sanctions imposed, re-imposed and re-labeled since January 20, 2017â€.

The window of opportunity for a deal won’t last long. Hardliners in Tehran couldn’t care less. At least 80% of Tehran members of Parliament are now hardliners. The next President most certainly will be a hardliner. Team Rouhani’s efforts have been branded a failure since the onset of Trump’s “maximum pressure†campaign. Hardliners are already in post-JCPOA mode.

That fateful Fateh

What none of the actors in the shadowplay can admit is that the revival of the JCPOA pales compared to the real issue: the power of Iranian missiles.

In the original 2015 negotiations in Vienna â€" follow them in my Persian Miniatures e-book â€" Obama-Biden 2.0 did everything in their power to include missiles in the deal.

Every grain of sand in the Negev desert knows that Israel will go no holds barred to retain its nuclear weapon primacy in the Middle East. Via a spectacular kabuki, the fact that Israel is a nuclear power happens to remain “invisible†to most of world public opinion.

While Khamenei has issued a fatwa clearly stating that producing, stockpiling and using weapons of mass destruction â€" nuclear included â€" is haram (banned by Islam), Israel’s leadership feels free to order stunts such as the sabotage via Mossad of the (civilian) Iranian nuclear complex at Natanz.

The head of Iran’s Parliament Energy Committee, Fereydoun Abbasi Davani, even accused Washington and London of being accomplices to the sabotage of Natanz, as they arguably supplied intel to Tel Aviv.

Yet now a lone missile is literally exploding a great deal of the shadowplay.

On April 22, in the dead of night before dawn, a Syrian missile exploded only 30 km away from the ultra-sensitive Israeli nuclear reactor of Dimona. The official â€" and insistent â€" Israeli spin: this was an “errantâ€.

Well, not really.

Here â€" third video from the top â€" is footage of the quite significant explosion. Also significantly, Tel Aviv remained absolutely mum when it comes to offering a missile proof of ID. Was it an old Soviet 1967 SA-5? Or, rather more likely, a 2012 Iranian Fateh-110 short range surface-to-surface, manufactured in Syria as the M-600 , and also possessed by Hezbollah?

A Fateh family tree can be seen in the attached chart. The inestimable Elijah Magnier has posed some very good questions about the Dimona near-hit. I complemented it with a quite enlightening discussion with physicists, with input by a military intel expert.

The Fateh-110 operates as a classic ballistic missile, until the moment the warhead starts maneuvering to evade ABM defenses. Precision is up to 10 meters, nominally 6 meters. So it hit exactly where it was supposed to hit. Israel officially confirmed that the missile was not intercepted â€" after a trajectory of roughly 266 km.

This opens a brand new can of worms. It implies that the performance of the much hyped and recently upgraded Iron Dome is far from stellar â€" and talk about an euphemism. The Fateh flew so low that Iron Dome could not identify it.

The inevitable conclusion is this was a message/warning combo. From Damascus. With a personal stamp from Bashar al-Assad, who had to clear such a sensitive missile launch. A message/warning delivered via Iranian missile technology fully available to the Axis of Resistance â€" proving that regional actors have serious stealth capability.

It’s crucial to remember that when Tehran dispatched a volley of deliberately older Fateh-313 versions at the US base Ayn al-Assad in Iraq, as a response to the assassination of Gen Soleimani in January 2020, the American radars went blank.

Iranian missile technology as top strategic deterrence. Now that’s the shadowplay that turns Vienna into a sideshow.

[May 03, 2021] U.S. Four Star Generals Ask DNI To Stop Lying

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Dear Director of National Intelligence, ..."
"... we, the the 4-star Generals leading U.S. regional commands all over the world, are increasingly concerned with about the lack of evidence for claims you make about our opponents. ..."
"... We, as true believers, do not doubt whatever judgment you make about the harmful activities of Russia, Iran and China. However - our allies and partners do not yet subscribe to the bliss of ignorance. They keep asking us for facts that support those judgments ..."
"... Unfortunately, we have none that we could provide. ..."
"... You say that Russia thought to manipulate Trump allies and to smear Biden , that Russia and Iran aimed to sway the 2020 election through covert campaigns and that China runs covert operations to influence members of Congress . ..."
"... Media reports have appeared in which 'intelligence sources' claim that Russia, China and Iran are all paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers. Fortunately no soldier got hurt by those rumors. ..."
"... Our allies and partners read those and other reports and ask us for evidence. They want to know how exactly Russia, Iran and China are doing these things. ..."
"... They, of course, hope to learn from our experience to protect their own countries. ..."
"... Currently we are not able to provide them with such information. Your people keep telling our that all of it is SECRET. ..."
"... We therefore ask you to declassify the facts that support your judgments. * ..."
"... PS: * Either that or shut the fuck up. ..."
May 03, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

These folks have had it with the constant stream of baseless propaganda U.S. intelligence is spilling over the world:

Dear Director of National Intelligence,

we, the the 4-star Generals leading U.S. regional commands all over the world, are increasingly concerned with about the lack of evidence for claims you make about our opponents.

We, as true believers, do not doubt whatever judgment you make about the harmful activities of Russia, Iran and China. However - our allies and partners do not yet subscribe to the bliss of ignorance. They keep asking us for facts that support those judgments

Unfortunately, we have none that we could provide.

You say that Russia thought to manipulate Trump allies and to smear Biden , that Russia and Iran aimed to sway the 2020 election through covert campaigns and that China runs covert operations to influence members of Congress .

Media reports have appeared in which 'intelligence sources' claim that Russia, China and Iran are all paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers. Fortunately no soldier got hurt by those rumors.

Our allies and partners read those and other reports and ask us for evidence. They want to know how exactly Russia, Iran and China are doing these things.

They, of course, hope to learn from our experience to protect their own countries.

Currently we are not able to provide them with such information. Your people keep telling our that all of it is SECRET.

We therefore ask you to declassify the facts that support your judgments. *

Sincerely

The Generals

----
PS: * Either that or shut the fuck up.

The above may well have been a draft for the letter behind this report :

America’s top spies say they are looking for ways to declassify and release more intelligence about adversaries’ bad behavior, after a group of four-star military commanders sent a rare and urgent plea asking for help in the information war against Russia and China.

The internal memo from nine regional military commanders last year, which was reviewed by POLITICO and not made public, implored spy agencies to provide more evidence to combat "pernicious conduct."

Only by "waging the truth in the public domain against America’s 21st century challengers†can Washington shore up support from American allies, they said. But efforts to compete in the battle of ideas, they added, are hamstrung by overly stringent secrecy practices.

“We request this help to better enable the US, and by extension its allies and partners, to win without fighting, to fight now in so-called gray zones, and to supply ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives," the commanders who oversee U.S. military forces in Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, as well as special operations troops, wrote to then-acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire last January.

“Unfortunately, we continue to miss opportunities to clarify truth, counter distortions, puncture false narratives, and influence events in time to make a difference," they added.

The generals must have been seriously miffed to write such a letter. There have been a number of published intelligence judgments where the NSA had expressed low confidence in conclusions made mainly by the CIA. The NSA is part of the military.

Between two bureaucracies such an accusing letter or internal memo is the equivalent of a declaration of war. It is doubtful that the intelligence folks would win that fight.

That gives some hope that the Office of the DNI and the agencies below it will now lessen their production of nonsensical claims.

Posted by b on April 28, 2021 at 15:49 UTC | Permalink


Josh , Apr 28 2021 16:02 utc | 1

Right on man.
Thank You.
Kartoschka , Apr 28 2021 16:04 utc | 2
I hope you're right.
It could go the other way.
They will produce more "evidence"
psychohistorian , Apr 28 2021 16:12 utc | 3
Thanks for that b....is it rubber meets the road time?

I just read that the US is getting all its ambassadorial folk out of Afghanistan....maybe somebody is believing May 1 is a firmer deadline than the Biden 9/11 myth.

The shit show is about to crash, IMO, but if it is in slow motion, this crazy could go on for a while....what geo-political straw will break the camel's back?

Caliman , Apr 28 2021 16:25 utc | 4
Lewis Black, a pretty good US comedian, used to have a bit in the mid-2000's where he would ask the W administration flacks why they didn't just make up evidence about the Iraq WMDs after they "found out" that there were no weapons in the country. Black would tell them just make it up; we're used to it. Just give us an excuse to believe in the BS for God's sake; we'll do it!

I feel it's the same with our satrap nations around the world. At this time, is there anyone who does not understand that US foreign policy is conducted for and by MICIMATT (look it up)? So the generals have got nothing to worry about: keep pounding out that BS; there's a willing, able, and ready corps of salesmen and women in the media who will make enough of the public believe it for "democracy's" purposes.

Serg , Apr 28 2021 16:29 utc | 5
General Mackenzie who testified before the US House Armed Services Committee said Iran’s widespread use of drones means that the US is operating without complete air superiority for the first time since the Korean War.

Iran has time and again stated that its military capabilities are merely defensive and are designed to deter foreign threats.

https://politnew.com/politics/4796-gen-kenneth-mckenzie-iran-possesses-one-of-most-capable-militaries-in-the-middle-east.html

librul , Apr 28 2021 16:30 utc | 6
General Flynn had been head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (military).
The CIA was out to get him. It took a while but they eventually hamstrung him good.
gottlieb , Apr 28 2021 16:36 utc | 7
"Dear Generals, who haven't won a war in 75 years, so much for the DIA huh? We'd love to share our intelligence with you, our evidence showing the overwhelming and egregious misdeeds of our hateful, spiteful disgusting enemies, whose questioning of our Word should be met with charges of treason, but to give you evidence on top of our own unquestionable and 100% correct threat estimations, would compromise our Intelligence Gathering Methods which are of the strictest security and would threaten the ongoing ability of this Agency to gather and disseminate the unquestionable facts that without fear of contradiction we know is the truth. In short, dear Generals - work on winning a war, any war, and don't meddle in places that befuddle your ability to follow orders. Hooah! The CIA."
librul , Apr 28 2021 16:51 utc | 8
This fight has been ongoing for years.
Bottom line: The CIA wants to control the messages and narrative.

Article from 2013, great lead photo. Robert Mueller, James Clapper, John Brennan
and General Flynn all seated near each other.

https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2013/07/intel-wars-dia-cia-and-flynns-battle-consolidate-spying/66716/
Headline and subtext:

Intel Wars: DIA, CIA and Flynn’s Battle to Consolidate Spying
The Defense Department wants in on the spying game. But will the CIA block their efforts?


The CIA essentially absorbed the Pentagon’s only military-wide spying agency seven years ago [2006]
when the Defense HUMINT Service was dismantled -- and now, the Pentagon wants it back.

The CIA is quietly pushing the Armed Services committees along, hoping that Flynn’s DCS will be remembered by history as a failed power grab.

Canadian Cents , Apr 28 2021 17:10 utc | 11

The CIA/FBI/17+ known/unknown agencies are clearly a security apparatus that's gone out of control when even the USA's "nine regional [four-star general] military commanders" are out of the loop and pleading to be better informed. Worryingly, though, they ask for "ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives," which they apparently are ready to go right along with.

Western news media, of course, has become but a compliant weaponized appendage of that security apparatus, and democracy, which depends on informed voters, is nowhere in control of any of this.

Down this slippery slope, lies fascism.

rgl , Apr 28 2021 17:31 utc | 13

I do not see how this is possible. Every major event, from Vietnam, to JFK, to 9-11, and a myriad of others, had US lies baked into the cake. If the US ceased to lie, it would cease to function as America functions today. It would be incapable of empire.

The US establishment, from the President on down, is based on lies. They cannot survive on truth.

No. Nothing is going to change in this regard.

librul , Apr 28 2021 17:48 utc | 15

b ended his post with: " lessen their production of nonsensical claims."

"Nonsensical" misses the mark. They are *agenda-driven* claims.
I don't believe the Generals care one whit whether the spineless jellyfish pols
in other countries see through our lies. The Generals want the Pentagon to
have more participation in shaping the agenda and it's attendant narrative.

m , Apr 28 2021 18:13 utc | 17

The military used to be that part pf the US government apparatus ("deep state") that emphasized the value and importance of allies the most.

IMHO what is happening here is that the generals sense the imcreasing cracks in the US-centered alliance system. They attribute it to the work of the intelligence community, which is certainly a contributing factor, but thr real cause is the relative decline in US power and general unreliability due to political instability. The USA is less and less attractive as a partner. When the generals ask another country for a favour as they had been used to for decades they increasingly often get just questions and excuses in return.

Erelis , Apr 28 2021 20:31 utc | 26

Is this a sign of a struggle between the CIA and Pentagon as to who is the boss of foreign and war policy? Anybody remember when CIA supported jihadists were fighting Pentagon supported groups (were they jihadists?) in Syria. Seems like the Pentagon is the one deciding on relations with the Syrian Kurds, and not the CIA. Flynn was actively helping the Damascus with info about the CIA backed jihadists.

I would rather have the Pentagon win as they are not all that hot-to-trot for actual wars. The CIA should just go back to running US media, law makers, corporation and ruining civil liberties.

K_C_ , Apr 28 2021 22:26 utc | 28

Isn't it safe to assume that *anything* the CIA says publicly, either through direct channels or their co-opted corporate media, is false? Cue the Mike Pimpeo quote: "We lied, we cheated, we stole..." and of course the entire history of that useless agency, lol.

[Apr 29, 2021] Crisis in American expertise- Washington has a dangerous destructive pattern of willful ignorance on Russia by Natylie Baldwin

Notable quotes:
"... Bernie Sanders in 2016, the self-described democratic socialist "showed little interest or knowledge about US-Russia relations and the attendant dangers of a new cold war." Instead, Sanders was ultimately content to mimic the juvenile and Manichean "democracies versus authoritarians" model of international relations. ..."
"... in the Obama era, as mediocre academics like Celeste Wallander were given positions on the National Security Council, and an ideologue like Michael McFaul was bizarrely appointed as ambassador. ..."
"... Under Biden – who caved to pressure from the foreign policy blob to not appoint Rojansky – the advisers who are in place or in line, including Jake Sullivan , Antony Blinken , Madeleine Albright/Hillary Clinton adviser Wendy Sherman, the German Marshall Fund's Karen Donfried , and State Department nominee Victoria Nuland represent more of the same dangerous ineptitude and strident thinking. Many of these advisers, like their predecessors, have little on-the-ground experience with contemporary Russia. ..."
"... Neoconservative ideologue Nuland, of course, is a slightly different case in that she has put her boots on the ground in the region. Unfortunately, that experience includes facilitating the dangerously divisive 2014 coup in Ukraine, without which Crimea would still be in Ukraine and the Donbass would be at peace. Competent officials would have warned Obama and Biden that the Maidan would lead to consequences like these. ..."
"... importantly, this 'perceived enemy' and its corresponding narrative sells... it enriches the military complexes, CIA etc. Even if it sounded unbelievable and outrageous, they will still be regurgitated and at best, given a new guised repackaging ..."
"... the author assumes that the mistakes made by advisors to Obama and others were because of incompetence, when in fact it should be seriously considered they were actually quite deliberate and planned ..."
"... the job was NOT to deliver facts to the public; the job was to tell the public how to think and what to believe; ie. anti-Russia propaganda. ..."
Apr 29, 2021 | www.rt.com
The rejection of Matthew Rojansky's candidacy as a Russia adviser to Joe Biden represents an escalation, and not a departure, from a pervasive bipartisan American pattern of dangerous ignorance about Russia in the post-Soviet era.

It was reported last week that Joe Biden's government would not be hiring Rojansky, of the Kennan Institute think tank, to help form policy towards Russia. Though the analyst is known as a moderate realist regarding Russia issues – in other words, he is not a virulent anti-Moscow ideologue – he was considered too controversial to be allowed a hearing during White House deliberations on policy regarding the world's largest country.

Rojansky's sin? Unlike many of the current crop of foreign policy officials, he actually has some expertise and experience on the subject.

While the scholar's fate may be a glaring and extreme example of an anti-Russia mindset in Washington that is counterproductive, it represents only a new low, and not a change from a pervasive bipartisan pattern in the post-Soviet era.

Those who aspire to, or attain, the most powerful executive position in the United States have shown a disturbingly willful ignorance of Russia. I learned from a former State Department official that, in response to a renowned Russia expert attempting to brief presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in 2016, the self-described democratic socialist "showed little interest or knowledge about US-Russia relations and the attendant dangers of a new cold war." Instead, Sanders was ultimately content to mimic the juvenile and Manichean "democracies versus authoritarians" model of international relations.

Similarly, an American business executive told me that, during a lunch with him and other leaders of commerce at the US Embassy in Moscow in 2012, then-Vice President Joe Biden showed no interest in his interlocutors' suggestions that it was in the US' best interests to partner with Russia after they offered social, economic, and strategic justifications for their view.

Biden seemed to see the meeting as an opportunity to lecture on his position rather than to learn or seek insight on Russia.

Moreover, once a US president is in power, the advisers that are appointed to counsel the commander in chief about Russia have been less than impressive from the 1990s onward. Condoleezza Rice served as an expert in the George Bush Senior administration and was wrong about the impending collapse of the Soviet Union. During her stint as secretary of state in the second term of the junior Bush administration, her Russian counterparts who spent significant time with her made the observation that Rice was "a Soviet expert, and not a Russia expert."

There was little improvement in the Obama era, as mediocre academics like Celeste Wallander were given positions on the National Security Council, and an ideologue like Michael McFaul was bizarrely appointed as ambassador.

According to investigative journalist Gareth Porter, advisers to Obama were so utterly incompetent that those serving in the administration really didn't think Russia had the ability or inclination to counter Washington's provocative actions in Syria, and therefore they did not plan for that possibility. This incompetence was also highlighted by Obama's public comments to the Economist in 2014, in which he claimed that Russia didn't make anything, immigrants didn't go there, and male life expectancy was 60 years – three claims that anyone with actual expertise on Russia should have easily known were false.

In fact, at that point, Russia was the second most popular migration destination in the world, after America itself, while average lifespans have been converging with those of the US over the past decade. As for manufacturing, Obama said these words at a time when the US, for instance, was totally reliant on Russian rockets for access to space, having retired its own unreliable Space Shuttle fleet. If he had access to a competent adviser on the subject, would he have made these mistakes?

Under Biden – who caved to pressure from the foreign policy blob to not appoint Rojansky – the advisers who are in place or in line, including Jake Sullivan , Antony Blinken , Madeleine Albright/Hillary Clinton adviser Wendy Sherman, the German Marshall Fund's Karen Donfried , and State Department nominee Victoria Nuland represent more of the same dangerous ineptitude and strident thinking. Many of these advisers, like their predecessors, have little on-the-ground experience with contemporary Russia.

Neoconservative ideologue Nuland, of course, is a slightly different case in that she has put her boots on the ground in the region. Unfortunately, that experience includes facilitating the dangerously divisive 2014 coup in Ukraine, without which Crimea would still be in Ukraine and the Donbass would be at peace. Competent officials would have warned Obama and Biden that the Maidan would lead to consequences like these.

It takes a special kind of hubris for the US political class to keep thinking they can get away with this level of sloppiness in understanding the world's other nuclear superpower – a country so massive that it straddles two major continents and is the sixth largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity – without serious consequences. At what point will God's providence run out?

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

If you like this story, share it with a friend!

Natylie Baldwin is author of "The View from Moscow: Understanding Russia and U.S.-Russia Relations," available at Amazon. She blogs at http://natyliesbaldwin.com/ .

See also


ewel Gyn 9 hours ago 9 hours ago

"Washington has a dangerous & destructive pattern of wilful ignorance on Russia in post-Soviet era" It is not just wilful ignorance per se. Without a 'perceived enemy', the narrative for Russia will fall apart. Ditto China, Iran, N Korea et al.

But importantly, this 'perceived enemy' and its corresponding narrative sells... it enriches the military complexes, CIA etc. Even if it sounded unbelievable and outrageous, they will still be regurgitated and at best, given a new guised repackaging, but with the antiquated contents remaining intact.

dotmafia 6 hours ago 6 hours ago
Good article, but, the author assumes that the mistakes made by advisors to Obama and others were because of incompetence, when in fact it should be seriously considered they were actually quite deliberate and planned. In the example of Obama's remarks to The Economist, the job was NOT to deliver facts to the public; the job was to tell the public how to think and what to believe; ie. anti-Russia propaganda.
Levin High 8 hours ago 8 hours ago
It used to be said that you couldn't be fired for buying IBM, now days in the US you seem to be hired for blaming Russia.
apothqowejh 9 hours ago 9 hours ago
The US State Department is packed with idiots, political appointees, ideologues and globalist nut jobs. Their lack of anything remotely like competence is as astonishing as the CIA's full on embrace of evil.
wowhead1977 4 hours ago 4 hours ago
The cabal in America always want to blame Russia. I'm a American citizen and have no problem with Russia. These so called sanctions on other countries is a control tactic that most Americans didn't vote for. This race baiting tactic is from The Fabian Society play book. Wolf in sheep's clothing is the Fabian Society logo.

We must realize that our Party's most powerful weapon is racial tension. By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races, that for centuries have been oppressed by the Whites, we can mold them to the program of the Communist Party ... In America, we will aim for subtle victory. While enflaming the color people minority against the Whites, we will instill in the Whites, a guilt complex for the exploitation of the color people.

We will aid the color people to rise to prominence in every walk of life, in the professions, and in the world of sports and entertainment. With this prestige, the color people will be able to intermarry with the Whites, and begin a process which will deliver America to our cause." ~ Israel Cohen - Fabian Society Founder

[Apr 27, 2021] Gauleiter: Swedish Filmmaker Exposes Biden Corruption In Eastern Europe And Ukraine

Apr 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Norwegian , Apr 25 2021 14:19 utc | 9

Must see video

Gauleiter: Swedish Filmmaker Exposes Biden Corruption In Eastern Europe And Ukraine

Norwegian , Apr 25 2021 14:34 utc | 11

@Norwegian | Apr 25 2021 14:19 utc | 9

Btw, I think the filmmaker is Finnish, not Swedish. This is judging from his dialect and the video contents.

@jared and @Lelush : Thank you

[Apr 27, 2021] Czech counterintelligence finds no proof of Russians presence in Vrbetice - president (TASS, April 25, 2021)

Apr 27, 2021 | tass.com

I will allow myself to quote from b’s link:

Czech counterintelligence finds no proof of Russians’ presence in Vrbetice - president (TASS, April 25, 2021)

PRAGUE, April 25. /TASS/. The evidence that some "Russian agents" were present at the ammo depot in the village of Vrbetice was not mentioned in the reports of the Czech Republic’s Security Information Service, Czech President Milos Zeman said in his emergency televised address in connection with the 2014 incident on Sunday.

"I can state that the report of the Security Information Service says and I underline this - that there is neither proof nor evidence [of eyewitnesses] that these two agents [the Russians who were accused of involvement in the incident - TASS] were at the [ammo depot] in Vrbetice. When the premises of the second depot were examined right before the explosion there, no explosive device was found there," Zeman said in his address broadcast by Prima and CNN Prima News TV channels.

The president stressed that the suspicion about the alleged role of two foreign agents in the 2014 ammo depot explosions in Vrbetice came to the surface over the past weeks. "The Security Information Service had never before mentioned the incident in Vrbetice over the past six years," he noted.
…

In the Russian-language version of the same story Zeman also talks about the possibility that the explosives were not properly handled:

Zeman: counterintelligence has no evidence of the involvement of "agents of the Russian Federation" in the explosions in Vrbetica (TASS, April 25, 2021 â€" machine translated from Russian)

…
Zeman also said that careless handling of ammunition is being considered as the cause of the explosions and the possible involvement of foreign intelligence services is being considered. "We are working with two versions - that the explosions [in Vrbetica] occurred as a result of careless handling of ammunition, and the second version - that agents of foreign special services are to blame for this," Zeman said.
…

Zeman also provided an indirect hint as to who might have coordinated the scandal on the Czech side and on whose orders:

Czech President questioned the effectiveness of the CIA (TASS, April 25, 2021 â€" machine translated from Russian, emphasis mine)

PRAGUE, April 25. / TASS /. Czech President Milos Zeman questioned the effectiveness of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in connection with incorrect information, on the basis of which the United States made an erroneous decision on a military operation against Iraq.

"The CIA is the intelligence agency that informed the US government that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And this [CIA allegation] was not only not confirmed, but was [completely] refuted," Zeman said Sunday in an interview with Prima and CNN. Prima NEWS . - The consequences [of this step by the CIA] were terrible - thousands of lives, enormous material damage, and so on. Is this how a high-quality intelligence service works? "

The head of state made such a statement, answering the question whether he intends to confer the rank of general on the head of the Security and Information Service - counterintelligence of the Czech Republic - Michal Koudelka, who was recently awarded the CIA medal in the United States . Zeman said that he would consider the possibility of his promotion next year and only if the version of the Czech special services about the involvement of foreign agents in the explosions at the ammunition depot in the village of Vrbetice in 2014 is confirmed.

Earlier Zakharova noted that the local authorities didn’t even know who operated the ammo depot:

Zakharova commented on the investigation of the explosions in Vrbetica (RT, April 20, 2021 â€" machine translated from Russian)

…
“Seven years have passed. Did the trial take place? There was no court. Two people died ... Here is the answer to your question, including - who is the beneficiary of all this marasmic parade. There was an investigation, there was an investigation - nothing came of it, " RIA Novosti quotes Zakharova.
…
She said that "the local authorities did not know that since 2006 the ammunition depot has not been used by the army, and the Ministry of Defense is renting out the warehouse premises to private arms companies."

Zakharova added that "the huge amount of weapons that were in the warehouses for eight years were without any control from the authorities."
…

Posted by: S | Apr 25 2021 13:05 utc | 4

[Apr 27, 2021] The Brits are the real pros in disinformation and obfuscation

Apr 27, 2021 | turcopolier.com

English Outsider says: April 17, 2021 at 7:14 am

The BBC take on the position in the Ukraine –

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-56776463

The art of omission at its most effective. Reply

[Apr 27, 2021] These days evidence no longer has to be presented for a claim because the accusation of Russia is a loyalty test for the Amerikastani Empire and vassal citizens.

Apr 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Biswapriya Purkayast , Apr 25 2021 14:20 utc | 10

These days evidence no longer has to be presented for a claim because the accusation is a loyalty test for the Amerikastani Empire and vassal citizens. The more outlandish the claim the more they have to rush to prove their loyalty so outlandish evidence free claims are far from as insane as they seem to be. They have a very definite purpose.

I do not want to talk about Covid though I'm Indian and my former teacher died today of it. I am convinced that discussions about it inevitably work to split the anti Imperialist resistance.

jared , Apr 25 2021 14:48 utc | 13

@ Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Apr 25 2021 14:20 utc | 10

"I am convinced that discussions about it inevitably work to split the anti Imperialist resistance."

That is an interesting take - world view.

My view is that:

The world is essentially run by and for and as it pleases wealthy and influential persons and organizations. They can do this because they have money and power and are thereby able to control access to money and power. These persons and organizations are the owners and the effect of their influence where it is somewhat constructive is neoliberalism and where it is less constructive is destabilization (surely there is a better term).

Beneath them are the operatives which serve them and thereby climb the ladder of wealth and influence. These are the politicians and beauracrats and media and the military. The beauracrats are particularly problematic because they are unelected, unaccountable, operate unmonitored and collaborate.

In this system, the only means for yourselves and family to survive is to serve the owners - via the structures created to enrich the beauracrats.

Please describe your view.

[Apr 27, 2021] Bounties- What Bounties

Notable quotes:
"... When truth is marginalized, the fringe is the only place where it’s to be found. ..."
Apr 27, 2021 | www.strategic-culture.org

When truth is marginalized, the fringe is the only place where it’s to be found.

So it looks like Russia didn’t pay the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers after all.

Last summer, the New York Times announced in a front-page story that “American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants killing coalition forces in Afghanistan â€" including targeting American troops.â€

The article rang with certainty. “Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the American military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries,†it said. The operation, it went on, appears to be “the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the GRU. … Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination.â€

This was red meat for congressional Democrats eager to tar Trump with whatever brush was at hand. Nancy Pelosi issued a call to arms, declaring: “Congress and the country need answers now.†Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer adopted a tone of mock disbelief: “Russia gives bounties to kill Americans and the administration does nothing? Nothing? Donald Trump, you’re not being a very strong president here as usual.†Joe Biden called the report “horrifying†and said “there is no bottom to the depth of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s depravity if it’s true.â€

Except that it isn’t true now that we know that U.S. intelligence agencies, according to the White House, view the report with only “low to moderate confidence†â€" which, in layman’s language, either means that it could be true â€" kind of, sort of, maybe â€" or that it’s pure baloney. In any event, it’s hardly reason to accus a sitting president of “a betrayal of every single American family with a loved one serving in Afghanistan or anywhere overseas,†as Biden did the day after the story broke.

Charlie Savage, whose byline appears on a number of last summer’s pieces, offered a series of mealy-mouthed excuses for how he and his fellow Times reporters managed to get it so wrong. “Former intelligence officials … have noted that it is rare in the murky world of intelligence to have courtroom levels of proof beyond a reasonable doubt about what an adversary is covertly doing,†he said . He described the original intelligence findings as “muddied†because a key figure in the alleged plot “had fled to Russia â€" possibly while using a passport linked to a Russian spy agency.â€

So it isn’t the Times’s or the CIA’s fault, you see â€" it’s merely a hazard of the trade. But isn’t it’s curious how words like “murky†and “muddied†never cropped up last summer when the Times was busily egging Democrats on with stories charging that the bounties had led to “at least one U.S. troop death†or maybe even three ? “Father of Slain Marine Finds Heartbreak Anew in Possible Russian Bounty,†a Times headline declared. “American officials intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account,†another claimed .

All of which was nonsense, as is now clear. Yet not only has the Times failed to apologize but White House spokesman Jen Psaki managed to spin the story last week so that it’s still Moscow’s fault and “there are [still] questions to be answered by the Russian government.â€

Although the corporate media dutifully echoed the Times, a few skeptics did get it right. Ray McGovern, an ex-CIA official who now heads a group calling itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, called the story “dubious†right off the bat. Scott Ritter, the ex-UN weapons inspector who blew the cover off charges that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was bristling with weapons of mass destruction, wrote that “there is no corroboration, nothing that would allow this raw ‘intelligence’ to be turned into a product worthy of the name.†Caitlin Johnstone, who covers U.S. politics from Australia yet still does a better job of it than most stateside reporters, denounced the entire affair as a “malignant psyop,†adding: “It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the western world will uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state media.â€

Then there’s someone named Dan Lazare who had pointed out a few obvious facts in Strategic Culture a few days after the supposed Times scoop came out:

“But the report doesn’t even make sense. Not only have the Taliban been at war with the United States since 2001, they’re winning. So why should Russia pay them to do what they’ve been happily doing on their own for close to two decades? Contrary to what the Times wants us to believe, there’s no evidence that Russia backs the Taliban or wants the U.S. to leave with its tail between its legs. Quite the opposite as a quick glance at a map will attest. Given that Afghanistan abuts the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan and is less than a thousand miles from Chechnya, where Russia fought a brutal war against Sunni Islamist separatists in 1999-2000, the last thing it wants is a Muslim fundamentalist republic in the heart of Central Asia.â€

The fact that the New York doesn’t even consider†the broad geopolitical backdrop, the article added, “makes its reporting seem all the more dubious†â€" words that are as appropriate now as they were then.

None of this matters, however, because Strategic Culture, it turns out, is “controlled by Russian intelligence†and publishes “fringe voices and conspiracy theories.†Yes, that’s what the Times says , and its source, as usual, is nothing more than unnamed U.S. government sources whispering in its ear. But if Strategic Culture is so marginal, how is it that it got the story right while the Times’s own conspiracy tales turned out to be false?

When truth is marginalized, the fringe is the only place where it’s to be found.

[Apr 27, 2021] The CIA Used to Infiltrate the Media " Consortiumnews

Notable quotes:
"... CaitlinJohnstone.com ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The Daily Beast ..."
"... The Daily Beast ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix ..."
"... Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone ..."
"... Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers ..."
"... This article was re-published with permission. ..."
"... The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of ..."
"... Consortium News. ..."
Apr 27, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

The CIA Used to Infiltrate the Media April 20, 2021 Save

Now the CIA is the media. This isn’t Operation Mockingbird, writes Caitlin Johnstone. It’s much worse.

(Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

B ack in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called Bountygate story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

“One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,†Greenwald tweeted . “So media outlets â€" again â€" repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.â€

Indeed, the NYT’s original story made no mention of CIA involvement in the narrative, citing only “officials,†yet this latest article speaks as though it had been informing its readers of the story’s roots in the lying, torturing , drug-running , warmongering Central Intelligence Agency from the very beginning. The author even writes “The New York Times first reported last summer the existence of the C.I.A.’s assessment,†with the hyperlink leading to the initial article which made no mention of the CIA. It wasn’t until later that The New York Times began reporting that the CIA was looking into the Russian bounties allegations at all.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382793565714153472&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F04%2F20%2Fthe-cia-used-to-infiltrate-the-media%2F&sessionId=f9f124f1ca8fb3f8d08d8c9bb0916072822c047d&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px

This would be the same “Russian bounties†narrative which was discredited all the way back in September when the top U.S. military official in Afghanistan said no satisfactory evidence had surfaced for the allegations, which was further discredited today with a new article by The Daily Beast titled “ U.S. Intel Walks Back Claim Russians Put Bounties on American Troops .“

The Daily Beast , which has itself uncritically published many articles promoting the CIA “Bountygate†narrative, reports the following:

“It was a blockbuster story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great Game†in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.

But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate†confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unprovenâ€"and possibly untrue.â€

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382769897420296194&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F04%2F20%2Fthe-cia-used-to-infiltrate-the-media%2F&sessionId=f9f124f1ca8fb3f8d08d8c9bb0916072822c047d&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px

So the mass media aggressively promoted a CIA narrative that none of them ever saw proof of, because there was no proof, because it was an entirely unfounded claim from the very beginning. They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story.

This allowed the CIA to throw shade and inertia on Trump’s proposed troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Germany, and to continue ramping up anti-Russia sentiments on the world stage , and may well have contributed to the fact that the agency will officially be among those who are exempt from Biden’s performative Afghanistan “withdrawal.â€

In totalitarian dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In free democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!†and the news media unquestioningly publish it.

In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “ The CIA and the Media †reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird . It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media is meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.

Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits . The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor , and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on U.S. intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol.

Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans such as John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-2&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382777804014641152&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F04%2F20%2Fthe-cia-used-to-infiltrate-the-media%2F&sessionId=f9f124f1ca8fb3f8d08d8c9bb0916072822c047d&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px

This isn’t Operation Mockingbird. It’s so much worse. Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even any pretence of separation, has been dropped.

This is bad. This is very, very bad. Democracy has no meaningful existence if people’s votes are cast without a clear understanding of what’s happening in their nation and their world. When their understanding is being shaped to suit the agendas of the very government they’re meant to be influencing with their votes, what you have is the most powerful military and economic force in the history of civilization with no accountability to the electorate whatsoever. It’s just an immense globe-spanning power structure, doing whatever it wants to whoever it wants. A totalitarian dictatorship in disguise.

And the CIA is the very worst institution that could possibly be spearheading the movements of that dictatorship. A little research into the many, many horrific things the CIA has done over the years will quickly show you that this is true; hell, just a glance at what the CIA was up to with the Phoenix Program in Vietnam will.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-3&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1382856410443186179&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F04%2F20%2Fthe-cia-used-to-infiltrate-the-media%2F&sessionId=f9f124f1ca8fb3f8d08d8c9bb0916072822c047d&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px

There’s a common delusion in our society that depraved government agencies who are known to have done evil things in the past have simply stopped doing evil things for some reason. This belief is backed by zero evidence, and is contradicted by mountains of evidence to the contrary. It’s believed because it is comfortable, and for literally no other reason.

The CIA should not exist at all, let alone control the news media, much less the movements of the US empire. May we one day know a humanity that is entirely free from the rule of psychopaths, from our total planetary behavior as a collective, all the way down to the thoughts we think in our own heads.

May we extract their horrible fingers from every aspect of our being.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Her work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook , following her antics on Twitter , checking out her podcast on either Youtube , soundcloud , Apple podcasts or Spotify , following her on Steemit , throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of her sweet merchandise , buying her new book, Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix , and her other books: Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

This article was re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.


Wiffle , April 22, 2021 at 17:36

Go to any platform and 98% of commentators’ “opinions†are exact duplicates of what the unholy intel/press partnership has trained them to say.


Hot Dog
, April 21, 2021 at 19:00

Douglas Adams, brilliant author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, invented the Infinite Improbability Drive to cross vast intersteller distances in a mere nothingth of a second without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. Following in his footsteps I adopted the Infinite Improbability Filter, which I use to parse every statement from governments. I recommend it. Afghans have to be paid by Russians to shoot the invaders and occupiers of their country ?? Infinitely improbable. Saddam Hussein had nuclear bombs in aluminum tubes that he could fly over US cities ?? ?? Infinitely improbable. A bunch of guys in a cave can knock down a skyscraper in Manhattan ?? Infinitely improbable. Joe Biden will put an end to war ?? ?? Infinitely improbable. The USA is spreading democracy in oil producing nations ??? Infinitely improbable. Russia won the 2016 election ??? Infinitely improbable. The CIA are the good guys ??? Infinitely improbable. Believe the corporate media ??? ??? Infinitely improbable. (hXXp://www.earthstar.co.uk/drive.htm). RIP Adams.

Rex Williams , April 21, 2021 at 18:52

“Drug-running�

Well done, Caitlin.First time I have seen any indication of that in the media and even I have known about it for a decade. Not just drug-running, but the world control of heroin. Australian soldiers filling in the role of protector of the crops in Afghanistan and also killing innocent civilians, a matter now under investigation but proven already.

Thankfully, when you list the past members of that infamous group and the controlling role they enjoy in today’s media, one should not forget the contributions made by many ex-CIA personnel seen on the pages of Consortium News and what a valuable contribution they have made to this publication. Many thanks to them.

I am sure that there will be many comments on this subject today.

rosemerry , April 21, 2021 at 15:22

Using the word “intelligence†for the nonsense that the USA collects and tries to get us to believe is pathetic!! Use your brains, US people and do not assume that because YOUR leaders want to attack and destroy designated enemies all over the globe,that other people are just like you. You are NOT in existential danger from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea- YOU are the ones doing the threatening, the attacking, the lying, the sanctions, the offensive descriptions of leaders with no attempt to be diplomatic and certainly no effort to understand the points of view of anyone outside your little circle of “élite†elected or appointed or bought rich men and women living in the Cold War years and educated into violent hatred of anyone different.


robert e williamson jr
, April 22, 2021 at 12:54

Hot Dog, I could not agree more, but Hot Damn there is more so much more. Is it possible that the revelations in this book I discuss might free Julian? The book proves miss use of secrecy classifications that were used to cover up an act of executive action with extreme prejudice

The pivotal events that allow the re-opening of the JFK murder case are exposed in Josiah Thompson’s “LAST SECOND IN DALLASâ€.

Like I have stated already please don’t take my word for this. Read the book thanks to the Zapruder film and the recordings taken that day of police radios being still of a quality to allow top notch analysis of them, irrefutable evidence has been verified. The story of facts have changed the nature of what we now know to be true. Facts that are provided with their mathematical proof.

If you believe in science, especially science as pursued in this investigation by individuals of exculpatory character and honesty you will learn the latest scientific interpretations of the evidence analysis.

Something that, as it turn out cannot be said about the Ramsey Panel.

Thompson’s investigation has neutered the Warren Commission and other various government attempts, see the House Select Committee effort and the Ramsey Panel’s efforts to cover up the truth.

This results in exposing the lies the CIA committed to trying to cover up their involvement. Lies ironically exposed by individuals investigating the murder, lies discovered in part by the release of JFK documents in 2017. Why did CIA lie from day one, Nov. 22,1963?

DECLASSIFY, DECLASSIFY, DECLASSIFY, Jimm you got it, and the curtain has been pulled back slightly if not more by this investigation.

Time for all to pressure CIA for the truth.

Thanks CN
PEACE


Anonymot
, April 21, 2021 at 10:11

Yes, excellent about the media, but there’s a far greater importance than that; the CIA IS, yes IS the American government. Certainly, it manages the public through its controlling influence on the MSM, but its controlling interest in foreign affairs has been followed by its creeping increasingly into the domestic field, also. It has been fighting for supremacy over both the State Department and the FBI for years and won the former hands down via the Bush and Obama years. Hillary at the State Department was the CIA’s dream! The devastation that followed, from the burning of everything from Libya to the Ukraine was their wildest wishes come true.

Trump ran on the idea that the intelligence agencies were too invasive and he battled with them from the beginning, but the CIA knows where everyone’s skeletons are hidden and Trump has a pile of them. What the CIA then did was point out to him that he had little room to squiggle or they would put him in jeopardy. As a sop, they allowed him to spend four years not hating Russia and instead, hating China, climate change, the EU, etc. while he allowed them to dictate what the CIA wanted done domestically, pipelines, the border, etc. That made them tower over the FBI.

Now that the CIA helped dump Trump with their media control, they are back in the saddle with Biden, Russia, the CIA’s favorite target for WW III, is back on the front burner with its usual hocus pocus stories about the Ukraine, Iran is heating up and so is China.
But America is now the mosquito attacking the elephant and the CIA with all of its ignorance and incompetence is back, leading the dance with their partners in the military and the military industrial complex.

It will be great fun to go out with a bang.

Philip Reed , April 21, 2021 at 10:08

Whatever happened to Carl Bernstein? Where is that guy from Watergate and Mockingbird? Now turned into a CNN shill.
Sad. Thanks Caitlin for reiterating what most of us know but always needs your persistent clarification.
Just a short beef with your article. Why did you feel it necessary to include Tucker in your list of CIA connected media personalities? Especially based on a link to an article that was an obvious hit piece on Tucker. Tucker has morphed into one of the only MSM personalities who attacks hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle. He reports on subjects that none of the other corporate media outlets won’t touch out of pure political felty to the Democratic Party. He used to take sides years ago. No longer the case. He often has Glenn Greenwald on in recent times and they are obviously simpatico with each other. Give Tucker a break Caitlin. He’s the only one on MS corporate media who dares to deviate from the “ chosen narrative “.

Stevie Boy , April 21, 2021 at 08:02

Unfortunately, this is also true of all the members of the ‘Five Eyes’ sewer.
In the UK, MI6, MI5, GCHQ and the other related institutions infest the MSM. The BBC and the Guardian being two obvious direct mouthpieces for the security services. And, the CIA run their operations directly out of RAF bases (Eg. Anne Sacoolas and her husband).
During the World Wars, the security services maybe had a legitimate role in fighting obvious enemies. However, now we are the enemy !
Can this sewer ever be drained ?


Donald Duck
, April 21, 2021 at 06:19

A slow-burning coup has been emerging in the West since the 1990s.; it is now reaching its full fruition. Political parties, the MSM, the military and spook organisations, state and corporate bureaucracies, a trillionaire class, film and entertainment industries have congealed into a massive technocratic centrist blob. Orthodox politics and ideology is now a thing of the past. These now are the controlling force behind a quasi-religious narrative that now seems unassailable. Where this is taking us in anybody’s guess. Maybe into the eugenicist Brave New World or of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel ‘We’ first published in 1924.

Well we’d better wake up soon, or we are not going to wake up at all.

John Hagan , April 21, 2021 at 03:32

Tumour: A ‘body’ can be 99 percent healthy yet one cancerous cell can cause much damage growing into a tumour. Although it realizes that by destroying the very body it feeds on it is also destroying itself yet that end does not prevent its greed for reproduction. Most US citizens are well aware where the tumour lies and its progress.
For those who have the interest I made a short video illustrating the thesis above regarding the possibility that US is suffering a malignant tumour in three areas.The three areas are the war machine, wall street, education. It can be found on YouTube. John Hagan.

Dave , April 20, 2021 at 21:17

Ms Johnstone is spot on, as usual. The CIA â€" aka the Christian Investment Authority â€" is no longer needed. Of course, it never was needed, given that the USA taxpayer funds more than fifteen other “intelligence†agencies, including State Dept. intelligence, the FBI, the various military intelligence groups, etc. The CIA was from its beginning an extra-legal, law-breaking, and often illegal operative group representing the filth, the sleaze of America’s corporate and banking empires. If the CIA is defunded, don’t worry about its work force. They will re-emerge in the media, the think-tanks, the corporate bureaucracies, the military-industrial complex, and foreign government sinecures. Anyway, good riddance to bad rubbish…at least an honest and responsible American can hope the CIA is disbanded as soon as possible.

S.P. Korolev , April 22, 2021 at 04:17

Haven’t heard that acronym before, excellent! My favourite is ‘Capitalism’s Invisible Army’…


[Apr 27, 2021] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 15 APRIL 2021 by Patrick Armstrong - TurcopolierTurcopolier

Apr 27, 2021 | turcopolier.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 15 APRIL 2021 by Patrick Armstrong Posted on April 15, 2021 by Patrick Armstrong

UKRAINE-RUSSIA WAR. Lots of heavy stuff moving in Russia; especially big artillery systems: 2S4 heavy mortars , 2S7 long-range guns and Iskanders . (Powerful counter-battery fire would be both effective and semi-deniable). Stockpiles of equipment near Voronezh. Two armies (corps) plus airborne formations (probably more than NATO could field anywhere in real life; certainly never as quickly). What most impressed me were ships from the Caspian Sea Flotilla being transferred via the Volga-Don Canal. Never forget that the really important stuff is not visible â€" the Russians are the best at operational-level deception. A Ukrainian convoy by comparison â€" pathetic mix of civilian vehicles and elderly APCs. (Incredibly, despite all the genuine videos, CNN still fakes it .) NATO huffs and puffs ; Blinken ditto ; Berlin throws some cold water on Kiev . Ritter calls Kiev’s “NATO fantasy†a “suicide pill†.

AND THEN AGAIN, MAYBE NOT. Just reported that the two US warships will not enter the Black Sea ; they are presently moored in Crete . Kiev changes its tune . Maybe the war hawks got the message: Moscow is determined, willing and more than capable.

BIDEN-PUTIN. At the US request, a phone call: White House take , Kremlin take . Biden talked tough (Ukraine, “cyber intrusions and election interferenceâ€), Putin mentioned Minsk agreement. No mention of Navalniy; I guess he’s passed his best-before date. Biden proposed a face-to-face meeting in a third country; I can’t believe that he will dare meet with Putin: look at his carefully scripted press conference . Probably won’t happen any way after this “national emergency†stuff.

INCOHERENCE. Killer, no soul but “ stable and predictable relationship with Russia “; more sanctions (love the election tampering charge â€" they’re not even trying to make sense now ) but mostly rational DNI report . Now a “ national emergency “. The self-delusion in Washington is stunning : “Freedom and justice for all†. Who’s in charge? Whoever it is, Washington is not agreement-capable.

HOW TO FIX UKRAINE. My idea . Dmitry Orlov’s more interesting suggestion.

SPACE STATION. The ISS is coming to the end and Putin has signed off on plans to build a new one . I’ll bet China signs on.

ARCTIC. CNN excitedly discovers “ huge Russian military buildup in the Arctic “; amusingly says “The Russian build-up has been matched by NATO and US troop and equipment movements.†Nope: Russia is far, far ahead of all the others: other than nuclear submarines, none has anything to compare .

SILENCE. Will be the sound that we hear in response to Lavrov’s call for a treaty banning weapons in space. (Not presumably to include the many communications and geo-locating satellites Russia and others already have up there. Bit of hypocrisy there: not weapons as such but necessary for many.)

HYPERSONIC. US test failure . The game of catch-up continues.

COVID. The EU’s vaccine rollout has been a dud and many countries are trying to obtain the Russian vaccine. CNN, for once, covers the issue reasonably evenly : reactions range from a welcome solution to the problem to those pesky Russians trying to divide us again. A German news outlet says Washington is trying to pressure Berlin and Korybko speculates that the tension in Ukraine may be related. One watches, somewhat dumbfounded â€" more evidence of things falling apart.

RUSSIA-TURKEY. I guess it’s time to teach Ankara another lesson: flights to Turkey have been severely restricted . Because of COVID; nothing to do with Ankara’s fiddling around in Syria or Ukraine. They say. Russian tourism is a big part of Turkey’s GDP. Moscow’s last shutdown brought results .

USA/AFGHANISTAN. Starting 1 May, all US troops to be out by 11 September . NATO’s too . Some questions: what about contractors, advisors, air power; but the biggest is how patient will Taliban be? â€" that’s another deadline passed. Neocons â€" Bolton , Haas , Boot â€" protest. The Pentagon too ? We’ll see. Whether it happens then or later, the Afghans have defeated another mighty empire.

PUTIN DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. 111 things Putin weaponised . Where does he find the time?

STASIS. We get closer to what Scott Adams foresaw: Biden in the White House, belief that the election was rigged. Rassmussen poll: “ A majority (51%) of voters believe it is likely that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election .†What happens if that number grows to, say, two-thirds?

UKRAINE/USA. Foreign interventions have a nasty habit of coming home . “Far-right extremists see the war zone there as a laboratory where they can gain actual combat experience to bring back home.â€

  1. Patrick Armstrong says: April 15, 2021 at 8:34 pm

    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/taliban-promises-nightmare-us-troops-if-they-stay-past-may-1st Reply

  2. Avatar J says: April 16, 2021 at 3:42 am

    This unfounded accusation against Russia is being walk backed once again:

    https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/us-intel-walks-back-claim-russia-put-bounties-american-troops

Vig says: April 16, 2021 at 6:47 am

Yes, stranger than fiction sometimes:

Department of State
@StateDept, United States government organization, @SecBlinken: Standing for people’s freedoms and dignity honors America’s most sacred values. At our best, we stand for freedom and justice for all. Not just here at home, but around the world.

Standing for Freedom and Justice for All?

Setting the Scene for Global Destruction. Now It’s the Arctic, Brian Cloughley, April 13, 2021, Strategic Culture

The scene-setting by Washington’s military-industrial complex and in the Pentagon’s sub-office in Brussels includes warnings about a Russian “buildup†in the Arctic, as reported by CNN which quoted a Pentagon representative as saying “Russia is refurbishing Soviet-era airfields and radar installations, constructing new ports and search-and-rescue centres, and building up its fleet of nuclear and conventionally-powered icebreakers.†This activity is indeed taking place, and is happening in Russian sovereign territory, which has nothing to do with the Pentagon or anyone else. It’s not in any way similar to the U.S. military’s overseas “forward military presence†of some 200,000 troops in over 800 bases around the world.

USA Today states that Trump “opened additional bases in Afghanistan, Estonia, Cyprus, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Niger, Norway, Palau, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Somalia, Syria and Tunisiaâ€, which seems pretty impressive, but in reality-land is entirely counter-productive. And it seems that Uncle Joe isn’t going to close down any of them.

USA today states it is not sure how many he closed. But Germany?
aka says: April 16, 2021 at 9:21 am

BTW the Strategic Culture foundation seems to be sanctioned by the US Treasury for being a SVR outlet. Southfront is also sanctioned.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0126 Reply

James says: April 16, 2021 at 10:45 am

Does this mean that it is now illegal for me to give money to Southfront? Is it now illegal for me to provide services to Southfront? Reply

LeaNder says: April 16, 2021 at 3:48 pm

All credit cards we use in “the Westâ€, presently, are issued are American institutions, basically. PayPal is American too. Can’t be that difficult to order institutions, who are within US jurisdiction, to collect whatever James et al. tries to give to whoever.

Technically all they needed to do is an algorithm that automatically collects everything going to a some person or institution.

That wouldn’t be the first time US laws are meant to apply extraterritoriality. Maybe based on US law the money didn’t even need to be returned to the sender? Extraterritorial forfeiture?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States#Statistics

But interesting. Thanks for the link, aka.

[Apr 27, 2021] Russian President Vladimir Putin has given a stern warning to anyone threatening the national security of Russia, telling officials that those responsible will "regret their actions like they have never regretted anything before."

Apr 27, 2021 | turcopolier.com

Avatar J says: April 21, 2021 at 9:20 am

Putin spoke this morning to Russian legislators, appraising of the current items and events.

Putin also spoke to the idiot leadership of NATO and the asleep at the switch D.C., and he didn't mince words.

https://www.rt.com/russia/521688-putin-federal-assembly-speech-retaliation-measures/

Putin promises 'asymmetrical' response to any threats made against Russia, promises those provoking Moscow will come to regret it

Russian President Vladimir Putin has given a stern warning to anyone threatening the national security of Russia, telling officials that those responsible will "regret their actions like they have never regretted anything before."

IMHO NATO and D.C. need to pull their heads out of their arses, for mankind's sake.

[Apr 25, 2021] Exactly what does the US gain by constantly smacking down Russia? better jobs, higher education, better health maybe? less debt/smaller deficits for US citizens?

Apr 25, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

hooligan2009 11 hours ago

cui bono?

exactly what does the US gain by constantly smacking down russia? better jobs, higher education, better health maybe? less debt/smaller deficits for US citizens?

why is it in the interest of the US to have open southern borders with tens of millions of the poor, sick and stupid seeking to join the free **** army of entitled karens - and yet - antagonize, vilify and belittle fellow white christians of russia?

the US is being invaded as we speak, its tax dollars are being siphoned off to pay for the poor, sick and stupid flooding in.

it is not russia that is doing the invading.

it is economic migrants answering the siren call of the GOON squad and a criminal cabal that is building a political base that cannot be defeated.

it is not russia that is bankrupting the US by forcing it to blow out spending beyond its tax base to defend its citizens.

it is socialist policies like the "green new deal" and the response to a (yet to be isolated) virus that are bankrupting the nation.

the enemy of the US is within and is ripping the country apart.

the enemy is socialism and the pursuit of the lowest common economic and educational denominator by mentally challenged morons like the illlegal POTUS (POXONUS) and his illegal immigrant VPOTUS (VPOXONUS).

looks so real 10 hours ago (Edited)

Colonize Russia and China the elites get off Scott free from persecution of international crimes committed by them. Their rise is terrifying to the elites soon if not stopped will impose international law on them, like going after the NazI's after WW2. They must feel the noose tightening judging by the paranoid attacks. That said recent moves by the west looks like they are ahead they are attacking on all fronts.

jusstpassinthru 9 hours ago (Edited)

Once again, it seems we're mistaking a corporation for a country. The United States government and America are two totally different things. At present the US corporate government is operating totally as a criminal organization.

cui bono? The corporation.

9 Corpus Juris Secundum, § 883

"The United States government is a foreign corporation with respect to a state." 19C.J.S. Corporations § 883 citing In re Merriam's Estate, 36 N.Y. 505, 141 N.Y. 479(1894), and affirmed in United States v. Perkins, 163 U.S. 625, 41 L.Ed. 287 (1896).

[Apr 25, 2021] Putin remarked how to "attack Russia" has become a sport, a new sport, who makes the loudest statements

Apr 25, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Putin remarked how to "attack Russia" has become "a sport, a new sport, who makes the loudest statements." And then he went full Kipling: "Russia is attacked here and there for no reason. And of course, all sorts of petty Tabaquis [jackals] are running around like Tabaqui ran around Shere Khan [the tiger] – everything is like in Kipling's book – howling along and ready to serve their sovereign. Kipling was a great writer".

The – layered – metaphor is even more startling as it echoes the late 19th century geopolitical Great Game between the British and Russian empires, of which Kipling was a protagonist.

Once again Putin had to stress that "we really don't want to burn any bridges. But if someone perceives our good intentions as indifference or weakness and intends to burn those bridges completely or even blow them up, he should know that Russia's response will be asymmetric, swift and harsh".

"Tensions skirting wartime levels"

Now compare all of the above with the White House Executive Order (EO) declaring a "national emergency" to "deal with the Russian threat".

This is directly connected to President Biden – actually the combo telling him what to do, complete with earpiece and teleprompter – promising Ukraine's President Zelensky that Washington would "take measures" to support Kiev's wishful thinking of retaking Donbass and Crimea.

There are several eyebrow-raising issues with this EO. It denies, de facto, to any Russian national the full rights to their US property. Any US resident may be accused of being a Russian agent engaged in undermining US security. A sub-sub paragraph (C), detailing "actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad", is vague enough to be used to eliminate any journalism that supports Russia's positions in international affairs.

Purchases of Russian OFZ bonds have been sanctioned, as well as one of the companies involved in the production of the Sputnik V vaccine. Yet the icing on this sanction cake may well be that from now on all Russian citizens, including dual citizens, may be barred from entering US territory except via a rare special authorization on top of the ordinary visa.

The Russian paper Vedomosti has noted that in such paranoid atmosphere the risks for large companies such as Yandex or Kaspersky Lab are significantly increasing. Still, these sanctions have not been met with surprise in Moscow. The worst is yet to come, according to Beltway insiders: two packages of sanctions against Nord Stream 2 already approved by the US Department of Justice.

The crucial point is that this EO de facto places anyone reporting on Russia's political positions as potentially threatening "American democracy". As top political analyst Alastair Crooke has remarked, this is a "procedure usually reserved for citizens of enemy states during times of war". Crooke adds, "US hawks are upping the ante fiercely against Moscow. Tensions and rhetoric are skirting wartime levels."

It's an open question whether Putin's State of the Nation will be seriously examined by the toxic lunatic combo of neocons and humanitarian imperialists bent on simultaneously harassing Russia and China.

But the fact is something extraordinary has already started to happen: a "de-escalation" of sorts.

Even before Putin's address, Kiev, NATO and the Pentagon apparently got the message implicit in Russia moving two armies, massive artillery batteries and airborne divisions to the borders of Donbass and to Crimea – not to mention top naval assets moved from the Caspian to the Black Sea. NATO could not even dream of matching that.

Facts on different grounds speak volumes. Both Paris and Berlin were terrified of a possible Kiev clash directly against Russia, and lobbied furiously against it, bypassing the EU and NATO.

Then someone – it might have been Jake Sullivan – must have whispered on Crash Test Dummy's earpiece that you don't go around insulting the head of a nuclear state and expect to keep your global "credibility". So after that by now famous "Biden" phone call to Putin came the invitation to the climate change summit, in which any lofty promises are largely rhetorical, as the Pentagon will continue to be the largest polluting entity on planet Earth.

... ... ...

Whatever happens next, for all practical purposes Iron Curtain 2.0 is now on, and it simply won't go away. There will be more sanctions. Everything was thrown at the Bear short of a hot war. It will be immensely entertaining to watch how, and via which steps, Washington will engage on a "de-escalation and diplomatic process" with Russia.

The Hegemon may always find a way to deploy a massive P.R. campaign and ultimately claim a diplomatic success in "dissolving" the impasse. Well, that certainly beats a hot war. Otherwise, lowly Jungle Book adventurers have been advised: try anything funny and be ready to meet "asymmetric, swift and harsh".


Lordflin 10 hours ago

Very true...

Also true... Kipling was a great writer... loved him as a kid... Still remember Rikki Tikki Tavi... who couldn't...

War is coming... and Putin will get dragged to the party kicking and screaming... but he has no choice but to show up...

zoghead 16 hours ago

Amazing how calm and composed Putin is when he talks of the West. I admire him for this phenomenal restraint. No one knows more than him, how the West (politicos and press) bandy him personally and his country around for absoutely no reason. The Russians are peaceloving folks, and just want to be left alone.

wootendw PREMIUM 16 hours ago

Putin remarked how to "attack Russia" has become "a sport, a new sport, who makes the loudest statements." And then he went full Kipling: "Russia is attacked here and there for no reason. And of course, all sorts of petty Tabaquis [jackals] are running around like Tabaqui ran around Shere Khan [the tiger] – everything is like in Kipling's book – howling along and ready to serve their sovereign. Kipling was a great writer".

For those who haven't read The Jungle Book , Shere Khan is US - and the story doesn't end well for him.

[Apr 25, 2021] The danger for American elites is not that more Americans might begin to question neoliberal deindustrialization, uncontrolled immigration and the consequences of maintaining the US global hegemony at the expense of the standard of living of ordinary Americans

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... THIS is why the U.S. maintains a rotating cast of "evil" countries to demonize. Whether its Russia, China, the DPRK, Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela, Americans will always find a way to externalize and blame the internal violence of their capitalist imperialist system on foreign foes. ..."
"... When will Americans get it through their head that the U.S. is NOT a "democracy" that needs to be "defended" because it was NEVER a democracy to begin with. The problem isn't other countries that you've been brainwashed to hate. It is YOUR capitalist imperialist system country. ..."
"... The definition of insanity is watching your colonial, capitalist, imperialist country time and time again inflict mass murder and violence both domestically and abroad and still thinking your country is a "democracy" that must be defended from "authoritarian" countries abroad. ..."
Jan 07, 2021 | Stephen Wertheim @stephenwertheim Jan 1

"The danger for American elites is not that the U.S. may become less able to accomplish geopolitical objectives. Rather, it is that more Americans might begin to question the logic of U.S. global hegemony," writes @RichardHanania :
Qiao Collective @qiaocollective Jan 1
Qiao Collective @qiaocollective

THIS is why the U.S. maintains a rotating cast of "evil" countries to demonize. Whether its Russia, China, the DPRK, Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela, Americans will always find a way to externalize and blame the internal violence of their capitalist imperialist system on foreign foes.

@qiaocollective 6h
@qiaocollective

When will Americans get it through their head that the U.S. is NOT a "democracy" that needs to be "defended" because it was NEVER a democracy to begin with. The problem isn't other countries that you've been brainwashed to hate. It is YOUR capitalist imperialist system country.

@qiaocollective 6h
@qiaocollective

The definition of insanity is watching your colonial, capitalist, imperialist country time and time again inflict mass murder and violence both domestically and abroad and still thinking your country is a "democracy" that must be defended from "authoritarian" countries abroad.

[Apr 25, 2021] Another Guardian article from this week warns of "pro-Kremlin outlets" spreading "coronavirus disinformation".

Notable quotes:
"... "Pro-Kremlin" and "pro-China" are labels which have literally lost all meaning in face of an almost totally unified global response to Covid19, and yet, if Nick has his way, they will be used to destroy any semblance of alternative media in Western society ..."
"... At one point in his incoherent diatribe he even cites "conspiracy theorists" alleged "antisemitism" (without any evidence to back it up). A beautiful example of what Huey Long called "fascism coming in the name of anti-fascism". ..."
"... Nick doesn't care about that. He's just here to promote authoritarianism and chew gum, and he's all out of gum. He's a massive hypocrite. Nothing more needs to be said. ..."
Apr 25, 2021 | off-guardian.org

Censorship Saves Lives

Another Guardian article from this week warns of "pro-Kremlin outlets" spreading "coronavirus disinformation".

Nick Cohen has an " op ed on the same subject, urging action against free speech so that "Russian meddling" doesn't persuade us all to break quarantine and rush outside like lunatics.

He spent the last four years comparing Jeremy Corbyn to Stalin, and now he's arguing that Facebook and YouTube should do some Stalinist censoring of their platforms in line with government policy.

Has no one at Graun HQ even noticed that the Kremlin (as well as China) is actually in lockstep with the West on the issue of covid19? Or does no whisper of reality percolate through their glassy walls any more?

"Pro-Kremlin" and "pro-China" are labels which have literally lost all meaning in face of an almost totally unified global response to Covid19, and yet, if Nick has his way, they will be used to destroy any semblance of alternative media in Western society

His article's headline " Social media no longer tolerates toxic lies? Don't believe a word of it ", makes the intent plain. He is returning to the theme that big tech companies have to do their part to make sure Russians and "conspiracy theorists" don't harm our society.

But this time he is overtly demanding wrong-thinking people (specifically David Icke in this instance) should be un-personed and barred from social media to "protect public health".

At one point in his incoherent diatribe he even cites "conspiracy theorists" alleged "antisemitism" (without any evidence to back it up). A beautiful example of what Huey Long called "fascism coming in the name of anti-fascism".

Nick doesn't care about that. He's just here to promote authoritarianism and chew gum, and he's all out of gum. He's a massive hypocrite. Nothing more needs to be said.

[Apr 25, 2021] Angelina Jolie s MI6 Interview Shows Just How Connected Hollywood Is To the Deep State

Notable quotes:
"... "Russia feels threatened by the quality of our alliances and, even in the current environment, the quality of our democratic institutions. It sets out to denigrate them, and it uses intelligence services to that end. It is a serious problem, and we should organize to prevent it," the British spook told the actress. ..."
"... To some, the pairing of a Hollywood star and a veteran spymaster might seem strange. But, in reality, the silver screen and the national security state have always been intimately intertwined. ..."
"... Jolie herself has slowly become a leading member of the U.S. national security apparatus, joining the influential and well-endowed Council on Foreign Relations think tank in 2007, and penning a joint op-ed in The New York Times ..."
"... "We talked to a lot of the women in the CIA," said Jolie of her experiences preparing for her role. She appeared to have nothing but admiration for the organization; "One after the other, they are just these lovely, sweet women that you can‟t imagine being put in a dangerous situation, but they really are," she added. Salt ..."
"... The level of state involvement in Salt ..."
"... In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, wrote that his organization "has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers -- studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors." Many of America's most familiar faces have visited the organization's headquarters in Langley, VA, including Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Bryan Cranston, and Tom Cruise. ..."
"... "Probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents and we just don't know it. And I wouldn't be surprised at all to discover that this was extremely common," said "Batman" star Ben Affleck in 2012, before going to describe himself, perhaps jokingly, as a CIA agent himself. ..."
"... Democrat-aligned voters' opinion of the FBI has been steadily rising over the last decade, to the point that 77% hold a favorable view of the institution (and almost two-thirds of the country supports the CIA). ..."
Nov 30, 2020 | www.mintpressnews.com

With election fever still gripping the U.S., talk of rigging or interference in the democratic process is reaching new levels, high enough that even Hollywood legend Angelina Jolie is talking about it. In an extraordinary interview in Time magazine, the star of "Wanted, Maleficent, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," sat down with the former head of the UK's MI6 spy network, Sir Alex Younger, to ask how worrying the threat from Russia or China really is.

"Russia feels threatened by the quality of our alliances and, even in the current environment, the quality of our democratic institutions. It sets out to denigrate them, and it uses intelligence services to that end. It is a serious problem, and we should organize to prevent it," the British spook told the actress.

Younger also went on to discuss the rise of China, and how the West must act to challenge the supposed threat Beijing poses. "We are going to have two sharply different value systems in operation on the same planet for the foreseeable future. We mustn't be naïve. We need to retain the capacity to defend ourselves," he told Jolie.

Never challenging him, Jolie even asked the head of perhaps the world's most notorious spying agency how we can protect ourselves from fake information.

To some, the pairing of a Hollywood star and a veteran spymaster might seem strange. But, in reality, the silver screen and the national security state have always been intimately intertwined. And as much as Jolie presents herself as a leading humanitarian, even being appointed as a Special Envoy for the UN Commission for Refugees, she has spent an inordinate amount of her free time rubbing shoulders with some of the world's worst human rights abuses.

At World Refugee Day in 2005, Jolie shared a stage with then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice was a key player in the Bush administration, responsible for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, two of the world's worst humanitarian and refugee crises that continue to plague the planet to this day.

Jolie herself has slowly become a leading member of the U.S. national security apparatus, joining the influential and well-endowed Council on Foreign Relations think tank in 2007, and penning a joint op-ed in The New York Times with John McCain two years ago calling for U.S. intervention in Syria and Myanmar. "Around the world, there is profound concern that America is giving up the mantle of global leadership," they questionably asserted, decrying America's "steady retreat over the past decade" that has, "dangerously eroded the rule of law," and condemned the Trump administration's inaction in Syria that could have "deterred mass atrocities," and reduced the refugee crisis.

Salt

Jolie's collaboration with high-level government officials is not limited to her personal life, however. The 45-year-old Californian has also worked closely, and openly, with CIA officials as part of her movies. A case in point is the 2010 blockbuster Salt , where Jolie plays a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy. The movie was released at the same time as the real-life Anna Chapman scandal, where the Russian national was caught spying for her country inside the U.S., and marked the beginning of hardening American relations with Moscow, ending up at the point where some have declared the beginning of a new Cold War.

" Salt was the first big cultural product reflecting this geopolitical change, for most of the 2000s Hollywood had no interest in evil Russians," Tom Secker, an investigative journalist with SpyCulture.com told MintPress . "If you watch the film the Russian politicians are clearly based on Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev."

Salt, Angelina Jolie Evil Russian

Jolie, playing an evil Russian spy in Salt, chokes out an NYPD officer

"We talked to a lot of the women in the CIA," said Jolie of her experiences preparing for her role. She appeared to have nothing but admiration for the organization; "One after the other, they are just these lovely, sweet women that you can‟t imagine being put in a dangerous situation, but they really are," she added. Salt even hired a former CIA officer to be an on-set technical advisor.

A CIA document Secker shared with MintPress highlights the extent of CIA involvement in Hollywood and their reasons for doing so. "In an effort to ensure an accurate portrayal of the men and women of the CIA," it reads. "For years the Agency has worked with creative artists from across the entertainment industry. [The CIA Office of Public Affairs] interacts with directors, producers, screenwriters, authors, documentarians, actors and others to help debunk myths and provide authenticity, and of course to protect Agency equities," it adds. But perhaps the most important reason stated is, "to help prevent inappropriate negative depictions of the Agency," in mass media.

Propaganda on an enormous scale

The level of state involvement in Salt is far from abnormal. In fact, Alford and Secker's book " National Security Cinema " details how, since 2005, documents they obtained showed that the Department of Defense alone had closely collaborated in the production of over 1,000 movies or TV shows. This includes many of the largest film franchises, such as "Iron Man," "Transformers," "James Bond," and "Mission: Impossible," and hit TV shows like "The Biggest Loser," "Grey's Anatomy," "Master Chef" and "The Price is Right."

In general, the military or the CIA will offer free services to productions, such as the use of prohibitively expensive military equipment, or technical direction, in exchange for editorial control over scripts. This allows the agencies to make sure the power, prestige, and integrity of these organizations are not challenged. Sometimes entire movies are radically rewritten.

"The Department of Defense actually apologized in their covering letter to the producers of "Hulk" (2003), since the changes they required were so extensive," Dr. Matthew Alford of the University of Bath told MintPress .

But really the disturbing thing here is the pattern and the scale What I suggest is that we focus on the deliberate, major, secretive pressures that rewrite scripts -- and we find they're all on the side of the national security state. Systematically scrubbed from the screen is an unsavoury century of military history including war crimes, illegal arms sales, racism and sexual assault, torture, coups, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction. It amounts to the airbrushing of an entire mediated culture."

Thus, the large majority of big-budget productions featuring military or intelligence services have been greenlighted by the national security state, who have negotiated for control over the message in order to better propagandize both Americans and the global public. However, serious antiwar content rarely makes it to network TV or Hollywood drawing boards, so wholescale interference is usually unnecessary.

In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, wrote that his organization "has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers -- studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors." Many of America's most familiar faces have visited the organization's headquarters in Langley, VA, including Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Bryan Cranston, and Tom Cruise.

In recent years, collaboration has become even more overt. The Department of Defense even tweeted out during the Oscars how proud it is to work so closely with Hollywood to further its own image.

https://twitter.com/deptofdefense/status/970461390283587585?lang=en

Meanwhile, the latest series of the hit spy show "Jack Ryan," for instance, has the eponymous CIA hero travel to Venezuela to help overthrow tyrannical dictator Nicolas Reyes (a clear allusion to current president Nicolas Maduro). John Krasinski, who plays Ryan, said that he worked closely with the Agency in order to make the show more realistic. Krasinski also described the CIA as amazingly "apolitical." "They're always trying to do the right thing," he said of them, claiming they "care about the country in a bigger, more idealistic way."

Last month, a real CIA agent, Matthew John Heath, was arrested outside Venezuela's largest oil refinery carrying explosives, a grenade launcher, a submachine gun, and stacks of U.S. dollars.

"Probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents and we just don't know it. And I wouldn't be surprised at all to discover that this was extremely common," said "Batman" star Ben Affleck in 2012, before going to describe himself, perhaps jokingly, as a CIA agent himself.

https://cdn.iframe.ly/VKxIpdm?iframe=card-small&v=1&app=1
Propaganda works

The effect of years of propaganda has been to improve the standing of the deep state and make the American public more conducive to supporting the tactics of the CIA and the military. One academic study found that showing torture scenes from the hit spy series "24" to liberal college students made them far more likely to support the use of it against anyone deemed an enemy of the state.

Democrat-aligned voters' opinion of the FBI has been steadily rising over the last decade, to the point that 77% hold a favorable view of the institution (and almost two-thirds of the country supports the CIA).

Thus, while the entertainment industry might be liberal in that it largely opposes Trump and donates to the Democratic Party, it works closely to support and uphold the national security state, promotes ultra-patriotism and American aggression throughout the world. While Jolie might present herself as a champion of human rights, working with the very institutions responsible for destroying those rights around the globe undermines this assertion.

Feature photo | Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie addresses a press conference at Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, Feb. 5, 2019. Photo | AP

Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent . He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting , The Guardian , Salon , The Grayzone , Jacobin Magazine , Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary .

[Apr 24, 2021] Blinken's Winking and Nodding to the Neocons -- Strategic Culture

Apr 24, 2021 | www.strategic-culture.org

Biden's Western Hemisphere foreign policy is not much different from that of Obama's, Wayne Madsen writes.

Like proverbial bad pennies, the neocon imperialists who plagued the Barack Obama administration have turned up in force in Joe Biden's State Department. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has given more than winks and nods to the dastardly duo of Victoria Nuland, slated to become Blinken's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the number three position at the State Department, and Samantha Power, nominated to become the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Nuland and Power both have problematic spouses who do not fail to offer their imperialistic opinions regardless of the appearance of conflicts-of-interest. Nuland's husband is the claptrappy neocon warmonger Robert Kagan, someone who has never failed to urge to prod the United States into wars that only benefit Israel. Power's husband is the totally creepy Cass Sunstein, who served as Obama's White House "information czar" and advocated government infiltration of non-governmental organizations and news media outlets to wage psychological warfare campaigns.

True to form, Blinken's State Department has already come to the aid of Venezuela's right-wing self-appointed "opposition leader" Juan Guaido, whose actual constituency is found in the wealthy gated communities of Venezuelan and Cuban expatriates in south Florida and not in the barrios of Caracas or Maracaibo.

Blinken and his team of old school yanqui imperialists have also criticized the constitutional and judicially-warranted detention of former interim president Jeanine Áñez, who became president in 2019 after the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government of President Evo Morales was overthrown in a Central Intelligence Agency-inspired and -directed military coup. The far-right forces backing Áñez were roundly defeated in the October 2020 election that swept MAS and Morales's chosen presidential candidate, Luis Arce, back into power. It seems that for Blinken and his ilk, a decisive victory in an election only applies to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, not to Arce and MAS in Bolivia.

It should be recalled that while Blinken was national security adviser to then-Vice President Biden in the Obama administration, every sort of deception and trickery was used by the CIA to depose Morales in Bolivia and President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. In fact, the Obama administration, with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, claimed its first Latin American political victim when a CIA coup was launched against progressive President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras. Today, Honduras is ruled by a right-wing kleptocratic narco-president, Juan Orlando Hernández, whose brother, Tony Hernández, is currently serving life in federal prison in the United States for drug trafficking. For the likes of Blinken, Power, Nuland, and former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, who currently serves as "domestic policy adviser" to Biden, suppression of progressive governments and support for right-wing dictators and autocrats have always been the preferred foreign policy, particularly for the Western Hemisphere. For example, while the Biden administration remains quiet on right-wing regimes in Central America that are responsible for the outflow of thousands of beleaguered Mayan Indians to the southern U.S. border with Mexico, it has announced that Trump era sanctions on 24 Nicaraguan government officials, including President Daniel Ortega's wife and Nicaragua's vice president, Rosario Murillo, as well as three of their sons – Laureano, Rafael, and Juan Carlos – will continue.

Biden's Western Hemisphere foreign policy is not much different from that of Obama's. Biden and Brazilian far-right, Adolf Hitler-loving, and Covid pandemic-denying President Jair Bolsonaro are said to have struck a deal on environmental protection of the Amazon Basin ahead of an April 22 global climate change virtual summit called by the White House. A coalition of 198 Brazilian NGOs, representing environmental, indigenous rights, and other groups, has appealed to Biden not to engage in any rain forest protection agreement with the untrustworthy Bolsonaro. The Brazilian president has repeatedly advocated the wholesale deforestation of the Amazon region. Meanwhile, while Biden urges Americans to maintain Covid public health measures, Bolsonaro continues to downplay the virus threat as Brazil's overall death count approaches that of the United States.

Blinken's State Department has been relatively quiet on the Northern Triangle of Central America fascist troika of Presidents Orlando of Honduras, Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Instead of pressuring these fascistas to democratize and stop their genocidal policies toward the indigenous peoples of their nations, Biden told Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador that he would pump $4 billion into supposed "assistance" to those countries to stop the flow of migrants. Biden is repeating the same old American gambits of the past. Any U.S. assistance to kleptocratic countries like those of the Northern Triangle has and will line the pockets of their corrupt leaders. Flush with U.S. aid cash, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador will be sure to grant contracts to greedy Israeli counter-insurgency contractors always at the ready to commit more human rights abuses against the workers, students, and indigenous peoples of Central America.

Biden is also in no hurry to reverse the freeze imposed by Donald Trump on U.S.-Cuban relations. Biden, whose policy toward Cuba represents a fossilized relic of the Cold War, intends to maintain Trump's freeze on U.S. commercial, trade, and tourism relations with Cuba. Biden's Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, a Jewish Cuban-American expatriate, is expected to reach out to right-wing Cuban-Americans in south Florida in order to ensure Democratic Party inroads in the 2022 and 2024 U.S. elections. Therefore, even restoring the status quo ante established by Barack Obama is off-the-table for Biden, Blinken, and Mayorkas. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Cuban-American and ethically-challenged Democrat Bob Menendez, has stated there will be no normalization of pre-Trump relations with Cuba until his "regime change" whims are satisfied. Regurgitating typical right-wing Cuban-American drivel, Mayorkas has proclaimed after he was announced as the new Homeland Security Secretary, "I have been nominated to be the DHS Secretary and oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones." The last part of that statement was directed toward the solidly Republican bloc of moneyed Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Bolivian interests in south Florida.

While Blinken hurls his neocon invectives at Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba, he remains silent on the repeated foot-dragging by embattled and highly unpopular right-wing Chilean President Sebastian Pinera on implementing a new Constitution to replace that put into place in 1973 by the fascist military dictator General Augusto Pinochet. The current Chilean Constitution is courtesy of Richard Nixon's foreign policy "Svengali," the duplicitous Henry Kissinger, an individual who obviously shares Blinken's taste for "realpolitik" adventurism on a global scale.

While Blinken has weighed in on the domestic politics of Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, he has had no comment on the anti-constitutional moves by Colombian far-right authoritarian President Ivan Duque, the front man for that nation's Medellin narcotics cartel. It would also come as no surprise if Blinken, Nuland, and Power have quietly buttressed the candidacy of right-wing banker, Guillermo Lasso, who is running against the progressive socialist candidate Andrés Arauz, the protegé of former president Rafael Correa. Blinken can be expected to question the results of the April 11 if Lasso cries fraud in the event of an Arauz victory. Conversely, Blinken will remain silent if Lasso wins and Arauz cries foul. That has always been the nature of U.S. Western Hemisphere policy, regardless of what party controls the White House.

[Apr 24, 2021] Putin Is Keeping the West Guessing and That's Just Fine With Him

Apr 24, 2021 | financialpost.com

...The view from Moscow is very different, fueled by a sense of grievance that the West is determined to weaken Russia and stoke a pro-democracy "color" revolution to topple Putin. By this reading, the U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies have repeatedly betrayed Russia, abandoning missile treaties and expanding ever closer to its borders, since Putin became the first foreign leader to offer help to Washington after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S.

"The Kremlin feels in a fortress, under sustained pressure from the U.S. and the West in general. With its aggressive actions, Russia is trying to deter the U.S., but Washington is just responding with stronger measures," said Oksana Antonenko, a director at Control Risks in London. "We are certainly at the most dangerous point since the Soviet Union collapsed."

... ... ...

On Wednesday, the day before Russia announced its troop withdrawal, Putin warned rival nations not to cross Russia's "red line" in his annual state-of-the-nation speech, saying pressure on his country had become "a new form of sport." But he also held out an olive branch of talks on strategic security.

... ... ...

Prosecutors this month asked a Moscow court to declare Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation and his campaign offices to be extremist organizations, which could subject staff and volunteers to criminal prosecution and imprisonment. They accused them of plotting to stage a "color" revolution in Russia on the instructions of unnamed foreign states.

A top Putin ally, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament, described Navalny as a "tool of American policy" that allowed himself to be used for interfering in Russia's domestic affairs.

... ... ...

In his call with Biden, Putin raised an alleged plot to stage a coup against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko hatched in consultation with the U.S., according to the Kremlin. Lukashenko, who's ruled Russia's neighbor and closest ally since 1994, has faced months of pro-democracy opposition protests since disputed elections last August.

"The practice of organizing coups and planning political assassinations, including of top officials, that's going too far," Putin said in his annual address. "They've overstepped all boundaries."

In talks with Lukashenko in Moscow next day, Putin said Russia is tightening military and security cooperation with Belarus.

... ... ...

Putin insisted in Wednesday's address that "we really don't want to burn bridges" with the West, before adding that anyone who mistakes Russian intentions for weakness "must know that Russia's response will be asymmetrical, swift and tough."

[Apr 19, 2021] Browder's grandfather is Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA. Now freely admitted that he held that post on the payroll of FBI and Office of Naval Intelligence. Bill merely continues the family business of damaging Russia by any means possible.

Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

oldhippie , Apr 19 2021 18:42 utc | 19

Bill Browder is mentioned in b's top post.

Browder's grandfather is Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA. Now freely admitted that he held that post on the payroll of FBI and Office of Naval Intelligence. Bill merely continues the family business of damaging Russia by any means possible.

Yes, Russophobia is a very durable policy.

[Apr 19, 2021] I think Scott Ritter is engaging in an imaginative future if he thinks the 'hate russia' team has no successors. The academy will be full of them just itching for an interns job with a congresscritter.

Notable quotes:
"... The USA has striven to obtain full spectrum dominance and they appear to have gotten close in terms of public political imagination, western political elites almost entirely in the 'hate russia' camp, useful idiots snapping at the Russian and Chinese heels, permanent state of conflict awareness and uncertainty in the public mind, perfection of colour revolution technique and its social infrastructure development mechanism. ..."
Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Apr 19 2021 20:48 utc | 40

I think Scott Ritter is engaging in an imaginative future if he thinks the 'hate russia' team has no successors. The academy will be full of them just itching for an interns job with a congresscritter.

Speaking of warmongers, where is Tony Blair these days? Could he be the USA useful idiot egging Boris on to sail a warship or two to the Black Sea? He never met a war he didn't like, did the 'hard man' act for Bush the fool, and has been traipsing about any warzone pontificating for a fat fee and would be right at home being the bumper-upper for Boris. It would all be hush hush as he is hated in UK.

In 2018 Boris appointed the previous UK ambassador to Turkey, Richard Moore, to the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). He was formerly the Director General, Political, at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Moore attended St George's College, Weybridge. Batchelor's degree at Worcester College, Oxford. He then won a Kennedy Scholarship to study at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University. In 2007, he attended the Stanford Executive Programme.

The ducks have been in alignment for some time.


powerandpeople , Apr 19 2021 20:49 utc | 41

Excellent article, B highlights that change won't come from the new administration BECAUSE money flows to the congressional-industrial-military cabal only if the existing regime is in power AND USA remains a 2 party system - one 'better' than China.

This principal was echoed in November 2020 by ex US Army Danny Sjursen

"...it's obvious that the Biden bunch has no desire to slow down, no less halt, the "revolving door" that connects national security work in the government and jobs or security consulting positions in the defense industry. The same goes for the think tanks that the arms producers amply fund to justify the whole circus...

Or consider retired Marine Corps major general turned defense consultant Arnold Punaro who recently said of Biden's coming tenure, "I think the industry will have, when it comes to national security, a very positive view."

Given the evidence that business-as-usual will continue in the Biden years, perhaps it's time to take that advice from Cornel West, absorb the truth about Biden's future national security squad, and act accordingly. There's no top-down salvation on the agenda -- not from Joe or his crew of consummate insiders. Pressure and change will flow from the grassroots or it won't come at all."

Salvation can only COME FROM the good people of America

But the very voting system prevents other voices being heard. There is no proportional representation, therefore no other views than the highly paid military-industrial consultants, the merchants of violence.

The Tweedledum and Tweedledee American political system is ossified, inflexible, suppressive.

A giant echo chamber.

Hello! Hello! anyone with a brain in there?

The echos bounce and fade. No reply.

American foreign policy is brain dead.

Until compulsory military service is Brought back to USA, all children of the highest earning bracket straight to the front line, no soft touch deployments, no bone-spur deferment.

Then, and only then, will foreign policy change under the US 2 party self-enrichment system.


juliania , Apr 19 2021 21:04 utc | 43

Stonebird @ 36 writes:

"...For four years, both "choices" were hammered by the Democrats into the supine brains of the US masses. which has given rise to "automatic" and forceful unthinking attitudes..."

This is not true, and pardon me for saying so because indeed there are elements of truth in what you are saying. It is NOT the US masses that are grabbing guns and ammunition and commiting mayhem on their fellow citizens. It is the gullible and the weak and the mentally disturbed, who are present in any large and stressed society. They probably match the one percenters at the top and cohorts in the ten percent - (just a guess on my part) but they are NOT the 'masses'.

The masses have bucked the mainstream mantras of the past O-T and now B years. We don't have power - power is as you say with the rich, with the party demagogues, with the leeches, and as b points out, their rule is coming to an end but they still hold the reins of power. Whether or not Biden saw, or Trump saw, or even Obama saw, that this is not the way it ought to be - they have each been powerless to do anything about it in a meaningful way so far.

Don't give up. It's a long haul but here's where I agree with the TINA principle. There is no alternative. We just have to keep on keeping on. The Dems will lose power in Congress come next elections. There will be inroads made, and if Republicans get elected, so be it. A few more will have better souls, and inch by inch the oldies will have to yield. It's gonna happen. And, in answer to a post above:

What has Putinist regime "restraint " achieved so far except brazen falsehood and enmity?

[Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Apr 19 2021 17:17 ]

Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with alignment with China and the tipping of the balance of world understanding in their favor. This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic agenda, and with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.

Thank God.

uncle tungsten , Apr 19 2021 21:25 utc | 47

alaff #27

++

Thank you for that incisive statement. One only has to watch those 5 minute utoob by Steve Pieczenic I posted to get a sense of the totality of USA dominance and imagined dominance and the malign drivers of its reach. I know he is a blowhard but he was at the apex of the dirty game. He is a rigid anticommunist, he talks as if Putin is one of their successes, he hates Xi so he must be alarmed that they have been brought into anti empire unity.

The USA has striven to obtain full spectrum dominance and they appear to have gotten close in terms of public political imagination, western political elites almost entirely in the 'hate russia' camp, useful idiots snapping at the Russian and Chinese heels, permanent state of conflict awareness and uncertainty in the public mind, perfection of colour revolution technique and its social infrastructure development mechanism.

Conventional weaponry has slipped their grasp. But that is matched by an alternative that they won't hesitate to use.

uncle tungsten , Apr 19 2021 21:42 utc | 50

juliania #43

Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with alignment with China and the tipping of the balance of world understanding in their favor. This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic agenda, and with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.

Thank you, that is the essence of diplomacy and the avoidance of conflict and even war.

War must end. It is an ignorant reversal of human progress, it poisons minds and the earth itself. Its legacy is one of tears and material loss. It give no one person of good will any benefit. It slaughters the innocent!! children, women and men and our environment. It is the game of ignorance asserting superiority over thought and imagination.

It is the daring imagination of betterment that motivates the development of OBOR and the east to west transit corridor in Russia. It is imagination of betterment to build trade and access to economy and elevation from poverty that is of the utmost benefit to us humans sharing and caring for this beautiful planet.

If the west cast off its parasitic mentality toward the other and embraced the same daring imagination for its people's betterment they might come close to the achievements we have seen in Russia and China and elsewhere that the philosophy is paramount. There is always hope and the chance that might come about.

uncle tungsten , Apr 19 2021 22:27 utc | 53

Intensifying anti Russian policies will result in the same outcomes the USA achieved in their anti Iranian policies.
EJ Magnier reports on the recent JCPOA members meeting:

"The Islamic Republic proved to be a shark with sharp teeth during its negotiation with the signatories (Russia, China, France, Great Britain and Germany) of the nuclear deal in Vienna, leaving few choices to the negotiators. Iran showed how complex and inflexible its position is with the most powerful county in the world, forbidding the US envoy to join the mediators in the same room because Donald Trump revoked its 2015 nuclear deal agreement. Moreover, Iran used the Israeli sabotage actions against the Natanz nuclear facility as an excuse to hit Israel, the US and all European negotiators who side with the Americans...


...Iran did not ask for a guarantee against another Trump-like decision – which revoked the nuclear deal – in the future because its nuclear capability is the guarantee. Iran is not asking for a guarantee from China and Russia, which are under US sanctions. Iran exhausted its patience in 2018 when it waited for an entire year without using its right to gradually withdraw from the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Iran then believed Europe might come forward and hold to its commitments even if the US pulled back. That was not the case, and Tehran is now aware that Europe and the US have the same objectives hidden behind different behaviours.

Today it is known that Iran is enriching uranium up to 60% and can reach 90% in several months. This does not mean Iran is necessarily producing nuclear weapons, but it is enough to cross the West's red lines. If the US sanctions are not lifted or partially lifted, if the deal is revoked or other sanctions are imposed in the future, Iran will fall back into its complete nuclear cycle without any warning."

round-color: rgb(222, 227, 233); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;"> Then, and only then, will foreign policy change under the US 2 party self-enrichment system.


Posted by: powerandpeople | Apr 19 2021 20:49 utc | 41

Stonebird @ 36 writes:

"...For four years, both "choices" were hammered by the Democrats into the supine brains of the US masses. which has given rise to "automatic" and forceful unthinking attitudes..."

This is not true, and pardon me for saying so because indeed there are elements of truth in what you are saying. It is NOT the US masses that are grabbing guns and ammunition and commiting mayhem on their fellow citizens. It is the gullible and the weak and the mentally disturbed, who are present in any large and stressed society. They probably match the one percenters at the top and cohorts in the ten percent - (just a guess on my part) but they are NOT the 'masses'.

The masses have bucked the mainstream mantras of the past O-T and now B years. We don't have power - power is as you say with the rich, with the party demagogues, with the leeches, and as b points out, their rule is coming to an end but they still hold the reins of power. Whether or not Biden saw, or Trump saw, or even Obama saw, that this is not the way it ought to be - they have each been powerless to do anything about it in a meaningful way so far.

Don't give up. It's a long haul but here's where I agree with the TINA principle. There is no alternative. We just have to keep on keeping on. The Dems will lose power in Congress come next elections. There will be inroads made, and if Republicans get elected, so be it. A few more will have better souls, and inch by inch the oldies will have to yield. It's gonna happen. And, in answer to a post above:

What has Putinist regime "restraint " achieved so far except brazen falsehood and enmity?

[Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Apr 19 2021 17:17 ]

Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with alignment with China and the tipping of the balance of world understanding in their favor. This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic agenda, and with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.

Thank God.

Posted by: juliania | Apr 19 2021 21:04 utc | 43

alaff #27

++

Thank you for that incisive statement. One only has to watch those 5 minute utoob by Steve Pieczenic I posted to get a sense of the totality of USA dominance and imagined dominance and the malign drivers of its reach. I know he is a blowhard but he was at the apex of the dirty game. He is a rigid anticommunist, he talks as if Putin is one of their successes, he hates Xi so he must be alarmed that they have been brought into anti empire unity.

The USA has striven to obtain full spectrum dominance and they appear to have gotten close in terms of public political imagination, western political elites almost entirely in the 'hate russia' camp, useful idiots snapping at the Russian and Chinese heels, permanent state of conflict awareness and uncertainty in the public mind, perfection of colour revolution technique and its social infrastructure development mechanism.

Conventional weaponry has slipped their grasp. But that is matched by an alternative that they won't hesitate to use.

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Apr 19 2021 21:25 utc | 47

juliania #43

Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with alignment with China and the tipping of the balance of world understanding in their favor. This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic agenda, and with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.

Thank you, that is the essence of diplomacy and the avoidance of conflict and even war.

War must end. It is an ignorant reversal of human progress, it poisons minds and the earth itself. Its legacy is one of tears and material loss. It give no one person of good will any benefit. It slaughters the innocent!! children, women and men and our environment. It is the game of ignorance asserting superiority over thought and imagination.

It is the daring imagination of betterment that motivates the development of OBOR and the east to west transit corridor in Russia. It is imagination of betterment to build trade and access to economy and elevation from poverty that is of the utmost benefit to us humans sharing and caring for this beautiful planet.

If the west cast off its parasitic mentality toward the other and embraced the same daring imagination for its people's betterment they might come close to the achievements we have seen in Russia and China and elsewhere that the philosophy is paramount. There is always hope and the chance that might come about.

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Apr 19 2021 21:42 utc | 50

Intensifying anti Russian policies will result in the same outcomes the USA achieved in their anti Iranian policies.
EJ Magnier reports on the recent JCPOA members meeting:

"The Islamic Republic proved to be a shark with sharp teeth during its negotiation with the signatories (Russia, China, France, Great Britain and Germany) of the nuclear deal in Vienna, leaving few choices to the negotiators. Iran showed how complex and inflexible its position is with the most powerful county in the world, forbidding the US envoy to join the mediators in the same room because Donald Trump revoked its 2015 nuclear deal agreement. Moreover, Iran used the Israeli sabotage actions against the Natanz nuclear facility as an excuse to hit Israel, the US and all European negotiators who side with the Americans...


...Iran did not ask for a guarantee against another Trump-like decision – which revoked the nuclear deal – in the future because its nuclear capability is the guarantee. Iran is not asking for a guarantee from China and Russia, which are under US sanctions. Iran exhausted its patience in 2018 when it waited for an entire year without using its right to gradually withdraw from the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Iran then believed Europe might come forward and hold to its commitments even if the US pulled back. That was not the case, and Tehran is now aware that Europe and the US have the same objectives hidden behind different behaviours.

Today it is known that Iran is enriching uranium up to 60% and can reach 90% in several months. This does not mean Iran is necessarily producing nuclear weapons, but it is enough to cross the West's red lines. If the US sanctions are not lifted or partially lifted, if the deal is revoked or other sanctions are imposed in the future, Iran will fall back into its complete nuclear cycle without any warning."

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Apr 19 2021 22:27 utc | 53

sset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4689067"> https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4689067

Tom , Apr 17 2021 22:07 utc | 40

Posted by: Bernard F. | Apr 17 2021 21:21 utc | 38

I suspect Sullivan and Blinken's next gig will be something like that. "We came here to forget", but instead of the French Legion, it will be PMC Wagner.

Personally what I would do would be a Operation Bagration 2.0 at the slightest misstep by Ukraine. There is may too much on the table here. Bio labs, nests of NATO rats, nuclear power plants, NATO missiles on the Ukrainian and Belarus borders with Russia. Time to clear out the rats including Lviv. After disinfecting this part of eastern Europe (again) of that other far more dangerous virus, Nazism, life will be much more peaceful in that part of the world, and likely by the domino effect (yes I actually said that!) to other places in the world plagued by US exceptionalism.

[Apr 19, 2021] Two decades a coordinated anti-Russia propaganda originating from the U.K. [MI-6 its former spies Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society] and Washington DC a nest of anti-Russia lobbyists [Atlantic Council BellingCat, etc]

Looks like neo-McCarthyism is really irreversible in the USA now...
Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Oui , Apr 19 2021 19:11 utc | 23

... two decades a coordinated anti-Russia propaganda originating from the U.K. [MI-6 – its former spies – Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society] and Washington DC a nest of anti-Russia lobbyists [Atlantic Council – BellingCat, etc]. In fact it's the vast majority with groundless and poor reasoning, these folks despise everything left, Socialist and Communist. Too many years and too much wealth have pushed the anti-Russia agenda. The new generation with social media lack comprehension what information is published and with what political agenda.

Due to the 9/11 attacks on America. the US and UK gave new life and purpose to NATO. From Afghanistan the expeditionary force was sent to Libya and Syria. The colour revolutions gave blood to anti-Putin rhetoric. US politics of both parties tried to divide the EU into Old and New Europe. The criminal acts of CIA torture, rendition and black sites made a number of states accomplishes in war crimes. No issue a decade later with drone assassinations. Calling out "Putin" as killer is ridiculous looking in the mirror how many tens and hundreds of thousands have died on the battlefield at the hands of the UK/US and allies. And the sales of arms, munitions and lethal weapons reach new heights in the Middle East and warring parties.

OCCRP Report: The Pentagon Is Spending Up To $2.2 Billion on Soviet-Style Arms for Syrian Rebels

The Czech Republic is responsible for arms and munitions delivery to Bulgarian arms dealers working with Pentagon contracts. These ended up in the Ukraine, Syria, Libya and Yemen. The bomb blast in Vrbetice most likely saved many (innocent) lives.

Some repentants

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer in Op-Ed of Dec. 2017 - 'NATO should not have committed to membership of Ukraine and Georgia'

In the recent past I have written about Legatum at a time Anne Applebaum found her employ at the think tank. The red alert signs and alarm bells were up at the time and I gave some background information. The first lady of Poland (almost) and her hubby former UK citizen and CIA agent Radek Sikorski of Afghan and Angola fame.

Anne Applebaum's Confession

Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit | The Guardian – July 2020 |


Les7 , Apr 19 2021 19:53 utc | 28

After 50 years of hate creation(cold war 1)

After 15 years of chaos creation

After 15 years of slander andback-stabbing

We are to believe this cabal of humanity hating zealots will fade into the background??

Because facts will matter???

Facts have never mattered. In this post-modern illusion our leaders call a reset, facts actually have negative value...sorta like negative interest rates.

Expect insanity to multiply at the same rate as the money supply expands

Patroklos , Apr 19 2021 20:02 utc | 29

Adam Curtis' new documentary series ("I Just Can't Get You out of my Head") deals (in part) with the way the West's entire worldview sees everything in simplistic Manichean terms, like Star Wars. The West is always good (even when they act immorally) and the baddies are always lone rogues, like a spaghetti Western. WW2 shaped the West's entire thinking about its role in the world: the Allies are on the side of decency and freedom while the enemy is simply evil through and through, beyond redemption. A parade of baddies from Hitler to Castro, Uncle Ho, Khomeini, Gaddafi, Hussein, Assad, Putin and Xi. Bond movies and Hollywood write the scripts, the MSM pumps out the pulp. No one wants to hear that history is a tad more complicated than bogeymen vs. Marvel superheroes, but then history does have a lovely way of biting people on the ass...

[Apr 19, 2021] Why Washington's Anti-Russian Policies Are Likely To Intensify

Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Why Washington's Anti-Russian Policies Are Likely To Intensify Mina , Apr 19 2021 16:49 utc | 1

Thanks to a monoculture of anti-Russia hawks in U.S. policy institutions relations between the U.S. and Russia are likely to further decline. But some hope might be seen at the horizon.

Scott Ritter predicts the end of a generation of anti-Russian influencers in Washington DC who depict Russia and is policies as being run by just one man:

These "Putin whisperers" infiltrated every aspect of American culture and politics, their writings achieving near-scripture-like reception in the pages of American newspapers and political journals, and the authors of this intellectual dreck being offered prime seats at the table of national security policymaking, either on the National Security Council, or as a National Intelligence Officer.
...
These "Putin Whisperers" thrived during the administration of President Barack Obama, led by the likes of Michael McFaul, and achieved near-critical mass during the Trump administration, empowered by overly politicized claims of collusion with Russia by people in the Trump circle. They continue to play an important role today, filling the airwaves and pages with anti-Putin propaganda whose cumulative effect is to dumb down the American public by demonizing Russia and its president to the point that any accusation will be accepted at face value , regardless of the lack of corroborating evidence or the improbable veracity of its claim; the recent scandal over allegations that Russia paid the Taliban bounties to kill Americans in Afghanistan serves as an apt illustration of this phenomenon.

Unfortunately the constant demonization of Russia's president by the 'Putin-whisperers' has already led to some tragic consequences :

A children's author and parish councillor died after a neighbour with mental health issues shot him in the face and stamped on his head, believing he worked for Vladimir Putin and was to blame for the spread of Covid-19, an inquest heard.

But the danger of seeing everything caused by just one man is much greater. It explains the confused policies of the Biden administration which may lead towards war.

Ritter argues that Biden trapped himself:

Biden is a prisoner of his own anti-Russian rhetoric, influenced in large part by the need to be seen as responding to a domestic political prerogative founded on decades of Russia - and Putin-bashing at the hands of the "Putin whisperers" and their ilk. It is one thing to spout off as a candidate for president; it is an altogether different reality to be serving as president, where words and actions have life-or-death consequences.

As the realities set in the people and their policies will have to change:

These are policies pushed and promoted by the "Putin whisperers." For the moment, their will continues to prevail. But their days are numbered, as realpolitik pragmatists in the White House, Pentagon and Intelligence Community are recognizing the reality that the days of taking for granted US global hegemony are over, and that for the United States to remain relevant, it must adapt to the reality of a multi-polar world, and Russia's rightful role therein. This will not happen overnight, but it is in the process of happening. In promoting and supporting Biden's latest round of sanctions, the "Putin whisperers" have reached their high-water mark. From here on out, their influence will begin to ebb as the national security demand for fact-based assessments outstrips the domestic political need for fact-free propaganda.

I am not that optimistic. The Blob is resistant to change because those who are inside it tend to bite away anyone with even a slightly different view.

Consider the case of Matthew Rojansky, Director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is known as a middle-of-the-road expert of U.S. and Soviet/Russian relations - not a hawk, but also not an appeaser.

Rojansky was supposed to chair the Russia desk in Biden's National Security Council. As soon as that became know the 'Putin Whisperers' came out in force to fight the nomination. Axios led the charge :

Cont. reading: Why Washington's Anti-Russian Policies Are Likely To Intensify

Posted by b at 16:38 UTC | Comments (54)
I am surprised that the Russians did not "leak" a few videos from the EU-sponsored refugee camps in Greece. People becoming mad, violence, suicide attempts, it would be enough to close for good the debate on Russian prisons.

vetinLA , Apr 19 2021 16:51 utc | 2

Increasingly, people need to disregard all rhetoric coming from the U$A. We're immersed in a society, at present, that is coming apart at the seams.

Just exactly what our ruling elites want, to "grease the ways" for the new feudalism to thrive.

Donbass Lives Matter , Apr 19 2021 16:58 utc | 3
It will continue for these reasons:

1) Conflict is a career opportunity. Peace is a bad way to get the grants, bribe money, and stature that the DC sociopaths want. No one whose career depends on conflict gets promoted without conflict.
2) They believe (possibly correctly) that they can attack Russia indirectly, or directly via proxy, and that Russia will only defend, rather than going on a counteroffensive.
3) Sociopaths have a psychological attachment to doing bad things. If a sociopath were given a choice between scamming a client out of $1000 and earning that amount by selling a good product, the sociopath would choose the former option every time, even if the profit and effort were the same.

Bernard F. , Apr 19 2021 17:09 utc | 4

Thanks b.
A lot to read tonight at work :-))

When rats in the same group start fighting each other because neither domination nor escape is possible, it is a good sign of collapse.

Willingness is not ability
https://youtu.be/xBWmkwaTQ0k

And, by the way, Washington (even american people) isn't the unique policy maker.

As James wrote


@ james | Apr 19 2021 4:19 utc | 62
[...]
russia leadership under putin and company have played their hand exceedingly well and have not got sucked into playing the game the way the west has wanted them to[...]

I posted it in the morning

Putin, as a leader of a country with 180 millions citizens and a huge history (and the wounds of USSR collapsus) must consider "Overton window". He done it very well.

As a "Commander in Chief", he must consider first, not to be defeated.


Sun Tzu said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy. #
To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

We must stay focuse have at some facts (not fake) news.
As b. focused, Russia weaponized...a lot
Russian new weapons/military doctrine since 2010, even not Russian propaganda.

https://spacenews.com/new-reports-highlight-russian-chinese-advances-in-space-weapons/


https://news.usni.org/2021/04/08/russian-and-chinese-nuclear-threats-pose-problem-for-u-s-deterrence-experts-say

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2020/11/18/russian_strategic_and_hypersonic_naval_nuclear_weapons_650130.amp.html

Carl D , Apr 19 2021 17:16 utc | 5
They gonna permanently change the meaning of "intelligence", till the word indicates stupidity
Biswapriya Purkayast , Apr 19 2021 17:17 utc | 6
Sanity will never set in without a massive defeat for Amerikastani interests. The most obvious two, which are not mutually exclusive, are Occupied Syria (including the Muhaysinic Emirate of Idlibistan and the Kyrd zionistan) and Ukranazistan. Russia needs to move on both immediately and Brook no further delay. What has Putinist regime "restraint " achieved so far except brazen falsehood and enmity?
Virgile , Apr 19 2021 17:23 utc | 8

It is possible that Biden is acting tough with symbolic sanctions to divert the attention from the reality that the Nord Stream 2 is well and soon alive. He also gets praise from the anti-russia
elements in his government.
Yet Ritter is right in a way. The tit-for-tat that Russia has decided to start will escalate to the point of a serious accident that may shake the USA. That Biden qualify Russia's response to the sanctions as "escalatory" shows that he took note that Russia will not stop retaliating. He is starting to worry that this path will lead to a paralysis of the diplomatic exchange on several important issues and to violent consequences detrimental to the USA and its allies.
Is Biden still mentally capable of an independent opinion?

vk , Apr 19 2021 17:36 utc | 9

Let me consult the oracles...

Here's the answer they gave me:

US, allies besieging Russia offers lesson for China: Global Times editorial

There are complex historical reasons for Central and Eastern European countries to tilt toward the US and become "anti-Russia," which is difficult for outsiders to comment on. It is a pity that internal disintegration rather than coercion from the US had directly led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation was one of the main promoters of the disintegration, and the original agreement to replace the Soviet Union with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was signed by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian leaders who had destroyed the Soviet Union had no idea what would happen to their country afterward.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has brought about geopolitical changes globally, and the evaluation of the event is destined to vary from country to country and from time to time. But it has become increasingly clear that Russia has been the biggest loser from that collapse.

Many Russians once believed that when the Communist Party stepped down and the Soviet Union collapsed, the US and the West would embrace Russia and respect them who had taken the initiative to end the Cold War. The reality, however, is harsh. Moscow has received no gratitude or kindness from the West. From the moment the Soviet Union collapsed, the US has arrogantly treated Russia as a defeated country in the Cold War, engaging in all possible moves to suppress Russia at will.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster for Russia. As the dominant power in the Soviet Union, if it chose to support reforms to solve problems at the beginning, Russia could pay a much smaller price than the geopolitical price it would pay in the following 30 years. Back then, Moscow had a broad sphere of influence and powerful control capability that it could act independently and defiantly against Washington. But it has ceded those geopolitical resources, giving up its advantages.

The US' vicious attitude toward Russia offers a glimpse into the brutality of great power competition and helps people see through Washington's geopolitical manipulation measures. The US portrayed its Cold War with the Soviet Union as an ideological confrontation to conceal its intention to dominate the world alone. Many people, including Russians, believed that a political change of course would fundamentally change their relationship with the US, and that Russia could thus integrate into the West and become a dignified member of the Group of Eight.

Feral Finster , Apr 19 2021 17:37 utc | 10

Swear to God that Ritter is correct.

However, if the foreign policy establishment learned nothing and suffered neither personal nor professional consequences from the War on Iraq, what makes Ritter so sure that anything will be different this time?

Ian2 , Apr 19 2021 18:02 utc | 14

The first cold war lasted 44 years. I wonder how long this one will last?

fyi , Apr 19 2021 18:04 utc | 15

Mr. vk

This attitude was not uncommon among others, such as the Eastern Europeans.

Before 1991, they were vassals of USSR, now they are vassals of vassals - a notch down the pecking order.

In Iran, there have been several million people - largely inhabiting the Greater Tehran area and rather influential - who shared an analogous attitude as the Russians did before 1991.

Fortunately for Iran, Judeo-Christians tried to destroy her by trying to destroy her economy.

Now, that population, has no leg to stand on - they are discredited domestically as their programme of productive engagement with the West turned out to be a fool's errand.

Russians, in 1991, did not expect USSR to break-up, they did not understand that USSR was unified in the corpus of the Red Tsar - just like the Russian Empire was unified (like the United Kingdom) in the person of the Emperor of Russia.

In an analogous manner, the "Secularist Liberals" in Iran, denizens of Tehran - should they get to power, will preside over the disintegration of Iran, since she is unified in the Shia Religion.

There are fools everywhere.

Babyl-on , Apr 19 2021 18:09 utc | 16

It is indeed necessary for the US to recognize the reality of a multi-polar world. However, let us be accurate, the West is one and only one empire of the Five Eyes alliance and not just the US.
Ultimately the question is this: Will the Western empire accept it has failed and will never control the entire world or will it use the nuclear weapons it used twice to become a global empire to ruin the world for anyone else?

Donbass Lives Matter , Apr 19 2021 18:30 utc | 18

To paraphrase John McCain, the Ukraine is a suicide bomber masquerading as a country.

oldhippie , Apr 19 2021 18:42 utc | 19

Bill Browder is mentioned in b's top post.

Browder's grandfather is Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA. Now freely admitted that he held that post on the payroll of FBI and Office of Naval Intelligence. Bill merely continues the family business of damaging Russia by any means possible.

Yes, Russophobia is a very durable policy.

vetinLA , Apr 19 2021 19:18 utc | 26

g @ 11 said;

" The CIA/Establishment/Neocon/liberal doctrine of a unitary imperial superpower that must assimilate all of creation into its usurious, profit making empire, or else, is challenged seriously by few."

There is NOTHING "liberal" in how our latest empire persues it's prerogatives of global corporate hegemony.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liberal

[Apr 19, 2021] Two decades a coordinated anti-Russia propaganda originating from the U.K. [MI-6 its former spies Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society] and Washington DC a nest of anti-Russia lobbyists [Atlantic Council BellingCat, etc]

Looks like neo-McCarthyism is really irreversible in the USA now...
Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Oui , Apr 19 2021 19:11 utc | 23

... two decades a coordinated anti-Russia propaganda originating from the U.K. [MI-6 – its former spies – Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society] and Washington DC a nest of anti-Russia lobbyists [Atlantic Council – BellingCat, etc]. In fact it's the vast majority with groundless and poor reasoning, these folks despise everything left, Socialist and Communist. Too many years and too much wealth have pushed the anti-Russia agenda. The new generation with social media lack comprehension what information is published and with what political agenda.

Due to the 9/11 attacks on America. the US and UK gave new life and purpose to NATO. From Afghanistan the expeditionary force was sent to Libya and Syria. The colour revolutions gave blood to anti-Putin rhetoric. US politics of both parties tried to divide the EU into Old and New Europe. The criminal acts of CIA torture, rendition and black sites made a number of states accomplishes in war crimes. No issue a decade later with drone assassinations. Calling out "Putin" as killer is ridiculous looking in the mirror how many tens and hundreds of thousands have died on the battlefield at the hands of the UK/US and allies. And the sales of arms, munitions and lethal weapons reach new heights in the Middle East and warring parties.

OCCRP Report: The Pentagon Is Spending Up To $2.2 Billion on Soviet-Style Arms for Syrian Rebels

The Czech Republic is responsible for arms and munitions delivery to Bulgarian arms dealers working with Pentagon contracts. These ended up in the Ukraine, Syria, Libya and Yemen. The bomb blast in Vrbetice most likely saved many (innocent) lives.

Some repentants

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer in Op-Ed of Dec. 2017 - 'NATO should not have committed to membership of Ukraine and Georgia'

In the recent past I have written about Legatum at a time Anne Applebaum found her employ at the think tank. The red alert signs and alarm bells were up at the time and I gave some background information. The first lady of Poland (almost) and her hubby former UK citizen and CIA agent Radek Sikorski of Afghan and Angola fame.

Anne Applebaum's Confession

Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit | The Guardian – July 2020 |


Les7 , Apr 19 2021 19:53 utc | 28

After 50 years of hate creation(cold war 1)

After 15 years of chaos creation

After 15 years of slander andback-stabbing

We are to believe this cabal of humanity hating zealots will fade into the background??

Because facts will matter???

Facts have never mattered. In this post-modern illusion our leaders call a reset, facts actually have negative value...sorta like negative interest rates.

Expect insanity to multiply at the same rate as the money supply expands

Patroklos , Apr 19 2021 20:02 utc | 29

Adam Curtis' new documentary series ("I Just Can't Get You out of my Head") deals (in part) with the way the West's entire worldview sees everything in simplistic Manichean terms, like Star Wars. The West is always good (even when they act immorally) and the baddies are always lone rogues, like a spaghetti Western. WW2 shaped the West's entire thinking about its role in the world: the Allies are on the side of decency and freedom while the enemy is simply evil through and through, beyond redemption. A parade of baddies from Hitler to Castro, Uncle Ho, Khomeini, Gaddafi, Hussein, Assad, Putin and Xi. Bond movies and Hollywood write the scripts, the MSM pumps out the pulp. No one wants to hear that history is a tad more complicated than bogeymen vs. Marvel superheroes, but then history does have a lovely way of biting people on the ass...

[Apr 19, 2021] No one fact check's the claims made by the intelligent agencies

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." ~attributed to Voltair
Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Dennis18 , Apr 19 2021 19:13 utc | 25

No one fact check's the claims made by the intelligent agencies. Bernie was told the Russians wanted him to win the election and he jump right in the laps of the liars. Trump knew more before he was president than he did once he was elected. That is why General Flynn was removed under false charges. He knew what was what. I remember the head of the CIA told Trump that the Russian has killed ducks and poison children. Trump fell for the lie hook line and casino
Now we have a president that has mental issues and already believes the Russian are dirty What could go wrong?

[Apr 19, 2021] Gorbachev and Yeltsin didn't want or wish for disasters due to the results they got (and maybe their tasks were impossible in their context). Clear mistakes were made and crimes "allowed", far too much was rushed and ill thought out

Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Sunny Runny Burger , Apr 19 2021 18:47 utc | 20

Don't make simple things complicated the irony of starting this way for this post lol :D (of course everything is complicated as well as simple, language betrays us all).

· The people of the Warsaw pact and then the Russians did what they did for themselves and not for others, and they did it by themselves. It went well as long as the people were in charge (ie. the initial actions) but the politicians then soon messed it up as politicians anywhere are bound to do.

Gorbachev and Yeltsin didn't want or wish for disasters due to the results they got (and maybe their tasks were impossible in their context). Clear mistakes were made and crimes "allowed", far too much was rushed and ill thought out. The politicians had no way of being prepared any more than they would be in the US right now.

· The US is out-competed, dysfunctional, and trapped in a cycle of excuses in order to shoehorn their labyrinth of lies into their current reality. All people lie despite this clear lesson as to why no one should, it is the lies one tells without realizing they are lies that are the worst. This is much like the USSR was but easily even worse.

Will people in Europe and the US manage to duplicate the fall of the Warsaw pact and the USSR? Right now it looks unlikely but remember or be aware that no one predicted the fall of the Iron Curtain or the Politburo and most if not all outsiders in "the west" had trouble believing it and understanding it when it happened or even now (and especially people on both/all sides that are running on ideological biases as fuel).

(Our systems and models do not capture reality and can not, not even theoretically, a different bigger discussion which boils down to the Shannon limit in the end (but I notice thermodynamics is contentious among some so why would I invite that much work?)).

A repeat of history is not necessary nor automatic; the US isn't doing anything to stop its own ongoing fall, at least not anything that I have noticed.

Because b is right.

(I really hope the CPC has a better grasp on this than that article vk posted hints at because I want a stable prosperous China and that includes/demands the continuation of the CPC and the way they have shaped and structured the Chinese system which is noticeable for not taking the USSR approach that worked itself into a blind alley despite decades of repeated attempts at reform (hell even Stalin tried)).

[Apr 19, 2021] Why now -- Trey Gowdy on Biden's move to pull troops from Afghanistan

This was Bush racket. Invasion on false pretenses to establish a foothold and get to former USSR republic. This move was initially a big success (and Putin helped by using his influence on Northern Alliance) but later backfire. In other words this was typical imperial policy.
Apr 19, 2021 | www.youtube.com

Gary Buchanan , 3 days ago

This time, let's don't leave all our equipment and ammunition for them to use against us.

Julie Monarch , 3 days ago

Shut the door! That's how you stop them from coming.

R. Dillon , 3 days ago

I would guess 2 things, 1. He's hoping if he ends the war then none of the terrorists that just snuck in won't attack. 2. He plans on starting a war elsewhere.

Cris Renner , 3 days ago

Please, get them out of office, before they do anymore damage!!!

Clarence Spangle , 3 days ago

"Obama may have gotten (U.S. soldiers) out wrong, but going in is, to me, the biggest single mistake made in the history of our country." -- Donald J. Trump

Ratpatrol Renegade , 3 days ago

Afghanistan's a racket. We're rebuilding their country instead of America. Power plants hospitals and schools that they're never going to use

[Apr 19, 2021] Biden's Russia-China Tactic Is To Wage War AND To Ask For Cooperation. It Will Fail

Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Clueless Joe , Apr 17 2021 19:04 utc | 12

The policies of the Biden administration towards Russia and China are delusional. It thinks that it can squeeze these countries but still successfully ask them for cooperation. It believes that the U.S. position is stronger than it really is and that China and Russia are much weaker than they are.

It is also full of projection. The U.S. accuses both countries of striving for empire, of wanting to annex more land and of human rights violations. But is only the U.S. that has expanding aspirations. Neither China nor Russia are interested in running an empire. They have no interest in planting military bases all over the world. Though both have marginal border conflicts they do not want to acquire more land. And while the U.S. bashes both countries for alleged human rights issues it is starving whole populations (Yemen, Syria, Venezuela) through violence and economic sanctions.

The U.S. power structures in the Pentagon and CIA use the false accusations against Russia and China as pretense for cold military and hot economic wars against both countries. They use color revolution schemes (Ukraine, Myanmar) to create U.S. controlled proxy forces near their borders.

At the same time as it tries to press these countries the U.S. is seeking their cooperation in selected fields. It falsely believes that it has some magical leverage.

Consider this exchange from yesterday's White House press briefing about Biden asking for a summit with Putin while, at the same time, implementing more sanctions against Russia:

Q What if [Putin] says "no," though? Wouldn't that indicate some weakness on the part of the American administration here?

MS. PSAKI: Well, I think the President's view is that Russia is on the outside of the global community in many respects, at this point in time. It's the G7, not the G8. They have -- obviously, we've put sanctions in place in order to send a clear message that there should be consequences for the actions; the Europeans have also done that.

What the President is offering is a bridge back. And so, certainly, he believes it's in their interests to take him up on that offer.

The G7 are not the 'global community'. They have altogether some 500 million inhabitants out of 7.9 billion strong global population. Neither China nor India are members of the G7 nor is any South American or African country. Moreover Russia has rejected a Russian return into the G7/8 format:

"Russia is focused on other formats, apart from the G7," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a brief statement ..

Russia has no interest in a summit which would only be used by the U.S. to further bash Russia. Why should it give Biden that pleasure when there is nothing that Russia would gain from it. Russia does not need a 'bridge back'. There will be no summit.

... ... ...

If Biden wants cooperation with Russia or China he needs to reign in the hawks and stop his attacks on those countries. As he is not willing or capable of doing that any further cooperation attempts will fall flat.

The U.S. has to learn that it is no longer the top dog. It can not work ceaselessly to impact Russia's and China's military and economic security and still expect them to cooperate. If it wants something it will first have to cease the attacks and to accept multilateral relationships.

Posted by b on April 17, 2021 at 17:53 UTC | Permalink

"It can not work ceaselessly to impact Russia's and China's military and economic security and still expect them to cooperate"
You have to understand the USA. They're doing it against Europe on a daily basis, and it actually works... Get them confused why it doesn't always work against others.


Mao Cheng Ji , Apr 17 2021 19:17 utc | 15

It's interesting what's happening right now (in the past hour or so).

First: Russian and Belorussian news about the arrest of leaders (or key participants) of an attempted military coup in Belarus, planned by the US security services.

Then, 30 minutes later: the Czechs expel 18 Russian diplomats, accusing them of spying and of connection to some explosion back in 2014.

I could've been skeptical about the details of the first story, but the second one seems to confirm it. The second story appears to be an obvious attempt to squeeze the first one out of the news. And who else could order the Czech government to do this with a 30 minute notice?

oglalla , Apr 17 2021 19:27 utc | 18

Wouldn't Oceania rulers love to print more of their own currency to buy up all the paper rights to industrial output without having to invest in the factories or anything else! They love this kind of business model.

"The secret of success is to own nothing but control everything."

Because of what's at stake and how little I trust Oceania, I confess I no longer have an opinion about global warming. Even if many of its scientists are *earnest*, who obtained, processed, and stored the data before they started building models? Those institutions are capable of anything.

[Apr 19, 2021] Bellingcat is in the middle of the GRU/Czech arms depot explosion story from 2014 - now being described as "defacto act of Russian state terrorism on a NATO soil."

Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

jayc , Apr 17 2021 22:59 utc | 46

Bellingcat is in the middle of the GRU/Czech arms depot explosion story from 2014 - now being described as "defacto act of Russian state terrorism on a NATO soil."

https://twitter.com/_JakubJanda/status/1383515969797038081

It appears the GRU were following closely a movement of arms from the Czech depot to a Bulgarian middleman, meant to be then delivered to Ukraine. The explosion is now attributed to the GRU because of the Petrov/Boshirov ID, and their presumed signature ineffectiveness failing to destroy the arms cache and later failing to kill the Skripals.

Also reports now that the GRU have a super-villain lair in the French Alps
https://www.dw.com/en/russia-posted-gru-agents-in-french-alps-for-eu-ops-report/a-51548648

Wolle , Apr 18 2021 10:44 utc | 110

One picture says all about Bellingcraps B*sh*t:
https://twitter.com/200_zoka/status/1383687849816428545

[Apr 19, 2021] One Man Stands in the Way of NATO's Run Onward to Moscow - ZeroHedge

Apr 19, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

A foreign military bloc of nations is inching closer to Moscow, Vladimir Putin reacts in kind, and somehow Russia is the aggressor. And learned Ph.D.'s scribble on, defying pure logic from Washington's Think Tank Row. Here's the latest sensational proof that the world will never, ever be at peace.

Dr. Mamuka Tsereteli and James Carafano have a new plan for defeating Russia for good. Now get this, in America, we have institutions like The Heritage Foundation that fund supposed research to perpetuate wars. No, really. The latest report of the foundation "Putin Threatens Ukraine -- Here's the Danger and What US, Allies Should Do About It" is a blueprint for continuing friction between west and east. Let's examine the three takeaways Heritage Foundation puts forward.

According to Tsereteli and Carafano, Putin is about to attack Ukraine. These well-paid foreign policy geniuses say a military buildup inside Russian territory, which was in response to threats from Kyiv, proves beyond a doubt the dastardly Putin is about to overrun Russia's neighbor. To quote the report, "Putin plans to use Russian forces in a full-blown military engagement with that country [Ukraine]." Well, let's find out why Russia's president alerted his military.

Didn't I just read how Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba announced that his country's National Security and Defense Council had approved a strategy aimed at retaking Crimea and reintegrating the strategically important peninsula? Yes, I am sure of it. Another Washington think tank has already outlined something called the Crimean Platform Initiative , another genius plan hatched in the bowels of CIA headquarters, to make Crimea an expensive proposition for Russia.

This came into being the instant Joe Biden took the oath of office as president, and it's only part of an overall strategy to engage Russia in a winner take all confrontation that many experts say, is long overdue. And the has taken unilateral aggressive steps toward the Donbass region and any pocket of the pro-Russia sentiment inside Ukraine. A statement by Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova on this issue bears repeating here:

"All efforts by Kyiv to reclaim Crimea are illegitimate and cannot be interpreted in any other way but a threat of aggression against two Russian [federal] subjects. We reiterate that we will consider the participation of any states or organizations in such activities, including the Crimean Platform initiative, as a hostile act against Russia and direct encroachment on its territorial integrity."

Now that we've established who the aggressor is, let's take a look at Tsereteli's and Carafano's next brilliant takeaway point. The dynamic duo of war strategies says cosmetic measures against Russia will not do! The "west" (meaning NATO), they say, needs a more clear strategy. Which certainly means a massive arms buildup west of the Siverskyi Donets River. The Zelensky government is being pushed from Washington to take even more drastic measures to force Russia into a war stance. The editorial board of the Washington Post recently advised Zelensky:

"Mr. Zelensky now has the opportunity to forge a partnership with Mr. Biden that could decisively advance Ukraine's attempt to break free from Russia and join the democratic West. He should seize on it."

So, now that we've shown who is doing the pushing here, let's turn to the final takeaway from Heritage Foundation master strategists. Tsereteli and Carafano come right out and say "countries left outside of NATO will remain targets of Russian aggression and manipulations." So, the purpose of all this supposed spread of militaristic-based democracy is to expand NATO to? I mean, seriously. Washington is not reaching out with the Peace Corps to shore up a budding Eastern European democracy. The United States is kidnapping another former Soviet republic on the way to the big score. My country has military bases in almost every country in the world, has had more wars than the Mongols, and spends more on weapons than everybody else combined – but Russia is being aggressive! Who believes this bullshit?

Let's be real here. First, please understand who is doing the "thinking" there in Washington. Take James Carafano, the former Lt. Colonel who wrote speeches for the head of the U.S. Army Chief of Staff. Carafano teaches at West Point, what the hell else can he advise, of war with Russia does not come about? The man's life is about justifying war. Then there's Mamuka Tsereteli, who's also the Founding Executive Director at the America-Georgia Business Council. America-Georgia business, hmm? I wonder if there is an America-Ukraine business council in the works soon? But, you can see where this new strategy from Heritage Foundation is headed, can't you? Taking advice on foreign policy from these so-called experts is putting the foxes in charge of the hen house. Only they're not as smart as foxes. They don't need to be. The public is just that numbed and misinformed these days.

Is heavily involved in helping promote the EU's Three Seas Initiative (3SI), which is an asymmetrical warfare economic platform to cut Russia off from the EU, and install the U.S. and central European powers in her place in East Europe. This report from Mamuka Tsereteli at Emerging Europe lays out the plan. To learn more about Tsereteli's role, readers should research the so-called Frontier Europe Initiative, currently propagandizing for greater Georgia-Ukraine strategies against Russia. Make no mistake, the narrative and strategies these people are discussing are the precursors to including not only Ukraine in NATO but Georgia as well. Retired Air Force General Phillip Breedlove and former CENTCOM Commander General Joseph Votel are two of the "experts" helping to draft these strategies. And The Heritage Foundation stands center stage of the move for NATO to force Putin and Russia into an inescapable corner.

This report appeared first at New Eastern Outlook

And there, is your true geopolitical Eurasia picture. The "west" will run on to Moscow, start World War III, and then blame Putin for the holocaust.


retrocop 1 day ago

We protect other countries borders, but not our own. The Pentagon lists military personnel in 514 "outposts" in 45 countries, and the DOD "acknowledges" personnel in more than 160 countries. Not bad for a nation that is essentially bankrupt.

TheABaum 23 hours ago

Did you mean entirely bankrupt?

The Count 20 hours ago (Edited)

Well, the border to Mexico is not really a border. It's just a never ending supply of cheap labor.

Village-idiot 22 hours ago (Edited)

The Globalists really don't like Putin; they don't like anyone who fights them and wins.

Putin already took their Russian central bank away from them.

He is also protecting the Russian culture, and is quickly turning Russia into the most Christian country in the world (around 85% Christian so far).

Putin reputably hates paedophiles as much as Trump does.

They must destroy Putin before his ideas start to spread.

.

gro_dfd 21 hours ago (Edited)

From reading comments on ZH, Putin's ideas have already spread. His pro-capitalist, anti-globalist, fiscally-conservative, nationalist, and culturally conservative views are noticed. He has many admirers in the US.

jldpc 22 hours ago

It has been 209 years (1812) since Napoleon's complete defeat in Russia.

It has been 99 years (1917-1922) since the end of the Russian Revolution discarding hundreds of years of Czarist rule, and the control/corruption of the elitist classes.

It has been 79 years (1942-1945) since the Germans were routed and destroyed by the Russians.

Think the Russians are going to cave-in to Joe B. and his band of wishful thinkers?

Threatening the well armed, and very experienced Russians is a fool's game.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. – Alexander Pope

REDinFL 17 hours ago remove link

All of the angels are in heaven,

And few of the fools are dead.

-James Thurber, from "Further Fables for Our Time"

PatriotSurge 17 hours ago remove link

I guarantee neither PedoJoe, nor any of his advisors have ever heard of the folly of attacking Russia. They don't read history.

Hell, most of them don't even read, clearly.

philbutler 11 hours ago

You are right. The only difference is, the Euromaidan put the Fourth Reich 250 miles from Moscow. It's a helluva head start over where Hitler finished. Nukes will be the endgame on this one I think.

[Apr 19, 2021] It's not only that USians are unaware of much of what's happening in other countries, it's the fact they are completly misinformed and misled about current events in foreign countries and deliberatly so

Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

norecovery , Apr 17 2021 20:23 utc | 25

@ pnyx -- It's not only that USians are unaware of much of what's happening in other countries, it's the fact they are misinformed and misled about current events by propaganda. This is also the case in Europe because their MSM also have been co-opted by the coordinated Intelligence Apparatus (CIA - MI6 - FiveEyes) that controls the flow of information in the U.S. MSM. We are witnessing censorship/control of Social Media, Search Engines, and formerly independent websites as well.

This is an all-out effort of Class War. One aspect of this is to broadcast a hidden personal message that if I feel oppressed, "it must be my own fault" because "success" supposedly is within everyone's grasp (note the emphasis on celebrity 'culture').

[Apr 19, 2021] McEnany torches liberal media's 'heinous' coverage of Russia bounty story - YouTube

Apr 19, 2021 | www.youtube.com


Rickey Johnson , 2 days ago

They investigated Trump with no evidence when Biden had evidence against him but would not be investigated

Captain_ Shredder , 1 day ago

"All I want to say is that they don't really care about us" - Michael Jackson

Abdul Jabars , 1 day ago

Apologize will come flowing thru today..... You're out of your mind if you think any of them will apologize for this cause they knew what they were doing

FactsNotFeelings , 1 day ago

i got to say i love how when Kayley isn't talking, she has that very intense look on her face of listening and paying attention of what others are saying that is so dang cute. Got to love the most beast press secretary of all times! Im glad to see her on fox semi regularly now.

Guru of Love , 1 day ago

She can't get enough of fighting the gall because there is so much of it. It's vexing. Good for her.

Alabama Mothman , 2 days ago

There is literally NO agency in our government that supports the American People.

Mark H , 22 hours ago

Anything they can say to deflect from their incompetence and lies, lies upon lies to deflect from the lies. Wow, it makes my head hurt.

Malone Mantooth , 1 day ago

When are "news" companies going to start being held accountable? They are the number one agitators of the U.S right now.

Greg Marchegiani , 1 day ago

Kaley is articulated and concise, on point, because what she says is the product of her own intellect, not a script well studied (Psaki). That the core of the difference in my opinion.

[Apr 19, 2021] Biden's Sanctions Leave Russia's Stocks and Bonds in Stalemate

Apr 19, 2021 | finance.yahoo.com

The U.S. has leveled sanctions on Russia over election interference and cyberattacks, including barring U.S. financial institutions from buying new domestically issued Russian government debt.

The Biden Administration went where Presidents Obama and Trump had not, barring U.S. financial institutions from buying new domestically issued Russian sovereign bonds. The move excluded the secondary market, though. Anyone can still trade the so-called OFZs already in circulation. And it was matched by a substantial carrot: a dovish speech on Russia by Biden, floating a potential summit with Putin this summer.

The market had feared worse, says Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist at BCS Global Markets in Moscow. The ruble is still down 4%, and stocks 3%, since Russia stoked tensions a month ago by massing troops on Ukraine's border. That is despite buoyant oil prices that should benefit Russia. "Everyone was discussing direct punishment of Russian companies or a cutoff from SWIFT," he says, referring to the backbone for global financial transactions. "The actual sanctions turned out to be relatively mild."

Global investors have been fleeing the OFZ market without any push from the White House. Foreigners' share of outstanding bond holdings have fallen to 20% from about a third last summer, notes Aaron Hurd, senior currency portfolio manager at State Street Global Advisors.

Political risk still depresses the value of Russian assets by 15%, Tikhomirov estimates. That is reasonable considering Biden's options for escalating sanctions, says Daniel Fried, an Atlantic Council fellow who was the State Department's sanctions coordinator under Obama. "He could move into the secondary debt market, restrict state-owned energy companies' ability to raise capital, or go after the money hidden by Putin and his cronies," he says. "It could get to be a pretty tight squeeze."

To close the political risk gap, Putin needs to at least restore calm with Ukraine, risking domestic political face after a month of hyping the alleged threat from Russia's southern neighbor. The coming week offers two opportunities for Putin to move toward Biden's proffered stable relationship, Tikhomirov says. He could sound friendly in an annual state of the nation address scheduled for April 21, and he could turn up (virtually) for the global climate summit Biden has called on April 23-24.

These may be far overshadowed by Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who is on hunger strike in a maximum-security prison outside Moscow. Navalny-allied doctors said April 17 he could "die within days" without outside medical intervention. Backing off from its merciless treatment of Navalny would also look like an embarrassing climb-down from the Kremlin's point of view.

Hurd expects a stalemate where Russian assets could nudge higher as oil prices remain firm and the Central Bank of Russia raises interest rates. Putin will make few concessions with his party facing parliamentary elections in September, he predicts. Washington will be constrained by the European Union's reluctance to stiffen anti-Russian measures. "The ruble could still go higher from here, but we remain tentative over the next six months," he says.

Putin has essentially accomplished the goal he set after his 2014 invasions of Ukraine, a self-sufficient Russia that can pursue its perceived security interests without worrying what the rest of the world thinks, says Yong Zhu, portfolio manager for emerging markets debt at DuPont Capital Management.

Government debt amounts to a mere 18% of gross domestic product, and in a pinch can be serviced domestically. That keeps yields too low to pay for the country's geopolitical turbulence, he concludes: 10-year Russian domestic bonds pay about 7% annually, compared with 9% for Brazil or South Africa. "Russia doesn't really need anything beside the iPhone," Zhu quips.

Self-reliance has also spelled isolation from the capital and talent that could lift Russia to its proper place in global innovation and growth. But Putin and his regime seem to like it that way.

[Apr 19, 2021] You have to be careful around them

Apr 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

NotBob , Apr 17 2021 19:24 utc | 16

robert@3 :

While I agree with 99% of your post, there is one point that I think needs to be keeping in mind. While the populace of this particular manure-hole certainly has its equal share of dumb creatures, the people running things cannot be so easily dismissed. The problem as I see it is they have a great deal of a certain kind of intelligence, as someone said "smart, but not wise". They are educated, but insane. The cream of the crop that has gone sour. In my travels I would often ask people what they actually thought of "Americans". An Indonesian man responded " soft, but cunning. You have to be careful around them."

If these cunning, insane, power hungry creatures were simply dumb and not truly evil, we might be in less of a shit show (nod to psychohistorian) than we are.


Ruben Chandler , Apr 17 2021 22:23 utc | 42

@ NotBob | Apr 17 2021 19:24 utc | 16

Aleister Crowley of all people summed up these kind of people:

A cunning combination of rat and ape.

Biswapriya Purkayast , Apr 18 2021 0:55 utc | 63

After 20 years of regular interaction with Amerikastanis online and in real life, I have realised that they live in a parallel universe in which Hollywood is the arbiter of truth. They genuinely believe that anything they choose to imagine is the truth just because they imagine it.

A couple of days ago when the Imperialist States admitted its "Russia Bounty" story was concocted, the people who had shrieked to the skies about it last year had a chance to apologise. Did they? They ignored it. It did not happen because they chose to believe it didn't.

[Apr 14, 2021] Biden's Presidency Will Be Destroyed By His Foreign Policy

Apr 14, 2021 | turcopolier.com

Posted on April 8, 2021 by Larry Johnson

Dementia Joe and his coterie of enablers have embarked on a foreign policy that is likely to result in a new war that will endanger America and further a growing perception that the United States is weak and divided. There are three troublesome flashpoints (Ukraine, China and Iran) that could explode at any time and catapult our nation into a costly, deadly military confrontation. Topping the list is the Ukraine.

The corrupt dealings in Ukraine over the last four years by Joe and Hunter Biden leaves them completely compromised and subject to coercion, even blackmail. With this as a backdrop the decade long effort by the United States to weaken Russia's influence in eastern Ukraine has been revived with Biden's arrival in the White House.

Let me first introduce you to some essential facts:

30,442 total views, 9,078 views today

Pages: 1 2 This entry was posted in As The Borg Turns , Borg Wars , Larry Johnson , Russia . Bookmark the permalink . ← No platform for the Left here China Joe Biden is the enemy of the constitution → 32 Responses to Biden's Presidency Will Be Destroyed By His Foreign Policy
  1. Pat Lang Pat Lang says: April 8, 2021 at 9:54 pm

    LJ

    Try to remember to turn the page counter on. Reply

  2. Avatar Ishmael Zechariah says: April 8, 2021 at 10:50 pm

    Larry Johnson,
    If the Ukraine blows so will Syria! Then the situation might transition from nemesis to tisis in short order. Here is a strangely appropriate analysis with just one word blanked out.
    In the years ahead, _____________ will assuredly find itself in new international crises involving nations or groups that have powerful leaders. In some cases, these leaders may have a special, dangerous mindset that is the result of a "hubris-nemesis complex." This complex involves a combination of hubris (a pretension toward an arrogant form of godliness) and nemesis (a vengeful desire to confront, defeat, humiliate, and punish an adversary, especially one that can be accused of hubris). The combination has strange dynamics that may lead to destructive, high-risk behavior. Attempts to deter, compel, or negotiate with a leader who has a hubris-nemesis complex can be ineffectual or even disastrously counterproductive when those attempts are based on concepts better suited to dealing with more normal leaders.
    https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/MR461.pdf
    We, too, pray for sanity.
    Ishmael Zechariah Reply

  3. Avatar Walrus says: April 8, 2021 at 11:22 pm

    Larry, I unfortunately agree with your observations and conclusion.

    I would add that in my opinion, the Russians are a lot more determined, as are the Chinese and Iranians, then the generally self absorbed younger generations in the West. "Woke" culture has no answer to sunken warships, downed aircraft and body bags. Do the SJWs want to die for LBGTIQ rights in Russia or another of their pet obsessions de jour? I don't think so.

    My concern for President Biden and America is that, if Ukraine attacks, unless President Putin succeeds in delivering a very short, sharp and successful lesson to Ukraine there is not going to be a clear path forward to a negotiated armistice. If that doesn't happen through bad luck, the fog of war, etc. Then I don't think Biden has the intelligence to get us out of the mess.

    If you add to that the possibility that Zelensky may demand American support "or else" when he starts to lose then we are in very very dangerous territory. If I were the Chinese, I would just stand back and watch. Taiwanese independence is a meaningless concept without American military backing and I'm sure the Taiwanese know it.

    The wild card to me is what is Israel's attitude? Is it possible that they might be a moderating influence for a change? Reply

    • Avatar Thomas says: April 9, 2021 at 8:08 pm

      Oh, yeah .!!!!!! The country that shoots women and children who get too close to the fence they have constructed in PALESTINE on other people"s land will be the moderating party. Or maybe Mad Dog Bolton.

      Try getting real, and come up with real world situations. Not some fantasy of killers acting like kittens. The Russians seem more balanced in responding to such provocations than the U.S. & it's gang of follower- puppets. How long would any of the these follower-puppets be able to go toe to toe with Russia in all-out-war situation. I'd bet less than 24 hours, probably far less. Or as a Chinese General once asked: would you want to give up Los Angeles to save Tiwan? The U.S. doesn't seem to have any sort of reliable anti-missile defence system. Would Ole Uncle Joe really like to get into such pissing contest so early on in his term of presidency? Maybe I am wrong, but from what I have seen so far, he just seems to be throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. In this game, if one blunders, the walls vanish, an the lights go out. Reply

  4. Avatar Andrei Martyanov says: April 9, 2021 at 12:42 am

    Russia moves cannon boats and amphibious vessels from Caspian Sea to the Black Sea, but in reality these combatants are perfect for operations in shallow waters and that means Azov Sea and Ukraine's South-Western flank. These ships can form both a surface group capable of dispatching anything Ukraine may have on Azov Sea, plus form excellent tactical amphibious group which can land a battalion or two of marines and support them with fire from the sea, both artillery and MLRS. Of course, there are other forces Russia has there but it is a good way to give Caspian Flotilla a chance for yet another combat deployment, after its missile ships spearheaded first salvos of 3M14 cruise missiles at ISIS targets in Syria in 2015. Here are some of those ships:
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Caspian_Corvette_Astrakhan_2.jpg

    Russia has an overwhelming firepower in the Black Sea proper and whatever the US is sending there is primarily for ISR purposes in case Ukies go bananas and decide to attack Donbass in death by cop scenario. The US will not interfere in any meaningful way other than supplying Ukies with recon data. Reply

  5. Avatar Peter Reichard says: April 9, 2021 at 6:28 am

    It is bigger than Biden or even the Military Industrial Complex. The establishment foreign policy apparatus transcends political parties and has a continuity that survives changes in administrations. It is obsessed with Russia. It opposed not just communism but Russia itself so when the Berlin wall fell for it the Cold War never ended and it successfully pursued the the break up and looting of the Russian Empire and the relentless eastward march of NATO. Putin pushed back on this resulting in him being demonized by the orchestrated Western media. Trump for all his faults had at least a halfway rational view of these matters but now the Borg is back and spoiling for a fight. I never cease to be amazed by the stupidity of these people, their apparent lack of understanding of the importance of Ukraine and Sevastopol in Russian history and their inability to read a map or know the basics of military operations to see the obvious indefensibility of Ukraine's eastern border. The danger now is that Ukraine's leaders will overestimate the support they think they have from the United States and start something they can't stop. This has the feel of 1914. Reply

    • Avatar Thomas says: April 9, 2021 at 9:00 pm

      Or the Georgian/Russian of 2008 when Georgia attacked on Russian territory. President Bush was talking tough, saying he would send aid to Georgia on warships. But the rules governing ships entering the Bosferus proscribed such stuff, aND Bush ended doing nothing. The Russians quickly neutralized the Georgian forces and pushed deeper into Georgia where they currently remain. The odiot who started the mess was forced out of Georgia & was afterwards appointed a governor or some such in Ukraine. But I think that too went bad. Such is the level of governance in Ukraine. Reply

  6. Avatar john kliss says: April 9, 2021 at 6:35 am

    The last 5 Ukros killed were killed by mines. The contact line has many zones where minefields are employed by both sides. It appears some were killed in their own minefield according to local reports. Civilians in the LPR and DPR have been killed by incoming fire, most recently a 5 year old boy. Of course OSCE is worthless except as a "bean counter"; who fired what and where is too much to record.. Reply

  7. Avatar JohninMK says: April 9, 2021 at 7:09 am

    Another good analysis there LJ.

    US defence attache with a group was up at the front yesterday as well as the comic.

    Ukraine really has its back up against the wall financially. This year with big interest payments due and no way to get the funds as the IMF seems to hit its limit on their 'we're never getting it back' budget. Their only steady source of funds is ironically Russia with the gas transit fees guaranteed at $7B total over the next four years, much of which will go to the EU and IMF as interest payments. After that the gas fees will drop to zero as the gas transits move to TurkStream and NS2. With nothing to pay Russia, apart from the little mentioned oil transit fees, Russia may stop shipping gas/coal/electricity for local consumption as well. At that point either Ukraine crashes or someone else has to pick up the bill.

    Although Kiev will lose dramatically there are very good reasons why Kiev would push the button. Will they ever again have this PR opportunity to play the innocent victim? Reply

  8. Avatar BillWade says: April 9, 2021 at 7:51 am

    Earlier this morning I saw a pic of Zelenskiy visiting the front, behind him was a makeshift field tent with a sign on it, the sign is in Ukrainian but translates as "Vietnam". Is Biden serious about backing Zelenskiy, I guess we'll find out soon enough. Reply

  9. Avatar jonst says: April 9, 2021 at 8:34 am

    wondering if anyone can point me to a fairly, anyway, reliable, (assuming one exists) 'war games scenario' document on an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China. Intuitively, it would seem a difficult challenge, especially given China's lack of any appreciable experience in seaborne invasion. Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide, and my apologies upfront LJ if you deem this offtopic. Reply

    • Avatar Yeah, Right says: April 9, 2021 at 7:58 pm

      Not meaning to be a smart-alec about it, but why assume that an invasion has to be "seaborne"?

      In WW2 the Royal Navy had total control of the waters around Crete. So the Germans simply went over the top of them and invaded the island from the air.

      It was very definitely touch and go for a while until German paratroopers managed to capture an airfield, and from that point it was all over.

      No idea how well defended Taiwanese airfields are, but the PLA would only need to capture one and, again, the final result will not be in doubt. Reply

      • Avatar jon stanley says: April 10, 2021 at 9:49 am

        well, the quick answer to your question would be 'fine, alter my initial question to include war games scenarios on airborne attacks on Taiwan. The glib answer might be, Taiwan is not Crete. And the Chinese PLA are not the Wehrmacht. Who, by the time of the Crete attack had built up a record that included many successful airborne attacks. I see no such history with the PLA. That, by no means rules it out. But, in any event, I can't imagine the PLA would role the dice, SOLELY, on an airborne attack. They would have to have a seaborne plan of attack, in case Plan A failed. So, in any event, I would be still be in search of that war games scenario. Reply

  10. Avatar Seamus Padraig says: April 9, 2021 at 8:38 am

    Absent any new evidence, I am going to continue to assume that this is really about Nordstream II. The Biden Junta are probably planning on having their Ukrainian cat's paw make a lunge at DNR/LNR, forcing the Russians to intervene directly. Ukraine, of course, is not actually a full NATO member, so no Article 5 will be triggered. Instead, Washington just self-righteously hollers 'Russian aggression!' and demands that Merkel immediately shut down Nordstream II -- the Russian pipeline into Germany -- just before it's ready to go online.

    And then, as a lush reward for their undying loyalty, the Germans get to import frack-gas and oil all the way from the US at four or five times the market rate. Problem solved! Reply

    • Avatar Terence Reeves-Smyth says: April 9, 2021 at 12:52 pm

      you are correct – the Ukraine state does not really want the return of the Donbass region let alone Crimea as it would result in a complete change in the balance of power in the Ukraine with the Russian-speaking population being able to form the government, as it had done pre 2014. They really want to push the Germans into stopping Nord Stream 2 by provoking Russia Reply

  11. Avatar Some Dude says: April 9, 2021 at 9:11 am

    Struggling to understand how a Ukraine with such supposedly strong ties to National Socialists of a century ago managed to end up with a Jewish comedian as President. Reply

  12. Avatar J says: April 9, 2021 at 10:20 am

    Larry, Colonel,

    Here's a backgrounder from the Ukraine military veterans of the Ukraine's 93rd Brigade's point of view. This was the period of 2014-2015.

    93: the Battle for Ukraine – first days of the war
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cMBPN3rjXU

    93: the Battle for Ukraine – around Donetsk Airport
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AtszHyy8rY Reply

  13. Avatar J says: April 9, 2021 at 11:28 am

    Here's the viewpoint of Ukraine Army's snipers who are primarily composed of volunteer housewives. While to D.C. and Moscow, it's part of their sphere of political chess, however to those on the front lines, it is survival and protection of their loved ones.

    The Female Fighters of Ukraine's Forgotten War
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGVc4HPhanc Reply

  14. Avatar Ed Lindgren says: April 9, 2021 at 11:57 am

    Almost half a century ago, I took a course in the German language as a refresher during the summer session at my local junior college. The woman who taught the course was a native Ukrainian. She told the class a little about her background.

    When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, she was in her mid- to late-teens. She had an intense dislike (hatred) of the Russians and took a job working for the German military government of occupation as an interpreter. She said they had welcomed the Germans as liberators from the oppression of the Soviet Communists.

    Later, when the Red Army juggernaut was rolling west through Ukraine, she realized that it would not be good for her long-term prospects to remain at home. She chose to move west with the retreating German army. Subsequent to the end of the war in Europe, she rattled around for awhile in displaced person camps, and ultimately made her way to the United States.

    I have no reason to doubt the veracity of her story. This was my first introduction to the enmity between the Russians and the Ukrainians. Reply

  15. Avatar Deap says: April 9, 2021 at 7:32 pm

    Biden is a tin-hat emperor moving tin soldiers in his bathtub at play time. Surrounded by self-selected idiots who make him dangerous as hell. This is what his "return to decency" looks like? May he be struck down deaf and dumb. Reply

  16. Avatar Deap says: April 9, 2021 at 7:42 pm

    Two front war – Russia moving into Ukraine at the same time China moves on Taiwan. They put their wet fingers up to the wind to see which way the Biden operation blows.

    And they could not escape the conclusion this was the time to strike if there is any fortuitous time to strike. Biden and his new team muddle deeply into reckless ineptitude. And Kamala Harris doesn't have anything to wear. Reply

    • Avatar Yeah, Right says: April 10, 2021 at 3:22 am

      An odd thesis. The Russians are signally very, very strongly that they do not want the Ukraine to start a war by attacking the rebels in Donbass.

      They could not be more explicit if they sent a hypersonic cruise missile through Zelensky's office window with a sign on it that reads "Don't start something you won't even live to regret".

      They very clearly do not think that this is "the time to strike", nor even that they think there is a "fortuitous time" for them to go to war with Ukraine.

      If Ukraine strikes first then, sure, they'll strike back. But I fail to see how anyone can come to the conclusion that the Russians are provoking this when it is very clearly the Ukies and their promoters in the White House who are pushing these buttons.

      Similarly with Taiwan.

      The Chinese are not provoking this. They made their red lines clear to everyone as far back as Nixon's trip to China i.e. if the USA sticks to a one-China-policy then the mainland will refrain from using force against Taiwan.

      But the USA is not sticking to the one-China-policy. Recent US diplomatic moves look exactly like what it is: maneuverings to prepare for when the Taipei government declares independence.

      Which is crazy.

      But in both cases the USA may well provoke a conflict and then dump their patsies like a discarded toy.

      Which would be beyond crazy. It would be an outcome so loopy that there isn't even a word to describe it. Reply

      • Avatar Eol says: April 10, 2021 at 3:20 pm

        Thank you for setting it straight.. it seems pretty evident Russia does not want a war but is sure as hell ready to finish this business if a war is pushed on to them and pushed on to them by the Americans. Ukraine has been armed by the U.S , funded by the IMF, and cheered by NATO. They will not do a single thing without their owners permission. Reply

  17. Avatar BillWade says: April 10, 2021 at 11:06 am

    Hunter's dad and his administration is making Trump look like the greatest statesman that ever lived. Reply

  18. Avatar J says: April 10, 2021 at 12:20 pm

    Back in December 2020 Putin had an expanded meeting with his Defense Ministry Board. In it he laid out several items and agendas to be carried out by the Military Staff.
    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64684

    The recent reinforcements by the Russian MOD to counter NATO along the Ukraine border region, it appears that the MOD has deployed the incorporation of their (RChBD) capabilities into their Military Field Hospitals. And it appears that Putin has authorized deployment of their Iskander near the Ukraine border. The Iskander is multi-faceted, EMP, fuel air explosive, as well as thermonuclear. Back in 2015 Putin authorized nuclear employment should they be needed.
    https://coffeeordie.com/russian-field-camps/
    https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/russian-ground-troop-units-and-iskander-ballistic-missiles-identified-at-ukrainian-border-by-janes
    https://eng.mil.ru/en/structure/forces/ground/structure/rhbz.htm
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K720_Iskander

    March 24th saw Ukraine's Zelensky virtually declaring war against the Russian Federation. One can not rule out Zelensky using the trade deals with Doha and use the direct flights between Kiev and Doha to smuggle in Jihad's from Syria and Libya to fight in Donbas. Zelensky on March 3rd in a joint press conference with the European Council President in Kiev stated that the retaking of Crimea from Russia was now Ukraine Official Policy.
    https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/ukraine-redux-war-russophobia-and-pipelineistan/ Reply

  19. Avatar J says: April 11, 2021 at 10:42 am

    Colonel,

    Speaking of 'foreign policy', question is who will win out -- D.C. or Tel Aviv?

    'The model' is headed to D.C. to try and convince our IC's head-cheeses that the Iran JCPOA isn't such a good deal, and Tel Aviv is trying to get him an audience with his high-arsed the 'King', China Joe. If D.C. swallows 'the model's' spiel, then they're bigger suckers than they already appear to be.

    Mossad chief said heading to Washington in bid to block US return to Iran deal
    https://www.timesofisrael.com/mossad-chief-said-heading-to-washington-in-bid-to-block-us-return-to-iran-deal/ Reply

    • Avatar Deap says: April 11, 2021 at 12:30 pm

      Assume this Mossad meeting will take place between Kackling Kamala who will be channeling Obama-Jarrett; or will it be Stinking Liar Susan Rose channeling Obama-Jarrett? But the Big Guy will be out to lunch. Reply

  20. Avatar English Outsider says: April 12, 2021 at 10:08 am

    Mr Johnson – this was posted today by a commenter on Dr North's blog.

    https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2376246-audio-tapes-of-thousands-of-overheard-conversations-a-reconstruction-of-the-mh17-disaster.html Reply

[Apr 14, 2021] Apparently, Yuri Andropov had a contingency plan on the event of the disintegration of the USSR - and yes, it included the partition of the Ukraine into two ("east bank Ukraine" and "west bank Ukraine"

Apr 14, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Apr 10 2021 21:41 utc | 54

Interesting interview. Apparently, Yuri Andropov had a contingency plan on the event of the disintegration of the USSR - and yes, it included the partition of the Ukraine into two ("east bank Ukraine" and "west bank Ukraine" - probably West of the Dnieper, East of the Dnieper). It's in Russian, so maybe inconsistencies with automatic translation may exist:

Петр Авен: "У Гайдара было вполне имперское сознание"

The interview is with Russian neoliberal banker (of the circle of Yeltsin and Gaidar, St. Petersburg intelligentsia) Viktor Loshak, from "Alfa-Bank group" (machine translation). He was a working under Shatalin in the 1980s, so he's allegedly an eye witness (primary source) of the alleged plans.

He also claims that the St. Petersburg neoliberals never intended to end the Union, and that what really happened in the 1990s wasn't intended. Smells like revisionism to me, but ok, the St. Petersburg circle was never known for their intellectual prowess, so it's possible.

--//--

@ Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Apr 10 2021 21:07 utc | 51

It has in the sense that the Ukraine wants to restore its entire territory, not just some part of it. There is no scenario where, it being able to reconquer LPR-DPR, it would leave Crimea with Russia.

vk , Apr 10 2021 22:22 utc | 57

ERRATA: @ 53, I said the interviewed was Viktor Loshak. Loshak is the interviewer. The interviewee (the Alfa-Bank banker) is Petr Aven.

[Apr 07, 2021] Operation Mockingbird 2: How Russia 'Weaponizes' everthing she touches

It is difficult to find a black cat in the empty dark room, but neoliberal MSM jump over their head screaming Cat! Evil Russian cat!
Notable quotes:
"... Looking for something in wikipedia, I discover that in 1961, the first manned spaceflight was..."a propaganda victory". There's no hope! ..."
"... I think Russians have weaponized word 'weaponized' because presence in headlines represents most useful mechanism to map current extent of Mockingbird 2 operations. ..."
"... It was an interesting demonstration of the circularity of belief mechanisms at work when people adopted ideas like: "Putin did not really intervene in our elections, he was much more devious. He made us think he did intervene and that way caused us to undermine ourselves! That is how devilish he is and we were even more right than we thought about that!" ..."
"... It is beyond question that such a "system" is overly hysterical, to say the least ..."
Apr 07, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Last night Bryan MacDonald, an Irish journalist currently working for RT, picked up on a theme we previously noted here .

Bryan MacDonald @27khv - 19:21 UTC · Apr 4, 2021

With the US/UK press in full Russia hysteria mode, right now, it's time for a thread on things the Anglo-American media has accused Moscow of "weaponising."
We shall start with Charlie Sheen.
Yes. Really. Not a joke.
Take a bow, @ak_mack & @ForeignPolicy


bigger

Bryan MacDonald's thread is a good opportunity to update our list of all the issues, ideas and things Russia has weaponized.

Even while the list below now includes 111 entries - like robotic cockroaches, postmodernism and 14.legged squids - it is likely far from being complete.

  1. Was Noah Green the weaponized target of the GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) masked as the FBI Cointelpro?
    Russia News, April 2021
  2. Congress Can Do Better to Fight Weaponized Corruption
    Foreign Policy, April 2021
  3. WAR ON THE WEST West on brink of vaccine 'world war' as Putin 'weaponizes' Sputnik V jab to 'attack' the EU, warns Macron
    Sun, March 2021
  4. Secret Is Out: Russia Weaponized and Trained Dolphins and Whales
    National Interest, January 2021
  5. Russia 'is researching how to weaponise deadly Ebola virus as part of a catastrophic doomsday project', experts fear
    Daily Mail, December 2020
  6. Vladimir Putin wasted no time in weaponizing Trump's election conspiracies to spread Russian propaganda
    Busines Insider, November 2020
  7. How Russia Tried to Weaponize Charlie Sheen
    Foreign Policy, September 2020
  8. 'Beijing & Moscow have weaponized space through killer satellites, directed energy weapons': Defense Sec
    Sociable, September 2020
  9. Russia Weaponizes Increasingly Sophisticated Disinformation
    AFCEA, September 2020
  10. China and Russia 'have weaponised space with killer energy weapon satellites '
    Daily Star, September 2020
  11. Russia's Weaponization of Tradition : The Case of the Orthodox Church in Montenegro
    CSIS, September 2020
  12. Will Russia Weaponize Its Wheat As the World Combats the Coronavirus?
    National Interest, July 2020
  13. Russia Weaponized (Again) with Anthony Leonardi
    OAN (video), July 2020
  14. Putin's Russia has weaponized World War II
    Atlantic Council, May 2020
  15. Russia has weaponized ideas of Samuel Huntington
    The Hill, February 2020
  16. How Russia weaponized social media , got caught and escaped consequences
    Washington Post, November 2019
  17. How Russian Hybrid Warfare Has Weaponized Disinformation
    Daily Signal, November 2019
  18. Russian Hybrid Warfare Has Weaponized Disinformation
    Ohio Star, November 2019
  19. Russian Hybrid Warfare Has Weaponized Disinformation
    Tennessee Star, November 2019
  20. For Russia, Even the Language Can Be a Weapon
    Bloomberg, November 2019
  21. Russia Unveils 'Unique' Weaponized Icebreaker as It Eyes Arctic Oil and Gas
    Newsweek, October 2019
  22. The Weaponization of Postmodernism : Russia's New War with Europe
    LSE, July 2019
  23. The Russians weaponized laughter !
    David Peck/Medium, February 2019
  24. How Putin's Russia turned humour into a weapon
    BBC, December 2018
  25. Weaponizing an Economy : The Cryptoruble and Russia's Dystopian Future
    U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), November 2018
  26. Weaponizing Religion : Putin's Philosopher Ivan Ilyin
    Daily Kos, November 2018
  27. The Russians Are Weaponizing Health Information
    History News Network, September 2018
  28. Russian trolls are weaponizing the vaccine "debate" to divide Americans
    Big Think, August 2018
  29. US Accused Russia Of Weaponizing Space Due To "Abnormal Behavior" Of "Mysterious" Satellite
    Raw Conservative Opinions, August 2018
  30. It's been 5 months since a Putin critic was found murdered in London, but almost nothing's happened since -- and Russia is weaponizing the silence
    Buisiness Insider, August 2018
  31. Russia Accused Of 'Weaponized' Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Attacks
    PrepForThat, August 2018
  32. Weaponizing hypocrisy , in Russia and beyond
    Columbia Journalism Review, July 2018
  33. America's racism has long been Russia's secret weapon
    CNN, July 2018
  34. How Russia Is Weaponizing International Students in the New Cold War
    Alternet, June 2018
  35. Russia, Facebook & Cybersecurity: Combating Weaponized FUD in the Social Media Age
    Information Week, June 2018
  36. Polish PM Calls Nord Stream 2 'Weapon' Of Hybrid Warfare
    RFERL, May 2018
  37. Weaponizing culture : "civilizationism" and nationalism in Putin's Russia
    NED, March 2018
  38. Vladimir Putin Outwitted Megyn Kelly by Weaponizing Incompetence
    The New Yorker, March 2018
  39. Britain accuses Russia of 'weaponizing information ' with 2017 cyberattack
    New York Post, February 2018
  40. #PutinAtWar: How Russia Weaponized "Russophobia"
    DRFLab/Medium, February 2018
  41. Is Russia Weaponizing The Giant Squid ?
    Alltime Conspiracies, January 2018
  42. Putin weaponizes sheep , launches hybrid attacks on US bases in Romania
    The Duran, January 2018
  43. Russian army demonstrates latest weapon: Cuddly puppies
    Associated Press, January 2018
  44. The Weaponization of Tedium Is Putin's New Strategy (Op-ed)
    Moscow Times, December 2017
  45. Fake news and botnets: how Russia weaponised the web
    Guardian, December 2017
  46. How Russia Weaponized Social Media With 'Social Bots'
    NPR, November 2017
  47. Russia has weaponized the energy sector in war against the West
    The Hill, October 2017
  48. Russia's Facebook ads show how Internet microtargeting can be weaponized
    Cornell University, October 2017
  49. 'Russia weaponizing Facebook ' is a tipping point for how much we rely on tech, says author
    CNBC, October 2017
  50. How Russia Weaponized Primetime
    Coda, October 2017
  51. We're learning more about how Russia weaponized Facebook, Twitter, and Google -- and it was remarkably easy
    Business Insider, October 2017
  52. Putin threatens the world with weaponizing terrorism
    Ukraine Military Pages, September 2017
  53. Russia weaponized Twitter to sway election
    CNN, September 2017
  54. Russia Has Weaponized Energy
    August 2017
  55. Postmodernism Weaponized: Russia's Assault on American Science
    American Council on Science and Health, August 2017
  56. How Vladimir Putin weaponized the internet
    The Week, June 2017
  57. Weaponizing Kleptocracy : Putin's Hybrid Warfare
    Hudson Institute, June 2017
  58. Russia Has Weaponized Fake News to Sow Chaos
    The New Republic, May 2017
  59. Shaheen Says Russia 'Weaponizing' NatGas , Calls for More Sanctions
    Natural Gas Intelligence, May 2017
  60. How Russia Weaponized Social Media in Crimea
    Strategy Bridge, May 2017
  61. Eurovision, Russia, and weaponized disability
    Euromaidan Press, March 2017
  62. Russia Is 'Weaponizing Misinformation ,' Says UK Defense Secretary
    NBC News, February 2017
  63. 'Meet The Press' Roundtable: Russia Weaponizing Intelligence ; Replacing Obamacare
    Real Clear Politics, January 2017
  64. Schiff: Russia 'weaponized' computer hacking
    Washington Examiner, January 2017
  65. Rep. Schiff: Unlike China's Hacks, Russia 'Weaponized' Data
    Newsmax, January 2017
  66. Believe it or not: Western media uncovers Putin plan to 'weaponize' 14-legged squid
    RT, December 2016
  67. Russia Weaponized Social Media in U.S. Election, FireEye Says
    Bloomberg, December 2016
  68. Russia is Weaponizing culture in CEE by creating a traditionalist "counter-culture"
    Stop Fake, December 2016
  69. Is 14-legged killer squid found TWO MILES beneath Antarctica being weaponised by Putin?
    Express, November 2016
  70. Russia has weaponized the American press
    Vice, October 2016
  71. Putin 'Weaponizing' WikiLeaks to Help Trump: Clinton Campaign
    Bloomberg, October 2016
  72. A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories
    New York Times, August 2016
  73. Commentary: Hybrid Business -- The Risks In The Kremlin's Weaponization Of The Economy
    RFERL, July 2016
  74. Putin weaponizing Judo by distributing 7 million free copies of his book
    SOTT, July 2016
  75. Latvia Decides Putin Is Weaponizing Names - Bans Russian Names for New Babies
    Russia Insider, June 2016
  76. Putin is Weaponizing Popularity : Newsweek is not Amused
    Off Guardian, June 2016
  77. Putin Weaponises Crosshairs , Foiling Plans to Keep Romania & Poland Safe From Iranian WMDs
    The Blog Mire, June 2016
  78. Migrant crisis: Russia and Syria 'weaponising' migration
    BBC, March 2016
  79. UK Says Russia Weaponizing 'Brexit' - Russian Embassy Slams Charge
    Russia Insider, March 2016
  80. How Russia Is 'Weaponizing' Migration to Destabilize Europe
    Bloomberg, March 2016
  81. Is Putin Weaponising Stupidity ?
    The Blogmire, March 2016
  82. NATO commander: Russia 'weaponizing' Syrian immigrants
    World Tribune, March 2016
  83. Russia Is Weaponizing Dolphins - Europe Quakes In Terror
    Russia Insider, March 2016
  84. Russia accused of 'weaponizing' Syria refugees
    CNBC, February 2016
  85. Is Russia 'Weaponizing Refugees ' To Advance Its Geopolitical Goals?
    RFERL, February 2016
  86. Russian Hackers Used Weaponized Word Files to Infect Ukraine's Power Grid
    Softpedia, Jan 2016
  87. Russian Hackers May Have Weaponized The Grid , And It's Got US Intel Spooked
    Daily Caller, January 2016
  88. Russian "Weaponized Default " Will Cause Financial Collapse Of Entire Western World
    Satu Insan, January 2016
  89. Russia's Population Is Being Weaponized
    RealClearWorld, December 2015
  90. From commodification to weaponization: the Russian language as 'pride' and 'profit' in Russia's transnational discourses
    International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, December 2015
  91. "Weaponizing" Federalism ? Russia and the Debate on Federalism/Decentralization in Ukraine and Other Post-Soviet States"
    Ukrainian-Canadian Congress, December 2015
  92. Weaponized AK47 NAILGUN - Russian Life Hack (vid)
    Youtube, November 2015
  93. Russia is Weaponizing Culture
    Integrity Initiative, November 2015
  94. Weaponized Default : Russia's Ultimate Answer to Western Aggression?
    Russia Insider, September 2015
  95. Russia May Soon Have Weaponized Robotic Cockroaches
    Modern Notion, September 2015
  96. Russia Has Weaponized Its National Trauma
    ReadRussia, September 2015
  97. Putin Has Weaponized Soviet History
    Newsweek, July 2015
  98. WEAPONIZATION OF FINANCE : Russia is turning to the Chinese yuan
    Business Insider, June 2015
  99. How Vladimir Putin Weaponized Russia's Media
    Defense One , April 2015
  100. Hearing: Confronting Russia's Weaponization of Information
    Foreign Affairs, April 2015
  101. How the Media Became One of Putin's Most Powerful Weapons
    Atlantic, April 2015
  102. Russia's "Weaponization" of Information
    Heritage Foundation, April 2015
  103. Weaponizing Weather : Russia And North Korea Might Be Able To Control The Weather, CIA Allegedly Fears
    Inquisitr, Feb 2015
  104. The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information , Culture and Money
    The Interpreter, November 2014
  105. Russia Has Weaponized Ebola
    Fortuna's Cornor/Morgenpost, August 2014
  106. Russia Is Weaponizing Jedi Mind Tricks
    Vice News, April 2014
  107. The Russians Have Weaponized Photoshop
    Global Voices, March 2014
  108. Whistleblower says Russians got antigravity weaponized spaceships
    Lunatic Outpost, August 2012
  109. Weaponizing the Russian language in Latvia again
    Thoughts From Latvia, December 2011
  110. WEAPONIZING NATIONALITY : AN ANALYSIS OF RUSSIA'S PASSPORT POLICY IN GEORGIA
    International Law Journal, Summer 2010
  111. More on Neo-Soviet Russia Weaponizing Psychiatry
    Publius Pundit, August 2007

Posted by b on April 5, 2021 at 10:53 UTC | Permalink


MarkU , Apr 5 2021 11:18 utc | 1

Some people, crazed extremists no doubt, might regard all that as a way of softening up public opinion for conflict. Reading through the list, it seems more like the ravings of paranoid schizophrenics then it does journalists.
peter mcloughlin , Apr 5 2021 11:19 utc | 2
This demonizing of Russia is an attempt to portray it as a threat: there is certainly a clash of interests between Russia and the West. But the confrontation being pursued will not lead to the conclusion NATO predicts. Failure to heed the warnings of history is leading us to the nuclear apocalypse.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Josh , Apr 5 2021 11:44 utc | 3
Have to vote for #106. No contest, that's the winner.
Tuyzentfloot , Apr 5 2021 11:52 utc | 4
How US media weaponizes 'weaponizing'.
Mao Cheng Ji , Apr 5 2021 12:00 utc | 5
Yeah, little goebbelses of the western liberal establishment aren't too creative.
j. casey , Apr 5 2021 12:03 utc | 6
Brilliant, Mr. B. And funny, too. Gracias.
Carl , Apr 5 2021 12:11 utc | 7
Pathetic as this kind of propaganda is...it works. Which is very disturbing.
librul , Apr 5 2021 12:22 utc | 8
Hmm...think this is not off topic.

Even for Reuters their center headline, photo and subtext are over the top.
They no longer make any effort to disguise political opinion as facts
(their sheeple readers won't catch on).

As of this writing the headline is:
Half of Republicans believe false accounts of Capitol riot: Reuters/Ipsos poll
and the subtext is:
Since the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have pushed false and misleading accounts to downplay the event that left five dead and scores of others wounded. His supporters appear to have listened.

Stonebird , Apr 5 2021 12:26 utc | 9
from number 69

He tread water wearing a blissful smile as the organism approached him (14 armed killer squid). Obviously the "vampire Squid" Goldman Sachs has been submersively trying to disrupt Russia.

James Cook , Apr 5 2021 13:02 utc | 11
Is there anything that humans have created that has NOT BEEN WEAPONIZED??????????
Stonebird , Apr 5 2021 13:02 utc | 12
Irresistable force https://twitter.com/27khv/status/1378798225927380992/photo/1

(From b's first link above)

William Gruff , Apr 5 2021 13:12 utc | 13
Why would the CIA be so interested in the ability of North Korea to modify weather? Most probably because the CIA's efforts to pull off a repeat of the flooding in North Korea in 1994-1995 failed and they want to know why.

Aside: Research the CIA's "Operation Popeye" in 1967 Vietnam if you are doubtful of how evil and crazy the CIA is.

Most likely the party involved in foiling the CIA's plot to flood North Korea again and trigger another famine was China and not Russia. Not only does China have extensive experience with cloud seeding, but they are in the proper location to accomplish the task. Cloud seeding is how the Chinese provided clear weather over Beijing for the Olympics in 2008... they seeded air masses farther upwind to make it rain there and dry out the air heading to Beijing. If the air heading towards North Korea (relatively consistent west to east flow there) has already been seeded and much of the moisture in it already precipitated out, then when the CIA's spook planes seed it nearer to the Korean peninsula it will be too dry to squeeze much more rain out of. The CIA would be cockblocked and frustrated and they will naturally want to know why their attempts at genocide failed.

Virgile , Apr 5 2021 13:14 utc | 14
The Western media parrots in action!
librul , Apr 5 2021 14:19 utc | 15
https://collateralglobal.org/
Our Mission
At Collateral Global, we believe that there is an urgent need to study the consequences of public health measures implemented in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, including the second and third-order effects.
Through commitment to the enduring principles of scientific inquiry, we aim to provide scholarship and research, building an evidence-based understanding of mitigation measures that is both accessible and actionable.

How long until the above site is compromised or McCarthyism-smeared?

Erelis , Apr 5 2021 14:37 utc | 16
Maybe these count. I looked for variations of weaponize in title. These were stories I remember reading and did quick search to retrieve something about them. Great list.

Russians Reportedly Weaponized Black Activism in U.S. During Presidential Election
https://www.diversityinc.com/russians-reportedly-weaponized-black-activism-u-s-presidential-election/

Don't Let Russia Undermine Trust in Science
Disinformation around genetic editing could set back advances to improve both health and the economy.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/russia-science-disinformation-genetic-editing-crispr-social-media.html

Iowa Researchers Accuse Russia of Injecting Anti-GMO Propaganda Into U.S. Media
https://gizmodo.com/iowa-researchers-accuse-russia-of-injecting-anti-gmo-pr-1823364808

Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/

ak74 , Apr 5 2021 14:41 utc | 17
I am deeply troubled that you conveniently neglected to include another fearsome Russian Super-Dooper Weapon: the children's cartoon Masha and the Bear .

Future shock: Ban threat for the new Russian superweapon Masha and shows that subverted all our minds
https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/16340356.future-shock-ban-threat-new-russian-superweapon-masha-shows-subverted-minds/

Children's show is propaganda for Putin, say critics
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/childrens-show-is-propaganda-for-putin-say-critics-j9wxcvslm?region=global&--xx-meta=denied_for_visit%3D0%26visit_number%3D0%26visit_remaining%3D0%26visit_used%3D0&--xx-mvt-opted-out=false&--xx-uuid=bbcdd521f8671d6ea5e55d42f09bbec8&ni-statuscode=acsaz-307

It's obvious that Masha and the Bear is a nefarious Russian plot to steal the precious bodily fluids of our children!

We must be constantly vigilant. The CIA, FBI, MI6, NSA, and Homeland Security must be notified about the Masha Threat. YouTube must censor Masha. And blue check-marked Twitter police must condemn anyone who watches Masha.

MikeH , Apr 5 2021 14:41 utc | 18
I can't believe Russia weaponizing Chuck Norris hasn't been claimed, yet.
librul , Apr 5 2021 14:49 utc | 19
This one didn't have the word 'weaponize', close though: "opening a new front in its spy battles".
accusing the Kremlin of opening a new front in its spy battles with the West amid the worldwide competition to contain the pandemic.
...

American intelligence officials said the Russians were aiming to steal research to develop their own vaccine more quickly, not to sabotage other countries' efforts. There was likely little immediate damage to global public health, cybersecurity experts said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/us/politics/vaccine-hacking-russia.html

librul , Apr 5 2021 15:00 utc | 20
From The Atlantic:
"How Putin Got Into America's Mind"
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/how-putin-got-into-americas-mind/616330/
Russia's weaponized Zersetzung
...
And although economic sanctions might hurt Russia's economy, they won't easily heal the divisions that weaponized decomposition has deepened in America. Putin's assault on the national soul is working.
Found another (though not very mainstream):
https://airmail.news/issues/2021-2-27/the-view-from-here
"Putin's allies weaponize wokeness to cancel the leader of the opposition, Alexei Navalny"
polecat , Apr 5 2021 15:07 utc | 21
So, the word for the weary is ***Weaponize*** .. with an R.

'sigh'

Fíréan , Apr 5 2021 15:08 utc | 22
Next they're weaponizing women's exotic underwear . God help the freemason who turns up at the changing rooms in the wrong attire.


/humor.humour.

gottlieb , Apr 5 2021 15:15 utc | 23
Brilliant compilation to illustrate the propaganda war against Russia. The China list won't be far behind as Enemy #1 for Empire is competition.

The simple fact is that WWIII is underway. We can see the slow motion train wreck as it careens off the tracks into the nuclear weapons depot.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

jared , Apr 5 2021 15:26 utc | 24
The U.S. media is weaponizing ignorance.
The more one absorbs their reporting, the more the brain is reduced to mush.
I can only manage a few hundred works and I become irritated and disoriented.
My hat is off to people who can somehow look at that stuff and remain sane.
Or are they...hmmm...
Tuyzentfloot , Apr 5 2021 15:36 utc | 25
A major mistake in interpreting the massive parallelism of all these claims is to assume a form of central coordination.
In fact the parallellism is spontaneous once the target has a bad reputation. Centrally organized propaganda can tune the reputation of the target but even that is not essential and it can happen organically. Once the reputation is set however the process has its own momentum. There is a bit more to it than merely the reputation of the target because the positive reputation of those who attack the target also plays. In fact you have to work with a large network of trust relations to get a good picture.
Glenn Greenwald recently linked to an article of Erik Weinstein on Russell Conjugation , how the same events get an entirely different emotional content depending on the reporter. In the long list of links above everyone is using the same spectacles for looking at events, but also for filtering what is relevant , meaningful and worthy of attention.
This is why the NYTimes is still an interesting paper once you know how to read it. But few people can use it that way.
james , Apr 5 2021 16:17 utc | 26
i'm with ak74... let me know when they weaponize Masha and the Bear.... then we are really in trouble! they have already weaponized karlof1 !!!
Jackrabbit , Apr 5 2021 16:55 utc | 28
Russia weaponizing vaccine resistance: Russian trolls blamed for spreading anti-vaccination propaganda

Because vaccine resistance in USA somehow makes Russia safer ... or something. Doubts about mRNA vaccines? You must be a Putin bot.

!!

jayc , Apr 5 2021 16:58 utc | 29
The Russians, along with the Chinese, have apparently weaponized the protests of British citizens against overreaching Police legislation.

"The disruption being caused through "Kill the Bill" protests in UK is an effort by the Sino-Russian alliance to destroy trust and confidence in political and institutional systems, in a bid to leave society demoralised and feeling powerless against events."
https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/china-russia-use-social-media-fuel-protests-uk

div> Surely Harry and Megan must have been weaponized by that dreadful Putin! Stands to reason. Doesn't it?

Posted by: foolisholdman , Apr 5 2021 17:25 utc | 31

Surely Harry and Megan must have been weaponized by that dreadful Putin! Stands to reason. Doesn't it?

Posted by: foolisholdman | Apr 5 2021 17:25 utc | 31

lysias , Apr 5 2021 18:58 utc | 35
As the Heydrich character says in the Wannsee Conference movie, "Das ist die Sprachregelung".
Ana Q , Apr 5 2021 19:19 utc | 37
Looking for something in wikipedia, I discover that in 1961, the first manned spaceflight was..."a propaganda victory". There's no hope!
Trauma2000 , Apr 5 2021 19:56 utc | 38
We need to keep in mind one thing: That which The West accuses Russia of, they are actually committing themselves.

Nearly all of the 'weaponisations' that we are reading about above, The West is actually DOING. The hypocracy is incredible. But we need to look at this hypocrisy, because in all instances the propaganda is being directed at YOU! You / Us / Me in The West. We are the target of this propaganda. In many instances it is MILITARY ORGANISTIONS that are targeting civilians with lies and misinformation. WE are being attacked by military organisations.

I think enough is enough on The West. It's disgraceful that military organisations are allowed to target civilians with BLATANT propaganda. It's time to fight back.

Thank you for sharing.

Bernard F. , Apr 5 2021 19:56 utc | 39
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/gayle-tzemach-lemmon-americas-partner-isis-fight-seeking-clarity

Russia
Amerika weaponized YPG & ISIS
Bernard F. , Apr 5 2021 20:23 utc | 40
Russia France weaponized Covid-19 vaccine
"We are facing a new type of world war , dealing with the actions of Russia and China trying to gain influence through the supply of vaccines,"

Emmanuel Macron 26.03.2021

"Allez vous cacher, vilaines"
Les Précieuses ridicules, Molière
Michael , Apr 5 2021 21:54 utc | 44
Gotta love it! Conclusive proof of the Imperial "Free and Independent" press. ;-)
theyreeverywhere , Apr 5 2021 21:55 utc | 45
Howdy people. I think Russians have weaponized word 'weaponized' because presence in headlines represents most useful mechanism to map current extent of Mockingbird 2 operations.
michaelj72 , Apr 5 2021 23:02 utc | 46
classical psychological projection by the weaponized narrative enablers of the worst Empire in all human history, as we stand at 90 Seconds to Midnight on the very precipice of nuclear war and ecological catastrophe, and the engine of the Armageddon Express starts to go off the cliff....


but LOOK, over there!!


....it's all russia's and putin's fault


blues , Apr 5 2021 23:18 utc | 47
I have two parakeets that I have been trying to weaponize for the better part of a month. But it appears to be totally hopeless. If Mr. Putin happens to read this blog for some weaponistic purpose, would you please offer me some of your invaluable advice? Please?
uncle tungsten , Apr 5 2021 23:21 utc | 48
Norwegian #33

That contact tracing applies in Australia now. Commerce as usual and the coffee is fine.

It only applies when there is a continuous daily detection - even one triggers the rule. All is good, no Galicia brigade at the door. Yet.

Miss Lacy , Apr 6 2021 0:05 utc | 49
I think weaponized sheep is the winner, with incompetence a close second.
Jen, can you please tell me where one can watch the skating? Or perhaps, well we would call them re-runs in the ancient history days - perhaps utoobs?
I see tantalizing hints on RT, but no real films.
The russian skaters (from what I saw last year) are truly amazing. Thanks.
vetinLA , Apr 6 2021 0:18 utc | 50
Edward Bernays would be amazed..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

Jen , Apr 6 2021 0:35 utc | 51
Norwegian @ 33:

If the system used by restaurants and cafes in HK is similar to what we have in Australia, then they are required at least to provide a method by which their customers can be contacted and advised if someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 has also visited the eateries within 14 days of the customers having visited the establishments. That way those customers can know if they need to isolate and limit their contacts with others.

The contact tracing is also supposed to help government authorities know how quickly the disease is or is not spreading so they only have to lockdown certain neighbourhoods or areas where there may be a cluster developing, instead of locking down an entire city or a state or even a whole country.

Also you need to be careful reading Al Jazeera articles: Al Jazeera is definitely not a fan of Russia or China.

"... And among those chafing at the government's response, like restaurant owners and their customers, a form of grassroots resistance was forged.

Instead of asking their customers to scan the health department's QR code and transmit their location, some owners have designed an alternative code that feeds into a Googleform which will be erased every 31 days, the period for which businesses are required by authorities to retain the data ..."

That action by the restaurant owners is not exactly grassroots resistance if the authorities have already approved the Googleform and the erasures.

The one thing the Al Jazeera article missed (deliberately perhaps?) is that COVID-19 restrictions have been relaxing in Hong Kong since February 2021 at least.

Kiza , Apr 6 2021 1:18 utc | 52
Around ten years ago, I called this "Dog Putin ate my homework syndrome". It is not only propaganda against an economic, political and even soul competitor (last resort of real Christianity is Russia), it is not even just a projection ("killer Putin", as Putin himself explained). Its primary purpose is to tell you why you are living worse than 20 years ago, why your children will live even worse than you now if they remain in this lost cause of deeply corrupt and rotten so called countries. It is an excuse for everything that is wrong - it is all because Putin and Xi weaponised it.

When I see such things in alt media, since I do not consume the swill from the main sewerage media, I get that sinking feeling that I live in a wrong place, a place without a future.

I do not care who the "authorities" denigrate, Russia, China, they are even to me. I only wish they would do something to reduce the problems of our own societies instead of always blaming someone else. Because as long as the rulers and their sewerage media sycophants keep pointing fingers at Russia and China nothing will change for the better here where I am.

CarlD , Apr 6 2021 1:33 utc | 53
Jen @ 50

You mention a Googleform? in HK?

Google is not accesible in China. Baidu only.

uncle tungsten , Apr 6 2021 1:34 utc | 54
My hearing aids play the Red Flag when they turn on.
My Win10 pc plays the Internationale just show Gates that the Ruskies have his code.

My iPhone needs the hammer and sickle swipe on the dot matrix encryption pad.

Those Ruskies have a wicked sense of humor.

jiri , Apr 6 2021 2:26 utc | 55
Very revealing list.

Provides a fairly comprehensive list of what the West itself has been trying to do to Russia.

Case of projection.

chola3 , Apr 6 2021 3:15 utc | 56
Any propaganda works if the people know they will never suffer the consequences of war.

The idea, all the way from Saddam Hussein, that we can influence the USA public to stop their govt waging war on us, is misplaced.

I used to believe it too. I dont believe anymore. I dont believe the USA govt needs to strain themselves to get the citizens behind them to put up blockades/sanctions or launch cruise missiles.

Some still think this or that event will be used to "sanction russia", "attack iran" etc.

(The "more sanctions coming" part is weird. As though Russia today prospers at the pleasure of the West)

The only thing that stops an attack on Iran is hard cold realities of thousands of dead US Marines and destitution at home once the oil terminals are blown up. Same vs Russia.

Still bloggers write stuff to try to convince the Anerican public.

Only thing that convinces any person/society is the consequences for actions.

But mark my words: West was beaten on 2020-01-08. Payment soon to Russia for going along with the c19. Iran got some of its payment with that 25yr agreement.

Jen , Apr 6 2021 3:28 utc | 57
Carl D @ 52:

It's still "One Country / Two Systems" in China / Hongkong as far as I can tell. If Googleforms are not available in Hongkong, maybe you need to tell The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

vetinLA , Apr 6 2021 3:39 utc | 58
"Because as long as the rulers and their sewerage media sycophants keep pointing fingers at Russia and China nothing will change for the better here where I am."

Posted by: Kiza | Apr 6 2021 1:18 utc | 51

Absolutely Kiza, damn shame, but expect no change, and no disappointment will arise. The new feudalism has arrived.

psychohistorian , Apr 6 2021 4:30 utc | 59
Below is a link to the latest Alastair Crooke piece at Strategic Culture and the take away quote

How Russia Weaponized China

The take away ending quote
"
For the EU, the Chinese entry into global politics is more problematic. It was trying to leverage its own 'strategic autonomy' by erecting European values as the gateway to inclusion into its market and trade partnership. China effectively is telling the world to reject any such hegemonic imposition of alien values and rights.

The EU is stranded in the midst. Unlike the U.S., it is precluded from printing the money with which to resurrect its virus-blighted economy. It desperately needs trade and investment. Its biggest trading partner, and its tech well-spring, however, has just told the EU (as the U.S.), to give up on its moralising discourse. At the same time, Europe's 'security partner' has just demanded the opposite – that the EU strengthens it. What's to be done? Sit back, and watch (with fingers crossed that no one does something extremely stupid).
"

Kassandra , Apr 6 2021 6:58 utc | 60
Trying to wade through the muck that passes as news today IS a fools errand.
Long time reader of MOA, followed Paveway long ago.
B, keep this site alive and let me know how to contribute.
Tuyzentfloot , Apr 6 2021 7:57 utc | 61
It was an interesting demonstration of the circularity of belief mechanisms at work when people adopted ideas like: "Putin did not really intervene in our elections, he was much more devious. He made us think he did intervene and that way caused us to undermine ourselves! That is how devilish he is and we were even more right than we thought about that!"

I recently read an article which stuck with me on a Flemish 'eminence grise' (Jan Balliauw)on Russia which commented on the European turnabout over the Sputnik vaccine(in dutch) : yes we misjudged the Russian vaccine but it is the fault of the Russians and the bastards are cheering now! And he goes on to the main theme by emphasizing the Russians can't be trusted.

Norwegian , Apr 6 2021 8:36 utc | 63
@Jen | Apr 6 2021 0:35 utc | 50

It is beyond question that such a "system" is overly hysterical, to say the least . Show me the proof that there is a need to cancel democracy and human rights for something that does not affect 99.9% if anyone at all. And if you do, why not lock everybody in because of traffic accidents, violent crime or actual diseases such as malaria, dengue fever or whatever.

I question the motives for what is going on: that is to say: I do not accept that people's health is the driving factor behind this. Show me the proof that what is claimed is actually happening and if so also show me the proof that the intrusive technology is actually meaningful. In my view this is conditioning the people to accept personal surveillance on a level that goes far beyond 1984, and it is infinitely more scary than "covid".

Bernard F. , Apr 6 2021 9:13 utc | 64
How Russia Amerika+France+UK+++ weaponized "the Great Syrian Democratic Revolution"
How much longer can people still insist that there is a Syrian revolution, when the most powerful group is not only friendly to the West, but an "asset"?
Very well summarize
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2021/04/06/648860/US-Media-Al-Qaeda-Facelift
Bernard F. , Apr 6 2021 9:18 utc | 65
@ Mina | Apr 6 2021 8:11 utc | 61

Since 1947 1830, "We" subsidize colonisation

Jen , Apr 6 2021 12:10 utc | 66
Norwegian @ 62:

In Australia, the minimum that restaurants, cafes, other dining establishments, other private retail establishments and places where large numbers of people might gather can do is provide a way in which customers and patrons can be notified that they may have come in contact with someone who has COVID-19 or who has tested positive for COVID-19. But most of these places cannot compel people to leave their contact details (usually mobile phone numbers) with them.

In cases where places do compel people to leave their mobile phone details for the purposes of contact tracing, people have the option of going somewhere else that does not insist on their leaving their contact details behind.

The system used in Hong Kong dining places appears to be similar to the system used in Australia: by law, these establishments must provide methods by which people can be contacted if they become sites of infection. They either encourage people to download a contact-tracing app or ask people to write their details down on paper forms. Customers have the option also of not going out at all and eating at home, which is difficult to do in a culture where dining out in public with friends and family is expected and where most people live in small apartments so they prefer to entertain others by taking them out to restaurants and cafes.

Some restaurants and cafes in HK have also refused to take people's contact details and have opted to serve takeaway meals only.

Theoretically this system would reduce the need for blanket lockdowns of an entire city or a larger administrative unit such as a state or province, or even country. In Sydney, the NSW government used contact tracing to determine that a cluster of COVID-19 cases was limited mainly to the northeast side of the metropolitan area and this part of Sydney was subjected to lockdown. Traffic access to the area (population: about 250,000) was blocked by police. The lockdown lasted about 21 days and included New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. During this period people living in the affected area couldn't leave it but were allowed to leave their homes for exercise, essential shopping and getting takeaway meals within the area.

The issue that Al Jazeera brings up is an issue of compulsion and creeping authoritarian rule (based on stereotypes about China and the Chinese government) but it uses a poor example to demonstrate what it wants its readers to believe. It turns out that the HK govt is not forcing all dining establishments to use its contact-tracing app but is giving them a choice. Al Jazeera should have done better research.

Jackrabbit , Apr 6 2021 14:36 utc | 68
Norwegian @Apr6 8:36 #62:
Show me the proof that there is a need to cancel democracy and human rights for something that does not affect 99.9% ...
Jen is not advocating for canceling democracy and human rights. And the pandemic affects us all. Everyone is capable of getting sick and passing it on to others.

Democracies have responded to the pandemic with measures that many people find onerous and many lies have been spread by some of these people such as: 1)"masks don't work" (they do work but they protect others, not the mask-wearer) ; 2) "only old people die" (even teens have died); and 3) that the pandemic is a hoax (it's not just the flu!).

Your "... does not affect 99.9% if anyone at all" is just regurgitating nonsense.

Many more-authoritarian countries have actually been more successful in fighting the pandemic. They haven't had to have the long "lockdowns" (a misnomer that exaggerates) that Western democracies have imposed. Among the things that they have done (as temporary emergency measures) is: rigorous contact-tracing, and quarantining the sick and suspected sick.

I would also note that the hypocrisy is astounding:

!!
Jackrabbit , Apr 6 2021 15:28 utc | 69
follow-up @Apr 6 2021 14:36 utc | 67

I should add, for the benefit of readers that don't know me, that my criticism of those who are critical of pandemic measures doesn't mean that I'm not skeptical of many things about this pandemic such as:

!!
ak74 , Apr 6 2021 16:49 utc | 70
The only thing that holds America or the "democratic" West together is an increasingly rabid hatred of Russia and China.

The Western-controlled Free Press and its unhinged accusations against Russia is matched by its equally unhinged torrent of Yellow Peril propaganda against China, as evidenced below:

Why the racism against Asians?, ask fundamentalist sinophobics...
https://nomadicthoughts.blogs.sapo.pt/why-the-racism-against-asians-ask-93263

Simply put, the collective West--led by the America and the Anglosphere--resembles a civilization of paranoid schizophrenics, whose delusional ravings will drive them towards world war--total war.

Needless to say, things will not end well for them.

[Apr 07, 2021] The fate of Durham probe

It was pretty predictable fate after Biden victory as Biden was one of key firugres in Russiagate: U.S. Attorney John Durham resigns; led prosecution of mobsters, drug kingpins and corrupt politicians. 'A hero in the law enforcement community', FEB 26, 2021. Finally color revolution against Trump was successful.
Apr 07, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Yen Cross 2 hours ago (Edited)

i want to know when the Durham probe is going to recommend indictments of the fake Russia probes, Biden laptops, IRS scandal ect...?

I demand ******* justice as a USA Citizen taxpayer!

Those scumbag assholes should be incarcerated.

Biden comes first in the Alphabet.

South China Sea 58 minutes ago

Durham retired. Did you miss that bit of news?

[Apr 04, 2021] An interesting undergraduate thesis from Munich put together a list of the adjectives and adverbs used in select articles about Obama (USA) and Putin (Russia) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine between 2000 and 2012 by Udo Ulfkotte

Notable quotes:
"... The adjectives used in the FAZ to describe Putin had overwhelmingly negative connotations, including: threatening, rough, aggressive, confrontational, anti-westem, power-political, untruthful, cool, calculated, cynical, harsh, abrasive, non-substantive (arguments) and implausible (arguments). ..."
"... The words used to describe Obama had a completely different tone: committed, fanatically welcomed, enthusiastic, conciliatory, praised, hopeful and resolute ..."
"... The former FAZ Washington correspondent Matthias Rub wrote the adulation to US President Bush cited above shortly before the Iraq War began in 2003, in violation of international law. One year later he received the Arthur F. Bums Award for a different article. The Arthur F. Bums Award is presented by Germany's Foreign Minister. So, who selects the winners today? ..."
Apr 04, 2021 | www.amazon.com

An interesting undergraduate thesis from Munich put together a list of the adjectives and adverbs used in select articles about Obama (USA) and Putin (Russia) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung between 2000 and 2012.

The words selected were ones that implied a value judgement in their description of Obama or Putin. The adjectives used in the FAZ to describe Putin had overwhelmingly negative connotations, including: threatening, rough, aggressive, confrontational, anti-westem, power-political, untruthful, cool, calculated, cynical, harsh, abrasive, non-substantive (arguments) and implausible (arguments).

The words used to describe Obama had a completely different tone: committed, fanatically welcomed, enthusiastic, conciliatory, praised, hopeful and resolute :' In plain language: The reporting in the once renowned FAZ newspaper is definitely not neutral, independent, unbiased nor objective these days. So where is this bias coming from? Does this style of reporting possibly have anything to do with the closeness that the FAZ's writers have to certain elites and powerful circles? In the following chapters, we won't only be considering the FAZ when it comes to this question. We will also look into why the mainstream media doesn't even want you to imply that they're close to the elite.

Chapter one, scene two: A few years ago, the reporter Thomas Leif painted a rather conspiratorial picture in the ARD television documentary Strippenzieher und Hinterzimmer (Puppet Masters and Back Rooms). In it, journalists, ministers and party officials appeared to all be sitting in the same boat, isolated from the common folk and getting along like gangbustcrs. Viewers got to see how politics is made in secret meetings behind the scenes. The film was about a corrupt world of cozy connections.4 What was being shown, however, wasn't a conspiracy theory.

The film was controversial, because die people being shown in it were the perpetrators. They thought that this form of corruption was completely normal. The journalists portrayed in the documentary took it as an affront when they were simply asked about these secret networks operating in the background.

... ... ...

The manipulation of the readers has been noticeable at the FAZ for many years. Dr. Heinz Loquai gave a famous speech in 2003 where he said the following about the FAZ:

We learn from the FAZ's Washington correspondents that, among other things, Bush studies the bible every day, prays regularly and bases his actions on the question, "What would Jesus do?" The president is a "paragon of modesty and close to his people." There may be "an arrogant bone or two in Bush's body," but he is "a man of love." His "portion of missionary fervor" is "softened by statesmanlike prudence," through "patient waiting," the "natural political talent's decision" has been "expressed." Although Bush may know that he is not an intellectual, he can rely on "his political instinct, his wisdom and his natural wit."

So (...) lectured, we can continue to count on the judgement and objectivity of leading German daily and weekly newspapers' America correspondents! Embedded with the allied troops, embedded in the political-media network in Washington - what's the difference? 16

The former FAZ Washington correspondent Matthias Rub wrote the adulation to US President Bush cited above shortly before the Iraq War began in 2003, in violation of international law. One year later he received the Arthur F. Bums Award for a different article. The Arthur F. Bums Award is presented by Germany's Foreign Minister. So, who selects the winners today? The jury includes, for example, the journalists Sabine Christiansen and Stefan Kornclius (Sflddeutsche Zeitung).17 Keep these names in the mind. We will come across them and their interesting connections quite often.

[Apr 03, 2021] The Spy Who Loved Me- Check It Out by Ted Rall

Highly recommended!
" Reporters uncritically echo intel agencies' election claims. Did they learn nothing from the Iraq war?" that a wrong question to ask. In reality presstitutes are controlled by their pimps from intelligence agencies. Like was the case in the USSR he MSM has generally abandoned journalism and became propaganda arm of the State Department and CIA if we are talking about foreign policy. .
By no stretch of the imagination can NPR or NYT any longer be called a news organizations. They are propaganda outlets. The book, "Legacy of Ashes," is a good place to start to learn something about CIA. And Presstitutes Embedded in the Pay of the CIA by Dr. Udo Ulfkotte describes how CIA controls journalists.
Notable quotes:
"... Some of our guys told us stuff. We won’t tell you who or why you should trust them, and we won’t show you any evidence that backs them up. The intelligence community is making a bold appeal to its own authority — an authority of which journalists have good reason to be skeptical. ..."
"... Organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency have a history of propagating disinformation to media outlets. Their biases are obvious: They exist not to report the truth but to disrupt foreign adversaries and, at least in theory, to further American interests. Formally they answer to the president and are overseen by Congress, but they also protect their parochial interests like all bureaucracies. ..."
"... Mr. Rall is a political cartoonist, columnist and author of "The Stringer," a graphic novel forthcoming in April. ..."
Apr 01, 2021 | www.wsj.com

Reporters uncritically echo intel agencies' election claims. Did they learn nothing from the Iraq war?

If your mother says she loves you, check it out, goes an old reporter’s saying. What if the intelligence community says so?

On March 15 the National Intelligence Council declassified an “intelligence community assessment” titled “Foreign Threats to the 2020 Federal Election.” From a journalistic standpoint, the section titled “sources of information” is of interest. It says only that “we considered intelligence reporting and other information made available to the Intelligence Community as of 31 December 2020.”

To put that in layman’s terms: Some of our guys told us stuff. We won’t tell you who or why you should trust them, and we won’t show you any evidence that backs them up. The intelligence community is making a bold appeal to its own authority — an authority of which journalists have good reason to be skeptical.

Organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency have a history of propagating disinformation to media outlets. Their biases are obvious: They exist not to report the truth but to disrupt foreign adversaries and, at least in theory, to further American interests. Formally they answer to the president and are overseen by Congress, but they also protect their parochial interests like all bureaucracies. (Speaking of bias, I draw cartoons for Sputnik News and frequently appear on their radio programs. I have many other clients as well. That may affect how seriously you take this article.)

Yet many in the media greeted the report with utter credulity. NPR aired a story March 17 titled “Russia’s Efforts at Information Warfare Against the West Continue”—not “Intelligence Agencies Claim . . .” Reporters Mary Louise Kelly and Greg Myre framed the report’s election-interference claims as straightforward fact, analyzed the political implications, and discussed what the U.S. might do to retaliate. “But the bigger question, Mary Louise, is how can the U.S. stop these major breaches being carried out by Russia?” Mr. Myre said.

The segment ignored the possibility that the report’s claims might be false or mistaken. It failed to mention the lack of documented evidence and the anonymous sourcing. NPR interviewed a single expert: Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency, identified only as an “official,” who took the report at face value.

Other media outlets were careful to use proper journalistic form, such as “report says” and “report alleges.” Yet they too presented unsourced allegations as fact. CNN said the report “confirms what was largely assumed” and called it “a wholesale repudiation of many false narratives that were pushed by right-wing news outlets.” CNN didn’t address the questions of anonymous sourcing or reliability.

While the New York Times allowed that “the declassified report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions,” it bent over backward to give the benefit of the doubt to the intelligence community: “The officials said they had high confidence in their conclusions about Mr. Putin’s involvement, suggesting that the intelligence agencies have developed new ways of gathering information after the extraction of one of their best Kremlin sources in 2017.”

In May 2004 the Times’s editors published a 1,200-word letter to readers apologizing for their coverage of Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. “We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been,” they wrote. “In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged—or failed to emerge.”

You’d think they’d have learned something from the mother of all intelligence—and journalistic—failures.

Mr. Rall is a political cartoonist, columnist and author of "The Stringer," a graphic novel forthcoming in April.

Appeared in the April 2, 2021, print edition.

Douglas Wolf

From the 50's on to the fall of the Soviet Union (which the "intelligence agencies completely missed) the assessments of the Soviet military was WAY overexaggerated to justify huge budgets for themselves and the military-industrial establishment. When the SU crumbled, new boogie men had to found! Oh and they missed the plot that became 9-11. WMD's in Iraq -nope. The list is long of the screwups and politically motivated reports. I say this as someone who has a long friendship with a CIA officer

Bryan Smith

Asking the media if they have any ethics,, is like asking the executioner why he is an hatchet man? Because the money is good!

Robert Bridges

50 Intelligence officers, including Brennan, said the Hunter Biden story was Russian misinformation before the election. They were wrong. Of course, they, and you, won't apologize to the American people for that blatant attempt to affect the election.

Michael Bomya

Mr. Rall reminds us of the WMD ploy that was the premise for the Iraq war, however he misses entirely the more recent 2016 Russian collusion narrative. The alleged journalists are simply extending their Russia story into a tome as thick as Tolstoy's "War and Peace". I might take the recent intel report to mean that Russia spent $75K on faceyspacey ads in the run up to the 2020 election, a 25% increase over their spending to install a sleeper agent, Donald Trump, into the White House.

No Mr. Rall, there are many "news" articles that I stop reading halfway through due to anonymous sources, a dearth of facts and its' alignment with a Dem narrative. I am not easily morphed into a consumer of fiction, when I wish to read the news.

David Everson

As long as their agendas coincide they will cooperate. The rest of us are left to sort out the epistemological sewage we live in.

Bill Schmaltz

"I'm from the government, I'm here to help you". (Be afraid)

"We're the FBI, we're here to pursue justice" (Not always)

"We're the intelligence community, you can trust us". (No, you can't)

Michael Kwedar

Sadly the question "Cui Bono" addresses a lot of what Mr. Rall declaims.

Richard Taylor

The author gives the "journalists" too much credit for being anything other than the political hacks they are. The intelligence information coincides with their political views and hence it is gospel. No need for any further review.

Richard Bolin

The issue of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction was not a failure of the intelligence community at large. That assessment was made by a rogue intelligence component that had the White House's ear. I was a senior intelligence officer at the time and when I asked my staff if they were still seeing evidence that Iraq still had a weapons of mass destruction program the unanimous answer was no.

Marc Jones
Yet the Director of the CIA still went forward, declaring "Slam Dunk!" Was it not his responsibility to vet the information he was passing on to ensure its accuracy, or was he one of the rogues? Where do you want to start with these rogue operations and elements? The 1950s in Latin America and Iran? The 1960s domestically? The 1970s in Asia? The 1980s and 1990s in the Middle East and again in Latin America? The record is long, ugly and it has a cause. There is a difference between gathering information and conducting clandestine foreign intervention.

The former is necessary and relatively benign. The latter leads to embarrassing and dangerous rogue operations. The United States has a military, Constitutionally established and maintained for the purpose of conducting violence in the country's behalf. It was the intent of the founders that would only happen after the members of Congress debated and agreed there was a need to do so. We need to return to that standard.

Kenneth Wilson

The "journalists" cited all intend to propagate the Democratic Party narrative that it's only "The Russians" who interfere in US presidential elections. You will not hear anything about China's involvement from "the intelligence community" or these same journalists.

Also you can be sure that "the intelligence community" won't say publicly anything about Dominion voting systems. One member of the intel community, former Trump cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs (who had been fired by Trump) testified to the Senate Homeland security committee that in no way were the voting machines connected to the Internet. Until Senator Ron Johnson showed evidence that yes, the machines are in fact connected to the Internet. Thus the vote counts can be manipulated from anywhere, including from servers abroad.

Madison Bagney

As Reagan famously said, "Trust but verify." Sadly advice that most Americans fail to do.

[Apr 03, 2021] Is that you Bill Browder?

Apr 03, 2021 | www.unz.com
Anon [367] Disclaimer , says: April 1, 2021 at 3:19 am GMT • 2.7 days ago

ugghhhh the propaganda channel – thesaker – continues unabated

"Putin single-handedly "resurrected" Russia in an amazingly short time"

just LOL @ single-handedly

" Putin turned Russia into the strongest military power on the planet and he completely reshaped the Russian perception of themselves and of Russia"

strongest? zvezda channel posting youtube videos doesn't make you the strongest military power

completely reshaped? so much that still all the young Russians want to emigrate

"the country which created the best vaccine on the planet "

the best vaccine? only 4% of Russians got vaccinated, that's 6 million out of 144 millions
so much about Russians trusting Putin, LOL

-- -- -

Andrei Raevsky, do you even re-read what BS you write?!
you aren't fooling anyone but a handful of braindead followers you got there on your blog
in the real world – no one gives a shyt about Putin

the West doesn't hate Putin, they just want to loot Russia or get a cut from the loot of Russia.
Russian oligarchs want to loot Russia for themselves without giving a cut/tribute to Western oligarchs.
Putin is a non-issue, a nobody, he just follows orders of the Russian oligarchs.

But there is a real hate @ Putin – that because he is a fake, only a carefully prepared media
image. And you Andrei Raevsky are part of that propaganda effort. Putin is no savior, Putin
is not working for the betterment of Russians or humanity as a whole. He is just a facade for
Russian oligarchs. And that is what we hate . And the more you and the likes of you push
that fake image of Putin, the more the pushback and hate from us.
So go on – continue.

I was a believer in Putin. Then I saw the light. Now I would have no quarrel putting a bullet in
Putin's head. Analyze this!

[Apr 03, 2021] Understanding anti-Putin PSYOPs- Preparing for war by The Saker

Apr 03, 2021 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

In truth, the West has a very long list of reasons for which to hate Putin and everything Russian, but I believe that there is one reason which trumps them all: the western leaders sincerely believed that they had defeated the USSR in the Cold War (even medals were made to commemorate this event) and following the collapse of the former superpower and the coming to power of a clueless, alcoholic puppet, the triumph of the West was total. At least in appearance. The reality, as always, was much more complicated.

The causes and mechanisms of the collapse of the Soviet Union are not our topic today, so I will just indicate that I believe that the USSR never "collapsed" but that it was deliberately destroyed by the CPSU apparatus which decided to break up the country in order for the Party and Nomenklatura to remain in power, not at the helm of the USSR, but at the helm of the various ex-Soviet republics. Weak leaders and ideologies which nobody really believes in do not inspire people to fight for their rulers. This is why the Russian monarchy collapsed, this is why the masonic democracy of Kerenskii collapsed and this is why the Soviet Union collapsed (this is also one of the most likely reasons for the final collapse of the US as a state).

Putin, who was not very well known in the West or, for that matter, in Russia, came to power and immediately reversed Russia's course towards the abyss. First, he dealt with the two most urgent threats, the oligarchs and the Wahabi insurrection in the Caucasus. Many Russians, including myself, were absolutely amazed at the speed and determination of his actions. As a result, Putin suddenly found himself one of the most popular leaders in Russian history. Initially, the West went into a kind of shock, then through a process reminiscent of the so-called " Kübler-Ross model " and, finally, the West settled into a russophobic frenzy not seen since the Nazi regime in Germany during WWII.

To understand why Putin is the Devil incarnate, we have to understand that the leaders of the collective West really thought that this time around, after a millennium of failures and embarrassing defeats , the West has finally "defeated" Russia which would now become a leaderless, culture-less, spiritual-less and, of course, history-less territory whose sole purpose would be to provide resources for the "Triumphant West". Not only that, but the AngloZionist leaders of the Empire executed the 9/11 false flag operation which gave them the pretext needed for the GWOT, but which completely distracted the West from its previous focus on the so-called "Russian threat" simply because by 2001 there was no Russian threat. So there was a certain logic behind these moves. And then, "suddenly" (at least for western leaders) Russia was "back": in 2013 Russia stopped the planned US/NATO attack on Syria (the pretext here was Syrian chemical weapons). In 2014 Russia gave her support to the Novorussian uprising against the Ukronazi regime in Kiev and, in the same year, Russia also used her military to make it possible for the local population to vote on a referendum to join Russia . Finally, in 2015, Russia stunned the West with an extremely effective military intervention in Syria .

In this sequence, Russia committed two very different types of "crimes" (from the AngloZionist point of view, of course):

The minor crime of doing what Russia actually did and The much bigger crime of never asking the Empire for the permission to do so

The West likes to treat the rest of the planet like some kind of junior partner, with very limited autonomy and almost no real agency (the best example is what the USA did to countries like Poland or Bulgaria). If and when any such "junior" country wants to do something in its foreign policy, it absolutely has to ask for permission from its AngloZionist Big Brother. Not doing so is something akin to sedition and revolt. In the past, many countries were "punished" for daring to have an opinion or, even more so, for daring to act on it.

It would not be inaccurate to summarize it all by saying that Putin flipped his finger to the Empire and its leaders. That "crime of crimes" was what really triggered the current anti-Russian hysteria. Soon, however, the (mostly clueless) leaders of the Empire ran into an extremely frustrating problem: while the russophobic hysteria did get a lot of traction in the West, in Russia it created a very powerful blowback because of a typical Putin "judo" move: far from trying to suppress the anti-Russian propaganda of the West, the Kremlin used its power to make it widely available (in Russian!) through the Russian media (I wrote about this in some detail here and here ). The direct result of this was two fold: first, the CIA/MI6 run "opposition" began to be strongly associated with the russophobic enemies of Russia and, second, the Russian general public further rallied around Putin and his unyielding stance. In other words, calling Putin a dictator and, of course, a "new Hitler", the western PSYOPs gained some limited advantage in the western public opinion, but totally shot itself in the leg with the Russian public.

I refer to this stage as the " phase one anti-Putin strategic PSYOP ". As for the outcome of this PSYOP, I would not only say that it almost completely failed, but I think that it had the exact opposite intended effect inside Russia.

A change of course was urgently needed.

The redirection of US PSYOPs against Putin and Russia

I have to admit that I have a very low opinion of the US intelligence community, including its analysts. But even the rather dull US "Russia area specialist" eventually figured out that telling the Russian public opinion that Putin was a "dictator" or a "killer of dissidents" or a "chemical poisoner of exiles" resulted in a typically Russian mix of laughter and support for the Kremlin. Something had to be done.

So some smart ass somewhere in some basement came up with the following idea: it makes no sense to accuse Putin of things which make him popular at home, so let's come up with a new list of accusations carefully tailored to the Russian public.

Let's call this a " phase two anti-Putin PSYOP operation ".

And this is how the "Putin is in cahoots with" thing began. Specifically, these accusations were deployed by the US PSYOPs and those in its pay:

Putin is disarming Syria Putin will sell out the Donbass Putin is a puppet of Israel and, specifically, Netanyahu Putin is a corrupt traitor to the Russian national interests Putin is allowing Israel to bomb Syria (see here ) Putin is selling the Siberian riches to China and/or Putin is subjugating Russia to China Putin is corrupt, weak and even cowardly Putin was defeated by Erdogan in the Nagorno-Karabakh war

The above are the main talking points immediately endorsed and executed by the US strategic PSYOPs against Russia.

Was it effective?

Yes, to some degree. For one thing, these "anti-Russian PSYOPS reloaded" were immediately picked up by at least part of what one could call the "internal patriotic opposition" (much of it very sincerely and without any awareness of being skillfully manipulated). Even more toxic was the emergence of a rather loud neo-Communist (or, as Ruslan Ostashko often calls them "emo-Marxist") movement (I personally refer to as a sixth column ) which began an internal anti-Kremlin propaganda campaign centered on the following themes:

"All is lost" ( всепропальщики ): that is thesis which says that nothing in Russia is right, everything is either wrong or evil, the country is collapsing, so is its economy, its science, its military, etc. etc. etc. This is just a garden variety of defeatism, nothing more. "Nothing was achieved since Putin came to power": this is a weird one, since it takes an absolutely spectacular amount of mental gymnastics to not see that Putin literally saved Russia from total destruction. This stance also completely fails to explain why Putin is so hated by the Empire (if Putin did everything wrong, like, say Eltsin did, he would be adored in the West, not hated!). All the elections in Russia were stolen. Here the 5th (CIA/MI6 run) column and 6th column have to agree: according to both of them, there is absolutely no way most Russians supported Putin for so many years and there is no way they support him now. And nevermind the fact that the vast majority of polls show that Putin was, and still is, the most popular political figure in Russia.

Finally, the big SNAFU with the pension reform definitely did not help Putin's ratings, so he had to take action: he "softened" some of the worst provisions of this reform and, eventually, he successfully sidelined some of the worst Atlantic Integrationists, including Medvedev himself.

Sadly, some putatively pro-Russian websites, blogs and individuals showed their true face when they jumped on the bandwagon of this 2nd strategic PSYOP campaign, probably with the hope to either become more noticed, or get some funding, or both. Hence, all the nonsense about Russia and Israel working together or Putin "selling out" we have seen so many times recently. The worst thing here is that these websites, blogs and individuals have seriously misled and distressed some of the best real friends of Russia in the West.

None of these guys ever address a very simple question: if Putin is such a sellout, and if all is lost, why does the AngloZionist Empire hate Putin so much? In almost 1000 years of warfare (spiritual, cultural, political, economic and military) against Russia, the leaders of the West have always hated real Russian patriots and they have always loved the (alas, many) traitors to Russia. And now, they hate Putin because he is such a terrible leader?

This makes absolutely no sense.

Conclusion: is a war inevitable now?

The US/NATO don't engage in strategic PYSOPs just because they like or dislike somebody. The main purpose of such PSYOPs is to break the other side's will to resist . This was also the main objective of both (phase one and phase two) anti-Putin PSYOPs. I am happy to report that both phases of these PYSOPs failed. The danger here is that these failures have failed to convince the leaders of the Empire of the need to urgently change course and accept the "Russian reality", even if they don't like it.

Ever since "Biden" (the "collective Biden", of course, not the potted plant) Administration (illegally) seized power, what we saw was a sharp escalation of anti-Russian statements. Hence, the latest " uhu, he is a killer " -- this was no mistake by a senile mind, this was a carefully prepared declaration. Even worse, the Empire has not limited itself to just words, it also did some important "body moves" to signal its determination to seek even further confrontation with Russia:

There has been a lot of sabre-rattling coming from the West, mostly some rather ill-advsied (or even outright stupid) military maneuvers near/along the Russian border. As I have explained it a billion times, these maneuvers are self-defeating from a military point of view (the closer to the Russian border, the more dangerous for the western military force). Politically, however, they are extremely provocative and, therefore, dangerous. The vast majority of Russian analysts do not believe that the US/NATO will openly attack Russia, if only because that would be suicidal (the current military balance in Europe is strongly in Russia's favor, even without using hypersonic weapons). What many of them now fear is that "Biden" will unleash the Ukronazi forces against the Donbass, thereby "punishing" both the Ukraine and Russia (the former for its role in the US presidential campaign). I tend to agree with both of these statements.

At the end of the day, the AngloZionist Empire was always racist at its core, and that empire is still racist : for its leaders, the Ukrainian people are just cannon fodder, an irrelevant third rate nation with no agency which has outlived its utility (US analysts do understand that the US plan for the Ukraine has ended in yet another spectacular faceplant such delusional plans always end up with, even if they don't say so publicly). So why not launch these people into a suicidal war against not only the LDNR but also Russia herself? Sure, Russia will quickly and decisively win the military war, but politically it will be a PR disaster for Russia as the "democratic West" will always blame Russia, even when she clearly did not attack first (as was the case in 08.08.08, most recently).

I have already written about the absolutely disastrous situation of the Ukraine three weeks ago so I won't repeat it all here, I will just say that since that day things have gotten even much worse: suffice to say that the Ukraine has moved a lot of heavy armor to the line of contact while the regime in Kiev has now banned the import of Russian toilet paper (which tells you what the ruling gang thinks of as important and much needed measures). While it is true that the Ukraine has become a totally failed state since the Neo-Nazi coup, there is now a clear acceleration of the collapse of not only the regime or state, but of the country as a whole. Ukraine is falling apart so fast that one could start an entire website tracking only all this developing horror, not day by day, but, hour by hour. Suffice to say that "Ze" has turned out to be even worse than Poroshenko. The only thing Poroshenko did which "Ze" has not (yet!) is to start a war. Other than that, the rest of what he did (by action or inaction) can only be qualified as "more of the same, only worse".

Can a war be prevented?

I don't know. Putin gave the Ukronazis a very stern warning (" grave consequences for Ukraine's statehood as such "). I don't believe for one second that anybody in power in Kiev gives a damn about the Ukraine or the Ukrainian statehood, but they are smart enough to realize that a Russian counter-attack in defense of the LDNR and, even more so, Crimea, might include precision "counter-leadership" strikes with advanced missiles. The Ukronazi leaders would be well-advised to realize that they all have a crosshair painted on their heads. They might also think about this: what happened to every single Wahabi gang leader in Chechnya since the end of the 2nd Chechen war? (hint: they were all found and executed). Will that be enough to stop them?

Maybe. Let's hope so.

But we must now keep in mind that for the foreseeable future there are only two options left for the Ukraine: " a horrible ending or a horror without end " (Russian expression).

The best scenario for the people of the Ukraine would be a (hopefully relatively peaceful) breakup of the country into manageable parts . The worst option would definitely be a full-scale war against Russia.

Judging by the rhetoric coming out of Kiev these days, most Ukrainian politicians are firmly behind option #2, especially since that is also the only option acceptable to their overseas masters. The Ukrainians have also adopted a new military doctrine (they call it a "military security strategy of Ukraine") which declares Russia the aggressor state and military adversary of the Ukraine (see here for a machine translation of the official text).

This might be the reason why Merkel and Macron recently had a videoconference with Putin ("Ze" was not invited): Putin might be trying to convince Merkel and Macron that such a war would be a disaster for Europe. In the meantime, Russia is rapidly reinforcing her forces along the Ukrainian border, including in Crimea.

But all these measures can only deter a regime which has no agency. The outcome shall be decided in Washington DC, not Kiev. I am afraid that the traditional sense of total impunity of US political leaders will, once again, give them a sense of very little risk (for them personally or for the USA) in triggering a war in the Ukraine. The latest news on the US-Ukrainian front is the delivery by the USN of 350 tonnes of military equipment in Odessa. Not enough to be militarily significant, but more than enough to further egg on the regime in Kiev to an attack on the Donbass and/or Crimea.

In fact, I would not even put it past "Biden" to launch an attack on Iran while the world watches the Ukraine and Russia go to war. After all, the other country whose geostrategic position has been severely degraded since Russia moved her forces to Syria is Israel, the one country which all US politicians will serve faithfully and irrespective of any costs (including human costs for the USA). The Israelis have been demanding a war on Iran since at least 2007, and it would be very naive to hope that they won't eventually get their way. Last, but not least, there is the crisis which Blinken's condescending chutzpah triggered with China which, so far, has resulted in an economic war only, but which might also escalate at any moment, especially considering all the many recent anti-Chinese provocations by the US Navy.

Right now the weather in the eastern Ukraine is not conducive to offensive military operations. The snow is still melting, creating very difficult and muddy road conditions (called " rasputitsa " in Russian) which greatly inhibit the movement of forces and troops. These conditions will, however, change with the warmer season coming, at which point the Ukronazi forces will be ideally poised for an attack.

In other words, barring some major development, we might be only weeks away from a major war.


macilrae , says: April 1, 2021 at 12:29 am GMT • 2.8 days ago

We must not forget President Putin's outrageous opinion piece in the New York Times of September 11th 2013: delivered at the same time as he had the impertinence to propose the voluntary relinquishment of all chemical weapons by Syria -- thwarting the traditional wholesale bombing campaign that the "Allies" were working up to. This was an unforgivable affront to the USA -- and to Obama in particular; who had only just invoked his "red line". It made him look ridiculous -- and a man in his position can't afford to look ridiculous.

This behaviour by Mr. Putin has never been forgotten or forgiven and it will be quite a while before the New York Times prints another oped by him.

Biff , says: April 1, 2021 at 1:04 am GMT • 2.8 days ago

Russia was "back": in 2013 Russia stopped the planned US/NATO attack on Syria (the pretext here was Syrian chemical weapons). In 2014 Russia gave her support to the Novorussian uprising against the Ukronazi regime in Kiev and, in the same year, Russia also used her military to make it possible for the local population to vote on a referendum to join Russia. Finally, in 2015, Russia stunned the West with an extremely effective military intervention in Syria.

Don't forget what Russia did the Georgia's American trained and supplied military in 2009.

Mulegino1 , says: April 1, 2021 at 1:37 am GMT • 2.7 days ago
@macilrae

This was an unforgivable affront to the USA -- and to Obama in particular; who had only just invoked his "red line". It made him look ridiculous -- and a man in his position can't afford to look ridiculous.

Excellent observation.

To deal with contemporary western elites is, to a great extent, to deal with Satan himself. The devil- and presumably, his minions- does not mind confrontation or opposition anywhere as much as he hates being the object of derision.

"The devil the prowde spirite cannot endure to be mocked." -- St. Thomas More

Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist , says: Website April 1, 2021 at 2:48 am GMT • 2.7 days ago

"why does the AngloZionist Empire hate Putin so much?"

I have an explanation, but that would tend to get me labelled a "sixth columnist".

It is obvious to anyone who does not believe that Putin is the Saviour Of Russia, but just a neoliberal politician who is moderately better than Yeltsin, and whose real alternatives, not Quislings like Navalny but real alternatives, are all far more nationalist and not beholden to international capital than he is. Since the 90s are now over, and the attempt to destroy Russia has failed, how does one ensure that the country does not become even stronger and, crucially, more assertive?

One possible answer is interesting: keep demonising the man in power, *even though you know that demonising him hardens support behind him*. Especially since it hardens support behind him. As long as you keep attacking him, the Russian people support him more, making it less likely for someone who would be more nationalist and less neoliberal to take charge.

Simple enough.

Greg S. , says: April 1, 2021 at 4:22 am GMT • 2.6 days ago

I've come to think that the whole "Putin the Devil" thing is pushed so hard by the corporate-communist-left (aside: I do struggle these days with what to call them) mostly as a distraction. "Hey! Look over there! A BAD MAN!" (and pay no mind to what I'm doing over here, flooding the country with replacements, thrashing the constitution, coming up with vaccine passports and enabling a totalitarian technocracy).

In fact, it's a necessary hallmark of ALL totalitarian leftist regimes to have a huge "outside enemy" who threatens the very existence of the state and is used to distract from domestic troubles. Try to find a single totalitarian state without one.

So the U.S. has everything to gain and little to lose (Biden gov thinks anyways) by goading Ukraine into "taking back Crimea." The U.S. is committed to fight that war down the very last Ukrainian.

anon [965] Disclaimer , says: April 1, 2021 at 4:43 am GMT • 2.6 days ago

Slightly old news from 10 days ago.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/20/ukra-m20.html

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba announced this week that the country's National Security and Defense Council had approved a strategy that is aimed at retaking Crimea and reintegrating the strategically important peninsula.

What could possibly go wrong?

SafeNow , says: April 1, 2021 at 5:47 am GMT • 2.6 days ago

Christopher Caldwell delivered what I thought was a good assessment of Putin in 2017, and this excellent piece by The Saker complements and updates it for me. I think Putin is even more reviled than ever by the U.S. Dems, because Putin = a national-sovereignty proponent = Trump.

I play online chess -- speedy games, and so I have a lot of experience with players from Russia and Ukraine. They tend to favor what chess players call "quiet moves." Is this a manner of thought, a philosophy, that can be extrapolated to government? (U.S. players, by contrast, tend to be more impetuous and impulsive in their chess style.)

The Caldwell essay:

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/how-to-think-about-vladimir-putin/

[Apr 02, 2021] America Is Back- Collides With A Multipolar Reality

Apr 02, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Patroklos , Apr 1 2021 20:35 utc | 26

The World Health Organization recently published its report on the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which has caused the Covid-19 pandemic. Most scientist agree that the virus is of zoonotic origin and not a human construct or an accidental laboratory escape. But the U.S. wants to put pressure on China and advised the Director General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom, to keep the focus on China potential culpability. He acted accordingly when he remarked on his agency's report:

Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deploy.

The U.S. State Department fetched the pass and ran with it. It asked its allies to sign on to its Joint Statement on the WHO-Convened COVID-19 Origins Study which requests more unhindered access in China:

The Governments of Australia, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, the Republic of Korea, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America remain steadfast in our commitment to working with the World Health Organization (WHO), international experts who have a vital mission, and the global community to understand the origins of this pandemic in order to improve our collective global health security and response. Together, we support a transparent and independent analysis and evaluation, free from interference and undue influence, of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this regard, we join in expressing shared concerns regarding the recent WHO-convened study in China, while at the same time reinforcing the importance of working together toward the development and use of a swift, effective, transparent, science-based, and independent process for international evaluations of such outbreaks of unknown origin in the future.

The most interesting with the above statement is the list of U.S. allied countries which declined to support it,

Most core EU countries, especially France, Spain, Italy and Germany, are missing from it. As is the Five-Eyes member New Zealand. India, a U.S. ally in the anti-Chinese Quad initiative, also did not sign. This list of signatories of the Joint Statement is an astonishingly meager result for a U.S. 'joint' initiative. It is unprecedented. It is a sign that something has cracked and that the world will never be the same.

The first months of he Biden administration saw a rupture in the global system. First Russia admonished the EU for its hypocritical criticism of internal Russian issues. Biden followed up by calling Putin a 'killer'. Then the Chinese foreign minister told the Biden administration to shut the fuck up about internal Chinese issues. Soon thereafter Russia's and China's foreign ministers met and agreed to deepen their alliance and to shun the U.S. dollar. Then China's foreign minister went on a wider Middle East tour. There he reminded U.S. allies of their sovereignty :

Wang said that expected goals had been achieved with regard to a five-point initiative on achieving security and stability in the Middle East, which was proposed during the visit.

"China supports countries in the region to stay impervious to external pressure and interference, to independently explore development paths suited to its regional realities ," Wang said, adding that the countries should " break free from the shadows of big-power geopolitical rivalry and resolve regional conflicts and differences as masters of the region ."

Wang's tour was topped off with the signing of a game changing agreement with Iran:

Suffice to say, the China-Iran pact deeply is embedded within a new matrix Beijing hopes to create with the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and Iran. The pact forms part of a new narrative on regional security and stability.

The "U.S. led rules based international order" is finally finished . Russia and China buried it :

Countries in Asia and further afield are closely watching the development of this alternative international order, led by Moscow and Beijing. And they can also recognise the signs of increasing US economic and political decline.

It is a new kind of Cold War, but not one based on ideology like the first incarnation. It is a war for international legitimacy, a struggle for hearts and minds and money in the very large part of the world not aligned to the US or NATO.

The US and its allies will continue to operate under their narrative, while Russia and China will push their competing narrative. This was made crystal clear over these past few dramatic days of major power diplomacy.

The global balance of power is shifting, and for many nations, the smart money might be on Russia and China now.

The obvious U.S. countermove to the Russian-Chinese initiative is to unite its allies in a new Cold War against Russia and China. But as the Joint Statement above shows most of those allies do not want to follow that path. China is a too good customer to be shunned. Talk of human rights in other countries might play well with the local electorate but what counts in the end is the business.

Even some U.S. companies can see that the hostile path the Biden administration has followed will only be to their detriment. Some are asking the Biden gang to tone it down :

[Boeing] Chief Executive Dave Calhoun told an online business forum he believed a major aircraft subsidy dispute with Europe could be resolved after 16 years of wrangling at the World Trade Organization, but contrasted this with the outlook on China.

"I think politically (China) is more difficult for this administration and it was for the last administration. But we still have to trade with our largest partner in the world: China," he told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Aviation Summit.

Noting multiple disputes, he added: " I am hoping we can sort of separate intellectual property, human rights and other things from trade and continue to encourage a free trade environment between these two economic juggernauts. ... We cannot afford to be locked out of that market. Our competitor will jump right in."

Before its 737 MAX debacle Boeing was the biggest U.S. exporter and China was its biggest customer. The MAX has yet to be re-certified in China. If Washington keeps the hostile tone against China Boeing will lose out and Europe's Airbus will make a killing.

Biden announced that "America is back" only to be told that it is no longer needed in the oversized role that it played before. Should Washington not be able to accept that it can no play 'unilateral' but will have to follow the real rules of international law we might be in for some interesting times :

Question: Finally, are you concerned that deteriorating international tensions could lead to war?

Glenn Diesen: Yes, we should all be concerned. Tensions keep escalating and there are increasing conflicts that could spark a major war. A war could break out over Syria, Ukraine, the Black Sea, the Arctic, the South China Sea and other regions.

What makes all of these conflicts dangerous is that they are informed by a winner-takes-all logic. Wishful thinking or active push towards a collapse of Russia, China, the EU or the U.S. is also an indication of the winner-takes-all mentality. Under these conditions, the large powers are more prepared to accept greater risks at a time when the international system is transforming . The rhetoric of upholding liberal democratic values also has clear zero-sum undertones as it implies that Russia and China must accept the moral authority of the West and commit to unilateral concessions.

The rapidly shifting international distribution of power creates problems that can only be resolved with real diplomacy. The great powers must recognize competing national interests, followed by efforts to reach compromises and find common solutions.

Russia's president Vladimir Putin has repeatedly asked for a summit of leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council:

Putin argued that the countries that created a new global order after World War II should cooperate to solve today's problems.

"The founder countries of the United Nations, the five states that hold special responsibility to save civilisation, can and must be an example," he said at the sombre memorial ceremony.

The meeting would "play a great role in searching for collective answers to modern challenges and threats," Putin said, adding that Russia was "ready for such a serious conversation."

Such a summit would be a chance to work on a new global system that avoids unilateralism and block mentality. As the U.S. is now learning that its allies are not willing to follow its anti-China and anti-Russia policies it might be willing to negotiate over a new international system.

But as long as Washington is unable to recognize its own decline a violent attempt to solve the issue once and for all will become more likely.

Posted by b on April 1, 2021 at 17:52 UTC | Permalink

Very thought provoking b, I wish time off brought me back firing on all cylinders like this!

No doubt vk will chime in here better than I but it surely cannot be a matter of "if America decides". There are historical forces at work in this financialized phase of late capitalism that are not grasped by the US leadership, let alone factored into intelligent policy debates. Biden is an arch-lobbyist for the vested interests which compel the US's unilateral and interventionist foreign policy. I'm quite sure he is incapable of 'deciding' anything (not just mentally but institutionally). But the underlying dynamic of world-historical change is beyond him and his whole country. The die was cast long ago when the Soviet Union fell and the US couldn't help themselves. Junkies for unilateralism since 1989, they will keep shooting up until they OD (Boeing notwithstanding...). I suspect they will end up like the schizoid UK, psychologically unable to accept increasing and humiliating losses of empire until it hits the bottom of the dustbin of History.

[Apr 02, 2021] Between mid- and late March, the American pillaged 112 truckloads of Syria's wheat from this facility

Apr 02, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Apr 1 2021 23:33 utc | 62

Looting is what the USA does everywhere it goes.

Syrian people need their wheat to just survive but the war criminal repeatedly steals it.

Starvation via military invasion and looting is a war crime.

"Though the Biden forces dismantled their illicit military base at the silos, in February, the criminal American troops have returned several times, to empty the grain, so many times that it might be convenient to create a template and just fill in the dates. Between mid- and late March, the American war criminals pillaged 112 truckloads of Syria's wheat from this facility."

[Mar 31, 2021] The US-China meeting in Anchorage took place 75 years almost to the day of the Winston Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri

Blinken is no Churchill
Mar 31, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Baron , Mar 31 2021 21:40 utc | 27

The US-China meeting in Anchorage took place 75 years almost to the day of the Winston Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. Just as the latter signalled a break point in the uneasy, war forced cohabit of the West with the communist Soviet Union, so too the Anchorage will enter the history as the break point in the US hegemony threatening collaboration of the West and China.

Since WW2, no other nation, not even Russia, has confronted the US so firmly and so publicly as did Yang Jiechi, one of the ruling member of the Chinese Politburo when he said that "the United States does not have the qualification to speak to China from a position of strength'.

That was a slap in the face the Americans will have to respond to, and it's in the nature of the response one will find whether the American Governing elite is prepared to share power or go for a confrontation.

[Mar 30, 2021] Blinken calls warmonger Madelaine Albright his "role model"

Mar 30, 2021 | odysee.com



Channel profile picture @Dwaine.Castle852 2 hours ago

I hope that someone sends her a pair of the Nike Satan sneakers. Perhaps with the blood of a few children inside. Channel profile picture @Tsigantes 2 hours ago

'role model' ?
We are warned....for what "it's worth" !

[Mar 30, 2021] Delusions of neocon Blinken

The real question is not about his neocon delusions, which are pretty predictable, but about the ability for the USA project global dominance in the decade to come.
Blinken is a marionette. And pretty much second rate even in that.
Notable quotes:
"... Let's consider this headline for a moment: "Blinken Accuses China of Trying to Undermine US-Dominated World Order." Blinken provides us with a definition of that "world order" in his own words cited in the article: "'... preserve the rules-based international order, in which we have all invested so much over the past 75 years , and which has served our interests and values well'." [My Emphasis] ..."
Mar 30, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
karlof1 , Mar 30 2021 17:08 utc | 28

Let's consider this headline for a moment: "Blinken Accuses China of Trying to Undermine US-Dominated World Order." Blinken provides us with a definition of that "world order" in his own words cited in the article: "'... preserve the rules-based international order, in which we have all invested so much over the past 75 years , and which has served our interests and values well'." [My Emphasis]

Clearly, he's referring to the rules put in place by the UN Charter. But as we at this bar all know, it's the Outlaw US Empire for whom Blinken works that's the #1 criminal when it comes to violating the UN Charter which is why it's "served our interests and values well."

Now when we turn to reality, it become very clear that China seeks to uphold the UN Charter--it's one of the foundational members of the newly established Friends of the UN Charter Group that the Outlaw US Empire will certainly snub because of the reality of its actual relations to that Act and Organization .

Indeed, what is being said by the very formation of that Group is a big NO!! to the Outlaw US Empire's attempt to say it abides by the system it's continuously violated for the past 75+ years. Yet, it's also clear that NO!! isn't being shouted out by global media enough, particularly when Outlaw US Empire officials give such an excellent opportunity to be rebuffed and ridiculed for their lies.

We have many good writers here who could take Blinken's words and turn them into an indictment of himself and the nation he represents. That implies that writers for global publications are just as good but need to examine the framing of their articles. Peace won't come to our planet unless the Outlaw Bully Nation is daily accused for what it is and does.

NATO is a distinct minority yet it holds the world captive in a terroristic manner. It's well past time to stop groveling and kow-towing and to stand-up and call out the bullshitters for what they are since being nice isn't getting us anywhere.

[Mar 30, 2021] Another day another lie

Mar 30, 2021 | asiatimes.com

... ... ...

The "Russia question" appears to have surfaced in response to a March 16 US intelligence community assessment that "Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden's candidacy, and the Democratic Party."

The 15-page public document is fluff. We heard it all before in December 2020, when fifty former intelligence officials denounced news reports of Hunter Biden's corrupt ties to Ukrainian oligarchs as Russian disinformation.

The New York Post claimed to have gotten hold of a laptop with smoking-gun emails to and from Biden's son. The voters never were allowed to consider the evidence, because the rest of the media suppressed the report and Twitter blocked reposting of the Post expose. In a December 4 column, I called this the " Treason of the spooks ."

By way of tying up loose ends, the intelligence community has now delivered an "assessment" claiming that "a key element of Moscow's strategy was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives -- including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden -- through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration."

Those are weasel words. The Post published the text of Hunter Biden emails that, strictly speaking, were "unsubstantiated" to the extent that the geek squad had not proven their provenance and the younger Biden hadn't owned up to their authenticity. But that does not prove they were false, much less justify employing extraordinary means to suppress the reports.

Source: New York Post

Apart from Biden's ABC interview, the nomination of Victoria Nuland as undersecretary of state for political affairs has sent an unmistakable signal to Moscow and, more importantly, to America's European allies.

In early 2014 Nuland was taped on a cell phone call with America's ambassador to the Ukraine ordering the composition of the next Ukrainian government after the Maidan coup, in the tone of a colonial viceroy.

Told that there might be some difficulties, Nuland explained that the UN was being enlisted in support and said, "That would be great, I think, and help glue this thing." She added, "And, you know, fuck the EU." German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the time denounced the remark as "unacceptable." That sort of faux pas normally would rate being assigned a diplomatic mission to the South Pole, but such is Washington's ideological fervor that Nuland survived and resurfaced.

Nuland is a neoconservative, a former deputy national security adviser to then-vice president Dick Cheney, as well as the spouse of Robert Kagan, one of the most persistent advocates of global transformation via the projection of American power.

[Mar 30, 2021] Even before the targets in Yemen had been "legally" designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization Obama used cluster bombs to shred dozens of women and children in a failed attempt to hit members of "al Qaida in Yemen (AQY)".

Mar 30, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

librul , Mar 30 2021 13:04 utc | 1

Even before the targets in Yemen had been "legally" designated as
a Foreign Terrorist Organization Obama used cluster bombs to shred
dozens of women and children in a failed attempt to hit members of
"al Qaida in Yemen (AQY)".
.
The war crime immediately became a dirty Obama secret, covered up
with the help of the MSM, in particular ABC.
.
An enthusiastic White House had leaked to their contacts at ABC that
Obama had escalated the War on Terror, taking it to another country,
Yemen. This was December 17, 2009 only days after Obama had returned
from his ceremony in Oslo where he proudly accepted the Nobel Peace
Prize.
.
ABC was thrilled with their scoop and in manly voices announced
the escalation in the War on Terror.
.
The very next day ABC went silent forever about it, joining the cover up
of a war crime.
.
Hillary Clinton, by the way, committed her own act of cover up.
Covering her butt by backdating a memo.
.
The designation of a organization as a FTO (Foreign Terrorist Organization)
is not official nor legal until it is published in the Federal Register.
An oversight? Obama attacked Yemen before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
had done the paperwork to make the killing legal?
.
The designation was not published until a month later, January 19, 2010.
Hillary Clinton back dated the memo she published in the Register with the date of
December 14, 2009, to somewhat cover her butt.
.
Obama's acceptance speech in Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize was December 10th.
.
Yemen leaders agreed to participate in Obama's coverup saying it was their
own Yemen forces that had accidentally shredded dozens of women and children.
.
Obama was grateful to the Yemen leaders. The Yemen leaders were not
honored in Oslo. But, ironically, Obama ended his speech honoring women
and children, days before he ordered their slaughter.
.
Obama in Oslo, December 10, 2009:
.
"Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty
still takes the time to teach her child, scrapes together what
few coins she has to send that child to school -- because she
believes that a cruel world still has a place for that child's
dreams.
.
Let us live by their example. We can acknowledge that oppression will
always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the
intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed,
we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.
We can do that -- for that is the story of human progress; that's the
.
hope
.
of all the world; and at this moment of challenge,
that must be our work here on Earth.
.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
.
One week later Obama shredded dozens of women and children in Yemen
and covered it up.
.
Here is ABC's Brian Ross using his most masculine voice to boast about Obama's attack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHcg3TNSRPs
.
Wikileaks cable corroborates evidence of US airstrikes in Yemen (Amnesty Intl)
https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2010/12/wikileaks-cable-corroborates-evidence-us-airstrikes-yemen/
.
Actual cable at Wikileaks:
https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10SANAA4_a.html
.
More at ABC [12/18/2009]:
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236
https://web.archive.org/web/20190624203826/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236 ">https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236">https://web.archive.org/web/20190624203826/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236
https://web.archive.org/web/20190725171012/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cr ">https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cr">https://web.archive.org/web/20190725171012/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cr

Norwegian , Mar 30 2021 15:09 utc | 10

@librul | Mar 30 2021 13:04 utc | 1

You can thank Thorbjørn Jagland for the Obama Nobel Price. He and Stoltenberg were buddies in the same party.

[Mar 28, 2021] Bidens missteps so early on are a very worrying indicator that his foreign policy team is worse than just being malign. They are incompetent. Thats a very dangerous combination.

Mar 28, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

PlutoniumKun , March 27, 2021 at 8:25 am

To go back to a previous BTL discussion on Patrick Cockburns recent article in Counterpunch, Bidens missteps so early on are a very worrying indicator that his foreign policy team is worse than just being malign. They are incompetent. Thats a very dangerous combination.

I don't think the Russians, Chinese, or most other major countries (apart from Europe) had a fundamental problem with Trumps approach. They understood him, and were quite happy to ignore his bombast and threats and focus instead on what was happening in the real world. But things are different for someone like Biden, and I'm very surprised nobody in his team seem to realise this. When he talks on the record, its assumed that it is a reflection of a real policy. At first, I thought maybe he was just doing the usual new guy in power thing of talking tough to set the ground for later compromises (the opposite of Obama, who appeared very weak to other leaders, and then just looked indecisive when his policies turned more hardline). But that does not seem to be the case so far.

I've no idea what the final outcome will be, but I do think that this is one of those points in history where things take a very sharp and irreparable change in direction. Obviously, things have been brewing for years, but the ineptness of US foreign policy seems to have created a strategic Russian/China alliance which will force many countries to make some very hard choices about which side of the fence they are on.

On a related note, I woke up this morning to find that a speech by Lawrence P. Wilkerson, who is associated with the conservative paleoconservatives is getting very wide circulation in China (you know this has to be officially approved otherwise it disappears very rapidly on WeChat. He makes a claim that the CIA back in the early '00's intended to use the Uigurs as a sort of proxy army to destabilise China. For all sorts of reasons, I would doubt that, but it is now widely believed among Chinese people, even those who have no liking for the CCP. The notion that the Uigurs are a sort of third force within China, and as such need to be destroyed now seems to be very deeply embedded in Chinese thinking, and the interference by 'official' western NGO's are undoubtedly making things much worse for them.

pjay , March 27, 2021 at 9:41 am

"[Wilkerson] makes a claim that the CIA back in the early '00's intended to use the Uigurs as a sort of proxy army to destabilise China. For all sorts of reasons, I would doubt that, but it is now widely believed among Chinese people, even those who have no liking for the CCP."

Just curious as to what your reasons would be for doubting this. The CIA has been doing precisely this all over the world for over 70 years. There is a clear pipeline between the Uighurs in China and the CIA-supported "rebels" in Syria. The expatriate Uighur organizations that are integral to the Western propaganda apparatus is supported and amplified by the NED and other CIA fronts, as your last sentence implies. This is not to deny the historical Uighur desire for autonomy in Western China, nor to defend Chinese policies toward them. Rather, it is to acknowledge the CIA's use of ethnic tensions to sow chaos and division in non-conforming nations *everywhere*.

PlutoniumKun , March 27, 2021 at 10:32 am

Its unlikely because:

1. The US has had little to no success in its many attempts to establish an intelligence foothold in China. There is zero evidence, direct or indirect, that it has had any successful contact with Uigur groups directly, although contacts via others, such as the Pakistani or Turkish intelligence agencies are possible. If there was even the tiniest amount of evidence of such a link, the Chinese would be broadcasting it from the skies, and not just re-messaging out tired CT stuff. Chinese intelligence is far ahead of the US in that region, so they would certainly know if something like that was happening.

2. Uigur groups in general such as we know about them tend to be as virulently anti Western as anti Han Chinese. All evidence suggests that the brand of Islam that has been belatedly introduced into those regions is essentially second hand Wahhabism (traditionally, they were never all that religious).

3. Any such attempt could be easily countered by China – simply by dumping Uigur radicals into Afghanistan to bolster the Taliban, or anywhere else that would create trouble. The fact that they haven't done this strongly suggests that the Chinese themselves see no link.

4. US military intelligence is often a misnomer, but even the CIA can't be stupid enough to think that fostering another islamic state on the borders of Afghanistan is anything but a terrible idea.

Of course, no doubt some mid ranking CIA officer may have circulated some report saying more or less 'hey, maybe we can use those Uighurs or whatever they are called'. But thats an entirely different thing from suggesting that there have been active links and a strategy for using them to destabilise the borders of China. The reality is that the US has been entirely unsuccessful in any attempts (when they've been made) to undermine China via internal Chinese ethnic or religious groups.

Incidentally, the reliability of Wilkerson (who I actually quite like and who says some interesting things), on that topic can be measured by his statement that the invasion of Afghanistan was motivated by an attempt to stop the Belt and Road Initiative. It's quite impressive intelligence if that was the case as the invasion predated the Belt and Road Initiative by more than a decade.

David , March 27, 2021 at 10:57 am

Yes, I think the important point is your last one. It's not out of the question that on a rainy afternoon in Virginia some junior CIA analyst amused himself by sketching out such an idea, and one day the product may leak and be presented as "proof." But for the reasons you give, the political leaders who would have to approve the scheme would turn it down, even if it were physically possible. I doubt it would be, actually: from what little information is publicly available, the US seems to be having little or no luck penetrating that area.

pjay , March 27, 2021 at 11:48 am

Thanks for the systematic reply. I appreciate each of your points, and pretty much agree with the first one – including your comment about Turkish intelligence. But regarding the others, the fact that we are talking about anti-Western Wahabist radicals does not mean the CIA (or elements of the CIA or other military/intelligence operations) would hesitate to weaponize them if possible. We did this in Afghanistan, Bosina, Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Chechnya etc. Indeed, we seemed to *welcome* the fostering of an Islamic State in Eastern Syria, because the various jihadists were a means to destroy the Syrian government. When the goal is to foster chaos and destruction in order to *undermine* an existing state, the calculus of unleashing the head-choppers is different than if we were actually interested in fostering stability in the region. I admit that such a strategy might sound insane to *us*, but Einstein's definition of insanity seems to rule our National Security Establishment.

David , March 27, 2021 at 1:28 pm

Not PK, but I would suggest these cases are not only different from each other, but also different from the Uigurs. Essentially, there was a war going on in all of these cases, and the US (and they were scarcely the only ones) decided to try to get a bit of influence by arming one or more of the factions. This is a tactic which is as old as arms themselves, and has a pretty spotty record of success, if that. Its advantage is that it is low-key and doesn't require a massive presence (the classic case is the Soviet Union and the Chinese flooding Africa with AK-47s and copies in the 1960s and 1970s). But the cases you mention are very disparate. In Bosnia there do seem to have been some (illegal) CIA deliveries to the Muslims in violation of the embargo, but these were very small scale and in any event the Muslims were one of the major parties to the conflict, as well as constituting the de facto government in Sarajevo, because the other ethnicities had withdrawn. Likewise, and in spite of preening memoirs and films, the US influence in Afghanistan was quite small : the mujahideen were already forming in the 1970s, and the only contribution the US really made was to supply anti-aircraft missiles, which complicated the Russians' existence quite a bit. But actually fomenting and arming an insurgency next to one of the three or four major powers on the planet, with highly skilled intelligence services? There is stupidity and there's downright insanity.

upstater , March 27, 2021 at 7:33 pm

I the 1950s, the CIA and MI6 trained and armed the "Forest Brothers" in the Baltics. Neutral Sweden and Finland were across hundreds of km of water. Land access was through Soviet territory or satellites. There was no significant international trade or commerce in the area at the time. Yet they had tens of thousands of well supplied (for that era) resistance fighters that took a decade for the USSR to stomp out.

To suggest that today's CIA is incapable of stirring things up in a well-connected Xinjiang when thousands of foreigners travel there, tons of business shipments and international flights and road transport is a mystifying statement. Particularly after CIA's decades of experience managing jihadis all across North Africa, Mideast and Central Asia, more than a few being Uigurs.

And suggesting that the only thing the US supplied the Afghan jihadis were Stinger missiles is far off the mark. It was a multi-billion dollar per year operation conducted by the US with collaboration of the ISI and Saudis. All those tens of thousands of jihadis didn't arrive by camels and make slingshots.

I agree "There is stupidity and there's downright insanity" in fomenting troubles in Xinjiang. The US has already passed that test. Many times.

Yves Smith , March 27, 2021 at 10:06 pm

*Sigh*

We are three generations past the 1950s. Not a relevant example.

The US is not even remotely as good as you'd have to believe to accept this theory. For starters, we don't begin to have enough people with native level language competence, much the less willing to live there long enough to be trusted. They'll take our arms, but our directives?

It is in the interest of the CIA to take credit for all sorts of things where their role was non-existent to marginal because funding.

PlutoniumKun , March 27, 2021 at 2:20 pm

David put it so much better than I could.

I can't claim any great knowledge or insight into the region, but the notion that the Uighurs were part of a grand CIA strategy, or that they have had sufficient influence in the region to manipulate them into opposing China, just doesn't pass the smell test. Unfortunately, like the notion that Covid is spread on frozen food, so far as I can tell it is now considered 'a fact' by most Chinese, inside and outside the country. As a result, even Chinese who strongly dislike their government are not at all bothered by reports coming out of the region.

For what its worth, I knew an English guy who lived for a few years in Urumqi with his Chinese wife about 15 years ago. He was virulently anti-muslim and didn't much like the non-Chinese locals he met, but I remember at the time that said that what he saw around him convinced him that things were going to end very badly for the Uighurs, the Chinese were just waiting for the opportunity to wipe them out. I was in Tibet at that period (I was fortunate to get a visa on the last year solo traveller were allowed in) and witnessed the way Tibetans were openly abused on the street by Chinese soldiers. Even Tibetans said that the Uighurs got it worse.

drumlin woodchuckles , March 27, 2021 at 5:53 pm

The US government and privately motivated US citizens have no credibility on this issue. That means if anyone is going to raise it, it will have to be someone other than America or Americans.

That doesn't change the fact of Great Han Lebensraum genocide-policy against the Uighurs on the part of the Chinese Communazi Party. And Chinese statements about their Lebensraum genocide against Uighuria are just as much hasbara as Israeli statements about antiPalestinianitic persecution in the Occupied West Bank.

And if that purely-private opinion of a mere U S citizen makes any Great Han hasbarists ( or might I say . . . Hansbarists) on this thread mad, then that makes me happy.

Fern , March 27, 2021 at 6:14 pm

Your friend was English; I have not seen this attitude on the part of Chinese friends or Chinese I've talked with. I was traveling on a domestic flight in China a number of years ago and found myself sitting on a plane next to a random Chinese soldier -- a memorably tall, handsome young man. He spoke English well enough to have a discussion (the relaxed atmosphere and the need to pass the time does wonders when it comes to breaking down language barriers). Major Uighur terror attacks and unrest had been in the news (around 2009), so I asked him what he thought about it. He said that he grew up in Xinjiang. His parents were Han Chinese who had first come to Xinjiang during the cultural revolution to build some local infrastructure/improvement project (he described it to me but I don't remember the details). They saw their goal as improving conditions in the region. Of course, the government wanted to solidify Chinese presence in that region of their country, but I heard no hint of anger or derision toward the Uighur. He said he was very concerned that the Uighur people were happy and he hoped China could find a way to mend the relationship. He said that growing up, there were many mixed Chinese/Han marriages and that "people say" that mixed Han/Uighur marriages produced the most physically beautiful children. I didn't see any evidence of the malignant racism you describe on the part of your English friend.

Strong central governments vs violent separatist movements tend to create lasting problems. Growing up in a border state over 100 years after our own civil war, I grew up with the fact that many people had still not let go of that resentment. Southerners still maintained a sense of grievance back then. The Maryland state song that I learned as a child is only now being decommissioned by the state legislature. One stanza refers to the "Northern scum".

This week's WaPo headline: "Maryland poised to say goodbye to state song that celebrates the Confederacy".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/maryland-state-song-repealed/2021/03/22/7a88fda4-89e8-11eb-bfdf-4d36dab83a6d_story.html

drumlin woodchuckles , March 27, 2021 at 10:40 pm

If your Han Chinese interlocutor's feelings are widely shared among the ruled-over rather than ruling-over ordinary majority of Han citizens, then it would appear that it is the MonoParty RegimeGovernment ruling over China which is Communazi, not the people as such.

Regardless, it will be up to countrygovs which have moral standing in this area to comment or not, not the US anymore. At least for now.

Probably the Uighurs have it even worse than Tibetans because Uighuria is very inhabitable by Han settlers whereas Tibet is high and dry enough that ( I have read), that lowland-adapted Hans have trouble physically coping over time with the lower oxygen levels at Tibet altitude.
If that is so, then the High Tibetan Plateau at least would not provide Lebensraum for millions of Han Settlers in any case, so why clear the Tibetans off the plateau and out of existence? Not so much need, in Tibet's case.

Keith Newman , March 27, 2021 at 2:43 pm

@PlutoniumKun
I have no knowledge about points 1 to 3, but totally disagree with point 4.
The hubris and desire of the US alphabet agencies to meddle is remarkable. A current example is the CIA support of jihadis in Syria that the US military itself is fighting against.
Interesting caution re Wilkerson – do you have a link?

The Rev Kev , March 27, 2021 at 10:03 am

Here is a link to an article talking about that talk PK. Having a coupla thousand Uygurs in Syria gaining combat experience for use later who knows where was probably proof enough for China of western intentions. Just think of the other Jihadists who have been used in places like Libya and the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and the Chinese would be drawing their own conclusions-

https://archive.ph/lMHQy#selection-2325.214-2325.220

[Mar 28, 2021] Something that became instantly clear was that all the combatants had very similar hopes dreams but were motivated by each states propaganda much harsher disciplinary measures than the Allies faced .

Mar 28, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Eustachedesaintpierre , March 27, 2021 at 12:11 pm

Fortunately for me I am able to listen to podcasts & audiobooks while working to fill gaps in my portfolio, as nothing paid for available as yet. Dropped on an AB written by a Wehrmacht soldier on the Eastern front, followed by the view from a Russian soldier. I then moved on to 2 AB's which featured around 15 testimonies from German military at or close to the D-day beaches.

Something that became instantly clear was that all the combatants had very similar hopes & dreams but were motivated by each states propaganda & much harsher disciplinary measures than the Allies faced . The German cannon fodder believed that they were creating a United Europe protected from Communism & were in partnership with the French – something that was made all the easier to believe due to the friendly treatment they received from at least some of the French locals. The Ivan's on the other hand were protecting the Motherland from Fascism & as they progressed were given plenty of evidence that they were correct to do so.

It was like getting a small bubble view of groups of men in either case whose main loyalty was concentrated towards the relatively small group pf men they fought & died with. A view under a microscope totally different from the usual general view from high above when individuals are reduced to numbers with only the top brass being honoured with names.

All described various versions of Hell on Earth, gory with very little glory & one thing that really surprised me in relation to D-day & the so called " Good War " was the accounts of the use of early phosphorous weapons & the horror they inflicted on the defenders. I looked it up on Wiki but it only mentions it in relation to the bombing & I assume rocket attacks from Typhoons & the like at Cherbourg. My Great Uncle Tommy came ashore that day & unlike my Grandad he talked a lot about his war experience, which included descriptions of the black burning skeletons of German soldiers in trenches in front of shattered concrete bunkers after air strikes & what he saw as one of the the biggest threats being shrapnel, which soon got him home after his left arm was amputated after being shredded by splinters from a machine gunned tree in the Bocage – his considered opinion on war films was & is not family blogable.

The German accents are a tad Private Schultz, but fortunately for me that soon got lost in the detail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2r6FIR87-c

JBird4049 , March 27, 2021 at 5:19 pm

It seems that those in charge always take what is the best in us to create the worse from us.

Eustachedesaintpierre , March 28, 2021 at 7:40 am

True, aided by everybody's low grade psychopaths that sow the bad seeds that has the rest full of hatred & thirsting for revenge.

Something else that upset me was the fate of the horses & pack mules which for both the Soviets & the Wehrmacht were the mainstay of their transportation. The Germans found that the small Steppe ponies were much tougher than their larger supposedly better bred ones – millions were killed & the Russian soldier who had worked in a mine as a youngster with pit ponies felt it deeply during the times when he witnessed the mortally wounded. He also became aware of the fate of many of the war caused stray dogs at the Russians advanced into totally shattered places like Belarus. They were rounded up & then fed under tanks for a period, before being starved then tied to a high explosive which was timed to go off at the estimated time it took for the them to run under an advancing Tiger, Panther or whatever.

Funnilly enough the biggest thing that shocked the Germans in relation to what was unloaded at D-Day was the fact that there were no horses.

Perhaps the plight of the animals is hard to take for some at least is because they were both totally blameless & innocent.

[Mar 28, 2021] Putin is the moderating force in Russia, keeping the hardliners at bay.

Mar 28, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

row


Victor999 1 hour ago

You really don't know what the hell is going on, do you! Putin is the moderating force in Russia, keeping the hardliners at bay. Once he is gone, people who aren't going to take any more **** from the US and its allies will be coming to power. Then we will see people like you piss in their pants worrying how to save themselves from Russia's fury.

Maltheus 1 hour ago

Putin is an old guy. I fear that his replacement won't have the same patience and wisdom. Or maybe I'm eagerly looking forward to it. Either way, it doesn't take much for things to get out of hand rather quickly.

European Monarchist 1 hour ago (Edited) remove link

President Putin is likely the healthiest leader Russia has ever had.

He is also 68, a full decade younger than Joe Biden.

I think he will be around for a while.

Vladimir Putin's hard-core daily routine includes hours of swimming, late nights, and no alcohol

Take a look at a day in the life of Vladimir Putin:

Putin rises late in the morning, taking breakfast around noon. He usually tucks into a large omelette or a big bowl of porridge, with some quail eggs and fruit juice on the side. Newsweek reports that the ingredients are "dispatched regularly from the farmland estates of the Patriarch Kirill, Russia's religious leader."

Once he's finished his meal, he drinks coffee.

Next, it's time to exercise. Newseek reported that Putin spends about two hours swimming. While he's in the water, Putin often "gets much of Russia's thinking done," Judah writes.

After he's done swimming laps, Putin lifts weights in the gym.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/vladimir-putin-s-hard-core-daily-routine-includes-hours-swimming-late-nights-and-no-alcohol-a7772216.html

vasilievich 3 hours ago

Opasnost. Danger. Control could be lost of the situation.

Perhaps even in Russia? Is Mr. Putin's power over the Russian military etc. limitless? I'm asking out of ignorance.

[Mar 27, 2021] The Charite Hospital reports on his health confirmed what doctors in Omsk had discovered and b, indeed, had reported here: the man suffers from very serious health problems

Mar 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

bevin , Mar 24 2021 21:09 utc | 43

re Navalny: the Charite Hospital reports on his health confirmed what doctors in Omsk had discovered and b, indeed, had reported here: the man suffers from very serious health problems. It is a measure of the cynicism of the imperialist secret police that they have choreographed this soap opera to end up in Navalny's death in a Russian prison. Another Magnitsky for the Canadian House of Commons to fawn over as it licks Washington's ar boots.

[Mar 26, 2021] All wars are bankers wars

Mar 24, 2021 | www.unz.com

Mefobills , says: March 24, 2021 at 2:02 pm GMT

History doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes.

The Revolutionary and Civil war was fought against finance capital; where said capital emanated mostly from London. By 1912 the U.S. was no longer Industrial Capitalist, but had been usurped by Finance Capitalism, and of course the (((usual suspects))) were pulling strings in the background.

WW2 was the now finance capitalist allies against the industrial capitalist axis powers.

The run up to WW2 had the axis "industrial capitalist" powers exit the London based finance capitalist "sterling" system. Churchill even admitted to the reason why the allies attacked.

http://www.renegadetribune.com/winston-churchill-germanys-unforgivable-crime/

Germany's most unforgivable crime before the Second World War was her attempt to extricate her economic power from the world's trading system and to create her own exchange mechanism which would deny (((world finance))) its opportunity to profit.

Finance capital exported jobs from the U.S. and the West toward China; this in order to take wage arbitrage. China then rope-a-dopes the dummies from the west, and uses its state credit and industrial capitalist system to acquire intellectual know-how, and climb the industrial curve.

Finance capitalist are slowly being cut-out of taking wage arbitrage from China and realize that their "assets" over there, can be taken by the Chinese state at any time. Now they want war to secure their asset position, and to buy more of China at a war time fire sale price.

Finance capital runs the same playbook over and over. The bad guys won in WW1 and 2. The (((international))) finance class works behind the scenes to take sordid gain on humanity, including mass death.

If your government is festooned with ne0-con Jews, then that should be strong signal that your country is not sovereign, but instead is operated by stealth with finance capital and its oligarchs.

This time around is different, China and Russia will exit the dollar system, and the western finance capitalist class can do nothing but make idle threats. Some will argue that the West will resort to nukes.

Maybe? I'm assuming that our (((friends))) are not completely insane, as they would lose their capital and asset position. Their greed will stop them from destroying themselves, and us.

Rev. Spooner , says: March 24, 2021 at 3:42 pm GMT • 10.8 hours ago

"If your government is festooned with ne0-con Jews, then that should be strong signal that your country is not sovereign, but instead is operated by stealth with finance capital and its oligarchs. "
You are a wise man Mefobills

Rurik , says: March 24, 2021 at 4:42 pm GMT • 9.8 hours ago
@Mefobills

If your government is festooned with ne0-con Jews, then that should be strong signal that your country is not sovereign, but instead is operated by stealth with finance capital and its oligarchs.

"When the law no longer protects you from the corrupt, but protects the corrupt from you – you know your nation is doomed."

And she would know.

[Mar 26, 2021] The origin on neo-McCarthysim is that the empire so far does not have China, Russia and Iran fully in its control

Notable quotes:
"... "Concern" about Libya in 2011 and Syria since 2011 to the present. So many "concerns" keep popping up about places that empire does not fully control. ..."
"... For some odd reason, this empire has no concern for the largest ethnic groups in its empire. It 24/7 calls them "deplorables" or "racists". The empire should look in the mirror at itself. ..."
Mar 26, 2021 | www.unz.com

Robjil , says: March 24, 2021 at 5:41 pm GMT • 8.8 hours ago

@Agent76 l.

Thus, the "concern" about Kosovans is "over".

"Concern" about Libya in 2011 and Syria since 2011 to the present. So many "concerns" keep popping up about places that empire does not fully control.

For some odd reason, this empire has no concern for the largest ethnic groups in its empire. It 24/7 calls them "deplorables" or "racists". The empire should look in the mirror at itself.

http://cwf.scu.edu.cn/idsInformationList.htm?action=idsInformationDetail&idsiId=1701594716361843&idstId=1121399520723421

[Mar 26, 2021] Biden foreign policy is counterproductive and can only lead to more isolation.

Mar 26, 2021 | www.unz.com

bayviking , says:

waw , says: March 25, 2021 at 9:25 pm GMT • 23.3 hours ago

The sooner America collapses, the safer the rest of the world will be, excluding the Ashkenazi

[Mar 26, 2021] Stavridis "oversaw operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria."

Mar 26, 2021 | www.unz.com

annamaria , says: March 24, 2021 at 8:07 pm GMT • 2.0 days ago

@Anonymous that a strong American military and national security posture is the best guarantor of peace and the survival of our values and civilization.

Stavridis has been at the forefront of the mass slaughter known as the implementation of the Oded Yinon Plan for Eretz Israel:

From 2002 to 2004, Stavridis commanded Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, conducting combat operations in the Persian Gulf in support of both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

Stavridis "oversaw operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria." In short, this prominent racketeer is dripping with the blood of hundreds of thousands of the victims.

[Mar 26, 2021] The True Battle of Chernobyl Uncensored

Mar 26, 2021 | www.youtube.com

1/7 - The True Battle of Chernobyl Uncensored

2/7 - The True Battle of Chernobyl Uncensored

3/7 - The True Battle of Chernobyl Uncensored

4/7 - The True Battle of Chernobyl Uncensored

5/7 - The True Battle of Chernobyl Uncensored

6/7 - The True Battle of Chernobyl Uncensored

7/7 - The True Battle of Chernobyl Uncensored

[Mar 24, 2021] US "intelligence" i.e the people who leak made up BS via anonymous sources to their media mouthpieces

Mar 24, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

_arrow


Five_Black_Eyes_Intel_Agency 2 hours ago (Edited)

US "intelligence" i.e the people who leak made up BS via anonymous sources to their media mouthpieces

sbin 2 hours ago

Funny

I can not think of anything intelligent they have ever done.

If a list was drawn up of all the threats to Americans the MIC and Intelligence agencies would be at the top.

joethegorilla 2 hours ago (Edited)

The US Intelligence used to be under the military chain of command. Dulles talked Eisenhower into letting him start the CIA as a civilian agency. Everyone warned this domestic political meddling would happen and guess what? They did it anyway. Spying on Americans is a feature, not a bug.

[Mar 23, 2021] Basically by creating a stealth bomber the USA waste a huge amount of money to do what ICBMs have been able to do for 60 years, and what Burevestnik can do with a lot more flexibility and stealth.

Mar 23, 2021 | www.unz.com

Tom Welsh , says: March 22, 2021 at 11:58 am GMT • 1.6 days ago

"The strategic stealth bomber will be able to deliver conventional and thermonuclear weapons to enemy targets anywhere and anytime in the world. It will be able to destroy any target, anywhere".

Once it gets there, anyway – which at presumably subsonic speed may take a long, long time.

So basically this will cost a huge amount of money to do what ICBMs have been able to do for 60 years, and what Burevestnik can do with a lot more flexibility and stealth.

Tom Welsh , says: March 22, 2021 at 12:04 pm GMT • 1.6 days ago

"Afghanistan is a great base from which to invade Central Asia and threaten Russia from the south. The country has been occupied by the US for 20 years "

If Russia, China, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Iran got together and supported the Taliban, they could get the Americans out of Afghanistan double quick.

I am slightly puzzled that they haven't done so long ago.

Unless they prefer to keep the Americans tied up and bleeding in Central Asia. Keep your enemies closer, etc.

[Mar 23, 2021] Starters or Main Course by Israel Shamir

Notable quotes:
"... Treasure Island ..."
Mar 23, 2021 | www.unz.com

This uncomfortable thought came to me while listening to Joe Biden talking about "soulless killer" Vladimir Putin. Smaller insults have sparked off wars. The "Footless, yellow earth-worm" slur moved Kaa the Rock Python to devour Bandar Log. Luckily, easy-going Putin replied with a smile. He said that in his childhood, kids responded with "I am rubber, you are glue; bounces off me and sticks to you"; he only wished good health for the American president and proposed to debate him online, so that Americans and Russians, as well as the whole world, could form their own opinion. Biden evaded the challenge. It's not clear he remembered who Putin is. An empty suit with a teleprompter, called him Donald Trump Jr . Biden said Putin meddled in the US elections and he will pay a price for it. Alas, Putin couldn't influence the US dead, and they swung the elections as they voted for Biden by whole cemeteries. Yes, Biden is a senile dummy that couldn't even board Air Force One without stumbling thrice the next day, but there is somebody who operates the teleprompter, and that is the problem.

The Russians were visibly furious. When US leaders drop such invective, it's like pirates passing a 'black spot' in Treasure Island . It's a signal that the foreign leader has to be deposed or killed outright. That's how they spoke of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi; both were killed and their 'rogue states' devastated. It was clearly a show of hostile intentions, not just from Biden but also from the US establishment speaking like ventriloquist through the current White House tenant.

Afghanistan is a great base from which to invade Central Asia and threaten Russia from the south. The country has been occupied by the US for 20 years, and Trump was determined to pull out the troops. Biden has already hinted that the US will renege on its agreement with the Taliban to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. The withdrawal was supposed to be completed by May 2021; it will be "tough" for the United States to withdraw forces from Afghanistan in six weeks, he said. Biden has also scrapped Trump's plan to withdraw forces from Germany, and with good reason. His administration wants Germans to drop the Nord Stream II project, and it is easier to convince a country if you have forty military bases there.

Fighting against Iran never stopped. When the US isn't doing it her best friend Israel is acting. It has emerged that during the last two years, Israeli frogmen sabotaged 12 Iranian tankers, reported the Wall Street Journal . But it all backfired. On February 16, the entire Mediterranean coast of Israel was covered with sticky black mess.

... ... ...

The blow to Israel was terrible – animals, plants and fish died; for a long time it will be impossible to swim and sunbathe on the oily shores. Only now the sad truth has begun to leak out: 'the worst pollution of the century' had been done by Israelis. The first to speak about the source of the pollution was Israeli Minister of the Environment Gila Gamliel. She said the oil was released by the Iranian tanker Emerald carrying a cargo of US-sanctioned oil products to Syria. This is Iranian eco-terrorism, she said. But Gila was quickly gagged – the Israeli military censorship forbade discussion of this topic, except in the most general terms. It appears Gila Gamliel was right – up to a point. The Israeli dissident Richard Silverstein wrote about it:

It was a deliberate attack by Israel on the Iranian vessel. Israel's naval commando unit, Flotilla 13 covertly attached a mine to the Emerald . The intent was to cause minor damage that would send a message to Iran that its own attacks on Gulf shipping would bring a cost. This Times of London report written by Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeiffer confirms my source. However, the commandos didn't realize that the Emerald was a rusty old hulk in desperately ill-repair. The Israeli mine, which was supposed to cause minor damage, actually ripped a hole so big that much of the contents of the ship's hold leaked into the Mediterranean. This is what caused the Israeli environmental disaster: Israel itself.


Phibbs , says: March 22, 2021 at 3:20 am GMT • 1.9 days ago

Biden voted for Gulf War Two. Why? Because as he admits, he is a Zionist. Zionists are traitors, terrorists and murderers. Yet Biden the terrorist accuses Putin of being a killer?

anonymous [400] Disclaimer , says: March 22, 2021 at 3:58 am GMT • 1.9 days ago

The illusion of a US president having any actual authority is pretty much being dispelled by this ventriloquist's dummy Biden signing whatever is placed in front of him and parroting whatever is on the teleprompter. A stupid egotist his entire life, his mental decline isn't as apparent as it might be quite yet because he's been carefully stage managed so far. They're being extremely careful not to let the cat out of the bag in letting people get a glimpse of what he's really like. And it's downhill from here.

The virus hysteria has been a test case lab in assessing what works, what doesn't, how to improve on herding and suppressing the population, etc. Insofar as dead foreign leaders goes, who really knows?

When tens of millions of dollars are available lots of people in some leader's circle might be tempted to expose the target to some form of poisoning or lethal radiation. Hugo Chavez expressed suspicion at how he and other leaders opposed to US diktat seemed to come down with cancer.

The US itself has claimed some of it's diplomats were possibly targeted by mystery rays in Cuba so the idea of something like this is not far-fetched; it's just a case of projection, accusing others of what one is guilty of.

The Real World , says: March 22, 2021 at 4:37 am GMT • 1.9 days ago
@Petermx

LOL, you don't know how many times, since his campaign and now as (fake) POTUS that Biden has reminded me of Chauncey Gardiner. It's the perfect comparison.

(But, Jobotomy Xiden will be gone soon and then the bi-racial, sociopathic Hillary 2.0 will be inaugurated. Excuse me while I go hurl.)

TKK , says: March 22, 2021 at 4:43 am GMT • 1.9 days ago

Think of the hysteria and histrionic nation wide wailing and teeth gnashing over Trump calling it "the China virus" and the dead silence when Biden calls Putin:

A soulless killer. .

I wish Putin would take revenge and pull a Soleimani on Biden & Co. but perhaps he laughs & chalks it up to the senile, demented ramblings of a clown.

Is this more theater?

To add to the insanity, the embrace and total absolution of the pathological liar, war criminal and mass torturer and murderer, George W. Bush leaves me .stunned:

Bush on Putin, 2001:

"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul ; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country."

Just another serf , says: March 22, 2021 at 6:19 am GMT • 1.8 days ago

Biden is a sociopath, one of limited intelligence. But a sociopath nevertheless.

If he is instructed by his controllers to initiate a nuclear war, he will do so unhesitatingly.

I would not be surprised if both Joe and Hunter were somehow benefiting from drug traffic across the border. Actually, I expect that is largely what is behind Biden's open border policy.

It's impossible for normal people to understand sociopathic behavior. The American political class has been selected for sociopathy now for generations.

Johan , says: March 22, 2021 at 6:55 am GMT • 1.8 days ago
@Petermx

"Americans should write a letter of apology to Putin, apologizing for our rude and senile leader (and the degenerate lunatics that surround him) and ask for President Putin's understanding and patience. "

Not a bad idea at all. I would formulate some things differently though, the idea is that the letter should also circulate, so mind the crude tone, show that even Americans can be tactful gentle-man. Even that would impress the whole world.

Mulga Mumblebrain , says: March 22, 2021 at 7:16 am GMT • 1.8 days ago

Thanatopia's attacks on Putin differ vastly from its deranged Sinophobia. Thanatopians want Putin gone, replaced by a New Yeltsin, and Russia vivisected for further pillage. But they don't want Russians dead, because this 'Free Russia' will be needed for the Great Purpose-the destruction of China.

The truly Evil campaign to entirely falsely accuse China of genocide in Xinjiang, is a call not just to war, but to genocide. A China devastated would still rise again, even if the USA and its villainous stooges succeed in breaking it up, again, as was nearly achieved in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The USA and the Western vassals promote, train and finance separatists in Xinjiang, Tibet, 'South' Mongolia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, even 'Manchuria'. Such civil discord would cause millions of deaths, but it gets worse.

The Imperial hatemongers never cease to vilify the CCP. The 'New Nazis', 'It is 1939 again, and 'appeasement' is treason', human organ harvesters etc. All lies, all the crudest projection. But the CCP is 100 million strong, and the Chinese CCP Government enjoys 95% satisfied or highly satisfied rating from the populace, according to the latest Harvard poll. So the entire population is complicit, 'Xi's willing executioners' etc, and must be punished. SARS CoV2 was obviously meant to kill millions of Chinese and devastate the economy, but the 'blowback' has been cosmic retribution, and that has only made the Western genocidists even more enraged.

Mulga Mumblebrain , says: March 22, 2021 at 7:22 am GMT • 1.7 days ago
@Johan

The Western oligarchy does not do mass high kultur. Kultur is a commodity and a venue for narcissistic display and mass kultur is base, exploitative and mind-destroying, keeping the plebs permanently obtunded, morally, intellectually and spiritually. 'Feed 'em muck' as Nellie Melba recommended.

thotmonger , says: March 22, 2021 at 7:34 am GMT • 1.7 days ago

Worldometer/coronavirus today: Tanzania population >60 million; CV19 cases <600. Dear Scott, that cannot be correct! (If all the brainwashing serves me right.)

RIP President Magufuli, the man who busted WHO with their fraud -- or scientific incompetence. Ha. This story could have been the lead paragraph, and no stone should be left unturned to find out if Magufuli was murdered. This especially includes death by a deadly viral infection, ala Operation Zyphr ?

Minor correction: Biden does not represent the American people. Those who think they support him are unaware of their Stockholm syndrome.

Now, let's arrest our schadenfreude about Israel's acts of sabotage spoiling their own coastline. Our fragile seas are too precious for that sort of vindictive spirit. Nevertheless, it is okay be encouraged about this colossal blunder, because it proves the controllers are really not in control at all. And they damn well know it.

Finally, forget not Shere Khan totally trumps Kaa. But as fate would have it even he loses in the end.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PpC4a6jCxSA?feature=oembed

Dumbo , says: Website March 22, 2021 at 7:41 am GMT • 1.7 days ago

Unless neocons are insane, I don't think that they want to start a war with Russia and much less China. The U.S. can't even win a war against goat herders with homemade explosives. The U.S. military is more concerned about having black transgender soldiers than about being efficient.

Also, China practically owns the U.S. and Canada at this point.

This is probably just another distraction to keep people from noticing that they are (again!) being fleeced and raped.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/8-million-americans-slipped-poverty-amid-coronavirus-pandemic-new-study-n1243762

https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-italy-coronavirus-pandemic-financial-markets-milan-821336fb6b1fe6892fd178433de0fc70

Carlos22 , says: March 22, 2021 at 8:11 am GMT • 1.7 days ago

It now appears the Russians and Chinese are using our woke BS against us like a deflector shield.

Putin's speech of the US projecting its own psychology on others, mentioning BLM and racism plus the Chinese mentioning the US "persecution of blacks".

They inflict this woke shit on us but didn't realize it could also be used by their enemies.

Ultimate blow back for the dumb fuckers in Washington. Totally hilarious.

GomezAdddams , says: March 22, 2021 at 9:39 am GMT • 1.7 days ago
@Johan

"We came -- we saw–he died !!!!" Hillary Clinton at her finest.

onebornfree , says: Website March 22, 2021 at 9:42 am GMT • 1.6 days ago

"This two-pronged attack on Russia AND on China is not a coincidence. The Biden regime prepares for war. "

This just in: "War is the health of the state" Randolph Bourne

Alfred , says: March 22, 2021 at 10:25 am GMT • 1.6 days ago
@follyofwar class="comment-text">

I fear that Leviathan must act quickly before it loses its perch as the world's reserve currency.

Martin Armstrong's computer model says that the dollar's reserve currency status will be over by 2028. The model is usually correct.

The Reserve Status of the Dollar will End by 2028 (paywall)

[Mar 23, 2021] Since 1980s, Russians considered themselves lucky if they could escape their frosty homeland and move westward. The sitution is slowly changing

Mar 23, 2021 | www.unz.com

People are all too vulnerable in the Righteous Empire. The enforcers of right attitudes can do with you anything, anything at all. A scientist who kept quiet when he heard the word n< > being uttered, has lost his job . A man, Robert Hoogland, has been sent to jail for calling his 14-year-old daughter, "daughter", and publicly referring to her with the pronouns "she" and "her", while the girl still isn't allowed yet to buy beer insists she will be a man. Add to that the misery created by lockdowns, and you will understand why thousands of Russian émigrés rush back into Mother Russia.

Since 1980s, Russians considered themselves lucky if they could escape their frosty homeland and move westward. The children of Stalin and Khrushchev, top government figures of Yeltsin days, artists and scientists, moved to Florida or Paris. They were always ready to condemn Putin the brutal dictator. A popular film actor Mr Alexei Serebryakov had left Russia for Canada, angrily slamming the door, condemning the "bloody regime" and Russia's "mix of strength, arrogance and rudeness". And suddenly – the wind had changed, and the reverse drift has begun. Serebryakov returned from Canada, though many Russians aren't welcoming his move back at all. A science journalist Asya Kazantseva returned to Moscow from Tel Aviv and Bristol, UK and wrote:

An unexpected collateral effect of the pandemic is that all the friends who immigrated to Europe a long time ago flocked home to spend the winter here in Moscow, where vaccines are free and available, and there is no lockdown. Social life here is twice as active as it was in peacetime. I will never be lonely again! [A popular Jewish blogger] Alina Farkash recently wrote that in Moscow, you are a beloved child in a large family, while emigration [in her case to Israel] is like being sent to an orphanage. That's all true. I really hope that I will never go anywhere else, that I will always be here, and that I will firmly remember what an endless happiness it is just to be here."

Indeed, Russia is not a wonderland; it has many faults and problems. Its oligarchs are too rich, its people are rather poor; taxes are too low; the social gap is greater than in the US or China, as you can read in this text (in Russian) . However, Russia is free. You can say and write whatever you wish. There are no lockdowns. Schools operate as usual; distance learning is rare. Churches are open. Theatres, ditto. There are no obligatory masks; where they are obligatory, the Russians still ignore them.

[Mar 22, 2021] Biden Picks a Pointless Fight with Russia - Eunomia

Mar 22, 2021 | daniellarison.substack.com

The Russian government is responding angrily to Biden's derisive comments about Putin:

The Kremlin has reacted angrily to US President Joe Biden's remarks that Russian leader Vladimir Putin is "a killer," calling the comment unprecedented and describing the relationship between the two countries as "very bad."

U.S.-Russian relations have been deteriorating steadily over the last ten years, and it always seemed unlikely that Biden would improve them. Now there will be even less of a chance that Biden can work constructively with his Russian counterpart. The president's blunt answer to a rather silly question from George Stephanopoulos has further damaged the relationship to neither country's benefit. Anatol Lieven observed recently that this is a "completely unnecessary confrontation with Russia" at a time when the U.S. needs Russian cooperation on some important issues. Lieven cites U.S. reentry into the JCPOA and extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan as his examples of issues where Russian cooperation could be very valuable, but he could have added new negotiations on future arms control agreements as well. Making progress on any one of these becomes much more challenging when our president is gratuitously insulting theirs. For an administration that prides itself on practicing diplomacy, they have a funny way of showing it.

[Mar 22, 2021] Nephew has described the destruction of Iran's economy as "a tremendous success," and lamented during a visit to Russia that food was still plentiful in the country's capital despite mounting US sanctions.

Mar 22, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mao , Mar 21 2021 16:06 utc | 14

The Joseph Biden administration has named Richard Nephew as its deputy Iran envoy. As the former principal deputy coordinator of sanctions policy for Barack Obama's State Department, Nephew took personal credit for depriving Iranians of food, sabotaging their automobile industry, and driving up unemployment rates.

Nephew has described the destruction of Iran's economy as "a tremendous success," and lamented during a visit to Russia that food was still plentiful in the country's capital despite mounting US sanctions.

Nephew's appointment to a senior diplomatic post suggests that rather than immediately returning to the JCPOA nuclear deal, the Biden administration will finesse sanctions illegally imposed by Trump to pressure Iran into an onerous, reworked agreement that Tehran is unlikely to join.

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/08/biden-iran-envoy-starving-civilians-pain-sanctions/


jayc , Mar 21 2021 17:56 utc | 23

Mao #14

Grayzone's report is fascinating in a "banality of evil" kind of way.

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/08/biden-iran-envoy-starving-civilians-pain-sanctions/

Nephew's "simple framework" for "sanctions to perform their expected function" reads like a torturer's manual (replace "target state" with "prisoner"):

- identify objectives for the imposition of pain and define the minimum necessary remedial steps that the target state must take for pain to be removed

- understand as much as possible the nature of the target, including its vulnerabilities, interests, commitment to whatever it did to prompt sanctions, and readiness to absorb pain

-develop a strategy to carefully, methodically, and efficiently increase pain on those areas that are vulnerabilities while avoiding those that are not

-monitor the execution of the strategy and continuously recalibrate its initial assumption of target state resolve, the efficacy of the pain applied in shattering that resolve, and how best to improve the strategy

etc

farm ecologist , Mar 21 2021 18:10 utc | 25

Kudos to Alan Macleod and MintPressNews (cited above by b) for providing further evidence of how the US and its allies don't care about human suffering and death as long as they are able to further their political goals. A previous article in this series uncovers this striking bit of disregard for human life in the 2020 Annual Report of the US Department of Health (sic) and Human Services:


Combatting malign influences in the Americas: OGA (Office of Global Affairs) used diplomatic relations in the Americas region to mitigate efforts by states, including Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia, who are working to increase their influence in the region to the detriment of US safety and security. OGA coordinated with other U.S. government agencies to strengthen diplomatic ties and offer technical and humanitarian assistance to dissuade countries in the region from accepting aid from these ill intentioned states. Examples include using OGA's Health Attaché office to persuade Brazil to reject the Russian COVID-19 vaccine, and offering CDC technical assistance in lieu of Panama accepting an offer of Cuban doctors.

Translation: Deaths in Brazil are skyrocketing, but at least we prevented them from using that damned Russian vaccine.

[Mar 22, 2021] US-Russia ties nosedive after Biden-Putin tit-for-tat

Of course semi-demented Biden was lured into this provocation by neocon Stephanopoulos. This evil gnome with connections to Epstein. That was an easy trap to avoid, but he got into it with both legs.
Comments to the article are interesting. Fro example H. Trsgget display the same level of Neo-McCarthyism as Biden has. Of course, ABC has specific audience and commenters but still...
Mar 18, 2021 | abcnews.go.com

Asked what he would tell Biden in response to his remarks, Putin said: "I would tell him: 'Be well.' I wish him health, and I say that without any irony or joking."

He noted that Russia would still cooperate with the United States where and when it supports Moscow's interests, adding that "a lot of honest and decent people in the U.S. want to have peace and friendship with Russia."

"I know that the U.S. and its leadership is generally inclined to have certain relations with us, but only on issues that are of interest to the U.S. and on its conditions," Putin said. "But we know how to defend our own interests, and we will work with them only in the areas we are interested in and on conditions we see as beneficial to ourselves. And they will have to reckon with it."

Speaking in separate comments later Thursday, Putin said he would ask the Foreign Ministry to arrange a call with Biden in the next few days to discuss the coronavirus pandemic, regional conflicts and other issues.

"We must continue our relations," he noted. "Last time, President Biden initiated a call and now I would like to offer President Biden to continue our discussions. It would be in the interest of both the Russian and U.S. people and other countries, bearing in mind that we bear a special responsibility for global security as the largest nuclear powers."

Other Russian officials and lawmakers were less diplomatic.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia's Security Council who served as president in 2008-2012 when Putin had to shift into the premier's job because of term limits, said that "time hasn't spared" the 78-year-old Biden and cited Sigmund Freud as saying, "Nothing costs so much in life as illness and stupidity."

And Andrei Turchak, the leader of the main pro-Kremlin United Russia party, described Biden's remarks as a reflection of "the U.S. political marasmus and its leader's dementia."

[Mar 22, 2021] Operation Mindfuck: The origins of the Illuminati conspiracy fraud and how it became popular in our times

Mar 22, 2021 | t.co


Posted by: killwallstreet | Mar 21 2021 13:56 utc | 4

[Mar 22, 2021] In Syria, The War Of Hunger Is Taking Over From The War Of Guns

Mar 22, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Patrick Cockburn via The Unz Review,

US sanctions have brought the number of Syrians who are close to starvation to 12.4 million, or 60% of the country...

Great dollops of hypocrisy invariably accompany expressions of concern by outside powers for the wellbeing of the Syrian people. But even by these low standards, a new record for self-serving dishonesty is being set by the Caesar Civilian Protection Act , the new US law imposing the harshest sanctions in the world on Syria and bringing millions of Syrians to the brink of famine .

Supposedly aimed at safeguarding ordinary Syrians from violent repression by President Bashar al-Assad , the law is given a humanitarian garnish by naming it after the Syrian military photographer who filmed and smuggled out of the country pictures of thousands of Syrians killed by the government. But instead of protecting Syrians, as it claims, the Caesar Act is a measure of collective punishment that is impoverishing people in government and opposition-held areas alike.

Bad though the situation in Syria was after 10 years of warfare and a long-standing economic embargo, the crisis has got much worse in the nine months since the law was implemented on 17 June last year. It has raised the number of Syrians who are close to starvation to 12.4 million, or 60 per cent of the population, according to the UN.

Already, more than half a million children under the age of five are suffering from stunting as the result of chronic malnutrition . As the Syrian currency collapsed and prices rose by 230 per cent over the last year, Syrian families could no longer afford to buy basic foodstuffs such as bread, rice, lentils, oil and sugar.

"The war of hunger scares me more than the war of guns," says Ghassan Massoud, the Syrian actor famous for playing Saladin in the 2005 Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven . A politically neutral and popular figure in Syria, Massoud is quoted as saying that government employees are earning 50,000 Syrian pounds ($13/£9) a month when they need 800,000 Syrian pounds to survive. "I am a vegetarian but I do not accept that a citizen is not able to eat meat because a kilo costs 20,000 Syrian pounds."

The Caesar Act threatens sanctions on any person or company that does business with Syria and thereby imposes a tight economic siege on the country . Introduced just as the Covid-19 epidemic made its first onset in Syria last summer and soon after the implosion of the Lebanese economy to which Syria is closely linked, the law has proved the final devastating blow to Syrians who were already ground down by a decade of destruction .

It was supposedly aimed at Assad and his regime, but there was never any reason to believe that it would destabilize them or compel them to ease repression. Since they hold power, they are well placed to control diminished resources. As with the 13 years of UN sanctions directed against Saddam Hussein between 1990 and 2003, the victims were not the dictator and his family but the civilian population. Iraqi society was shattered, with results that are still with us, and the same is now happening in Syria.

[Mar 22, 2021] Ten Years On, Syria is Almost Destroyed. Who Is To Blame?"

Mar 22, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

jayc , Mar 21 2021 17:09 utc | 19

Bhadrakumar: "Ten Years On, Syria is Almost Destroyed.Who Is To Blame?"

https://www.indianpunchline.com/ten-years-on-syria-is-almost-destroyed-whos-to-blame/

A concise summary. A cold geopolitical decision by arch war criminal Obama, following decades of meddling.
The destructions of Iraq, Syria, and Libya are the most serious state-led crimes of this century, yet in the western bubble the fingers point to Crimea, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. Bhadrakumar's "Animal Farm" reference is apt.

[Mar 22, 2021] TRANSCRIPT- ABC News' George Stephanopoulos interviews President Joe Biden

Old neocon still is dreaming about imperial greatness and full spectrum Dominance, when the country is significantly and irreversibly crippled by neoliberalism and its accumulation by dispossession which eliminated a large swats of well paid workers and professionals. It is now the country where the Congress is now hiding from people behind barbed wall.
It is difficult to teach old dog new tricks. Intimidation of the opponent replaced diplomacy. Semi-Dementia mixed with arrogance in action. "White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden would continue to look to cooperate on efforts to stem Iran's nuclear program and, more broadly, nuclear nonproliferation. But she said Biden did not regret referring to Putin as a killer and pushed back against suggestions that the rhetoric was unhelpful."
Mar 22, 2021 | abcnews.go.com

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Director of National Intelligence came out with a report today saying that Vladimir Putin authorized operations during the election to under -- denigrate you, support President Trump, undermine our elections, divide our society. What price must he pay?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He will pay a price. I, we had a long talk, he and I, when we -- I know him relatively well. And I-- the conversation started off, I said, "I know you and you know me. If I establish this occurred, then be prepared."

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You said you know he doesn't have a soul.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I did say that to him, yes. And -- and his response was, "We understand one another." It was-- I wasn't being a wise guy. I was alone with him in his office. And that -- that's how it came about. It was when President Bush had said, "I looked in his eyes and saw his soul."

I said, "Looked in your eyes and I don't think you have a soul." And looked back and he said, "We understand each other." Look, most important thing dealing with foreign leaders in my experience, and I've dealt with an awful lot of 'em over my career, is just know the other guy. Don't expect somethin' that you're-- that -- don't expect him to-- or her to-- voluntarily appear in the second editions of Profiles in Courage.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So you know Vladimir Putin. You think he's a killer?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Uh-huh. I do.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So what price must he pay?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The price he's gonna pay we'll-- you'll see shortly. I'm not gonna-- there's-- by the way, we oughta be able that ol' -- that trite expression "walk and chew gum at the same time," there're places where it's in our mutual interest to work together.

That's why I renewed the start agreement with him. That occurred while he's doin' this. But that's overwhelmingly in the interest of humanity, that we diminish the prospect of a nuclear exchange. But that and SolarWinds as well. He's been -- they've done some mischievous things, to say the least. And so we're gonna have -- I'm not gonna announce what I'm doing, but he's gonna understand that --

[Mar 22, 2021] I don't know whether to laugh or cry ...

Mar 22, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Francis , Mar 21 2021 13:19 utc | 1

I don't know whether to laugh or cry ...

Vladimir Putin issues new 'kill list' - and six of the targets live in Britain

EXCLUSIVE: The warning of a deadly post-pandemic campaign comes from same spy who alerted that Salisbury novichok victim Sergei Skripal was earmarked for assassination

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/vladimir-putins-issues-new-kill-23765739

[Mar 22, 2021] Has anyone else noticed this piece of idiocy?

Mar 22, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

foolisholdman , Mar 21 2021 19:14 utc | 36

Has anyone else noticed this piece of idiocy?

SAS ORDERED TO START DISRUPTING RUSSIAN MEDDLING AROUND THE WORLD
(Headline in the Daily Telegraph)
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/sas-takes-fight-meddling-russiaSTARTns-194726807.html
SAS soldiers will be told to disrupt Russian meddling around the world as part of a major shake up of defence priorities.

The SAS and other units in the Special Forces Group will likely work alongside MI6 to conduct covert surveillance operations against Russian spies and military units.

Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, the chief of the general staff, told The Telegraph that special forces will be tasked with tackling "hostile state actors".

The move comes ahead of the publication of the Defence Command Paper, the MoD's contribution to the Government's Integrated Review of foreign, defence, security and development policy, which will be published on Monday.

How can one interpret this except as an attempt to curry favour in Washington? Why now? Presumably, because the USG has just said that it is focussing on Russia. Even if this is a policy shift why announce it? This is the sort of information that, (You might think!) discovered and passed to the Russian Embassy would get you locked up for a long time! If this has any effect, I imagine it would be that if/when the Russians come across any unexplained Brits in (say) Syria, they will KNOW what they are there for and will deal with them accordingly. A more poodle-like action is hard to imagine.


Fyi , Mar 21 2021 19:35 utc | 38

Mr. B

The Five Eyes are servants of polities that are dominated by the English-speaking White Judeo-Christians.

3 of them - Canada, Australia, New Zealand - are military protectorates of the American wing of the Judeo-Christians.

migueljose , Mar 21 2021 19:41 utc | 39

As a practitioner of permaculture I look for patterns, including power constructs of the U.S./5 eyes mafia. Here's one.
Look at Luis Almagro, enthusiastic mouthpiece and cheerleader for the U.S. empire. Now look at NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg. They could be brothers or cousins judging their resumes and history of kissing the rings of powerful mafiosos. Norwegian has already given us a summary of how Stoltenberg "failed up" and Almagro's history is similar. He's most known lately for being the screamer who triggered the coup in Bolivia over a year ago.He didn't ask for my advice. I'd have told him: "run away and hide!" He's still in the limelight as he once again stepped up to call for Jeanine Añez's release from jail for her crimes during the nazi/keystone (cops) reign of terror. Bolivia is responding much like the Russians, Chinese and Iranians: they are standing firm AND now considering prosecuting Almagro!
https://orinocotribune.com/oas-almagro-defends-coup-plotters-in-bolivia-declares-court-case-political-persecution/
https://orinocotribune.com/bolivia-considers-taking-legal-action-against-oas-secretary-general-luis-almagro/
To me, it is like Almagro is walking around naked and trying to act as if he has clothes on. Almagro is similar to Kamala in that his own people in Uruaguay don't like him: national hero and former Tupac Amaru revolutionary hero before he became president Jose Mujica canceled Almagro. He snuggled up to Pompeo and now seamlessly genuflects before... pick a name: Blinken, Kamala, Colombian born frat boy Juan Gonzalez. Fear of the U.S. is diminishing. Same in Ecuador. Alliances are growing stronger--Venezuela and Iran are a shining example of the way forward. They are not hiding their actions... they are BRAGGING about them! https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/15133
Bottom line-- obvious dimwit psychopaths Elliot Abrams and Pompeo are gone, replaced by new guys who are not that bright but they think they are while they are losing the only leverage left: threats. No one likes them and no one fears them. China and Russia's smackdowns will resonate throughout Latin America. Alliances will grow at an increasingly rapid pace. Meanwhile, watch the Ecuador election results April 11. Arauz is strong and gaining more, the people there are getting more mobilized. another game changer in South America.


[Mar 21, 2021] Blinken, like his boss, is a complete moron.

Mar 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Mar 21 2021 3:55 utc | 181

Blinken, like his boss, is a complete moron. He blew it with his patronising threatening 'rules based order' drivel because he has no expertise. Blinken has been doing this for a decade or two: Syria, Libya, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, and on and on. He has the form of a killer, the mind of a killer and the intentions of a mass murderer. He has proven the latter and is the type of global ambassadorial psychopath that one should meet with once and then never meet again.

The USA has lost its mind and every day that passes proves that point.

This bar deserves broader analysis of other quarters of the planet and no more references to the Guardian or NYT.


Mao , Mar 21 2021 5:58 utc | 186

Three Takeaways from China-U.S. Alaska Meeting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3isU3mpx8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCtMl_0h6P4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHAbhZovh2E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NszIE48KE_Y

Mao , Mar 21 2021 5:58 utc | 187

Posted by: willie | Mar 20 2021 15:31 utc | 116

A majority of american ambassadors are rich businessmen and women,who have not the slightest idea what diplomacy is about.

Stop Letting Rich People Buy Ambassadorships
President Biden could score a quick win by dismantling the donor-to-ambassador pipeline.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/opinion/biden-ambassadors-donors.html

Biden under pressure to tap fewer political ambassadors than Trump, Obama
Donors are growing impatient as Biden delays naming coveted ambassador posts.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/15/biden-political-ambassadors-476050

curmudgeon , Mar 21 2021 6:52 utc | 190
I know that the United States and its leaders are determined to maintain certain relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to the United States and on its terms. Even though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to uphold our interests. We will work with the United States, but in the areas that we are interested in and on terms that we believe are beneficial to us. They will have to reckon with it despite their attempts to stop our development, despite the sanctions and insults. They will have to reckon with this.

The author provides basic but essential definition of conflict resolution. The USians either don't understand or defy it.
oldhippie , Mar 21 2021 7:25 utc | 192

James @ 170

Your link to statement by Blinken & Sullivan is propaganda as you say. It is also an expression of how deeply limited and very stupid these two are. They have no idea what just hit them.

[Mar 21, 2021] Two states striving to achieve ambitious goals confronted each other during the Polish-Soviet War.

Mar 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Mar 19 2021 21:51 utc | 45

Well, the Outlaw US Empire team just got sacked three straight times and must now punt. Sophomoric attempts to twist Putin's words won't work. I highly suggest reading the entire Kremlin transcript b cited and I relink as it dovetails with Putin's speech at the anniversary celebration I cited and relink . Furthermore, in the area of historical research being undertaken in Russia to ensure historical events are recounted accurately, there's this current effort dealing with The Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921 and The 1921 Treaty of Riga. Putin is speaking:

"Two states striving to achieve ambitious goals confronted each other during the Polish-Soviet War. Polish leaders perceived the reinstatement of the old-time borders of Rzeczpospolita as their task. Bolshevik leaders dreamed of a world revolution. The Polish Army's offensive on the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet republics, linked with Soviet Russia by allied agreements, preceded fighting at the approaches to Warsaw in August 1920. I would like to recall that Polish forces had seized most of Belarus and all of Western Ukraine by late 1919, and that they and their allies, commanded by Symon Petlyura, had entered Kiev on May 7, 1920.

"Signed in Riga on March 18, 1921, the treaty touched upon territorial issues and was therefore largely similar to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Today, we can see that the then re-division of Europe, the often arbitrary and unfair demarcation of borders had stepped up confrontation between states and helped create conditions for a new world war.

"The Soviet side was forced to agree with the fact that Poland had established control over 50 percent of modern Belarus' territory and 25 percent of modern Ukraine. The transfer of Belarusian and Ukrainian territories to another state did not meet the then ethnic, cultural or social realities. On the one hand, it facilitated discrimination against the local population; and, on the other hand, it helped encourage extreme nationalist ideas. We also recall the tragic fate of the Red Army soldiers who were taken prisoner; many of them perished in Polish camps."

As with earlier Great Patriotic War exhibitions, this exhibition has numerous aspects as described below that will surely interest other historians:

"The historical documentary exhibition The Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921. The Treaty of Riga 1921, dedicated to the armed confrontation between Soviet Russia and Poland and the resolution of the conflict by diplomatic means opened on March 16 in Moscow. It displays historical documents from the holdings of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, the Russian State Military Archive, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Modern History and other federal archives, the Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation and the Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Empire, contributed by the Foreign Ministry's Department of History and Records, the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation and state archives of Belarus. The exhibition also features unique museum items, sound recordings and newsreels. An internet project with full-length electronic copies of over 1,000 archive documents is also part of the exhibition."

Here's the link to that project .

[Mar 21, 2021] The narrative says that Putin's mother survived the siege of Leningrad, but it doesn't go into the details

Mar 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Grieved , Mar 21 2021 16:13 utc | 225

@202 Norwegian

That's a lovely little compilation about Putin and his family, thanks.

The narrative says that Putin's mother survived the siege of Leningrad, but it doesn't go into the details. You can get the story from one of the several Russian documentaries about Putin - I forget which one but I could dig for it if pressed.

Putin's father came back from the front, wounded and on crutches. He showed up just as medics were taking his wife out to whatever transport they were using to clean up the dead bodies - she was practically dead, and the witness to this says she was "washed up". Putin's father fought the medics away with his crutches and took his wife back into their home, and nursed her back to life.

Thus runs the story, and this is the woman who later gave birth to Putin, already with two brothers dead that he never knew. It sounds exaggerated when I write out the story like that, but I never disbelieved it when I heard it, and I still don't.

So this is the depth of the man who heads the Russian Federation. Personally touched by war, personally grieving for the losses of Russia, personally committed to the safety of civilians and to minimal death in general.

~~

While I'm on the subject, two other stories occur to me. One was when he first took command of Russia and addressed the war in the Caucasus - his famous episode with his military commanders in the tent, when he said they would not drink to success until they had achieved it (I paraphrase), and put his glass down untouched. To drink prematurely, he said, would be to dishonor all those who had already died in this war. First, to stop the dying.

But the story I wanted to say about that was that he also forcefully told his generals to be very careful how they conducted operations: they were entering places where civilians lived - old people, those who had fought in the Great Patriotic War, those to whom everyone present owed their lives. He was very serious about taking great care not to harm those most honorable people.

The second story is when the Berlin Wall went down, and crowds surged to invade the Stasi building, ripping its secrets into the open. They also came to the KGB building. The chief of that bureau fled, leaving by the back way. That left Putin as next in command. He went down to address the crowd. He stood in front of them and they asked who he was and he lied and said that he was "the interpreter". He said that this building was the property of the USSR. In his gun he had twelve bullets, he said, eleven for those whom he faced and the last for himself. The crowd understood that this building was not East Germany but the Soviet Union, and that this officer would defend it with his life. Whatever they thought, they turned away and left the building unmolested.

~~

I'm impressed with the character and caliber of this human being called Putin, for good reasons, I find. There's a heroic scale to him that comes from Russia itself and the experiences that Putin was born into and from. And yet he personally is a naturally modest man. He bears that heroic dimension of scale with the grace that comes from ordinariness. He loves ordinary people. He renews his own mental health from being in their company. The security state of Russia chose the best person it could find, in a last-ditch attempt to save their country. It worked.

[Mar 21, 2021] The 'takes one to know one' quote is not a direct quote from Putin, it is a claim by Biden

Mar 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Lurk , Mar 19 2021 19:23 utc | 4

The 'western' media reporting of the spat between Biden and Putin is typically bad.

The Guardian @guardian - 18:15 UTC · Mar 18, 2021

'Takes one to know one': Putin-Biden spat escalates over 'killer' accusation

That was not what Putin had said:

Ivan Pentchoukov @IvanPentchoukov - 16:56 UTC · Mar 19, 2021

Can't believe how many outlets are running with the same totally false translation of what Putin said.

The idiom Putin used is much closer to "the names you call others is what you should be called."

The official Kremlin transcript agrees with Ivan's formulation:

[D]ifficult, dramatic, and bloody events abound in the history of every nation and every state. But when we evaluate other people, or even other states and nations, we are always facing a mirror, we always see ourselves in the reflection, because we project our inner selves onto the other person.

You know, I remember when we were children and played in the yard, we had arguments occasionally and we used to say: whatever you call me is what you are called yourself. This is no coincidence or just a kids' saying or joke. It has a very deep psychological undercurrent. We always see ourselves in another person and think that he or she is just like us, and evaluate the other person's actions based on our own outlook on life.

There is an additional passage of interest which sets out rules for future talks that I have not seen reported in 'western' media:

I know that the United States and its leaders are determined to maintain certain relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to the United States and on its terms. Even though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to uphold our interests. We will work with the United States, but in the areas that we are interested in and on terms that we believe are beneficial to us. They will have to reckon with it despite their attempts to stop our development, despite the sanctions and insults. They will have to reckon with this.

We, with our national interests in mind, will promote our relations with all countries, including the United States.

The 'takes one to know one' quote is not a direct quote from Putin, it is a claim by Biden.

Here is the Daily Beast's take on it. (Yeah, I know it's a ridiculous source, but it was the first source I found that correctly attributed that quote to Biden.)

Biden recalled: "We had a long talk, he and I, when we... I know him relatively well. And the conversation started off, I said, 'I know you and you know me. If I establish this occurred, then be prepared.'"

The president also confirmed that, some years ago, he was alone with Putin in his office and he brought up the topic of Putin's lack of a human soul. "I said, 'I looked in your eyes and I don't think you have a soul,' and he looked back and said, 'We understand each other.' The most important thing of dealing with foreign leaders... is just know the other guy."


Kapusta , Mar 19 2021 19:39 utc | 8

@ 6 Posted by: Peter Moritz

The Guardian's translation of "it takes one to know one," which has been amplified by western media and social media, is absolutely incorrect. It implies that Putin is admitting that he is a 'killer,' which he absolutely does not do. Anybody that has a working knowledge of Russian will be able to translate the saying that Putin uses to mean that he is suggesting that Biden is projecting. In fact, Putin provides context for this statement by referring to US History.

tucenz , Mar 19 2021 19:48 utc | 11

Re: Peter Moritz | Mar 19 2021 19:29 utc | 6

I say bullshit. "It takes one to know one" - suggests some equivalence for the two people. That meaning is not in Kremlin transcript of Putin's words. Putin is saying "you are projecting (your own problem)".

Kapusta , Mar 19 2021 20:38 utc | 30

@ 24 Posted by: Peter Moritz

I understand that this is just semantics, but something as widespread as this has become in western media can have a big impact on perception of lazy westerners if the interpretation is incorrect. This should be obvious, regardless of the supposed "elegance" of the phrase.

"Takes one to know one" does not imply projection, it rather implies hypocrisy. Putin is not accusing Biden of hypocrisy, he is accusing Biden of projection. "Takes one to know one" gives a western audience the suggestion that Putin qualifies an admission of being a killer with an accusation that Biden is also a killer. Putin, in fact, does not do this. He only suggests that Biden is projecting and only projecting.

Norwegian , Mar 19 2021 20:44 utc | 32

@Kapusta 8, 29
Thank you for the explanations and clarification of what Putin actually said, and what it implies. Facts matter.

alaff , Mar 19 2021 20:44 utc | 33
in a shabby Alaskan hotel

Haha, nice)

Minister Lavrov today confirmed Putin's words, saying " [We] will be ready to cooperate only in those areas that are of interest to us, and only on terms that are beneficial to us ".

In my opinion, the Chinese representatives gave a good answer to the American side, although this answer will obviously not be heard.
The Americans have completely lost the culture of negotiation. If there are no elementary human manners, then what kind of agreements can we talk about?
A sad picture. And dangerous. A madman with nuclear weapons (and chemical weapons, by the way) is not the best option for a reliable negotiating partner.

LeaNder , Mar 19 2021 21:04 utc | 37

...a few hints on Putin's comment.

https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2021/03/18/on-a-roll/comment-page-1/#comment-37067

Powerandpeople , Mar 19 2021 21:31 utc | 41

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/65172

For Pres Putin's EXACT words.

Yes, projection.

His words about the moral attributes of the US elites - he very carefully excludes the public are MUCH more significant!

karlof1 , Mar 19 2021 23:15 utc | 61

The editors at Strategic-Culture see it this way :

"In a desperate bid to thwart the strategic partnership between Russia and Europe, Washington is resorting to ever-more frantic threats of sanctions and other disruptive measures. Biden is playing the personal insult card in a gambit for blowing up bilateral relations with Russia as a way to sabotage Nord Stream 2.

"It's a pathetic move, one that actually speaks more of America's historic enfeeblement rather than pretensions of power. Russia would do well to stay calm and let the Americans make fools of themselves."

It seems Russia's doing just that--attending to the vital business of developing its nation and peoples. Russia's geared for numerous patriotic celebrations throughout the year, and Biden's comments were made on the eve of Crimean reunification with Russia, which only served to cement Russians closer and hold Putin in even greater esteem. Talk about an Own Goal!

Outlaw US Empire Nord Stream policy is close to being the same as literally torpedoing it, making it an act of war against the EU and Russia. Somehow, I don't think Blinken understands that fundamental fact.

vetinLA , Mar 19 2021 23:37 utc | 64

"I know that the United States and its leaders are determined to maintain certain relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to the United States and on its terms. Even though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to uphold our interests. We will work with the United States, but in the areas that we are interested in and on terms that we believe are beneficial to us. They will have to reckon with it despite their attempts to stop our development, despite the sanctions and insults. They will have to reckon with this."

This statement is a positive, that is the mark of a government that adheres to real values, beneficial to the growth of humanity, and not just for the enrichment of a greedy minority of it's citizens.

How utterly refreshing....

bevin , Mar 20 2021 16:58 utc | 123

The most peculiar aspect of Biden's outburst is its timing.

If there was one moment in time when it would be ill advised for even the most brass necked, cynical American exceptionalist not to restrain himself from accusing anyone of murder, it would have to be that moment in which the bulkiest object in the "Out" tray on the Presidential desk happened to be a crude coffin like box containing the butchered remains of the Washington Post journalist and long established CIA asset Adnan Khashoggi.

Now there was the victim of a killer, the Crown Prince, acting with the permission of the US government and in the spirit of the Deep State which put Joe Biden in office.

Joe was perhaps thinking of Khashoggi-a beltway denizen he must have run into in one of the cocktail parties or brothels on the circuit- when he murmured admiringly, to himself, blissfully unaware of the presence of George Stephanopolous- one of the grande horizontales of American culture- and the TV camera, "That guy, whatsisname, the one from whatsitcalled, Russia, is a killer."

Though of course he's not in Obama's league.

Boogity , Mar 20 2021 19:42 utc | 142

Putin fell into a trap. He should have not said a damn thing after Biden spouted off about him being a killer. The western MSM on both sides of the Pond are now running with the incorrect translation and narrative that Putin admitted to being a killer. The western MSM is now also claiming that Putin's wishing Biden good health means he's threatening to poison him.

Putin should have heeded Mark Twain's wise words:

"Don't wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it."

Carver , Mar 20 2021 20:09 utc | 145

The western media was captured many years ago and serves only its propaganda business model.
America is number one instigator and developer of conflict across the entire planet and is increasingly unworthy of anyones trust or respect.

Carver , Mar 20 2021 20:24 utc | 146

The US media has degenerated into a slave to the propaganda business model that it has chosen to adopt.
The US is the Number One instigator and manipulator of conflict across the planet and is unworthy of anyones trust or respect. The American way defines all that is devious and corrupt.
None of this is new. There was some disruption for a few years recently, but now that all obstacles are permanently neutered the destruction of the future for personal gain can get back into top gear once again.

Bernard F. , Mar 20 2021 22:51 utc | 155

@Boogity | Mar 20 2021 19:42 utc | 141, and others Barflies...

Putin don't wrestle with the pig.

1) as b., and thanks for his Job, all of us must go to the original and extensive version. MSM and chats are narrative tools reducing and calibrating our souls.
2) with regards to China and Russia stay tune about context
3) be careful about "translation".

For this "WWE double smackdown" you must read here:
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/65172


To Biden as an old man, Putin just wish him Good health.


"I would say "stay healthy." [... ] I am saying this without irony or tongue in cheek."

But "secondly, taking a broader approach to this matter"
"to the US establishment, the ruling class – not the American people who are mostly honest, decent and sincere people who want to live in peace and friendship with us",
he said something like [you are not qualified to speak to Russia from a position of strength]


their mindset [of US ruling class] was formed in rather challenging circumstances which we are all aware of. After all, the colonisation of the American continent by the Europeans went hand-in-hand with the extermination of the local people, the genocide, as they say today, outright genocide of the Indian tribes followed by a very tough, long and difficult period of slavery , a very cruel period. All of that has been part of life in America throughout the history of the United States to this day. Otherwise, where would the Black Lives Matter movement come from? To this day, African Americans face injustice and even extermination.

The ruling class of the United States tends to address domestic and foreign policy issues based on these assumptions. After all, the United States is the only country to have used nuclear weapons , mind you, against a non-nuclear state – Japan, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW II. There was absolutely no military need for the bombing. It was nothing but the extermination of civilians.

I am bringing this up, because I know that the United States and its leaders are determined to maintain certain relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to the United States and on its terms. Even though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to uphold our interets .
[...]
despite their attempts to stop our development, despite the sanctions and insults. They will have to reckon with this.
We, with our national interests in mind, will promote our relations with all countries"


And he said that on March 18th, 7th anniversary of Crimea reuniting to Russia.

The next Day in Anchorage
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202103/1218870.shtml and scroll....

Yang Jiechi stated China's position at his opening remarks, saying China hopes this dialogue is sincere and honest.
Opening remarks were for 8mn (4x2mn),
But after Yang Jiechi spoke Blinken broke protocole agrement, recall journalists in order to show is strength. They came to 90mn press conference.

Strength was on chinese side:
"we thought the US would follow the necessary diplomatic protocol In front of the Chinese side, the US side is not qualified to speak to China from a position of strength"

"the US must focus on its own human rights issues -- like the Black Lives Matter movement -- and not meddle in the country's internal affairs "

Grieved , Mar 21 2021 0:31 utc | 169

Putin's elaboration of the history and founding culture of the USA was brilliantly well done, I thought. As an academic lesson it could hardly be more concise, nor more penetrating and accurate.

He was speaking to his home constituency of Russia, but he was well aware that the whole world would listen. The so-called Global South listens to these words for the same reason we do, to know what has now been said out loud and thus can now be referenced in future discussions and in future geopolitical positions and stances.

In this sense, all of these words, and words like them, are strength to the backbone of the world. It clarifies what Russia is now prepared to say out loud, and it suggests very clearly where a lesser nation might stand, perhaps, and even solicit the support of Russia - at the UN or in diplomacy at least, if not with S-400s.

And so as these words are sent out into the real world as things that can now be "noticed", to use the judicial sense of the word, the growing world alliance coheres around these words, and the world changes in its global attitude.

Those who believe that none of this matters - and this would obviously include the ruling class of the US, described so perfectly by Putin - are in for a shock.

I can't easily demonstrate how greatly these words matter, other than to remind us how things used to look half a dozen years ago, when the US was such an ogre, and how things look now, when the US is more literally a dotard than ever before, and when the fear of challenging the US is beginning to disappear from the world, overcome by disgust.

These are dangerous times - for the US. Being described accurately is a small step from being in someone's cross-hairs.

[Mar 21, 2021] How do we change a nation state that has so thoroughly morphed into an advertising and marketing phony, aided and abetted by so many deluded morons?

Mar 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

vetinLA , Mar 20 2021 5:24 utc | 98

Many great observations tonight, but all, beg the question; How do we change a nation state that has so thoroughly morphed into an advertising and marketing phony, aided and abetted by so many deluded morons?

[Mar 21, 2021] Going to be a lot of very confused people at Foggy Bottom. They may never have experienced this degree of contempt before.

Mar 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Yeah, Right , Mar 19 2021 22:08 utc | 46

This is interesting. Apparently both the Russians and the Chinese have concluded that Biden intends to use "CornPop" faux-macho posturing as his foreign policy, and they have both decided that "f**k that, let's nip this in the bud".

Because it looks like they have decided they have had a gut-full of US "exceptionalism" and are quite determined to say so. To anyone, but especially to the Americans.

Going to be a lot of very confused people at Foggy Bottom. They may never have experienced this degree of contempt before.


karlof1 , Mar 19 2021 22:10 utc | 47

ak74 @39--

I about fell on the floor when I read Blinken's words, my first thought being "this klutz has zero knowledge of history since 1588 and just admitted as much. In China, Blinken would never achieve any position of power.

The decadence of the Outlaw US Empire's government is like so many prions turning brain tissue into a swiss-cheese-like mass and then boasting about how finely tuned are its cognitive abilities. And when Harris is installed, we'll have a genuine novice in charge--The Blind leading the Blind.

It's no wonder the Chinese sought an audience with Lavrov ASAP.

[Mar 21, 2021] The Americans have completely lost the culture of negotiation. If there are no elementary human manners, then what kind of agreements can we talk about?

Mar 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Ian2 , Mar 20 2021 1:53 utc | 85

The Americans have completely lost the culture of negotiation. If there are no elementary human manners, then what kind of agreements can we talk about? A sad picture. And dangerous. A madman with nuclear weapons (and chemical weapons, by the way) is not the best option for a reliable negotiating partner.

alaff | Mar 19 2021 20:44 utc | 32:

And Bio-weapons.

[Mar 19, 2021] The USA neoliberal elite is far more Russophobic then than Sinophobic.

Mar 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

NemesisCalling , Mar 19 2021 0:36 utc | 46

Just a theory, but maybe all of our newsrags' belligerent headlines aimed at China are a necessary diversion to conjure enough faux-enmity to make it appear that our government is at least making the attempt at stopping China from eating our economic lunch.

I'm sorry, but once again the thought that a dem admin, which is primarily funded by those who prosper from our "relationship" with China ( here is an oldie from 1996 re: China covertly funding the Dem Party) would bite the hand that feeds is a little farfetched.

Occam's Razor holds that some type of token effort (lame headlines from lame sources hardly any American reads and military maneuvers in the S. China Sea) is still needed to keep the plebs from realizing how hitched at the hip Chinese and American elites realky are.

Take it from an American, b: it is far more the case for urban libs to froth at the mouth at the mention of Russia then a deplorable to advocate going to war with China. Deplorables are nationalist: revitalizing our domestic manufacturing would more butter our bread while dems are internationalists, chomping at the bit for a round with Russia. We are more Russophobic then than Sinophobic.

[Mar 19, 2021] On 17 March Russia withdraws it's US Ambassador for consultations:

Mar 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

powerandpeople , Mar 19 2021 0:33 utc | 45

  1. 17 March Russia withdraws it's US Ambassador for consultations:
    "Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov has been summoned to Moscow for consultations in order to analyse what needs to be done in the context of relations with the United States.

    The new US administration took office about two months ago and the symbolic 100-day mark is not too far away, which is a good occasion for trying to appraise what Joe Biden's team has managed to do and where it was not very successful.

    The most important thing for us is to identify ways of rectifying Russia-US relations, which have been going through hard times as Washington has, as a matter of fact, brought them to a blind alley.

    We are interested in preventing an irreversible deterioration in relations, if the Americans become aware of the risks associated with this."

  2. Pres. Putin invite Pres. Biden for a live on-line public discussion of issues:
    "I want to invite President Biden to continue our discussion, but on the condition that we do this actually live, as they say, online. Without any delay, but directly in an open, direct discussion. It seems to me that it would be interesting for the people of Russia, for the people of the United States, and for many other countries", Putin said on air on the Rossiya 24 broadcaster.
  3. The talk to be tomorrow (Friday). If not, then Monday, as he is spending free time in the Taiga (oblique reference to North Korea going up the sacred mountain to re-majorly rethink policy). This also places a live face to face in Prime media time, avoiding the dead news weekend.
  4. Biden is an intelligent man, but can't appear on an unedited live TV show with Putin - not because of his age-related related memory recall difficulty - this is normal - but because it risks exposing the cartoon-like tropes, lies, racism, & duplicity of the US Govt. approach.

    Especially when compared and contrasted with the serious and adult approach of the Russian President. Nearly 100 days in, USA Govt. has been given the chance, and it is clear USA Govt aggression and attempts to interfere in Russian domestic policy will continue. Should Russia abandon soft diplomacy and strategic patience with USA?

  5. Perhaps it is all theatre, coordinated by the Presidential envoys.

    Perhaps a 'crisis' is created, Ukraine creates a threat to Europe, climate must be cooperatively addressed, the Middle East could explode at any moment, a new peace treaty in the Gulf required, blah blah, blah.

    A live face to face airs the issues from both sides publicly, done respectfully, sensibly, no political point scoring or spittle-mouthed fabrications from the US Govt side.

    The Press filter is sidestepped - a Trump tactic. It would be intended as a circuit breaker, and the start of a new course for USA Govt. Russia is ready, has been for years, and repeated it over and over.

    If the USA Govt fails to step up it will hardly be the end of the world. But it will show what a lot of short-sighted, self-interested, careerist, and functionally useless time-servers most of the US political class are.

    They will identify themselves as impediments to the health and welfare of the American people.

[Mar 19, 2021] For those who have been waiting for Putin's response to Biden's "killer" slur, we now have it

Putin is trolling Buden ;-) It is no secret Biden is suffering from severe dementia.
Mar 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
worldblee , Mar 18 2021 20:00 utc | 14

For those who have been waiting for Putin's response to Biden's "killer" slur, we now have it:

https://www.rt.com/russia/518521-putin-biden-live-debate/

The president named the fight against the pandemic, regional conflict resolution, and strategic stability issues as possible topics, noting that he would be ready to talk to Biden on Friday or Monday in an "open" chat.

"I would like to suggest to President Biden that we continue our discussion, but on the condition that we actually do it live, without any delays, directly in an open, live discussion," Putin told the Russia 24 TV channel on Thursday. "I think it would be interesting for the people of Russia and the people of the United States and many other countries," he added.

It would be so delicious to actually witness such a debate. By asking for it to be streamed live, Putin is subtly calling out Biden's lie that he "told Putin he had no soul" (whereas it's unlikely that Biden actually had a 1:1 meeting with Putin during the Obama administration) as well as making Biden look weaker when Crash Test Dummy doesn't respond to the invite.


oldhippie , Mar 18 2021 21:23 utc | 27

Biden"s time is limited. Cannot be trusted near a microphone, no matter how well prepared or how thoroughly edted. Has trouble walking, begins to have trouble standing up.

Kamala is still very much a problem. First, no one likes her. Not the public, not her peers. The public is not prepared for her accession. Her competence is possibly even lower than Biden's. She may be better able to read a TelePrompter, she still annoys everyone when she speaks. May turn out to have some aptitude for riding herd on the advisors, we shall see. She may be able to function as some sort of ringmaster but will contribute nothing, she knows nothing.

It shall be government by advisors and functionaries and hidden hands. The advisors and functionaries are all steeped in hegemony and exceptionalism. They have no idea of anything else. Anyone who ever had a thought in their head was weeded out of academia and out of public life a long time ago. That leaves the hidden hands. We will never know much about that. It does appear they are perhaps ready to close down the American project and move on.

karlof1 , Mar 18 2021 21:25 utc | 28

S @24--

If those within the US government were so stupid as to swallow Russiagate's bullshit thus resulting in a "deep hatred of Russia," why would Russia want to deal with such obtuse idiots incapable of logic or critical thinking?

IMO, the current goal of Russia/China/Iran is to completely ice-out the Outlaw US Empire from having any practical impact on global affairs. The new initiative to Re-ratify the UN Charter is a case in point for such a policy. The not agreement capable nation now has a figure head that can't be allowed to talk without minders, a fact Putin would like the entire world to observe. The world has no way to deny that it sees a nation talking like a Gangster and acting like a Gangster as its recent behavior's been very explicit and public. IMO, such behavior hasn't been observed since 1938, but there'll be no appeasement or betrayal of another nation this time. China's already invited Lavrov to Beijing once its diplomats return from Alaska. Yet the Empire lies to itself when it says it has more tools to deal with Russia. The reality is it has no more cards to play--not even its nukes.

Australian lady , Mar 18 2021 23:02 utc | 38

Absolutely no difference in foreign policy?
B, I think you're pandering to your audience.
I wonder what President Putin would think- or perhaps "feel" about teamBiden versus Trump?.
How would you like to be called a "killer, without a soul"? Not withstanding all the theatrical bellicosity of Pompeo, Putin at least understood that Trump admired him as a person. I contend this is a big difference.
Do you think the Dems want any comparison with the Trump administration? They are after contradistinction.
The Dems, the internationalists and the Blairites imagine themselves to be on a roll. Putin is in their crosshairs.
This time the belligerence is the real thing.

powerandpeople , Mar 19 2021 1:27 utc | 53

And...18th March..

in a circuitous way, Pres. Putin calls Pres. Biden the real killer:

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/65172

International Music Festival volunteer coordinator and representative of Crimea Federal University Polina Bolbochan: Mr President, I have a somewhat personal question for you. Yesterday, President Biden got quite tough in his interview, including with regard to you. What would you say to him?

Vladimir Putin: With regard to my US colleague's remark, we have, indeed, as he said, met in person. What would I tell him? I would say "stay healthy." I wish him good health. I am saying this without irony or tongue in cheek. This is my first point.

Secondly, taking a broader approach to this matter, I would like to say that difficult, dramatic, and bloody events abound in the history of every nation and every state.

But when we evaluate other people, or even other states and nations, we are always facing a mirror, we always see ourselves in the reflection, because we project our inner selves onto the other person.

You know, I remember when we were children and played in the yard, we had arguments occasionally and we used to say: whatever you call me is what you are called yourself. This is no coincidence or just a kids' saying or joke. It has a very deep psychological undercurrent.

We always see ourselves in another person and think that he or she is just like us, and evaluate the other person's actions based on our own outlook on life.

With regard to the US establishment, the ruling class – not the American people who are mostly honest, decent and sincere people who want to live in peace and friendship with us, something we are aware of and appreciate, and we will rely on them in the future – their mindset was formed in rather challenging circumstances which we are all aware of.

After all, the colonisation of the American continent by the Europeans went hand-in-hand with the extermination of the local people, the genocide, as they say today, outright genocide of the Indian tribes followed by a very tough, long and difficult period of slavery, a very cruel period.

All of that has been part of life in America throughout the history of the United States to this day. Otherwise, where would the Black Lives Matter movement come from? To this day, African Americans face injustice and even extermination.

The ruling class of the United States tends to address domestic and foreign policy issues based on these assumptions. After all, the United States is the only country to have used nuclear weapons, mind you, against a non-nuclear state – Japan, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW II. There was absolutely no military need for the bombing. It was nothing but the extermination of civilians.

I am bringing this up, because I know that the United States and its leaders are determined to maintain certain relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to the United States and on its terms.

Even though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code .

But we know how to uphold our interests. We will work with the United States, but in the areas that we are interested in and on terms that we believe are beneficial to us.

They will have to reckon with it despite their attempts to stop our development, despite the sanctions and insults.

They will have to reckon with this.

My bolds, to bring out the essence.

Essentially, he is saying 'We reject your posturing and rudeness, do what you want. We are ready, and will go our own way. You are not worthy of our cooperation. It' over'.

So, the ball, once again, is in the USA Govt court.

[Mar 14, 2021] Four recurrent themes in demonization of Vladimir Putin: Killer, kleptocrat, genius, spy by Keith Gessen,

Jan 20, 2021 | www.theguardian.com

Originally from: From the archive- Killer, kleptocrat, genius, spy- the many myths of Vladimir Putin – podcast - News - The Guardian

Vladimir Putin, you may have noticed, is everywhere. He has soldiers in Ukraine and Syria, troublemakers in the Baltics and Finland, and a hand in elections from the Czech Republic to France to the United States. And he is in the media. Not a day goes by without a big new article on " Putin's Revenge ", " The Secret Source of Putin's Evil ", or "10 Reasons Why Vladimir Putin Is a Terrible Human Being".

Putin's recent ubiquity has brought great prominence to the practice of Putinology. This enterprise – the production of commentary and analysis about Putin and his motivations, based on necessarily partial, incomplete and sometimes entirely false information – has existed as a distinct intellectual industry for over a decade.

...At no time in history have more people with less knowledge, and greater outrage, opined on the subject of Russia's president. You might say that the reports of Trump's golden showers in a Moscow hotel room have consecrated a golden age – for Putinology.

...

Compared to the 40-year cycle of US deindustrialisation, during which only the rich gained in wealth; the 25-year rightwing war on the Clintons; the eight-year-old Tea Party assault on facts, immigration and taxes; a tepid, centrist campaign; and a supposed late-breaking revelation from the director of the FBI about the dubious investigation of Clinton's use of a private email server – well, compared to all those factors, the leaked DNC emails must rank low on the list of reasons for Trump's victory. And yet, according to a recent report, Hillary Clinton and her campaign still blame the Russians – and, by extension, Barack Obama, who did not make a big issue of the hacks before November – for her electoral debacle. In this instance, thinking about Putin helps not to think about everything else that went wrong, and what needs to be done to fix it.

This evasion is the essence of Putinology, which seeks solace in the undeniable but faraway badness of Putin at the expense of confronting the far more uncomfortable badness in front of one's face. Putinology predates the 2016 election by a decade, and yet what we have seen in connection to Trump these past few months has been its Platonic ideal.

[Mar 12, 2021] Oil Spill Caused By Israeli Attacks On Iranian Oil Bound for Syria

Mar 12, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Oil Spill Caused By Israeli Attacks On Iranian Oil Bound for Syria Jen , Mar 12 2021 10:39 utc | 5

The Wall Street Journal reports today:

Israel has targeted at least a dozen vessels bound for Syria and mostly carrying Iranian oil out of concern that petroleum profits are funding extremism in the Middle East, U.S. and regional officials say, in a new front in the conflict between Israel and Iran.

Since late 2019, Israel has used weaponry including water mines to strike Iranian vessels or those carrying Iranian cargo as they navigate toward Syria in the Red Sea and in other areas of the region. Iran has continued its oil trade with Syria, shipping millions of barrels and contravening U.S. sanctions against Iran and international sanctions against Syria.

Some of the naval attacks also have targeted Iranian efforts to move other cargo including weaponry through the region, according to U.S. officials.

The attacks on the tankers carrying Iranian oil haven't been previously disclosed. Iranian officials have reported some of the attacks earlier and have said they suspect Israeli involvement.

The 'exclusive' leak to the WSJ , by U.S. officials(!), is designed to damage the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahoo.

It explains a number of recent incidents which Israel had claimed to be 'Iranian aggressions' but which were caused by Israel itself or were in obvious retaliation for Israeli deeds.

In mid February oil which had leaked from an unknown tanker damaged the beaches of Palestine :

Israel closed all its Mediterranean beaches until further notice on Sunday, days after an offshore oil spill deposited tons of tar across more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) of coastline in what officials are calling one of the country's worst ecological disasters.

Activists began reporting globs of black tar on Israel's coast last week after a heavy storm.
...
The Environmental Protection Ministry and activists estimate that at least 1,000 tons of tar, a product of an oil spill from a ship in the eastern Mediterranean earlier this month, have already washed up on shore. The ministry is trying to determine who is responsible. It declined commenting on details of the investigation because it was ongoing.

What made this event curious was the unusual Israeli attempt to censor reporting on it :

Cont. reading: Oil Spill Caused By Israeli Attacks On Iranian Oil Bound for Syria

Posted by b at 9:17 UTC | Comments (21) Surely one significant aspect of this story is that US govt officials, speaking as they always do "anonymously", informed none other than the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal. Does Rupert Murdoch no longer support Binyamin Netanyahu? Has Netanyahu's appeal dimmed somewhat since the death of US casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson whose newspaper "Israel Hayom" was a big Netanyahu supporter? Is the Biden-soon-to-be-Harris administration tiring of Netanyahu and keen to throw him and his wife Sara under a huge bus?

Take a gander at this news, MoA barflies!

Alleged contract with husband 'grants Sara Netanyahu veto over Mossad, IDF '

"... A former senior official from Israel's Aerospace Industries claims to have first-hand knowledge of the 15-page long legal contract between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara, writes The Times of Israel.

In a video interview, posted on the internet, David Arzi, former vice president of commercial and civil aviation at Israel Aerospace Industries, says he was allowed to read clauses of the contract in 1999, during Netanyahu's first stint as prime minister, by the Prime Minister's lawyer and cousin David Shimron ...

...The legal contract signed by the couple, he says, grants Sara Netanyahu (Sara Ben-Artzi prior to her marriage) far-reaching control over their life. Accordingly, she is reportedly allowed to sign off on appointments of the heads of Mossad intelligence agency, Shin Bet domestic security service, and the Israeli military.

In line with the contract, according to Arzi, the prime minister vows not to take any overnight trip without taking along his wife, by profession an educational and career psychologist, who is also allegedly permitted to take part in top-secret meetings ...

... "She authorises the following appointments, the head of the Mossad, the head of the Shin Bet and the IDF chief of staff. And that is in writing, she has to give the authorization in writing, if not, it is a violation of the contract," continues the ex-Aerospace Industries' official.

He adds in the video that violation of the contract would result in Benjamin Netanyahu "forfeiting all their property to her."

Regarding finances, the alleged contract stipulates that Sara Netanyahu wields major control as well.

"There was a very detailed section that she would handle their finances It was written that he would not have credit cards, only she would. And if he needed money she would give it to him," says Arzi in Hebrew, as quoted by the outlet ..."

Well, talk about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East when the place seems to be run by wannabe Queen Hatshepsut.


Mao Cheng Ji , Mar 12 2021 10:50 utc | 6

@Bemildred 4 "Pres. Biden is, like Trump, a vindictive man, and he does not like Nuttyahoo."

I don't think this has anything to do with anyone's (and especially Biden's, who probably doesn't remember who Netanyahu is) alleged personality traits. This is not how things are done. An official leak published by WSJ should have a better explanation, imo.

Stonebird , Mar 12 2021 10:50 utc | 7
I gather that Israel has made attacks on 12 Iranian tankers. Surprising that there have not been MORE than one "oil spill".
traducteur , Mar 12 2021 12:48 utc | 8
Shot themselves in the foot again, have they? The Zios are good at doing that. The day is coming when they will make one misstep too far and go over the edge.
! خلاص
snake , Mar 12 2021 13:24 utc | 9
U.S. officials then leak the whole scheme to the WSJ to stop Netanyahoo from continuing the self-defeating campaign. USA officials don't release this kind of information without a purpose.

Jen @ 5 thinks maybe "Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal may no longer support Binyamin Netanyahu?

<== to jen I add the conspiracy theory that Maybe the official anonymous disclosure reflects wall streets concern that Netanyohoo is a husband victim of something like this which uses marriage contracts to cover for spouse side family control over appointments, to the head of the Mossad, to the head of the Shin Bet and to the IDF chief of staff. I can not imagine any other reason for documents exposed here today to have been written and their terms enforced.

Why where those documents written is my question? great work B.

Christian J. Chuba , Mar 12 2021 14:18 utc | 10
They fall into the pit they dig for others I knew something was up when both the Mossad and Defense Minister went out of their way to disavow the Israeli EPA minister's claim. MoA, I know that you are pining for, and holding a torch for Donald J. Trump, the Insurrector and Chief, but his Administration would NEVER leak this to the press.

Israel's lesson only attack Iranian tankers in the Red Sea. That will harm their new found friends, the Saudis, Egyptians, and Sudan but I don't think Netanyahu cares about them.

Tadlak Davidowitsch , Mar 12 2021 14:26 utc | 11
Bravo, B!
So many distortioners would have written that these oil spills ravaged "the coasts of Israël". You put tne matter straight through calling entire the stretch of coastline between Egypt and Lebanon "the coast of Palestine. Thank You!
chola3 , Mar 12 2021 14:32 utc | 12
the US is unhappy because there is a deal after Iran retaliation for Soleimani:

Iran Russia and others to go along with the Covid thing so the west and others can reduce petroleum consumption in stages

(saudi wells are emptying and attempts to loot Russia/Iran has fizzled. Venezuela/Canada stuff too expensive)

A few naughty stunts are good optics for everyone but Israel will not be allowed to be a loose cannon.

Sarah Sponda , Mar 12 2021 14:32 utc | 13
The U.S. might have done this because they want Gantz to win in the upcoming elections so there can finally be a war against Iran.
Christian J. Chuba , Mar 12 2021 14:37 utc | 15

Why would Israel pollute their own shores by attacking an Iranian ship in the Mediterranean?

Please do not say 'false flag'. The most simple explanation is that the Izzies figured that the Iranians (or ship owner) would direct the tanker to the nearest port for repairs, there are several in Egypt. Victimized tankers likely did that before, but in this case, the Capt decided to make a run for Syria.

the pair , Mar 12 2021 15:52 utc | 19
the oil is obviously anti-semitic. just look at all the time it spends hanging out with saudis and texans!
Jackrabbit , Mar 12 2021 15:52 utc | 20
US Intelligence Reveals Israel Has Bombed "Dozens" Of Iranian Oil Tankers
... a new bombshell report in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reveals Israeli intelligence has been waging its own tanker sabotage campaign against the Iranians over the past two years ...

It also appears part of the Israeli and US campaign to essentially starve the Assad government and bring it to its knees, further amidst near weekly Israeli airstrikes inside the war-torn country. The new report clearly suggests US intelligence officials knew about the covert tanker sabotage campaign in real time, and may have even assisted in some level of the planning or operations ...


<> <> <> <> <> <>

Why didn't they tell us about the continuing tanker war when they announced that the Israeli ship was "struck" by an explosion?

One must wonder if they are revealing this now because Israel's story about the tanker being attacked lacks credibility. They desperately want us to believe that the damage to the ship was NOT a false flag (Israeli sabotage of their own vessel).

But it gets even better. They also implicitly excuse (depict sympathetically) Israel's attacks on Iranian tankers ... because they oppose Assad and Biden's Iran initiative. Where is the condemnation for such behavior?

!!

gottlieb , Mar 12 2021 16:28 utc | 21

Yes, interesting as to the motives. One hopes this is part of a plan of strategery to 'de-escalate' the wag-the-dog mentality that runs the 'Middle East' foreign policy of the US. War with Iran is insane. Those who foment war with Iran are insane. It is good to walk it all back. Is this what is happening? We'll soon know.

[Mar 09, 2021] The New York Times and The Washington Post have long been, and continue to be, stenographers for the State Dep't and CIA -- why is anyone surprised at these recent campaigns?

Mar 09, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bemildred , Mar 9 2021 17:25 utc | 4

What I notice is the State Dept. continues to hold absolute faith in the efficacy of bullshit.

gottlieb , Mar 9 2021 17:49 utc | 5

As my ilk has said for a long while, when it comes to US foreign policy - IT DOES NOT MATTER WHO IS PRESDIENT - the facts are fixed around the policy (to quote the dodgy dossier case). Of course Venezuela is Cuba 2.0. There is no independence from Empire
chet380 , Mar 9 2021 19:22 utc | 16

The New York Times and The Washington Post have long been, and continue to be, stenographers for the State Dep't and CIA -- why is anyone surprised at these recent campaigns?

Piotr Berman , Mar 9 2021 19:40 utc | 17

Perhaps it could help to correct the misused vocabulary. Then we can say that "The policy of inhumane interventionism defends illiberal world order and fosters anti-democratic aspirations."

Rob , Mar 9 2021 19:43 utc | 18

@psychohistorian (1) "The NYT continues to be a water carrier for empire and it has and continues to be very effective in doing so....in spite of b's and others efforts."

Carrying water for the empire is an essential component of the NYT's business model. It is what gives them unparalleled access to government officials and intelligence operatives, which creates the false aura of authoritativeness that surrounds the Times, which, in turn, attracts readers and advertisers and, importantly, influences what is written and said by other media outlets. That is how the Times became and has remained the "paper of record." It's a perfect symbiotic relationship. The WaPo has some of the same cachet but will always be second tier in terms of managing the narrative that the U.S. government wants people to hear.

Bernard F. , Mar 9 2021 20:02 utc | 20

@Bobby | Mar 9 2021 18:40 utc | 10
Are you serious?
31 billions is just what's US steal from Venezuela blocking money in US banking system.
EU and others, like England, Korea or Japan.... as well and $billions more.
And that's only the emerge part of iceberg.

JUST read , for example, something honest from a American politician
https://orinocotribune.com/us-senator-demands-end-of-us-interference-in-venezuela-and-bolivia/

Mao Cheng Ji , Mar 9 2021 21:01 utc | 23

@chet380 16: "The NYT could, and should be, called out for its lies every week."

Why? It's the main establishment newspaper. And as such it's useful for discovering what the establishment wants you think, at any given moment. What they emphasize, what they ignore, conceal.

All this can be analyzed, and it'll help you figure out what the establishment's plans are. In a similar way to what they used to call 'kremlinology'.

[Mar 09, 2021] Hal Turner Radio Show - RUSSIA SYRIA BOMB OIL STORAGE FACILITIES BEING USED BY U.S., TURKEY ISRAEL INSIDE SYRIA

Mar 09, 2021 | halturnerradioshow.com

The Syrian Arab Army and Russian forces inside that country, fired Tochka Ballistic missiles at Oil Storage Tank Facilities being occupied by and used by the United States, Turkey and Israel, inside Syria. Giant explosions levelled most of the storage tank farms, rendering it impossible for the US, Turkey or Israel to continue STEALING Syrian Oil; something that has been going on for years while the US was allegedly "fighting ISIS."

... ... ...

Images coming out of Syria provide irrefutable proof the missiles used were Russian Tochka, also known in NATO circles as the SS-21.

The video below comes from a COVERT INTELLIGENCE SOURCE inside Syria, from directly next to the destroyed and burning oil storage tank farm: (Article continues below green subscriber only area below)

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The missile debris in the second video above makes clear this was a RUSSIAN attack. Initial intelligence estimates are saying Russia intentionally destroyed these Syrian oil storage facilities, likely with the permission of the Syrian government, to put an end to the rampant THEFT of Syrian oil by the United States, Turkey and most recently, Israel.

Conservative estimates reported that, during it's battle against ISIS, the USA stole $30 Million a month. Later when Turkish troops entered Syria allegedly to contain the Kurds, Turkey began stealing the oil too, raising the amount stolen to about $60 Million a month. Most recently, Israel allegedly joined the theft, and was allegedly stealing another 20-30 Million for themselves each month, causing Syria to lose upwards of $100 Million a month to this theft ring.

No one knows who is getting all the oil money. Speculation exists that it is greasing the pockets of American military higher-ups, American politicians, and those of similar position in both Turkey and in Israel. Russia just slapped all of them in the face and destroyed their money pipeline. They can't steal the oil anymore because Russia just smashed the needed oil storage facilities from which the oil was being smuggled out of Syria.

With its free money pipeline cut off, the "Deep State" is likely to go berserk, and thus my former colleagues in the Intel Community tell me the push will be "on" in the Intel and military communities, to drive the US to direct war against Russia inside Syria.

My former colleagues also told me that the most immediate and likely retaliation will be a major escalation inside eastern Ukraine, as the US and the West strike back to cause big trouble for Russia.

The most staggering warning from my former colleagues is that "this situation could rapidly escalate to direct warfare, inside Syria, between the US and Russia, with a second front opened against Russia by Europe, with warfare in Ukraine on the continent of Europe."

We could be seeing the actual outbreak of what history may call World War 3.

No other mass media outlets are covering this either in the US or in Europe. Both the American people and folks in Europe are blissfully unaware of how badly things have just escalated. If war breaks out, the civilian populations in American and Europe will be caught completely off-guard and with no preparations.

Prep now. Have emergency food, emergency water, spare supplies of medicines you may need. Spare fuel. Have a way to generate electricity. Have CB or HAM radios for communications.

If this goes bad, it will go bad fast.

MORNING UPDATE

March 6, 2021 - 7:30 AM EST

The Russian missiles not only struck oil storage tank farms, they also went after the oil smuggling tanker trucks as well. Entire parking areas filled with hundreds of smuggler tanker trucks were hit and destroyed.

This killed a number of truck drivers, but it also sent a message to every other truck driver: Don't be involved in stealing Syrian Oil for the Americans or anyone else, or YOU can be blown up too.

In one fell swoop, Russia stabbed the Syria smuggling and oil theft operation, directly in its heart. Even if teh US, Turkey and Israel _wanted_ to continue stealing, no one in his right mind will drive a smuggling truck for them; for fear of being blown to bits by Russia missiles again.

The "Deep State" has had its illegal oil smuggling cash cow, slaughtered by Russia last night.

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MORNING UPDATE

March 6, 2021 - 7:30 AM EST

The Russian missiles not only struck oil storage tank farms, they also went after the oil smuggling tanker trucks as well. Entire parking areas filled with hundreds of smuggler tanker trucks were hit and destroyed.

This killed a number of truck drivers, but it also sent a message to every other truck driver: Don't be involved in stealing Syrian Oil for the Americans or anyone else, or YOU can be blown up too.

In one fell swoop, Russia stabbed the Syria smuggling and oil theft operation, directly in its heart. Even if teh US, Turkey and Israel _wanted_ to continue stealing, no one in his right mind will drive a smuggling truck for them; for fear of being blown to bits by Russia missiles again.

The "Deep State" has had its illegal oil smuggling cash cow, slaughtered by Russia last night.

[Mar 06, 2021] Biden's -Nothing Will Fundamentally Change- Promise Extends To His Foreign Policy

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Laguerre , Mar 4 2021 18:27 utc | 1

"America is back" claimed Joe Biden to no ones amusement. But the world has changed after four years of Trump and after a pandemic upset the world. The U.S. position in this world and its role in it have thereby also changed. To just claim one is back without adopting to the new situation promises failure.

As candidate Joe Biden promised that there would be no changes.

Joe Biden to rich donors: "Nothing would fundamentally change" if he's elected

Former Vice President Joe Biden assured rich donors at a ritzy New York fundraiser that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he is elected.

Biden told donors at an event at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan on Tuesday evening that he would not "demonize" the rich and promised that " no one's standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change ," Bloomberg News reported.

That Biden statement destroyed the illusion of those who had hoped that he would lift the standard of living for the average Amercian.

Biden stayed true to his words at the fundraiser. There will be no rise in the minimum wage. The $2,000 checks he promised to all voters will now be only $1,400 checks. They will also be heavily means tested . Those who made more than $80,000 in 2019 but lost their income in 2020 will get no check at all.

Even as they hold the White House and the House and Senate majorities the Democrats are unable or unwilling to deliver basic progress. This will likely cost them their House majority in 2022 and the presidency in 2024.

Biden's "nothing will fundamentally change" attitude extends into foreign policy.

Secretary Pompeo @SecPompeo - 0:29 UTC · Dec 21, 2019
Today, the #ICC prosecutor raised serious questions about the ICC's jurisdiction to investigate #Israel. Israel is not a state party to the ICC. We firmly oppose this unjustified inquiry that unfairly targets Israel . The path to lasting peace is through direct negotiations.
---
Secretary Antony Blinken @SecBlinken - 1:34 UTC · Mar 4, 2021
The United States firmly opposes an @IntlCrimCourt investigation into the Palestinian Situation. We will continue to uphold our strong commitment to Israel and its security, including by opposing actions that seek to target Israel unfairly.

With that, and with its lack of punishment for the Saudi clown prince, the Biden administration has blinked on human rights which it had emphasized in earlier statements .

That nothing will change is also expressed in two policy papers the Biden administration released yesterday. The early emphasis on human rights, which distinguished it from the Trump administration, is already gone.

The common theme is now 'democracy' as if that were not just a form of government but a value in itself.

The White House published an Interim National Security Strategic Guidance (pdf). The paper is dripping with ideological LGBTQWERTY librulism. Its central claim is that 'democracy' is under threat:

At a time when the need for American engagement and international cooperation is greater than ever, however, democracies across the globe, including our own, are increasingly under siege . Free societies have been challenged from within by corruption, inequality, polarization, populism, and illiberal threats to the rule of law. Nationalist and nativist trends – accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis – produce an every-country-for-itself mentality that leaves us all more isolated, less prosperous, and less safe. Democratic nations are also increasingly challenged from outside by antagonistic authoritarian powers. Anti-democratic forces use misinformation, disinformation, and weaponized corruption to exploit perceived weaknesses and sow division within and among free nations, erode existing international rules, and promote alternative models of authoritarian governance. Reversing these trends is essential to our national security .

It then singles out China:

We must also contend with the reality that the distribution of power across the world is changing, creating new threats. China , in particular, has rapidly become more assertive. It is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system. Russia remains determined to enhance its global influence and play a disruptive role on the world stage. Both Beijing and Moscow have invested heavily in efforts meant to check U.S. strengths and prevent us from defending our interests and allies around the world. Regional actors like Iran and North Korea continue to pursue game-changing capabilities and technologies, while threatening U.S. allies and partners and challenging regional stability. We also face challenges within countries whose governance is fragile, and from influential non-state actors that have the ability to disrupt American interests.

To fight China the U.S. will (ab)use its allies:

We can do none of this work alone. For that reason, we will reinvigorate and modernize our alliances and partnerships around the world. For decades, our allies have stood by our side against common threats and adversaries, and worked hand-in-hand to advance our shared interests and values. They are a tremendous source of strength and a unique American advantage, helping to shoulder the responsibilities required to keep our nation safe and our people prosperous. Our democratic alliances enable us to present a common front, produce a unified vision, and pool our strength to promote high standards, establish effective international rules, and hold countries like China to account.

Good luck with that. Neither the European U.S. allies, nor the Asian ones, have any interest in following the U.S. into a confrontation with China. It is their greatest trading partner and they do not perceive it as an ideological or security threat.

A speech Secretary of State Anthony Blinken gave yesterday touches on the same points. It is headlined A Foreign Policy for the American People

The main theme is again 'democracy':

The more we and other democracies can show the world that we can deliver, not only for our people, but also for each other, the more we can refute the lie that authoritarian countries love to tell, that theirs is the better way to meet people's fundamental needs and hopes. It's on us to prove them wrong.

So the question isn't if we will support democracy around the world, but how.

We will use the power of our example. We will encourage others to make key reforms, overturn bad laws, fight corruption, and stop unjust practices. We will incentivize democratic behavior.

But we will not promote democracy through costly military interventions or by attempting to overthrow authoritarian regimes by force. We have tried these tactics in the past. However well intentioned, they haven't worked. They've given democracy promotion a bad name, and they've lost the confidence of the American people. We will do things differently.

The "lie that authoritarian countries love to tell, that their's is the better way to meet people's fundamental needs and hopes" is targeted at China. But that China did and does much better than the U.S. to meet its people's needs and hope is not a lie. The pandemic has again demonstrated that.

The last quoted paragraph has seen some positive attention on social media. But it is based on a falsehood. The U.S. has not once used military means to 'promote democracy'. Not ever. It has used war to gain markets and power, to destroy its competition. The neo-conservatives have claimed to be motivated by 'democracy promotion'. But that was always just a pretext to hide the real reasons for waging war. Iraq became democratic not because the U.S. wanted it to be that. In fact, after invading Iraq the the U.S. pro-consul Paul Bremer tried to prevent universal elections in Iraq. Only the insistence of Ayatollah Sistani on a universal vote led to a somewhat democratic system in Iraq.

Blinken is, just like Pompeo before him, focused on China:

And eighth, we will manage the biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century: our relationship with China.

Several countries present us with serious challenges, including Russia, Iran, North Korea. And there are serious crises we have to deal with, including in Yemen, Ethiopia, and Burma.

But the challenge posed by China is different. China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system – all the rules, values, and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to , because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.

That there is no change from the Trump to the Biden administration in hostility to China is disappointing only for those who had expected some:

Pang Zhongying, a specialist in international relations at Ocean University of China, said Beijing would be disappointed with the Biden administration's approach to "continue and even elevate" the tough policies of the Trump era and to strengthen alliances to deal with China.

"There does not seem to be any change yet in the serious tensions in China-US relations," he said. "I think there may be some frustration in Beijing that after more than 40 days [of the new administration] they have not seen any change but there is actually more pressure from the US."

Beijing will manage the conflict and it is likely to see it as a chance.

The U.S. failure to adopt to new circumstances will accelerate its demise. The U.S. empire was a historical abnormality and its twilight is near :

[The Realist professors of International Relations David Blagden and Patrick Porter] observe America's "position as 'global leader' is premised on a set of impermanent and atypical conditions from an earlier post-war era", but " the days of incontestable unipolarity are over, and cannot be wished back ". The result is that "overextension abroad, exhaustion and fiscal strain at home, and political disorder feed off one another in a downward spiral, cumulatively threatening the survival of the republic".

The US empire is, then, at an impasse. Its moral and political justification of overseeing a global order of universal liberal democracy -- the closest real-world equivalent to the Kantian perpetual peace that has both motivated and eluded liberal idealists for the past two centuries -- is now beyond its capabilities to maintain.
...
How does this end for America? Biden and the presidents after him will be forced to make a hard choice: whether to retrench to a smaller and more manageable empire, or to risk a far greater and more dramatic collapse in defence of global hegemony.

Biden has made his choice. Nothing will fundamentally change under him. He is thereby likely to repeat all of Trump's foreign policy failures. There will be no new JCPOA with Iran nor will there be any win for the U.S. in the Middle East. North Korea will continue to test bombs and missiles. The U.S. will continue to be stuck in Afghanistan. The Chinese-Russian alliance will strengthen. U.S. allies will further distance themselves from it.

We can not yet know what, at what point will cause the collapse of U.S. hegemony. But we are coming more near to it.

Posted by b on March 4, 2021 at 18:04 UTC | Permalink

Did anybody expect anything else?

Bemildred , Mar 4 2021 18:28 utc | 2

Frankly, Biden's speech to the grand poobahs sounded more like a plea for understanding than a promise, and if you take what the policy paper says at face value it suggests that "Biden" understands that we have to change to compete. It is also an admission that they have presided over a period of decline in Uncle Sugar land, so of course they don't want to dwell on that. I think Biden is worried the "owners" wom't let him do anything.

And it is totally appropriate that Biden is the guy up there trying to deal with this mess, because he as one of the prime intigators or the present situation, going back 40 years.

Prof K , Mar 4 2021 18:43 utc | 3
Patrick Porter's book, The False Promise of Liberal Order, is good.

But, his realist critique of vulgar liberal propaganda for US imperialism doesn't locate the source or material roots of US grand strategy.

Realist theory understands power, hegemony and balancing only in terms of military power. That is the only currency of power in realist thinking, because realism rests on a state centricity which insists on the autonomy of the state from any social or economic factors. Military power is thus all that remains.

This theory obviously fails to explain the real history of US foreign policy, which has used militarism and other tools in support of strategic economic interests on a global scale, primarily in the South. The military balance of power is by and large only an expression of the economic balance of power and the class interests of ruling classes derived from it.

Porter and other realists point out the contradictions of liberal theory and practice but fail to provide a scientific explanation for consistent US policies.

dsfco , Mar 4 2021 18:54 utc | 4
"The Chinese-Russian alliance will strengthen."

There is a partnership currently but it's not yet an alliance. The rationale for one is very strong. Russia needs China or it will be overwhelmed by a hostile US and fairly hostile Europe. China needs Russia to save it from a resource embargo by US and allies. Together they will form a huge power bloc in Eurasia combining their respective territories with joint influence over Central Asia. Other countries in Asia like South Korea, Vietnam and India will see bloc and decide to stay neutral or side with the China-Russia bloc.

As compelling as this vision is it hasn't happened yet. It takes time sure but there must be reluctance from within the countries and other challenges. Which side is dragging its feet more? It would be interesting to understand why things aren't moving faster.

Canadian Cents , Mar 4 2021 19:02 utc | 5
As Ron Paul observed in Biden's Syria Attack: An Actual Impeachable Offense :

When President Biden says "America is back," what he really means is "the war party is back." As if they ever left.

The neocons just shifted their attention to the other side of the same coin.

eps , Mar 4 2021 19:25 utc | 6
As compelling as this vision is it hasn't happened yet. It takes time sure but there must be reluctance from within the countries and other challenges. Which side is dragging its feet more? It would be interesting to understand why things aren't moving faster.
Posted by: dsfco | Mar 4 2021 18:54 utc | 4

A guess: PRC having vastly greater economic power thinks its share of influence should be greater. Russia having vastly superior military power & technology, disagrees. For example the Chinese government might like access to the most advanced Russian military technology; the Russians having been invaded many times from both East & West, probably take the long view.

[Mar 06, 2021] We've Gone To A Liberal Form Of John Bolton -- Rand Paul Blasts Biden's Foreign Policy

Mar 06, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

This week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a confirmation hearing for Wendy Sherman, nominated by the Biden White House to serve as deputy secretary of state.

The career diplomat answered the usual questions on how she views United States posture toward American rivals and official enemies like Russia, China, and Iran. Once again it was Sen. Rand Paul who had the most direct pushback and biting criticism against an administration that seems bent on returning to the foreign adventurism and unilateral military interventionism of the Obama and Bush years.

"We've gone to a liberal form of John Bolton," Paul said of President Biden during his turn to question Sherman. Paul is especially outraged over Biden's Syria strike without consulting Congress last week.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8HanUqh_-CE

During the above exchange with Wendy Sherman, Paul in his concluding remarks had blasted away at Biden's vision of the world, citing past failed Democratic-led military interventions in places like Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

"I think we've gone to a liberal form of John Bolton with your new boss and that's something I'm really concerned with," Paul said.

"All I will say is that we're bombing now again in Syria without Congressional approval and we're sending more convoys in there without Congressional approval . It's a messy war - it's been going on forever, there's nothing good that's going to come out of our involvement," Paul explained in his statement.

"People say 'well US lives are at risk' ... yeah because we put'em there . We put them in the middle of a civil war that's largely over but can continue if we keep putting troops into there... to put our troops as a 'trip wire' to get involved in a further escalation of this war."

And that's when the Republican Senator from Kentucky blasted President Biden on his Syria stance and general interventionist foreign policy:

"I hope that we'll be sane voices and I hope that you'll be one of those," he said addressing Sherman.

"But I don't have a great deal of confidence that we've actually gone away from John Bolton, I've think we've gone to a liberal form of John Bolton with your new boss, and that's something I'm very concerned with ."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1367631736591421442&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fweve-gone-liberal-form-john-bolton-rand-paul-blasts-bidens-foreign-policy&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=e1ffbdb%3A1614796141937&width=550px

Sherman in response had tried to claim that the Biden admin is not trying to get more deeply involved in the Syria conflict, but maintained the 'countering ISIS' stance that the Pentagon has used for years to argue it must continue the occupation of the northeast portion of the country.

[Mar 06, 2021] The USA goverment has lost control of its mercenary army. I don't assume that "Biden" necessarily knew about it beforehand. All that stuff about civilian control is "exaggerated", that corporate trough is mighty tasty. It's common in a lot of places, almost a norm. The CIA is very fond of taking its own advice too.

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bemildred , Mar 6 2021 7:46 utc | 87

The USAi has lost control of its occupying army. Xerxes had the same problems in his ancient chain of command.

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Mar 6 2021 6:02 utc | 82

Yes. I think it has always been that way with a couple of historical exceptions. So it's what I look for, and why when things happen, I don't assume that "Biden" necessarily knew about it beforehand. All that stuff about civilian control is "exaggerated", that corporate trough is mighty tasty. It's common in a lot of places, almost a norm. The CIA is very fond of taking its own advice too.

If you want to read "Catch-22" by Joe Heller, he's not kidding about all that.

Regarding that particular incident I ran into a piece yesterday that framed it just like that, and attempt to get an unconsidered response by some officer with ideas. But they hit the wrong people.

The Russians and/or Syrians seem to be tearing it up in Northern Aleppo. The Russian military, on the other hand, seems to have its shit unusually well put together these days. I don't think there is anybody else I can say that about. They do much with little.


Norwegian , Mar 6 2021 7:51 utc | 88

@uncle tungsten | Mar 6 2021 0:20 utc | 59
These are not normal people in charge. They have lost their minds.
I agree with that. It applies especially to the US, but you can include the rest of the western "leaders" with the same diagnosis. In fact there is a huge vacuum of sanity being filled with total insanity, there are no real leaders. They have all been assassinated like Olof Palme in Sweden or totally corrupted like Jens Stoltenberg and Boris Johnson.

Now these corrupt idiots are getting scared and are doubling down with criminal and insane behavior. We need a Nuremberg style cleanup.

uncle tungsten , Mar 6 2021 9:53 utc | 90

Bemildred #87

The Russians and/or Syrians seem to be tearing it up in Northern Aleppo.


That oil smuggling bombardment will perhaps awaken Erdoghan. Given the extreme mendacity of Erdoghan and his provocation in Nagorno-Karabakh/Azerbaijan, I expect his entire Syrian playground to be drastically reduced in the next week and the SDF to have its wings clipped.

Thanks for the Catch 22 reference, read that accurate history lesson in my younger days. Accurate indeed.

Bluedotterel , Mar 6 2021 10:47 utc | 92
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Mar 6 2021 7:45 utc | 86

Maybe, maybe just a little propaganda from a Turkophobe. That is common enough in the Orthodox world, however, you never know with Erdoğan, and NATO doesn't even have to be in the picture. I suppose, we will find out soon enough where the truth lies. Erdoğan runs his own ship and changes allies depending on the direction of the wind.

Bemildred , Mar 6 2021 13:56 utc | 93
Posted by: Bluedotterel | Mar 6 2021 10:47 utc | 92

I agree, I don't think Erdogan is that stupid. He is a smart politician, and Putin does not want to alienate Turkey, so they play games. The NK situation look unstable, so ...

But I don't think Erdogan is dumb enough to try to plant jihadis there now. This Aliyev fellow looks like a shifty person though, crooked and ambitious. I see hints that both Russia & Iran are annoyed about what happened there.

[Mar 06, 2021] Aaron Mate gives a penetrating and documented account of U.S. war crimes by showing clips of Biden and his people admitting their support of Wahabi terrorists and criminal sanctions.

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

migueljose , Mar 6 2021 3:42 utc | 76

The Grayzone is blowing up the D.C. fairy tales.

Syria: Aaron Mate gives a penetrating and documented account of U.S. war crimes by showing clips of Biden and his people admitting their support of Wahabi terrorists and criminal sanctions. Mate cites Tulsi Gabbard's courageous and consistent positions in support of the Syrian people against the crimes of Obama, Trump and now Biden/Harris. https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/05/tulsi-gabbard-calls-out-the-us-dirty-war-on-syria-that-biden-aides-admit-to/
Ecuador:Ben Norton was in Ecuador during and after the first election on Feb. 7. He exposed Yaku Perez as a "woke" fraud. A number of "woke" inteligencia in the U.S. wrote a letter denouncing Norton and this is Norton's response. It is one of the most coherent, well researched, rebuttals I have ever read. In the process he exposes the actions of his accusers and lists their self-serving actions as they cater to the power elites of the globe, particularly, Latin America. Norton also gives a lot of background into Yaku Perez's wife, a French/Brazilian dripping with cutting edge "woke" identity and a consistent supporter of corporate and right wing powers. Norton gives us a multi-faceted look at the face of our "liberal" enemy which peels off especially young idealists and turns them against the true people's movements such as in Bolivia and Ecuador. It's not working there but it's not over.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/01/academic-letter-censor-grayzone-ecuador-yaku-perez/
The third piece in this trifecta by Anya Parampil and Max Blumenthal is about "Jimmy" Story, fake U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, stationed in Bogota, Colombia, also a "must read". Gives plenty of Story's history through Obama, Trump and now Biden. Starts with an account of Story's pig barbecue party/meeting at his Bogota home with Colombian and Venezuelan coup plotters to talk more about how to....wait for it... overthrow Maduro. https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/03/virtual-ambassador-venezuela-hosts-insurrectionist-bidens-guaido/

The Grayzone has become the best site for investigative journalism by North Americans especially regarding U.S. imperial actions in Latin America. Aaron Mate is the top guy on Russiagate which also leads into many topics; Ukraine, Syria, Euro shenanigans.

[Mar 06, 2021] This proposition requires the occupied bartering away their land and amending their borders, always for the benefit of the illegal occupier. These 'negotiations' are expressly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions. Every functioning government in the world knows this.

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Paul , Mar 4 2021 21:57 utc | 37

Thanks b for the research and journalism.

One of the favourite tropes of the transparent cabal who have seized power in the US and other captive nations is that the solution to the Palestine/Israel problem is "the path to peace is through direct negotiations.'

This proposition requires the occupied bartering away their land and amending their borders, always for the benefit of the illegal occupier. These 'negotiations' are expressly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions. Every functioning government in the world knows this.

The alien invaders are under an obligation to simply get out. Every 'agreement' is null and void.

The New Zealand government and the NZ superannuation fund has recently decided to divest their investments in Israeli banks citing international law, the Geneva Conventions and reputation damage as key factors.

Read the decision making document here:

https://www.nzsuperfund.nz/assets/documents/responsible-investment/R-GNZS-IC-Paper-Exclusion-of-Israeli-Banks-January-2021.pdf

Expect a MSM wall of silence on this one.

It is sheer hypocrisy for the usual suspects to talk about human rights, rules based international law, democracy and our values, while advocating the opposite policies in the middle east.

Is it possible they actually believe their own propaganda and their own lies through Bernays like repartition?

[Mar 06, 2021] If Russia and China really ever formed a bloc Europe and several countries in the Middle East and Asia would immediately switch firmly into the American camp and form a bloc, too. That`s precisely what Washington wants!

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

m , Mar 5 2021 10:33 utc | 87

@4 dsfco
If Russia and China really ever formed a bloc Europe and several countries in the Middle East and Asia would immediately switch firmly into the American camp and form a bloc, too. That`s precisely what Washington wants!

Bejing does the opposite, making deals with key allies of the USA, like recently the EU, Japan, Australia, New Zealand (RCEP) etc. - thus stalling the US efforts. The "Eurasian Bloc" is a Russian wet dream but it`s not in the interest of China.

@42 Passer by
You are reading this wrong. It says in sweet EU diplomacy talk: "Accept a partnership on equal level if you want our continued support."

[Mar 06, 2021] The US could also suffer damage.But then the US has also never been shy about losing lives in the US to maintain its hegemony

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Lucci , Mar 5 2021 9:43 utc | 86

[The US could also suffer damage.But then the US has also never been shy about losing lives in the US to maintain its hegemony.

Interesting times ahead. The US goal of full spectrum dominance is on schedule and raring to go.

Posted by: jiri | Mar 5 2021 3:57 utc | 73]

The US do not have a functional Nuclear Shelters for their citizens. That's a first.
It's also do not have nuclear proofed infrastructure such as power infrastructure, farms, water system, etc.
It doesn't have citizens cohesion necessary to survive shattered government authorities (easy to riot, looting, and murdering happen. Too divided)
Nor it trained or can be controlled in any nuclear warfare scenario protocols to reorganize and rebuild (recent covid measures reveals their Karen mentality).
It never have or achieve food securities and independence.
It never have energy independence.
It's industrial sector hollowed up with middle managerial class the one that have the knowledge to ensure their crews and workers can remain in production rapidly aging and or moving aboard with no replacement due to corporate 'restructuring' culture (no regular s became senior enough to have their level of experience).
I can go on and on of how delusional your statement is but I'll just stop for now because it's dumb when you have to specifically point this out.


The only one that can take nuclear war and win their race for rebuilding perhaps just Russia.

[Mar 06, 2021] The difference between Soviet and China political leadership

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Mar 4 2021 23:27 utc | 45

Mao Cheng Ji @ 39:

Soviet leaders were of the people as you say, yes, but when you drill into the details of their careers before they became General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, you find they had careers as political administrators and propagandists. Only Leonid Brezhnev had a technical background. They were the early equivalents of people like former UK Prime Minister David Cameron who went straight into the British Conservative Party after leaving Oxford University with typical graduate qualifications for a career party hack and who for a time worked for a media communications company; or like current Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison who worked in marketing executive roles in which his most outstanding qualities were his sheer ineptitude and flouting procurement guidelines.

From Nikita Khrushchev onwards, all General Secretaries with the exceptions of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko (neither of whom lasted long as leaders) had some personal or family connection with the Ukrainian SSR. This may not have been coincidence: it may suggest that there was a network of individuals selecting future leaders for promotion based on close personal career connections.

Until recently most people in the most senior levels of the Communist Party of China , from whom China's leaders are drawn, had technical, engineering or scientific backgrounds. Current members are now drawn from most walks of life though several of them have worked in factories or done manual labour at some point in their working lives.

[Mar 06, 2021] Some still think that the collapse of the USSR was a tragedy

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Smith , Mar 6 2021 0:02 utc | 54

As a south east asian myself, I do think the east asians really aren't the way forward, not until Korea is united, Vietnam and China rid themselves of "to be rich is to be glorious" Dengists, Japan free of LDP and American sock puppetry. I'm also VERY wary of chinese reactionaries who speak of Confucianism.

Maybe the grass is always greener on the other side, but I look favorably to the slavs and their culture, and of course the shining beacon that was the USSR and the 2nd world until 1991 fucks everything up.


Smith , Mar 6 2021 0:18 utc | 58

@ james

Taoism nowadays is basically superstitions. The historical taoist practiced by the ancient and medieval chinese political class is basically free market libertarianism "just let the market regulates itself bruh".

There's a reason that most of the greatest chinese emperors practice legalism (Qin Shi Huang, Liu Bang, Han Wudi), which is direct government intervention in all matters, especially in market and infrastructure, while the Taoist-leaned dynasty (i.e. the Song) resulted in mysticism and the take-over of China by the khitdan and then mongols.

In the West, "Taoism" and "Buddhism" are rebranded as some kind of new age exotic philosophies, but in Asia proper, Taoism is kookery and Buddhism is militarist/nationalist state religion, see Myanmar and Thailand.

karlof1 , Mar 6 2021 0:27 utc | 61

james @55--

I see you qualify your comment by specifying Hong Kong Chinese. They most certainly are not Mainlanders and have a culture polluted by British Imperialism that's closer to the Gangsterism of Chiang Kai-shek than Mao's Collectivism.

You may recall the book and video Affluenza that does a good job of explaining how traditional conservative mores are assaulted and trampled by affluent modernity. Such outcomes aren't restricted to North America but are global thanks to human similarity.

If one were to develop a moral equivalency chart evaluating all global cultures and major sub-cultures, you'd see a majestic hodge-podge with very little uniformity, which also relates to the very uneven state of human development in all its facets. The great task of humanity over the next several centuries is to peacefully level out those disparities. But as I wrote on the Shia thread, the remaining Imperialist nations are a very large impediment in attaining that goal and need to be removed so humanity can evolve.

LurkingDragon , Mar 6 2021 1:17 utc | 66

There is no reason to speculate. Chinese culture, history, stories, have the answers.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, for example, has:

3 brothers who are put forwards as "godly". There is a celebrated image of the three of them making the vow of brotherhood in an orchard. The leader, Liu Bei, is a prince of the declining dynasty. He basically constantly virtue signals, but basically mostly does as the rest, which is fight, kill, and grab other people's territories. His two other brothers include a psycho drunk and a supremely self satisfied other. They look good next to a character like Cao Cao;

the intelligentsia are basically bunch of self satisfied gurus of varying degrees of competence that compete with devising deception schemes against other kingdoms.

the military is hardcore, brutal. also stuck on formations, aesthetics, which can be a weakness.

the general population are docile cattle.

What the world hasn't seen for 2 centuries is the famous Chinese arrogance that was their reputation until they truly pooped the pooch of their country with the arrival of Jews and Europeans.

A certain fragrance of superstition and sentimentality also is always present, at various degrees.

Obsequious to superiors, inhuman to inferiors. This is what you can expect from a world order with Chinese characteristics.

Carl Denis Stephan , Mar 6 2021 1:32 utc | 68

Lurking Dragon 66
Obsequious to superiors, inhuman to inferiors. This is what you can expect from a world order with Chinese characteristics.

Well, this is what we are seeing from our western "partners" as was bestowed upon the globe by so many self righteous defenders of human rights, democracy and the "white man's burden"

See for an example Halliburton's mercenaries, ISIS and other creepy creatures invented and bestowed upon civilisation by people that believe that if you are not jewish, you are not human and, therefore, can be dispensed at will if of no use to the chosen ones.

Smith , Mar 6 2021 1:32 utc | 69

@ james

Yes, the western hippie generation is very fueled by drugs and new age philosophies. But note that these rebranded exotic religions do not resemble the native ones.

For example in Asia proper, you have actual deities to worship in Taoism, and it's not just a philosophy waxing about the Dao like in the west.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daode_Tianzun

And Taoist priests are still an actual thing, and you can hire them to check Feng Shui and even exorcism.

Still, it's superstitions and money making schemes, and I wouldn't put much trust in them.

Bemildred , Mar 6 2021 1:36 utc | 70

Obsequious to superiors, inhuman to inferiors. This is what you can expect from a world order with Chinese characteristics.

Posted by: LurkingDragon | Mar 6 2021 1:17 utc | 66

That sounds pretty much like every job I have had here in the USA all of my life. (Except the union jobs.) There is a reason they hate unions, especially ones that have not been domesticated yet.)

Jen , Mar 6 2021 4:15 utc | 77

James @ 55:

Hong Kong culture is very different from the culture of Mainland China, thanks in no small part to HK having once been a link between China and the rest of the world for a long time and becoming very wealthy as a manufacturing and financial services centre as a result. HK people are very materialistic and status-conscious, and look down on other Chinese (to say nothing of what they think of other Asians and other non-white people) who do not speak HK Cantonese. The only people HK people respect are English-speaking white British and Americans.

My parents visited HK back in the 1990s and my mother tried speaking Taishanese (our native language: it is related to Cantonese and is spoken just west of the Pearl River delta not far from Macau, in Guangdong province) to shop assistants. They ignored her and it was only when she switched to English that their attitude changed dramatically and fell over one another to help.

Before the 1980s, huge numbers of Cantonese people living in English-speaking countries were actually Taishanese speakers. My parents visited San Francisco's Chinatown in 1988 and nearly everyone they came across spoke Taishanese. It was the dominant language there.

Jason , Mar 6 2021 5:41 utc | 80

My dad's second (and current) wife is Chinese. He met her online in the late 90's, and she moved with her young son to Wisconsin and married him around 2000.

I think my dad was looking for a docile women after his previous marriage and girlfriends, and on the surface, Xue Lin seemed docile...in reality she is not docile, but subtle, a characteristic I found true of her, her son and the Chinese people I have met thru them. Nobody ever got my dad to work as hard or be as frugal as she!

They came over with money and bailed my dad out of a tax mess. She still owns apartment buildings in China. Both are very hard working, smart and frugal, but not materialistic.

Jake (her son) and I ended up being pretty close. He received an MBA from the University of Wisconsin and worked in the natural gas business in Texas before moving back to China where I've had the pleasure of visiting him.

My impression of China and the Chinese is largely positive, the extreme work ethic can be a bother given I am a pothead hippy slacker. There is a lot of optimism and energy there, it makes the USA feel like a barbaric backwater country whose best days are past.

Jason , Mar 6 2021 5:52 utc | 81

@66
Sounds like projection. You have nicely described my experience in the USA! Aside from my union jobs, it has been kiss up and kick down...even self-employed.

"A certain fragrance of superstition and sentimentality also is always present, at various degrees." Growing up in a small, conservative religious town, this is a great description of my experience.

I will say, the general American population isn't docile, but are herded about like cattle none the less. I'd also say the Chinese aren't so much docile as they are subtle, which I believe is far more effective than rowdy but dumb.

vk , Mar 6 2021 15:52 utc | 98

... ... ...

The stereotype of the Chinese as the greedy merchant in SE Asia comes from the colonial era. Western colonization of China created a Chinese comprador elite who was allowed many commercial privileges within the Mainland (as middlemen) but also in the SE Asian region. As every Latin American well know, comprador elites are the worst of the worst. No wonder the peoples of Indonesia, Philippines etc. etc. see the Chinese as a negative force in their countries.

The same is true for the stereotype of the Chinese as a mafioso in Latin America: the Chinese who emigrated to Latin America are mainly triad and hyper-capitalists from Taiwan or pre-communist China (who may or may not have indirectly come from Taiwan in later decades).

The same is true for the stereotype of the Chinese as the arrogant, pro-laissez faire upper middle class individualist in Canada, USA, Australia and Western Europe in the modern times. They are most tourists and/or a selected bunch of upper middle class Chinese who are lured into real estate schemes in those countries (Australia, Vancouver etc.).

As we can see, peoples make up stereotypes of other peoples based on small and heavily skewed samples. That's why we have statistics, and they tell us the Chinese are one of the most if not the most down-to-Earth, non-religious, socialist and tolerant peoples of the world today.

[Mar 06, 2021] Not agreement capable

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Mar 6 2021 0:38 utc | 62

arby #56

Are you gonna believe what I tell you or are you gonna believe what you see, comes to mind.

I believe what I see and I don't see the USA doing any bridge building, even in its own country where bridge infrastructure is in serious decay.

I repeat: These are not normal people in charge. They have lost their minds.

Maybe once a long time ago the USA diplomatic corp was supported by elected officials that set out to make allies based on mutual respect. But those days are long gone. The only bridges the USA builds is munition supply channels, be it by air or by sea. They destroy physical and metaphorical bridges in every nation they occupy.

The USA builds walls and barriers and obstruction: at home at the Mexican border, in the capital state, by economic sanctions illegally applied throughout the world, by destroying its home regulatory system to keep poisoned citizens from seeking judicial or regulatory redress for pollution and human suffering.

I see a mendacious, failed state surrounding its elected officials and financial institutions and even suburbs with walls and barriers. Then they attack people who criticise them in moderately peaceful ways. That is who they are, that is what I see.

[Mar 04, 2021] The top-10 Russian billionaires are worth an estimated $180 billion. As per the Moscow times, "Russia's ultra-wealthy have increased their net worth by nearly $500 million in 2020 "

Mar 04, 2021 | www.unz.com

antibeast , says: March 4, 2021 at 12:24 pm GMT • 14.0 hours ago

@chris access to the natural resources of Russia? Why should the USA sanction Russia for building the Nord Stream II pipeline which would carry Russian natural gas to Europe? Western hostility to Putin's Russia is predicated not on lack of Western access to Russia's natural resources but on Putin's buildup of Russian military might based on its nuclear arsenal, hypersonic missiles, missile defense systems and fifth-generation fighter jets.

Russian military power is the main obstacle to the complete domination of Europe by the USA Empire. Only by 'neutralizing' Russian military power could the US Deep State achieve its dreams of conquering Europe which is exactly what NATO aims to do.

Sean Ryan , says: Website March 4, 2021 at 9:07 pm GMT • 5.2 hours ago

I'm no fan of the greedy Davos bunch, nor of the rising inequality across the globe.
And this is not a defense of their actions, which are causing global financial crises.
But Russia and Putin are no better, nor answers to those growing inequalities of the "West".
Russian billionaires and Aristocrats, whom Putin answers to, are just as bad as their American counterparts.

Ditto for Chinese Billionaires.
And Indian Billionaires.
And so on

Take a look at the following chart from the World Inequality Database:
https://wid.world/country/russian-federation/
That inequality in Russia has exploded since 1991.
Similar to most countries.

The top-10 Russian billionaires are worth an estimated $180 billion. As per the Moscow times, "Russia's ultra-wealthy have increased their net worth by nearly $500 million in 2020 "
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/12/01/russian-billionaires-see-500mln-windfall-in-2020-a72202

What interests me most, is not only how the 1% are complaining more & more about their own 1% making greater strides, but how many more global billionaires are complaining of how much less they have compared to the wealthiest global billionaires.

Meanwhile billions are living in true poverty.

Regardless whether "free market", "socialism" or "communism", greed currently rules.
And the "capitalists" (wealth-hoarders) of each of those economies are using their wealth to influence governmental & public policy to their advantage, for special-interest legislation to gain ever-more wealth.

I firmly believe in the right to make money, and in reaping the rewards of hard work & true innovation, but there are limits.
Even the "Father of Laissez-faire economics", Adam Smith, warned of the consequences of unfettered wealth hoarding.

"Capitalists" themselves are destroying capitalism.

Every economy requires spending, to continue to thrive & grow.
The more a few have & hoard, the less the more have to spend, to keep an economy healthy.
We are currently witnessing the consequences of that hoarding.
Thus the massively increasing rises of the massive Everything Bubbles, which will certainly eventually pop.

A pandemic not often talked about is the seeming global human insecurities I see continuing to grow.
Humans unable to face their own mortality, or their own self-worth, minus massive wealth.

[Mar 04, 2021] Putin Blasts W.E.F. Honchos at Davos Gabfest, by Mike Whitney

Mar 04, 2021 | www.unz.com

At the end of January, Putin was given the opportunity to address the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland (online). The WEF is a prestigious assembly of political leaders, corporatists and billionaire elites many of who are directly involved in the massive global restructuring project that is currently underway behind the smokescreen of the Covid-19 pandemic. Powerful members of the WEF decided that the Coronavirus presented the perfect opportunity to implement their dystopian strategy which includes a hasty transition to green energy, A.I., robotics, transhumanism, universal vaccination and a comprehensive surveillance matrix that detects the location and activities of every human being on the planet. The proponents of this universal police state breezily refer to it as "The Great Reset" which is the latest make-over of the more familiar, "New World Order". There's not a hairsbreadth difference between the Reset and one-world government which has preoccupied billionaire activists for more than a century. This is the group to which Putin made the following remarks:

"I would like to speak in more detail about the main challenges ..the international community is facing . The first one is socioeconomic .. Starting from 1980, global per capita GDP has doubled in terms of real purchasing power parity. This is definitely a positive indicator. Globalisation and domestic growth have led to strong growth in developing countries and lifted over a billion people out of poverty .Still, the main question is what was the nature of this global growth and who benefitted from it most ..

developing countries benefitted a lot from the growing demand for their traditional and even new products. However, this integration into the global economy has resulted in more than just new jobs or greater export earnings. It also had its social costs, including a significant gap in individual incomes . According to the World Bank, 3.6 million people subsisted on incomes of under $5.50 per day in the United States in 2000, but in 2016 this number grew to 5.6 million people.. ..

Meanwhile, globalisation led to a significant increase in the revenue of large multinational, primarily US and European, companies In terms of corporate profits, who got hold of the revenue? The answer is clear: one percent of the population .

And what has happened in the lives of other people? In the past 30 years, in a number of developed countries, the real incomes of over half of the citizens have been stagnating, not growing . Meanwhile, the cost of education and healthcare services has gone up. Do you know by how much? Three times

In other words, millions of people even in wealthy countries have stopped hoping for an increase of their incomes. In the meantime, they are faced with the problem of how to keep themselves and their parents healthy and how to provide their children with a decent education .

These imbalances in global socioeconomic development are a direct result of the policy pursued in the 1980s , which was often vulgar or dogmatic. This policy rested on the so-called Washington Consensus with its unwritten rules, when the priority was given to the economic growth based on a private debt in conditions of deregulation and low taxes on the wealthy and the corporations .

As I have already mentioned, the coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated these problems. In the last year, the global economy sustained its biggest decline since WWII. By July, the labour market had lost almost 500 million jobs . In the first nine months of the past year alone, the losses of earnings amounted to $3.5 trillion. This figure is going up and, hence, social tension is on the rise." (" Session of Davos Agenda 2021Online Forum, Putin Addresses World Economic Forum, Jan 27, 2021)

Why is Putin telling his elitist audience these things? Does he think these fatcats don't know how the system works or how it was originally set up? Does he think they are unaware of the glaring flaws in a system that shifts all of the profits to obscenely wealthy corporations and scheming elites while working people slip further into debt and desperation?

Putin knows how globalisation works, just as he knows who it was designed to benefit. It's no secret. Check out this quote from the Russian president in a speech nearly 5 years ago:

"Back in the late 1980s-early 1990s, there was a chance not just to accelerate the globalization process but also to give it a different quality and make it more harmonious and sustainable in nature. But some countries that saw themselves as victors in the Cold War, not just saw themselves this way but said it openly, took the course of simply reshaping the global political and economic order to fit their own interests.

In their euphoria, they essentially abandoned substantive and equal dialogue with other actors in international life, chose not to improve or create universal institutions, and attempted instead to bring the entire world under the spread of their own organizations, norms and rules. They chose the road of globalization and security for their own beloved selves, for the select few, but not for everyone." (President Vladimir Putin, Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club)

"To the victor belongs the spoils"? Isn't that what Putin is saying, that Washington figured its Cold War triumph entitled them to create a system whereby they could pillage and loot the rest of the world with impunity?

Indeed, that is precisely what he's saying. And he knows what he's talking about, too. Putin has followed developments in global trade for over 20 years. He knows the system is rigged and he knows who rigged it. And now he's telling them in no uncertain terms that they are responsible for the mess the world is in today. "The world is in crisis, because you fu**ed up." That's what he's saying. It's not a subtle message, he's simply laying it on the line. Check out this blurb from an earlier speech by Putin where he shows that he's not just a capable leader but also an astute critic of social trends linked to globalization:

"It seems like elites don't see the deepening stratification in society and the erosion of the middle class (but the situation) creates a climate of uncertainty that has a direct impact on the public mood. Sociological studies conducted around the world show that people in different countries and on different continents tend to see the future as murky and bleak . This is sad. The future does not entice them, but frightens them. At the same time, people see no real opportunities or means for changing anything, influencing events and shaping policy. As for the claim that the fringe and populists have defeated the sensible, sober and responsible minority – we are not talking about populists or anything like that but about ordinary people, ordinary citizens who are losing trust in the ruling class. That is the problem . " (President Vladimir Putin, Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club)

In this one brief comment, Putin shows that he has a better grasp of 'what is going on' in the west than any of the numbskulls in congress today. And notice how he ignores the hype about "racial justice", BLM, "white supremacy" and the other "racialized" bunkum that's propagated in the media today. He's not hoodwinked by that nonsense. He knows it's just another diversion promoted by the cadres of dirtbags who use race and identity politics to conceal their role in the ongoing class war. That's what's really going on. The men that Putin is addressing in his speech are the very same men who are doing everything in their power to eviscerate democracy, skewer the middle class and grind America's working population into dust. It's plain old class war dolled-up to look like racial unrest. Here's more from Putin:

" During the past 20 years we have created a foundation for the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (AKA–"The Great Reset") based on the wide use of AI and automation and robotics. The coronavirus pandemic has greatly accelerated such projects and their implementation . However, this process is leading to new structural changes, I am thinking in particular of the labor market. This means that very many people could lose their jobs unless the state takes effective measures to prevent this . Most of these people are from the so-called middle class, which is the basis of any modern society.

. The rise of economic problems and inequality is splitting society, triggering social, racial and ethnic intolerance . Indicatively, these tensions are bursting out even in the countries with seemingly civil and democratic institutions that are designed to alleviate and stop such phenomena and excesses.

The systemic socioeconomic problems are evoking such social discontent that they require special attention and real solutions. The dangerous illusion that they may be ignored or pushed into the corner is fraught with serious consequences." ( Putin, WEF)

Putin understands that the Covid-related lockdowns and closing of "non-essential" businesses is merely prelude for the massive societal restructuring project elites have in store for us. They've already put millions of people out of work and expanded their surveillance capabilities in anticipation of the social unrest they are deliberately inciting. Putin thinks this futuristic strategy is unnecessarily reckless, disruptive and fails to account for intensifying social animosities and widening political divisions that are bound to have a catastrophic impact on democratic institutions. But Putin also knows that his appeal for a more cautious approach will be brushed aside by the billionaire powerbrokers who set the policy and call the shots. Here's more:

" Society will still be divided politically and socially. This is bound to happen because people are dissatisfied not by some abstract issues but by real problems that concern everyone regardless of the political views that people have or think they have. Meanwhile, real problems evoke discontent. "

This is a recurrent theme with Putin and one that shows that he has a deeper understanding of what is really happening in both the United States and Europe than any of his peers. Populist candidates, like Trump, have not gained momentum due to thier abilities and charisma, but because the financial situation of millions of Americans continues to deteriorate forcing them to seek remedies outside the establishment candidates. The economic distress is real and widespread and, as Putin notes, it is expressing itself in outbursts of discontent, frustration and rage. Here's more:

"So, the key question today is how to build a programme of actions in order to not only quickly restore the global and national economies affected by the pandemic, but to ensure that this recovery is sustainable in the long run, relies on a high-quality structure and helps overcome the burden of social imbalances. Clearly economic growth will largely rely on fiscal incentives with state budgets and central banks playing the key role.

Actually, we can see these kinds of trends in the developed countries and also in some developing economies as well. An increasing role of the state in the socioeconomic sphere at the national level obviously implies greater responsibility and close interstate interaction when it comes to issues on the global agenda.

Calls for inclusive growth and for creating decent standards of living for everyone are regularly made at various international forums. This is how it should be, and this is an absolutely correct view of our joint efforts.

It is clear that the world cannot continue creating an economy that will only benefit a million people , or even the golden billion. This is a destructive precept. This model is unbalanced by default. The recent developments, including migration crises, have reaffirmed this once again." ( Putin, WEF )

Putin's recommendations, of course, are going to be dismissed with a wave of the hand by the men in power. The last thing these sociopaths want is "inclusive growth.. and decent standards of living for everyone." That's not even on their list, and why would it be. After all, they know what they want. "They want more for themselves and less for everyone else." (George Carlin) Which is why the system works the way it does, because it was constructed with that one solitary goal in mind.

Putin also acknowledges the need for greater state intervention in the economy to counterbalance the more destructive effects of "smash and grab" capitalism. And, while he rejects the swift and far-reaching structural changes (The Great Reset) that would precipitate massive social upheaval, he does support a larger role for the state in providing essential fiscal stimulus, employment and a more equitable distribution of the wealth. This does not imply that Putin supports state socialism. He does not. He merely supports a more regulated and benign form of Capitalism that veers from the "scorched earth" model backed by powerful members of the WEF and other elitist organizations.

With that in mind, Putin makes these specific recommendations:

"We must now proceed from stating facts to action, investing our efforts and resources into reducing social inequalit y in individual countries and into gradually balancing the economic development standards of different countries and regions in the world. This would put an end to migration crises."

The focus of this policy aimed at ensuring sustainable and harmonious development are clear. They imply the creation of new opportunities for everyone, conditions under which everyone will be able to develop and realize their potential regardless of where they were born and are living

I would like to point out four key priorities , as I see them.

First, everyone must have comfortable living conditions, including housing and affordable transport, energy and public utility infrastructure. Plus, environmental welfare, something that must not be overlooked.

Second, everyone must be sure that they will have a job that can ensure sustainable growth of income and, hence, decent standards of living. Everyone must have access to an effective system of lifelong education, which is absolutely indispensable now and which will allow people to develop, make a career and receive a decent pension and social benefits upon retirement.

Third, people must be confident that they will receive high-quality and effective medical care whenever necessary, and that the national healthcare system will guarantee access to modern medical services.

Fourth, regardless of the family income, children must be able to receive a decent education and realize their potential. Every child has potential." (Putin, Davos )

What does it mean that the current president of Russia is now throwing his weight behind a program that is nearly identical to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic Bill of Rights? Doesn't that seem a bit odd? After all, Putin is a devout Orthodox Christian, a strong proponent of the traditional family, a self-avowed social conservative, and a hardscrabble survivor of the failed Soviet state. Who would have thought that such a man would support a program that provides a decent standard living to every member of society regardless of their circumstances?

But it makes sense, doesn't it? Putin is pushing for a return to the heavily-regulated "Heyday" of 20th Century capitalism, when workers' wages were still on the rise, when college tuition and health care were still affordable, and when the American Dream was still within reach of the average guy. People were happier then, because they felt that if they applied themselves, worked like hell, and stashed their savings in the bank; they'd eventually reach their goal. But that's not true anymore. People are much more pessimistic now and no longer believe that America is the land of opportunity.

Putin wants to rekindle that optimism. He wants to avoid social unrest by implementing programs that provide a more equitable distribution of the wealth. This isn't a return to Communism. It's sensible way to soften the harsher effects of unrestrained capitalism , which is presently ravaging the West. Here's Putin again:

"This is the only way to guarantee the cost-effective development of the modern economy, in which people are perceived as the end, rather than the means . A strategy, also being implemented by my country, hinges on precisely these approaches. Our priorities revolve around people, their families, and they aim to ensure demographic development, to protect the people, to improve their well-being and to protect their health. We are now working to create favourable conditions for worthy and cost-effective work and successful entrepreneurship and to ensure digital transformation as the foundation of a high-tech future for the entire country, rather than that of a narrow group of companies.

We intend to focus the efforts of the state, the business community and civil society on these tasks and to implement a budgetary policy with the relevant incentives in the years ahead ." ( Putin, Davos )

Imagine a political leader who actually put the needs and well-being of his people before the special interests of his deep-pocket donors and shady corporate buddies. Imagine a leader who stood eye-to-eye with the big money guys and told them that their system "sucked" and that they were taking too much for themselves leaving nothing for anyone else. Imagine a leader who invited more criticism, hectoring, demonizing and punitive sanctions for "speaking truth to power" in order to stand on the side of ordinary working people, pensioners, cast-offs and the other victims of this globalist rip-off system.

The reason Putin spoke out at the WEF confab and put himself at risk, was because Putin is one of the "good guys" who actually believes that everyone deserves a shot at a decent life. And that's what sets Putin apart from the other leaders in the world today. He doesn't just "talk the talk", he also "walks the walk."


RG , says: March 3, 2021 at 4:45 am GMT • 1.9 days ago

IF the above comment by BHObama is really him he is arguing that we should hold the course of American exceptionalism and dominance. I personally, after 70 years of hearing how "we should tell the world that only we matter" and expect them to ignore their own needs and aspirations is why China (in particular) is on the rise and the 'myth of America' is crashing. The recent rebellion among people sick of the way things are heading (typified by the so-called tRUMP diversion) should serve as a wake up call that something is horribly wrong.

It wasn't tRUMP that was the problem nor was his idiocy a solution. It is the results of years of flagrant propaganda that created a nation that considers itself exceptional. We are exceptionally selfish and war like.

Anonymous [306] Disclaimer , says: March 3, 2021 at 5:06 am GMT • 1.9 days ago
@Rubicon

Had the US corporate/banking/Wall Street NOT MADE the egregious mistake with millions of jobs "offshored"

It was not a mistake. It was done consciously by design by the NWO ELITE CABAL, knowing the Consequences is going to bring to the 99.9%. The Transnational Globalist Elites do not have allegiance to a country any more. All they care about is more profit and power.

Majority of One , says: March 3, 2021 at 7:20 am GMT • 1.8 days ago

After reading Putin's statements and Whitney's commentaries, I am further convinced that whenever some individual or organization constantly and consistently badmouths Putin and Russia ; these messages come from the enemies of humanity.

Vojkan , says: March 3, 2021 at 7:51 am GMT • 1.8 days ago
@Franz

It depends on what is meant by globalisation. Globalisation of trade is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that "trade" is not the operative word of the elites, "loot" is.

El Dato , says: March 3, 2021 at 8:18 am GMT • 1.8 days ago
@Barack Hussein Obama with as little friction as possible.

That thing doesn't exist. Every complex society in history has eventually collapsed and had to be regrown from a new basis. Trying to "design a system" is self-defeating. I guess one could rig governmental buildings with self destruct charges and sarin gas containers controlled by random nuclear decay to keep the monster in check and to shed useless load from time to time. "Schrödinger's Office Warmers". I'm going to patent that.

Anyway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Tainter's_critique

Showmethereal , says: March 3, 2021 at 12:22 pm GMT • 1.6 days ago

There is too much of a focus on "isms". Right policy is right policy no matter the system. But the ghosts of Cecil Rhodes still exist. There is a certain group that believes it is their divine right to rule over all others. There are some who dont belong to their group but will agree with them as long as they can reap crumbs. Hence the struggles in the world. God alone will eventually "fix" the problems of man. Until then it is a constant squabble.

bayviking , says: March 3, 2021 at 2:23 pm GMT • 1.5 days ago

The premise that Putin is not the dangerous evil that the US Military Industrial Complex makes him out to be, is certainly valid. He is trying to carve out a profitable role for Russia in the future, that depends on participation in Western economies. Germany is on board with that, but not the USA.

But, like claiming Trump is a populist, there is a certain naivety in suggesting Putin is an advocate for the common man. I agree with all his words, which fall on deaf ears in the West, but like Trump, Putin takes care of himself first. Trump sought to destroy universal health care and was able to pass another tax cut for the rich, designed by the Aynn Rand nutcase Paul Ryan.

Still it should be recognized that when Clinton and Larry Summers bamboozled Russia into reorganizing their society into a dozen Oligarchs, the average Russian suffered greatly, which ultimately led to Yeltsin resigning in tears and handing the reins of Government over to Putin. Under Putin the average Russian income doubled.

Meanwhile, the USA is doing its best to reignite the cold war. Given our engineered reliance on Chinese goods today, this doesn't make a lot of sense. These Putin speeches make a lot of sense yet contradict the current economic structure of Russia and China today, not just the West.

For those of us in the West taxing the rich is a partial solution to designing a sustainable economy, which promotes the general welfare, as declared in our constitution. This is an issue which only Sanders, Warren and a fresh delegation of progressive representatives support today. They are still a minority.

Temporary Insanity , says: March 3, 2021 at 2:58 pm GMT • 1.5 days ago

""To the victor belongs the spoils"? Isn't that what Putin is saying, that Washington figured its Cold War triumph entitled them to create a system whereby they could pillage and loot the rest of the world with impunity?"

Mike Whitney , says: March 3, 2021 at 3:09 pm GMT • 1.5 days ago

Putin is an Orthodox Christian and I greatly admire that.

He is also pro family, pro traditional values and a social conservative.

But some people might think that his conservative leanings make him more "free market" than he really is.

Putin does not worship the market or the people who are able to exploit the system to their own advantage. Remember, in order to put Russia back on the right track, Putin had to reign in the oligarchs who had split up the country's wealth under Yeltsin leaving the economy in dire straits.

This is the lesson that Putin has for us all: If you can't reign in the Bill Gates, George Soros and other cutthroat oligarchs who want to own and control everything, than you are not going to have a free and prosperous society .

I was hoping that Trump would meet Putin so Putin could give him so pointers on this issue. But now the oligarchs have their puppet in the White House so we're screwed.

the grand wazoo , says: March 3, 2021 at 3:18 pm GMT • 1.5 days ago

I've been admiring Putin for several years now. However I can't get one particular thought out of my head. And it goes to Trump too. Why did he give his credence to Covid19? Why hasn't he, or any major leader, stood up to the 'science' and rebuked the world wide reaction to this obvious psy-op? I'm not saying there isn't a set of symptoms (and that's the CDC definition) that define Covid19. What I'm saying is what any one with a thinking brain is pondering: Why is everyone wearing a useless mask, closing their pub, standing on a specific X when in line, bumping elbows, and acting like a certain type of cattle? Why is MSM dedicating 50 minutes of every hour to a set of symptoms we have all lived with our entire life? I'll answer my own question. Remember 911 and the news coverage then? If you don't let me remind you. It was 24/7 Osama Bin Laden, Iraq Iraq Iraq, Muslim bad, weapons of mass destruction. Over and over again. And today we are living with the consequences of our silent acquiescence. And if you don't know what the consequences were you haven't been on an airplane. There's a reason the media reports the way they do. It's not really reporting, it's a particular method, a method of indoctrination, previously known as brainwashing. Ala Edward Bernays.
We have been criminally assaulted by Big Tech, the MMSM, and corrupt politicians, and there should be consequences.

anarchyst , says: March 3, 2021 at 3:53 pm GMT • 1.4 days ago
@the grand wazoo

COVID-19 was a brilliant tactic used by the world oligarchs to facilitate "the great reset".

Irish Savant , says: Website March 3, 2021 at 4:16 pm GMT • 1.4 days ago
@Rubicon

It was NOT a mistake. Just ask Romney or Paul Ryan or any "American" CEO. The people behind the offshoring knew exactly what would happen. How could they not? They didn't care as long as they made personal fortunes out of it.

Paul Greenwood , says: March 3, 2021 at 5:15 pm GMT • 1.4 days ago

Go back to the London Conference 1953 and see how The West rigged export surpluses in West Germany's favour together with 66.2% Debt Reduction and limits on repayments to permit export surpluses.

This deal alone guaranteed Trade Deficits in UK and USA and a violation of IMF and GATT rules on persistent trade surpluses. Look how Germany had an undervalued D-mark made convertible in 1957 and not until 1972 did USA try to reverse it with a Forced Revaluation of D-Mark. That is when the Werner Plan put the EEC on course for a Single Currency. – which 1991 Germany locked in at an undervalued rate against D-Mark thus gaining persistent surpluses when Unification should have meant trade deficits.

Distortions of World Trade to serve Western geopolitical interests led directly to higher inflation in USA and UK which required OPEC to recycle surpluses through Western Banks into Second World economies. The distortions are what skewed global trade and currency crises for 50 years.

Globalisation was simply a means of exploiting cheap labour and welfare standards to FINANCIALISE the economic system and facilitate Unbalanced Budgets in The West consistently and on an upward trend.

China has simply exploited The West and accessed technology and manufacturing capacity to render The West a non-industrial society of paper-shufflers and transaction-traders wholly dependent on China for physical goods

steinbergfeldwitzcohen , says: March 3, 2021 at 5:31 pm GMT • 1.4 days ago
@the grand wazoo more of the same? Bomb Syria. Check. More troops to Syrian and Afghanistan. Check. More sanctions on Russia. Check.

In Syria, they are stealing 140,000 barrels-day. That is a Trump legacy. But Bidet is doubling down. They now have 11 bases in Iraqi Kurdistan-North Syria province. They seem to want to create a de facto country in North Syria.

They are also focusing on Thailand and Myanmar. This is fundamentally 'If we can't have it, we destroy it.' And a f#ck you to China.

I expect that under Bidet we are going to see Israel dictate American Foreign policy to the point where the U.S. is no more than a Thug. BiBi the Clown faces another election. I wonder how that will play out?

Showmethereal , says: March 3, 2021 at 6:16 pm GMT • 1.3 days ago
@GMC is why they stepped in to help Syria. Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa – the real reason it was invaded is because Gaddafi had been influencing African leaders to switch Africa to a gold standard and to price all African commodities in a new African currency. That would have pushed out France and the US economic influence over Africa. So for that he had to die – and now Libya is among the worst places in Africa. But France reaped what it sowed. Refugees on top of refugees using Libya as their spring board.

Europeans should thank Putin because the refugee problem could be even worse from Syria right now. But they have themselves to blame anyway.

Proud_Srbin , says: March 3, 2021 at 8:50 pm GMT • 1.2 days ago
@Vojkan

Christianity is actually more humane than leftist secular humanism or any of its ideological offsprings.

Did anyone compare number of victims during Christian forced conversions, inquisition and compare it to victims of other ideologically inspired terror and atrocities?
Orthodox dogma is VERY VERY different from Vatican or Protestants that is much closer to Plato's time when God and Mother Nature were synonymous.

chris , says: March 3, 2021 at 9:00 pm GMT • 1.2 days ago
@Franz investment in clandestine media control in Russia (Max Blumenthal article), sanctions, Syria, the neocons are circling Russia and getting ready to strike and Putin is going to this Davos dufus derby talking about stagnant US wages. There's a deafening lack of focus here.

The whole point with Russia, in case some might have missed it, is that the Empire sees the need to control Russia as an existential priority. Not just to eliminate it as a threat but because they know that if China has free access to Russia's natural resources, the Empire is finished.

It's for this reason that I think that if Putin doesn't see this, he's ceded the field already.

frontier , says: March 3, 2021 at 10:31 pm GMT • 1.2 days ago
@Anonymous derstands this now, but Russia is still stuck at the reaction part of the problem-reaction-solution cycle. They are being bombarded with problems and can't catch a break. I see some attempts by the Russian government to form some sort of a political line and seek real political allies but it looks like they are being blocked by Germany and the Russian oligarchs. We shall see.

Mike Whitney is reading way too much into Putin's Davos speech, it's simple politics – praise globalization some to make Xi happy, poo-poo it some to appeal to the average Westerner, add happy talk about fairness, stir, not shake and serve cold – there's nothing more to it.

anonymous [400] Disclaimer , says: March 3, 2021 at 10:34 pm GMT • 1.2 days ago

For all these many years now Putin has been relentlessly demonized as a thug, dictator, threat, you name it. Many Americans have bought into these images under the influence of the American propaganda machine. One can see the reason for this campaign when one looks at what he actually says. Americans might get some idea that a president should be looking out for their interests and that would be bad. Putin can give speeches, field questions, give his personal analysis on different subjects whilst standing on his feet. Compare him to the current addled mental midget we have and note the vast difference.

antibeast , says: March 3, 2021 at 11:35 pm GMT • 1.1 days ago
@chris oy the USA. In an ideal world, the US Deep State would like the USA Empire to have an exclusive monopoly on nuclear weapons while preventing other geopolitical rivals from acquiring nuclear weapons. That is exactly what happened at the end of WWII when Truman decided to drop two atomic bombs on Japan to intimidate Stalin who frantically embarked on a nuclear weapons program.

What the Yanks wants to do is to 'defang' the Russian bear so they no longer have to fear Russian nukes, without which Russia would no longer pose an 'existential threat' to the USA. The Yanks could then do anything, such as bomb any country they want and pretty much rule the world, FOREVER.

Avery , says: March 4, 2021 at 12:35 am GMT • 1.1 days ago
@chris

{" What shocked me then about Trump, and now about Putin is that they don't seem to get it, this isn't some kind of friendly game of Cricket or something, their opponents don't just want to beat them they want to destroy them "}

Don't be fooled by Putin & Co speeches to the West.
Don't be fooled either by them using terms like "our partners" and such.
Russian leadership got a rude awaking after Yeltsin: Putin is quite aware of what GloboSorosaNATO is trying to do. He is a former KGB officer posted to East Germany and knows quite a lot about West/NATO mindset.

anon [298] Disclaimer , says: March 4, 2021 at 1:06 am GMT • 1.1 days ago
@Flying Dutchman han to its own? And particularly a people that suffers from the mania of objectivity as much as the Germans. For, after all this, everyone will take the greatest pains to avoid doing the enemy any injustice, even at the peril of seriously besmirching and even destroying his own people and country.

Now it is entirely unlikely that a KGB agent cum President of Russia is ignorant of matters relating to propaganda.

Isn't it perfectly understandable that the whole country ends up by lending more credence to enemy propaganda, which is more unified and coherent, than to its own?

The inevitable conclusion in a world, where even the Ayatollah wears a face mask, is that this is all kabuki theatre. Donald A Thomson , says: March 4, 2021 at 2:03 am GMT • 1.0 days ago

...I concede that here's plenty of US racism expressed by wars of aggression against countries outside the USA but that's supported by all races within the USA and both main parties. In foreign policy, there's only one War Party, dedicated to ruling the world, in the most aggressive country on earth. That's nothing like the reality within the USA. Yanks don't want to treat other Yanks like they treat disobedient foreigners and they certainly don't want to copy Israeli Jews. [email protected]

steinbergfeldwitzcohen , says: March 4, 2021 at 3:48 am GMT • 22.6 hours ago
@Avery

Absolutely agree.
Russia lacks solid, political structures-from a written constitution and time honored customs and conventions-and Putin knows this. I thought his reforms were meant to address this area?

Russia needs some more time, some more babies and good men at the helm. We can hope.

chris , says: March 4, 2021 at 6:51 am GMT • 19.5 hours ago
@antibeast ct and practical causes than the more theoretical nuclear threats it poses.

Owning the significant Russian natural resources would make the US bullying of China, Europe, the Middle Eastern vassals all the more effective. Yeah, the official story might be nukes but the vastly more significant pay-off is the control of all the other actors. The proof is the fact that the neocons are absolutely in a frenzy about destroying Russia, and yet nuclear stuff never even comes up.

And if you wanted to neutralize a threat, you don't make a frontal attack on it, you would be better served to befriend the country and create better ties than to try to overtly destroy them.

[Mar 03, 2021] The Biden regime considers Russia its enemy Number One and Novalny poisoning false flag was created to legitimize additional sunctions on Russia

Mar 03, 2021 | www.unz.com

Originally from: America descends into virtual night, by Israel Shamir - The Unz Review

... ... ...

In this screenshot of his response in 2007, Mr Navalny bans somebody for being "a bugger and a kike". Still, Jews supported him all right when told by their betters. They didn't even mention his real anti-Jewish prejudice for they were (reasonably) afraid the Russian masses would see it as rather a feather in his cap. The Jews are in line with the obscure real power, and have to follow its demands, like the jesters before the king. The Covid plans for the world reset are more important for the Masters than Jewish sentiments, and Jewish leaders recognise that.

The Biden regime considers Russia its enemy Number One. Russia is in relatively good shape. Russians are on their way out of Covid mass hysteria. They have begun to dismantle the Covid measures. The rules are still there, but people sabotage them as they sabotaged Brezhnev's rules. They also have their own vaccine Sputnik-V which is an old-style vaccine without gene modification, as opposed to much of the Western stuff. I do not think it is necessary for health, but it could help citizens under the spell of Covid to recover and forget the lockdown nightmare.

Things began to move very fast after Biden was installed in the White House. After a year of delays caused by US sanctions, on Monday 25/01/2021 the Russian pipe-laying vessel Fortuna resumed its work off Denmark's shores on the undersea pipeline Nord Stream 2 to sell Russian gas directly to Europe bypassing the latest US colony, the Ukraine. The US wants Germany to stop the project and buy (more expensive) American gas instead. It would make Russia more vulnerable. Despite the sanctions, Germany refused to stop the project. At the same time, the Russians began to supply gas to Serbia creating a new line bypassing the Ukraine. At this time, the Biden regime employed the Navalny card.

The return of Alexei Navalny to Russia is part of a plan to undermine Russia. The immense power of Big Data and its social networks promoted his return as the new savior. But somehow it didn't work. Instead of the expected tens of thousands, only one or two thousand followers turned up at the airport, fewer than for a pop singer. He was promptly detained and arraigned for thirty days. It was anticipated, and his people published his new Gelenjik Palace film together with his call to demonstrate on 23/01.

The Russian internet had been saturated by YouTube pushing people to view it. The video had been offered endlessly, time after time, and the numbers of viewers allegedly grew into the billions. It was basically a psyops played by Google (the owner of YouTube) against Putin. Again, it didn't work.

I witnessed the demo on Saturday 23/01, and it was not particularly impressive. Being a day off, with a lot of people walking the streets and practically nobody carrying a poster or a slogan, it is difficult to estimate how many were actually demonstrating, but it was in the low thousands, as far as I could see. The police were well behaved; none of the rough justice we see meted out in Paris or Amsterdam, let alone Washington. The Navalny activists were also rather peaceful, excepting some marginal figures who were promptly arrested.

It seems that the Russians are not as silly as the Western planners expected them to be. In 1990 they, or their parents listened to Yeltsin's calls to throw off the privileged Communist rulers because they, the rulers, had it so good with cars, dachas, Western goods. They paid for this response with ten of the most awful years our generation experienced. Now they and their children are unlikely to smash their state and their life just because their president has (or has not) a palace. We shall see what the Russian state will do against inevitable future assaults.

Putin is a cautious statesman. He does not want to aggravate relations with the Biden regime, but the digital giants do not leave him many options. A Russian company gave a hand to the Parler social network that was deplatformed by Amazon, and it came back into being. Another Russian social network, Vkontakte , began to attract Western users. And Russia is not alone: Turkey's Erdogan hit Twitter , Pinterest and Periscope with advertising bans after they refused to follow Facebook and appoint a local representative to take down contentious posts under a new law aimed to pass the right to censure from the networks to the Turkish state. Russia plans to follow the Turks. China has its own networks and is immune to the Big Five pressure.

[Feb 28, 2021] In this video Mate and Max Blumenthal start by explaining how Twitter inadvertently boosted the Grayzone's explosive uncovering of the BBC, Bellingcat and others' programs designed to do what Russiagaters accuse Putin of doing; the difference is that Blumenthal gives evidence in the form of emails. impressive. bottom line, "R2P""Russia bad"... the wheels are falling off.

Feb 28, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

migueljose , Feb 28 2021 17:37 utc | 12

My apologies if this has already been posted. Aaron Mate continues to rise in stature-- IMO-- as he keeps digging into Russiagate and exposing deeper and deeper proof of U.S. and U.K. plots, programs and coverups regarding Russia. In this video Mate and Max Blumenthal start by explaining how Twitter inadvertently boosted the Grayzone's explosive uncovering of the BBC, Bellingcat and others' programs designed to do what Russiagaters accuse Putin of doing; the difference is that Blumenthal gives evidence in the form of emails. impressive. bottom line, "R2P""Russia bad"... the wheels are falling off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtQthwrWhqI

[Feb 28, 2021] Vladimir Putin's Very Bad Week

Feb 28, 2021 | www.counterpunch.org

BY STEVE O'KEEFE

Vladimir Putin's Very Bad Week

It's been a rough week for Russian Federation President, Vladimir Putin. The European Union imposed sanctions under Euro-Magnitsky; Australia is expected to pass its own Aussie-Magnitsky ; and imprisoned anti-corruption crusader, Alexei Navalny, is leading a growing Russian protest movement from behind bars. Oh yeah, Pussy Riot is back!

Putin is considered the richest man in the world for the amount of wealth he controls , not the amount he owns. Alexei Navalny is considered the bravest man in the world for returning to Russia after recovering from Novichok poisoning in Germany. Putin had Navalny's returning flight diverted to avoid mobs of protestors, then arrested Navalny at the airport.

Never lacking a certain Russian sense of humor, Putin charged Navalny, whom he calls "the blogger," with violating parole

... ... ...

Putin called the EU's bluff, expelling three E.U. diplomats from Russia during a visit by the EU's foreign minister, Josep Borrell, on February 5. Putin's pugnacious foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, spoke disapprovingly of the E.U. in a press conference standing right next to the humiliated minister. This is the same Lavrov seen laughing in a famous White House photo with U.S. President Donald J. Trump on the day after Trump fired FBI Director, James Comey.

With the E.U. suddenly voting 28-0 against Russia, with Joe Biden proclaiming "America is back," and with Tony Blinken promising Russia must pay for the recent SolarWinds cyber attack against the U.S., Vlad the Underpants Poisoner must be feeling his briefs getting uncomfortably snug.

As Putin desperately tries to wriggle out of the sanctions surrounding him and his oligarch buddies, he faces the ultimate decline in his fortune: the green new deal. The majority of Putin's wealth is still in the ground , and it's worthless if the world turns away from fossil fuels as quickly as it appears to be. Without the NORD-2 pipeline shipping gas from Russia to Germany, without the corrupt contracts to supply satellite nations with fuel, Russia has nothing to sell except tourism and nesting dolls.

Putin will encounter the same problem the nations of the Arab Spring encountered: domestic youth realizing their futures look nothing like the lives they see on their phones. The Russian people are not stupid. They know they're not enjoying the same quality of life as their European neighbors. Even though Western Democracies fail to provide for basic living needs, they are at least exciting and hold the possibility of getting unbelievably rich.

... ... ...

STEVE O'KEEFE is the author of several books, most recently Set the Page on Fire: Secrets of Successful Writers , from New World Library, based on over 250 interviews. He is the former editorial director for Loompanics Unlimited.

[Feb 27, 2021] Lavrov: Russia Has Information that US Plans to Stay in Syria Forever, Destroy the Country

Feb 27, 2021 | sputniknews.com

Lavrov's speech opens the opportunity for me to approach the decline of the American Empire from a more cultural/social point of view.

During WWII, after suffering its first decisive defeats, Hitler refused to retreat to the old borders, instead opting for a "stay and fight to the death/fight for every piece of land" strategy.

Sure, this option saved the Wehrmacht from massacres initially, but it would result in catastrophic defeats in the third phase of the war (after Kursk).

One of the reasons Hitler insisted with this failed strategy to the end was that, besides the "stabbed in the back" mythology of the interwar period, he didn't want to suffer the same humiliating defeat Napoleon did. Napoleon retreated suddenly after he failed to capture the Czarist government in Moscow, suffering heavy losses in the process. In his return home, he was politically dead.

Analogously, I think there is an element of "we don't want another Vietnam humiliation" in the American Empire nowadays. I think every POTUS after Vietnam has made a point of honor (and of political survival) to never admit defeat and never leave a country it is occupying.

However, this "stubbornness" is also a sign of decline of the POTUS Office:

Wage war: Biden blasted for picking a fight in Syria, letting minimum wage slide at home

The two factors are interlinked: Biden is not able to give his own people what it needs, so he's insisting on an adventure it doesn't need. The more the present and future POTUSes become impotent at home, the more they'll try to solve the Empire's inner contradictions abroad. In this case, the narrative is clear: if you want to get your USD 15.00 minimum wage, you have to invade Syria to get the wealth to back it up.

... ... ...

Posted by: vk | Feb 26 2021 14:17 utc | 3

Sputnik 's report on Lavrov presser after meeting with Afghanistan's FM vk linked @3, shows Russia's changed attitude toward the EU also extends to the Outlaw Empire. His "new" information could easily be based on all the Outlaw Empire's past post-WW2 occupational behavior. Furthermore, in his remarks prior to media questions , Lavrov mentioned the likely aims of the Outlaw Empire's Terrorist Foreign Legion known as ISIS:

"We have a common view that ISIS is a serious factor in the deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan. ISIS wants to enhance its influence, including in the northern provinces of Afghanistan, with a view to turning it into a bridgehead for expansion into Central Asia ." [My Emphasis]

I trust the transcript will be finished later today and include more info.

In contrast to what we know about Russia's changed attitude toward the EU, we know very little about its new stance aimed at the Outlaw Empire. Lavrov went well beyond repeating the usual lines about the Outlaw Empire's many violations of the UN Charter and charged:

"they are making the decision to never leave Syria, even to the point of destroying this country."

Of course, that was the initial plan for which there's plenty of evidence. But IMO, Russia's change in attitude is related to the mission given to ISIS, which it likely knows of thanks to its intel sources. ISIS is clearly the Outlaw Empire's Terrorist Foreign Legion and are only in Afghanistan because they were airlifted from Syraq. Putin just met with the Kyrgyz president and certainly talked about this menace aimed at the CSTO. An emergency meeting of Russia's Security Council was held today ostensibly to "discuss the situation around the Nagorno Karabakh peace settlement," but also surely including the illegal attack in Syria where only 4 minutes of warning were provided. Much of Putin's talk with the FSB two days ago centered on Terrorism, and we know Russia was directly attacked by the Outlaw Empire though its Terrorist Foreign Legion. IMO, those acts have been forgotten by the Outlaw Empire but not at all by Russia, and IMO they carry lots of weight in Russia's decision making. Nor will Russia have forgotten that Biden was involved up to his neck in organizing ISIS and other Terrorist groups to destroy Syria.

There's more to my assessment than the above; there's also the roots of the conflict to consider that's been ongoing since the mid 1800s and involves the other part of the Outlaw Empire, the UK, for they are the source of the Russophobia that now controls the EU's actions toward Russia as was already known and just reinforced by new revelations. Lavrov's accusation was made in a very public venue and cannot be ignored by the Outlaw Empire, and IMO is exactly the right accusation to make since the initial criminal cabal that launched the war on Syria are back in the saddle.

Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 26 2021 18:55 utc | 14

[Feb 27, 2021] I found Vernadsky's History of Russia to be the best balanced and most in-depth of all the histories of Russia I've read, somewhere around 3,000 pages in all

Feb 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Feb 26 2021 23:28 utc | 25

After reading Escobar's essay, I began trying to find all the volumes of Vernadsky's History of Russia which I read while self-learning Russian history in 1993 thanks to the University of Hawaii Manoa's libraries. The first volume is linked @21. Volume Two, Kievan Russia ; Volume Three, The Mongols and Russia ; Volume Four, Russia at the Dawn of the Modern Era ; Volume Five, The Tsardom of Moscow ; and his overview volume, A History of Russia . The series Vernadsky and his academic partner Michael Karpovich initially envisioned was never completely finished as Karpovich died in 1959, and Vernadsky passed in 1973.

I found the series to be the best balanced and most in-depth of all the histories of Russia I've read, somewhere around 3,000 pages in all. I suggest leaving the overview volume for last. Do enjoy!!

[Feb 27, 2021] Probably whatever Durham was investigating will receive a quiet burial

After all President Biden in 2016 was active participant of Russiagate false flag operation
Feb 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
gm , Feb 26 2021 22:54 utc | 24

Special Counsel John Durham Resigns as US Attorney – Effective February 28th -- Before Biden AG Merrick Takes Office

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/02/scammed-breaking-john-durham-resigns-effective-february-28th-biden-ag-takes-office/

Durham was investigating the Mueller Russia-Collusion coup against President Trump and his administration.
He was appointed as Special Counsel in October.

He resigned as US Attorney in Connecticut.

There will likely be no indictments after the Deep State spied on Trump and attempted to throw him from office.

[...]

Update 3:59 pm EST via Twitter/Chad Pergram:

"John Durham steps down as US Atty in CT. But stays on board as special counsel probing origins of Trump/Russia investigation. Biden Admin asked US attys to resign by end of February"

Probably means whatever Durham was investigating will receive a quiet burial.

[Feb 26, 2021] "Engagement with the world" and a "restoration of the pre-Trump era" was Biden's platform. Don't ask me why but this made him more popular. He was literally the VP in the most interventionist Presidency in US history.

Feb 26, 2021 | www.unz.com

Not Only Wrathful , says: February 26, 2021 at 11:13 am GMT • 15.4 hours ago

Biden has been a major disappointment for those who hoped that he'd change course regarding America's pathological involvement in overseas conflicts

Who hoped that? He didn't run on such a platform. "Engagement with the world" and a "restoration of the pre-Trump era" was his platform. Don't ask me why but this made him more popular. He was literally the VP in the most interventionist Presidency in US history.

... People like Giraldi sometimes seem like plants put in place to discredit anti-interventionism by trying to make it synonymous with anti-semitism.

Robjil , says: February 26, 2021 at 11:58 am GMT • 14.7 hours ago

Biden is a Israel firster like Pelosi. He has been one for a long time. He is an American laster like many presidents since 12.13.1913.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/02/13/bought-and-paid-for-bidens-long-history-pandering-to-the-israeli-lobby/


In the late 1980s, Rannie Amiri, an independent commentator on political affairs, challenged then-Senator Joe Biden on his stance toward the Israel-Palestine conflict following a campus speech that Biden gave, asking him:

Rather than succumb to the influence of various lobbying groups in Washington, such as AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee -- which promotes the views of Israel's right-wing Likud Party], and the untold amount of money they use to dictate policy, wouldn't it be more prudent to examine the real effects that collective punishment, daily humiliation, and countless civilian casualties inflicted by the Israelis have on an occupied population, and use that understanding to formulate a more rational approach toward the Palestinians?

Here is Biden response to that:

At the end of the exchange, Biden turned, put his arm around Amiri's shoulder, and addressed the audience.

If this was not such a fine, articulate, and sincere young man, and he implied that my vote had been bought, I would give him a swift kick in the ass.

The audience roared in applause, and Amiri sat back down to his chair defeated. However, a friend rose up to defend him, telling Biden: "If my father heard you say such a thing, I believe he would have done the same to you first."

The tribal stupidity of the people who support Israel first is beyond words. Who would think in the 20th and the 21th century we would be led by primitive thinking of tribal fantasies from thousands of year ago?

Most of the us in the west did not know that this has been going on for so long since we have been deluded with the term "free press" to describe our press in the west. We are slowly waking up to reality with some "freedom" here and there on the internet like this site.

Sick of Orcs , says: February 26, 2021 at 12:39 pm GMT • 14.0 hours ago

So, Biden has been a major disappointment for those who expected that he might change course regarding America's pathological involvement in overseas conflicts while also having the good sense and courage to make relations with countries like Iran and Israel responsive to actual U.S. interests.

You're giving the morons way too much credit, Sir. It's doubtful even 5% of voters know or care about geopolitics, and probably less than 1% who voted based on fraudsident biden's foreign policies.

For 5 years it was nonstop Trump-hatred from the ((( lügenpresse ))) even as Trump did weasel jared's bidding. Stevie Fking Wonder could see the election was rigged.

The USA is kaput, the supreme joke spineless

The ((( Underminers ))) are a c ** t-hair away from total control.

The Free United States must part ways with the devils in DC. Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, the Dakotas and Montana for starters.

Realist , says: February 26, 2021 at 1:53 pm GMT • 12.8 hours ago

Biden's Journey: Change Is Imperceptible

That's how it is with the two sides of the Deep State coin, Republican/Democrat heads they win, tails you lose. It's been that way for decades.

[Feb 26, 2021] The US bombs Syria and ridiculously claims self defense

Feb 26, 2021 | www.unz.com

annamaria , says:

Zarathustra , says: February 26, 2021 at 2:23 pm GMT • 12.3 hours ago

I do not understand.
US has no more proxy as Al Nusra. Sunni in the area are all dispersed.
US can bomb here and there but without boots on the ground he will get nowhere.
If Biden wants to please Israel than he has to put boots on the Ground.
Than there will be Americans fighting and dying. That could mean internal discontent in US and even possible revolution. Sunni and Kurds do not trust US anymore.
So any Biden's moves are only humbug.

[Feb 26, 2021] Moscow Blasts -Extremely Outrageous- Strike On Syria As Biden Stays Silent - ZeroHedge

Feb 26, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Moscow Blasts "Extremely Outrageous" Strike On Syria As Biden Stays Silent BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, FEB 26, 2021 - 13:15

As expected Russia has reacted fiercely to the overnight US airstrikes on eastern Syria, which marked the first military action of the Biden presidency, calling out what the Kremlin said is an "extremely outrageous" violation of sovereignty.

"We strongly condemn such actions and call for Syria's sovereignty and territorial integrity to be unconditionally respected," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a press briefing.

Other Russian officials, including a prominent senator for foreign affairs, Sergei Tsekov, blasted the American aggression as an "extremely outrageous" move, saying further, "Now, if someone struck a blow on U.S. territory, what would that look like? They strike at the territory of a sovereign republic without the consent of Syrian leadership."

But perhaps the most interesting detail is that Russia's defense ministry was forewarned about the strike shortly before it happened. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed as much - saying the warning came a mere "minutes" before they commenced.

"This sort of warning -- when strikes are already underway -- gives (us) nothing," Lavrov said according to Moscow Times .

Given that over the past years since Russia's invitation by the Assad government in 2015 to assist in defeating the jihadist insurgency there's been an increasing number of rival warplanes operating over Syria's skies, the Pentagon and Russia have maintained a military-to-military hotline in order to avoid inadvertent escalations. Presumably the Russians were "warned" via this method of communication.

While little has ultimately been confirmed, regional media outlets and monitors have cited over 20 killed in the strike , which the US claims was on "Iranian-backed militias" operating in Syria.

More details of how the strike unfolded have kept rolling in throughout the day Friday...

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1365360965076811780&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fmoscow-blasts-extremely-outrageous-strike-syria-biden-stays-silent&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=889aa01%3A1612811843556&width=550px

"Specifically, the strikes destroyed multiple facilities located at a border control point used by a number of Iranian-backed militant groups, including Kata'ib Hezbollah and Kata'ib Sayyid al Shuhada," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said .

"The operation sends an unambiguous message; President Biden will act to protect American coalition personnel. At the same time, we have acted in a deliberate manner that aims to de-escalate the overall situation in both Eastern Syria and Iraq."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1365276855205580801&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fmoscow-blasts-extremely-outrageous-strike-syria-biden-stays-silent&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=889aa01%3A1612811843556&width=550px

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1365123279476899848&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fmoscow-blasts-extremely-outrageous-strike-syria-biden-stays-silent&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=889aa01%3A1612811843556&width=550px

But Biden himself has remained silent on the strike , which has angered a handful of Congress members questioning his basis for authorizing the unilateral attack.

Damascus for its part called the attack "cowardly" and said it will surely "escalate" the crisis in the region. "Syria condemns in the strongest terms the cowardly US aggression on areas in Deir Ez-Zor near the Syrian-Iraqi border, which is inconsistent with international law and the Charter of the United Nations. Syria warns that it [this move] will lead to consequences that will escalate the situation in the region," the country's foreign ministry said, as cited in state-run news agency SANA.

[Feb 26, 2021] Trump didn't exactly give Syrian land to the Zionist entity. Rather he recognized "Israel's" annexation in violation of international law and possibly US law

Feb 26, 2021 | www.unz.com

Sirius , says: February 26, 2021 at 8:51 am GMT • 17.8 hours ago

@Harold Smith br> Larry Summers (former head of the US Treasury)
Bill Richardson (former Governor of New Mexico, ex-ambassador to the United Nations and United States Energy Secretary)
Michael Steinhardt (hedge fund manager)
Jacob Rothschild
Mary Landrieu (former United States Senator from Louisiana)

All of the above are complicit in the violation of international law and can be prosecuted as such one day should anyone have the will to do so, as well as Trump himself.

Trump's reward for this illegal recognition: his name on an illegal Zionist colony on occupied Syrian territory: "Trump Heights" by none other than Benjamin Mileikowsky (Netanyahu).

Molip , says: February 26, 2021 at 9:47 am GMT • 16.9 hours ago

"Respecting the rule of law. And treating every person with dignity. That's the grounding wire of our global policy. Our global power. That's our inexhaustible source of strength," Biden said.

Seventeen people were murdered in Syria today because the US totally ignores any international law that is in the way. If Biden wanted to send a message to Iran, why murder those 17 who simply signed up to fight ISIS, to do good a thousand kilometers from where the US was attacked in Iraq?

Biden is going to sanction Russia over Navalny being poisoned even though the US murders its own citizens abroad using drones.

Nixon recognized China's sovereignty over Taiwan in the Shanghai Declaration 50 years ago. Biden sent warships through the Taiwan Strait in his first month in office.

It appears that the inexhaustible strength of the US is derived from profound weakness of character.

Talk about pining for Bernie Sanders.

[Feb 25, 2021] Censorship Gone Bonkers - 'Be A Good Citizen!'

"Twitter's accusation is a classic case of it jumping to conclusions, as there is nothing at all to suggest the leaks were a product of hacking."
Feb 25, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Yesterday the censorship department at Twitter went bonkers.

Twitter Safety blogged:

Disclosing networks of state-linked information operations

Today we are disclosing four networks of accounts to our archive of state-linked information operations; the only archive of its kind in the industry. The networks we are disclosing relate to independent, state-affiliated information operations that we have attributed to Armenia, Russia and a previously disclosed network from Iran.
...
Russia

Today we're disclosing two separate networks that have Russian ties.

1. Our first investigation found and removed a network of 69 fake accounts that can be reliably tied to Russian state actors. A number of these accounts amplified narratives that were aligned with the Russian government , while another subset of the network focused on undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability .
...

Be a good citizen!

Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Everyone got that now?


Also this:

Aaron Maté @aaronjmate - 18:53 UTC · Feb 23, 2021

Twitter adds a warning to @MaxBlumenthal's report in @TheGrayzoneNews on leaked UK gov't files ( https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters.. ) exposing a major propaganda campaign targeting Russia: "These materials may have been obtained through hacking."

Is this warning applied equally? I doubt it.


bigger

The warning is of course not applied equally. Neither do 'Uighur' stories based on hacked papers from China censored nor do 'Navalny poison' stories based on hacked data from Russia get a 'hacked materials' warning.

Unfortunately even tweets which links to the Moon of Alabama piece on the 'hacked' British documents do not get such marks.

That's too bad because Twitter's 'hacked material' insert created a Streisand effect and the such marked Grayzone story went viral.

The censors did not like that. Some twenty hours after the 'hacked materials' insert on tweets to that story was first applied it vanished.

I have, by the way, no idea if the British material was hacked or if it comes from a whistle blower. Neither is that important. The material is genuine and it is full of information which the British authorities want to hide but which that the global public deserves to know. That is the only thing that is important for publishing it.

Posted by b on February 24, 2021 at 15:16 UTC | Permalink

Fran , Feb 24 2021 15:25 utc | 1

next page " Sputnik has a interview with Kit Klarenberg about these leaked files: UK Foreign Office Docs Reveal 'Full-Spectrum' Psyops to 'Destabilise Russia', Journalist Says

My guess is, there will be no discussion about this files in the western msm.

[Feb 25, 2021] There has been a long string of these unconvincing stories aimed at Russia. The claim the supported Trump after 2016 was a watershed too, all caution to the winds after that. Skripals, Navalny, one after another that makes no sense.

Feb 25, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bemildred , Feb 25 2021 0:54 utc | 53

You would think they would hire people who have some idea as to what might be plausible when they invent these stories? It's very strange to see. There has been a long string of these unconvincing stories aimed at Russia. The claim the supported Trump after 2016 was a watershed too, all caution to the winds after that. Skripals, Navalny, one after another that makes no sense. It's like they want to make a point and are failing. Or maybe propaganda is all they have.

[Feb 24, 2021] NYT waives the white flag, admits Assad won the war against the USA-ISIS:

Feb 24, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Feb 23 2021 19:23 utc | 242

NYT waives the white flag, admits Assad won the war against the USA-ISIS:

Having Won Syria's War, al-Assad Is Mired in Economic Woes

schmoe , Feb 24 2021 3:20 utc | 266

vk @242

Yes and amazingly the NYT is allowing oomments from people who know the truth of that tragedy. Assad will need considerable foreign aid to survive given their economic woes so I would not say the US/Saudi/Israel have lost yet.

[Feb 24, 2021] I have to say that specific advertising policy of the former head of MCST Babayan in the form of periodic high-profile claims that the new processor Elbrus E2K is about to "break" Intel, permanently ending zilch, being zero from the beginning, has raised in me distrust of this company since the beginning of the 2000s. Moreover, when Babayan with a team of leading employees left for Intel in 2004, I thought that this was definitely all.

Feb 24, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Feb 23 2021 4:20 utc | 188

Arch Bungle

The Russians are at it too.

I have to say that specific advertising policy of the former head of MCST Babayan in the form of periodic high-profile claims that the new processor Elbrus E2K is about to "break" Intel, permanently ending zilch, being zero from the beginning, has raised in me distrust of this company since the beginning of the 2000s. Moreover, when Babayan with a team of leading employees left for Intel in 2004, I thought that this was definitely all.

And yes, the company went quiet, and all the following years just quietly profited from something for the defence industry, almost without communicating with the outside world. It withdrew into itself. With long interruptions, it dryly posted new versions of processors on its website:

2005 – Elbrus-2000, which turned out to be a very simplified version of the E2K. Processor technology 130 nm, frequency 300 MHz, 1 core.

2010 and 2011 – Elbrus-S and Elbrus-2C+. Processor technology is 90 nm, the frequency is 500 MHz, 1 and 2 cores, respectively.

2014 – Elbrus-4C. 65 nm processor technology, frequency 800 MHz, 4 cores.

All of this was produced and financed for the defence industry, and so everything would have been sluggish and continued further, if not for the events of 2014. The fall in the ruble exchange rate and the sanctions of the western world have led to the need to have their own computing equipment not only in the military, but also in the civilian segment. But, I must say, the Medvedev government was particularly slow to do so.

Medvedev again, what a miserable turd.

Thank you for the 68000 referal. I will take a peek but I might avoid repeating the glory of my youth and aim for keeping my orchard in good condition and the occasional walk in ancient woods. I still tinker but with small things.


c1ue , Feb 23 2021 16:08 utc | 224

@Arch Bungle #218
That's because the USSR/Russia never cared about the consumer side.
Thus all of their work is military/intelligence agency related.
Consumer: cheap. Military: durable.
Consumer: small (closely related to cheap). Military: works.
Consumer: throw masses of transistors at the problem. Military: create a custom design that addresses the need.
Consumer: good enough. Military: As good as is practical given above.
Now, to be fair, small does yield speed so the tradeoff isn't fully branched.
But Russian electronics work just fine - the radar, target acquisition and targeting systems for the hypersonic missiles and the S400/S500 system are clearly extremely fast and efficient.
Thing is - do you really need 7 nm tech for that? Answer is: no.
Silicon is also not particularly rad or EMP resistant.

Bemildred , Feb 23 2021 18:58 utc | 238

Posted by: Arch Bungle | Feb 23 2021 15:34 utc | 218

Why do the Russians not have their own fancy chips?

I think c1ue got it right, not interested in commercialization, high-density chips and speed are marketing points rather than an answer to some need. I would add that they have likely not abandoned analog methods to the extent we have, not having the commercial incentive to do that, and realizing that digital is not the answer to every control problem.

They are going to have to make some sort of changes soon anyway, I don't see X-Ray lithography being a thing. Or we could realize that for most purposes what we have is fine, and for what isn't fine, we need something new and better.

I had an 8088 with and 8087 co-processor for some time in the 80s, cut my teeth on it. Incredibly slow but you could program "on the bare wires".

c1ue: Re #154: thank uou, took me quite a while to get to that point of view. One of the positive results of the last 20 years is to make it all very plain.

c1ue , Feb 24 2021 2:25 utc | 262

@Bemildred #238
I have no idea how much further the commercial processes will go.
However, it is abundantly clear that the commercial benefit for these new processes is extremely limited.
One of the primary reasons why the PC and laptop market was stagnating for year prior to COVID and WFH was that there really was minimal difference in performance between 2 or even 4 generations of hardware.
I am typing this on a refurbished laptop whose progenitor was originally purchased in 2016. I say progenitor because this is now the 3rd chassis which the hard drive and one or two other components have been migrated to.
In the 90s, you could visibly see the difference between computers bought in different quarters. In the 00s, business and engineering/technical specialist software migrated to laptops, thus absorbing the performance increase.
In the last 10 years? Much less clear. A former coworker of mine - I just helped him buy a 64GB Ram, 2 TB NvME SSD laptop with a graphics coprocessor for $1600. It is 90% pure ego why he bought it - there are a few corner cases where that performance *might* help.
On my side - I will buy a refurb laptop with 32GB Ram, 512 GB NvME SSD plus 1TB hard drive for $1099 mostly because I am literally unable to connect to a number of wifi setups due to my OS being Win 7 still. That's the only reason.
On the cell phone side - the benefit of additional compute power has long since passed necessary. There just isn't the interface to even make use of it - all that power is mostly playing cat videos and using social media.
But I would note that analog design is still very much with us. The major power consumption sink in a cell phone is the cell signal comms; the digital is increasingly minimal.
Similarly, while WiFi is pretty old now - latest generations of WiFi are 1000mbps or more which ups power consumption significantly.
But overall - not at all clear that there is a growing market anymore for PCs and laptops. That's what ends the long, profitable growth ride of the semiconductor industry.

[Feb 21, 2021] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 11 FEBRUARY 2021 by Patrick Armstrong - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Feb 21, 2021 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 11 FEBRUARY 2021 by Patrick Armstrong


WAR PLANS. US/NATO war plans always start with a heavy bombardment. The expectation is that complete air superiority will be quickly gained so that aircraft and cruise missiles will have unrestricted freedom to destroy vital infrastructure. This succeeds against countries like Iraq, to say nothing of Afghanistan. But it won't happen if the first few minutes of the war see the destruction of half of NATO's airfields, hangars, ports and EW assets in a cloud of hypersonic missiles. Russia sends another message to Washington and Brussels – don't even think of it. But, of course, they are thinking of it . Shoygu called for increased production of hypersonic missiles . Not, they say, easily detectable by radar . A US ship entering the Black Sea would have about three minutes to detect and defend against Kinzhals fired from 550 kms away in Crimea. The just-deployed Bastion system would take longer. Russia isn't trying to do everything everywhere , just defend its own territory: that's an achievable goal; the other isn't.

WAR DREAMS. Fantasy: in NATO planning the Polish Army quickly seizes Kaliningrad . Partial reality: in Polish Army war game, Warsaw is surrounded in five days . Real reality. Poland has targets: see above.

NAVALNIY. The story continues. The theory that he's being fitted up for a treason charge was given a boost when Zakharova said he should be called an "agent of influence" rather than a politician . His suspended sentence for fraud was lifted and he's off to prison. Read Yves Rocher's statement ; sounds to me as if the company believes he did swindle them. The fact that there's now a campaign against the company suggests my deduction is correct . Meanwhile his wife is being set up as the new Navalniy – it's evident from the Charité report that his health is pretty bad . After the lacklustre performance of the demos, one of his people declared a moratorium but was ordered to reverse the decision.

COVID. The Sputnik vaccine received good press from The Lancet . Vaccination centre in Sochi . Russia has developed a quick PCR process . Forget all that stuff we were saying a few months ago : we want it now . All this is causing cognitive dissonance for Western propaganda organs: read this tripe: " Putin's COVID-19 charm offensive will be transient ".

FINES. Moscow fines RFE/RL for failure to declare 'foreign agent' status on material aimed at Russians. Washington will have the fantods but this is just Moscow's version of the US FARA legislation in action.

POLICE BRUTALITY. Here's the video Moscow is giving every visitor who comes to lecture it.

START Extended for five years . A good thing, but otherwise more of the same from Washington: " determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our democracy " and so on.

RUSSIA-CHINA. A piece in the Russian media suggests that the two are very close to concluding a formal military alliance and enumerates the mutual advantages to the world's largest economy and best military (too soon to call it that? Should we wait a few years when it will be obvious?). It's coming.

EU. The EU has made a mess of its COVID vaccine policy . An EU official is sent to Moscow to beg for the Sputnik vaccine. But he can't resist giving the usual moralistic lecture. (As an aside, I am sick and tired of EU flunkeys posturing about "European values"; if it weren't for the USSR – 80% – and the Anglosphere – 20% – they'd all be goose-stepping around in leather giving each other Hitler salutes : Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and the rest of them were all Europeans). Lavrov is not amused and called the EU unreliable . EU guy returns, usual sources accuse him of being feeble , and he starts talking tough again. " Headless chicken ". Moscow doesn't care : the Western model is now seen as one of failure .

WESTERN VALUES™. Listen to Blinken explain why Israel can annex Golan ; one day he will explain why Crimea can't be Russian.

DAVOS. An inflection moment? Putin speaks of the failure of the "Washington Consensus" and unilateralism. Xi agrees . Merkel promises neutrality .

PUTIN DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. Vladimir Putin Has Become America's Ex-Boyfriend From Hell : "a geopolitical stalker". This from the outlet that has "stalked" Putin 3000 times in four years . And never forget this demented bit of filth .

UKRAINE. Hopeless . Meanwhile, let's ban the Russian vaccine . Not that we have any from anywhere else .

THE DEATH OF IRONY. If it's Russia, it's OK to ban it . Actually they're opposition TV channels.

© Patrick Armstrong Analysis, Canada Russia Observer


JerseyJeffersonian , 11 February 2021 at 08:43 PM

Patrick,

Andrei Martyanov (SmoothieX12) put up this post on the topic of NATO/EU saber rattling.

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2021/02/people-are-talking-about-it-warning.html?m=0

It starts with a quote from an article a few years back from Col. Douglas Macgregor about the true costs of peer on peer warfare that should - should - make one think. But given that the anti-Russian neocons like Victoria "Cookies" Nuland are back in the government, such well-founded worries might be lightly tossed aside.

Andrei tries to convey the serious consequences of such ill-considered hyperaggresiveness on the part of the US/NATO/EU. The Russian Federation will not be punked. But with Biden "in charge" (i.e., being led by the nose by overconfident morons), one may legitimately fear for the worst.

On Slow Joe, these words from an old Virginia farmer seem apt:


https://www.riverdavesplace.com/forums/attachments/screenshot_20201010-134807-jpg.930848/

joey_n , 12 February 2021 at 04:15 AM
if it weren't for the USSR – 80% – and the Anglosphere – 20% – they'd all be goose-stepping around in leather giving each other Hitler salutes
I've heard rumors that the Anglosphere supported Hitler and his attack on Russia early on, that Hitler based his racial laws on similar policies in the USA and UK, and that the Anglosphere began attacking Hitler's Germany only after it became clear that Germany was losing to Russia. Some even said Franco was supported by the Anglosphere in the name of 'anti-communism' until his death in 1975. Can you confirm/dispute any of these? Thanks.
Patrick Armstrong , 12 February 2021 at 08:42 AM

@joey Lots of people say this. There is some -- but only a bit -- of truth in it. There was no universal reaction. I recommend
https://www.amazon.ca/Origins-Second-World-War-ebook/dp/B002RI8ZNC/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=origins+of+the+second&qid=1613137200&s=digital-text&sr=1-2

As to something Russians often say, that D Day was delayed until it was clear the Sovs were winning, that's not true. D Day couldn't have happened earlier
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/06/26/d-day-more-difficult-than-you-think/

turcopolier , 12 February 2021 at 08:56 AM

All

There had been desire on the American side to invade in 1943 but the British argued correctly that there would not be enough of anything until 1944.

Ghost Ship , 12 February 2021 at 09:10 AM

It looks like Lukashenko in Belarus is using the political persecution of Donald Trump to go after one of the leaders of the Belarus insurrection at the last election . The charge, "conspiracy to seize state power & setting up extremist group", does sound familiar.

j. casey , 12 February 2021 at 09:20 AM

Russian diplos certainly turning up the heat on the hapless EU this week. Some kind of sea change? Charges against NATO folks behind the Maidan and ongoing shelling of civilians in Donbass?

Patrick Armstrong , 12 February 2021 at 09:45 AM

@ j casey I think the EU is a good, cheap place for Moscow to make the point.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/11/04/goodbye-has-russia-had-enough-insults/

Fourth and Long , 12 February 2021 at 02:17 PM

The panel here might appreciate a reading of Gilbert Doctorow's latest on Lavrov's recent statement regarding the EU:

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/


"If you want peace, prepare for war!" Sergei Lavrov, 11 February 2021 speaking on cutting relations with the EU

In a televised interview on Russian state television yesterday, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov made this declaration together with the threat to cut relations with the EU if Russia's vital economic interests were put in danger by any further sanctions they might consider imposing. His remarks were clearly calculated to turn on a light in the thick skulls of EU Parliamentarians, of the EU Commission run by former German Defense Minister von der Leyen, and of her deputy for external relations Borrell.

"Prepare for war" is an old bit of wisdom that we have heard from time to time coming from the Kremlin together with related folk wisdom such as : if you do not finance properly your own army, you will be financing someone else's army; and if you cannot deal with Lavrov, then you will have to deal with Shoigu (Russian Defense Minister).
(Continued at link above).

ISL , 13 February 2021 at 10:43 AM

PA,
Re:Covid19 - I read the tripe, and I think tripe is too good a term to describe it - the author claims that the impressive 1.2 billion doses ordered is solely based on positive memes!

With Sputnik V and the failure of Astra Vectra (against the new variants) Russia has major leverage.

The EU primarily imports oil and gas from Russia, and give Chinese growth (and EU anti-growth), it seems likely that Russia could easily shift these EU exports east - china-Russia trade has doubled in the last four years, which could absorb most of the oil and gas directed at the EU in a few years.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1003171/russia-value-of-trade-in-goods-with-china/

I am guessing Nordstream 2 will be finished and not used to allow for it to be turned on (perhaps at a premium) at a future date (perhaps when the EU breaks up).

See also,

https://www.statista.com/topics/5947/trade-in-russia/#:~:text=China%20was%20Russia's%20major%20trade,country's%20third%20largest%20import%20origin.

Cortes , 13 February 2021 at 03:43 PM

The arguments over the timing of the invasion are covered in detail in

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1304117.War_Diaries_1939_1945

in which Alanbrooke was not shy about describing the need to rein back Churchill from making premature commitments to schemes and scheduling. His portrayal of Churchill was thought to be the main reason he was passed over in the postwar awards of plum appointments.

(The British delegation flight back from Moscow to Tehran is notable for the off-the-cuff poem by Wavell on why there will be no Second Front in 1943).

The discussions with US commanders are never less than extremely interesting.

irf520 , 13 February 2021 at 06:32 PM

Those Russians might have some good missiles - but do they have solar powered tanks?

https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/europe/nato-chief-suggests-battle-tanks-with-solar-panels-as-militaries-go-green-1.1160313

Don't want to be emitting too much CO2 while blowing things up.

Patrick Armstrong , 13 February 2021 at 09:28 PM

@irf520 Solar-powered tanks. Sounds great -- wars in the desert only.
But thanks for this: I an contemplating a paper about how NATO uses its military as a captive group for social experiments while at the same time wanting to fight everybody everywhere.
Tentative title "mincing towards war"
This is good material.

J , 14 February 2021 at 01:39 AM

@Patrick

I liked Putin's speech at Davos.

It's a good thing that Russia has been working on its own internet. Take a look at this:

https://dailylibertynews.com/us-government-mass-censorship-last-week-did-you-notice/


"On February 2nd, less than two week after Biden's inauguration, we noticed a complete shutdown of VPN services. No other servers on the internet were affected. These were only the VPNs. They became terribly, terribly slow.

Did you notice? Did you think that was your VPN provider screwing up?

It wasn't. It was the US Government.

They used a special type of technology called DPI(Deep Packet Inspection) that was able to differentiate regular server traffic with traffic that was using a VPN.

This was all uncovered by one of the most seasoned tech experts on the internet. A new video by a tech privacy guru named Rob Braxman Tech was how I learned about this issue.

Fortunately, there are ways around this issue which Rob Braxmen has brought up.

There are ways of what tech experts call "obfuscating" so it does not look like VPN traffic. People in China have been developing ways to fight these VPN sniffers for decades.

So, Liberty Lover, it might actually be with the help of very intelligent people in China who have already figured out how to defeat firewalls so that we can defeat the Deep State and protect our First Amendment rights."

Fred , 14 February 2021 at 11:47 AM

Patrick, irf520,

In addition to solar tanks we have the LCS, which, to quote Lord Fisher, can neither "run nor fight" (who would ever think a navy need do that), and, to top it off, we're getting tranny ready:
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/Statements/display-statements/Article/2481990/statement-from-cno-on-transgender-policy-change/

Sure glad we have our priorities straight.

[Feb 21, 2021] The Tycoon Plot: Putin noted that digital tycoons are dangerous for the world. In his own words, "Modern technological giants, especially digital companies, are de facto competing with states. In the opinion of these companies, their monopoly is optimal. Maybe so but society is wondering whether such monopolism meets public interests"

The truth is hard to come by, like a needle in a haystack.
Notable quotes:
"... Israel Shamir can be reached at ..."
"... The Unz Review ..."
Feb 21, 2021 | www.unz.com

Putin surprised me. He flatly refused the offer of Schwab and his ilk. He condemned the manner of recent pre-Covid growth, for all the growth went into a few deep pockets. Moreover, he noted that digital tycoons are dangerous for the world. In his own words , "Modern technological giants, especially digital companies, are de facto competing with states. In the opinion of these companies, their monopoly is optimal. Maybe so but society is wondering whether such monopolism meets public interests".

The tycoons were probably amazed. In 2007 in Munich, they laughed at him. Max Boot, a Russian Jewish émigré, called Putin, "The louse that roared" and added, "in Putin's sinister and absurd rhetoric, you can hear an empire dying". Mad Max didn't know yet which empire is dying.

Putin was supposed to be softened up by pro-Navalny demos on January 23 (The Davos talk was on January 27), but he was not. Quite the reverse. The Russian President does not like to be pushed. The demo on January 31 was met with force; those detained were sentenced to heavy (by Russian standards) fines. Three European diplomats were expelled from Russia for joining the demonstration. Josep Borrell, a Spanish diplomat and a representative of the EU, went to Moscow and was harshly treated. In the concluding press-conference, the Russian minister for foreign affairs Sergey Lavrov told the press that Russia does not (repeat, not) consider the EU to be a "reliable partner". The expulsions were carried out at the same time. In addition, Putin warned the West that 'sanctions' (acts of economic warfare) could cause Russia to use direct military force. It was probably the first such warning since 1968.

At the same time, Russia practically ended corona restrictions. Bars and restaurants have been opened for night revellers; sport events have returned; schools are open; in some parts of Russia, the masks became "recommended" instead of "compulsory". Russians are now allowed to travel and return freely from many countries. The Russians have easy access for their vaccine Sputnik-V that was deemed by The Lancet the best of all existing Corona vaccines. It is a coup comparable to the first Sputnik launched in 1957, the Western experts said. Thus Russia has derailed the Grand Reset.

This development had caused a huge shift in consciousness in Russia. If until now (since 1970, at least) the Russian educated classes tended to feel inferior to the West, the prosperous lands of the free, then this has now changed. One of the leading Russian theatre directors, Constantine Bogomolov declared that the West is undone. The West's compulsory political correctness, its culture-cancelling, its kneeling and boot-licking of BLM, its cult of transgenders, its fear of 'harassment' and sex, its obligatory smile, its wokeness, its fear of death (and of life!), are comparable to the behaviour of Alex, the victim of Clockwork Orange therapy, said Bogomolov.

The young man [Alex] does not just get rid of aggression – he is sick of music, he cannot see a naked woman, sex disgusts him. And in response to the blow, he licks the boot of the striker. The modern West is such a criminal who has undergone chemical castration and lobotomy. Hence this false smile of goodwill and all-acceptance, frozen on the face of a Western person. This is not the smile of Culture. It is a smile of degeneration.

He concludes:

The West tells us: Russia is at the tail of progress.

Wrong.

Just by chance, we have found ourselves at the tail of a runaway train, rushing headlong into [Hieronymus] Bosch's hell, where we will be greeted by smiling multicultural, gender-neutral devils.

We should uncouple our carriage off the train, make a sign of cross and start rebuilding our good old Europe, the Europe we dreamed of. The Europe they have lost.

Take notice of his call to 'make the sign of the cross'. In the West, the churches are barred, service had been discontinued. The Anglican Church is on the verge of dying , with its Archbishop of Canterbury celebrating BLM, removing statues from the churches, accepting every SAGE edict locking the churches up. Meanwhile Russian churches are all open and worshippers are pouring into their cathedrals every feast and Sunday.

Russian boys and girls are flirting with each other, fearless of MeToo and harassment charges. Russian cafes are open. Whoever wants, can get a jab against Covid, or ignore it.

For the first time in many years, Russia shows the way for the West. This is good. Perhaps, the West, after a long-needed correction, will be able to overtake Russia again. Though Russia showed the way of socialism to Europe, the best results of socialism were achieved elsewhere, in the North of Europe. Good old Europe (and the US, its overseas offshoot) are still able to repeat this feat and get rid of the plotting tycoons and their preaching of compulsory love. At this occasion, perhaps banning all tycoons is a good idea. In the better world before their rise, there were no multi-billionaires. History is not over; we are entering the most interesting part of it. Be of good cheer!

Israel Shamir can be reached at [email protected]

This article was first published at The Unz Review .


St-Germain , says: February 11, 2021 at 3:39 pm GMT • 9.4 days ago

Bravo! Israel Shamir. I enjoyed every syllable of that essay. It frames the shocking reality that is nowhere treated so forcefully in print in the decadent West. These tycoons not only purchasse their corrupted governments but are positioned to trade them in concert like Monopoly board properties, all in plain sight of our blind mass media.

Putin courageously stepped up a notch when he said as much to the Davos crowd and then demonstratively restored to his own countrymen many of the basic freedoms that have just been erased in the locked-down EU.

How long will it take for Europe's venal career politicians to realize they are in danger of becoming just expendable hirelings in the new world order they have so gleefully promoted? Probably nothing short of a revolution could now save the United States from the new feudalism.

But Putin's warning must have resonated among the European politicians, whose status and relevance still derives from a long tradition of statism with a strong social components. Will the national governments finally grasp that the gravest threat is not the hated populism but relegation to irrelevance by corporations and plutocrats. The stakes are clear; either governments will reassert their prerogatives or plutocrats will govern.

Franz , says: February 11, 2021 at 5:49 pm GMT • 9.3 days ago

For the first time in many years, Russia shows the way for the West. This is good . Perhaps, the West, after a long-needed correction, will be able to overtake Russia again.

This is good and timely and needs to be repeated often.

Actually, near where I'm at, "Russia" has been showing the way since Putin got rolling, even before they tried pulling the Obama rug over our eyes when our hollowed-out economy became obvious in the days after Bush W. ("War President") made large segments of the old working class ashamed to be American again.

By all means, let Putin pull out a dusty copy of Ron Reagan quotes and start punting them back to the United States of Blah.

How did Ron put it in 1982? Oh Yeah: "A nation that cannot honor its own people's rights cannot be trusted anywhere else."

Putin can simply quote the Dead Cowboy. The current Plutocracy won't get it, the economically wrecked in the USA already knows it, and everyone else can enjoy the Old Truth that always gives a wicked return: What goes around comes around.

Notsofast , says: February 11, 2021 at 7:14 pm GMT • 9.3 days ago

thank you mr. shamir for the uplifting analysis of this brave new world order being foisted upon us.

I don't think we will be able to throw off our billionaire overlords unfortunately, as the average citizen is too compliant and indoctrinated to understand what is happening to them.

We have no vladimir putin to slay the dragon here. i'm just glad that russia is here as a counterweight to the kleptocratic cthulhu wrapping its tentacles around the world.

Three of Swords , says: February 11, 2021 at 9:51 pm GMT • 9.1 days ago

Still another note of thanks, Mr. Shamir, for this insightful article.

Thus Russia has derailed the Grand Reset.

I do hope that you are correct in your assessment that the train has been derailed and not just delayed in its arrival.

Cheers!

Mulga Mumblebrain , says: February 12, 2021 at 8:05 am GMT • 8.7 days ago

Max 'Jack' Boot's comment reminds one of Croesus. Contemplating whether to attack Persia or not, he consulted the Pythia at Delphi and the oracle declared that, if he attacked, a great kingdom would fall. He attacked, but the Empire that fell was his, not Persia. And brilliant example of Zionazi hubris.

Biff , says: February 12, 2021 at 8:56 am GMT • 8.7 days ago

The State must observe intricate arcane rules, while the tycoons have no such limits. As a result, they shape our minds and lives, making the State a poor legitimate king among powerful and wealthy barons.

That nails it.

Miro23 , says: February 12, 2021 at 5:50 pm GMT • 8.3 days ago

Just by chance, we have found ourselves at the tail of a runaway train, rushing headlong into [Hieronymus] Bosch's hell, where we will be greeted by smiling multicultural, gender-neutral devils.

We should uncouple our carriage off the train, make a sign of cross and start rebuilding our good old Europe, the Europe we dreamed of. The Europe they have lost.

There are some fine sentiments – and many in the West would like to joint the project.

[Feb 20, 2021] The US and its allies are allegedly committing widespread grain theft and crop destruction in Syria.

Feb 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

farm ecologist , Feb 17 2021 19:33 utc | 16

Just when I thought (again) that they couldn't possibly sink any lower, I find that the US and its allies are allegedly committing widespread grain theft and crop destruction in Syria.

Biden Forces Vacate a 'Wheat Silos Army Base' in Hasakah after Looting it

Hearing is Not Like Seeing: NATO's Terrorists Burning Syrian Wheat Crops – Video

Trump Forces Loot Syria's Grains, Smuggle Them to Iraq

Ambassador Jaafari Issues Formal Complaint on US Burning Wheat Fields

Turkish Madman Erdogan Stealing Syrian Wheat, Kids Injured by Bomb

The above articles are all from the same source, which clearly (and very reasonably) has an axe to grind. Does anybody know of reliable corroborating reports? Thanks.

[Feb 19, 2021] McCarthyism=cancel culture: The cancel culture was pioneered by the red baiting of the capitalist elites and their shock troops in agencies such as the FBI to break, often through violence, radical movements and labor unions. Tens of thousands of people, in the name of anti-communism, were cancelled out of the culture.

Feb 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

michaelj72 , Feb 17 2021 20:33 utc | 23

I love to read Chris Hedges whenever I can. Here's a bit from his recent essay on the new and dangerous 'Cancel Culture' - which has become a rather effective and 'liberal' elitist weapon against, among others, those who criticize Israel, as well as against many radicals, and Wikileaks....

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/02/15/chris-hedges-cancel-culture-where-liberalism-goes-to-die/
Chris Hedges: Cancel Culture, Where Liberalism Goes to Die

....The cancel culture, a witch hunt by self-appointed moral arbiters of speech, has become the boutique activism of a liberal class that lacks the courage and the organizational skills to challenge the actual centers of power -- the military-industrial complex, lethal militarized police, the prison system, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the intelligence agencies that make us the most spied upon, watched, photographed and monitored population in human history, the fossil fuel industry, and a political and economic system captured by oligarchic power....

....The cancel culture was pioneered by the red baiting of the capitalist elites and their shock troops in agencies such as the FBI to break, often through violence, radical movements and labor unions. Tens of thousands of people, in the name of anti-communism, were cancelled out of the culture. The well-financed Israel lobby is a master of the cancel culture, shutting down critics of the Israeli apartheid state and those of us who support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semites. The cancel culture fueled the persecution of Julian Assange, the censorship of WikiLeaks and the Silicon Valley algorithms that steer readers away from content, including my content, critical of imperial and corporate power.

In the end, this bullying will be used by social media platforms, which are integrated into the state security and surveillance organs, not to promote, as its supporters argue, civility, but ruthlessly silence dissidents, intellectuals, artists and independent journalism....

[Feb 19, 2021] You can see what happened in the United States. This is a watershed running across the world as a whole, an ideological watershed, which is absolutely obvious

Feb 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Feb 17 2021 20:22 utc | 22

Putin's response to the Duma Speaker is worth citing fully. Too bad so few will read his words:

"What you have said regarding the so-called platforms, the IT companies, presents a major challenge, and not only to us alone. You can see what happened in the United States. This is a watershed running across the world as a whole, an ideological watershed, which is absolutely obvious . I have said this before, but I can repeat it now: if they behave like this in their own country, how will they treat others if they think themselves exceptional? This is a serious matter, and we certainly need to think about it in advance, this is the obvious thing.

"As for freedom of speech, the situation is perfectly clear to us as well. The so-called double standards have manifested themselves so vividly recently that we have no doubt about how our so-called opponents will behave towards us, no doubt at all.

"Just take a look at Ukraine, where three leading channels have been shut down at the stroke of a pen. And everyone keeps silent, while some have even given them an approving pat on the back.

"How can we comment on that? The only thing we can say is that they are using these instruments to attain their own geopolitical goals. This is also true for Ukraine. Why are the developments pivoted on Nord Stream 2? They want Russia to pay for their Ukraine geopolitical project, that is it. In fact, this is a rather primitive and simple thing. We have become aware of this long ago, but this is the world we are living in.

"Or take a look at what has happened in Latvia. They have clamped down on 16 of our media outlets, but the only reaction to this is silence. Why have the Western truth seekers not provided any assessments of what is happening to freedom of expression there, in Europe? No, there are no evaluations, as if this is how it should be, because they are allegedly fighting propaganda. As if what they are doing is not propaganda. What is it then? This is an instrument of attaining their geopolitical goals, in this particular instance, with regard to our country.

"We must take this into account. I would like to say once again that this is nothing out of the ordinary. I believe we have been observing this, seeing this happen for a long time, but the recent events have especially vividly confirmed the correctness of our views and assessments." [My Emphasis]

Myself and many others would certainly like to know what Putin sees as "their geopolitical goals" as well as those "with regard to our country." I know Putin's said he sees the Outlaw US Empire is trying to deter Russia's development, but that seems too simplistic to me knowing that the #1 policy goal is Full Spectrum Dominance.

[Feb 19, 2021] Lots of trolls accuse Putin of promoting Neoliberalism. The above proves them liars. Putin's foremost concern has always been for the welfare of his fellow Russians.

Feb 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Feb 17 2021 20:49 utc | 24

The last outstanding nugget from Putin's conference is an admission by Putin of his political-economic philosophy made during his reply to the Communist Party's Gennady Zyuganov:

"The growth of unemployment during the pandemic – it is not big but it is still here and we are seeing and recording it. I speak about this all the time and encourage the Government to do what is necessary to reach pre-crisis levels. In general, the situation is improving and has proven to be better than preliminary forecasts. But you are right. It is clearly necessary to focus on this all the time .

"Of course, I know that the Communist Party is always concerned over issues of privatisation. I have also spoken about this. Probably, our approaches to this matter do not always coincide, but at any rate I believe we share the common view that privatisation for the sake of privatisation is unacceptable for us, especially the way it was carried out in the 1990s in some areas. It must be beneficial for the economy; it must improve the economic structure. We must proceed from the premise that any step in this context must create a better, more efficient owner de facto, in practice rather than formally . But obviously, this must be done in a certain environment so as not to give away what costs millions and maybe billions for next to nothing. This is the bottom line for us." [My Emphasis]

Lots of trolls accuse Putin of promoting Neoliberalism. The above proves them liars. Putin's foremost concern has always been for the welfare of his fellow Russians. If I haven't made that clear over the years of my reporting on his speeches and pressers, then the failure must be on those feigning blindness when they can see perfectly well.

IMO, the four main political parties are all fundamentally nationalist, even the Communists. I don't think anyone/party anti-Russian/pro-Neoliberalism has any chance politically, and won't for many years. However, it's what I'll term progressive nationalism that seeks to promote the same in its partners--even in those nations that don't deserve such treatment. Russia takes the high road and doesn't deviate, which I find commendable. It's my hope that the Eurasian Bloc will follow the examples of Russia and China, but selfishness and greed are formidable obstacles, not to mention exceptionalism.

[Feb 17, 2021] The EU should not be confused with Europe. We are not leaving Europe, we have many friends and like-minded people in Europe, and we will continue to expand mutually beneficial relations with them

Feb 17, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Feb 16 2021 19:24 utc | 92

Yesterday's Lavrov presser has finally had the Q&A section added to it and its a doosey! Lavrov's sounds incendiary in print! "Question: Your recent interview generated a lot of controversy. You implied that Russia admits the possibility of breaking off with the EU. How do you see this break and what conditions would have to happen for it to occur, that is, where does Moscow draw the red line?"

Lavrov: "This interview took place on February 12, and the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell was here on February 5. Upon his return, he made a number of statements to the effect that Russia had failed to live up to expectations and to become a modern democracy and is rapidly moving away from Europe. That is, it sounded as if Russia was a hopeless case. This happened several days before the interview. Hence, the question as to whether we were ready to break off with the EU during the interview with Vladimir Solovyov based on those remarks about Russia. As a matter of fact, anyone who is even slightly interested in the situation in Europe has long known that a break-off has been underway for many years now. The EU has been consistently tearing down our relations.

"2014 was a turning point. A coup took place in Ukraine, and the EU showed it was helpless and unable to comply with the agreement that was reached between the government and the opposition right before the coup. Importantly, Germany, France and Poland put their signatures under it. The opposition spat on these signatures and on the EU, which thought it was important to comply with this agreement. It was then that the EU was really humiliated. Everyone knows what happened next. By and large, the EU turned a blind eye to the attacks against the residents of Crimea and eastern Ukraine on the part of the ultras and neo-Nazis who came to power, and decided to put all the blame on the Russian Federation.

"The EU has consistently destroyed all the mechanisms without exception that were based on the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, including the biannual summits and annual meetings between the Russian Government and the European commissioners and presidents of the European Commission, projects to form four common spaces, over 20 sector-specific dialogues and almost every other more or less important contact, as well as the Partnership and Cooperation Council's annual meetings with the Russian Foreign Minister and the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. These meetings were supposed to be used to conduct a full review of all areas of cooperation between Russia and the EU. To reiterate, all of that has been destroyed. Not by us, mind you."

That's the most candid I've read of his answers to the events of that time. Lavrov turns down his fire and brimstone to make this very important distinction as he finishes his answer:

" Importantly, we do not have any problems in our relations with individual European countries , I would even say, most European countries. Russia's relations with Finland are a very good example of how they are being built systematically and based on general principles, primarily, equality and mutual benefit, and how they are translated into the language of specific economic, cultural and other projects that are of interest to both sides.

" The EU should not be confused with Europe. We are not leaving Europe, we have many friends and like-minded people in Europe, and we will continue to expand mutually beneficial relations with them ." [My Emphasis]

It's the NATO/EU combo controlled by the Outlaw US Empire that's the problem. And another blast aimed at the EU over Navalny related events:

"In evaluating the questions expressed by Mr Haavisto, we heard that our colleagues from Finland and other EU countries always bring them. We know that they are edited and written by the EU, in Brussels, and are a subject of consensus. We hear this regularly enough, and these statements are practically the same, word for word. If the organisation called the European Union has made this decision, we take it as a certainty. We reply to problematic issues, and the main point we express is how the EU consistently, diligently and deviously avoids specific discussions that are fact-based rather than accusations often made against us for some reason or without any evidence ." [My Emphasis]

In the last Q&A, Lavrov again restates what he earlier said about the EU being at fault for the utter erasing of relations that were painstakingly built up over many years, and he repeats what Merkel said at the time foe emphasis, for Russia was innocent of all the crap it was being accused of in 2014:

"At this point, German Chancellor Angela Merkel specially took the floor to say in public that Russia must be punished and that in this situation politics must prevail over the economy. This was very unconventional for a representative of Germany."

This ought to remind people that this proved Merkel to merely be a cheap prostitute unworthy of any trust, who should have been ousted from her position years ago.

[Feb 16, 2021] New Documents Reveal More British Efforts To Undermine Russia

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The information discussed is from government files which outlay various projects and from companies and -- interestingly -- from charities who make bids to run the FCO projects. All underlying files are available for download as one archive file (~80 MB). ..."
"... The budget for the various anti-Russian projects runs at dozens of millions pounds per year. The first programs were launched in 2016 and some continue through this year. ..."
"... Note that 'Russian disinformation' is whatever Britain does not like about Russia. 'Exposing' such 'disinformation' is best done by spreading one's own. These are not defensive programs but attacks on Russia. ..."
"... Many years of painstaking work of HMG through its embassies and intelligence cutouts precede a chemical attack. They create Media, CSOs and pseudo humanitarian organisations that happen to be just at the correct place and in the correct time with their cameras ready when 'suddenly' a dreadful accident 'shocks every one into action'. ..."
"... Do you believe HMG staged the 'Navalny accident' as part of some kind of a secret operation? Did HMG create Media outlets, nurture bloggers and stringers that it controlled? Did it engage Russia's youth and CSOs? Did it try to demonise Putin just like it had done with Assad by labeling them Evil Dictators who poisoned their people with forbidden chemical weapons? Do you know what all of this is needed for? They need it to delegitimise a leader of a country and convince people around the world that 'no holds should be barred to fight a mad dictator'. Can you grasp the gravity of what is going on? ..."
"... That view is not even exaggerated. The 'west' has the knives out against Russia. We previous mentioned a report from the Pentagon think tank RAND which evaluated how to best 'unbalance and overextend' Russia. ..."
"... The aims we have towards Russia are very big. We do not want anything less but regime change in Russia, which is difficult to achieve by economic pressure. ..."
"... The new documents also reveal some interesting new points on Navalny who seems to be on the British government payroll: ..."
"... By now you must have guessed the identity of one of the popular YouTubers investigating corruption. After obtaining EXPOSE Network files and examining the case studies two years ago, we didn't figure out which YouTuber the FCO supported through ZINC. We refrained from making any preliminary conclusions even when journalists discovered that Vladimir Ashurkov, a close ally of Alexei Navalny, was a part of the Integrity Initiative cluster. ..."
"... But when we saw Mr. Navalny and Bellingcat together, things started to make sense. By digging deeper, we discovered another Navalny's supporter who lives in London - some shadowy Maria Pevchikh who is promoting a system of smart voting in Russia. The Labour used a similar voting system to take the votes of the Conservatives. So, basically it is highly likely that the UK recommended the system to Mr. Navalny. ..."
"... It also turned out that Navalny began a smear campaign against the RT - one of the few media outlets in the West that allows those who disagree with the official position of western government to speak out. Note that Navalny's campaign was running in parallel with that of the Integrity Initiative. A reasonable question is - why Navalny who is mostly engaged in political battles inside Russia spends time fighting a TV network operating outside the country? ..."
"... Not only countries bordering Russia, a cell existed in Spain and it had consequences, when the new government came to power the local cell ran a campaign against the new nominee for National Security for not being tough on Russia as required, he was out of the job, and the main local newspapers were and are in bed with British intelligence dutifully reporting how bad Russia is and how good Navalny and his boys are, journalists working for the media with the largest readership in the country. ..."
"... Devinette: when was the last time a state which was not supported by the US has committed a chemical attack? ..."
"... BTW Maria Pevchikh accompanied Alexei Navalny from Omsk to Berlin. She was the one who was supposed to have gone to his hotel room in Tomsk and picked up the water bottle supposed to contain Novichok, at least until information came out that she acquired the water bottle from a vending machine at Omsk airport en route to Berlin. Pevchikh was the one person in Navalny's entourage who did not submit to questioning by Russian authorities on Navalny's poisoning. ..."
"... I recall that I first found the video below from a MofA comment, but very pertinent to this discussion and maybe it is discussing the same program: Top French Intel Boss Reveals Operation Beluga: US UK Plot to Discredit Putin and Destabilize Russia ..."
"... It gives me pause to try to understand the ethics / morals / humanity of the thousands of western bureaucrats working on these elaborate (sometimes comical) plans to destroy other nations. ..."
"... One visible thing about the complete "undermining of Russia", is that a large amount of bureaucratic planning has gone into it. The quantity of companies that have been employed and with specific duties to perform is shocking. An incidental factor is that the UK and French participants get well paid. £975 or £700 per day, in comparaison to "locally found" participants. ..."
Feb 16, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

In 2018 we wrote about:

The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The "Russian Threat" .

The reporting was based on the British Integrity Initiative's internal files which some 'anonymous' organization had acquired and published.

Data acquired from Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office by the same group revealed large British propaganda programs in support of Jihadis in Syria as well as British influence operations designed to undermine the security institutions of Lebanon and to secretly influence its population.

Now another large set of files has been published by the same source. These describe an extensive British government program designed to undermine Russia by organizing and financing 'independent' Russian language media, by 'training' Russian journalists and by secretly paying Russian influencers. It is certainly not the only British anti-Russia program but it probably has, secretly, the most public influence.

The anonymous author has laid out the complete Undermining Russia program in four extensive parts: One , two , three , four .

The information discussed is from government files which outlay various projects and from companies and -- interestingly -- from charities who make bids to run the FCO projects. All underlying files are available for download as one archive file (~80 MB).

The most interesting files are the bids the companies make for projects. They reveal previous projects, methods and people and thereby create the larger picture.

The budget for the various anti-Russian projects runs at dozens of millions pounds per year. The first programs were launched in 2016 and some continue through this year.

A 'Supplier Event' for one of the projects laid out the general idea :

Programme Strands

Note that 'Russian disinformation' is whatever Britain does not like about Russia. 'Exposing' such 'disinformation' is best done by spreading one's own. These are not defensive programs but attacks on Russia.

Projects to achieve the above were to be implemented in nearly every country that borders Russia and has a Russian speaking minority as well as in Russia itself.

The British government does not want you to know about such projects. The 'Supplier Event' sheet says:

Security

No unauthorised disclosures of activity on this work. Contract will need to take a look at who we are working with. Basic IT security reasonable steps should cover our requirements but the FCO may request an explanation of what steps have been taken to ensure security and Duty of Care.

It should be noted that for security reasons, some grantees will not wish to be linked to the FCO. It should be noted that the Programme Team would prefer the programme documents do not end up in the Russian media. We know that they are following us, and we are expecting an expose soon.

What is the overall purpose of such secret programs? The author of the Undermining Russia series explains that with regards to the 'poisoning' of Alexei Navalny:

Many years of painstaking work of HMG through its embassies and intelligence cutouts precede a chemical attack. They create Media, CSOs and pseudo humanitarian organisations that happen to be just at the correct place and in the correct time with their cameras ready when 'suddenly' a dreadful accident 'shocks every one into action'.

Do you believe HMG staged the 'Navalny accident' as part of some kind of a secret operation? Did HMG create Media outlets, nurture bloggers and stringers that it controlled? Did it engage Russia's youth and CSOs? Did it try to demonise Putin just like it had done with Assad by labeling them Evil Dictators who poisoned their people with forbidden chemical weapons? Do you know what all of this is needed for? They need it to delegitimise a leader of a country and convince people around the world that 'no holds should be barred to fight a mad dictator'. Can you grasp the gravity of what is going on? Well, you ought to. They are preparing us for war with the Russians and the Chinese. They are looking for casus belli, and only the truth can stop them, because 'if wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth'. (Julian Assange)

That view is not even exaggerated. The 'west' has the knives out against Russia. We previous mentioned a report from the Pentagon think tank RAND which evaluated how to best 'unbalance and overextend' Russia. In the end it was clearly aimed at regime change in Russia, or if not otherwise possible, war. On Friday Gabriel Felbermayr , the president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, was asked by a German radio station about new sanctions the EU might impose on Russia. He is skeptic that those might work because (my translation):

The aims we have towards Russia are very big. We do not want anything less but regime change in Russia, which is difficult to achieve by economic pressure.

The new documents also reveal some interesting new points on Navalny who seems to be on the British government payroll:


bigger
These self-exposing documents show that the FCO has established a network of popular YouTubers in Russia who investigate corruption in the government, and the YouTubers get assistance from some journalists from the Baltic States. Also, the FCO has experience of instigating protests in Russia.

By now you must have guessed the identity of one of the popular YouTubers investigating corruption. After obtaining EXPOSE Network files and examining the case studies two years ago, we didn't figure out which YouTuber the FCO supported through ZINC. We refrained from making any preliminary conclusions even when journalists discovered that Vladimir Ashurkov, a close ally of Alexei Navalny, was a part of the Integrity Initiative cluster.

But when we saw Mr. Navalny and Bellingcat together, things started to make sense. By digging deeper, we discovered another Navalny's supporter who lives in London - some shadowy Maria Pevchikh who is promoting a system of smart voting in Russia. The Labour used a similar voting system to take the votes of the Conservatives. So, basically it is highly likely that the UK recommended the system to Mr. Navalny.

It also turned out that Navalny began a smear campaign against the RT - one of the few media outlets in the West that allows those who disagree with the official position of western government to speak out. Note that Navalny's campaign was running in parallel with that of the Integrity Initiative. A reasonable question is - why Navalny who is mostly engaged in political battles inside Russia spends time fighting a TV network operating outside the country? Was RT really such a problem for him? No, it wasn't. It was a problem for the Western imperialists and apparently, they told Navalny to join in.

Anyway. Here are again links to the four parts of 'Undermining Russia': One , two , three , four .

They give extensive insight into the methods the 'west' is using to destroy foreign countries. Knowledge that one needs to really understand what is happening in this world.

Posted by b on February 15, 2021 at 19:24 UTC | Permalink


Norwegian , Feb 15 2021 20:13 utc | 4
Many thanks b. This is real journalism. That is a strong compliment these days.
Paco , Feb 15 2021 20:22 utc | 5
Projects to achieve the above were to be implemented in nearly every country that borders Russia and has a Russian speaking minority as well as in Russia itself.

Not only countries bordering Russia, a cell existed in Spain and it had consequences, when the new government came to power the local cell ran a campaign against the new nominee for National Security for not being tough on Russia as required, he was out of the job, and the main local newspapers were and are in bed with British intelligence dutifully reporting how bad Russia is and how good Navalny and his boys are, journalists working for the media with the largest readership in the country. Some got fired when the scandal went public, others went through the revolving door, that simple. They had a lot to do with the Assange case, as explained in the link bellow.

Integrity Initiative Spain

Piotr Berman , Feb 15 2021 20:23 utc | 6
Russian authorities are more sophisticated that the British, not to mention Americans. The way I see it, American flunkies tend to make most glaring mistakes routinely, and with propaganda efforts they may get some mileage in Latin America -- not as much as they could wish. But in Europe and Middle East, it takes the British to keep track which country is which etc.

In that vein, Russia is not so eager to clobber Navalniks with political accusations. To a larger degree than China and the West, Russia wants to allow free access to information etc., and focuses on discrediting "Navalniks". Let them have 40 offices around the country plus a slew of foreign ones, online TV channels etc. In the same time, Russia is copying Western methods.

In the same time, collaborating with the West puts people who do it in an unpopular box. Navalny tries to circumvent those limitation with rank demagogy, but he still suffers by contagion, and from condemnations from less cynical followers of other Western projects -- for accepting Russian Crimea, frowning on immigrants etc.

Erelis , Feb 15 2021 20:57 utc | 10
On the US side, the program 60 Minutes just aired a segment where president of Microsoft claimed that the Russians used 1000+ hackers for the SolarWinds flair. No wonder Microsoft produces such crap software. If the Russians could manage 1000+ engineers, then they should be outsourced for all of DOD's software.

Largest-ever the world has seen': Microsoft president claims 1,000+ software engineers must have worked on SolarWinds breech
https://www.rt.com/news/515617-solarwinds-breach-largest-ever

The Biden admin is supposedly now deciding what new sanctions or actions to take against Russia. And this psyop comes out. Timing. All about timing. Somebody timed this.

Just confirms that the Biden regime will take the US into a shooting war with Russia just as the Brits were going toward that if their propaganda failed to oust Putin.

Stonebird , Feb 15 2021 21:08 utc | 11
Thanks b.
Skimmed through part 1. I see you are quoted. A question (which may be answered in a later part of the same), are the connections to the "five eyes" as well as the Spanish (re. Paco post) organised by the UK or are they joint efforts? (Anonymous doesn't think too much of the others.)

The FCO seems to be the operative, but is it really the originator? In the sense that at present the financial and "sanctions" elements are part of US/Israel policy. They may have been suggested by the FCO discretely?
-----
I note that Corbyn was attacked for anti-semitism by the FCO and also by Israeli media. They also seem to be deeply involved in the same setup. Were the Israelis involved in the planning?

karlof1 , Feb 15 2021 21:27 utc | 14
Many things to consider given this new information. It provides extra dimensions to Today's Crooke essay and the one by Tim Kirby I posted yesterday. Agent Smith tried to pooh-pooh it all by saying the international culture wars are a side show when in reality they are the crux of the matter since at the end of the day everything boils down to First Principles--Values. Truth, Virtue and Promotion of the Individual to Advance the Many versus Lies, Deceit and Denigration of the Individual to Advance The Few.
mpn , Feb 15 2021 21:28 utc | 15
@10 erelis. Noticed the paid advert on 60 minutes last nite, also. But after watching for 5 minutes, had to switch channels. Saw b's latest write up on Solarwinds which I would tend to trust note than ms / CBS. A follow up from b would be nice.
MarkU , Feb 15 2021 21:33 utc | 16
The poisoning narratives touted by the Western oligarchies and their corporate media should be seen for what they are, hilariously funny. As I said on a previous occasion, I laughed out loud for about half a minute when I read that Navalny had been poisoned with a 'novichok-like substance'. In the most literal sense those stories do not pass the laugh test. From the Litvinenko-polonium story to the Navalny- novichok underpants story they have all been a tissue of quite absurd lies.

Worryingly, despite the absurdities and the frequent changing of details in these narratives, people who are demonstrably quite intelligent in their daily lives appear to be buying into the anti-Russian narrative. People who can watch 'Game of Thrones' and comprehend a fictional character's argument when he asks the question 'why would I frame myself' are seemingly incapable of applying the argument in real life situations. Why would the FSB frame themselves? Why would they use a substance that has not yet succeeded in killing any of the intended targets? There must be literally hundreds if not thousands of toxins that could be used and there are countless other ways of killing a person.

Imagine a check box list of the desirable characteristics of an assassination weapon, neither 'novichok' nor polonium would tick enough (if any) of those boxes to be considered.

So what is it about? Clearly that rubbish is not going to work on the people of the Russian Federation (at least not enough of them to be worthwhile) That just leaves us as the target, they are quite obviously manufacturing consent. Do they actually mean to start WW3? or is it a bluff intended to frighten the Russians into submission? Or ruin their economy with massive increases in arms expenditure? Perhaps it is just more pressure to cancel Nordstream 2 so the US can sell their overpriced fracked gas and delay their coming economic collapse for a short while. Only time will tell, I fear the worst.

Oligarchies usually end with arrogance, stupidity, ignorance and eventually insanity. The modern counterparts of Nero and Caligula are running the western world. While dynasties are usually founded by exceptional people, as a rule the only exceptional thing about their descendants is their arrogance.

Mar man , Feb 15 2021 21:42 utc | 17
There are some flaws in western plans.
  1. Russians can, and do, watch and read western media to see firsthand how badly western press slander Putin and Russians in general. Putin is extremely popular in Russia for saving the country from oligarchs, reuniting Crimea, shutting down western sponsored terrorism in southern Russia and standing up to naked aggression from NATO. Western press shows Russians just how stupid western people have become by believing the inane poisoning stories, airplane shootdowns, and Russian "invasions" such as Crimea. The Russians only need to read western press to know the west is preparing regime change or war. Putin and the Kremlin do not need to say a word to convince Russians the west considers them enemies.
  2. The constant lies about Russia and threats to Europeans and Turkey are backfiring. The Germans, Turks and others are furious over the British and Americans constantly demonizing them for making smart business deals and military purchases with Russia. With all the "maximum pressure" campaigns and sanctions, some European and Middle East countries consider the US and UK bigger threats than Russia.
  3. If the west actually achieves the goal of starting war with Russia, the result will be disastrous for the west. Russia has become so advanced militarily, there is no doubt Russia would easily crush any attacks and then counter attack. Be careful what you wish for, Americans.
JohninMK , Feb 15 2021 21:47 utc | 18
Whilst we the British people, who have no problem with the Russians, have no say in the matter. Oh to be a fly on the wall at the next official Anglo Russian get together. That will be a 'shortest straw' gig as no British politician will want to face Lavrov now, especially after that EU prat visit last week.
John Cleary , Feb 15 2021 22:07 utc | 19
Very interesting b.

Alex Salmond joined RT as a commentator in November 2017. Immediately the powers of the west turned against him.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/02/the-moa-week-in-review-ot-2021-011.html?cid=6a00d8341c640e53ef026bdebc837b200c#comment-6a00d8341c640e53ef026bdebc837b200c

But Alex is a helluva politician. He fought back, and that fightback reaches its climax in the coming weeks.

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/02/08/scottish-politics-in-crisis-as-craig-murray-testifies-on-plot-against-alex-salmond/

What's going on? Why this animosity towards Russia?

I'll give you my opinion.

The British leadership are VERY ambitious. The nature of their empire has changed. First, They no longer seek to become an empire of nations, but rather an empire of national leaders - primarily Heads of State who control the domestic legal system. Second, they are a feminist empire, with power passed from mother to daughter. They are able to do this because, while there can be but one King, there can be multiple queens simultaneously. For example, from the death of George vi in 1952 until the death of Mary of Teck in 1953 there were no less that three queens of the United Kingdom. Then until 2001 there were two queens. Like chess, with two queens you always win the game.

But they can only do this while the United Kingdom exists. England alone, shorn of Scotland, loses the medieval laws and powers that underpin this empire.

If you investigate the monarchies of Europe you will find that they all are members of the Order of the Garter (KG). This is a sovereign order, which means that in order to join one must swear an oath to the Sovereign of the Order, Queen Elizabeth.

If you investigate the politicians of the US you will find many that have joined the Order of Bath (KB) even though it is explicitly against the constitution for them to do so (I think it is called the Emoluments Clause, but I may have misremembered). Again, in order to join this organization you must swear an oath to Queen Elizabeth.

It used to be that only the Republicans (Reagan, Bush, Weinberger and so on). But in January 2001 I came across a photograph of the three Clintons "leaving Buckingham Palace following a private visit". The benefits gained by the Clintons is what has launched the family into the big time of money and personal unrestrained power and the complete control of the Democratic Party.

This is a millennial empire. It is meant to last for a thousand years. The other great civilizations - Russia, China, Iran - are equally millennial, and are seen as a threat to the British plans for world domination.

The other great civilizations understand all I have written. They know a fight is coming. And I think that this is the reason that Lavrov finally took off the gloves when dealing with Borrell last week. For while he would bend over backwards to understand the EU position in the past, the UK has now quit the EU. The only ties now to the British Empire are those personal ones to the monarchs of Europe like, in the case of Borrell, Felipe vi and his father, juan Carlos. Both Knights of the Garter.

Hope this helps.

Tuyzentfloot , Feb 15 2021 22:28 utc | 20
Devinette: when was the last time a state which was not supported by the US has committed a chemical attack? I think we can dismiss Syria and Iraq.
psychohistorian , Feb 15 2021 22:30 utc | 21
@ John Cleary | Feb 15 2021 22:07 utc | 19 with the description of the British empire

About that Queen thing. I can't think right now where the details are but it is my understanding that annually the Queen presents herself to the City of London in a supplicatory manner. I agree that there is empire and that the Queen is part of the fabric of the curtain behind which are the real lever movers, those that own global private finance.

Paul , Feb 15 2021 22:55 utc | 24
British hostility to Russia has a long history. Indeed, we should not forget that the British Royal family supported Hitler. No doubt this, at least in part, accounts for Neville Chamberlain's 'appeasement' Adolf Hitler, following Germany's annexation of Sudetenland in 1938 and sequent invasion of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939.
See- A brief history of the British Royals and their alleged Nazi connections 28 Aug 2017; Link:
https://www.sbs.com.au/guide/article/2017/08/28/brief-history-british-royals-and-their-alleged-nazi-connections
kiwiklown , Feb 15 2021 23:04 utc | 25
Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 15 2021 21:27 utc | 14 -- "Many things to consider given this new information. It provides extra dimensions to Today's Crooke essay and the one by Tim Kirby I posted yesterday. Agent Smith tried to pooh-pooh it all by saying the international culture wars are a side show when in reality they are the crux of the matter since at the end of the day everything boils down to First Principles--Values. Truth, Virtue and Promotion of the Individual to Advance the Many versus Lies, Deceit and Denigration of the Individual to Advance The Few."

Thanks, karlof1, for yet another informative article. Saved it for study along with the Tim Kirby article.

So much to read... so much to learn.... so much to pleasure in.... first principles, eternal values, objective truth, good governance... and did God say that the white man's burden is to go rape, pillage, rob the rest of the world?

And thanks for reminding me that his name is Agent Smith.

This is to help me remember not to engage trolls and / or idiots:

"Never again will we try to persuade a foolish person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous. In conversation with them, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of them. They are under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in their very being.' -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Jen , Feb 15 2021 23:08 utc | 26
... These self-exposing documents show that the FCO has established a network of popular YouTubers in Russia who investigate corruption in the government, and the YouTubers get assistance from some journalists from the Baltic States. Also, the FCO has experience of instigating protests in Russia ...

It would be interesting to know if the Russian-language news website Meduza.io might have some connection to this assistance to the YouTubers. Meduza.io is based in Riga, Latvia, and employs Russian-language journalists. Kevin Rothrock , formerly of The Moscow Times (English-language newspaper in Moscow), is editor-in-chief of Meduza.io's international version.

BTW Maria Pevchikh accompanied Alexei Navalny from Omsk to Berlin. She was the one who was supposed to have gone to his hotel room in Tomsk and picked up the water bottle supposed to contain Novichok, at least until information came out that she acquired the water bottle from a vending machine at Omsk airport en route to Berlin. Pevchikh was the one person in Navalny's entourage who did not submit to questioning by Russian authorities on Navalny's poisoning.

I think we should see a bit more (in Google's English-language translation) of what Gabriel Felbermayr said to Katharina Petz of Deutschlandfunk:

Gabriel Felbermayr : I am sceptical about [further sanctions]. The question is always what we want to achieve with sanctions. If we really want to bring Russia to its knees economically, we would need a large coalition of countries to do so, and Europe alone cannot do as much as is necessary. At least China on board and, best of all, India and other [Russia's] trading partners would need it. The fact that sanctions have worked so badly in the past has to do with the fact that they are being undermined by other countries, that is a key problem. That is why I am sceptical that putting a on it (sic) really helps now. The objectives we have with Russia are very large. After all, we want nothing less than regime change in Russia, which is very difficult to achieve with economic pressure ...

... I believe that we must also see who we are hitting with the sanctions. Are these really the people who are acting and who, in the light of the sanctions, may then reconsider their actions, or is it the general population that is hit very diffusely, each a little bit. This does not hurt enough, so to speak, to put great pressure on the regime, but it does hit the general public. That is why I believe that a sanctions instrument that is much more adicating (sic) to individuals is more promising and does not affect the broad mass of Russians. That already exists, we are using it in the European Union. These could be travel restrictions, that could be the freezing of assets abroad, and this could also be sanctions against certain companies that are very close to the Kremlin. Perhaps there is more that can be done than Europe alone, because Russian foreign assets are not in China, so to speak, and the second residences of Russian oligarchs are not somewhere in the Third World, but in Monaco and London and Paris. So smart sanctions are certainly what is more promising – one has to ask whether Europe has the right instruments ...

...Yes, of course, the economic impact of the sanctions is quite different. Germany suffers from the Russia sanctions that have been in place since 2014, more than any country in the world, in absolute terms, and is also much more affected in percentage of economic output than in France. In Germany, this costs about 0.2% of GDP, according to various estimates, and in France this figure is much lower. There are, of course, other European countries where the level of concern is higher, [Bulgaria] for example, or the Eastern European Member States of the European Union as a whole. This unequal concern is certainly a political dilemma.

It is also a political problem with regard to the United States of America, which, while always insisting and pushing for sanctions, has so far drawn little economic disadvantage from it, simply because US trade with Russia is very low. That is the core problem when it comes to forging a broad coalition that costs are too unevenly distributed. We would certainly also have to think about compensation mechanisms within Europe or within the Western world, so that the joint fight against the violation of human rights, for example in Russia, must be paid for economically, not only by a few countries ...

... Yes, I would agree, I think [Nordstream II shutdown] is overestimated. The question is how much billions of export revenues Russia generates in the European Union by selling natural gas, that is the central question. And whether natural gas enters the European Union via Ukraine or Turkey or Germany does not matter much. It may even be the case that the possibility of shutting down or blocking such a pipeline again, or imposing conditions, means that Germany will even get a leverage over Russia that would not otherwise have been possible.

So I also think that Nord Stream 2 is overestimated. Here again the question would have to be asked, who does it actually cost if you do not complete the project. A great many European and German investors are also negatively affected, and with sanctions we want to inflict pain, above all, on the Russian power apparatus and not on ourselves. I believe that Nord Stream 2 is a bad instrument ...

So the sanctions regime against Russia is hitting the EU, and Germany and parts of Eastern Europe in particular, harder than it's hitting Russia and the EU needs more nations on board with sanctioning Russia.

I can't imagine the US would be willing to compensate the EU for any losses it has to sustain by sanctioning Russian government officials and businesspeople.

schmoe , Feb 15 2021 23:11 utc | 27
I recall that I first found the video below from a MofA comment, but very pertinent to this discussion and maybe it is discussing the same program: Top French Intel Boss Reveals Operation Beluga: US UK Plot to Discredit Putin and Destabilize Russia
Sam F , Feb 15 2021 23:26 utc | 29
The UK aristocracy and their opportunists have nothing to credit themselves but ill-gotten money or the hope thereof, they have always been forced to equate money=virtue to pretend to any merit, between themselves and their families. This is the cause of their eternal hatred of socialism and virtue in government, and their eternal hatred of Russia, even in the post-USSR era. If they have no one with less money to hate, they have no claim to personal merit, and must face the truth.

Of course the same is true of the upper classes anywhere, even among the poorest. For what was the purpose of their lying, cheating, stealing and perpetual materialism, what were the values they taught their children, if money is not virtue. Virtue is an unknown land to them, an unforgiveable sin, for that way lies the ugly truth about them.

Passer by , Feb 15 2021 23:28 utc | 30
>>More British Efforts To Undermine Russia

Lots of people living in la la land - that is - in the good old times when the West subjugated the planet.

UK economic drop 2020 -10 %
EU economic drop -7 %
Russia economic drop -3.1 %

Moment to reach 2019 Q4 economic level:
UK beginning of 2023
EU beginning of 2023
Russia Autumn 2021

>>Gabriel Felbermayr: The aims we (EU) have towards Russia are very big. We do not want anything less but regime change in Russia.

Yes, Gabi, it is good that you are honest. It will only warn people of your intentions, so it is preferable to talk that way. :) Meanwhile, in the real world, lots of EU businesses and NGOs will flew out from Russia and be replaced with Asian ones. It already happening with cars, trade, energy flows, diplomatic missions and tourists. So good riddance to bad rubbish.

Passer by , Feb 15 2021 23:35 utc | 32
Posted by: Jen | Feb 15 2021 23:08 utc | 26

>>I can't imagine the US would be willing to compensate the EU for any losses it has to sustain by sanctioning Russian government officials and businesspeople.

The place of the EU in this whole scheme was already described by Victoria Nuland. That is - "F the EU". :)

This is not a problem though, they have long experience with it.

oldhippie , Feb 15 2021 23:45 utc | 34
US will not be selling any LNG to EU/Germany to compensate for loss of NS2. The fracking business is shutting down and shutting down right now. Wells are going offline, replacements are not being drilled. No drill, no gas. Fertilizer shortages are already in sight. As we lose ability to grow food we will not be sending feedstock material across the ocean just because it sounded good in a strategic fantasy.
kiwiklown , Feb 15 2021 23:59 utc | 37
Posted by b on February 15, 2021 at 19:24 UTC | -- "They give extensive insight into the methods the 'west' is using to destroy foreign countries."

Thanks, B, for using the light of truth to expose the insanity of western leadership. It gives me pause to try to understand the ethics / morals / humanity of the thousands of western bureaucrats working on these elaborate (sometimes comical) plans to destroy other nations. How does a "civil" servant like that conceive such evil, then go home to teach their children how to be human beings? This banality of evil is absolutely unfathomable to ordinary people such as I.

Reminds me of the thousands of good Germans who "went along to get along" on the way into WW2. Also, the thousands of good British "planners" who war-gamed their way into WW2.

Passer by , Feb 16 2021 0:06 utc | 40
Gabriel Felbermayr

>>And whether natural gas enters the European Union via Ukraine or Turkey or Germany does not matter much.

This ignorant euro-puppet should be fired immediately.

Having a gas pipeline via Turkey increases the geopolitical weight of Turkey and it allows it to blackmail the Balkan Countries receiving the gas.

Using the Ukrainian route means that additional billions of euros will have to be invested in repairing the old and disrepeit Ukrainian Gas Transit Network which is from the 80s, with good amount of the money disappearing due to corruption.

The gas then may stop due to Russia-Ukrainian disputes (as it happened in the past) or "misterious" explosions may happen on the pipeline (as it happened too).

It is also unclear for how long will Russia be interested in saving the EU from freezing (in January the EU was forced to buy record amounts of gas due to cold temperatures), considering the rise of Asian markets.

Right now Russia is connecting the Western pipelines and the Eastern Pipelines, meaning that "EU gas" may be reserved for the East.

Gazprom is also looking to accelerate work on the Power of Siberia 2 (PoS2) pipeline, as part of plans to unite domestic gas transmission infrastructure across eastern and western Russia into a single system.

https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2127793-work-starts-on-final-part-of-russiachina-gas-pipeline

karlof1 , Feb 16 2021 1:24 utc | 41
TASS reports Lavorv's comments after meeting Finnish Foreign Minister revealing the lawless nature of the EU's behavior as it abets crimes against its own laws:

"The minister paid special attention to the fact that Brussels enables brazen violations of rights of Russian speakers and attacks on the Russian language and culture in the Baltic States, Ukraine and several other states. '

Of course, we cannot but take into account the EU condoning blatant breaches of Russian speakers, Russians and the attacks on the Russian language and culture that we witness in the Baltic States, Ukraine and some other countries. When Russian-speaking [TV] channels are shut down, when criminal cases are opened against Russian-speaking journalists for simply doing their jobs, when the disgraceful institute of statelessness remains in the EU, while the European Union watches it all without any desire to change anything, I believe that it is not Russia distancing itself from the EU, but the very EU moves away from the Russian language, Russian culture and all things Russian, meaning that it is drifting away from the Russian Federation ,' the minister noted." [My Emphasis]

As reported earlier, Russia will finish Nord Stream 2 and continue fulfilling its commitments. But given EU co-responsibility for the terrorism and refugee crises combined with the recent revelations, I don't see any positive developments occurring.

kiwiklown , Feb 16 2021 1:57 utc | 42
Posted by: Jen | Feb 15 2021 23:08 utc | 26

Thanks for that very revealing translation of Gabriel Felbermayr's words. It shows that a man can be intelligent and insane at the same time. He speaks as if the need for destroying Russia is a given. Sounds like he is one of those thousands who go along to get along....

"I fooled myself. I had to. I didn't want to see it, because I would then have had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community." -- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

norecovery , Feb 16 2021 2:02 utc | 43
Let's get to the heart of the matter: why are expatriate Jews so mad at Russia? That is it, in the simplest terms, is it not?
norecovery , Feb 16 2021 2:20 utc | 44
The answer: because they can never get enough.
kiwiklown , Feb 16 2021 2:33 utc | 45
Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 15 2021 23:46 utc | 35 -- "I see New Zealand is still headed by the Queen of England. Time for independence I'd say!"

No way to break free until the world order is rearranged after WW3.

Which may, or may not be during our lifetimes..... ;o)

RJPJR , Feb 16 2021 2:54 utc | 46
For Psychohistorian and John Cleary, regarding the City of London...

The City was never thoroughly brought to heel by William the Conqueror with the result that it was granted a sort of autonomy within the realm, hence its absence in the Doomsday Book, which assessed the realm's lands for taxation by the crown. Whether or not it is part of the United Kingdom is a moot point, for its autonomy (strengthened over time) makes it, in a sense, impervious to United Kingdom legislation that it wishes to ignore. In this regard, it is a sort of anomaly, like the Channel Islands (the last remaining part of the Duchy of Normandy still under the British crown) and the Isle of Mann, both of which are NOT part of the United Kingdom and were not part of the European Union, and both of which are notorious tax havens.

The peculiar status of the City of London is what has made it a great financial center, for it can regulate itself (and does, to some extent, if only to keep the scandalmongers at bay), unlike the New York and Swiss financial centers, which are subject to "outside" oversight, New York by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and Switzerland by the FINMA (Financial Market Supervisory Authority).

kiwiklown , Feb 16 2021 2:57 utc | 47
MarkU @ 16 -- "While dynasties are usually founded by exceptional people, as a rule the only exceptional thing about their descendants is their arrogance."

Ancient Chinese wisdom on generational wealth: First generation make money; second generation keep money; third generation lose money. Start over.

MarkU @ 16 -- "Oligarchies usually end with arrogance, stupidity, ignorance and eventually insanity. "

Good fit for most parts of the Western (*) leadership, lying one day, reversing their own lies the next, then reverting to their original lie, then pivoting to some other lie. Insane. They have gone past derision, gone past shame, gone past dishonour, into insanity. Destruction cometh next.

(*) Russia is Eurasia, not the West.

Stonebird , Feb 16 2021 11:33 utc | 68
"Now it's time to expose another intelligence cutout - BBC Media Action. Don't be surprised that the detested mainstream media outlet BBC has its own secret firm which gets its funding from your taxes as well as from the CSSF." (Taken from part two)

One visible thing about the complete "undermining of Russia", is that a large amount of bureaucratic planning has gone into it. The quantity of companies that have been employed and with specific duties to perform is shocking. An incidental factor is that the UK and French participants get well paid. £975 or £700 per day, in comparaison to "locally found" participants.

Other things of note are the targeting of Russian speaking, younger age groups and the admission that the over 40's are more difficult to change. (This is a common factor for other areas of propaganda as well.)

The "Covid story" has had an effect. No longer are " mother and daughter tea parties " with 40 participants possible. Not a joke , but it serves to underline the thoroughness of the propaganda effort leading up to effect a "regime change".

----
About the Monarchy, and inferred connection to the "landed Gentry Aristocracy". Possible, but would rely on education in the "best" Schools, and their production of eligible members of "secret" manipulative societies via old boy networks, as well as "ordinary" leaders. ie Politicians, Top civil servants.
Private Schools such as Eton and Harrow have recognised "specialities" and form the basis of networks. It is not for nothing that you have to put the names down of likely progeny almost at birth. Closed shop attitude as in a "trade Union"! ST. Johns, Leatherhead, produces clergy for example.
The UK Monarchy was connected by intermarriage to almost all the Royalty in Europe. There are still connections (for those who have the cash), through such goups as Bilderberg, etc.

The relation of the "Dukes" to a desire to take over Russia, is a possible source of interest. ie. The Duke of Grosvernor owns the Square mile of the City of London. (Which is an entity in itself.) The City has the key to the finance of the UK and much of the "dark money, and money laundering in the world.
----
all for today.

Jackrabbit , Feb 16 2021 15:08 utc | 73
vetinLA @Feb16 6:32 #60
Those beliefs led us to DJT..
Obama, Bernie and DJT have led their flocks to nowhere. What led us to them is the establishment's desire to derail populist Movements.

One clue (among many): Each of these so-called populists is pro-Empire.

Nothing will change as long as we keep falling for compromised leaders that are promoted by a compromised media.

!!

Stonebird , Feb 16 2021 15:49 utc | 74
JohninMK | Feb 16 2021 12:59 utc | 70

I heard this when I was a student in London. It may be hearsay after all, as I also tried to find relevant info after your comment. Trouble is the enormous power of the City, the Banks, and major corporations all who have a "vote" (or not) in the affairs of the Corporation, make any detailed study next to impossible. Trusts, etc. I followed somebodies FOI request which led to ..... nothing.

Note that known Grosvenor territory (the house I had a flat in. The street belonged to them.) were part of their assets, and in the last seven years of a 99yr lease. After which it had to be "returned in the same state as it was "sold" in the first place.

The present Duke does apparently not have much to say in the Grosvenor Family Trust. He is still rich. (according to one grovelling article).

It does make a prime suspect for setting up the Anti-Russian saga, as those Banks/Corporations and Billionaires etc. would be the ones to profit massively from a"regime change".

tut, tut !!

Prof K , Feb 16 2021 17:23 utc | 81
Like clockwork, the NYT begins to set a rationalization for more US imperialism in Syria. This is such a contrived article. It doesn't come out of the blue.
These ferocious dogs never stop. The push is to rebuild the Turkish relationship, and so regain influence over Syria through 'protecting Idlib' and its 'children.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/world/middleeast/syria-turkey-erdogan-afrin.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Charles Michael , Feb 16 2021 17:33 utc | 82
Karlofi (with all due respect for your posts)

About Tim Kirby advises to Russia. The guy is completely delusional and really ignorant of Russia history and mental structures.Russi is not going to metamporphose in USA or UEJohn Hermer: http://johnhelmer.net/1000th-dance-with-bears/
But Russia is going fine with China

karlof1 , Feb 16 2021 18:07 utc | 83
Charles Michael @81--

Thanks for your reply! I've often disagreed with Kirby; but as I wrote in my first linking to his essay, there are some suggestions that merge with ideas we've discussed over the months here. I've written about what I see as Russia's fundamental ideology, how it differs from the West, and fume intensely when Putin says differences with the West aren't ideological when it's so clear they are--Putin just laid out the vast chasm in his Davos speech. Lavrov just reiterated that Russia cannot abide nations/organizations that are pathological prevaricators. And China is the same. IMO, the First Principles of Russia and China are the ones humanity needs to adhere to and merge with policy. They are the same as those proposed by Henry Wallace for his Century of The Common Man. I see them as an evolutionary step forward to a Commonwealth of Humanity that would inspire a Great Leveling--which the elite of course oppose. The most recent manifestation of the Abrahamic Religions also appeals to such an arrangement as does most Afro/Asian philosophy.

What we have is an embattled minority trying to keep its power using every trick at its disposal. The #1 question most of us have: Is that minority suicidal--will it see nuclear war as a way to keep its position? Putin has answered that if it does try it will lose. And IMO, the minority knows that it currently will lose but hopes to reverse that outcome--They don't seek compromise as they want it all. And that's where the big problem lies--How to dissuade them of their unattainable Zero-sum Fetish?

psychohistorian , Feb 16 2021 18:24 utc | 85
So empire (is it British, American, Jewish...) threw up Donald Trump as the attempt to gather the totally delusional around a maniacal "strong/bully" leader to push back against the Russia/China axis and it didn't work entirely like they wanted but it broke enough social anchors to increase the fragility/fear factors of society. When the mostly manufactured crisis does come they trust their ability to manufacture Western outcomes that keep private finance alive and with some ongoing control over some chunk of the world.

I don't expect to live to see private finance go entirely away anymore. I think the trajectory is set in that direction but the timeframe will be longer than I wanted/expected. Look at the number of commenters here that still want to play whack-a-mole bad apples games while behind the curtain the global private finance elite are continuing their species perversion through British ways like b has shown here.

The West needs a better social system that has the broader public instead of a cult of folks as its focus or we will continue our road to deserved extinction.

juliania , Feb 16 2021 18:47 utc | 86
emersonreturn @ 9, I have just done the same this morning as gently as I could with family members in New Zealand. It is very hard for them to recognize this is not all Trump's doing - especially when they are benefitting from better government themselves as far as coping with the virus, and they remember fondly better days in the relationship with the US.

All we can do is keep trying.

Paco , Feb 16 2021 18:56 utc | 87
Lavrov at work, day after day. Today with Togolese Foreign Minister, a quick translation so as to induce a little smile:

Question: How do Western countries view the rapprochement between Russia and African countries?

Foreign Minister Lavrov: In different ways. Some are neutral, others, like the former US Administration, are very negative. Former US Secretary of State M. Pompeo traveled to Africa before the end of President Trump's term and publicly urged not to cooperate with Russia and China in the field of trade, because Moscow and Beijing allegedly proceed from geopolitical interests, trying to benefit. The United States, on the other hand, "does it from the heart." I will not comment on this kind of position.

Recently, representatives of the new US Administration called on the Russian Sputnik V vaccine to be viewed with suspicion, since again, this is a "Kremlin's geopolitical plan" and one must be "careful" not to become "dependent on Russia."

willie , Feb 16 2021 19:00 utc | 88
I think Crimea was meant to be the new homeland for Israel citizens, when the usurpator state goes down. Now they will have to save themselves to Patagonia.
Hoarsewhisperer , Feb 16 2021 19:11 utc | 89
Intriguing topic.
It's anyone's guess why the Christian West's front-of-curtain leaders are training the Homeland serfs to become accustomed to 24/7 lies about remote enemies. The notion that the West can "win" a war with Russia/China is laughable. Each/both could retaliate EFFECTIVELY if attacked. So if the bs isn't about WWIII then what is it about?

My guess is that it's nothing more sophisticated than Creative Distraction from what's been going on in AmeriKKKa and, to a lesser extent the Rest of the West, since the Oligarchs had their own taxes slashed in the '70s, '80s and '90s. This helped to fund the Oligarch's favourite hobby: "Privatise Every Publicly Owned Monopoly/Utility." Keeping wage-growth flat also helped to fund the take-over.

From a country-to-country perspective the trend, whilst quite uneven, has been inexorable. And there is a notable absence of serious debate about reversing the trend.

It doesn't matter what the ultimate goal of this social engineering may or may not be. It has to be reversed. And one way to reverse it would be to submit every excuse Rich People use to justify their tax breaks to Public Scrutiny and laughed out of court.

In the 1950s Rich People, worldwide, paid eye-watering Taxes on all 'excess income' beyond the top marginal rate. And when they went to Heaven their Estate was taxed on its 'excess value'. They've killed off those taxes too, by playing one country/ jurisdiction off against another - using Lawfare (high-priced lawyers whom ordinary folk can't afford).

They're too eerily inept to win a war against Russia/China. Their war is against their own countrymen. And it's aim is to prevent as many serfs as possible from getting their grubby little mits on OUR MONEY!

juliania , Feb 16 2021 19:19 utc | 91
Thank you, karlof1 @ 14; Crooke's essay is masterful! If only others in the West could be persuaded to read it -- the references to Ireland and India are so persuasive, but then he doesn't stop but demonstrates how the situation today is so much worse. The bolded quote,
"...We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both." (Emphasis added).

has to be seen in the entirety of the article to be appreciated, and his definition of the EU as a cartel is pure genius! They are all not even worthy of the title 'empire' -- they are all cartels!!

Jo , Feb 16 2021 19:31 utc | 93
UK loaned 1.5b to Ukraine to build 2 warships for them...plus rebuild shipyards to re construct the navy....paratroopers are training Ukraine forces....do they plan to go against Donbass like this....reminds me of old film a bridge too far where British forces failed ......and Nato gonna give Black Sea a lot more trouble for Russia too.
karlof1 , Feb 16 2021 19:48 utc | 94
Paco @87--

I was just going to post the link to that transcript, From it much can be learned about the degree of Russian involvement in Togo and Africa as a whole; this for example:

"The Association for Economic Cooperation with the African States was created in Russia following the 2019 Sochi summit. It includes representatives from the related departments and major Russian companies. The Russia-Africa Partnership Forum, which is a political association, was created as well. Its secretariat is located at the Russian Foreign Ministry. We agreed to hold the forum's annual political meetings at the foreign minister level, from Russia and the African Union Troika that is comprised of its former, current and incoming chairpersons. In 2020, we held them via videoconference with the foreign ministers from South Africa, Egypt and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hopefully, we'll be able to meet in person in 2021."

That's a lot of interaction that also includes Russian businesses, all of which ought to be added to China's activities. In addition to what Paco provided, there's this closing paragraph that reveals more of the Anti-Russian nature of BidenCo:

" It wasn't long ago that representatives of the new US administration said the Russian Sputnik V vaccine should be treated with suspicion, since it was another geopolitical plan from the Kremlin, and that one must be careful not to become dependent on Russia . It's sad if they have nothing else to say about normal and friendly relations between countries, and if this is the only thing that they have to say about this. We never make friends with other countries in order to oppose third countries. If Russia and its foreign partners are mutually attracted, we have every right to develop our relations as we see fit. I hope others will also learn their lessons and treat our ties with Africa with respect." [My Emphasis]

Russia and China act while the Outlaw US Empire focuses on fashioning a False Narrative that can easily be seen as such. However, it seems the underlying scourge is becoming easier for English speakers to see: "All animals are equal; but some animals are more equal than others."

Paco , Feb 16 2021 20:14 utc | 98
Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 16 2021 19:48 utc | 94

Too bad the mid.ru site usually does not publish the guests comments and answers, excess of caution maybe, but it was interesting what the Togo foreign minister had to say concerning good relations with the Soviet Union and then Russia in many countries all over Africa, he expressed his gratitude for the many African students in Russia, students that have become high cadres in Togo and other countries. Another interesting point was the fact that Lome is the main deep water port in all of West Africa, and therefore the minister was talking about regional matters, Togo as a hub. Macron must have watched the press conference, after all the foreign minister spoke in French. Russia is recovering lost presence in Africa.


[Feb 16, 2021] Opening The CIA's Can Of Worms by Edward Curtin

Some level of control of the press by intelligence agencies is present in all modern societies. The question is "when the quantity turns into quality"/
It is strange that people are surprised by the side effect of the conversion of the state to the national security state model (which actually happened after WWII, not now) and idealize the past so much. Probably some warts became more visible with Internet and the rise of alternative media. Still what exists in the USA looks more like some variation of the "inverted totalitarism" model of the national security state than the dreadful Stalinism model of the same.
One of the negative side of the Internet revolution and the revolution in communications (such as emergence of smartphones, social sites and such) is the dramatic increase of the capabilities of state surveillance. Do intelligence agencies literally picked up thinks that were ling on the ground for anybody to take. Look at the published material about Prism. That a natural outcome of the ubiquity of electronic email and email portals. Low hanging fruit so to speak. And the PRISM program is just a tip of the iceberg, and its revelation by Snowden is limited handout, so to speak.
It is fascinating to watch how the US state changed from 1980 to 2020, but nothing new under the sun: the seeds of this transformation were planted in 1946.
Feb 16, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Edward Curtin via Off-Guardian.org,

"The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy," wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.

This is true. The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state's ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience.

We have long been subjected to this "information warfare," whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.

Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.

For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team ; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks , among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in "courting the Compatible Left" since right wingers were already in the Agency's pocket.

All this is documented and not disputed. It is shocking only to those who don't do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.

With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive. It, therefore, should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves.

Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.

Just the other day The New York Times had this headline :

"Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims."

Notice the lack of the word alleged before "false virus claims." This is guilt by headline. It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram's ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook, Instagram's parent company.

That ban should follow soon, as the Times ' reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. "makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers" at Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe .

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.

Which brings me to the recent work of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi , both of whom have strongly and rightly decried this censorship. As I understand their arguments, they go like this.

First , the corporate media have today divided up the territory and speak only to their own audiences in echo chambers: liberal to liberals (read: the "allegedly" liberal Democratic Party), such as The New York Times, NBC, etc., and conservative to conservatives (read" the "allegedly" conservative Donald Trump), such as Fox News, Breitbart, etc.

They have abandoned old school journalism that, despite its shortcomings, involved objectivity and the reporting of disparate facts and perspectives, but within limits. Since the digitization of news, their new business models are geared to these separate audiences since they are highly lucrative choices. It's business-driven since electronic media have replaced paper as advertising revenues have shifted and people's ability to focus on complicated issues has diminished drastically.

Old school journalism is suffering as a result and thus writers such as Greenwald and Taibbi and Chris Hedges (who interviewed Taibbi and concurs: part one here ) have taken their work to the internet to escape such restrictive categories and the accompanying censorship.

Secondly , the great call for censorship is not something the Silicon Valley companies want because they want more people using their media since it means more money for them, but they are being pressured to do it by the traditional old school media, such as The New York Times , who now employ "tattletales and censors," people who are power-hungry jerks, to sniff out dissenting voices that they can recommend should be banned.

Greenwald says,

They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous 'disinformation.'"

Thus, the old school print and television media are not on the same page as Facebook, Twitter, etc. but have opposing agendas.

In short, these shifts and the censorship are about money and power within the media world as the business has been transformed by the digital revolution.

I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power-hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.

These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so. If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core.

For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many. The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.

To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense. These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc. They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA's program to control, use, and infiltrate the media. Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.

In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden's revelations.

Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.

Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times , etc. The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.

That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon Valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.

But for whom do these intelligence agencies work?

Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world's wealth through the stories they tell.

It is a symbiotic relationship.

As FDR put it bluntly in 1933, this coterie of wealthy forces is the "financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson." Their wealth and power has increased exponentially since then, and their connected tentacles have further spread to create what is an international deep state that involves such entities as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, those who meet yearly at Davos, etc.

They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.

As is well known, or should be, the CIA was the creation of Wall St. and serves the interests of the wealthy owners. Peter Dale Scott, in "The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld," says of Allen Dulles, the nefarious longest-running Director of the CIA and Wall St. lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell:

There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles's influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director."

It was Dulles, long connected to Rockefeller's Standard Oil, international corporations, and a friend of Nazi agents and scientists, who was tasked with drawing up proposals for the CIA. He was ably assisted by five Wall St. bankers or investors, including the aforementioned Frank Wisner who later, as a CIA officer, said his "Mighty Wurlitzer" was "capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired."

This he did by recruiting intellectuals, writers, reporters, labor organizations, and the mainstream corporate media, etc. to propagate the CIA's messages.

Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges are correct up to a point, but they stop short. Their critique of old school journalism à la Edward Herman's and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing of Consent model, while true as far as it goes, fails to pin the tail on the real donkey. Like old school journalists who knew implicitly how far they could go, these guys know it too, as if there is an invisible electronic gate that keeps them from wandering into dangerous territory.

The censorship of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an exemplary case. His banishment from Instagram and the ridicule the mainstream media have heaped upon him for years is not simply because he raises deeply informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates, the pharmaceutical companies, etc. His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.

To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues. To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.

This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state's assassination of both his father and his uncle.

It is why his wonderful recent book , American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family , that contains not one word about vaccines , was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces.

These worms must be kept in the can, just as the power of the international overlords represented by the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset must be. They must be dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories not worthy of debate or exposure.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., by name and dedication to truth seeking, conjures up his father's ghost, the last politician who, because of his vast support across racial and class divides, could have united the country and tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.

So they killed him.

There is a reason Noam Chomsky is an exemplar for Hedges, Greenwald, and Taibbi. He controls the can opener for so many. He has set the parameters for what is considered acceptable to be considered a serious journalist or intellectual. The assassinations of the Kennedys, 9/11, or a questioning of the official Covid-19 story are not among them, and so they are eschewed.

To denounce censorship, as they have done, is admirable. But now Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says – "This far and no further" – and jump over it. That's where the true stories lie. That's when they'll see the worms squirm.


4Celts 14 hours ago (Edited) remove link

But now Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says – "This far and no further" – and jump over it.

Easy for you to say, Mr. Curtin.

"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." - W. Wilson

Ms No PREMIUM 14 hours ago

That quote really does display it all and it should have chilled people to the bone.

bananaz 2 hours ago

A *** is Director of the CIA now.

So no can of worms will be open.

TRM 4 hours ago remove link

Tragedy & Hope
Wall St & the Bolshevik Revolution
Wall St & the Rise of Hitler
... ... ...

Normal 14 hours ago remove link

No crap, the federal government is attacking the citizens of the nation.

Mr. Apotheosis 14 hours ago

In truth, the "owners" of the federal government are attacking the people of the world. Ever notice how no matter what country you're referring to, they ALL have the same talking points and the same sensationalist media? The rabbit hole goes much deeper than the US federal government. They are mere tools as the article suggests.

wee-weed up 14 hours ago (Edited)

The MSM are not just stenographers for the Deep State... but avid cheerleaders!

Pandelis 13 hours ago

regular scum selected for the job ....

GreatUncle 4 hours ago remove link

The government is owned and controlled by the globalists.

Hell they paid for the fraudulent election what did you expect?

CIA is just an extension of it along with the FBI.

Plus Size Model 1 hour ago

You should look into Ivy Lee. He was one of Rockefeller's cronies for a long time. Chomsky disregards him to distract and divert. His deeds run way deeper than Bernnays or the Creel Committee.

Ivy Lee pioneered the modern role of press agent for big corporations. He's also credited with promoting communism in the 20's and had the Red Cross as well as IG Fabien (Nazi Party front) as his clients.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Lee

InfiniteIntellRules 12 hours ago

Robert F. Kennedy is the last lawyer standing fighting and winning legal cases against large corporations, big pharma on medical, purposeful and criminal malfeance resulting in the injury and death of thousands of people, perhaps more. He is a brave man. He has walked in the Valley of Death with his father and uncle's horrific murders. He fears no one. Least of all these corporations of death and destruction along with their bought and paid for politicians. Be grateful. He legally sues corps who pollute, poison food in addition to untested, harmful vaccines. He saves lives. Checkout https://childrenshealthdefense.org/ play_arrow

Rubicon727 58 minutes ago

The hatred behind The Kennedy's probably harkens back to the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy. He was adamantly against the formation of the CIA. Kennedy realized the deeply criminal aspects of the CIA and vehemently pushed back.

drjimi 14 hours ago

Real journalists around the world risk their lives standing up to the government.

American "journalists" want to work for the government.

Oldwood 14 hours ago remove link

Corruption knows no profession, it is anywhere there's a buck and a desire for power.

Liesel 13 hours ago (Edited) remove link

Just remember, when they start censoring people, then you know the people getting censored must be saying something of value. I knew when they went after Alex Jones awhile back, they were coming after all of us at some point. I even said they were coming after ZH. Unfortunately, now this place is censored like all the rest. The scariest event happening right now is not: a pandemic, capitol riot, impeachments, etc. No doubt, it's the censorship of the American people. In fact, one of the very important building block of America was free speech. Essentially, this massive censorship is an outright attack on America by shadowy-dot-gov agencies, banks, elites, big tech, and the large corporations. Sadly enough, the elected officials in Washington are nothing more than submissive puppets.

Ms No PREMIUM 13 hours ago (Edited)

That isn't always the case actually. That's why they call it limited hangout.

Somebody feigning attack and being downtrodden (like Pelosi's s garage) is often contrived for street cred. They will also leak some valuable info (often nothing new though, stuff that's already out or a false detour) for credibility building.

"A limited hangout or partial hangout is, according to former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Victor Marchetti , "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting -- sometimes even volunteering -- some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further." [1] [2] "

this definition is even limited intentionally...lol

Its used primarily now to set up controlled opposition and control information.

I am Jack's existential crisis 14 hours ago remove link

The intelligence agencies have always been a safeguard between the rulers and the ruled. They are in the business of mining data on everyone while acting as provocateurs in fomenting political and social destabilizing events that the public won't do on their own . Period. They care about freedom only in how to prevent it from occurring.

"As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented." -- Propaganda, Edward Bernays

johnny two shoes 13 hours ago (Edited) remove link

Stale repost:

The U.S. attacked itself to provoke a war on 9/11.

It did the same before in Cuba, blew up its own ship...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)

Also with Japan- basically guided them into the attack on Pearl Harbor.

https://mises.org/library/how-us-economic-warfare-provoked-japans-attack-pearl-harbor

This is called the "Batsh*t Crazy offensive defense maneuver in the dark".

It is a tried & true method.

Vlad & Xi should be scared ****less that the freaks who seized the White House are getting ready to orchestrate an attack on themselves... and blame it on them, and then attack them.

maybe this time it's different, but there's all kinds of Skunk Works they've been just itching to use

Cloud9.5 8 hours ago (Edited) remove link

Read up on the Phoenix Operation in Vietnam. This will tell you all you need to know about how the CIA operates. They are doing exactly the same thing here and they have captured the government. The only reason any of us are still alive is that we do not matter to them. https://thevietnamwar.info/the-rise-of-phoenix-program-in-vietnam/

They want a monopoly of power. That is why they have been attacking the second amendment for decades.

InfiniteIntellRules 7 hours ago

Look up Operation Gladio. That is replicated here as well. Thanks.

Amel 5 hours ago

"Pacification"

bustdriver 9 hours ago

And then there is Eric Schmidt and DARPA....

https://aim4truth.org/2019/07/02/former-lover-exposes-eric-schmidt/

Patmos 13 hours ago (Edited)

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world's wealth through the stories they tell.

It goes beyond that

Patmos 12 hours ago

The MK Ultra program and the deliberate creation of DID victims

And Sirhan Sirhan being a likely subject, which is tragically on point here.

MrBoompi 4 hours ago

Professor Carroll Quigley already explained the process to us in Tragedy and Hope. The book was written decades ago but the conspiracy it explains is still controlling the world today.

tdlcoop 7 hours ago (Edited) remove link

Some have to ask what the hell was Truman thinking in 1946 when he signed a bill that allowed an above the law and above Government oversight department to be created?

Did he honestly think once that department stopped spying on Cuba that he could just disband the merry men?

Really how stupid are these Politicians?

And now you have Democrats fronting Policy that will allow Big Tech Corporations (even though Corporations were created as a form of abolishing Slavery) to form their own Governments! It's TPP through the back door and most Americans don't even know it's happening.

You didn't cede power to Politicians to have them sell that power to unaccountable corporations. They don't have that right but they do it because Americans pay more attention to the idiocy of Celebrities than they do to the people they pay to protect the country.

Notice they call it the Central Intelligence Agency and not something with the word America or Federal in it? Just like Central Banking the CIA wasn't created to serve/disrupt just a single Country. Having said that even the Federal Reserve is not American but it has the word Federal in it to fool Americans.

AlexCat3741 4 hours ago remove link

Yup. Whether it is a Congressional Committee holding hearings to supposedly expose truth about things perceived to be wrong but then to do nothing except refer a matter to the Dept. of Two Tiered Justice for prosecution that never happens; the nonsensical presentations on TV cast as "News" or entertainment in the form of Professional Sports Contests, IT'S ALL "BREAD & CIRCUS" TO KEEP THE POPULATION DISTRACTED THAT THEIR POCKETS ARE BEING PICKED AND THEIR FREEDOMS ERODED.

Instead of being a sheep to focus on things that don't matter, put away your electronic leashes, e.g., iPhones, Fakebook/Twitter Accounts, to get organized to fight for your Republic, your Constitution, and your life because whether you know it or not, the United States is in a state of war; Undeclared Total War against the basic principles and the foundations of this Republic's Constitutional System. And the initiator of this war is not comrade Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, of course, it's the system, however ridiculous it may sound, the World Communist System, or the World Communist Conspiracy, whether it scares some people or not I don't give a hoot. If you're not scared by now, nothing can scare you. What actually happens now that we may have literally some years to live on unless the United States People wakes up. The time bomb is ticking. Every second, the disaster is coming closer and closer. And unlike earlier times in the World, we will have nowhere to defect to unless you want to live in Antarctica with penguins. This is it. This is the last country of freedom and possibility.

redbaron 5 hours ago

The Conquest book on the Russia revolution has a chapter describing the ideology and it is a good analysis that accurately describes what we see today in the USSA.

Amel 5 hours ago (Edited)

Scott called the deep state intelligence communities "supra national"...

[Feb 15, 2021] EU - Russia Conflict Deepens

Feb 15, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Virgile , Feb 12 2021 17:38 utc | 2

Last week. during a visit by the EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov slapped down the EU's sanctimonious interference in Russia's internal policies.

Back in Brussels, Borrell, who was criticized by some EU hardliners for not directly rebuffing Lavrov's talk, set down to write a blog post in which again attacked Russia over the latest Navalny stunt:

I have just returned from a very complicated visit to Moscow, on which I had embarked to discuss the fraught state of EU-Russia relations. They have been low for a number of years, and deteriorated even further after recent developments linked to the poisoning, arrest, and sentencing of Alexei Navalny as well as the related mass arrests of thousands of demonstrators. The purpose of this mission was to express directly the EU's strong condemnation of these events and to address, through principled diplomacy, the process of a rapid worsening of our relationship with Russia, and to help prepare the forthcoming European Council discussions on EU-Russia relations.

Borrell is delusional. Hardly anyone in Russia believes the nonsensical poisoning story for which the 'west' could provide exactly zero evidence:

Brett Harris @BrettHar123 - 18:41 UTC · Feb 7, 2021

Only 15% in Russia believe the Navalny poisoning was the Govt trying to eliminate an opponent, and the 15% based this opinion from Telegram and the Internet and were mostly 18-24. The rest think it was staged, a Western false flag, personal or opposition: https://levada.ru/2020/12/24/...

The whole Navalny poisoning was obviously some secret service operation to bash Russia. His lavish living in in a 5 bed room luxurious apartment in Germany after he was released from hospital was paid by the libertarian oligarch Evgeny Chichvarkin . Chichvarkin, who lives in London, is probably an MI6 cutout. It is still not known who paid the multimillion production costs for the fake 'Putin palace' video. The studio renting for the video was requested by a company in Los Angeles. Some U.S. involvement is thereby assured.

Poland and other NATO countries are now openly pressing Navalny and other traitors like him to continue their regime change attempts:

Cont. reading: EU - Russia Conflict Deepens

Posted by b at 17:14 UTC | Comments (120)

This confrontation was predictable. There is a limit to what Russia can accept. Even after the russophobic UK departure from the EU, the mood is the same.
Therefore a frank confrontation may either be a wake-up call for Europe that they may lose totally Russia as a partner or in the contrary bring them more apart.
What the EU fails to realize is that without Russia , it may end up become the puppet of the USA and the UK
Time will tell



james , Feb 12 2021 17:39 utc | 3

thanks b.... you're correct borrell is delusional and a perfect representative for a delusional europe.... i am glad lavrov said what he did.. i just wish russia would throw the shit back at them by making a parallel with the wests treatment of assange... it really highlights the outrageous-ness of the west at this point...

and someone on the open thread posted about mh17 and trying to access more info contained in boxes on the rear part of the plain that might lead to a different conclusion... as i see it mh17, skripal, navalny and etc. etc - are all frame ups to take down russia... it has reached a level of insanity and borrell is the perfect delusional character to represent it all here..

throw the shit back at them russia... call the west out on their endless bullshit... the time for diplomacy is long gone and this appears to be the conclusion that russia is indeed coming to, however slowly....

jayc , Feb 12 2021 18:02 utc | 6
Borrell - "The strategic choices we make now will determine international power dynamics in the 21st century, and notably whether we will advance towards more cooperative or more polarised models, based on closed or on freer societies."

He answers his own question - the EU (and "partners") will advance towards a more polarized international model, based on their own self-serving definitions of "closed" or "freer" societies. This self-generated dichotomy will be used to mask the true nature of this perceived crossroad: "they" can live with us, but "we" can't live with them.

Beibdnn , Feb 12 2021 18:07 utc | 7
In a video posted earlier today, 12/02/2021 Alexander Mercuoris of The Duran analysed the reaction of Germany's politicians to Lavrov's comments.
Basically even Heiko Maas the anti-Russian foreign minister shit his pants at the though of Russia abandoning Europe and therefore jeapordizing Germany a significant percentage of it's energy supply.
When all is said and done, the E.U. will suffer far worse than Russia if Moscow abandons Europe.
The technocrats know this. However the level of maturity required to overcome their hubris is patently lacking and to re-orientate themselves idealogically will be viery difficult as can be seen by the reaction of 70 mental retards who pose as M.E.P.s in a letter they signed calling for Borrell's resignation and a tougher stance on Russia.

Interesting times ahead.

Carlos , Feb 12 2021 18:11 utc | 8

Until a few years ago, Russia did not have an alternative for purchases of many items other than from the West. It now has China to supply most needs. When China finally solves the problems caused by the US sanctions to semiconductor factories (it will take roughly a decade to develop its own photolithography and design, the most critical tools of advanced semiconductor processing), China will be able to provide everything that Russia needs except for warm climate fruits and vegetables (maybe Turkey?). This new paradigm seems to be behind Russia's new assertiveness. Europe should make peace with Russia before it fully tilts towards the East.

AriusArmenian , Feb 12 2021 18:14 utc | 9

In 1990 at the what I then thought end of Cold War there seemed an opening to the coalescing of a northern hemisphere zone of peace - but that vision has come to nothing. What an idiot I was! How could I ever have thought that the best of the inheritance of Western civilization would lead in the West. The plowing, plundering, grasping, murdering and scheming for profit psychos in the West stabbed that vision in the heart. I am sure now another opening will not come in my lifetime - the West will make sure of that.

If I was younger I would leave the US but now can only hunker down and stay out of the way of the juggernaut of rampaging psychos lurching from one failure to another. The only relief from the deepest moments of despair is looking to the East and others that are building and working together to build a new world. Obviously Russia and China, along with Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and others. It is a strange world for me turned upside down when I even include North Korean resistance to the US Empire of Mendacity as contributing to the building of that new world.

Hoyeru , Feb 12 2021 19:56 utc | 14

the Reality is NOT quite right the way b has present it. EU together with US, Canada CAN and WILL hurt Russia deeply if they slap severe economic sanctions on Russia's energy sector. And Russia knows that and EU knows that Russia knows it.
The West's game is very simple: cut Russia from the Western world, by denying it access to any type of new tech, economic loans and any type of ties with the West. (this worked quite well with the Soviet Union, so it WILL work again) And this WILL hurt Russia deeply economically, no question about it. And before you tell me about China and the supposed Russia-China's ties, let me inform you that the ties are merely economic and both still don't trust each other. The Russians are well aware of CHina's claims over Siberia. They don't really work together, most of those ties are imaginary and dont really exist.
Putin has made several mistakes, and he is too dependent on the Rich Russian millionaires. The threat of sanctions made him freeze when the West went after Ukraine and Putin didn't act to save it. Russia will cry bloody tears over this in the very near future. This is only the overture of things to come. There will be another fake false flag even in the Azov sea after which USA will demand Russia be boycotted. Ys that will hurt EU also, but the Eu are masochists who love getting their asses fucked by US.
Russia better get prepared and get their supply ass grease ready, they will be getting serious ass fucking very very soon. And they wont be able to do anything about it. Good going, Putin!

karlof1 , Feb 12 2021 19:58 utc | 15

AriusArmenian @9--

I commiserate as we're in the same boat. I watch like a hawk because forewarned is forearmed!

/////

Published at the right moment given events is this Strategic-Culture Editorial : "NATO's Road To Perdition With Ukraine." It omits the Borrell incident to focus on the recent meeting between NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg hosted Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shymhal at the organization's headquarters in Brussels:

"At a joint press conference, both men were upbeat about Ukraine joining NATO. Stoltenberg admitted that the former Soviet Republic has been eyed for membership of the alliance since 2008, a timescale which puts more recent conflict over the past nearly seven years in perspective. He also confirmed that NATO forces have been building up their presence in the Black Sea in coordination with Ukrainian counterparts. In recent weeks, three US warships have been training with Ukrainian naval vessels in order to counter what Stoltenberg says is 'Russian aggression'."

So, there's much more in the stew than it appears:

"It is interesting to speculate why Stoltenberg – a former Norwegian premier and nominal civilian head of NATO – this week appeared to give new impetus to Ukraine's ambitions. Could it be related to the change of administration in the United States? Senior members of the Biden administration have publicly stated during Senate hearings a willingness to increase military support for the Kiev government in its conflict with pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. American and European envoys at the UN Security Council this week reiterated strident accusations against Russia claiming that Moscow was responsible for prolonging the conflict in Ukraine . Russia's envoy Vassily Nebenzia countered that it was the Kiev regime and its Western allies who have not implemented the previously agreed Minsk peace accord signed in 2015." [My Emphasis]

Bald-faced lies in public forums that began with Clinton/Gore have steadily escalated and clearly aren't a product of any one administration but a continuity of the War Party's attempt at Full Spectrum Domination that keeps slipping further away from any possibility of occurring, thus its desperation. Yesterday, I provided this link to The Saker's latest analysis and called it a Must Read. Within he links to several reports from Russian media and military sources that those watching closely need to read. Yesterday, Putin met with his Security Council ostensibly about arms control but I think the conversation went well beyond that, although I have no confirmation. The Solovyov-Lavrov transcript isn't complete yet, but what's there is incredible! As Lavrov said, "Well, this is some kind of a kingdom of crooked mirrors." If what Lavrov said of Borrell's position, we should have some pity for him being put into such an impossible position--but then, he's well paid to do his duty.

Brendan , Feb 12 2021 20:22 utc | 18

Patrick Armstrong wrote yesterday about the consequences of the Navalny brothers' scam in 2012 against Yves Rocher:

NAVALNIY. The story continues. The theory that he's being fitted up for a treason charge was given a boost when Zakharova said he should be called an "agent of influence" rather than a politician. His suspended sentence for fraud was lifted and he's off to prison. Read Yves Rocher's statement; sounds to me as if the company believes he did swindle them. The fact that there's now a campaign against the company suggests my deduction is correct.
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2021/02/11/russian-federation-sitrep-11-february-2021/
That contains a couple of links giving more details of the case.

Armstrong also links to this tweet by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs of a video showing many examples of police brutality in the West and also violence by protesters against police in Russian (the opposite of what is shown in Western media).
https://twitter.com/mfa_russia/status/1356674233464729609

karlof1 , Feb 12 2021 20:23 utc | 19

Stonebird @12--

Several days ago on the 10th, I posted this link and commented about what I deemed the notable words spoken by Lavrov on Diplomats' Day. IMO, it's a martial pep-talk given his peroration followed by this paragraph:

"Russia's attempts to become an independent state, to uphold its right to an independent foreign policy and to protect international law are coming against increasingly harsh resistance of our Western colleagues, who would like to teach 'obedience' to us. They would like us to accept the highly questionable interpretation of common human values, an interpretation that contradicts Russia's cultural and civilisational traditions. They would like Russia to become a 'convenient' territory for promoting their own security, economic, social and political interests. We can see that these are becoming ever more aggressive with every passing day. We must actively apply our efforts, knowledge and experience, based on the wisdom of our predecessors, to consistently promote the foreign policy course formulated by President Vladimir Putin."

How else do you prepare your diplomatic corp for war?

If you've followed Lavrov closely for many months as I have, the change in his demeanor is quite marked; yet as Paco notes, he still maintains his professionalism. Lavrov's perplexity about how consensus is supposed to function was well put--we know several nations disagree with the policy yet go along with it--WHY?--the united front undercuts your own interests. In Putin's latest conversation with his Energy Minister, there was no mention of Nord Stream 2's situation. Given all the sanctions and lack of pushback by the EU nations most dependent on it, IMO Russia is willing to sacrifice it as it didn't bear all the costs and has plenty of potential customers for its hydrocarbons. So, I wouldn't at all be surprised if Russia stopped short of finishing, said it would fulfill its existing contracts, but no more would be negotiated until conditions drastically change. Hardball is just that--Hardball.

alaff , Feb 12 2021 21:14 utc | 24
Only 15% in Russia believe the Navalny poisoning was the Govt trying to eliminate an opponent, and the 15% based this opinion from Telegram and the Internet and were mostly 18-24. The rest think it was staged, a Western false flag, personal or opposition:
https://levada.ru/2020/12/24/chto-rossiyane-dumayut-ob-otravlenii-alekseya-navalnogo/

Levada is considered a [pro-]Western sociological service (there are links with Soros) in Russia and the results of its polls, let's say, cause a certain skepticism. 15% of those who believe in "poisoning"... I would say figures of 5-8 (maximum 10) percent look much more realistic.
It is still not known who paid the multimillion production costs for the fake 'Putin palace' video.

Well, I would look for sources in names like Khodorkovsky or/and Browder .
Both scammers are longtime haters of Russia.

The Kremlin later said that some media misrepresented Lavrov's remarks but essentially confirmed his stand

According to Russian legislation, the country's foreign policy is determined directly by the president. The Foreign Ministry is essentially just a repeater, although of course it introduces its own peculiarities. Therefore, there is no doubt that Lavrov's words were coordinated with (and approved by) Putin. Peskov, as usual, in his own manner, tried to somewhat "smooth out"/"embellish" Lavrov's directness and rigidity, which, however, does not negate the essence of the statements themselves.

Today Navalny was back in court for publicly insulting a World War II veteran. The EU will certainly make remarks about that. But only a few days ago police in Scotland arrested someone because he typed a mean tweet about a British veteran of that war.

Here I can only support the British, who massively stood up for the offended veteran Sir Thomas Moore.
Citizens wrote mass appeals, statements to the police demanding to bring to justice the degenerate who insulted the memory of the war hero.

Unfortunately, Russian society often lacks such civic initiative. Yes, the authorities will do their job, and a piece of shit named Navalny, who slandered the war veteran, will be punished. But besides the actions of the authorities, it would be nice to see also the "demand of the people", you know.

Stonebird , Feb 12 2021 21:18 utc | 25

karlof1 | Feb 12 2021 20:23 utc | 19

And I have been following you, following Lavrov.....

The Nordstream II is a question mark. It is being finished by the Russians, with their own ships. The Germans have also realised that their own interests are tied up there. The "Threatening situation" (from the west) does not come from either one.

My conclusion is that EU policy is being dictated from outside , the secondary question is "by whom". Unfortunately I suspect that the main driving force is the same one that "enabled" Biden, Enabled the ousting of socialist candidates in many countries. (Corbyn, and in S. America generally), and generally assume they are the top of the top.

Is this force based on "nationality" or on "interests", call them Religious nuts, Extreme militarists OR Financial Fascists? Alternatively are they a mixture of all three***.

One explanation for Lavrov's coldness is that IF the EU was an independent representative body (which it isn't) then certain actions to improve the lot of the populace would have been taken. That they are not means that they lack the ability to deviate from what they have been ordered. By way of an explanation, the Media will lie, because they cannot do otherwise having been "bought" in some way. Lavrov has certainly changed. Because he probably knows what is "supposed" to happen, and the EU miasma do not understand that they too will be in the forefront of any battleground. (Since that includes me, I am not too happy about the situation either).

Aside; *** They could be mixture of all three tendencies. ie. 9/11 had operatives from the Saudis, Israel, and the Pentagon, with three different motivations. Religious (Saudis), Suprematist (Israel) and monetary (Pentagon and it's "lost" trillions, and profitability by insiders).

uncle tungsten , Feb 12 2021 21:20 utc | 26

The stalker zone has a good take on it:

As the head of the Soviet intelligence service, Leonid Shebarshin, an extremely well-informed man, once said: "The west wants only one thing from Russia -- that it does not exist".
karlof1 , Feb 12 2021 22:24 utc | 30

Stonebird @25--

Thanks for your reply! You wrote:

"One explanation for Lavrov's coldness is that IF the EU was an independent representative body (which it isn't) then certain actions to improve the lot of the populace would have been taken ." [My Emphasis]

Now what current ideology supports such a policy--that the lot of the masses isn't supposed to be improved; rather, they are to have their wealth wrung out, then be tossed aside and used as manure. Hint: It was famously announced as Trickle-down Economics, which was lambasted as Voodoo Economics.

If you read Hudson, then you know where the power center lies within the Outlaw US Empire and its network of vassals--The privately held Central Banks and those that control them and many other key corporations thanks to interlocking boards of directors--the same basic cabal that failed to assassinate FDR and oust him via a coup but succeeded with JFK, RFK, MLK, and so many others: millions when adding in their terrorists and their Death Squads.

To rid Europe of its Central Bank, the EU would need to be disbanded. But to gain complete sovereignty, NATO would need to die also. Currently, Europe is essentially occupied by a force every bit as immoral as the Nazis. It's not by accident that Lavrov, Putin and others invoke the Great Patriotic War and the events that led to it as recurring.

I would not be surprised to see Russia actually perform the deeds it's accused of, like actually invade and subdue Ukraine. It it did so, realistically what would change? Nuland famously gave the answer Russia would now echo--Fuck the EU. As with the Republic's Trade Federation secretly aligning with the Sith, the EU will come to regret playing dummy to the Outlaw US Empire as it gets barred from gaining any benefits from being in the Eurasian Bloc and China's BRI Combo.

_K_C_ , Feb 12 2021 22:45 utc | 31

I don't really follow the Navalny situation anymore because as soon as I see Russia mentioned in any Western media I assume it's an "intelligence community" psyop or just plain old propaganda. But something piqued my curiosity regarding this alleged mansion of Putin's.

Strategic culture provided two links to YouTube videos in their articles, one of which to my knowledge isn't subtitled so I don't know what was being said in Russian. In this video a group of guys made the trip to the site of this mansion compound and showed the place in disrepair, looking like exterior had aged quite a bit.

The other is to Navalny's own video which alleges to explain that the reason for the current state of the project is that the original design/construction were faulty and that a serious mold problem, as well as leaking roofs, had caused them to strip out the entire interior ostensibly to rebuild from scratch (and allegedly tossing "billions" of rubles worth of marble and other fancy construction materials). He also says that the original photos and video which show the place in pristine condition, were from 6 years ago before the teardown.

Leaving aside the obvious fake photos (like the one in Moscow times which was a photoshopped Putin swimming in his new mansion, lol) and the situation in general (i.e., whether Putin has anything to do with this structure at all), can anyone square this circle for me? Is it disproven that the place was indeed built a while back and later stripped down due to the leaking roofs and mold? If so is there a source in the English language that explains the situation?

Thanks to anyone who can help.

Kiza , Feb 12 2021 22:52 utc | 32

There is a strong whiff of desperation of the EuroCrapsters and their US masters to grab what Russia has (resources) and thus delay own economic collapse. All these crapsters are freezing their asses off right now whilst dreaming of profits from pillaged Russian energy. The most precarious is the Western pension system, which with ZIRP and NIRP interest rates has stopped existing. There is no source of funding in this World that could feed that hungry monster with ageing population. The Western printing presses are overheating and this is only a delaying solution for the deeply debalanced system. Absolutely the only way out for the West is to bring down Russian government and pillage. If Russia did not have nuclear weapons this would have happened a while ago. The Russians understand this perfectly.

Will the sick West run into a desperate confrontation against a bee with a big sting? It must be unusually frustrating for the AngloAmerican crapsters not to be able to just take what they want and need from the World as they have been doing over the past couple if centuries. They have the big sting but their mark has an even bigger (hypersonic) sting. What a profound change in world affairs - pillaging from now on to come at the huge cost. And Putin appears prepared to prevent pillaging of not only Russia.

The calculation is fairly clear - either they will feed, cloth and keep warm the Western elderly and others using Russian resources or there will be no pensioners after a nuclear Holocaust. Either way problem solved.

JB , Feb 13 2021 0:58 utc | 41
would like to know, in concrete terms, what is the benefit from constant denigration and provocation of Russia, and who benefits, in precisely what ways. I do know, however, who does not benefit. The vast majority of Europeans, the Russians and generally the majority of humanity.
-Pushing Russia around and away is counter productive for the EU and Europe as whole. It is a big, peaceful, neighbouring country willing to cooperate on the basis of mutual respect and interest. Russia has put foreward many constructive proposals, all of which have been rejected
- There is no rational basis for the long-lasting and escalating pressure on Russia. If that is correct, the goals and actions of the West, and the the EU in particular, are irrational from the perspective of the real life interests of the majority of European citizens and welfare and wellbeing of the majority of people in the world.
- I hope that Russia does not abandon its orientation towards Europe, because it is a European state. It should be part of European integration projects, albeit not on the present model of the EU. That does not clash, but accords, with its Asian relations and projects.
- The EU should radically change its policies towards Russia, and welcome it as an important partner in all fields.
- The qeustion is - who is going to stop the race into the abys that the European leaders are accelarating? I don't see anyone or anything on the European scene considering, capable of and willing to put an end to this utter madness. I do see who is paying the price and who will pay even more dearly in the future. The majority of European citizens.Deeply depressing and very scary.
J W , Feb 13 2021 0:59 utc | 42
Truest words that has ever been spoken at the EU.
S.P. Korolev , Feb 13 2021 4:57 utc | 54

AntiSpin @33, gm @39

The Bulletin article doesn't really delve into the issues around the US' new low-yield 'tactical' nukes, it concentrates on a new big 'strategic' ICBM system, the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD). It seems to be basically an attempt to resurrect the capabilities of the Reagan era MX 'Peacekeeper' that was scrapped under the START treaties as it was optimised to carry a large number of warheads and the US preferred to keep a larger number of Minuteman III missiles with single warheads.

Although it probably won't be quite as large as the MX, it will be better suited than the Minuteman for carrying multiple hypersonic glide vehicles like the Russian 'Avangard' system. The Russians have an initial operating capability on their SS-19/UR-100N ICBM (similar in payload to the Minuteman) but will soon deploy their much larger RS-28 Sarmat which will allow multiple hypersonic gliders to be carried.

The article describes a typically corrupt US procurement process, with the big three arms companies (Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman) fighting it out for the mountain of $. Northrop Grumman managed to win out by buying up the only manufacturer of the large solid rocket motors that the contract required the contractors to use. Solid rocket motors were one of the only aspects of space technologies where the US was unequivocally in the lead, with 4 or 5 companies producing them. By the time of the GBSD contract only one company remained after the orgy of mergers and buyouts, Orbital ATK. ATK was the successor to Thiokol Corp, whose product doomed the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger (being basically a big 'light it and stand the f*** back' firework solid motors are not a great option for crewed spaceflight, but well suited to ICBMs).

By buying up ATK, Northrop Grumman threatened to massively cut into the profits of any other company bidding, ensuring a clear run to the contract for itself. Many analysts had suspected that Boeing would be given the GBSD contract to compensate for their losses on the 737Max, but Northrop's maneuvers and Boeing's terrible recent track record in space made that impossible. Boeings SLS moon rocket failed its crucial static-fire test in Jan 2021 and is 5 years behind schedule despite it being basically a Space Shuttle tank with Shuttle engines bolted to the bottom (early 70s tech). Its Starliner Space Station ferry also failed its uncrewed flight test last year due to a plethora of software errors, one of which was discovered with minutes to spare and would have killed a crew by crashing the service module into the crew module moments after the modules seperated for reentry into the atmosphere.

With all that in mind I don't think the Russians are too troubled by the US's prowess in space or financial technology. Whatever Frankenstein's Rocket emerges from the GBSD program will be most unlikely to rival the RS-28 (known to NATO as 'Son of Satan'), and by that time the 'Grandson of Satan' will probably be flying.

Gravel Rash , Feb 13 2021 12:19 utc | 70

The problem with armchair strategists is of course they don't know all the facts, those at hand to the actual players. Some leaks into the real world but far too much is hidden.

All we know is that Russia appears to have stopped its subservient position and have started with the EU, not the US. Is that because they believe they are now finally powerful enough for a military conflict? Or perhaps as they believe one is coming anyway? Or are there other hidden factors in play?

One thing of interest is that it hasn't taken long for the NATO/Russian situation to escalate quickly since Trumps removal, anyone still doubt he was removed? Also of note the US general now stating nuclear war is possible, more fear to add or just introducing the idea to us as something that may "have" to be done to save the world for democracy?

How much does one believe in coincidence? Karmically there is no such thing. Many big issues going on in the world now from covid with its fascist responses to Big Resets, massive world debt, and now increasing military tension with Russia and perhaps China as well soon. All interlinked?

Eighthman , Feb 13 2021 15:14 utc | 83

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/vladimir-putin-real-lessons-75th-anniversary-world-war-ii-162982

Putin created a document about lessons from WW2. Even if you disagree with him or just hate him, ask yourself if Trump, Biden, Pelosi or any other elderly US leaders could reason at this level or offer this depth of thought. That's my take away...

pretzelattack , Feb 13 2021 16:02 utc | 88

navalny is apparently the ramon guaido of russia, the designated front man for a us coup operation.

bevin , Feb 13 2021 18:22 utc | 97

The problem with Navalny is not that he is a 'traitor' to Russia but that he is an agent of the Empire, on the payrolls of the Five Eyes security complex. Which makes him a traitor to humanity.

[Feb 14, 2021] For those confused by American corporate media, here is what the Syrian war is about

Feb 14, 2021 | www.unz.com

As telling other nations how to behave backed up by the 101 st Airborne division has become a wonderful indoor board game in this age of Coronavirus-19, my favorite article for the past week has to be the news that Honest Joe Biden has appointed yet another Zionist harpy to his team of war planners in an apparent attempt to keep Nuland, Sherman, Haines, Rice, Power and Neuberger company. Her name is Dana Stroul and she will be running the Pentagon's Middle East Desk, making her the senior policy official focused on that region. Indications are that her eagle eye will be fixed on those major malefactors Iran and Syria.

Stroul has been whisked away from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), where she has been the Shelly and Michael Kassen Fellow in the Institute's Beth and David Geduld Program on Arab Politics. WINEP is the think tank founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in an attempt to demonstrate that hatred of all of Israel's enemies in the Middle East is somehow an American vital interest, so it is perhaps odd to consider that the organization would even allow Arabs to have politics. Stroul had worked at the Pentagon and had also co-chaired the Syria Study Group set up by Congress prior to landing at WINEP.

Stroul, who believes that there is a threat to the U.S. from "Iranian nuclear ambitions and support for terrorist groups throughout the region," also has had some interesting ideas about what should be done to Syria, some of which was laid out in a final report that was presented to Congress in September 2019 by the Syria Study Group.

The report states that "From the conflict's beginning in 2011 as a peaceful domestic uprising, experts warned that President Bashar al-Assad's brutal response was likely to have serious, negative impacts on U.S. interests. Given Syria's central location in the Middle East, its ruling regime's ties to terrorist groups and to Iran, and the incompatibility of Assad's authoritarian rule with the aspirations of the Syrian people, many worried about the conflict spilling over Syria's borders The threats the conflict in Syria poses -- of terrorism directed against the United States and its allies and partners; of an empowered Iran; of an aggrandized Russia; of large numbers of refugees, displaced persons, and other forms of humanitarian catastrophe; and of the erosion of international norms of war and the Western commitment to them -- are sufficiently serious to merit a determined response from the United States. The United States and its allies retain tools to address those threats and the leverage to promote outcomes that are better for American interests than those that would prevail in the absence of U.S. engagement. The United States underestimated Russia's ability to use Syria as an arena for regional influence. Russia's intervention, beginning in 2015, accomplished its proximate aim -- the preservation of the regime in defiance of U.S. calls for Assad to 'go' -- at a relatively low cost. Russia has enhanced its profile and prestige more broadly in the Middle East."

One immediately notes the incoherence of the argument being made. To make U.S. presence in Syria palpable to the long-suffering American public, it is necessary to attempt to establish a threat against the United States even though in this case there is none. And the repeated citation of "interests" without credibly explaining what interests might compel invading and occupying a foreign country is completely lacking in any detail. Stroul also several times cites the heavy terrorist threat, ignoring the fact that the existing terrorists are being sustained by Israel and by the United States, while President Bashar al-Assad has the overwhelming support of most of the Syrian people. Reports are that Syrians are returning home after a refugee crisis caused by the United States and its allies. And we all know that the last refuge of a scoundrel is to play the Russian card, which Stroul does, as well as surfacing that perennial demon Iran. U.S. support of Israeli bombing attacks are also just fine in her opinion, even though they are a clear violation of the "international norms of war" that she pretends to defend.

Stroul inevitably supports U.S. retention and what she curiously refers to as "ownership" of the one third of Syria that is "resource rich." That includes the Syrian oil producing region now occupied by U.S. troops as well as by what she euphemizes as "Syrian Democratic Forces." She observes that it also includes the country's best agricultural land, which, if denied to the government in Damascus, could be used as leverage to bring about regime change. Starving Syrians are not Stroul's concern so she consequently opposes any form of international relief or reconstruction funding for the Syrian people and supports U.S. pressure on international lenders through the worldwide banking system to deny Damascus any money to rebuild.

LINK BOOKMARK So, the prize for the truly awful story of the week goes to the appointment of this monster daughter of AIPAC to head Pentagon planning for the Middle East, joining a sterling cast of characters at State Department and in the intelligence community. Also, if one includes the account of a diversified U.S. Army where soldiers will now be encouraged to snitch on each other over privately held views, one has to ask "Can it get any worse?" Judging from Joe Biden's list of appointments so far, it will, yes it will.

Philip Giraldi, Ph.D. is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.


Carlton Meyer , says: Website February 11, 2021 at 11:28 pm GMT • 2.0 days ago

For those confused by American corporate media, here is what the Syrian war is about:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/P512QBpjoq4?feature=oembed

Garliv , says: February 13, 2021 at 6:45 am GMT • 16.8 hours ago
@Carlton Meyer

John Kerry proudly states that Qatar, Saudi Arabia would fund US army to invade and topple Syrian President Al Assad. And Israel goad America to fight "for its interests". Words of Major General Smedley Butler that essentially US army is a mercenary unit comes to mind.

Mulga Mumblebrain , says: February 13, 2021 at 8:09 am GMT • 15.4 hours ago
@Carlton Meyer

Or, as Smotrich, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, declared a few years ago on Israeli TV-'Damascus belongs to the Jews'. But what does not?

[Feb 14, 2021] At officer level in the Navy, regular army and Air Force it will be an orgy of rent seeking from the pet minorities

Feb 14, 2021 | www.unz.com

Intensifier , says: February 12, 2021 at 3:14 pm GMT • 1.3 days ago

@Just another serf

The vast majority of the military never actually fight. When was the last serving member of the US Navy killed while on active service aboard ship? The army is useless against any but third world opposition.

The Marines and Special forces such as the SEALs and Rangers do the actual fighting and I suspect that the junior officer and NCO positions there will be relatively free of diversity in order to keep them at least semi-useful.

Meanwhile, at officer level in the Navy, regular army and Air Force it will be an orgy of rent seeking from the pet minorities

[Feb 14, 2021] The U.S. is inept, disorganized, and dishonest. The possibility of a nuclear detonation, or nuclear war, occurring through incompetence, miscalculation, or systems error, is now significant

Feb 14, 2021 | www.unz.com

SafeNow , says: February 10, 2021 at 8:43 pm GMT • 3.8 days ago

The U.S. is inept, disorganized, and dishonest. The possibility of a nuclear detonation, or nuclear war, occurring through incompetence, miscalculation, or systems error, is now significant. Probably the Russian and Chinese policymakers give the U.S. a lot of latitude for that very reason, the way a parent might placate a two-year-old to prevent a tantrum.

[Feb 14, 2021] Putin was saying there's no single democratic model. That was eventually conceptualized as "sovereign democracy". Democracy cannot exist without sovereignty

Feb 14, 2021 | www.unz.com

Sirius , says: February 12, 2021 at 11:04 am GMT • 2.2 days ago

Putin was saying there's no single democratic model. That was eventually conceptualized as "sovereign democracy". Democracy cannot exist without sovereignty

This is one of the key concepts here and to me the most interesting one. "Sovereign democracy". There are actually now very few countries in the world with true sovereignty, never mind democracy.

The ones that try to exercise sovereignty, or even that don't show sufficient servility, are severely punished. If they aren't large or strong enough, like Syria and Lebanon, they suffer tremendously under "sanctions", which in reality is economic warfare. If they are, like Russia and Iran, they still suffer sanctions, but will probably ride them out.

I remember a speech by King Hussein of Jordan in 1990, in a moment of rare candor, remarking something like, and I paraphrase: "We live in a world dictatorship". The context was the run up to the US/Saudi/Zionist-led attack on Iraq the first time around, when George Bush I, urged by Margaret Thatcher, assembled a huge coalition against that country. I've never been able to locate that speech since (I would be grateful to anyone who can).

For a background on that conflict, which set up the post-Cold War order:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/S8BGpohOupQ?feature=oembed

[Feb 11, 2021] Many people see that as a Russian weakness, Maybe it is. But I see it as playing a strong long game. NATO and Russia's enemies want her to get deep into a bloody muck and bleed profusely. Russia is wise enough to resist the urge.

Feb 11, 2021 | www.unz.com

Avery , says: February 10, 2021 at 9:38 pm GMT • 13.4 hours ago

@War for Blair Mountain There are many other examples of GloboSorosistas desperately trying to get Russia to get into a bloody mess and drain itself so that the SorosaVultures can swoop in an steal her immense natural resources.

Russia cannot afford to get involved in a dawn out conventional fight with NATO's prostitutes.
That is exactly what US & UK want, both of which – safely away from continental Europe – want exactly that. They could not care less if all of Europe get smoked.

Russia wants an intact (Western) Europe, particularly Germany and France, for mutual future benefit. Expecting US & UK to become impotent sometime in the future., and leave Europe alone.

[Feb 11, 2021] The shift in both hard soft power between the neoliberal/NWO and the pro-sovereignty blocs is evident in the last two decades

The collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 was the major contributor to this shift. Now we have "the king is naked" situation for neoliberal and neoliberal globalization and does not help the US centered global neoliberal empire.
BTW Russia is still remains a neoliberal country although "Putinism" deviates from neoliberalism in both domestic and foreign policy. But Putin days in power are not indefinite and a new yeltson can emege and sell Russia to the West again...
Feb 11, 2021 | www.unz.com

Exile , says: February 10, 2021 at 3:32 am GMT • 1.3 days ago

America/Israel and NATO are apparently not going to change their approach despite the shift in both hard & soft power between the neoliberal/NWO and the pro-sovereignty blocs in the last two decades. And Europe is going to suffer worst from this...

Carlton Meyer , says: Website February 10, 2021 at 5:29 am GMT • 1.2 days ago

Germany is key to Europe. The American empire ordered Germany to double its low military spending, they said no. Trump threatened to close American military bases in Germany, polls showed most Germans didn't care. They ordered Germany to cancel a new NatGas pipeline to Russia, they said no. Once they oust that Neocon puppet Merkel, the empire will be in trouble.

cranc , says: February 10, 2021 at 5:34 am GMT • 1.2 days ago
@Jay Roach

What is the status of the relationship between Russia and Israel ?
If it as simple as you say – and Saker himself seems to refer consistently to the US-NATO-EU 'Anglozionist empire', then surely Russia would recognise Israel as the key ideological opponent to its vision of a multipolar world order ?
Yet this is not what I read. Russia has deep and cordial and increasingly close ties to Israel, even as Israeli jets illegally bomb Syria on a regular basis. This is never explained.

Tom Welsh , says: February 10, 2021 at 9:03 am GMT • 1.1 days ago

'Svetlana Tikhanovskaia has appealed to the wife of Navalnyi, Iulia, to become the "she president of Russia"'.

As in the case of Juan Guaido, no need for anything as old-fashioned as an election. (For obvious reasons).

Miro23 , says: February 10, 2021 at 9:44 am GMT • 1.1 days ago

For example, Lavrov bluntly said " We are proceeding from the assumption that the EU is not a reliable partner, at least at the current stage. I hope that in future strategic attention will be given to the EU's fundamental interest in its closest neighbours and that the talks we have held today will promote movement to a more constructive trajectory. We are ready for this".

Lavrov is following Putin's line (Davos speech), ergo that Russia is ready to interact with Europe as a mutually respectful equal partner – but not with Europe as puppet of the US NWO, NeoCon , ZioGlob/CIA crowd. Hopefully the Germans are listening and can reassess their true interests.

Also the Poles, who urgently need to wake up to the fact that that they have more in common with Putin's Russia than they do with ZioGlob NWO USA.

Contraviews , says: February 10, 2021 at 10:32 am GMT • 1.0 days ago

Russia of late indeed is becoming more assertive, most likely because it is confidant their militairy capabilities have become superior to that of their adversaries. NATO and US know that very well, but will never let on. Their provocations are nothing more than grandstanding. However what would Russia do in Syria if confronted with increased American aggression in that country? That's what I like to know. Russia is deeply involved in Syria supporting that country in defeating ISIS. Russia has a strategically important navy base there too. Biden so it seems wants to rekindle the war in Syria supported by Israel and will find a pretext to do so.

MayRay , says: February 10, 2021 at 11:12 am GMT • 23.8 hours ago
@cranc hat the media or the Israeli state (the same entity in actuality) claims.

Most Israeli strikes are agreed before hand with Russia. The Israelis need to save face for their cowardly fascist habit of killing civilian Palestinians. These useless strikes against Syria are purely symbolic and are used to deceive the Israeli and US populations.

Besides, more than 60% of Israeli citizens are not Jews, let alone practicing Jews. Israeli is changing due to massive immigration of non-Jews from Russia, and in a generation will change from the rulers of the US to a Russian outpost and there is nothing the Zionists can do about it.

RadicalCenter , says: February 10, 2021 at 1:53 pm GMT • 21.1 hours ago
@MayRay have a consistently higher fertility rate than other Jews in Israel and (2) Arabs have a slightly higher fertility rate than secular Jews, then we may expect that the under-18 population of Israel is less than 70% Jewish, though more of those Jewish kids will be Haredim. Looking for a source on this.

If these fertility and immigration trends continue, we could see an Israel in 2050 that is severely polarized between a Haredim zealot contingent approaching 15% of the population, Arabs around 22% of the population, and "neither Jew nor Arab" growing to as much as 15%. Non-ultra Jews would start passing below 50%. But that is not certain and is likely a few decades off.

Agent76 , says: February 10, 2021 at 6:37 pm GMT • 16.4 hours ago

Apr 4, 2019 NATO EXIT: Prof. Michel Chossudovsky

NATO is a criminal entity, an instrument of the Pentagon. There is no "Alliance". There is military Occupation.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/649_HXyJPAg?feature=oembed

Nov 29, 2016 The Map That Shows Why Russia Fears War With USA

https://www.youtube.com/embed/L6hIlfHWaGU?feature=oembed

Agent76 , says: February 10, 2021 at 6:41 pm GMT • 16.3 hours ago
@michael888 schooling years.

January 10, 2014 *500* Years of History Shows that Mass Spying Is Always Aimed at Crushing Dissent *It's *Never* to Protect Us From Bad Guys*

No matter which government conducts mass surveillance, they also do it to crush dissent, and then give a false rationale for why they're doing it.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/500-years-of-history-shows-that-mass-spying-is-always-aimed-at-crushing-dissent/5364462

[Feb 11, 2021] Interestingly, the Russians did not expel any US diplomats (at least not yet) in spite of the fact that these officials all agreed that the origin of the PSYOP was from overseas and in spite of the quasi-certainty that US officials must have been present, at least in the Moscow and Saint Petersburg protests

Looks like Venezuelan scenario with Navalny as a Russian Guado...
Notable quotes:
"... we protest about "Putin murdering his own people with combat gasses" while on the other we are about to complete North Stream 2 (NS2), which we need to remain competitive; if we continue, we will lose NS2 and we will alienate Russia even further, but if we stop acting like an idiot on suicide watch, our overseas masters will make us pay. ..."
"... Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, added that "The task [of Borrell] was to carry out a public flogging, which, I think, they planned very carefully, it was a cascade of topics: talks about rallies, talks about journalists, and making [Alexey] Navalny the main theme of the discussion". According to Zakharova , this plan failed because Russia insisted on discussing the "real issues". ..."
"... Interestingly, the Russians did not expel any US diplomats (at least not yet) in spite of the fact that these officials all agreed that the origin of the PSYOP was from overseas and in spite of the quasi-certainty that US officials must have been present, at least in the Moscow and Saint Petersburg protests ..."
"... Lavrov bluntly said " We are proceeding from the assumption that the EU is not a reliable partner, at least at the current stage. I hope that in future strategic attention will be given to the EU's fundamental interest in its closest neighbours and that the talks we have held today will promote movement to a more constructive trajectory. We are ready for this". ..."
"... Translated from diplospeak into plain English, this means 1) we are fed up with you and 2) we don't need you. ..."
"... Russia does not want a constructive dialog ..."
"... In western parlance the degree of "democratism" or "authoritarianism" is solely defined by the willingness of a country to be a satrapy of the Empire. Under this definition, all sovereign countries are "dictatorships" and all AngloZionist satrapies are paragons of democracy. ..."
"... As for Navalnyi's supporters in the EU, they have decided to create a Russian government in exile . Again, this is not a joke. By the way, the "Minister of Foreign Affairs" of this "Russian Government in Exile", Leonid Volkov , initially declared that the illegal riots should be halted, only to be told otherwise by his handlers. ..."
"... We will not hold a rally next weekend The wave of protest must end at a high point. Because if we continue to decline, it will be terribly demotivating and frustrating for everyone We will prepare well and hold something big both in the spring and in the summer. We will never give up our demands ..."
"... We'll make it much trickier ..."
"... The NATO members instructed the "opposition", and in fact their agents of influence, how to continue "more cunning" to conduct subversive work. Too much money and resources have already been invested by the West in this story to wait until spring. They clearly understand: in the spring, the information campaign pumped up by Westerners will be blown away. They can no longer juggle the topic of "chemical weapons" without presenting the facts – they are pinned to the wall. So they double down. ..."
"... As for Navalnyi and his supporters, Zakarova was even more direct , saying " stop calling them opposition, they are NATO agents !". ..."
"... As I have explained many times, western politicians double down not when they feel strong, they double down when they feel weak and when they place their hopes in the willingness of the other side not to seriously further escalate. ..."
"... 'Svetlana Tikhanovskaia has appealed to the wife of Navalnyi, Iulia, to become the "she president of Russia"'. As in the case of Juan Guaido, no need for anything as old-fashioned as an election. (For obvious reasons). ..."
"... Lavrov is following Putin's line (Davos speech), ergo that Russia is ready to interact with Europe as a mutually respectful equal partner – but not with Europe as puppet of the US NWO, NeoCon , ZioGlob/CIA crowd. Hopefully the Germans are listening and can reassess their true interests. ..."
"... Israeli is changing due to massive immigration of non-Jews from Russia ..."
Feb 11, 2021 | www.unz.com

This latest PSYOP was apparently organized in the US last fall, while Trump was still in power, at least nominally. This makes sense, just like the huge "Patriot Act" was carefully prepared months, if not years before 9/11 happened. This time around, some US intelligence agency (probably the CIA) then passed the baby to the German BND which was supposed to act as an intermediary to give the US "plausible deniability". The big problem is that the Germans apparently screwed things up, and the plan was a flop: the latest sacral victim failed to die (again!). As for Putin, he used his executive power to allow Navalnyi (who was on parole) to immediately fly to Germany for treatment as soon as the Russian medics stabilized him. From there on, everything went south and Navalnyi's curators scrambled to save whatever could be saved.

They produced a movie about Putin's palace in Crimea, only to have Russian reporters film the location and prove that this movie was a total fake. Then they sent Navalnyi back to Russia figuring that if the Russian authorities arrested him huge protests would follow or, alternatively, if the Russians did nothing, Navalnyi would be able to create chaos during an important election year in Russia. This resulted in another flop, not only were the crowds in Russia small, their behavior was deeply offensive and even frightening to most Russians who have seen enough Maidans and color revolutions to know how this stuff ends. As for Navalnyi, he was arrested immediately upon landing, and his parole was revoked.

Of course, all this was reported very differently in what I call Zone A , but while this made it possible for the authors of this PSYOP to conceal the magnitude of their failure, in the rest of the world and, especially, in Russia, it was pretty clear that this ridiculous buffoonery had failed. That outcome presented the EU headless chicken with a major problem: on one hand, we protest about "Putin murdering his own people with combat gasses" while on the other we are about to complete North Stream 2 (NS2), which we need to remain competitive; if we continue, we will lose NS2 and we will alienate Russia even further, but if we stop acting like an idiot on suicide watch, our overseas masters will make us pay. EU leaders obviously failed agree on a plan so, just like a headless chicken, they ran in all directions at the same time: they publicly protested, but also sent as top official, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission Josep Borrell, to try to appease the Russians. Borrell actually did a decent job trying to placate the Russians, but this time something went very wrong. Not only was Foreign Minister Lavrov very blunt in his public comments, the Russians also expelled 3 EU diplomats for participating in the demonstrations even while Borrell and Lavrov were talking. This is when the proverbial bovine excreta hit the fan, at least in EU whose "watchdog media" (here I use the term "watchdog" as meaning "immediately barking at anybody daring to stray from the official propaganda line") went crazy and accused Borrell of caving in to the Russians. Some even demanded Borrell's resignation. As for Borrell himself, he did what all western officials do after a visit to Moscow: he changed his tune as soon as he came back home.

Finally, Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, added that "The task [of Borrell] was to carry out a public flogging, which, I think, they planned very carefully, it was a cascade of topics: talks about rallies, talks about journalists, and making [Alexey] Navalny the main theme of the discussion". According to Zakharova , this plan failed because Russia insisted on discussing the "real issues".

Interestingly, the Russians did not expel any US diplomats (at least not yet) in spite of the fact that these officials all agreed that the origin of the PSYOP was from overseas and in spite of the quasi-certainty that US officials must have been present, at least in the Moscow and Saint Petersburg protests . To its credit, the US embassy in Moscow did recommend to all US citizens that they stay away from illegal demonstrations. This is an ongoing crisis and by the time this analysis is posted, things might have changed dramatically. My purpose today is not to look at the US or the EU, but at what I believe is a major shift in Russian policy.

At this point, we should not see the expulsions of the 3 EU diplomats as anything more than just a "shot across the bow", a way to indicate that the winds have changed. But these expulsions are not big enough to qualify as a real, painful, retaliation. Why?

Because the real slap in the collective face of the EU was the press conference of Lavrov and Borrell in which Lavrov was truly uniquely direct and candid. For example, Lavrov bluntly said " We are proceeding from the assumption that the EU is not a reliable partner, at least at the current stage. I hope that in future strategic attention will be given to the EU's fundamental interest in its closest neighbours and that the talks we have held today will promote movement to a more constructive trajectory. We are ready for this".

Translated from diplospeak into plain English, this means 1) we are fed up with you and 2) we don't need you.

This blunt statement is what triggered all the subsequent hysterics in Brussels about Borrell being ill treated by the Russians and Borrell's subsequent declaration that " Russia does not want a constructive dialog " and that the EU must now decide if it still wants to get closer to Russia or if it wants to distance itself from a country slipping into authoritarianism.

In western parlance the degree of "democratism" or "authoritarianism" is solely defined by the willingness of a country to be a satrapy of the Empire. Under this definition, all sovereign countries are "dictatorships" and all AngloZionist satrapies are paragons of democracy.

... ... ...

As for Navalnyi's supporters in the EU, they have decided to create a Russian government in exile . Again, this is not a joke. By the way, the "Minister of Foreign Affairs" of this "Russian Government in Exile", Leonid Volkov , initially declared that the illegal riots should be halted, only to be told otherwise by his handlers. He immediately made a required 180 and declared that protests will resume. This is how Maria Zakharova bluntly, and very officially, reacted on Facebook to his "change of mind": (minimally fixed machine translation)

NATO doubles down

On February 4, 2021, Volkov declared that the protests in Russia were canceled and will resume in the spring and summer. " We will not hold a rally next weekend The wave of protest must end at a high point. Because if we continue to decline, it will be terribly demotivating and frustrating for everyone We will prepare well and hold something big both in the spring and in the summer. We will never give up our demands ." Then, on February 9, 2021, Volkov changed his mind and announced that the campaign will continue in February. " We'll make it much trickier " he added. What happened between February 4 and 9 and forced the "opposition" to radically change tactics? Everything is quite simple – on February 8, 2021, an online meeting with Volkov and Ashurkov took place at the Permanent Mission of Poland to the EU in Brussels, in which EU countries, the United States, and Britain took part. And in fact-this was a meeting of the NATO countries.

The NATO members instructed the "opposition", and in fact their agents of influence, how to continue "more cunning" to conduct subversive work. Too much money and resources have already been invested by the West in this story to wait until spring. They clearly understand: in the spring, the information campaign pumped up by Westerners will be blown away. They can no longer juggle the topic of "chemical weapons" without presenting the facts – they are pinned to the wall. So they double down.

As for Navalnyi and his supporters, Zakarova was even more direct , saying " stop calling them opposition, they are NATO agents !".

As I have explained many times, western politicians double down not when they feel strong, they double down when they feel weak and when they place their hopes in the willingness of the other side not to seriously further escalate.

And, just to make sure that the Empire can win the battle for the "hearts and minds" of the Russian people, the Brits are now counting (again) on Pussy Riot to release a song in support of protests . Again, while this does sound like a joke, it is not.

Now comes the best part: there are a lot of signs that the EU will, again under the pious pretext of "solidarity" follow the 3B+PU politicians and, if not recognize such a government in exile, at least treat its members as real officials. That is also supposed to also terrify the Kremlin, I guess. But if that is the best the EU can come up with, VVP and the people of Russia, can sleep in peace.


Exile , says: February 10, 2021 at 3:32 am GMT • 1.3 days ago

America/Israel and NATO are apparently not going to change their approach despite the shift in both hard & soft power between the neoliberal/NWO and the pro-sovereignty blocs in the last two decades. And Europe is going to suffer worst from this...

Carlton Meyer , says: • Website February 10, 2021 at 5:29 am GMT • 1.2 days ago

Germany is key to Europe. The American empire ordered Germany to double its low military spending, they said no. Trump threatened to close American military bases in Germany, polls showed most Germans didn't care. They ordered Germany to cancel a new NatGas pipeline to Russia, they said no. Once they oust that Neocon puppet Merkel, the empire will be in trouble.

cranc , says: February 10, 2021 at 5:34 am GMT • 1.2 days ago
@Jay Roach

What is the status of the relationship between Russia and Israel ?

If it as simple as you say – and Saker himself seems to refer consistently to the US-NATO-EU 'Anglozionist empire', then surely Russia would recognise Israel as the key ideological opponent to its vision of a multipolar world order ?

Yet this is not what I read. Russia has deep and cordial and increasingly close ties to Israel, even as Israeli jets illegally bomb Syria on a regular basis. This is never explained.

Tom Welsh , says: February 10, 2021 at 9:03 am GMT • 1.1 days ago

'Svetlana Tikhanovskaia has appealed to the wife of Navalnyi, Iulia, to become the "she president of Russia"'. As in the case of Juan Guaido, no need for anything as old-fashioned as an election. (For obvious reasons).

Miro23 , says: February 10, 2021 at 9:44 am GMT • 1.1 days ago

For example, Lavrov bluntly said " We are proceeding from the assumption that the EU is not a reliable partner, at least at the current stage. I hope that in future strategic attention will be given to the EU's fundamental interest in its closest neighbours and that the talks we have held today will promote movement to a more constructive trajectory. We are ready for this".

Lavrov is following Putin's line (Davos speech), ergo that Russia is ready to interact with Europe as a mutually respectful equal partner – but not with Europe as puppet of the US NWO, NeoCon , ZioGlob/CIA crowd. Hopefully the Germans are listening and can reassess their true interests.

Also the Poles, who urgently need to wake up to the fact that that they have more in common with Putin's Russia than they do with ZioGlob NWO USA.

Contraviews , says: February 10, 2021 at 10:32 am GMT • 1.0 days ago

Russia of late indeed is becoming more assertive, most likely because it is confidant their military capabilities have become superior to that of their adversaries. NATO and US know that very well, but will never let on. Their provocations are nothing more than grandstanding.

However what would Russia do in Syria if confronted with increased American aggression in that country? That's what I like to know. Russia is deeply involved in Syria supporting that country in defeating ISIS. Russia has a strategically important navy base there too. Biden so it seems wants to rekindle the war in Syria supported by Israel and will find a pretext to do so.

MayRay , says: February 10, 2021 at 11:12 am GMT • 23.8 hours ago
@cranc The media or the Israeli state (the same entity in actuality) claims.

Most Israeli strikes are agreed before hand with Russia. The Israelis need to save face for their cowardly fascist habit of killing civilian Palestinians. These useless strikes against Syria are purely symbolic and are used to deceive the Israeli and US populations.

Besides, more than 60% of Israeli citizens are not Jews, let alone practicing Jews. Israeli is changing due to massive immigration of non-Jews from Russia, and in a generation will change from the rulers of the US to a Russian outpost and there is nothing the Zionists can do about it.

[Feb 10, 2021] Despite its huge military budget it can't field an army. It has a foreign legion. ISIS, for instance, is part of its foreign legion. The European NATO is part of its foreign legion.

Feb 10, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Prof Hudson:

The United States is muscle-bound. Despite its huge military budget it can't field an army. It has a foreign legion. ISIS, for instance, is part of its foreign legion. The European NATO is part of its foreign legion. But there's no way American can ever have a land war again, so you can never invade and conquer a country with a military army. All America has is the Atom bomb, and that's muscle bound. It cannot go to wage any kind of war except atomic war. There's nothing in between.

I think Russia and China know that, and Russia at least has taken steps to protect itself and said, "If the United States wants atomic war, we'll be wiped out but it'll be wiped out too, and Europe will be wiped out." I think probably the first exchange would be to wipe out England and Europe, to say "We don't want to go to war with you and really blow up the world, America. Let's just show you what we can do. Let's blow up England and Europe so at least you won't have your colonies there." If America persisted, it would be the end of the world. Will America really do that?

There was worry that Donald Trump would do that so he could go down in history as the man who destroyed civilization, but I don't think other people are going to do that.


Alex Cox , February 6, 2021 at 12:55 pm

This is a great piece, but I'm not sure its nuclear war-fighting take is accurate. If the US and Russia engage in nuclear war, there is no way it can be limited to Europe and the UK. France and England have hundreds of nukes of their own. The atomic destruction of Europe would result in a nuclear winter of indeterminate length and disastrous consequences.

Orange Man Bad actually asked an interesting question re. US nuclear policy: does the US really want to start an atomic war in order to 'defend' Lithuania or Japan? Would it not make more sense for them to acquire their own nukes, or [fill in saner alternative]?

rosemerry , February 7, 2021 at 4:28 am

Michael made it clear, quoting Putin, that it would be the end of the world.

HotFlash , February 7, 2021 at 3:58 pm

I think that what Prof Hudson points out is true: The US has not won any land war since (at the least) 1948, they have not the smarts to win an economic war (as have the Chinese), and the only arrow in their quiver is E=mc2. Talk about bringing a nuke to a knife fight!

[Feb 06, 2021] American Exceptionalism Is Back, except... by Michael Every

Feb 06, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

FEB 05, 2021

By Michael Every of Rabobank

"American Exceptionalism is Back", except...

"Oh say, can you see! By Dawn's early light; a pro-dollar trade; that puts the bears to flight?" Bloomberg Daybreak this morning boldly states "American exceptionalism is back" (baby). Apparently better-than-expected data and corporate earnings and the prospects of fiscal stimulus show the USA is still the global standout after all. As a result, bearish USD trades touted for the first month of the year need to suddenly be unwound: EUR is now back below 1.20, AUD is clinging to 0.76, and JPY is past 105.50, while as an EM proxy, MXN is back to 20.38 at time of writing vs. 19.55 on January 21.

... ... ...

President Biden has called on the military in Myanmar to relinquish power after their recent coup. What happens when they refuse? A signature criticism of the Obama foreign policy team was its refusal to match US rhetoric (e.g., "pivot to Asia") with any substantive action (e.g., in the South China Sea or Syria). The new team gave interviews before assuming office saying they had learned these lessons. So what options with teeth does the US have for the generals in Naypidaw to back their demand? Sanctions are meaningless for a group who rarely travel abroad and whom can look to China for support if needed, despite their coolness towards Beijing to date.

This underlines the need for any top dog (or cat) to build up a pack (or clowder). Here again we see problems. Many articles have been written about the new US administration's call for the EU to stand alongside it to create new global frameworks favourable to the West (and by extension for USD) and not China (and CNY); and about how the EU is not willing to step up to that plate because of French exceptionalism and German Merkel-cantilism. Macron now says the EU should not gang up on China with the US : " This kind of common front against China risks pushing Beijing to lower its cooperation on issues like combatting climate change, and exacerbating its aggressive behaviour in Asia, including in the South China Sea, " he says. So will the US response then have to be Trumpian and EUR negative, like last time? If not, then what exactly?

Of course, the previous administration had been building bridges to India, which has its own issues with China. However, this relationship is still in its early stages, and India has traditionally looked to Russia for muscle, a role Moscow would be happy to play again. In that regard, the White House backing large anti-government protests in New Delhi against an agricultural reform programme ostensibly to the US's liking, and criticizing the government for cutting off the internet to try to disrupt them, is unlikely to help build bridges: indeed, India has already drawn comparisons to the events of 6 January in the US Capitol, showing the US is not as exceptional as it likes to project it is. These kind of shifts can matter, even if this is just one small step on a much longer journey (and USD trend channel).

Meanwhile, the Aussie government (which has also never and will never target house prices, "just land, bricks, mortar, etc.") might be wondering what the US will help do about a report that a Chinese company is planning to build a new city on a Papua New Guinea island near Australia's northern border . 'New Daru City' allegedly includes an industrial zone, seaport, business and commercial zone, along with a resort and residential area. Will Canberra regard this as a market-driven response to the well-known Chinese demand for lifestyle residences in the vibrant cultural hub that is the PNG hinterland, or as a Bond-villain project to develop a port just 200km from their Northern Territory? The PNG Prime Minister himself says he is "unaware" of this proposal(!) Yes, this may well not come to pass; but one can again see the paving stones being prepared for alternative paths for currencies like AUD, USD, and CNY (to say nothing of PNG's Kina) to travel over the course of the 2020s.

Meanwhile, the US can at least rely on the UK, as usual, where yesterday saw regulators ban China's CGTN TV news service, and the Telegraph also reports that three Chinese spies posing as journalists have just been expelled from the country. Somehow, along with the whole BNO passports issue, this is not likely to help ensure the "golden era" of Sino-British relations promised under previous UK leadership.

But will it ensure a golden era of Bido-BoJo relations? That is another path as yet untrod.

Happy Friday! "We love it so much, I think you do too."

[Feb 06, 2021] Gaslight (1944 Movie) is both timeless and timely as for the gaslighting of America in 2021

Feb 06, 2021 | www.youtube.com

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Gaslight (1944 Movie) is both timeless and timely as for the gaslighting of America in 2021. A projection, accusing others of what they themselves do.

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[Feb 05, 2021] Head Of Strategic Command Warns Nuclear War With Russia, China -A Real Possibility- - ZeroHedge

Feb 05, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

The head of US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) warned that a nuclear war with Russia or China is a "real possibility" and is calling for a change in US policy that reflects this threat .

"There is a real possibility that a regional crisis with Russia or China could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons, if they perceived a conventional loss would threaten the regime or state," Vice Adm. Charles Richard wrote in the February edition of the US Naval Institute's monthly magazine .

Charles A. Richard, the 11th commander of US Strategic Command

Richard said the US military must "shift its principal assumption from 'nuclear employment is not possible' to 'nuclear employment is a very real possibility,' and act to meet and deter that reality."

The STRATCOM chief said Russia and China "have begun to aggressively challenge international norms and global peace using instruments of power and threats of force in ways not seen since the height of the Cold War."

Richard hyped up Russia and China's nuclear modernization, calling for the US to compete with the two nations. When it comes to China's nuclear weapons, the US and Russia have vastly larger arsenals. Current estimates put Beijing's nuclear arsenal at about 320 warheads, while Washington and Moscow have about 6,000 warheads each .

Even if Beijing doubles its arsenal over the next decade, as the China hawks are predicting, it will still be small compared to Washington's. The US would have to eliminate a good amount of its arsenal to convince Beijing to participate in arms control agreements.

Since STRATCOM is the command post that oversees Washington's nuclear arsenal, its commanders are always overplaying the risk of nuclear war and asking for more money to modernize the stockpile. But with the US prioritizing so-called "great power competition" with China and Russia and an increased US military presence in places like the South China Sea , the Arctic , and the Black Sea , the threat of nuclear war is rising.

[Feb 03, 2021] Former Navy SEAL- The Miseducation Of Antony Blinken - ZeroHedge

Jan 29, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Kenny MacDonald via The Libertarian Institute,

On January 19th, the US Senate held confirmation hearings for Joe Biden's Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken. Blinken has a reputation on both sides of the aisle for being exceptionally qualified for the job of America's top diplomat, which is surprising considering he was on the wrong side of every major foreign policy blunder of the last 20 years ; Iraq, Libya, and Syria .

When Senator Rand Paul asked Antony Blinken what lessons he has learned from his disastrous foreign policy record in Libya and Syria, Blinken replied that after "some hard thinking" he's proud that he has done "everything we possibly can to make sure that diplomacy is the first answer, not the last answer, and that war and conflict is our last resort."

Of course war is the last resort. Even the most hawkish war criminals would agree that war is the last resort. But the question is, war is the last resort to accomplish what? If war is the last resort to get a country to fully capitulate to Washington's demands then eventually the US will be at war with everyone. To Blinken, war as the last resort can only be understood in the same way a mugger considers shooting his victim as a last resort to stealing their wallet.

Via the AP

Blinken displayed his hubris a few minutes later when he said, "The door should remain open" for Georgia to join NATO under the justification of curbing Russian aggression .

Rand Paul informed Blinken, "This would be adding Georgia, that's occupied [by Russia], to NATO. Under Article 5, then we would go to war ."

Senator Paul is right. According to Washington, Russia has been occupying 20 percent of Georgia since 2008. Under the principle of collective defense in Article 5 of NATO, the US would be obligated to treat Russia's occupation of the country of Georgia the same way the US would treat a Russian occupation of the US state of Georgia. That sounds like a recipe for war. But don't worry, peaceniks, Antony Blinken has assured us that war is the last resort!

Blinken's framing of the issue exposes his disingenuous approach. Russian aggression is a term used by Washington insiders to describe a Russian reaction to western aggression. Blinken knows that the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia was not Russian aggression, he calls it that because it suits his agenda and the American press is dependably ignorant enough to not ask questions.

In the 2008 war, Georgia was the aggressor against the South Ossetians, a people who are ethnically distinct from Georgians, and who have never -- not even for one day -- considered themselves a part of Georgia. The Ossetians have a history of Russian partiality ; they were among the first ethnic groups in the region to join the Russian Empire in the 19th century and the USSR in the 1920s. Today, ethnic Ossetians straddle both sides of the current Russian border, and they are more aligned with the Russian government than with the Georgian government.

When Georgia gained sovereignty from the former Soviet Union in 1991, South Ossetia declared its independence. In response, Georgian forces invaded South Ossetia, initiating an armed conflict that killed more than 2,000 people . In 1992, a ceasefire agreement was signed in Sochi between Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia, which created a tripartite peacekeeping force led by Russia. Although the international community never acknowledged South Ossetia's independence, they have enjoyed political autonomy since the 1992 Sochi agreement.

The Sochi agreement held up until Georgia's ultra-nationalist President Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in the 2003 western-backed bloodless " Rose Revolution " coup-d'etat. The pro-western President Saakashvili advocated joining the EU and NATO, and insisted on asserting Georgian rule over South Ossetia. U.S. President George Bush supported the new Georgian president's effort to bring Georgia into NATO, which for Russia would mean bringing a hostile military up to its border. In 2006, President Saakashvili offered South Ossetia autonomy in exchange for a political settlement with Georgia. A referendum was held, and the South Ossetian people overwhelmingly reaffirmed their desire for independence from Georgia.

In August, 2008, After exchanging artillery fire with South Ossetia, Georgia invaded South Ossetia's capital city of Tskhinvali, killing 1,400 civilians and 18 Russian peacekeepers . Georgia's attack triggered a Russian invasion into South Ossetia and Abkhazia (another breakaway region) to restore stability and protect peacekeeping forces.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1354066564375601152&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fformer-navy-seal-miseducation-antony-blinken&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Russia is by no means innocent -- they used disproportionate force attacking targets inside Georgia -- but only a Russophobic shill would conclude that this war was somehow caused by Russian aggression. The idea that Russia had no business intervening is laughable. Under the 1992 Sochi agreement , Russia took charge of a peacekeeping coalition to help prevent exactly the scenario that happened in the summer of 2008.

If George Bush had succeeded in bringing Georgia into NATO, the United States may have been dragged into war with Russia in 2008. Antony Blinken claims that NATO membership deters Russian aggression, but does he really believe that Russia would have been deterred from intervening to protect its own peacekeeping force? Does Blinken believe that Georgia -- backed by the U.S. military -- would have acted more cautiously in South Ossetia, or is it more likely they would have been bolder?

It's undeniable that it is in Russia's best interest to have pro-Russian countries on its borders. But pretending as if Russia is going to march into Tbilisi and reabsorb the entire country of Georgia into Russia is a level of paranoia that should disqualify anyone from having an opinion on the subject. The military conflict in Georgia is about the two breakaway regions and their right to self determination. Russia's self interest happens to align with the wishes of the people in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. By supporting Georgia, America -- the champion of democracy and self determination -- has adopted the position that South Ossetians didn't really mean to repeatedly choose independence when given the option. This is a situation where America's professed values are diametrically opposed to its policy of countering Russian influence everywhere on the map.

Antony Blinken should pause to consider if America's policy objectives are worth fighting a war for. Is it worth confronting Russia in South Ossetia? Was it worth confronting Russia over Crimea and the Donbas in Ukraine ? Is it a good idea to withdraw from the INF Nuclear Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty ? Should we have spent the last 30 years marching NATO -- a military alliance hostile to Russia -- right up to the doorsteps of Russia ? Is any of this really making us safer?

Blinken has bought into his own propaganda. To Blinken, regardless of the stubborn details of history, every conflict on Russia's border is simply Russian aggression. Washington's solution is the expansion of NATO, which Russia describes as " NATO encirclement. " This is an unacceptable military threat to Russia, who has a deep distrust of western intentions due to a long history of western invasions into Russia. Antony Blinken still lives in a bipolar world in which the United States and Russia are existential threats to each other's existence. Every conflict and every alliance is only viewed through the lens of the New Cold War crusade against Russia. This maniacal crusade could thrust America in the unthinkable abyss of nuclear war.

Rand Paul got his answer, Antony Blinken learned nothing from all his mistakes! The danger isn't merely resorting to war too early, the danger is in sticking our noses in conflicts that we have no business being in. War should be the last resort to defending America's people and it's homeland from foreign invasion; it should not be the last resort to enforcing America's utopian vision on the world, and it certainly shouldn't be the last resort to prevent an ethnic group in the South Caucasus -- that almost no American has ever heard of -- from the right to self-determination.

Kenny MacDonald is a former Navy SEAL and Afghanistan War veteran. He is currently pursuing a bachelor's degree in history. Youtube Channel . Medium . Facebook .

[Feb 02, 2021] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 28 JANUARY 2021 by Patrick Armstrong

Notable quotes:
"... Not sure the world is really ready for the total collapse of the pushy de facto American Empire where everything has been our business ..."
"... i would rather see American self-sufficiency and reversion to global isolationism. Let someone else manage or neglect the rest of the globe - one advantage of being a quasi-island nation. Always felt global "domination" was thrust upon us; not something actively sought. ..."
Feb 02, 2021 | turcopolier.typepad.com

DOOMED. Kasparov, a famous chess player, says Russia's on the way down thanks to Putin. Said the same thing 13 years ago. Why does the Western media keep printing this rubbish? Silly question.

PUTIN PALACE. Here's a palace actually built on his orders. And here's how the richest man in the world spends his time. (But it's gotta be Putin's: here's a photoshop of him in the pool). More rubbish.

COVID. A WHO representative thinks Russia's getting it under control. Moscow is opening up.

VACCINE. It is reported that the EU is considering approving the Sputnik vaccine because of delays in US ones. Merkel says she will help. Only a few months ago, this was out of the question.

INTERESTING. Zakharova: "The most popular comment I receive from Americans on my personal social media accounts is how to get Russian citizenship". I doubt much will come of this – but... Russia, land of the free and home of the brave. Has a ring to it, hasn't it? There are some Americans there.

OPEN SKIES. Moscow is preparing to leave after failing to get assurances that US allies won't share information with Washington. But, if Washington changes its mind, it will too.

NAVALNIY. Navalniy returns on plane filled with Western reporters and supporters, arrested and, after bail hearing, jailed for 30 days. (Broke probation terms on fraud conviction). Great excuse to sanction Nord Stream! Demos around Russia on Sunday – see video of 14-year old. Usual stuff, usual coverage. Meanwhile both Sweden and Germany keep information about his so-called poisoning from Russia.

NAVALNIY, COCKROACHES AND PISTOLS. I'd heard he'd called Muslims cockroaches but I didn't know there was a video. Here it is with English subtitles. Definitely Nobel Prize material. Did Washington really want to suggest that he is an "ally"?

DOESN'T MAKE ANYTHING. This week's "Made in Russia" video: aircraft, vaccine, buses, robot weapons, pigs, medical facilities and a new airport. All very new, shiny and high-tech, too.

PUTIN-BIDEN. They had their first phonecall. Interesting to compare the Kremlin's record with the White House's: but Biden has to talk tough, Putin doesn't. But "interference in the 2020 United States election"? Really? Wasn't it the most secure ever? Does Biden really want to raise that subject?

RUSSIA-EU. This seems to me to be much harder language than we've seen before. More suggestion that Moscow is going to dump the EU qua EU.

SAUCE, GOOSE, GANDER. RFE/RL has been fined for not admitting it's a foreign agent.

SOLARWINDS HACK. Not Russia but Israel? And another so-called Russian hack blows up.

AMERICA-HYSTERICA. While START will likely be extended for another five years which is good, we can otherwise expect more of the same: Clinton and Pelosi suggest Trump was following Putin's orders and Biden mentioned bounties, Solarwinds and Navalniy.

FAKE NEWS. The NYT printed over 3000 items on the bogus Trump/Russia story. That's two a day!

NEW NWO. European poll. Everything has changed: "Most Europeans rejoiced at Joe Biden’s victory in the November US presidential election, but they do not think he can help America make a comeback as the pre-eminent global leader... Majorities in key member states now think the US political system is broken, and that Europe cannot just rely on the US to defend it... look to Berlin rather than Washington as the most important partner... A majority believe that China will be more powerful than the US within a decade and would want their country to stay neutral in a conflict between the two superpowers. Two-thirds of respondents thought the EU should develop its defence capacities... Washington cannot take European alignment against China for granted. Public opinion will have a bigger effect on the relationship than it once did, and needs to be taken into account." Another time when Trump exposed the emptiness behind the curtain. Note the reference to having to pay attention to "public opinion" – the dreaded populism appears.

EUROPEANS ARE REVOLTING. One of the Trump Administration's last actions was to impose more sanctions on Nord Stream 2. The chair of the relevant German parliament committee said the sanctions were "unacceptable" and suggested penal duties on US gas. I doubt Biden will change the policy.

UKRAINE. Only 10% of Ukrainians think things are going in the right direction. In a curious parallel, given the US involvement in destroying Ukraine, only 14% of Americans think their country is.

TURKEY. Erdoğan says Ankara will not ask Washington for permission to buy more S-400 SAMs.


Deap , 28 January 2021 at 12:57 PM

How will China's future control of the high seas affect US trade and economy, when China becomes the "global policeman"? Will this in fact lead to a net US savings, being relieved of this current role.

Patrick Armstrong , 28 January 2021 at 03:32 PM

@Deap I don't think China has the slightest interest in being the "global policeman". Don't forget it has two awful examples of the fate of countries who thought that everything, everywhere was always their business.

Deap , 28 January 2021 at 06:09 PM

If the US does not provide global maritime security, how will China protect transit of their fishery exploitation, their African mineral exploitation and cheap product transits into global markets, once the US stops acting as the "global policeman". Will the UN step in and take over this role?

Or is everyone now on their own good behavior - do unto others sort of self-governance? Not sure the world is really ready for the total collapse of the pushy de facto American Empire where everything has been our business - for the benefit of everyone else too.

I would rather we pay the price and continue running the high seas than defaulting any other close contender. Which would be as you claim China, who shall decline the honor and suck off of us?

Or will the Russian polar route become the new grand global highway for all maritime trade in the near future. Just read polar ice cap melting is a 60 year cyclical phenomenon, and not a new global warming trade route, only a temporary one.

But if had my druthers, i would rather see American self-sufficiency and reversion to global isolationism. Let someone else manage or neglect the rest of the globe - one advantage of being a quasi-island nation. Always felt global "domination" was thrust upon us; not something actively sought. This being the voice of a WWII War Baby, who still remembers simpler times in the neophyte global hegemonist US of A.

Patrick Armstrong , 28 January 2021 at 06:23 PM

@ Deap. If there's a problem, there's an international, cooperative solution.

[Jan 29, 2021] 6 Warning Signs from Biden's First Week in Office OffGuardian

Jan 29, 2021 | off-guardian.org

6 Warning Signs from Biden's First Week in Office The "progressive" candidate praised as a "woke bloke" seems to be carrying on where all his authoritarian Imperialist predecessors left off Kit Knightly

It's been a busy first week for the 46th President of the United States, there are the 20,000 troops occupying the capital city to organise, as well as the totally unprecedented show-trial of his immediate predecessor.

You know, usual democracy type stuff.

On top of that, Biden has now signed at least 37 executive orders in his first week . The record for any President, and more than the previous four presidents combined.

What do these orders, or any of his other moves, tell us about the future plans of the recently "elected" administration? Nothing good, unfortunately.

1. VACCINATION PASSPORTS

I still remember people claiming the introduction of vaccination passports (or immunity passes or the like) was just a "conspiracy theory", the paranoid fantasy of fringe "covidiots". All the way back in December, when they were getting fact-checked by tabloid journalists who can't do basic maths .

These days they are rebranded as "freedom certificates" which are "divisive, politically tricky and probably inevitable" .

Many countries are already preparing to roll it out, including Iceland the UK and South Africa . Biden's "Executive Order on Promoting COVID-19 Safety in Domestic and International Travel" adds the US to this list:

International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Consistent with applicable law, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of HHS, and the Secretary of Homeland Security (including through the Administrator of the TSA), in coordination with any relevant international organizations, shall assess the feasibility of linking COVID-19 vaccination to International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) and producing electronic versions of ICVPs.

2. CABINET APPOINTMENTS

Biden's cabinet is praised as the "most diverse" in history, but will hiring a few non-white people really change the decades-old policies of US Imperialism? It certainly doesn't look like it.

His pick for Under Secretary of State is Victoria Nuland , a neocon warmonger and one of the masterminds of the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014. She is married to Robert Kagan , another neocon warmonger, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and one of the masterminds behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The incoming Secretary of State, Antony Blinken , is also an inveterate US Imperialist, arguing for every US military intervention since the 1990s, and criticised Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria.

Biden's pick for Defence Secretary is the first African-American ever appointed to this role, but former General Lloyd Austin is hardly going be some kind of "progressive" voice int his cabinet. He's a career soldier who retired from the military in 2016 to join the board of Raytheon Technologies , an arms manufacturer and military contractor.

As "diverse" as this cabinet may be in skin colour or gender there is most certainly no "diversity" of opinion or policy. There are very few new faces and no new thoughts.

So, it looks like we can expect more of the same in terms of foreign policy. A fact that's already been displayed in

3. IRAQ

Despite heavy resistance from the military and Deep State, Donald Trump wanted to end the war in Iraq and pledged to pull American troops out of the country. This was one of Trump's more popular policies, and during the campaign Biden made no mention of intending to reverse that decision.

Then, on the very day of Biden's inauguration, ISIS conducted their deadliest suicide bombing for over three years , and suddenly the situation was too unstable for the US to leave, and Biden is being forced to "review" Trump's planned withdrawal .

The Iraqi parliament has made it clear it wants the US to take its military off their soil , so any American forces on Iraqi land are technically there illegally in contravention of international law. But that never bothered them before.

4. AFGHANISTAN

Turns out the US can't withdraw from Afghanistan either. Last February Trump signed a deal with the Taliban that all US personnel would leave Afghanistan by May 2021.

Joe Biden has already committed to "reviewing" this deal . Sec. Blinken was quoted as saying that Biden's admin wanted:

to end this so-called forever war [but also] retain some capacity to deal with any resurgence of terrorism, which is what brought us there in the first place".

As a great man once said , nothing someone says before the word "but" really counts. The US will not be withdrawing from Afghanistan, and if there is any public pressure to do so, the government will simply claim the Taliban broke their side of the deal first, or stage a few terrorist attacks.

5. AND SYRIA

Far from simply continuing the on-going wars, there are already signs Biden's "diverse" team will look to escalate, or even start, other conflicts.

Syria was another theatre of war from which Donald Trump wanted to extricate the United States, unilaterally ordering all US troops from the country in late 2019.

We now know the Pentagon ignored those orders. They lied to the President , telling Trump they had followed his orders but not withdrawing a single man. This organized mutiny against the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces was played for a joke in the media when it was finally revealed.

There will be no need for any such duplicity now Biden is in the Oval Office, he was a vocal critic of the decision to withdraw , claiming it gave ISIS a "new lease of life". Indeed, within two days of his being sworn in a column of American military vehicles was seen entering Syria from Iraq .

6. DOMESTIC TERRORISM

We called this before the inauguration . They made it just too obvious. Before the dirty footprints had been cleaned from Nancy Pelosi's desk it was clear where it was all going.

Within 24 hours of being sworn in as president, Biden had ordered a "review of the threat posed by domestic terrorism" .

As usual, the press are laying down the covering fire for this. Talking heads have been busily comparing MAGA voters to al Qaida in television interviews. The Washington Post and New Yorker Journal have cut-and-paste pieces about this supposed threat. Politico published an article titled "Biden vowed to defeat domestic terrorism. The how is the hard part" , which outlines what Biden could do:

Direct the Justice Department, FBI and National Security Council to execute a top-down approach prioritizing domestic terrorism; pass new domestic terrorism legislation; or do a bit of both as Democrats propose a crack down on social media giants like Facebook for algorithms that promote conspiracy laden posts.

That last part is key. The "crack down on social media" part, because the anti-Domestic Terrorism legislation will likely be very focused on communication and so-called "misinformation".

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has publicly called for a congressional panel to "rein in" the media :

We're going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can't just spew disinformation and misinformation,"

And who will be the target of these crack downs and new legislations? Well, according John Brennan (ex-head of the CIA and accomplished war criminal), practically anybody:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=kit_knightly&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1352007118392582148&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Foff-guardian.org%2F2021%2F01%2F27%2F6-warning-signs-from-bidens-first-week-in-office%2F&siteScreenName=kit_knightly&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

They're casting a wide net. Expect "extremist", "bigot" and "racist" to be just a few of the words which have their meanings totally revised in the next few months. "Conspiracy theorist" will be used a lot, too.

Further, they are moving closer and closer toward the "anyone who disagrees with us is literally insane" model. With many articles actually talking about "de-programming" Trump voters. The Atlantic suggests "mental hygiene" would cure the MAGA problem.

Again AOC is on point here, clearly auditioning for the role of High Inquisitor, claiming that the new Biden government needs to fund programs that "de-radicalise" "conspiracy theorists" who are on the "spectrum of radicalisation" .

*

As I said at the beginning, it's been a busy week for Joe Biden, but you can sum up his biggest policy plans in one short sentence: More violence overseas, less tolerance of dissent and strict clampdowns on "misinformation".

How progressive.

[Jan 29, 2021] Meet Antony 'Blinkered' Biden's Choice for America's Top Diplomat -- Strategic Culture

Jan 29, 2021 | www.strategic-culture.org

Blinken does not seem to have repented from his fundamentalist belief in American imperial goodness, notwithstanding his appeal for "humility".

Barring an earthquake in Washington, Antony Blinken is set to become the new U.S. Secretary of State and America's top diplomat. The youthful and telegenic Blinken (58) takes over from Mike Pompeo who was America's representative to the world under the last Trump administration.

The contrast could not be more stark. In place of Pompeo's thuggish, rough-edged style, Blinken has the appearance of consummate diplomat. He's fluent in French owing to a European education, he's urbane and sophisticated and comes from a family which has diplomacy in its genes. His father was an ambassador to Hungary and an advisor to President John F Kennedy. An uncle was ambassador to Belgium.

Blinken has Hungarian and Russian Jewish ancestry. His mother remarried a Polish-American Jewish survivor of the Nazi holocaust. During his confirmation hearing in the Senate this week, Blinken told the story of how his stepfather escaped from a Nazi death march in Bavaria and was eventually rescued by an American tank driven by an African-American officer.

That story has shaped Blinken's worldview of America's prestige and international role. He's a proponent of U.S. military interventionism with a presumption of moral duty. He's an advocate of America working with European allies and upholding the transatlantic alliance – in contrast to Trump's boorish America First sloganeering. Understandably, Blinken is imbued with an unshakable belief in "American exceptionalism" and "manifest destiny" as a world leader.

The Senators at his confirmation hearing this week swooned as Blinken spoke. He's certain to be confirmed as the new Secretary of State in the coming days. That's because he is seen to be perfect for the task of restoring America's international image which has been so badly tarnished under Trump and his grumpy gofer Pompeo. The Europeans will lap up Blinken and his transatlantic romanticism.

Blinken has said that America's foreign policy must be conducted with "humility and confidence", which may sound refreshingly modest. But it's not. Underlying this "quiet American" is the same old arrogance about U.S. imperial might-is-right and Washington's presumed privilege of appointing itself as the "world's policeman".

If Blinken's record is anything to go on, his future role as America's top diplomat is foreboding.

Previously, he was a senior member in the Obama administrations serving as national security advisor to both the president and Joe Biden who was then vice-president. Blinken rose to become deputy Secretary of State in the final years of the second Obama administration. In those roles he was a key player in a series of foreign interventions which turned out to be utterly disastrous.

He was a big proponent of U.S. military intervention in Libya in 2011 which led to the toppling and murder of Muammar Gaddafi. That intervention along with other NATO powers has left a ruinous legacy not only for Libya but for North Africa, the Mediterranean and Europe.

Blinken was also a point-man in Obama's intervention in Syria where the U.S. (and other NATO powers) supplied weapons to anti-government militants. The so-called "rebels" were in fact myriad terrorist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda and other extremist Islamists. Up to half a million people have been killed in the decade-long Syrian war and much of that blood is on America's hands from its de facto support for terror gangs. Maybe Blinken genuinely thought he was supporting "pro-democracy rebels". But even if we give him the benefit of doubt, the upshot is still a disaster of American interventionism.

Another catastrophic consequence of Blinken's policymaking is Yemen. Under his direction, the Obama administration backed the Saudi war on its southern neighbor beginning in March 2015 and continuing to this day. Yemen has become the worst humanitarian crisis in the world with millions facing starvation amid Saudi aerial bombardment carried out with U.S. warplanes and logistics.

The new Biden administration has indicated it will withdraw military support for Saudi Arabia in its war on Yemen. But that doesn't absolve the U.S., and Blinken in particular, for having created the horrendous quagmire from which it is belatedly trying to extricate itself from.

What's rather perplexing, however, is that Blinken does not seem to have repented from his fundamentalist belief in American imperial goodness, notwithstanding his appeal for "humility". During his Senate hearings, he showed little regret about America's illegal bombing of Libya and its arming of jihadists in Syria.

He described the world with the conventional brainwashed American ideology as being a place where China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are enemies that must be confronted. He also told Senators he was in favor of increasing supplies of lethal weaponry to the Ukraine and its rabidly anti-Russian regime in Kiev. Recall that it was the Obama administration which instigated a coup d'état in Kiev against an elected president in February 2014. The new regime was and is dominated by far-right nationalists who laud past links to Nazi Germany. If Blinken has his way the war against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine will escalate and could ignite a bigger confrontation between Russia and the U.S.

One of the hallmarks of the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev is its espousal of Neo-Nazi traditions and in particular antisemitic hatred.

Given Antony Blinken's own Jewish ancestry and his own intimate connection to the Nazi holocaust, you do have to question his competence if he becomes America's foreign policy leader. His boss President Joe Biden has fondly lionized Blinken as a "superstar" of diplomacy. Superficially perhaps, he has finesse and intelligence. But in much the same basic way of adhering to American imperialism, Blinken is as crude and thuggish as his predecessor Pompeo. He just projects a more plausible look and sound, which is most desirable as a moral cover for America's criminal imperialism.

Blinken is known to self-deprecate his "insatiable habit" for making up bad puns. For example, on one occasion when he was addressing an audience on policy regarding the Arctic, he began by joking he would be "breaking the ice". Given his ability to pursue destructive dead-end policies, he might therefore appreciate the moniker "Secretary of State Tony Blinkered".

[Jan 29, 2021] A Domestic Terrorism Law- War on Dissent Will Proceed Full Speed Ahead -- It could be Russiagate all over again, with a claimed foreign threat being used to conceal civil rights violations being committed by the federal government at home.

Jan 29, 2021 | www.strategic-culture.org

And, as the old saying goes, the Revolution is already beginning to devour its own children. Universities and schools are insisting that teachers actively support both publicly and privately the new "equity and diversity" order while police departments are purging themselves of officers suspected of being associated with conservative groups, meaning that something like a loyalty test might soon become common.

Recently the Defense Department has begun intensive monitoring of the social media of military personnel to identify dissenters, as is already done in some large companies with their employees. The new Director of National Intelligence hardliner Avril Haines has already confirmed that her agency will participate in a public threat assessment of QAnon, which she has described as America's Greatest Threat.

Haines has also suggested that intelligence agencies will "look at connections between folks in the U.S. and externally and foreign" while Biden on his first full day in office has pledged to thoroughly investigate claims about Russian hacking of U.S. infrastructure and government sites, the poisoning of Putin critic Alexei Navalny, and the story that Russia offered the Taliban bounties to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. It could be Russiagate all over again, with a claimed foreign threat being used to conceal civil rights violations being committed by the federal government at home.

And, of course, the new policies will reflect the biases of the new rulers. Right wing "terror" will be targeted even though the list of actual right-wing driven outrages is embarassingly short. Groups like Black Lives Matter will be untouchable in spite of their major role in last year's rioting, arson, looting and violence that caused $2 billion damage and killed as many as thirty because they are in all but name part of the Democratic Party. Antifa, which rioted in Portland last week, will also get a pass – the media routinely describes leftist violence as "mainly peaceful" and only sometimes concedes that some "property damage" occurred.

[Jan 29, 2021] Unable to achieve complete regime change, the Empire has shifted gears and now is waging a war primarily based on starvation

Using the short form of trillion, and counting that the Pentagon budget (+ secret ops) was already estimated to be 1'2 trillion about five years back. Which makes $3'287'671'232.88 per day. Three thousand two hundred and eighty two million.. Easier to calculate, (incl US contribution) is that the total NATO budget is x 22 that of Russia.
Jan 29, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Jen , Jan 29 2021 11:01 utc | 1

No surprise to hear that all of a sudden, and so soon after Joe Biden's inauguration as US President, Syria is coming back into the United States' target sights. The team that used to advise O'Bomber on his Middle East policy must have all come back and are probably also being paid bigger bucks for the next four-year cycle.


Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 29 2021 20:20 utc | 34

Is al-Tanf really a launching pad for ISIS attacks in the region?

This question reminded me of something Putin told Oliver Stone in Episode 1 of The Putin Interviews regarding the Chechen 'uprising'. About 40 minutes in he tells Stone that "The Americans were flying fighters around (inside Russia)."
Putin complained about this to Bush II. The US response came in the form of a letter from the Director of the CIA which said, in effect: "The CIA reserves the right to engage with Opposition parties and will continue to do so."
In other words "Go fuck yourself."

Putin doesn't say what action, if any, Russia took in response to Yankee Chutzpah inside Russia but he's certainly familiar with Yankees throwing their weight around inside other people's countries.

The foregoing occurred AFTER Russia had moved heaven and earth to help and co-operate with the Yankees in their Fake War in Afghanistan.

Canadian Cents , Jan 29 2021 22:25 utc | 37

This article from thesaker site last week relates:

"Unable to achieve complete regime change, the Empire has shifted gears and now is waging a war primarily based on starvation. Limiting the flow of food and energy in the country may not even succeed in directly impeding military operations, but it can effectively turn Syria into a third world country by grinding civilian life to a halt and starving the population."

- Deir Ezzor is a Sign of Things to Come

It ties in how, the US in 2003 "unilaterally disbanded the Iraqi army without pay, despite warnings that this would create a pool of manpower for terrorism. Many of these soldiers later filled the ranks of ISIS."

It could also have tied in how, in 2011, the US overthrew the stable, peaceful government in Libya and ensured the spread of weaponry to Syria/Iraq/ISIS/AQ/Africa, despite many warnings about that too. So the US deliberately created a pool of manpower for terrorism, then deliberately created a pool and flow of weaponry.

As stated in a 2014 article , "The states which the US planned to destroy in 2001 (as reported by General Wesley Clark in his memoirs) - Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Syria - are now in fact destroyed societies. All but Iran are left with civil war and majority destitution where once they had been relatively prosperous and life secure."

The people of Syria suffered far less under Trump than under Obama/H.Clinton/Biden, and, unfortunately, just days into the new administration it already looks like they will suffer more again now that Biden has empowered the neocons again.

rick , Jan 29 2021 22:12 utc | 36

It's extraordinary that in the current balance of power situation the SAA (Syrian Arab Army) and the Russian Military have to tolerate these clandestine operations in Syria by US and UK Special Forces protected by the threat of US and Israeli air power and invasive US military reaction. These operations have been initiated at the end of the proxy war waged unsuccessfully by the US/UK since 2012 with the aim in the longer term to extend by violence and terror the strength and penetration of Salafist Jihadist terrorism (embracing ISIS remnants etc) into mainland Syria much like the incursions conducted by the Contras in Nicaragua in the eighties to weaken the state and demoralise the people. That there is some confusion as to the role of these occupied Syrian territories despite the covert nature of the US/UK presence is worrying since it must be understood that the US and UK military are now providing direct operational and logistical support in addition to training, financing, resupplying terrorists including ISIS all operating from safe, protected bases inside Syria controlled by the US. It's now obvious that unlike earlier in the Syrian conflict when US/UK involvement was limited by the policy of fronting the proxy war in Syria by Saudi Arabia, Gulf States and Turkey the US has stationed its forces on the front line of this low level proxy war which the US intends to stage manage while economic war is waged against the Syrian people to further weaken their resolve and resistance. This blatant criminal enterprise cannot go unanswered by all anti imperialist forces and organisations in the Middle East and Europe.

Paul , Jan 29 2021 12:34 utc | 7

Not only is the US/UK military occupation of Syrian sovereign territory illegal but the 'pillage' of Syrian oil is also illegal and prohibited by the Hague Conventions. This has been customary international law for over one hundred years.

So much for the fabled 'ruled based international order' a phrase which is recited by rote and trumpeted endlessly by the self same Anglo/Zionists. As if saying the phrase means doing it.

These war criminals will stop at nothing in the service of bandit state.

[Jan 29, 2021] Syria - The U.S. Controlled Al-Tanf Serves As 'ISIS' Base - Truth Or Propaganda-

Jan 29, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Syria - The U.S. Controlled Al-Tanf Serves As 'ISIS' Base - Truth Or Propaganda?

by Hedwig Kuijpers


Photo of US soldiers training Maghweer al-Thora forces in the al-Tanf pocket (source: Hammurabi news)
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Many questions remain unanswered about the al-Tanf United States base in the Syrian desert, that is called illegal by the Syrian government and Russia. Why is al-Tanf so important to the US? What are the US soldiers still doing there? Who else are hosted in the al-Tanf pocket? Why is ISIS growing again? Is al-Tanf really a launching pad for ISIS attacks in the region?

Why is the al-Tanf base so important to the US?

The al-Tanf base is located in the al-Tanf pocket, at about 20km of the al-Tanf border crossing. It's 55 km-deconfliction zone is located along the border with Iraq and Jordan, and cuts off the Baghdad-Damascus highway. By controlling this highway, the United States ensures that Iranian deliveries to the Syrian capital Damascus cannot take place by land. This is of high strategic importance to the US, because Iranian shipments and air deliveries are much easier intercepted, and form an easy target to Israeli airstrikes.

The US-led coalition forces use al-Tanf as an entrance point to launch operations into Syria. The base can be easily reached from both Baghdad and Jordan. Both the Syrian government and Russian officials have repeatedly stated that the al-Tanf zone are being used by terrorist groups active in the region, as a safe haven and a foothold to carry out attacks on government-held areas and Iranian proxy-groups in the Bukamal area. This 'ISIS rear base' has been actively protected by the forces stationed at al-Tanf, which threaten any deployment of the Syrian Arab Army, Iranian proxy-groups and Russian forces close to the al-Tanf zone. The formal justification given by the US surrounding these actions is that Syrian government troops as well as Iranian-backed forces in Syria pose a threat to US-backed 'less-radical' rebel groups and US troops deployed at the garrison.

Oil, Rebels, Iran, Chaos and Leverage

Many allegations exist surrounding the activities of the US soldiers present at al-Tanf, even though the Trump-administration claimed it wanted to pull back troops from Syria and victory had been announced over ISIS.

One of the reasons is the presence of US-backed 'rebel' groups such as Maghweer al-Thora. According to an OIR inspector general report released Aug. 4. 2020, OIR officials want to want to double the size of US-proxy forces in Syria and finish training a 2,200-man "oilfield guard" unit there.

The same report also mentions the oil revenues of the area. US-backed forces likely produced at least 30,000 barrels of oil per day, garnering nearly $3 million a day in revenue, until the recent price collapse. "Although US-backed Kurdish forces have "bolstered" their "security presence near major oil and gas fields in northeastern Syria," they have "remained co-located with Coalition forces whose protection SDF leaders still depend on," the IG report also reads, reminding us of the cooperation of a shady US oil company partnering up with the Kurdish-led SDF to refine and sell Syria's oil . The Kurdish-led SDF occupies a great part of the country's wheat fields and the majority of Syria's oilfields, and thus actively threaten Syria's economy. Another reason the US government might utter are 'humanitarian reasons' As there are 10.000 refugees and Bedouins living inside the deconfliction zone, which is heavily infiltrated by ISIS militants and said to be a launching pad for 'ISIS' attacks by Syrian officials . US officials might utter these 'refugees' have been under US protection for years now, and leaving them behind might put them in danger, so they must stay.

Army Gen. Joseph Votel, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, acknowledged the base's strategic importance in countering the sway of Iran . He was quoted as following: "Al Tanf's location is also central to its role in preventing the Iranians from gaining a firmer foothold in the region. The base sits in the heart of what Iran hopes will be part of a "Shia Crescent," a continuous land bridge linking Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon." US officials have also uttered that their presence at al-Tanf could form leverage in the negotiations on the outcome of the conflict. As Syria, Russia, Turkey and Iran all want the United States to leave Syria, it might give them some leverage when Syria's future will be formed.

Maghaweer al-Thowra, liberated ISIS prisoners, and the British SAS

As mentioned earlier, the rebel group "Revolutionary Commando Army" or 'Maghaweer al-Thowra' is hosted in the al-Tanf pocket, they are called 'less-radical' are trained by US soldiers to fight in anti-ISIS operations. Yet, defects of the group have claimed that 'U.S. troops at Al-Tanf base sold weapons to ISIS in Syria' and use the group to hinder operations of the Syrian Arab Army and Iranian proxies in the area instead.

"American instructors trained them to carry out sabotage at oil and transport infrastructure, as well as for terrorist acts in the Syrian government-controlled territories," state another group of defectors of Maghaweer al-Thowra. In addition to US-backed rebel groups, it is also stated that former ISIS militants are being hosted in the al-Tanf pocket. Though the US forces have not denied that ISIS militants may have infiltrated the refugees there, multiple reports state that ISIS prisoners released by Kurdish officials have been massively transported to the US military base. Western forces are being host in the al-Tanf base as well. The British special forces SAS have been operating alongside US forces and Syrian 'rebels' since 2016 in operations hidden from the public. The British covert operation started as early as 2011 , when the British were assisting the earliest Syrian 'rebels' and assessing their needs to overthrow Syrian president Assad. The SAS began actively training the 'rebels' fighting Assad from bases in Jordan in 2012. At the same time, the SAS also began " slipping into Syria on missions". That the rebels they supported had strong affiliations with ISIS did not matter to them. The Free Syrian Army that was supported in the British operation, was in effect allied to IS until the end of 2013 and was collaborating with it on the battlefield until 2014, despite tensions between the groups. "We have good relations with our brothers in the FSA," ISIS leader Abu Atheer said in 2013, having bought arms from the FSA.

In 2015, reports started to emerge of SAS fighters dressed as ISIS militants and waving the black flag, while at the same time continuing operations against the Syrian Arab Army.

Other reports show that the SAS has been actively training and fighting alongside the Kurdish-led SDF. British special forces continue to operate on the ground in Syria in 2019 and are reported to number at least 120 soldiers , as a new cyber unit was announced that 'was created to take on Russian and Chinese battle tech' and 'also track down remaining ISIS commanders'. In 2020, the SAS has continued 'secret manoeuvres' in Syria. They have also fought alongside the Kurdish-led SDF and were clad in Burkas during operations in the area. Reports by British media also state that the forces will also be deployed to hinder Russia's and Iran's covert activities. SAS forces are stationed in Jordan and al-Tanf.


SAS fighters (source: Pinterest.com)
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Why is ISIS growing again?

Attacks claimed by ISIS in both Iraq and Syria have increased significantly in 2020, demonstrating both a capacity and a willingness on ISIS's part to continue attacks and retake territory, support in the area, and resources. ISIS has led a steady beat of assassinations, ambushes, and bombings in eastern Syria in 2020, and is responsible for the deaths of a number of regime and SDF forces. By August, 126 attacks by ISIS across Syria were reported for 2020 -- compared to 144 in all of 2019. Reasons mentioned for the ISIS resurgence in Syria are to be found in several complex situations. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have released more than 600 ISIS fighters and 15.000 ISIS-supporters from al-Hol camp. In addition, 785 ISIS fighters escaped from Ayn Issa during Turkish shelling, and about 100 hardcore ISIS-militants have reportedly escaped from ISIS-prisons .


ISIS prisoners in Hasakah (source: Rudaw)

Another reason for ISIS' opportunity to grow are the flaring tensions between the SDF and tribal forces in Deir ez-Zor, after the assassinations of several powerful Arab tribal leaders. The SDF blamed the Syrian government, Turkey, Iran and their respective local allies of using certain elements in Deir ez-Zor to cause instability. Though in 2019, victory over ISIS was declared after the last ISIS stronghold was retaken in the battle for Baghouz , the amount of ISIS attacks has seemed to have risen. Maps made by Gregory Waters show the exact location of the ISIS attacks, and how the location of the attacks suddenly spread from the al-Tanf/al-Bukamal axis to the Deir ez-Zor-Uqayribat axis (ISIS stronghold that was liberated by the Syrian Arab Army in 2017) in 2020, as well as multiplying and intensifying by orders of magnitude.


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By analyzing these maps, an interesting trend can be seen. ISIS attacks seem to focus on areas that have been recaptured by the Syrian Arab Army, stretching deeply in SAA territory. Other ISIS attacks focus on Iranian proxies from al-Bukamal to Deir ez-Zor. An amount of ISIS attacks also occurred in SDF-held territories, focussing on the Deir ez-Zor region. These attacks conveniently seem to target tribal leaders that oppose the SDF-US oil deal .

Is al-Tanf really a launching pad for ISIS attacks in the region?

The controversial al-Tanf base is mentioned as a launching pad for ISIS attacks in the region by many sides. All sides seem to agree that dubious attacks – claimed to be committed by ISIS - seem to be launched from the al-Tanf pocket.

The al-Tanf pocket hosts ISIS-affiliated refugees and militias like Maghaweer al-Thowra, that have cooperated with ISIS and use quite the same modus operandi. These groups still receive training by US soldiers today.

It is undeniable that escaped or released ISIS fighters may have rejoined the group. Released jihadists often return to ISIS or similar groups .

British SAS forces remain operative in the reason, and are stationed in Jordan and al-Tanf, from where they launch operations. Little is known about their activities in Syria, as the SAS is exempt from freedom of information laws and operates under a strict "no comment" policy. Secrecy around the corps is pervasive.

Statements of defectors, Russian government officials and Syrian government officials, and other signs explained in this article all point in the same direction; that al-Tanf has become the launching pad of dubious activities in the region. They allege US-sponsored ISIS factions, US-backed rebel groups, or secretive SAS operations are behind the attacks.

Proving these allegations or distinguishing the real perpetrator is very hard, yet all evidence points at al-Tanf. And even if proven, accusations will remain unheard by the larger public. Yet, when arguing about this growing threat, one must take the US military's earlier actions in the Middle East in mind. The US has a long history of state-sponsored terrorism , and cooperation with terrorist- and radical jihadist groups. Proof of these operations often only shows up years after. And I myself will not be surprised if - one day - news about a clandestine ISIS-US cooperation appears in the media through leaks or whistle blowers, books will be written, and documentaries will be made.

Posted by b on January 29, 2021 at 10:44 UTC | Permalink


Jen , Jan 29 2021 11:01 utc | 1

No surprise to hear that all of a sudden, and so soon after Joe Biden's inauguration as US President, Syria is coming back into the United States' target sights. The team that used to advise O'Bomber on his Middle East policy must have all come back and are probably also being paid bigger bucks for the next four-year cycle.
PavewayIV , Jan 29 2021 11:31 utc | 2
How can a U.S. citizen even respond? U.S. Intel agency secrets. CENTCOM's treason, the nation's complicity in another eternal war for Israel. It's just too sad to comment about. Maybe voting and the law will fix this mess.
Johny Conspiranoid , Jan 29 2021 11:47 utc | 3
" that is called illegal by the Syrian government "
If the Syrian government say something inside Syria is illegal then that's what it is because they are the Syrian government.

What's this 'regime' you talk about? Is it the American one?

Mao Cheng Ji , Jan 29 2021 11:51 utc | 4
I'm pretty sure one important function of that military base is to block an important road from Iran to Iraq to Lebanon.

Breaking the so-called Shia Crescent, more or less the main geopolitical purpose of the whole Syrian operation of the last decade. And still ongoing.

Temporarily Sane , Jan 29 2021 11:53 utc | 5
"Many questions remain unanswered about the al-Tanf United States base in the Syrian desert, that is called illegal by the Syrian government and Russia. "

It's probably unintentional but this phrasing is similar to what the NYT and WaPo use when they want to cast doubt on a claim made by US "adversaries."

The fact is, the al-Tanf base is unquestionably illegal because the US is in Syria without Damascus' consent. It is an occupation force but no war was declared nor did the UN authorize the occupation. This makes it illegal under international law no matter what anyone says or doesn't say about it.

Et Tu , Jan 29 2021 12:13 utc | 6
This same article was published on Southfront a day or two ago.

https://southfront.org/isis-in-al-tanf-propaganda-or-reality/

It also says "Written by Hedwig Kuijpers exclusively for SouthFront"

I find it strange MoA makes no mention of Southfront at all?

Paul , Jan 29 2021 12:34 utc | 7
Not only is the US/UK military occupation of Syrian sovereign territory illegal but the 'pillage' of Syrian oil is also illegal and prohibited by the Hague Conventions. This has been customary international law for over one hundred years.

So much for the fabled 'ruled based international order' a phrase which is recited by rote and trumpeted endlessly by the self same Anglo/Zionists. As if saying the phrase means doing it.

These war criminals will stop at nothing in the service of bandit state.

Stonebird , Jan 29 2021 13:00 utc | 8
The SAS ought to be designated publicly as a "terrorist entity" by the Syrians and their backers.

I note that some of the targets mentioned are tribal leaders. If my memory serves me correctly the Shaihtah* tribe near Al Bukamal-Al Mayadin and whose original territory was on the Eastern side of the river, lost 750 people massacred by ISIS and who have now become (part of?) the SDF. Mainly Women and children of course. It won't change much if Tribal leaders are assassinated, as the tribe as a whole will remember. That is what Tribal afffinities are for.

* "Shaitah" is an approximative spelling !

Louis N Proyect , Jan 29 2021 13:04 utc | 9
Always with the USA and England colluding with ISIS against Assad. Don't you people read outside your comfort zone?

Under Obama: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/obama-expands-isis-bombing-campaign-to-fourth-country-media-barely-notices/

Under Trump: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/1/3/us-intensifies-bombing-in-syria-after-trump-announced-withdrawal

vk , Jan 29 2021 13:20 utc | 10
Another reason for ISIS' opportunity to grow are the flaring tensions between the SDF and tribal forces in Deir ez-Zor, after the assassinations of several powerful Arab tribal leaders. The SDF blamed the Syrian government, Turkey, Iran and their respective local allies of using certain elements in Deir ez-Zor to cause instability. Though in 2019, victory over ISIS was declared after the last ISIS stronghold was retaken in the battle for Baghouz, the amount of ISIS attacks has seemed to have risen. Maps made by Gregory Waters show the exact location of the ISIS attacks, and how the location of the attacks suddenly spread from the al-Tanf/al-Bukamal axis to the Deir ez-Zor-Uqayribat axis (ISIS stronghold that was liberated by the Syrian Arab Army in 2017) in 2020, as well as multiplying and intensifying by orders of magnitude.

One factor may be the direct consequence of the other: ISIS was defeated as a regular force, so now they're scattered around East Syria doing the more traditional terrorist attacks.

b , Jan 29 2021 13:50 utc | 11
@Et Tu
It also says "Written by Hedwig Kuijpers exclusively for SouthFront"

I find it strange MoA makes no mention of Southfront at all?

Hedwig had send me the piece two days and asked me to publish it. I did not know that it was on South Front. Nor do I know about anything "exclusive".

snake , Jan 29 2021 13:52 utc | 12
How can a U.S. citizen even respond? U.S. Intel agency secrets. CENTCOM's treason, the nation's complicity in another eternal war for Israel. It's just too sad to comment about. Maybe voting and the law will fix this mess.

Posted by: PavewayIV | Jan 29 2021 11:31 utc | 2

I think maybe its time to rethink is it actually the nation state of Israel, OR is it that the Nation State of Israel is the same as the Nation State of the USA, a warrior, pawn and get it done group that both holds captive its citizens by rule of law and that serves the will and wishes of the Oligarch..

Oligarchary has gone global. They are in control of the top of nearly all governments and they privately own (92% owned by just 6 entities) the media (the ninth tier in the 9 tier model) At the top and at the bottom they have what it takes to keep divided the populations so the deplorable cannot effectively organize. Until someone comes up with a way to overcome the divided nation,nothing effective is likely to surface. Nation states are the pawns, the war machine (leg breakers) that keep the Oligarch familes wealthy.. forget the nation state as the center of power, the nation state is not, the center of power is invisible, the nation state is just the war machine, and law making machine and the wealth extraction machine the oligarch depend on to keep their wealth and to deny the deplorable their chance at the good life.

One of the biggest challenges to democracy lay in the copyright and patent monopolies. these monopolies are creatures of the rule of law, without law there can be no privately owned monopolies. as of Oct 1, it is reported that 90% of the balance sheets of the traded companies is either patents or copyrights. that only leaves 10% for physical assets. Rule of law, without effective input from those who are the governed, is the enemy of the deplorable and the supression of Democracy, Independence of mind, thought and deed.

If you removed the laws that enable copyright and patents, overnight some mighty big corporate enterprises would be broke.

Christian J. Chuba , Jan 29 2021 13:58 utc | 13
Who is ISIS attacking the most? according to the NATO funded
SOHR Syrian Observatory of Human Rights
"Since 24th of March 2019, SOHR has documented the killing of at least 1,221 regime soldiers [and allies]"

My question to you is this, how many SDF [Kurdish soldiers] have ISIS killed over that time frame? [not rhetorical, I don't know the answer, I'd like to know]

A disparity of numbers will tell you who ISIS sees as their biggest enemy.

[If I ask a rhetorical question, I'll throw in a pompous, 'again I ask' at the end.]

Nathan Mulcahy , Jan 29 2021 14:16 utc | 14
"Maybe voting and the law will fix this mess."

Posted by: PavewayIV | Jan 29 2021 11:31 utc | 2

=======

Who are you gonna vote for? Tweedledum or tweedledee?

Christian J. Chuba , Jan 29 2021 14:36 utc | 15
Slightly OT: conspiracy theories Marjorie Taylor Greene

1. Parkland shooting was staged to undermine gun rights, 2. laser beam fired from space to help high speed rail in CA

Why do people so quickly embrace such far fetched explanations?

1. the theory has to give a conclusion that the listener wants to believe, 'my rights are being threatened by powerful people, bad people'. 2. It only requires plausibility, not proof, or a friends approval.

Back to this topic earlier, I said that ISIS considers the govt of Syria a bigger enemy than the SDF because they have attacked the SAA thousands of times, and I only see a few against the SDF.

I did not start with, 'Israel and the U.S. is in an alliance w/ISIS' to explain the same set of facts. I would say that the U.S. and Israel are more interested in hurting the Syrian govt even if it helps ISIS but that does not require a conspiracy.

I know this is pedantic. But I am fascinated by people who jump off the ledge and I'm trying to understand where the line is or if people have other observations.

Ian2 , Jan 29 2021 14:51 utc | 16
Nathan Mulcahy @14:

PavewayIV wasn't serious.

William Gruff , Jan 29 2021 15:37 utc | 17
PavewayIV @2: "Maybe voting and the law will fix this mess."

That sarcasm is much to dark for this bright and sunny morning.

Jackrabbit , Jan 29 2021 16:10 utc | 18
Louis N Proyect @Jan29 13:04 #9 shows up to administer ideological policing to "you people" that think outside of the carefully constructed "comfort zone" of media narratives.

But moa readers have seen how fake these narratives have been with psyops like the White Helmets. And we have not forgotten the "Obama Administration's" "willful choice" to let ISIS rise after Russia prevented USA from bombing Syria in 2013.

Furthermore, we have noticed that ISIS never attacks Israel. And we can see that ISIS' continuing existence in Syria is crucial to USA's ability to legally remain in Syria under UN Resolution 2249.

!!

Arch Bungle , Jan 29 2021 16:58 utc | 19
Posted by: Louis N Proyect | Jan 29 2021 13:04 utc | 9

Always with the USA and England colluding with ISIS against Assad. Don't you people read outside your comfort zone?

Good to see *you* showing up on MoA to read outside your 'comfort zone' ...

oldhippie , Jan 29 2021 17:04 utc | 20

JR @ 18

2249 does not remotely give USA legal cover. If you read only half the resolution while attempting to reason with the mind of a petulant child you could construct a rationale, but your older brother would see through that rationale in a second.

Yes, US diplomats often reason like small children. Let us not assist them.

gottlieb , Jan 29 2021 17:08 utc | 21
They say the bigger they are the harder they fall. In the end, after the fall, after the 'truth commissions' and investigations, and post-apocalyptic introspection, the citizens of Empire will live in the shame of a humanity that worshiped greed as a religion, and practiced inhumanity to humans as simply another course in a feast. Meanwhile the billions of victims of Empire will dance, sing and rejoice as the current imperial project of the lizard-people sinks beneath the waves to join another in a long line of human empires that misunderstood the meaning of life.
Dogon Priest , Jan 29 2021 17:09 utc | 22
Riddlemethis

How much loot does the US military industrial complex make every 24 hours on the ground?
Oiligopoly not included....
Asking for a friend

karlof1 , Jan 29 2021 17:18 utc | 23
The acronym ought to be ISUS or USIS. Of course, al-Tanf is a terrorist base, the terrorists primarily being forces of the Outlaw US Empire and its main accomplice. Accepting that as fact, we must then determine WHY? What is the overall aim? If Hudson's correct about the overall geopolitical aims of the Parasitical Neoliberal Fascists running the Outlaw US Empire and its NATO vassals, then we've known the answer for quite awhile. The following is what Hudson has distilled it to:

"All economic systems seek to internationalize themselves and extend their rule throughout the world. Today's revived Cold War should be understood as a fight between what kind of economic system the world will have . Finance capitalism is fighting against nations that restrict its intrusive dynamics and sponsorship of privatization and dismantling of public regulatory power . Unlike industrial capitalism, the rentier aim is not to become a more productive economy by producing goods and selling them at a lower cost than competitors. Finance capitalism's dynamics are globalist, seeking to use international organizations (the IMF, NATO, the World Bank and U.S.-designed trade and investment sanctions) to overrule national governments that are not controlled by the rentier classes . The aim is to make all economies into finance-capitalist layers of hereditary privilege, imposing anti-labor austerity policies to squeeze a dollarized surplus .

" Industrial capitalism's resistance to this international pressure is necessarily nationalist , because it needs state subsidy and laws to tax and regulate the FIRE sector . But it is losing the fight to finance capitalism, which is turning to be its nemesis just as industrial capitalism was the nemesis of post-feudal landlordship and predatory banking. Industrial capitalism requires state subsidy and infrastructure investment, along with regulatory and taxing power to check the incursion of finance capital . The resulting global conflict is between socialism (the natural evolution of industrial capitalism) and a pro-rentier fascism, a state-finance-capitalist reaction against socialism's mobilization of state power to roll back the post-feudal rentier interests ." [My Emphasis]

The situation in Syria and Iraq represent the kinetic edge of what's mostly a Cold War globally. It's noted that some of the Parasitical organizations have powers equal to some nation-states and that the main underlying aim is the weakening of governments's abilities to regulate them. The pandemic has weakened a great many nations while the Parasites have grown stronger as they get massive transfusions from the Fed. Thus it seems very plausible that given their motive, the Parasites spawned the pandemic, not this or that government. We watched as those forces operated independently of Trump by disobeying his orders, and now we have further understanding of why the so-called Forever Wars. We can also understand the real motive for 911 was the destruction of evidence at Building 7 and the Pentagon that would've gravely injured the Parasites while also providing a covering reason for launching the Forever Wars. IMO, the only way the Outlaw US Empire will leave the areas it occupies is if its physically ousted--Korea, Japan, Europe, Afghanistan, Southwest Asia. It ought to be possible to now see how Full Spectrum Domination can be obtained without a military conflict, as well as the real reasons behind the demonization of China and Russia.

Both Putin and Xi told Davos and the Parasites that they're committed to their development path which is completely at odds with what the Parasites desire. IMO, the global masses would agree with both and join them if they knew what they said. We can also see why the attack on the Ummah, which is the Islamic global collective that adheres to the values that promote the collective, not the Parasites that would feed on it. And we just witnessed how the Parasites are able to quickly counter any concerted effort to disciple them, which also served the purpose of outing Big Tech as an enemy of the collective. Cold War or Class War? The difference between them is close to indistinguishable.

ld , Jan 29 2021 17:38 utc | 24
Arch Bungle @19
No matter how frustrated I may get with some comments.
I always leave with a smile.
I always find some point of agreement with every poster.
I have learned more here than in my entire academic career. I rarely post because I cannot add. I love the tactful and the witty. I do admire those that have come here 'out of their comfort zone'. It all begins somewhere.
james , Jan 29 2021 17:44 utc | 25
why? because the usa is servant to israel... that and al- tanf is a terrorist base for usa-israel.... anything else is a lie and what you will read in the msm regularly...

@ karlof1... thanks again for the hudson article...

Stonebird , Jan 29 2021 17:49 utc | 26
Dogon Priest | Jan 29 2021 17:09 utc | 22

Using the short form of trillion, and counting that the Pentagon budget (+ secret ops) was already estimated to be 1'2 trillion about five years back. Which makes $3'287'671'232.88 per day. Three thousand two hundred and eighty two million, six hundred and seventy one thousand, two hundred and thirty two dollars, and eighty eight cents.

I wish I had friends like yours, but tell it/them/etc. that I didn't count in the actual sum spent on contracts and procurement. Ask Congress, I think they have "oversight" (overshot?). Pelosi will know.

Easier to calculate, (incl US contribution) is that the total NATO budget is x 22 that of Russia.
-----------

General comment; If ISIS is mainly in the southern part of the desert east of the Euphrates, then it's arms must come from somewhere near. Al-Tanf is the most likely and the Israelis have admitted giving some (earlier) from the Golan heights area.
------------
snake | Jan 29 2021 13:52 utc | 12

There are supposed to be 655 "families" that control all. The question is; are the corporations (Nouveau rich) and the families the one and the same? I do not think they are, but they use the same methods of control. (Media et al.)

------------
Cheer up. here is a clip of "Putins palace" - the real insider facts. At least you will see why there is less unemployment in Russia.

https://twitter.com/ValLisitsa/status/1355135339795505163

Stonebird , Jan 29 2021 17:53 utc | 27
@26
Three thousand two hundred and eighty two million

It should have been ....eighty seven million. But what's five million a day between friends?

juliania , Jan 29 2021 18:08 utc | 28
Paaveway @ 2 - here is how Indians are responding to injustice:

https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/
the-many-splendoured-sewa-network-at-singhu/

Willy2 , Jan 29 2021 18:12 utc | 29
- I see a REAL possibility that these US trained fighters have an agenda of their own that "doesn't align/run parallel" with the plans the US has for Syria & Iraq/Iran.
Jackrabbit , Jan 29 2021 18:20 utc | 30
oldhippie @Jan29 17:04 #20

Yeah, it's a legal fig leaf. But that's enough for a superpower to throw its weight around.

!!

juliania , Jan 29 2021 18:23 utc | 31
snake @12, this is indeed what has been happening, and why b's post on the Wall Street shenanigans is so important. Not only do oligarchs make their billions through monopolies, (thank you Clinton) but also Wall Street has been shown to be oligarchical territory for turning billions into trillions and not any little person can have leverage there.

Education happens outside the universities and the state run school system these days. The soft spots for the oligarchical/tyrannical system are surely educating many that 'it's a big club and you ain't in it', though I would rephrase that:

It's a little club, and you ain't in it.

[Jan 29, 2021] No one's above the law- FBI lawyer who altered evidence to enable spying on Trump gets PROBATION instead of jail -- RT USA New

Jan 29, 2021 | www.rt.com

29 Jan, 2021 18:47 / Updated 6 hours ago Get short URL No one's above the law? FBI lawyer who altered evidence to enable spying on Trump gets PROBATION instead of jail Kevin Clinesmith is the FBI lawyer who altered evidence to secure a FISA warrant for spying on Carter Page (December 7, 2018 file photo). © REUTERS/Yuri Gripas 152 Follow RT on RT The only FBI official charged in the improper use of FISA warrants to spy on President Donald Trump via campaign aide Carter Page got a slap on the wrist. Kevin Clinesmith's sentence was a year of probation, and community service.

Clinesmith worked at the FBI General Counsel's Office (GCO) and was assigned to Crossfire Hurricane, the probe of Trump's alleged ties with Russia during the 2016 election. In that capacity, he altered an email from the CIA that described Page as a source for the spy agency, to say he was "not" a source – enabling the FBI to request a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against Page as a "Russian agent" – and, through him, spy on the Trump campaign, transition and presidency.

ALSO ON RT.COM Trump declassifies 'binder of materials' related to Russiagate probe, but caves to FBI & keeps saucy bits secret

On Friday, federal judge James Boasberg – who also sits on the FISA court – sentenced Clinesmith to 12 months' probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $100 fine.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1355206047867301888&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F514079-clinesmith-sentence-fbi-russiagate%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Boasberg was reportedly swayed by Clinesmith's insistence that he'd acted in good faith and that his wife has a baby on the way, while shrugging-off Page's testimony that his life had been ruined as the result of false claims he was a "Russian agent."

The Republicans sitting on the House Judiciary Committee called the sentence "insanity" and "outrageous."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1355210065674989573&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F514079-clinesmith-sentence-fbi-russiagate%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California), the Judiciary GOP first exposed the FISA abuse and published a memo about it in February 2018, revealing that the FBI had relied on the "Steele Dossier" – a collection of spurious claims compiled by a British spy and paid-for by Hillary Clinton's campaign – in the initial spying request.

Others pointed out that Clinesmith's transgression was far greater than almost anyone who ended up going to jail as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller's 'Russiagate' probe. Campaign aide George Papadopoulos spent two weeks in jail for allegedly lying to the FBI – the same process crime Clinesmith pled guilty to last August – and General Michael Flynn spent four years trying to beat the same charge.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1355209138633015297&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F514079-clinesmith-sentence-fbi-russiagate%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Clinesmith is also the only FBI official to face any scrutiny over the bureau's handling of Crossfire Hurricane. Former director James Comey, his deputy Andy McCabe, lead agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page – all of whom were involved in the probe – have landed lucrative book contracts or cable news jobs, or become heroes of the Democrat "resistance" instead.

ALSO ON RT.COM Twitter influencer Douglass Mackey, aka Ricky Vaughn, arrested for allegedly tricking Clinton backers to lose their votes in 2016

The lenient sentence for a FBI lawyer altering evidence was seen as especially egregious, as, earlier this week, a Trump supporter going by the handle 'Ricky Vaughn' on Twitter was arrested and charged by the Biden administration for "conspiracy to deprive people of their voting rights" by posting memes that allegedly misled Clinton voters in 2016.

"The entire game is rigged," said Federalist editor Sean Davis. "The rule of law is dead."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-3&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1355206434921836544&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F514079-clinesmith-sentence-fbi-russiagate%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

"As outrageous as this is, it's also useful. It's in our faces now," wrote lawyer and filmmaker Mike Cernovich. "When they come for more Trump supporters Remember today."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-4&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1355209922078674944&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F514079-clinesmith-sentence-fbi-russiagate%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Democrats, who spent the past four years insisting that "no one is above the law" and that Trump must be investigated for an array of suspected crimes, did not comment.

ALSO ON RT.COM Pro-Trump 'WalkAway' campaign founder Brandon Straka arrested by FBI on federal charges linked to Capitol riot

[Jan 28, 2021] Russiagate was BS to cover for Clinton being a horrible candidate.

Jan 28, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

NotTimothyGeithner , January 27, 2021 at 9:51 am

Facebook ads that might even be linked to a Russian server after the November 2016 election. They are just that crafty. Pelosi bungling the VRA? What was that? If it was important Pelosi would know about it.

Ultimately, it's an excuse for cycles of Team Blue poor performance, but Biden is President now. The pageantry is back! And Team Blue fans aren't worried at all about the House losses.

Edward , January 27, 2021 at 1:28 pm

My favorite was the ads featuring Spongebob Squarepants and Pokomon. I think the U.S. anti-Russia hysteria is a big joke in Russia, and some Russians wanted troll Americans into chasing their tales with these ads. If the Russian government wanted to influence Americans, they could surely do better then those weird ads. There was probably another trolling incident when Putin and his defense minister went fishing without wearing shirts, after the U.S. hysteria over the picture of Putin on a horse, without a shirt. The U.S. press ignored the fishing incident, though.

I never followed "Russiagate" that closely because none of it made any sense, but the alleged interference kept changing over time. There was so little discipline and rigor in the accusations that this "changing of the goalposts" evoked little criticism or comment. We were at war with Eastasia yesterday, but today we are at war with Eurasia, Orwell-style. As I recall, the first accusation was that Trump was a Russian agent, because of a loan or some other financial motivation. Later, there was a "pee-tape" accusation, based on gossip paid for by a Clinton opposition researcher named Steele, who had formerly been an MI6 agent. You don't get a more unimpeachable, unbiased source of information then that, but the press treated the Steele dossier as the gospel truth, not to be questioned, and the FBI justified their investigation on it. Another "tell" with these accusations is that the Russians are not invited by the U.S. press to respond to them.

Skip Intro , January 27, 2021 at 10:11 am

And there is more evidence of cops doing violence and destruction in the summer than either of those two!

I am in Blue-MAGA world. I had a friend kick me out of their house during a soiree when I told them Russiagate was BS to cover for Clinton being a horrible candidate. They were in deep conditioning though, even using the giveaway Manchurian-Candidate-phrase 'whip smart'. That was 2 years ago. I wonder what they believe now. I have had friends go down 'right-wing' information holes and their beliefs were changed pretty quickly. I think a huge problem is the fracturing of information sources which has basically broken a certain fundamental consensus about reality. It may be that that consensus was always based on a lie, but now there are dozens of incompatible lies that people believe.

It is too easy to blame the victims. If media hadn't been co-opted for propaganda, then abused to the point of Pravda-levels of credibility by lazy low-bid privatized propagandists, the thirst for alternate news would be reduced, he attention-economy polarization phenomenon would have less grip.

Carolinian , January 27, 2021 at 10:21 am

There were Dems before the recent election who said there was no way Trump was going to win and any win by him would automatically be viewed as suspicious and to be resisted. It wasn't a big secret. They said this and it was so reported.

That being the case I'd say the Trumpies were perfectly justified to have a skeptical attitude toward the result even if they didn't make their case in the courts. But then, Trump being Trump, he just couldn't let it go and refused to do what he ended up doing anyway. Bottom line: we're better off without Trump. We aren't better off with Biden. The whole process is a clusterf*ck.

KD , January 27, 2021 at 8:02 pm

I think what people do not seem to understand is a lot of these "false beliefs" are code.

To use an old one, the Obama birth certificate "controversy." Obama is not American = Obama mixed race son of an African immigrant is not a member of my ingroup (My ingroup = Americans). Sometimes its race but it might be for some that Colin Powell is okay but Obama is too much. You can't "disprove" that Obama is a not an American citizen because its really a coded way to signal something that is true (that guy isn't in my ingroup, and I identify my ingroup with the real America).

The idiocy in 2016 was top down. Obviously, either Hillary and her team were incompetent, and completely out of touch and got clobbered by an orange clown who can't utter a coherent sentence, or there must be some nefarious foreign conspiracy which magically threw the election through a $4,500 buy in Facebook ads. Given the pathological narcissism and sociopathy of our American ruling class, they are constitutionally incapable of the kind of introspection the first hypothesis would force, so it was Russians under the bed all the way baby!

I think 2020 Qanon and the rest of it is the same kind of bottom up stuff that the Birther business touched on. R'ahl 'Umarikhans have been displaced in their own country by the evil nefarious elites and will never be able to elect another R'ahl 'Umarikhan again. Obviously, the arc of justice is that R'ahl 'Umarikhans rule 'Umarikhanistan, so it can only be diabolical forces aligned with Hollywood pedo rings that prevented justice. All code for status anxiety for continued power and existence of their ingroup, which won't go away no matter how many bar graphs you show them.

It far more important to figure out what people really mean, and address those anxieties, fears, or other issues than focusing on refuting what people say. There are a lot of people in this country in a world of hurt, with basically no representation whatsoever, they aren't going away, their fears, pains and concerns aren't going away, and the kind of smug bourgeois media trust fund narrative isn't constructive.

[Jan 28, 2021] Ukraine is become a Wild West for spies and mercenaries. Perhaps that was whole intent of coup

Jan 28, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

oldhippie , Jan 27 2021 16:04 utc | 3

Ukraine is become a Wild West for spies and mercenaries .Perhaps that was whole intent of coup

Bemildred , Jan 27 2021 16:07 utc | 4

I have been dumbfounded for some time by supporters of the Izzies apparent lack of concern about the eventual consequences of this sort of behavior. But I suppose, as with Uncle Sugar, the notion of ones own exceptional nature prevents a sensible assessment.
gm , Jan 27 2021 16:17 utc | 7

Israeli intel spinoffs/cutouts, US FBI/CIA and the NSA surveillance/blackmail collection agencies and their agents; they are facets of the same worldwide "NWO" criminal Blob-Mob, imo.

It should be obvious by now they have the power to set up one US President, and depose him through a ham-handed domestic election fraud coup, and install an eaaily controlled neurodegenerating corrupt puppet, and completely control and pervert the US Judicial system, so as to essentially get away and continue with their criminal culture and crimes against humanity unchecked.

With such a history, of course they have the means to frame Russia, as well as to destroy any others who stand in their way to more power and autocratic control of the planet.

[Jan 28, 2021] 'Where is the line between global business attempts to control society-' Putin asks Davos as he calls out power of Big Tech

Jan 28, 2021 | www.rt.com

'Where is the line between global business & attempts to control society?' Putin asks Davos as he calls out power of Big Tech 27 Jan, 2021 12:10 / Updated 3 hours ago Get short URL 'Where is the line between global business & attempts to control society?' Putin asks Davos as he calls out power of Big Tech © Pixabay / Gerd Altmann 354 18 Follow RT on RT Technology giants have become powerful rivals to governments, but there are doubts over the benefits for society of their monopoly positions, Russia's President Vladimir Putin told the annual World Economic Forum, on Wednesday .

"Where is the line between a successful global business, in-demand services and consolidation of big data – and attempts to harshly and unilaterally govern society, replace legitimate democratic institutions, restrict one's natural right to decide for themselves how to live, what to choose, what stance to express freely?" Putin wondered.

"We've all seen this just now in the US. And everybody understands what I'm talking about," he added.

The Russian leader was apparently referring to the crackdown by Big Tech corporations like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon, mostly on Donald Trump and his supporters, during the recent presidential election in the US. The companies, which, according to some critics, sided with Democratic candidate Joe Biden, blocked President Trump's social media accounts over accusations of inciting violence, with the same being done to many pages of groups and individuals who'd backed him.

ALSO ON RT.COM YouTube prolongs Trump suspension citing 'ongoing potential for violence' as Big Tech doubles down on deplatforming policies

However, one-sided bias claim voiced by some might be an overestimation – the accounts of Democrats supporters were also subject to restrictions, but on a much smaller scale.

Conservative Twitter-like platform Parler was also forced offline, and now there are calls to block the Telegram app as well.

These events have shown that Big Tech companies "in some areas have de facto become rivals to the government," Putin said.

Billions of users spend large parts of their lives on the platforms and, from the point of view of those companies, their monopolistic position is favorable for organizing economic and technological processes, the Russian president explained. "But there's a question of how such monopolism fits the interest of society," he stressed.

ALSO ON RT.COM Putin tells Davos that divided modern world facing 'real breakdown', with demographic struggles & echoes of 1930s pre-WW2 tensions

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shadow1369 8 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 07:51 AM

This is a great opportunity for Russia to create some Big Tech operators which actually allow free speech. Russia certainly has the expertise and the means, and cannot be bullied by western regimes.
Proton1963 shadow1369 1 hour ago 27 Jan, 2021 02:54 PM
Sure.. But only after the Russians can build a drivable car or a decent smart phone or a laptop.
Election_Fraud Biden shadow1369 1 hour ago 27 Jan, 2021 02:12 PM
The West is surely giving Russia a lot of opportunities, through its own arrogance and stupidity, does not it ? It keeps going backwards in its effort to diminish Russia. And the same goes for China too.
JOHNCHUCKMAN 7 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 08:45 AM
Putin is a remarkable statesman, and he sets a very high standard for political discourse. I can't think of any of our Western leaders who speak in these truthful and philosophic terms. What we hear in the West are slogans or whining or complaining.
Tenakakhan JOHNCHUCKMAN 3 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 01:03 PM
The patriarch of the west has become extremely weak. It seems like our leaders lack any moral authority to speak truth and common sense for fear of being cancelled. What we see now is the virtue signaling dregs sponsored by extreme groups leading our nations down the toilet. If a real war was to break out now we would be cannon fodder.
Hilarous 7 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 09:04 AM
I think there's a simple explanation. Big tech is afraid to lose section 230 of the communications act, which stipulates that online platforms are not legally responsible for user content. Trump and some Republicans have accused social media sites of muzzling conservative voices. They said undoing Section 230 would let people who claim they have been slighted sue the companies. So Big Tech has a strong interest to remove Trump and run down a few bad examples to convince people and politics that Section 230 must remain.
Count_Cash 8 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 07:40 AM
In many cases they aren't rivals, but owners of government. Money controls everything in the west and big tech have it. They have taken control of, or are blackmailing governments. The Western Liberal Regime straddles both Big Tech and government!
RTaccount Count_Cash 7 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 08:57 AM
Correct. Let us never forget that in America we are ruled by oligarchs just like the rest of the world, and that our oligarchs are largely hidden. They are our true government, and so it is meaningless to make this type of distinction.

[Jan 28, 2021] What Biden Wars Will Actually Look Like by Caitlin Johnstone

Jan 28, 2021 | consortiumnews.com


CaitlinJohnstone.com

T here's a news story about a U.S. military convoy entering Syria being shared around social media with captions claiming that President Joe Biden is already "invading" Syria which is getting tons of shares in both right-wing and left anti-imperialist circles.

The virality of these shares has inspired clickbait titles like " Joe Biden Invades Syria with Convoy of U.S. Troops and Choppers on First Full Day as President ," which are being shared with equal virality.

But if you read the original report everyone jumped on, accurately titled "U.S. military convoy enters northeast Syria: report," you don't have to read too far to get to this line :

"Other local media report that such maneuvers are not unusual as the U.S. often moves transfers equipment between Iraq and Syria."

So, while this is a movement of troops between illegitimate military occupations which have no business existing in either country, it is nothing new and would have been happening regardless of which candidate had won the last U.S. presidential election.

Another inaccurate narrative that's gone completely viral is the claim that Biden is sending more troops to Iraq. This one traces back to a single Twitter post by some Trumpy account with the handle "@amuse" who shared a Jerusalem Post article with the caption "BREAKING: President Biden is considering reversing Trump's drawdown in Iraq by adding thousands of troops to combat growing terror threats in the region as evidenced by Thursday's attack near the U.S. embassy."

If you read the actual JPost article titled " Baghdad bombing could be the Biden admin's first challenge " you will see that it contains no such claim, and if you were to search a bit you would find @amuse claiming that they were sharing something they'd learned from "sources" in D.C. instead of accurately summarizing the contents of the article.

Unless you know this person and know them to be consistently trustworthy, there is no valid reason to believe claims allegedly said by alleged anonymous sources to some openly partisan anonymous account on Twitter.

But the bogus tweet was amplified by many influential accounts, most notably by Donald Trump Jr with the caption "Getting back into wars on the first full day. The Swamp/War Inc. is thrilled right now."

Its virality then caused it to work its way outward to dupe many well-meaning anti-imperialists (myself included until I looked into it) who are vigilant against Biden's notorious warmongering , and now there's a widespread narrative throughout every part of the ideological spectrum that Biden is escalating warmongering in both Syria and Iraq.

It is entirely possible – probable even – that reliable warmonger Joe Biden will end up sending more U.S. troops to Iraq and Syria at some point during his administration. But if the antiwar community keeps staring at the movement of ground troops with hypervigilant intensity, they won't be paying enough attention to the areas where the more deadly aspects of Biden's hawkishness are likely to manifest.

Trump's base has been forcefully pushing the narrative that the previous president didn't start any new wars, which while technically true ignores his murderous actions like vetoing the bill to save Yemen from U.S.-backed genocide and actively blocking aid to its people, murdering untold tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, rolling out many world-threatening Cold War escalations against Russia, engaging in insane brinkmanship with Iran , greatly increasing the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians , and reducing military accountability for those airstrikes.

Jan. 28, 2019: The Trump administration's U.S. National Security Advisor John R. Bolton, left, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announce sanctions of the Venezuela oil company PDVSA. (The White House, Wikimedia Commons)

Trump may not have started any "new wars," but he kept the old ones going and inflamed some of them. Just because you don't start any new wars doesn't mean you're not a warmonger.

Rather than a throwback to "new wars" and the old-school ground invasions of the Bush era, the warmongering we'll be seeing from the Biden administration is more likely to look like this. More starvation sanctions. More proxy conflicts. More cold war. More coups. More special ops. More drone strikes. More slow motion strangulation, less ham-fisted overt warfare.

It is certainly possible that Biden could launch a new full-scale war; the empire is in desperate straits right now, and it could turn out that a very desperate maneuver is needed to maintain global domination. But that isn't the method that it has favored lately.

The U.S. empire much prefers nowadays to pour its resources into less visible acts of violence like economic siege warfare and arming proxy militias; the Iraq invasion left Americans so bitter toward conventional war that any more of it would increase the risk of an actual antiwar movement in the United States, which would be disastrous for the empire.

So rather than tempt fate with the bad publicity of flag-draped coffins flying home by the thousands again imperialism is now served up with a bit more subtlety, with the military playing more of a backup role to guard the infrastructure of this new approach.

It appears clear that this would be the Biden administration's preferred method of warmongering if given the choice.

The incoming Secretary of State Tony Blinken now advocates replacing the old Bush model of full-scale war with "discreet, small-scale sustainable operations, maybe led by special forces, to support local actors." Biden's nominee for CIA Director William Burns urged caution in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion and later expressed regret that he didn't push back against it.

Rather than picking bloodthirsty psychopath Michele Flournoy for defense secretary as many expected, Biden went with the less cartoonishly evil Raytheon board member Lloyd J. Austin III. All this while depraved coupmonger Victoria Nuland is being added to the administration and the murderous Venezuela coup is folded into its policy.

Antiwar protest in San Francisco, Aug. 29, 2013. (Steve Rhodes, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Too much of the antiwar community is still stuck in the early 2000s. The Western war machine just doesn't generally kill that way anymore, and we need to adjust our perspectives if we want to address the actual murderousness as it is actually showing up. If you keep looking out for obsolete ground invasions, you're going to miss the new form of warmongering completely.

Trump supporters who claim to oppose war missed this completely throughout the entirety of his presidency, confining the concept of "war" solely to its most blatant iterations in order to feel like their president was a peacemaker instead of a warmonger.

One of the few positive developments that could potentially arise from the Biden administration is helping such people to recognize acts of violence like starvation sanctions as war, since they will be opposing Biden and that is how this new administration will be manifesting much of its murderousness.

The political/media class likes to keep everyone focused on the differences between each president and his immediate predecessor, but we can learn a whole lot more by looking at their similarities. Biden's warmongering is going to look a lot like Trump's -- just directed in some different directions and expressing in slightly different ways -- despite all the energy that has been poured into painting them as two wildly different individuals.

Once you see beyond the partisan puppet show, you see a single oligarchic empire continuing the same murderous agendas from one sock puppet administration to the next.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Her work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook , following her antics on Twitter , checking out her podcast on either Youtube , soundcloud , Apple podcasts or Spotify , following her on Steemit , throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of her sweet merchandise , buying her books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

This article was re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.


[Jan 28, 2021] Diana Johnstones "Fools Crusade" goes into the destabilization efforts made by various EU and Nato entities to precipitate the break up. It's where the Clintons beta tested the nation breaking tools Bush/Cheney began deploying around the world.

Jan 28, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Eustache de Saint Pierre , January 27, 2021 at 7:18 am

It's part & parcel here especially from DUP types who sometimes appear to be living in a fantasy world – Shinners not so much but I imagine that SF dissidents have similar extreme positions & all of this comes from some intelligent & professional people not just the malleable mobs. Meanwhile there is a turf war for the gangster versions of both UVF & UDA hitting the streets in Belfast.

I recall a few years back reading an account from a British Army general who was familiar with both Northern Ireland & the former Yugoslavia before they blew up, who in both instances was shocked by how people who had for the most part lived happily side by side within a relatively short space of time became sworn enemies. All of that had a religious background with the latter including ethnicity, but to him both sides in both cases spiraled down through negative reactions into extremes, becoming in the end each others sworn enemies.

Politics & Class have I believe caused the same fractures & after all the successful & presumably intelligent PMC also have their deplorable others that are largely a construction based on generalisations & stereotypes, while sadly peace & reconciliation efforts as far as I can tell always appear to arrive as an epilogue to a very bad book.

vlade , January 27, 2021 at 8:33 am

Yugoslavia definitely didn't live happily side by side. Its tensions were hidden under Tito, but existed before (cf WW2 Croats vs Serbs, as most visible example), and blew up after, to a great extent because they were so supressed before w/o any reasonable outlet. It might have given a semblance of "happines", but it wasn't really there.

Can't comment on NI.

Wukchumni , January 27, 2021 at 9:11 am

I was only in Yugoslavia once for about a week in 1982, and you could see what a mess it was in the making. I'm used to Europeans drinking, but Belgrade made em' look like teetotalers. Add in age old tensions and kaboom!

One of the biggest hyperinflationary episodes came out of their civil war, only to be eclipsed in the numbers game by Zimbabwe after the turn of the century.

The Rev Kev , January 27, 2021 at 9:46 am

I was going through Yugoslavia by train in 1981 and the one thing that struck me looking out the windows was flags. You had Yugoslavian flags everywhere you looked to the point that it was almost a fetish. It was only years later that I wondered if the point of those flags was to encourage the different groups to think of themselves as Yugoslavians first and foremost.

Robert Gray , January 27, 2021 at 12:26 pm

> flags everywhere you looked to the point that it was almost a fetish.

Erm that sounds just like the US of A.

a different chris , January 27, 2021 at 9:21 am

> to a great extent because they were so supressed before w/o any reasonable outlet.

But this seems to excuse the fighting? If everybody was "suppressed" then why did they kick sideways, rather than up? As I think I said once before, my friend from Serbia would say "I'd be on "my" side of the street and "they" would be shooting at me, and then I'd cross the street and "my" people would be shooting at me".

He, like so many nowadays, came to the US not because this was some beacon of hope but because where he lived, a place he loved for many reasons, was that messed up.

Reading Wikipedia I come across this tiresome sentence: "The Croat quest for independence led to large Serb communities within Croatia rebelling and trying to secede from the Croat republic. Serbs in Croatia would not accept a status of a national minority in a sovereign Croatia, since they would be demoted from the status of a constituent nation of the entirety of Yugoslavia."

Croats? Serbs? Like they are fundamentally different species? It's as bad as the Reconstruction South, but per my example above people didn't even have different colored skin, heck they were physically indistinguishable. They just wanted something they themselves couldn't even describe without foaming at the mouth.

To be considered above somebody else by birth was what it really was.

Oh, and another head-banging quote: "the "Croatian Spring" protest in the 1970s was backed by large numbers of Croats who claimed that Yugoslavia remained a Serb hegemony and demanded that Serbia's powers be reduced .Tito, whose home republic was Croatia,"

An iron-fisted dictator runs the country, he is from Croatia, yet the country is considered by Croatians to be "Serb hegemony". Ok whatever, hey it does make more sense than following a normal-height dark-haired dark-eyed man because he says that tall blond-haired blue eyed people are superior. And that was a short-by-American-standards drive away

We can give the globe a spin and find the same idiocy in Asia, where "they all look alike" to western eyes but oh boy they slaughter each other just as regularly as we do.

Ok I'm done ranting. What a plague on the planet this species is.

vlade , January 27, 2021 at 9:51 am

Kicking sideways (or downwards) is always easier than kicking upwards, especially if people were doing it for years.

Otherwise, you're just accentuating my point – and I agree with you. It was incredible watching people in pub who were getting on very well until one of them asked where the other was from, and that has changed the whole atmosphere.

Wukchumni , January 27, 2021 at 9:59 am

My cousin from Prague came to America in the late 90's to live on a genuine ranch for a spell and go on a long roadtrip in search of

So he gets pulled over for speeding in a red state and gives the officer his Czech drivers license, and he told me the officer went into a harangue over all the ethnic cleansing that was going on in his country, and how sorry he was about it, and let him off.

Cousin was torn between telling the copper, nah that's a few countries over, but went for the victim card instead.

vlade , January 27, 2021 at 11:23 am

Hah, do you know the Western press brain-melt induced by having Slovakia and Slovenia (which, moreover have very similar flags..) in the same World Cup (soccer) 2022 qualification group?

ex-PFC Chuck , January 27, 2021 at 11:26 am

Croats? Serbs? Like they are fundamentally different species?

Not different species, but different religions; Roman and Orthodox Catholicism, respectively. Think German-speaking Europe during the Thirty Years War.

km , January 27, 2021 at 1:33 pm

The irony of course is that, in 1992, Croats for the most part didn't go to mass, Serbs did go to Liturgy, and Bosniak Muslims thought beer went well with their pork chops.

Think of it not as a religious war, but a re-hash of WWII.

jsn , January 27, 2021 at 4:19 pm

Diana Johnstones "Fools Crusade" goes into the destabilization efforts made by various EU and Nato entities to precipitate the break up. It's where the Clintons beta tested the nation breaking tools Bush/Cheney began deploying around the world.

Karl Von Hapsburg and the Pope were both involved in prying the Catholic portions loose from the Yugoslav federation and bringing them back into the Mont Pelerin orbit of the former Habsburg empire.

The Orthodox regions have been left to the Russians with black markets to everyone's benefit and the Bosnians given the standard settler/colonial treatment of designated "races."

Eustache de Saint Pierre , January 27, 2021 at 12:29 pm

Vlade – perhaps I should not have used the word happily but basically neighbours were not killing each other as was also mainly the case in NI, although there were tensions gradually building up in tandem with the Civil Rights movement based on the MLK. model.

I don't know what the tipping point was in the Balkans, but in NI it was the treatment received by the marchers & the likes of the Bogside at the hands of the B specials & RUC in Derry which gradually spread elsewhere in mass battles between mobs from both sides & the above armed cops. All of this capped off in 72 by the Provos most successful recruiting campaign courtesy of the Parachute regiment on Bloody Sunday, while about that time around 10,000 Catholic refugees crossed into the Republic.

PlutoniumKun , January 27, 2021 at 12:02 pm

If the General thought that people in NI lived happily side by side before the Troubles, then he was sorely misinformed. Tensions were always very strong, although not just religious ones. In Dublin growing up I had neighbours who were Belfast protestants but had been driving out of Belfast because their grandfather was involved in a shipyard trade union and that was sufficient for him to have been labeled as a communist and Taig lover.

Eustache de Saint Pierre , January 27, 2021 at 12:43 pm

Yes happily was the wrong word but in the North outside of the cities there was mixing & occasionally mixed marriages.

You are very correct in relation to the troubles in the shipyards, which I read a few books about in prep for a statue. Funny thing is that during my 2 stints at the Titanic studios for GoT I was informed by the top man that many of the tradesmen were ex paramilitaries from both sides who managed to work well together for a decade, but in separate teams. That was also tjhe case during the yearly Wraps where they all took full advantage of the free bars but besides a few scuffles, there was never any real trouble.

A lot of the work would have been carried out in the original paint hall.

vlade , January 27, 2021 at 2:56 pm

Oooh.. Reminds me of E.T. Setton's Two Savages and the difference between "Emmy Grants" and "Passengers"..

Eustache de Saint Pierre , January 27, 2021 at 7:58 pm

You have lost me there Vlade ( If you were indeed commenting on my post ) as I don't know the book, but you have reminded me of one very violent incident on location in Spain between 2 Catholics in a bar. It was due to one of them being a member of another group of savages that plagued Belfast as the other 2 wound down.

They were called the Hoodies who were part of the huge crime wave that hit Belfast as a consequence of the Troubles. It was cleaned up in Catholic areas over about 7 years under the command of Bobby Storey.

[Jan 27, 2021] There will be adjustments at the margin, reconsiderations of method. There will be no consideration whatsoever of America's hegemonic objectives -- of the imperial project.

Jan 27, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

In a matter of hours, Biden's key national security people -- Antony Blinken as secretary of state, Avril Haines as director of national intelligence, and Lloyd Austin as defense secretary -- gave us a remarkably fulsome idea of what we are in for these next four years.

Haines and Austin, neither of whose records are to be admired, are at bottom functionaries who were nominated and swiftly confirmed because they do what they are told and do not think too much -- always a career-advancer in Washington.

It is instead Blinken, who is said to enjoy some kind of "mind-meld" with Biden, that we must consider carefully. (Such a meld must be odd terrain.)

Blinken's Senate testimony last Tuesday sprawled over four hours. It is best to scrutinize his remarks while seated in a chair with sturdy armrests, ideally to calm one's nerves with a pot of chamomile tea.

Seen or read as a whole, those four hours gave us an extraordinary display of how empire works and how it prolongs itself. One by one, Blinken's senatorial interlocutors told him in so many words, "Son, this is what you need to say if you want our confirmation. We want you to endorse our commitment to aggression, to unlawful interventions, to 'regime change' ops, to merciless sanctions, and altogether to the empire. But you must make it look nice. Make it look thoughtful and complicated and considered."

July 14, 2016: Vice President Joe Biden, right, and Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (Air Force, Christopher Hubenthal)

I am convinced, having endured the entire C–Span recording, that what I watched was sheer ritual. Blinken won the Senate's support and now succeeds the shockingly bovine Mike Pompeo at State. He will do so, however, with the élan and faux sophistication our nakedly bankrupt foreign policy now requires if the American pantomime is to be sustained another four years.

Among Blinken's many rather sad-to-witness "Yes sirs," two standout: his finely chiseled endorsement of Pompeo's reckless assassination a year ago of Qassem Soleimani, Iran's revered military commander ("Taking him out was the right thing to do"), and his approval of the Trump administration's decision to send lethal arms to the manically corrupt regime in Kiev ("Senator, I support providing that lethal defensive assistance to Ukraine," when the Obama administration, from which he comes, did not.)

Late last year, Blinken appeared on "Intelligence Matters," the podcast run by Michael Morrell, the coup-mongering former deputy director at the Central Intelligence Agency and now -- of course -- a regular commentator on the televisions news networks. In their exchange, the two took up the question of our "forever wars" and Biden's well-advertised commitment to ending them. Here is a snippet from Blinken's remarks:

"As for ending the forever wars, large-scale deployment of large, standing U.S. forces in conflict zones with no clear strategy should and will end under his [Biden's] watch. But we also need to distinguish between, for example, these endless wars with large-scale, open-ended deployment of U.S. forces with [sic], for example, discreet, small-scale sustainable operations, maybe led by special forces to support local actors. In ending the endless wars we have to be careful not to paint with too broad a brushstroke."

This is what we are in for these coming years, the hyper-rational irrationality of the middling technocrat. There will be adjustments at the margin, reconsiderations of method. There will be no consideration whatsoever of America's hegemonic objectives -- of the imperial project.

Blinken's testimony reflected these bitter truths start to finish.

Changes to the Iran Deal

July 14, 2015: President Barack Obama, with Vice President Joe Biden, announcing the signing of the Iran-nuclear agreement. (White House)

Of the various questions the new secretary of state took up during his confirmation hearings, Iran is the most pressing. Senator Bob Menendez, Blinken's interlocutor in this case, insisted that yes, the U.S. wants to rejoin the 2015 accord governing Iran's nuclear programs, but only if this includes prohibitions against Tehran's "destabilizing activities" and a missile program that Iran justly considers essential to its security.

An honest, clear-eyed diplomat who wanted to get somewhere with Tehran would have rejected the very frame of Menendez's line of inquiry, with its references to "support for terrorism" and "funding and feeding its proxies." But Blinken read his cues and tucked right in:

"The president-elect believes that if Iran comes back into compliance we would, too, but we would use that as a platform to seek a longer, stronger agreement and also, as you have pointed out, to capture these other issues, particularly with regard to missiles and Iran's destabilizing activities. This would be the objective."

This is sheer charade. Blinken knows as well as anyone else that the added conditions the Biden regime will require before rejoining the agreement -- an end to Iran's ballistic missile programs and its support for the Syrian government against Islamists and the illegal U.S. incursion -- effectively cancel all chances that the U.S. will rejoin the accord.

I predicted in this space shortly after Biden was elected that he and his foreign policy people only pretended to be serious about reviving the nuclear agreement with Iran. Blinken's testimony confirms this.

Over the weekend The Times of Israel , citing Channel 12 television, reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sending Yossi Cohen, chief of Mossad and a close confidant, to Washington to "set out terms" for any revival of the nuclear deal. Israel purports to "set out terms," and Biden will receive this spook? This is getting completely unserious. Completely.

On China, Russia, and Venezuela: Blinken was putty in the hands of the Foreign Relations Committee's across-the-board hawks. A two-fronted new Cold War across both oceans -- Sinophobia and Russophobia all at once -- is to be our reality these next four years.

Over the weekend, to be noted, the American Embassy in Moscow had the gall to broadcast routes protesters could take to demonstrations in various Russian cities to dispute Alexei Navlany's arrest . A good start.

Marco Rubio, the coup-loving senator from Florida, wanted to know if Blinken thought the U.S. should continue backing Juan Guaidó, the buffoon Rubio and Pompeo puffed up as Venezuela's "interim leader" as part of a failed coup operation a couple of years ago. Blinken:

"I very much agree with you, senator, first of all with regard to a number of the steps that were taken toward Venezuela in recent years, including recognizing Mr. Guaidó and seeking to increase pressure on the regime . We need an effective policy that can restore Venezuela to democracy, and how can we best advance that ball? Maybe we need to look at how we more effectively target the sanctions that we have ."

Grim, grim times lie ahead if Blinken runs State as he promised the Senate he would.

There are those among us who look for shafts of light. People I greatly respect (some, anyway) thought it was good news when Biden named William Burns, a career foreign service officer, to head the CIA. At last diplomacy, not unlawful interventions!

Over the weekend, there were reports that Biden will review -- not more at this point -- the designation of Yemen's Houthis as terrorists, a label Pompeo affixed as he emptied his desk last week. Finally, we will stop supporting the Saudis' savagery!

People believe what they need to believe these days, I find, and belief overrides cognition in many such cases. I caution these people. At bottom Blinken demonstrated for us that no one who purports to alter our imperial course will ever be allowed to hold high office. For people such as Blinken, it is merely a question of wielding influence without having any.

This is where Americans live -- in a crumbled republic no longer capable of changing.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century . Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via his Patreon site .

John Allen aka Ol' Hippy , January 26, 2021 at 12:16

I'm 66, almost 67, and will, most likely, never see any real peace from the US government. A big portion of the economy is based on imperialist actions and the manufacture of conflicts around the globe mainly to keeps the arms makers in business. Or simply, war. And no, there is no nation willing to risk the wrath of the US government by trying to halt this insane posture of aggression, it's just too big and has a momentum all its own. Biden will continue unabated this absurd, insanely expensive machine to its eventual implosion in the near future. All the parts of the fall of the economy are in place, all that's needed is some ill defined tipping point to be crossed. Perhaps, a war with Iran?

[Jan 27, 2021] Blinken rose to become deputy Secretary of State in the final years of the second Obama administration. In those roles he was a key player in a series of foreign interventions including Libya and Syria which turned out to be utterly disastrous

Jan 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jan 26 2021 18:47 utc | 17

Looks like continuity will be the rule with Blinken now confirmed as Sec of State if Finian Cunningham's assessment is correct :

"Blinken has said that America's foreign policy must be conducted with 'humility and confidence', which may sound refreshingly modest. But it's not. Underlying this 'quiet American' is the same old arrogance about U.S. imperial might-is-right and Washington's presumed privilege of appointing itself as the 'world's policeman'.

"If Blinken's record is anything to go on, his future role as America's top diplomat is foreboding.

"Previously, he was a senior member in the Obama administrations serving as national security advisor to both the president and Joe Biden who was then vice-president. Blinken rose to become deputy Secretary of State in the final years of the second Obama administration. In those roles he was a key player in a series of foreign interventions which turned out to be utterly disastrous."

The once upon a time manufactured aura of Virtue projected by the Outlaw US Empire that was swallowed by so many naïve nations has vanished with nothing other than its stark ugliness as a replacement. Refusal to see that reality is what Xi just referred to again as "arrogance" which puts Blinken into the same ideological camp as Pompeo. As Global Times notes , if the Outlaw US Empire's attitude's not going to change, than why should China's as Pompeo's constant lying is replaced by Psaki's:

"When White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded to a question Monday about US-China relations, she said that 'China is growing more authoritarian at home and more assertive abroad,' adding that China 'is engaged in conduct that hurts American workers, blunts [US] technological edge, and threatens [US] alliances and [US] influence in international organizations.' She also noted that Washington is 'starting from an approach of patience as it relates to [its] relationship with China.'"

The editor's response to such inanity:

"Psaki's statement shows that the Biden administration's view and characterization of China is virtually identical to those of the Trump administration. Psaki stressed that 'We're in a serious competition with China. Strategic competition with China is a defining feature of the 21st century,' reflecting that the Biden administration only cares about a "new approach" to holding China accountable."

And Psaki's words are the same as Blinken's, which were the same as Pompeo's and Trump's. In other words, the hole digging by the Outlaw US Empire in its relations with the rest of the world will continue, which will cause further deterioration of its domestic Great Depression 2.0. Yesterday I posted a comment that highlighted Putin's expounding on the further enhancement of the educational component of Russia's Social Contract that is impossible for Navalny's backers to match. On the previous thread, a good comparison was made between the Yeltsin years and the ongoing drowning of the Outlaw US Empire. The Reset that's in the works isn't the one envisioned by Global Neoliberals like Klaus Schwab of the WEF/Davos crew. It's what Xi spoke of yesterday that I commented upon and Escobar reported on today. The Winds of Change are blowing again, but there's a gaping hole in the USA's wind sock so it can't see in which direction it's blowing.


james , Jan 26 2021 18:52 utc | 18

blinken is bad news.. i think that is very obvious from a superficial read on him.. the usa can't get out of the ditch it has made for itself.. nothing is gonna change...
michaelj72 , Jan 27 2021 0:51 utc | 89


'liberal interventionism' has always been the hallmark of the US Liberal Class and its foreign policy Establishment, especially since at least Wilson's jumping into WWI.

Has the US ever not intervened in Latin America whenever it felt like it or thought its "interests" were at stake?

I think Caitlan J. has a good grasp on what to expect from the Biden war mongering crowd that has recently moved into DC once again:

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/01/24/what-bidens-warmongering-will-actually-look-like/

"....Trump's base has been forcefully pushing the narrative that the previous president didn't start any new wars, which while technically true ignores his murderous actions like vetoing the bill to save Yemen from U.S.-backed genocide and actively blocking aid to its people, murdering untold tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, rolling out many world-threatening Cold War escalations against Russia, engaging in insane brinkmanship with Iran, greatly increasing the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians, and reducing military accountability for those airstrikes....

....Rather than a throwback to "new wars" and the old-school ground invasions of the Bush era, the warmongering we'll be seeing from the Biden administration is more likely to look like this. More starvation sanctions. More proxy conflicts. More cold war. More coups. More special ops. More drone strikes. More slow motion strangulation, less ham-fisted overt warfare...."

---

Simply put, more small scale wars/ops mostly by proxy, more support for local wankers (like Guaido in Venezuela, who has incredibly little popular support), and more of these killing sanctions, which are especially pernicious to the civilian populations in vulnerable countries like Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Nicaragua and Venezuela, etc.

[Jan 27, 2021] There are far more similarities between Putin-tards and Q-tards than is generally admitted.

Jan 27, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Kasia , January 27, 2021 at 6:46 am

I have plenty of "liberal" friends who insist that Putin "stole" the 2016 election. They also think "white nationalists" disguised as BLM or Antifa were responsible for all the blue city summer violence and riots. Sometimes they claim the fires were started by police "agents provocateurs". They also insisted that Trump was a right wing fanatic who was going to create a thousand year reich in the US.

These liberals tend to be highly educated with well-paid jobs and are very respected in their communities. None are married or have children though. Several drink far too much wine than is good for them.

There are far more similarities between Putin-tards and Q-tards than is generally admitted.

voteforno6 , January 27, 2021 at 7:15 am

That being said, there's more evidence that the Russians rigged the 2016 election than that he Democrats stole the 2020 election. That's not a commentary of the strength of Russiagate accusations, by the way.

Edward , January 27, 2021 at 7:36 am

What is the evidence the Russians rigged the 2016 election?

NotTimothyGeithner , January 27, 2021 at 9:51 am

Facebook ads that might even be linked to a Russian server after the November 2016 election. They are just that crafty. Pelosi bungling the VRA? What was that? If it was important Pelosi would know about it.

Ultimately, it's an excuse for cycles of Team Blue poor performance, but Biden is President now. The pageantry is back! And Team Blue fans aren't worried at all about the House losses.

Edward , January 27, 2021 at 1:28 pm

My favorite was the ads featuring Spongebob Squarepants and Pokomon. I think the U.S. anti-Russia hysteria is a big joke in Russia, and some Russians wanted troll Americans into chasing their tales with these ads. If the Russian government wanted to influence Americans, they could surely do better then those weird ads. There was probably another trolling incident when Putin and his defense minister went fishing without wearing shirts, after the U.S. hysteria over the picture of Putin on a horse, without a shirt. The U.S. press ignored the fishing incident, though.

I never followed "Russiagate" that closely because none of it made any sense, but the alleged interference kept changing over time. There was so little discipline and rigor in the accusations that this "changing of the goalposts" evoked little criticism or comment. We were at war with Eastasia yesterday, but today we are at war with Eurasia, Orwell-style. As I recall, the first accusation was that Trump was a Russian agent, because of a loan or some other financial motivation. Later, there was a "pee-tape" accusation, based on gossip paid for by a Clinton opposition researcher named Steele, who had formerly been an MI6 agent. You don't get a more unimpeachable, unbiased source of information then that, but the press treated the Steele dossier as the gospel truth, not to be questioned, and the FBI justified their investigation on it. Another "tell" with these accusations is that the Russians are not invited by the U.S. press to respond to them.

Jim Hannan , January 27, 2021 at 9:57 am

For what it's worth, here's the Wikipedia account of the 2016 DNC email hack:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Committee_email_leak

According to this entry, in July 2018 Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers for the hack.

Skip Intro , January 27, 2021 at 10:28 am

So according to this theory, it was the release of undisputed emails from the campaign that 'rigged the election'? That seems to be the extent of the indictment, which we know lacked actual forensic evidence, and is contradicted by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals' forensic analysis (somehow missing from the wikipedia entry). Pretty amazing that a story that got virtually no coverage swayed an election where Clinton dropped $1.3billion, and the media gave Trump non-stop coverage.

Kasia , January 27, 2021 at 11:14 am

The only election the release of those emails proves was rigged was the 2016 Democratic Primary election.

[Jan 27, 2021] typical

Jan 27, 2021 | www.extremetech.com

PICNIC .

i've also been in various IT roles and it's funny how people ghettoize themselves...web design/"full stack" guys were always the worst but i had a lot of server/NAS guys who had ZERO clue about security and would use idiot passwords like that (and torrent episodes of "the wire" and watch sports on youtube and etc etc).

as for the israelis, the cellebrite guys and probably these jackasses are good examples of what happens when you get to sit around on stolen land and live off free money from the US. which is funny because a lot of skilled "1337hax0rz" also come from poor-ass areas of russia and the other former soviet areas.

Posted by: the pair | Jan 27 2021 16:45 utc | 13 @Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:35 utc | 11

I saw that headline too.

I didn't (bother) to read it, but wondered why the MSM
would do everyone a favor and warn about this guy.

His usefulness had ended? So eke out that last drop of value from him
by sowing distrust within Proud Boys and other alternate organizations.
Or (heaven's forbid!) that guy is being set up for assassination
by the Deep State as a false-flag. (Outrageous, simply outrageous,
but imagine if they did a Navalny/Skripal on him - whoa!)

Posted by: librul | Jan 27 2021 16:46 utc | 14 Posted by: librul | Jan 27 2021 16:46 utc | 14

We do seem to have some disagreements among our ruling "elites" these days, and I think that may have something to do with it, but I really don't know and that is a good question. "Why are they telling me this" is always a good question.

Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to warn the young these days, so I thought I'd post it.

Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:53 utc | 15 @Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:53 utc | 15

For sure, that is the rub.
When to self-censor, when to post.
Better to post and then discuss
then simply censor.

Posted by: librul | Jan 27 2021 17:00 utc | 16 @Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:35 utc | 11

Yep. FBI is following the time-tested "proactive" standard playbook of synthetic terror/crime creation to support the Borg's agenda.

Some congressman a few years back got a hold of, and publically released official docs showing that FBI was budgeting a yearly payroll for nsome >15,000 paid confidential informants/agent provacatuers circa 2014(?).

This FBI practice goes all the way back to the 1960's and probably much earlier.

In the last 60+ years, there have been oo many FBI-created/supported domestic 'crime/terror' groups/leaderships to list in one post here.

Likely the leadership of both BLM and US antifa is also controlled by FBI (Euro antifa=>likely CIA). [CIA Operation Ajax/Kermit Roosevelt)was running paid *rent-a-mobs* all the way back in the 1953 overthrowal of Iran's Mossadegh govt].

Posted by: gm | Jan 27 2021 17:00 utc | 17


Wikipedia falsely claimed ...


Recently I've been unable to find anything on Wikipedia that has not been corrupted to some degree or other by lies.

What a disappointment of a once grand ideal.

Posted by: Arch Bungle | Jan 27 2021 17:21 utc | 18

I know it is OT, but, I was wondering what is happening with the Huawei Princess in Canada since the regime change in the USA?

Posted by: Young | Jan 27 2021 17:52 utc | 19 Good report. The Wikileaks Vault 7 release clearly shows the USA has tools to create false flag cyber warfare. To say one knows where a hack originates says more about the accuser than the accused. Ms. Webb's reporting on the Epstein case was profound, and her follow-up reporting on various threads has been stellar. There is no reason to doubt her reporting here. It is no accident that most of Webb's threads lead back to Israel. When one considers the USA's blind fealty to Israel, often alone in its support, one must consider that mass blackmailing of political leaders going back decades is a real possibility to explain the USA's Israel-centric foreign and domestic policy.

Posted by: gottlieb | Jan 27 2021 17:52 utc | 20

Ukraine used to be closer than Canada to the US; after CIA/State manipulation it became a Mexico or El Salvador.

IF Ukrainian criminals are going to be labeled Russian than label Salvadorian criminals as Americans.

Posted by: Antonym | Jan 28 2021 2:37 utc | 48

[Jan 27, 2021] Was there a better way for Trump to telegraph (or tweet, whatever) to the public that the establishment had no idea who was behind the hack?

Jan 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

William Gruff , Jan 27 2021 16:27 utc | 9

"The Washington borg immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump attributed it to China."

Was there a better way for Trump to telegraph (or tweet, whatever) to the public that the establishment had no idea who was behind the hack?

If Trump said that he didn't believe Russia did it that would just give the establishment mass media ammunition to say he was Putin's puppet. After dozens of mass media products echo the narrative off each other to amplify a weak and vague suggestion and build it into something that the public perceives as truth, Trump crushed it all by just accusing someone else. Rather than laboriously dismantling the accusation aimed at Russia he just cut it off at the knees.

Unfortunately that is something only a President can do, and the current figurehead in that position absolutely will not be doing anything that might undermine the establishment narrative du jour. I miss Trump already for that alone.

[Jan 27, 2021] I have no direct knowledge of SolarWinds specifically, but if Boeing hired HCL (formerly Hindu Computer Limited) to develop software for its 737 max, I'll make a wild guess and assume that SolarWinds too probably hired a bunch of Indian kids worth $10/hour each, who come and go every few months.

Jan 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mao Cheng Ji , Jan 27 2021 16:14 utc | 6

I have no direct knowledge of SolarWinds specifically, but if Boeing hired HCL (formerly Hindu Computer Limited) to develop software for its 737 max, I'll make a wild guess and assume that SolarWinds too probably hired a bunch of Indian kids worth $10/hour each, who come and go every few months.

And if that's indeed the case, then anything's possible.

[Jan 27, 2021] Solar Winds was an Israeli penetration- Not Russia- - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Jan 27, 2021 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Solar Winds was an Israeli penetration? Not Russia?


"As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel , not Russia . Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel , yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.

Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds' acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage's deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange's integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door's insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds' Czech-based contractor. " unlimitedhangout

----------------

Pilgrims! I am suggesting or at least raising the possibility that Israel has massively broken into American government IT systems. Hmmm. Does that mean that I am a Rooshan asset?

The sadly funny thing in this is how deaf, dumb and blind the main stream media are with regard to any, any, any possibility that Israel does not think its interests are identical with those of the US.

Natanyahu is quite open about his intention to bully Biden into continuing Israeli policy aimed at a Morgenthau model for Iran.

People openly say on the TeeVee that not only must Iran give up its nuclear ambitions but it must also accept Israeli hegemony in the region. Joltin' Jack Keane is one of the foremost proponents of such a vision of the future Middle East. For him the Syrian military are merely "Iranian surrogate forces." Perhaps someone should look carefully at the funding for the Institute for the Study of War. Keane is the chairman thereof. pl

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/01/investigative-reports/another-mega-group-spy-scandal-samanage-sabotage-and-the-solarwinds-hack/


Ed Lindgren , 26 January 2021 at 11:30 AM

When friends and acquaintances question my apparent antipathy towards the State of Israel, I suggest that they familiarize themselves with the circumstances regarding the attack on the USS Liberty and the Pollard spy scandal.

I have been slogging through Jerome Slater's book 'Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1917 - 2020.' Frankly, after getting 3/4 of the way through this book, I gave up because Slater's narrative was so depressingly repetitive. Slater documents Israel's repeated intransigence and refusal to make any meaningful concessions towards a just and lasting arrangement for peace with the Palestinians.

Probably the only event that will cause a serious reassessment of the US relationship with Israel will be the day when we can no longer find a buyer for our debt and we are forced to live within our means. But when that day arrives, the US/Israeli relationship will probably be the least of our problems.

Deap , 26 January 2021 at 11:47 AM

......." Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of "Russian hackers" in that event......."

CrowdStrike ...CrowdStrike ......CrowdStrike.

Still think Trump's mention of CrowdStrike in his Ukraine phone call, that led to his bogus impeachment ,was the real reason Democrats went apoplectic.

The echo chamber media treatment of the CrowdStrike element of the phone call as a "long discredited conspiracy theory", without ever mentioning CrowdStrike by name, was the first clue.

Is Israel First any worse than America First, or China First?

Certainly Netanyahu was eager to congratulate "President Elect Biden" before the Trump body was even cold demonstrated Trump's history of special treatment and good will towards Israel counted for nothing in their own version of their nation's real-politik.

Which is to also include our own self-serving interests, treating Israel in the same fashion. I think we should all be prickly against each other. Real-politik. Give only what one can afford to lose.

Fred , 26 January 2021 at 12:20 PM

So Isabel Maxwell is sister to Ghislaine Maxwell of Jeffrey Epstein fame. The connecting dots point to an ever shrinking world of espionage against the US in order to get at more local targets. I wonder what they have on John Roberts.

irf520 , 26 January 2021 at 12:59 PM

I thought at the time how ironic it was that Netenyahu couldn't wait to throw Trump under the bus even though Trump spent so much time kissing up to Israel.

Alex , 26 January 2021 at 01:04 PM

I thought it was obvious to most Americans that Israel does not have the same interests that the U.S.has.The source of Israel's influence in the U.S. is the evangelical vote which is Protestant in nature going back to Plymouth Rock and naming their kids after OT heroes and guilt from WW2. Nationalist Americans still fall in the trap of supporting Israel thinking we are all in this together with them. Think about it, all senators and congressmen vote uniformly for anything Israel wants and yet can't get a proper stimulus package thru. By the way Israel first is worse than America first.

turcopolier , 26 January 2021 at 01:12 PM

Alex

As someone who has dealt with the issue of American illusions about Israel for many decades, I assure you that most Americans think Israel is the 51st state. I was the principal liaison between US and Israeli military intelligence for seven long years.

scott s. , 26 January 2021 at 02:25 PM

Alex,
I'm not sure I can agree with your source of Israel influence going back to Plymouth Rock. The Pilgrims were strongly reformed and promoted Covenant Theology, while current American evangelicals largely accept Dispensationalism and pre-tribulation as developed by Darby in the early 1800s and popularized by Schofield in the early 1900s.

sbin , 26 January 2021 at 02:30 PM

Used tools such as Solar Winds extensively as engineer in wireless telcom industry.
There are much better tools.
Have read many accounts of this security breach and Israel being involved is much more probable and likely explanation.
Also available evidence points that way.
Russia Russia Russia and China China China are easy talking points for those that are lazy

Walrus , 26 January 2021 at 03:00 PM

For we are a stiff necked people...

_dex_ , 26 January 2021 at 04:09 PM

NSA has Israel under surveillance for decades afaik.

turcopolier , 26 January 2021 at 04:56 PM

dex

Thank God. I see you are in Slovenia. What is your point? If you think they don't get far more from us than we get from them, you are misinformed.

turcopolier , 26 January 2021 at 05:05 PM

All

The lazy, ignorant Spanish trolls who apparently never heard of wikipedia claim to not know what I meant by a "Morgenthau model." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan

Seward , 26 January 2021 at 06:32 PM

In 1989, as an IBM contractor, I spent a month at a VQ2 det in the Med, helping install a computer system, and instructing key personnel in its use. I became friends with the Chiefs, male and female, that ran the place, walking around in their starched kakis with clipboards, instructing the pilots and recon officers, slouching in their flight suits, their assignments for the day. (Which of course came down from VQ2 itself, likely compiled by Chiefs there. As Zhukov said when asked who ran the Russian Army: "The Sergeants and myself.") We both knew several of the Liberty survivors: I from my previous Government employment; they from the Navy. They all assured me privately that the Navy was determined never to let anything like that happen again. There's undoubtedly been a complete turn over or two of personnel since then, but I suspect the same determination prevails today: Once bitten, twice shy.

The Twisted Genius , 26 January 2021 at 09:01 PM

Given the publicly available evidence and information, there is no reason to rule out Israel. They have the skill and motivation to pull this off. The same can be said for China as well as Russia. North Korea and Iran are also strong contenders. Those two are surprisingly capable. However, from our viewpoint any attribution is based on circumstantial evidence only. True attribution needs more than that such as that laid out in the GRU 12 indictment for the DNC hack or the Dutch AIVD witnessing of the APT29 (SVR) hack of the Pentagon in 2015. We need to see the adversary's traffic and infrastructure. Without that, we're guessing.

Our inability to see Israel as an adversary is exasperating. As Ed Lindgren mentioned, the USS Liberty and the Pollard spy ring should be reason enough to cause permanent suspicion. The author brought up the case of Trump campaign collusion with Israel and Saudi Arabia. The evidence for this was actually stronger than any Trump-Russia collusion. Yet that went unnoticed outside a small group of researchers. Our blindspot towards Israel may prove fatal some day.

jim ticehurst , 26 January 2021 at 09:44 PM

Who contracted Solarwinds..? It was associated with "GITHUB"which was making enemys in the Middle East..and was Involved with Jared Kushner as a Backer...according to the Wiki Write up on "GitHub" Thats a Backdoor I would look at..

Leith , 26 January 2021 at 11:55 PM

AIPAC and their friends on both sides of the aisle in Congress already has access to info from the various federal agencies that were hacked. Would they endanger that open gateway by a penetration of US government IT systems?

The Izzies are much more interested in hacking Iranians. Or those european signers of JCPOA that are trying to negotiate with Iran. They hacked computers in various European hotels that had Iranian guests. In the US Israeli hackers' target has been the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest & Sanction) movement, plus any association or group that promotes civil rights for Palestinians. I wouldn't doubt that they are also hacking congresswoman Rashida Talib, the Arab American Institute, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, various Arab-American lobbies, and the Palestinian diaspora in Detroit and other American cities.

However, there is suspicion that Israeli private individuals may at one time or another be involved with or helped provide expertise to Cozy Bear & other cyber APTs operated mainly out of Russia.

mcohen , 27 January 2021 at 03:46 AM

A new one for consideration

"A deed in hand is worth a burning bush for it is belief that lights the flame."

Funny how solarwinds pops up after the election,isn't it.the winds of change are blowing.

Yeah, Right , 27 January 2021 at 04:14 AM

I know you can't go into specifics, but as a general rule of thumb did Israeli military intelligence ever offer you any intel that you didn't already know?

Seamus Padraig , 27 January 2021 at 05:07 AM

@scott s. | 26 January 2021 at 02:25 PM

Theologically, you have a point. Except that historically, virtually all the low-church British protestants were very pro-Jewish anyway, regardless of theology. Remember: it was Oliver Cromwell who let the Jews back into England after nearly three centuries of absence. Why? I don't know. Maybe the Proddies thought the Jews would make good allies against Rome. There is also the fact that they tended towards biblical literalism in those days, looking to the Bible as though it were system of law--similar to the way the Jews did.

turcopolier , 27 January 2021 at 09:18 AM

Yeah, right.
No, it was a one way street. It amounted to a firehose stream going one way. There were a lot of meetings at which they gave us nothing of value, and that evidently was not enough because they planted people all over the government to feed them stuff we did not want to give them. Occasionally they got caught passing material and when that happened the politicians would forbid prosecution. That was true of both US parties. Pollard was recruited for the purpose of not having their significant assets put at risk. He was passed lists of specific documents by his Israeli handlers. The documents were listed by serial number so that he would not bring the wrong ones out of the US security envelope. He brought them to the team safe house where they were copied and then he returned them to the Navy's safes. On one occasion I decided to probe their willingness to actually cooperate with us. I told the liaison rep in Washington that we maintained encyclopedic files on all the armed forces of the world. this was a routine task. I told them that it was a waste of our time to collect basic data about the IDF. That being the case, I asked them to give us the TO&E of a type IDF infantry brigade so we would not waste analytic time. The request went to Tel Aviv and was refused.

turcopolier , 27 January 2021 at 09:43 AM

leith

Israel has a long history of stealing US information over and above that which they are given. They don't believe that we give them everything we have and so they steal what they think we may be keeping from them. Compartmentation makes it impossible for them to be sure. Remember Pollard? In Pollard's case the material he was directed to obtain for them often had nothing to do with the ME, but it was good trading material.

The Beaver , 27 January 2021 at 11:37 AM

@ Fred

To learn more about the Maxwell twins who moved to Silicon Valley:
https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/ghislaine-maxwell-family-twin-sisters.html
https://www.wired.com/1999/02/maxwell/

james , 27 January 2021 at 01:46 PM

at what point does the relationship with usa and israel get severed??

[Jan 27, 2021] More Cyber Crimes, Attributed To Russia, Are Shown To Have Come From Elsewhere

Jan 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

More Cyber Crimes, Attributed To Russia, Are Shown To Have Come From Elsewhere

Earlier today police in Europe took down the Emotet bot-network:

First discovered as a fairly run-of-the-mill banking trojan back in 2014, Emotet evolved over the years into one of the most professional and resilient cyber crime services in the world, and became a "go-to" solution for cyber criminals.

Its infrastructure acted as a mechanism to gain access to target systems, which was done via an automated spam email process that delivered Emotet malware to its victims via malicious attachments, often shipping notices, invoices and, since last spring, Covid-19 information or offers. If opened, victims would be promoted to enable macros that allowed malicious code to run and instal Emotet.

This done, Emotet's operators then sold access on to other cyber criminal groups as a means to infiltrate their victims, steal data, and drop malware and ransomware. The operators of TrickBot and Ryuk were among the many users of Emotet.

Up to a quarter of all recent run of the mill cyber-crime was done through the Emotet network. Closing it down is a great success.

Wikipedia falsely claimed that Emotet was based in Russia:

Emotet is a malware strain and a cybercrime operation based in Russia.[1] The malware, also known as Geodo and Mealybug, was first detected in 2014[2] and remains active, deemed one of the most prevalent threats of 2019.[3]

bigger

However the Hindu report linked as source to the Russia claim under [1] only says :

The malware is said to be operated from Russia, and its operator is nicknamed Ivan by cyber security researchers.

"Is said to be operated from Russia" is quite a weak formulation and should not be used as source for attribution claims. It is also definitely false.

The operating center of Emotet was found in the Ukraine. Today the Ukrainian national police took control of it during a raid (video). The police found dozens of computers, some hundred hard drives, about 50 kilogram of gold bars (current price ~$60,000/kg) and large amounts of money in multiple currencies.


bigger

Since the 2016 publishing of internal emails of the DNC and the Clinton campaign attribution of computer intrusions to Russia has become a standard propaganda feature. But in no case was there shown evidence which proved that Russia was responsible for a hack.

The recently discovered deep intrusion into U.S. companies and government networks used a manipulated version of the SolarWinds Orion network management software. The Washington borg immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump attributed it to China. But none of those claims were backed up by facts or known evidence.

The hack was extremely complex, well managed and resourced, and likely required insider knowledge. To this IT professional it 'felt' neither Russian nor Chinese. It is far more likely, as Whitney Webb finds, that Israel was behind it :

The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was "compiled, signed and delivered through the existing software patch release management system," per reports . This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had "a high degree of familiarity with the software." While the way the attackers gained access to Orion's code base has yet to be determined, one possibility being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.
...
Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in 2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government.
...
Samanage offers what it describes as "an IT Service Desk solution." It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage's products could be added to SolarWinds' IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying that it is an American company, Samanage is actually an Israeli firm . It was founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked for several years at MAMRAM , the Israeli military's central computing unit .
...
Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed SolarWinds Service Desk, became listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition's announcement in April of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time. Samanage's automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the now-compromised software during that period.

The U.S. National Security Agency has ways and means to find out who was behind the SolarWinds hack. But if Israel is the real culprit no one will be allowed to say so publicly. Some high ranging U.-S. general or official will fly to Israel and read his counterpart the riot act. Israel will ignore it just as it has done every time when it was caught spying on the U.S. government.

With more then half of Washington's politicians in its pockets it has no reason to fear any consequences.

Posted by b on January 27, 2021 at 15:32 UTC | Permalink


Jackrabbit , Jan 27 2021 15:51 utc | 1

Whitney Webb's entire article is a must-read.

!!

Jackrabbit , Jan 27 2021 15:55 utc | 2
pat lang weighs in (also in the comments): Solar Winds was an Israeli penetration? Not Russia?

!!

oldhippie , Jan 27 2021 16:04 utc | 3
Ukraine is become a Wild West for spies and mercenaries .Perhaps that was whole intent of coup
Bemildred , Jan 27 2021 16:07 utc | 4
I have been dumbfounded for some time by supporters of the Izzies apparent lack of concern about the eventual consequences of this sort of behavior. But I suppose, as with Uncle Sugar, the notion of ones own exceptional nature prevents a sensible assessment.
dan of steele , Jan 27 2021 16:11 utc | 5
can someone explain why they had all that gold there? do people pay ransom in gold bars now?

this seems very odd to me.

Mao Cheng Ji , Jan 27 2021 16:14 utc | 6
I have no direct knowledge of SolarWinds specifically, but if Boeing hired HCL (formerly Hindu Computer Limited) to develop software for its 737 max, I'll make a wild guess and assume that SolarWinds too probably hired a bunch of Indian kids worth $10/hour each, who come and go every few months.

And if that's indeed the case, then anything's possible.

gm , Jan 27 2021 16:17 utc | 7
Israeli intel spinoffs/cutouts, US FBI/CIA and the NSA surveillance/blackmail collection agencies and their agents; they are facets of the same worldwide "NWO" criminal Blob-Mob, imo.

It should be obvious by now they have the power to set up one US President, and depose him through a ham-handed domestic election fraud coup, and install an eaaily controlled neurodegenerating corrupt puppet, and completely control and pervert the US Judicial system, so as to essentially get away and continue with their criminal culture and crimes against humanity unchecked.

With such a history, of course they have the means to frame Russia, as well as to destroy any others who stand in their way to more power and autocratic control of the planet.

Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 27 2021 16:26 utc | 8
...
With more than half of Washington's politicians in its pockets ("Israel") has no reason to fear any consequences.
Posted by b on January 27, 2021 at 15:32 UTC | Permalink

Precisely. And it's almost as bad in Oz, and even worse in the UK. Money is the only logical explanation for the "Israel" Worship indulged in by corrupt, amoral Western political 'leaders'.

William Gruff , Jan 27 2021 16:27 utc | 9
"The Washington borg immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump attributed it to China."

Was there a better way for Trump to telegraph (or tweet, whatever) to the public that the establishment had no idea who was behind the hack?

If Trump said that he didn't believe Russia did it that would just give the establishment mass media ammunition to say he was Putin's puppet. After dozens of mass media products echo the narrative off each other to amplify a weak and vague suggestion and build it into something that the public perceives as truth, Trump crushed it all by just accusing someone else. Rather than laboriously dismantling the accusation aimed at Russia he just cut it off at the knees.

Unfortunately that is something only a President can do, and the current figurehead in that position absolutely will not be doing anything that might undermine the establishment narrative du jour. I miss Trump already for that alone.

librul , Jan 27 2021 16:28 utc | 10
b posted, "Is said to be operated from Russia" is quite a weak formulation

However, don't give the average reader of newsignorance
much credit. Even well above average readers can have a readiness for
confirmation bias.

side rant:
Human intelligence is just a tool. High intelligence does not guarantee
a dedication to a search for truth. High intelligence can give one
a developed skill at
rationalizing whatever beliefs one already holds.

-----
Privacy!

I just learned about this!
Check this out (always remember, though, "trust but verify")
And an alternative service that can rightly be trusted today
is not necessarily trustworthy tomorrow.

https://restoreprivacy.com/
lists alternative services for everything from Google Docs, iCloud, secure messengers, and search engines.

Bemildred , Jan 27 2021 16:35 utc | 11
Never trust your local FBI plant:

Exclusive: Proud Boys leader was 'prolific' informer for law enforcement

librul , Jan 27 2021 16:38 utc | 12
@Posted by: librul | Jan 27 2021 16:28 utc | 10

In my excitement I didn't realize that
restoreprivacy
does not appear to give video platforms.

Here are some suggested by a ZH article:

"video platforms like LBRY.tv (Odysee.com), Bitchute, Rumble, or Brighteon– places I'll be posting all my videos from now on."

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-01-27/protecting-my-extremist-content-censorship

the pair , Jan 27 2021 16:45 utc | 13
some of the hack was semi-sophisticated ("semi" since it could have been an inside job) but some was just a typical PICNIC .

i've also been in various IT roles and it's funny how people ghettoize themselves...web design/"full stack" guys were always the worst but i had a lot of server/NAS guys who had ZERO clue about security and would use idiot passwords like that (and torrent episodes of "the wire" and watch sports on youtube and etc etc).

as for the israelis, the cellebrite guys and probably these jackasses are good examples of what happens when you get to sit around on stolen land and live off free money from the US. which is funny because a lot of skilled "1337hax0rz" also come from poor-ass areas of russia and the other former soviet areas.

librul , Jan 27 2021 16:46 utc | 14
@Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:35 utc | 11

I saw that headline too.

I didn't (bother) to read it, but wondered why the MSM
would do everyone a favor and warn about this guy.

His usefulness had ended? So eke out that last drop of value from him
by sowing distrust within Proud Boys and other alternate organizations.
Or (heaven's forbid!) that guy is being set up for assassination
by the Deep State as a false-flag. (Outrageous, simply outrageous,
but imagine if they did a Navalny/Skripal on him - whoa!)

Bemildred , Jan 27 2021 16:53 utc | 15
Posted by: librul | Jan 27 2021 16:46 utc | 14

We do seem to have some disagreements among our ruling "elites" these days, and I think that may have something to do with it, but I really don't know and that is a good question. "Why are they telling me this" is always a good question.

Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to warn the young these days, so I thought I'd post it.

librul , Jan 27 2021 17:00 utc | 16
@Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:53 utc | 15

For sure, that is the rub.
When to self-censor, when to post.
Better to post and then discuss
then simply censor.

gm , Jan 27 2021 17:00 utc | 17
@Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:35 utc | 11

Yep. FBI is following the time-tested "proactive" standard playbook of synthetic terror/crime creation to support the Borg's agenda.

Some congressman a few years back got a hold of, and publically released official docs showing that FBI was budgeting a yearly payroll for nsome >15,000 paid confidential informants/agent provacatuers circa 2014(?).

This FBI practice goes all the way back to the 1960's and probably much earlier.

In the last 60+ years, there have been oo many FBI-created/supported domestic 'crime/terror' groups/leaderships to list in one post here.

Likely the leadership of both BLM and US antifa is also controlled by FBI (Euro antifa=>likely CIA). [CIA Operation Ajax/Kermit Roosevelt)was running paid *rent-a-mobs* all the way back in the 1953 overthrowal of Iran's Mossadegh govt].

Arch Bungle , Jan 27 2021 17:21 utc | 18

Wikipedia falsely claimed ...


Recently I've been unable to find anything on Wikipedia that has not been corrupted to some degree or other by lies.

What a disappointment of a once grand ideal.

Young , Jan 27 2021 17:52 utc | 19 I know it is OT, but, I was wondering what is happening with the Huawei Princess in Canada since the regime change in the USA?
gottlieb , Jan 27 2021 17:52 utc | 20
Good report. The Wikileaks Vault 7 release clearly shows the USA has tools to create false flag cyber warfare. To say one knows where a hack originates says more about the accuser than the accused. Ms. Webb's reporting on the Epstein case was profound, and her follow-up reporting on various threads has been stellar. There is no reason to doubt her reporting here. It is no accident that most of Webb's threads lead back to Israel. When one considers the USA's blind fealty to Israel, often alone in its support, one must consider that mass blackmailing of political leaders going back decades is a real possibility to explain the USA's Israel-centric foreign and domestic policy.
gm , Jan 27 2021 17:58 utc | 21
More on Proud Boys FBI Snitch Enrique Tarrio's long informant history with the FBI:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/proud-boys-leader-was-prolific-fbi-snitch-court-docs

While US officials claim that 'far-right extremism' is one of the largest threats facing America, the leader of the group most commonly singled out as an example - the Proud Boys - was a 'prolific' informant for federal and local law enforcement, according to Reuters, citing a 2014 federal court proceeding.

Enrique Tarrio repeatedly worked undercover for investigators following a 2012 arrest, court documents reveal.

Curiously, Tarrio was ordered to stay away from Washington D.C. one day before the January 6 Capitol riot after he was arrested on vandalism and weapons charges - upon a request by government prosecutors that he be prohibited from attending. At least five Proud Boys members were charged as part of the riot.

In the 2014 hearing, a federal prosecutor, an FBI agent and Tarrio's attorney describe his undercover work - noting that the Proud Boys leader helped authorities prosecute over a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling, accoding to Reuters.

In a Tuesday interview with Reuters, Tarrio denied working undercover or cooperating in cases.

"I don't know any of this," he said, adding "I don't recall any of this."

[...]

During Tarrio's 2014 hearing, both the prosecutor and Tarrio's defense attorney asked for a reduced prison sentence after pleading guilty in a fraud case related to the relabeling and sale of stolen diabetes test kits. In requesting leniency for Tarrio and two co-defendants, the prosecutor noted that Tarrio's information had resulted in the prosecution of 13 people on federal charges in two separate cases, and helped local authorities investigate a gambling ring.

Someone , Jan 27 2021 18:37 utc | 22
@dan of steel:gold is compact -- 1 kg gold fits in the back pocket of your jeans. Impossible with any currency bills worth $ 60K AFAIK
james , Jan 27 2021 18:40 utc | 23
good work b and whitney webb! i like how you and her connect the dots.... and as you note - 'nothing will change' when they find who is behind this..

wikipedia has been a write off for some time...

dan of steele , Jan 27 2021 18:46 utc | 24
Someone | Jan 27 2021 18:37 utc | 22

that is all true, but can you buy a cup of coffee or a sandwich with it? or a car? a credit card is a lot smaller and easier to use.

it just seems odd that someone would have all that gold in what looks like a workshop...a kind of messy one at that.

[Jan 27, 2021] The USAi general that needs to be recalled is CENTCOM chief Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr.

Notable quotes:
"... Almost immediately after taking command at CENTCOM in March 2019, McKenzie launched his campaign of political manipulation. By requesting additional forces to contain a supposedly urgent Iranian threat, McKenzie triggered the dispatch of an aircraft carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Middle East. A month later, he told reporters he believed the deployments were "having a very good stabilizing effect," and that he was in the process of negotiating on a larger, long-term U.S. military presence. ..."
Jan 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Jan 27 2021 0:10 utc | 84

The USAi general that needs to be recalled is CENTCOM chief Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr.

The grayzone writer, Gareth Porter explains:

A four-star general who previously served as director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, McKenzie is regarded as the most politically astute commander ever to lead Middle East Command, according to journalist Mark Perry. He has also shown himself to be exceptionally brazen in scheming to defend his interests.

Almost immediately after taking command at CENTCOM in March 2019, McKenzie launched his campaign of political manipulation. By requesting additional forces to contain a supposedly urgent Iranian threat, McKenzie triggered the dispatch of an aircraft carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Middle East. A month later, he told reporters he believed the deployments were "having a very good stabilizing effect," and that he was in the process of negotiating on a larger, long-term U.S. military presence.

As a result of his maneuvering, McKenzie succeeded in acquiring 10,000 to 15,000 more military personnel, bringing the total in his CENTCOM realm to more than 90,000. The rapid increase in assets under his command was revealed in a Senate hearing in March 2020.

I am reminded of the excellent Rolling Stone report on General Stanley McCrystal.

Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.

"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"

"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"

From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.

The journalist Michael Hastings was later killed when his car committed a high speed crash and burned. McCrystal was later defrocked by O'bummer. Here is another Rolling Stone related report dated 15 November 2020 by Tessa Stuart.

Grayzone reporter Gareth Porter should avoid any high tech vehicle that is so easy to hack.

[Jan 27, 2021] Jailed Kremlin foe Navalny being used by West to destabilise Russia- Putin ally - Reuters

Jan 27, 2021 | www.reuters.com

Jailed Kremlin foe Navalny being used by West to destabilise Russia: Putin ally

By Reuters Staff

3 MIN READ

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny is being used by the West to try to destabilise Russia, a prominent hardliner and ally of President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday, saying he must be held to account for repeatedly breaking the law.

Slideshow ( 2 images )

Navalny was remanded in custody for 30 days last week after returning from Germany where he had been recovering from a nerve agent poisoning. He could face years in jail for parole violations and other legal cases he calls trumped up.

Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council, called for Navalny to face the full force of the law in comments that offered a glimpse into the mood inside Russia's security establishment after tens of thousands of Navalny's supporters protested against his jailing on Saturday.

"He (Navalny), this figure, has repeatedly (and) grossly broken Russian legislation, engaging in fraud concerning large amounts (of money). And as a citizen of Russia he must bear responsibility for his illegal activity in line with the law," Patrushev told the Argumenty i Fakty media outlet.

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me title=

"The West needs this figure to destabilise the situation in Russia, for social upheaval, strikes and new Maidans," Patrushev said, in a reference to the 2014 revolution in Ukraine that ousted a Moscow-backed president.

When asked about Patrushev's comments, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was up to a court to make further decisions in the opposition politician's case and that it was not a matter for the Kremlin.

Navalny faces a court hearing on Feb.2.

RELATED COVERAGE

G7 calls for peaceful Navalny protesters to be released by Russia

Police detained more than 3,700 people on Saturday as protesters called on the Kremlin to release Navalny. The Kremlin said the protests were illegal.

Peskov on Tuesday said there could be no dialogue with illegal protesters, accusing them of behaving aggressively and of using what he called unprecedented violence against the police.

He said incidences of police violence against protesters, some of which were captured on video, were far fewer and being investigated.

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In a sign that Russian authorities may crack down hard after the protests, the Kommersant newspaper on Tuesday cited unnamed security sources as saying they may open a criminal investigation that would treat the demonstrations as "mass unrest".

The West has called for Navalny's release, but the European Union has said it will refrain from fresh sanctions on Russian individuals if Moscow releases Navalny after 30 days.

[Jan 26, 2021] Show me whom you pardon and will tell you who you are

Now Trump has shafted DR Congo because the money was well appreciated by Dan Gertler as documented by Dershowitz.– "Letting Dan Gertler off the hook sends a message to the world's most corrupt businesspeople that the U.S. will let them walk free after a bit of lobbying,"-NYTimes
Notable quotes:
"... Trump's most pervasive foreign policy initiatives have involved Israel, encouraging the Jewish state's attacks on Palestinian, Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian targets with impunity, killing thousands of civilians on his watch. Trump has given Israel everything it could possibly ask for, with no consideration for what the U.S. interests might actually be. The only thing he did not do for the Jewish state was to attack and destroy Iran, and even there, reports suggest that he sought to do just that in the waning days of his administration but was talked out of it by his cabinet. ..."
"... But even given all that, Trump the panderer clearly wanted to give one last gift to Israel, and he saved it for his last day in office, when he issued more than 140 pardons and commutations. Though other presidents have issued controversial pardons, no other head of state has so abused the clemency authority to benefit not only friends and acquaintances but also celebrity defendants including rappers, some advocated by the likes of the Kardashians, and also those promoted by monied interests. Most of the pardons went to cronies and to supplicants who were willing to pay in cash or in kind to be set free. It was suggested that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was engaged in the selection process and money was often a key element. Some might describe that as corruption. ..."
"... Elliott Broidy, former finance chair of the Republican National Committee, had no less than five Rabbis vouching for him. Last year Broidy had pleaded guilty to acting as an "unregistered foreign agent," part of a larger investigation into the Malaysian "1MDB Scandal" in which Prime Minister Najib Razak stole more than $700 million dollars from his country's state-run 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Broidy worked on behalf of Razak and was offered $75 million if he could get the U.S. Justice Department to drop its own investigation into the scandal. ..."
"... Another clemency beneficiary who exploited his Jewish links was Philip Esformes, a former nursing home executive who executed one of the biggest Medicare frauds in U.S. history. Just days after being released after serving four years of his 20-year sentence, Esformes celebrated his daughter's wedding in a lavish party held at his multi-million dollar Florida home. He benefited from a lobbying campaign by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch Aleph Institute, a group advised by the ubiquitous former Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz. The movement reportedly has connections to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. ..."
"... Another person pardoned by Trump was Sholam Weiss, a Hasidic businessman from New York who was sentenced to more than 800 years in prison in 2000 for racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering connected to a huge fraud scheme that stole $125 million from the National Heritage Life Insurance Company, leading to its bankruptcy. He fled the country but was subsequently arrested in Austria and extradited to the United States. Weiss had reportedly received the endorsement of from Dershowitz, who also recently has been involved in the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell espionage case. ..."
"... Trump gave a full pardon to Aviem Sella, a seventy-five year old former Israeli Air Force officer, who was indicted in the U.S. in 1987 for espionage in relation to the Jonathan Pollard spy case. Sella fled to Israel days before Pollard was arrested outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. and the Israeli government refused to extradite him. Sella, at the time doing a degree course at New York University, was Pollard's initial contact. He had started working part-time for the Mossad intelligence agency in the early 1980s and received some of the classified top-secret documents provided by Pollard in exchange for money and jewelry. ..."
Jan 26, 2021 | www.unz.com
by Philip Giraldi - The Unz Review Another disgraceful performance from "Israel's president" PHILIP GIRALDI JANUARY 26, 2021 1,700 WORDS 141 COMMENTS REPLY Tweet Reddit Share Share Email Print More

One keeps hearing that former President Donald Trump will be judged well by the history books because he was the only American head of state in recent memory who did not start any new wars. Well, the claim is itself questionable as Jimmy Carter, for all his faults, managed to avoid entering into any new armed conflict, and Trump can hardly be described as a president who eschewed throwing his weight around, both literally and figuratively. He attacked Syria on two occasions based on fabricated intelligence, assassinated an Iranian general, withdrew from several arms and proliferation agreements, and has been waging economic warfare against Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Iraq. He has sanctioned individuals and organizations in both China and Russia and has declared Iranian government components and Yemeni Houthi rebels to be terrorists. He has occupied Syria's oil producing region to "protect it from terrorists" and has generally exerted "maximum pressure" against his "enemies" in the Middle East.

So no, Donald Trump is no antiwar activist. But Trump's most pervasive foreign policy initiatives have involved Israel, encouraging the Jewish state's attacks on Palestinian, Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian targets with impunity, killing thousands of civilians on his watch. Trump has given Israel everything it could possibly ask for, with no consideration for what the U.S. interests might actually be. The only thing he did not do for the Jewish state was to attack and destroy Iran, and even there, reports suggest that he sought to do just that in the waning days of his administration but was talked out of it by his cabinet.

Trump's pander to Israel started out with withdrawing from the nuclear monitoring agreement with Iran, followed by his shutting down the Palestinian offices in the United States, halting U.S. contributions for Palestinian humanitarian relief, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, giving a green light for Israel to do whatever it wishes on the formerly Palestinian West Bank, and, finally permitting paroled former Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard to go "home" to Israel where he received a hero's welcome. Trump, to be sure, was aided in his disloyalty to his own country by former bankruptcy lawyer Ambassador David Friedman in place in Israel, an ardent Zionist and a cheerleader for whatever atrocities Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to commit. Couple that with a Congress that gives billions of dollars to Israel annually while bleating that the Jewish state has a "right to defend itself" and a media that self-censors all the human rights violations and war crimes that Netanyahu unleashes, and you have a perfect love fest for Israel expressed daily throughout the United States.

But even given all that, Trump the panderer clearly wanted to give one last gift to Israel, and he saved it for his last day in office, when he issued more than 140 pardons and commutations. Though other presidents have issued controversial pardons, no other head of state has so abused the clemency authority to benefit not only friends and acquaintances but also celebrity defendants including rappers, some advocated by the likes of the Kardashians, and also those promoted by monied interests. Most of the pardons went to cronies and to supplicants who were willing to pay in cash or in kind to be set free. It was suggested that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was engaged in the selection process and money was often a key element. Some might describe that as corruption.

Those of us in the actual antiwar plus anti-surveillance-state movement had been hoping that Trump would actually do something good at no cost to himself, pardoning whistleblowers Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, Reality Winner, and Chelsea Manning as well as journalist Julian Assange. Kiriakou has reported that when he petitioned for a pardon through one of Trump lawyer Rudi Giuliani's aides, he was told that such an arrangement would cost $2 million.

Bribes for pardons aside, it would have cost Trump nothing to pardon the whistleblowers and it would be a vindication of those who had put themselves at risk to attack the machinations of the Deep State, which Trump had blamed for the coordinated attacks against himself. This was his relatively cost-free chance to get revenge. Admittedly, there is speculation that Senator Mitch McConnell may have warned Trump against pardoning Julian Assange in particular, threatening to come up with enough GOP votes to convict him in his upcoming impeachment trial if he were to do so. Be that as it may, not a single whistleblower was pardoned though there was room on the ship for plenty of heinous white collar criminals. Former Dr. Salomon Melgen, for example, had his sentence commuted. Melgen, a close friend of the seriously corrupt Senator from New Jersey Robert Menendez got into trouble in 2009 when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) discovered that he had overbilled Medicare for $8.9 million for a drug called Lucentis. Two years later Melgen's business was hit with a $11 million lien from the IRS and four years after that he was charged and convicted over more than 76 counts of health care fraud and making false statements.

Some of those pardoned had Jewish organizations going to bat for them. Elliott Broidy, former finance chair of the Republican National Committee, had no less than five Rabbis vouching for him. Last year Broidy had pleaded guilty to acting as an "unregistered foreign agent," part of a larger investigation into the Malaysian "1MDB Scandal" in which Prime Minister Najib Razak stole more than $700 million dollars from his country's state-run 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Broidy worked on behalf of Razak and was offered $75 million if he could get the U.S. Justice Department to drop its own investigation into the scandal.

Another clemency beneficiary who exploited his Jewish links was Philip Esformes, a former nursing home executive who executed one of the biggest Medicare frauds in U.S. history. Just days after being released after serving four years of his 20-year sentence, Esformes celebrated his daughter's wedding in a lavish party held at his multi-million dollar Florida home. He benefited from a lobbying campaign by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch Aleph Institute, a group advised by the ubiquitous former Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz. The movement reportedly has connections to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Another person pardoned by Trump was Sholam Weiss, a Hasidic businessman from New York who was sentenced to more than 800 years in prison in 2000 for racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering connected to a huge fraud scheme that stole $125 million from the National Heritage Life Insurance Company, leading to its bankruptcy. He fled the country but was subsequently arrested in Austria and extradited to the United States. Weiss had reportedly received the endorsement of from Dershowitz, who also recently has been involved in the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell espionage case.

And, of course, there was also the Israel factor. For no plausible reason whatsoever and contrary to actual American interests, Trump gave a full pardon to Aviem Sella, a seventy-five year old former Israeli Air Force officer, who was indicted in the U.S. in 1987 for espionage in relation to the Jonathan Pollard spy case. Sella fled to Israel days before Pollard was arrested outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. and the Israeli government refused to extradite him. Sella, at the time doing a degree course at New York University, was Pollard's initial contact. He had started working part-time for the Mossad intelligence agency in the early 1980s and received some of the classified top-secret documents provided by Pollard in exchange for money and jewelry.

Sella had passed on the Pollard contact to Mossad's agent handler Rafi Eitan, who continued to "run" Pollard until he was arrested. Sella's indictment was essentially meaningless theater, as is generally true of nearly all Israeli spy cases in the U.S., as Tel Aviv refused to extradite him to the United States and the Justice Department made no attempt to arrest him when he was traveling outside Israel. Trump's pardon for Sella as a favor to Netanyahu sends yet another signal that Israel can spy against the U.S. with impunity. The request to Trump for clemency came from the Israeli government itself and was reportedly endorsed by Netanyahu, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, the United States Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and Miriam Adelson. According to the White House statement on the pardon, "The state of Israel has issued what a full and unequivocal apology, and has requested the pardon in order to close this unfortunate chapter in U.S.-Israel relations."

Was it a gift or merely a pander? Note particularly the inclusion of David Friedman, who as U.S. Ambassador to Israel is supposed to defend the interests of the United States but never does so. Once upon a time it was considered a potential conflict of interest to send a Jewish Ambassador to Israel. Now it seems to be a requirement and the Ambassador is apparently supposed to be an advocate for Israel as part of his or her mission. Friedman will no doubt be replaced by a Democratic version to deliver more of the same. And then there is Miriam Adelson. Good old Sheldon is hardly cold on the ground and his wife has taken up the mantle of manipulating players in Washington on behalf of the Jewish state.

Money talks and so the drama in Washington continues to play out. Trump manages to make himself look even worse with his last round of pardons and commutations on his ultimate day in office. No one who deserved clemency got it and a lot of well-connected rogues who were willing to fork over money in exchange for mercy benefited. Business as usual delivered by the so-called Leader of the Free World.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]


Z-man , says: January 26, 2021 at 5:14 am GMT • 19.0 hours ago

Owned.
But guess what, senile Joe is a loyal 'Zionist' and Kamalawala is married to a Jew.

Ghali , says: January 26, 2021 at 5:32 am GMT • 18.7 hours ago

While I whole heartily agree with Dr Giraldi, I strongly believe that Trump was a hostage of wealthy Jews and Zionists. It is most likely that he has committed misdemeanour while he was involved (friendship) with Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine who operated an elitist paedophilia criminal enterprise. The criminal enterprise was to advance the interests of Israel and Jews. It was used as a honey trap. Remember, Trump was under constant threat by wealthy Jews and by right-wing Zionists like Senators Mitch McConnell, Robert Menendez, etc. Trump was not a smart president. He committed heinous crimes on behalf of Israel and wealthy Jews.

RedpilledAF , says: January 26, 2021 at 5:54 am GMT • 18.3 hours ago
@Z-man

All Shabbos goys. Our nation is truly Zionist occupied territory. It has been for a long time, but under trump it became overt, and will continue to be under Biden.

Our whole reality, in a sense, has become a Talmudic dialectic. The rabbinate's mouthpiece, our media, disseminates the two sides of that demonic dialectic. The education system and academia train and mold Shabbos goys and Noahides. We work for them and they see us as beasts of burden.

Our citizenry likes the slavery they have been placed in. They are content.

LarryS , says: January 26, 2021 at 6:02 am GMT • 18.2 hours ago

So, the Populist is a shill for Israel and Qanon is probably a psy-op run from Tel Aviv. I wanted to believe there was hope for the USA. I really did. Now we have Biden "I am a Zionist" with an Israeli cabinet. Was there really election fraud? Will we ever know?
What's next?

Just another serf , says: January 26, 2021 at 6:26 am GMT • 17.8 hours ago

I pity those people, probably otherwise good folks, that were conned by this character. Was a blanket pardon for all Jews and BLACKS just not possible? I'm confident Alan Dershowitz could have worked through the complex legalities of such a "comprehensive" pardon.

Jim Christian , says: January 26, 2021 at 6:33 am GMT • 17.7 hours ago

I see the perverts Bob Kraft and Alan Dershowitz in the picture.

nsa , says: January 26, 2021 at 6:45 am GMT • 17.5 hours ago

What are a few yid pardons when, unbelievably, Americans routinely mutilate the sex organs of their male offspring at birth to demonstrate total fealty to the vile Cock Cutter Cult that rules them ..a practice so bizarre even an equatorial pygmy would laugh at the practitioners. Of course, the practitioners claim hygienic as well as spiritual benefits look ma, no dick cheese!

Tolstoy , says: January 26, 2021 at 6:46 am GMT • 17.4 hours ago

Trump is a crypto Jew. Well at least all his grandkids are ..real Jews. So is Hillary's grandkid. So corrupted on both side. What's new? Nothing. The only thing remarkable is that red necks still believe in Trump, hence the white race is doomed.

AriusArmenian , says: January 26, 2021 at 6:47 am GMT • 17.4 hours ago

Trump was too busy being co-president of Israel to give any thought to the American people.

Gleimhart Mantooso , says: January 26, 2021 at 7:43 am GMT • 16.5 hours ago

Is five rabbis vouching for you considered something of value? These are the same people who shouted "Give us Barabbas!"

Publius 2 , says: January 26, 2021 at 8:08 am GMT • 16.1 hours ago

Incredible.

Varna , says: January 26, 2021 at 8:11 am GMT • 16.0 hours ago

Agree with most of the article, but calling Jimmy Carter a recent president is more than just a bit of a stretch.

Carter exited office 40 years ago. The current median age in the US is about 38.4 (2019).
So in the lifetime of a very large portion of Americans there has not been a president that hasn't started a new war.

Sirius , says: January 26, 2021 at 8:20 am GMT • 15.9 hours ago

Frankly, I don't see why presidents should have the power to pardon. It has been abused so much that perhaps it's time to strip presidents of that power, or at least there should be an appeals process or some sort of oversight when that abuse becomes so egregious. Aside from all the financial criminals, he pardoned actual war criminals, men who murdered innocent civilians in Iraq. Pardons weren't meant for this.

Of course, leave it to Trump to take it to new levels of corruption as well as abuse. If John Kyriakou's allegation of Trump's directly selling pardons is true, that should be a first.

Ilya G Poimandres , says: January 26, 2021 at 8:23 am GMT • 15.8 hours ago

Carter kickstarted funding the Taliban 6 months before the Russians intervened.

I'm nor surprised by Trump's graft, but the whole system of making laws in Congress includes bribery so nothing new here to see.

Aside from being a bad manager, he is no strategist it seems. Not pardoning Assange means the GOP are going to vote not to impeach you? How gullible is he? He is getting impeached whatever he does, he could jump on a literal sword and they'd still impeach him because they are so offended by the prols.

Ron G , says: January 26, 2021 at 8:25 am GMT • 15.8 hours ago

Trump lost his job because he didn't do what he was elected for . attack Iran.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/mHn6TvsWq6w?feature=oembed

Brewer , says: January 26, 2021 at 8:30 am GMT • 15.7 hours ago

The sight of Dersh rubbing his hands in the pic is nearly enough to induce this commenter to say good riddance despite the obviously stolen election and the incoming disaster. I got the Apolitical Blues.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/lkfbE-5erhQ?feature=oembed

antitermite , says: January 26, 2021 at 8:38 am GMT • 15.6 hours ago

It would not have mattered whether Donald Trump had pardoned any whistleblowers.

As we can see, the Harris administration is dismantling as much of his legacy as they can, as fast as they can.
The parts that offend, that is.

It only matters if the CIA pardon Snowden or Assange, else they will forever be looking over their shoulders, wondering when something will be slipped into their tea, or over their doorknob..

mark green , says: January 26, 2021 at 8:46 am GMT • 15.4 hours ago
@Z-man ing back.
Therefore: stop bad-speak. Stop unauthorized thinking. For the love of God: eradicate anti-Semitism!

Has Israeli dominance of Zio-Washington and US 'news' ever been greater? Nah. And it may even be growing. OK, Trump blew the whistle on 'fake news'. But that teaser was pretty much far as it went.

For all his boldness, Trump realized that–when it came to Israel and the deep state– he met is match. Time to retreat.

Meanwhile, Israel and Zionist America have basically merged. In the dark of night, no less.

(Can you guess who the senior partner is?)

Humbert Humbert , says: January 26, 2021 at 8:52 am GMT • 15.3 hours ago

This article is a full on demolition of the idea that Trumpstein is any sort of patriot. I can not imagine any patriotic figure in all of human history doing a tenth of what this shabas goy has done for another country – and one so universally despised as Israel – and not only getting away with it, but still being praised in certain circles for standing up for his "motherland". Bonkers.

Greta Handel , says: January 26, 2021 at 8:59 am GMT • 15.2 hours ago

Go back to the preposterously optimistic article and comments under "A Pardoning Time of Year," December 29, 2020.

Will his supporters who thought that Mr. Trump would do right, even if only on his way out the door, now admit that they were duped?

A few, maybe. But there will still be plenty like them for the next Most Important Election Ever, their dissent channeled into naive, participatory assent to more Red+Blue governance from Washington.

Smith , says: January 26, 2021 at 9:25 am GMT • 14.8 hours ago

The fact (american) right wingers haven't dropped Trump like a sack of rock foretells more LOSING in the future.

HeebHunter , says: January 26, 2021 at 9:30 am GMT • 14.7 hours ago

Amerimutts are either kikes or kike slaves. There is no other places on earth (except semitic hell, of course), where "huwhites" cut children's foreskin against their will, as good "Christians".

Disgusting nation of heretics, quadroons, subhumans, kike lovers and yids.

1945 payback.

Supply and Demand , says: January 26, 2021 at 10:31 am GMT • 13.7 hours ago
@Z-man

Every boomer is Jewish or aspirationally Jewish. No avoiding it with old crones.

Defcon , says: January 26, 2021 at 10:46 am GMT • 13.4 hours ago

No surprise here, coming from "the best president Israel ever had". Expect more of the same from the new administration of Israeli stooges. I was hopeful the orange bastard would pardon Snowden and Assange, oh well.

Anonymous [661] Disclaimer , says: January 26, 2021 at 10:57 am GMT • 13.3 hours ago

Israel: America's–and the world's–#1 liability for the last 70 years.

Greg Bacon , says: Website January 26, 2021 at 11:06 am GMT • 13.1 hours ago

Pedo Joe is wasting no time showing Jews & Israel he can pander and grovel to Israel and Jew Inc better than Zion Don.

Look at 10 of his high-level Cabinet appointments..ALL Jews. If they had been all Muslims or all Chinese, it would've hit the fan and by now, most would have dropped out from that spot.
But since their Jews, well look the other way you Silly Goyim.

I thought Diversity was our strength?

All 10 of Biden's High Profile Appointees Are Jews

Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State

David Cohen, CIA Deputy Director

Merrick Garland, Attorney General

Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence

Ronald Klain, Chief of Staff

Eric Lander, Office of Science and Technology Policy director

Rachel Levine, deputy health secretary

Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security

Anne Neuberger, National Security Agency cybersecurity director

Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of state

Janet Yellen, Treasury secretary

https://www.freedomofspeechtwentyfirstcentury.com/2021/01/all-10-of-bidens-high-profile.html

Next up, a 9/11 false flag that hits an American city or US base that the MSM will blame on Iran that had Syrian helpers.

Or maybe us white guys will get the blame when some fertilizer blows up a Midwest city?

Timur The Lame , says: January 26, 2021 at 11:12 am GMT • 13.0 hours ago

Idiocracy, the director's cut. Trump grabs himself by the pussy in a surprise ending!

Remember, the Phoenix cannot rise from the fire, it has to rise from the ashes. Only then can the real MAGA begin. See if its true that Bismarck (allegedly) stated that " there is a special providence for drunkards, fools and the United States of America".

Cheers-

Hughes , says: January 26, 2021 at 11:16 am GMT • 12.9 hours ago

Lol and here i read on some other board that Trump would've given the capitol trespassers pardons. I guess not. Wishful thinking on the cult.

Frank frank , says: January 26, 2021 at 11:18 am GMT • 12.9 hours ago

It's pretty fascinating for anyone who knows what's happening to see Jews utterly destroy and evacuate yet another great civilization by using the same corrupting forces and patterns used in their clearly deliberate rotting out of Rome, the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire, then Russia, and now the USA. It's like Jews are a kind of human parasitoid that will always kill its host as part of its lifecycle after it has drained all energy and resources from within.

Remember that movie Alien, there the larva like offspring attaches to inject its seed into humans and then clearly affects the human's nervous system to make them kind of forget that ever happened as they carry the parasitoid in them that develops and feeds on their body until the day it bursts from their chest in the form of the beast we know as the alien.

As stated about our in the movie, something along the lines of "pure survival instinct burned by the limitations of delusions of morality"; pretty much describes how Jews operate and act, and how they keep infecting and then destroying the very societies and civilizations they feed on until they burst from their victims' chest.

I wish China all the luck it needs to see this threat from this parasitoid and freed themselves of it before it infiltrates and infests and feeds on their society out too. By all indications it is already too late for them too and they just don't realize it yet. The recent video of the Chinese academic bragging about the control of American officials would indicate as much, judging by the section of the video that was totally ignored, about the Jewish woman executive of an American bank who is thick as thieves with the Chinese communist party who manipulated things for the Chinese in America.

Sean , says: January 26, 2021 at 11:26 am GMT • 12.8 hours ago

Jimmy Carter, for all his faults, managed to avoid entering into any new armed conflict

What about Iran. Carter must take responsibility for the mishandling of Iran by letting the Shah into the US, and failing to withdraw the embassy when it became obvious Iranian internal politics meant US diplomats were becoming targets.

He attacked Syria on two occasions based on fabricated intelligence.

Russian forces fought a whole war in Syria on a correct appreciation of what could be gained for Russia.

Trump, to be sure, was aided in his disloyalty to his own country by

America has to come to the aid of its allies, right or wrong, otherwise it will have no allies.

[J]ournalist Julian Assange

Assange didn't describe himself as simply such until after his legal troubles started.

https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/04/assange-wikileaks-radical 5 APRIL 2011
Assange: "WikiLeaks is the intelligence agency of the people"
The site chief discusses radical journalism and WikiLeaks's main threat in an exclusive

As for Snowden he wasn't drafted but rather was sought the job. He knew it was was not in a boy scout group, and the secrets he was swearing an oath to keep were not going to be about thoroughly wholesome activities such as training guide dogs for the blind. No more than someone who becomes a made member of the mafia could Snowden be shocked at what the organization he was associated with was doing.

Business as usual delivered by the so-called Leader of the Free World.

He never claimed to be a global Santa for those who brought nothing to the table.

G J T , says: January 26, 2021 at 11:26 am GMT • 12.8 hours ago

Trump is pathetic. Anyone still making excuses for him is a battered wife and a sycophant. I hope they continue to humiliate him now that he's out of office, because it's exactly what he deserves.

Trump, just like his Republican counterparts, are more despicable than shitlibs and the radical left, because they lie and stab you in the back every single time. At least the shitlibs and radical leftists don't pretend they don't absolutely hate us.

Go to hell, Trumpenstein.

Herald , says: January 26, 2021 at 11:27 am GMT • 12.8 hours ago

The article has nothing to do with the corrupt Joe Biden. It's all about the corrupt Trump and the selling of favours to his corrupt Zionist chums.

roonaldo , says: January 26, 2021 at 11:30 am GMT • 12.7 hours ago

If bribe money was paid, how was it spread around, and what besides money can be extracted in return? A "no" vote on inpeachment? Pardons to Mossad/Israeli connected cases in return for their pressure on certain politicians on whom they have compromising photos, etc?

A pardon for Assange and Kiriakou takes the pressure off Biden to do so, and these are Obama political persecutions. And Winner was arrested in what, June 2017, by the FBI for leaking classified info feeding the feeble Russian election interference narrative? She posted numerous anti-Trump diatribes.

Sure, they and Snowden deserve pardons, but now the Dems will face dissension, criticism, and sniping within their own ranks on these matters.

Smith , says: January 26, 2021 at 12:00 pm GMT • 12.2 hours ago
@Herald

Trump might as well be more corrupted than Joe Biden at this point.

I'm convinced the American deep state removes him because he's actually an Israeli agent which would make the Zionist scene in USA look bad, like holy hell, is there any zionist jew he doesn't suck off? That's disgusting.

moi , says: January 26, 2021 at 12:00 pm GMT • 12.2 hours ago

The hierarchy that controls our government and moral/social values, in order, goes as follows:

Yids
Nigs
Spics

Trump, loved with under-educated and redneck whites, was an all-out Shabbos goy, not to mention he was greedy, egotistical/egoistical and a self-serving liar.

moi , says: January 26, 2021 at 12:02 pm GMT • 12.2 hours ago
@Ghali

Trump, in his younger days, was a coached by and was a protege of Roy Cohn. Look into who Roy Cohn was.

mcohen , says: January 26, 2021 at 12:03 pm GMT • 12.2 hours ago

Donald trump is a mensch.He did what was needed to be done and he played a full round of golf while doing it.

zard , says: January 26, 2021 at 12:27 pm GMT • 11.8 hours ago

In many ways Trump has been like a Terminator sent by the Jewish Establishment to completely derail, discredit and destroy the Patriot movement in America. Now any American Patriot who is against the U.S. Establishment and says CNN is fake news is automatically associated with Trump and deemed an enemy of America. Can you say Mission Accomplished? The Jewish Snake must be patting itself on the back for its brilliant move to hurt the greatest threat to it in a long time.

Unfortunately there are many people who still believe that Trump was a great President sent by God to save America. It makes me sad to see so many people so clueless. I wish that all those still supporting Trump will wake up and recognize as so many others have that the man is nothing but a Snake who knows how to speak your language while totally betraying your cause. How can you support a two faced man like this who has hurt your cause more than anyone else possibly could?

EDIT TO ADD: Trump left office in disgrace just as was intended but the real disgrace is not on Trump but on the American Patriot movement. Now the American Patriot movement is in a far worse position than it was in 2016 before it accepted Trump as its leader. We were greatly deceived but in 2020 there is no excuse for anyone to still be deceived about Trump. He completely betrayed our cause and it was all by design. His entire purpose for becoming POTUS was, outside of giving Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to Israel (his true loyalty), to turn our cause into something that the American public would perceive as ugly and to be shunned when in reality our cause is very noble. We were played by Trump and his Jewish backers but that is now in the past. Let us stop talking about this man once and for all. He is nothing but a distraction away from what it is important to us. I consider anyone still supporting Trump at this point or in the future to be an enemy.
http://www.chuckmaultsby.net/id55.html

Ugetit , says: January 26, 2021 at 12:28 pm GMT • 11.7 hours ago

Providing mucho fertilizer for excellent articles like this which expose the hideous and disgusting perfidy of the Zionist sewer and its catamites is only worth of the Chrumpster and his time as Netanyahu's orifice.

Anon [295] Disclaimer , says: January 26, 2021 at 12:28 pm GMT • 11.7 hours ago
@Z-man

Blaming single acts and single people serves the purpose to remain in denial of the general situation, I guess?

Ugetit , says: January 26, 2021 at 12:30 pm GMT • 11.7 hours ago
@mcohen

Donald trump is a mensch.He did what was needed to be done and he played a full round of golf while doing it.

And I thought he was playing 4-D chess the whole time. Silly me!

Greg Bacon , says: Website January 26, 2021 at 12:39 pm GMT • 11.6 hours ago
@Ron G , just get me into the WH.
Which will happen, we'll have a power-mad prez that has never won any primaries doing Israel's blood work.

THERE'S A WAR GOING ON OVER KAMALA HARRIS'S WIKIPEDIA PAGE, WITH UNFLATTERING ELEMENTS VANISHING

A line about Harris traveling to Israel and the West Bank in November 2017, where she met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was removed altogether.

https://www.sgtreport.com/2020/08/theres-a-war-going-on-over-kamala-harriss-wikipedia-page-with-unflattering-elements-vanishing/

Defcon , says: January 26, 2021 at 12:48 pm GMT • 11.4 hours ago
@Supply and Demand

My comment a few days ago on transgenerational hate got a lot of negative feed back. You are correct though, boomers and church goers worship the yids, despite what Jesus said about them and later Martin Luther.

Father O'Hara , says: January 26, 2021 at 1:06 pm GMT • 11.1 hours ago
@moi

What Roy Cohn was? You mean,the Jew? The "fixer"? The tax cheat? The fag?

Old and Grumpy , says: January 26, 2021 at 1:09 pm GMT • 11.1 hours ago
@Supply and Demand

Obviously you have never met all boomers.

Hans , says: January 26, 2021 at 1:12 pm GMT • 11.0 hours ago

Please read the following carefully line by line:

"I've never seen a President -- I don't care who he is -- stand up to them. It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip these people have on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens certainly don't have any idea what goes on." – Admiral Thomas Moorer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, interview, 24 Aug. 1983

Now that "Zion Don" appears to be out of the way, we can get back to encouraging illegals, giving them their rights, setting our sights on the another Hitler in Syria, globalizing what's left of the industrial base, getting trannies more judgeships, queering history, and on and on cuz all dem ideas are homegrown and strictly non-kosher.

Old and Grumpy , says: January 26, 2021 at 1:25 pm GMT • 10.8 hours ago

I thought the pardons were great. Who knew there were so many criminal Jews who have been actually convicted? Its almost like the Jewish stereotypes are really true. Does that mean no one can be anti Semitic? Also the way black rappers get killed off, supply and demand dictates jailed ones need to be free. Very Reaganesque.

Sarcasm aside I think Jews tended to hate Trump because in sucking up to them, The Donald wound up revealing many ugly truths. Outside of Trump's energy and environmental policies, its a good riddance from me. Unfortunately the looming costs related to energy and taxes, I'll eventually and unfortunately will wind up missing the weak and Ivanka sniffing SOB.

Anon [374] Disclaimer , says: January 26, 2021 at 1:30 pm GMT • 10.7 hours ago

Phil,

Run for president in 2024. Ya' got one vote here. You can use the catchphrase, "Make America Independent Again". Red, White, and Blue hats, etc. Your campaign rally speeches would be epically entertaining in the gnashing of establishment journo's teeth as they described them.

Katrinka , says: January 26, 2021 at 1:41 pm GMT • 10.5 hours ago
@Tolstoy

White people have survived much worse. Stop being hyperbolic.

Hillaire , says: January 26, 2021 at 1:48 pm GMT • 10.4 hours ago
@Ghali

Drumpf the rancid orange golem played you all to the very last coda, pissing in your eyes as he pardoned a most rancorous group of bent buddies and chosen criminal diversities . maga men hung to dry, swinging in the wind.

Half of america shafted and stockholm syndromed, as the fake fat narcissist waltzes of to play golf and hide the ginger squirrel with the reanimated frank-epstein and his transhumanised teenage sorority clones in tel-aviv.

by the way see where this link leads: antifa.com .
hint: the whitehouse.

SolontoCroesus , says: January 26, 2021 at 1:52 pm GMT • 10.3 hours ago
@Sean

Wasn't it Carter who gave Golda Meier the first holocaust museum, Jewish Trojan horse at the front door of the capital of the USA.

Hillaire , says: January 26, 2021 at 2:11 pm GMT • 10.0 hours ago
@LarryS

Well, if history is a yardstick, probably starvation and slaughter.

I would plan accordingly.

Che Guava , says: January 26, 2021 at 2:37 pm GMT • 9.6 hours ago

Assange has neither been charged nor convicted, AFAIK, the only precedent is Ford-Nixon.

Bradly Manning was a soldier in uniform at the time, so had no right to do what he did.

Anybody who has been in uniform would know this.

Still, probably deserved a re-pardon.

As an outside observer, the single observer most deserving of a pardon, for many years, Leonard Peltier, as always ignored.

Che Guava , says: January 26, 2021 at 2:48 pm GMT • 9.4 hours ago
@Che Guava

In the second instance of 'observer', it was meant to say 'person'.

Che Guava , says: January 26, 2021 at 2:57 pm GMT • 9.3 hours ago

I follow interesting facts from the U.S.A., the fraud was such a bad joke on so many facts and statistical measures.

People in many places have noticed.

I will remember, but the U.S. empire is sure to make a BIG effort to make most forget.

JoaoAlfaiate , says: January 26, 2021 at 3:01 pm GMT • 9.2 hours ago
@LarryS nd its American friends get what they want, no matter what.

Trump was terrible and I'm glad to see him gone. Problem is Biden & Co. will probably be worse, letting in countless third worlders and pandering to BLM, trannies and countless other perverts and sexual curiosities.

Neither party represents the interests of the American people. Did we really want 14 million illegals here and $6 trillion spent on failed adventures in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc.?

I harken back to H L Mencken who said both parties spend their time proving the other is unfit to govern and are both right.

Realist , says: January 26, 2021 at 3:10 pm GMT • 9.0 hours ago
@mark green

Why is there is no pushback?

The vast majority of Americans are stupid.

antitermite , says: January 26, 2021 at 3:11 pm GMT • 9.0 hours ago

The pardoning of the Blackwater scum has fascinating implications for any country with a Status of Forces Agreement /Visiting Forces Agreement, which is what, 80% of the world?

A host country might want to revisit these terms if it means that their women & children could be raped, killed, mutilated whilst the perpetrators walk free.

Rev. Spooner , says: January 26, 2021 at 3:16 pm GMT • 8.9 hours ago
@Greg Bacon

This is beyond belief. Are Americans blind? Is there something in the water they drink?
A whole population bent over with their posteriors pointed at the sky, willingly accepting the abuse by the zionists.
Love them or hate them, these jews dream big. Bravo

BAMA , says: January 26, 2021 at 3:17 pm GMT • 8.9 hours ago

Another on target Giraldi article. The ultimate blame for our being occupied and used without a shot being fired is with American gullibility and blindness. How does a global power, in almost every way, become the lap dog, errand boy, bully and financier for such an ungrateful, blood sucking little country? We have created a Frankenstein Monster for the world.

Sean , says: January 26, 2021 at 3:29 pm GMT • 8.7 hours ago
@SolontoCroesus ight Palestinians were there even if there was strong Israel Lobby domestic pressure. But in 1979 Carter–distracted by the fall of the Shah–merely brokered a Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty deal that eliminated Egypt from the conflict, and the lack of the deterrent they represented meant meant hat Israel was free to do what it liked in the West Bank and attack Lebanon. The Palestinians will never get another US president like Carter. Israel does not want an agreement, the current situation suits them very well. So Iran is not deterring Israel from doing anything it wants to do. Moreover, Israel likes having a pseudo threat like Iran.
Realist , says: January 26, 2021 at 3:31 pm GMT • 8.7 hours ago
@Greta Handel

Will his supporters who thought that Mr. Trump would do right, even if only on his way out the door, now admit that they were duped?

Not a chance stupidity reigns supreme.

While a pardon of Assange and Snowden would have been the moral thing to do America is still on the shit slide almost at the bottom.

Realist , says: January 26, 2021 at 3:32 pm GMT • 8.7 hours ago
@Greta Handel

Will his supporters who thought that Mr. Trump would do right, even if only on his way out the door, now admit that they were duped?

Not a chance stupidity reigns supreme.

While a pardon of Assange and Snowden would have been the moral thing to do America is still on the shit slide almost at the bottom.

Marckus , says: January 26, 2021 at 3:32 pm GMT • 8.7 hours ago

Well I have to say this comes as a surprise. To think that American politicians take bribes, favour one particular group etc etc is news to me. However, Trump catering to the foreskin modifiers and the dick cheese eliminators is the good news.

The bad news is the new team is already in bed not only with the foreskin challenged sticks, but with the chopsticks and every other stick with a dollar bill wrapped around the head. When the 25th collides with Joe's worn out pecker and Kamala takes over that will be the sign that circumcised or not we are all fucked.

As some readers commented on UR, honesty is the best policy, turn the other cheek and love conquers hate. All good advice I am sure but redundant and inapplicable in the world we live in.

The ruled live by these rules but the rulers live by their own !

[Jan 25, 2021] I wonder how many people picked up Pres. Biden's passing reference to Russia paying bounties for American scalps (in Afghanistan). It was a 24-hr. story long ago and died quickly for lack of evidence and logic. But Biden keeps using it, as he did in one of the 'debates' with Trump.

Jan 25, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

allan millard , January 23, 2021 at 01:55

I wonder how many people picked up Pres. Biden's passing reference to Russia paying bounties for American scalps (in Afghanistan). It was a 24-hr. story long ago and died quickly for lack of evidence and logic. But Biden keeps using it, as he did in one of the 'debates' with Trump. Two questions arise. 1. Does Biden really believe the story or does he use it to score patriotism points? Either way it reflects very badly on him. 2. Is the bounty myth a distant cousin of Russiagate or is it a signal of a renewed pursuit of the Cold War by Biden and his hawkish appointees?

Mikhailovich , January 23, 2021 at 00:56

US politicians will carry on with their Russo-phobia anyway. What really is good about the new administration, they are not so keen for a new nuclear arm race as Trump was. It looks, the new administration is less subordinate to the military industrial complex.

Mark Thomason , January 22, 2021 at 18:48

Russia/Putin is a way to talk about anything but. That is what Never Trump was, avoidance of things they did not mean to do. Now they need to reinforce the smoke and mirrors behind which they do Triangulation to serve the interests of elites and big money.

[Jan 25, 2021] What is particularly hard to fathom is not so much the gross dishonesty and malice of politicians like H. Clinton and Pelosi but the boneheaded stupidity and ignorance of the broad population that accepts fables like Russiagate as fact

Jan 25, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

.


PEG , January 22, 2021 at 15:06

What is particularly hard to fathom is not so much the gross dishonesty and malice of politicians like H. Clinton and Pelosi but the boneheaded stupidity and ignorance of the broad population that accepts fables like Russiagate as fact.

This is a testament to the immense power of propaganda, when repeated on a daily basis by the mass media.

Joe Lauria says convincingly, "Russiagate was an invention to help explain away Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016 and to undermine the legitimacy of the man who beat her."

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, the "stab in the back legend" in post-World War I Germany was an invention by the extreme right wing and later Nazis to help explain away Germany's defeat in that war and to undermine the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic, putting the blame on domestic "enemies" in cahoots with foreign adversaries.

Very much the same thing.

Russiagate was aimed at President Trump and a foreign enemy. Now, following the "new 9/11" of the Capitol Riot and planned domestic "antiterrorism" legislation, it looks like the state will mainly go after "domestic enemies". A new Reichstag Fire has occurred. The parallels are becoming ever more apparent.

Bob In Portland , January 22, 2021 at 18:51

Russiagate was well afoot in the summer of 2016. It wasn't merely to slander Trump. It was to prepare us for a war against Russia.

If I had access to network time I'd ask: If Russiagate is true, and if you have proof, why wasn't Trump charged with treason? You had two chances to do it but Democratic leadership never thought to bring it up. How curious.

DH Fabian , January 22, 2021 at 22:01

Yes. Just one point: Russia wasn't a "foreign enemy" until the Clintonites falsely claimed that they somehow interfered with the 2016 election. Russia was a solid ally in both world wars. Since the Perestroika era, united efforts of US and Russian scientists brought extraordinary progress. There was solid unity from the fall of the Soviet state in the 1990s, until the Clintonites falsely accused Russia of some sort of "election interference." This is how the Democrats destroyed decades of diplomatic progress toward nuclear disarmament.

PEG , January 23, 2021 at 05:16

I agree – I didn't mean "enemy" in the literal sense, but rather in the sense you refer to.

JohnO , January 23, 2021 at 12:43

Russian propaganda from the beginning has always and ever been to secure vast sums of revenue from the people's' taxes, and to scare the crap out of those same people. When Truman dropped the first A-bomb on Hiroshima, he remarked that 'this will let the Russians know that we are serious', or words to that effect. He slaughtered an urban populace to make a point! And generations of Americans were raised in fear of Russians and nuclear war.
The current state of domestic surveillance is a self-conscious recognition, I believe, of the wholly irresponsible policies of the two parties. Third-rate healthcare, pathetic public education, mass incarceration, and massive deregulation in the industrial and financial sectors. All to pay for wars and control across the globe. It is an arrangement that will continue to provoke protests, insurrection and conspiracy theorizing.

evelync , January 22, 2021 at 13:43

I find it amusing that the top ranks of the political hacks whose psy-ops that use Russia as the great threat against "the most powerful country in the world" – these hacks choose to ignore the real, the relevant investigation that should be in the forefront – the money trails of Trump's so called financial empire – the banks, the oligarchs, the money laundering – the sources of his funding over the years who really would have had the opportunity to push him around ..
Investigating the finances may be too uncomfortable for them to examine .. Even though his financial schemes hurt real people – wages unpaid, debts unpaid; bankruptcies; students betrayed.

On another note – Amy Goodman on Democracy Now's 1/21/21 news summary pointed out that the Biden Administration was sticking with Gaido being the "recognized" leader of Venezuela ..the democratically elected Maduro remains the target, apparently .
meanwhile FT writes that the "EU dropped its de facto recognition of Juan Guaidó as Venezuela's interim president, a serious diplomatic setback to the opposition leader's faltering campaign to oust Nicolás Maduro from power."

wikipedia:
"Venezuela is a major producer and exporter of minerals, notably bauxite, coal, gold, iron ore, and oil, and the state controls most of the country's vast mineral reserves. In 2003 estimated reserves of bauxite totaled 5.2 million tons."

countries in South America with Lithium ( used in batteries for electric vehicles) and who have democratic minded politicians who think their people should get some benefit from the country's resources watch out for other U.S favored Guaidó's ..

Anonymot , January 22, 2021 at 13:11

Thanks for raising the subject, Joe.

It's really to ridiculous to merit a reply. One would think an honest party would have excreted Hillary Clinton by now, but no, they can't. She still owns the DNC as I've repeated for years and note that Neither Joe Biden nor Harris nor any member of Biden's cabinet would be there without the DNC/Hillary stamp of approval. Buttigieg's appearance in a cabinet level post is solely her doing, for he has zero qualifications for that post. His presence is the equivalent of hers as Secretary of State- to give credence to his qualifications on hid next run for President. She failed hers; we'll see about his.

Hillary's handlers are the dangerous ones.

Dorothy Sillman Crouch , January 22, 2021 at 13:01

My greatest fear with Biden was that he would find a place for Hillary in his administration. My understanding of what happened during the 2016 primary was those emails downloaded at the DNC revealed what they were doing to take down Bernie as a candidate so that Hillary would be the Democratic candidate with the niave assumption she could win over Trump. Big mistake. Hillary has never been a viable candidate. And of course the DNC never wanted to sponsor a Socialist like Bernie. I was very concerned after the election of Trump that my Democratic state senators continued to insist Russia was involved. Blame Russia has been the mantra of the Democratic Party ever since. As suggested Bill Binney tried to disproved that connection but the party didn't want to hear that. I agree with John Chuckman in his appraisal of Putin. I would never want to see Biden revive the 'blame Russia' mantra. Someone suggested we had to feed the military industrial complex so that's why it happened. Needs to stop.

vinnieoh , January 22, 2021 at 11:33

"Beyond that, Russiagate has been a convenient and successful strategy of deflection from one's own responsibility for America's social and political crises."

This, more than providing cover for HRC's disastrous nomination and campaign, I believe is the true purpose. Remember that – love him or hate him – Sanders was the only high profile politician actually beginning to articulate the root causes of US dysfunction and it was resonating energetically on the left of the D leaning electorate. This of course HAD to be nipped in the bud or the whole corrupt gravy train might be exposed. With Russiagate a "crisis" was manufactured that absolved the D's from doing anything to address our real problems (and thus hinder the gravy train.)

I composed a long comment on the environmental piece posted yesterday, but before I posted it wanted to check on some details because I didn't want to add to the noise by posting something poorly-informed or flat out wrong. The gist of that comment was that the fight over Nordstream II is mainly about the effort to force US exported LNG derived from shalegas on our European "allies." I reviewed two pieces, one from The Atlantic Council and one from The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. The Atlantic Council piece was a jaw-dropping screed of such hateful anti-Russian propaganda that it made me shudder. The Oxford piece was an in-depth analysis of all of Russia's gas exporting capability via Gazprom to Europe and the Near East. Hard to plow through, full of important technical considerations, but it painted a picture of a sovereign nation and national industry doing what any other such entities would be doing to successfully operate in any commodities market. ( I did not post that comment – the subject needs an in-depth analysis and exposure.)

The satirical organization The Onion picked such a perfect name. I realized during the GWB administration the the layers of lies, misdirection, and obfuscation one must try to burrow through is exactly like peeling back the layers of an onion. So hard to get to the truth and even harder to formulate a strategy to domestically organize to change it. And it often makes your eyes tear up.

rosemerry , January 23, 2021 at 14:47

I saw yesterday that the "European Parliament" voted to sanction Russia and stop the remaining bit of the Nordstream pipeline (Pompass had already tried to stop at the last minute too) because of ..Navalny!!!! Hard to believe-the pipeline to bring Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe, voluntarily undertaken as a commercial venture between partners knowing the needs and wishes of their people, being challenged by "European" well-paid "reps" allegedly upset for a common criminal in Russia!!!!

Ed Rickert , January 22, 2021 at 10:48

Thanks for the excellent summary of Russiagate and for yet another glimpse into the corrupt, demented mind of Hillary Clinton. What a treasure she is: her hand in the Honduras coup, her role in the destruction of Libra, the arm shipments to ISIS and other "moderate rebels" in the attempted overthrow of the Syrian government. And like so many other "statesmen" never held accountable for her actions.

Anne , January 22, 2021 at 11:41

OOps Only western politicos/"states" folkies are NOT held accountable, no matter how criminal – as in human rights/illegal warring – their actions

One only has to list everything that the US has done to other peoples from the dropping of those two A bombs on civilian populations in 1945, through the US initiated and heavily destructive Korean and Vietnamese Wars, the Use of the Marshall Islands (and their population) as nuclear testing sites, to the Chagos Islanders being forcefully removed from their homes and dumped in Madagascar in order for the US to build its huge base there (Diego Garcia), to the bombing of Grenada, Panama, Serbia (40+ days and nights and largely on civilians), invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq (based on utter lies), Bombing of Libya, Syria, Torture at so-called black sites overseen if not done by the now Blue Face vaunted CIA, Guantanamo (still existing and zero mention), the Economic Sanctions, i.e. Siege Warfare, of Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and all of those legitimately elected govts from Guatemala (Arbenz), to Iran (Mossadegh), to Allende (Chile) and on and on overthrown with the CIA's direct or indirect assistance

And that doesn't include the Human Rights that our govt and helpers have done back here: genocidal ethnic-cleansing, our own sterilization of the Mentally handicapped, Native Americans, and African Americans (up to c. 1980) and possibly some of the female Latino attempted immigrants of these past four years, MK – ULTRA and Mr Sidney Gottlieb et al

We have absolutely Zero position to even talk about, mention other countries' "human rights abuses" when we have done and continue to do these and many another barbarism to other peoples (and our own) but listening to NPR (and the Beeb – and the UK has more than enough of its own HRs abuses in its history and present) you'd think we had never and were not so committing as we breathe any such abominations, heinous crimes

evelync , January 22, 2021 at 15:05

In my darker moments I'm thinking that those dropped bombs etc etc are simply moving merchandise out to boost sales for the next quarter justifying the huge budget .
A for profit arms industry is grotesque – we need the enemies to keep it going

Are we consciously aware that that's part of it all?
Somewhere in the back of everyone's minds as Leonard Cohen sings – "Everybody knows".

I always enjoy your clear informative direct comments. Thanks!!!!

Anne , January 23, 2021 at 12:05

Thank you very muchly, evelync Since my husband died this is one of the few places where I can, sometimes, let off a little of my political steam and not be trashed!!!

evelync , January 23, 2021 at 18:58

Sorry that you lost your husband, Anne.

People – humans – have a long way to go to be able to communicate well enough to avoid violent flailing about with confusion and trashing others with whom they think they disagree.

They'd be better off trying to get to bottom of what upsets them about others' comments in an effort to understand the differences between the "opposing" views. Common ground can, I think, sometimes be achieved by asking questions instead of flailing about trashing others.

One example, IMO, of unnecessary sometimes violent disagreement on social issues that politicians love to drum up but common ground might be reachable :

Years ago I head a Harvard social scientist point out that Sweden (I think it was Sweden) has the most liberal abortion laws and the fewest abortions. Why?
Because, she's said, Sweden provided housing, medical care and financial support and a job after the pregnant woman was able to go back to work .
If that could be explained to everyone maybe it would deflate the disinformation balloon that distances people from one another so that these differences could be resolved and acceptable solutions found

We have a long way to go ..

It's good your thoughts are appreciated here!

[Jan 25, 2021] Putin's 5 Star Hotel in Gelendzhik by Anatoly Karlin

Jan 25, 2021 | www.unz.com

VictorW26 , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 11:22 am GMT • 11.6 hours ago

Sometimes it seems a struggle within to assess who I detest more – Karlin or Navalny. Both are dishonest parasites living off Western sources of funds.

I think I will call it a draw and be done with it.

Ray Caruso , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 11:39 am GMT • 11.3 hours ago

Navalny is a most unimpressive individual, a gadfly who hopes to rise by selling out his country to decadent Western interests.

Lucy Lipinska , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 12:13 pm GMT • 10.7 hours ago
@JL

Correct. I am enough familiar with the Russian language and culture to agree with you, JL. Not that I know what is true about Mr Putin, but I find it ugly, calling him Vlad, as ignorant people associate it with an evil creature in Romania.

awry , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 12:28 pm GMT • 10.5 hours ago
@Ray Caruso

There are some similarities between Navalny and Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin became known for attacking the privileges of the nomenclature (as the Communist Party boss of Moscow, no less) like their access to special shops, luxury cars (by Soviet standards), special healthcare facilities, nice apartments etc. He was for a time a "star" in Soviet media with this, but finally Gorbachev got him fired for attacking him and his cronies too.

Bashibuzuk , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 1:36 pm GMT • 9.3 hours ago
@Olivier1973

Mais c'est excellent! Il vient tout d'un coup de monter d'un cran sur mon échelle de gens potentiellement respectables. Et il a tout à fait raison : un peuple armé est un peuple libre. Imaginez les Gilets jaunes armés d'AK-47, ça aurait été une toute autre histoire, n'est-ce pas ?

Temporary Insanity , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 2:13 pm GMT • 8.7 hours ago

"But on the off chance I am wrong, Russians will only prove themselves morons."

You would be absolutely right if it turned out that way and there would be no help for the Russians, just as the American simpletons who balk at the notion of compensating the three branches of the United States government adequately leading to the pernicious influence from the likes of the late Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban among others.

We should pay our representatives one million dollars a piece and two million for senators but the chief executive must be paid at least fifteen million dollars per anum if not more to keep out interlopers and the whole shebang would amount to little more than one billion dollars which would be a drop in the bucket to save the nation from the predators.

Avery , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 3:22 pm GMT • 7.6 hours ago
@dina r Nation and their people."}

Erdogan trying to, quote, ' ..preserve human nature, ' ?
As far as I know neither Orban nor Hungary have been involved in mass murder and invasions of sovereign countries lately.

Sutan Erdogan is an IslamoFascist dictator, who was instrumental ( .together with US, KSA, Israel, UK, France, ..) in training, arming, and sending cannibalistic head-chopper terrorists into Syria, resulting in the deaths of several hundred thousand innocent Syrians.

Orban is a Hungarian Christian nationalist, trying to defend Hungary from GloboSorosization.
Sultan Erdogan is an IslamoFascist head of a genocidal, criminal state.

annamaria , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 3:36 pm GMT • 7.3 hours ago
@mal

The presentation of Navalni's "investigation" on YouTube has collected millions of comments in no time. A native speaker has noticed that there were the same identical comments that appeared thousands of times under different names. Looks like a computer-generated wave of responses.

stevennonemaker88 , says: Website Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 4:24 pm GMT • 6.5 hours ago

I'm sure many others have realized what I have; although it is rarely put into words. It seems like the columnists here who write about Russia are falling into the idiot binary view that can be expressed as follows: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Sometimes this is true. Often times, the enemy of my enemy is an even worse enemy. Just because Russia is clearly not under the thumb of the creeps in Washington dos NOT mean that Russia is the beacon of justice, truth, and freedom. Do not lose sight of the fact that the current (((elites))) are GLOBAL and their original source of influence and power is international finance (greatly expanded by fiat systems). The covid response and vaccine push as carried out by Russia should be an eye opener to anyone who doubts the fact that they are heavily compromised. Remember, Abortion (murdering a baby) has been legal in Russia for most of a century and they had/have some of the highest rates of abortion in the world. It is estimated that well over 100 million babies have been murdered, LEGALLY. The utter evil of this cannot be put into words. I detest the post-christian, perverted west. IS Russia any better? in some ways, perhaps. But at the end of the day, we must not allow ourselves to fall into the idiot binary view that because one group is bad, its (alleged) adversaries are good.

annamaria , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 4:30 pm GMT • 6.4 hours ago
@Ray Caruso d that the US Embassy ought to explain why they had posted a series of 'protest routes' marking the locations where demonstrators planned to mee t. "One can only imagine what would have happened if the Russian Embassy in Washington published a map of protest routes indicating the end point, for example, in the Capitol," Maria Zakharova said. "Giving directions to those on the ground would have led to global hysteria among American politicians, Russophobic slogans, threats of sanctions and the expulsion of Russian diplomats."

It is time to remind the US Embassy staff about what was done to Maria Butina for nothing by the lawless US. The Russian Federation should boot out the American subversives.

Beckow , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 4:32 pm GMT • 6.4 hours ago
@annamaria – and everyone knows that.

He must know this. He must also know that his electoral prospects are nil – even if he was allowed to compete and given access. Short of a revolution he is done, and revolution is not coming, too soon. That is not a good place to be. He is in theory protected by his sponsors, but that may not amount to much if things get hot. At best he would get exchanged. Or he can quietly slip away after a few years if he is lucky.

Mulatto did his job, now mulatto can go. A single-use politician who is endlessly promoted, celebrated, and then discarded and forgotten, only to be listed on a sad list of names to demonise the enemy. That enemy is his own country, is that really heroism?

[Jan 25, 2021] An American neoliberal ideological project

Jan 25, 2021 | www.rt.com

McFaul cautions against what he refers to as "Putin's ideological project" as a threat to the neoliberal international order. Yet he is reluctant to recognize that the neoliberal international order is an American ideological project for the post-Cold War era.

With no sign of US returning to fold, Russia is preparing to withdraw from 'Open Skies' treaty - Foreign Ministry READ MORE: With no sign of US returning to fold, Russia is preparing to withdraw from 'Open Skies' treaty - Foreign Ministry

After the Cold War, neoliberal ideologues advanced what was seemingly a benign proposition – suggesting that neoliberal democracy should be at the center of security strategies. However, by linking neoliberal norms to US leadership, neoliberalism became both a constitutional principle and an international hegemonic norm.

NATO is presented as a community of neoliberal values – without mentioning that its second largest member, Turkey, is more conservative and authoritarian than Russia – and Moscow does not, therefore, have any legitimate reasons to oppose expansionism unless it fears democracy. If Russia reacts negatively to military encirclement, it is condemned as an enemy of democracy, and NATO has a moral responsibility to revert to its original mission as a military bloc containing Russia.

Case in point: there was nobody in Moscow advocating for the reunification with Crimea until the West supported the coup in Ukraine. Yet, as Western "fact checkers" and McFaul inform us, there was a "democratic revolution" and not a coup. Committed to his ideological prism, McFaul suggests that Russia acted out of a fear of having a democracy on its borders, as it would give hope to Russians and thus threaten the Kremlin. McFaul's ideological lens masks conflicting national security interests, and it fails to explain why Russia does not mind democratic neighbors in the east, such as South Korea and Japan, with whom it enjoys good relations.

Defending the peoples

States aspiring for global hegemony have systemic incentives to embrace ideologies that endow them with the right to defend other peoples. The French National Convention declared in 1792 that France would "come to the aid of all peoples who are seeking to recover their liberty," and the Bolsheviks proclaimed in 1917 "the duty to render assistance, armed, if necessary, to the fighting proletariat of the other countries."

The American neoliberal international order similarly aims to liberate the people of the world with "democracy promotion" and "humanitarian interventionism" when it conveniently advances US primacy. The American ideological project infers that democracy is advanced by US interference in the domestic affairs of Russia, while democracy is under attack if Russia interferes in the domestic affairs of US. The neoliberal international system is one of sovereign inequality to advance global primacy.

READ MORE Putin says American presence in Afghanistan is beneficial to Moscow's interests, rubbishes claims of 'Russian bounties to Taliban' Putin says American presence in Afghanistan is beneficial to Moscow's interests, rubbishes claims of 'Russian bounties to Taliban'

McFaul does not consider himself a Russophobe, as believes his attacks against Russia are merely motivated by the objective of liberating Russians from their government, which is why he advocates that Biden "distinguish between Russia and Russians – between Putin and the Russian people." This has been the modus operandi for regime change since the end of the Cold War – the US supposedly does not attack countries to advance its interests, it only altruistically assists foreign peoples in rival states against their leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin etc.

McFaul and other neoliberal ideologues still refer to NATO as a "defensive alliance," which does not make much sense after the attacks on Yugoslavia in 1999 or Libya in 2011. However, under the auspices of neoliberal internationalism, NATO is defensive, as it defends the people of the world. Russia, therefore, doesn't have rational reasons for opposing the neoliberal international order.

McFaul condemns alleged efforts by Russia to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US, before outlining his strategies for interfering in the domestic affairs of Russia. McFaul blames Russian paranoia for shutting down American "non-governmental organizations" that are funded by the US government and staffed by people linked to the US security apparatus. He goes on to explain that the US government must counter this by establishing new "non-government organizations" to educate the Russian public about the evils of their government.

The dangerous appeal of ideologues

Ideologues have always been dangerous to international security. Ideologies of human freedom tend to promise perpetual peace. Yet, instead of transcending power politics, the ideals of human freedom are linked directly to hegemonic power by the self-proclaimed defender of the ideology. When ideologues firmly believe that the difference between the current volatile world and utopia can be bridged by defeating its opponents, it legitimizes radical power politics.

Consequently, there is no sense of irony among the McFauls of the world as US security strategy is committed to global dominance, while berating Russia for "revisionism." Raymond Aaron once wrote: "Idealistic diplomacy slips too often into fanaticism; it divides states into good and evil, into peace-loving and bellicose. It envisions a permanent peace by the punishment of the latter and the triumph of the former. The idealist, believing he has broken with power politics, exaggerates its crimes."

If you like this story, share it with a friend!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


Ghanima223 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:36 AM

In short, the tables have turned since the end of the Cold War. It is no longer communist ideologues that try to export revolution and chaos while the western world would promote stability and free markets. Now it's western ideologues that are trying to export revolutions and chaos while clamping down on free markets with Russia, as ironically as it sounds, being a force for stability and a strong proponent for the free exchange of goods and services around the world. The west will lose just as the USSR has lost.
US_did_911 Ghanima223 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 01:01 AM
The Dollar is the only fake reason that still keeps US afloat. The moment that goes, it loss will be a lot worse then of USSR.
US_did_911 Ghanima223 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 12:58 AM
That happened not exactly after the end of the cold war. It was about even for a decade after that. The real u-turn happened after the 9/11 false flag disaster.
Amvet 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 10:00 AM
Foreign dangers are necessary to keep the attention of the American people away from the 20 ton elephant in the room--the fact that 9/11 was not a foreign attack. Should any of the main stream media suddenly turn honest and report this in detail, things will get interesting.
King_Penda 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:11 AM
I wouldn't worry too much. At the same time Biden will be purging the US military of any men of capability and replacing them trans and political appointments. The traditional areas where the military recruited it's grunts are falling as they are waking up to the hostility of the state to their culture and way of life. The US military will end up a rump of queerss, off work due to stress or perceived persecution and fat doughballs sat in warehouses performing drone strikes on goats.
Fjack1415 King_Penda 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 01:20 PM
Yes, you point to a paradox. While the globalists are using the US as their military arm for global domination, they are at the same time destroying the country that supports that military. Perhaps the US military will be maintained by dint of its being the only employer for millions of unemployed young men in the American heartland, doughballs or not.
Ghanima223 King_Penda 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:39 AM
Ideologues will always be more concerned with having political reliable military leadership as opposed to actually qualified leaders. It took the Russians 2 decades to purge their own military of this filth of incompetent 'yes' men within their military.
UKCitizen 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:09 AM
'The Liberal International Order' - yes, that seems a fair description. Led by what might be termed 'liberal fundamentalists'.
far_cough 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 07:01 AM
the military industrial complex and the various deep state agencies along with the major corporations need russia as an adversary so that they can milk the american people and the people of the western world of their money, rights, freedoms, etc etc...
roby007 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:54 AM
I'm sure Biden will pursue "peaceful, productive coexistence" just as his friend Obama did, with drones and bombs.
Paul Citro 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:16 AM
I hope that Russian leaders fully realize that they are dealing with a country that is the equivalent of psychotic.
Fjack1415 Paul Citro 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 01:26 PM
True, the ruling party and MSM mouthpieces and their readers and followers are now truly INSANE. Beyond redemption. Staggering in the depth and power of the subversion of so many people, including many with high IQs (like my ex girlfriend and housemate in the US).
Anastasia Deko 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 10:57 AM
US security strategy is committed to global dominance
Absolutely. Biden has filled up his admin with "progressive realists," which when it comes to foreign policy, is just a euphuism for neocons and their lust for world empire. So expect an unleashing of forces in the coming two years that will finally humble America's war machine.
tyke2939 Anastasia Deko 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 01:07 PM
They are desperate for a war with someone but it must be someone they can beat convincingly. It certainly will not be Russia or China and I suspect Iran will be a huge battle even with Israel s backing. More than likely they will invade some country like Venezuela as Syria has Russia covering its back. What a dilemma who to fight.
9/11 Truther Anastasia Deko 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 11:24 AM
The "American war machine" has been humbled from Saigon, Vietnam 1975 to Kabul, Afghanistan.
Salmigoni 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:25 AM
They are not really liberals. They are blood thirsty parasitic neoconservative fascist war mongers working for the Pentagon contractors. General Eisenhower warned us about these evil people. A lot of Americans still do not get it.

[Jan 25, 2021] Politically Navalny is zero. May be even less then zero. And he understands that.

Notable quotes:
"... many of the demonstrators are paid one way on another by the West ..."
Jan 25, 2021 | www.unz.com

Beckow , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 4:32 pm GMT • 6.4 hours ago

@annamaria or wish it well – and everyone knows that.

He must know this. He must also know that his electoral prospects are nil – even if he was allowed to compete and given access. Short of a revolution he is done, and revolution is not coming, too soon. That is not a good place to be. He is in theory protected by his sponsors, but that may not amount to much if things get hot. At best he would get exchanged. Or he can quietly slip away after a few years if he is lucky.

Mulatto did his job, now mulatto can go. A single-use politician who is endlessly promoted, celebrated, and then discarded and forgotten, only to be listed on a sad list of names to demonise the enemy. That enemy is his own country, is that really heroism?

Robjil , says: January 24, 2021 at 5:52 pm GMT • 5.1 hours ago
@annamaria by them.

He is a nationalist like the Maiden. Maiden in power promoted with violence anti-Russian hysteria. This action created a civil war since a large part of Ukraine are Russian speakers.

Navalny, if in power, would do something similar as in Ukraine. Act as a Nationalist of only the Russians in the Russian Federation. Get all the other peoples of the Russian Federation to break away or stir up a civil war.

Within a few years, put in place Zion/USA puppets like Poroshenko and Zelensky. Look at the recent Ukrainegate Impeachment trial, almost everyone supporting Ukrainegate trial was Jewish, even the Ukrainians in this sham trial. .

TheIdiot , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 6:36 pm GMT • 4.3 hours ago

This is not about bringing down Putin but about dismembering Russia and ending its sovereignty

The easiest proxy here is the 1990s campaign against Milosevic (the campaign) as a tool to dismember Yugoslavia

Russia is too rich, too week and is refusing to surrender, hence it will be divided between and

Absorbed on one side by China and on the other side/s by USA and EUSA

The initial planning for disintegration of Russia was drafted in the NSC directive in 1948

West of Russia to Urals will be absorbed by EU/(Germany)
East of Russia to Yenisei will be controlled by US/(Japan)
China will take over hte greatest price – everything between Urals and Yenisei

Putin with his United Russia/One Russia Party is a major obstacle to the master plan and
will therefore
be eliminated
whether one likes it or not

annamaria , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 7:03 pm GMT • 3.9 hours ago
@Beckow s.
After being a popular dissident for some time, Mr. Khdorkovsky is finally looked upon as a crook and murderer. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-khodorkovsky-arrest/russia-wants-khodorkovsky-arrested-abroad-on-murder-charges-idUSKBN0U60PO20151223 .
Mr. Khodorkovsky, a very wealthy Jewish man, is accused of crimes committed during the lawless years of Yeltsin's regime. By supporting Mr. Navalny and Mr. Khodorskovsky, the western presstituting apparatus reminds the world about the fate of Julian Assange, imprisoned by the western injustice system for honest journalism.
Beckow , says: Next New Comment January 24, 2021 at 9:52 pm GMT • 1.1 hours ago
@annamaria from his sponsors are of little use in his current situation.

I find the Western coverage of this affair absurdly propagandistic. A few things are never mentioned:

– what was Navalny convicted off – fraud

– that he is not by any stretch of imagination the "opposition" leader – his party has not reached even 5% required to be represented in the parliament

There is also an omission of why Russia claims "interference" – because US Embassy published the routes for the demos. And many of the demonstrators are paid one way on another by the West – if the situation was reversed, liberals would call for a war (as they basically did with Trump's allegations).

Assange for Navalny would be a win-win.

[Jan 24, 2021] Towards US -Hyper-interventionism- in the Middle East- Biden's Secretary of State Nominee Anthony Blinken by Daniel McAdams

Notable quotes:
"... Not surprisingly, Blinken is a favorite of the AIPAC-bankrolled Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which, as Phil Giraldi reported , Tweeted that Blinken would be part of a " superb national security team. The country will be very fortunate to have them in public service." ..."
"... We have Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to thank for at least bringing up the fact that Blinken has blundered from foreign policy disaster to foreign policy disaster – which only gets you promoted in Washington DC. In Blinken's confirmation hearing, Paul reminded Blinken of his addiction to intervention in the Middle East and how that has worked out for everyone. ..."
"... Yes, Senator Paul is right. "Regime change" doesn't work. It kills or destroys the lives of the most vulnerable. The poor and the innocent. The US enemies may occasionally find themselves on the wrong end of a noose or a knife rape , but it is the civilians who always suffer when they are "liberated" by Washington. ..."
"... Buckle up, as incoming Senate Majority Leader Schumer advised, there's a whole lot of interventionism in the queue. There's a whole lot of death and destruction to be unleashed by Biden, Blinken, and their gang of " humanitarians ." ..."
Jan 23, 2021 | www.globalresearch.ca

By Daniel McAdams Global Research, January 23, 2021 Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity 21 January 2021

While the saccharine continues to ooze from the mainstream media for the incoming Biden Administration, the real iron fist of what will be the Biden foreign policy is starting to materialize. As if on cue, major bombings in Baghdad – by ISIS remember them? – have opened the door for the Biden Administration to not only cancel President Trump's troop drawdown from Iraq but to actually begin sending troops back into Iraq.

Is this to be Iraq War 4.0? 3.7? 5.0? Anybody's guess.

If Biden uses this sudden – and convenient – unrest in Iraq as a trigger to return US troops (and bombs), it should not surprise anyone. As Professor Barbara Ransby points out in this video , Biden did much more to make the disastrous 2003 attack on Iraq happen than just vote "yes" on the authorization to use force. As Professor Ransby reminds us, Biden used the full power of his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to ensure the Senate approved George W. Bush's lie-based war on Iraq. Biden prevented any experts who challenged the "Saddam has WMDs and he's about to use them" narrative from being heard by Members of Congress, guaranteeing that only the pro-war narrative was heard.

As much as Bush or Cheney, Biden owns the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which killed a million Iraqi civilians. And he may well be taking us back.

One figure in the Biden Administration who will play a pivotal role in returning the US to its hyper-interventionism in the Middle East is Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken . As a Biden Senate staffer in 2003, he helped the then-Foreign Relations Committee Chairman put together a pro-war coalition in the Democratic Party to support President Bush's Republican push for invasion.

Later on Blinken was Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor, where he successfully made the case that destroying both Libya and Syria were fantastic ideas. Both countries drowned in the Obama Administration's "liberation" bloodbath and neither country has recovered from the "democracy" brought by Washington, but being a neocon foreign policy ideologue means never having to say you're sorry.

And Blinken isn't.

Not surprisingly, Blinken is a favorite of the AIPAC-bankrolled Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which, as Phil Giraldi reported , Tweeted that Blinken would be part of a " superb national security team. The country will be very fortunate to have them in public service."

We have Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to thank for at least bringing up the fact that Blinken has blundered from foreign policy disaster to foreign policy disaster – which only gets you promoted in Washington DC. In Blinken's confirmation hearing, Paul reminded Blinken of his addiction to intervention in the Middle East and how that has worked out for everyone.

Paul reminded the Secretary of State nominee that his only criticism of the Syria "regime change" plan was that the US did not successfully overthrow Assad. But the US was using jihadist proxies to overthrow the secular Assad , so what does this say about Blinken's judgement?

"The lesson of these wars," said Paul , is that 'regime change' doesn't work!"

Paul added:

Even after Libya you guys went on to Syria wanting to do the same thing again it's a disaster.

You got rid of one 'bad guy' and another 'bad guy' got stronger.

Yes, Senator Paul is right. "Regime change" doesn't work. It kills or destroys the lives of the most vulnerable. The poor and the innocent. The US enemies may occasionally find themselves on the wrong end of a noose or a knife rape , but it is the civilians who always suffer when they are "liberated" by Washington.

Buckle up, as incoming Senate Majority Leader Schumer advised, there's a whole lot of interventionism in the queue. There's a whole lot of death and destruction to be unleashed by Biden, Blinken, and their gang of " humanitarians ."

*

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[Jan 24, 2021] They forgot nothing and they learned nothing: In 2014, ignoring the warning of Robert F. Kennedy of the need to put yourself in the other Country's shoes, Biden supported the violent Coup which essentially included a violent takeover of the Ukrainian Parliament (Rada) by violent protesters, similar to taking over the US Capitol on January 6, 2021

Jan 24, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

Mike Lamb , January 23, 2021 at 15:00

After the Coup in Ukraine in 2014 for several years I listened weekly to the John Batchelor show when he interviewed Russia scholar the late Stephen Cohen.
From those conversations I learned that Ukraine is politically divided EAST (pro European Union) / WEST (pro Russian) (a bit like the United States is divided RED / BLUE).
Politically by vote Ukraine was close to 50% pro E.U., 50% pro Russia.
After the Coup Crimea voted to return to Russia thus making the political breakdown of Ukraine more pro E.U.

Forbes Magazine in 2008 republished an interview with Soviet critic Alexander Solzhenitsyn

see: forbes.com/2008/08/05/solzhenitsyn-forbes-interview-oped-cx_pm_0804russia.html?sh=593c65b65f53

Solzhenitsyn, among other things, noted 1) in 1919 Lenin in bringing Ukraine into the Soviet Union gave Ukraine "several Russian provinces to assuage her feelings," 2) that when in 1954 Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine Sevastopol was not transferred to Ukraine as Sevastopol was a military city subject to the Central Government of the U.S.S.R.

I would note that Khrushchev's transfer of Crimea to Ukraine violated Soviet Law / Constitution as the people of Crimea were not asked if they wanted to be transferred.

At the time I did some searching about the history of Crimea and Ukraine and it turns out that shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union Crimea wanted to separate from Ukraine and the Central Government of Ukraine threatened to invade Crimea.

The Central Government of Ukraine in its Constitution gave Crimea a special status not given other provinces.

I would note that in October 1962 Joe Biden was 19 years 11 months old and likely a college student. In October 1962 the world came close to ending (at least a good deal of the so called civilized world) with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

However, in 2014, ignoring the warning of Robert F. Kennedy of the need to put yourself in the other Country's shoes, Biden supported the violent Coup which essentially included a violent takeover of the Ukrainian Parliament (Rada) by violent protesters, much akin to the Trump Taliban taking over the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It seems that Biden thought that NATO could just move into Sevastopol and take over not just the port of the Russian navy, but the Russian Navy itself.

[Jan 24, 2021] Russiagate Ain't Over

For Russiagates burning witches at the stake looks like not such a bad tradition, after all.
Jan 22, 2021 | consortiumnews.com
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Even in victory the Democrats are rearing the ugly head of Russiagate to further vanquish the vanquished and protect their power, writes Joe Lauria.

Hillary Clinton. (Evan Guest/Wikimedia Common)

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

R ussiagate was an invention to help explain away Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016 and to undermine the legitimacy of the man who beat her.

Now that that man himself has been defeated, and a Democrat is back in the White House, one would think it was over. But Russiagate has proved too useful an instrument to discard. It beat up not only Donald Trump, but riled Russia too. It was an elixir for CNN's and MSNBC's ratings.

And now Russiagate is poised to be used again against Russia, Trump and Trump voters. The latter are way more than "deplorable" now. They are "cult members" and a threat.

Democrats are surely sticking to the Russiagate story as sure as it was exposed as pure opposition research stitched up to appear as a serious intelligence assessment.

Last Friday Clinton invited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi onto her podcast to discuss the events at the Capitol. In the middle of it, Clinton, who has no official position in the Biden administration, revealed the power she has behind the scenes. She brought up the topic by asking Pelosi:

"We learned a lot about our system of government over the last four years with a president who disdains democracy and -- as you have said numerous times -- has other agendas. What they all are, I don't think we yet know. I hope historically we will find out who he's beholden to, who pulls his strings."

"I would love to see his phone records to see whether he was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol," Clinton went on. "We now know that -- not just him, but his enablers, his accomplices, his cult members -- have the same disregard for democracy."

As if those words weren't astonishing enough, Clinton made a startling policy proposal. She wanted to know if Pelosi thought the U.S. needs "a 9/11-type commission to investigate and report everything that they can pull together." Sounding as if this were pre-arranged, Pelosi responded, "I do." She added: "I don't know what Putin has on him, politically, financially or personally."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1351297926769872899&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F01%2F22%2Frussiagate-aint-over%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Normally before any investigation can begin there has to be some prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. There has to be something to investigate. But in this instance all there is is wild speculation. Speculation that Trump may have been on the phone with Putin while Trump supporters marauded through the halls of Congress.

The Usefulness of Russiagate

Repeatedly blaming Russia allows Democrats to deny the role they have played in the devastation of working and formerly middle class Americans–which helped elect Trump and fueled the assault on the Capitol.

Rather than enact a social democratic agenda that will repair the damage done to the poor and working class from 40 years of bi-partisan economic neoliberalism, the Democrats, now in control of Congress and the White House, continue to smear their enemies as Russian agents, while threatening a domestic War on Terror and even more surveillance. (It's not enough that Trump is gone and led a mostly disastrous presidency and that many of his followers were duped by him.)

Russiagate is also too useful to discard because it is a tool for politicians to get out of sticky situations. In previous years, if a publication revealed a politician's corruption and it was completely verified, that politician in most cases would eventually resign.

Today that politician can override the truth of the exposure by falsely blaming a hostile foreign power for being behind it. The corruption story is still true, but now the focus is on who leaked it, which is irrelevant. (U.S. prosecutors routinely use evidence from criminals turned informants to nail bigger fish.)

Such of course was the case with WikiLeaks ' publication of the Clinton and Podesta emails. (Even though Russia was immediately blamed, four DNC officials did resign , including the chairwoman -- "sacrificial lambs" from the party's perspective to keep Clinton in place.)

Beyond that, Russiagate has been a convenient and successful strategy of deflection from one's own responsibility for America's social and political crises.

The message is that the destruction of American democracy has nothing to do with bipartisan approval of money's corruption of politics, and vast overspending on the military instead of on education, health care and infrastructure.

Instead it is all being engineered by an evil genius in the Kremlin -- a virtual James Bond villain. The adolescent level of political education in the public, and in much of the media , creates fertile ground for such a grand deception to flourish.

It is more absurd and transparent to suggest that Moscow had something to do with the Capitol uprising than it did with the 2016 election.

Despite four years and counting of Democratic Party propaganda about Trump conspiring with Russia to steal the 2016 election, a $32 million, 22-month investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of any conspiracy.

Shawn Henry, the head of the company CrowdStrike hired by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign (while keeping the FBI away) to examine the DNC servers declared under oath to the House Intelligence Committee that no evidence of a hack was discovered.

Despite this, the Russiagate saga is still believed by millions of Americans, bolstered by Congressional studies that relied on intelligence briefings. Mueller and Henry were legally obliged to tell the truth. Intelligence agencies aren't.

And now Clinton and Pelosi will shamelessly reinvigorate the Moscow-menace malarkey (h/t Biden) into a risky, renewed tension with Russia, which just might work nicely with the hawks in Joe Biden's cabinet.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe , and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London and began his professional career as a stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe


Consortiumnews.com , January 23, 2021 at 19:02

Ranking Member Mr. [Adam] Schiff: Do you know the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data from the DNC? when would that have been?

Mr. Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have no indicators that it was exfiltrated (sic). There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don't have the evidence that says it actually left.

Mr. [Chris] Stewart of Utah: Okay. What about the emails that everyone is so, you know, knowledgeable of? Were there also indicators that they were prepared but not evidence that they actually were exfiltrated?

Mr. Henry: There's not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There's circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.

Mr. Stewart: But you have a much lower degree of confidence that this data actually left than you do, for example, that the Russians were the ones who breached the security?

Mr. Henry: There is circumstantial evidence that that data was exfiltrated off the network.

Mr. Stewart: And circumstantial is less sure than the other evidence you've indicated.

Mr. Henry: "We didn't have a sensor in place that saw data leave. We said that the data left based on the circumstantial evidence. That was the conclusion that we made.

In answer to a follow-up query on this line of questioning, Henry delivered this classic: "Sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate, that we didn't see the data leave, but we believe it left, based on what we saw."

Cadogan Parry , January 23, 2021 at 13:25

The late Robert Parry astutely asked "Why Not a Probe of 'Israel-gate'?" (CN-20-April-2017).

It still seems that no extreme is too extreme for ever-compliant US media to protect the American people from any critical thinking about Israeli political-influence-and-propaganda campaigns and the vigorously bi-partisan pro-Israel Lobby.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu personally welcomed convicted spy Pollard (30-Dec-2020) and Sheldon Adelson's corpse (11-Jan-2021) to Israel. On his last half-day in office, Trump granted full pardon to Pollard's Israeli handler.

"Well everybody's dancin' in a ring around the sun
Nobody's finished, we ain't even begun."
– Grateful Dead (1967), "The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)"

Kamulegeya , January 23, 2021 at 09:48

It's amazing. Are Americans so gullible not to see that? But also one wonders,Who Rules America or USA for that matter?


robert e williamson jr
, January 23, 2021 at 12:08

Who rules America? Kamulegeya come closer so I don't have to shout. Not so much gullible as uncaring, intimidated, and over whelmed.

The CIA calls the shots, the remainder of the intelligence community falls in line with with CIA, the State Department plays middle man for the intel community throwing their support behind what ever the caper is and if any problems develop with the process the DOJ always rules in favor of keeping all the secrets secret, even despite them not knowing the truth. After the right senators are contacted.

This all starts at the top stays at the top, the part of the Deep State that delivers to those elites I often talk about, those super wealthy elitist the SWETS.

The President oft times don't know sickem and far too ofte don't want to know what is going on himself.

Hell, what could go wrong.

[Jan 24, 2021] That the emails were indeed leaked to Wikileaks, not provided to Assange by mysterious, non-existing "Guccifer 2.0" hackers

Jan 24, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

William David Fusfield , January 22, 2021 at 10:37

Another fine, well-articulated article, nicely debunking once again the risible "Russiagate" hoax which the establishment, DNC-directed Dems just can't seem to let go of, at least as long as the general American public has not yet been provided with any thorough debunking, -- of the type, say, that Bill Binney is STILL unsuccessfully trying to interest the MSM to cover -- as long, that is, as the still largely uncritical mass of the MSMs' audiences remain easy "marks" for such ostensibly "official" conspiracy theories, especially those having the solid support of 17, oops, 1, intelligence agency, oops, 1 former CIA director, and a couple of other old timers who were dragooned into declaring before a congressional committee that they too believed that Russian interference in our elections was at least "highly probable."

Clearly only with a very wide dissemination of the truths about Russiagate, only with a refutation reaching out well beyond the recipients of the alternative press, only with one which is easily available to, and comprehensible by the general public are we likely to see any retraction or diminution of the many spurious reiterated Russiaphobic accusations from the Dems. Just how to facilitate such a wide-ranging dissemination of a sensible deconstruction and refutation of the hoax is, of course, a huge remaining problem for all of us determined to bring the truth to as many of our compatriots as possible.

While I completely agree with all that you have written, Joe, I would like to comment on two things you mentioned in passing. First, just as you say, the Dems are claiming that the U.S. needs "a 9/11-type commission to investigate and report everything" about Russian interference. Such a demand is quite humorous even just taken upon its literal meaning, since, if there is one thing that is NOT needed it is precisely something like the chaotically hobbled together, -- and in the face of great opposition from the Bush administration, -- intentionally starved of funds, de facto whitewash, produced by the "just accidentally" amazingly pro-Zionist 9/11 commission, a report that was even quickly disowned by several of its authors as just such a political whitewash upon its release!

But even if we assume our goodly Dems mean to call for some more serious, fair-minded, disinterested, inquiry into the actual facts behind the great Russiagate hoax, that too is something the Dems could hardly be serious about commissioning since it would presumably only quickly reveal just what so many of us have been arguing for four years now, most specifically, inter alia, that the DNC emails, including Hillary Clinton's illegally unsecured emails, could not possibly have been obtained through a Russian, or any other kind of "hack," but merely through an on-site download of the files onto a thumb drive, something which can be, and demonstrably was, accomplished in only a fraction of the time any hack would require, and the subsequently physical delivery of that thumb drive to Wikileaks.

That the emails were indeed leaked to Wikileaks, not provided to Assange by mysterious, non-existing "Guccifer 2.0" hackers, as still claimed in the official account, has also been maintained consistently by Julian Assange himself, much to the always deaf ears of the MSM. Indeed, anyone with more curiosity and intelligence than a grapefruit can easily determine, both from Assange's own actions apropos the matter, and from other evidence, including a direct naming of the person, provided by those who were closely associated with Wikileaks at the time, exactly who it was who hand-delivered the thumb drive in question to Assange. But this truth of the matter, while easy to obtain, also destroys what little remains of the ONLY link the Dems have which allegedly ties Trump to the genetically nefarious Russians, which is why, of course, Mueller declined to interview Assange, even though the latter was quite willing to set him straight. And so, all the conspiracy seeking Dems can do, aside from admitting it was a hoax from the git go, which they are certainly unlikely to do, is double down on their conspiratorial nonsense while hoping that its debunking remains confined to the easily demonized "alternative" press, as, alas, it has been so far.

And thus, just to coin a new phrase, we can say that; "Russiagate lives on because the moment for its demise [i.e. public refutation] was missed." Well, mostly missed, that is, since a few of us, and first among them all of you at Consortium News, didn't miss the disingenuous legerdemain at all, but spoke out clearly against it, albeit not yet in a manner that could have finished the employment of such a pack of obvious lies off once and for all in the minds of the American people.

P.S.: At the risk of displaying my ignorance about such things, what does "h/t Biden" mean?


Anna
, January 22, 2021 at 13:43

The FBI still did not look at Seth Rich's computer.
Meanwhile, the fraudsters at CrowdStrike have been prospering and those who hired a foreign agent Steele to slander POTUS were not punished as traitors.

[Jan 24, 2021] What is particularly hard to fathom is not so much the gross dishonesty and malice of politicians like H. Clinton and Pelosi but the boneheaded stupidity and ignorance of the broad population that accepts fables like Russiagate as fact

Jan 24, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

.


PEG , January 22, 2021 at 15:06

What is particularly hard to fathom is not so much the gross dishonesty and malice of politicians like H. Clinton and Pelosi but the boneheaded stupidity and ignorance of the broad population that accepts fables like Russiagate as fact.

This is a testament to the immense power of propaganda, when repeated on a daily basis by the mass media.

Joe Lauria says convincingly, "Russiagate was an invention to help explain away Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016 and to undermine the legitimacy of the man who beat her."

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, the "stab in the back legend" in post-World War I Germany was an invention by the extreme right wing and later Nazis to help explain away Germany's defeat in that war and to undermine the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic, putting the blame on domestic "enemies" in cahoots with foreign adversaries.

Very much the same thing.

Russiagate was aimed at President Trump and a foreign enemy. Now, following the "new 9/11" of the Capitol Riot and planned domestic "antiterrorism" legislation, it looks like the state will mainly go after "domestic enemies". A new Reichstag Fire has occurred. The parallels are becoming ever more apparent.

Bob In Portland , January 22, 2021 at 18:51

Russiagate was well afoot in the summer of 2016. It wasn't merely to slander Trump. It was to prepare us for a war against Russia.

If I had access to network time I'd ask: If Russiagate is true, and if you have proof, why wasn't Trump charged with treason? You had two chances to do it but Democratic leadership never thought to bring it up. How curious.

DH Fabian , January 22, 2021 at 22:01

Yes. Just one point: Russia wasn't a "foreign enemy" until the Clintonites falsely claimed that they somehow interfered with the 2016 election. Russia was a solid ally in both world wars. Since the Perestroika era, united efforts of US and Russian scientists brought extraordinary progress. There was solid unity from the fall of the Soviet state in the 1990s, until the Clintonites falsely accused Russia of some sort of "election interference." This is how the Democrats destroyed decades of diplomatic progress toward nuclear disarmament.

PEG , January 23, 2021 at 05:16

I agree – I didn't mean "enemy" in the literal sense, but rather in the sense you refer to.

JohnO , January 23, 2021 at 12:43

Russian propaganda from the beginning has always and ever been to secure vast sums of revenue from the people's' taxes, and to scare the crap out of those same people. When Truman dropped the first A-bomb on Hiroshima, he remarked that 'this will let the Russians know that we are serious', or words to that effect. He slaughtered an urban populace to make a point! And generations of Americans were raised in fear of Russians and nuclear war.
The current state of domestic surveillance is a self-conscious recognition, I believe, of the wholly irresponsible policies of the two parties. Third-rate healthcare, pathetic public education, mass incarceration, and massive deregulation in the industrial and financial sectors. All to pay for wars and control across the globe. It is an arrangement that will continue to provoke protests, insurrection and conspiracy theorizing.

evelync , January 22, 2021 at 13:43

I find it amusing that the top ranks of the political hacks whose psy-ops that use Russia as the great threat against "the most powerful country in the world" – these hacks choose to ignore the real, the relevant investigation that should be in the forefront – the money trails of Trump's so called financial empire – the banks, the oligarchs, the money laundering – the sources of his funding over the years who really would have had the opportunity to push him around ..
Investigating the finances may be too uncomfortable for them to examine .. Even though his financial schemes hurt real people – wages unpaid, debts unpaid; bankruptcies; students betrayed.

On another note – Amy Goodman on Democracy Now's 1/21/21 news summary pointed out that the Biden Administration was sticking with Gaido being the "recognized" leader of Venezuela ..the democratically elected Maduro remains the target, apparently .
meanwhile FT writes that the "EU dropped its de facto recognition of Juan Guaidó as Venezuela's interim president, a serious diplomatic setback to the opposition leader's faltering campaign to oust Nicolás Maduro from power."

wikipedia:
"Venezuela is a major producer and exporter of minerals, notably bauxite, coal, gold, iron ore, and oil, and the state controls most of the country's vast mineral reserves. In 2003 estimated reserves of bauxite totaled 5.2 million tons."

countries in South America with Lithium ( used in batteries for electric vehicles) and who have democratic minded politicians who think their people should get some benefit from the country's resources watch out for other U.S favored Guaidó's ..

Anonymot , January 22, 2021 at 13:11

Thanks for raising the subject, Joe.

It's really to ridiculous to merit a reply. One would think an honest party would have excreted Hillary Clinton by now, but no, they can't. She still owns the DNC as I've repeated for years and note that Neither Joe Biden nor Harris nor any member of Biden's cabinet would be there without the DNC/Hillary stamp of approval. Buttigieg's appearance in a cabinet level post is solely her doing, for he has zero qualifications for that post. His presence is the equivalent of hers as Secretary of State- to give credence to his qualifications on hid next run for President. She failed hers; we'll see about his.

Hillary's handlers are the dangerous ones.

Dorothy Sillman Crouch , January 22, 2021 at 13:01

My greatest fear with Biden was that he would find a place for Hillary in his administration. My understanding of what happened during the 2016 primary was those emails downloaded at the DNC revealed what they were doing to take down Bernie as a candidate so that Hillary would be the Democratic candidate with the niave assumption she could win over Trump. Big mistake. Hillary has never been a viable candidate. And of course the DNC never wanted to sponsor a Socialist like Bernie. I was very concerned after the election of Trump that my Democratic state senators continued to insist Russia was involved. Blame Russia has been the mantra of the Democratic Party ever since. As suggested Bill Binney tried to disproved that connection but the party didn't want to hear that. I agree with John Chuckman in his appraisal of Putin. I would never want to see Biden revive the 'blame Russia' mantra. Someone suggested we had to feed the military industrial complex so that's why it happened. Needs to stop.

[Jan 24, 2021] I wonder how many people picked up Pres. Biden's passing reference to Russia paying bounties for American scalps (in Afghanistan). It was a 24-hr. story long ago and died quickly for lack of evidence and logic. But Biden keeps using it, as he did in one of the 'debates' with Trump.

Jan 24, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

allan millard , January 23, 2021 at 01:55

I wonder how many people picked up Pres. Biden's passing reference to Russia paying bounties for American scalps (in Afghanistan). It was a 24-hr. story long ago and died quickly for lack of evidence and logic. But Biden keeps using it, as he did in one of the 'debates' with Trump. Two questions arise. 1. Does Biden really believe the story or does he use it to score patriotism points? Either way it reflects very badly on him. 2. Is the bounty myth a distant cousin of Russiagate or is it a signal of a renewed pursuit of the Cold War by Biden and his hawkish appointees?

Mikhailovich , January 23, 2021 at 00:56

US politicians will carry on with their Russo-phobia anyway. What really is good about the new administration, they are not so keen for a new nuclear arm race as Trump was. It looks, the new administration is less subordinate to the military industrial complex.

[Jan 24, 2021] Widespread arrests dozens of police injured in pro-Navalny protests in Russia as organizers say MORE TO COME next weekend

Jan 24, 2021 | www.rt.com

In this headline alone there is one information that already proves beyond all reasonable doubt the pro-Navalny protests are just an artificial, pathetic color revolution attempt: "next weekend".

Didn't know revolutions had to wait for weekends to happen...

I can smell the fetid aroma of the middle class and the petite bourgeoisie from thousands of kilometers of distance - that's my gift and my curse. And I can tell you those pro-Navalny protesters stink from that smell.

[Jan 24, 2021] What poisoning?

Jan 24, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

Anne , January 23, 2021 at 12:01

What poisoning? Hmm?? Interesting that the Skripal affair and the Navalny one (the latter for sure a put up job from start to finish) did not end in deaths NOR were any other people (children, ducks, restaurant workers, hospital staff, daughter of British army nurse in first "case"; Navalny's supporters/workers what have you, hotel workers, airplane cleaners, EMS, Omsk/Tomsk (sorry don't recall) hospital workers) affected at all – but isn't "Novichok" supposed to be the deadliest of nerve agents no cure yet the Skrips and Navalny survived and NO ONE else affected

And the stories about how this so-called deadliest of poisons was administered kept changing – in part at least because not few in the public and in the none MSM kept questioning the reality of the presented story

Re Navalny: a) why would the "Kremlin" order his killing via a nerve agent that screams "Russia did it" unless you believe that Russia and Mr Putin are clodpolls?; b) Navalny only has around 3% support among some of the Russian population; c) Why, after he had been saved in Omsk/Tomsk would the Kremlin agree to his being transferred to a hospital in Germany and that Charite Hospital in particular (known to have German govt connections) had the order for his being "poisoned" gone out from the Russian govt?; d) Navalny had been charged and convicted of Fraud and his prison sentence "reduced" to monthly appearances at court – probation, essentially his five months collaborating (well the whole affair was a collaboration, and a nicely remunerated one, no doubt) with the west in Germany meant that he broke the terms of his probation/sentence which was why he was arrested on his return.

Don't tell me he and his Handlers didn't know precisely what they – he was – were doing when they had him return They knew he would be arrested (as would anyone in the west under similar judicial orders – but don't expect to hear that on NPR or the BBC World Service, oh no all confected horror and outrage )

[Jan 22, 2021] Neoliberal international order needs Russia as enemy to galvanize West

Notable quotes:
"... Consequently, there is no sense of irony among the McFauls of the world as US security strategy is committed to global dominance, while berating Russia for "revisionism." ..."
Jan 22, 2021 | www.rt.com

By Glenn Diesen , Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway, and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal. Follow him on Twitter @glenndiesen

Donald Trump's efforts to reduce the ideologically driven base of US foreign policy fuelled great resentment among those who believed it betrayed Washington's leadership position in the so-called "liberal international order."

Now that power has changed, will the pendulum swing in the opposite direction, with Joe Biden's administration applying a radical ideological foreign policy?

A recent article by Michael McFaul, once Barack Obama's ambassador to Russia and a noted 'Russiagate' conspiracy theorist, indicates what such an ideological foreign policy would look like. McFaul's article, 'How to Contain Putin's Russia', makes a case for a containment policy.

Containment: learning from the past or living in the past?

To advance his argument, McFaul quotes George Kennan, the author of the Long Telegram and architect of erstwhile US containment policy against the Soviet Union. McFaul suggests that Kennan's advocacy for a "patient but firm and vigilant containment" against the revolutionary Bolshevik regime 75 years ago remains as valid as ever.

It would have made more sense to quote Kennan when he condemned NATO expansionism and predicted it would trigger another Cold War. As Kennan noted: "there was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves."

Kennan continued to express disbelief over the rhetoric by the misinformed US leadership, presenting "Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime." Kennan then went on to correctly predict that, when Russia would eventually react to US provocations, the NATO expanders would wrongfully blame Russia.

ALSO ON RT.COM Biden hopes for 5-year extension of New START nuclear treaty while seeking to demonize Russia for 'hacking, meddling & bounties'

Ideologues often have nostalgia for the Cold War, when the bipolar power distribution was supported by a clear and comfortable ideological divide. The Western bloc represented capitalism, Christianity, and democracy, while the Eastern bloc represented communism, atheism, and authoritarianism. This ideological divide supported internal cohesion within the Western bloc and drew clear borders with the adversary.

The liberal international order has attempted to recast the former capitalist-communist divide with a liberal-authoritarian divide. However, the ideological incompatibility between American liberalism and Russian conservatism is less convincing. For example, McFaul cautions against Putin's nefarious conservative ideology committed to "Christian, traditional family values" that threatens the liberal international order.

The new ideological divide nonetheless advances neo-McCarthyism in the West. McFaul presents a list of European conservatives and populists that should be treated as American conservatives, purged from political life as enemies of the liberal international order and thus possible agents of Russia. Hillary Clinton even suggested that the Capitol Hill riots were possibly coordinated by Trump and Putin – yes, Russiagate is here to stay. The solution, for McFaul, is for American tech oligarchs to manipulate algorithms to protect populations from Russian-friendly media.

An American ideological project

McFaul cautions against what he refers to as "Putin's ideological project" as a threat to the liberal international order. Yet he is reluctant to recognize that the liberal international order is an American ideological project for the post-Cold War era.

READ MORE: With no sign of US returning to fold, Russia is preparing to withdraw from 'Open Skies' treaty - Foreign Ministry

After the Cold War, liberal ideologues advanced what was seemingly a benign proposition – suggesting that liberal democracy should be at the center of security strategies. However, by linking liberal norms to US leadership, liberalism became both a constitutional principle and an international hegemonic norm.

NATO is presented as a community of liberal values – without mentioning that its second largest member, Turkey, is more conservative and authoritarian than Russia – and Moscow does not, therefore, have any legitimate reasons to oppose expansionism unless it fears democracy. If Russia reacts negatively to military encirclement, it is condemned as an enemy of democracy, and NATO has a moral responsibility to revert to its original mission as a military bloc containing Russia.

Case in point: there was nobody in Moscow advocating for the reunification with Crimea until the West supported the coup in Ukraine. Yet, as Western "fact checkers" and McFaul inform us, there was a "democratic revolution" and not a coup. Committed to his ideological prism, McFaul suggests that Russia acted out of a fear of having a democracy on its borders, as it would give hope to Russians and thus threaten the Kremlin. McFaul's ideological lens masks conflicting national security interests, and it fails to explain why Russia does not mind democratic neighbors in the east, such as South Korea and Japan, with whom it enjoys good relations.

Defending the peoples

States aspiring for global hegemony have systemic incentives to embrace ideologies that endow them with the right to defend other peoples. The French National Convention declared in 1792 that France would "come to the aid of all peoples who are seeking to recover their liberty," and the Bolsheviks proclaimed in 1917 "the duty to render assistance, armed, if necessary, to the fighting proletariat of the other countries."

The American liberal international order similarly aims to liberate the people of the world with "democracy promotion" and "humanitarian interventionism" when it conveniently advances US primacy. The American ideological project infers that democracy is advanced by US interference in the domestic affairs of Russia, while democracy is under attack if Russia interferes in the domestic affairs of US. The liberal international system is one of sovereign inequality to advance global primacy.

READ MORE Putin says American presence in Afghanistan is beneficial to Moscow's interests, rubbishes claims of 'Russian bounties to Taliban'

McFaul does not consider himself a Russophobe, as believes his attacks against Russia are merely motivated by the objective of liberating Russians from their government, which is why he advocates that Biden "distinguish between Russia and Russians – between Putin and the Russian people." This has been the modus operandi for regime change since the end of the Cold War – the US supposedly does not attack countries to advance its interests, it only altruistically assists foreign peoples in rival states against their leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin etc.

McFaul and other liberal ideologues still refer to NATO as a "defensive alliance," which does not make much sense after the attacks on Yugoslavia in 1999 or Libya in 2011. However, under the auspices of liberal internationalism, NATO is defensive, as it defends the people of the world. Russia, therefore, doesn't have rational reasons for opposing the liberal international order.

McFaul condemns alleged efforts by Russia to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US, before outlining his strategies for interfering in the domestic affairs of Russia. McFaul blames Russian paranoia for shutting down American "non-governmental organizations" that are funded by the US government and staffed by people linked to the US security apparatus. He goes on to explain that the US government must counter this by establishing new "non-government organizations" to educate the Russian public about the evils of their government.

The dangerous appeal of ideologues

Ideologues have always been dangerous to international security. Ideologies of human freedom tend to promise perpetual peace. Yet, instead of transcending power politics, the ideals of human freedom are linked directly to hegemonic power by the self-proclaimed defender of the ideology. When ideologues firmly believe that the difference between the current volatile world and utopia can be bridged by defeating its opponents, it legitimizes radical power politics.

Consequently, there is no sense of irony among the McFauls of the world as US security strategy is committed to global dominance, while berating Russia for "revisionism."

Raymond Aaron once wrote: "Idealistic diplomacy slips too often into fanaticism; it divides states into good and evil, into peace-loving and bellicose. It envisions a permanent peace by the punishment of the latter and the triumph of the former. The idealist, believing he has broken with power politics, exaggerates its crimes."

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Jan 22, 2021] Blinken who looks like more dangerous variant of Pompeo

Notable quotes:
"... "Blinken acknowledged that the US must set an example at home on what it preaches abroad. He also stressed the need for "humility". But he insisted nonetheless that the US' global leadership "still matters" since the world is incapable of organising itself "when we're not leading," as some other country may usurp America's lead role impacting "our interests and values", or, simply, chaos may follow! ..."
"... At any rate, Blinken has pledged to "revitalise American diplomacy" and address the challenges of "rising nationalism, reseeding democracy, growing rivalry from China, and Russia and other authoritarian states, mounting threats to a stable and open international system and a technological revolution that is reshaping every aspect of our lives, especially in cyberspace." ..."
Jan 22, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Jan 21 2021 0:50 utc | 114

James @ 36 and onwards:

I would not set too much store by Plato's political philosophy. For Plato, the political ideal was a society of three layers: philosopher kings who rule, guardians (the military), producers / workers.

Ideally philosopher kings would be trained from childhood, adolescence or young adulthood onwards to be rational and to think in terms of what is best for society as a whole. They would be trained to be selfless and to shun the pursuit of material wealth.

There are many criticisms that can be made of Plato's ideal society. One such criticism among others is that philosopher kings / rulers may have a very narrow idea of what is best for society as a whole and may lead their people into trouble with, erm, "noble lies" (in whatever form the propaganda and the cultural conditioning take - and when does a "noble" lie cease to be "noble" and become just plain outright manipulation and falsehood?) if they confuse their own interests with the interests of society, when the reality is that their interests as philosopher kings and the interests of the rest of society are far apart.

The irony I've just uncovered is that the present system of government that exists in the US looks a little too much like Plato's ideal.

james , Jan 21 2021 3:42 utc | 134

@ Jen | Jan 21 2021 0:50 utc | 114... thanks jen... i was waiting to find out from juliania, but i appreciate your take on this which seems fairly informed... i know nothing about all of it, but it was an interesting idea cross purposing bidens inaugurations speech with platos idea of a or the noble lie... the problem with ideals, is they are hard to live in reality, thus they remain ideals only.. it sems philosopher kings and political leaders rely heavily on ideals to make a pitch to the public.. not everyone is receptive to them though... thanks for your input!

M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Blinken's diplomatic cart will have a bumpy ride

"Blinken acknowledged that the US must set an example at home on what it preaches abroad. He also stressed the need for "humility". But he insisted nonetheless that the US' global leadership "still matters" since the world is incapable of organising itself "when we're not leading," as some other country may usurp America's lead role impacting "our interests and values", or, simply, chaos may follow!

Now, that's an extraordinary boast so soon after the Capitol Riots whose leitmotif was Chaos in capital "C". Blinken made a laughable claim. But it also betrays delusional thinking.

At any rate, Blinken has pledged to "revitalise American diplomacy" and address the challenges of "rising nationalism, reseeding democracy, growing rivalry from China, and Russia and other authoritarian states, mounting threats to a stable and open international system and a technological revolution that is reshaping every aspect of our lives, especially in cyberspace."

[Jan 22, 2021] Blinken is an unrepentant, unapologetic openly zionist

Jan 22, 2021 | www.unz.com

Mustapha Mond , says: January 22, 2021 at 12:52 am GMT • 1.2 hours ago

@follyofwar hat Trump did not, and for which Trump deserves credit: NOT attacking Iran; NOT starting a war in the Donbass region of Ukraine; and NOT escalating the attack on Syria to the point where Syria collapses and Al-Nusra and ISIS terrorists take over (which is what Israel has openly said they would prefer to Assad!) And I am NOT a 'Trumper', think he was a disgusting zionist boot-licker, and that he didn't do diddly squat of what he promised to do for the average American, but sure kissed Wall Street's bottom. The problem is, Bidet may be worse, if his past is any indication.

Regardless, the next four years are gonna be ugly, really ugly, foreign policy-wise, I'm afraid ..

[Jan 22, 2021] Blinken who looks like more dangerious variant of Pompeo has pledged to "revitalise American diplomacy" and address the challenges of "rising nationalism, reseeding democracy, growing rivalry from China, and Russia and other authoritarian states, mounting threats to a stable and open international system and a technological revolution that is reshaping every aspect of our lives, especially in cyberspace."

Jan 22, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Jan 21 2021 0:50 utc | 114

James @ 36 and onwards:

I would not set too much store by Plato's political philosophy. For Plato, the political ideal was a society of three layers: philosopher kings who rule, guardians (the military), producers / workers.

Ideally philosopher kings would be trained from childhood, adolescence or young adulthood onwards to be rational and to think in terms of what is best for society as a whole. They would be trained to be selfless and to shun the pursuit of material wealth.

There are many criticisms that can be made of Plato's ideal society. One such criticism among others is that philosopher kings / rulers may have a very narrow idea of what is best for society as a whole and may lead their people into trouble with, erm, "noble lies" (in whatever form the propaganda and the cultural conditioning take - and when does a "noble" lie cease to be "noble" and become just plain outright manipulation and falsehood?) if they confuse their own interests with the interests of society, when the reality is that their interests as philosopher kings and the interests of the rest of society are far apart.

The irony I've just uncovered is that the present system of government that exists in the US looks a little too much like Plato's ideal.

james , Jan 21 2021 3:42 utc | 134

@ Jen | Jan 21 2021 0:50 utc | 114... thanks jen... i was waiting to find out from juliania, but i appreciate your take on this which seems fairly informed... i know nothing about all of it, but it was an interesting idea cross purposing bidens inaugurations speech with platos idea of a or the noble lie... the problem with ideals, is they are hard to live in reality, thus they remain ideals only.. it sems philosopher kings and political leaders rely heavily on ideals to make a pitch to the public.. not everyone is receptive to them though... thanks for your input!

M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Blinken's diplomatic cart will have a bumpy ride

"Blinken acknowledged that the US must set an example at home on what it preaches abroad. He also stressed the need for "humility". But he insisted nonetheless that the US' global leadership "still matters" since the world is incapable of organising itself "when we're not leading," as some other country may usurp America's lead role impacting "our interests and values", or, simply, chaos may follow!

Now, that's an extraordinary boast so soon after the Capitol Riots whose leitmotif was Chaos in capital "C". Blinken made a laughable claim. But it also betrays delusional thinking. At any rate, Blinken has pledged to "revitalise American diplomacy" and address the challenges of "rising nationalism, reseeding democracy, growing rivalry from China, and Russia and other authoritarian states, mounting threats to a stable and open international system and a technological revolution that is reshaping every aspect of our lives, especially in cyberspace."

[Jan 22, 2021] Strong parallels between the demonization of him and Russia and how Jews were blamed for just about everything during the Thirties by Ray McGovern

Notable quotes:
"... Oliver Stone told me recently that, in one of his conversations in Russia, Mr. Putin, somewhat exasperated, said something along the lines of, "Now Russians are thought of like Jews before World War II". Think about that. ..."
"... But clearly, Putin is also aware of the parallels between the demonization of him and Russia and how Jews were blamed for just about everything during the Thirties. Evidence-free accusations by the likes of Pelosi and Clinton will make the task of restoring a modicum of trust an uphill battle. ..."
Jan 21, 2021 | original.antiwar.com

Posted on January 21, 2021

Interviewed by Mrs. Clinton Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi eagerly rose to the bait when Clinton spoke of "her concerns that the outgoing commander-in-chief was compromised by the Kremlin". Setting the stage, Clinton expressed the hope that "we'll find out who he [Trump] is beholden to, "who pulls his strings".

Clinton added ominously: "I would love to see his phone records to see whether he was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol". She then asked Pelosi if the nation needs "a 9/11-type commission to investigate and report everything they can pull together." Pelosi agreed on the need for such a commission, and proceeded to burnish her own anti-Putin credentials:

"As I said to him [Trump] in that picture with my blue suit pointing rudely at him, 'With you Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin.''

Pelosi conceded that she does not know 'what Putin has on him politically, financially, or personally, but what happened last week was a gift to Putin."

Putin's Useful Idiots?

Pelosi added, "And these people, unbeknownst to them, they are Putin puppets. They were doing Putin's business when they did that at the incitement of an insurrection by the president so, yes, we should have a 9/11 commission and there is strong support in the Congress for that."

What leaps out of this Clinton-Pelosi pas de deux is who is leading the dance. Clinton hints broadly (not, of course, for the first time) that Putin is pulling Trump's strings. It is Clinton who voices suspicion that Trump and Putin were somehow coordinating on the phone on Jan. 6; and it is she who suggests that "a 9/11-type commission" might be needed.

Due largely to the captive "mainstream" media, 'Russia Russia Russia' has proved to be the gift that keeps giving for the Democrats. Are there limits to the degree of credence Americans will give to corporate media spinning all the sins attributed to Russian President Putin? Why the insinuation that he may be partly to blame for the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6?

Russia is Convenient

It's a matter of convenience. For the Democrats it has been super-convenient to blame Mrs. Clinton's defeat in 2016 on Russia, although key aspects of that case (Russian "hacking" of the DNC, for example) have been debunked .

But, don't go away, Russia, not just yet. The MICIMATT still finds you convenient as the kind of "threat" it can cite to justify spending untold billions of dollars on defense, enriching the already rich. Please see " Why Russia Must Be Demonized ."

The way the U.S. system is structured, it matters little in the grand scheme of things on where the money is spent – whether a Republican or Democrat sits in the Oval Office. In short, the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex rules the roost (MEDIA in all caps, as the linchpin). Clinton wonders aloud who Trump "is beholden to". Well, speaking of beholden, Joe Biden enters office with zero vaccination against being beholden – to the MICIMATT. It is fair to say that, without that the MICIMATT's blessing, candidates end up like Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard.

Uncertainties

There are just enough straws in the wind to make the MICIMATT and its clients and supporters nervous. What would happen, should Putin and Russia become less demonized? Could there be a thaw in the unnecessarily chilly relations with Moscow? What could that mean for bloated defense spending – particularly at a time when those funds are so desperately and demonstrably needed at home?

It appears likely that strategic arms negotiations with Russia will be high on President Joe Biden's agenda, as will cooperation with Russia and the other parties to the Iran nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew. Assuming William Burns, former ambassador to Russia, is confirmed as CIA director, Biden will have at his beck and call a straight-speaking, highly experienced expert who has dealt with President Putin. Burns was also one of the chief US negotiators of the Iran nuclear deal.

In my view, it is also significant that President-elect Biden has held back from explicit condemnation of Russia by name amid the recent flurry of accusations of Russian hacking of several US institutions over the past several months. Yes, he has referred to what Secretary of State Pompeo and Attorney General Barr have said blaming Russia, and it can be argued that he has indirectly implicated Russia in the context of his sparse statements on this issue.

In my experience, though, the Kremlin is likely to have taken note of the caution that Biden has exercised on this neuralgic issue. Nor has this likely escaped the attention of the MICIMATT and induced some worry about the long-term viability of the portrayal of Putin as villain.

The Kremlin Is Watching

Oliver Stone told me recently that, in one of his conversations in Russia, Mr. Putin, somewhat exasperated, said something along the lines of, "Now Russians are thought of like Jews before World War II". Think about that. Amid the Russia Russia Russia over the past four-plus years, Putin has kept his voice down – and his powder dry – while staying open to negotiations to reduce arms competition, cyber warfare, and other facets of bilateral tension.

If past is precedent, he is likely to see opportunities to take a fresh look at US intentions under President Biden – especially during the traditional "honeymoon" period normally accorded a new president.

But clearly, Putin is also aware of the parallels between the demonization of him and Russia and how Jews were blamed for just about everything during the Thirties. Evidence-free accusations by the likes of Pelosi and Clinton will make the task of restoring a modicum of trust an uphill battle.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A CIA analyst for 27 years, he led the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and prepared/briefed The President's Daily Brief for three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

[Jan 22, 2021] Another Mega Group Spy Scandal- Samanage, Sabotage, And The SolarWinds Hack by Whitney Webb

Jan 22, 2021 | www.unz.com

Another Mega Group Spy Scandal? Samanage, Sabotage, and the SolarWinds Hack WHITNEY WEBB JANUARY 21, 2021 4,800 WORDS 13 COMMENTS REPLY Tweet Reddit 3 Share Share 2 Email Print More 5 SHARES RSS

The devastating hack on SolarWinds was quickly pinned on Russia by US intelligence. A more likely culprit, Samanage, a company whose software was integrated into SolarWinds' software just as the "back door" was inserted, is deeply tied to Israeli intelligence and intelligence-linked families such as the Maxwells.

In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies, major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.

The hack , which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds , was blamed on Russia on January 5 by the US government's Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the attackers were " likely Russian in origin ," but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.

Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets began reporting the intelligence community's "likely" conclusion as fact right away, with the New York Times subsequently reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the "Russian hackers." Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the evidence-free report from US intelligence on "likely" Russian involvement, is said to be the reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds' contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.

Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election, when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of "Russian hackers" in that event.

There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel , not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel , yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.

Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds' acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage's deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange's integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door's insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds' Czech-based contractor.

Orion's Fall

In the month since the hack, evidence has emerged detailing the extent of the damage, with the Justice Department quietly announcing , the same day as the Capitol riots (January 6), that their email system had been breached in the hack -- a "major incident" according to the department. This terminology means that the attack "is likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations, or the economy of the United States or to the public confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people," per NextGov .

The Justice Department was the fourth US government agency to publicly acknowledge a breach in connection to the hack, with the others being the Departments of Commerce and Energy and the Treasury. Yet, while only four agencies have publicly acknowledged fallout from the hack, SolarWinds software is also used by the Department of Defense, the State Department, NASA, the NSA, and the Executive Office. Given that the Cyber Unified Coordination Group stated that "fewer than ten" US government agencies had been affected, it's likely that some of these agencies were compromised, and some press reports have asserted that the State Department and Pentagon were affected.

In addition to government agencies, SolarWinds Orion software was in use by the top ten US telecommunications corporations, the top five US accounting firms, the New York Power Authority, and numerous US government contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, and the Federal Reserve. Other notable SolarWinds clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Credit Suisse, and several mainstream news outlets including the Economist and the New York Times .

Based on what is officially known so far, the hackers appeared to have been highly sophisticated, with FireEye, the cybersecurity company that first discovered the implanted code used to conduct the hack, stating that the hackers "routinely removed their tools, including the backdoors, once legitimate remote access was achieved -- implying a high degree of technical sophistication and attention to operational security." In addition, top security experts have noted that the hack was " very very carefully orchestrated ," leading to a consensus that the hack was state sponsored.

FireEye stated that they first identified the compromise of SolarWinds after the version of the Orion software they were using contained a back door that was used to gain access to its "red team" suite of hacking tools. Not long after the disclosure of the SolarWinds hack, on December 31, the hackers were able to partially access Microsoft's source code, raising concerns that the act was preparation for future and equally devastating attacks.

FireEye's account can be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the CIA is one of FireEye's clients , and FireEye was launched with funding from the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-tel. It is also worth being skeptical of the " free tool " FireEye has made available in the hack's aftermath for "spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of systems."

In addition, Microsoft, another key source in the SolarWinds story, is a military contractor with close ties to Israel's intelligence apparatus, especially Unit 8200, and their reports of events also deserve scrutiny. Notably, it was Unit 8200 alumnus and executive at Israeli cybersecurity firm Cycode, Ronen Slavin , who told Reuters in a widely quoted article that he "was worried by the possibility that the SolarWinds hackers were poring over Microsoft's source code as prelude to a much more ambitious offensive." "To me the biggest question is, 'Was this recon for the next big operation?'" Slavin stated .

Also odd about the actors involved in the response to the hack is the decision to bring on not only the discredited firm CrowdStrike but also the new consultancy firm of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos, former chief information security officer of Facebook and Yahoo, to investigate the hack. Chris Krebs is the former head of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was previously a top Microsoft executive. Krebs was fired by Donald Trump after repeatedly and publicly challenging Trump on the issue of election fraud in the 2020 election.

As head of CISA, Krebs gave access to networks of critical infrastructure throughout the US, with a focus on the health-care industry, to the CTI League , a suspicious outfit of anonymous volunteers working "for free" and led by a former Unit 8200 officer. "We have brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to assist in this review and provide best-in-class guidance on our journey to evolve into an industry leading secure software development company," a SolarWinds spokesperson said in an email cited by Reuters .

It is also worth noting that the SolarWinds hack did benefit a few actors aside from the attackers themselves. For instance, Israeli cybersecurity firms CheckPoint and CyberArk, which have close ties to Israeli intelligence Unit 8200, have seen their stocks soar in the weeks since the SolarWinds compromise was announced. Notably, in 2017, CyberArk was the company that " discovered " one of the main tactics used in an attack, a form of SAML token manipulation called GoldenSAML. CyberArk does not specify how they discovered this method of attack and, at the time they announced the tactic's existence, released a free tool to identify systems vulnerable to GoldenSAML manipulation.

In addition, the other main mode of attack, a back door program nicknamed Sunburst, was found by Kaspersky researchers to be similar to a piece of malware called Kazuar that was also first discovered by another Unit 8200-linked company , Palo Alto Networks, also in 2017. The similarities only suggest that those who developed the Sunburst backdoor may have been inspired by Kazuar and "they may have common members between them or a shared software developer building their malware." Kaspersky stressed that Sunburst and Kazuar are not likely to be one and the same. It is worth noting, as an aside, that Unit 8200 is known to have previously hacked Kaspersky and attempted to insert a back door into their products, per Kaspersky employees.

Crowdstrike claimed that this finding confirmed "the attribution at least to Russian intelligence," only because an allegedly Russian hacking group is believed to have used Kazuar before. No technical evidence linking Russia to the SolarWinds hacking has yet been presented.

Samanage and Sabotage

The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was "compiled, signed and delivered through the existing software patch release management system," per reports . This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had "a high degree of familiarity with the software." While the way the attackers gained access to Orion's code base has yet to be determined, one possibility being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.

US investigators have been focusing on offices of SolarWinds that are based abroad, suggesting that -- in addition to the above -- the attackers were likely working for SolarWinds or were given access by someone working for the company. That investigation has focused on offices in eastern Europe, allegedly because "Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted" in those countries.

It is worth pointing out, however, that Israeli intelligence is similarly "deeply rooted" in eastern European states both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, ties well illustrated by Israeli superspy and media tycoon Robert Maxwell's frequent and close associations with Eastern European and Russian intelligence agencies as well as the leaders of many of those countries. Israeli intelligence operatives like Maxwell also had cozy ties with Russian organized crime. For instance, Maxwell enabled the access of the Russian organized crime network headed by Semion Mogilevich into the US financial system and was also Mogilevich's business partner . In addition, the cross-pollination between Israeli and Russian organized crime networks (networks which also share ties to their respective intelligence agencies) and such links should be considered if the cybercriminals due prove to be Russian in origin, as US intelligence has claimed.

Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in 2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government. Israel is deemed by the NSA to be one of the top spy threats facing US government agencies and Israel's list of espionage scandals in the US is arguably the longest, and includes the Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s to the Larry Franklin/AIPAC espionage scandal in 2009.

Though much reporting has since been done on the recent compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, little attention has been paid to Samanage. Samanage offers what it describes as "an IT Service Desk solution." It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage's products could be added to SolarWinds' IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying that it is an American company, Samanage is actually an Israeli firm . It was founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked for several years at MAMRAM , the Israeli military's central computing unit .

Samanage was SolarWinds' first acquisition of an Israeli company, and, at the time, Israeli media reported that SolarWinds was expected to set up its first development center in Israel. It appears, however, that SolarWinds, rather than setting up a new center, merely began using Samanage's research and development center located in Netanya, Israel.

Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed SolarWinds Service Desk, became listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition's announcement in April of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time. Samanage's automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the now-compromised software during that period.

Samanage appears to have had access to Orion following the announcement of the acquisition in April 2019. Integration first began with Orion version 2019.4, the earliest version believed to contain the malicious code that enabled the hack. In addition, the integrated Samanage component of Orion was responsible for "ensuring the appropriate teams are quickly notified when critical events or performance issues [with Orion] are detected," which was meant to allow "service agents to react faster and resolve issues before . . . employees are impacted."

In other words, the Samanage component that was integrated into Orion at the same time the compromise took place was also responsible for Orion's alert system for critical events or performance issues. The code that was inserted into Orion by hackers in late 2019 nevertheless went undetected by this Samanage-made component for over a year, giving the "hackers" access to millions of devices critical to both US government and corporate networks. Furthermore, it is this Samanage-produced component of the affected Orion software that advises end users to exempt the software from antivirus scans and group policy object (GPO) restrictions by providing a warning that Orion may not work properly unless those exemptions are granted.

Samanage, Salesforce, and the World Economic Forum

Around the time of Samange's acquisition by SolarWinds, it was reported that one of Samanage's top backers was the company Salesforce, with Salesforce being both a major investor in Samanage as well as a partner of the company.

Salesforce is run by Marc Benioff, a billionaire who got his start at the tech giant Oracle. Oracle was originally created as a CIA spin-off and has deep ties to Israel's government and the outgoing Trump administration. Salesforce also has a large presence in Israel, with much of its global research and development based there . Salesforce also recently partnered with the Unit 8200-linked Israeli firm Diagnostic Robotics to "predictively" diagnose COVID-19 cases using Artificial Intelligence.

Aside from leading Salesforce, Benioff is a member of the Vatican's Council for Inclusive Capitalism alongside Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, and members of the Lauder family, who have deep ties to the Mega Group and Israeli politics.

Benioff is also a prominent member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and the inaugural chair of the WEF's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), making him one of the most critical players in the unfolding of the WEF-backed Great Reset. Other WEF leaders, including the organization's founder Klaus Schwab, have openly discussed how massive cyberattacks such as befell SolarWinds will soon result in "even more significant economic and social implications than COVID-19."

Last year, the WEF's Centre for Cybersecurity, of which Salesforce is part, simulated a "digital pandemic" cyberattack in an exercise entitled Cyber Polygon . Cyber Polygon's speakers in 2020 included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Mishustin, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, and IBM executive Wendi Whitmore , who previously held top posts at both Crowdstrike and a FireEye subsidiary. Notably, just months before the COVID-19 crisis, the WEF had held Event 201, which simulated a global coronavirus pandemic that crippled the world's economy.

In addition to Samanage's ties to WEF big shots such as Marc Benioff, the other main investors behind Samanage's rise have ties to major Israeli espionage scandals, including the Jonathan Pollard affair and the PROMIS software scandal. There are also ties to one of the WEF's founding " technology pioneers ," Isabel Maxwell (the daughter of Robert Maxwell and sister of Ghislaine), who has long-standing ties to Israel's intelligence apparatus and the country's hi-tech sector.

The Bronfmans, the Maxwells, and Viola Ventures

At the time of its acquisition by SolarWinds, Samanage's top investor was Viola Ventures, a major Israeli venture-capital firm. Viola's investment in Samanage, until its acquisition, was managed by Ronen Nir, who was also on Samanage's board before it became part of SolarWinds.

Prior to working at Viola, Ronen Nir was a vice president at Verint, formerly Converse Infosys. Verint, whose other alumni have gone on to found Israeli intelligence-front companies such as Cybereason . Verint has a history of aggressively spying on US government facilities, including the White House , and created the backdoors into all US telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook, on behalf of the US' NSA.

In addition to his background at Verint, Ronen Nir is an Israeli spy , having served for thirteen years in an elite IDF intelligence unit, and he remains a lieutenant colonel on reserve duty. His biography also notes that he worked for two years at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, which is fitting given his background in espionage and the major role that Israeli embassy has played in several major espionage scandals.

As an aside, Nir has stated that "thought leader" Henry Kissinger is his "favorite historical character." Notably, Kissinger was instrumental in allowing Robert Maxwell, Israeli superspy and father of Ghislaine and Isabel Maxwell, to sell software with a back door for Israeli intelligence to US national laboratories, where it was used to spy on the US nuclear program. Kissinger had told Maxwell to connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to US national laboratories, which directly enabled this action, part of the larger PROMIS software scandal .

In addition, Viola's stake was managed through a firm known as Carmel Ventures, which is part of the Viola Group. At the time, Carmel Ventures was advised by Isabel Maxwell , whose father had previously been directly involved in the operation of the front company used to sell bugged software to US national laboratories. As noted in a previous article at Unlimited Hangout , Isabel "inherited" her father's circle of Israeli government and intelligence contacts after his death and has been instrumental in building the "bridge" between Israel's intelligence and military-linked hi-tech sector to Silicon Valley.

Isabel also has ties to the Viola Group itself through Jonathan Kolber, a general partner at Viola. Kolber previously cofounded and led the Bronfman family's private-equity fund, Claridge Israel (based in Israel). Kolber then led Koor Industries, which he had acquired alongside the Bronfmans via Claridge. Kolber is closely associated with Stephen Bronfman, the son of Charles Bronfman who created Claridge and also cofounded the Mega Group with Leslie Wexner in the early 1990s.

Kolber, like Isabel Maxwell, is a founding director of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. Maxwell, who used to chair the center's board, stepped down following the Epstein scandal, though it's not exactly clear when. Other directors of the center include Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad. Kolber's area of expertise, like that of Isabel Maxwell, is "structuring complex, cross-border and cross industry business and financial transactions," that is, arranging acquisitions and partnerships of Israeli firms by US companies. Incidentally, this is also a major focus of the Peres Center.

Other connections to Isabel Maxwell, aside from her espionage ties, are worth noting, given that she is a "technology pioneer" of the World Economic Forum. As previously mentioned, Salesforce -- a major investor in Samanage -- is deeply involved with the WEF and its Great Reset.

The links of Israeli intelligence and Salesforce to Samanage, and thus to SolarWinds, is particularly relevant given the WEF's "prediction" of a coming "pandemic" of cyberattacks and the early hints from former Unit 8200 officers that the SolarWinds hack is just the beginning. It is also worth mentioning the Israeli government's considerable ties to the WEF over the years, particularly last year when it joined the Benioff-chaired C4IR and participated in the October 2020 WEF panel entitled "The Great Reset: Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution."

Start Up Nation Central, an organization aimed at integrating Israeli start-ups with US firms set up by Netanyahu's longtime economic adviser Eugene Kandel and American Zionist billionaire Paul Singer, have asserted that Israel will serve a "key role" globally in the 4 th Industrial Revolution following the implementation of the Great Reset.

Gemini, the BIRD Foundation, and Jonathan Pollard

In addition to Viola, another of Samange's leading investors is Gemini Israel Ventures. Gemini is one of Israel's oldest venture-capital firms, dating back to the Israeli government's 1993 Yozma program.

The first firm created by Yozma, Gemini was put under the control of Ed Mlavsky, who Israel's government had chosen specifically for this position. As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout , Mlavsky was then serving as the executive director of the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, where "he was responsible for investments of $100 million in more than 300 joint projects between US and Israeli high-tech companies."

A few years before Gemini was created, while Mlavsky still headed BIRD, the foundation became embroiled in one of the worst espionage scandals in US history, the Jonathan Pollard affair.

In the indictment of US citizen Pollard for espionage on Israel's behalf, it was noted that Pollard delivered the documents he stole to agents of Israel at two locations, one of which was an apartment owned by Harold Katz, the then legal counsel of the BIRD Foundation and an adviser to Israel's military, which oversaw Israel's scientific intelligence-gathering agency, Lekem. US officials told the New York Times at the time that they believed Katz "has detailed knowledge about the [Pollard] spy ring and could implicate senior Israeli officials."

Subsequent reporting by journalist Claudia Wright pointed the finger at the Mlavsky-run BIRD Foundation as one of the ways Israeli intelligence funneled money to Pollard before his capture by US authorities.

One of the first companies Gemini invested in was CommTouch (now Cyren), which was founded by ex-IDF officers and later led by Isabel Maxwell. Under Maxwell's leadership, CommTouch developed close ties to Microsoft, partially due to Maxwell's relationship with its cofounder Bill Gates.

A Coming "Hack" of Microsoft?

If the SolarWinds hack is as serious as has been reported, it's difficult to understand why a company like Samanage would not be looked into as part of a legitimate investigation into the attack. The timing of Samanage employees gaining access to the Orion software and the company's investors including Israeli spies and those with ties to past espionage scandals where Israel used back doors to spy on the US and beyond raises obvious red flags. Yet, any meaningful investigation of the incident is unlikely to take place, especially given the considerable involvement of discredited firms like CrowdStrike, CIA fronts like FireEye and a consultancy firm led by former Silicon Valley executives with their own government/intelligence ties.

There is also the added fact that both of the main methods used in the attack were analogous or bore similarities to hacking tools that were both discovered by Unit 8200-linked companies in 2017. Unit 8200-founded cybersecurity firms are among the few "winners" from the SolarWinds hack, as their stocks have skyrocketed and demand for their services has increased globally.

While some may argue that Unit 8200 alumni are not necessarily connected to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, numerous reports have pointed out the admitted fusion of Israeli military intelligence with Israel's hi-tech sector and its tech-focused venture capital networks, with Israeli military and intelligence officials themselves noting that the line between the private cybersecurity sector and Israel's intelligence apparatus is so blurred, it's difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. There is also the Israeli government policy, formally launched in 2012 , whereby Israel's intelligence and military intelligence agencies began outsourcing "activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber technologies."

Samanage certainly appears to be such a company, not only because it was founded by a former IDF officer in the military's central computing unit, but because its main investors include spies on "reserve duty" and venture capital firms linked to the Pollard scandal as well as the Bronfman and Maxwell families, both of whom have been tied to espionage and sexual blackmail scandals over the years.

Yet, as the Epstein scandal has recently indicated, major espionage scandals involving Israel receive little coverage and investigations into these events rarely lead anywhere. PROMIS was covered up largely thanks to Bill Barr during his first term as Attorney General and even the Pollard affair has all been swept under the rug with Donald Trump allowing Pollard to move to Israel and, more recently, pardoning the Israeli spy who recruited Pollard during his final day as President. Also under Trump, there was the discovery of "stingray" surveillance devices placed by Israel's government throughout Washington DC, including next to the White House, which were quickly memory holed and oddly not investigated by authorities. Israel had previously wiretapped the White House's phone lines during the Clinton years.

Another cover up is likely in the case of SolarWinds, particularly if the entry point was in fact Samanage. Though a cover up would certainly be more of the same, the SolarWinds case is different as major tech companies and cybersecurity firms with ties to US and Israeli intelligence now insist that Microsoft is soon to be targeted in what would clearly be a much more devastating event than SolarWinds due to the ubiquity of Microsoft's products.

On Tuesday, CIA-linked firm FireEye, which apparently has a leadership role in investigating the hack, claimed that the perpetrators are still gathering data from US government agencies and that "the hackers are moving into Microsoft 365 cloud applications from physical, on-premises servers," meaning that changes to fix Orion's vulnerabilities will not necessarily deny hacker access to previously compromised systems as they allegedly maintain access to those systems via Microsoft cloud applications. In addition to Microsoft's own claims that some of its source code was accessed by the hackers, this builds the narrative that Microsoft products are poised to be targeted in the next high-profile hack.

Microsoft's cloud security infrastructure, set to be the next target of the SolarWinds hackers, was largely developed and later managed by Assaf Rappaport , a former Unit 8200 officer who was most recently the head of Microsoft's Research and Development and Security teams at its massive Israel branch. Rappaport left Microsoft right before the COVID-19 crisis began last year to found a new cybersecurity company called Wiz.

Microsoft, like some of Samanage's main backers, is part of the World Economic Forum and is an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in the Great Reset agenda, so much so that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote the foreword to Klaus Schwab's book " Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution ." With the WEF simulating a cyber "pandemic" and both the WEF and Israel's head of Israel's National Cyber Directorate warning of an imminent " cyber winter ", SolarWinds does indeed appear to be just the beginning, though perhaps a scripted one to create the foundation for something much more severe. A cyberattack on Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global economy and likely have economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the WEF has been warning. Yet, if such a hack does occur, it will inevitably serve the aims of the Great Reset to "reset" and then rebuild electronic infrastructure.


The ADL hates me , says: January 22, 2021 at 5:36 am GMT • 8.7 hours ago

Israel is the gift that keeps on giving. Lol.

JFK
USS Liberty
91 gulf war
September 11 mossad/cia attack
03 Iraq war
Epstein/Wexner honeypot operations
Microsoft hack

Richard B , says: January 22, 2021 at 5:37 am GMT • 8.7 hours ago

Another great article from Whitney Webb.

Regarding the article, certainly one takeaway would be that, though they're good at acquiring power, they're no good at managing it.

Another way of putting this would be to say that, though they're good at infiltration, subversion, radical ingratitude, betrayal, insane hatred, vindictive hysteria, denial, projection, destruction and death, they're just no good at social management.

Case in point: A country they control whose social institutions are all in free fall, The United States of America. Which, if we were to be perfectly honest, we'd be better off simply referring to as The United States of Israel. In which case we'd have to replace each of the 50 stars on the flag with stars of David. Who knows? Maybe they will. Stranger things have happened in history.

But that would draw too much attention to the USA's many, many social failures. Which, of course, are always – always – the result of self-focused , low-character leadership .

And Character is, in this case, How we treat others .

Verymuchalive , says: January 22, 2021 at 9:52 am GMT • 4.4 hours ago

A very good article, with one point of dubiety.

A cyberattack on Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global economy and likely have economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the WEF has been warning.

A gross exaggeration, but the Western MSM can be relied upon to make such a cyberattack appear like a massive World crisis – just like they've done with COVID-19, which is nowhere near as virulent even as Hong Kong Flu.

Gerorge Orwell famously wrote:
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
To which he should have added: Who controls the media controls the present.
For the majority, indoctrinated by the MSM, this seems sadly to be true.

No Friend Of The Devil , says: January 22, 2021 at 9:52 am GMT • 4.4 hours ago

The U.S. military, surveillance state, and government have willingly sold off national security secrets and have made every American business, institution, and individual vulnerable as a result of it.

Bill Clinton permitted technology national security secrets developed by the military, U.S. companies, and universities, all financed by tax payers to be handed over to the CCP by U.S. tech companies that opened factories in China which required the blue prints to the technology in exchange for the CCP to allow them to do it.

NYC is now the new Mossad cyber front, after the NSA and US gov permitted them to all open office in NYC managing day to day operations of US gov., US businesses, and US citizens and residents communications systems and security.

The Negav Desert is the new home of almost every U.S. Silicon Valley company, all invited by Israel to open fronts there, after the US gov and tax payers catapulted the Silicon Valley Titans to unprecedented levels of wealth in world history.

The espionage perpetrated by the US government and survellance state is the primary problem!

There is no such thing as national security as long as these these foxes are guarding the hen house.

They really should all be tried for treason!

Cambridge Analytica was used to spy on US citizens during the 2016 election in order to shift the burden onto another country. They frequently hire intelligence agents from foreign countries as unofficial but frequently practiced policy.

I have noticed that spies have no loyalty to any country or institution. They often work together with spies fro other countries. They are thieves. People spy because they are sex offenders, thieves, intellectual property thieves, or identity thieves. There is no such thing as an honest spy. Their entire life is a series of lies, and it has to be since what they are doing is illegal. Then of course there is the Five Eyes apparatus strengthening bonds in the international surveillance state.

They will sell anything to anyone, and what has happened in Ametica is 100% proof. Nothing is off the table. Everything and everyone has a price as far they are concerned.

Andrea Iravani

Frank frank , says: January 22, 2021 at 11:18 am GMT • 3.0 hours ago
@Jiminy

I'm not sure I follow the twenty years interval or the significance of the three towers (being a 9/11 reference), but you seem to imply it's some eschatological and/or messianic thing. Could you or someone else explain?

The Soft Parade , says: January 22, 2021 at 11:29 am GMT • 2.8 hours ago

A tree is best measured when it's down.

The only question at hand–once the electronically addicted IQistas abandon their angle of dominating the world by means of interdependence–is that upon examining the size of whatever as will soon lie in the dust, (be it 911 or Microsoft) whether we should ever again allow ourselves to become so dependent upon a thing so large and vulnerable.

We did not need the computer to experience the beauty of America prior to abandoning the gold standard, and we don't need the computer now. Yeah, rave on with all that hype Steve Jobs gave to John Scully, ie, You want to sell sugar water all your life, or you want to come with me and change the world?

Jobs had a good mind, yet a monolithically weak objective when it came to change. There is nothing new under the sun. Let it crash.

Stan d Mute , says: January 22, 2021 at 11:54 am GMT • 2.4 hours ago

So they're laying out the groundwork for blaming "hackers" rather than central bankers and politicians when the financial system collapses?

Temporary Insanity , says: January 22, 2021 at 12:01 pm GMT • 2.3 hours ago

"Kissinger had told Maxwell to connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to US national laboratories, which directly enabled this action, part of the larger PROMIS software scandal."

You can blame the two Jews for obviously being Jews but John Tower should have been hanged, quartered and displayed in the four corners of these United States for disloyalty.

chuckywiz , says: January 22, 2021 at 12:31 pm GMT • 1.8 hours ago

Hope to see more articles like this instead of the good old beaten up concepts. Or opinionated write up.
Does anyone know what kind of job Jonathan Pollard got in Israel? Chief of intelligence collection agency.

dirtyharriet , says: January 22, 2021 at 12:47 pm GMT • 1.5 hours ago

Many years ago, on the Yahoo News message boards, after I was awakened to some hard truths about our country , I made a prediction that this day would come – that one day it would get pretty bad (free speech) in America, with the usual suspects behind it, and that the closer Americans get to the truth, the worse it will get.

We're here.

This fine article by Whitney Webb indicates what might be next. Pretty scary.

Just a note – Gab is a good alternative in case Unz finally gets taken down. And vice versa. They have a Dissenter browser that will allow you to comment on anything, evidently.

I lurk here a lot because the comments are the best I've ever seen anywhere.

God bless, everyone.

Ray Caruso , says: January 22, 2021 at 1:43 pm GMT • 34 minutes ago

The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia on January 5 by the US government's Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the attackers were "likely Russian in origin," but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.

I wonder when the U.S. government last made a statement that wasn't a lie.

Bert33 , says: January 22, 2021 at 1:57 pm GMT • 20 minutes ago
@dirtyharriet

Democrats will never silence America. When you tell people to shut up in this country, it just makes them MORE angry, study more, take notes, etc. Myabe Twitterbook will be open next year maybe they won't.

[Jan 22, 2021] The Future of War in Biden's America Consortiumnews

Jan 22, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

H ard as it is to believe in this time of record pandemic deaths, insurrection, and an unprecedented encore impeachment, Joe Biden is now officially at the helm of the U.S. war machine. He is, in other words, the fourth president to oversee America's unending and unsuccessful post-9/11 military campaigns.

In terms of active U.S. combat, that's only happened once before, in the , America's second-longest (if often forgotten) overseas combat campaign.

Yet that conflict was limited to a single Pacific archipelago. Biden inherits a global war -- and burgeoning new Cold War -- spanning four continents and a military mired in active operations in dozens of countries, combat in some 14 of them, and bombing in at least seven.

That sort of scope has been standard fare for American presidents for almost two decades now. Still, while this country's post-9/11 war presidents have more in common than their partisan divisions might suggest, distinctions do matter, especially at a time when the White House almost unilaterally drives foreign policy.

So, what can we expect from Commander-in-Chief Biden? In other words, what's the forecast for U.S. service-members who have invested their lives and limbs in future conflict, as well as for the speculators in the military-industrial complex and anxious foreigners in the countries still engulfed in America's war on terror who usually stand to lose it all?

Many Trumpsters, and some libertarians, foresee disaster : that the man who, as a leading senator facilitated and cheered on the disastrous Iraq War, will surely escalate American adventurism abroad. On the other hand, establishment Democrats and most liberals, who are desperately (and understandably) relieved to see Donald Trump go, find that prediction preposterous.

Clearly, Biden must have learned from past mistakes, changed his tune, and should responsibly bring U.S. wars to a close, even if at a time still to be determined.

In a sense, both may prove right -- and in another sense, both wrong. The guess of this long-time war-watcher (and one-time war fighter) reading the tea leaves: expect Biden to both eschew big new wars and avoid fully ending existing ones.

At the margins (think Iran), he may improve matters some; in certain rather risky areas (Russian relations, for instance), he could worsen them; but in most cases (the rest of the Greater Middle East, Africa, and China), he's likely to remain squarely on the status-quo spectrum. And mind you, there's nothing reassuring about that.

Sgt. John Hoxie watches 82nd Airborne Division's All American Week celebration May 18, 2009. Hoxie returned to Fort Bragg for the first time since he was injured during a 2007 deployment to Iraq. (U.S. Army/Flickr)

It hardly requires clairvoyance to offer such guesswork. That's because Biden basically is who he says he is and who he's always been , and the man's simply never been transformational. One need look no further than his long and generally interventionist past record or the nature of his current national-security picks to know that the safe money is on more of the same.

Whether the issues are war, race , crime , or economics , Uncle Joe has made a career of bending with the prevailing political winds and it's unlikely this old dog can truly learn any new tricks.

Furthermore, he's filled his foreign policy squad with Obama-Clinton retreads, a number of whom were architects of -- if not the initial Iraq and Afghan debacles -- then disasters in Libya, Syria, West Africa, Yemen, and the Afghan surge of 2009. In other words, Biden is putting the former arsonists in charge of the forever-war fire brigade.

There's further reason to fear that he may even reject Trump's "If Obama was for it, I'm against it" brand of war-on-terror policy-making and thereby reverse The Donald's very late, very modest troop withdrawals in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia.

Yet even if this new old hand of a president evades potentially existential escalation with nuclear Russia or China and offers only an Obama reboot when it comes to persistent low-intensity warfare, what he does will still matter -- most of all to the global citizens who are too often its victims.

So, here's a brief region-by-region flyover tour of what Joe's squad may have in store for both the world and the American military sent to police that world.

The Middle East: Old Prescriptions for Old Business

It's increasingly clear that Washington's legacy wars in the Greater Middle East -- Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular -- are generally no longer on the public's radar. Enter an elected old man who's charged with handling old business that, at least to most civilians, is old news.

Odds are that Biden's ancient tricks will amount to safe bets in a region that past U.S. policies essentially destroyed. Joe is likely to take a middle path in the region between large-scale military intervention of the Bush or Obama kind and more prudent full-scale withdrawal.

As a result, such wars will probably drag on just below the threshold of American public awareness, while avoiding Pentagon or partisan charges that his version of cutting-and-running endangered U.S. security. The prospect of "victory" won't even factor into the equation (after all, Biden's squad members aren't stupid), but political survival certainly will.

Here's what such a Biden-era future might then look like in a few such sub-theaters.

"Wars will probably drag on just below the threshold of American public awareness."

The war in Afghanistan is hopeless and has long been failing by every one of the U.S. military's own measurable metrics, so much so that the Pentagon and the Kabul government classified them all as secret information a few years back.

Actually dealing with the Taliban and swiftly exiting a disastrous war likely to lead to a disastrous future with Washington's tail between its legs is, in fact, the only remaining option. The question is when and how many more Americans will kill or be killed in that "graveyard of empires" before the U.S. accepts the inevitable.

U.S. Army helicopter pilots fly near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, April 5, 2017. (U.S. Army, Brian Harris, Wikimedia Commons)

Toward the end of his tenure, Trump signaled a serious, if cynical, intent to so. And since Trump was by definition a monster and the other team's monsters can't even occasionally be right, a coalition of establishment Democrats and Lincoln-esque Republicans (and Pentagon officials) decided that the war must indeed go on. That culminated in last July's obscenity in which Congress officially withheld the funds necessary to end it.

As vice president, Biden was better than most in his Afghan War skepticism , but his incoming advisers weren't , and Joe's nothing if not politically malleable. Besides, since Trump didn't pull enough troops out faintly fast enough or render the withdrawal irreversible over Pentagon objections, expect a trademark Biden hedge here.

Syria has always been a boondoggle , with the justifications for America's peculiar military presence there constantly shifting from pressuring the regime of Bashar al-Assad, to fighting the Islamic State, to backing the Kurds, to balancing Iran and Russia in the region, to (in Trump's case) securing that country's meager oil supplies.

As with so much else, there's a troubling possibility that, in the Biden years, personnel once again may become destiny. Many of the new president's advisers were bullish on Syrian intervention in the Obama years, even wanting to take it further and topple Assad.

Furthermore, when it comes time for them to convince Biden to agree to stay put in Syria, there's a dangerous existing mix of motives to do just that: the emotive sympathy for the Kurds of known gut-player Joe; his susceptibility to revived Islamic State (ISIS) fear-mongering; and perceptions of a toughness-testing proxy contest with Russia.

When it comes to Iran, expect Biden to be better than the Iran-phobic Trump administration, but to stay shackled "inside the box."

First of all, despite Joe's long-expressed desire to reenter the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran that Trump so disastrously pulled out of, doing so may prove harder than he thinks. After all, why should Tehran trust a political basket case of a negotiating partner prone to significant partisan policy-pendulum swings, especially given the way Washington has waged nearly 70 years of interventions against Iran's politicians and people?

In addition, Trump left Biden the Trojan horse of Tehran's hardliners, empowered by dint of The Donald's pugnacious policies. If the new president wishes to really undercut Iranian intransigence and fortify the moderates there, he should go big and be transformational -- in other words, see Obama's tension-thawing nuclear deal and raise it with the carrot of full-blown diplomatic and economic normalization. Unfortunately, status-quo Joe has never been a transformational type.

Keep an Eye on Africa

Djiboutian soldiers, Oct. 31, 2019. (U.S. Air Force, J.D. Strong II)

Though it garners far less public interest than the U.S. military's long-favored Middle Eastern playground, Africa figures significantly in the minds of those at the Pentagon, in the Capitol, and in Washington's influential think-tanks.

For interventionist hawks, including liberal ones, that continent has been both a petri dish and a proving ground for the development of a limited power-projection paradigm of drones, Special Operations forces, military advisers, local proxies, and clandestine intelligence missions.

It mattered little that over eight years of the Obama administration -- from Libya to the West African Sahel to the Horn of East Africa -- the war on terror proved, at best, problematic indeed, and even worse in the Trump years.

There remains a worrisome possibility that the Biden posse might prove amenable yet again to the alarmism of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) about the rebirth of ISIS and the spread of other al-Qaeda-linked groups there, bolstered by fear-mongering nonsense masquerading as sophisticated scholarship from West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, and the Pentagon's perennial promises of low-investment, low-risk, and high-reward opportunities on the continent.

So, a savvy betting man might place chips on a Biden escalation in West Africa's Sahel and the Horn of East Africa, even if for different reasons.

American Special Forces and military advisers have been in and out of the remote borderlands between Mali and Niger since at least 2004 and these days seem there to stay. The French seized and suppressed sections of the Sahel region beginning in 1892, and, despite granting nominal independence to those countries in 1960, were back by 2013 and have been stuck in their own forever wars there ever since.

American war-on-terror(izing) and French neo-colonizing have only inflamed regional resistance movements, increased violence, and lent local grievances an Islamist resonance. Recently, France's lead role there has truly begun to disintegrate -- with five of its troops killed in just the first few days of 2021 and allegations that it had bombed another wedding party. (Already such a war-on-terror cliché .)

Don't be surprised if French President Emmanuel Macron asks for help and Biden agrees to bail him out. Despite their obvious age gap, Joe and Emmanuel could prove the newest and best of chums. (What's a few hundred extra troops between friends?)

Especially since Obama-era Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her then-favored errand boy, inbound national security adviser Jake Sullivan, could be said to have founded the current coalition of jihadis in Mali and Niger.

That's because when the two of them championed a heavy-handed regime-change intervention against Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, thousands of his Tuareg fighters blew back into that region in a big way with more than just the clothes on their backs. They streamed from post-Gaddafi Libya into their Sahel homelands loaded with arms and anger.

It's no accident, in other words, that Mali's latest round of insurgency kicked off in 2012. Now, Sullivan might push new boss Biden to attempt to clean up his old mess.

Jake Sullivan, second from left, as deputy chief of staff to the secretary of state, with his boss Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, Nov. 20, 2012. (White House, Pete Souza)

On the other side of the continent, in Somalia, where Trump began an 11th-hour withdrawal of a long-failing and aimless U.S. troop presence (sending most of those soldiers to neighboring countries), there's a real risk that Biden could double-down in the region, adding soldiers, special operators, and drones.

After all, if Trump was against it, even after exponentially increasing bombing in the area, then any good Democrat should be for it, especially since the Pentagon has, for some time now, been banging the drum about Somalia's al-Shabaab Islamist outfit being the biggest threat to the homeland.

However, the real selling point for Biden might be the fantasy that Russia and China are flooding into the region. Ever since the 2018 National Defense Strategy decisively shifted the Pentagon's focus from counterterror wars to "great power competition," or GPC, AFRICOM has opportunistically altered its own campaign plan to align with the new threat of the moment, homing in on Russian and Chinese influence in the Horn region.

As a result, AFRICOM'S come-back-to-the-Horn pitch could prove a relatively easy Biden sell.

Russian Bears & Chinese (Sea) Dragons

Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, with Russian President Vladimir Putin during visit to Moscow for state visit, Xi Jinping. (Kremlin)

With that new GPC national security obsession likely to be one Trump-era policy that remains firmly in place, however ill-advised it may be, perhaps the biggest Biden risk is the possibility of stoking up a "new," two-theater, twenty-first-century version of the Cold War (with the possibility that, at any moment, it could turn into a hot one).

After making everything all about Russia in the Trump years, the ascendant Democrats might just feel obliged to follow through and escalate tensions with Moscow that Trump himself already brought to the brink (of nuclear catastrophe). Here, too, personnel may prove a key policy-driver.

Biden's nominee for secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, is a resident Russia hawk and was an early " arm-Ukraine " enthusiast. Jake Sullivan already has a tendency to make mountains out of molehills on the subject, as when he described a minor road-rage incident as constituting "a Russian force in Syria aggressively attack[ing] an American force and actually injur[ing] American service members."

Then there's the troubling signal of Victoria Nuland, the recent nominee for undersecretary of state for political affairs, a pick that itself should be considered a road-rage-style provocation. Nuland has a history of hawkish antagonism toward Moscow and is reportedly despised by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her confirmation will surely serve as a conflict accelerant.

Nevertheless, China may be the lead antagonist in the Biden crew's race to risk a foolhardy cataclysm. Throughout the election campaign, the new president seemed set on out-hawking Trump in the Western Pacific, explicitly writing about "getting tough" on China in a March 2020 piece he penned in Foreign Affairs .

Joe had also previously called Chinese President Xi Jinping " a thug ." And while Michèle Flournoy may (mercifully) have been passed over for secretary of defense, her aggressive posture toward Beijing still infuses the thinking of her fellow Obama alums on Biden's team.

As TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich pointed out last September, a Flournoy Foreign Affairs article illuminated the sort of absurdity she (and assumedly various Biden appointees) think necessary to effectively deter China.

She called for "enhancing U.S. military capabilities so that the United States can credibly threaten to sink all of China's military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours." Consider that Dr. Strangelove -style strategizing retooled for an inbound urbane imperial presidency.

Endgame: War as Abstraction

Historically, foreign-policy paradigm shifts are exceedingly rare, especially when they tack toward peace. Such pivots appear almost impossible once the immense power of America's military-industrial complex, invested in every way in endless war, as well as endless preparations for future Cold Wars, has reached today's grotesque level.

This is especially so when each and every one of Biden's archetypal national security nominees has, metaphorically speaking, had his or her mortgage paid by some offshoot of that war industry. In other words, as the muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair used to say : "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Count on tactics including drones, commandos, CIA spooks, and a mostly amenable media to help the Biden administration make war yet more invisible -- at least to Americans. Most Trump-detesting, and domestically focused citizens will find that just dandy, even if exhausted troopers, military families, and bombed or blockaded foreigners won't.

More than anything, Biden wishes to avoid overseas embarrassments like unexpected American casualties or scandalous volumes of foreign civilian deaths -- anything, that is, that might derail his domestic agenda or hoped-for restorative leadership legacy.

That, unfortunately, may prove to be a pipe dream and leads me to two final predictions: formulaic forever war will never cease boomeranging back home to rot our republican institutions, and neither a celestial God nor secular History will judge Biden-the-war-president kindly.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and contributing editor at antiwar.com . His work has appeared in the LA Times , The Nation , Huff Post , T he Hill , Salon , Truthdig , Tom Dispatch , among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . His latest book is Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War . Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet . Check out his professional website for contact info, scheduling speeches, and/or access to the full corpus of his writing and media appearances.

This article is from Tom's Dispatch .

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

[Jan 22, 2021] We're Back Baby! Bomb'n Biden says -Come on Man- We're Off to War.......

Jan 22, 2021 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Happy Friday America! It's been less than 48 hours and already our brave redacted Commander in Chief has, finished with using 25,000 troops he says he can't trust to ethnicly cleanse the Capital of all Americans, sent troops back to Syria. Come on man, we gotta take on the Roooshans, just like we've been telling you for years. For (check's list) Freedom in the Middle East.

I guess those four peace treaties the Trump administration helped to get enacted don't matter. Ready or not, here they come:

That's a brave warrior of Meal Team VI, just finishing protecting Bomb'n Biden from the YUUUGE inaugural crowds.

You remember when Joe campaigned on bringing the troops home defending Syrians in Syria from Syrians? It was right there in the answer to the question posed by the third circle reporter:

Ah, what a campaign. Dominionating the Donald. It will go down in infamy history as the most free and fair election ever!. Now, back to war. (Thanks Joe! That's what 80 million voted for.) Here they are, bravely moving forward from where Donald J. Trump ordered them not to be in the first place.

I'm so glad our officer corps is loyal. Let me pause here to pronounce my loyalty to the man who garnered more votes than Barack, more votes than any president in history. Phew, glad I got that out. I'd hate to be pronoun-ed disloyal the Resistance.

Russia's response to these troop movements (authorized by Congress of course) via the twitter safety council warning video DANGER on this tweet . Aren't you glad twitter is keeping us safe from videos? Unlike this 21 seconds of How Dare They direspect the CinC . (I'm sure they were just scanning the vast inauguration crowds celebrating the election of Bomb'n Biden, to keep him safe.)

Meanwhile AMN News reports :

"A large U.S. military convoy was seen entering northeastern Syria on Thursday, marking the first time since Damascus issued its letter to the United Nations Security Council demanding the immediate withdrawal of American forces from the Arab Republic. "According to a field report from northeastern Syria on Thursday, the U.S. military convoy entered the Al-Hasakah Governorate from neighboring Iraq, as they were observed entering the Arab Republic via the Al-Waleed Crossing." (Apparently that site is currently under a DNS attack. Surprise, surprise.) Thank's Joe. Nothing says unity quite like body bags back from Kabul Baghad NW Syria where we bravely went to do what? Infrastructure, good jobs, Climate Change? Whatever. I'm sure they'll be remembered: Though unlike brain cancer victims they won't get to lie in state in the Senate Rotunda. We're back baby! Bomb's Away! It's the Bomb'n Biden Agenda. 80,000,000 votes. I'm sure that's worth one bomb each? At least the MSM won't be talking about China, FangFang, Corruprtion, The Big Guy's 10%, or even why gas prices are already up 10%.

[Jan 22, 2021] In non-binding resolution, EU parliament calls for new anti-Russia sanctions in attempt to stop Nord Stream 2 over Navalny ar

Jan 22, 2021 | www.rt.com


Sort by Best


K0ur0i 15 hours ago 21 Jan, 2021 05:54 PM

I would like to see the EU Parliament taking the same stance with US and UK concerning Assange. Until then, it is all theatre, just for the show. The danger lies in the fact that the EU might back itself in a corner if they are not careful..
GoldFeather K0ur0i 3 hours ago 22 Jan, 2021 05:38 AM
Or maybe these politicians have shares in the much more expensive US gas!!
Augustus K0ur0i 5 hours ago 22 Jan, 2021 04:07 AM
Who does the EU Parliament think they represent? This anti-Russia narrative is illegal and immoral.
Tom_Callan 16 hours ago 21 Jan, 2021 04:41 PM
"strengthen transatlantic unity in protecting democracy and fundamental values against authoritarian regimes," Indeed!...I'd vote against working with the authoritarian USA regime who use fake evidence to start illegal wars and attack sovereign countries, not to mention using politics to control energy markets to their own advantage.
Iwanasay Tom_Callan 13 hours ago 21 Jan, 2021 07:51 PM
It's winter in Europe, just turn off the gas supply and see how quickly these MEPs change their tune, the EU doesn't have sufficient LNG storage and with winter in the US it's doubtful they could supply much, businesses in Europe that depend on gas for manufacturing would be hit hard, Europe would have a major problem
ErgoSum Tom_Callan 13 hours ago 21 Jan, 2021 07:37 PM
Translation: "Grovelling to the US so they will keep their NATO forces in Germany and prop up our economy".
natalia555705 13 hours ago 21 Jan, 2021 07:23 PM
EU parliament resolution finally revealed who is Navalny : agent of influence of western politicians designated to make Russia of colony under anti-russian management . It is exactly what happened in Ukraine. He does not care about Russian citizens, he cares about his political career.

[Jan 21, 2021] Watch- Rand Paul Challenges New Secretary Of State Over Regime-Change In Syria - ZeroHedge

Jan 21, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Watch: Rand Paul Challenges New Secretary Of State Over Regime-Change In Syria BY TYLER DURDEN THURSDAY, JAN 21, 2021 - 10:19

Via AlMasdarNews.com,

Senator Rand Paul recently challenged the new Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken on his history of pushing regime change in the Middle East and North Africa:

"Regime change in the Middle East has led to chaos, instability and more terrorism," Sen. Paul argued.

"Like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton you've been a supporter of military intervention in the Middle East from the Iraq war to the Libyan war to the Syrian civil war..." he introduced in his Tuesday questoning of Blinken.

Sen. Paul began his argument by questioning Blinken's role in the NATO intervention of Libya in 2001 and his support for the US military invasion of Iraq in 2003, which the Kentucky congressman said was a major disaster that paved the way for a stronger Iran.

The congressman argued that Blinken continued to push regime change in Syria, which he said was a significant blunder, especially with the amount of money spent training "moderate rebel forces" .

Sen. Paul said the administration of former President Barack Obama spent $250 million (USD) on training 60 rebels [as part of the DoD side; the CIA program was much more expansive], which he said was a waste of money.

He would go on to question why Blinken would support the Syrian opposition groups on the ground, as he pointed out the most powerful fighters are those from the jihadist groups like the Al-Nusra Front .

"Even after Libya you guys went on to Syria wanting to do the same thing again... it's a disaster. The lesson of these wars is that regime change doesn't work!" Paul said.

"You got rid of one 'bad guy' and another 'bad guy' got stronger," Paul added while lambasting the US strategy of going after Iran while Iraq is still weakened by Bush's regime change war there.

"Maybe we shouldn't be 'choosing' governments in the Middle East," Paul continued.

about:blank

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me title=

Watch the full exchange here:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_i5ynePhmnk

Blinken claimed in response that he wasn't supportive of a full-scale 'Iraq-style' regime change war in Syria while vaguely claiming that he's done "deep thinking" and reflection on the issue . Blinken never repudiated the policy of regime change in the Middle East, however.

Sen. Paul then shifted his attention to NATO, which he said Blinken was trying to strengthen for the purpose of combatting Russia. The senator said Blinken's policy on NATO would lead to war with Russia, which the latter responded would have the opposite effect.

Antony Blinken upon his nomination for Secretary of State in the new administration, via Reuters

Paul concluded by saying that regime change needs to end because it is involving the US in long wars that are costly to the military.


The Luftwaffe 8 hours ago

We will see a new major war started by this administration within two years

Cloud9.5 7 hours ago

We have to do something to reduce the population.

Leather-Dog 7 hours ago

You mean in addition to the 103.5% effective covid vaccine?

RiverRoad 7 hours ago

On duckduckgo.com search > "Med Cram".
On You Tube: Dr. Seheult's med school video lecture "Vitamin D and Covid 19: The Evidence for Prevention and " (5.3m views)
Vitamin D3 is sold over the counter.
Karma is coming for Covid.

eatapeach 7 hours ago

Hopefully it's also coming for the thieving liars who pushed this cheap PsyOp (Pompeo is one, Fauci is another).

bigjim 3 hours ago

I guess Bibi mis-spelled Rand's email address on the memo.

boattrash 2 hours ago

103.5%... that sounds like the voter turnout in all the blue cities.

rastanarchocapitalist 7 hours ago

If one could take all the people in the world and cram them into a city as dense as Tokyo, it would cover the area of Rhode Island.

BaNNeD oN THe RuN 5 hours ago

BS
Tokyo pop density=16121.8 /sq.mi.
Rhode Island = 1045 sq.mi.

At that density RI would hold 16.8 million people.

At the average annual population growth rate of the last century there will be 1 sq.m. of land per person in only 750 years. That includes all mountains, frozen tundra, jungles and deserts... now "get off my lawn".

bearwinkle 6 hours ago

Sure, that's why Xiden is allowing millions of immigrants to invade our borders.

aloha_snakbar 7 hours ago

I thought it might be like today...

Hatterasjohn 7 hours ago

Anyone crazy enough to join ,or be in the military , is out of his friggin mind.

BarnacleBill 7 hours ago

Or likes killing civilians. Don't overlook the psychopaths.

headslapper 7 hours ago

and that will be the end of the US.

RiverRoad 7 hours ago

How about the Regime Change just effected right HERE in the good old USA?

Im1ru12 4 hours ago

Exactly - "Maybe we shouldn't be 'choosing' governments in the Middle East," Paul continued

That's what they do - they just did it here

starman99 7 hours ago

(((Anthony Blinken)))

USAllDay 7 hours ago

I'd take Assad over Biden.

9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago (Edited)

Assad has more integrity in his shoe than Biden has accumulated in the past 50 years.

Armed Resistance 7 hours ago

If the deep state hates Assad, then I know he must be legitimately a good guy deep down.

9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago

BINGO!

Brutlstrudl 6 hours ago

It seems that after each election, the USA becomes more of a contrarian indicator

SERReal1 7 hours ago

I agree. At least Assad puts his country first and gives the finger to the Deep State.

BaNNeD oN THe RuN 5 hours ago

Plus a secular government that respects the rights of all religious minorites. Sets a bad example for all the intolerant apartheid states in the region.

Hopefully the "Assad Must Go" curse gets the entire Biden Administration sooner rather than later.

aloha_snakbar 8 hours ago

Who cares...Uncle Scam lost the tiny bit of credibility he had on 01/20/2021. RIP America....

eatapeach 7 hours ago

I care. Here's yet another Israel-first douchenozzle getting put in a very, very high position. And acting like it'd be any different with Trump at the helm is severe folly. (Pompeo)

FluTangClan 6 hours ago

Sorry bro but anyone with eyes hasn't thought the US credible for more than a century.

4Celts 7 hours ago

Paul concluded by saying that regime change needs to end because it is involving the US in long wars that are costly to the military.

Pardon , but the " cost " to the military shouldn't be the top/only argument. What happened to morally/ ethically wrong ?

SwmngwShrks 7 hours ago

"All wars are Bankers' wars." -Smedley Butler

white horse 7 hours ago

Moral is dead long ago, replaced by new fake moral called humanitarianism.

DonGenaro 7 hours ago

You're an astute observer - few detect such "tells"

Feck Weed 5 hours ago

Consider the audience

FringeDweller 5 hours ago

Fair point.

Lord JT 5 hours ago

He mentioned that it creates more terrorism, and that the incoming regime may be even worse than the previous.

Unknown User 8 hours ago

Biden will start a war, or two, or three...

Why-Am-I-Banned 6 hours ago

Maybe the best thing that could happen to free us all finally is an all out war with Russia, we aren't going to see a revolution to get rid of the corruption the population is lazy and scared of doing without.

Maybe forced into mutual assured destruction is truly the only way to get rid of the deep state...

Russia lost approx 250 million via communism over decades, maybe we need to just swallow the poison pill and get it over with.

Not all of us will die, and definately no one is going to listen to the deep state leaders after the dust clears...

FluTangClan 6 hours ago

Cho Bai Den fol peace!

wick7 5 hours ago

It's amazing how Democrats flipped overnight to being pro war once Obama started new wars. They were mad when Trump was signing peace deals. Lol.

You_Cant_Quit_Me 8 hours ago

He's right. One disaster after another. Who has Assad attacked? If small countries want the US to back off then they must develop nuclear weapons. When was the last time the US attacked a country with nuclear capabilities?

JRobby 7 hours ago

Bust Blinken's balls until he quits like a little rat trying to naw through steel cables

gespiri 7 hours ago

The only way to stop these wars is to send the people (and their kids) who are pushing for it in the first place to the front lines.

rastanarchocapitalist 7 hours ago

Or make the state obsolete by transitioning to a private law society.

RedDog1 7 hours ago

Remember how Gaddafi surrendered his nukeprogram to Bush, a few years later Obama/HRC invaded...resulting in Gaddafi being lynched?

eatapeach 7 hours ago

Iran and NK and Syria remember, for sure. Wish we all remembered the USS Liberty when shaping foreign policy.

LooseLee 4 hours ago

Remember Libya has no central bank?

Pandelis 3 hours ago (Edited)

you really believe that bs ... it is much more than that ... at the end is about the land and the people ... money can be printed out of thin air and there is nothing libya (or iraq, iran etc.) central bank can do about it ...

bring on dr. fraucistein to explain it all to us ... maga!!

roach clipper 6 hours ago

Assad placed his country too close to Is ra hell

manofthenorth 8 hours ago

Sorry guys but we have been played like a second hand fiddle.

It is ALL BS.

THEY don't give a **** about US

LetThemEatRand 8 hours ago

I assume Paul has figured out by now that being a murderous psychopath is a job requirement in DC. It's the first question in the job interview. "Do you enjoy death and destruction for profit and personal power?"

littlewing 7 hours ago

Remember when Trump bombed Syria and all of a sudden everyone in DC loved him for 15 minutes.

Talk about the big reveal.

aloha_snakbar 7 hours ago

The same Rand Paul who was criticizing Trump in the eleventh hour? That one?? They are all swamp creatures and seriously make me want to vomit...

pro·le·tar·i·at 7 hours ago

The apple rolled away from the tree.

Leather-Dog 7 hours ago

Paul, I like you, you seem to care a little bit. However, if they haven't cared in the last forever, they are definitely not going to start now. They just regime changed ourselves with almost no substantial resistance, you think they will care about Syria?

StanleyTheManly 5 hours ago

He puts on a show to care once in a while.

He didn't stand for the truth when it counted.

Goat of Steverino 7 hours ago

GREAT RAND, BUT WHERE WERE YOU ON BIG TECH CENSORSHIP AND ELECTION FRAUD?

Bank_sters 7 hours ago

He's cucked.

Ted Baker 6 hours ago

What is this obsession with Russia? Russia is a peaceful country who defends its people. How difficult is that to understand?

ReadyForHillary 6 hours ago

Russia isn't down with the NWO.

Dinaric 7 hours ago

(((Blinkin))) is all you need to know.

9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago

Does anyone honestly believe that if Biden was honest and had any degree if integrity that he would be president at this moment in U.S. history? That boy is a 50 year swamp critter A thoroughly reliable member of the compromised fraternity. Same for Nancy.

freakscene 7 hours ago

Remember the video of younger Biden telling some voter that he graduated top of his class, with honors????

None of which were true.

littlewing 7 hours ago

His degree is from University of Phoenix.

Now all colleges are that. haha

Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago

Ironically, he wants to set up a comity for Integrity In Government.

freakscene 7 hours ago

Yeah. Thats hysterical!!

Saturday Night Live material - if they had any spine.

BarnacleBill 7 hours ago

Which they don't. Come on, man!

StanleyTheManly 5 hours ago

Yep. They needed someone with zero integrity.

yeketerina velikaya 7 hours ago

You know who's been right all along?

Tulsi Gabbard.

Right on big tech

Right on Kamala

Right on pardoning Assange and Snowden

Right on the uniparty and false flags in Syria

Right on Queen of Warmongers Hillary and DNC

Right on the MSM

Right on securing the elections/ballot harvesting

She's the real deal and would have delivered on these things but never had a shot.

Armed Resistance 7 hours ago

She was wrong on gun control. Very wrong! And that's a non-negotiable.

Why-Am-I-Banned 6 hours ago

Don't worry real gun control is coming and so much more you didn't ask for...

rastanarchocapitalist 7 hours ago

She should have been Trump's vp choice.

StanleyTheManly 5 hours ago

You know....I think you're right. I hadn't thought of that.

StanleyTheManly 5 hours ago

I like Tulsi. She seems like a genuine person with integrity that really cares about the country. BUT I disagree with her on quite a few issues. Maybe she'll come around.

littlewing 7 hours ago

The steal was sealed when the Supreme Court refused to hear the Texas case.

Greasy John Roberts wrecked America.

Max21c 7 hours ago

The steal was sealed when the Supreme Court refused to hear the Texas case.

True.

Vichy John Roberts went full Quisling and brought back Jim Crow laws. The Supreme Court endorsed election fraud, supported the coup d'etat, forced Trump from power, helped usher in a new era for the banana republic of Jim Crow laws...

phillyla 7 hours ago

John Roberts is compromised 8 ways to Sunday. Trump should have had him impeached and removed from the bench

El Chapo Read 7 hours ago

If you thought Trump was surrounded by Red Sea Pedestrians with an agenda, research the ethno-religious background of Biden's cabinet picks.

Shalom!

SassyPants 7 hours ago

Every administration is. Trumps son in law and advisor is as well. Please see the entire picture for a change.

snatchpounder PREMIUM 7 hours ago

How about closing all military bases overseas and dismantling the MIC and oh **** it an old demented neocon is playing president for a few months, scratch that.

rastanarchocapitalist 7 hours ago

The crack up boom of the FRNs may force that one day

snatchpounder PREMIUM 7 hours ago

I think it'll happen sooner rather than later, the chances are good based on the demented old pedophile being selected president and his retards at the fed.

rastanarchocapitalist 4 hours ago

In the long run, that might be a good thing if we return to honest money but you can be sure they'll try to kick the can for another 50 years with some form of new fiat or erasing a couple of zeroes of our current notes.

Hopefully the masses will just say know but I wouldn't put much faith in that.

RedNemesis 6 hours ago

Parents, do not let your smart, winning kids into the armed services. The MIC will grind them out with PTSD, brain injuries, and lost limbs. There is no 'patriotism' or allegience to the Deep State.

Why-Am-I-Banned 6 hours ago

Maybe the best thing that could happen to free us all finally is an all out war with Russia, we aren't going to see a revolution to get rid of the corruption the population is lazy and scared of doing without.

Maybe forced into mutual assured destruction is truly the only way to get rid of the deep state...

Russia lost approx 250 million via communism over decades, maybe we need to just swallow the poison pill and get it over with.

Not all of us will die, and definately no one is going to listen to the deep state leaders after the dust clears...

Max21c 6 hours ago (Edited)

Maybe the best thing that could happen to free us all finally is an all out war with Russia..

Maybe we should instead just launch a sneak attack on Alpha Centauri instead. Skip the small fry like Russia and China. In a few generations we shall know whether our Earthling space torpedoes hit Alpha Centauri. This of course should be debated by the people and approved by a plebiscite per ballot referendums. Then the space war bill sent to the Earthlings Politburo for their approval. It'll take around a decade or more to design and build the space torpedoes... then 100 years plus for travel time and the same to get the data back from the mothership...

Plus we can have both a Cold War and a Hot War with Alpha Centauri... under the leadership of an Earthling appointed or elected by the Earthlings Council and elevated to the rank of Don Quixote with the accompany title of Primal inter Pares

We just need more right thinking smart people to join the cult and become enlightened to the prospects of a new 100 years war with other planets...and maybe some small wars with planetoids...asteroids and comets...

We can establish of house of OverLords composed of only the best Astrologers to help pick out which planets to attack & destroy...based upon whether they have offended our star charts or the zodiac calls for war... In addition we can establish a lower house of UnderLords composed of mad scientists and Generalissimos and crazy Spy Chiefs... and maybe some nutty press types from the official media and puppet press to lead us in the Two Minutes Hate against the Alpha Centauri folks, the space peoples, and the flying saucer people...

Maghreb2 5 hours ago

CIA already had plans for all this under the Stargate Program. After Ike's treaty with various alien species the MIC began its descent into madness and universal conquest.

surroundedbyijits 6 hours ago

A war like that might "free" you, because the Russians will kick your ***.

balz 7 hours ago

Each time I see this "Office of the President Elect" picture thing, I get nauseous.

Fake office for a fake president who wasn't elected in the first place.

BLOTTO 8 hours ago

Like nothing happened back here at home.

Max21c 6 hours ago

Blinken may prove out to be more slick and savy than Dumbo Pompeo the flying cartoon elephant but he's still a fawking neanderthal and a ******. Maybe an elite ****** but he's still a ******. Blind, deaf, and dumb is still blind, deaf, and dumb even with all the powers of the secret police at their disposal.

Ms No PREMIUM 7 hours ago

Rand is sick too. He goes on about how these things are bad specifically because they strengthened Iran? How about liberty crushing mass murder?

"Sen. Paul said the administration of former President Barack Obama spent $250 million (USD) on training 60 rebels [as part of the DoD side; the CIA program was much more expansive], which he said was a waste of money."

So your mad they steal money while creating terrorists? Or are you mad that they don't tell you what they do with the rest? They abduct children from war zones to make them. Maybe the indoctrination and rape children's homes are expensive. They have screwed the entire planet.

There is something wrong with him too. He is another limited hangout

silverlinings00 7 hours ago

He's all bark no bite like Elizabeth Warren. Trotted out to show a feigning resistance.

Insert farm animal here 4 hours ago

Poor Rand is going to have a tough and lonely battle over the next few years. Let's wish him well, he'll be going it alone for sure.

the_pencil 2 hours ago

It seems odd that no one has allied themselves with him in the same manner as McCain & Graham.

Pareto 6 hours ago

Another life long bureaucrat talking about his resume. And fails to answer a simple question. Woop there it is. That's why they hated Trump. Because somebody off the street had better answers than 25 years of experience.

bikepathwalkerjogger 5 hours ago

Every single time!! --

Blinken was born on April 16, 1962, in Yonkers, New York , to Jewish parents, Judith (Frehm) and Donald M. Blinken , the former United States Ambassador to Hungary . [1] [2] [3] His maternal grandparents were Hungarian ****. [4] Blinken's uncle, Alan Blinken , served as the American ambassador to Belgium

Garciathinksso 5 hours ago

Rand Paul, one of the few good ones left. Good Luck with Biden and his war hawks!

NumbNuts 6 hours ago

These same people are attempting a regime change in the United States too. From Freedom to Fascism.

Helg Saracen 6 hours ago

The Americans lost perspectives and actually real freedom when Woodrow Wilson sold US to international banksters in 1913, now this scam just ends and a new scam begins. You haven't figured it out yet. By the way, fascism is Italian National Socialism. No offense.

frank further 6 hours ago

Then what was German National Socialism, if not fascism?

/

/

BluCapitalist PREMIUM 6 hours ago (Edited)

They are not attempting. They have done it. They have perfected their craft over the last 70 years in other countries and they brought it home to keep their criminal organization going.

urhotdogs 6 hours ago remove link

They didn't attempt, they did it! Took a little over 4 years but had to stoop to massive election fraud and changing state laws on the fly. It was coordinated throughout all levels of government down to states and courts and SCOTUS.

bunkers 5 hours ago

Communism

bunkers 5 hours ago

Maybe not.

WhiteHose 6 hours ago

Russia Russia Russia! They never stop! BTW, wheres scumbag Hunter?

starman99 7 hours ago

(((Anthony Blinken)))

rkb100100 7 hours ago

Yea we know the cabinet is full of heeb's.

brown_hornet 7 hours ago

Is he in the boat with Winken and Nod?

GatorMcClusky 7 hours ago

Good one.

Mount Massive 7 hours ago (Edited)

There is a reason Russia has spent the last 2 months ramping up testing of its mil hardware including hyper-vel ICBM's and SLBM's. - Xiden

SelectedNotElectedBiden 7 hours ago

Rand will be the only Senator to give the Dems a hard time. Sad since it should be payback for EVERY Republican Senator.

freakscene 7 hours ago

Cruz will be fun to watch too. They excel being outnumbered.

Ms No PREMIUM 7 hours ago

If they wanted Rand out of that spot he would have been gone a long time ago.

Bob Lidd 5 hours ago

Does anyone think the US policy in the middle east will change with 10 of biden's

appointees being jewish .......??

The "greater israel" will continue no matter the cost to the American tax cattle.......

((((blinken))) ..........

ReadyForHillary 7 hours ago

The neocons are back!

Max21c 7 hours ago

The neocons are back!

Does not matter. They could not win before and they shall not win now. They're ineffective, inept, and incompetent. They won't be able to fix the messes and disasters they've created for themselves. At best they might be able to sick the secret police on a few people at home and drop some bombs or missiles abroad. But for the most part it's some more of the same. Evil is as evil does. They're not going to be able to work themselves out of the fix they've got themselves into or figure it out. They're toast. They're bad people and they're toast. Washingtonians may have absolute power but they've had absolute power all along...and they still can't fix the disasters they've caused.

Northern Exposure 6 hours ago (Edited)

Oh thank God!

If we're not looking for a new pointless war to start or jumping into an existing one then this isn't the America that I know and love!

</sarc>

karzai_luver 7 hours ago

Where is the BUFFALOBILL dude storming the Senate to drag this blinken criminal scum out and do justice for his wanton murder of thousands?

Shut down this freak show.

I would rather have BUFFALOBILL and his idiots running the place than these feckless people's representatives.

Tony , have you learned your lesson?

Senator - screw you and your people I will think it over.

Alexander 7 hours ago

Silence republicans! Yes we stole the election using widespread mail in ballots, yes your state governments changed the rules to allow us to count these mail in ballots more quickly, yes there were far more votes in this election than any other ever. ANDDDD... NO we will not look into the validity of this election becuase muh capital rioting grandma threatened sweet little socialist AOC.

Now give us your children to fight a war in syria.

artless 7 hours ago

Barack Obama. Neocon to the core. Biden is no different. Gonna do us some "liberating" again. And from the left there will be silence as thousands of poor, short brown people are killed as "collateral damage".

Welcome back America to what you do the best. Destroy lives. Any over/under on how many days it takes Biden to start killing folks and hence become a war criminal like pretty much all his predecessors? I might like a piece of that action.

SassyPants 7 hours ago

Republicans are neocons, democrats are neoliberal. You're basically right, just left out half the problem.

pods 7 hours ago

Can't bitch about foreign actions in our elections when we pick other governments.

Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago

Pick ???? Surely you jest !

pods 7 hours ago

We choose sides right?

We picked the CIA stooge in Venezuela.

Not sure about your question.

Maybe "kinetically pick" would be better?

Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago

Sorry, I didn't read your post properly. I didn't see "other" governments.

rwe2late 7 hours ago

you either forgot the sarc tag

or failed to notice such as V. Nuland hand-picking leadership in Ukraine,

or the Trump picking of Guiado for Venezuela.

Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago

Poor eye sight is my best and only excuse.

SelectedNotElectedBiden 7 hours ago

Where is Hunter?

Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago

The Big Guy made him the Advance Minister of Foreign Extortion.

headslapper 7 hours ago

The faces change but the song remains the same. What a waste of energy this government is. Resources thrown down the toilet to make the Ruling class more wealthy. Why do we even pay attention. We all need to have a look in the mirror. Myself included of course.

Armed Resistance 7 hours ago

So now that you've looked in the mirror, what are you going to do about it? Send a strongly-worded letter? Or are you ready to actually step up. As morally wrong and demented as the radical left is, at least you have to admire them in the sense they actually step up to the plate to get sh!t done. It's immoral, but effective.

Canadian Dirtlump 7 hours ago

Lest we forget the same bearded butchers that Chris Stevens flew into ben gazi with (al Quaeda inter alia aligned ) who were funded and trained by the West were the same ones who flew from ben gazi to the incirlik nato base to try to do the same thing in syria.

The only reason it didn't work was because of the SAA, Hezbollah and of course the ultimate backstop Russia. I'm thankful for this.

mikka 7 hours ago

Imagine Russian or Chinese parliament publicly debating regime change in USA.

Uncle_Cuddles 7 hours ago (Edited)

Debating? China has ALREADY done it here.

joew8989 7 hours ago

Rand will continue to fight the good fight, when you live a life based on principal, that's what you do. We will always need more people like him. That's what built this country, not the parasites at the helm now.

ItsTooHotForThis 6 hours ago

Paul voted to confirm the electors. His challenge to the new Sec. of State means nothing.

Garciathinksso 5 hours ago

his argument was based on State's right issue, in case you care

bunkers 5 hours ago

It doesn't matter WHY, he voted with traitors, only, that he did.

SillyTheEnemy 6 hours ago (Edited)

This is literally the only guy we have in the senate who even remotely gives a ****. Yet the amount of **** that is going to happen to us when biden heats up the war in Syria is immeasurable. F*ck me

hardright 6 hours ago

Rand Paul is wasting his time.

If he wants to make a difference he should be lobbying Russia to send more troops into Syria.

surroundedbyijits 6 hours ago

And arranging imports of the Russian vaccine. Less likely to kill you and more effective than the only 45% effective Pfizer ****.

BluCapitalist PREMIUM 6 hours ago

This guys eyes look exactly like the vampires in the movie 30 days of night. Am I in a simulation? Why do these people actually look like fictional villains? I mean Whitmer, Newsom, this new fat, unhealthy, mentally ill assistant "health secretary"? Did I do something really wrong? Am I in hell and don't know it? No. I am here on earth and psychopaths are real and evil is real.

duckandcover 1 hour ago

they're just a little scared and overwhelmed. You might be too

WhiteHose 7 hours ago

Look at this Blinken twit! F you pal! And....wheres HUnter??? Diddling his brothers minor niece? Again? Still?

0h 7 hours ago

2021-01-21 If you go here https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ you can send an email. I just sent: "Joe, you know he won."

LorDampNuts 7 hours ago

I know you are an idiot.

Misesmissesme 7 hours ago

First Ron and now Rand. I think the club just lets them in as the token Don Quixote. They have been the only voices of reason for the last 25 years or so, but they are only tilting at windmills. Nothing is going to change until something forces them to change. The war mongering and corruption will just roll right along while the MIC and congress get richer by the minute.

The unrelenting droning of brown people in foreign lands that are ill-equipped to fight back will commence in 3,2,1...

SassyPants 7 hours ago

Leaving the Republican Party would be the first best step.

ejmoosa 7 hours ago (Edited)

We put too much on one man and one man alone to change things.

Faced with judges and a House and A Senate against him the task before Trump was Herculean.

Add to that 2/5ths of the states with governors also against Trump and it's even worse.

What you need to do is get involved in your local politics and take control back of your Cities and County Commissions, as well as your state governments.

Had Trump held control of the House and the Senate and we had sitting on Courts people who put the Constitution first FOR the people rather than using it against them, things would be a lot different today.

The choice is yours.

Time to play 7 hours ago

It's good to see that Rand, is starting to think more like his father!

north_hand_demon 7 hours ago

So he's controlled opposition, too?

Lyman54 7 hours ago

Pretty early to be smoking crack isn't it?

otschelnik 7 hours ago

With Cookies Nuland as Blinken's deputy, you've got the neocon family business installed at Foggy Bottom. Robert (Victoria's huband), Fredrick, and Kim each with their own pro-war think tank, and a list of supporters which constitute the "A-list" of the USSA's merchants of death. Northrup-Grumman, UTX, Raytheon, Lockheed....

9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago

Winken, Blinken and Nod.

That's the administration we got now.

silverlinings00 8 hours ago

Careful Rand, we wouldn't want you to get another "visit" from a neighbor while you're mowing the lawn.

Pdunne 3 hours ago (Edited)

Biden's biggest Cabinet mistake will ultimately be Blinken.

Like Obama picked H Clinton with disasterous consequences Biden picks Blinken.

JackOliver4 4 hours ago

Rand Paul says " Assad is a terrible person " !!!

Dr Assad is a HERO !!

Rand Paul is either completely misinformed or just another useless politician afraid to speak the TRUTH !

A COWARD !

Hessler 4 hours ago

Assad may be a good person at heart but he is not qualified to run a state. He should be a doctor or something.

JackOliver4 4 hours ago

And Joe Biden is ??

OR Boris Johnstone ??

Helg Saracen 4 hours ago

It is up to the Syrians to decide, not you. You already paid for the genocide of the Syrian Christians in the "fight against the tyrant Assad." I've seen all kinds of idiots and hypocrites, but you are their king.

Hessler 4 hours ago (Edited)

Why did not Assad anticipated the Zionist invasion even though the Snowden document reveled the CIA/Mossad works in the making in 2006 ??

If he did anticipated an invasion why he did not do anything to safeguard his nation and it's people ?

Why every men, women and child capable to lift and shoot was not given and an ordinance and proper training ?? Israel has that. Why can't Syria ?

Syria is a part of Greater Israel. They have been marked for genocide the day Israel was created, what haste did Mr. Assad showed to safeguard his country against their genocidal maniacs psychopaths ??

I will never forgive those who inflicted the terrible atrocities on the children and women and Mr. Assad has a blame to share.

mark3383 3 hours ago

Assad risked his life and continues to do so every day, trump recently bragged he thought about "taking him out". he's a true hero more than you or I will ever be

steve2241 5 hours ago

Rand Paul doesn't understand. Blinken follows the path that Israel tells him to. Middle East instability benefits Israel. The fomenting of Sunni-Shia conflict kills Israels' enemies, the muslims, without Israel having to lift a finger. Syria is no longer a threat to Israel. Mission accomplished.

Hessler 4 hours ago (Edited)

You're wrong on two accounts. First, there's no ****te/Sunni conflict. What goes in Miiddle East is entire different than what is portrayed here. The locals know but how many of them get interviewed on live TV or get a airtime on a prime time desk ? Those are reserved for the chosenites who spew BS about Arabs and Muslims 24/7.

****te/Sunni fiction as broadcasts in the west is nothing but a ploy to wash the hands of the responsibility and pin the blame on the victims.

Second, Syria is now a bigger threat to Israel than it was in Pre War era. Battle Hardened troops, better organization, training with Russian/Iranian Military, better equipment, talented strategists and when you fight a war like that for that long you tend to grow a bigger set of balls.

JackOliver4 4 hours ago

Syria wants the GOLAN back - I would say they are a threat to ISRAEL !!

Sick Monkey 5 hours ago

Speaking of war didn't Rand Paul vote to accept the illegitimate electors. I like Paul he seems to have a level head but you voted to put the commies in power. Like you said in your speech "there are repercussions". Those who took a stand against this coup must be kept in power as they put skin in the game. That's a rare and precious gift to us the people. In the year 2021 it's as good as gold.

Taffer 5 hours ago

Exactly, hence my previous comment below.

mark3383 3 hours ago

trump lost the election because he allowed million of fraud votes to be counted and never said or did anything about it in the year leading up to it. he 's the one that lost it. no one else

Sinophile 6 hours ago

"War Pigs"----Black Sabbath

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerers of death's construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds
Oh lord yeah!

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor
Yeah!

Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait 'til their judgement day comes
Yeah!

Now in darkness world stops turning
Ashes where the bodies burning
No more war pigs have the power
Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of judgement, God is calling
On their knees the war pig's crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan laughing spreads his wings
oh lord yeah!

surroundedbyijits 6 hours ago

Circuses. Theatre for the plebes. Not one bit of foreign policy is decided or affected by debates or hearings in the Legislative branch. They're all following a script, some of them act like they aren't in on the joke.

Cloudcrusher 6 hours ago

Psychosis the denial of reality. The military industrial complex is make believe. It's military industrial congress, Congress is in charge they alone are to blame know one else. The sooner everyone starts living in reality the better off will be. You want to win the war of words better start with reality. Or your going to get a another kind of war one where only the strong survive.

Max21c 6 hours ago (Edited)

Watch: Rand Paul Challenges New Secretary Of State Over Regime-Change In Syria

Meaningless inside the beltway for the record drool-n-dribble... Rand Paul just wants to pad his resume, bio, and gain some street cred claims...

TahoeBilly2012 6 hours ago

When do the new wars start? Dems can't wait. Blame them on Covid or something, they will buy it.

vspam 7 hours ago

Biden will go to war with Iran and turned thr ME into a fireball. The mainstream media will cheer him on under the banner of peace and unity

Max21c 7 hours ago

Diablo Corona

Washingtonians are for the most part the spawn of Satan.

DC= the Devil's City... they are evil... Washingtonians are just pure rotten evil...

Washington DC ... Devil's City

Washington DC .... Devil's Crown

The evil ones cannot change their evil ways... they're too far gone... the evil ones cannot be redeemed...

Max21c 7 hours ago

Paul concluded by saying that regime change needs to end because it is involving the US in long wars that are costly to the military.

Too late. Washington is toast. It's just a question of when Washingtonians lose in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, et cetera. They already made a mess of things and they do not have the brains to fix it. Same with their inabilities as regards nonproliferation, North Korea, et cetera. They don't have what it takes to figure it out and work it out and nobody is going to fix it for them because they're assholes regardless of which cabal of Ivy League assholes or ******* elites are in power.

ThomasEdmonds 7 hours ago

Paul isn't supposed to question a Zionist's motives..

aloha-snackbar 7 hours ago

if the youth said no to war and moms said not my child and burned down the recruitment/death centers then war would end...

tunEphsh 7 hours ago

Thank goodness that Paul told the idiot Blicken to lay off regime change. Obama-Biden made a mess of the middle east and caused a refugee crises which is still with us. Instead of being named secretary of state, me thinks Blicken should be put in jail for acts in the Middle East which killed hundreds of thousands of people.

moneybots 7 hours ago

The EU has become a mess because of regime change.

freakscene 7 hours ago

Of course he should. But that would require sanity.

yerfej 7 hours ago (Edited)

Simple way to stop all this insane venturism and nation building it to MANDATE that every aysshole like Blinken have a spouse or child or sibling or relative ON THE GROUND fighting in one of these shyyytholes. These elites love this crap because THEY never pay a personal price, no they have farmed that out to the "commoners" who supply the bodies. The filthy elites are good at leveraging everyone else to fulfill their fantasies while paying no price.

Occams_Razor_Trader 7 hours ago

You've seen the videos of Chelsea and Malia on tour in Kabul? Yeah?

yerfej 7 hours ago

More like Eeyore pontificating from her 20 million dollar penthouse about how she is so not into money, or Maglia dancing around stoned like a "social justice warrior".

Flynt2142ahh 7 hours ago (Edited)

The senate needs more Rand Paul types - and they dont have to be in the Republican party...This would force actual accountability of uniparty folks and these appointees. We need less murkowski and collins

phillyla 7 hours ago

I am going to harp on this

in 2014 Matt Bevin challenged McConnell in a Senate Primary

He was gaining momentum

Then Rand endorsed McConnell

Bevin lost McConnell got re-elected

Bevin was later elected Governor of KY so he had the votes

Rand Paul Broke my heart

Leguran@premium PREMIUM 7 hours ago

We need use the Progressive's signage: He is not my President.

LostMyGunsInABoatingAccident 7 hours ago

You can't necessarily call it an "American" policy.

America lost control of it's policy long ago.....

Mount Massive 7 hours ago

Here comes another war, and this time, it will spiral out of control. In two years or less, I expect the US to be in a major conflict and/or hit at home. Sigh....Leftist

Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago

Pelosi just took Rand aside and said, wait and see what your neighbor on the other side of you has to say about this.

9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago

Rand is in the senate. nancy runs the house. That would be Schumer's job.

Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago

Pelosi seems to be running the show and is the face of the party

WorkingClassMan 8 hours ago (Edited)

Rand Paul, the lone voice of sanity in a rubber-stamp corrupt government.

If you or someone you care about is either in or thinking about joining this nation's military...please don't. Let these antiwhites fight their own wars. They hate you and don't trust you because you're White and they hate you owning guns, but they'll put a gun in your hand and point you at their and Isn'treal's enemies without hesitation.

fudge punch 8 hours ago

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

AVmaster 3 hours ago

"Regime change in the Middle East has led to chaos, instability and more terrorism,"

Uhhh, yea...

... Thats what they WANTED!

Duh!

Scipio Africanuz 3 hours ago

Thank you Senator Paul..

For your candor..

The challenge of US Foreign Policy, is akin to a heroin addiction. It's bad for the country, but all attempts to cure the country of addiction to imperialism has failed, including our energetic efforts over the years..

Too many people benefit from the ruination of the country as it engages in squandering lives, honor, power, reputation, and treasure, in maintaining a facade of illusory power, at the expense of the true power of the country..

Put simply Senator, at this point, we don't believe any entity on earth can cure the US of the addiction to depravity save nature, which cure is more preferable to that of the Entity whose decision is not subject to appeal..

Now Senator, you may not believe in God Almighty and thus, swat away the simple insight but God does not require your belief to act..

Over His creation..

The only cure, if sense and rationality don't prevail, is exactly what we don't desire to know and why?

Because we've seen it before, applied to different societies with similar mentality over the course of human history and Senator, it's never palatable..

Anyhow, probation is till summer, to allow folks do intensive introspective contemplation, enough to acquire prudent humility and if they don't, well..

Cheers...

Ckierst1 2 hours ago

I believe the Senator is a Christian.

Pdunne 4 hours ago

Blinken is a bald faced liar and is already working with Ms Nuland on more regime changes.

Venezuela and Syria need to get ready for more robust attacks.

Dzerzhhinsky 2 hours ago

Control the oil, you control the world.

the_pencil 2 hours ago

Oil was the cause of every war for the past century.

Posa 4 hours ago

A ridiculous exchange. Sen Paul seems to take at face value the Liberal-NeoCon claim that Regime Change is good-intentioned attempt to democratize the Middle East.

Hardly. Regime Change was always designed to a) install Israeli supremacy in the region ("Operation Clean Break"); and b) secure US Global Uni-polar dominance (the Wolfowitz Doctrine) as part of the Brezezinski "Grand Chessboard". That's the intention... this exchange demonstrates how out of it Rand Paul is; and what a nasty weasel Blinken is.

Ckierst1 2 hours ago

That's not what Sen. Paul said. He doesn't agree with regime change. That's what he said.

PaulDF 5 hours ago

To which the Biden appointee replied, "You know, the thing!"

mark3383 3 hours ago

cmon man!

duckandcover 2 hours ago

do your job!

Taffer 5 hours ago

Rand Paul's opinion and $6 will get him a latte at Starbucks.

Hessler 6 hours ago (Edited)

Foreign policy is never gonna change no matter who's in change because the way system is setup.

The lifestyle (our way of life) pertaining to the western model of civilization (our values) needs unlimited supply of money to be supported. The money that can't be made by legal means, hence the continues war that needs to be maintained overseas while also starting new ones as requirement arise.

And since this is a continues state, so accompanies it continues propaganda, lies, false flags, deception and manipulation of facts and truth. LYING IS IN VERY GENES OF THE WHITE CHRISTIAN WEST. They have been doing it for so long that they have almost mastered the "the art of lying" the zenith of which is to project your own flaws and crimes on to the subjects you carried it out on. One thing you can always be sure of, they will never admit their crimes unless there's no other way. And that they will be accusing their opponents of the same things they would be doing.

War underpins their society, nation and civilization.

steve2241 4 hours ago

The problem is that the U.S. is abusing its position as printer-in-chief of the Reserve Currency of the world. With that fake money, it can intervene in the affairs of nations throughout the world - a capability that no other country enjoys. Take away its reserve currency and watch how quickly middle eastern strife ends - and the nation of Israel, too.

apparently 6 hours ago

will the left and their mindless supporters be comforted to know that their guy promotes these "endless wars"? will they be happy to sacrifice their sons and daughters for desert real-estate whose oil we don't want?

Paul was being way too polite. He should simply say: "I'm not voting to confirm this war monger" then get up and leave the room.

Hessler 6 hours ago

If you think it's about the oil, you really don't understand the world you inhabit.

apparently 6 hours ago (Edited)

I don't think it's about oil but I'm struggling to name a single US interest in sand-wars. maybe you can? yes, yes, military/industrial complex, blah, blah, but why the middle east? please enlighten us.

Hessler 5 hours ago (Edited)

It's to rebuild the world in the image of the west and Islam is the biggest hampering in the way. Like other religions, it can't be altered or dominated so the only way is to completely destroy it. This is why Israel was setup by the Anglos at a strategic location in the heart of the Arab world to engage them into perpetual war and destroy them.

That's about it.

And whenever a war on a civilization is waged, there are always monetary benefits. Oil, MIC, Political donations come into play here. But that's just a sideshow. And with a civilization as big as Islamic, benefits also tend to be massive.

apparently 5 hours ago

no evidence that the arab spring was against islam. why aren't we doing regime change in indonesia? why did joe just reverse the Muslim travel ban?

do you understand anything about the world you live in?

Hessler 5 hours ago (Edited)

A lot actually. We are concentrating on the core of the Islamic civilization for when the core collapses, the outer layers collapses with it. It's the core that holds the entire thing together, hence we concentrate on Middle East and not on Indonesia.

Arab spring was to sow chaos and turmoil. By the way of deception.....Jewish moto

It is not that Israel establishes America's foreign policy. It is that the basic world view produced by WASP culture is naturally aligned with Jewish thought in most ways, especially in terms of Empire: ruling the world.

InflammatoryResponse 5 hours ago

it was not a muslim travel ban. it was a ban on places that didn't have adequate infrastructure to verify who was travling.

duckandcover 1 hour ago

where is the last place, core or not core, that Islam religion and Muslim culture has been eradicated by any means? Yugoslavia? India? Not seeing it. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Your argument does not hold.

starman99 5 hours ago

(((THEM)))

Groucho 5 hours ago

No of course not. Nothing to do with what George Kennan called "the greatest strategic material prize in world history".

Hessler 5 hours ago

And whenever a war on a civilization is waged, there are always monetary benefits. Oil, MIC, Political donations come into play here. But that's just a sideshow. And with a civilization as big as Islamic, benefits also tend to be massive.

apparently 2 hours ago

by now, we should be weary (and wary) of "it's all a sideshow" arguments.

it simply asserts greater knowledge (never disclosed) and terminates the thread.

as for the grand anti-islam plan... how's that going in western europe?

Groucho 5 hours ago

No of course not. Nothing to do with what George Kennan called "the greatest strategic material prize in world history".

JackOliver4 4 hours ago

It is ALWAYS about the OIL - thats why IRAN and VENEZUELA are being weakened by crippling sanctions !!

THAT"S how the ZIO/US does it - SANCTIONS first - WAR 2nd !

Doesn't work anymore since RUSSIA stepped in !

nocturnal66 7 hours ago

Just ask if this 100 year plus war is to create "greater Israel" . It all documented. Enough already with the lies. Just admit it.

Occams_Razor_Trader 7 hours ago

WWE- fake fights have begun again in earnest .....................

Paul Ryan could fake a punch as good as John Boehner ............

Max21c 7 hours ago (Edited)

"Maybe we shouldn't be 'choosing' governments in the Middle East," Paul continued.

The Washington establishment imposed their chosen ruler Joe Schmo Biden to rule over America.

jesus_loves_you 7 hours ago

H a n g t h e m a l l

Aquamaster 7 hours ago

Should we have a contest to see who can pick the first country Biden will send troops to?

Lyman54 7 hours ago

DC !

SERReal1 7 hours ago

You win!

WTFUD 7 hours ago

Blinken Heck , don't worry ya'll, Nuland (Nudelman's) back to steady the ship with a fab new chocolate chip cookie recipe that the terrorists will adore.

littlewing 7 hours ago

And they aren't even trying to hide it.

fzrkid 7 hours ago

Rand can say whatever he wants and it changes NOTHING

Armed Resistance 7 hours ago

Who is still planning on filing taxes? At the very least, turn your back on the system-right? Upvote for not filing, downvote for I just want to avoid conflict-I'm filing.

brown_hornet 7 hours ago

But, we are getting a return.

No paying next year though.

rwe2late 7 hours ago (Edited)

Doesn't matter if it is a disaster for the peoples invaded and for domestic liberty in the USA.

It's considered "worth it" by those in power

to protect the financial supremacy of the dollar,

promote the regional military supremacy of Israel,

and continue the war profiteering of the MIC.

north_hand_demon 7 hours ago

So what? Your cushy lifestyle and mine is a direct result of hegemony. Get over it.

rwe2late 7 hours ago (Edited)

Celebration of a "cushy lifestyle" gained by plunder and murder is not for everyone.

To revel in it, one requires a special insensibility.

DonGenaro 7 hours ago (Edited)

This fence-sitter did virtually NOTHING to stop the steal.
Now he's whining about having to lie in bed his cowardice helped make.
Many MORE thousands will soon be massacred by these war-mad psychopaths.
This POS is DEAD TO ME.

littlewing 7 hours ago

Rand is smart, he knew no matter what Xiden was going to be installed.

HominyTwin 7 hours ago

He's smart. A bunch of idiots, after a good breakfast at IHOP, were herded into the capital by govt informants to break stuff for the cameras, and then herded right back out in time for a hearty dinner at Golden Corral. They did sacrifice their lunch for exactly nothing, though. Congrats. He stayed away from all that nonsense.

9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago

That's about the size of it, in retrospect.

zulu127 7 hours ago

regime change needs to end because it is involving the US in long wars that are costly to the military.

Wrong! "regime change needs to continue because it is involving the US in wars that are profitable to the military.

ableman28 4 hours ago

Part of the problems is that neither the democrats or republicans are primarily in favor of DEMOCRATIC governments in the middle east. When Egypt FREELY ELECTED the Muslin Brotherhood to power in Egypt the US fell all over itself to help unseat them, using every technique we can.....currency debasement, food aid manipulation, tacit encouragement to strongment (military) that we feel are controllable, etc. etc.

The US was never in favor of one man one vote in South Africa during apartheid and explained this convenient hypocrisy as an unfortunate necessity.

Supporting regime change is entirely, ENTIRELY, different than supporting democracy. The US has a very very very long history of supporting the former and claiming it was the latter when in fact it wasn't. Democracy means letting the chips fall where they may. In countries whose ruling leadership is oppressive to its people and for which we have a long history of support its very unlikely that any democratic election would bring us new friends. It would, in every case, bring to power people who opposed the old government and by association US.

People playing to the stands here in the US are smart enough to know this. But maintaining the correct political position for domestic consumption also trumps doing the right thing in anywhere else.

International politics is a pure expression of national interest. Our national interest is economic outside the US. That part of socialist or marxist theory is spot on.

Hessler 4 hours ago

Insightful, thanks!

LooseLee 4 hours ago

'Disaster' is the MO, Rand. Please, get real or get lost.

Musum 5 hours ago

Senator Rand Paul recently challenged the new Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken on his history of pushing regime change in the Middle East and North Africa

Pointless and hopeless. The only way to end America's endless wars is to deal with the guys in small hats.

Hessler 5 hours ago

Small hats were employed by the English speaking protestants for their ulterior motives, world view, global ambitions which were in alignment with the chosenites.

You can't solve the Jewish problem without solving the problem of western civilization.

Fire_Hog 5 hours ago

The real problems are the 3 letter intelligence agencies, not religion.

Musum 4 hours ago

Are you naive or misdirecting? Offices are occupied by people.

train rider 6 hours ago

Deep thinking and reflection...what about our military personnel and contractors...why are we putting them in danger with these interventionist kockamamie screw balls coming up with these strategies...meanwhile innocent civilians keep getting maimed and killed.

We have no business over there, let the countries decide for themselves what they want etc. we need energy idependence...greta can go fly a kite...keep reducing emissions with tech we have.

nocturnal66 6 hours ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinon_Plan

LorDampNuts 7 hours ago

It is very sad that paul's neighbor does not have a more lethal right hook.

TheZeitgeist 7 hours ago

Sen. Paul began his argument by questioning Blinken's role in the NATO intervention of Libya in 2001

So...only off by a decade. I think ZeroHedge drops these snafus into the copy just to see if anyone actually reads the stuff.

freakscene 7 hours ago (Edited)

Its skimming material at best. Reading all the way through went out the window when ZH become a CNN sponsor.

:)

littlewing 7 hours ago

When Ron Paul was calling out Bernanke you would see they were alone in the room.

There is no debate, its all a fraud. Saw the vote on election theft and it was their aides voting for them.

StanleyTheManly 7 hours ago

Give me a break, Rand Paul. YOU KNOWINGLY voted for this by not standing for our elected President.

You're a traitor. Shut up and sit down.

TRON Paul 7 hours ago

PRESIDENT PAUL!

PRESIDENT PAUL!

PRESIDENT PAUL!

wmbz 7 hours ago

War is a business, and "we" are big business. Matter no how many completely innocent people get blown away. What matters are the spoils. We were warned over and over again about the MIC yet here we are.

Profit always wins over peace, no money in it.

totally unwise 7 hours ago

Today, wars aren't meant to be won

they're meant to bring chaos

Chaos

Calling Maxwell Smart and agent 99

Where's that shoe phone ?

freakscene 7 hours ago

I guess, good for Rand? Thats about all he can do.

Dog Will Hunting 7 hours ago

Oh, that Rand Paul. I wondered where he was hiding this whole time peels back Trump's saggy *** cheeks to find the good doctor

in_xanadu_did_kubla_khan 8 hours ago

Achoo: Hey, Blinkin

Blinkin: Did you say Abe Lincoln?

Achoo: No! I said, HEY, BLINKIN!

createnewaccount 8 hours ago

If we can't have Giant Meteor maybe a global helter skelter of 'regime change' will be a good consolation prize.

Lt. Frank Drebin 8 hours ago

I voted for Giant Meteor, but the Dominion voting machines switched my vote to turd sandwich.

Holding My Breath 7 hours ago

A big upvote for sarcasm (or is it utter stupidity?)

createnewaccount 4 hours ago

Uh oh!

https://www.livescience.com/13738-trouble-detecting-sarcasm-dementia-sign.html

Herdee 7 hours ago

The Military/Industrial Complex needs endless foreign wars and imaginary enemies so that the money won't be spent at home helping Americans. Such as infrastructure projects. The goal from within is to destroy the American middle class and turn the United States into a third world country. Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump all served the crooks.

littlewing 7 hours ago

Uh then why didn't Trump start wars?

Bear 11 minutes ago

Like father like son ... insight and wisdom

Arizona1234 26 minutes ago

China Joe and the mentally ill Marxist that run his crap show already started a multi Trillion dollar endless war. The War on the weather they call Climate Crisis. It's the one where we loose and wind up praying to find the small potato to make it through the day, and then hope to find a few dry sticks for the fire to cook it. Where you will have to make the small fire at night so that mentally ill #AOC carbon police can't easily see the smoke.

Maltheus 1 hour ago

It's taken less than 24 hours, after Biden's inauguration, for ISIS to magically make an appearance again. They're not even pretending anymore.

Tom Angle 2 hours ago

I think I had heard all I want to hear from Rand Paul after.

boattrash 2 hours ago

Gawdamit Rand, we like you and everything, but the Coup you should be focused on is HERE, even if it means you should spit in your hands, hoist the black flag and start slittin throats.

Sincerely,

The American People

Dzerzhhinsky 3 hours ago

If the US can steal Syria, it means it will be able to build a pipeline, steal Iranian gas and sell it to Europe.
The US needs something to give its financiers and controlling energy supplies to Europe would go a long way to paying off the debt.

learnofjesuits 4 hours ago

vatican's wars

Hessler 3 hours ago

Puritans burred the Vatican so deep underground that if even the nuke detonates there, if won't make a shockwave on the ground

TemporarySecurity 4 hours ago

Perfectly fine for anybody in the executive to lie through their teeth.

Say one thing in the hearing and do what they always do once confirmed. Our post Constitutional government needs to fail.

tangent 4 hours ago

Ran Paul's ability to talk as if they are not simply being outright bribed for their positions is impressive. I suppose the new CCP SoS will take the positions of the CCP, which is the one paying him the most money for those positions.

richnhappy 4 hours ago

Just read confessions of an economic hit man, by john perkins, all you need to know. The playbook sounds like what china is doing in the us now, distract the masses with the middle east ****show.

Seditious 4 hours ago

We have had just one president so far this century that has not used American blood and treasure to destroy a nation. He was a rogue billionaire that got taken out by every other billionaire that wanted to stay in the club. The American people are going to have to figure out that they will have better results solving this nations problems at the Bezos, Walton, Zuckerberg and Dorsey homes than they will going to the Capitol in Washington DC.

The Child sacrifice murders committed by these people don't occur in some hidden room at a pizza parlor. They occur on public roads under semitrailers marked Amazon Prime and Walmart that wouldn't be allowed on the roads of nations that we used to call the third world.

I suppose the only big question is, who's child dies tomorrow?

Maghreb2 4 hours ago

You could look it at that way. I'd say he was a hairs breadth from starting world war III with Iran and China and was removed by a stroke of bad luck from Wuhan and the old establishment asserting their authority through corruption.

Trump might be remembered fondly for actually lowering the number of small conflicts but the U.S war machine is bigger than any one president and his closeness to Israel show what camp he was in. Only God or a few insiders can really judge what his ultimate aim was but he wasn't the man who pulled the first shot of the first world war. Damn well loaded the gun and gave it to the Israelis in my opinion.

Seditious 4 hours ago

During Obama's time in office we had a year in which the United States dropped bombs in more nations than they did in any single year during WW2.

Bezos, Walton's and others spill our blood domestically. Biden will spill our blood overseas to keep some other billionaires happy.

Maghreb2 5 hours ago (Edited)

I'll play devils advocate even though I like the guy. His father thought things like that were a good idea as an alternative to imperial invasion.

steve2241 4 hours ago

Based on your comment, I take it you REALLY like Blinken! Yes?

Fire_Hog 5 hours ago

The same thing happened in Egypt when Obama pushed for and got quick elections when the only organization that could field candidates was the Muslim Brotherhood. The result was very predictable.

The Brotherhood took over and the result was so bad that the people finally rebelled against Morsi's government. This lead to Al Sisi who was better than Morsi. I question whether the situation improved by letting the Muslim Brotherhood take control.

Maghreb2 4 hours ago

People? Thought that was the military?

WatchnSee 5 hours ago

"regime change doesn't work" "Maybe we shouldn't be 'choosing' governments in the Middle East,".... nor in the USA. Time will tell.

Hessler 6 hours ago (Edited)

Don't worry Mr. Paul, these white men in the suits are the leaders of the terrorists groups. It's hardcoded in their genes, they don't know any other way of earning a living.

Mancolo 6 hours ago

Lessons? I don't need your stinking lessons. I've got friends to pay off.

Pvt Joker PREMIUM 7 hours ago

I like the US policy of Perma War and Regime change. The more troops over there , the less troops over here.

Scornd 7 hours ago

I dont understand the complaints.

You voted for this.

MCDirtMigger 6 hours ago

By 'you', do you mean Dominion?

littlewing 7 hours ago

District of Criminals

that's all they are.

I am bailing out forever now.

Just looking at them and their actions is self harm.

Max21c 7 hours ago (Edited)

District of Criminals

Diablo Corona

Washingtonians are for the most part the spawn of Satan.

DC= the Devil's City... they are evil... Washingtonians are just pure rotten evil...

Washington DC ... Devil's City

Washington DC .... Devil's Crown

The evil ones cannot change their evil ways... they're too far gone... the evil ones cannot be redeemed...

LorDampNuts 7 hours ago

Keep sending your donations to Stop the Steal, Trump has a plan and will be sworn in by April when it warms up. Free Chumptard hat with every $100 donation.

Occams_Razor_Trader 7 hours ago

I'd donate a hunny for you to flush your head in a toilet ...............

foxenburg 7 hours ago

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Rammbock 7 hours ago

Republicans are great actors

Kotwica 44 7 hours ago

This guy speaks truth, but, no one gives a flying fu<k.

Ajax_USB_Port_Repair_Service_ 7 hours ago

Attention Secret Police: We've got one for you!

freedommusic 7 hours ago (Edited)

Whatever these folks say is irrelevant. They are all sitting on foreign soil. The UNITED STATES CORPORATION is a foreign Municipal entity owned by China claimed in the recent bankruptcy settlement. POTUS said when he was leaving. Go ahead, take it. The buildings, the chairs, statues, it's all yours . Anyone who steps outside of that foreign jurisdiction will be entering American soil and subject to the Laws of the United States Constitutional Republic and prosecuted for treason and sedition.

DC is now a Chinese embassy.

I wonder how much food they have stocked up in there? I would presume the military would uphold a blockade and prevent the exchange of trade from occurring into a surrounded hostile territory of the enemy.

YOU WANT IT

YOU GOT IT

HAVE A NICE DAY

SERReal1 7 hours ago

Where was Rand in calling out the election fraud?

Now he is acting all tough again on the deep state creatures.

9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago (Edited)

He wants to stay in office. No way is going to touch the third rail. None of them will.

rkb100100 7 hours ago

This is part of a Punch and Judy show put on for retards.

leodogma1 7 hours ago

And yet not one peep of this Quislings tie's to the Chinese Communist party of Evil !

Southern Discomfort 7 hours ago

I'm sure it will be blamed on an action taken by Trump and the only cure will be intervention. Maybe Joetard can set up a new cabinet level position to seek out opportunities for new wars.

More-Cowbell 8 hours ago

The show must go on. As if these asz clowns ( all of them ) matter.

north_hand_demon 8 hours ago

Whatever. Your cushy lifestyle, and mine, exists because we're the dominant imperial power on the planet. Might makes right. Paul knows it too; this is just virtue signaling.

artless 7 hours ago (Edited)

And in your statement lies the real problem with the vast majority of people in this country.

Yeah I edited the lame ad hom line after I read a few comments. But perhaps it is long due that rather than simply accept things as the way they are and calling any opposition to it the thoughts of a ten year old, it might be high time to actually try to make a change in how people think and ultimately behave.

LooseLee 4 hours ago

Said like a card-carrying Zio.

[Jan 21, 2021] Sometimes you drain the swamp sometimes the swamp drains you

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved", ..."
"... "We will never give up. We will never concede, it just doesn't happen." ..."
"... " Biden's America Would Be A Dystopian Hellhole ", ..."
"... Trump has not signed the Insurrection Act. ..."
"... 'trust the plan' is a never ending story psyop ..."
"... 'best is yet to come' .. ..."
"... to beam back to the mothership. ..."
"... the humans are out to get them ..."
"... it happening you watch just donate ..."
"... without symptoms. ..."
"... Amnesty run by US State Department representatives, funded by convicted financial criminals, and threatens real human rights advocacy worldwide. ..."
"... Yes yes yes – as if we didn't fucking know! ..."
"... YOU MEAN TO DESTROY THE NHS AND YOU WILL REPEAT THIS OVER AND OVER AND OVER UNTIL IT IS DONE! ..."
Jan 21, 2021 | off-guardian.org

THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF CAPITULATES

The Trump Era is over after the incumbent announced in the day after Wednesday's storming of the US Capitol that "My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power", which was widely interpreted by friends and foes alike as the tacit concession that he previously promised never to provide a little more than 24 hours prior during his speech at the Save America Rally .

At that event, he literally said that "We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved", yet completely changed his tune following the day's tumultuous events and after mysteriously "going dark" for over 24 hours, during which time some speculate that he was forced by his enemies in the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (" deep state ") to give up the fight.

BETRAYING HIS BASE

This totally devastated his supporters who elected him primarily for the purpose of executing his chief promise to "drain the swamp" that all of them so deeply despise. They truly believed that he could irreversibly effect significant long-term change to the way that America is run, something which Trump himself also sincerely thought he could do as well, but he ultimately lacked the strength time and again to take the decisive steps that were necessary in order to do so.

Thus, he ended up getting swallowed by the same "swamp" that he attempted to drain, which is licking its lips after feasting on the political carcass that he's since become as a result of his capitulation. For as much hope as he inspired in his supporters and the respect that many of them still have for him, most of them are profoundly disappointed that he gave up and didn't go down fighting.

That's not to say that the vast majority of them expected him to forcefully resist Biden's impending inauguration, but just that they never thought they'd see the day where he publicly capitulated after carefully cultivating such a convincing reputation among them as a fighter who literally said a little more than 24 hours prior that "We will never give up. We will never concede, it just doesn't happen."

This prompted an ongoing soul-searching process among the most sober-minded of them who aren't indoctrinated with the cultish Q-Anon claims that Trump still has a so-called "master plan" that he's preparing to implement after this latest "5D chess" move. It's over, the Trump Era has ended, and the "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) movement that he inspired is now at risk of being declared a " domestic terrorist " organization in the coming future.

TRUMP'S MOST FATAL POLITICAL MISCALCULATION

" Biden's America Would Be A Dystopian Hellhole ", like the author predicted a few months ago, and all of Trump's supporters know that. Some had already resigned themselves to its seeming inevitability after his efforts to legally reverse the contested results of the latest elections failed for a variety of reasons that most of them attribute to the "swamp's" corruption, but they nevertheless remained as positive as possible after having believed that their hero would go down with them to the end.

None ever thought twice about his promise to "never give up, never concede", and they even expected him to have to be escorted from the White House on 20 January, yet his tacit concession is forcing many of them to re-evaluate their views about him in hindsight. Not only is he going out with a whimper on the "deep state's" terms, but he never fully "drained the swamp".

Trump's most fatal political miscalculation is that he thought that he could change the system from the "inside-out" after symbolically -- yet importantly, not substantively -- taking control of it as America's first modern-day "outsider" President. He immediately switched from an "outsider" to an "insider" shortly after his inauguration by capitulating to the "deep state's" demands that he fire former National Security Advisor Flynn, which was his "original sin" that paved the way for all that would later follow.

Trump the self-professed "deal-maker" thought that he could strike a "compromise" with his enemies through these means, but all that he did was embolden them to intensify their fake news-driven efforts to oust him and continue sabotaging him from within through many of the same "swamp" creatures that he naively continued to surround himself with.

RINOS + MSM = TRUMP'S DEFEAT

The most reviled among them in the eyes of his base is "Javanka", the popular portmanteau of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka. He continued listening to these "Republicans In Name Only", or RINOs as many MAGA members describe them, as well as many others such as those who still sit in Congress but pretended to be his friend just to win re-election.

Furthermore, the influence that his former reality TV career had on him resulted in Trump remaining obsessed with how his enemies might malign him in the Mainstream Media (MSM) for any decisive moves that he took to smash the "deep state". This weakness of character proved to be his greatest personal flaw since he should have followed his instincts instead of submitting to the egoistic desire to be "liked" by his foes.

So influenced was he by the MSM that his enemies were able to employ the most basic "reverse-psychology" tricks to manipulate him into "playing it safe" in his struggle against the "deep state". They fearmongered since even before he entered office that he'd turn into a so-called "dictator", yet he never seriously contemplated any such authoritarian moves in that direction despite always having the possibility of utilizing the immense powers vested in him by the Constitution to do so if he sincerely wanted.

His MAGA supporters passionately pleaded that he should have turned into his enemies' worst nightmare by declaring at least limited martial law in response to the decades-long Hybrid War of Terror on America finally going kinetic last summer after Antifa and "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) orchestrated nationwide riots to oust him.

TRUMP'S THREE GREATEST FAILURES

Bewildering his base, Trump also failed to revoke Article 230 despite now-proven fears that it would empower Big Tech to censor him and his supporters , nor did he thwart the Democrats' mail-in ballot and Dominion voting system schemes which they argue ultimately led to them stealing the election.

Just as concerning was his decision to not stop the Democrat Governors from locking down their populations for political reasons under the convenient pretext of COVID-19. The author addressed all of these issues in his analysis published shortly after the election about why " The Anti-Trump Regime Change Sequence Is Worthwhile Studying ". Trump could have legally exercised near-"dictatorial" powers to avert all of this and thus save America as his supporters see it, yet time and again he failed to gather the strength needed to do so due to his deep personal flaws.

THE HYBRID WAR ON AMERICA IS OVER

While Trump was unquestionably victimized by the "deep state" during his entire time in office, he's no longer as much of a martyr as he used to be after suddenly giving up the fight following Wednesday's storming of the US Capitol. He surrendered to the shock of his base, was subsequently swallowed by the "swamp", and is now being mercilessly destroyed in an ominous sign of what awaits the rest of the MAGA movement in the Biden-Kamala era.

Had he gone down fighting to the end and "never gave up" like he promised, then it would be an altogether different story, but instead his over-hyped "deal-making" instincts got the best of him at the very last minute and he foolishly thought that he could save himself by capitulating to their demands. The "deep state" is now showing their "thanks" by censoring him from social media and pushing for his impeachment.

The MAGA movement always believed that the country has already been at "war" for years even though most couldn't articulate the hybrid nature of it like the author did in his piece last summer about how " The Hybrid War Of Terror On America Was Decades In The Making ".

They truly felt that Trump shared their threat assessment after he was viciously attacked by the "deep state" from the second that he stepped onto the campaign trail, but it turned out that he underestimated the threat even though his enemies never did. To the "deep state" and their public Democrat proxies, this was always a "war" in its own way, which they never shied away from expressing.

The supreme irony is that while Trump lambasted the "weak Republicans" in his Save America Rally speech, he himself ultimately epitomized that very same weakness by later surrendering.

THE "DEEP STATE" WON

His opponents know no limits and believe in classic Machiavellian fashion that "the ends justify the means", whereas he thought that he could play by the rules -- and not even all of them as was early explained by pointing out his refusal to employ the near-"dictatorial" powers vested in him by the Constitution -- and still come out on top.

His naïveté will go down in history since it's what's most directly responsible for him failing to fully recognize the seriousness of the "deep state's" no-holds-barred war on him and the rest of America.

As a born-and-raised New Yorker, Trump perfected the art of slick talking, so much so that he even managed to dupe his base into believing that he shared their threat assessment about the decades-long Hybrid War of Terror on America. They fell for this charade since they desperately wanted to believe that there was still some hope left.

There isn't, though, since the war is over and the "deep state" won once and for all. The " Great Reset "/" Fourth Industrial Revolution " brought about by World War C is barreling forward at full speed ahead, and practically every domestic accomplishment that Trump has to his name will likely be reversed by Biden-Kamala during their first year in office, especially since the "deep state's" Democrat proxies control all branches of government now (remembering that the Supreme Court's supposed "conservative supermajority" really just consists of RINOs as was proven by their refusal to hear his team's convincing election fraud cases).

After " Analyzing The MAGA Movement's Democratic Security Failure " on Wednesday, it's clear that whatever "master plan" he and/or the MAGA movement might have had backfired and was actually exploited by their opponents.

THE REAL "MASTER PLAN"

In fact, the only real "master plan" was that of the "deep state", which effectively thwarted every one of Trump's moves and ultimately turned his supporters' "last hurrah" of a mostly peaceful rally into the nail that'll now be hammered into the MAGA movement's coffin.

It's extremely suspicious that the US Capitol was so poorly defended despite there being an ongoing session of Congress on such an historic day and after weeks of preparation to ensure the site's safety ahead of Trump's long-planned Save America March.

It's even more baffling that some of the police officers removed the barricades and even opened the doors to some of the protesters, which in hindsight suggests that the "deep state" wanted to tempt the most "overly passionate" among them (to say nothing of suspected provocateurs) into storming the site as the pretext for what followed.

The whole point in passively facilitating this scenario through the masterful exploitation of crowd psychology was to lay the basis for a comprehensive nationwide crackdown against the MAGA movement on the grounds that it's now "proven" to be a "domestic terrorist" group.

That explains the push behind impeaching Trump less than two weeks before he himself acknowledged just the other day that he'll be leaving office after ensuring the "transition of power".

Had he not surrendered, then he probably would still be a martyr to most of the MAGA movement, but now he's just a palace hostage awaiting his highly publicized political execution as the opening salvo of the "deep state's" Democrat-driven reprisals against his supporters in the name of "defending against domestic terrorism". That, not whatever Q-Anon imagines, is the real "master plan", and it succeeded.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Trump was swallowed by the "swamp" because he lacked the strength to drain it. Every MAGA member needs to accept this harsh truth no matter how painful it might be. Time and again, he failed to muster up the strength needed to meaningfully fulfill what many sincerely believed to be his destiny.

This was due to his fatal political miscalculation of transforming from an "outsider" into an "insider" in a doomed-to-fail attempt to change the system from within. He continued relying on RINOs despite their proven unreliability. Trump's obsession with how his foes portrayed him in the MSM also led to him never seriously countenancing the use of the near-"dictatorial" powers vested in him by the Constitution to save America.

He pathetically surrendered after the "deep state's" "master plan" succeeded, and now he can't even go down in history as a martyr.

Originally published on One World Press Jan 20, 2021 2:08 PM

Trump was part of the show nothing more nothing less. They had the goods on him for decades. He made Izzrail grate again. That was about it. Notice Jizzlaid Maxwell, the Mossad kiddy victim procurer watching her mark in the background of the video below from 92 as the king of bankruptcy eyes the broads and "struts" his stuff.

Meanwhile Kill Bill Gates gets to poison Planet Sheeple and nobody ever questions his association with Mossad kiddy porn snuff director, Epstein or Kill Bill's sojourns on Pedovore Island. Anyone remember the CIA Operation Brownstone"? It's global and it's Satanic.

King of Bankruptcy and King Pedovore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUDr_c2PalI&ab_channel=TODAY

Kill Bill and King Pedovore

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fg4nK4u8vuU?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent 0 0 Reply


Malatok , Jan 20, 2021 2:10 PM Reply to Malatok

https://www.youtube.com/embed/AUDr_c2PalI?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

Jams O'Donnell , Jan 13, 2021 6:47 PM

How could Trum 'drain the swamp' when he lives in the swamp. contributes to the swamp and essentially is part of the swamp.

This story is sh!te. Trump is a swamp dweller.

Trump is just the same as all the other oligarchs and would be oligarchs. He is a rich, privileged, white entrepreneur. His propaganda campaign in which he claimed to be on the side of the poor and unemployed whites is just about the biggest lie which has been swallowed wholesale since Goebbles was whitewashing the Nazi regime.

How you fools here can fall for this tripe has me absolutely beat.

Aethelred , Jan 13, 2021 10:17 AM

Trump in his political ineptitude resembles Jimmy Carter, an idealist incapable of wielding power. Neither man had the gumption, nor the charisma (much the same thing) to win over the apparatchiki. Both vain and selfish men (like all politicians), neither inspired sufficient love nor fear to gather support, unlike Reagan or Clinton, both of whom exuded calm confidence. Trump differs from Carter in that Trump's social incapacity manifests in bombast, and Carter's in staged humility. Neither could convince the ruling classes, and so were ushered away.

The elevation of Biden, an aged hack, is a signal the republic is finally overturned. The feds not only can convict but now can elect and govern through a ham sandwich.

Blather , Jan 13, 2021 8:21 AM

Does the author know how to read Trump's speech or is he so BIAS as not to see?

Trump DID NOT capitulate. Read careFOOLY. It can go both waze.

ZenPriest , Jan 12, 2021 8:50 PM

Trump was never going to drain the swamp. He was a clown put in place by America's masters, to keep an endless supply of material for their media and to stir up hatred among citizens.
It's funny because citizens should be uniting against the puppeteers. Or they would be if they knew they even existed, or knew they were being played.

S Cooper , Jan 13, 2021 2:47 AM Reply to ZenPriest

"Quite a number already know this. That number keeps growing with each passing day. Got Debs?"

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rsL6mKxtOlQ?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&listType=playlist&list=FLnnoDlrP9jUXGwJPoM_f7sg

https://www.tumblr.com/search/v%20debs

captain spam , Jan 12, 2021 7:32 PM

F**k Twitter.
#Boycott Twitter.

niko , Jan 12, 2021 7:24 PM

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Remember that line? That was Ronnie Raygun back in 1986, with one of his (or his ghost writers') versions for 'draining the swamp' then, getting government off our backs, and blah, blah, blah. Agitprop thrown the masses so the corporate state could get down to bizzness as usual in dispossessing 'we the people' by rolling back government programs for social welfare and building up wealth and power for elites via the MIC and Wall Street (complementary to Iron Bitch Thatcher's neoliberal programs for a greater fascism in Britain).

Hardly anything original, such marketing ads. Politricking fronts of the ruling class have been campaigning before and after getting into office with noble lies of populism covering for their brands of treachery as long as the fraudulence of capitalist democracy and representative government have been around. In the post-WWII era of Pox Americana, the U$ CEOs for the Fortune 500 routinely have disguised their institutional role in managing the empire under cover of brands of reform that keep promising power to the people with one hand while taking it away with the other.

But when it comes to the greatest show on earth, it's the words attributed to P.T. Barnum that there's a sucker born every minute (or at least every election season) which ring truest. So now we've got the ringmasters retiring the Donald and installing good ole Creepy Joe to 'build back better' on behalf of the Great Reset. That's after Swamp Thang has played his part as dictator of distraction overseeing such achievements as the greatest robbery of the commons in human history and launch of technofascism under Operation Warp(ed) Speed, all thanks to a global coup with which he's been entirely complicit. And his manufactured base of true believers still carry on with the covidiocy as much as the controlled opposition of the faux left.

The more things change, the more they stay the same (only worse!).

Chris , Jan 12, 2021 5:14 PM

The Q group are patriots with access to a quantum computer able to untangle timelines from a possibility/probability vortex.
Their movement was designed to awaken many individuals with key roles to play in the real Operation Warpspeed.

The majority of these folks had some connection to the military or other branches of government including the police.

Chris , Jan 12, 2021 7:34 PM Reply to Chris

In 2012 nearly all technology, ancient or more modern, was suddenly rendered non functional.
The Mayans were obviously dead right with their calender.
The race was on to gain absolute supremacy in the prediction game.
All major stakeholders have access to quantum computing, but the US has the upper hand.
The true value of quantum computers lies not in the task of pure number crunching, but in its ability to predict probabilities of complex situations.

The quantum computer exposes the most probable timelines and delivers the results in numerical form that correspond to actual events and dates/times .

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:43 PM

"The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins."
― I.F. Stone

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 12:42 PM

President Trump has declared a State of Emergency in the District of Columbia.
White House

Waldorf , Jan 12, 2021 2:00 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

Not reported anywhere else that I can see.

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 7:00 PM Reply to Waldorf

Try the Whitehouse website

Moneycircus , Jan 12, 2021 2:20 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-approves-district-columbia-emergency-declaration/

Strange that it is reported by overseas news outlets, ignored by domestic.

Strange also that U.S. Capitol Police officer commits suicide days after riots Saw something he didn't oughta? Stepped out of the thin blue line?

Cyd , Jan 12, 2021 3:01 PM Reply to Moneycircus

Witness protection?

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 12:21 PM

To everyone that believes in the rule of law congratulations President trump has won.

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 7:03 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

Correction, President Trump has not signed the Insurrection Act.

My error.

REvail , Jan 13, 2021 5:18 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

OW look the fruitcakes and cult follower spent another new moon being juiced , Trump has not signed the Insurrection Act. BUT BUT BUT
Cult of BIG disclosure keep watching.donate huge Arrests and stay tuned keep watching
it happening – keep watching- it happening soon, BIG disclosure huge Arrests . it Happening soon psyop AND distraction

Simple simon and Q nonsense told another lie to the sheep

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 12:16 PM

President Trump has signed the Insurrection Act.

YouDontCareAboutGrandma , Jan 12, 2021 12:47 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

Proof? And don't link to Simon Parkes' YouTube channel. He's provided no evidence whatsoever for his claims. He says he talks to aliens and "Q" on the telephone.

REvail , Jan 13, 2021 5:20 PM Reply to YouDontCareAboutGrandma

comment is above

Sgt_doom , Jan 12, 2021 3:04 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

Please stop spreading Q-propaganda -- they originate out of Asia and are a silly, cartoonish disinfo outlet of the CCP!

Sgt_doom , Jan 12, 2021 3:07 PM Reply to Sgt_doom

When a serious traceroute is done on the Q lines it tracks back to a Filipino Maoist group.

Moneycircus , Jan 12, 2021 10:12 AM

Capitol Riot: 10 Questions -- James Tracy's Memory Hole Blog

https://www.youtube.com/embed/mEyUmL0_KR0?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

Sgt_doom , Jan 12, 2021 6:59 AM

Gosh, evrn more baffling and scarey and reminescent of 1963, never seen footage of the murder of Ms. BABBIT showing collusion between police and antifa agitators, taken by an independent Japanese reporter!

https://youtu.be/5nvqvvsqJ_s

.
!nd this is the real plan begun almost 50 years ago:

https://21stcenturywire.com/2016/12/31/us-middle-class-still-suffering-from-rockefeller-kissinger-industrial-transfer-scheme-to-china/

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-china-class-fights-trump

Great article but consider how many thousands of people the Islamist extremist, Erdogan of Turkey, had to fire and imprison, to dismantle the positive Deep State structure Attaturk put in place to keep that country secular? Functioned admirably for many years.

DimlyGlimpsed , Jan 12, 2021 1:06 AM

Dems enthusiatically voted from Bill Clinton, Obama, Hillary and Biden. All corrupt and compromised. Repubs voted for Bush Jr., Romney, and Trump. All corrupt and compromised. Both accuse the other of corruption, dishonesty and hypocrisy. Both are right, of course.
Reality, though, is not possible to perceive when limited to a diet of mainstream news. Neither is it a trivial task to navigate the rough seas online disinformation.'
Unless one is privy to big-picture high-level (and secret) information, one is left to attempt to identify and assemble a complex jigsaw puzzle using one's own sleuthing and intuition skills.
Common people without inside knowledge can still interpret the world, however. War is evil, and those who advocate war have been seduced by evil. Kindness and generosity are among the highest values. On the other hand, those who are selish and cruel pollute our world. Etc,, etc.
Let us keep in mind that the most evil cloak themselves in the garb of peace, kindness and generosity, in order to dine on sheep who wishfully and willfully refused to judge behavior rather than be seduced with addictive slogans. Let us also keep in mind that no leaders can remain in power without the compliance of the rest of us.
Any of should be able to recognize Joe Biden as evil. His "track record" is one of corruption, budget cutting, war and authoritarian legislation. And Trump? One of the great mysteries of human civilization is that Trump, the ultimate swap creature, was elected by promising to "clean the swamp".

Julia , Jan 12, 2021 8:52 AM Reply to DimlyGlimpsed

I literally want to copy and paste this comment and send it to as many people as I can. You capture it precisely.

Sgt_doom , Jan 12, 2021 3:11 PM Reply to DimlyGlimpsed

That is fairly accurate but Trump did push back against America's China Class and the CCP -- more than you can say for commies like the Bidens, Obamas, Clintons, Bushes, etc.

REvail , Jan 12, 2021 5:35 PM Reply to Sgt_doom

Trump's America First Hoax: Trump is an Israeli agent. He put #Mossad asset #JaredKushner in charge of infiltration of US Intelligence and Defense. Bidens are Chinese agents? Charles Kushner (Jared's father), is an agent of #AnbangInsurance, a Chinese Communist front group.

Jams O'Donnell , Jan 13, 2021 6:54 PM Reply to REvail

All US presidents, vice-presidents, chiefs of staff, etc are Israeli agents, or more accurately, are in effect the same thing.

Jams O'Donnell , Jan 13, 2021 6:53 PM Reply to Sgt_doom

"commies like the Bidens, Obamas, Clintons, Bushes, etc."

If you think that the above mentioned capitalist clowns are "commies", then you really, REALLY, need to get an education, because clearly you don't know your arse from your elbow.

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:46 PM Reply to DimlyGlimpsed

"Trump, the ultimate swap creature " I do not think you have any idea what the 'swamp' is to make such a claim.

Otherwise, a great post.

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 12, 2021 12:40 AM

Note: I drafted this as a response, but the person is not worthy of a reply, so I'll post it here instead.
--

I've always said that Q is a deep-state operation. It's the NSA, military intelligence, etc. It's just a different deep state to the CIA/MI6 deep state. And I've always said that people should at least know what "the plan" is. They should know what it is because it's by far the most coherent explanation for what is happening now, and for what has happened over the last four years.

A couple of years ago I thought a deal had been struck between the opposing factions, and it was all going to be wound down. But I changed that view after the Covid911, attempted colour revolution. The overwhelming view on this site, from contributors and posters, was that Trump would fall in June 2020. I was one of only a handful of people saying Trump would survive.

I can't predict the details of what's happening now, but I think Trump will survive this because:
a) he has the ammunition
b) it would make no sense to go this far and not see it through
c) even though it seems to be going to the precipice, it still fits a coherent plan

For some time now, the best rolling updates have been provided by X22 Report:
https://rumble.com/c/X22Report

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 12, 2021 2:35 AM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

I've only recently started following Simon Parkes, but in his latest update he claims to have spoken to the real Q. Of course, as anybody who's been following Q posts would know, this would breach the "no outside comms" principle.

https://www.simonparkes.org/post/11th-january-third-update

Moneycircus , Jan 12, 2021 10:20 AM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

I'm not at all impressed. Appeared on the scene coincidental with Gen McInerney and all the misinformation about "hammer and scorecard" which was a blatant distraction from clear and convincing evidence of election fraud.

Parkes does far too much, "I could have told you beforehand but then I'd have had to kill you."

REvail , Jan 12, 2021 5:37 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Your on the ball wow from 1 psyop to another Now your following simon charlatan parkes.
HE gets excepted into the Q nonsense and trump Savior psyop and becames one of there star leaders over night.
Do you not do basic checks on who you start to worship?? or do they have to say code words like Q and trump maga and its like there chosen to lead you.

Sgt_doom , Jan 12, 2021 3:13 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Negative, far too silly and cartoonish and tracks back to a Filipino Maoist group directed by the CCP!

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 7:34 PM

We've been manipulated into fighting against each other over trivial differences to divert us from the fact that we're all in the same boat.

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 11, 2021 6:33 PM

Andrew Korybko: "That, not whatever Q-Anon imagines, is the real "master plan", and it succeeded."

Okay, I'm trying to figure this out. With regard specifically to this thread, are we allowed to post direct links to Q posts? For instance, Q has stated explicitly that there is no "Qanon" (#4881). Instead, there is Q and there are anons. I personally think this is debatable, and that Qanon is a collective name for a highly amorphous movement and method of enquiry. Furthermore, that movement and method predates Q and was to some extent co-opted by Q. The movement will also outlive Q, though it may retain the name. As a movement, Qanon stands in opposition to the hierarchical, hive-mind vacuity of the Rationalists and Neo-Platonists. In short, Qanon is Blakean. Welcome to Jerusalem!

We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just & true to our own imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live forever; in Jesus our Lord.
– William Blake
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Milton_(excerpts)/Preface

Sophie - Admin1 , Jan 11, 2021 7:25 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Oh please

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 11, 2021 7:40 PM Reply to Sophie - Admin1

So what happened to my other posts?

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 12, 2021 9:17 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Q Alerts is back up so I'll try again. The following is a critical part of "the plan".
--

Q (Oct 17, 2020):
I'm going to bring the whole diseased, corrupt temple down on your head. It's gonna be Biblical.
Enjoy the show!
https://qalerts.app/?n=4884

https://www.youtube.com/embed/LUsLDzXWUU4?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

Marion Reynolds , Jan 11, 2021 6:01 PM

Please – can we have more of Andrew Karybko. I've seen him on Peter Lavelle. For such an acutely well informed young chap about international politics, he demonstrates an equally rigorous understanding about Trumps psyche.

Loverat , Jan 12, 2021 6:28 PM Reply to Marion Reynolds

Andrew Korybko is probably one of the best geo-political analysts I've come across and his depth of knowledge across all continents shines through. A very warm and engaging person.

He runs a site called OneWorld Press. Recently accused by mainstream media and The Daily Beast of being GRU agents. Well if it is, they are most measured and balanced in the history of intelligence services.

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 11, 2021 5:18 PM

The best is yet to come.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ozWZYbYfkp4?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

REvail , Jan 11, 2021 11:50 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Your be saying that on the way to the concentration camps!!!
'trust the plan' is a never ending story psyop
Similar to the 'best is yet to come' ..
you trumpsters have your own Down Syndrome language.
WWG1WGA, another bunch of devotees similar to a cult who will not except there guru is a oppressor

mikael , Jan 11, 2021 1:09 PM

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."Reinhold Niebuhr

Pardon moi for the lenght.

I dont know whats with people this days, the shere avalange of bollocks is baffling, the inability to conect the dots to what was, the past, to the present is making me think there must be something, hehe, with the narrative, or should we say in this uh . conpiracy tinfoil hat wearing days, in the tap water, and the rethotic, about Trump, I have my issues, and I have never been quiet about them, but then to whine about things when most of it have been inplace before Trump came into the WH, incl children in gages to wars, Obamalama started more wars than any other American president ever, with Hitlary the Beast from Little Rock beside, after Her husband stole Social sec and now, witch could be massive, is completely eradicated out of existence, and the sactions, etc, most of them are just continuations of existing systems, we can always blame Trump for something, but please, do know the difference and dont just throw bollocks because of the people whom wanted change, when Obamalama said it, you belived, and what happened, again, he pissed upon you all, and have since laughed all the way to the bank, the economic crashes, the insane austeritys, the bailins and outs, you name it to color revolutions.
This isnt to defend Trump, for me, He was more an castrat, singing but otherwise balless, but also tied, unable to move, and been relentlessly attacked by those that defenses the past witch in no way was better.

Then we have the eh .. storming?, and if you look at videos, what sticks out is, what storming, some gass clouds, yea, means what, an Cop throving an gass can, but take an look for your self, it was never in any way what the MSM wants you to belive, and the army of people crawling all over the sites wants you to persive, along with profanitys about people whom did suported Trump, because they hoped for change, you cant attack them, maybe for been a bit naive, but one thing shal be the thing Trump did, exposed them all, in an way witch is unpresedented despite His flaws, nobody have done that in this level, He exposed them all, and if you havent gotten it yet, you have an problem, nobody else, incl the people whom did their duty as free citizens of the USA, did the protesting.
Rioting, again, what riot, the worst thing I can come up with, after watching some videos, is minore, a window, probably by the AntiFags/BLMs/eh leftards?, and one man whom ran off with an piece of the furiture, nothing else, and if I drag that further, maybe the stormers should have wiped their shoos off before entering the Hill, stepping on the fine carpets on the floor in the hallway, what an horrible crime, right.
What storming, do you see anything, do enlighten us.

So, I know I am pushing the attention span to the limit.
BUT, I have thru the years found out that Americans, not that I want to call em stupid, but regarding world poltics, more infantile, naive, brainwashed to such an extent thru the decades/centurys of propaganda, where the various Gov always have had an enemy, it have variated, from muslims etc to what it have become to day, domestic terrorism aka conservatives whatever that means, and not only in the MSM but also thru an army of so called Alternative MSM, witch have feed upon this narratives and played upon this, but overall, gone the same erant as the Gov wanted them to go, and witch have resulted in wars upon wars, and stil some want more wars, like the broad attack line on Iran, just to give you one ex to the strangling of others, like western sahara to the Palestinians.
Then we have the new enemy, in mainly the so called alternative ugh .. rightwinged? whatever whom sommehow manages to blame everything on socialism, yea, apart from the weather because thats Putins fault, despite that, I found Putin to be an scoundrel, the Russian Gov rotten to its core, that dont mean I hate Russians but there will always be those that cant differentiate at all.
Whom is the "enemy" Americans, socialism, China, Russia, Iran, huh.

I have saxed this from P. L. Gonzalez.
Social media networks, payment processors, airlines, hotels, streaming services, and online vendors are strangling people based on ideology but TPUSA is still complaining about "socialism." Burn your money or donate it to TPUSA, it's the same thing.

Yup, briliantly summarised everything in some few lines, and why, do you refuse to see them when they are right infront of your very own eyes, and yet, you blame some imaginary enemy witch have nothing to do with this coup, its an class war, its the oligarcs, the robber barons, witch have an army of buttspreaders in the capitol Hill to their abuse, and this bitches do whatever they are told, do notice how the RepubliCONs threw you under the buss, is that to the Chines fault.

So, I hope the Americans whom stil have some parts of their bran fuctional, can notice the difference, in Norway we have the same problem, but we are an so called socialistic nation, but we are held hostages by the same pack of scums that is plundering your nation and resources, and have nothing but contempt for everyone of us, and an Gov that do whatever they want and whom are we then to blame, the Hottentots, Maoris, communism is an tool for social unrest, and when they have done their job, thrown under the buss, because the PTB wants us to fight each others, as long we do, they will win.
Unite and you have an chanse, if not, well, I am old, and my life span expectanse isnt that long anymore and I will not have to live in the totalistaian regime that comes, but the sole reason for me to even bother, is for our children, and their children.
And to all of you whom went to the protest, you have my deepest respect.
It truly is an war, against the dark forces.
You all need to take an stand.
Be the light.

peace

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:53 PM Reply to mikael

We have the same problem worldwide. Singling out and scorning the Americans is simply divisive. It has always been the People against the Oppressors. The Americans are people and have Oppressors bearing down on them like the rest of us. There is a cancer that needs to be removed lest it devour us all.

Chris , Jan 11, 2021 10:57 AM

The overtone of Korybko's writing is excessively defeatist. When the "Deep State" applies such overt tools to steal the U.S. election, imposes censorship, labels millions of American citizens as potential "domestic terrorists", silences the still incumbent U.S. President, resorts to provocation, deprives Americans of essential liberties through Covid, curfews or other bogus emergencies, then it means that the establishment behind the "Deep State" is scared. Scared not as much of Donald Trump as scared of You – the People. I know it since I live in a central European country with a very bitter experiences with dicatorship. When the power starts to resort to an open forgery and uses coercion or force it reveals its weakness, not strength. Its power derives only from the passive attitude of majority of population, nothing more. What this so called 'liberal elite' in America hopes for is to return to the good old days, when the whole Middle America remained voiceless, silent, isolated, without any leadership or political representation. Now it is their objective to 'legally' separate the 'progressive America' from the 'populist' one and they might even inspire separation, violence or secessionist moves to achieve it. But MAGA movement must not play this delusional vision of retreat to entrench in false sense of local security. That's what the 'Deep State' wants to achieve – to herd the popular opposition into their home arrests and their privacy soon to be possibly separated by walls, sanitary wards, wired fences or a new Indian reservation. Americans would never win their Independence by acting in defense only, by retreating to 'wait and see' tactics as Korybko suggests. What must be done is to recapture Your state institutions that have been stolen and turned into a travesty of American political tradition. Before that happens a common awareness is needed that those who appear to rule as a new 'government' are just a tiny bunch of criminals who try to impress the whole world that their power has no limits, that they monopolised the mass media and economy, that they are invincible. Do not let this delusion of 'Deep State' victory to dominate Your outlook. Yes, I agree that Trump failed as a leader in a time of crisis but MAGA (or however we call it) but all the people who really care for America need to maintain representation, authority and leadership. They shouldn't accept a comfortable fantasy that sooner or later the 'Deep State' would crumble under its own weight and then by some miracle a new movement would be born. If Trump indicates that 'its only the beginning' then his supporters should join him in any action he offers. All Republican politicians, conservative or libertarian societies, local communities, state legislatures or any other active group must be engaged in this action. Struggle for political freedom always involves risk and mistakes. Trump certainly made a lot of them. But it is the People who are sovereign, not any office, institution or technological dicatorship. When the Constitution, the congressional debate and civil liberties are ruined by 'elite' it is the responsibility of the People to act in emergency to restore law, order and liberty. The 'Deep State' perfectly understands that after the four years of Trump and the emergence of trumpism as a social-political fact there can not be any turning back to the business as usual. Not under normal and peaceful circumstances. That's why they are so frightened and act in panic. That's why they impose health and security 'emergencies' to incapacitate the population, to make it superfluous and useless. We saw it in totalitarian regimes.
The world needs the U.S. not as an imperial power but as an example of well established social contract, human liberty and hope for a better future. The European 'elites' are in revolt against their people too but here we won't have a chance for any anti-establishment president to support us. That's why in Europe we still believe that not all has been lost in America.

Laurence Howell , Jan 11, 2021 12:17 PM Reply to Chris

Lt. General Thomas Mcinerney,

"special forces imbedded in Antifa rioters have Nancy Pelosi's laptop"

Panic in DC would ban understatement.

Bring it on

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 2:56 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

laptop always the laptop it on the laptop he/she left the laptop at
it etc etc et was found there# etc etc etc bullshit
laptop psyop used as much as the immaculate passport psyop found at the scene of crime in a burning inferno it aimed at idiots

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 7:24 PM Reply to Asylum

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 10:37 AM Reply to Asylum

Are you saying that Hunter Biden's laptop and the released information that it contains is of no value?

Conflating 911 with the current conspiracies is not helpful. This would need an article of longer length and written by an unbiased observer which you are not.

Instead of saying etc. etc. bullshit, why not explain why this is your position?
Or does this not fit in with your soundbite posting?

Jacques , Jan 11, 2021 9:41 AM

Historically speaking, the problem with the "deep state" is essentially that the current system has corrupted itself to a point where it is so far from what is claimed, or perhaps appears to be, that there is no way to fix it from within by rebuilding it, by "draining the swamp".

Klaus "Cockroach" Schwab et al understand this, hence the Great Reset, a new vision for the future. Of course, they want a future for themselves, but that's another story.

Even if Trump were entirely sincere in his effort to "drain the swamp", he had nothing to offer apart from some vague anachronistic concept of Making America Great Again. What the fuck is that supposed to mean anyway, eh? The only thing he had behind him was populism which in itself is an empty concept.

Like it or not, a change will only come if people formulate a new philosophy, ideology, and if the new ideology is proposed and embraced on a broad scale. Ideally in a non-violent fashion.

Right now, there is fuck all, people are still stuck on all sorts of left-right bullshit dichotomies, (fake) democracy, the games that have been played for decades if not hundreds of years.

If you ask me, it would be nice if the ideology of the future was loosely based on Hayek's spontaneous order.

Thom1111 , Jan 11, 2021 3:03 PM Reply to Jacques

If Trump can pull something off this week or early next, the new plan is already waiting in the wings. It's called Nesara/Gesara. It's a new economic system not based on a debt based system.

rechenmacher , Jan 12, 2021 3:45 PM Reply to Thom1111

Heard that one before. Fraud.

Thom1111 , Jan 12, 2021 7:09 PM Reply to rechenmacher

It's a real framework plan, it's just whether it can be implemented is the question.

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:57 PM Reply to Jacques

"Like it or not, a change will only come if people formulate a new philosophy, ideology, and if the new ideology is proposed and embraced on a broad scale. Ideally in a non-violent fashion."

Sure. So we the people have had centuries or more to figure the answer out. Repeating the dilemma is not enlightening. Idealism has no voice with tyrants.

ZenPriest , Jan 11, 2021 8:53 AM

All this talk of the 'deep state' yet no one can name them. Lol.

Thom1111 , Jan 11, 2021 3:04 PM Reply to ZenPriest

you must have been born yesterday. In America it's the alphabet agencies but obviously all runs back to Rothschild and the Vatican.

gordan , Jan 11, 2021 7:48 PM Reply to Thom1111

eustace mullins
book

the curse of canaan

old names
very old
and new ones

written in the 1980s
still up to date

ZenPriest , Jan 12, 2021 2:44 PM Reply to Thom1111

If you think it stops at the Vatican and Rothschilds, maybe you were born yesterday.

Thom1111 , Jan 12, 2021 7:11 PM Reply to ZenPriest

well actually no, it goes off planet or interdimensionally if you want to go that deep.

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 4:02 PM Reply to ZenPriest

https://www.corbettreport.com/?s=deep+state

Start here.

ZenPriest , Jan 12, 2021 5:02 PM Reply to Igby MacDavitt

Corbett is owned like almost everyone else. Gives you everything but the source.

Joerg , Jan 11, 2021 8:50 AM

ARCHBISHOP VIGANÒ: OPEN LETTER TO DONALD TRUMP, WARNS ABOUT 'GREAT RESET' PLOT TO 'SUBDUE HUMANITY,' DESTROY FREEDOM
https://counterinformation.wordpress.com/2021/01/10/archbishop-vigano-open-letter-to-donald-trump-warns-about-great-reset-plot-to-subdue-humanity-destroy-freedom-2/

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Researcher , Jan 11, 2021 2:13 PM Reply to Ashley

Look. Your spam filter, didn't catch the SPAM.

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 2:59 PM Reply to Researcher

but it does catch certain comments funny that

aspnaz , Jan 10, 2021 11:47 PM

The 6 January protest march clearly shows that the majority of Trump voters had already given up on Trump so did not join the protest. There was originally talk of a possible one million people attending, it didn't get anywhere close. If half the nation was still behind Trump, this was a very puzzling showing.

Trump just did not have what it takes, or was not really trying, to ruthlessly cut out the cancer of corruption in government. History will show that he was a weak leader who allowed the deep state to distract him to the extent that he never did anything of note other than to reveal, through no action of his own, how extreme is the corruption that he had promised to drain.

The Democrat distractions, paid for by their oligarch owners, showed the world that extreme corruption is running the USA. Even the most loyal Democrats must be puzzled by the current purges and threats of extreme centralised thought control, the arrogance of the swamp now that it has gotten rid of the peoples' man.

To his credit, I am still willing to believe that Trump tried to do the right thing.

Although the author is trying to place Trump as a coward who resigned, going back on his word, I think this is not how his original supporters see him. From what I can see, the majority of his original supporters still support him and see him as a figurehead, but they recognise that he doesn't have the skills to do the job. He is not a coward, he did not cave in, he recognised, probably because of the low protest numbers, that he did not have what is takes to continue the fight, he could see that his base had already given up on him. He is still a figurehead in the patriot movement. He may have lost the far right, but he still has a lot of centre-ground supporters.

MaryLS , Jan 11, 2021 4:47 AM Reply to aspnaz

I disagree with your claim that the majority of supporters had already given up on him. It was the middle of the week. People have jobs. It was a significant turn out. People understand what is at stake. I would not place the blame for failure on Trump. He is amazing in so many ways.

Carmpat , Jan 12, 2021 8:39 AM Reply to MaryLS

I just don't understand here how anybody can believe Trump was sincere in wanting to change anything: he's a narcissistic bully in it for his own benefit and that of his offspring. Fighting corruption??? Come on!

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 4:06 PM Reply to Carmpat

The mere fact that hundreds and hundreds of treasonous actors throughout government and business have been clearly and openly revealed through the process started by Trump is a damn good start.

S Cooper , Jan 11, 2021 5:53 AM Reply to aspnaz

"What is going in DC right now is like what went on at Jonestown after Jim Jones went crackers. Except instead of cyanide laced Kool-Aid they are going to use 'Doc' Billy Eugenics EUTHANASIA DEATH SHOT to off the 'faithful'. If only Billy and they would just off themselves and leave the rest of the World out of it."

" EUTHANIZE the World! Corporate Fascism and Eugenics forever."

S Cooper , Jan 11, 2021 4:24 PM Reply to S Cooper

"Time now for Na n zi Pelosi, Chuckie 'Upchuck' Schumer and all the rest of the war criminal gang of CORPORATE FASCIST FABIAN EUGENICISTS to beam back to the mothership. They see insurrections, rebellions and conspiracies everywhere. They believe the humans are out to get them . They are going full Jim Jones. "

https://giphy.com/gifs/alien-they-live-john-caenter-3og0IUd5D9Y77EXtRK

S Cooper , Jan 11, 2021 6:40 PM Reply to S Cooper

"Also Nasty Na n zi should lay off the hooch. It is beginning to have a deleterious and harmful effect upon the sad thing's cognitive faculties and behavior."

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:35 PM

I *Hope* they name the next Carrier after him – USS Donald J. Trump – CVN 83

😉

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:38 PM Reply to Sgt Oddball

- Nickname: – 'Big Don'

Voxi Pop , Jan 10, 2021 9:57 PM

https://worldchangebrief.webnode.com INSURRECTION ACT "PROBABLY" SIGNED –
Military In Control of the US, Under Commander In Chief Trump/
Updates Will Follow Throughout The Day

Cal , Jan 10, 2021 9:56 PM

.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 9:26 PM

"Captain America's been torn apart,
Now he's a court jester with a broken heart,
He said, "Turn me around and take me back to the start",
"I must be losing my mind!" Are you blind?!
– I've seen it all a *Million Times* "

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 9:02 PM

Situation Update Jan 8th – Trump fighting from secure location, did NOT concede
https://www.hangthecensors.com/487773.html?fbclid=IwAR2Na1XhGeff0jKFmZWBWrQnd5hjKgFEsSqwJOjQIqZFFkzN7flG-FcGG_s

Sukma Dyk , Jan 10, 2021 8:50 PM

You are going to be very surprised. See what happens.

David Meredith , Jan 10, 2021 9:08 PM Reply to Sukma Dyk

I was just about to post a comment saying: It's not over yet, but you beat me to it! Well done.

John Smith , Jan 11, 2021 6:17 PM Reply to Sukma Dyk

Why the secrecy? If you know summit then spill.

Jacques , Jan 10, 2021 8:49 PM

I don't know what Trump's intentions were, and I couldn't care less.

From where I'm standing, it appears that he was elected on a wave of populism, which seemed to be an alternative to the "liberal democracy" fakery, the swamp. An interesting presentation of that was here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA50BE7d1X8 ). IMHO, Bannon kicked Frum's butt in that debate.

It would appear that populism was a big enough threat for the "swamp" to unleash four years of a hate campaign against Trump, possibly, probably culminating with COVID. Hard to believe that it was a coincidence.

Be it as it may, and allowing for the possibility that this or that or the other thing has been staged this way or that way, Trump's presidency has certainly set things in motion, woken up people. Had somebody more slick been elected, the transition to the dystopia that seems to be in the pipeline would probably have been less noticeable, perhaps not noticeable at all. With the shitshow that has been going down since last February, all of a sudden there is a public debate. Perhaps misinformed, perhaps mislead, but there is a debate nevertheless. Will it result in something positive? Hard to say, hopefully.

Bottom line, Trump's presidency has been historically a good thing.

YouTube_censors_unfortuna , Jan 11, 2021 10:05 AM Reply to Jacques

Covid19 was decided in 2010 and earlier.

Jacques , Jan 11, 2021 10:37 AM Reply to YouTube_censors_unfortuna

So what? What sort of relevance does it have to what I said?

First understand the bigger picture, then worry about details.

Carmpat , Jan 12, 2021 8:43 AM Reply to Jacques

Covid 19 was DECIDED? But of course, yes, it's just a detail .. lol

Researcher , Jan 10, 2021 8:45 PM

Turns out the Viking Guy aka QAnon Shaman aka Jake Angeli aka Jacob Anthony Chansley aka Actor and self proclaimed "Super Soldier" pals around with Bernard Kerik and Rudy Giuliani when he takes time off from memorizing the latest NSA script:

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 10, 2021 9:42 PM Reply to Researcher

Oh look, a photo at some sort of book-signing type event. I'll file it alongside the one of Oswald and Mother Teresa.

Researcher , Jan 10, 2021 11:32 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Where's the book? Nowhere. Not a book signing.

Freemason handshake tho, Lost_In_Your_Tiny_Mind

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 11, 2021 4:37 PM Reply to Researcher

BTW: if that's what Bernard Kerik looks like when he's "palling around", you definitely wouldn't want to fall out with him!

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:10 PM Reply to Researcher

Haven't you figured out yet that QAnon is an intelligence agency psyop based in the type of magical thinking that will get you killed and lose the nation? If not, you really aren't qualified to participate in what is currently hitting us. The enemy has your number. This is obviously a photo op staged by the security state to feed the false narrative created around QAnon.

Researcher , Jan 10, 2021 11:23 PM Reply to James Meeks

Can you read? Read what I wrote again. Read it enough times until you understand.

QAnon = Q Group NSA

Nothing is hitting you except the Democrats and Republicans together against the citizens. That's not new.

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 6:30 PM Reply to Researcher

S Cooper , Jan 11, 2021 10:25 PM Reply to Asylum

"If there was a non WAR RACKETEER CORPORATE FASCIST in SHAM DEMOCRACY USA for whom to vote and the REPUBLICRATS did not FAKE the counts and rig the SHAM elections WE THE PEOPLE might. Where is a Eugene Victor Debs when the world needs one?"

"Soon that is not going to be an issue, however. There will be no need for SHAM ELECTIONS after Billy EugenIcs and the CORPORATE FASCIST FABIAN EUGENICISTS cull all the untermenschen and useless eaters with their EUTHANASIA DEATH SHOT."

https://www.deviantart.com/redamerican1945/art/Eugene-V-Debs-Republican-Democratic-Party-674343047

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rsL6mKxtOlQ?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&listType=playlist&list=FLnnoDlrP9jUXGwJPoM_f7sg

REvail , Jan 11, 2021 11:42 PM Reply to S Cooper

it was a compliment and joke on others who still be lie ve in what you eloquently posted

S Cooper , Jan 12, 2021 12:23 AM Reply to REvail

"Just can not give up the opportunity for a good lead up (segue'). In good faith and in all seriousness, thanks for providing it."

Cmiller , Jan 12, 2021 5:27 AM Reply to Researcher

Masonic handshake

Dayne , Jan 10, 2021 8:40 PM

Peasants in 19th-century Russia clung to a notion of the Czar as a benevolent, fatherly figure. Even when he rained misery and oppression down on them, it was only because he was "misinformed", "surrounded by bad guys", etc.

It makes sense: Those were desperate, illiterate people living in misery. Hoping against hope was all they had. But why would anyone in 2021 think of Trump in essentially the same way is beyond me. An entrenched military-industrial-media-psychiatric-intelligence system, hundreds of years in the making and with untold trillions in funding, just stood by as a Robin-Hood-type hero and people's champion rose to take the Oval Office? Sorry. Trump might as well sprout wings and fly.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:10 PM Reply to Dayne

Thanx for your comment, Dayne – I've been trying to put this into words, and as I'm autistic, I could frankly, literally *Sperg'-out* over this, right now

- TL:DR version is this, tho': – Ever wonder why 'Populism' is such a dirty word for the establishment and their MSM bullhorn? – The argument I've heard thus far generally goes like the South Park underpants gnome's plan for world domination: – Phase 1: Popular Uprising (aka: 'Civil Unrest') Phase 2: ? . Phase 3: Fascist 'Strongman' Dictatorship – Why is that?

- Also that we're *Too Stoopid*(/ie: Self-Absorbed) – Like the Mud-Pickin' peasants in Monty Python' Holy Grail

- I would suggest 2 reasons for this:

- 1.) The Davostanis (Global Banksters/Oligarchs) never *merely* back the *winning horse* in the race, – In fact they back *every* horse that they *allow* to run (ergo: Trump was an Establishment-groomed *Stalking Horse* )

- 2.) The Davostanis (again), have *long since* seen to it that *most everyone*, from birth onwards, is psychologically conditioned, first with childhood myths and fairy-tales about Charming Princes and Fair Princesses, then with religio-spiritual 'adult' myths and fairy-tales about (In Judeo-Christian terms) Messianic, White-Knight champion/rescuer types who, if *we would only* put our lives and our *Utmost Faith* in their holy, heaven-sent hands, would *Save Us All* from all the terrible, terrible *Mess We've All Made* for ourselves down here on Earth, by collectively *Shitting The Bed*

*Obviously*, this is *All* just so much *Childish Nonsense*, and, more to the point, a *Writ-Large Con-Job*

- Cutting to the chase: – The 'Great-Man' theory of history is *Bunk* – Always *Has Been*, always *Will Be*

If you're still "Holding Out For A Hero", I invite you to stare *Long And Hard* into the nearest available mirror, *Take A DEEP Breath*, and then go out and *Elect Yourself* to the office – *Better Yet*, elect your family, elect your friends, elect your neighbors, elect *Everyone*

- And then let's *Do This Shit* – *Together*!

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:23 PM Reply to Dayne

It could have something to do with the fact that Biden is backed by every billionaire member of the Davos gang of criminals getting ready to use this event, coupled with medical martial law, to stage the "great reset" scheme. A wet dream of Malthusian eugenecists like Faucci & Gates, since it includes a drastic reduction in world population aka genocide of the elderly, vulnerable, poor and non compliant. This Globalist Technocracy will be led by un-elected bankers and corporate CEO's effectively ending any form of Democracy planet wide. MSM mockingbirds are completing the programming of the public to make Casey's statement to Reagan ring true" We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is wrong."

janmarsh , Jan 10, 2021 8:16 PM

Insurrection Act signing brought forward.
Scroll down to 10th. January update:
https://www.simonparkes.org/

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 3:31 PM Reply to janmarsh

Ow look Simon one trick pony parkes been laughed at and ridiculed and busted for his many many many many lies and it happening you watch just donate psyop
gets excepted into the Q nonsense and trump Savior psyop and became s one of there leaders!!!

doesn't anyone go back 5 years and do basic check on thsoes they watch and then make idols of them.

fools follow fools

Mike , Jan 10, 2021 8:15 PM

Trump was never going to be Ameica's hero. He was played to depict America as a fascist, racist, neo-nazi country that needs to be saved by the Left aka Joe Biden/Kamala Harris. The Left can now "save us all" from the "damage" caused by the MAGA movement and Trump. They can do this through heavily increased mass surveillance and what is essentially imprisonment, to make sure that we don't fall victim to the "domestic terrorism" that is represented by Trump and his fan base.

David Meredith , Jan 10, 2021 9:10 PM Reply to Mike

saved by the left? The left has been selling out the US to the globalist agenda for the last 20 years (in power or out). Trump is not finished restoring America to a country that doesn't sell out to China.

S Cooper , Jan 10, 2021 9:32 PM Reply to David Meredith

"Left-Center-Right" seems that paradigm is a tad askew. It is more like a top to bottom pyramid [scheme/racket]. The CORPORATE FASCIST OLIGARCH MOBSTER PSYCHOPATH SLAVE MASTERS sitting on their gold platinum thrones at the very top of the tower/pyramid and all their prole slave victims, WE THE PEOPLE (HUMANITY) in the mud at the base. The PSYCHOS will say or do anything to get the prole slaves at each others throats. IF WE ARE FIGHTING AMONG OURSELVES WE ARE NOT FIGHTING THEM."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rsL6mKxtOlQ?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&listType=playlist&list=FLnnoDlrP9jUXGwJPoM_f7sg

https://www.tumblr.com/search/v%20debs

Mike , Jan 10, 2021 11:12 PM Reply to David Meredith

Well, being saved by the left was a sarcastic comment. And Trump is clearly done with "restoring America" because it was never his to restore, let alone him conceding to the left after the Capitol "riots".

falcemartello , Jan 11, 2021 3:53 AM Reply to David Meredith

@ David
The left is as left as my right GONAD

Martin Usher , Jan 10, 2021 10:12 PM Reply to Mike

Biden/Harris "the left"? Surely you're joking? These two are conservatives, in another timeline they'd be Republicans. What they have going for them is they, like many Americans, believe in the Constitution of the United States, about what the country is and what its trying to acheve. It strives to build "a more perfect union".

This the fundamenal error many people made about the Deep State. I've no doubt that there's a fom of Deep State out there, an ingrained conservative streak in the bureaucracy, because there is in all bureaucracies. But the real Deep State is all of us, its every last person who believes in the system, in the American form of democracy and the principles upon which the nation was founded. There are innumerable personal interpretations of exactly what this means but the sum total is the United States.

Trump, MAGA and the modern GoP represent 'capture', the idea that the capture of the state can be turned to personal profit. In doing so Trump and his enablers degraded the notion of what the US is and why it exists. This is what's caused the backlash, its not 'the left' or 'socialism'.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:54 PM Reply to Martin Usher

"Biden/Harris "the left"? Surely you're joking?"

- The proverbial 'Overton Window' has, at this point, collapsed to a quantum singularity, about a nothingth of a planck length wide

- Prepare for *Teh Great Suck*!

Peanut butter wolf , Jan 10, 2021 8:11 PM

You seriously think Trump was genuinly elected? All the points you make show obviously he was a puppet and psy-op of the deepstate from the very beginning.
The deepstate won because they never had an enemy, they created him from the start, with or without him knowing we dont know, but anyone on that level is on a need to know basis anyway. It's clear that his every move is steered with the goal to bring down rogue antiestablishment sentiments.

And it worked very well. Radical left antiestablishment is suddenly prodemocrats and radical right antiestablishment is totally disillusioned and just became domestic terrorists.

David Meredith , Jan 10, 2021 9:12 PM Reply to Peanut butter wolf

you spelled Biden incorrectly on your fourth word in.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:57 PM Reply to Peanut butter wolf

- *Divide and Conquer* Churn, same as it ever was

BTW, My condolences for MF Doom

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 3:07 PM Reply to Sgt Oddball

ironic dont you think a artist MF Doom who is known for wearing a mask gets sacrifices sorry dies on the usual astro constellation
zzzzzzzz

Thom1111 , Jan 11, 2021 3:15 PM Reply to Peanut butter wolf

Trump wasn't supposed to win in 2016. The deep state probably wanted liberal Jeb Bush or Rubio or Cruz in there. Trump destroyed all the competition in the GOP primaries. Remember, Trump wasn't picked by the deep state to be their guy. He financed his own campaign. He was a major burr in their saddle. The Trump phenomenon is real and he proved it with a landslide victory that was stolen.

Martin Usher , Jan 12, 2021 6:16 PM Reply to Thom1111

What 'landslide'? The numbers tell a very different story. Trump should have won a second term but he didn't because of two things, one being the grass roots efforts of Democrats to motivate voter groups despite systematic road blocks being placed in those groups' path and the other -- a important one -- being that there's quite a lot of life long Republicans out there that cannot stand Trump.

Trumpism is like a cult in many ways. One feature is that those who 'believe' find it difficult to come to grips with the fact that they might hold a minority view. They're used to being embattled, that's a signature feature of such groups (they're always fighting for something against an implacable enemy, preferably an unseen one) but its just inconceivable that they're really a fringe group. The events of last Wednesday have probably done more to promote Democrat candidates than anything else this cycle; fortunately for the most part the election was over so all they lost were the two Senate seats.

PS -- May I draw your attention to an old Beatles song -- "Revolution"? (I'd also suggest an even old song "Trouble Coming" from the Mothers of Invention.)

Voz 0db , Jan 10, 2021 7:58 PM

Under the CURRENT MAIN SYSTEM – The Monetary System – there is no "drain the swamp"!

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:29 PM Reply to Voz 0db

Then you're going to love the technocrats "social credits" scheme such as China currently imposes on it's population.

Voz 0db , Jan 11, 2021 10:43 AM Reply to James Meeks

China developed that system with the HELP of the Western Corporations, so that in a near future the tech will be deployed in the western Plantations. OPERATION COVIDIUS is just the 1st of many operations that will create the FEAR & PANIC conditions among the herds of modern western moron slaves, that will make it really easy for THEM to deploy that tech.

Why do you think China was the chosen one to practice a "city lockdown" during EVENT 201 planning?

Why do you think China was on the news of western countries while they were executing the lockdown and then no more China news?

China is also under the Shadow of the SRF & Billionaires at least for now. The only thing China is trying to achieve is to shift the POWER of the SRF into Chinese Families, nothing more.

maxine , Jan 10, 2021 7:48 PM

What has Off-G come to? .One must be truly mad to imagine that D. tHRUMP
"SINCERELY" thought ANYTHING EVER, let alone "changing the way America is run" .He's incapable of comprehending what the word "SINCERITY" means .Sorry the author has lost his hero.

wardropper , Jan 10, 2021 8:24 PM Reply to maxine

OffG publishes articles and anybody who wants to can comment on them.

It does not push, or imagine, any group philosophy other than to support us all in a deep distrust of what the mainstream media ram down our throats every day, and to give us space to express our personal disgust in our own way.

We are not going to imagine what you would like us to imagine merely on your say-so either, although you are quite free to tell us what your personal recommendations are.

OffG has never been pro-Trump, and we are all aware that the alternative is far from being any better.

Perhaps you would like to tell us what is really bugging you, given that you have never been under any pressure even to show up here At the very least, you could stay on topic:
So, what about the swamp, and who you think is most likely to succeed in draining it ?

Carol Jones , Jan 10, 2021 8:53 PM Reply to wardropper

Hear Hear!

Gezzah Potts , Jan 10, 2021 10:26 PM Reply to wardropper

Spot on W👍

YouTube_censors_unfortuna , Jan 10, 2021 7:40 PM

Trump's racist fan base supported America's bogus War of Terrorism against blameless Muslim countries, did they not? What goes around, comes around.

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:40 PM Reply to YouTube_censors_unfortuna

I think you are getting fan bases mixed up. Trump inherited these conflicts from Bush, Iraq 2002 invasion & Obama's 2015 invasion of Syria and it was Trump that threatened to end the propping up of the endless war industry. In fact that played the major role in why Trump had to be removed at all costs including selling treason and vote rigging as Democracy to be defended against "domestic terrorists".

YouTube_censors_unfortuna , Jan 11, 2021 9:45 AM Reply to James Meeks

Did America's white patriots oppose the demonisation of Muslims as being terrorists who did 9/11 or did they participate in this US government fiction?

Thom1111 , Jan 11, 2021 3:17 PM Reply to YouTube_censors_unfortuna

No, at least half of the patriots are and were aware that 9/11 was an inside job.

Geoffrey Skoll , Jan 10, 2021 7:25 PM

Right! The Donald was too weak and too stupid. A smarter president got shot for his troubles, but the rulers knew they didn't have to resort to that against the Donald. He was obsessed with his mirror. All those meeting between Ike and JFK, what do you think they were talking about?

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 11:01 PM Reply to Geoffrey Skoll

- Please also note the *Extreme* copypasta, every other sentence, in the article – Who *Actually Is* this guy?

DM: , Jan 11, 2021 12:22 AM Reply to Sgt Oddball

A fifty-center.

Lisa , Jan 10, 2021 7:09 PM

Fuck Trump and his knuckle dragging moron supporters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_P-0I6sAck

Mr Y , Jan 10, 2021 7:21 PM Reply to Lisa

Now tell us what *you* like.

David Meredith , Jan 10, 2021 9:14 PM Reply to Lisa

hey, my knuckles don't drag – how dare you suggest such a thing.

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:44 PM Reply to Lisa

Sounds like you came to Off Guardian thinking it was the Guardian and expected to find a group of like minded consumers of security state propaganda in a Trump bashing fest.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 11:02 PM Reply to Lisa

"Oook, Oook, Oook!!! "

*Flings Monkey-Poop *

sue , Jan 10, 2021 6:55 PM

A premature judgement. Time will tell.

MANUEL , Jan 10, 2021 6:55 PM

Do u relly guys think Trump was a hope for all pf us? I am still amazed that people(including off-guard) still thinks in terms of left vs right, good vs bad, and all that narrative. I am afraid that nnarrativ has never been true. It is part of the game of "the matrix" to keep us entertained in shows programmed for tth masses, division, polarizaiomn, saviours and "heros". In my opinion it is time for a deep shift. Continuing to hope that some guy will save us all, it is just seeing a tree but not being able to see the woods. While some keep waiting for somebody to save us, they are moving forward with their plans really fast. But no problem guys. Sooner or later the rrality will knock on you door, and you will have to decide if you are going to be a slave or a free human. And it will be all about what you decide. No american hero or any messiah will do it for you.

Sophie - Admin1 , Jan 10, 2021 9:50 PM Reply to MANUEL

We have warned against accepting the Left/Right paradigm many times. This is NOT an editorial and therefore is not 'the voice of OffG'.

Some visitors here need to up their sophistication level to the point they understand we publish a SPECTRUM of dissident opinion that we consider merits discussion or a wider audience, without necessarily agreeing with all of it.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 11:15 PM Reply to Sophie - Admin1

"Some visitors here need to up their sophistication level to the point they understand we publish a SPECTRUM of dissident opinion "

- Yep, well that's as may be, but Andrew Korybko's position is *Lame As All Hell* – Every establishment talking point *Covered* – just from the 'Contrarian' side

- Trump was an 'Outsider' who 'Became' an 'Insider'?! – Aww Puh-lease! – He was a *Stalking Horse

- "He didn't have the *'Strength'* to 'Drain The Swamp'(tm)"??!?! – *No-One* *Indivudal* in all Creation could've

- Do you think we're *Children*?!

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 3:26 PM Reply to Sgt Oddball

been on this site a whole while now not seen any articles discussing trump failures

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 11:06 PM Reply to MANUEL

We are all aware that we are the playthings of the rich and powerful but all you're doing is stating what most of us already know. What is your solution? So tell us please what you are doing to that makes you feel free and not a slave? Are you living off the grid? Not using currency? What is it you're doing that makes you different from those of us you claim are not facing reality? I think many people, myself included, who have no love for Trump see that he is being denounced by every billionaire member of the Davos gang of criminals as a threat to world order and the economy while they shut down the planet with medical martial law and create an authoritarian Globalist Technocratic dictatorship ending Democracies worldwide and targeting "domestic terrorists" who oppose them.

George Mc , Jan 10, 2021 6:35 PM

The steps on how to destroy all of the services, public and private though focussing on the NHS:

Seize on a moderate flu variant. Build it up to be the blackest death since the black death. Seize on all the old people who die anyway and claim their numbers as an indication of the carnage. For anyone still hesitant, introduce hypocritical emotional blackmail about "the most vulnerable" in our society to shame everyone into the game On the basis of those appropriated death figures, endlessly circulate fear porn – enhanced by the fact that the symptoms of this apocalyptic virus are indistinguishable from the regular flu or even the common cold. Get everyone to steer clear of everyone else. Close down all "inessential" work plus communal gathering places to ensure everyone is isolated before the droning monolithic message you are pumping out. Introduce even more draconian measures for anyone who "has" the bug – effectively barring them even (especially) from care work. Prioritise the new bug cases so that they have access to hospital facilities – while anyone with other (real) illnesses are barred to "protect" them! This fills up the hospitals with hypochondriacs with the common cold. Introduce the notion that some may carry the bug without symptoms. Introduce a new test which can determine who has the symptomless bug. On the basis of those magical symptomless bug test kits, bar the essential workers from supporting the vulnerable – in order to "protect the vulnerable"! Constantly report on how the NHS is collapsing – which it is, being filled up with folks with the cold and turning everyone else away, and also being deprived of essential workers who tested positive for the symptomless bug. Just stand back and watch it all collapse whilst continuing to report on it with increasing horror!

George Mc , Jan 10, 2021 6:41 PM Reply to George Mc

PS the list is not exhaustive. I didn't even touch on the phony Left/Right divide.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL , Jan 10, 2021 7:18 PM Reply to George Mc

EXCERPTS FROM THE AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REPORTS INTO COVID-19 AND CARE HOMES.

A must read.

The Department of Health and Social Care . adopted a policy, that led to 25,000 patients, including those (known to be) infected (with Covid-19, and also those who were) possibly infected with Covid-19 (but) had not been tested, being discharged from hospital into care homes between 17 March and 15 April -- exponentially increasing the risk of transmission to the very population most at risk of severe illness and death from the disease. (This, while being denied) access to testing, (being denied) personal protective equipment, (while having) insufficient staff, and limited (and confusing) guidance.

(As expected) care homes were overwhelmed.

http://www.preearth.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1184

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 11:10 PM Reply to AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

Amnesty International is US State Department Propaganda Amnesty run by US State Department representatives, funded by convicted financial criminals, and threatens real human rights advocacy worldwide.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/amnesty-international-is-us-state-department-propaganda/32444

DM: , Jan 11, 2021 12:30 AM Reply to George Mc

Who the hell down-voted this. I want a name, address, and employment details.

Teresa , Jan 10, 2021 6:27 PM

No, the entire "game" hasn't played out yet. Hold back on your final conclusions for now. Watchful waiting at the moment.

Moneycircus , Jan 10, 2021 6:21 PM

Computah sez. I mean computer is science, right? And you gotta trust the science Just Google it, OK?

So, AI sez BABY FILTER!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/qUm2KWPmnHg?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

George Mc , Jan 10, 2021 6:04 PM

The tackiest of plays unfolding with the most tedious predictability: "And the NHS can't take much more as .."

Yes yes yes – as if we didn't fucking know!

YOU MEAN TO DESTROY THE NHS AND YOU WILL REPEAT THIS OVER AND OVER AND OVER UNTIL IT IS DONE!

[Jan 20, 2021] Biden is an attempt to put the mask back on the monster so that the woke, "resistance" crowd will continue to not care about the unabated slaughter abroad

Jan 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

William Gruff , Jan 20 2021 21:14 utc | 77

Too many people letting their wishful thinking override their wisdom, just like when Obama was enthroned. I will admit that I was fooled back in 2008 as well, thinking "This time things are finally different!" , though in my defense I will say that the "Reality Distortion Field" built around BHO by the mass media was far more believable than the one they have scraped together for Biden.

Biden being installed will thus buy the empire a "grace period" in which other countries (EU mostly) will happily buy into America's next war effort. As with the post-Bushlette era decorated with the Obama figurehead, the empire will take advantage of this "grace period" to escalate its violence.

After all, that is why they want someone like Biden in the White House in the first place. If the imperial establishment were at all interested in global de-escalation then they would have gone forward with it when Trump demanded troops out instead of playing shell games to keep the empire's wars on a low boil. Trump's belligerent noise-making made it impossible for the empire to escalate its wars. The empire needs someone who is willing to put a nice "progressive" spin on mass murder in order to get buy-in for a renewed round of slaughter.

The empire will not waste this opportunity. They have been waiting four years for it. There will be more war.

_K_C_ , Jan 20 2021 21:26 utc | 84

Posted by: William Gruff | Jan 20 2021 21:14 utc | 77

Agree with most of this as well as your other post earlier in the thread.

Biden is an attempt to put the mask back on the monster so that the woke, "resistance" crowd will continue to not care about the unabated slaughter abroad. I mean, when you really look at it, they (and the corporate mainstream "liberal" media) rarely criticized Trump's foreign policy and often cheered it, albeit without ever openly praising him, per se. We saw the occasional article about the ethnic cleansing in Yemen that Trump greatly aided and abetted, but everyone including the NYT was completely behind his war on Venezuela and attempt to create war with Iran. The media got a bit up in arms when Kashoggi was murdered - because of course he was then a journalist - but even that died down quite quickly while Trump continued feting the Israelis and Saudis.

The coming hot wars will be fought with all of the record breaking arms that Trump sold in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

All of that having been said, I'll repeat a point I've made since we started talking about the election: Trump didn't "start any new wars" because there wasn't much left to do after Obama and Bush set the world on fire and the Iranians (and Venezuelans) showed restraint when attacked - both physically and economically. Trump and his Zionist handlers would have loved it if the USA had ended up in a war with either of those countries and I have no doubt that if he was elected to a 2nd term, we'd have seen one or both transpire. With Biden, same thing as the first thing about Trump - There isn't much left to destroy that the USA could actually get away with and I suspect he will continue the existing wars for however long he (or Kopmala) is in office.

[Jan 20, 2021] The differences between the two monopoly parties in the USA are entirely domestic and are nothing but the size of the crumbs given to the people who think they are free

Jan 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

gottlieb , Jan 20 2021 20:09 utc | 59

It's an Empire with a revolving-door Emperor called a President or Prime Minister. The facts are fixed around the policy. We're obviously headed back toward a more 'can't we all get along' empire, after four years of a guy who thought he was an actual emperor, instead of a bobble-head. The differences between the two monopoly parties in the USA are entirely domestic and are nothing but the size of the crumbs given to the people who think they are free.

[Jan 20, 2021] IMO Biden will do as he is told. His white house chief of staff is a powerful and skilled player and is quite experienced in working with Biden. Joe could well be diverted to give solid focus on the home front while the rats he has appointed continue their global piracy and belligerence. I figure that is why they ran the old fool.

Jan 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Jan 20 2021 21:39 utc | 93

james #64

bottom line kadath.. the usa will be an ongoing slavish servant to israel.. that much is clear as day... which way it goes - syria or iran - none of the saber rattling will stop.. israel doesn't want it to stop! neither does the american duopoly! the people might, but they don't get a say and generally are not interested in foreign policy..

IMO Biden will do as he is told. His white house chief of staff is a powerful and skilled player and is quite experienced in working with Biden. Joe could well be diverted to give solid focus on the home front while the rats he has appointed continue their global piracy and belligerence. I figure that is why they ran the old fool.

Four days ago Ron Klain released his memo explaining immediate actions.

On January 21, the president-elect will sign a number of executive actions to move aggressively to change the course of the COVID-19 crisis and safely re-open schools and businesses, including by taking action to mitigate spread through expanding testing, protecting workers, and establishing clear public health standards.

On January 22, the president-elect will direct his Cabinet agencies to take immediate action to deliver economic relief to working families bearing the brunt of this crisis.

Between January 25 and February 1, the president-elect will sign additional executive actions, memoranda and Cabinet directives. The president-elect will fulfill his promises to strengthen Buy American provisions so the future of America is made in America. He will take significant early actions to advance equity and support communities of color and other underserved communities. He will take action to begin fulfilling campaign promises related to reforming our criminal justice system. The president-elect will sign additional executive actions to address the climate crisis with the urgency the science demands and ensure that science guides the administration's decision making. President-elect Biden will take first steps to expand access to health care – including for low-income women and women of color. He will fulfill his promises to restore dignity to our immigration system and our border policies, and start the difficult but critical work of reuniting families separated at the border. And, President-elect Biden will demonstrate that America is back and take action to restore America's place in the world.

As noted above, this list is not comprehensive. More items and more details will be forthcoming in the days ahead.

Time will tell how the other appointees in the administration align with Klain and the extent of the savage power struggle that is soon to manifest.

[Jan 20, 2021] Biden Administration's 'New' Foreign Policy Is The 'More Of The Same' Old One

Jan 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Jan 20 2021 14:03 utc | 10

The USA is now the proverbial Whale in a Swimming Pool: it is big, powerful and impressive - but can't hide its moves anymore and has little to none margin for any maneuver.

The American Center-wing is ossifying, or, in Cold Warrior terminology (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.), is losing its "vitality". It is entering a stage where it must "burn the village in order to save it".


mrm , Jan 20 2021 14:11 utc | 11

... it seems the answer is that Germany plays the role in Europe that the US plays in the world and both are satisfied with that role even though neo-liberalism, austerity and war-mongering are leading us to inhumanity and disaster.
Lucci , Jan 20 2021 14:18 utc | 13
Like i said before elsewhere Biden would capitalize on what Trump has put forth and take the infamy and blame for instead of moving in the opposite directions of whatever Trump criticized for in foreign policy. That means be it trade war with China, renege on climate deals, strong arming NATO and EU countries, or giving everything Israel wants nothing stop Biden from maintaining what has been put in place.
At most they'll just make excuse on why they had to maintain the policies they themselves criticized Trump for without changing direction.
Norwegian , Jan 20 2021 14:43 utc | 15
There will be absolutely no change in policy towards Israel

That is obviously correct: Joe Biden: "I Am A Zionist. You Don't Have To A Jew To Be A Zionist" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo-UXZ-1ups

Zanon , Jan 20 2021 14:44 utc | 16
Extreme leftist madness goes on: Washington Post : Blacklist Fox News 'as We Do with Foreign Terrorist Groups' https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/01/18/wapo-pushes-to-bar-fox-news-as-we-do-with-foreign-terrorist-groups/
Norwegian , Jan 20 2021 14:45 utc | 17
He said Joe Biden's strong conviction was that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a "bad idea" and that the administration would use "every persuasive tool" to convince partners, including Germany, to discard the project.
That is pretty much a declaration of war against countries in Europe. Stay away,
vk , Jan 20 2021 14:50 utc | 18
America's disarray is its own woes, not other countries' opportunity The Financial Times lives in a world where the USA doesn't have more than 2,000 operational nukes, doesn't control the financial system (SWIFT), doesn't issue the universal fiat currency (Dollar Standard), doesn't have a big fucking navy, doesn't enjoy absolute ideological hegemony etc. etc.

Trump's 4-year effort to contain China was unwise, unrealistic: Global Times editorial Well, that's what happens when you hire a right-wing ideologue as your main advisor (Steve Bannon): you do policy based on a delirious utopia and get smacked by reality.

pnyx , Jan 20 2021 15:07 utc | 19
...Tronald's foreign policy has been a disaster, even if he has supposedly not sparked a new war. Let's not talk about all the secret operations, multiplied drone attacks, state terrorist assassinations, etc. And the new administration is now continuing this...
bevin , Jan 20 2021 15:07 utc | 20
"How exactly are they "ossifying"?" Jackrabbit@14

They've stopped thinking, become utterly predictable.

They just go through the motions. They know that they can't win-achieve their long held objectives-but they can't stop repeating themselves, including their past errors. They are not allowed to. The US ruling caste-servants of the ruling class- are only allowed to operate within very narrow boundaries. They aren't allowed to take radical measures when faced with new crises- they are confined within ever diminishing political circles. The duopoly has become an obvious One Party system. And its politics are those of the Gilded Age-150 years old and still going strong.

The only solution to America's problems is defeat so complete that it cannot be denied even by the least perceptive. Anyone with money to spare should be buying popcorn futures.

Eighthman , Jan 20 2021 15:08 utc | 21
...Biden is an elderly figurehead. Trump's mistake was being openly bullying and vulgar instead of underhanded. Already, the EU ( as cowardly vassals ) are falling into line on Iran and Russia.
Larry Paul Johnson , Jan 20 2021 15:11 utc | 22
...Paul Craig Roberts is correct. There has not been a regime change, there has been a revolution and treating policies of this "president" as if he is more than a figurehead being run by oligarchs is foolish in the extreme.
Jackrabbit , Jan 20 2021 15:39 utc | 24
bevin @Jan20 15:07 #20
They've stopped thinking, become utterly predictable.

One could say this about the American people who have been herded into two camps so that the Center can rule. Here's an example: One of Biden's first executive actions is to include undocumented residents in the Census. This will please the Left immensely and outrage the Right. But the Census is conducted every 10 years and it was completed in 2020. So Biden's action is actually meaningless. How many people will actual notice this? Very few.

dh , Jan 20 2021 16:04 utc | 25
@24 Some people in Central America have noticed.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/honduran-migrants-us-guatemala-crackdown-1.5877244

William Gruff , Jan 20 2021 16:16 utc | 26
It is funny/sad to see the Post Trump Stress Disorder victims are already rationalizing and making excuses for the war that the establishment drones they voted for will be starting, and those drones are not even sworn in to office yet. They know that they voted for war yet their plastic, Hollywood "identities" are so intertwined with their assumed self-evident moral superiority that they are compelled to defend the evil they are responsible for even before it is committed. For them, doing nothing crudely is far worse than murdering millions accompanied by lofty and emotive platitudes.
AntiSpin , Jan 20 2021 16:49 utc | 27
Joe Biden's Cabinet Is on Loan From Corporate America An interview with David Dayen 12/8/20 https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/david-dayen-american-prospect-joe-biden-cabinet

Beware of the Hawk: What to Expect from the Biden Administration on Foreign Policy
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2020/11/08/beware-of-the-hawk-what-to-expect-from-the-biden-administration-on-foreign-policy/

Biden Administration Betrayals of Working Americans
By Leonard C. Goodman
https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/democrats-and-ruling-by-fear/Content?oid=85065430 -

Why They're Denying You Healthcare And Financial Support During A Pandemic
by Caitlin Johnstone
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/12/20/why-theyre-denying-you-healthcare-and-financial-support-during-a-pandemic/

Biden Goes To Bat For BlackRock, Stays Vague On Direct Aid To Struggling Americans
https://www.dailyposter.com/p/biden-goes-to-bat-for-blackrock-stays

Biden and the Democrats Could Change Everything. But They Won't Try
by Ted Rall | January 7, 2021
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/ted-rall/94642/biden-and-the-democrats-could-change-everything-but-they-won-t-try

The Biden Democrats Already Show They Learned Little from Trump's Loss
by Richard Wolff | December 24, 2020
https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/biden-democrats/

Biden's Foreign Policy History and What it Portends for his Presidency
By Jeremy Kuzmarov January 11, 2021
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/01/11/exclusive-series-bidens-foreign-policy-history-and-what-it-portends-for-his-presidency/

Biden's Transition Team is Filled With War Profiteers, Beltway Chickenhawks, and Corporate Consultants
by Kevin Gosztola 11/14/20
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/14/bidens-transition-team-war-profiteers-chickenhawks-corporate-consultants/

Biden's Pentagon Transition Team Members Funded by the Arms Industry
by Dave DeCamp – 11/11/2020
https://news.antiwar.com/2020/11/11/bidens-pentagon-transition-team-members-funded-by-the-arms-industry/

Biden's Victory Does Not Guarantee a Progressive Agenda. We Must Fight for It.
by Marjorie Cohn 11-23-20
https://truthout.org/articles/bidens-victory-does-not-guarantee-a-progressive-agenda-we-must-fight-for-it/

Meet the Filthy Rich War Hawks That Make up Biden's New Foreign Policy Team
"I expect the prevailing direction of U.S. foreign policy over these last decades to continue: more lawless bombing and killing multiple countries under the cover of "limited engagement," – Biden Biographer Branko Marcetic
by Alan Macleod November 13th, 2020
https://www.mintpressnews.com/filthy-rich-war-hawks-make-joe-biden-foreign-policy-team/273039/

More Humane Cages? Prospects for Immigration Justice Under Biden Appear Dim
by Adrienne Pine | November 18, 2020
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/adrienne-pine/93930/more-humane-cages-prospects-for-immigration-justice-under-biden-appear-dim

Neera Tanden – Reduce US Deficits by Raiding the Economies of Countries We Have Destroyed:
Neera Tanden, Biden's Pick for Budget Office: Now Is Not the Time To 'Worry About Raising Deficits and Debt'
by Robby Soave
https://reason.com/2020/11/30/neera-tanden-biden-omb-debt-deficit/
She once suggested that if Americans care about the deficit so much, maybe we should make Libya pay for it.
| 11/30/2020
( Ariana Ruiz/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom )

Neera Tanden and Antony Blinken Personify the 'Moderate' Rot at the Top of the Democratic Party
by Norman Solomon 12/29/20
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/norman-solomon/94514/neera-tanden-and-antony-blinken-personify-the-moderate-rot-at-the-top-of-the-democratic-party

Obama & the Democrats Sending Mixed Messages about the Catfood Commission
By Carl Bloice 10-14-12
https://www.laprogressive.com/catfood-commission/

Progressives Made Trump's Defeat Possible -- Now It's Time to Challenge Biden and Other Corporate Democrats
by Norman Soloman 11/7/20
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/norman-solomon/93753/progressives-made-trumps-defeat-possible-now-its-time-to-challenge-biden-and-other-corporate-democra

Someone Should Ask Ursula Burns If She Supports Child Labor in Africa
by Thomas Neuburger | 12/30/20
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/thomas-neuburger/94527/someone-should-ask-ursula-burns-if-she-supports-child-labor-in-africa

The Dark Past of Biden's Nominee for National Intelligence Director
by John Kiriakou 12/31/20
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/12/29/john-kiriakou-the-dark-past-of-bidens-nominee-for-national-intelligence-director/

The REAL Joe Biden
"The Chinese Uyghur Dark Legend and Washington's Campaign to Counter Chinese Economic Rivalry"
by Stephen Gowans 10/25/20
https://gowans.blog/2020/10/25/the-chinese-uyghur-dark-legend-and-washingtons-campaign-to-counter-chinese-economic-rivalry/

Top 10 Reasons to Reject Blinken
by David Swanson
https://davidswanson.org/top-10-reasons-to-reject-blinken/

Who Is Michèle Flournoy, Biden's Rumored Pick for Pentagon Chief
by Thomas Neuberger 11/11/20
https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2020/11/who-is-michele-flournoy-bidens-rumored.html

Why Biden Will Keep the U.S.-Imposed Cold War Rolling
by Vijay Prashad| 11/19/20
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/vijay-prashad/93949/why-biden-will-keep-the-u-s-imposed-cold-war-rolling

Why Progressives Should Care About Biden's Pick for Commerce Secretary
by Zena Wolf 1/7/21
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/zena-wolf/94644/why-progressives-should-care-about-bidens-pick-for-commerce-secretary

Why Senators Must Reject Avril Haines for Intelligence
by Medea Benjamin | 12/30/20
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/medea-benjamin/94528/why-senators-must-reject-avril-haines-for-intelligence

Will the Senate Confirm Coup Plotter Victoria Nuland?
by Medea Benjamin 1/15/21
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/medea-benjamin/94817/will-the-senate-confirm-coup-plotter-victoria-nuland

No, Joe, Don't Roll out the Red Carpet for Torture Enablers
by Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd 12/22/20
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/medea-benjamin/94425/no-joe-don-t-roll-out-the-red-carpet-for-torture-enablers#comment

Norwegian , Jan 20 2021 16:55 utc | 28
'This Is What 80 Million Votes Looks Like': Biden Inauguration EMPTY (PICS)
Down South , Jan 20 2021 17:05 utc | 29
Zanon @ 16

I'm not surprised. You only have to watch this segment from Tucker Carlson to understand why. https://youtu.be/M0l7xH5zbIg

Paul , Jan 20 2021 17:06 utc | 30
Trump ripped the mask off US foreign policy and exposed it for what it is - ugly Zionism and outrageous Jewish supremacy. Trump did many foreign policy changes previous incumbents and their handlers wanted to do but were constrained by the optics and international opinion.

I agree the Biden administration will continue the same tired old foreign policy, only with the mask back on. Of course the media won't notice the similarities, but the public will. No matter how fervently the managers tinker with the edges it is events that drive changes and change people.

lex talionis , Jan 20 2021 17:08 utc | 31
Blue is the new red! All hail the Bidet administration! Dermocracy (депмократия) dies in the dark!
juliania , Jan 20 2021 17:32 utc | 32
I just listened to President Biden's speech. It was a good one, even a great one. Thinking about what Plato means by the 'noble lie' it was a noble speech, and there wasn't much of a lie about it.

I just wish he were a younger man.

psychohistorian , Jan 20 2021 17:33 utc | 33
b finished the posting with
"
While Trump had continued the wars the U.S. waged when he came into office he did not start any new ones. Since Joe Biden first entered the Senate 47 years ago he has cheered on every war the U.S. has since waged. It would be astonishing to find four years from now that he did not start any new ones.
"

Prepare to be astonished. Biden isn't going to start any new wars for the same reason that Trump didn't......MAD

Humanity has been in the MAD phase of the civilization war we are in since the Obama era push back in Syria.

Biden's chest beating will not be as "impressive" as Trump's but the trajectory is the same.

karlof1 , Jan 20 2021 17:34 utc | 34
The new chief says to tighten the circle of wagons, but those accused of besieging the Outlaw US Empire's wagon train stopped attacking and moved on long ago. Meanwhile, supplying the wagon train continues to take resources away from dealing with very real domestic problems. The upshot is China will continue to pull away and increase its lead geoeconomically, and together with Russia will continue to solidify and strengthen the Eurasian Bloc. Very soon, the EU is going to be faced with a very stark choice--to join the Eurasian Bloc and thus stave-off economic atrophy or continue to allow its brand of Neoliberal Parasites to eat and risk rupture, perhaps not in 2021 but before 2030.

The key is that the false narrative that was initiated in 1945 and bolstered in 1979 continues to be treated as gospel despite its path to certain ruin. I noted there were no questions asked about the international call for a Bretton Woods 2.0 that would end dollar hegemony and Petrodollar recycling, while removing the one source of coercion behind its illegal sanctions.

The only possible target of opportunity I see is Venezuela as the frack-patch is about to fold-up shop and fuel prices cause domestic inflation to soar -- Here in Oregon, gas prices have gone up 50cents/gal since the first of the year--25%. The oil being the obvious target now the the lower-48 has definitely peaked.

Lucci , Jan 20 2021 17:38 utc | 35
@Jackrabit 24

|One could say this about the American people who have been herded into two camps so that the Center can rule.|

There's no center or centrist in USA there's only elite capitalist oligarchs who is neocons through and through at the core.

james , Jan 20 2021 17:40 utc | 36
@ 32 juliania... you are the eternal optimist! there is something admirable about that!.. however you have to contend with a lot of cynical people who think like it's business as well, as b's post notes..... you might not like to hear this, but nothing is going to change under biden... big wheels set in motion and biden is not interested in the least in changing any of it... neither was trump as some of his fanbots are coming to see too... political speeches are just so much b.s... juliania - as the saying goes, talk is cheap, it is actions that count.... watch peoples actions, not their talk... biden can talk a good line, but that has nothing to do with his actions... top of the day to you!
dh , Jan 20 2021 17:42 utc | 37
@34 Invading Venezuela and 'taking the oil' won't be easy though there is a possibility Colombia will help out. Which means the total disruption of South America. More economical to just buy the stuff.
Per/Norway , Jan 20 2021 18:00 utc | 38
"It is funny/sad to see the Post Trump Stress Disorder victims are already rationalizing and making excuses for the war that the establishment drones they voted for will be starting, and those drones are not even sworn in to office yet. They know that they voted for war yet their plastic, Hollywood "identities" are so intertwined with their assumed self-evident moral superiority that they are compelled to defend the evil they are responsible for even before it is committed. For them, doing nothing crudely is far worse than murdering millions accompanied by lofty and emotive platitudes."

Posted by: William Gruff | Jan 20 2021 16:16 utc | 26

Tnx for expressing this in a much nicer and polite way then i would have written. And yes, yes it is sad/amusing to watch NPC`s turn into pretzels to explain away their cognitive dissonans ,utter foolishness and stupidity.

dh , Jan 20 2021 18:03 utc | 39
@37 On the subject of gas prices perhaps it might be a bad time to cut off Canadian supply?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/keystone-xl-may-sold-scrap-203840567.html

[Jan 20, 2021] Biden will technically be President , so it's time to ask ourselves what kind of world are we in for?

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... If not for the "new normal" we 100% would guarantee a new war – or a restarted old war – within a year. As it stands, we're only 60% sure they'll be some kind of military intervention sometime soon (Venezuela wouldn't be a surprise). ..."
"... The real crackdowns are going to be domestic. There is a huge push to take "domestic terrorism" seriously , and that will go hand-in-hand with increased purges of social media (again with "Russian disinformation" playing a major role). ..."
"... I wonder if the military occupation was designed to disguise the total lack of support, given the evidence of election fraud. You couldn't get more emptiness and virtual absence of reality if the military conducted the installation in a bunker in the dying days of the Reich. ..."
"... Another poster said it looked like a junta in a minor banana dictatorship. Spot on. It was a military installation visually and in a political sense for there were no people. ..."
Jan 20, 2021 | off-guardian.org

This particular inauguration is going to look a lot different from all the others – the twin bogus narratives of coronavirus and the "attempted coup" on January 6th have forced, FORCED, capitol city into an almost Martial Law-like standing.

A heavy troop presence as your leader is sworn in is one of the hallmarks of legitimacy, you understand. And not even slightly a sign of power being seized illegitimately.

That said, Biden will technically be "President", so it's time to ask ourselves – what kind of world are we in for?

For one thing, it's possible they are preparing to sideline the covid "pandemic" narrative , as the mayor of Chicago and governor of New York have both said that lockdowns need to end, and a report has been published saying lockdowns don't work.

Internationally it's likely to be business as usual. If you look at his cabinet choices, from Victoria Nuland to Samantha power , we have a LOT of warmongers who bleat about America's "responsibility to protect". While politicians and pundits are already rebuking Trump & Johnson for failing in US/UK's "moral leadership" of the world, or praising Biden for his plans to "counter Russian disinformation".

If not for the "new normal" we 100% would guarantee a new war – or a restarted old war – within a year. As it stands, we're only 60% sure they'll be some kind of military intervention sometime soon (Venezuela wouldn't be a surprise).

The real crackdowns are going to be domestic. There is a huge push to take "domestic terrorism" seriously , and that will go hand-in-hand with increased purges of social media (again with "Russian disinformation" playing a major role).

The big question is whether the inauguration will go off smoothly, or they'll try another manufactured incident to sell that agenda.

How do you think President Creepy Uncle Joe is going to shape our world? How long before, for whatever reason, Kamala Harris replaces him? Will the pandemic be "solved"? Will we have a new war? Discuss below.

Jan 21, 2021 2:24 AM

Washington DC was empty except for the troops. Windblown streets. Jason Goodman did his walkabout could not even get a distant view of the Capitol. It's as if no one voted for Biden: no supporters even tried to attend the inauguration. You would have expected someone a few diehards who hadn't heard about the military occupation.

I wonder if the military occupation was designed to disguise the total lack of support, given the evidence of election fraud. You couldn't get more emptiness and virtual absence of reality if the military conducted the installation in a bunker in the dying days of the Reich.

Another poster said it looked like a junta in a minor banana dictatorship. Spot on. It was a military installation visually and in a political sense for there were no people.

An inauguration of the leader of a nation cannot be legitimate if the people play no part .

Celebrities cheered with exaggerated leering grins and lockjaw, tongues lolling in a vain caricature of support from the class of paid actors.

The term 'State Actor' has a new meaning today. The Corporatist Media could not recognise its own banality. This was like the USSR Actors' Union huddling and fawning around Secretary General Brezhnev as the Soviet Union teetered to collapse.

Social cretinism is the best one can say about this sorry debacle but I fear it is something much, much worse.

Crowdsource the Truth 2

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jowNNrASaFQ?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent 1 0

Disillusioned Peasant , Jan 21, 2021 2:38 AM Reply to theobalt

Agreed, Trump was used as a puppet to shame anybody who questions the narrative or resists the deep state. He was asked to be a cartoon, a ridiculous exaggeration of a "traditionalist" or "nationalist" to forever tarnish that stance. He was basically the Alex Jones president .the ultimate controlled opposition. A clown.

I'm so embarrassed I fell for it in 2016. Of COURSE he was phony. Jan 21, 2021 1:39 AM

The snake as a new head. It's still the same snake. It still crawls on it's belly and it still spits the same lies on behalf of the masters who stand behind the curtain. We could still hear Bush Sr when Clinton spoke ; We could still hear Bush Jr when Obama spoke. Red and Blue are the same colour.

It was refreshing in parts to have an American president who didn't try to contrive a narrative that would justify invading another country or contrive yet another cell of 'radicalised' terrorists. No explosions on home soil intended to be taken as an attack from foreign soil. Nothing in four years.

It was all the more surprising as many believed that Trump was and is a great real estate dealer and TV celebrity who has manufactured his charisma from arrogance and ignorance. He has never been celebrated for much beyond his business acumen in the real estate area and TV. This wasn't exactly an erudite man. Former presidents of different ages were and were capable of putting it on paper in their memoirs. Trump was the sign of the times ; a Twitter president. His reign was punctuated by the occasional flexing of Uncle Sam's muscles with threats and a go -ahead-punk-make-our-day approach to public speaking. Yet still no threats of war. This was an odd four years. That odd = peace says more about the US than Trump though. So, what was his role ?

In 2001 we had the Twin Towers. The most dramatic mass murder and the destruction of the laws of Physics and Logic all in one day. Soon after we had the destruction of personal freedom and the creation of domestic terror. It had been suggested by Philip Zelikow three years earlier that a 'searing event such as a terror attack' would be a useful and effective tool in transforming the future by breaking away from the past in no uncertain terms. It would be the event that nobody dare question, and that would be perfect for creating a real fear within the people of the west that such a disaster could occur any time without warning. All they needed was the right salesman to address us.

And so the Patriot Act was born. The surveillance of everyone in their streets, in other towns and their homes was pushed through as a public health measure and a matter of national security. If you protested you were a ' 9 /11 denier' and 'unpatriotic'. If we went too long without evidence of this terror then somewhere would be bombed and the bomber would be 'neutralised' before we would ever learn who was behind it. It took time to become a 'new normal' but it became the 'new normal'. Complain- you were a 'dangerous' conspiracy theorist; in some states it was considered grounds to label you under the mental health act. Just for asking questions. This was how to protect democracy- by tyranny.

So, two decades on we were ready and primed.

Gates and his cohort billionaire 'philanderers' had been beavering away for decades creating more subtle forms of terror. No bangs; no smoke; no mess. These 'missiles' were microbes and the control groups had been observed closely. From mice, to bats to black people to gay people. Once the results /data became big enough numbers, the bomb factory went to work behind the closed doors of 'Cancer Research ' facilities.

We all know now about the hypothetical exercises 'imagined' by the Gates 'Good Club' ; nightmares of being unprepared etc. They penned in 2030 as target date for the endgame. . A date that will have seen the human race enslaved or culled by their terrorism.

Liability would have been taken off the table, giving them free reign. All involved sank their pennies into the manufacturing of these little bombs. And all Academic Institutions, MSM platforms, and pharmaceutical industries were funded by Gates and Co. Then Monsanto and it's subsidiaries were purchased the same way, and the same immunity from prosecution granted from the damaging synthetic /poison crops and food.

So, 2020, was Trump's last stand. He had his '9 /11'. He had domestic bio terrorists. Then the rest of the world had it. We had the same threats to national security and the same 'need' for a new version of a Dystopian Patriot Act.

This wasn't about ISIS or Al -Qaeda and their radicalised lunatics. Trump had found a new group of Bogeymen. China. He would have sounded a bit paranoid if Russia was blamed for something again. Besides, everyone knows that all SARS- type or flu-like viruses are made in China quicker and cheaper. And the US should know that by looking in their many, many stockpiles in their own Biological War labs they pretend are trying to cure cancer.

Trump decided to refer to the Covid 19 virus as 'The Chinese disease '. Fang Ling Fauci had told him to on behalf of Wong Sing Gates.

He went on to call himself a 'war time president' ( there you go- he got one).

He invoked the Defence Production Act, an old Cold War law which allows the Executive Branch to control and redirect the production and distribution of scarce materials deemed "essential to the national defense. " In an executive order dated March 18th, 2020.

To add another layer to the movie the troops were brought in and all medics were now 'heroes on the front line'.

The script went global. It began in the country that Gates had composed such a hypothetical scenario- America. Hence the 'Chinese Disease'. It was the new war on terror minus the James Bond bad guy Bin Laden.

So Trump ushered it in right on time. It didn't win the election( we were told). Instead, it won it for Obama's man, Biden.

Biden and Obama were the most vehement advocates of Monsanto, Sterilisation, and Social Technology ( eugenics ; social cleansing). Obama was made a very wealthy man for his services to the Gates agenda, pharma and GM / Frankenfood. He was surprisingly racist as well as elitist. Tom Vilsack was their frontman. Biden has already called him out of retirement.

So, given the 'war-on-(bio)-terror ' that was born in the USA and sold worldwide, there was no place for Trump. His job was to let the the 'enemy' in, warn us of the possible 'war ahead' and leave it to Gates. But Trump seemed to have spotted that and didn't seem too keen on the narrative. So, come on down Barack O Biden. The timing's right.. Jan 20, 2021 11:40 PM Reply to Ben

Do not be bamboozled, in SHAM DEMOCRACY USA there is only one party, THE REPUBLICRATS (the WAR RACKETEER CORPORATE FASCIST political racket so corrupt it needs two aliases).

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

~ Frederick Douglas, 1857

Schmitz Katze , Jan 20, 2021 10:44 PM

„That said, Biden will technically be "President", so it's time to ask ourselves – what kind of world are we in for?
The real crackdowns are going to be domestic.-
Will the pandemic be "solved"? „

It will only be solved when people have had enough of it. The deep state got rid of Trump (for the timebeing-) under the guise of a pandemic. For them and their minions in MSM, government and academia it´s a gift that keeps on giving, with never ending corona mutation fearporn.
It´s totalitarianism, it´s dystopia under under the guise of – domestic-safety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4hBCBdutUE

[Jan 20, 2021] Russiagate now will be swiped under the rug

Jan 20, 2021 | www.thegatewaypundit.com

Feds Quietly Close Flynn Leak Investigation, Find No Wrongdoing By Crooked Obama Officials


frozeninbemidji-INA sec.212(f) 4 hours ago

Everything will be swept under the rug now.

They have an all too willing media and a bureaucracy loaded with 99% like minded scumbags.

Commie-Crusher dlovely 3 hours ago ,

Barr is Deep State

flash dlovely 3 hours ago ,

We begged Trump to get rid of him many months ago. Same with Wray. Without justice you have no society and no Constitution. Halper came into the CIA by Brennan. Should have gotten rid of her many months ago. These are Trumps biggest mistakes.

Donald J Tromp flash 3 hours ago ,

Sessions, Barr, Wray, Haspel, Coates, Krebs... Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett... even his SC Justice picks are suspect at this point. Honestly, it's pathetic!

[Jan 20, 2021] LOL: Clinton, Pelosi ask "Was Russia/Putin involved in the riots?"

Jan 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Zanon , Jan 19 2021 8:11 utc | 137

LOL!

Clinton, Pelosi: Was Russia/Putin involved in the riots?
https://www.foxbangor.com/national-news/clinton-suggests-putin-may-have-known-about-riot-in-capitol-pelosi-wants-9-11-commission-type-probe/

[Jan 20, 2021] The UN General Assembly actually affirmed that Israel's continued occupation of the Golan Heights is 'a violation of international law'

Jan 20, 2021 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Northern Star

November 26, 2018 at 1:48 am
Occupied but not forgotten
https://syria360.wordpress.com/2018/11/16/un-general-assembly-votes-overwhelmingly-in-favor-of-resolution-affirming-syrias-sovereignty-over-occupied-golan/
If Syria can consolidate her sovereign status and territorial integrity she may well be able take back the Golan heights from Israel.
cartman November 26, 2018 at 3:40 am
Where Cheney, Murdoch, and the Rothschilds purchased oil concessions.

Like Like

Mark Chapman November 26, 2018 at 10:23 am
Gosh! The UN General Assembly actually affirmed that Israel's continued occupation of the Golan Heights is 'a violation of international law'!! But the USA voted against the resolution. Does that mean the USA supports violations of international law, or that it believes it has the right to decide what does or does not constitute violations thereof?

My vote is with option B. As others have pointed out, the USA loves to throw the weight of 'international law' about, often when there is no such backing and even more often without getting any more specific than just 'international law'. The supposed annexation of Crimea is a natural example – the USA and Ukraine monotonously refer to the transfer of Crimea to the Russian Federation as such a violation, but do not specify what law was violated, instead bleating about the Budapest Memorandum.

The latter is not international law, and more importantly, it assumed that conditions which prevailed at the time of signing would endure; no provision was made for a bloody coup right next door, and nobody would be fool enough to sign such an agreement as unconditional. Not to blame it all on the USA and Ukraine, either – the USA's retinue of lickspittles who depend on it for trade and economic reasons are happy to parrot it as a 'violation of international law'.

That only shows you how easily an action the west routinely lauds as the very essence of democratic principles – a declaration of independence supported by a huge majority of the inhabitants – can be made to seem 'a violation of international law': simply refuse to recognize the decision as the will of the people, and characterize it as a forced decision made under duress. Because America says the Crimean referendum was not legal or proper, Crimea should have been forced against its will to remain a possession of Ukraine – the very and complete polar opposite of the USA's customary prancing and whooping about 'freedom'.

Mark Chapman November 26, 2018 at 8:30 am
I wouldn't want to be a Russian in Ukraine now, though. Hysteria will be high, and the nationalists will be looking for an outlet for their frustration and hate.
Cortes November 26, 2018 at 2:37 pm
Protests about the lack of heating and hikes in utility prices are going to be kiboshed by the decree.
Northern Star November 26, 2018 at 10:44 am
Since a nation's territorial Waters extend 12 miles beyond its coast, doesn't that put the entirety of the Ketch strait in Russian territorial waters ??
BTW What happens where the 12 mile extensions of two nations overlap???

Like Like

Moscow Exile November 26, 2018 at 11:30 am
In such cases there is usually some sort of convention, as there is as regards the 20.7 mile wide Straits of Dover.

This matter was brought up in Moon of Alabama :

The usual anti-Russian subject in "western" political circles use the incident to demand more measures against Russia. Fronting the effort is the weapon industry lobbying group Atlantic Council:

Anders Åslund, a resident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, said: "NATO and the United States should send in naval ships in the Sea of Azov to guarantee that it stays open to international shipping."

Such action, Åslund said, "would be in full compliance with the UN Law of the Sea Convention of 1982 and the Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits of 1936."

Anders Aslund is listed as member of the "U.S. & Canadian Cluster" of the secret influence operation by the British Foreign Office describe here two days ago. He is obviously unable to read a map, sea chart, or UN convention. The Ukrainian attempt to pass through the Kerch Strait without Russian consent is a breach of Article 7, 19 and 21 of the UN Law of the Sea Convention (pdf):

Article 7: "Subject to this Convention, ships of all States, whether coastal or land-locked, enjoy the right of innocent passage through the territorial sea."

Article 19-1: "Passage is innocent so long as it is not prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal State. Such passage shall take place in conformity with this Convention and with other rules of international law."

Article 21-4: "Foreign ships exercising the right of innocent passage through the territorial sea shall comply with all such [coastal state] laws and regulations and all generally accepted international regulations relating to the prevention of collisions at sea."

There will now be again a lot of noise in the media about the 'nefarious Russians' and new demands for even more useless sanctions. But the legal case is clear. It was the Ukrainian navy that willfully attempted to pass from the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov through Russian territorial waters without regard to the laws and regulations of the coastal state. Russia was within its full rights to prevent the passage and to seize the Ukrainian boats.

Mark Chapman November 26, 2018 at 12:40 pm
Dear God; Anders Aslund. Now he's an expert in maritime law. Might as well, I guess; he's a chrome-plated clusterfuck as an economist – good on you, Anders, to make a career change so late in life.

Anders Aslund is a wooden-head whose sole useful function is to give the veneer of academia to agit-prop.

Jen November 26, 2018 at 8:32 pm
The Atlantic Council seems to attract many people who have quite sudden and dramatic mid-life career changes, for example that former women's lingerie salesman turned investigative journalist Eliot Higgins.

[Jan 20, 2021] After looting the xUSSR space there are no countries left to be looted by the US where to recoup Pentogon costs. In this sense the decline of the empire is inevitable

Jan 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

passerby , Jan 20 2021 21:03 utc | 71

In the end, it's all about money. And the US has an army that costs more than can be plundered from the countries it occupies.
The US military costs about a trillion every year. There are no countries left to be conquered by the US where that kind of treasure can be looted.

[Jan 20, 2021] It wouldn't be the first time that Navalny would seem to prefer a Russian jail to the company of his CIA "friends".

Jan 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Cyril , Jan 19 2021 2:17 utc | 136

@S | Jan 18 2021 21:24 utc | 124

What this means is that Navalny has deliberately decided (or was told by his handlers) to be put in Russian jail.

If you are right about this, it wouldn't be the first time that Navalny would seem to prefer a Russian jail to the company of his CIA "friends". When Boris Nemtsov was assassinated, we eventually learned that Navalny had gotten himself arrested a few days before. Perhaps he considered himself safer in Putin's hands. Maybe he is thinking the same these days.


uncle tungsten , Jan 18 2021 23:31 utc | 133

downtownhaiku #130

Thank you for that post. Strategic Culture is a good read and one is mindful that it is a Russian source and no doubt has some affinity with the Russian Government and empathy for Russian people's point of view. That is perfectly fine. I don't see it as a craven mouthpiece (like the grauniad is to the UK) but rather an information source.

There is no secret about SC. John Helmer has this to say in a recent report:

Alexei Navalny believes he is throwing down a gauntlet for the Kremlin either to arrest him when he returns to Moscow from Berlin on Sunday, or to allow him to walk freely out of the airport. Either way, from behind bars as a political prisoner or from his Moscow film studio as an opposition candidate for regime change, Navalny and his supporters will announce they have shown strength, the President of Russia weakness. The one outcome Navalny hasn't counted on is that Russians will be laughing at him.

This is the strategy of Vzglyad, the Moscow online newspaper which publishes sophisticated and accurate analysis of military, intelligence and security issues unmatched by the English-language media. It is almost unnoticed in the west, except for those services who believe it reflects the thinking of key figures, past and present, in the presidential administration. Because the Russian figures don't think the way the western services or their media organs depict them, Vzglyad hasn't drawn the attention of foreign reporters as do state media like RT, Sputnik, the Strategic Culture Foundation, and the Valdai Club.

Read this Helmer report it is the style and quality of commentary that you will NEVER see in the western press.

uncle tungsten , Jan 18 2021 23:18 utc | 131

S #124

Thank you, your accuracy is a desirable trait in reporting these matters. The west has enough channels for their lying thieving pursuits and MoA should avoid being at their service.

Navalny and the west's use of him is clearly a sign of their predatory ignorance and dishonesty. I am sure they will keep up their homeside propaganda in favor of their aggressive mendacity in the world. In fact I guess Joe Biden will have little to do but ride on the coattails of a fool such as Navalny. That is about the sum total of the intellectual capacity of Xerxes Biden. Off he goes to another ignominious defeat. Imagine what it will be like after he gets sworn in!

S , Jan 18 2021 21:24 utc | 124

@vk #86:

Navalny is on parole, which was revoked the moment he fled to Germany. He was then recalled to Russia.

Not true. His suspended sentence (not parole) was not "revoked the moment he fled to Germany". He was given an explicit permission to be treated in Germany. The problem is that after he was released from the hospital he was supposed to return to Russia for his regular check-in with authorities which he had to keep doing until his suspended sentence ran out on December 30, 2020. On December 22, 2020, Lancet has published an article where they stated that Navalny had been released from hospital on September 20 and was completely healthy by October 12. That's why the Moscow office of FSIN (Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service) has publicly demanded on December 28, 2020 that Navalny immediately returns to Russia to perform his last check-in, lest his suspended sentence is replaced with a real one. Navalny's press secretary has replied on the same day that he won't comply with the demand. So on January 12, 2021, FSIN has started the legal procedures to replace Navalny's suspended sentence with a real one. What this means is that Navalny has deliberately decided (or was told by his handlers) to be put in Russian jail.

FSIN suspects Navalny of violating probation rules ( RBK , December 28, 2020)

FSIN demanded through court to change Navalny's suspended sentence to real ( RBK , January 12, 2020)

downtownhaiku , Jan 18 2021 16:47 utc | 102

latest from Helmer on Navalny

http://johnhelmer.net/navalny-s-courtroom-wager-biomedical-and-drugs-evidence-and-article-275-of-the-russian-criminal-code/

Norwegian , Jan 18 2021 16:12 utc | 96

@Tuyzentfloot | Jan 18 2021 12:41 utc | 88

that would mean the BND threatened Navalny. Quite speculative.

No such threat required. Just say "Skripal" to him.
vk , Jan 18 2021 12:26 utc | 86

Navalny is on parole, which was revoked the moment he fled to Germany. He was then recalled to Russia.

I already can imagine the dialogue the BND had with Navalny: "either you become a liberal martyr alive in a Russian prison or dead in mysterious circumstances in Germany". Navalny must've quickly found out he was actually safer in Russia.

Tuyzentfloot , Jan 18 2021 12:02 utc | 84

Navalny is aligned with the US/CIA/CHGQ. That makes him an enemy. It does not necessarily make him dishonest, and I would agree he is courageous.

It could make him a target for elimination.

The most plausible explanation for what happened to him however for me includes a lot of CIA/CHGQ deception. Pity James Randi is dead.

[Jan 20, 2021] Bear in mind on the basis of Navalny's supposed phone call with Kudryavtsev, Kudryavtsev's mother-in-law was actually accosted by Navalny groupie, lawyer Lyubov Sobol, who obtained entry into an apartment block under false pretences and then forced her way into the mother-in-law's apartment with other people illegally wearing government agency uniforms and took photos on her mobile phone. The mother-in-law has had to seek protection.

Jan 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Jan 20 2021 2:20 utc | 78

Here is an interesting development in the saga of Alexei Navalny since he became The Human Headline in October last year. It concerns how the information about GRU agents tailing him was apparently obtained.

Russian policeman under house arrest, reportedly suspected of selling confidential flight information to Bellingcat – RBK sources

A police officer in Samara is being investigated on suspicion of leaking information from the country's centralized travel records, which registers all tickets bought in Russia, linking them to passengers' passport numbers.
Samara is a large city in the center of Russia, around 1,000 kilometers east of Moscow.

It is reported that the US and UK government-funded group Bellingcat used the data in a recent investigation into the alleged poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny.

That's according to Moscow daily newspaper RBK, citing a source, which revealed that authorities are clamping down on leaks from databases following the report. Bellingcat was joined by journalists from the the Russian-language outlet The Insider, America's CNN and Germany's Der Spiegel. Together, they were accessing the flight information of FSB agents they allege had trailed the anti-corruption activist around the country.

RBK's source says that the accused policeman, Kirill Chuprov, is now under house arrest, and would face up to ten years in prison if convicted. Officially, no information has been released, but the Samara District Court's press service confirmed that he was detained on suspicion of abuse of office.

The source revealed that Chuprov had accessed data from the country's travel database, which contains information about who has traveled on trains and planes. In Russia, internal flight and rail tickets are generally bought using passports, meaning that this data is highly valuable. If he is found to be the source of the information, in a challenge to Bellingcat's established narrative, the revelation would highlight that [Bellingcat] not only uses open sources for its investigations, but also buys data from corrupt officials.

According to the western state-funded outlet, leaked databases were an integral part of its investigation, allowing its team to track the locations of eight men they believe were part of a plot to poison Navalny. By accessing flight records, Bellingcat claimed that FSB agents had flown around the country to the same locations as the opposition figure.

Last month, Navalny published a recording of a telephone conversation with one of the alleged participants in the assassination attempt, a man purported to be FSB officer Konstantin Kudryavtsev. Kudryavtsev is one of the men whose movements were leaked, allegedly by Chuprov.

Well, well, who'd have thunk it? ... upright "citizen journalist" group Bellingcrap sinking to the level of Christopher Steele's Orbis Intelligence organisation in buying hacked data (which could also have been tampered with) from corrupt officials on the black market.

Bear in mind on the basis of Navalny's supposed phone call with Kudryavtsev, Kudryavtsev's mother-in-law was actually accosted by Navalny groupie, lawyer Lyubov Sobol, who obtained entry into an apartment block under false pretences and then forced her way into the mother-in-law's apartment with other people illegally wearing government agency uniforms and took photos on her mobile phone. The mother-in-law has had to seek protection.

Consider also that Bellingcrap obtained "information" demonstrating that Russian tourists Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov who visited Salisbury in March 2018, at the time of the supposed poisoning of Sergei and Julia Skripal, were actually two GRU agents from a phone database. In light of the news of the Russian police officer's arrest for selling hacked data to Bellingcrap, what credibility does that organisation still have now?

[Jan 19, 2021] Trump's movement does not hold a monopoly on xenophobic conspiracy theories in response to election failures. Just look at Hillary and Pelosi

Notable quotes:
"... Some people have become completely delusional + share the Russiagate, which was actually Britishgate, delusion in the wake of the muted reports of it's non-existence. ..."
"... The lengths this woman will go to not look at her own faults is astounding! Russia, Russia, Russia, instead of "hey maybe I'm just a warmonger and the people don't like that"... The disconnect is strong with this one! ..."
Jan 19, 2021 | twitter.com

Aaron Maté @aaronjmate Jan 18

Have you heard of #BlueAnon ? Here, two top members speculate that Trump spoke to Putin before the MAGA riot and call for a 9/11-style commission on Trump-Putin ties (FBI & Congressional probes were presumably insufficient). As this cult's mantra goes: "All roads lead to Putin."

Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton · Jan 18 .

@SpeakerPelosi and I agree: Congress needs to establish an investigative body like the 9/11 Commission to determine Trump's ties to Putin so we can repair the damage to our national security and prevent a puppet from occupying the presidency ever again.

aaronjmate Jan 18
@aaronjmate

As I wrote last week, while Trump's movement is uniquely violent & dangerous, it does not hold a monopoly on xenophobic conspiracy theories in response to election failures.

aaronjmate Jan 18
@aaronjmate

Their Russiagating BS is getting so tiresome! Thanks for your great work, Aaron! 1 4 33

Meurig Davies @crustycobs Jan 18
Some people have become completely delusional + share the Russiagate, which was actually Britishgate, delusion in the wake of the muted reports of it's non-existence.
Tommy Knocker @Hutijin Jan 18
Replying to @aaronjmate Jan 18
@aaronjmate

The lengths this woman will go to not look at her own faults is astounding! Russia, Russia, Russia, instead of "hey maybe I'm just a warmonger and the people don't like that"... The disconnect is strong with this one!

[Jan 19, 2021] The Two Faces of Empire Consortiumnews

Notable quotes:
"... CaitlinJohnstone.com ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... This article was re-published with permission. ..."
"... The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News. ..."
Jan 19, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

T he Biden/Harris inauguration event is going to be a star-studded celebration spanning an unprecedented five days, a giddy orgy of excitement at a murderous oligarchic empire having a new face behind the front desk after promising wealthy donors that nothing will fundamentally change .

This comes at a time when Americans are now reporting that they trust corporations more than they trust their own government or media, when pundits are gleefully proclaiming in The New York Times that "CEOs have become the fourth branch of government" as they pressure the entire political system to smoothly install Biden, when the leading contender for the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division is an Obama holdover who went from the administration to working for both Amazon and Google, and when Americans are being paced into accepting an increasing amount of authoritarian changes for their own good.

And this manic celebration and increasing brazenness of corporate power are of course overlaid atop an unceasing river of human blood as the globe-spanning empire continues to smash any nation which disobeys it into compliance so as to ensure lasting uncontested planetary hegemony.

But hey, at least they voted out fascism.

... ... ...

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Her work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook , following her antics on Twitter , checking out her podcast on either Youtube , soundcloud , Apple podcasts or Spotify , following her on Steemit , throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of her sweet merchandise , buying her books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

This article was re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

DH Fabian , January 18, 2021 at 12:03

Yes, nervous middle classers pray Joe Biden will be their salvation. The rest of us know why "business as usual" will continue. The only real difference between Biden and Trump is that Biden is more likely to start a catastrophic war (as his record clearly indicates).

Jeff Harrison , January 17, 2021 at 23:17

Good points. Since Americans don't see any consequence to their government's outrageous behavior, everything's outstanding (there are real benefits to those two oceans)! And it will remain outstanding until someone shoves our bad behavior in our faces (which could really happen. The Russians and Chinese are arming themselves to defend themselves from the US. That's a lot cheaper than having to support a major offensive capability) or our brokeness blows our economy to hell. You might want to read up on what happened to Sparta ..

[Jan 19, 2021] Neoliberal Democrats are part of the problem not the part of the solution

Jan 19, 2021 | twitter.com

No, I am not excited for the inauguration of a man who: Wrote the crime and bankruptcy bills, voted for the Iraq War, took more money from Wall Street than Trump, and told a room of rich donors that "nothing will fundamentally change." Democrats are part of the problem too.

[Jan 19, 2021] So create a situation when people would be at each other's throats over the obvious differences, even while they were fabricated or were minor is the essence of age-old strategy of divide and conquer by Edward Curtin

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Here we are in Weirdsville, USA where most people, whether of the left, right, or center, are hypnotized by the flickering screens. That's what movies do. That's what long planned psychological operations do. That's what digital technology allows corrupt rulers and the national security state with its Silicon Valley partners in crime to do. ..."
"... We now live in a screen world where written words and logic are beside the point. Facts don't matter. Personal physical experience doesn't matter. Clear thinking doesn't matter. Hysterical reactions are what matter. Manipulated emotions are what matter. Saying "Fuck You" is now de rigueur, as if that were the answer to an argument. ..."
"... It's all a movie now with the latest theatrical performance having been the January 6, 2021 stage show filmed at the U.S. Capitol. A performance so obvious that it isn't obvious for those hypnotized by propaganda, even when the movie clearly shows that the producers arranged for the "domestic terrorists" to be ushered into the Capitol. They let the "Nazis" in on Dr. Goebbels orders. Thank God Almighty they were beaten back before they seized power in their Halloween costumes. ..."
"... Now who could have given that order to the Capitol and D.C. police, Secret Service, National Guard, and the vast array of militarized Homeland Security forces that knew well in advance of the January 6 demonstration? Who gave the stand-down orders on September 11, 2001, events that were clearly anticipated and afterwards were described by so many as if they were a movie? Surreal. Dreamlike. ..."
"... To accept that Trump and Biden are scripted actors in a highly sophisticated reality TV movie is a bit of "reality" too hard to bear. Exposing them and their minions doesn't hurt at all. There's no business but show business. ..."
"... "A magician is only an actor," ..."
"... "an actor pretending to be a magician." ..."
"... "Will wonders ever cease," ..."
"... On a conscious level, however, many people continue to rationalize their grasp of what is going on in the United States as if ..."
"... The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy .My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation ..."
"... still cling to the belief that he is the man they believe in and was going to "clean the swamp" but was sabotaged by the "deep state." Biden supporters, driven by their obsessive hatred for Trump and the ongoing delusions that the Democratic Party, like the Republican, is not thoroughly corrupt, look forward to the Biden presidency and the new normal when he can "build back better." For both groups' true faith never dies. It's very touching. ..."
"... As I have written before, if the Democrats and the Republicans are at war as is often claimed, it is only over who gets the larger share of the spoils. Trump and Biden work for the same bosses, those I call the Umbrella People (those who own and run the country through their intelligence/military/media operatives), who produce and direct the movie that keeps so many Americans on the edge of their seats in the hope that their chosen good guy wins in the end. ..."
"... But if that is so, why, despite Trump and Biden's superficial differences – and Obama's, Hillary Clinton's and George W. Bush's for that matter – have the super-rich gotten richer and richer over the decades and the war on terror continued as the military budget has increased each year and the armament industries and the Wall Street crooks continued to rake in the money at the expense of everyone else? These are a few facts that can't be disputed. There are many more. So what's changed under Trump? We are talking about nuances, small changes. A clown with a big mouth versus traditional, "dignified" con men. ..."
Jan 19, 2021 | off-guardian.org

...Life today seems like a dream, doesn't it? Surreal to the point where everything seems haunted and betwixt and between, or this against that, or that and this against us... Or a Luis Buñuel film. The logic of the irrational. Surrealistic. A film made to draw us into an ongoing nightmare. Hitchcock with no resolution. Total weirdness, as Hunter Thompson said was coming before he blew his brains out. A life movie made to hypnotize in this darkening world where reality is created on screens, as Buñuel said of watching movies:

This kind of cinematographic hypnosis is no doubt due to the darkness of the theatre and to the rapidly changing scenes, lights, and camera movements, which weaken the spectator's critical intelligence and exercise over him a kind of fascination.

Here we are in Weirdsville, USA where most people, whether of the left, right, or center, are hypnotized by the flickering screens. That's what movies do. That's what long planned psychological operations do. That's what digital technology allows corrupt rulers and the national security state with its Silicon Valley partners in crime to do.

We now live in a screen world where written words and logic are beside the point. Facts don't matter. Personal physical experience doesn't matter. Clear thinking doesn't matter. Hysterical reactions are what matter. Manipulated emotions are what matter. Saying "Fuck You" is now de rigueur, as if that were the answer to an argument.

It's all a movie now with the latest theatrical performance having been the January 6, 2021 stage show filmed at the U.S. Capitol. A performance so obvious that it isn't obvious for those hypnotized by propaganda, even when the movie clearly shows that the producers arranged for the "domestic terrorists" to be ushered into the Capitol. They let the "Nazis" in on Dr. Goebbels orders. Thank God Almighty they were beaten back before they seized power in their Halloween costumes.

Now who could have given that order to the Capitol and D.C. police, Secret Service, National Guard, and the vast array of militarized Homeland Security forces that knew well in advance of the January 6 demonstration? Who gave the stand-down orders on September 11, 2001, events that were clearly anticipated and afterwards were described by so many as if they were a movie? Surreal. Dreamlike.

As with the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the recently staged show at the Capitol that the mainstream media laughingly call an attempted coup d'état will result in a new "Patriot Act" aimed at the new terrorists – domestic ones – i.e. anyone who dissents from the authoritarian crackdown long planned and underway; anyone who questions the vast new censorship and the assault on the First Amendment; anyone who questions the official narrative of Covid-19 and the lockdowns; anyone who suggests that there are linkages between these events, etc.

Who, after all, introduced the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act in 1995 that became the template for the Patriot Act in 2001 that was passed into law after September 11, 2001? None other than former Senator Joseph Biden . Remember Joe? He has a new plan.

Of course, the massive Patriot Act had been written well before that fateful September day and was ready to be implemented by a Senate vote of 98-1, the sole holdout being Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. In the House of Representatives the vote was 357-66.

For those familiar (or unfamiliar) with history and fabricated false flags, they might want also to meditate on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 that gave Lyndon Johnson his seal of approval to escalate the war against Vietnam that killed so many millions. The vote for that fake crisis was 416-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate.

In the words of Mark Twain:

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

Harry Houdini, the magical performer who was able to escape from any trap, any nightmarish enclosure, any lockdown, once said,

It's still an open question, however, as to what extent exposure really hurts a performer.

The question has been answered. It doesn't hurt at all, for phoney events still mesmerize millions who are eager to suspend their disbelief for the sake of a sad strand of hope that their chosen leaders – whether Biden or Trump – are levelling with them and are not playing them for fools. To accept that Trump and Biden are scripted actors in a highly sophisticated reality TV movie is a bit of "reality" too hard to bear. Exposing them and their minions doesn't hurt at all. There's no business but show business.

Houdini knew well the tricks used to deceive a gullible audience hypnotized by theatrics. "A magician is only an actor," he said, "an actor pretending to be a magician." This is a perfect description of the charlatans who serve as presidents of the United States.

Life today seems like a dream, doesn't it? "Will wonders ever cease," said Houdini, as he closed his shows.

When I was a child I had a repetitive dream that I was trapped in a maze. Trying to escape, all I could hear as I tried desperately to find an exit was a droning sound. Droning without end. The only way I could escape the maze was to wake up – literally. But this dream would repeat for many years to the point where I realized my dreams were connected to my actual family and life in the U.S.A.

Then, when I was later in the Marines and felt imprisoned and was attempting to get out as a conscientious objector, the dream changed to being trapped in the Marines, or the prison I was expecting if they didn't let me go. Even when I got out of the Marines and was not in prison, the dreams that I was continued.

It took me years to learn how to escape.

I mention such dreams since they seem to encapsulate the feelings so many people have today. A sense of being trapped in a senseless social nightmare. Prisoners. Lost in a horror movie like Kafka's novel The Castle in which the protagonist K futilely seeks to gain access to the rulers who control the world from their castle but can never reach his goal. But these are dreams and The Castle is fiction.

On a conscious level, however, many people continue to rationalize their grasp of what is going on in the United States as if what they take to be reality is not fiction. Trump supporters – despite what are seen by them as his betrayals when he said on January 7 that

The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy .My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation

still cling to the belief that he is the man they believe in and was going to "clean the swamp" but was sabotaged by the "deep state." Biden supporters, driven by their obsessive hatred for Trump and the ongoing delusions that the Democratic Party, like the Republican, is not thoroughly corrupt, look forward to the Biden presidency and the new normal when he can "build back better." For both groups' true faith never dies. It's very touching.

As I have written before, if the Democrats and the Republicans are at war as is often claimed, it is only over who gets the larger share of the spoils. Trump and Biden work for the same bosses, those I call the Umbrella People (those who own and run the country through their intelligence/military/media operatives), who produce and direct the movie that keeps so many Americans on the edge of their seats in the hope that their chosen good guy wins in the end.

It might seem as if I am wrong and that because the Democrats and their accomplices have spent years attempting to oust Trump through Russia-gate, impeachment, etc. that what seems true is true and Trump is simply a crazy aberration who somehow slipped through the net of establishment control to rule for four years. A Neo-Nazi billionaire who emerged from a TV screen and a golden tower high above the streets of New York.

This seems self-evident to the Democrats and the supporters of Joseph Biden, and even to many Republicans.

For Trump's supporters, he seems to be a true Godsend, a real patriot who emerged out of political nowhere to restore America to its former greatness and deliver economic justice to the forgotten middle-Americans whose livelihoods have been devastated by neo-liberal economic policies and the outsourcing of jobs.

Two diametrically opposed perspectives.

But if that is so, why, despite Trump and Biden's superficial differences – and Obama's, Hillary Clinton's and George W. Bush's for that matter – have the super-rich gotten richer and richer over the decades and the war on terror continued as the military budget has increased each year and the armament industries and the Wall Street crooks continued to rake in the money at the expense of everyone else? These are a few facts that can't be disputed. There are many more. So what's changed under Trump? We are talking about nuances, small changes. A clown with a big mouth versus traditional, "dignified" con men.

Trump's followers were betrayed the day he was sworn in, as Biden's will be shortly unless they support a crackdown on civil rights, the squelching of the First Amendment, and laws against dissent under the aegis of a war against domestic terrorism.

I'm afraid that is so. Censorship of dissent that is happening now will increase dramatically under the Biden administration.

Now we have the "insurrection," also known as an attempted "coup d'état," with barbarians breaching the gates of the sacred abode of the politicians of both parties who have supported bloody U.S. coups throughout the world for the past seventy plus years. Here is another example of history beginning as tragedy and ending as farce.

But who is laughing?

If you were writing this script as part of long-term planning, and average people were getting disgusted from decades of being screwed and were sick of politicians and their lying ways, wouldn't you stop the reruns and create a new show?

Come on, this is Hollywood where creative showmen can dazzle our minds with plots so twisted that when you leave the theater you keep wondering what it was all about and arguing with your friends about the ending. So create a throwback film where the good guy versus the bad guy was seemingly very clear, and while the system ground on, people would be at each other's throats over the obvious differences, even while they were fabricated or were minor. This being the simple and successful age-old strategy of divide and conquer.

I realize that it is very hard for many to entertain the thought that Trump and Biden are not arch-enemies but are players in a spectacle created to confound at the deepest psychological levels. I am not arguing that the Democrats didn't want Hillary Clinton to win in 2016. I am saying they knew Trump was a better opponent, not only because they could probably defeat him and garner more of the spoils, but because if he possibly won he was easily controlled because he was compromised. By whom? Not the Democrats, but the "Deep State" forces that control Hillary Clinton and all the presidents. A compromised and corrupt lot.

The Democrats and Republicans were not in charge in 2016 or in 2020. Their bosses were. The Umbrella people. Biden will carry out their orders, and while everyone will conveniently forget what actually happened during Trump's tenure, as I previously mentioned, they will only remember how the Democrats "tried" to oust this man in the black hat, while Biden will carry on Trump's legacy with minor changes and a lot of PR. He will seem like a breath of fresh air as he continues and expands the toxic policies of all presidents. So it goes.

... ... ...

Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies .

[Jan 19, 2021] United States and its closest allies, tried to ratchet up pressure, blackmail, ultimatums and illegitimate actions while introducing unilateral restrictions and other forms of interference in the internal affairs of many countrie

Jan 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jan 19 2021 22:48 utc | 47

Lavrov at his annual recent year-in-review presser had the following to say about the behavior of the Outlaw US Empire and its Western vassals:

"Unfortunately, not everywhere and not always has this quest for solidarity and joint work manifested itself during the pandemic. Some of our Western colleagues, primarily the United States and its closest allies, tried to take advantage of the situation and to ratchet up pressure, blackmail, ultimatums and illegitimate actions while introducing unilateral restrictions and other forms of interference in the internal affairs of many countries, including our closest neighbour Belarus.

"The West unanimously ignored the calls by the UN Secretary General and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to suspend, at least for the duration of the pandemic, unilateral and illegitimate sanctions regarding the supply of medications, food and equipment needed to fight the virus while Russia was ready to back up this approach. President Putin put forward a parallel initiative during the G20 summit to create green corridors in the economy that are free from sanctions and other artificial barriers. Unfortunately, these sensible appeals - both ours and those of the UN leaders - were left hanging in the air.

"Last year we observed the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII, the birth of the United Nations and the entry into force of its Charter. Against the backdrop of these anniversaries, we are very concerned about the continuous arrogant actions of the United States and most of its Western allies, which are aimed at undermining international security, which is based on the UN, its Charter and its agencies and replacing the traditional norms and standards of international law with a "rules-based international order.'"

Lavrov then proceeds to indict the EU for promoting "multilateralism" outside the framework of the UN in a manner meant to replace the UN with EU diktats: "The EU views the establishment of specific rules as its exclusive right in the belief that all others must follow these standards. Examples are many." Thus the EU follows the Outlaw US Empire's lead. Lavrov then shares his own analysis:

"[T]hese are apprehensions of competition and the understanding that in today's world the West can no longer dictate its own orders to others as it has over the last five centuries. History is moving forward, it is developing. This has nothing to do with ideology. This is just a statement of fact. It is necessary to consider the views of the countries that now have a much greater weight in the world arena (completely incomparable with that of the colonial era) and the countries that want to preserve their civilisational identity and that do not see in the West the ideals for their societies. Tolerance of diversity is another characteristic that the West is losing very quickly."

And all that is connected to other related developments:

"There are situations where half a dozen people that have created their own technological empires do not even want to know what rights they have in their own states. They determine their rights themselves proceeding from so-called corporate standards and completely ignore the constitutions of their states. We have seen this clearly in the US and this is a source of deep concern . Much has been said about this recently in television reports and special analytical materials. We are not pleased by the attempts of the Western elites to find external enemies to resolve their internal political problems. They find these enemies in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. The list of these countries is well known. [Yet, Lavrov insists there's no ideology involved, a point of contention I have with him.]

"We all see the response to the news of Alexey Navalny's return to the Russian Federation. Carbon-copy comments on this event are coming in one after another. They are full of joy because they allow Western politicians to think that in this way they can divert public attention away from the deepest crisis of the liberal development model.

"I am convinced that it is necessary not to seek outside excuses to justify one's own actions or sidetrack attention from one's deepest problems and crises. On the contrary, it is essential to play an honest game and look for opportunities to resolve domestic problems via fair and equitable international cooperation. No one can expect to resolve its own problems outside multilateral formats any longer."

Unfortunately, they do exhibit just that expectation. Yet, the most insidious, factual accusation made against the West in Russia's defense is this:

" They just don't provide the facts, which is what decent people always do in order to justify their discussions ." [My Emphasis]

Thus my very heavy critique of Cynthia Chung who invented facts to fit her ideological hypothesis.

Lavrov closes his peroration by directly addressing those foreign reporters in the audience:

"We are interested in addressing problems through a dialogue. However, 'forcing a closed door' that the West keeps 'under lock and key' is beneath our dignity . Your governments are well aware of our proposals that we have made repeatedly, starting with the dialogue on strategic offensive arms, arms control and nonproliferation to interaction on cybersecurity and non-deployment of weapons in space. There are many such areas. For each of them, Russia has proposals for establishing honest cooperation on key threats that are common to all countries around the world instead of using these threats to achieve unilateral geopolitical advantages by means of unscrupulous competition. President Putin's initiative to hold a summit of the five UN Security Council permanent members is a manifestation of such a desire to start a dialogue. All other leaders of the Group of Five responded positively to this proposal." [My Emphasis]

Lavrov closes by reminding his audience that Russia is hardly alone or isolated, that it's in combination with over 1/3 of the planet's people; and that instead of an unhealthy competition, Russia has openly asked all Eurasian nations to join together with its partners who "share our common philosophy: to say no to confrontation and to address existing problems on a balance of interests ." [My Emphasis]

In his presser, Lavrov referred to Russia's Main Foreign Policy Results in 2020 , the document available at the link. There's so much to read! Lavrov's response to the question about Latvia's recent behavior IMO best encapsulates the depth of Western immorality and blatant double-standards for its behavior. When it comes to the Outlaw U Empire:

"The most important thing is that our proposals on cybersecurity and on investigations into our alleged interference in US affairs, as well as on space projects and arms control, are on the table. As recently as in September 2020, President Putin publicly invited the United States – not President Trump or anyone else, but the United States as a power which, we hope, has retained at least a degree of respect for continuity and compliance with foreign policy agreements – to reboot our relations in the sphere of cybersecurity and non-intervention into internal affairs of each other."

Russia simply would like to hear an answer, even no is better than being ignored. There's so much more, particularly on the Freedom of Speech topic where Lavrov again remined people of their nations's responsibilities under the treaties they've signed and ratified. Lavrov made the effort to highlight this:

"I have already mentioned the topic of states' obligations and now want to remind you about them. The US is a member of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Interestingly (however, this issue is often omitted) there have been two international treaties, one for civil and political rights, and the other the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Having signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (it was in the 1960s), the US flatly refused to sign the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child [just as it refused to ratify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was the product of Eleanor Roosevelt's doggedly determined efforts].

" This is a refusal to take any responsibilities related to providing adequate quality of life to its population and solving social and economic problems ." [my Emphasis]

My point is the same as Lavrov's: The Outlaw US Empire has on several occasions not to sign and ratify a treaty that it's Constitution says it ought to in order to form a more perfect union and to advance the general Welfare, which is quite telling when we discuss the reasons for the rise in Populism and the reasons someone like Trump is elevated well beyond his standing and abilities.

And since no English language media source published anything about Lavrov's very important presser, how should we rate its Information Hygiene while Pompeo's illegal antics get reported no matter their outrageousness? Gross failure is my verdict.

As Paco said, reporting on Lavrov's presser would be rather long, and he was quite correct! I left quite a lot on the cutting room floor.

[Jan 19, 2021] I am especially proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars

Jan 19, 2021 | www.rt.com

banallwars 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 04:32 PM

What a lie. The bombs being dropped from the U.S. made jets the Saudi pilots fly over Yemen killing civilians leaves blood all over his hands not to mention shaking the hand of the Saudi that murdered a journalist before selling him weapons to kill Yemen's civilians.
Waryaa Moxamad 48 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 05:36 PM
1) False flag chemical attack on Syria. 2) killing Soleimani in a sovereign country he was invited to 3) Guaido 4) Bolivia. 5) continuing the wars predecessors started.

Who is being fooled that U.S. presidency has any say in America's imperialism?

Debra***** Waryaa Moxamad 40 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 05:46 PM
Who really pushed for General Soleimani to be killed and has the most personal and intense vendetta against Soleimani? Mike Pompeo. Trump did not give the Pentagon and CIA all the wars they wanted, especially in Syria. Now the Pentagon and the CIA have their puppet, Corrupt Biden, who will do what they command him to do. I would expect in one year to see another massive war. Where? Syria. The US mothers will cry when their sons come home in coffins. The Hez in Lebanon will not back down, and they will enter Syria again. Trump did not want young American boys coming back in coffins!!!!!!!

[Jan 19, 2021] Biden's Nominee for CIA Director by John Kiriakou

Jan 19, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

January 11, 2021 Save

If there must be a CIA, I feel better with Bill Burns being in charge of it.

William Burns in 2014 as U.S. deputy secretary of state. (State Department)

By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News

P resident-elect Joe Biden has finally named a new CIA director, one of the final senior-level appointees for his new administration. Much to the surprise of many of us who follow these things, he named senior diplomat Williams Burns to the position. Burns is one of the most highly-respected senior U.S. diplomats of the past three decades. He has ably served presidents of both parties and is known as both a reformer and as a supporter of human rights.

Burns is currently the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an important Washington-based international affairs think tank. He served as deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama and was ambassador to Russia under President George W. Bush and ambassador to Jordan under President Bill Clinton. He was instrumental in the negotiations that led to the Iran Nuclear Deal and spent much of his career focused on the Middle East Peace Process. Burns joined the Foreign Service in 1982.

Please Contribute to Consortium
News ' Winter Fund Drive

When he made the announcement of Burns' appointment, Biden said,

"Bill Burns is an exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the word stage keeping our people and our country safe and secure. He shares my profound belief that intelligence must be apolitical and that the dedicated intelligence professionals serving our nation deserve our gratitude and respect. The American people will sleep soundly with him as our next CIA Director."

The message from Biden is clear: The CIA will not be led by a political hack like Mike Pompeo, a CIA insider like John Brennan, or someone associated with the CIA's crimes of torture, secret prisons, or international renditions like Gina Haspel. Instead, the organization will be led by someone with experience engaging across a negotiating table with America's enemies, someone experienced in solving problems, rather than creating new ones, someone who has dedicated much of his career to promoting peace, rather than to creating war.

Rank & File Response

The question, though, is what will be the response from the CIA's rank-and-file to Burns' appointment? I can tell you from my 15 years of experience at the CIA that there will be two reactions. At the working level, analysts, operators, and others will continue their same level of work no matter who the director is. Most working level officers don't even care who the director is. It doesn't matter to them. They never encounter the director and policies made at that top level generally don't impact them on a day-to-day basis.

At the senior levels, the leadership levels, CIA officers will be of two minds. Some will welcome Burns and his professionalism. They'll welcome a director who doesn't attract adverse press because of a past history of committing war crimes or crimes against humanity. (Even if they supported those crimes when they were being committed, press attention is always unwelcome.) They'll welcome a director who didn't head secret prisons overseas. They'll welcome a director who wasn't in charge of Guantanamo. They'll welcome a director who wasn't in charge of maintaining a secret "kill list."

Others will resent Burns, though, as they resented an earlier outsider, Admiral Stansfield Turner. Turner had been appointed by President Jimmy Carter to "clean up" the CIA. Turner then fired fully a third of the CIA's operations officers, some just months away from qualifying for retirement. He was universally reviled after that, and he never regained the trust of agency personnel.

That's not Burns' style. He's not a military officer who demands fealty. He's a diplomat, a negotiator. The CIA has to be cleaned up. Its policies have to be reformed. If there must be a CIA, I feel better with Bill Burns being in charge of it. At the very least, we should give him enough time to at least get started.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act -- a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.


bobLich , January 12, 2021 at 09:29

Some paragraphs found in this article.

hXXps://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/12/brns-j12.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

As a top-level State Department official through the administrations of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama, Burns is implicated in virtually every crime of US imperialism over the past three decades, including the war in Iraq, the US-NATO attack on Libya, the military coup that drowned the Egyptian Revolution in blood, and the US intervention in Syria.

After such a career, as the saying goes, Burns knows where all the bodies are buried. Now he is assigned to head an agency that is probably responsible for more killing, torture and mass suffering than any other on the planet: the CIA.

A preview of what to expect from a Burns-led CIA was given during an interview with National Public Radio's Mary Louise Kelly on "US Global Leadership" held June 19, 2019 at the Truman Center for National Policy in Washington, DC. In the extended conversation, Burns defended the US and NATO-led coup in Libya which ended with the grisly murder of Muammar Gaddafi, followed by an ongoing civil war, the torture and killing of refugees and the return of slave-markets.

"It was right to act in Libya in the way that we did," Burns said. While the US government might have "got some assumptions wrong," he expressed no regrets, saying that he still thought Obama's "decision to act was unavoidable."

Anne , January 12, 2021 at 14:15

I would agree with your estimation some one, anyone who can think, believe, say etc that what we did in Iraq, Libya (I don't doubt Serbia), Syria is "rightful" has a heinously distorted mind (pretty much everyone in DC, in the MICIMATT) And Biden has revealed himself – again – as a subject of the corporate-capitalist-imperialist plutocratic ruling elites (and one with his hand forever stuck out)

Mikhail , January 12, 2021 at 22:31

In addition:

see: rt.com/usa/512136-biden-cia-director-william-burns-russia/

Scott Ritter and Melvin Goodman seem to agree with John:

See: rt.com/op-ed/512276-biden-burns-cia-chief/

See: counterpunch.org/2021/01/12/burns-at-the-cia/

[Jan 19, 2021] Galloway- Looking forward to Joe Biden's first 100 days, it's impossible to believe he'll actually be in charge by George Galloway

Jan 19, 2021 | www.rt.com

George Galloway George Galloway

was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator. Follow him on Twitter @georgegalloway

19 Jan, 2021 18:23 It's hard not to wonder if Joe Biden will even last his first 100 days in office... but those arguing his mind isn't sound enough shouldn't expect a swift exit, because since when was that a disqualifier?

... ... ...

The madness of Donald Trump had nothing on his Republican predecessor and fellow-impeachee Richard Nixon. So disturbing were the last days of Tricky Dicky, it came as a relief to America and the world when he resigned – even though it was famously said his successor Gerald Ford couldn't chew gum and walk in a straight line at the same time. Bovine he may have been, but a mad-cow he wasn't.

The Raging Bull Donald J Trump – grotesque, bizarre, unbelievable – had the misfortune to go quite mad in the age of cable news and social media. His narcissistic predilections always bordered on personality disorder. But his natural braggadocio stormed him to victory in 2016 in a backlash against the super-smooth professorial presidency of Barack Obama, with Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton riding shotgun.

Under Obama, the Clintonite deindustrialisation of America became almost complete . China was presented with America's lunch. And in no less than nine conflicts across the globe Obama was 'nation-building' in other people's countries while his own country was falling apart. But a dark storm was gathering

If only the Democrats had not started out by trying to steal Trump's election in a flurry of pussy-hats and fake Russiagate hoaxes. If only they hadn't striven might and main to railroad the Electoral College into betraying their mandate and – in the case of Nancy Pelosi – make a thinly disguised call for "uprisings throughout the country." If only they hadn't spent countless millions and two whole years of a four year-term with the Mueller Inquiry and the cockamaney theorem that the man who confronted Russia from Ukraine and the Baltics through the wrecked INF and Open Skies treaties to the killing fields of the Levant was, in fact, an agent of Vladimir Putin. If only, if only

ALSO ON RT.COM President Biden now you've got rid of that ghastly Mr Trump, it's time the US and UK rekindled our 'special relationship'

As it happened, the descent into madness of Trump was complete by the end. The coronavirus he derided at first, before predicting it would disappear in the warm weather of spring, before pondering whether bleach up the bahookie might not be an option as a cure. The Tammany Hall skullduggery of election day, practiced over a century in places like New York, rolled out across the country. The political suicide of only half-making a revolution on January 6 dug his own grave. Nobody ever beat a candidate who polled over 75 million votes before. But Sleepy Joe Biden did.

And he did it hardly ever leaving his basement home studio, where he painfully struggled to read an autocue even with an earpiece shrieking the words to him. When he did speak, it was often gibberish that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. He oftentimes plainly didn't know where he was, what office he was running for, which woman was his sister and which was his wife.

When Boris Yeltsin was rattling down, the world endlessly amused itself at the sight of Russia on its back, legs akimbo with thieves picking its pocket. With Joe Biden, though, the political class and its media echo-chamber merely look the other way.

Despite Democratic Party control of all levels of Federal power, it seems unlikely we are about to witness an FDR or a JFK barnstorming 100 days. It seems fair to wonder if Sleepy Joe will even see out a hundred days in office. It is, however, certain that if he is in office he will not be in power. Because power has already passed to the cavernous uncertainty of Vice President Kamala Harris.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


Mark Conley 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:44 PM

Thanks for reminding the world that the president of the USA including his puppet elected office bearers has absolutely no power whatsoever. Well said. Thus you have answered your own observation at the end. The future is indeed dark and uncertain with the only certainty that nothing good can be expected from any USA government. Thus the onus is on the peaceful majority to do what is necessary.
Atilla863 42 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:15 PM
One thing is certain in the new leadership - the debt will go on growing, perhaps reaching 40+ T dollars before the next elections. While this trend continues - the Chinese will be laughing all the way running to their banks as their economy records fortune after fortune proportional only inversely to the rate at which America recedes into superpower sunset.
JJ_Rousseau 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:18 PM
I'm surprised at George Galloway's comments, as he is a former MP in British politics. Kamala in charge? Don't make me laugh. The cabal is in charge, as they have been since Woodrow Wilson. Before actually, as Garfield was assassinated for shedding light on the banker machinations. Garfield knew that control of the nation's money was control of the nation. The coup of America is complete. The POTUS is only the spokesman for the cabal, nothing else
5th Eye 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:08 PM
An election stolen is a stolen election.
KarlthePoet 5th Eye 13 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:43 PM
Biden will be much easier to control and manipulate by the Jewish Banking Cartel, which ultimately controls the US government and Wall Street. Trump was too unpredictable and would have made it difficult for them to achieve their historical hope. "The Jews energetically reject the idea of fusion with other nationalities and cling firmly to their historical hope of World Empire." - Dr. Max Mandelstamm ***We should always listen to the doctors.
Skeptic076 5th Eye 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:13 PM
Not stolen.....50 states certified, 60 plus courts found nothing fraudulent, and the electoral votes were confirmed by the House and Senate, with the Senate led by Pence. So, as the world knows and anyone who knows election laws, the election was one of the most legitimate ever held in the US.
KarlthePoet 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:10 PM
The Jewish Banking Cartel is ultimately in control of the US government and Wall Street. They've been in control for decades. Now they've obviously teamed up with the Jewish Big Tech companies like Facebook and Google in order to gain even more control. Controlling the money, money system, and the minds of the masses has been their goal. Two Jewish controlled companies control over $9Trillion of American's wealth. (BlackRock Inc. & Goldman Sachs) They've finally achieved their goal. The cartel is now in control of a country that is completely out of control. Karma!
Daffyduck011 KarlthePoet 38 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:18 PM
Ashkenasty banking cartel.
JJ_Rousseau KarlthePoet 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:29 PM
It's not only the banking cabal, it's the media (which the same gang own, of course). This cannot happen without a complicit media. This is a very old strategy
Blackace180 7 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:49 PM
He'll be impeached multiple times, along with his family. Removed and jailed. People need a reminder of just how messed up Obama/Biden was and it is coming. The caravans are already on the way and gas has jumped 55 cents a gallon since the election, for no reason other than it is Biden. People will run the nutcracker right out of office, hopefully before the country collapses from his nutcracker policies.
White Elk 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:45 PM
The press-elected.
Xilla White Elk 33 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:23 PM
How did the press elect him?
Franc 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:28 PM
Xilla/Herrbifi, you're not welcome here. We all know what your goals are, and we all know you're just here to make a pointless mess.
5th Eye 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:18 PM
An Italian bureaucrat once said, "Everything is changed, so that it remains the same." It will be exactly like that under Biden to legitimate his regime.
The_Chosenites 51 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:06 PM
Since both Trump and Biden are proud zionists, the only thing I am certain of is Israel and the Jewish community have won another election and we'll see many jewish politicians elevated to positions of power in the Biden administration. Biden best do what's best for Israel if he knows whats good for him and his health.
KarlthePoet The_Chosenites 16 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:40 PM
Maybe when Kamala becomes President she can get advice from her Jewish husband, who is a lawyer. What a coincidence.
Enki14 9 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:48 PM
That Henry Kissinger, long time shadow government puppet endorsed demented biden is a clue as to what might happen as they know in 2 years the masses will reinstate conservatives and in 4 years another trumpster. We may see sweeping changes, with some huge blowback.
The_Chosenites Enki14 4 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:53 PM
Kissinger has had a bed in the oval office for many a President, he must have been installed by the Chosennites to stay in office forever. Presidents come and go, but Kissinger remains to pull the strings. Goldman Sach's et al rule the roost.
Daniel Fernald 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:42 PM
Biden's 100 days are interesting. It's exactly 100 days from January 20 to May 1, which is the communist May Day.
Skeptic076 Daniel Fernald 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:44 PM
Used to be the American May Day as well, you know? Interesting if you research why it is not anymore.
Michael Knight 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:46 PM
Impossible to believe he'll be in charge????? That's probably because he won't be!

RCBreakenridge Mike Freeman 1 hour ago
19 Jan, 2021 02:28 PM
Mike, seriously? What echo chamber are you living in? How can you look at Biden and not understand that he's little more than a life-size cardboard cutout of the man that used to be Obama's puppet? He'll be in office as long as they can continue to stand him up for photo ops and he continues to do exactly what he is told. As soon as either of those conditions falter, Nancy and friends will roll out the 25th amendment, show him the door and lead KH to the presidents chair. But make no mistake, the only choices Sleepy Joe will be making are to do as he is told.

[Jan 19, 2021] Trump was a desperate "Murica must have the biggest dick" imperialist massively triggered by the US decline and trying to save the US Empire. Like a rabid dog that is wounded, he attacked anything that moves, including those who helped him get into power.

Jan 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Passer by , Jan 19 2021 21:57 utc | 36

Posted by: teri | Jan 19 2021 21:31 utc | 33

>>Today, the Trump administration filed an appeal against the UK decision not to extradite Assange. I must imagine that means that Trump has no intention of pardoning Assange.

Trump was a desperate "Murica must have the biggest dick" imperialist massively triggered by the US decline and trying to save the US Empire. Like a rabid dog that is wounded, he attacked anything that moves, including those who helped him get into power.

Anyone who thought that he will help the likes of Russia or Assange does not understand the psychology of elite US WASPs.

These people thought that they and the US should rule the world and that they are the cream of the cream. Anything denying them that would lead to crazed reactions, hysteria, rabid animalistic behavior, and snarling and gnashing of teeth at anything that moves.

Simply put, their decline caused them to go rabid. A rabid dog attacks anything that moves, whether friendly or not. Unfortunately for the likes of Russia and Assange.

[Jan 19, 2021] Goodbye Sheldon Adelson by Philip Giraldi

What is interesting tha casino traditionally was regarded as mafia connected business.
Jan 19, 2021 | www.unz.com

Casino magnate and Israeli patriot multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, one of the world's richest men, died in Las Vegas on January 11 th at age 87. He had been suffering from cancer and has been buried at the Mount of Olives Cemetery in Israel . When his body arrived in Israel it was met by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Jonathan Pollard, the most damaging spy in United States history. Tributes to the fallen "hero" poured in from the political class in both the United States and Israel and it has even been reported that President Donald Trump was intending to hoist the American flag at half mast over federal buildings to honor the "great humanitarian philanthropist." Unfortunately, the flag was already at half mast honoring the death of Capitol Police Force officer Brian Sicknick, who was murdered in the Capitol building last Wednesday.

Trump has not mentioned the service unto death of Sicknick and the flag lowering itself was apparently a bit of an afterthought on behalf of the White House, but he had plenty to say about his good buddy Adelson, who has been the principal funder of the Republican Party over the past five years. As he can no longer use Twitter, the president's condolences were posted on the White House site: "Melania and I mourn the passing of Sheldon Adelson, and send our heartfelt condolences to his wife Miriam, his children and grandchildren. Sheldon lived the true American dream. His ingenuity, genius, and creativity earned him immense wealth, but his character and philanthropic generosity his great name. Sheldon was also a staunch supporter of our great ally the State of Israel. He tirelessly advocated for the relocation of the United States embassy to Jerusalem, the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and the pursuit of peace between Israel and its neighbors. Sheldon was true to his family, his country, and all those that knew him. The world has lost a great man. He will be missed."

Missing from the Trump eulogy is any mention of what Adelson did for the United States, which is his country of birth and where he made his fortune engaging in activity that many would consider to be a vice. In fact, Adelson was all about the Jewish state, positioning himself as the principal funder of the Republican Party under Donald Trump and receiving in return as a quid pro quo the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA), the move of the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, the recognition of Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, and a virtual concession that the Jewish state could do whatever it wants vis-à-vis the Palestinians, to include expelling them from Palestine. Adelson once commented that Israel does not have to pretend to be a democracy but it must be Jewish, presumably to help the process of Arab genocide move along.

Adelson's mechanism, initiated under George W. Bush, is familiar to how the Israel Lobby operates more generally. It consisted of the exploitation of the incessant need of campaign money by the GOP, which Adelson provided with strings attached. He worked with the Republicans to completely derail the admittedly faux peace process begun under Bill Clinton, which depended on a two-state solution, and instead give the Jewish state a free hand to implement its own unilateral Greater Israel Project extending from "the Jordan River to the Mediterranean." As part of that expansion, Israel has been building illegal settlements while also bombing and killing Lebanese, Syrians, and Iranians and assassinating scientists and technicians throughout the region.

All of the interventions against Israel's neighbors took place even though the Jewish state was not technically at war with anyone. The U.S. meanwhile funded Israeli aggression and watched the spectacle without any complaint, providing political cover as necessary, while also maintaining a major military presence in the Middle East to "protect Israel," as Trump recently admitted.

In short, Sheldon Adelson committed as much as half a billion dollars from his vast fortune to buy control over a major element of U.S. foreign policy and subordinated American interests to those of Israel. In addition to direct donations to both major political parties, he also paid for Congressional "fact finding" trips to Israel and funded a number of pro-Israel lobbies, so-called charities and other related Jewish projects. It is indisputable that he wielded an incredible degree of power to shape Washington's actions in the Middle East. In her own tribute to her dead husband, Miriam Adelson, an Israeli, described how he "crafted the course of nations."

Adelson was actively engaged on Israel's behalf until the week before his death. He provided his casino's private 737 luxury executive jet to transport Jonathan Pollard "home" to Israel. Pollard has served 30 years in prison after being convicted of espionage and was on parole, which restricted his travel. As yet another a gift to Israel, Donald Trump lifted that restriction, allowing him to fly to Israel where he received a hero's welcome. It is generally agreed that Pollard was the most damaging spy in American history, having stolen the keys to accessing U.S. communications and information gathering systems. A month after Pollard's arrest in 1985, C.I.A director William Casey stated: "The Israelis used Pollard to obtain our war plans against the USSR – all of it: the co-ordinates, the firing locations, the sequences, and Israel sold that information to Moscow for more exit visas for Soviet Jews."

Sheldon Adelson used his wealth and political connections to shield himself from any criticism due to his openly expressed preference for Israel over the land of his birth. He famously publicly stated that he wished he had worn the Israeli Army uniform instead of that of the U.S. Army, where he served briefly as a draftee. He also expressed his desire that his son would serve as an Israeli army sniper, presumably allowing him to blow the heads off of Palestinians. In 2013 Adelson advocated ending nuclear negotiations with Iran and instead detonating a nuclear weapon in "the middle of the [Iranian] desert," followed by a threat to annihilate the capital city Tehran, home to 8.6 million, to force Iran to surrender its essentially non-existent nuclear program.

Other acknowledgements of the impact of Adelson came from officials in the Trump Administration. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo commented how his "efforts to strengthen the alliance between Israel and the United States the world, Israel and the United States are safer because of his work." Yeah, right Mike.

So, the world is definitely a better place due to the passing of Sheldon Adelson. Or is it? His Israeli wife Miriam owns more than 40% of Las Vegas Sands Corp Casinos Inc., estimated to be worth in excess of $17 billion. She has proposed that a new chapter be included in the Jewish bible, the Book of Trump, and has pledged herself to continue her husband's work. Trump had previously given her the highest award that a president can bestow, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Freedom, of course, does not apply to Palestinians. And if one is concerned that the Democrats will not be cooperative, they too have their own major donor similar to Adelson. He is an Israeli film producer named Haim Saban, who, echoing a similar statement by Adelson, said that he is a one issue guy and that issue is Israel.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]

[Jan 19, 2021] "Paranoia strikes deep -- into my soul it creeps": Internet and phone lines cut off in the Russian consulate in New York

Jan 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Passer by , Jan 19 2021 19:49 utc | 14

Internet and phone lines cut off in the Russian consulate in New York.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/russia-us-new-york-consulate-phone-lines-b1789485.html

Sunny Runny Burger , Jan 19 2021 20:57 utc | 23

The stuff about the NY consulate really sets me off, Sputnik said the phones are down for two days running and internet intermittent.

It's hard to guess at the reason for any of it since it could be almost anything (and pretty much entirely stupid no matter what) but what's much more noticeable is the apparent lack of interest in truly clarifying what the hell the point is/was supposed to be (instead of bs) from anyone inside anywhere in the US government structures, or intelligence services, or armed forces.

Dystopian and dysfunctional become synonyms at some point.

Other than that I'm only waiting to see if anything within the Pentagon will get a move on to clear up all the mess (rather than "worrying" about National Guards who will do whatever they're told). If anything happens I expect it to be clean and orderly and then after the fact maybe the NG troops will be told something or the other a little before everyone else, and that's about it. They don't have any need to know about anything in advance or as it happens.

That's just me, at least a little bit more realistic in my "if-so" than the FBI and Pelosi gang? :)

[Jan 19, 2021] President Biden's Corruption Already Pervades His Administration -- Strategic Culture

Notable quotes:
"... "A month after the election, Biden's nominations make clear that the president-elect is most focused on trying to fulfill his ..."
"... to donors that nothing fundamentally changes. And yet, that tacit admission may have stunned those who keep hearing from liberal and progressive groups in Washington that, in fact, the left has been notching monumental victories in Biden's cabinet appointments ..."
"... What little organized left political infrastructure exists in Washington is largely valorizing or publicly defending swamp creatures who at minimum deserve a loyal opposition. The ..."
"... being done by a small handful of under-resourced groups to mount a real opposition is getting trampled by a culture of obsequiousness. This culture of acquiescence gives swamp creatures a free pass ..."
"... Despite Tanden's ..."
"... push for Social Security cuts ..."
"... , Beltway liberal groups whose mission is to defend Social Security ..."
"... . Despite Tanden having her organization ..."
"... rake in cash ..."
"... from Wall Street, Amazon, billionaires and ( ..."
"... ) foreign governments, a Ralph Nader-founded, all-purpose consumer advocacy group ..."
"... CAP as "one of our key partners in the fight to tax corporations and the rich, rein in monopoly power, tackle government corruption, and much more." Despite Tanden ..."
"... a union at CAP, ..."
"... union leaders ..."
"... in Washington lauded her. ..."
"... American Prospect ..."
"... "a President Biden would be in the business of confronting Mr. Putin for his aggressions, not embracing him. Not trashing NATO, but strengthening its deterrence, investing in new capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer space, under the sea, A.I., electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to countries like Ukraine, Georgia, the Western Balkans ..."
"... "a President Putin would be in the business of confronting Mr. Biden for his aggressions (in Syria, or elsewhere), not embracing them. Not trashing the Warsaw Pact, but strengthening its deterrence, investing in new capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer space, under the sea, A.I., electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to countries like Canada, Mexico, and other nations that are near the U.S. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Bernard Schwartz, ..."
"... a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin ..."
"... (which is by far the largest seller to the U.S. Government, and also the largest seller to most of America's allied Governments), is one of Joe Biden's top donors. CNN headlined, on October 24th, ..."
"... "Biden allies intensify push for super PAC after lackluster fundraising quarter" ..."
"... , and reported that, "Bernard Schwartz, a private investor and donor to the former vice president's campaign, said he spoke with Biden within the last two weeks and encouraged him to do just that." It's not for nothing that throughout Biden's long Senate career, he has voted in favor of every U.S. invasion that has been placed before the U.S. Senate. ..."
Jan 19, 2021 | www.strategic-culture.org

President Biden's Corruption Already Pervades His Administration Eric Zuesse December 8, 2020 © Photo: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

That didn't take long. He's not even in office, and he has already surrounded himself, as the incoming President, with individuals who derive their wealth from (and will be serving) America's top defense contractors and Wall Street. The likelihood that these Government officials will be biting the hands that feed them is approximately zero. Great investigative journalists have already exposed how corrupt they are. For that to be the case so early (even before taking office) is remarkable, and only a summary of those reports will be provided here, with links to them, all of which reports are themselves linking to the incriminating evidence, so that everything can easily be tracked back to the documentation by the reader here, even before there are any 'Special Prosecutors' (as if those were serving anyone other than the opposite Party's political campaigns, and, ultimately, the opposite Party's billionaires).

First up, is the independent investigative team of David Sirota and Andrew Perez. On December 4th, they bannered "The Beltway Left Is Normalizing Corruption And Corporatism" , and reported that "A month after the election, Biden's nominations make clear that the president-elect is most focused on trying to fulfill his promise to donors that nothing fundamentally changes. And yet, that tacit admission may have stunned those who keep hearing from liberal and progressive groups in Washington that, in fact, the left has been notching monumental victories in Biden's cabinet appointments ."

Liberal (that's to say Democratic Party) U.S. media hide the corruptness of Democratic politicians, and conservative (that's to say Republican Party) U.S. media hide the corruptness of Republican politicians; and, so, the public today are getting corrupt leaders whichever side they vote for. No mainstream 'news' media report what independent investigative journalists such as Sirota and Perez report. Authentically good journalists use as sources -- and link to in their articles -- neither Democratic nor Republican allegations, but instead are on the margins, outside of the major media, and so rely on whistleblowers and other trustworthy outsiders, not on people who are somebody's paid PR flacks, individuals who are being paid to deceive. As Sirota and Perez state: " What little organized left political infrastructure exists in Washington is largely valorizing or publicly defending swamp creatures who at minimum deserve a loyal opposition. The good work being done by a small handful of under-resourced groups to mount a real opposition is getting trampled by a culture of obsequiousness. This culture of acquiescence gives swamp creatures a free pass ." It's all some sort of mega-corporate propaganda -- 100% billionaire-supported on the conservative side, 100% billionaire-supported also on the liberal side, and 0% billionaire-supported for anything that is authentically progressive (not dependent, at all, upon the aristocracy).

That independent reporting team focused on Biden's having chosen an economic team which will start his Administration already offering to congressional Republicans an initial Democratic Party negotiating position that accepts Republicans' basic proposals to cut middle class Social Security and health care benefits in order for the Government to be able to continue expanding the military budgets and purchases from the billionaire-controlled firms, such as Northrop Grumman -- firms whose entire sales (or close to it) are to the U.S. Government and to the governments (U.S. 'allies') that constitute these firms' secondary markets. (In other words: those budget-cuts aren't going to be an issue between the two Parties and used by Biden's team as a bargaining chip to moderate the Republicans' position that favors more for 'defense' and less for the poor, but are actually accepted by both Parties, even before the new Administration will take office.) Obviously, anything that both sides to a negotiation accept at the very start of a negotiation will be included in the final product from that negotiation; and this means that during a Biden Presidency there will be reductions in middle-class Social security and health care benefits in order to continue, at the present level -- if not to increase yet further -- Government spending on the products and services of such firms as Lockheed Martin and the Rand Corporation (firms that control their market by controlling their Government, which is their main or entire market).

Sirota and Perez focus especially upon one example: Neera Tanden, whom Biden chose on November 30th to be the White House Budget Director, and who therefore will set the priorities which determine how much federal money the President will be trying to get the Congress to allocate to what recipients:

Despite Tanden's push for Social Security cuts , Beltway liberal groups whose mission is to defend Social Security lauded her think tank . Despite Tanden having her organization rake in cash from Wall Street, Amazon, billionaires and ( previously ) foreign governments, a Ralph Nader-founded, all-purpose consumer advocacy group praised CAP as "one of our key partners in the fight to tax corporations and the rich, rein in monopoly power, tackle government corruption, and much more." Despite Tanden busting a union at CAP, two national union leaders in Washington lauded her.

Next up: One of the rare honest non-profits in the field of journalism is the Project on Government Oversight, POGO, which refuses to accept donations from "anyone who stands to benefit financially from our work," and which states in its unique "Donation Acceptance Policy" that, "POGO reviews all contributions exceeding $100 in order to maintain this standard." In other words: they refuse to be corrupt. Virtually all public-policy or think-tank nonprofits are profoundly corrupt, but POGO is the most determined exception to that general rule.

On 20 November 2020, POGO headlined "Should Michèle Flournoy Be Secretary of Defense?" and their terrific investigative team of Winslow Wheeler and Pierre Sprey delivered a scorching portrayal of Flournoy as irredeemably corrupt -- it ought to be read by everybody. It's essential reading throughout, and its links to the evidence are to the very best sources. So, I won't summarize it, because all Americans need to know what it reports, and to be able to verify, on their own (by clicking onto any link in it that interests them), any allegation that the given reader has any question about. However, I shall point out here the sheer hypocrisy of the following which that article quotes Flournoy as asserting: "It will be imperative for the next secretary to appoint a team of senior officials who meet the following criteria: deep expertise and competence in their areas of responsibility; proven leadership in empowering teams, listening to diverse views, making tough decisions, and delivering results." (Of course, that assertion presumes the given 'expert' to be not only authentically expert but also honest and trustworthy, authentically representing the public's interest and no special interests whatsoever -- not at all corrupt -- which is certainly a false allegation in her own case.) She had urged the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and had participated in planning and overseeing both the war against Syria, and the coup that destroyed Ukraine (and none of those countries had ever invaded, or even threatened to invade, the United States); and, so, for her to brag about her "delivering results" is not merely hypocritical, it is downright evil, because she is obviously proud, there, of her vicious, outright voracious, record.

Her business-partner, Tony Blinken, has already received Biden's approval to become his Secretary of State, and the first really good investigative journalist that American Prospect magazine has had, Jonathan Guyer, headlined on November 23rd, "What You Need to Know About Tony Blinken" , and what Guyer reports is just what any well informed reader would expect to see for a business partner of Flournoy's.

Guyer's report closes by making passing reference to a CBS 'news' puff-piece for Blinken. In that CBS puff-piece , Blinken says, "a President Biden would be in the business of confronting Mr. Putin for his aggressions, not embracing him. Not trashing NATO, but strengthening its deterrence, investing in new capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer space, under the sea, A.I., electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to countries like Ukraine, Georgia, the Western Balkans ." What would Americans think if Russia were to have retained its Warsaw Pact, and "a President Putin would be in the business of confronting Mr. Biden for his aggressions (in Syria, or elsewhere), not embracing them. Not trashing the Warsaw Pact, but strengthening its deterrence, investing in new capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer space, under the sea, A.I., electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to countries like Canada, Mexico, and other nations that are near the U.S. "? Guyer pointedly noted that "The [CBS News] podcast was sponsored by a major weapons maker. 'At Lockheed Martin, your mission is ours,' read an announcer." Tony Blinken's mission is theirs. These people get the money both coming and going -- on both sides of the "revolving door." Today's American Government is for sale to the highest bidders, on any policy, domestic or foreign. 'Government service' is just a sabbatical to boost their value to the firms that will be paying them the vast majority of their lifetime 'earnings'. This is the reality that mainstream U.S.-and-allied 'news' media refuse to publish (or, especially , to make clear). Only an electorate which is ignorant of this reality can accept such a government.

Back on 26 January 2020, I had headlined "Joe Biden Is as Corrupt as They Come" and documented the reality of this, but America's mainstream media were hiding that fact so as to decrease the likelihood that the only Democratic Party Presidential candidate whom no billionaire supported , Bernie Sanders, might win the nomination. Perhaps now that it's too late, even those 'news' organizations (such as CNN, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC, New York Times , Washington Post , PBS, and NPR) will start reporting the fact of Biden's corruptness. Where billionaires control all of the mainstream media, there is no democracy -- it's not even possible , in such a country

As far back as 25 October 2019, I had headlined "Biden Backer -- Former Lockheed Leader -- Convinces Joe Biden to Sell-Out" , and reported that

Bernard Schwartz, a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin (which is by far the largest seller to the U.S. Government, and also the largest seller to most of America's allied Governments), is one of Joe Biden's top donors. CNN headlined, on October 24th, "Biden allies intensify push for super PAC after lackluster fundraising quarter" , and reported that, "Bernard Schwartz, a private investor and donor to the former vice president's campaign, said he spoke with Biden within the last two weeks and encouraged him to do just that." It's not for nothing that throughout Biden's long Senate career, he has voted in favor of every U.S. invasion that has been placed before the U.S. Senate.

Near the end of the Democratic Party's primaries, on 16 March 2020, CNBC headlined "Megadonors pull plug on plan for anti-Sanders super PAC as Biden racks up wins" , and reported that Bernard Schwartz had become persuaded by other billionaires that, by this time, "Biden could handle Sanders on his own." They had done their job; they would therefore control the U.S. Government regardless of which Party's nominee would head it.

Biden -- like Trump, and like Obama and Bush and Clinton before him -- doesn't represent the American people. He represents his mega-donors. And he is staffing his Administration accordingly. He repays favors: he delivers the services that they buy from him. This is today's America. And that is the way it functions.

[Jan 19, 2021] Bhadrakumar sees the return of Navalny to Moscow as the opening gambit of a regime-change operation directed at Putin

Jan 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

jayc , Jan 19 2021 20:26 utc | 20

Bhadrakumar sees the return of Navalny to Moscow as the opening gambit of a regime-change operation directed at Putin. Part of this effort, he writes, will focus on the new Biden foreign policy team working on isolating Russia from China. This is replacing the Trump team's hopes to isolate China from Russia. Top notch strategic thinking there - just pretend the much publicized alliance between the two doesn't exist.
https://indianpunchline.com/us-makes-aggressive-opening-move-on-russian-chessboard/

But he also anticipates a period of retrenchment for US foreign adventurism, as the domestic problems overwhelm. Note the candid admittance that the period of post Cold War hegemony is over, made by CIA designate Burns.
https://indianpunchline.com/biden-is-shifting-leftwards/

[Jan 19, 2021] US expands sanctions against Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, targeting ships Russian firms working on vital pan-European projec

Jan 19, 2021 | www.rt.com

46 Follow RT on RT Outgoing US President Donald Trump has delivered his "parting gift" to the Moscow-led Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, with newly announced sanctions targeting a pipe-laying vessel and companies involved in the multinational project.

The specialist ship concerned, named, 'Fortuna,' and oil tanker 'Maksim Gorky', as well as two Russian firms, KVT-Rus and Rustanker, were blacklisted on Tuesday under CAATSA (Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) as part of Washington's economic war on Moscow. The same legislation had been previously used by the US to target numerous Russian officials and enterprises.

Russian energy giant Gazprom warned its investors earlier on Tuesday that Nord Stream 2 could be suspended or even canceled if more US restrictions are introduced.

ALSO ON RT.COM Gazprom warns investors that Nord Stream 2 could be canceled as Trump announces more US sanctions in 'parting gift'

However, Moscow has assured its partners that it intends to complete the project despite "harsh pressure on the part of Washington," according to Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov. Reacting to the new package of sanctions on Tuesday, Peskov called them "unlawful."

Meanwhile, the EU said it is in no rush to join the Washington-led sanction war on Nord Stream 2. EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, said that the bloc is not going to resist the construction of the project.

"Because we're talking about a private project, we can't hamper the operations of those companies if the German government agrees to it," Borrell said Tuesday.

Nord Stream 2 is an offshore gas pipeline, linking Russia and Germany with aim of providing cheaper energy to Central European customers. Under the agreement between Moscow and Berlin, it was to be launched in mid-2020, but the construction has been delayed due to strong opposition from Washington.

ALSO ON RT.COM One more European firm caves to US pressure on Nord Stream 2 project – media

The US, which is hoping to sell its Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) to Europe, has hit the project with several rounds of sanctions over scarcely credible claims that it could undermine European energy security. Critics say the real intent is to force EU members to buy from American companies.

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Fatback33 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:20 AM

The group that owns Washington makes the foreign policy. That policy is not for the benefit of the people.
DukeLeo Fatback33 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:06 PM
That is correct. The private banks and corporations in the US are very upset about Nord Stream - 2, as they want Europe to buy US gas at double price. Washington thus introduces additional political gangsterism in the shape of new unilateral sanctions which have no merit in international law.
noremedy 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:22 AM
Is the U.S. so stupid that they do not realize that they are isolating themselves? Russia has developed SPFS, China CIPS, together with Iran, China and Russia are further developing a payment transfer system. Once in place and functioning this system will replace the western SWIFT system for international payment transfers. It will be the death knell for the US dollar. 327 million Americans are no match for the rest of the billions of the world's population. The next decade will see the total debasement of the US monetary system and the fall from power of the decaying and crumbling in every way U.S.A.
Hanonymouse noremedy 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:37 PM
They don't care. They have the most advanced military in the world. Might makes right, even today.
Shelbouy 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:25 PM
Russia currently supplies over 50% of the natural gas consumed by The EU. Germany and Italy are the largest importers of Russian natural gas. What is the issue of sanctions stemming from and why are the Americans doing this? A no brainer question I suppose. It's to make more money than the other supplier, and exert political pressure and demand obedience from its lackey. Germany.
David R. Evans Shelbouy 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:58 PM
Russia and Iran challenge perpetual US wars for Israel's Oded Yinon Plan. Washington is Israel-controlled territory.
Jewel Gyn 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:34 AM
Sanctions work both ways. With the outgoing Trump administration desperately laying mines for Biden, we await how sleepy Joe is going to mend strayed ties with EU.
Count_Cash 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:20 AM
The US mafia state continues with the same practices. The dog is barking but the caravan is going. The counter productiveness of sanctions always shows through in the end! I am sure with active efforts of Germany and Russia against US mafia oppression that a blowback will be felt by the US over time!
Dachaguy 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:24 AM
This is an act of war against Germany. NATO should respond and act against the aggressor, America.
xyz47 Dachaguy 42 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:20 PM
NATO is run by the US...
lovethy Dachaguy 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:04 PM
NATO has no separate existence. It's the USA's arm of aggression, suppression and domination. Germany after WWII is an occupied country of USA. Thousand of armed personnel stationed in Germany enforcing that occupation.
Chaz Dadkhah 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:19 PM
Further proof that Trump is no friend of Russia and is in a rush to punish them while he still has power. If it was the swamp telling him to do that, like his supporters suggest, then they would have waited till their man Biden came in to power in less than 24 hours to do it. Wake up!
Mac Kio 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:34 PM
USA hates fair competition. USA ignores all WTO rules.
Russkiy09 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:33 PM
By whining and not completing in the face of US, Russia is losing credibility. They should not have delayed to mobilize the pipe laying vessel and other equipment for one whole year. They should have mobilized in three months and finished by now. Same happens when Jewtin does not shoot down Zio air force bombing Syria everyday. But best option should have been to tell European vassals that "if you can, take our gas. But we will charge the highest amount and sell as much as we want, exclude Russophobic Baltic countries and Poland and neo-vassal Ukraine. Pay us not in your ponzi paper money but real goods and services or precious metals or other commodities or our own currency Ruble." I so wish I could be the President of Russia. Russians deserve to be as wealthy as the Swiss or SIngapore etc., not what they are getting. Their leaders should stand up for their interest. And stop empowering the greedy merchantalist Chinese and brotherhood Erdogan.
BlackIntel 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:27 PM
America i captured by private interest; this project threatens American private companies hence the government is forced to protect capitalism. This is illegal
Ohhho 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:15 PM
That project was a mistake from the start: Russia should distance itself from the Evil empire, EU included! Stop wasting time and resources on trying to please the haters and keeping them more competitive with cheaper Russian natural gas: focus on real partners and potential allies elsewhere!
butterfly123 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:58 PM
I have said it before that part of the problem is at the door of the policy-makers and politicians in Russia. Pipeline project didn't spring up in the minds of politicians in Russia one morning, presumably. There should have been foresight, detailed planning, and opportunity creation for firms in Russia to acquire the skill-set and resources to advance this project. Not doing so has come to bite Russia hard and painful. Lessons learnt I hope Mr President!
jakro 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:37 AM
Good news. The swamp is getting deeper and bigger.
hermaflorissen 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:49 AM
Trump finally severed my expectations for the past 4 years. He should indeed perish.
ariadnatheo 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:06 PM
That is one Trump measure that will not be overturned by the Senile One. They will need to amplify the RussiaRussiaRussia barking and scratching to divert attention from their dealings with China
Neville52 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:01 PM
Its time the other nations of the world turned their backs on the US. Its too risky if you are an international corporation to suddenly have large portions of your income cancelled due to some crazy politician in the US
5th Eye 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:03 PM
From empire to the collapse of empire, US follows UK to the letters. Soon it will be irrelevant. The only thing that remains for UK is the language. Probably hotdog for the US.
VonnDuff1 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:10 PM
The USA Congress and its corrupt foreign policy dictates work to the detriment of Europe and Russia, while providing no tangible benefits to US states or citizens. So globalist demands wrapped in the stars & stripes, should be laughed at, by all freedom loving nations.

[Jan 17, 2021] Guardian Smears Syria's President With Implausible Link To Beirut's Port Blast

Notable quotes:
"... As an ex-fan of the Guardian, I thought it was jolly decent of the Editors to flag BS stories by omitting the Reader Comments beneath the article. It saved me a lot of time during the transition from reliable News outlet to reliable Mawkish Drivel outlet. Some of the drivel can be amusingly pointless/naif-ish. ..."
"... "The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. " ..."
Jan 17, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Et Tu , Jan 15 2021 13:56 utc | 8

The Guardian is trash.

I have a poorly researched theory on the Guardian to share here if i may... a mix of interesting events reconstructed into a theoretical conspiracy of sorts... here it goes.. I won't take any reasoned or better informed debunking personally i assure you.

-Since the Edward Snowden scandal, it appears the Guardian has experienced a transformation of sorts. From rogue investigative journalism, to MSM / Intel Services propaganda mouthpiece... a la WaPo, NY Times etc...
-To my knowledge, the Guardian's original independence and journalistic integrity was facilitated by a Trust Fund of sorts which allowed it some form of editorial independence and objectivity based on finances not entirely reliant on ad revenue/sponsorship and various other corporate partnership/ownership deals
-I am not particularly sure about the exact timings, but in recent years this Trust Fund of sorts began to underperform and The Guardian started running into financial trouble
-The Guardian's financial misadventures roughly coincided with significant changes in its editorial content, key departures including Glen Greenwald himself and various other legal disputes and misfortunes

My amateurish thesis..

Could it be that this Trust Fund of sorts was deliberately sabotaged, through toxic Board infiltrations or deliberate bad financial advice, aimed at eroding The Guardian's financial independence and thus its editorial independence and promotion of dissenting narratives? Given the extent of integration between Intel/Weapons/Finance industries, a congruence of mutual interests is not unexpected, and if this Fund was advised or run by members of major Wall St et al. firms, it doesn't seem too far fetched to conceive of such a possibility.

Please feel free to post any relative info or comment.


Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 15 2021 15:28 utc | 16

As an ex-fan of the Guardian, I thought it was jolly decent of the Editors to flag BS stories by omitting the Reader Comments beneath the article. It saved me a lot of time during the transition from reliable News outlet to reliable Mawkish Drivel outlet. Some of the drivel can be amusingly pointless/naif-ish.

Les , Jan 15 2021 15:55 utc | 19

Guardian changed after 2014 when they published the Edward Snowden leaks. Cameron threatened to take over the newspapers for revealing the Five Eyes' global surveillance.

Verdant , Jan 15 2021 16:45 utc | 24

The Guardian was once a comparatively good newspaper. The Snowden episode changed everything.
Nowadays it's just another pseudo-liberal, post-feminist, opinionated propaganda outlet. In some way a Daily Mail for "intellectuals".
Basically half of their articles are "opinion" pieces. The only thing worth reading is the football section (and even that gets more and more opinionated).

It's a shame really.

Kabobyak , Jan 15 2021 17:50 utc | 34

So the evil-doers carry out a complicated mission with many moving parts, plus a huge monetary outlay. They wait seven years before finishing the dastardly deed, just to thicken the plot. The Guardian says yeah, that sounds plausible. Because they know their readers have been groomed for years to believe BS.

Reminds me of the Skripal nutty shifting narratives, or better yet Jonathon Chait's New York Magazine piece (Trump a Russian asset since 1987).

Martin Chulov should be scolded by his Minders for not linking Russia to the plot (the three were "joint Russian-Syrian citizens"). Maybe that will be written into the script in the next Guardian article.

Jen , Jan 15 2021 19:42 utc | 44

Et Tu @ 8:

My understanding is that for years the bulk of The Fraudian's funding was subsidised by revenues from sales of Manchester-based tabloid newspapers. I believe this continued into the 1990s and maybe the first decade of this century. A major part of The Fraudian's income also used to come from government employment advertisements in the pre-Internet age.

Once the connections with Manchester-based newspapers were cut by the Trust that runs The Fraudian, and other traditional sources of funding dried up, the newspaper started sacking editorial and other office staff. This was about the same time The Fraudian opened offices in the US and Australia in an effort to get more readers (and more subscribers), and also coincides with Julian Assange working with The Fraudian and other MSM papers on releasing Wikileaks email revelations. The sackings were disguised as voluntary redundancies or retirements and the scale was quite huge, a fair few hundred jobs were cut.

This of course led to The Fraudian having to partner with various "media agencies" in the Middle East, eastern Europe and other parts of the world. You can guess who funds these other agencies The Fraudian calls its "partners".

That Martin Chulov writes an article linking the Syrian govt to last year's bomb blast is no surprise. The news comes just before Joe Biden's inauguration. I had expected that one of his first priorities as POTUS would be resuming the US invasion of Syria, using any excuse. The Chulov article smacks of the same devious cherry-picking that Bellingcat engaged in to finger and "identify" two Russian tourists in Salisbury in 2018 as GRU agents. I would not be surprised if Chulov, like Higgins, had been told what to write and by the same people.

_K_C_ , Jan 15 2021 20:34 utc | 45

Ahem... refreshing to see some content that isn't about the whole Trump situation in the USSA.

As with other things, including, in part, the Trump thing, we're witnessing full "1984" level shit from the media and governments. Everyone knows that the CIA and other Pentagram offices (and MI6) have full control over what Western media publishes, but it's like they aren't even trying anymore. Just full-on lie mode with zero accountability even when what they print is refuted beyond any doubt.

Of course they were going to blame Syria, Iran or Venezuela. If any external government was involved and it wasn't simply negligence by Lebanon's, then it was Israel. Period. Jesus F*cking Christ, it's so obvious.

cirsium , Jan 15 2021 22:06 utc | 53

For those querying the position of The Guardian

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-09-11-how-the-uk-security-services-neutralised-the-countrys-leading-liberal-newspaper/amp/
"The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. "

Jason , Jan 16 2021 0:05 utc | 58

Guardian did a good job reporting on the Iraq War II...it was after that (2008), and in response to its halfway decent reporting of Iraq that the ownership mechanism was changed.

The new Guardian ownership enacted a "constitution" guaranteeing it would retain its earlier journalistic integrity, but that was pure horseshit, as it went down hill rapidly after the ownership change and became just another mouthpiece for neoliberal/neoconservative propaganda.

Tom , Jan 16 2021 4:25 utc | 65

Why Martin Chulov, the Guardian's Middle East correspondent and author of the piece, did not do the basic diligence of checking the records or chose not to tell his readers that such address sharing is extremely common and does not prove anything is beyond me.

If the Guardian had a proper fact checker that would defeat the purpose of the Guardian in the first place. I'm not sure if that counts as a circular argument.

Posted by: Ghost Ship | Jan 15 2021 16:41 utc | 23

And you can get your nails and a (bikini) waxing done next door. I guess it's safer that doing it at home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJEetU0O64&feature=youtu.be

(Mrs. Brown's boys)

Piotr Berman , Jan 16 2021 5:01 utc | 69

... I recall a story how The Guardian was tamed. In the aftermath of Snowden revelations, The Guardian was raided and the people who run it were seriously threatened. Ever since, they diligently follow the orders which are given to them with some sophistication (this is England after all, not Zimbabwe), hence preserving some shreds of "leftists credibility". Apparently, unlikely as it may seem, some people still read it. Just before I stopped reading them, they had an actually interesting series about police shootings in USA. Criticizing local governments in USA is still allowed.


c1ue , Jan 16 2021 14:15 utc | 86

@Et Tu #8
You're thinking too hard.
Matt Taibbi has nailed it on the head: Facebook and Google's ongoing strangulation of news via monopolization of the channel and demonetization of classified ads has forced newspapers (and other media) to become ever more click-bait focused. This in turn has caused them to focus ever more narrowly on "engaged" (read: made angry) groups.
The Guardian's turn is directly linked with Russiagate, not Snowden.

chet380 , Jan 16 2021 23:35 utc | 123

The Guardian? One of the russo-phobic propaganda voice in the UK. Nothing to expect from it except manipulation of information. No one is fooled.

Posted by: Virgile

As well as being one of the proponents of the concoction of the Labour anti-Semitism smear through its uber-Zionist Freedland.

blues , Jan 16 2021 22:53 utc | 122

... my real important point about the fascist aristocrat dictatorship of the USSA. The ruling class aristocracy is certainly not at all in the business of increasing their profits by acquiring yet more money. That's just a very stupid notion. For all relevant purposes they already possess all the money. Let's get real. Their sole real business is simply to retain power. Period. And how do they do that? Easy.

They establish and constantly maintain a churnatistic society. They just keep the commonalty spinning around in circles by constantly churning 'current events'.

They start a war, or an obviously fake election, or an economic depression, or a mass shooting, or any outlandish disaster they can churn up to keep the masses in a constant state of bewilderment.

And then they drop the cherry on top by publishing narratives in media such as the Guardian that the poor serfs always know deep down make no sense at all.

Therefor no revolt is possible because the serfs are in a perpetual state of disorientation. All fascist societies are ultimately based on churnatism.

[Jan 17, 2021] A lesson in cyber spying vs. cyber attack by Anatol Lieven

It is unclear whether it was Russians or this is another false flag. Anatol Lieven has zero credentials to discuss this complex subject as he has zero training in computer security and it looks like he has zero understanding of how easy you can create a false flag in this area. Looks like Lieven in not only incompetent but also a neocon. For example "The second entirely appropriate response is for Washington to intensify its own existing cyber-intelligence operations against Russia. " If this London professor thinks that GB can benefit for this, he is deeply mistaken.
Notable quotes:
"... the only countries that have to date carried out a truly successful and destructive act of cyber-sabotage are the U.S. and Israel, through the " Stuxnet " virus, which as introduced into the Iranian nuclear system and first uncovered in 2010. ..."
Jan 17, 2021 | responsiblestatecraft.org

... ... ...

The most important thing to remember in this regard is the difference between an "attack" and an act of espionage. The SolarWinds hack has been generally described in the United States as the former (including by incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan , and Biden ), but was in fact the latter. Nobody is suggesting that the hackers in this case introduced viruses to paralyze U.S. state systems or damage domestic infrastructure and services. This was purely an information-gathering exercise.

This distinction is crucial. An attack on the citizens or infrastructure of another state has traditionally been considered an act of war. Actions by the United States, Russia, Israel and other countries in recent decades have somewhat blurred this distinction. But no one can doubt that if another country carried out a major act of sabotage on American soil, (especially one threatening the lives of citizens), then Washington's response would -- rightly -- be a ferocious one.

As a matter of fact, while Russia has engaged in limited operations against Estonia and Ukraine, the only countries that have to date carried out a truly successful and destructive act of cyber-sabotage are the U.S. and Israel, through the " Stuxnet " virus, which as introduced into the Iranian nuclear system and first uncovered in 2010.

Espionage by contrast is something that all states do all the time -- often to friends as well as adversaries. We may remember the scandal under the Obama administration when U.S. intelligence was found to have hacked into the communications of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior leaders of NATO countries. The hacking of a Belgian telecom company by British intelligence (" Operation Socialist ") is another example. And I would be both shocked and deeply disappointed to learn that U.S. intelligence is not trying to penetrate the state information systems of Russia and China.

And for each revealed act of espionage there is a well-established and calibrated set of responses. The aggrieved country issues a formal protest and expels a given number of "diplomats" from the country responsible. That country expels an equal number of diplomats. The media and the writers of spy thriller writers have a party. Then everything goes back to normal. For after all, everybody knows that there is no chance whatsoever that states will ever give up spying.

There are, however, three aspects of cyber-espionage that make it different from and more dangerous than traditional espionage.

Firstly, as Jake Sullivan has pointed out, unlike most forms of espionage, hacking can be used both for spying and for sabotage, and one can form the basis for the other. A key goal of responsible statecraft should be to establish a clear line between the two when it comes to cyberspace: to develop a set of calibrated and limited responses to cyber-espionage, and to make clear that cyber-sabotage will lead to a much fiercer and more damaging retaliation.

Secondly, unlike traditional espionage, the cyber variety is an area where third parties, uncontrolled by either side, can play a major role and cause serious damage to relations (and of course this also gives all sides plausible deniability -- as with U.S. moves against Iran).

For example, those behind the authors of the 2011 cyber-attack on the G20 summit in Paris have never been identified. Several major hacks have been conducted by independent cyber-anarchists, or even by clever teenagers, sometimes it seems simply for fun. In the present atmosphere, however, all such hacks against the United States are likely to be blamed on Russia and to lead to a further deterioration of relations.

Thirdly, and in part because of these blurred lines, no clear and understood international traditions are in place concerning the response to cyber-espionage, and there is a serious risk of overreaction leading to a spiraling escalation of tension and retaliation.

This is what the Biden administration must avoid. Apart from the immediate damage to relations, overreaction would mean that when -- as is bound to happen someday -- Russia or China eventually discover a cyber-espionage operation against them by U.S. intelligence, they will not only look justified in a disproportionate and escalatory response -- they will actually be justified.

One thing that Biden must definitely not do is to follow the suggestion that the United States should shut Russia out of the SWIFT international bank transfer system which -- the most damaging of all U.S. sanctions against Iran, and one that would have a disastrous effect on Russian trade.

Last year, then Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia would regard such a move as equivalent to an act of war and would respond accordingly. Various Russian responses would be possible, including a definitive move into the Chinese geopolitical camp and massive military aid to Iran. Without doubt however, one of them would be to move from cyber-espionage to cyber-sabotage against the United States.

The most sensible response would in fact be to follow literally President-elect Biden's statement that his administration will "respond in kind" to the attack is the most sensible -- that is to say in the cyber-field. The first step (as after any counter-intelligence failure) must obviously be to strengthen U.S. cyber-defenses which. Amongst other things, this requires using presidential orders to combine, streamline, and rationalize the competing plethora of U.S. agencies currently responsible for cyber-security.

The second entirely appropriate response is for Washington to intensify its own existing cyber-intelligence operations against Russia. That, however, is another reason not to engage in overblown moral outrage over the latest hack. The American pot already has quite a global reputation for calling kettles black, and there is no need to blacken it further.

Finally, the Biden administration should do everything possible to develop agreed international restraints on state cyber-operations, including an absolute ban on cyber-sabotage. This should involve opening new negotiations with Moscow on longstanding Russian proposals for an international "arms control" treaty in the area of cyber-warfare, and for a joint U.S.-Russian working group to establish mutual ground rules and confidence building measures.

These Russian proposals cannot be accepted as they stand (above all because of Moscow's desire to limit free flows of information); however, more than a decade ago, then- National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander said that "I do think that we have to establish the rules, and I think what Russia has put forward is, perhaps, the starting point for international debate." This remains true today, and the danger of a failure to reach international agreement has grown vastly since then.

One of the worst things about hysterical statements in the United States about "cyber-attacks" is that unwary readers might mistakenly conclude from them that things can't get any worse. They can get much, much worse.

[Jan 17, 2021] Knowing an extremely low quality of the American historiography of WW II I would be very cautious with what I read.

Jan 17, 2021 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Andrei Martyanov , 17 January 2021 at 05:07 PM

We have been Morgenthau'ed and not just industrially.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-morgenthau-plan-john-dietrich/1116763529

Posted by: Horace | 17 January 2021 at 01:47 PM

@Horace

Knowing an extremely low quality (and it continues to deteriorate steadily) of the American historiography of WW II, if I would be you--I would be very cautious with what I read. The whole title of the book you proposed is already a typical sensationalist revisionist fantasy, which shows clearly that the author is in historical falsification business, most likely whitewashing Nazis. There is plenty of "scholar" literature like that to go around in the Anglo-sphere and it is not a real history, but propaganda. Not to mention the fact that Morgenthau Plan was never really implemented, to start with. Most of what was written about USSR in the US after the WW II, with some rare, however important, exceptions, is garbage along the lines of Ziemke's war fantasies.

[Jan 17, 2021] 'America is back'- Biden fills State Department slots with more Obama vets, including Ukraine 'coup plotter' Victoria Nuland

Jan 17, 2021 | www.rt.com

'America is back': Biden fills State Department slots with more Obama vets, including Ukraine 'coup plotter' Victoria Nuland 16 Jan, 2021 22:18 Get short URL 'America is back': Biden fills State Department slots with more Obama vets, including Ukraine 'coup plotter' Victoria Nuland Victoria Nuland is shown greeting Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in 2015. © Reuters / Mikhail Palinchak 9 Follow RT on RT President-elect Joe Biden is getting the old interventionist-foreign-policy team back together, including Ukraine coup engineer Victoria Nuland, signaling a hardline Russia stance as he fills out top posts in the State Department.

"These leaders are trusted at home and respected around the world, and their nominations signal that America is back and ready to lead the world, not retreat from it," Biden said on Saturday in a statement announcing his picks to fill top positions under his nominee for secretary of state, Anthony Blinken.

ALSO ON RT.COM Biden signals US return to full-on globalism and foreign meddling by picking interventionist Anthony Blinken as secretary of state

Like Blinken, the five latest State Department picks are veterans of the Obama-Biden administration. Nuland , a neoconservative who was named undersecretary for political affairs, goes all the way back to former President Ronald Reagan's administration and was a foreign policy adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Other new re-hires include: Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of state, who led the Obama-Biden administration's negotiating team on peace talks with Iran; Brian McKeon, deputy secretary for management and resources, who was a national security adviser to then-Vice President Biden; Bonnie Jenkins, undersecretary for arms control and international security, who previously coordinated nonproliferation programs; and Uzra Zeha, undersecretary for civilian security, who formerly was charge d'affaires at the US Embassy in Paris.

READ MORE US foreign aid agencies paid for Kiev street violence - ex-US agent Scott Rickard US foreign aid agencies paid for Kiev street violence - ex-US agent Scott Rickard

After four years of President Donald Trump's 'America First' policy, including efforts to wind down foreign interventions and broker peace deals, Biden's declaration of "America is back" portends a sharp contrast in foreign policy. He said his latest nominees will "use their diplomatic experience and skill to restore America's global and moral leadership."

Nuland, who studied Russian literature at Brown University, wrote last summer in Foreign Affairs of how "a confident America should deal with Russia " with a more "activist" policy, including "speaking directly to the Russian people about the benefits of working together and the price they have paid for (President Vladimir) Putin's hard turn away from liberalism." She added, "Washington and its allies have forgotten the statecraft that won the Cold War and continued to yield results for many years after."

Nuland perhaps was using such "statecraft" when, as assistant secretary of state in December 2013, she handed out cookies to protesters at Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti square who were demanding the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovich. An audiotape leaked in February 2014 showed that her involvement in the uprising went well beyond cookies, as she spoke with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt about plotting to replace Yanukovich with Washington's chosen opposition leader, Arseny Yatseniuk, and about involving the UN to "f**k the EU" by pushing through a US-preferred Ukraine policy.

ALSO ON RT.COM Nuland's biscuits again: Maidan midwife's plan for US policy on Russia is dumb, delusional and dangerous

Ironically, Nuland's appointment comes just as politicians in Washington fret over this month's storming of the US Capitol by pro-Trump protesters, which some called a coup attempt.

"I knew it wasn't a real coup because Victoria Nuland wasn't handing out cookies," Cato Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow said of the Capitol assault. "She'll be back overthrowing governments in the Biden administration, so it remains a valid standard."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1348047492227756034&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F512763-biden-appoints-nuland-sherman%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

In light of Nuland's hawkish history, 25 anti-war groups have jointly called for the Senate to reject confirmation of her nomination as undersecretary for political affairs.

"Victoria Nuland is returning to the State Department," one commenter wrote on Twitter. "The United States is returning to the former Soviet republics with great strides. A fierce struggle with Russia begins."


[Jan 15, 2021] The leaders of Transition Integrity Project (TIP) believe that a mass mobilization will help them to achieve what Russiagate could not, that is, the removal Donald Trump via an illicit coup conjured up by behind-the-scenes powerbrokers and their Democrat allies. by Mike Whitney

Notable quotes:
"... "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself." ..."
"... Gatestone Institute ..."
"... The Transition Integrity Project ..."
"... Unlimited Hangout ..."
"... Paul Craig Roberts ..."
Sep 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself."

Marcus Tullius Cicero

The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) is a shadowy group of government, military and media elites who have concocted a plan to spread mayhem and disinformation following the November 3 presidential elections. The strategy takes advantage of the presumed delay in determining the winner of the upcoming election. (due to the deluge of mail-in votes.) The interim period is expected to intensify partisan warfare creating the perfect environment for disseminating propaganda and inciting street violence. The leaders of TIP believe that a mass mobilization will help them to achieve what Russiagate could not, that is, the removal Donald Trump via an illicit coup conjured up by behind-the-scenes powerbrokers and their Democrat allies. Here's a little more background from an article by Chris Farrell at the Gatestone Institute:

"In one of the greatest public disinformation campaigns in American history -- the Left and their NeverTrumper allies (under the nom de guerre: "Transition Integrity Project") released a 22-page report in August 2020 "war gaming" four election crisis scenarios: .The outcome of each TIP scenario results in street violence and political impasse.

Is it possible that the leadership of the American Left, along with their NeverTrumper allies, are busy talking themselves into advocating and promoting street violence as a response to a presidential election?

The answer is: Yes . expect violence in the aftermath of the election, because now that is the new 'normal." (" How to Steal an Election", Gatestone Institute )

Farrell is right. As we can see from the many articles that have recently popped up in the media, the American people are being prepared for a contested election that will fuel public anxiety and revolt. This all fits with the overall strategy of the TIP. Selected journalists will be used to provide bits of information that serve the interests of the group while the people will be told to expect a long and drawn-out constitutional crisis. Meanwhile, the media, the Democrat leadership, trusted elites and elements in the Intelligence Community will put pressure on Trump to step down while firing up their political base to take to the streets. TIP's 22-page manifesto makes it clear that mass mobilization will be key to any electoral victory. Here's an excerpt from the text:

"A show of numbers in the streets-and actions in the streets-may be decisive factors in determining what the public perceives as a just and legitimate outcome." ( "Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition" The Transition Integrity Project )

In other words, the authors fully support demonstrations and political upheaval to achieve their goal of removing Trump. Clearly, this scorched earth approach did not originate with Joe Biden, but with the cynical and bloodthirsty puppetmasters who operate behind the curtain and who will do anything to advance their agenda.

This is a full-blown color revolution authored and supported by the same oligarchs and deep-state honchoes that have opposed Trump from the very beginning. They're not going to back down or call off the dogs until the job is done and Trump is gone. And when the dust settles, Trump will likely be charged, tried, sentenced and imprisoned. His fortune will be seized, his family will be financially ruined, and his closest advisors and allies will be prosecuted on fabricated charges. There's not going to be a "graceful transition" of power if Trump loses. He will face the full wrath of the scheming mandarins he has frustrated for the last 4 years. These are the men who applauded when Saddam and Ghaddafi were savagely butchered. Will Trump face the same fate as them?

Trump has less than two months to rally his supporters, draw attention to the conspiracy that has is presently underway, and figure out a way to defend himself against the coup plotters. If he is unable to derail the impending junta, his goose is cooked.

It's worth noting, that the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) has no legal authority to meddle in the upcoming election. They were not appointed by any congressional committee nor did any government entity approve their intrusive activities. This is entirely a "lone wolf" operation designed to exploit loopholes in campaign laws in order to undermine public confidence in our elections and to express their unbridled hostility towards Donald Trump. That said, there analysis will probably influence those who share their views. In the first page of their "Executive Summary" they say:

"We assess with a high degree of likelihood that November's elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape. We also assess that the President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power. " (Ibid )

This short statement provides the basic justification for the group's existence. It presents the participants as impartial observers performing their civic duty by objectively analyzing exercises (war games?) that indicate that Trump will challenge the election results in a desperate attempt to hold on to power. Not surprisingly, the group provides no evidence that the president would react the way they think he would. In fact, their hypothesis seems extremely far-fetched given the fact that Trump has no militia, no private army, and very few allies among the political class, the Intelligence Community, the FBI, the military or the deep state. Who exactly does the group think would help Trump hold on to power: Bill Barr, Larry Kudlow, Melania??

There is nothing "impartial" about this analysis. It is partisan gibberish aimed at discrediting Trump while creating a pretext for launching a coup against him. Here is another sample of TIP's "objective analysis" from page 1 of the manuscript:

"The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) was launched in late 2019 out of concern that the Trump Administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election and transition process. TIP takes no position on how Americans should cast their votes, or on the likely winner of the upcoming election; either major party candidate could prevail at the polls in November without resorting to "dirty tricks." However, the administration of President Donald Trump has steadily undermined core norms of democracy and the rule of law and embraced numerous corrupt and authoritarian practices. This presents a profound challenge for those –from either party –who are committed to ensuring free and fair elections, peaceful transitions of power, and stable administrative continuity in the United States." (Ibid )

Got that? In other words (to paraphrase) "Trump is a corrupt dictator who hates democracy and the rule of law, but that is just our unbiased opinion. Please, don't let that influence your vote. We just want to make sure the election goes smoothly."

As we noted, the hatred for Trump permeates the entire 22-page document and that, in turn, undermines the credibility of the author to portray his project as an impartial examination of potential problems in the upcoming election. There is nothing evenhanded in the approach to these issues or in the remedies that are recommended. This is a partisan project concocted by malicious elites who despise Trump and who plan to remove him from office by hook or crook.

So, do we know who the leaders of this (TIP) group are?

Well, we know who their two main spokesmen are: Rosa Brooks– Georgetown law professor and co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project, and Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary, and chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to an article by Whitney Webb:

" (Rosa) Brooks was an advisor to the Pentagon and the Hillary Clinton-led State Department during the Obama administration. She was also previously the general counsel to the President of the Open Society Institute, part of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a controversial organization funded by billionaire George Soros. Zoe Hudson, who is TIP's director, is also a former top figure at OSF, serving as senior policy analyst and liaison between the foundations and the U.S. government for 11 years .

OSF ties to the TIP are a red flag for a number of reasons, namely due to the fact that OSF and other Soros-funded organizations played a critical role in fomenting so-called "color revolutions" to overthrow non-aligned governments, particularly during the Obama administration. Examples of OSF's ties to these manufactured "revolutions" include Ukraine in 2014 and the "Arab Spring" ..

In addition to her ties to the Obama administration and OSF, Brooks is currently a scholar at West Point's Modern War Institute, where she focuses on "the relationship between the military and domestic policing" and also Georgetown's Innovative Policing Program. She is a currently a key player in the documented OSF-led push to "capitalize" off of legitimate calls for police reform to justify the creation of a federalized police force under the guise of defunding and/or eliminating local police departments. Brooks' interest in the "blurring line" between military and police is notable given her past advocacy of a military coup to remove Trump from office and the TIP's subsequent conclusion that the military "may" have to step in if Trump manages to win the 2020 election, per the group's "war games" described above.

Brooks is also a senior fellow at the think tank New America . New America's mission statement notes that the organization is focused on "honestly confronting the challenges caused by rapid technological and social change, and seizing the opportunities those changes create." It is largely funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, including Bill Gates (Microsoft), Eric Schmidt (Google), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Jeffrey Skoll and Pierre Omidyar (eBay) . In addition, it has received millions directly from the U.S. State Department to research "ranking digital rights." Notably, of these funders, Reid Hoffman was caught "meddling" in the most recent Democratic primary to undercut Bernie Sanders' candidacy during the Iowa caucus and while others, such as Eric Schmidt and Pierre Omidyar, are known for their cozy ties to the Clinton family and even ties to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign." (" "Bipartisan" Washington Insiders Reveal Their Plan for Chaos if Trump Wins the Election ", Unlimited Hangout )

Is it safe to say that Rosa Brooks is a Soros stooge overseeing a color revolution in the United States aimed at toppling Trump and replacing him with a dementia-addled, meat-puppet named Joe Biden?

Political analyst Paul Craig Roberts seems to think so. Here's what he said in a recent post at his website:

"I have provided evidence that the military/security complex, using the media and the Democrats, intends to turn the November election into a color revolution The evidence of a color revolution in the works is abundantly supplied by CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, NPR, Washington Post and numerous Internet sites funded by the CIA and the foundations and corporations through which it operates.. All of these media organizations are establishing the story in the mind of Americans that Trump will not leave office when he loses or steals the election and must be driven out.

With Antifa and Black Lives Matter now experienced in violent protests, they will be unleashed anew on American cities when there is news of a Trump election victory. The media will explain the violence as necessary to free us from a tyrant and egg on the violence, as will the Democrat Party. The CIA will be certain that the violence is well funded .

What is a reelected President Trump going to do when the Secret Service refuses to repel Antifa and Black Lives Matter when they breach White House Security?

American Democracy is on the verge of being ended for all times, and the world media will herald the event as the successful overthrowing of a tyrant." ( "America's Color Revolution" , Paul Craig Roberts )

Another of the leading spokesmen for TIP is Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson who made this revealing statement in a recent interview:

"Let me just say some of the things that we're putting out there. Among those things, one that is very important is the media, particularly the mainstream media. They cannot act as they usually act with regard to elections. They have to play a coup on election night. They can't be declaring some state like Pennsylvania for one candidate or the other. When Pennsylvania probably has thousands upon thousands of votes yet to come in and count. So, the media has to get its act in order and it has to act very differently than it normally does."

(NOTE: In other words, Wilkerson does not want the media to follow the normal protocols for covering an election, but to adjust their reporting to accommodate the aims of the coup-plotters. Does that sound like someone who is committed to evenhanded coverage of events, or someone who wants reporters to shape the news to meet the specifications of his own particular agenda? Here's more from Wilkerson:)

"Second, .we also have learned that poll workers have to be younger. And we've started a movement all across the country to train young people. And we've had really good luck with the volunteers to do so , to be poll workers. Because we found out in Wisconsin, for example, poll workers are mostly over 60. And many of them didn't show up because they were afraid of COVID-19. And so Wisconsin went from about one 188 polling places, to about 15. That's disastrous." (" This 'War Game' Maps out what happens if the President contests the Election" , WBUR )

Why is Wilkerson so encouraged by the young people he's trained to act as poll workers? Doesn't that sound a bit fishy, especially from a dyed-in-the-wool partisan who's mixed up with a group whose sole aim is to beat Trump? And why are the authors of the TIP manifesto so eager to reveal their true intentions. Take a look:

"There will likely not be an "election night" this year; unprecedented numbers of voters are expected to use mail-in ballots, which will almost certainly delay the certified result for days or weeks. A delay provides a window for campaigns, the media, and others to cast doubt on the integrity of the process and for escalating tensions between competing camps. As a legal matter, a candidate unwilling to concede can contest the election into January. .."( Ibid)

So, that's the GamePlan, eh? The coup plotters want a contested election that drags on for weeks, deepens divisions among the population, undermines confidence in the electoral system, instigates ferocious street fighting in cities across the country, and gives the Biden camp time to mobilize its political resources in Congress to mount a Constitutional attack on Trump.

Can we at least call this treachery by its proper name: Treason– "the crime of betraying one's country by trying to overthrow the government?"

If the shoe fits ..

[Jan 15, 2021] Will the Senate Confirm Coup Plotter Victoria Nuland- -

Notable quotes:
"... By Medea Benjamin. cofounder of ..."
"... CODEPINK for Peace ..."
"... , and author of several books, including ..."
"... Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran ..."
"... . @medeabenjamin; Nicolas J. S. Davies, an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of ..."
"... Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq ..."
"... . @NicolasJSDavies; and Marcy Winograd of Progressive Democrats of America served as a 2020 Democratic delegate for Bernie Sanders,and is Coordinator of ..."
"... CODEPINK CONGRESS ..."
"... . @MarcyWinograd ..."
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
Jan 15, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Will the Senate Confirm Coup Plotter Victoria Nuland? Posted on January 15, 2021 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Biden's nominees have skewed towards the awful, particularly on the foreign policy front. But his plan to install Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland at State is a standout. For those of you new to this site and not familiar with Nuland's sorry history, this post gives an overview of her role in fomenting the coup in Ukraine and in putting relations with Russia on a Cold War footing. The authors encourage readers to call their Senators and urge them to vote against her nomination.

And before you get unduly excited by Biden nominating Gary Gensler to the SEC, I would much rather have seem Gensler at Treasury. Gensler demonstrated at the CFTC that he's effective and dedicated to combatting abuses by Big Finance. However, his best shot at making the SEC feared and respected again is to appoint a tough head of enforcement, so keep an eye out for that pick.

The problem that Gensler will have at the SEC is that it is the only Federal financial services industry regulator that is subject to Congressional appropriations, rather that living off its fees and fines (the SEC collects far more than Congress allows it). And Democrats, like Joe Lieberman, then the Senator from Hedgistan, have been if anything more aggressive than Republicans in threatening the SEC and in keeping it budget-starved.

I had said to Lambert that if Biden wanted to be Machiavellian, the way to pretend to reward Elizabeth Warren while actually sandbagging her would be to make her SEC chair. Let's hope that isn't his logic for appointing Gensler.

By Medea Benjamin. cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace , and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran . @medeabenjamin; Nicolas J. S. Davies, an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq . @NicolasJSDavies; and Marcy Winograd of Progressive Democrats of America served as a 2020 Democratic delegate for Bernie Sanders,and is Coordinator of CODEPINK CONGRESS . @MarcyWinograd

Photo Credit: thetruthseeker.co.uk Nuland and Pyatt planning regime change in Kiev

Who is Victoria Nuland? Most Americans have never heard of her because the U.S. corporate media's foreign policy coverage is a wasteland. Most Americans have no idea that President-elect Biden's pick for Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs is stuck in the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia Cold War politics and dreams of continued NATO expansion, an arms race on steroids and further encirclement of Russia.

Nor do they know that from 2003-2005, during the hostile U.S. military occupation of Iraq, Nuland was a foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the Bush administration.

You can bet, however, that the people of Ukraine have heard of neocon Nuland. Many have even heard the leaked four-minute audio of her saying "Fuck the EU" during a 2014 phone call with the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.

During the infamous call on which Nuland and Pyatt plotted to replace the elected Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, Nuland expressed her not-so-diplomatic disgust with the European Union for grooming former heavyweight boxer and austerity champ Vitali Klitschko instead of U.S. puppet and NATO booklicker Artseniy Yatseniuk to replace Russia-friendly Yanukovych.

The "Fuck the EU" call went viral, as an embarrassed State Department, never denying the call's authenticity, blamed the Russians for tapping the phone, much as the NSA has tapped the phones of European allies.

Despite outrage from German Chancellor Angela Markel, no one fired Nuland, but her potty mouth upstaged the more serious story: the U.S. plot to overthrow Ukraine's elected government and America's responsibility for a civil war that has killed at least 13,000 people and left Ukraine the poorest country in Europe.

In the process, Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan, the co-founder of The Project for a New American Century , and their neocon cronies succeeded in sending U.S.-Russian relations into a dangerous downward spiral from which they have yet to recover.

Nuland accomplished this from a relatively junior position as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. How much more trouble could she stir up as the #3 official at Biden's State Department? We'll find out soon enough, if the Senate confirms her nomination.

Joe Biden should have learned from Obama's mistakes that appointments like this matter. In his first term , Obama allowed his hawkish Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Republican Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and military and CIA leaders held over from the Bush administration to ensure that endless war trumped his message of hope and change.

Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, ended up presiding over indefinite detentions without charges or trials at Guantanamo Bay; an escalation of drone strikes that killed innocent civilians; a deepening of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan; a self-reinforcing cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism; and disastrous new wars in Libya and Syria .

With Clinton out and new personnel in top spots in his second term, Obama began to take charge of his own foreign policy. He started working directly with Russia's President Putin to resolve crises in Syria and other hotspots. Putin helped avert an escalation of the war in Syria in September 2013 by negotiating the removal and destruction of Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles, and helped Obama negotiate an interim agreement with Iran that led to the JCPOA nuclear deal.

But the neocons were apoplectic that they failed to convince Obama to order a massive bombing campaign and escalate his covert, proxy war in Syria and at the receding prospect of a war with Iran. Fearing their control of U.S. foreign policy was slipping, the neocons launched a campaign to brand Obama as "weak" on foreign policy and remind him of their power.

With editorial help from Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan penned a 2014 New Republic article entitled "Superpowers Don't Get To Retire," proclaiming that "there is no democratic superpower waiting in the wings to save the world if this democratic superpower falters." Kagan called for an even more aggressive foreign policy to exorcise American fears of a multipolar world it can no longer dominate.

Obama invited Kagan to a private lunch at the White House, and the neocons' muscle-flexing pressured him to scale back his diplomacy with Russia, even as he quietly pushed ahead on Iran.

The neocons' coup de grace against Obama's better angels was Nuland's 2014 coup in debt-ridden Ukraine, a valuable imperial possession for its wealth of natural gas and a strategic candidate for NATO membership right on Russia's border.

When Ukraine's Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych spurned a U.S.-backed trade agreement with the European Union in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia, the State Department threw a tantrum.

Hell hath no fury like a superpower scorned.

The EU trade agreement was to open Ukraine's economy to imports from the EU, but without a reciprocal opening of EU markets to Ukraine, it was a lopsided deal Yanukovich could not accept. The deal was approved by the post-coup government, and has only added to Ukraine's economic woes.

The muscle for Nuland's $5 billion coup was Oleh Tyahnybok's neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and the shadowy new Right Sector militia. During her leaked phone call, Nuland referred to Tyahnybok as one of the "big three" opposition leaders on the outside who could help the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Yatsenyuk on the inside. This is the same Tyanhnybok who once delivered a speec h applauding Ukrainians for fighting Jews and "other scum" during World War II.

After protests in Kiev's Euromaidan square turned into battles with police in February 2014, Yanukovych and the Western-backed opposition signed an agreement brokered by France, Germany and Poland to form a national unity government and hold new elections by the end of the year.

But that was not good enough for the neo-Nazis and extreme right-wing forces the U.S. had helped to unleash. A violent mob led by the Right Sector militia marched on and invaded the parliament building , a scene no longer difficult for Americans to imagine. Yanukovych and his members of parliament fled for their lives.

Facing the loss of its most vital strategic naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, Russia accepted the overwhelming result (a 97% majority, with an 83% turnout) of a referendum in which Crimea voted to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia, which it had been a part of from 1783 to 1954.

The majority Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine, triggering a bloody civil war between U.S.- and Russian-backed forces that still rages in 2021.

U.S.-Russian relations have never recovered, even as U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals still pose the greatest single threat to our existence. Whatever Americans believe about the civil war in Ukraine and allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, we must not allow the neocons and the military-industrial complex they serve to deter Biden from conducting vital diplomacy with Russia to steer us off our suicidal path toward nuclear war.

Nuland and the neocons, however, remain committed to an ever-more debilitating and dangerous Cold War with Russia and China to justify a militarist foreign policy and record Pentagon budgets. In a July 2020 Foreign Affairs article entitled "Pinning Down Putin," Nuland absurdly claimed that Russia presents a greater threat to "the liberal world" than the U.S.S.R. posed during the old Cold War.

Nuland's narrative rests on an utterly mythical, ahistorical narrative of Russian aggression and U.S. good intentions. She pretends that Russia's military budget, which is one-tenth of America's, is evidence of "Russian confrontation and militarization" and calls on the U.S. and its allies to counter Russia by "maintaining robust defense budgets, continuing to modernize U.S. and allied nuclear weapons systems, and deploying new conventional missiles and missile defenses to protect against Russia's new weapons systems "

Nuland also wants to confront Russia with an aggressive NATO. Since her days as U.S. Ambassador to NATO during President George W. Bush's second term, she has been a supporter of NATO's expansion all the way up to Russia's border. She calls for "permanent bases along NATO's eastern border." We have pored over a map of Europe, but we can't find a country called NATO with any borders at all. Nuland sees Russia's commitment to defending itself after successive 20th century Western invasions as an intolerable obstacle to NATO's expansionist ambitions.

Nuland's militaristic worldview represents exactly the folly the U.S. has been pursuing since the 1990s under the influence of the neocons and "liberal interventionists," which has resulted in a systematic underinvestment in the American people while escalating tensions with Russia, China, Iran and other countries.

As Obama learned too late, the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time can, with a shove in the wrong direction, unleash years of intractable violence, chaos and international discord. Victoria Nuland would be a ticking time-bomb in Biden's State Department, waiting to sabotage his better angels much as she undermined Obama's second-term diplomacy.

So let's do Biden and the world a favor. Join World Beyond War , CODEPINK and dozens of other organizations opposing neocon Nuland's confirmation as a threat to peace and diplomacy. Call 202-224-3121 and tell your Senator to oppose Nuland's installation at the State Department.


John A , January 15, 2021 at 7:44 am

Nuland has also been declared persona non grata by Russia, so she would not be able to go with Biden, were he to visit Moscow. Russian foreign minister Lavrov, actually refused to shake her hand when she attended a US-Russia meeting with Kerry. She is poison to any attempt to peaceful relationships.

Susan the other , January 15, 2021 at 11:28 am

Yes, I remember that meeting clearly. Can't cite the network, but it covered her closely – body language only. I wonder where Biden stood on that act of diplomacy given his own corruption, and also what John Kerry's thinking is about now. John Kerry's stepson was in cahoots with Hunter Biden. It looked like Kerry brought her along for some rehabilitation and Lavrov was having none of it. Instead he went directly to the delegation from Ukraine and they stood in a circle all with their backs turned to Vicky who had no choice but to wander over to the coffee table and pretend she wasn't totally uncomfortable. Totally excluded. How can she recover from that?

The Rev Kev , January 15, 2021 at 9:10 am

If there is one thing that Russia hates it is fascists and that is because of the enormous damage caused by them in WW2. We call those invaders Nazis but the Russians seem to call them fascists. I sometimes wonder if it is part of their mother's milk this hatred. For people like Nuland to help topple the government of a large, bordering country like the Ukraine and install people that were literally fascists was too much for the Russians. These were fascist of a very low order that had the old 1930s routines down pat, including the torchlight parades. And there was Nuland, handing out cookies to the rioters, many of whom had been trained in rioting tactics in Poland and were being paid about $100 a day by the US if I recall correctly. Of course Nuland was not alone as there was also a Representative from the EU also handing out cookies. The only equivalent that comes to mind is a violent revolution in Canada using professional rioters and having diplomatic representatives from the Russian Federation and China handing out donuts to the rioter. I wonder what Washington would say about a stunt like that.

lyman alpha blob , January 15, 2021 at 9:32 am

Nuland is a disgusting human being. Since she is a right winger, regardless of what party may be listed on her voter ID, I don't think Bettridge's law applies here at all.

So glad all these 'woke' people put good old Uncle Joe back in office. Wonder how many realized they were supporting people being burned alive by actual Nazis in doing so?

From an actual journalist, Robert Parry – https://consortiumnews.com/2014/05/10/burning-ukraines-protesters-alive/

clarky90 , January 15, 2021 at 3:46 pm

So the USA now has literally placed, "literal fascists" in power?

Literally ..

Mark Gisleson , January 15, 2021 at 10:26 am

More war is not the answer to any of the problems facing us.

Carolinian , January 15, 2021 at 11:35 am

Thanks for this. Our "learned nothing/forgot nothing" Bourbon restoration will be led by one of the dimmer Bourbons who couldn't even set up a good grift in Ukraine without boasting about it and then angrily denying it. Should the press finally, improbably turn on him it should make for some fun news conferences. But perhaps he'll merely be moving to the White House basement from his Delaware basement.

Encephalitis Lethargica , January 15, 2021 at 12:47 pm

CFTC's budgets are also set through congressional authorization and appropriations. Yes, the CFPB is not subject to Congressional appropriations, but for good reasons. However, all financial regulation can be overturned by the Congressional Review Act.

As for the article, citation needed. Sort of a laundry heap of questionable material. Make no mistake, the Russo-Ukrainian War is a real war. Uniformed Russian armored infantry of 331st regiment of the 98th Svirsk airborne division dropped into Ukraine territory on 24 August 2014. From 25 to 27 August, Russian troops in civilian clothing, backed up by an armored column [not in disguise] took Novoazovsk. This is about Russia not being able to station 25,000 troops in Crimea as they had under Yanukovych. US troop levels in Europe have been at their lowest for the last 20 years. The US would like to [nay, needs to] keep it that way. However, the erosion of territorial integrity is a touchy subject in Europe given the lasting peace of the post-war period in a place where the wars have a pre-fix like "Hundred Years".

President Arseniy Yatsenyuk is of Jewish origin so the claims of coordination with Nazi sympathizers is dubious. Not even going to get the boycotted unconstitutional Crimean referendum.

As for WW III, Obama's defense department made it a priority to recover all the MANPADS, such as the Chinese-made FN-6 [via Qatar], Russian-made Strela-2's and Igla-S's [via Libya] from the FSA without so much as a thank you from the Russian Air Force. [Turkey, on the other hand, armed the FSA with Stinger's.] It should be noted that the Syrian conflict's death toll, in just four years, surpassed the 19-year death toll in all the Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq war theatres combined.

Think about this way: who needs NATO and the EU more to maintain his power structure, Joe Biden or Vladimir Putin. Isn't it clear Americans don't care, and American business does not look to compete in Russian anytime soon. The geography is wrong. But Putin must find a way to engender ethnicities who do not like the Russian Empire, who had been cleansed by Stalin. One way is to sell energy below cost to the republics and buy in back from political allies in the form of electricity. Something upon which the EU frowns. [Personally, I did not care for the way Putin early on systematically and indiscriminately starved Chechen civilians for years. It was cruel on a level unseen outside of the Rwandan genocide. More importantly, it was the Russian Federation abdicating its authority by not providing for its own citizens and not letting NGO's fill the calorie gap. I'd like to think had Putin's admin not been so wobbly the first few years, he might've let the Red Cross feed the children.]

John Steinbach , January 15, 2021 at 4:35 pm

There is overwhelming documentation of Yatsenuk's collaboration with Svboda & other fascist organizations in forming the coup government. For example: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/analysis-u-s-cozies-kiev-government-including-far-right-n66061

Russia was never going to permit a US orchestrated coup in Ukraine without resistance. The idea that Putin needs NATO more than Biden does seems unreasonable.

steelyman , January 15, 2021 at 11:02 pm

Talking about "citations", perhaps you could supply the readership of this site with some credible citations and links for a few of the far fetched claims you're making here. Most of this comment reads like pro-Ukrainian propaganda.

Matthew G. Saroff , January 15, 2021 at 1:30 pm

I heard about Gary Gensler, Samantha Power, and Victoria Nuland, and I immediately thought, "The good, the bad, and the ugly."

Gensler surprised everyone when he was at the CFTC by doing his job, and doing it well, and his running the SEC is a good thing.

Samantha Power is an aggressive war monger, and in her position at USAID, she will likely have her fingers in regime change pie, since USAID is part of the deep state regime change apparatus..

Nuland is just a pro-Nazi nut though.

Jack Parsons , January 15, 2021 at 9:39 pm

About NATO and the Ukraine war:

I've long suspected that NATO has existed since 1991 to allow the US/EU axis to control Middle-Eastern and African resources. For example, the Rammstein military hospital is where every Gulf War soldier was airlifted for major treatment and convalescence.

Also, there is a huge international trade in opium. It's grown in Afpak and shipped out in every direction. I suspect that a fair amount of that flows through Ukraine and Crimea. If you look at a topo map of Crimea, there's a lot of seashore that could be good "smuggler's coves". Following this line of argument, Russia grabbing it from Ukraine was a gimme to Russia's gangsters. This, as well as the "Pipeline Wars", gives Russia a strong reason to encircle Ukraine.

[Jan 15, 2021] Joe Biden's Weird Version of Goebbels' Big Lie - American Thinker

Jan 15, 2021 | www.americanthinker.com
Joe Biden's Weird Version of Goebbels' Big Lie By James S. Corum

me title=

At his press conference on July 8, Joe Biden offered a rather bizarre interpretation of history, in which he likened Ted Cruz and his challenge to some electoral votes to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and the "Big Lie." Biden illustrated his point by referring to the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945 in which, he said, "250 or 2,500 people" were killed. And yet Joseph Goebbels inflated the number to 25,000, even 250,000, thus perpetrating "The Big Lie." Biden added, "like Goebbels and the Great Lie. You keep repeating the lie, repeating the lie."

me sandbox=

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fR37AMD1Dcg?enablejsapi=1&origin=https:%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com

As an historian I am flummoxed at Biden's illustration of Dresden as a Big Lie. In fact, the best estimate is that 28,000 people died in the bombing of Dresden. In a bizarre way, however, Joe Biden has accurately linked the Allied bombing campaign of Germany to the Big Lie of Nazi propaganda. Except the Nazi Big Lie was not about Dresden. Rather it was about the British and American bombing of Hamburg in 1943. From July 24 through August 2, 1943, the Allied air forces, mainly the RAF, unleashed a series of massive bomber raids against Hamburg involving as many as 700+ planes at a time.

Hamburg, one of Germany's greatest industrial centers, was struck in a way no previous city had been. The raids were especially devastating, inflicting an estimated 34,000 to 38,000 dead. The raid of 27 July 1943 alone, in which atmospheric conditions created a firestorm, killed more than 18,000 Hamburg residents. The Allied attack on Hamburg destroyed or damaged more than 60% of the housing in the city and wrecked more than half the factories, a serious blow to German industrial production. The Hamburg raids came as a gigantic shock to the Nazi leadership and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels admitted to his diary that Germany was losing the war.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=610

The Big Lie about Hamburg was the official position of the Nazi government put through the German news media: Hamburg had been bombed but casualties were not heavy, damage was not severe, and the city was carrying on. Indeed, it sounded plausible at first. Up to summer 1943, Germany was coping well with RAF bombing raids. The German civil defense system was well-organized and able to quickly repair infrastructure, put damaged factories back into operation, and efficiently feed and rehouse civilians made homeless.

But in Hamburg the German government and military were simply overwhelmed. More than half the city's inhabitants lost their housing and possessions, and the streets were choked with the dead. A million civilians were immediately evacuated from Hamburg, broken into groups and dispatched from suburban train stations to towns all across Germany so that no single area would be overwhelmed by the mass of refugees who needed food and housing. Thousands of concentration camp prisoners (unable to communicate the horrors they saw) were brought into Hamburg to collect and bury the tens of thousands of dead in mass graves and to clear streets of rubble. The destruction was so severe that Hamburg never recovered during the war.

The shell-shocked survivors of the Hamburg bombing were warned by the Gestapo not to speak of what they had experienced -- or else. Every effort was made by the Nazis to insist that Hamburg was still a functioning city. In 1943 Germans who listened to the news from British radio (which provided accurate accounts of the scale of casualties and damage of the Hamburg raids) could be arrested and even executed. Hamburg survivors who told their new neighbors about the devastation they witnessed invited arrest by the Gestapo. Every effort was made to keep the truth of Hamburg from the German public.

Yet survivors still talked. One cannot go through such a horrific experience and keep silent. A million witnesses saw the inability of the Reich government to prevent a major city from becoming a literal Hell. The stories all rang true, and the common people of Germany believed the survivors. Only diehard Nazis believed the official German government line after Hamburg and increasing numbers of Germans turned to listening to forbidden British radio rather than the state propaganda. German civilian morale plummeted when people realized that if the Allies could totally devastate one of Germany's greatest cities in a few days, then the war was truly lost.

The big lie failed. Still, the Gestapo made sure that Germans carried on the war effort to the end.

It's interesting to watch the Democrats constantly making historical analogies to Naziism because, at every attempt, they display their astounding ignorance of history. From the historical context, a Big Lie is a demand by political leaders that the public believe something highly improbable. This belief is repeated by a government-controlled media and its public acceptance is coerced by government agencies and a co-opted judicial system. Ted Cruz and a handful of minority senators and congressmen publicly contesting corrupt and illegal actions of state and local governments does not fit the historical definition of the Big Lie. For Biden's charge to work we must accept, as an article of faith, that election fraud is virtually nonexistent, that one-party Democrat machine cities in the swing states are devoted to serving the public, and that the humble and devoted leaders and civil servants of these cities would never, ever break the law for political and personal gain.

The Big Lie of 2020 is that it was a clean and honest election. Like the Big Lie of Hamburg raids, the Big Lie will fail. Like Hamburg in 1943, there are simply too many witnesses. There are the videos of election observers being blocked in several cities and videos in Atlanta of observers sent away, and in their absence election workers piling ballots into the counting machines. There is sworn testimony from hundreds of election workers detailing illegal actions. There are the Dominion machines in Michigan that were set up to create ballot errors which were "adjudicated" (flipped) in favor of Democrats. There is hard documentary evidence of the dead voting by mail, or of (supposedly) living voters receiving and returning their ballots by the postal service within a day. There are thousands of Georgia voters who illegally provided post office box numbers as their place of residence. There is the analysis of highly respected IT experts and statisticians who have spotted statistically implausible vote spikes, unusual local turnout, and voting patterns not seen in previous elections. The evidence presented at state legislative hearings (I watched some on One America News) is thorough, well-documented and plausible.

Joe Biden is beginning his presidency with one of the biggest lies in the history of American politics. On top of the "honest election" lie, he will have to maintain lies about his family's Chinese and Ukrainian business connections, as well as his involvement in illegal deep state surveillance of political opponents. With so many lies, we'll have an interesting time seeing the Democrats defending Biden over the next four years. Still, the historical pattern is consistent. Even the most coercive states cannot maintain the Big Lie.

Photo credit: YouTube screengrab

James S. Corum PhD is a military historian, author and co-author of 14 books, and is a retired lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/joe_bidens_weird_version_of_goebbels_big_lie.html#ixzz6jdmVcvoY
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

[Jan 15, 2021] When we say "russian hacking" we mean CIA by Larry C Johnson It is illegal, or at least on paper it is, for the CIA to spy on American citizens on American soil. So why was the CIA spying on Mr. Edward Butowsky and/or Matt Couch? If you have read Joe Hoft's excellent piece ( It is illegal, or at least on paper it is, for the CIA to spy on American citizens on American soil. So why was the CIA spying on Mr. Edward Butowsky and/or Matt Couch? If you have read Joe Hoft's excellent piece ( It is illegal, or at least on paper it is, for the CIA to spy on American citizens on American soil. So why was the CIA spying on Mr. Edward Butowsky and/or Matt Couch? If you have read Joe Hoft's excellent piece ( see here ) on the latest trials and travails of Ty Clevenger, an intrepid attorney battling the Deep State, who has been fighting for more than three years to secure the release of damning documents exposing the Russia hoax and sedition by the Obama Administration, you know he is forcing the FBI to cough it up. But the latest response also contained this bombshell--the CIA was spying on his clients as well. Ty's latest account of this new info dump from the US Department of Justice is posted at But the latest response also contained this bombshell--the CIA was spying on his clients as well. Ty's latest account of this new info dump from the US Department of Justice is posted at But the latest response also contained this bombshell--the CIA was spying on his clients as well. Ty's latest account of this new info dump from the US Department of Justice is posted at LawFlog . Here are some key snippets:

Notable quotes:
"... In The Transparency Project v. Department of Justice, et al., my client asked to see records indicating whether the CIA or its Directorate of Digital Innovation, its contractors, etc. inserted Russian "fingerprints" into the metadata of the emails that were released publicly. (You can review the entire request by clicking here and reading Paragraph 11). ..."
"... In a joint report filed today , the CIA informed the court that it intends to assert a Glomar response to the request, i.e., that it "cannot confirm or deny" the existence of such records. . . . [In other words], The Central Intelligence Agency will neither confirm nor deny that it fabricated the Russian "fingerprints" in Democratic National Committee emails published in 2016 by Wikileaks and "Guccifer 2.0.", and the FBI implicitly acknowledged today that it never reviewed the contents of DNC employee Seth Rich's laptop despite gaining custody of the laptop after his murder. ..."
www.moonofalabama.org
In The Transparency Project v. Department of Justice, et al., my client asked to see records indicating whether the CIA or its Directorate of Digital Innovation, its contractors, etc. inserted Russian "fingerprints" into the metadata of the emails that were released publicly. (You can review the entire request by clicking here and reading Paragraph 11).

In a joint report filed today , the CIA informed the court that it intends to assert a Glomar response to the request, i.e., that it "cannot confirm or deny" the existence of such records. . . . [In other words], The Central Intelligence Agency will neither confirm nor deny that it fabricated the Russian "fingerprints" in Democratic National Committee emails published in 2016 by Wikileaks and "Guccifer 2.0.", and the FBI implicitly acknowledged today that it never reviewed the contents of DNC employee Seth Rich's laptop despite gaining custody of the laptop after his murder.

Full disclosure--Mr. Clevenger is a friend of mine. He writes in his article that he reached out to me and I made some phone calls to retired friends who held senior positions at the CIA. My friends and I agreed that a GLOMAR response to the basic question, Did you spy on Mr. Butowsky and/or Mr. Couch was a tacit admission-yes! Ty explains this point clearly and succinctly:

Allow me to illustrate the point. If I asked the CIA for intercepted emails from the president of another country, the CIA would rightly issue a Glomar response, because it would not want to confirm or deny that it has been spying on the foreign president. That's what Glomar is for, because the CIA is in the business of secretly spying on foreign presidents, officials, agents, etc.

My client's request, on the other hand, is more akin to asking the CIA for records showing whether it helped Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate President John F. Kennedy. We would expect the CIA to declare that it has no such records because it would never do such a thing.

Why would the CIA spy on Mr. Butowsky, for example. Ed Butowsky was brought into the Seth Rich saga in December 2016 by Ellen Ratner, the sister-in-law of Julian Assange's former lawyer. Ellen spoke with Julian in November 2016 and asked Mr. Butowsky to reach out to the parents of Seth Rich and get them some help investigating who murdered their son.

It should come as no surprise that the CIA, the NSA and Britain's GCHQ were monitoring every communication going in and out of Wikileaks, including all communications of all personnel working at or associated with Wikileaks.

We know this thanks to the evidence and writings of Mr. Edward Snowden. Once Snowden made his escape to Russia with the help of Wikileaks, Wikileaks became a number one intelligence target.

Both the United States and the United Kingdom had ample cause to ensure that no new secrets leaked out of Wiki and caught them unawares. In light of the comprehensive monitoring of all Wiki communications, I believe the intel folks knew exactly the contents of Ratner's chat with Assange, which ultimately led them to Ed (i.e, Ellen Ratner talked to Julian and then talked to Ed to relay a request from Julian to help the Rich family).

Now that Donald Trump has finally released FBI documents on Russiagate (I do not know if there are any CIA documents in the pile), we shall see what the FBI had to say about Mr. Rich. Too bad the President waited so long to do this. If he had forced the issue last year the plot to steal the 2020 election might have been disrupted.

[Jan 15, 2021] It's so crazy how Israel's constant airstrikes on Syria are just background noise that hardly anyone is aware of. Imagine a country in western Europe routinely bombing its neighbor and killing large numbers of people and the public being generally unaware that it's happening because the press barely reports it

Jan 15, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

michaelj72 , Jan 15 2021 3:51 utc | 66


Caitlan makes a point:
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/01/14/its-spelled-dead-asshole-not-philanthropist-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/

"...It's so crazy how Israel's constant airstrikes on Syria are just background noise that hardly anyone is aware of. Imagine a country in western Europe routinely bombing its neighbor and killing large numbers of people and the public being generally unaware that it's happening because the press barely reports it..."

the link in her paragraph above,
https://news.antiwar.com/2021/01/13/us-assisted-israeli-attacks-in-east-syria-kill-at-least-57/

with this added paragraph and link in the antiwar.com article

"....US officials are pointing to their own involvement with this, saying Mike Pompeo provided the intelligence to Mossad. They suggested the intelligence was about Iranian arms. It's not clear why so many troops were killed if warehouses were the target..."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-official-israel-carried-out-syria-strikes-using-american-intelligence/

Surely the war against Syria has to rank as one of the greatest wars crimes of the last 50-60 years or more.... But not a liberal in sight. hah.

Oh I almost forgot that this great crime, along with the complete destruction and destitution of the richest nation in all of Africa, Libya, was all started under Obama-Biden-Clinton-Rice-Power administration. double hah.

[Jan 15, 2021] Sic Semper Tyrannis

Jan 15, 2021 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 14 JANUARY 2021 by Patrick Armstrong

RUSSIA-CHINA. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi says: "I n developing China-Russia strategic cooperation, we see no limit, no forbidden zone and no ceiling to how far this cooperation can go ." The two now settle 25% of their business in their own currencies . I would say that the two lasting achievements of the neo-cons and their New American Century have been the ever-closer Moscow-Beijing alliance and the increased influence of Iran. Who did win the Cold War after all ?

RESERVES. The Central Bank of Russia has published its account of Russia reserves as of 30 June 2020 . The total was 561.1 billion USD (up $44.3 billion since a year before). Euro holdings accounted for 29.5% . For the first time ever gold (22.9%) was a bigger proportion than USD (22.2%). Renminbi was 12.2%. Russia's economy – failing always failing .

NAVALNIY. The report from the Charité Hospital in Berlin fires another nail gun's worth into the coffin of the Navalniy story. Numerous health problems, lots of drugs in him, but no novichok symptoms .

COVID. Putin has ordered mass use of the Sputnik vaccine (1.5 million inoculated already). No side effects, they say . A scientist is optimistic that COVID will have faded down by the summer .

PUTIN CHRISTMAS. What Putin did on the 6th ; what some Americans think he did . Or this.

WESTERN VALUES™. As Western social media apps censor, people are bailing out and Russian ones grow: the founder of Telegram says 25 million new members have joined in past 72 hours . These things are bubbles: Twitter and Facebook are said to have lost fifty billion dollars after banning Trump .

PAVLIK REDEVIVUS. From Vladimir Goldstein . And she wants to be a lawyer, too .

JOKES. Just heard this one: I can make anti-Putin jokes on Russian social media. So, what, I can make anti-Putin jokes on Western social media. (A re-tread of a Soviet-era joke). Or this: Due to travel restrictions abroad, Americans have done a coup at home.

MOON. Moscow considering manned moon mission . Hmmmm . Russian/Chinese base on the Moon in ten years?

SURVEILLANCE. Moscow City has revealed a plan to spend money on a database containing information about every resident, including passport numbers, insurance policies, salaries, car registrations. Much of it appears to already exist. For safety, security and convenience, of course. Mind you, we all volunteered: we all carry smartphones around broadcasting everything we do.

ARMENIA-AZERBAIJAN. Putin chaired a meeting of the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan . They signed a statement on development of Karabakh region. Here are the official statements after the meeting. Its another step in resolving the difficult problem which has deep roots. I note a reference to the OSCE Minsk Group but I don't expect it to get much involved. It's done nothing much in 28 years and who wants the West meddling in the area anyway?

THE EMPTINESS OF FORMER FLAPS. " After months of bashing Russia's Sputnik V vaccine, Western journalists in Moscow line up to be inoculated ". A reminder of the job description .

NUGGETS FROM THE STUPIDITY MINE. I am amused that the US Navy has announced that it may start "freedom of navigation" trips in the Russian Arctic (despite not not signing on to the UNCLOS .) But the biggest US icebreaker is rather elderly and can barely handle two-metre ice . So perhaps it will lease icebreakers from Finland . Given that the Arctic is a Russian lake , not least because of the Russian monopoly of gigantic icebreakers , one can easily image some embarrassments for the Americans.

NEW NWO. " We are seeing images that I never imagined we would see in this country-in some other capital yes, but not here. No one in the world is likely to see, respect, fear, or depend on us in the same way again. If the post-American era has a start date, it is almost certainly today ." Richard N Haass .

EUROPEANS ARE REVOLTING. After seven years of negotiation, the EU and China have produced a comprehensive trade agreement . Washington is not amused . Meanwhile Nord Stream 2 chugs along .

UKRAINE. Has been left rather high and dry on vaccines with none of its BFFs in the West doing anything for it. But the Foreign Minister insists Kiev will not buy Sputnik vaccine even if it works: "It [Russia] cares about imposing its propaganda cliches and ideology by supplying the vaccine, even if it were effective" . Like most things in Ukraine, it's a mess .

© Patrick Armstrong Analysis, Canada Russia Observer

[Jan 15, 2021] https://twitter.com/bears_with/status/1349827865710387202?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

Jan 15, 2021 | twitter.com

Helmer's site (now unavailable) is here:
http://johnhelmer.net/

Posted by: downtownhaiku | Jan 14 2021 22:15 utc | 42

here is a copy of the Helmer article about Navalny which caused Helmer's website to be attacked

BERLIN CLINICAL DATA CONFIRM ALEXEI NAVALNY HAD PANCREATITIS, DIABETES, LIVER FAILURE, STAPHYLOCOCCAL INFECTION, MILD HEART ATTACK – NO NOVICHOK SYMPTOMS


Instead of "LOVE" on pill box, substitute POWER
On jar behind, instead of HYMEN'S, substitute MERKEL

By John Helmer, Moscow

The German laboratory test results for Alexei Navalny, published by a group of doctors at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin last month, reveal a surprising number of medical symptoms, but they are not those of Novichok nerve agent poisoning as Navalny and his supporters in western governments have alleged.

Clinical doctors, toxicologists, and pharmacology experts outside Germany believe the test results which the Charité group released on December 22 reveal symptoms of acute pancreatitis, diabetes, liver failure, severe dehydration, muscular rigidity, as well as a serious bacterial infection, and a possible heart attack associated with his kidney problems. According to the experts, these are not recognisable symptoms of a nerve agent attack.

The German medical publication reports Navalny's "laboratory values on admission", and toxicology and pharmacology results "in blood and urine samples obtained on arrival of the patient of the patient at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (day 3)". Accordingly, the newly available data are evidence of the condition Navalny was in during his two-day treatment in Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1 in Russia; and of the treatment he received there, as well as during his six-hour flight on a German medical evacuation aircraft from Omsk to Berlin.

The German doctors have also released a tabulation of their laboratory test results for Navalny during 33 days of his stay in the Charité hospital, and a subsequent visit to the hospital as an outpatient. The four data tables are described by the Germans as following "the supposed poisoning of the patient". The doctors don't wish to sign their names to this "supposing".
[ more]

Navalny first fell ill on the morning of August 20, during a flight from Tomsk, where he had been on an election campaign tour, to Moscow. The flight was diverted to Omsk, and Navalny admitted to hospital in Omsk in mid-morning local time. He was in intensive care there for 48 hours until he was released for German medical evacuation to Berlin on August 22.

The German doctors treating Navalny at the Charité were led by Kai-Uwe Eckardt, the chief of the Charité treatment unit whom Navalny publicly thanked on October 7. Eckardt and David Steindl are the principal authors of the December 22 report; Eckhardt is a specialist on diabetes and kidney transplants; Steindl is a specialist on musculo-skeletal pathologies.

Read their report in the British medical journal, The Lancet, here. https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(20)32644-1.pdf A forensic analysis of the report can be read here. http://johnhelmer.net/berlin-doctors-report-on-navalny-case-reveals-new-evidence-raises-new-questions/ This exposes the many contradictions between the medical evidence now attested by the Germans and the allegations from Navalny and his supporters.


Kai-Uwe Eckardt and David Steindl -- http://johnhelmer.net/berlin-doctors-report-on-navalny-case-reveals-new-evidence-raises-new-questions/

In their 4-page case report, Eckardt and Steindl say "severe poisoning with a cholinesterase inhibitor was subsequently diagnosed", not by the Charité group, but by a "laboratory of the German armed forces"; that was the Institut für Pharmakologie und Toxikologie der Bundeswehr (IPTB).

British toxicologists have repeatedly cautioned there can be many causes and sources for the cholinesterase inhibition detected from metabolites in Navalny's blood and urine, and they continue to ask the German doctors and the IPTB: "Name the compound. That would be a good start." In their publication of Navalny's test results, Eckardt and Steindl say: "results of toxicology analyses conducted in a special laboratory of the armed forces [IPTB] are not included." They don't give a reason.

In the Lancet case report, there are several references to a 4-page appendix. This contains Navalny's test results, but the appendix is not easy to find and was published separately. The Lancet editors explain: "this appendix formed part of the original submission and has been peer reviewed. We post it as supplied by the authors." It can be opened and read here. LINK.

ALEXEI NAVALNY'S LABORATORY TEST RESULTS ON ARRIVAL IN BERLIN


Source: LINK, Appendix S1.

A review of these data by a clinician with specialised training in pharmacology provided a detailed interpretation of each line of data where the reported value for Navalny was either well above or below normal.

The expert, who declines to be identified, reports that the sodium and chloride scores show Navalny was suffering from extreme dehydration on his arrival in the Berlin hospital. How this was possible after the German medevac flight is unknown.

The spikes in the tested creatine kinase-MB and myoglobin reveal that his muscle function was breaking down; the visible symptom, according to the expert, should have been muscle rigidity. According to the German doctors, they didn't see it, and neither did the Omsk hospital doctors, or witnesses of Navalny's collapse on board the flight from Tomsk. The German case report, quoting from the Omsk hospital "discharge report", says "the patient presented [in Omsk on August 20] comatose with hypersalivation and increased diaphoresis [sweating]." When Navalny reached the Charité, the doctors there reported in December, he was "deeply comatose, with mild bradycardia hypersalivation, hypothermia (33.5C), increased diaphoresis and small pupils not reactive to light, decreased brainstem reflexes, hyperactive deep tendon reflexes, and pyramidal signs."

The independent expert does not know how hyperactive tendon reflexes can have produced the abnormal MB and myoglobin test results.

The expert said the standard diagnosis which follows from the reported albumin result is chronic disease of the liver. The high lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) score indicates metabolic disorders commonly seen with cancerous tumours. The amylase and lipase results signify pancreatitis, a condition which the Russian press has reported Navalny to have experienced in the past. The results for C-reactive protein, leukocytes, neutrophils, and erythrocytes all point to a serious bacterial infection. The German case report confirms that skin and rectal swabs and urine samples found staphylococcus aureus and other infectious bacteria which were treated with antibiotics, the standard procedure. How Navalny picked up the bacterial infection, and where – in Tomsk, Omsk, in the medevac flight, or in Berlin – is unknown.

ALEXEI NAVALNY'S LABORATORY TEST RESULTS DURING HIS BERLIN HOSPITALISATION -- EXCERPT


Source: LINK, Appendix S4. The table extends to Day 33 in hospital, and includes Day 42 when he returned for testing as an outpatient.

The unusually high result for the urinary protein/creatinine ratio has been diagnosed by the expert as signifying kidney failure – "clinical diabetes but not an extreme presentation." Diabetes has been reported for Navalny in the past; his staff deny it.

The abnormally high troponin-T results reported on Days 4 and 5 at Charité are puzzling to the independent expert because they signify a heart problem or mild heart attack, possibly related to the reported kidney failure. Eckardt and Steindl say in their case report that Navalny's heart was beating abnormally slowly (bradycardia – 44 beats per minute) when tested in Omsk hospital, then 59 beats per minute during the flight to Berlin. After he arrived at Charité the bradycardia worsened to 33 bpm.

The independent expert accepts that the unusually low test score for butyryl cholinesterase – 0.42 on arrival in Berlin, 0.41 at Day 3 – usually signifies exposure to a cholinesterase inhibitor. The German doctors' report says: "based on clinical and laboratory findings, severe cholinesterase inhibition was diagnosed and the patient was started on atropine and obidoxime Cholinergic signs returned to normal within 1 h[our] after the onset of this antidotal therapy." The German test results do not substantiate this conclusion, neither for troponin-T which didn't normalise until Day 7, or butyryl cholinesterase, which didn't reach normal until Day 17.

Testing for cholinesterase inhibition is the key to the allegations of the German Army laboratory, the German intelligence agency BND, and German officials that Navalny had been poisoned by a Russian Novichok nerve agent. The new data disclosure falls short of proof. Instead it reveals that in Berlin Navalny's laboratory testing revealed cholinesterase inhibition, while in the Omsk hospital laboratory reports published in part in August, revealed that "cholinesterase inhibitors were not detected in blood and urine"; for more details of the earlier test data, read this http://johnhelmer.net/brain-poisoning-by-russian-nerve-agent-alexei-navalny-infects-german-chancellery/ and this. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/09/04/highly-toxic-but-unreliable

This week the independent expert also reviewed the table of medications which testing of Navalny revealed on his admission at Charité:

ANAESTHETIC AND ANTIDOTE DRUGS NAVALNY WAS GIVEN IN OMSK AS TESTED IN BERLIN

Source: Appendix S2. LINK

According to the source, the presence of pain relieving and anaesthetic drugs, antibiotics, and atropine are conventional treatment. Amantadine is a neurological drug often used in treatment of Parkinson's Disease; lithium is a psychiatric medication for treating bipolar mood disorders and depression. Lithium, the expert says, along with the relaxant drugs recorded in Navalny's system -- diazepam, nordazepam, oxazepam -- are commonly taken orally. If Navalny had been comatose at Omsk hospital and then at Charité, then it is likely he took these drugs himself in Tomsk before his flight. The Omsk hospital testing also reported that Navalny had taken "tricyclic antidepressants" before his collapse. End+


Posted by: downtownhaiku | Jan 14 2021 23:19 utc | 50

downtownhaiku #42

Thank you for the heads up on johnhelmer. I found this just down the thread...

The USAi Joint Chiefs of Idiocy have truly lost their minds.

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Jan 14 2021 23:25 utc | 52

[Jan 14, 2021] SolarWinds spyware attack - NSA and CIA did it?

Jan 14, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Petri Krohn , Jan 14 2021 12:44 utc | 4

SolarWinds spyware attack - NSA and CIA did it?

All last year we were hearing how Huawei is a threat to US national security. Chinese state operatives would insert spyware into Huawei networking equipment. The software that runs on Huawei equipment is open source and open to inspections. It is unlikely to contain hidden threats. But similar backdoors and spy gates are sure to exist on Western equipment.

The real threat to US "security" comes from the US not being able to install their spyware on European networks.

It seems that a massive US spy operation has just been exposed. The US presidential elections have overshadowed this from the news, but at the end of December this was the top story in the US. Allegedly "Russian hackers" had infiltrated US government organizations. According to Lou Dobbs on Fox News this was a new Pearl Harbor.

The story broke out in mid December when the cyber security company FireEye noticed that their servers had been attacked and the code for their Red Team assessment tools had been stolen. They soon discovered that the attack had utilized a backdoor in SolarWind's Orion IT monitoring and management software. FireEye called it a supply-chain attack.

There are several layers of misinformation in the way the Western media reported this.

  1. Supposedly 18,000 organizations were attacked. This is the number of users of the SolarWinds network management software. No evidence has been presented that any of these organizations were actually attacked.
  2. The attackers were supposedly Russian. Cyber attribution is usually impossible. It could as well have been the NSA or CIA acting as "Russians". Actually no technical analysis has ever been presented that points the attack to Russia. The whole Russia story was invented by the media or by their masters in the US Intelligence Community.
  3. The real story not in how US government organizations were possibly attacked, but in how the spyware found its way into the SolarWinds source code in the first place.

The spyware was part of the source code for the "BusinessLayer.dll" shared library. I find it impossible that the spyware code was somehow inserted from Russia. It is likewise far fetched to assume that some Russian mole was working for SolarWinds and secretly inserting spyware into the source code. No such mole has been arrested. It is more likely that the malware was inserted by US actors.

This "sophisticated supply chain attack" would have been impossible without US insiders in the company. Most likely the whole software team was compromised. The attack vector must have been part of the specification of the software. Proof of this comes from the fact that it has taken several weeks and SolarWinds still has not fixed the problem. The spyware must be so embedded and intertwined with the rest of the software that they would not know what to remove. Instead, they said their "investigations are early and ongoing". They have the source code, yet they have not published any part of it.

No links in this post. I have collected some links and sources on my wiki.

[Jan 14, 2021] 25 Organizations Say Victoria Nuland should not be nominated for undersecretary of state for political affairs, and if nominated should be rejected by the Senate.

Jan 14, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Organization's statement originally published at https://worldbeyondwar.org/nuland

Victoria Nuland, former foreign policy adviser to vice president Dick Cheney, should not be nominated for undersecretary of state [for political affairs], and if nominated should be rejected by the Senate.

Nuland played a key role in facilitating a coup in Ukraine that created a civil war costing 10,000 lives and displacing over a million people. She played a key role in arming Ukraine as well. She advocates radically increased military spending, NATO expansion, hostility toward Russia, and efforts to overthrow the Russian government.

The United States invested $5 billion in shaping Ukrainian politics, including overthrowing a democratically elected president who had refused to join NATO. Then-Assistant Secretary of State Nuland is on video talking about the U.S. investment and on audiotape planning to install Ukraine's next leader, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was subsequently installed.

The Maidan protests, at which Nuland handed out cookies to protesters, were violently escalated by neo-Nazis and by snipers who opened fire on police. When Poland, Germany, and France negotiated a deal for the Maidan demands and an early election, neo-Nazis instead attacked the government and took over. The U.S. State Department immediately recognized the coup government, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk was installed as Prime Minister.

Nuland has worked with the openly pro-Nazi Svoboda Party in Ukraine. She was long a leading proponent of arming Ukraine. She was also an advocate for removing from office the prosecutor general of Ukraine, whom then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed the president to remove.

Nuland wrote this past year that "The challenge for the United States in 2021 will be to lead the democracies of the world in crafting a more effective approach to Russia - one that builds on their strengths and puts stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens."

She added:

" Moscow should also see that Washington and its allies are taking concrete steps to shore up their security and raise the cost of Russian confrontation and militarization. That includes maintaining robust defense budgets, continuing to modernize U.S. and allied nuclear weapons systems, and deploying new conventional missiles and missile defenses, . . . establish permanent bases along NATO's eastern border, and increase the pace and visibility of joint training exercises."

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=830

The United States walked out of the ABM Treaty and later the INF Treaty, began putting missiles into Romania and Poland, expanded NATO to Russia's border, facilitated a coup in Ukraine, began arming Ukraine, and started holding massive war rehearsal exercises in Eastern Europe. But to read Victoria Nuland's account, Russia is simply an irrationally evil and aggressive force that must be countered by yet more military spending, bases, and hostility. Some U.S. military officials say this demonizing of Russia is all about weapons profits and bureaucratic power, no more fact-based than the Steele Dossier that was given to the FBI by Victoria Nuland.

SIGNED BY:

Alaska Peace Center
Center for Encounter and Active Non-Violence
CODEPINK
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
Greater Brunswick PeaceWorks
Jemez Peacemakers
Knowdrones.com
Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
Nukewatch
Peace Action Maine
PEACEWORKERS
Physicians for Social Responsibility – Kansas City
Progressive Democrats of America
Peace Fresno
Peace, Justice, Sustainability NOW!
The Resistance Center for Peace and Justice
RootsAction.org
Veterans For Peace Chapter 001
Veterans For Peace Chapter 63
Veterans For Peace Chapter 113
Veterans For Peace Chapter 115
Veterans For Peace Chapter 132
Wage Peace
World BEYOND War


TimeTraveller 36 minutes ago (Edited)

The funny thing about appointment of Nuland, is that basically every European government hates her.

Those idiots in the EU complained about Trump. Well the American Empire war machine is about to ratchet up a notch or three, btches.

Max21c 50 minutes ago

The U.S. State Department immediately recognized the coup government, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk was installed as Prime Minister.

The Washington establishment immediately recognized the coup government, and Joe Schmoe Biden was installed as ruler.

replaceme 52 minutes ago

Why wouldn't they appoint a murderer?

TimeTraveller 50 minutes ago (Edited)

It is funny that they oppose that. After all, every single person in the Democrat party was in agreement with those foreign coup and wars. If we're going to all of a sudden start pointing the finger, then there would be no Democrats left in congress

aspnaz again 38 minutes ago

Nationalist, extremist, exceptionalist, white supremicists are okay if they are democrats.

eatapeach 13 minutes ago

She's an Israel-firster, thus has a pass?

TimeTraveller 51 minutes ago

Those 25 organizations are about to be cancelled. Social Media thought police will be working overtime tonight.

You_Cant_Quit_Me 52 minutes ago

So we go around the world interfering with every country's internal affairs but when they do it to the US is meddling in US elections.

does nooner know how hypocritical Washington sounds?

Ms No PREMIUM 36 minutes ago

"pro-Nazi Svoboda party"

That is a headfake there. They are definitely tyrannical and Bolshevik, but not targeting Jewish people.

As a matter of fact Nuland's Council on Foreign Relations huband-brother (whatever they really are) is a Kagan, like Kagan-ovich, and that ain't a coincidence.

So you can see what the mob did there. It helps with plausible deniability down the road when they get charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, terrorism, aggression, etc

xious 37 minutes ago

They don't care what you think. You will watch child molesters on TV and like it.

TryingSomethingNew 38 minutes ago

But she's Jewish and a woman, right? Those 25 organizations are clearly Anti-Semitic and sexist.

Ms No PREMIUM 35 minutes ago

Why would a Jewish Mobster set up a Nazi like color revolutionary group and coup the Ukraine with it?

Already looking at plausible deniability down the road. Nobody's *** is covered anywhere but theirs. Their apparatchiks should ponder that.

Pliskin 43 minutes ago

Amurikans should keep the fcuk out of other countries affairs...!

Sad-sacks!

Dzerzhhinsky 48 minutes ago

People think Zionists are anti Nazi, but Zionism is the non Christian version of Nazism. Herzl the founder of the Zionist party was enamoured with the Nazis, but they rejected him on religious grounds.

It's natural for Nuland and the other Kaganites to be in bed with Ukrainian Nazis.

Ms No PREMIUM 22 minutes ago remove link

I remember Lavrov getting grilled by angry journalists about why Russia wasn't bombing the **** out of the color revolutionaries that took the Ukraine with US money.

He basically said, What would you have us do, cause countless deaths of our own Russian speaking people? They don't care about their deaths but we have to.

Then the first thing the US did was put in illegal bioweapons labs in the Ukraine. There was a super weird outbreak prior to the color revolution takeover too..Then Russians were really pissed off. So Putin drew red line in Syria

Russia will get the Ukraine back someday. They have to. It was their bread basket during last grand minimum.

bluskyes 14 minutes ago

perhaps, when the western threat become stronger than ethnic bias. Though it will probably split first.

Anthraxed 38 minutes ago

Victoria Noodlebrain should be on Interpol's top 10 most wanted list.

Cautiously Pessimistic 49 minutes ago

Man....I had all but forgotten about many of these scumbags that are resurfacing now in the Biden administration. This woman should be waterboarded until deceased.

Dzerzhhinsky 46 minutes ago

It's always the same people, the front men change, but behind the scenes it's always the same people.

RKKA 6 minutes ago

Again, all these demons of the Obama era are striving for power. During the Trump presidency, we have already forgotten about these devils.

Victoria Nuland, her real Jewish surname is Nudelman, her parents are Moldovan ****. The parents of the former Ukrainian President Poroshenko, who seized power as a result of the Maidan and the coup d'etat, are also Moldovan **** by the name of Valtsman. Already in adulthood, Petr Valtsman took the name of his wife and became - Poroshenko. They are the father and mother of the war in Ukraine, and Joe Biden blessed them for this.

Another Ukrainian oligarch, also a ***, Igor Kolomoisky, financed the Ukrainian nationalist battalions of Azov, Dnepr and Aydar. Tell me, what are these Nazis who are financed and serve the ****? Adolf spins tirelessly in his coffin!

And you probably thought that the **** are such poor and offended children of the Holocaust and the Nazis are their enemies? No, **** and Nazis merged in violent ecstasy and it is time to introduce the term - Jewish Nazism into the lexicon!

de tocqueville's ghost 28 minutes ago

that was a good four years...no new wars. Good going liberals, you voted for a war monger.

Lt. Shicekopf 14 minutes ago

Yes! Maybe we can do to all kinds of countries what we did to Libya. The continuing calamity that has been going on in Libya since Obama and Hillary got done with them has been studiously ignored by all the Western media. Anarchy, chaos, death, an open slave market in which black Africans are bought and sold by Arab traders. All good stuff to the American left.

David Q. Little 45 minutes ago

Joe and Hunter owe her a favor.

Musum 19 minutes ago

Neocons are returning with a vengeance.

Death2Fiat 28 minutes ago

Her job is to destroy the US and do the bidding of the Globalists.

tbone654 28 minutes ago

none of it matters... with the dems controlling everything the [M]ilitary [I]ndustrial [I]ntelligence [C]omplex is gonna ramp up and spend a crap-ton on wars all over the globe... it's how it works when they have the throttle... everyone was worried about Trump, but he de-escalated everywhere...

The people have spoken (I mean cheated) and now they must be punished... Ed Koch

Lyman54 34 minutes ago

Yatsenyuk, Nulands pick, was given a Canadian passport. Likely hiding in Manitoba.

ThomasEdmonds 36 minutes ago

Some things in this life don't matter and Biden cares squat. Perhaps these groups can express their contempt for Samantha Power as well. Let's extend that to his foreign policy team.

WTFUD 13 minutes ago remove link

Joseph Biden reminds me of Hedley Lamar in Blazing Saddles, forming a posse of the biggest wackjobs available.

As long as he doesn't put Hunter in charge of the Afghani Poppy Crop Investment Fund then his Middle-East and Central Asian policy could prove fruitful.

[Jan 14, 2021] America-Europe began to be ignored as a boring mistress

Jan 14, 2021 | alaff84.wordpress.com

The 16th big press conference of Russian President Vladimir Putin has drawn a line. In the history of the "concentration of Russia", a thirty-year period has come to an end, characterized by successively advancing: fascination with the West, doubt in the West, and disillusionment with Western "values". Russia has entered a new period.

During the final press conference of Putin, an incident occurred that caused a lot of funny comments in Russian society and in the Russian press. BBC journalist Steven Rosenberg asked the Russian President: "Is Vladimir Putin personally responsible for the deterioration of relations with Western countries? Or is Russia all these 20 years of Putin's rule "white and fluffy"? And, in addition, as expected, [he asked] "how is it going with the investigation into the poisoning of Navalny?"

A dialogue ensued, during which the British journalist looked rather pathetic, to which everyone paid attention. But the result of this conversation, although everyone quoted it, was not appreciated by anyone. In the end [of the dialogue], it was said that Putin is responsible for the people of Russia and before the people of Russia, and that yes, we are white and fluffy, especially compared to you.

I can understand how the British journalist felt at this time. The world collapsed around him. From his point of view, such an end to the conversation was simply impossible. He was not taught this.

Recollection of the present

I know very well what I am saying. In 1993, together with another three dozen diplomats representing all post-Soviet republics (including Russia) and all post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe (then none of them were members of either NATO or the EU, although everyone already dreamed of), I was at diplomatic internship in the UK. Among other things, we were offered an educational format for communicating with the Western press, which (what a coincidence) was represented by a rather elderly lady from the BBC. She explained to us for a long time and tediously that we, as government officials, would have to listen carefully to the position of journalists and if the journalist himself (especially a Western one) became interested in some information or pointed out some political error, then the information should be provided immediately, and the error should be corrected with an apology.

She talked for about forty minutes. I waited until she was exhausted and asked: "Why?" I waited on purpose. Usually, in such cases, our Western friends simply repeat their monologue. But the journalist was already quite second-hand, she had fizzled out over the previous hour and, losing her guard, missed a hit. She answered with a question to the question: "What do you mean why?".

about:blank

It was then that I explained to her that in any country, Great Britain is no exception, there are a lot of journalists from mass media. And each of them will be happy to interview a government official and receive exclusive information on his (official's) terms. And such "smart" ones as she won't even get into the waiting room. There are many ways to avoid accreditation under a plausible pretext. And after her publication is given to understand that no one will ever speak to this journalist in this country, she will simply be fired for incompetence or sent to the Papuans, from where one report is published every ten years.

This dialogue took place in the summer of 1993. I was 27 then. I think that Steven Rosenberg was then at the same (plus or minus a couple of years) age. I have long forgotten the name of the BBC lady, but I will never forget her face. She looked at me as if the gates of hell had opened behind me and the entire infernal army was about to rush at her. Rosenberg's face was half hidden by a mask, but it could not hide his confusion, further emphasized by a stampede from the press conference.

Let me stress again that I understand him well and sympathize with him. 27 years ago, when the incident I described above happened, journalists already liked to speculate about the "fourth power", but most of them themselves did not really believe in this thesis. Nevertheless, open disregard for the "rights of the press" was not comme il faut even then. Like "homophobia" about ten years later.

Since then, the young and then seasoned BBC journalist Steven Rosenberg was taught for 27 years that he was not just a "fourth power", but a representative of Western civilizers in a semi-primitive world that dreams of becoming like the West. Stephen is the bearer of civilization. Any of his statements is a priori true, and the authorities of the "wild tribes" to whom he brings civilization must justify themselves to him and immediately rush to eliminate the shortcomings he has noticed.

"Russia is disappointed with Europe's inability to defend its interests on its own"

And after all, for a long time it was so. Including in Russia. Not that the Kremlin believed in the Western "mission of good offices", but they proceeded from the fact that compromise is better than enmity and were ready to make reasonable concessions in anticipation of reciprocal steps. It cannot be said that this strategy has completely failed to justify itself. Part of the Western world, especially in the EU and especially in Germany and Italy, really strives to build equal pragmatic relations with Russia on the basis of a mutually acceptable compromise.

But the part is not the whole, and on the whole, the Western world retains its hostility towards Russia, poorly hidden by unfounded arrogance. Moreover, it is clear that despite the strengthening of the Western political circles sympathetic to our country, this trend will not be broken in the coming years. But then it will be too late. The window of opportunity will close.

Any political decision is possible and expedient within a certain time frame. If someone does not have time to meet these deadlines, then they have to implement a different version of the future. That is why not a single serious state works according to the principle of no alternative. There are always fallbacks, maybe not as good, but not disastrous, usually just less profitable. But those who are late for the joint train to the future remain at a broken trough.

2020 was the year of summing up the results in Russian-European relations. At the level of statements by politicians and press materials, at the level of visits, agreements and active events, the fading of Russia's interest in the European vector and the redirection of the dominant of its foreign policy to the Far and Middle East became noticeable.

The last warning was the autumn speeches of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in which it was stated openly that Russia is disappointed with Europe's inability to defend its interests on its own and, given this factor, does not expect anything else from cooperation with the West and does not plan to unilaterally take into account the opinion and the interests of the West.

about:blank

Perhaps in the UK or specifically on the BBC, being immersed in their Brexit, Lavrov was not heard. But that's their problem. Russia is not doing anything out of the blue. Before openly telling the West that "We didn't actually want to work with them" a long-term (stretching over a decade and a half) work was carried out to search for alternative markets, to import substitution of critical products imported from the West, to strengthen the army, to recreate the ocean-going fleet, gaining allies, creating military bases controlling trade routes that are critical for Russia.

The West missed this entire era of "concentration of Russia" (the expression of Chancellor Gorchakov). Already the second time the West misses (the first "concentration" in the XXI century ended in 2008). In Europe and the United States they consoled themselves with the fact that Russia is a "colossus with feet of clay", that it does not have sufficient resources even to intervene in the situation in the post-Soviet space, that "Moscow is bluffing", that the West is indispensable because it is a "civilizational choice" etc.

And suddenly, in 2020, the collective West saw that Russia's positioning towards it had changed dramatically. If earlier [the West's] claims were heard, explanations were given, Russia was trying to prove something, now Europe began to be ignored as an annoying mistress. With some countries, the Kremlin has stopped talking altogether, with some it talks, but "without respect."

"Yes, we are white and fluffy"! -- But only for ourselves. So what will you do to us?

Western journalists, especially BBC journalists, do not ask random questions at press conferences of heads of state. BBC is a state corporation, its activities are aimed at realizing the state interests of Great Britain, including collecting information using the possibilities of journalism. By asking the question "Are you white and fluffy?" -- the leading circles of the West probed the soil and were ready to hear anything in response, except what sounded: "Yes, we are white and fluffy" -- and your opinion on this issue interests us least of all.

This is the point, the end of the long-term flirtation between Russia and the West, which the West hoped to start up in an absolute moral and material gain, and suddenly sees itself in the role of "Ariadne abandoned." Given the Western vindictiveness, such public humiliation of it became possible only following the results of a decade and a half of well-coordinated, albeit invisible, work of all Russian state structures, including state-owned companies.

In 2014, the West was surprised to learn that Russia is able to ensure its food security (over the next six years, Moscow has been steadily increasing its food exports). In 2015, the West became convinced of the stability of the Russian financial system, which it never managed to break. In 2016, the West still laughed at the "cartoons" and argued that in reality Russia did not have demonstrated weapons systems, because it could never be. Since 2018, he has been forced to admit his critical lag in the military sphere. In 2017-2018 the West suddenly learned that Russia concentrates on itself the supply of liquefied gas, for which the West was a de facto monopoly, one by one introducing the corresponding terminals in the North and the Far East (which makes the fight against Nord Stream 2 and other flows senseless, since Russian gas will come to Europe by a route alternative to the Ukrainian one, if not through gas pipelines, then with the help of gas carriers). By 2020, the West learned that Russia is also able to build gas carriers on its own (as well as other ships and vessels of any class).

In parallel, international systems of cooperation between Russia and China, Iran, Turkey and Egypt were being built. If, until about 2014, Russia's priority was to ensure internal stability and security in the context of a likely break with the West, then the emphasis in domestic policy shifted to disavowing the ideological expansion of the West, and in foreign policy to building alternative trade and economic ties, securing promising markets. and partners.

All this, of course, is not as beautiful as the even ranks of the royal grenadiers, bravely breaking the enemy's resistance under a hail of grapeshot. But for the latter to become possible, many years of routine work are needed to create an independent economy capable of meeting the needs of the army and the people in any conditions, for a period of time of any length, as well as to provide the rear with reliable military-political alliances.

about:blank

And only after many years of efforts of millions of people, someone alone can smile and say to the unfortunate journalist, turning over his head to the collective West: "Yes, we are white and fluffy!" -- So what will you do to us?

In the history of Russia, a thirty-year period has come to an end, characterized by successively advancing: fascination with the West, doubt in the West, and disillusionment with Western "values." The line has been drawn. Russia has entered a new period characterized by indifference towards the West and a lack of illusions about all of its current partners and allies. We leave ideals for home use, for external use we have only interests. Russia itself has built its own well-being and is going to use it itself. And whoever doesn't like it, can cry, or gnaw the earth, or bite his elbows. We are "white and fluffy", but only for ourselves.

--

Rostislav Ischenko, 21.12.2020 / Source .

[Jan 13, 2021] Biden has surrounded himself with dual allegiance appointees in the critical security agencies so that he cannot achieve peace or make progress with any of his (foolishly) perceived enemy nations. He will find it almost impossible to negotiate in any meaningful way with Iran or China or Russia or Iraq

Jan 13, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Jan 12 2021 20:43 utc | 20

The apartheid settler gang is beneath contempt. It blocks supply of vaccines for covid to the Palestinian people and blockades their trade and freedom of travel and navigation. Like the USA they have totally filled up with hubris and lost their way in the world.

Biden has surrounded himself with dual allegiance appointees in the critical security agencies so that he cannot achieve peace or make progress with any of his (foolishly) perceived enemy nations. He will find it almost impossible to negotiate in any meaningful way with Iran or China or Russia or Iraq or Syria or pretty much any other nation that is invaded by his armies or sanctioned by his idiot decisions or threatened by Israel's belligerence.

The tensions have been incredibly heightened in many nations due to the coronavirus transmission within their populations and the persistent suspicion that it has a USA origin. Any USAi pretense of negotiating in good faith in these circumstances is virtually impossible. All the more so when reactionaries lead both Israel and USA.

Biden is right when he says nothing will change. His ally in the middle east, Israel, has an arsenal of formidable power sufficient to command an uncomfortable peace in any circumstance. Yet it has no integrity to clinch a deal with anybody such is the universal distrust of their intentions. Time and again this illegal settler state has mauled every neighbor in a most grievous way. Every week they attack Syria with missiles! The aggrieved neighbors will not forget or forgive the treachery. That is just how it is.

There are no statesmen in the USA or Israel with the nous or capacity to find a way out.


fyi , Jan 12 2021 21:48 utc | 29

Mr. karlof1

US is still digging herself in the religious war against Islam.

She cannot offer anything to Iranians any longer - Mr. Trump's war against Iran had eviscerated whatever US or EU had to offer to Iran.

US cannot even end the war in Palestine; she does not have that power.

fyi , Jan 12 2021 21:49 utc | 30
Mr. steven t johnson

Israelis are not Western, they are Eastern European and Middle Easterners for the most part.

They lack the culture of Western Europe.

[Jan 13, 2021] I believe due to strategic failure of maximum pressure to subdue Iran and more importantly due to US' own strategic necessity to keep China and Russia away from ME, US and EU will want to decouple or even prevent Iran from a mutual strategic necessity or alliance with China or and Russia it might be possible US will adopt a new posture toward Iran.

Jan 13, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kooshy , Jan 12 2021 20:23 utc | 18

Few observations on Biden, Iran and the nuclear deal.
I don't know if US will or will not return to implement it's obligations under the UNSC 2231, nor I know if US Jewish lobby will allow that. But for sure Iran will not renegotiate for new terms or a new deal on nuclear program secondly under no circumstances Iran will negotiate (with anyone) her conventional military capabilities or her policies and alliances toward her allies in the region since these are real matter of national security for Iran. But also there are signs from Biden that should be considered. Firstly almost all Biden's national security team are diplomats with experience negotiating with Iran that could be a signal on policy change, secondly I believe due to strategic failure of maximum pressure to subdue Iran and more importantly due to US' own strategic necessity to keep China and Russia away from ME, US and EU will want to decouple or even prevent Iran from a mutual strategic necessity or alliance with China or and Russia for that reason IMO it might be possible US will adopt a new posture toward Iran. I also believe Iran's foreign policy in ME is basically based on her long term interests and security with her regional alliances, multipolarity, and stability in her region, therefore any proposal by US or EU to agitate this policy will be rejected or not adopted by Iran.


uncle tungsten , Jan 12 2021 20:43 utc | 20

The apartheid settler gang is beneath contempt. It blocks supply of vaccines for covid to the Palestinian people and blockades their trade and freedom of travel and navigation. Like the USA they have totally filled up with hubris and lost their way in the world.

Biden has surrounded himself with dual allegiance appointees in the critical security agencies so that he cannot achieve peace or make progress with any of his (foolishly) perceived enemy nations. He will find it almost impossible to negotiate in any meaningful way with Iran or China or Russia or Iraq or Syria or pretty much any other nation that is invaded by his armies or sanctioned by his idiot decisions or threatened by Israel's belligerence.

The tensions have been incredibly heightened in many nations due to the coronavirus transmission within their populations and the persistent suspicion that it has a USA origin. Any USAi pretense of negotiating in good faith in these circumstances is virtually impossible. All the more so when reactionaries lead both Israel and USA.

Biden is right when he says nothing will change. His ally in the middle east, Israel, has an arsenal of formidable power sufficient to command an uncomfortable peace in any circumstance. Yet it has no integrity to clinch a deal with anybody such is the universal distrust of their intentions. Time and again this illegal settler state has mauled every neighbor in a most grievous way. Every week they attack Syria with missiles! The aggrieved neighbors will not forget or forgive the treachery. That is just how it is.

There are no statesmen in the USA or Israel with the nous or capacity to find a way out.

groucho , Jan 12 2021 20:45 utc | 21

Did I hear someone say something about "the tail wagging the dog" ?

Dr. George W Oprisko , Jan 13 2021 0:30 utc | 50

A new JCPOA will obviously have to eliminate all sanctions. But that might not be enough. Iran might want compensation for the economic damage done, compensation from the UK, France, and Germany as well as the US. Moreover, Iran will want to keep its now much larger stockpile of low-enriched uranium. It might want an even larger stockpile, and the right to enrich to 20%, which it is now doing. A breeder reactor and a plutonium stockpile would be nice, too.

But there are even other demands that might be made: reduction or removal of US/NATO/Israeli forces in the Gulf; reduction or elimination of Israeli nuclear weapons.

That train left the station.

In the past 5 years Iran re-configured it's economy into an autarcic fully industrialized, food secure, and diversified economy. It now earns more from the sale of manufactures and foods than from petroleum. It now manufactures AfraMax tankers, general cargo vessels, and naval vessels. It manufactures cars and trucks, and railroad rolling stock. It built hydro and irrigation schemes. It launches satellites into orbit.

Iran is now pressing ahead with the Arak heavy water reactor.

Khameni just banned import of NATO vaccines, and ordered the country to be vaccinated with Iran's own vaccine.

Khameni and the hard liners will not permit Iran to rejoin or to negotiate any agreements with the "Great Satan". Their line will be the US must show itself to be agreement capable by rejoining the JCPOA and removing any and all sanctions while paying damages too.

Iran will increase the amount of assistance given the Houthis. Trump's declaration of the Houthis as terrorists, benefits the resistance by solidifying their adherence to it. The Houthis must now "go for broke" or surrender. They will not surrender.

The harsh reality is Biden/Harris will be occupied at home suppressing the MAGA crowd. Since this group is 74 million strong, and mostly white, in a country trying to make them second class citizens, will be quite a challenge that. The jury is still out on that one.

Then there is the not so small matter of US oil production dropping like a stone from 12 mmBbl/day to 7 by July with further drops in the following 12 months. This coupled with and likely due to bankruptcies of a large number of producers going forward.

Will be an interesting year.

INDY

[Jan 11, 2021] Trump is a monster of self-centredness.

Notable quotes:
"... I hate virtually all of Trump's policies. I hate his stupidity in continually hiring people who hated him. He could have turned to members of the genuine left -- men such as Stephen Cohen -- for advice. ..."
"... n a classic act of projection, woke Dems accuse Trump of not conceding, whereas in fact they are the ones who never conceded the presidency in 2016. This is so obvious, and yet it has apparently become invisible to most!!! Memory hole opened up like a crack in the earth behind each step. ..."
"... The gullibility of Trump is astounding. He did everything to keep the swamp happy, to keep Israel happy, flipped on Nato and on Russia, had hawks left and right and at the end he will be discarded like a used condom. ..."
"... can't help but think that Donald Trump is a man with no common sense, lacking the real conviction of his words and just not very bright or he was to some degree willfully complicit in this now obviously dire state the U.S. finds itself. ..."
"... If anyone thinks there is some good news because this murderous, warring empire is coming to an end, I suggest you think again. The war machine is still fully intact and funded. The international bankers who are in complete control are buying up everything and are planning on a 'reset' dictated by them. To the world! Understandably, there will likely be a few countries who do not feel inclined to agree with this reset and it's terms. There will have to be war to correct this thinking, even if a billion or more are killed. The more the merrier. Less 'useless eaters' to deal with. ..."
Jan 11, 2021 | thesaker.is

Mike from Jersey on January 07, 2021 , · at 8:00 pm EST/EDT

Mr. Roberts is right on point when he says that Trump will be locked up.

The people running the United States are going to make an example of Trump. They will send a message that no "outsider" should ever again dare to run for President.

Trump will spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Mark my words.

citymouse on January 08, 2021 , · at 1:07 am EST/EDT

I fear you are right. In this case it might be better if he weren't such a street fighter, because standing up for himself to me isn't worth the price he will pay. He should get himself and his family post haste to a country with no extradition and simply live the rest of his life in peace. No one needs the vitriol that has been and will continue to be heaped on him.

Jimmy on January 08, 2021 , · at 2:58 am EST/EDT

Trump _should_ spend the rest of his life behind bars -- for contributing to the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings. Ordinary Syrians, Iranians, Cubans, and Venezuelans died because of the murderous sanctions Washington put on their countries, and Pres. Trump did nothing to help -- and in fact, intensified them.

Very similar to his indifference to the plight of Edward Snowden & Julian Assange. Trump is a monster of self-centredness. In fact, in the words of his own former White House Chief of Staff, he is 'the most damaged human being I have ever met.' Just the sort of creature we would expect to find as head of the US empire

James on January 08, 2021 , · at 5:02 am EST/EDT

I'm afraid you are spot on -- Trump lies to the World when he was running for President & then broke almost all of his promises -especially to drain the Swamp. He also unforgivably allowed the Jews to take over Palistinian land etc. He has alot to answer for even if he wasn't as War like as the 3 Presidents before him.

augusto on January 08, 2021 , · at 8:37 am EST/EDT

YOu re problably right, Jimmy.
But it turns out differently when one gets the point where Trump locked up prospect here is not him but a whole lot of american people trying to get rid of globalism and the need for wars
Who might be buried up along with him.

Bill Osborne Jr on January 08, 2021 , · at 9:40 am EST/EDT

Trump should have pardoned Snowden and Assange instead of Jared Kushner's criminal father.

Boris Kazlov on January 08, 2021 , · at 4:14 pm EST/EDT

You are only looking to his overseas policy.
That is an imposition of the military and Zionists, when you dance with a gorilla you gotta him a banana.

eagle eye on January 08, 2021 , · at 6:43 pm EST/EDT

But not a word about the crimes of those who preceded him, which included the ultimate crime, that of engaging in unjustified warfare?

Your post implies you have a standard of behaviour you are judging Trump by. By definition it must be universally applied, otherwise all you are seeking is the selective imposition of your view.

Katherine on January 09, 2021 , · at 9:19 pm EST/EDT

I agree. If Trump deserves lockup, so do Obama, Bush, and the Clintons.

I hate virtually all of Trump's policies. I hate his stupidity in continually hiring people who hated him. He could have turned to members of the genuine left -- men such as Stephen Cohen -- for advice.

But that is not the point. Since 2016 those who tried to eliminate Trump did so not for his real crimes but for made-up. Basically his crime of being president in the first place.

I n a classic act of projection, woke Dems accuse Trump of not conceding, whereas in fact they are the ones who never conceded the presidency in 2016. This is so obvious, and yet it has apparently become invisible to most!!! Memory hole opened up like a crack in the earth behind each step.

Trump's crime, for which he may actually be locked up, was in truth just winning the presidency in 2016 and humiliating Hillary (whom everyone hated anyhow). I am becoming quite terrified of people I have known all my my life and even am related to.

Katherine

Disaffected on January 08, 2021 , · at 7:56 am EST/EDT

Trump is already charred toast. It appears that he's not even in charge now. Self-preservation is his only concern now.

Maltus on January 08, 2021 , · at 7:49 pm EST/EDT

Corrected assessment. His wealth and his 5 children (and their future) are too much of a liability for him to do the necessary. His policy of appeasement will not work though with the rabid bolshevik kabal.

I think he and his family will be persecuted and likely prosecuted unless the has the foresight to move to Russia and save his skin.

Gorgeous George on January 08, 2021 , · at 1:19 pm EST/EDT

The gullibility of Trump is astounding. He did everything to keep the swamp happy, to keep Israel happy, flipped on Nato and on Russia, had hawks left and right and at the end he will be discarded like a used condom.

Russia saw it from the get go, at the end he will have the full weight of both parties against him, and instead of locking her up it will be the other way around. The cowards have no sense of decency, they will not show any good will like he did.

Trump betrayed his base, failed to organize again and again, put his trust in all the wrong people and now is done. I'll be surprised if he doesn't face jailtime on some trumped up charges.

For all his charisma and good intentions he turned out a clueless clown, sad clown at the end. History will not be kind, and neither will the victors.

True Americans have seen their last train leave the station, it will take time to realize that there are no more trains. Game over.

Craig Mouldey on January 08, 2021 , · at 2:07 pm EST/EDT

I thought this was a good summation by Dr. Roberts. I can't help but think that Donald Trump is a man with no common sense, lacking the real conviction of his words and just not very bright or he was to some degree willfully complicit in this now obviously dire state the U.S. finds itself. Maybe he owed the Rothschild clan a favour.

If anyone thinks there is some good news because this murderous, warring empire is coming to an end, I suggest you think again. The war machine is still fully intact and funded. The international bankers who are in complete control are buying up everything and are planning on a 'reset' dictated by them. To the world! Understandably, there will likely be a few countries who do not feel inclined to agree with this reset and it's terms. There will have to be war to correct this thinking, even if a billion or more are killed. The more the merrier. Less 'useless eaters' to deal with.

Try to see something good in creation every day. Try to do good every day. This world as it is does not have much time. Someone said that what cannot go on forever won't! At some point, the One who gives life to all will say it is enough. Some of us just celebrated his most blessed nativity.

Alabama on January 08, 2021 , · at 2:26 pm EST/EDT

This guy biden is king of promises, and as every year goes by and so many promises are not met, don't think these people wont show up on D.C.'s doorstep looking for revenge.

This is just the tip of the iceburg.

Disaffected on January 08, 2021 , · at 3:20 pm EST/EDT

Who better to preside over the collapse of the empire? The usual rules will apply: the feckless Dems – always at their abysmal worst when they assume power – will blame the "evil Reps" for everything that goes wrong (and there will be plenty – although none of it will ever be discussed publicly!), and the Reps will be at their sterling obstructionist best. Talk of impeachment for Biden – who will be nowhere in sight for most of his term – will linger throughout his term, while Trump will soon be prosecuted and jailed, his entire administration canceled from the official histories, with Queen Hillary named "Presidentess in Exile" for 2016-2020 due to alleged Russian interference with her rightful coronation. The Empire will trumpet from on high for all to hear that this signals the glorious victory of US Democracy (angelic chorus sounds here) over the forces of darkness, or some such agitprop; and the skies will clear, the birds will sing, and a rosy glow will return to the cheeks of all the fair maidens and indeterminant gendered of our great land. The masks, of course, will remain firmly in place, as the "new normal" slowly becomes merely business as usual, and the sheeple graze contentedly in their prison stalls, content in the knowledge that Big Brother is looking out for their health and welfare, at least until the ritual sacrificial slaughter of the lambs should be deemed necessary. For the good of all, of course. Should all make for some excellent reality TV.

Alabama on January 09, 2021 , · at 7:35 am EST/EDT

Well the empire is going to collapse the citizens before it collapses, and even before the empire collapse comes a global scare of epic proportions to shake and rattle the cage for those whom are not prepared.

Ken Leslie on January 08, 2021 , · at 2:29 pm EST/EDT

The moronic face of the fake revolution – looks like the fake American wrestling – only Hulk Hogan was more convincing.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1347035563635986432

evilempire on January 08, 2021 , · at 2:54 pm EST/EDT

Trump isn't going anywhere. I was at the rally in DC and listened to his
entire speech on the ellipse. He stated that he would not concede. With
this assurance why would the demonstrators have any reason to aggressively
breach the Capitol building? The whole thing was a staged provocation by antifa.
There are videos of how this was staged all over the internet. Let us all
hope and pray that the Scarlet(Whore) color revolution against Trump is finally
eradiated and extirpated now that all the Deep Satanists have been exposed for
their participation in the coup and election fraud.

Beirut on January 08, 2021 , · at 3:53 pm EST/EDT

The question has been asked – what is the US military going to do? Will they just stay put and watch the theft unfold?
Whilst many commentators were soiling themselves in phantasies of a pro trump military coup to end the charade, drain the swamp and burn down DC, PCR had a very clear view (expressed elsewhere): why would the military object to a new leadership if it promises more war, more blood, more money? It won't, it will welcome it in fact.

Be it as it may, and despite all the stinkin' lies about the election I would think it is too tall an order for a non-murrican to mourn the self-destruction of the most evil, ghastly, ruthless hegemon the world has seen in the last 100 years.

Ken Leslie on January 08, 2021 , · at 4:38 pm EST/EDT

Dear Beirut,

I second the sentiment. It's not even that. The media are full of Muricans' moaning about their fate. It's everywhere – and on top of that, the scumbags are accusing China and Russia for their "tribulations".

We don't care and we don't want to hear about how hard the life is for Billy Bob who would die for the very criminals that have condemned him to a life of meth, moonshine and malingering – while telling him that he is solely responsible for his own miserable existence.

There is a huge big world elsewhere that is currently booming – thousand flowers are blooming despite the oppression by the parasitical cancerous sub-empire – and yet, we obsess over whether Trump is a fraud or not.

I suppose it provides a great platform for ranting :-)

[Jan 11, 2021] Is America's Future a Civil War, by Paul Craig Roberts -

Notable quotes:
"... The military would support whomever pays their salary and their pensions, i.e. the Establishment. However, as Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, the U.S. military, while possessing remarkable firepower when taken on directly and openly, is quite vulnerable. The U.S. military is essentially mercenaries. Mercenaries work for pay. Mercenaries are not willing to die for a cause. You can't spend money if you're dead. ..."
Jan 11, 2021 | www.unz.com

As a person who grew up in the glorious aftermath of World War II, it never occurred to me that in my later years I would be pondering whether the United States would end in civil war or a police state. In the aftermath of the stolen presidential election, it seems a 50-50 toss up.

There is abundant evidence of a police state. One feature of a police state is controlled explanations and the suppression of dissent. We certainly have that in abundance.

Experts are not permitted forums in which to challenge the official position on Covid.

Teachers are suspended for giving offense by using gender pronouns.

Recording stars are dropped by their recording studios for attending the Trump rally. Parents ratted on by their own children are fired from their jobs for attending the Trump rally. https://www.rt.com/usa/512048-capitol-riot-employees-fired/ Antifa is free to riot, loot, intimidate and hassle, but Trump supporters are insurrectionists.

White people are racists who use hateful words and concepts, but those who demonize whites are righting wrongs.

Suppression of dissent and controlling behavior are police state characteristics. It might be less clear to some why dictating permissible use of language is police state control. Think about it this way. If your use of pronouns can be controlled, so can your use of all other words. As concepts involve words, they also can be controlled. In this way inconvenient thoughts and expressions along with accurate descriptions find their way into the Memory Hole.

With the First Amendment gone, or restricted to the demonization of targeted persons, such as "the Trump Deplorables," "white supremacists," "Southern racists," the Second Amendment can't have much life left. As guns are associated with red states, that is, with Trump supporters, outlawing guns is a way to criminalize the red half of the American population that the Establishment considers "deplorable." Those who stand on their Constitutional right will be imprisoned and become cheap prison labor for America's global corporations.

Could all this lead to a civil war or are Americans too beat down to effectively resist? That we won't know until it is put to the test.

Are there clear frontlines? Identity Politics has divided the people across the entire country. The red states are only majority red. It is tempting to see the frontiers as the red center against the blue Northeast and West coasts, but that is misleading. Georgia is a red state with a red governor and legislature, but there were enough Democrats in power locally to steal the presidential and US senate elections.

Another problem for reds is that large cities -- the distribution centers -- such as Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles -- are in blue hands as are ports and international airports. Effectively, this cuts reds off from outside resources.

What would the US military do? Clearly, the Joint Chiefs and the military/security complex are establishment and not anti-establishment Trumpers. With the soldiers themselves now a racial and gender mix, the soldiers would be as divided as the country. Those not with the Establishment would lack upper level support.

Where are the youth and younger adults? They are in both camps depending on their education. Many of the whites who went to university have been brainwashed against themselves, and regard white Americans as "systemic racists" or "white supremacists" and feel guilt. Those who did not go to university for the most part have experienced to their disadvantage the favoritism given to people of color and have resentment.

What about weapons? How can the reds lose when guns are a household item and blues would never dirty themselves by owning one? The answer is that unlike the War of Northern Aggression in the 1860s, today the weapons in the hands of the military are devastating compared to those in the hands of the public. Unlike in the past, it is impossible for a citizens' militia to stand against the weapons and body armor that the military has. So, unless the military splits, the reds are outgunned. Never believe that the Establishment would not release chemical and biological agents against red forces. Or for that matter nuclear weapons.

What about communications? We know for an absolute fact that the tech monopolies are aligned with the Establishment against the people. So much so that President Trump, in the process of being set-up for prosecution, has been cut off from communicating with his supporters both in social media and email.

The American Establishment is doing to President Trump exactly what it did to Ukrainian President Yanukovych in Washington's orchestrated "Maidan Revolution," called "the Revolution of Dignity" by the liars at Wikipedia, and precisely what it did to Chavez, Maduro, and would like to do to Putin.

Suppose an American civil war occurs. How is it likely to play out? Before investigating this, first consider how the Establishment could prevent it by bringing the red states to its defense. The Trump supporters are the only patriots in the American population. They tend to wear the flag on their sleeve. In contrast, blue state denizens define patriotism as acknowledging America's evils and taking retribution on those white racists/imperialists who committed the evils. In blue states, riots against the "racist system" result in defunding the police. If the Antifa and Black Lives Matter militias were sicced on the Biden regime, red state patriots might see "their country" under attack. It is possible that the "Proud Boys" would come to Biden's defense, not because they believe in Biden but because America is under attack and he is "our president." Alternatively, an Antifa attack on the Biden regime could be portrayed as an unpatriotic attack on America and be used to discourage red state opposition to the police state, just as "Insurrection" has resulted in many Trump supporters declaring their opposition to violence. In other words, it is entirely possible that the patriotism of the "Trump Deplorables" would split the red state opposition and lead to defeat.

Assuming that the Establishment is too arrogant and sure of itself or too stupid to think of this ploy, how would a civil war play out? The Establishment would do everything possible to discredit the case of the "rebels." The true rebels, of course, would be the Establishment which has overthrown the Constitutional order, but no media would make that point. Controlling the media, the Establishment, knowing of the patriotism of its opponents, would portray the "rebels" as foreign agents seeking to overthrow American Democracy.

The "foreign threat" always captures the patriot's attention. We see it right now with Trump supporters falling for the disinformation that Switzerland and Italy are behind the stolen election. Previously, it was Dominion servers in Germany and Serbia that did the deed.

On whose head will the Establishment place the blame for "the War Against America"? There are three candidates: Iran, China, and Russia. Which will the Establishment choose?

To give Iran credit conveys too much power to a relatively small country over America. To blame Iran for our civil war would be belittling.

To blame China won't work, because Trump blamed China for economically undermining America and Trump supporters are generally anti-China. So accusing the red opposition with being China agents would not work.

The blame will be placed on Russia.

This is the easy one. Russia has been the black hat ever since Churchill's Iron Curtain speech in 1946. Americans are accustomed to this enemy. The Cold War reigned from the end of World War II until the Soviet Collapse in 1991. Many, including retired American generals, maintain that the Soviet collapse was faked to put us off guard for conquest.

When the Establishment decided to frame President Trump, the Establishment chose Russia as Trump's co-conspirator against American Democracy. Russiagate, orchestrated by the CIA and FBI, ensured for three years that Trump was accused in the Western media of being in cahoots with Russia. Despite the lack of any evidence, a large percentage of the American and world population was convinced that Trump was put into office by Putin somehow manipulating the vote.

The brainwashing was so successful that three years of Trump sanctions against Russia could not shake the Western peoples back into factual reality.

With Russia as the historic and orchestrated enemy, whatever happens in the United States that can be blamed elsewhere will be blamed on Russia. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes have already associated "Trump's insurrection" with Russia. https://www.rt.com/russia/512071-capitol-violence-consequences-fear/

Suppose that an American civil war becomes intense. Suppose that the Establishment's propaganda against Russia becomes the reigning belief as propaganda almost always becomes, how can the Establishment not finish the insurrection threat by attacking the country responsible? The Establishment would be trapped in its own propaganda. Emotions would run away. Russia would hear threats that would have to be taken seriously.

You can bet that Biden's neocon government will be egging this on. American exceptionalism. American hegemony. Russia's fifth column, the Atlanticist Integrationists, who wish absorption into the degenerate and failing Western World, will echo the charges against Russia. This would make the situation a serious international incident with Russia as the threatened villain.

What would the Kremlin do? Would Russia's leaders accept yet another humiliation and false accusation? Or will the anger of the Russian people forever accused and never stood up for by their own government force the Kremlin into awareness that Russia could be attacked at any moment.

Even if the Kremlin is reluctant to acknowledge the threat of war, what if another of the numerous false warnings of incoming ICBMs is received. Unlike the past, is it believed this time?

The stolen election in America, the emerging American Police State, more vicious and better armed than any in the past, could result in American chaos that could be a dire threat to the Russian Federation.

What Trump and his supporters, and perhaps the Kremlin, do not understand is that real evidence no longer counts . The Establishment makes up the evidence that it needs for its agendas. Consider how easy it was for the Capitol Police to remove barriers and allow some Antifa mixed in with Trump supporters into the Capitol. This was all that was required to create a "Trump led insurrection" that terminated the presentation of evidence of electoral fraud and turned the massive rally of support for Trump into a liability. Trump now leaves the presidency as an "insurrectionist" and is set up for continued harassment and prosecution.

As I previously wrote, the stolen election and its acceptance abroad signifies the failure of Western democracy. The collapse of the Western world and its values will affect the entire world.


Joe Stalin , says: January 10, 2021 at 5:16 pm GMT • 23.4 hours ago

How long did it take for the mighty USA military to restore electric utilities in the face of insurgency in Iraq?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/gg-Zd193j60?feature=oembed

No member of the State wants to be picked off one by one, be it military, cops, leadership or functionaries.

What has been overlooked in the debate over the combat potential of violent extremists is the diffusion of something much more rudimentary and potentially more lethal: basic infantry skills. These include coordinated small-team tactical maneuvers supported by elementary marksmanship. The diffusion of such tactics seems to be underway, and it may generate serious concerns for U.S. security policy in the future if ignored.

https://warontherocks.com/2018/02/shock-of-the-mundane-the-dangerous-diffusion-of-basic-infantry-tactics/

Imagine if fuel pipe lines to urban areas were hit, railroad tracks hit, water processing facilities hit; the vision of an easy victory over Red America would quickly come home to the city dwellers.

Harry Huntington , says: January 10, 2021 at 6:02 pm GMT • 22.6 hours ago
@Joe Stalin /p>

Elections in the US are not about picking winners. They are about making voters complicit in governance by their having voted. The most recent election failed to make the Red voters "complict" because there was no transparency and everyone believes there was fraud. No election with mail in voting in the US will every work because everyone will assume fraud.

In a nation as large as the US with as much concentrated city living, logistics are a nightmare. The next time the lights go out, you may wonder. When your grocery chain runs out of meat, you may wonder. When sewers in your city keep breaking, you may wonder. Thus truly scares me.

Vidi , says: January 10, 2021 at 6:13 pm GMT • 22.4 hours ago

today the weapons in the hands of the military are devastating compared to those in the hands of the public

True enough. However, the weapons and the ammunition don't magically appear; they need to be manufactured somewhere, and those places (and/or their suppliers) can be destroyed.

TG , says: January 10, 2021 at 6:19 pm GMT • 22.3 hours ago

I must disagree. There will be no "civil war" in the United States. The establishment controls the levers of power and all communications and all organized structures. There may be a bunch of disaffected citizens, but they will remain a disorganized mob. Any apparent emergent rival for power will be ruthlessly suppressed, deplatformed, villified, or co-opted. The working class has been effectively divided and will waste its energy fighting itself over crumbs ('diversity').

Disorganized mobs do not fight civil wars.

No, the fate of the United States will be the sort of chaotic autocracy we see in places like Mexico and Brazil. Verging on being a failed state, the rich will nonetheless live lives of great luxury secure in their walled estates. Meanwhile the average person will be crushed into poverty, criminal gangs will flourish, and there will be a tension between the central police and local gangs, but gangs are rarely organized enough to truly challenge centralized states, and life will muddle on. There will be little social cohesion and no real trust of central authorities, but that only matters if you want a strong and unified society. The rich will do fine.

On the other hand, the overall national power will decline, and other powers like China (which for all its flaws has not declared war on the working class, nor does it routinely excuse or celebrate incompetence in leadership) will rise and take its place both on the world stage and as the cutting edge of science and culture.

Wyatt , says: January 10, 2021 at 6:48 pm GMT • 21.8 hours ago
@Vidi

And the people making them don't tend to want those weapons used against their friends and neighbors.

Notsofast , says: January 10, 2021 at 8:03 pm GMT • 20.6 hours ago

to me the biggest outcome of this faux coup/insurrection is the splintering of the republican party. with this schism the trump "populists" have been cleanly pared off of the party and thrown overboard and the remaining party will meekly do the bidding of the neocon deep state that now totally controls both of these sock puppet parties. we will now see both parties calling for a unification of our "indispensable nation". more than likely some false flag will provide the necessary impetus to bury the hatchet and focus us all on our new/old enemy. the only hope i see is an outside chance that so many republicans have been redpilled that the party becomes the new whigs and fades into obscurity, leaving room for new parties to rise from the ash. the dems are ripe for a schism themselves with aoc champing at the bit to kick the boomers to the curb and the bernie bros finally realizing that three card monty is a rigged game. i would love to see the destruction of both of these hopelessly corrupt parties but the deep state cthulhu has its tentacles thoroughly wrapped around our poor planet and anything emerging out of this toxic mess would most likely be even worse. the situation reminds me of voltaire's candide and his sage advice to cultivate your garden.

Anon [912] Disclaimer , says: January 10, 2021 at 8:26 pm GMT • 20.2 hours ago

I'd advise the young to develop a "plan B". Pick another country you find bearable amd study it. Find out what jobs are in demand there. Develop those skills in your spare time (computers, electricians, mechanics, etc.). Practice their language an hour or two per week with online resources/dvd's/books. Research their immigration laws and perhaps contact their embassy.

If it gets really awful for whites here, you may be able to take your family some place more hospitable. Hopefully none of this will be neccessary and the rhetoric will tone down. Trump personally really got under the left's skin. Don't umderestimate Hillary's supporters influence here. They were ticked off. The Obama's too. Perhaps they will calm down a notch now. Have a plan B though young whites.

Citizen of a Silly Country , says: January 10, 2021 at 11:17 pm GMT • 17.4 hours ago

Another insightful article by PCR. However, I must somewhat disagree on some points.

What would the US military do?

The military would support whomever pays their salary and their pensions, i.e. the Establishment. However, as Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, the U.S. military, while possessing remarkable firepower when taken on directly and openly, is quite vulnerable. The U.S. military is essentially mercenaries. Mercenaries work for pay. Mercenaries are not willing to die for a cause. You can't spend money if you're dead.

Think of the Troubles in Ireland.

The Establishment absolutely can deliver a punch to an identifiable opponent, but it can't take a punch. Low level violence directed at officers and politicians would bring them to their knees.

Controlling the media, the Establishment, knowing of the patriotism of its opponents, would portray the "rebels" as foreign agents seeking to overthrow American Democracy.

I agree that they will try. However, I suspect that PCR is underestimating how little faith many whites have in the media.

The Establishment will never be more powerful than it is today. They have inherited institutions, the people to man those institutions and a generally functioning economy. Basically, they stole the keys to car that they didn't create. But the Establishment run those institutions and economy into ground. They will slowly start to show cracks.

Whites need to stay low, start forming small groups and begin preparing for the openings that will come.

Dr. Robert Morgan , says: January 11, 2021 at 1:34 am GMT • 15.1 hours ago

The racial right has been fantasizing about a civil war since forever, but I can't see it. Too many people have too much to lose, there's no real desire for blood, and the people are anyway too soft to initiate or withstand the violence real war would unleash upon them. Further, and in stark contrast to the SJWs and antifa, the few racially conscious whites who fantasize about this are mostly too old to make good soldiers. Also, just like the "God emperor" himself, Trumpers are some of the stupidest people on the face of the earth, largely down with their own enslavement, nauseatingly fond of "law and order", sporting "Blue Lives Matter" badges, etc. Despite being preyed upon by blacks and browns for decades now, they still refuse to become racist. Most of them are Bible thumpers who really believe that race is just skin color, that all are equal before their imaginary friend called God, and that Israel is America's greatest ally. Then too, vast numbers of whites work for the government or its many offshoots such as education, law enforcement, the military, and the defense industry. Civil war would mean they'd be revolting against themselves.

Will America become a police state? In case you haven't noticed, Americans already live in a police state, and have for decades. PCR should know this as well as anyone, as he was part of it during the Reagan years. America is an open-air prison Americans built themselves, and they rat each other out and betray each other to keep themselves ideologically in line. When someone white is doxxed and fired for having bad thoughts, who do you think does the enforcing? For the most part, it's other white people. Fake president and China asset Biden is just the new warden.

Harold Smith , says: January 11, 2021 at 3:45 am GMT • 12.9 hours ago

As a person who grew up in the glorious aftermath of World War II, it never occurred to me that in my later years I would be pondering whether the United States would end in civil war or a police state. In the aftermath of the stolen presidential election, it seems a 50-50 toss up.

In a very meaningful sense we already have a "police state." Why do we have a police state? Because our masters realize that they can't run the whole world from anything resembling a constitutional republic (as the Founders and Framers envisioned it). It's the agenda for complete world domination and control that's driving the domestic oppression. As they continue to squander everything of value on the agenda and take more risks, etc., while the corruption and rot continue to take a toll and the country crumbles, the boot will need to come down ever harder on the neck.

And please stop kidding yourself about Trump. It wasn't for the benefit of Joe and Jill Sixpack that he seized Syrian oilfields, tried to start a war with Iran, tried to overthrow the Maduro government in Venezuela, tried to stop Nord Stream 2, started a trade war with China, pulled out of all the nuclear treaties, etc. Trump wasn't just fully onboard with the agenda, he pursued it enthusiastically.

If Trump's nuclear brinkmanship and aggressive foreign policies aren't promptly reversed, the U.S. may end as a pile of nuclear ash. Comments coming out of Moscow recently seem to suggest that Russia is finally losing its patience with interminable U.S. hostility and may soon start responding more forcefully to U.S./NATO provocations (and Biden's tough talk on Russia isn't helping matters any).

Neither Russia, China nor Iran are going to surrender to the USraeli empire and start taking orders, so either the U.S. "government" must back off and accept a multipolar world or WW3 is still on the table, even by accident.

tanabear , says: January 11, 2021 at 5:45 am GMT • 10.9 hours ago

From Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.

The Civil War in Corcyra

"So savage was the progress of this revolution, and it seemed all the more so because it was one of the first which had broken out. Later, of course, practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state – democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans. In peacetime there would have been no excuse and no desire for calling them in, but in time of war, when each party could always count upon an alliance which would do harm to its opponents and at the same time strengthen its own position, it became a natural thing for anyone who wanted a change of government to call in help from outside.

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings . What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character ; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one's blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all. Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership , since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever. These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime ; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime. If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world . The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps , and each side viewed the other with suspicion. As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves."

Just another serf , says: January 11, 2021 at 6:04 am GMT • 10.6 hours ago

Whether civil war as we may imagine it, or something equally unappealing to our every day lives, something bad is about to happen.

I'm curious though, regarding what I do believe was unprecedented election fraud. How is it possible, after watching the Georgia State Farm arena video, that the President of the United States, with all the power that office should hold, could not force the woman identified in that video, one Ruby Freeman, to answer questions about what we saw? Ruby Freeman was never questioned as far as I can find. How is this possible? Nothing makes sense. Before we begin killing one another, can we do two things; 1. Interrogate Ruby Freeman and 2. Interrogate the killer of Ashli Babbit?

Zarathustra , says: January 11, 2021 at 6:24 am GMT • 10.2 hours ago

Little bit feverish article. And I do have to say no.
Civil war can happen only after hyperinflation accompanied with lawlessness.
And that will happen only if US looses its international position.
Everything depend now on Germany.
If Germany joins China Russia camp than US as a world leader will not mean anything anymore.
China now is courting Europe intensively. Particularly is courting Germany.
Nothing is set yet.
So everybody can relax.
.
Biden is out of his mind. In his speech he said that he wants to increase minimum wage and reestablish unions. That could be a little help also.

shylockcracy , says: January 11, 2021 at 6:58 am GMT • 9.7 hours ago

People living in the core areas of Ziocorporate globalism, like the US/EU, remain mostly oblivious about the nature of their ruling regime than those living in the direct periphery of globalist power. Take Colombia for an example, like Mexico's, all its presidents are subservient to US Ziocorporate power. Last one, a Nobel peace prize winner under whose pre-presidential stint as "Defense" minister oversaw the US-serving Colombian military's systematic massacre of tens of thousands of lower class Colombian youths who were then disguised as guerrillas to cash in rewards paid US Plan Colombia dollars, proceeded, now as president, to negotiate the disarmament of the actual guerrillas under the Obama/Biden regime's orders. Massmurder and massacres maintained an average level.

Then, in 2018, right after the Trumpet, a shamelessly pro-US regime, even for Colombian standards, took over and massacres and massmurder picked right up again, to an average of 2 or 3 per week, with exploding cocaine production even for Colombia standards as well, and extreme political polarisation, and all the while the Ziocorporate mother ship in Washington, with its Qtard and MAGA bullshit, looked the other way except to accuse Venezuela of being undemocratic and of human rights violations.

If Americans weren't so stupid and daydreaming like fucktards that they live in "muh democracy/republic" instead of the Ziocorporate conglomerate regime that rules over them, they could take a clue or two from their own regime's foreign policy, not only did Trumpet do things like transferring $400 billion in weapons to ISIS/al-Qaeda royal Salafi patrons in Ziodi Wahhabia, he doubled-down on the Obama/Biden policy of Venezuela "is a national security threat to muh democracy and freedom"; to start pondering about the kind of manipulation and radicalisation Ziocorporate agents Trump/Republicans and Biden/Democrats have in store for them. Cointelpro certainly mutates far faster than Covid-1984.

Happy New World Order and Great Reset.

shylockcracy , says: January 11, 2021 at 7:17 am GMT • 9.4 hours ago
@catdog i-deep state" character is actually the opposite of:

"White House teams up with Google to build coronavirus screening site"
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/13/white-house-teams-up-with-google-to-build-coronavirus-screening-site/

What do Qtarts and the like need to realise this simple, evident facts? That the Trumpet himself comes on national TV telling you all "I and the Democrats have been playing divide and conquer with you dumbfucks for 4 years"?

Feeling that anti-deep state MAGA magick yet?

Miro23 , says: January 11, 2021 at 7:25 am GMT • 9.2 hours ago

The American Establishment is doing to President Trump exactly what it did to Ukrainian President Yanukovych in Washington's orchestrated "Maidan Revolution," called "the Revolution of Dignity" by the liars at Wikipedia, and precisely what it did to Chavez, Maduro, and would like to do to Putin.

What Trump and his supporters, and perhaps the Kremlin, do not understand is that real evidence no longer counts . The Establishment makes up the evidence that it needs for its agendas.

Their playbook "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals" by Saul D. Alinsky, makes it clear that it's necessary to play dirty. This covers all aspects of their Regime Change projects and the current US project surely isn't any different.

It's a cocktail of lies, fabrications, subversion, threats, blackmail, false friendships – in fact any means to advance themselves.

For example: From Alinsky – "Means and Ends" His take on morality:

Rule 10) You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.

Rule 11) Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", "Of the Common Welfare, "Pursuit of Happiness" or "Bread and Peace".

So yes, this is why the most unpatriotic Patriot Act is called the Patriot Act and they operate from patriotic sounding places like the American Enterprise Institute.

If traditional America is going to get anywhere in the upcoming conflict they have to get used to playing by the same rules – difficult for them – but they have to do it. It's inevitably going to be a dirty war.

Abdul Alhazred , says: January 11, 2021 at 8:01 am GMT • 8.6 hours ago

Point of order- Russia is not the historic enemy, but the orchestrated one, rather it was the Soviet Union which is the historic enemy, as the sponsors of the destruction of Russia are behind the destruction of America.

Carlos22 , says: January 11, 2021 at 8:09 am GMT • 8.5 hours ago

We are already in a police state and you can kiss goodbye to the 1st and 2nd amendment soon as free speech becomes hate speech just like they did in Europe.

So this site and many others in the alt news universe will soon be gone.

There's not going to be a civil war as the current generation of young people are too weak and distracted and have been brainwashed into hating themselves.

There's a big elephant in the room and wild card that's been missed too and that's the new covid vaccines who's long term effects on health are unknown.

Vaccines need to be studied for about 10 years before their safety can be guaranteed.

If tens / hundreds of millions are willing to be injected with a new untested genetic engineered substance that could make them disabled or kill them in 5 years to save them against something with a 99% survival rate what does that tell you about the mental state of the Population?

The US as you once knew it is finished it's just that many are still in denial or haven't realized it yet.

noname27 , says: Website January 11, 2021 at 8:34 am GMT • 8.1 hours ago

I see no civil war in the USA. I see no organisation amongst the people in order to carry it out. They have no leader, they have no Hannibal, Boadicea or Adolf to rally them together for a major insurrection against The Beast Empire. Unless of course something is brewing secretly.

A French style form of resistance, as previously mentioned in these comments, also takes a lot of planning and organisational skills, and I see no inkling of that taking place amongst American patriots.

I also believe many do not realise how serious the matter is, they still, being bogged down in irrelevant party politics.

If however a large swathe of the police and US Military including officers were to desert their corrupt masters, things would look very different and a civil war could happen.

Ilya G Poimandres , says: January 11, 2021 at 8:39 am GMT • 8.0 hours ago

The civil was has been on since Crossfire Hurricane, the usurpers of the constitution simply kept it cold because they thought they could enforce their tyranny silently.

And if Trump surrenders then they would have been proven right, at least for the leadership fight.

Biden will likely launch a war because he already has his bay of pigs with his graft, and will need a moonshot for the misdirection.

I don't think they can fight half the nation (and the military will split), and Russia at the same time, so the only question is on whom the war will be launched. I still think the odds are higher that it will be a civil war, but the Russia option looms strong for sure.

TKK , says: January 11, 2021 at 9:39 am GMT • 7.0 hours ago

The US military is the most "woke" diverse incompetent organization in America.

Remember- contractors do all the heavy lifting "in theater"- from cooking to plumbing to firefighting to IT to combat.

This knowledge is hidden from view- kept on the down low.I only know because my brother has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan for KBR for the past 15 years. I have seen him accumulate well over Half a million in cash. What does he do? He makes sure the troops have water and food. He is in logistics. For the past decade I have heard hundreds if not thousands of stories of the jaw dropping incompetence, insouciance and laziness of the American military.

Rank-and-file Americans, indeed no one, talks about this very real infrastructure that props up every dumb, overweight enlisted. About 4 contractors to every enlisted.

Most of the contractors in theater are from Eastern Europe and sub Sahara Africa. If they were given orders to release biological or chemical weapons on the American populace, as long as the huge checks were hitting their account they would do it in a heartbeat

More than the military- fear the shadow military that knows the systems, does the work .. And will do whatever it is asked as long as they are paid.

Their mother doesn't live here.

Everywhere we turn, diversity and hiring people from the "other" never works out.

*** Side note: My brother revealed that when blacks came back from their R&R after the George Floyd insanity, most of them became more aggressive and entitled. Unable to do their work because they could not stop going to report others for incidence of racism.

This includes the American black contractors and enlisted.

These are dumb young black men and women who are making $92,000 a year to move pallets around. If they were asked to stop calling in sick every day, they would run to report their supervisor for-

Racism.

Many whites have lost their lucrative positions or been subject to discipline for having the audacity to ask blacks to come to work.

It's over. It's too far gone.

[Jan 11, 2021] William Burns is Biden's new CIA Director nomination with with State Dept career and DC Thinktank experience.

Jan 11, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

imo , Jan 11 2021 14:17 utc | 119

William Burns is Biden's new CIA Director nomination with with State Dept career and DC Thinktank experience.

Might have better constructive peer-peer dialogue potential with Russian Foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. Now whence little Gina 'Abu Ghraib stinker' Haspel?

But, what about global opium and heroine supplies? Gulp, ...!

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/11/politics/william-burns-cia-director-nomination/index.html

[Jan 11, 2021] Fake news in action: the backdoor "resembles" a tool that is only "tied to" a hacking group which "Estonian authorities" "have said" (i.e. claim without evidence) serves the FSB.

Jan 11, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Jan 11 2021 11:56 utc | 104

Fake news:

SolarWinds hack linked to Russian spying tools, say researchers

Here's the "evidence":

Investigators at the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said the "backdoor" used to compromise up to 18,000 customers of the US software maker SolarWinds closely resembled malware tied to a hacking group known as Turla, which Estonian authorities have said operates on behalf of Russia's FSB security service.

So, the backdoor "resembles" a tool that is only "tied to" a hacking group which "Estonian authorities" "have said" (i.e. claim without evidence) serves the FSB.

This is not the first time The Guardian uses absurd extrapolations to create a big fat lie. Last week, it put a criminal headline - with potentially grave consequences on public opinion and geopolitics - stating China had refused to receive a WHO team to investigate the origins of the SARS-CoV-2. China defused the fake news by releasing on its own MSM that they were still making the arrangements of the visit - which will happen this Thursday -, not that it had blocked the WHO.

What did The Guardian want to achieved with that headline? Prepare the British people for war against China? Are they insane?

uncle tungsten , Jan 11 2021 12:04 utc | 105

@vk

Mentioning Estonia at any time would indicate pure unmitigated BS. But mentioning BOTH Estonia and the Grauniad in the one post is just painfully obvious that the entire story is bollocks.

[Jan 11, 2021] Clinton broke Reagan's promise and expanded NATO eastwards, he dismantled the Glass Steagall act which led to a malignant hypergrowth of the banking sector, and he was the who introduced the telecommunications act in 1996 which allowed for the concentration of corporate media in the hands of the few.

Notable quotes:
"... Clinton hollowed out his own country in order to completely remove all constraints (financial, mediatic, military). He doesn't get called out for it nearly enough in my opinion. ..."
"... Clinton was a particular type of low-class, sybaritic evil but he didn't have a strong USSR to contend with. Instead he had the drunken traitor Yeltsin dance for him like a bedraggled starving bear. ..."
Jan 11, 2021 | thesaker.is

Serbian girl on January 08, 2021 , · at 7:42 am EST/EDT

"So when was this golden age? Under Reagan? Well, this is when the dismantling of the inner core of the empire began."

Beg to differ. Reagan understood how to administer the US empire. He knew the risks of overstretching it. He made the promise to the Soviets not to encroach on their sphere of influence. He defended the high interest rates which strengthened the USD and which kept the banking sector in check.

All of that went to hell with Bill Clinton:
He broke Reagan's promise and expanded NATO eastwards, he dismantled the Glass Steagall act which led to a malignant hypergrowth of the banking sector, and he was the who introduced the telecommunications act in 1996 which allowed for the concentration of corporate media in the hands of the few.

Bill Clinton basically turned the empire into a rapacious and uncontrollable animal. (Funny how noone here is talking about imprisoning him )

There is a silver lining to Bill C's blood-soaked administration. It was while he was in power, that the Russians finally awoke from their 1990s stupor. They began to understand the mortal danger they were facing, and they patriotically chose Putin to lead them in 1999.

Ken Leslie on January 08, 2021 , · at 8:05 am EST/EDT

– Reagan was a disgusting Russophobe and Serbophobe who proclaimed 10th April (the founding of the Independent State of Croatia) a national holiday in California as governor. Not surprising given that his was the most RC government ever – he also colluded with the Polish anti-Christ to destroy the USSR. In the process he encouraged the German Nazis (see visit to Bitburg) who then destroyed Yugoslavia.

– He brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust that was prevented by a vigilant Russian officer (in 1983?).

– He turbo-charged the power of corporations and decimated social structures and the rights of the working class (the Americans are paying for this now).

This is not to say that the scumbag Clinton was good – after all he was trained at Georgetown – that seminary for American murderers.

Serbian girl on January 08, 2021 , · at 9:33 am EST/EDT

Thanks for this Ken. Good to know who Reagan really was!

To get back to your point about the "dismantling of the empire" Reagan, for all his personal awfulness and recklessness (and subversiveness) was still more restrained than Clinton. Clinton hollowed out his own country in order to completely remove all constraints (financial, mediatic, military). He doesn't get called out for it nearly enough in my opinion. I guess it's personal, after what he did to us.

Ken Leslie on January 08, 2021 , · at 11:07 am EST/EDT

Oh, I have nothing but hatred and contempt for that criminal, trust me.

Ken Leslie on January 08, 2021 , · at 11:49 am EST/EDT

Clinton was a particular type of low-class, sybaritic evil but he didn't have a strong USSR to contend with. Instead he had the drunken traitor Yeltsin dance for him like a bedraggled starving bear. Never again!

[Jan 11, 2021] "We are all Taiwanese now" stunt is Pompeo's act of petty spite for getting outfoxed in the Hong Kong colour revolution play.

Jan 11, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

LittleWhiteCabbage , Jan 11 2021 15:19 utc | 128

@84:
As sometimes said: don't sweat the small stuff.
This "We are all Taiwanese now" stunt is Pompeo's act of petty spite for getting outfoxed in the Hong Kong colour revolution play.
Empire's useful idiots were let loose to trash the hapless city, fired up by the Western propaganda machinery.
Now Beijing is putting the stock on those pompous minions with the National Security Law, and their foreign masters can't do nuffin' except squeal human rights and apply some nuisance sanctions.
The West fails because it looks at China through ideological lenses and sees Communists, who can fall back on 5000 years of statecraft to push back at interlopers.
Beijing's moves can be likened to two classic strategies.
1. Zhuge Liang fools the enemy to fire all their arrows at straw men, which become ammunition against them.
2. The Empty City strategy. Invaders take over an ostensibly abandoned city, only to be trapped inside.
Global Times is cantankerous and sometimes risible, but even a broken clock is right, twice a day.
So when it says that crossing Beijing's red line on the Taiwan issue is not in the island's best interests, the incoming BiMala administration should take note.

[Jan 10, 2021] Trump's Last Stand, by Israel Shamir

Highly recommended!
Trump run his election complain of 2016 as champion of common Americans. After he won the office the betrayed them all and governed like Bush III with his own cabal of neocons and neoliberals. \
He betrayed his followed again on Dec 6, when he first incited them for the action but did not provide organization, security and the plan needed to press Congress to appoint the commission for investigation of election "irregularities" for then days before Biden inauguration. He is now completely spent politically and his enemies and first of all, Ms Pelosi, are after him. Moreover he gave a shot in the arm for the gang of Russiagaters who were pursuing him since his inauguration.
The fact that Trump leaves the political scene is good. While useful as a wrecking ball for the neoliberal empire and neoliberal establishment he proved to be completely inept as a politician and lack courage necessary for the national leader. Which he proved again on Dec 6. Famous quote from Friedrich Schiller's play Fiesco "The Moor has done his duty. The Moor can go." is probably applicable. What is interesting is that Zionists betrayed Trump.
But the fact hat he will be replaced by neocon warmonger and staunch neoliberal Biden means that there is no light at the and of tunnel for the common people.
Like Trump, Biden was never Presidential material. He a a mediocre politician, by all accounts. And extremely corrupt in addition to that.
Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump denounced the people whom he personally called to protest. His close political allies withdrew their support. ..."
"... The deck was stacked against President Trump from Day One. His orders were ignored. The US courts, judges, police, the whole system of law enforcement was against him; his orders were blocked or overturned, while the media made fun of him and the opposition relentlessly delegitimised him. ..."
"... On January 6, a massive demonstration in his support gathered in Washington, DC. Hundreds of thousands Americans came to the capital to demand justice after the election fraud became obvious. They hoped that the Republican representatives would refuse to certify the fraud and appoint a commission to check and recount the votes. ..."
"... The horror and outrage of the Dem politicians and media were as faked as their news. During last year, many government buildings were taken over by Dem-sponsored BLM activists, and in not one case did the police use lethal weapons or even rush the protesters out of buildings. ..."
"... For them, it was an honest and funny way to express their indignation. But the real gambit plotters intended to frame them. They even murdered four protesters hoping they would respond with violence, but in vain. ..."
"... White American protesters are exceptionally non-violent lot; as with Occupy Wall Street a few years back the January 6 Capitol protesters were timid and obedient as lambs. For this reason, BLM was invented, for Blacks are able to riot violently, as opposed to well-trained whites. It is not a race thing: lily-white French Yellow Vests and Ukrainian nationalists have fought the police all right. But US whites are not prone to riot, not since the Civil War. ..."
"... Anyway, their non-violence didn't help them. The president-elect Biden begrudged them even the name of protesters: "Don't dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists." Indeed, the name should be preserved for Deep State-authorised looters and their brethren all over the world, whether in Hong Kong or Minsk, in Seattle or Portland. ..."
"... researchers will argue whether duplicitous Biden's minions organised it or just capitalised on the Trumpers' sincere protest. ..."
"... There is no doubt that to an objective observer the 2020 elections were profoundly unfair. I won't trouble you with too many published details about the statistically impossible results, but here is one example of fraud. The city of Detroit gave 95 per cent of its vote to Biden/Kamala, a number that Mr Kim Jong-un would view with slight envy, while Mr Lukashenko would murmur, "How can it be done?" It is highly likely this mind-boggling result was achieved in the following way. ..."
"... The problem is, Trump was a poor organiser. He could win elections, if he could prevent Cynthia Stephens's kind of legislation, outlaw postal ballots, enforce obligatory IDs for voting, mobilise his people for election control. A formidable task, but not impossible, while dealing with a prone-to-cheat adversary. He could even do a revolution on January 6, tasking the right people to act, forming a revolutionary HQ, planning a strategy of takeover, but he didn't do anything of the sort. He probably thought Congress would see the vast crowds and allow for the checking of election results. ..."
"... Alternatively, he was so naïve that he believed revolutions just happen by themselves, as in the movies. They do not. Behind every successful revolution, there is a lot of planning, armed force, weapons ready for use, supply lines, logistics, media support, and communications. Trump had none of that. It was enough to turn off Twitter to make him deaf and dumb. ..."
"... There was no coup attempt, as correctly stated by Tyler Durden : "Trump has never had the concentration, organizational acumen, or ideological coherence to mount a bona fide "coup," and a mob intrusion which was swiftly dispersed by armed agents of the state doesn't change that. ..."
"... Many Trumpists believed in the QAnon and Kayfabe conspiracies; they posted reports of bad guys being arrested, of servers snatched by the FBI, of Clinton and Biden waiting for rough justice behind bars. This belief disarmed people who would otherwise have fought to achieve this very result. That is the problem with conspiracies: imaginary conspiracies prevent real action. ..."
"... He succeeded against enormous odds in improving the lot of American workers: for the first time since the 1970s, their incomes rose in relation to the other classes. He stopped mass migration to the US: legal immigration went down to a trickle. He avoided new wars; he tried to make peace with Russia. He refused to bomb Iran even in the last days of his presidency, though some pro-Israel supporters promised him a second term if he would. ..."
"... His fight against the corona madness was his great achievement. He was against the lockdowns that are about to destroy our world so completely that few things will survive. The last great US ruler who didn't wear the cowardly mask will be remembered. He could not defeat the mighty medical complex, or FAGMA, or the Masters of Discourse, but he tried. ..."
"... Israel Shamir can be reached at ..."
"... The Unz Review ..."
Jan 10, 2021 | www.unz.com

President Trump was decisively beaten, if not fair and square. The hopes of millions of American voters were squashed and extinguished. The saga of the Orange Man is over. The victors used a gambit: they sacrificed the sanctity and security of the Capitol, allowed intruders in, permitted them to take selfies in the Speaker's office, and then faked horror and outrage. The attempted calls for electoral transparency were deflated in real time as huge crowds were dispersed, electors were confirmed, and the ascendancy of Biden was assured, while Trump followers were branded 'domestic terrorists'.

Donald Trump denounced the people whom he personally called to protest. His close political allies withdrew their support. Within hours, or even minutes, this ruler of the world admired by millions became a non-person. Like a boy who posted an obscenity, he was banned by Twitter and Facebook. Time will tell whether he will go to prison, as so many Dems pray for, but his political life seems to have ended, even if his cause may live.

The deck was stacked against President Trump from Day One. His orders were ignored. The US courts, judges, police, the whole system of law enforcement was against him; his orders were blocked or overturned, while the media made fun of him and the opposition relentlessly delegitimised him. He was blocked even by Fox News. Dem-run states adjusted their laws to assure the elections' result. Trump was a lame duck from the very beginning of his presidency to its bitter end. He was kept on a short leash by the almighty Deep State, and when he tried to free himself, they pulled the leash.

On January 6, a massive demonstration in his support gathered in Washington, DC. Hundreds of thousands Americans came to the capital to demand justice after the election fraud became obvious. They hoped that the Republican representatives would refuse to certify the fraud and appoint a commission to check and recount the votes. Some of the protesters managed to break into the Capitol, or were let in by the police. This peaceful Occupy Capitol action, the exercise of a natural right to protest, was met with lethal fire, and a young female protester from San Diego, Ashli Babbitt, was murdered by the plainclothes police. The Republican representatives were cowed and surrendered; Biden was confirmed to take office.

The horror and outrage of the Dem politicians and media were as faked as their news. During last year, many government buildings were taken over by Dem-sponsored BLM activists, and in not one case did the police use lethal weapons or even rush the protesters out of buildings.

"Shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the locked King Street entrance to the Capitol, chanting "Break down the door!" and "General strike!" Moments later, police ceded control of the State Street doors and allowed the crowd to surge inside, joining thousands who had already gathered in the Capitol to protest the votes. The area outside the Assembly, which is scheduled to take the bill up at 11 a.m. today, was crowded with protesters who chanted, "We're not leaving. Not this time."

Department of Administration spokesman Tim Donovan said although protesters were being encouraged to leave, no one would be forcibly removed. Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said he had instructed Police Chief Noble Wray not to allow his officers to participate in removing demonstrators from the building."

This was what happened in Madison, Wisconsin in March 2011, as Steve Sailer reminded us. Indeed, this is what the protesters expected; some were dressed in flamboyant carnival attire; they behaved well and peacefully, within acceptable limits. It was not an insurrection; they didn't try to take over the Congress in any meaningful sense. For them, it was an honest and funny way to express their indignation. But the real gambit plotters intended to frame them. They even murdered four protesters hoping they would respond with violence, but in vain.

White American protesters are exceptionally non-violent lot; as with Occupy Wall Street a few years back the January 6 Capitol protesters were timid and obedient as lambs. For this reason, BLM was invented, for Blacks are able to riot violently, as opposed to well-trained whites. It is not a race thing: lily-white French Yellow Vests and Ukrainian nationalists have fought the police all right. But US whites are not prone to riot, not since the Civil War. Being a foreigner, I do not understand why the Americans want to keep their guns if they never use them, but that's the way they are.

Anyway, their non-violence didn't help them. The president-elect Biden begrudged them even the name of protesters: "Don't dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists." Indeed, the name should be preserved for Deep State-authorised looters and their brethren all over the world, whether in Hong Kong or Minsk, in Seattle or Portland.

Russian social networks were comparing the Washington DC events with those nearer to home and complained of 'double standards'. The US media expressed no indignation when their appointee Boris Yeltsin shelled the Russian Parliament in 1993. The New York Times and the State Department had encouraged the nationalist mob to storm Ukrainian government offices in 2014. They cheered on the opposition in Minsk in taking over their parliament after failing to win elections. The Belarus protesters claimed their country's election results were rigged, just like Trump supporters did for the US elections, but Biden didn't call them "domestic terrorists". (Actually, neither did President Lukashenko: he called them 'protesters', and their violent demos were dispersed without a single shot fired.) In such cases, Jews respond with "How can you compare?!"

The Russians compared the Capitol 'coup attempt' with their own semi-staged 'coup' of 1991, a partly pre-planned provocation. In 1991, the feeble coup organisers could not detain Yeltsin and surrendered as if on cue; the wave of indignation removed Gorbachev and the Communist party from power. In the Capitol, too, police waved the 'invaders' in, as you can see on this video forwarded by the BBC. More videos suggesting Capitol police involvement in the ostensible provocation are presented here . The orchestrated indignation allowed the victors to censor and purge the defeated Trump and his followers. Just as the USSR went down in August 1991, Trump's America went down in January 2021, and the liberal elites representing the big corporations came to power. It was achieved by a provocation, but ordinary Trump followers were really angry with the Election Steal. Likewise, 1991 was a provocation, but ordinary Russian citizens were angry at Gorbachev's perestroika, while the liberal elites used it to dismantle the Soviet state and transfer all assets to their oligarchs.

People with a good knowledge of history refer to the Reichstag Fire of February 1933, the arson contrived by the newly formed Nazi government itself to turn public opinion against its opponents and to assume emergency powers. Alternatively, other researchers have contended that there was no proof of Nazi complicity in the crime, but that Hitler merely capitalised on the Dutch Communist van der Lubbe's independent act. The fire is the subject of continued debate and research, says the Encycopaedia Britannica . Probably the same will be said about the Capitol "invasion", and researchers will argue whether duplicitous Biden's minions organised it or just capitalised on the Trumpers' sincere protest.

There is no doubt that to an objective observer the 2020 elections were profoundly unfair. I won't trouble you with too many published details about the statistically impossible results, but here is one example of fraud. The city of Detroit gave 95 per cent of its vote to Biden/Kamala, a number that Mr Kim Jong-un would view with slight envy, while Mr Lukashenko would murmur, "How can it be done?" It is highly likely this mind-boggling result was achieved in the following way.

Detroit Dems outsourced ballot harvesting to local drug lords, offering them as a prize – recreational marijuana business licenses. These licences are the best thing since a licence to print money . Having such licenses is like having your own ATM. Here you can read about their profitability and the lengths criminals will go to obtain them. Detroit Dems had changed local laws allowing the sale of marijuana in their fine city (it was forbidden until November 2020). They changed local laws prescribing the issuing of marijuana licences to drug dealers with previous convictions for drug dealing. They let drug lords out of jail . They changed local laws to allow ballot harvesting; that is, collecting postal votes and assisting with the filling in of ballots. After that, the drug dealers went around collecting postal ballots and filling them in immediately, if they were conscientious, or just filling them in at their leisure, if feeling lazy. They had a judge at their disposal, Cynthia Stephens , who single-handedly changed Michigan election laws, and then rejected Trump's claims of fraud.

Yes, Virginia, there was election fraud in many American states. They are used to gambling; they aren't surprised by a beautiful hand of four aces, as Mark Twain suggested. Usually the two parties deal in turns, and cheat in turns. Only this time, Trump convinced many people that it is different; that this is their last chance.

The problem is, Trump was a poor organiser. He could win elections, if he could prevent Cynthia Stephens's kind of legislation, outlaw postal ballots, enforce obligatory IDs for voting, mobilise his people for election control. A formidable task, but not impossible, while dealing with a prone-to-cheat adversary. He could even do a revolution on January 6, tasking the right people to act, forming a revolutionary HQ, planning a strategy of takeover, but he didn't do anything of the sort. He probably thought Congress would see the vast crowds and allow for the checking of election results.

Alternatively, he was so naïve that he believed revolutions just happen by themselves, as in the movies. They do not. Behind every successful revolution, there is a lot of planning, armed force, weapons ready for use, supply lines, logistics, media support, and communications. Trump had none of that. It was enough to turn off Twitter to make him deaf and dumb.

There was no coup attempt, as correctly stated by Tyler Durden : "Trump has never had the concentration, organizational acumen, or ideological coherence to mount a bona fide "coup," and a mob intrusion which was swiftly dispersed by armed agents of the state doesn't change that. Shortly after the breach, he released a video instructing his followers not to take Senators hostage or imprison Mike Pence, but to "go home." No factions of the federal government joined the mob on Trump's orders, because he didn't bother issuing any. The whole episode never stood the remotest chance of preventing the certification of Joe Biden, much less overthrowing the government. It was just another goofball charade, and in that sense, a fitting end to the Trump presidency."

Conspiracy theories played their disappointing part in the debacle. Many Trumpists believed in the QAnon and Kayfabe conspiracies; they posted reports of bad guys being arrested, of servers snatched by the FBI, of Clinton and Biden waiting for rough justice behind bars. This belief disarmed people who would otherwise have fought to achieve this very result. That is the problem with conspiracies: imaginary conspiracies prevent real action.

Still, I do not want to finish this piece on such a sad and disappointing note. President Trump was a great leader. He succeeded against enormous odds in improving the lot of American workers: for the first time since the 1970s, their incomes rose in relation to the other classes. He stopped mass migration to the US: legal immigration went down to a trickle. He avoided new wars; he tried to make peace with Russia. He refused to bomb Iran even in the last days of his presidency, though some pro-Israel supporters promised him a second term if he would.

His fight against the corona madness was his great achievement. He was against the lockdowns that are about to destroy our world so completely that few things will survive. The last great US ruler who didn't wear the cowardly mask will be remembered. He could not defeat the mighty medical complex, or FAGMA, or the Masters of Discourse, but he tried.

The day of his defeat, January 6, was the Epiphany, or Adoration of the Magi, of the Three Wise Men who came to worship Jesus in his cave. It was also Christmas Eve for the Eastern Church. It is the darkest time of the year; from now on, the day will increase and so will our hopes.

Israel Shamir can be reached at [email protected]

This article was first published at The Unz Review .

[Jan 10, 2021] Top adviser signals Biden would keep troops in Syria as leverage

Jan 10, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Passer by , Jan 10 2021 23:21 utc | 64

Posted by: Circe | Jan 10 2021 23:07 utc | 61

There you go

Top adviser signals Biden would keep troops in Syria as leverage

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/05/biden-blinken-syria-oil-obama-red-line-kurds-assad.html#ixzz6jBp9f4aY


Joe Biden hits the president over Syria troop withdrawal in Iowa speech

https://eu.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2019/10/16/joe-biden-donald-trump-syria-troop-withdrawal-turkey-kurds-foreign-policy-iowa-caucuses-2020/4002281002/

Biden Says Would Keep Small U.S. Troops Presence In Afghanistan, Iraq

https://gandhara.rferl.org/a/biden-says-would-keep-small-u-s-troops-presence-in-afghanistan-iraq-/30833114.html

[Jan 09, 2021] American exceptionalism hurt by violent Capitol debacle, expect Biden to push aggressive foreign policy in bid to repair damage by Fyodor Lukyanov

Jan 09, 2021 | www.rt.com

Fyodor Lukyanov , the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director of the Valdai International Discussion Club How could something like this happen in Washington? It was assumed that, despite all its social and political problems that have worsened in recent years, America was different and far more robust than we are now seeing. A habit of being special

The rule of thumb was, 'there is America and there are others'. With the others, shortcomings are natural and to be expected, even if many of them are well-established democracies. But America is a different story, because by default, the US is a role model that was supposed to remain the democratic icon forever.

Exceptionalism is foundational for America's political culture. This type of self-identification was the cornerstone on which the nation and society were built a couple of hundred years ago. That's how Americans are raised. And you will run into this phenomenon everywhere.

When asking his supporters gathered by the Capitol building to go home, President Donald Trump said, "You are special." People from the more liberal political camp have even deeper convictions about the US being exceptional and therefore under an obligation to bring light into the world, as they see it.

That's why everybody is shocked – how could this have happened? The reaction was followed by a wave of explanations as to why the clashes near and inside the Capitol building only looked like similar events in other countries, but in reality, they were something entirely different. Here is a comment from the CNN website, "Sure there are superficial similarities... but what's happening in America is uniquely American. It is that country's monster."

Such restlessness is understandable. If we look at exceptionalism in the context of the world order that we've had in recent decades, we see that after the end of the Cold War, the US has held the unique position of the sole global hegemon. No other power in world history has ever reached this level of dominance.

Besides massive military and economic resources, America's exceptionalism has also been relying on the idea that this nation sets the tone for the global worldview. This authorized America to certify systems of government in other countries and exert influence in situations that it believed required certain adjustments. As we all know, this influence took different forms, including direct military intervention.

We are not going to list the pros and cons of such a world order in this article. What's important is that one of the key aspects of this order is the belief in the infallibility of the global leader. That's why American commentators and experts are so worried about the Capitol Building events and Trump's presidency in general hurting the international status of the US.

Boomerang effect

Generally speaking, post-election turmoil is not a rare occurrence. After all, the US itself has encouraged the new political tradition that has emerged in the 21st century. In recent times, in certain places, election campaigns haven't ended after the votes were counted and the winner is announced. Instead, Washington often encouraged the losing side to at least try to challenge the results by taking to the streets. Indeed, resistance was part of the US Declaration of Independence after all.

Western capitals consistently emphasized the legitimacy of such actions in situations when people believed that their votes had been 'stolen'. Washington was usually the lead voice in these declarations. Granted, this mostly applied to immature democracies with unstable institutions, but where are all those unshakable, solid democratic countries today? The world is experiencing so much instability that nobody is exempt from major shocks and crises.

Information overload

There is another reason why traditional institutions are losing their footing. They were effective in a solidified informational environment. The sources of information were either controlled or perceived as trustworthy by the majority.

Today there are problems with both. Technological advances boost transparency, but they also create multiple realities and countless opportunities for manipulation. Institutions must be above reproach if they are to survive in the new conditions. It would be wrong to say that they are all crumbling. They are, however, experiencing tremendous pressure, and we can't expect them to be perfect.

Looking for a scapegoat

The US is not better or worse at facing the new challenges. Or, rather, it is better in some areas and worse in others. This would all be very normal if America's exceptionalism didn't always need affirmation.

Situations in which the US appears to be just like any other country, albeit with some unique characteristics, are a shock to the system. In order to stay special, America looks where to place the blame. Ideally, the guilty party should be someone acting in the interests of an outside power, someone un-American.

This mechanism is not unknown to Russians from the experience in our country – for a long time now, Russian elites have been keen to blame outsiders for their own failures. But America's motivation today is even stronger; there is more passion, because simply covering up the failures is no longer enough – America wants to prove that it is still perfect.

Russia says American system 'archaic' & not up to 'modern democratic standards' after rioters raid Washington's Capitol building

Democrats are taking back the American political landscape. For the next two years (until the 2022 mid-term elections), they will have all the power – in the White House and Congress. Trump's supporters have seriously scared the ruling class, and the Capitol building debacle during the last days of his presidency has created a perfect pretext for cleaning house. Big Tech companies are at their disposal (so far).

Internal targets

Target number one is Trump himself. They want to make an example out of him, so that others wouldn't dare challenge the sanctity of the political establishment. But Trump will not be enough, something must be done about his numerous supporters. The awkward finale of his presidency opens the door for labeling his fans as enemies of the republic and democracy.

The Democrats will do everything within their power to demoralize their earnest opponents. This won't be hard, since the Republican Party itself is a hot mess right now. Trump has alienated almost all his supporters from the party leadership, but he is still popular among regular voters.

Demonstrative restoration of order and democratic fundamentals will also be used to reclaim the role model status. The reasoning is clear – we successfully neutralized the terrible external and internal threats to our democracy, so now we have regained the right to show the world how one should deal with the enemies of said democracy. The 'summit of democracies' idea proposed by Joseph Biden is starting to look like an emergency meeting for closing the ranks in a fight against enemies of progress.

Foreign targets

And this brings us back to the foreign policy issue, because it's not difficult to predict who will be enemy number one. Putin as an almighty puppeteer of all undemocratic forces in the world (including Trump) has been part of the rhetoric for a few years now. Hillary Clinton said it when giving a campaign speech in Nevada in August 2016, and Nancy Pelosi echoed the sentiment after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building. Of course, China is a close second on the enemy list created by the Democratic leadership, but there are some economic restraints there.

America's inevitable strife to reclaim its exceptionalism will clash with the current tendencies in global development. All aspects of international affairs, from economy to security, to ideology and ethics, are diversifying. Attempts to divide the world along the old democracy vs. autocracy lines, i.e. go back to the agenda prevalent at the end of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century, are doomed, because this is not the way the world is structured now.

But attempts will be made nevertheless, and we can't rule out some aggressive 'democracy promotion'. Even if it's just to prove that the embarrassing Trump episode was nothing more than an unfortunate accident. This, by the way, could become a short-term unifying factor for the diverse members of the Democratic Party, some of whom represent the old generation, while others are energetic young proponents of left-wing politics.

We can conclude that the world will not really benefit from the new presidency, even if respected foreign policy professionals return to the White House now that Trump is leaving. It might stabilize America's frenzy in international affairs that we are all used to by now, but a new wave of ideology will neutralize the potential advantage (if it even existed, which is debatable).

America's resolve to prove to the world that it's not like others will encounter the large-scale 'material resistance', which will make a dangerous situation even worse. At least with Trump we knew that he didn't like wars, and he didn't start any new ones. Biden's credit history is very different.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Jan 09, 2021] The US henchmen in the Kingdom in Riyadh pitched in to break the Soviet economy by destroying the Soviet capacity to obtain foreign exchange.

Jan 09, 2021 | www.unz.com

Dutch Boy , says: January 8, 2021 at 8:36 pm GMT • 2.8 hours ago

@Priss Factor

The "patriotism" of the previous establishment was bound up with their economic interests. Once the USA dropped protectionism, the allure of cheap foreign labor (via immigration or outsourcing) became too much for them and they abandoned the interests of their fellow Americans to follow the profits.

Rufus Clyde , says: January 8, 2021 at 8:43 pm GMT • 2.7 hours ago
@Richard B

Thanks for the Tralfamidor perspective. Those of us here on earth know that the US was never a democracy and always existed as a mechanism for exploitation of everyone else by an oligarchy.
The USSR was collapsed by traitors as a function of the US imperial drive to destroy them economically, not because the people were enraged at the "hostile elite". The US henchmen in the Kingdom in Riyadh pitched in to break the Soviet economy by destroying the Soviet capacity to obtain foreign exchange.

[Jan 08, 2021] I am always shocked to see the Michail Gorbachov is still alive and not hanging by some lamppost for high treason.

Jan 08, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Jan 8 2021 12:51 utc | 1

You know you reached rock bottom when even Mikhail frickin' Gorbachev takes a jab on you:

Gorbachev, once America's greatest friend in Moscow, believes Capitol invasion calls into question stability of US as a state


Abe , Jan 8 2021 12:58 utc | 2

vk @1

I am always shocked to see he is still alive and not hanging by some lamppost for high treason.

Den lille abe , Jan 8 2021 13:28 utc | 3
@nr2 Abe

High treason, where, what? Did I miss something then ? I think not. The Soviet Union was doomed,
virtually bankrupt, its population queuing for almost everything, DDR likewise and Poland too, I have seen it in all three places. Oh, you could get everything if you had dollars!
Poland 1975: 1 kg of Russian Caviar and 4 bottles of the best Crimean Champagne :$10 !
Russia: Brand new Makarow, 9 mm, and 100 shots $20 including nice shoulder holster too in leather $30
But ordinary people did not have $, only the nomenclature had $. A totally corrupt and failed system in all the Eastern block. I was there then, saw it, and I have not forgotten.
So it was high time for change, and yes it would be tough, but the eastern people are tough people ( and hospitable, very indeed)so they stood it out.
Abe, take a trip to Russia and speak to some older people, so you may stop posting nonsense!

Abe , Jan 8 2021 13:54 utc | 6
@3 @4

Him and his underlings, along with its successor Yeltsin (died too soon, unfortunately) are directly responsible for millions of dead and destroyed lives in Russia in the `90-ties. But I sense you are from countries that now grow unhealthy and pathological hate towards Russian people, so as far you are concerned, it was great period, right?

oglalla , Jan 8 2021 13:56 utc | 7
Blame the Soviets for the economy of places ravaged by war and sabotaged by the West? Remember the Eastern Front suffered the majority of action. Russia itself suffered the worst and had to rebuild more than anybody, whereas USA factories easily re-supplied Western Europe.

Eastern Europeans better guard against being played by the West into fighting Russia again. They allied with Western-financed Hitler the last time. So, I'm a little worried they'll be conned again.

alaff , Jan 8 2021 15:43 utc | 25
It is curious that in one of the articles MoA wrote that, in his opinion (which I share), there are now two superpowers - the United States and Russia, while China is only on the way to this.

But Chinese journalists think differently - for example, in this article (very controversial, btw) the author asks the question "Russia has the potential to become a superpower, what are the factors preventing it from doing this?" At the same time, apparently, the journalist believes that the current superpowers are China and the United States, while "something prevents" Russia from becoming such.
Funny.

Just one quote from the article:


The distance between Russia and the superpower is still very large, and not only because of the country's "internal problems" - the United States is also constraining and restraining Russia by all means. It is not easy to become a superpower.
Kabobyak , Jan 8 2021 15:55 utc | 26
Paco @11

"If you talk to older people in Russia they'll tell you how deeply they despise the "marked one" as they call him."

I know there are multiple perspectives when assessing Gorbachev's legacy, but I also encountered that reaction often during my time there by old and young alike. It was a surprise to me as I had assumed he would be universally accepted in a positive light as he is in the west.

Asking them why they felt that way, a common response was that he had been too trusting of the US promises, which ushered in the looting and manipulation of the 90's. Many mentioned Baker's promise to Gorbachev that if East Germany went to the west, NATO would not move "one inch to the east", and Gorbachev's failure to get that in writing. (Not to say the US would have honored it even then, of course, but at least some proof to show the west's duplicity).

steven t johnson , Jan 8 2021 15:58 utc | 27
vk@8 "The USSR could've reformed and opened up like China did, and would be in a much better situation than what really happened (Yeltsin's neoliberal genocide)."

This is nonsense. That's exactly what Gorbachev did. The relative stagnation of the USSR turned into an economic catastrophe under Gorbachev who dismantled a still-functional economy. Yeltsin's neoliberalism was a continuation of Gorbachev's economics. Yeltsin's revolution was not to impose a new policy but to smash the opposition to the new policy, to carry it out ruthlessly, to concentrate the theft of public property in Great Russian hands. China's opening up was deliberately fostered by the western powers as a way of separating the socialist powers. There was never going to be any such opening up with Europe, not for the USSR. There wasn't in NEP in the Twenties. This absurd counterfactual misreads what happened with the capitalist roaders in China.

There also seems to be some nonsense lurking about how the Cultural Revolution was a gigantic catastrophe. Of course, though no one cares to notice, if this was true, then India would have had all those years to race ahead of China, not being cursed with such a nightmare. In truth, the Cultural Revolution brought many benefits to the countryside in particular, and still progressed the economy as a whole. Then after the murderous Deng took over, there wasn't any magical Great Leap Forward on IOUs to Imperialism as he promised. For years and years, the wonders of reform and opening up delivered not much faster (at all?) than the previous system. Not even the notorious Southern Tour was so miraculous. The failure to deliver on his overblown promises is why the students at Tien An Men square were so worried about getting good jobs commensurate with their higher elite status, reaffirmed by Deng. Only after decades did the economic conjuncture finally lead to rapid growth...but at a tremendous social cost still denied by too many. The iron rice bowl was broken long before the privilege of working for a capitalist firm started to really pay.

[Jan 07, 2021] Victoria 'F--k the EU' Nuland to make a comeback in Biden's cabinet media -- RT USA News

Jan 07, 2021 | www.rt.com

Home USA News Victoria 'F**k the EU' Nuland to make a comeback in Biden's cabinet – media 6 Jan, 2021 13:28 / Updated 15 hours ago Get short URL Victoria 'F**k the EU' Nuland to make a comeback in Biden's cabinet – media FILE PHOTO. Victoria Nuland during her visit in Kiev, Ukraine. ©Serg Glovny / Global Look Press 81 Follow RT on RT Joe Biden has reportedly tapped Victoria Nuland, a devoted Russia hawk with a disdain for EU members and a suspected Russiagate peddler, to take the third-highest job in his State Department.

Nuland will be nominated for the position of under secretary of state for political affairs, the US media said on Tuesday with Politico being the first to drop the scoop. It's the highest-ranking post in the department after the secretary and deputy secretary. During the Obama administration, Nuland served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, and was a key official in formulating and implementing his Russia policies. She also served as US envoy to the UN under George W. Bush and advised Vice President Dick Cheney on foreign policy.

The news that the vocal Russia hawk was returning to the White House was understandably met with loud cheering by the fans of Pax American on both sides of the Atlantic. Critics were dismayed and somewhat horrified, considering her record.

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Arguably the most publicly known episode of Nuland's Obama tenure came in 2014, when a tape of her conversation with then-ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked. It happened shortly after Ukraine's democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovich was ousted in a wave of street protests culminating in an armed coup, which happened with much encouragement from Washington.

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Nuland and Pyatt were discussing who among the coup leaders should be in the upcoming Ukrainian government, which indicated that Washington played a much bigger role in the crisis than it publicly admitted. The infamous " F**k the EU" remark came as Nuland expressed frustration with European nations, who were reluctant to lend legitimacy to the benefactors of the events, and said UN officials could be called in to help "glue this thing" instead.

The EU's skepticism at the time could have been due to the fact that President Yanukovich was expelled under a threat of violence just hours after Germany and Poland helped seal a power sharing agreement between him and the opposition leaders, serving as guarantors of the deal. Her return as a senior diplomatic official is likely to get on a few people's nerves in Europe, which is ironic considering how the Biden administration is supposed to rebuild alliances damaged by the Trump presidency.

ALSO ON RT.COM Biden 'should pick OBAMA as AG,' paving the way for him to later ascend to Supreme Court, former White House lawyer says

While flying private in the world of academia and think tanks during the Trump years, Nuland maintained her confrontational attitude to anyone challenging US dominance. Her recipe for dealing with Russia, as outlined in Foreign Policy magazine last summer, is more sophisticated weapons, permanent NATO bases on the Russian border (which will require abolishing a key Russia-NATO agreement) and deniable cyber operations against Moscow.

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Nuland also played a peculiar part in US domestic affairs, possibly having a hand in the promotion of the notorious Steele dossier. The collection of opposition research and rumors was used by the FBI to justify surveillance of the Trump campaign and fueled the endless flood of claims that the incumbent president was somehow a Russian stooge.

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An FBI memo released last year revealed that Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson "and others were talking to Victoria Nuland at the US State Department" about the file. The firm looked into Donald Trump for the Hillary Clinton campaign and retained retired British intelligence agent Christopher Steele for the job.

In multiple interviews, Nuland insisted that her role with the dossier was very limited because it dealt with domestic politics. "[Steele] passed two to four pages of short points of what he was finding, and our immediate reaction to that was, 'This is not in our purview,'" she told CBS News in 2018, adding that she advised him to go to the FBI. Some skeptics believe her role in launching the Steele dossier may have been much more significant.

ALSO ON RT.COM Ex-CIA congressman says disputing election results helps America's enemies STEAL ELECTIONS – just what the CIA always did!

Nuland is one of many Obama-era officials tapped by Biden to serve again with him at the helm. In addition to her, the latest reported batch includes Wendy Sherman, the former under secretary of state for political affairs, Jon Finer, who had various roles under Obama, and Amanda Sloat, ex-deputy assistant secretary for Southern Europe and Eastern Mediterranean affairs.

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[Jan 07, 2021] Russia remains a developing nation, and such nations have such problems and need to resolve them as best they can. In many respects, Russia is still recovering from the destruction of WW2 and then the rapine it was subjected to from 1990-2000

Jan 07, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

alaff , Jan 7 2021 0:57 utc | 75

@Mao Cheng Ji, #1

People feel attacked, unite, rally around the flag. Internal problems are blamed on the external enemy. The sanctions, the sort the West likes to impose, help develop domestic industries. Etc. Yeah, favors.

So, according to your logic, a hostile or unfriendly policy [towards Russia] will be when the United States abolishes its discriminatory measures (they call them sanctions), withdraws its troops from Europe, agree to North Stream-2, apologize for the coup in Ukraine etc.?

And then Russians will not be able "to justify" their problems with some kind of external enemy?

I did not hear any more absurdity.

Btw, I am from Russia and I don't know of internal problems that the authorities would try to "justify" by some external enemy/threat. In Russia, there are fires, there are cases of corruption of officials, somewhere there is a break in power lines (ice on the wires), in some places there are no necessary medicines in pharmacies, floods occur in summer... - a lot of problems, like in any other country. All these are internal problems. And there has never been such a thing that the Russian authorities said "this is all because of the American sanctions!".

karlof1 , Jan 7 2021 1:14 utc | 78

alaff @75--

Yes, as Putin has said, Russia remains a developing nation, and such nations have such problems and need to resolve them as best they can. In many respects, Russia is still recovering from the destruction of WW2 and then the rapine it was subjected to from 1990-2000. Putin and his team know there's much to do. IMO, the new Eurasian Bloc will become far more powerful and vastly improved over the USSR and its Warsaw Pact Bloc. But improvements don't happen instantly, so people need to remain patient. Thanks much for your input!

[Jan 06, 2021] How Trump 'Appeased' Russia

Jan 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mao Cheng Ji , Jan 6 2021 18:18 utc | 1

Two years ago we have written about the Trump's relation with Russia:

Putin Asks And Trump Delivers - A List Of All The Good Things Trump Did For Russia

Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of Russian influence over him is surely justified.

There followed 34 headlines and links to stories about Trump actions, from closing Russian consulates to U.S. attacks on Russian troops, that were hostile to Russia.

In fact no other U.S. administration since the cold war has been more aggressive towards Russia than Trump's.

But some U.S. media continue to claim that Trump's behavior towards Russia has not been hostile at all. Consider this line in Politico about anti-Russian hawks in the incoming Biden administration:

Nuland and Sherman, who entered academia and the think tank world after leaving the Obama administration, have been outspoken critics of President Donald Trump's foreign policy -- particularly his appeasement of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Where please has Trump 'appeased' Vladimir Putin?

Here are a number of headlines which appeared in U.S. media since we published our first list two years ago. Which of the described actions were designed to 'appease' Putin or Russia?

U.S. to withdraw from nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, raising fears of a new arms race - Washington Post, Feb 1 2019

Putin says U.S.-Russia relations are getting 'worse and worse' - Reuters, Jun 13 2019

Green Berets train Polish, Latvian resistance units in West Virginia - Army Times, Jul 8 2019

Trump Adds to Sanctions on Russia Over Skripals - NYT, Aug 1 2019

INF nuclear treaty: US pulls out of Cold War-era pact with Russia - BBC, Aug 2 2019

US Slaps New Sanctions on Russia for 2018 Nerve Agent Attack - Daily Signal, Aug 2 2019

1000 U.S.Troops Are Headed to Poland - National Interest, Sep 29 2019

U.S. sanctions Russians over attempted interference in 2018 elections - CBS News, Sep 30 2019

US formally withdraws from Open Skies Treaty that bolstered European security - CNN, Nov 22 2020

Nord Stream 2: Trump approves sanctions on Russia gas pipeline - BBC, Dec 21 2019

Trump sanctions Rosneft, Russia's largest oil company, for aiding Maduro in Venezuela - MSN, Feb 19 2020

Russia Says New U.S. Weapon Threatens Nuclear War - Newsweek, Mar 7 2020

Trump Continues to Be Exceedingly Tough on Russia - Townhall, Jul 25 2020

U.S.-Russia Military Tensions Intensify in the Air and on the Ground Worldwide - NYT, Sep 1 2020

White House rejects Putin's proposal to extend last U.S.-Russia nuclear arms treaty - LA Times, Oct 16 2020

U.S., Russian Navies Involved In Brief Confrontation At Sea - NPR, Nov 24 2020

US sanctions NATO ally Turkey over Russian missile defense - AP, Dec 14 2020

Pompeo accuses Russia of sowing 'chaos' in the Mediterranean - Rawstory, Dec 15 2020

Exclusive: U.S. preparing new sanctions to impede Russia's Nord Stream 2 pipeline - Reuters, Dec 23 2020

As we have written before :

When one adds up all those actions one can only find that Trump cares more about Russia, than about the U.S. and its NATO allies. Only with Trump being under Putin's influence, knowingly or unwittingly, could he end up doing Russia so many favors.

Not.

Posted by b at 18:01 UTC | Comments (3)

Why, you certainly could view most (if not all) of those actions as favors.

People feel attacked, unite, rally around the flag. Internal problems are blamed on the external enemy. The sanctions, the sort the West likes to impose, help develop domestic industries. Etc. Yeah, favors.


arby , Jan 6 2021 18:24 utc | 2

n one of the comments that I read yesterday some Russian told another one who is sanctioned by the US that that is a badge of honour.

Tollef Ås/秋涛乐 , Jan 6 2021 18:43 utc | 3

Point on! Trump was never 'the Russians' bitch'. He was the whore of the Russian émigré mafia that had relocated to the US in south Queens in New York City. A major difference!

Abe , Jan 6 2021 18:51 utc | 4

Well, the logic is to destroy or ad least severely weaken Russia. Yet damn Russia is getting stronger and stronger, hence what ever happened under Trump's watch must have been a favor to Russia.

Competent government would look itself in the mirror and admit it is their own fault and stupidity, but that ship sailed long time ago for US.

[Jan 06, 2021] The whole point of US and Western MSM obsession with demonizing Russia is to divert public attention away from the crisis of neoliberalism at home

Jan 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Tollef Ås/秋涛乐 , Jan 6 2021 18:43 utc | 3

Point on! Trump was never 'the Russians' bitch'. He was the whore of the Russian émigrés mafia that had relocated to the US in south Queens in New York City. A major difference!


Jen , Jan 6 2021 20:01 utc | 17

Of course the whole point of US and Western MSM obsession with demonising Russia and China, and castigating those like Trump (for not going far enough to oppose either one or the other nation, or both), is to divert public attention away from govt failings at home and to push the public into supporting regime change against both Russia and China.

B's post should be read as a companion piece to his previous post on China as an existential threat to the US, as an example of a nation that achieved stability, peace and enough prosperity for most of its people by pursuing an alternate political and economic ideology in the space of 40 years. An ideology that moreover challenges the ideology that the West has followed for the past 500 years, and the assumptions on which that ideology is based. Despite Western attempts to destabilise, break up and impoverish Russia in the 1990s, in order to steal its energy and mineral resources, that nation managed to bounce back to some level of stability and economic security. In addition Russia and China signed a friendship treaty in 2001 and are committing to a closer political ans economic relationship.

All this serves to marginalise the Anglosphere nations and to deny the US, the UK and their elites the opportunity to plunder these nations and their allies for their natural resources.

uncle tungsten , Jan 6 2021 20:25 utc | 21

Tollef Ås/秋涛乐 #3

Point on! Trump was never 'the Russians' bitch'. He was the whore of the russian emigrée mafia that had relocatet to the US in south Quens in New York City. A maijor difference!

Exactly that, thank you. The mafia that manages the D party are of Mediterranean roots and are totally pi$$ed of with the Russians.

Enough of this polite avoidance of the reality of the USAi gangland - it is a mafia state. The D 'reformist' squad just blew their best chance to start the reformation. They will be neutered well before another chance arises.

Jackrabbit , Jan 6 2021 20:28 utc | 23

Trump appeased . . . NOT is only half the story.

AFAICT Russiagate's neo-McCarthyism and Trump's supposed friendliness toward Putin was a set up prior to Trump negotiations with Putin at Helsinki.

"I'm your only friend ... and your last best hope ..." is a powerful pitch - especially when it is accompanied by generous offers of aid and support. And perhaps it would've worked if it had come years before.

So now we have a new Cold War - with both Russia and China.

!!

[Jan 06, 2021] Biden Taps Architect of 2014 Ukraine Coup for State Department by Dave DeCamp

Notable quotes:
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
Jan 06, 2021 | news.antiwar.com

Victoria Nuland, wife of neoconservative Robert Kagan, is expected be nominated for under secretary of state for political affairs

According to a report from Politico , Joe Biden's transition team is expected to nominate Victoria Nuland to be the under secretary of state for political affairs for the incoming administration's State Department.

Nuland, who is married to neoconservative Robert Kagan, is known for her role in orchestrating the 2014 coup in Ukraine while she was the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration.

A recording of a phone call between Nuland and then-US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked and released on YouTube on February 4th, 2014 . In the call, Nuland and Pyatt discussed who should replace the government of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who was forced to step down on February 22nd, 2014.

The US-backed coup sparked the war in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region and led to the Russian annexation of Crimea. Both regions have a majority ethnic-Russian population who rejected the nationalist, anti-Russian post-coup government that even had neo-Nazis in its midst .

In a 2020 column for Foreign Affairs titled, "Pinning Down Putin," Nuland said Russian President Vladimir Putin "seized" on the 2014 coup and other "democratic struggles" to "fuel the perception at home of Russian interests under siege by external enemies." She also cited the war in the Donbas and annexation of Crimea as examples of Russian aggression, as most in Washington do.

Currently, Nuland is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and works for the Albright Stonebridge Group. She is also a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy , a US-taxpayer funded nonprofit that funds "pro-democracy" movements across the world.

Nuland worked in the Bush administration from 2005 to 2008 as the US ambassador to NATO. From 2011 to 2013, she served as the spokesperson for Barack Obama's State Department, and from 2013 to 2017, Nuland was the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs.

Politico also reported that the Biden administration is tapping Wendy Sherman to work directly under Secretary of State-designee Anthony Blinken. Sherman worked in the Obama administration's State Department and played a crucial role in negotiating the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

[Jan 06, 2021] Ex-AG Barr Reportedly Met With Jeffrey Epstein's Last Cellmate - Newsmax.com

Notable quotes:
"... Why would China be bounty hunting the cultivator and securer of its ME energy supplies? ..."
Jan 06, 2021 | www.newsmax.com

Ex-AG Barr Reportedly Met With Jeffrey Epstein's Last Cellmate bill barr stands at a podium and speaks Attorney General William Barr speaks at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention Feb. 26, 2020, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

By Charlie McCarthy | Tuesday, 05 January 2021 07:06 PM

Short URL | Email Article | Comment | Contact | Print | A A Copy Shortlink

Former Attorney General William Barr investigated the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, reportedly even meeting with the multimillionaire sex offender's last cellmate.

Epstein was found hanging in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan early on Aug. 10, 2019. Efrain "Stone" Reyes had shared the cell with Epstein until being transferred a day before the suicide.

Epstein's death rattled the highest levels of the Justice Department, according to the New York Daily News on Monday.

Following Epstein's death, Reyes was pulled from a privately run jail in Queens to meet frequently with authorities, once with the attorney general himself.

"Barr wanted to know about what was going on in [the Metropolitan Correctional Center]," a source told the Daily News. "Barr told him, 'I owe you a favor, thank you for telling us the truth.'

"He said [Barr] was a good guy. Barr was nice about it. He just wanted to know if [inmates] were being mistreated. What [Reyes] believed happened. Just basically that. He told them everything. He cooperated with Barr."

The Daily News source said he befriended Reyes when both were being held at the Queens jail, per the Daily Mail .

me title=

A Justice Department spokesman declined comment to the Daily News.

The New York Times reported previously that a "livid" Barr was personally overseeing four inquiries into Epstein's suicide.

Reyes caught coronavirus at the Queens Detention Facility earlier this year, was released in April and died last month. He was 51.

The source said he and Reyes watched a documentary about Epstein, who associated with some of the world's most powerful men while allegedly running an international child sex trafficking scheme.

"[Reyes] was like, 'I just didn't see that from him. I didn't see that side of him. I never pictured him being with young girls. Some guys like that are creepy,'" the source recalled. "He said he never really got that side of Epstein -- like he was someone who took advantage of girls. But we all have our secrets, you know? You never know."

Related Stories:

[Jan 06, 2021] Again the 'highly likely' -- US spies accuse Russia of SolarWinds hack in repeat of Russiagate hysteria by Nebojsa Malic

Jan 06, 2021 | www.rt.com

US intelligence and security agencies declared that the SolarWinds hack was 'likely Russian in origin,' echoing evidence-free mainstream media claims as well as their own language in the 'assessments' about the 2016 election.

In a joint statement on Tuesday, the FBI, NSA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said that their investigative work "indicates that an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor, likely Russian in origin" was behind the compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, first revealed three weeks ago.

"At this time, we believe this was, and continues to be, an intelligence gathering effort. We are taking all necessary steps to understand the full scope of this campaign and respond accordingly," the statement added.

What does "likely of Russian origin" even mean? Don't expect the mainstream media outlets to ask – they've all been accusing Moscow for weeks, using unverifiable assertions by anonymous sources instead of any actual evidence.

Several things in the statement jump out. One, that CISA was put in charge of "asset response" and mitigation. This is the same agency that on November 13 hosted a statement – attributed to it by the media, but in reality coming from two advisory committees – declaring the 2020 US election "the most secure in American history," hastening to add that "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."

That was a remarkable rush to judgment, given the subsequent claims to the contrary that seem far more credible than any assessments of "likely" Russian hacking.

Americans can surely sleep easy knowing the FBI is the "lead agency for threat response," which is presently still collecting evidence, and analyzing it "to determine further attribution."

This is the agency once run by James Comey and Andrew McCabe, who discussed an "insurance policy" in case Donald Trump gets elected with senior staff like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and framed General Michael Flynn over a perfectly legal and legitimate conversation with a Russian ambassador.

This is the same FBI that hastened to send 15 agents to investigate a garage rope pulley in Talladega, but sat on Hunter Biden's laptop for a year and did nothing with tips about the suspected Nashville RV bomber.

https://platform.twitter.com

Again, the mainstream media will not point any of this out, but will parse the "likely" as "definitely" and claim the statement somehow proves their claim Russia was behind the SolarWinds breach. Just watch.

That's precisely what happened with the infamous "Intelligence Community Assessment" published in January 2017. A handpicked group of FBI, CIA, ODNI and NSA staff was first conflated with "all 17 US intelligence agencies" and then their "assessment" treated as established fact. Only in November 2018, after the midterm elections, did the source material the ICA was based on see the light of day.

It was quickly forgotten, however, as it made clear that the assessment was based on wishful thinking about what the US spies believed was "consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts." Couldn't have this frank admission interfere with the fantasy political interests in Washington needed to believe, after all.

We want to believe: 'Russian hacking' memo REVEALS how US intel pinned leaks to Kremlin

Note also that no one involved in the exercise in dissembling that was Russiagate ever faced any consequences. Only one person – a FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith – has been prosecuted for altering evidence in the Flynn case, and he got a slap on the wrist . Meanwhile DNI James Clapper and CIA chief John Brennan got cable news sinecures, while FBI director Comey landed lucrative book and TV deals. McCabe, Strzok and Page went on to become media darlings and heroes of the #Resistance.

With all that in mind, it's curious that the "likely" and "believe" are doing a lot of heavy lifting in that joining statement about the SolarWinds hack. Why should US spies couch their claims in bureaucratic language, designed to shield the author from consequences of being wrong, when impunity is the order of the day in Washington? Policy is based on assessments anyway, and it's pretty obvious at this point that evidence – or lack thereof – is an irrelevant detail to the US establishment.

But again, that's a question one shouldn't expect the mainstream media to ask.

[Jan 06, 2021] New York Times Still Stoking Alarm At 'Russian Hacking' by Ray McGovern

Jan 06, 2021 | original.antiwar.com

Forget what Vice President Pence has suggested he might do this week regarding counting the votes for president and forget President Trump's ominous military buildup near Iran, the Sunday New York Times two-column, above-the-fold lede tells us what we should really be worried about: "Scope of Russian Hacking Far Exceeds Initial Fears." The on-line title was " As Understanding of Russian Hacking Grows, So Does Alarm ."

Forget, too, that this latest NYT indictment of Russia, does not substantially advance the story beyond the information available two weeks ago, when "neither the actor, nor the motive, nor the damage done [was] known for certain in this latest scare story." Although no evidence is adduced to show that Russia is behind this latest flurry of hacking – Russia no doubt sits toward the top of a long list of suspects. The Times ominously quotes Suzanne Spaulding, a senior cyber official during the Obama administration, saying Russia is the foregone conclusion:

"We still don't know what Russia's strategic objectives were," she said "But we should be concerned that part of this may go beyond reconnaissance. Their goal may be to put themselves in a position to have leverage over the new administration, like holding a gun to our head to deter us from acting to counter Putin."

The Sanger Sewing Machine

NYT Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger is listed first on the byline for Sunday's story together with Nicole Perlroth and Julian Barnes. That should give us a clue, given Sanger's record for sewing things out of whole cloth. In a word, Sanger enjoys an unenviably checkered record for reliability. Until we are shown more in the way of evidence attributing the recently discovered hacking to the Russians, we would do well to review his record.

Sanger's reporting on Iraq before the war was as wrong as it was consequential. Those who were alert at the time may remember that Sanger was second only to Judith Miller in spreading the party line on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Seldom do historians obtain documentary evidence of plans for a war of aggression, but on May 1, 2005 the London Times published a paper (now known as the "Downing Street Memos") that recorded what Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 (the UK counterpart to the CIA) relayed to Prime Minister Tony Blair on July 23, 2002 about what he was told by George Tenet at CIA headquarters on July 20, 2002. (No one has challenged the authenticity of the minutes.)

"C (Dearlove) reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." [Emphasis added.]

With David Sanger and his colleague Judith Miller having cried wolf on WMD so many times over the prior two years, the Times decided it would be best to suppress the embarrassing revelation that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." So the Times ignored it for more than six weeks, when Sanger wrote an article to put the whole thing in perspective, so to speak.

The title of Sanger's June 13, 2005 article was "Postwar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made." Those looking for a measure of Sanger's credibility could do no better than read this masterpiece of deceptive circumlocution. Here's the lead paragraph:

WASHINGTON, June 12 – A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made "no political decisions" to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced. "

And those asking how Sanger could write that with a straight face need only to read the Downing Street Memos , which are quite succinct and clear.

One could almost sympathize with Sanger, who had co-authored a piece with Thom Shanker, on July 29, 2002 in which WMD were flat-facted into Iraq no fewer than seven times. See: " U.S. Exploring Baghdad Strike As Iraq Option of July 29, 2002 ." That was about a week after CIA Director Tenet had briefed Dearlove on the fixing of the intelligence and the facts. It is a safe bet that Sanger's sources in the intelligence community briefed him on what line to take on those (non-existent) WMD.

Years Later Still Drinking at the Government Trough

On July 26, 2016 , Candidate Clinton reportedly approved a "blame-Russia" plan. According to a letter from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sept. 29, 2020, CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on "Russian intelligence analysis" regarding "alleged approval by Hillary Clinton of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services."

The Russian intelligence analysis report was deemed important enough that on Sept. 7, 2016, US intelligence officials forwarded an "investigative referral" to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding it. ( Such a referral usually indicates that a leak has occurred about a particularly sensitive issue or program. Thus, it is possible that the putative leaker wished to get the information out into the open.)

But it is one thing to leak; quite another to get an Establishment journalist to write about it without checking beforehand with the intelligence community for a nihil obstat . There has been no additional reporting about the "investigative referral." But if it was about a leak, the information never saw the light of day at the time.

July 26, 2016 : The exact date timing may be coincidence, but on the same day Mrs. Clinton was alleged to have given the go-ahead for Russia-gate, Sanger co-authored an article with Eric Schmitt titled: "Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked D.N.C.":

"WASHINGTON – American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have 'high confidence' that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have been briefed on the evidence."

There is much more that can be said about Sanger's reporting on very consequential issues. On Iran, for example, taking Sanger's reporting at face value, one would think he never read the National Intelligence Estimate that helped prevent a war planned by Cheney/Bush for 2008. I refer to the November 2007 NIE the unanimous, "high-confidence" key judgment of which was that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003 and had not resumed such work. That key judgment stands, but you would never know that from Sanger's reporting.

Beware chief Washington correspondents; or at least look at their record.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).


[Jan 06, 2021] Biden Taps Victoria "F-ck The EU" Nuland For Key National Security Post

Why the protégé of Cheney Nuland? Why now? Did Biden completely succumbs to Alzheimer? Does Biden administration strive to be as dysfunctional, neocon-dominated and destructive as Obama administration?
Jan 06, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Politico reports Tuesday that President-elect Joe Biden is tapping former senior Obama administration foreign affairs officials to serve in his cabinet.

Most notably among them is neocon Victoria Nuland, who has just been tapped as Biden's state department undersecretary for political affairs.

Writes Politico : "Another veteran diplomat, Victoria Nuland, will be nominated for the role of under secretary of State for political affairs, one of the people said. Nuland also previously served in the Obama administration, as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs."

Recall that in this capacity she ran point for Obama's regime change "democracy promotion" efforts in Ukraine . In 2014 leaked audio clip posted to YouTube caused deep embarrassment for the State Department amid accusations the US was coordinating coup efforts using the ongoing "Maidan Revolution" to oust then President Viktor Yanukovych.

In that leaked phone call Nuland told US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt "F*ck the EU" - for which she was later forced to apologize. Here's some of the audio for a little trip down memory lane.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/L2XNN0Yt6D8

She had also been instrumental in her prior postings at the State Department in Obama's disastrous Libya intervention.

After the Obama administration she's been part of various think tanks, including the hawkish Brookings Institution, where she's been a fierce critic of Trump's supposed "appeasement" of Putin. She's also argued for deeper military intervention in Syria .

Politico in its description of the incoming Obama-era officials underscores they are hawks on Russia :

Nuland and [Wendy] Sherman, who entered academia and the think tank world after leaving the Obama administration, have been outspoken critics of President Donald Trump's foreign policy -- particularly his appeasement of Russian President Vladimir Putin .

On the National Security Council, former State Department official Jon Finer will be named deputy national security adviser, the people said, reporting up to incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Finer, a former journalist, joined the Obama White House as a fellow in 2009 and served in various roles throughout Obama's tenure, including as a foreign policy speechwriter for Biden and a senior adviser to then-deputy national security adviser Blinken. Finer had been working in political risk and public policy at the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, which was co-founded by Blinken's father, since leaving government in 2017.

The key NSC role of senior director for European Affairs will go to Amanda Sloat, a Brookings Institution fellow ...

... ... ...

As is the unfortunate norm in the Washington beltway, the Liberal hawks under Obama simply went to who's who of neocon think tanks like Brookings, and have now been called back in revolving door fashion for pretty much a return to Obama era foreign policy (and its disasters ).

[Jan 06, 2021] You could not make this up...

Jan 06, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Democrycy 7 hours ago

You could not make this up...

BREAKING: Biden to nominate Victoria Nuland as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs.

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1346542671339409408

russian_troll_farm 7 hours ago

F the EU Nuland

buff24seven 6 hours ago

the same Victoria Nuland that said Obama State Dept. informed FBI of reporting from Steele dossier. wow you cant make this stuff up.

ThePub'Lick_Hare 5 hours ago

Not the "Cookie Monster" surely!

Mentaliusanything 1 hour ago

You wait for Hillary to be called up... and the Gangs all here.

What Idiot said there is no Honor amongst thieves

[Jan 05, 2021] The Democrats Have Stolen the Presidential Election by Paul Craig Roberts

Notable quotes:
"... It is difficult to know or to ensure that the ballots are actual ballots from registered voters. For example in the early hours of the morning of November 4 large ballot drops occurred in Michigan and Wisconsin that wiped out Trump's lead. State officials have reported that people not registered -- probably illegals -- were permitted to vote. Postal service workers have reported being ordered to backdate ballots that suddenly appeared in the middle of the night after the deadline. These techniques were used to erase Trump's substantial leads in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia. ..."
"... Digital technology has also made it easy to alter vote counts. US Air Force General Thomas McInerney is familiar with this technology. He says it was developed by the National Security Agency in order to interfere in foreign elections, but now is in the hands of the CIA and was used to defeat Trump. Trump is considered to be an enemy of the military/security complex because of his wish to normalize relations with Russia, thus taking away the enemy that justifies the CIA's budget and power. ..."
"... The military/security complex favors the disunity that the Democrat Party and media have fostered with their ideology of Identity Politics. ..."
"... I would take it a little further and say that voting by mail is a method of vote fraud. The supposed safeguards are easily circumvented, as some whistleblowers have illustrated with ballots being brought forth in large numbers after election day without postmarks and postal workers being ordered to stamp them with acceptable postmarks. ..."
"... Eisenhower is always lauded for his MIC warning. Frankly he ticks me off. Thanks for the warning AFTER you were in some position to mitigate. ..."
"... the most likely source of fraud that is hard to detect, is ballot harvesting. This should be outlawed as it violates the idea of a secret ballot. Somebody comes to the home of a disinterested voter and makes sure he votes (of course they will never admit to hounding the person) and "helps" them with the ballot. If the voter cannot be cajoled into voting the correct way, you merely throw his ballot in the trash. ..."
"... Living in an urban setting I often had to visit apartment buildings. Without fail, there was always a pile of undeliverable mail in the lobby under the mailboxes. ..."
"... His farewell address was just flapdoodle; it wasn't really dredged up till the 70s. Eisenhower spent eight years spreading tripwires and mines and then said "Watch out." Thanks buddy. ..."
"... As the German newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte revealed in his book, Bought Journalism, the European and US media speak with one voice -- the voice of the CIA. The very profitable and powerful US military/security complex needs foreign enemies. ..."
"... inventive creative new ways to deceive.. first it was election machines, then mail in votes. ..."
"... The phrase "there's no evidence" is just a public commitment to ignore any evidence, no matter how blatant or obvious. ..."
"... Paper ballots as ascribed by Tulsi Gabbard legislation is the only safe option for elections. Kudos to Tulsi! ..."
"... Everyone knew about the potential for voter fraud to occur, but the entire system is corrupt, including Trump who has allowed the massive corruption within the system that was present when he entered office to persist and grow because he is a wimpy, spineless, coward, that was too afraid to make any waves and take the heat that he promised his voters. ..."
"... Why anyone voted for Trump in 2020 confounds me. I voted for him in 2016 and he has turned out to be one of the worst presidents in history. ..."
"... Trump in his cowardess and dishonesty knew that the ailing economy would harm his chances of being re-elected, so he allowed the health scare scamdemic to occur and destroy the livelihoods, lives, and businesses of hundreds of millions of Americans because he is a psychopath. Trump did not do what he promised. Trump made America worse than it has ever been since the end of slavery. ..."
"... Trump has also demanded the extradition of Assange after telling his voters that he loved wikileaks. Trump is a two-faced, lying, fraud. It has been his pattern. He consistently supports various groups and people like Wikileaks, Proud Boys, and others and panders to them and voters and tells people that he loves them, and then every time without fail when the heat is on, Trump says," I really don't know anything about them." ..."
"... "I know nothing." Trump saying "I know nothing." defines his presidency and who he is as a person, a spineless, pandering, corrupt, two-faced, narcissist, loser, and wimp! ..."
Nov 12, 2020 | www.unz.com

139 COMMENTS

Paul Craig Roberts' Interview with the European magazine Zur Zeit ( In This Time ):

https://zurzeit.at/index.php/die-demokraten-haben-die-praesidentenwahl-gestohlen/

English Translation:

A few months ago it looked like the re-election of Trump was almost certain, but now there was a close race between Trump and Biden? What happen during the last months?

In the months before the election, the Democrats used the "Covid pandemic" to put in place voting by mail. The argument was used that people who safely go to supermarkets and restaurants could catch Covid if they stood in voting lines. Never before used on a large scale, voting by mail is subject to massive vote fraud.

There are many credible reports of organized vote fraud committed by Democrats. The only question is whether the Republican establishment will support challenging the documented fraud or whether Trump will be pressured to concede in order to protect the reputation of American Democracy.

For those influenced by a partisan media that is denying the massive fraud that occurred, here is an overview of the elements of the fraud and the legal remedies. https://www.unz.com/article/of-color-revolutions-foreign-and-domestic-the-first-72-hours/

It is difficult to know or to ensure that the ballots are actual ballots from registered voters. For example in the early hours of the morning of November 4 large ballot drops occurred in Michigan and Wisconsin that wiped out Trump's lead. State officials have reported that people not registered -- probably illegals -- were permitted to vote. Postal service workers have reported being ordered to backdate ballots that suddenly appeared in the middle of the night after the deadline. These techniques were used to erase Trump's substantial leads in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Digital technology has also made it easy to alter vote counts. US Air Force General Thomas McInerney is familiar with this technology. He says it was developed by the National Security Agency in order to interfere in foreign elections, but now is in the hands of the CIA and was used to defeat Trump. Trump is considered to be an enemy of the military/security complex because of his wish to normalize relations with Russia, thus taking away the enemy that justifies the CIA's budget and power.

People do not understand. They think an election has been held when in fact what has occurred is that massive vote fraud has been used to effect a revolution against red state white America. Leaders of the revolution, such as Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are demanding a list of Trump supporters who are "to be held accountable." Calls are being made for the arrest of Tucker Carlson, the only mainstream journalist who supported President Trump.

In a recent column I wrote:

"Think what it means that the entirety of the US media, allegedly the 'watchdogs of democracy,' are openly involved in participating in the theft of a presidential election.

"Think what it means that a large number of Democrat public and election officials are openly involved in the theft of a presidential election.

"It means that the United States is split irredeemably. The hatred for white people that has been cultivated for many years, portraying white Americans as "systemic racists," together with the Democrats' lust for power and money, has destroyed national unity. The consequence will be the replacement of rules with force."

Mainstream media in Europe claim, that Trump had "divided" the United States. But isn`t it actually the other way around, that his opponents have divided the country?

As the German newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte revealed in his book, Bought Journalism , the European and US media speak with one voice -- the voice of the CIA. The very profitable and powerful US military/security complex needs foreign enemies. Russiagate was a CIA/FBI successful effort to block Trump from reducing tensions with Russia. In 1961 in his last address to the American people President Dwight Eisenhower warned that the growing power of the military/industrial complex was a threat to American democracy. We ignored his warning and now have security agencies more powerful than the President.

The military/security complex favors the disunity that the Democrat Party and media have fostered with their ideology of Identity Politics. Identity politics replaced Marxist class war with race and gender war. White people, and especially white heterosexual males, are the new oppressor class. This ideology causes race and gender disunity and prevents any unified opposition to the security agencies ability to impose its agendas by controlling explanations. Opposition to Trump cemented the alliance between Democrats, media, and the Deep State.

It is possible that the courts will decide who will be sworn into office at January 20, 2021. Do you except a phase of uncertainty or even a constitutional crisis?

There is no doubt that numerous irregularities indicate that the election was stolen and that the ground was well laid in advance. Trump intends to challenge the obvious theft. However, his challenges will be rejected in Democrat ruled states, as they were part of the theft and will not indict themselves. This means Trump and his attorneys will have to have constitutional grounds for taking their cases to the federal Supreme Court. The Republicans have a majority on the Court, but the Court is not always partisan.

Republicans tend to be more patriotic than Democrats, who denounce America as racist, fascist, sexist, imperialist. This patriotism makes Republicans impotent when it comes to political warfare that could adversely affect America's reputation. The inclination of Republicans is for Trump to protect America's reputation by conceding the election. Republicans fear the impact on America's reputation of having it revealed that America's other major party plotted to steal a presidental election.

Red state Americans, on the other hand, have no such fear. They understand that they are the targets of the Democrats, having been defined by Democrats as "racist white supremacist Trump deplorables."

The introduction of a report of the Heritage Foundation states that "the United States has a long and unfortunate history of election fraud". Are the 2020 presidential elections another inglorious chapter in this long history?

This time the fraud is not local as in the past. It is the result of a well organized national effort to get rid of a president that the Establishment does not accept.

Somehow you get the impression that in the USA – as in many European countries democracy is just a facade – or am I wrong?

You are correct. Trump is the first non-establishment president who became President without being vetted by the Establishment since Ronald Reagan. Trump was able to be elected only because the Establishment thought he had no chance and took no measures to prevent his election. A number of studies have concluded that in the US the people, despite democracy and voting, have zero input into public policy.

Democracy cannot work in America because the money of the elite prevails. American democracy is organized in order to prevent the people from having a voice. A political campaign is expensive. The money for candidates comes from interest groups, such as defense contractors, Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the Israel Lobby. Consequently, the winning candidate is indebted to his funders, and these are the people whom he serves.

European mainstream media are portraying Biden as a luminous figure. Should Biden become president, what can be expected in terms of foreign and security policy, especially in regard to China, Russia and the Middle East? I mean, the deep state and the military-industrial complex remain surely nearly unchanged.

Biden will be a puppet, one unlikely to be long in office. His obvious mental confusion will be used either to rule through him or to remove him on grounds of mental incompetence. No one wants the nuclear button in the hands of a president who doesn't know which day of the week it is or where he is.

The military/security complex needs enemies for its power and profit and will be certain to retain the list of desirable foreign enemies -- Russia, Iran, China, and any independent-inclined country in Latin America. Being at war is also a way of distracting the people of the war against their liberties.

What the military/security complex might not appreciate is that among its Democrat allies there are some, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are ideological revolutionaries. Having demonized red state America and got rid of Trump (assuming the electoral fraud is not overturned by the courts), Ocasio-Cortez and her allies intend to revolutionize the Democrat Party and make it a non-establishment force. In her mind white people are the Establishment, which we already see from her demands for a list of Trump supporters to be punished.

I think I'm not wrong in assuming that a Biden-presidency would mean more identity politics, more political correctness etc. for the USA. How do you see this?

Identity politics turns races and genders against one another. As white people -- "systemic racists" -- are defined as the oppressor class, white people are not protected from hate speech and hate crimes. Anything can be said or done to a white American and it is not considered politically incorrect.

With Trump and his supporters demonized, under Democrat rule the transition of white Americans into second or third class citizens will be completed.

How do you access Trump's first term in office? Where was he successful and where he failed?

Trump spent his entire term in office fighting off fake accusations -- Russiagate, Impeachgate, failure to bomb Russia for paying Taliban to kill American occupiers of Afghanistan, causing Covid by not wearing a mask, and so on and on.

That Trump survived all the false charges shows that he is a real person, a powerful character. Who else could have survived what Trump has been subjected to by the Establishment and their media prostitutes. In the United States the media is known as "presstitutes" -- press prostitutes. That is what Udo Ulfkotte says they are in Europe. As a former Wall Street Journal editor, I say with complete confidence that there is no one in the American media today I would have hired. The total absence of integrity in the Western media is sufficient indication that the West is doomed.


Twodees Partain , says: November 12, 2020 at 7:21 pm GMT • 1.0 days ago

Never before used on a large scale, voting by mail is subject to massive vote fraud.

I would take it a little further and say that voting by mail is a method of vote fraud. The supposed safeguards are easily circumvented, as some whistleblowers have illustrated with ballots being brought forth in large numbers after election day without postmarks and postal workers being ordered to stamp them with acceptable postmarks.

It really seems to me that there would be no democrat majorities in Congress or in so many state legislatures without vote fraud.

Ann Nonny Mouse , says: Website November 12, 2020 at 7:42 pm GMT • 1.0 days ago

So fraud is needed to protect the reputation of American democracy. Only fraud can! Thanks, PCR!

endthefed , says: November 12, 2020 at 7:53 pm GMT • 24.0 hours ago
@Notsofast

Eisenhower is always lauded for his MIC warning. Frankly he ticks me off. Thanks for the warning AFTER you were in some position to mitigate.

MarkinLA , says: November 12, 2020 at 9:37 pm GMT • 22.2 hours ago

Worse than the fraud available with vote by mail is the voting of people normally who don't bother to vote. Think of how stupid and uninformed that average American voter is. Now realize how much more stupid and uninformed the non-voter is, only now he votes.

However, the most likely source of fraud that is hard to detect, is ballot harvesting. This should be outlawed as it violates the idea of a secret ballot. Somebody comes to the home of a disinterested voter and makes sure he votes (of course they will never admit to hounding the person) and "helps" them with the ballot. If the voter cannot be cajoled into voting the correct way, you merely throw his ballot in the trash.

Curmudgeon , says: November 12, 2020 at 9:43 pm GMT • 22.1 hours ago

I have little doubt that there have been massive "irregularities", particularly in the so-called battleground states, that are at play in "stealing" the election.

...The favourite phrase these days is "no evidence of wide spread voter fraud". Let's break that down. Only 6 states have been challenged for vote fraud. In the big scheme of things, 6 states is not wide spread, even if there is massive vote fraud within those 6 states. That the vote fraud is not widespread, implies that some vote fraud is acceptable, and that the listener should ignore it. Last and most importantly, in the narrowest of legalistic terms, testimony or affidavits are not evidence. Testimony and affidavits become evidence when supported by physical evidence. An affidavit with a photograph demonstrating the statement would be evidence.

Another phrase is something like "election officials say they have seen no evidence of voter fraud". I have yet to hear a reporter challenge the "seen no evidence of " part of the statement, regardless of the subject, by asking if the speaker had looked for any evidence. They won't, because they know damn well no one has.

That is how the liars operate. Not so different from Rumsfeld's "plausible deniability".

Beavertales , says: November 12, 2020 at 10:21 pm GMT • 21.5 hours ago

Living in an urban setting I often had to visit apartment buildings. Without fail, there was always a pile of undeliverable mail in the lobby under the mailboxes.

The envelopes were mostly addressed to people who had moved out or died. If ballots were sent to these people based on incorrect voter rolls, then these too would likely have been left sitting on the floor or on a ledge for anyone to take.

It doesn't take a leap of faith to know what a Trump-hating leftist would do when no one is looking. This moral hazard was intentionally created by Dems, who know that urban dwellers are transient and lean left politically.

Franz , says: November 12, 2020 at 10:54 pm GMT • 21.0 hours ago
@endthefed

Eisenhower is always lauded for his MIC warning. Frankly he ticks me off. Thanks for the warning AFTER you were in some position to mitigate.

Ike's a mystery. Why did he NOT question Harry Truman's commitments to NATO, the UN, and all that rubbish? Ike was a WWII guy. He knew Americans hated the UN in 1953 as much as they hated the League of Nations after WWI. But he let it all slide and get bigger.

His farewell address was just flapdoodle; it wasn't really dredged up till the 70s. Eisenhower spent eight years spreading tripwires and mines and then said "Watch out." Thanks buddy.

endthefed , says: November 12, 2020 at 11:08 pm GMT • 20.7 hours ago
@Bragadocious

Well, agree on your points however, on the other side of the ledger, he never understood the stupidity of the Korean war (that he could have ended) and majorly up-ramped CIA activities in all manner of regime change (bay of pigs anyone?). Almost a direct path to our foreign policy now (and now domestic policy)

Notsofast , says: November 12, 2020 at 11:28 pm GMT • 20.4 hours ago
@Bragadocious

He did deploy the military assistance advisory group to Vietnam in 1955. This is considered the beginning of U.S. involvement in the war. This allowed the French to moonwalk out the back door leaving us holding the bag. In fairness this was Johnson's war however. Eisenhower did cut the military budget as a peace dividend to fund interstate system and other domestic projects. In today political spectrum he would be considered a flaming liberal.

Louis Hissink , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:30 am GMT • 14.4 hours ago

Hi PCR

As the German newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte revealed in his book, Bought Journalism, the European and US media speak with one voice -- the voice of the CIA. The very profitable and powerful US military/security complex needs foreign enemies.

What intrigues me is the ultimate political goal of the UN and the WEF when they anticipate a single global government centered at the UN and the absence of nation-states.

So what is the MIC going to do when there are no existential threats of competing nation-states? Or will the MIC re-engineer religious wars between the various religious groups, secular and theological? It seems the aspirations of the WEF and its fellow travellers preclude the occurrence of future armed conflicts.

Of course one needs capitalistic economies to produce the ordnance and materiels for the engineered social factions to war with each other. Yet if the Greens have their way, there will be no mining period.

More likely is the possibility that none of them actually understand what they are doing. As Nassim Taleb is alleged to have remarked, 99% of humans are stupid.

anonymous [284] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:35 am GMT • 14.3 hours ago

The total absence of integrity in the Western media is sufficient indication that the West is doomed.

It's because Western media is completely under the control of Jews, the world's foremost End Justifies Means people. The Fourth Estate has become the world's most powerful Bully Pulpit. There are still a few good ones though, brave souls they are: Kim Strassel of WSJ, Daniel Larison of The American Conservative , Neil Munro of Breitbart.

The rest are more or less lying scums, including everyone on NYTimes, WSJ, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, MSNBC, Fox News (minus Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo), The Economist , and let's not forget the new media: Google, Facebook, Twitter. The world would be a much better place without any of them.

The Real World , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:44 am GMT • 14.1 hours ago
@Beavertales -- with either vote flipping on machines or having the totals that paper ballot scanners tabulate adjust via a pre-programmed algorithm. Many elections have already been stolen this way.

But, in the vein of what you mention is this fascinating article. I urge everyone to read it. He spills the beans in detail. https://nypost.com/2020/08/29/political-insider-explains-voter-fraud-with-mail-in-ballots/

Imagine hundreds of those people around the country over decades. There must be scads of illegitimate office holders all over. It's horrendous

Alfred , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:51 am GMT • 14.0 hours ago

Nancy Pelosi claims that Biden's victory gives the Democrats a "MANDATE" to alter the economy as they see fit with 50.5%. This proves that Biden will NOT represent everyone – only the left! I have warned that this has been their agenda from day one. Now, three whistleblowers from the Democratic software company Dominion Voting Systems, alleging that the company's software stole 38 million votes from Trump. There are people claiming that Dominion Voting Systems is linked to Soros, Dianae Finesteing, Clintons, and Pelosi's husband. I cannot verify any of these allegations so far.

We are at the Rubicon. Civil War is on the other side. There should NEVER be this type of drastic change to the economy from Capitalism to Marxism on 50.5% of the popular vote. NOBODY should be able to restructure the government and the economy on less than 2/3rds of the majority. That would be a mandate. Trying to change everything with a claim of 50.5% of the vote will only signal, like the Dread Scot decision, that there is no solution by rule of law. This is the end of civilization and it will turn ugly from here because there is no middle ground anymore. As I have warned, historically the left will never tolerate opposition.

Democrats Claim Mandate to Alter the Economy & 3 Whistleblowers from Software Company Allege they stole 38 million votes from Trump | Armstrong Economics

Priss Factor , says: Website November 13, 2020 at 5:56 am GMT • 13.9 hours ago

DEMOCRATS TURN MENACING AS FRAUD FALLS APART

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/WMA7DXLDgzBy/

Just another serf , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:18 am GMT • 13.6 hours ago

Yes, the theft is blatant. But what are you, us, going to do about it? We really can't do much as the Office of the President Elect requires us to wear masks. For our safety.

animalogic , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:35 am GMT • 13.3 hours ago
@Curmudgeon

"in the narrowest of legalistic terms, testimony or affidavits are not evidence. Testimony and affidavits become evidence when supported by physical evidence. " Correct – but they also can become evidence by verbal testimony. ie "I saw the defendant hit the victim with a rock"

Anon [115] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:55 am GMT • 12.9 hours ago

Not only have they stolen the election but when Joe Biden and other democrats claim that President Trump caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans because of his handling of Covid 19, they are in sane. No world leader could stop the spread of this respiratory virus. However, Joe Biden and democrats have caused the deaths of hundreds of white people, while whipping up weak minded people to kill many whites. Biden and the democrats are criminals. Any one who is white, man or woman, that supports the democratic party is enabling a criminal organization to perpetrate violence on white people, including murder.

chet roman , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:05 am GMT • 12.8 hours ago

Since the article was from a German magazine it's understandable that there is no mention of "the one who shall not be named". No mention of the people behind the Lawfare group, the same people behind the impeachment, the same people providing financial and ideological support for the BLM/Antifa, the same people that own the media that spewed lies for 5 years and censored any mention of the Biden family corruption, no mention of the people behind this Color Revolution, the same people who promoted the mail in voting and those that managed the narrative for the media on election night to stop Trump's momentum.

For the public consumption the election will be described in vague terms, like this article, blaming special interests and institutions like the FBI, CIA and MIC without naming names as if an institution, not the oligarchs and chosen pulling the strings, are somehow Marxist, anti-white or anti-Christian.

Clay Alexander , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:18 am GMT • 12.6 hours ago

The interviewer quotes the Heritage Foundation does anyone even care what they say? The English Tavistock Institute by way of the CIA which the British molded from the OSS created programs for the Heritage Foundation as well as the Hoover Institute, MIT, Stanford University, Wharton, Rand etc. These "rightwing think tanks" were created to counter the CIA's "leftwing think tanks" at Columbia, Berkeley etc. Thank you British Intelligence.

Priss Factor , says: Website November 13, 2020 at 7:24 am GMT • 12.5 hours ago

Bloat the Vote: https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/2020-wisconsin-election-fraud/

Thomasina , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:31 am GMT • 12.3 hours ago

Steve Bannon was just interviewing someone (can't remember his name). Apparently there are about 200 to 300 IT professionals/engineers working on these so-called "glitches" (not glitches at all) which mysteriously "disappeared" thousands of Trump votes. Then they'd dump phony Biden votes into the mix. These IT professionals are going to follow the trail.

I've also heard that Dominion Voting Systems played a big part in this scam by using algorithms. One Trump lawyer said that big revelations are coming.

We're going to have to be patient and just wait.

"The inclination of Republicans is for Trump to protect America's reputation by conceding the election."

I honestly think it's more like the old established Republicans (corporate bought) want Trump to lose because that is what their campaign donors want (Big Pharma, Wall Street, etc.) They are part of the elite, and the elite (both the Democrats AND Republicans) want Trump gone so they can continue their crony capitalist looting. They've got to appear like they're behind Trump, but I don't think they are. Of course, that's not all Republican representatives.

Sounds like they've been rigging elections for awhile now. I bet they just messed up with Hillary. I think that's why she was so upset. She had it, but they screwed up and didn't supply enough ballots.

Biff , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:39 am GMT • 12.2 hours ago

My conclusion is: They are probably going to get away with it.

My advice: Make them suffer.

sally , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:45 am GMT • 12.1 hours ago
@KenH inventive creative new ways to deceive.. first it was election machines, then mail in votes. next it will be magic carpet voting. But the votes don't count, cause it is the electoral college that elects the President.

Trump also lost a significant number who did not understand Trump was an Israeli at heart, they thought he was a uncoothed NYC red blooded American.

As far as white, black or pokadot color or any of the religions ganging up against Trump I don't think that happened, the fall out into statistically discoverable categories is just that, fall out, not those categories conspiring to vote or not vote one way or the other.

Wizard of Oz , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:46 am GMT • 12.1 hours ago

PCR seems to have trouble seeing a difference between the counting of perfectly proper votes which Pres Trump's post office delivered late which may or may not be allowed by law which can be determined in court, and fraud like the dead voting or votes being forged.

Anonymous [272] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:54 am GMT • 12.0 hours ago

The fraud is all so transparent but no one in the power elite seems to give a crap whether the public catches on or not these days. They know that the entire media which creates the false matrix of contrived "truth" that we all live in will back them to the hilt because they are actually just one more working part in the grand conspiracy. We all know that when "O'Brian" says 2 + 2 equals 5 we must all believe it, or at least say we do. We interface with "O'Brian's" minions on a daily basis but we don't know the ultimate identity of "O'Brian" (in the singular or multiple). Many guesses are made, but they hide that from us fairly well with the aid of their militaries and "intelligence" agencies (aka secret police in other times and places).

Wally , says: November 13, 2020 at 8:08 am GMT • 11.7 hours ago
@MarkinLA s://amgreatness.com/2020/11/09/on-electoral-fraud-in-2020/"> https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/09/on-electoral-fraud-in-2020/
Why Did Six Battleground States with Democrat Governors (Except One) ALL Pause Counting on Election Night? And How Was This Coordinated?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/six-battleground-states-democrat-governors-pause-counting-election-night-coordinated/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons
Biff , says: November 13, 2020 at 8:57 am GMT • 10.9 hours ago

For example in the early hours of the morning of November 4 large ballot drops occurred in Michigan and Wisconsin that wiped out Trump's lead.

In a very similar vein, it is the same thing that happened to Bernie Sanders during the primary's. Joe was down and out, and Bernie was enjoying the lead and then "Bam!" Overnight Joe is back on top.

Well, fool me once,,,,,, .,and blah, blah whatever Bush said .

Verymuchalive , says: November 13, 2020 at 9:48 am GMT • 10.1 hours ago
@Stephen Allen

Dr Roberts has referenced in the interview a UR article that goes into considerable detail about the massive electoral fraud by the Democrats and their partners. You've obviously not bothered to read it.

You're like one of those MSM hacks who denies electoral fraud without making any attempt to look at the evidence.

Sollipsist , says: November 13, 2020 at 10:17 am GMT • 9.6 hours ago
@Begemot And it's almost always a closer race than anyone would have guessed beforehand -- which I also find suspicious. How likely is it that the majority of presidential elections over the last century were decided by more or less even numbers of voters from each party, between more or less evenly matched candidates?

Really seems like they've perfected the art of putting on rigged political shows that you can't quite believe in, but don't have anything really solid to back up your suspicions. It's like the "no evidence of fraud" canard -- anything solid enough to show obvious manipulation is explained away as the exception, rather than the tip of a very deep iceberg

James Speaks , says: November 13, 2020 at 10:40 am GMT • 9.2 hours ago
@S Martini

Like the false accusations about Russia, delegitimizing the presidential election as fraud is turning out to be much ado about nothing.

Let's review. The Democrats perpetrated the phony 2016 Russian influence fraud, and now the Democrats are perpetrating the phony 2020 election victory.

The common elements are Democrats perpetrate fraud.

Do try to keep up.

Lee , says: November 13, 2020 at 11:48 am GMT • 8.1 hours ago

IMO this is a simple remedy to settle the election fraud mess or we will be arguing about this 20 years from now .from the American Thinker.

The candidates on the ballot must have an opportunity to have observers whom they choose to oversee the entire process so the candidates are satisfied that they won or lost a free and fair election.

That is not what happened in the 2020 election. That is the single most important and simple fact that needs to be understood and communicated. The 2020 election was not a free and fair election, because poll-watchers were not allowed to do their essential job. The 2020 election can still be a free and fair election with a clear winner, whoever that may be, but time is running out.

In every instance where poll-watchers were not allowed to observe the process, those votes must be recounted. They must be recounted with poll-watchers from both sides present. If there are votes that cannot be recounted because the envelops were discarded, those votes must be discarded. Put the blame for this on the officials who decided to count the votes in secret. Consider it a way to discourage secret vote counts in the future.

The pandemic has not been fearful enough to close liquor stores, and it in should not be used as excuse to remove the poll-watchers who are essential to a free and fair election. If we must have social distancing, then use cameras.

Certainly, there are other issues with the 2020 election. There may be problems with software, and there are issues like signature verification and dead people voting. Everything should be considered and examined, but no other issue should distract from the simple fact that both sides must be able to view the entire process. If one side is not allowed to view the vote-counting, then that side should be calling it a fraud. We should all be calling it a fraud.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/the_simplest_most_important_issue_regarding_the_2020_election.html#ixzz6dfsChU00

TomGregg , says: November 13, 2020 at 12:23 pm GMT • 7.5 hours ago
@Anon

https://www.youtube.com/embed/OyBNmecVtdU?feature=oembed

The Spirit of Enoch Powell , says: November 13, 2020 at 1:02 pm GMT • 6.8 hours ago

...Trump had control of the Senate, the House and of course the Executive between his inauguration in January of 2017 and the Midterm Elections of 2018, a total time period of 1 year and 10 months. What did he do during this time? He deregulated financial services and passed corporate tax cuts.

At the end of the day, being emotionally invested in US elections is no different to being emotionally invested in Keeping up with the Kardashians , that is to say your life wouldn't be that different if your don't follow either.

Realist , says: November 13, 2020 at 1:04 pm GMT • 6.8 hours ago

The Democrats Have Stolen the Presidential Election

The Deep State Has Stolen the Presidential Election. FIFY. But they have been in control for decades they just don't care who knows now. They are taking final steps to make their control impervious to attack.

anon [434] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 1:06 pm GMT • 6.8 hours ago
@Notsofast nd protect the actual elephant in the Oval Office: CIA.

Trumman did speak up one month after JFK was killed by the unmentionable "I" of M.(I).I.C.

https://archive.org/stream/LimitCIARoleToIntelligenceByHarrySTruman/Limit%20CIA%20Role%20To%20Intelligence%20by%20Harry%20S%20Truman_djvu.txt

This is the reason that the establishment latched on to the Eisenhowerian bon mot but entirely memory hole Trumman's far more explicit warning a freaking month after a sitting president is shot like a turkey in Dallas: it white washes CIA and NSC .

Priss Factor , says: Website November 13, 2020 at 1:31 pm GMT • 6.3 hours ago

Why are CIA goons like Anderson Pooper serving as journalists? CIA is a criminal organization that subverts other nations.

MLK , says: November 13, 2020 at 1:32 pm GMT • 6.3 hours ago

The place to begin, and it's mind-blowing when you think about it this way, is that nothing was resolved on election night. Not who will take the oath on January 20th. Nor which party will control the Senate. Nor even who will be Speaker and which party will control the House.

Suffice it to say, a still raging factional struggle has simply moved to a greater degree behind the curtain.

I noted this movie reference on another thread here:

If your father dies, you'll make the deal, Sonny.

-- "The Godfather"

My point being, you're foolish if you ascribe certainty as to outcome at this point.

Being rid of Trump has been as close to a dues ex machina for the establishment as imaginable since he took the oath. This ineluctable observation elicits no end of foot-stomping by those who assume it necessarily says anything positive about the man.

With every persistent revision of the script they wrote for him, all ending with his political demise at least, Trump has not just survived but grown stronger. While the Democrats turned our elections into something only seen in a third-world shit hole, Trump legitimately drew 71M votes from Americans.

That's a lot of air in the balloon. Believe me, filth like Russian mole Brennan may think everything is finished once they get rid of terrible, awful Trump, but those above his pay grade know better.

Like him or hate him, Trump is the only principal not wholly or largely discredited. He was saved from destruction during his first term by the Republican base moving to protect him. That was the import of his 90-95% approval among them, destroy him and you destroy the Republican Party.

Now, despite -- or perhaps, because of -- everything they've done, that base now includes a significant number of Democrats and independents. Trump is merely a vessel for an American majority attached to this constitutional republic thingie we've got going.

Don't get lost in the details. This isn't a puzzle you can solve by internet sleuthing. The plan they executed -- to steal sufficiently to make the outcome inevitable by the morning after the election at the latest -- failed. This was evident early on Election Day (e.g. fake water main breaks in Atlanta) and necessitated their playing their Fox/AZ card and shutting down the count at least until they had removed Republican monitors.

BannedHipster , says: Website November 13, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMT • 4.9 hours ago

People need to stop falling for Republican bullshit.

The Republicans control:

1. The Senate

2. The Supreme Court with a 6 to 3 majority.

3. The majority of state governments by a huge margin:

https://bannedhipster.home.blog/2020/11/12/bidens-first-cabinet-pick-israel-first-zionist-jew-ron-klain/

"In 22 states, Republicans will hold unified control over the governor's office and both houses of the legislature, giving the party wide political latitude -- including in states like Florida and Georgia."

"Eleven states will have divided governments in 2021, unchanged from this year: Democratic governors will need to work with Republican legislators in eight states, and Republican governors will contend with Democratic lawmakers in three."

The Democrats have: Joe Biden, and a slim majority in the House of Representatives which they are almost certain to lose in two years.

What the Republicans are going to do is everything we hate, but they will pretend they were "forced" to do it by the Democrats – the Democrats being the minority party.

Amnesty? Democrats made us do it.

More immigration? Democrats made us do it.

The Republican party is the greater of two evils.

Rurik , says: November 13, 2020 at 2:59 pm GMT • 4.9 hours ago

Who else could have survived what Trump has been subjected to by the Establishment and their media prostitutes. In the United States the media is known as "presstitutes" -- press prostitutes. That is what Udo Ulfkotte says they are in Europe.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sYUmnLnoz8?feature=oembed

Mr. Ulfkotte died of a "heart attack" in January, 2017

Rest in Peace Udo.

Zarathustra , says: November 13, 2020 at 3:00 pm GMT • 4.9 hours ago

Left and right.
(What you small brains do not understand is this.)
Democrats enabling the elite to invest in far east (lower wage costs, higher profits) did abandon the working class in America. Democrats by this act did throw away the working class as a dirty rug.
Democrats with their TPP exporting most of the production to far east would totally destroy working class in USA. Trump's first act was to cancel this insanity. Democrats are insanely delusional.
Democrats were left. Left is a party that supports the working people.
So here switch occurred. Democratic party now represent the elite, and Republicans now represent the working people.
(The irony of the fate)

Robert Dolan , says: November 13, 2020 at 3:26 pm GMT • 4.4 hours ago

https://www.bitchute.com/video/hxrVAGuE7Oo1/

Robert Snefjella , says: November 13, 2020 at 3:30 pm GMT • 4.4 hours ago

The headline for PCR's article is a prediction, not yet established, and incomplete.

There is an ongoing massive attempt to steal the Presidential election as well as to steal an unknown number of House and Senate seats, and who knows what else.

The 'game' is still on. Many tens of millions of citizens – actual total unknown but possibly in numbers unprecedented in American history – voted for Trump. Republican candidates for office generally had strong support, but again, the actual percentage of support is unknown but presumably larger than now 'recorded'.

There are also the many millions who ardently supported Trump, know that Biden is illegitimate, deeply corrupt, and the precursor to perils unknown. Their determination and backbone and intelligence will now be tested.

There is the electoral college process; there are the state legislators that have a say in the process; there is the Supreme Court.

There is also the possibility of pertinent executive orders that mandate transparent processes in the face of, say, apprehended insurrection via fraudulent voting processes.

There is also the matter of how millions of 'deplorables' with trucks and tractors and firearms and other means to make their point will react to obvious massive election travesty.

The conjunction of the COVID global scamdemic/plandemic, with crazed Bill Gates and kin lurking in the background with needles, 'peaceful' protesters in many cities setting fires and looting with near impunity, and a mass media that is clearly comprehensively committed to a demonic degree of dishonesty and manipulation, and lunatic levels of 'identity politics' ideology, are among the elements setting the stage for what may be an historical watershed.

The American Revolution in the 18th century, against the British Crown's authority, came about after years of simmering anger and sporadic resistance against British injustice. At some point there was a 'tipping point'. When Germany invaded and occupied Norway early in the 2nd WW, an effective resistance quickly formed in reaction, where death and torture were the known willing risk. Two years before, those forming the resistance would have been just going on with their lives.

No one knows today how this plays out.

Agent76 , says: November 13, 2020 at 3:45 pm GMT • 4.1 hours ago

Who's Afraid of an Open Debate? The Truth About the Commission on Presidential Debates. The CPD is a duopoly which allows the major party candidates to draft secret agreements about debate arrangements including moderators, debate format and even participants.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1NXhoP5bQ2M?feature=oembed

Mar 6, 2014 Truth in Media "End Partisanship"

Ben Swann explains how the new coalition of EndPartisanship org is working to break the 2 party hold on primary elections, which currently lock around 50% of voters out of the process.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/h1zRfXkOmPI?feature=oembed

Sep 5, 2012 DNC Platform Changes on God, Jerusalem Spur Contentious Floor Vote

Democratic National Convention 2012: Delegates opposed to adding language on God, Israel's capital to platform shout, 'No!' in floor vote.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/t8BwqzzqcDs?feature=oembed

anon [287] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 4:21 pm GMT • 3.5 hours ago

For those who are sick of Fake News CNN or FoxNews, watch this new channel that many Trump voters are flocking to:

https://www.newsmaxtv.com/

I am currently watching an interview with SD Governor Kristi Noem, who went on ABC to challenge George Stenopolosus' claim that there is no fraud in this election. She pointed out that there has been many allegations, including dead people voting in PA and GA, she says we don't know how widespread this is, but we owe it to the 70+ million people who voted for Trump to investigate and ensure a clean and fair election. She said we gave Al Gore 37 days to investigate the result in 2000, why aren't we giving the same to Trump?

She is extremely articulate and sounds intelligent and honest, and what's more courageous to come forward like this. I hope she runs for president in 2024, I'd vote for her.

Anonymous [721] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 4:21 pm GMT • 3.5 hours ago
@Chris in Cackalacky

Am I the only one who sees something profoundly spiritual happening in front of our eyes?

Yes. In reality, 5% of White men sent Trump packing. That doesn't match the GOP negrophile narrative where "based" Hindustanis join the emerging conservative coalition to make sure White people can't get affordable healthcare in their own countries, though. So we'll have to watch you parasites spool up this pedantic "fraud" nonsense until the fat orange zioclown gracelessly gets dragged out.

OutsideMan , says: November 13, 2020 at 4:30 pm GMT • 3.4 hours ago
@Drew

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens
by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

Agent76 , says: November 13, 2020 at 4:31 pm GMT • 3.3 hours ago
@TomGregg

Good post. You will gain more insight from this background on the speech and drafting.

Jan 19, 2011 Eisenhower's "Military-Industrial Complex" Speech Origins and Significance US National Archives

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address, known for its warnings about the growing power of the "military-industrial complex," was nearly two years in the making. This Inside the Vaults video short follows newly discovered papers revealing that Eisenhower was deeply involved in crafting the speech.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Gg-jvHynP9Y?feature=oembed

Thomasina , says: November 13, 2020 at 4:42 pm GMT • 3.2 hours ago
@The Real World

Great article. Thanks. Agree with you about the big stealing being electronic. Trump tweeted out yesterday that over 2 million votes were stolen this way. For him to say this, they must have evidence.

Dinesh D'Souza said he hopes that when this matter comes before the Supreme Court that they will tackle once and for all what constitutes a legal vote.

Some pretty big names are involved with this Dominion Voting. It will be interesting to see what Trump's team of IT experts discover re the use of algorithms to swing the vote.

Cyrano , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:03 pm GMT • 2.8 hours ago

Why (Oh, why) did Trump had to go? Because Trump is an enema to the Deep State. He was threatening to expose the biggest lie of the last 100 years – the supposed "liberalism" of US...

Genrick Yagoda , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:07 pm GMT • 2.7 hours ago
@Wizard of Oz

It has already been determined by the court. Pennsylvania ruled that late ballots are not to be counted.

https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2020/11/602-MD-2020-Order-Nov.-12.pdf

DanFromCT , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:15 pm GMT • 2.6 hours ago
@Stephen Allen

The author refers to a body of overwhelmingly persuasive evidence of voter fraud that can be specified and quantified to provide proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal cases, not to mention hands down proof in civil cases requiring only a preponderance of the evidence to establish guilt. Furthermore, the Democrats' easily documented, elaborate efforts at concealing the vote counting process by shutting down the counting prior to sneaking truckloads of ballots in the back door is by itself powerful circumstantial evidence of their guilt. You have no idea what "evidence" means, either in general usage or in its strictly legal sense.

fatmanscoop , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:15 pm GMT • 2.6 hours ago

The election cannot be trusted at all, just based on the insane entitled emotional state of the Globalist establishment alone. The system as-a-whole cannot be trusted, for the same reason. They are actively corrupting it in every way they can, and fully believe (as a matter of religious conviction) that they are right to do so.

fatmanscoop , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:38 pm GMT • 2.2 hours ago
@Curmudgeon

"no evidence of wide spread voter fraud"

That's one of the Jew/Anglo Puritan Establishment's new catch-phrases. There's also "no evidence" that Joe Biden acted in a corrupt manner in Ukraine, even though he admitted to it on tape. There's "no evidence" that Big Tech is biased against conservative plebians, despite their removing conservative plebians' published content arbitrarily and with no State compulsion to do so. The phrase "there's no evidence" is just a public commitment to ignore any evidence, no matter how blatant or obvious.

Robert Dolan , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:39 pm GMT • 2.2 hours ago

https://www.trunews.com/stream/michigan-republican-governor-candidate-saw-voter-machines-connected-to-internet

Peripatetic Itch , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:41 pm GMT • 2.2 hours ago
@DanFromCT

This newly discovered legal standard goes beyond "preponderance of the evidence" or even "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" to establish absolute certainty as the standard.

Just the obvious and necessary complement of the Bob Mueller standard for Russian collusion, don't you think -- "could not (quite) exonerate"? /s

Don't you dare call this hypocrisy.

Orville H. Larson , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:57 pm GMT • 1.9 hours ago
@Rogue

When it comes to protecting the integrity of elections, "low-tech" might be best!

anon [771] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:05 pm GMT • 1.8 hours ago
@endthefed

His impotence makes a lot more sense when you know the full version was supposed to be Military-Industrial Congressional Complex.

The Real World , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:42 pm GMT • 1.2 hours ago
@TheTrumanShow as the reason why.

They went for a softer approach in KY in 2019. The first-term Repub Gov had a Yankee's forthrightness so they just latched onto comments he made regarding the underfunded teachers pension program and amped-it to high heaven getting teachers all in a frightful frenzy.

In that solidly Red state, with all other prominent offices on the ballot (AG, SoS, etc.) going overwhelmingly Repub , somehow the Repub Gov loses to the Dem by around 5000 votes. The "teachers pension" narrative was rolled-out as the reason. (Btw, it seems that Dominion, or another type, software was used to switch the votes in that race. I've seen video about it.)

Art , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:47 pm GMT • 1.1 hours ago
@Orville H. Larson

When it comes to protecting the integrity of elections, "low-tech" might be best!

Paper ballots as ascribed by Tulsi Gabbard legislation is the only safe option for elections. Kudos to Tulsi!

The Real World , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:55 pm GMT • 56 minutes ago
@Orville H. Larson out how the winds are blowing. There is nothing good about it.

Why not this:
-- ONLY in-person voting over a 2-day period, a Sat and Sun, with polls being open from 6AM to 9PM both days.
-- Exceptions are the traditional requested absentee ballot where the voter can be authenticated.
-- Paper ballots must be used at the polls and no single box of 'Straight Vote by Party' is offered.
-- Some kind of SIMPLE scanning tabulator could be used of the ballots and with it NOT being connected to the internet.

There is far too much cheating opportunity built into our current system. That's intended, of course.
It needs to end!

Priss Factor , says: Website November 13, 2020 at 7:02 pm GMT • 49 minutes ago

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/exclusive-based-reports-auditors-specialists-data-analysts-statisticians-number-illegitimate-votes-identified-four-swing-states-enough-overturn-election/

... ... ...

No Friend Of The Devil , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:09 pm GMT • 42 minutes ago

Because you don't get it. You are missing the big picture. It was well known that these systems had the ability to be hacked as soon as they were implemented. It is also a well known fact that massive mail in ballots increases the likelihood that corrupt individuals are more likely to get away with election fraud.

Everyone knew about the potential for voter fraud to occur, but the entire system is corrupt, including Trump who has allowed the massive corruption within the system that was present when he entered office to persist and grow because he is a wimpy, spineless, coward, that was too afraid to make any waves and take the heat that he promised his voters.

Why anyone voted for Trump in 2020 confounds me. I voted for him in 2016 and he has turned out to be one of the worst presidents in history.

Trump in his cowardess and dishonesty knew that the ailing economy would harm his chances of being re-elected, so he allowed the health scare scamdemic to occur and destroy the livelihoods, lives, and businesses of hundreds of millions of Americans because he is a psychopath. Trump did not do what he promised. Trump made America worse than it has ever been since the end of slavery. Jeremy Powell said today that the economy is dead and will never recover.

The only injustices that Trump gave a damn about were the injustices against himself and his family, and has committed countless injustices against the entire country and world during his term. Trump is a corrupt narcissist. The facts prove it. Trump is such a corrupt narcissist that he was willing to destroy the entire economy based on scientific fraud, high crimes, and treason to use as political cover for his own incompetency which is the most offensive and disgusting diabolical act ever perpetrated on the entire country.

Trump has also demanded the extradition of Assange after telling his voters that he loved wikileaks. Trump is a two-faced, lying, fraud. It has been his pattern. He consistently supports various groups and people like Wikileaks, Proud Boys, and others and panders to them and voters and tells people that he loves them, and then every time without fail when the heat is on, Trump says," I really don't know anything about them."

"I know nothing." Trump saying "I know nothing." defines his presidency and who he is as a person, a spineless, pandering, corrupt, two-faced, narcissist, loser, and wimp!

Why would anyone vote for him the second time around after a record of pathological incompetency and pathological corruption? What's to approve of about him? Go ahead, investigate voter fraud it if is permitted, and if it isn't then ask yourselves why it is that a system that enables election fraud is in place, and ask yourselves who had the ability to change it and, who had the ability to benefit from it!

Andrea Iravani

[Jan 04, 2021] I believe that in fueling Russiagate hysteria US intelligence and MIC were motivated to pull rank/take the reins due to the threat posed by the Russia-China alliance.

Jan 04, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Jan 4 2021 7:24 utc | 92

I believe that US intelligence and MIC were motivated to pull rank/take the reins due to the threat posed by the Russia-China alliance. A threat that was belatedly recognized in 2013-14 when Russia stood up to USA in Syria and Ukraine. Before that, it was assumed that Russia would eventually join with the West and China would be isolated.

Its funny that some commenters here argue that USA/Empire is falling behind but seem to expect that the US power elite will not act to prevent that from happening despite evidence that they are indeed doing so.

Isn't it clear by now that USA is not trying to reach a rapport with Russia and China? They are gradually eliminating trade ties with Empire adversaries and are preparing for war with a big military build-up, discarding arms control treaties, militarizing space, and breath-taking belligerence like 1) reneging on NK peace treaty; 2) occupying Syrian oil fields; 3) snubbing the UN to support Israel; 3) assassinating Gen. Soleimani; 4) seizing Venezuelan State assets; and I would add 5) the Beirut port explosion - a 911-like event for Lebanon that has effectively sidelined Hezbollah as a political force.

!!

[Jan 04, 2021] That's where NSA/FBI Deep State friends are paid for.

Jan 04, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Antonym , Jan 4 2021 5:28 utc | 75

CNN + WaPo: "Here is the full transcript of and audio of the call between Trump and Raffensperger" reg. the Georgia elections.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html

That's where NSA/FBI Deep State friends are paid for.

On Biden zilch dirt, him being the new poster geriatric.

[Jan 04, 2021] For friends of globalist faction of neoliberal oligarchy everything, for enemies the law

Jan 04, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

"Obama Official Ben Rhodes Admits Biden Camp is Already Working With Foreign Leaders: Exactly What Flynn Did" [ Glenn Greenwald ]. "Any doubts about how customary it is for such calls to be made by transition officials were unintentionally obliterated on Monday night by former Obama national security official Ben Rhodes, who is almost certain to occupy a high-level national security position in a Biden administration. Speaking on MSNBC -- of course -- Rhodes, while amicably chatting with former Bush/Cheney Communications Director turned-beloved-by-liberals-MSNBC-host Nicolle Wallace, admitted in passing that ' foreign leaders are already having phone calls with Joe Biden talking about the agenda they're going to pursue January 20 ,' all to ensure 'as seamless a transition as possible,' adding: 'the center of political gravity in this country and the world is shifting to Joe Biden.'" • Presumably the FBI should be interrogating Rhodes about his guilty knowledge. Anyhoo, I'm so old I remember when IOKIYAR was current in the blogosphere: "It's OK If You're A Republican." But now IOKIIOG: "It's OK If It's Our Guy."


Billpreston , November 10, 2020 at 2:20 pm

Logan Act? What Logan Act?

Obama Security Adviser Admits Biden Is Already Talking With Foreign Leaders; A Breach Of The Logan Act

zagonostra , November 10, 2020 at 2:34 pm

>David Sirota – "That was enough to barely defeat Trump.."

I'm getting confused, was Trump officially defeated. If not why are all these folks making these kinds of statements without any qualifications, none, zip. He could have said "most likely" or some other qualifier. Am I missing something here? Let the legal process of contesting the election play out for Pete's sake.

ex-PFC Chuck , November 10, 2020 at 7:42 pm

In the words of the late, great Yogi Berra, "It ain't over til it's over."
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/fore/

[Jan 04, 2021] Navalny And Handlers Lose The Plot... He Is A Convicted Felon On Probation - ZeroHedge

Jan 04, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Navalny And Handlers Lose The Plot... He Is A Convicted Felon On Probation BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, JAN 04, 2021 - 3:30

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Russia's federal prison authorities were right to jolt Alexei Navalny this week by warning him to return immediately from Germany or else face a suspended sentence being made into jail time.

The "professional" opposition activist claims to be convalescing in Germany after he was allegedly poisoned by a Soviet-era nerve agent in August. Western news media dutifully repeat the claim that Navalny is "recuperating" in Germany after having survived an assassination plot by Kremlin agents. Navalny has personally accused Russia's President Vladimir Putin of ordering the alleged hit.

Last week, a team of medics from the Berlin hospital where Navalny had been staying published a paper in The Lancet medical journal in which they claimed he had been poisoned with Novichok nerve agent. Their findings are dubious because the medics acknowledged the involvement of German military intelligence laboratories in conducting their analysis.

But one thing the German doctors did let slip was that a 55-day follow-up check on Navalny ascertained that he had made a "near-complete recovery".

The Russian dissident figure was flown to Berlin on August 22, two days after he was treated in a hospital in Omsk, Russia. Thus, the German medical team are indicating – no doubt inadvertently – that Navalny's health recovered nearly two months ago, if not before that.

That means there is no medical reason why he should remain at large in Germany. His claims of "convalescing" and the Western media's indulgence of those claims are false, if the German doctors are correct about his "recovery".

Despite Navalny's arrogant disdain for Russian state laws, he is nevertheless answerable to those authorities as a citizen. While in Germany he was on probation for a suspended jail sentence concerning a fraud conviction in 2014. His so-called Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has a checkered history of shady financing, from allegations of foreign funding by the U.S. State Department to charges of embezzling millions of dollars. Ironically, the blogger and media activist produces slick programs accusing the Russian government of corruption.

In any case, under the laws of the Russian Federation, the 44-year-old Navalny was on probation during the past four months of his stay in Germany. For the last two months, he is in good health, according to his German doctors. So there are no grounds for why he should abscond from Russian territory and evade the laws for which he is answerable.

about:blank

me title=

Not only is Navalny living as if he above the law, he has also shown flagrant contempt for the Russian authorities.

Last week, he published a video on his website claiming that he had pranked a named member of Russia's security service, the FSB, into admitting that agents had poisoned him while he was visiting the Siberian city of Tomsk on August 20. He was later flown in an emergency to Omsk where he was treated after having apparently fallen ill onboard a flight to Moscow.

The FSB dismissed Navalny's prank telephone claim as a "deep fake". The Russian doctors who treated him in Omsk – and who probably saved his life – have repeatedly stated that their tests showed there was no poison in Navalny's body, and specifically no traces of nerve agent. They said his illness was due to a metabolic disorder. Perhaps self-induced as a ruse to later transfer to Germany?

The transcript of Navalny's purported prank call to the FSB agent reads like a comic set-up. Posing as a senior member of Russia's national security council, Navalny affects to bully the supposed agent as if he is a pathetic stooge.

A telling segment is where the self-styled super sleuth fishes for compliments about his own character from the purported FSB man, betraying the narcissism of a megalomaniac.

Again, incredibly, we are expected to believe that someone who had a near-death experience with a lethal nerve poison and who is "convalescing" still in Germany somehow managed to find the energy and mental reserves to pull off a daring 45-minute telephone sting.

If Navalny is fit enough to participate in such practical jokes – regardless of their credibility – then he is surely fit enough to abide by Russian laws and respect his probation terms. As the Russian Federal Prison Service stated this week: "The convicted man is not fulfilling all of the obligations placed on him by the court, and is evading the supervision of the Criminal Inspectorate."

One gets the unerring impression that Navalny and his foreign handlers have become so self-intoxicated with hubris that they are blind to their own absurd implausibilities.

Why was he permitted to fly by air ambulance to Berlin in the first place if the Russian authorities had evil designs against him?

While there, as a guest of the German government, Navalny has wildly accused President Putin of ordering his alleged assassination. The European governments have subsequently and rashly imposed sanctions on Russia in support of Navalny's unfounded claims. Then we have the media activist mounting further provocations parlayed into even more outlandish accusations against President Putin and the Kremlin.

All the while there has been no evidence of poisoning presented to support these claims, other than unverifiable assertions by German doctors working with German military intelligence labs, as well as two other NATO laboratories and the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons. All of them including the OPCW (the latter compromised over complicity in NATO false-flag provocations in Syria) have refused to share their analytical data and samples with Russia, and yet they are demanding that Moscow launch a criminal investigation into the Navalny case.

The abdication by European governments of due process and of respect for Russian state laws, its government, and its president is astounding. They are indulging a foreign-sponsored gadfly as if he is the sovereign representative of the Russian Federation.

Navalny and his foreign allies have lost the plot in their own telling of an alleged assassination plot.

First things first: he is a convicted felon who is answerable to Russian law. Pushing false flags and slanderous falsehoods from abroad with the intent of damaging Russia's sovereignty is an abuse of his rights.

Arrogant and overindulged Navalny is patently incapable of even understanding his obligations under law as a Russian citizen. He evidently feels above the law, like many of his Western backers. That's why Russia is right to tell him to put up or shut up.

[Jan 04, 2021] Brick Lives Matter: Vandalis carefully avided speing pain on brick while vandalising Pelosi's garage door under watchful eyes of Secret service agents

Looks like Nancy is just a regular type of gal ;-). No security at all. No even 24x7 cameras. Did they used Photoshop with masking to deface Piglosi's .jpg garage door ?
And amazingly enough the vandals remembered to bring masking tape or at least a peace of cardboard to protect the bricks.
Jan 04, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

When you think of your average Antifa type ( these mug shots may be representative), does that Antifa guy or gal strike you as the kind of person who would carefully avoid getting any paint on bricks so as to spare Pelosi the inconvenience of getting the paint off the bricks?


Soloamber 3 hours ago

No doubt this was a false flag . You don't think Pelosi has security covering her yard, house, cars ?

Nobody gets that close to her house without a swat team there in a minute. So where is the video showing who did it , when , and how . This will be used to justify some full time guard house or something else .

lennysrv 2 hours ago

You are absolutely correct. Years ago, when John Kerry was a candidate in the Democrat primaries, I was walking near his neighborhood in Boston. Near. As in about eight blocks away. Not even close to his house. I didn't even know he was living there. I was challenged by a Secret Service agent and his backup friend (in a vehicle behind him). SS guy asked who I was, what I was doing, why I was there, etc. Spoke into a microphone beneath his overcoat. Told me that my chosen route was no longer available and that if I would be well-advised to head the other direction. The point being that nobody, not a single person, gets near Pelosi's house without a bunch of security knowing about it and stopping it.

This entire "vandalism" thing is a complete tub of BS.

JZ123 6 hours ago

Pelosi pulled a Juicy smollet? Nah, I think the hatred is real for these people. The volcano will erupt this year.

The Ordinal Numbers PREMIUM 4 hours ago remove link

I feel redeemed. I've been saying that these photoshopped since the news broke.

FAKE NEWS is real....

Lamejokes 7 hours ago

You don't understand. Russian agents, following the last plan written by Soleimani, arguably his master plan, tagged poor Nancy's door, and - and there's where you can see how tricky and evil Russians and Iranians are- they PURPOSEFULLY protected the walls, so people would think it's fake, and accuse poor Nancy, that gorgeous woman, that Saint, of manipulation attempt!

(Do I really need a /s here?)

SirBarksAlot 2 hours ago

And just like the Pentagon on 9-11, there were no pictures of the event

AlphaSnail 6 hours ago

the cameras were epsteined

6 hours ago

To those of you that noticed it was a hoax congratulations, you passed the ".gov finger on the pulse of society" test. For those of you who believed it hook, line, and sinker; get more omega 3 fatty acids in your diet, stop voting, and cut back on the high fructose corn syrup and Cheetos.

MieleBauknecht 7 hours ago

antifa's are vegetarian. The hogshead itself is sufficient proof of false flag.

Alexander 2 hours ago

You are fricken dreaming if you think nancy would even pay someone to clean this garage door. She's getting a new garage door and YOU are going to pay for it.

HomeBrewPrepper 2 hours ago

I thought she lived in a gated, luxurious house?

That looks like a house in Dundalk, Md. Outside of Baltimore.

toady 2 hours ago

That's her 4th house in the city where she houses her Chinese slaves.

Ms No PREMIUM 5 hours ago

...People should scream that at her: "Why did antifa use tape around your garage, you lying b*tch?"

[Jan 03, 2021] Will Biden's Administration Simply Represent a Third Obama Term

Notable quotes:
"... The Biden administration, staffed with Obama veterans , may be in effect a third Obama term. Biden may seek a détente with China on some issues. But Democratic foreign policy elites as well as Republicans view China more harshly than they did four years ago. The most likely scenario, then, is an attempt to restore Obama's trilateral strategy of building the biggest possible coalition of allies against China. ..."
"... Democratic foreign policy elites are much more Europhile and Russophobic than their Republican counterparts. ..."
Jan 03, 2021 | nationalinterest.org

Under Barack Obama, the containment of China -- the "pivot to Asia" -- took the form of what might be called trilateralism, after the old Trilateral Commission of the 1970s. According to this strategy, while balancing China militarily, the United States would create trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic trade blocs with rules favorable to the United States that China would be forced to beg to join in the future. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was intended as an anti-Chinese, American-dominated Pacific trade bloc, while the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) sought to create a NATO for trade from which China would be excluded.

Obama's grand strategy collapsed even before the election of 2016. TTIP died, chiefly because of hostility from European economic interests. In the United States, the fact that the TPP treaty was little more than a wish-list of giveaways to U.S. finance and pharma interests and other special-interest lobbies made it so unpopular that both Hillary Clinton and Trump renounced it during the 2016 presidential election season.

Trump, like Obama, sought to contain China , but by unilateral rather than trilateral measures. The Trump administration emphasized reshoring strategic supply chains like that of steel in the United States, unwilling to offshore critical supplies even to allies in Asia and Europe and North America. This break with prior tradition would have been difficult to pull off even under a popular president who was a good bureaucratic operator, unlike the erratic and inconsistent Trump.

The Biden administration, staffed with Obama veterans , may be in effect a third Obama term. Biden may seek a détente with China on some issues. But Democratic foreign policy elites as well as Republicans view China more harshly than they did four years ago. The most likely scenario, then, is an attempt to restore Obama's trilateral strategy of building the biggest possible coalition of allies against China.

An emphasis by the Biden administration on alliances may succeed in the case of the U.S.-Japan-Australia-India "Quad" (Quadrilateral alliance). The UK may support America's East Asian policy as well. But Germany and France, the dominant powers in Europe, view China as a vast market, not a threat, so Biden will fail if he seeks to repeat Obama's grand strategy of trilateral containment of China.

Democratic foreign policy elites are much more Europhile and Russophobic than their Republican counterparts. In part this is a projection of domestic politics. In the demonology of the Democratic Party, Putin stands for nationalism, social conservatism, and everything that elite Democrats despise about the "deplorables" in the United States who live outside of major metro areas and vote for Republicans. The irrational hostility of America's Democratic establishment extends beyond Russia to socially-conservative democratic governments in Poland and Hungary, two countries that Biden has denounced as "totalitarian."

In the Middle East, unlike Eastern Europe, a Biden administration is likely to sacrifice left-liberal ideology to the project of maximizing American power and consolidating the U.S. military presence, with the help of autocracies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Any hint of retrenchment will be denounced by the bipartisan foreign policy establishment that lined up behind Biden, so do not expect an end to any of the forever wars under Biden. Quite the contrary.

Michael Lind is Professor of Practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The American Way of Strategy. His most recent book is The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite.

[Jan 03, 2021] Ex-CIA congressman says disputing election results helps America's enemies STEAL ELECTIONS just what the CIA always did!

Jan 03, 2021 | www.rt.com

After pushing phony stories of 'Russian interference' and working for an agency that interferes in elections, ex-CIA agent now Congressman Will Hurd thinks the GOP should accept Joe Biden's win, or risk helping the US' "enemies."

A dozen Republican Senators are getting set to object to the Electoral College's certification of Joe Biden's win in November, unless an "emergency 10-day audit" is held in a number of key swing states won by Biden. The move is also backed by a number of Republican representatives in the House.

However, there's a rival faction of Republicans who want to put allegations of Democrat fraud behind them and go back to business as usual under a Biden administration. Outgoing Texas Rep. Will Hurd is one of them, and he made a novel argument against questioning the election on Saturday.

"When I was undercover at the CIA, I saw firsthand how our enemies steal elections and try to interfere in ours," he tweeted. "Elected officials continuing to sow doubt amongst the public for petty political gain is playing into our enemies' hands."

As for who these "enemies" are, Hurd was presumably referring to the reliable old specter of "the Russians." Throughout Trump's four years in office, Hurd has repeatedly claimed that Moscow meddled in the 2016 election, despite there literally being zero proof for these claims.

" This is honestly one of the most hilarious mega-viral tweets I've ever seen on Twitter," journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted. In a follow-up tweet, Greenwald joked that Hurd "must have been in a different part of the CIA" than former Director James Woolsey, who told Fox News' Laura Ingraham in 2018 that his agency had meddled in European elections during the Cold War "in order to avoid the Communists taking over," and continues to dabble in election meddling, but "only for a very good cause.

Hurd was mocked on all sides. First for condemning election interference from an agency famed for interfering in elections

... ... ...

And then for bragging about his undercover status...

[Jan 02, 2021] Russiagate has dual purpose: depose Trumpvia color revolution and to initiate a new McCarthyism. Both goals were evnetually achieved

So neoliberals managed to take revenge for their 2016 fiasco...
May 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , May 10 2020 16:52 utc | 14

Norwegian @ May10 14:22
Russiagate has been an obvious coup attempt from the beginning

jinn @ May 10 15:20

That is not at all obvious... you have to be extremely gullible to believe any of it is real.

IMO Russiagate was about initiating a new McCarthyism.

And Trump's Deep State selection was about re-igniting nationalism in response to the Russia-China alliance which was recognized as a threat to the Empire in 2013-2014 with Russia's blocking of US action in Syria and Ukraine.

I've been saying this for years.

!!

jinn , May 10 2020 16:54 utc | 15
There was nothing mysterious about "Russiagate." It was a transparently false narrative designed, by the most incompetent election campaign team in history, to excuse their shocking inability to defeat one of the weakest and most discredited Presidential candidates there has ever been.
_________________________________________________

Yeah that is what we are asked to believe, but the problem is how did this incompetent election campaign keep the ball in the air for more than 2 years?

They did not invent the Flynn lied to FBI story and they did not invent the Trump obstructed justice stories. And they did not create any of the silly stories about contacts with Russians. There is no doubt the Hillary supporters sat on the sidelines and cheered all the nonsense that was unfolding in the Russiagate narrative but the storyline that they were cheering for was all created by Trump and his lackeys.


[Jan 02, 2021] Tulsi Gabbard slams COVID relief bill as a 'slap in the face' to Americans - YouTube

Jan 02, 2021 | www.youtube.com



liveltoob
, 6 days ago

She voted against the bill because she's smart and she actually reads things

Joseph Klimchock , 6 days ago

Congress has failed the American people again and again. They do almost nothing, we might actually be better if they did NOTHING!!!!!

Shawn Cornell , 1 week ago

One of the few dems that talks sensibly. That's why the communist dems kept changing the rules to keep her out of the debates.

EAZY-E Zero , 5 days ago

Respectfully, Tulsi Gabbard could have been a better candidate than Joe Biden. That's just my opinion.

Jn Stonbely , 3 days ago

Bravo Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for putting it to the "Demagogue" Party for their deviousness, lies, and clearly ; anti-American behavior !


Kai Chinn
, 6 days ago

I like Tulsi, she actually has a head on her shoulders and actually cares about the American People! Aaaaand, she is not hard on the eyes either! :)

boonarga , 6 days ago

Gabbard represents what Democrats were before they became evil.


chiefordnance
, 4 hours ago

As a Republican Tulsi was the only Democrat I was rooting for, the Democrats destroyed her because she wasn't part of their agenda.


Brian Hariprashad
, 2 days ago

She embodies what a true good democrat is idk what's up with the rest of the party, she has my vote


What Is Your Worldview? - Creation or Evolutionism?
, 6 days ago

In a world of [neo]liberalism, it is the VICTIM that gets punished, not the criminals.

[Jan 02, 2021] HARPER- THE LESSONS OF STALINGRAD BY STEVE DOUGLAS - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Jan 02, 2021 | turcopolier.typepad.com

HARPER: THE LESSONS OF STALINGRAD BY STEVE DOUGLAS


After hearing a lecture by my friend Steve Douglas on the lessons of the battle of Stalingrad, I urged him to write this essay on the topic. Given the current toxic relationship between the United States and Russia--the two predominant thermonuclear-armed states--it is a useful reminder of a crisis moment in world history when the U.S. and Russia were allies against a great common threat. it primarily serves as an invaluable lesson in the role of the subjective factors and leadership in warfare.

STALINGRAD: A LESSON IN THE PRIMACY OF THE SUBJECTIVE IN WAR

November 19, 2020 marked the 78th anniversary of the strategic counteroffensive that the Soviet Red Army launched against the German Wehrmacht at Stalingrad in World War II. The vast, surprise double-pincered armored envelopment that the Soviets launched that day---from apparently out of nowhere---sealed the fate of the German Army in Russia. It was arguably the turning point of the entire war.

Stalingrad was the biggest battle in the most destructive war in the history of mankind. Soviet casualties in the battle that raged between August 23, 1942 and the surrender of Field Marshal Paulus's 6th Army on February 2, 1943 numbered 1,129,619, including 478,741 personnel killed or missing. That is, the Soviets suffered more dead and wounded in the Battle of Stalingrad, than the U.S. Armed Forces suffered on all fields of battle combined during the entirety of World War II! (982,800 total casualties, including 416,800 killed or missing).

By the time that the Soviets unleashed their November 19th counteroffensive, the badly battered 62nd Army of General Chuikov, which was the principal Soviet military formation in the meager thousands of square meters that remained of Soviet-controlled Stalingrad, numbered only about 6000 men. What had once been a full-sized army of over 100,000 soldiers, had been reduced in size to less than half of an undersized division! And it was facing round-the-clock assaults from the elite formations of Paulus's 6th Army and the German Luftwaffe that were more than 30 times its size, with seemingly infinitely greater firepower.

What sustained the Soviet soldiers in the face of these indescribable, almost unimaginable horrors? What enabled them to triumph against such overwhelming odds? Insofar as the imperial arrogance of the members of today's anti-Russia lobby ominously echoes the anti-Soviet arrogance of German political and military strategists in Hitler's time, they would be well-advised to consider the answers to these questions, before proceeding any further with their dangerous, ill-considered provocations.

The Leadership Question

The Show Trial purge process which Stalin conducted against the Soviet military from 1937-1939 had virtually decapitated the Red Army. Approximately 50% of the officer corps, including 3 out of 5 marshals, 13 out of 15 army group commanders, 57 out of 85 corps commanders, and 110 out of 195 division commanders were executed, imprisoned, or "discharged" in the purge. Only the ascendancy of General Zhukov and the arrival of Arctic-like temperatures and snowfall in November 1941 stopped the German Army from taking Moscow.

While the limited success which the Soviets experienced in some winter engagements against the Germans prompted some expressions of misguided optimism in high level Soviet government circles, those naïve hopes were shattered by the disaster that the Soviets suffered at the 2nd Battle of Kharkov. The sixteen-day battle which ended on May 28, 1942 resulted in 171,00 dead, missing, or captured Red Army troops, and opened the door for the German advance deep into southwest Russia. Soviet losses were compounded by the loss of another 118,00 soldiers when the garrison at Sevastopol in Crimea surrendered to the German 11th Army of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein on July 4, 1942.

So, when the city of Rostov on the Don River fell to the Germans with hardly a fight on July 23rd, Stalin acted decisively to alter the dynamic of defeat and despair. On July 28,1942 Stalin issued his famous Order 227---the "Ni Shagu Nazad!" Order---the "Not a Step Back!" Order. In it, he declared: "Every commander, soldier, and political worker must understand that our resources are not unlimited To retreat further would mean the ruin of the country and ourselves. Every new scrap of territory we lose will significantly strengthen the enemy and severely weaken our defense of our Motherland 'Not a Step Back!' this must now be our chief slogan. We must defend to the last drop of blood every position, every meter of Soviet territory, to cling on to every shred of Soviet earth and defend it to the utmost." (pp. 41-42. Stalingrad -- How the Red Army Triumphed , by Michael K. Jones--2007, Pen & Sword Books LTD, Great Britain).

Stalin coupled his Order 227 with a number of initiatives that were designed to awaken and unleash the powerful spiritual, patriotic impulses which had resided deep in the souls of Russian subjects for centuries, long before the birth of Karl Marx or the Bolshevik Revolution. He had come to recognize that Communist sloganeering was simply not sufficient to mobilize the people or the soldiers of the Soviet Union for victory.

Birth of a Plan and Advent of General Chuikov

On September 12 Zhukov and Vasilevsky spoke with Stalin about the prospects for a strategic encirclement of Paulus's 6th Army, to change the complexion of the war altogether. Stalin was intrigued with the idea and dispatched them to Stalingrad to investigate the feasibility of it. He expressly admonished them, that they were to discuss this idea with absolutely no one but himself. They returned to Moscow on September 27th and presented him with a detailed report on their plan, affirming its viability. After some minor alterations, he signed off on it the next day.

The date for the surprise attack was set for November 9th. The commanders of the three Soviet Fronts (army groups) in the Stalingrad region were not to be informed of the plan until mid-October at the earliest. And they, in turn, were not to inform their own command staffs of the plans until November1st! These strictures would give the Front commanders and their staffs little time to prepare for the counteroffensive But secrecy was of the highest priority.

Zhukov's and Vasilevsky's plan was premised on the assumption that the beleaguered troops of the Soviet 62nd Army could continue to conduct such a deadly and effective defense against the Germans, that the 6th Army of Paulus and the 4th Panzer Army of Herman Hoth would become narrowly focused on rooting them out of the city to such an extent, that they would leave their long flanks relatively under-protected, and therefore vulnerable to Soviet attack.

That is exactly what happened, thanks to the extraordinary leadership of the 62nd Army's Commanding General---Vasily Chuikov. Chuikov was appointed commander of the 62nd Army on Sept. 12, 1942, 6 days after its former commander, General Lopatin, had been arrested for "disobeying Order 227 and lying to the Soviet High Command." Lopatin had been installed as commander of the 62nd Army after its original leader, General Kolpakchi, had been removed from his post on July 27th because of his poor performance. Chuikov placed the highest priority on the restoration of the morale in the ranks of his men. "If you rely on an order, without preparing the morale of the men who will carry it out, then those men will not swim towards the battle, but back to the bank they set out from. In this situation, posters and slogans won't help you. "(pg. 89 -- Jones).

Chuikov made it a point to visit his soldiers in their forward positions any and everywhere on the battlefield, soliciting their insights on how better the 62nd Army could combat the Wehrmacht. Word rapidly spread throughout the ranks that Chuikov was a "soldier's general" who listened to his troops and spared no effort to get them the backup and supplies that they needed. Chuikov said, "The soldier is often his own general in street fighting. You can't be a commander if you don't trust your own soldiers' skills." (pp. 88-89, Jones)

Chuikov knew that he had to "de-awesomize" the combined arms warfare capabilities of the German Wehrmacht in the minds of his men, if he were going to prevent the Germans from taking Stalingrad. Respect for the Wehrmacht was healthy; but to harbor awe of it was paralytic and deadly. Chuikov told his men to think of Stalingrad as a breakwater against the Fascist wave of Germans. Lt. Anatoly Mereshko, a 20-year-old member of the 62nd Army staff summarized his thinking:

"Imagine a strong wave from the sea. It hits the coast with tremendous force. But when you have breakwaters in the sea, the wave gets broken. The same was true in the steppe. There the Germans had the power of the whole wave. In the city, they were broken into smaller streams. Houses, especially stone houses, became obstacles. And the further the Germans went into the city, the more resistance they received from the flanks. The Germans did not change their tactics at all But a town gives a completely different war arena---especially ruin. We could split into small groups and occupy strongholds---to split their river into tributaries. We were very successful in achieving this." (pp 9-10 Jones)

Consulting closely with his troops, Chuikov devised new forms of deployment and battle, that were calculated to maximize the impact of small ad-hoc groups of soldiers, and individual soldiers, such as snipers, in deployment against the Germans in the shattered, congested cityscape of Stalingrad. For example:

It is no doubt one of the great ironies of the Battle of Stalingrad, that the 62nd Red Army won in no small measure due to the fact that its soldiers, beginning with its commander Vasily Chuikov, operated on the (Prussian) principle of Auftragstaktik. Auftragstaktik, or "mission orders", had always been the hallmark of Prussian military excellence, since the early nineteenth century when Prussia worked with Czar Alexander I to defeat Napoleon. According to that principle, officers were encouraged to use their own judgment to determine how best to fulfil their "mission orders". Creative, innovative thinking, not blind obedience to rigid orders, was encouraged at all levels of the Prussian Army. This is exactly what Chuikov meant, when he said, "the soldier is often his own general in street fighting." Later he said, "the most important thing I learned on the banks of the Volga, was to be impatient of blueprints. We constantly looked for new methods of organizing and conducting battle, starting from the precise conditions in which we were fighting." (pg. 85 Jones).

The Spiritual Substance of Victory

Notwithstanding the effectiveness of the innovations that Chuikov and his staff made in battle in 1942, those innovations do not explain how the Soviets were able to triumph at Stalingrad. Chuikov, himself, said, "The defense of Stalingrad is a paradox of military science. The encirclement and our final offensive at Stalingrad can be understood in terms of military science---but our defense is impossible to comprehend through any system of rational analysis." (pg. 10 Jones) ." It was beyond the understanding of any of us." (pg. 7 Jones)

Lieutenant Vladimir Turov, an infantry officer in the 62nd Army echoed those sentiments when he said, "In terms of our military understanding, how we held out at Stalingrad is still a complete mystery to us." (pg. 10 -- Jones)

Chuikov created an environment that was defined by an unrelenting, spiritually animated, all-encompassing commitment to the fulfilment of an historically-grounded mission whose realization would determine not only the future of Russian society, but that of the world as a whole. The spirit of Chuikov's 62nd Army was encapsulated in the Oath that all its veterans, and all new troops that joined after Oct. 17, 1942 recited.

The Oath Not to Surrender Stalingrad stated: "The Germans have destroyed the avenues and brought down the factories of Stalingrad; but Stalingrad has remained invincible. Its burned-out houses, its very stones are sacred to us. We swear to our last drop of blood, to our last breath, to our last heartbeat that we shall defend Stalingrad, and hold the enemy back from the Volga. We swear that we shall not disgrace the glory of Russian arms, and we shall fight to the end. "(pg. 233-- Jones)

Acting as the true leader that he was, Chuikov, the Russian patriot, led what amounted to a religious crusade of his communist and atheist soldiers against the invading fascists. Anatoly Kozlov, a veteran of the battle, recalled that the swearing of the Oath "involved swallowing a piece of Stalingrad's soil. By doing so, men swore to fulfil their mission under any circumstances---including giving up their lives." (pg. 234 Jones) It was as if, in swearing the Oath and swallowing the soil, soldiers were taking Communion in a Christian Church, and the bread/body of Christ was the soil of Stalingrad.

And their pathway to immortality was paved with the sacrifices that they and their fellow members of the Red Army were making in Stalingrad. Kozlov reported that, "Our soldiers created their own rituals during the battle." (pg. 234 Jones) Often men would swear over the dead body of a fellow soldier, that they would take revenge on the German Army. The war correspondent Vasily Grossman witnessed this ritual and its effect, reporting that "It was as if the dead had passed on their strength to the survivors, and there were moments when ten resolute bayonets successfully held an area which had (previously) been held by an (entire) battalion." (pg. 234 Jones)

Lieutenant Mereshko said of this battlefield ritual: "It seemed unbelievable that anyone could continue to hold out, but when a division of thousands was reduced to a couple of hundred soldiers, they would hold the ground for their dead friends." (pg. 234 Jones)

Lieutenant Alexander Fortov, the commander of an artillery unit in the 112th Division reported that, "After the battle ended, guys in my company turned to the Bible. We began to read sections of the Old Testament to each other. We were all atheists and communists, but those passages really spoke to us. It was as if someone really understood what we had gone through." (pg. 248 Jones)

In an illuminating discussion that the son of Vasily Chuikov, Alexander, had with the author Michael K. Jones, after his father died, Alexander reported,

"I remember sorting through my father's papers after his death I came across a small, hand-written prayer and immediately recognized his writing. The paper was old and creased, the ink faded. The scrap of paper would have been folded and kept as a talisman. My father---a committed communist---never spoke about it. But I know from other members of the family, that he carried it with him during the war."

The prayer read as follows: "O Powerful One! The one who can turn night into day, and rough soil into a garden of flowers. Make light everything that is hard for me---and help me." (pg. 249 Jones). "That is how we were defending Stalingrad," Alexander Chuikov said to Michael K. Jones. (pg. 249)

Under Vasily Chuikov's leadership, this spiritual mission orientation came to dominate and animate every important aspect of life and death in the 62nd Army. As Chuikov told Vasily Grossman in an interview, "On other parts of the front they are worried that cowardice will spread amongst the men; here at Stalingrad it is courage which is infectious." (pg. 135 Jones)

Ivan Burlakov, a defender of Stalingrad's Barrikady Factory spoke of the extraordinary quality of the spiritual bond that came to predominate among the soldiers: "We spoke of the saying of (Generalissimo) Suvorov---'Though you may perish in the attempt, come to the aid of your comrade-in-arms." (pg. 11 Jones)

Led and inspired by the indomitable spirit of Vasily Chuikov, the 62nd Army held its vital ground in Stalingrad until the Red Army finally, after a ten-day logistical delay, launched its great encirclement of the German 6th Army on November 19th. As Zhukov and Vasilevsky had anticipated, the Germans left their long flanks outside of Stalingrad undermanned and vulnerable to attack, as they poured all their effort into the fight against the remnants of the 62nd Army in the smoldering ruins of Stalingrad.

It is noteworthy that, given the secrecy strictures that Stalin had imposed on the operation from the outset, the first that anyone in the 62nd Army knew of the counteroffensive was at midnight on November 18th. The heroic resistance that the 62nd Army conducted at Stalingrad was done without the benefit of any direct knowledge of the impending strategic counteroffensive. It was done for its own sake!


Rick Merlotti , 02 January 2021 at 11:00 AM

Fantastic. Thanks for posting. Required reading for ignorant Russophobes.

Patrick Armstrong , 02 January 2021 at 11:28 AM

You can start a war with Russia, but Russia will probably be the one to finish it.
I often thank that the cannon-founders of France and the banner-makers of Nazi Germany certainly did not expect their products to end up where they did.

Barbara Ann , 02 January 2021 at 11:49 AM

Absolutely fascinating post, many thanks Harper.

The Oath Not to Surrender Stalingrad with its dirt eating ritual sounds like it could have been written by Tyrtaeus himself - from his wiki:

He [Tyrtaeus] wrote at a time of two crises affecting the city: a civic unrest threatening the authority of kings and elders, later recalled in a poem named Eunomia ('Law and Order') where he reminded citizens to respect the divine and constitutional roles of kings, council, and demos; and the Second Messenian War, during which he served as a sort of 'state poet', exhorting Spartans to fight to the death for their city.

Your final paragraph is particularly interesting - extraordinarily good OPSEC from the Soviets. As a consequence the encirclement of an enemy bent on world domination who viewed them as deplorable untermenschen came as an almost total surprise - even to allied forces.

Walrus , 02 January 2021 at 12:26 PM

Thank you Harper and to your friend Steve Douglas for this wonderful Christmas present!

Steve Ogle , 02 January 2021 at 12:43 PM

Thank You. No words just feelings.

Leith , 02 January 2021 at 12:48 PM

Thanks, well written. i would guess that much of this insight come from the book by Michael K Jones: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005D7FKJG/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb

Chuikov was amazing and should have gotten much more recognition in the West. Although he was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross by the US.

BTW that 'hugging the enemy' tactic of Chuikov was copied by Giap and Tran Van Tra and used against us in the Nam.

lux , 02 January 2021 at 12:51 PM

I often thank that the cannon-founders of France and the banner-makers of Nazi Germany certainly did not expect their products to end up where they did.
Posted by: Patrick Armstrong | 02 January 2021 at 11:28 AM

Slightly cryptic. Cannon founders?

TV , 02 January 2021 at 12:51 PM

If Hitler had been an American or Canadian, would he have invaded that endless space of Russia?
I think not.
Many Europeans have no concept of the vastness of Russia, Canada,
the US.
If you are in Brussels, you can go to Luxembourg for lunch.

Laura Wilson , 02 January 2021 at 12:54 PM

Fascinating. Thank you!

Robert G Spenser , 02 January 2021 at 01:07 PM

That was an incredible read. Thank you for posting it.

Deap , 02 January 2021 at 01:31 PM

A sole line from a college history class well almost 60 years ago always haunted me. "Russian troops would not fight for the Soviet Union, but the tide of WWII was turned when they were rallied to fight for , Mother Russia ."

Other details from that lecture are now missing from memory but after reading this superb article, this must have been the very the battle and the very General the college history professor was talking about.

That line stayed with me since at the time we were in the height of the Cold War, and it was comforting to learn the bloodless, automoton "Soviets" could still be sentimental human beings devoted most to their own Mother Russia homeland.

Our college freshman class motto was "Stay Alive til '65", having been the first Duck and Cover generation cowering under our school desks in the 1950's fearing nuclear annihilation was an air raid siren's call away. Ergo, "covid" is piffle.

Thank you for this article.

[Jan 02, 2021] That's what neoliberals do to the countries that refuse to surrender. They destroy them slowly and make them suffer for refusing to be debt slaves

Jan 02, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

LibertarianMenace 21 minutes ago (Edited)

Remember what Benzion Mileikowsky said:

"If we get caught they will just replace us with persons of the same cloth. So it does not matter what you do, America is a golden calf and we will suck it dry, chop it up, and sell it off piece by piece until there is nothing left but the world's biggest welfare state that we will create and control. Why? Because it is the will of God and America is big enough to take the hit so we can do it again and again and again. This is what we do to countries that we hate. We destroy them very slowly and make them suffer for refusing to be our slaves."

Herdee 9 minutes ago remove link

This is the philosophy that both the CIA and Pompeo used on Trump in order to help destroy him. It actually sounds like something very similar or left over from the Nazi German era from WW2:

https://www.rt.com/russia/511378-american-exceptionalism-foreign-ministry/

[Jan 02, 2021] Russia ready to 'fight off' Western attempts to seize its assets in $50bn battle with oligarchs over collapsed Yukos oil empi

Jan 02, 2021 | www.rt.com

Russia ready to 'fight off' Western attempts to seize its assets in $50bn battle with oligarchs over collapsed Yukos oil empire 29 Dec, 2020 12:43 Get short URL Russia ready to 'fight off' Western attempts to seize its assets in $50bn battle with oligarchs over collapsed Yukos oil empire FILE PHOTO. © Getty Images / serggn 86 147 Follow RT on RT Any hope of a quiet 2021 for Russia has been dashed as one of the country's top officials warns it faces a series of court battles that risk confrontation with the West, including a fight over the world's largest legal bill.

In an interview published by Moscow news agency Interfax on Tuesday, Deputy Justice Minister Mikhail Galperin said that litigation over the collapsed Yukos oil empire and fallout from Russia's 2014 reabsorption of Crimea means that "a tough year" is on the cards.

The long-running dispute over Yukos, once among Russia's leading energy firms and one of the most valuable companies in the world, has been raging for years. However, it now appears to be coming to a head as the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, which claims it has jurisdiction in the case, prepares to hear an appeal from Russia's lawyers. A legal settlement of more than $50 billion, thought to be the largest in history, hangs in the balance.

'It will be a challenging year': Russia's minister of justice talks to RT about legal battle with 'Yukos oligarchs' & 2021 outlook READ MORE: 'It will be a challenging year': Russia's minister of justice talks to RT about legal battle with 'Yukos oligarchs' & 2021 outlook

"Of course, we're not sitting idly, waiting for the Supreme Court's decision," said Galperin. "Every day, we're defending our national interests in this case in different ways. Legal battles related to the Yukos case are taking place not only in the Netherlands, but in other jurisdictions as well."

Those who lost money in the collapse of the Yukos empire insist that the arrest of its CEO on fraud charges and a colossal bill in back-taxes amounted to state appropriation.

Russian authorities argue that previous rulings in foreign courts on the side of the claimants failed to take into account Russia's anti-corruption laws, and claim that the investors weren't "bona fide." Moscow also insists that only Russia's courts have jurisdiction, as the Energy Charter Treaty under which the case is being brought was signed but never ratified.

Galperin added that the country's "main legal argument is that Russia never agreed for the case to be heard by an international court of arbitration, which means that the judges had no mandate to consider the lawsuit Yukos ex-shareholders filed against Russia."

ALSO ON RT.COM Russia can refuse to pay $50 billion bill to Yukos oligarchs, country's top court rules, as international legal battle rages on

Last week, one of Russia's highest judicial authorities ruled that the country should disregard any judgement coming from overseas tribunals. They state that, while the government of the day took steps to join the Energy Charter Treaty in 1994, they did not have the authority to make national laws subject to international agreements, or to "challenge the competence" of Russian courts. Therefore, the jurists conclude, adhering to the Dutch court's demands would be "unconstitutional."

However, if the verdict goes in favor of Yukos' former shareholders, refusing to pay the bill could have substantial repercussions for Russia, with the claimants already calling for the confiscation of the country's assets overseas as collateral.

ALSO ON RT.COM Netherlands rejects Russia's request to suspend enforcement of record-breaking $50 billion awarded in Yukos case

Galperin, however, is confident that Russia could avoid cash and property falling into the hands of the oligarchs who have brought the case. "Since 2014," he said, "they have made multiple unscrupulous attempts to seize not only state property, but also assets that belong to Russian companies in Western Europe. We have successfully repelled all these assaults."

Moscow claims win after US court rejects oligarchs' demand for seizure of Russian assets in $50bn Yukos legal battle READ MORE: Moscow claims win after US court rejects oligarchs' demand for seizure of Russian assets in $50bn Yukos legal battle

"While we can't rule out that in 2021 YUKOS ex-shareholders will continue their legal battle in a number of countries, I can tell you without unnecessary bravado that we are fully prepared to fight off any attempts to seize our property in any country of the world."

The Supreme Court of the Netherlands is expected to hear the case in February next year, while simultaneous battles have also been fought in US and British courts. The row comes at a time when tensions between Russia and the West are growing, with Moscow's diplomats arguing that verdicts against the country have been "politically motivated." In December, Justice Minister Konstantin Chuychenko told journalists that the case is part of a "legal war that has been declared on Russia."

As well as the Yukos case potentially reaching a dramatic climax, Galperin expects that his ministry will have their hands full next year with at least two other international disputes. As early as January, the European Court of Human Rights is expected to announce a decision on a legal fight between Moscow and Kiev over disputed Crimea. There is a further $8 billion claim from a Ukrainian energy firm that insists it lost its assets when the peninsula was reabsorbed into Russia. The same court will also rule on a case brought by Georgia over events in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008.

[Jan 02, 2021] Aaron Mate pushes back:- "Stephen F. Cohen on Russia's democratization and how US meddling undermines it"

Jan 02, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Jan 1 2021 21:19 utc | 54

While we are on the subject of Russian meddling

Aaron Mate pushes back:- "Stephen F. Cohen on Russia's democratization and how US meddling undermines it"

[Jan 02, 2021] Pull My Finger- - (Afghan Edition)

Notable quotes:
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
Jan 02, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

b , Jan 1 2021 8:16 utc | 7

June 26 2020, New York Times

Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says

August 17 2020, CNN

US intelligence indicates Iran paid bounties to Taliban for targeting American troops in Afghanistan

December 31 2020, Axios

Scoop: Trump administration declassifies unconfirmed intel on Chinese bounties

January 1 2021, Moon of Alabama

Sources: To Keep Troops In Afghanistan U.S. Intel Paid Militants Bounties To Kill Them

Date corrected :-)


Another factless headline in today's NYT:

Microsoft Says Russian Hackers Viewed Some of Its Source Code

Microsoft said no such thing.

Nowhere in Microsoft's blogpost on the issue is there mention of 'Russian', 'Russia' or some other attribution.

Arch Bungle , Jan 1 2021 9:05 utc | 9

Posted by: Antonym | Jan 1 2021 6:13 utc | 1


CHINESE SPY NETWORK EXPOSED IN AFGHANISTAN

I've already exposed pajwhok news as a European-created front organisation.

Repeating the same endless propaganda every few days just makes you look like a mindless digital drone.

[Jan 02, 2021] What is it with the British obsession with underpants? All the more disturbing then that the real Kudryavtsev's mother-in-law ended up an indirect victim of British intel's stupidity, when her flat was invaded by one of Navalny's idiot groupie followers.

Jan 02, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Jan 1 2021 12:37 utc | 23

J W @ 22:

I would have thought the ongoing saga of Alexei Navalny's poisoning by FSB agents with the most deadly toxin known being smeared on his underpants in the 31-hour gap between going into intensive care in the Omsk Hospital and a German air ambulance reaching the hospital and putting a doctor by his bedside was Western intelligence at its most oxymoronic. This, coming on top of the poison in the tea in the airport cafeteria, followed by the poison in the water bottle picked up by Navalny's followers wearing no protective masks or gloves.

Of course with Bellingcat (founded by an unemployed ladies-underwear sales representative) involved in the latest installment in the farce, the obsession with Navalny's underpants becomes understandable. That phone conversation Navalny had with "Kudryavtsev" surely had to be staged. What is it with the British obsession with underpants?

All the more disturbing then that the real Kudryavtsev's mother-in-law ended up an indirect victim of British intel's stupidity, when her flat was invaded by one of Navalny's idiot groupie followers.

Stonebird , Jan 1 2021 15:31 utc | 28

Jen | Jan 1 2021 12:37 utc | 23

What is it with the British obsession with underpants?

When I was a rather timid student and had a car, I took two other students and a Professor on a journey form London to Birmingham. We stopped on the way to vist my parents house. My mother, turning to the Professor, and asked in front of the others, "You do make sure he changes his underpants don't you?" I had a hard job living it down. (Maybe that's why I changed my nationality)

Navalny - don't forget that the person who was said to have carried the water bottle to Germany was photoghaphed by CCT buying the said water bottle from a vending machine in Germany after arrival. Obviously, the Russki FSB go around filling up machines with poisoned water bottles. So we must expect a massive "Novachoco" at German Airports any time now.

[Jan 01, 2021] JOHN KIRIAKOU- The Dark Past of Biden's Nominee for National Intelligence Director by John Kiriakou

Jan 01, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

F ormer acting CIA Director Mike Morell, who has disingenuously argued for years that he had nothing to do with the agency's torture program, but who continued to defend it, has taken himself out of the running to be President-elect Joe Biden's new CIA director.

The decision is a victory for the peace group Code Pink, which spearheaded the Stop Morell movement, and it's a great thing for all Americans. Now, though, we have to turn our attention to Biden's nominee to be director of national intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines.

Haines is certainly qualified on paper to lead the Intelligence Community. A longtime Biden aide, she has the president-elect's confidence. But that's not good enough. Haines is exactly the kind of person who shouldn't be in a position of authority in intelligence. She is the kind of neoliberal intelligence apologist whom so many of us have opposed for so many years. Don't just take my word for it, though. Look at her record .

Haines first began working for Biden when she served as deputy general counsel of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was its chairman. When Biden became vice president in 2009, Haines moved to the State Department, where she was the assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs. After only a year, she moved to the White House, where she became deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel to the president for national security affairs, the National Security Council's chief attorney.

That's quite a position. What it means was that her job was to legally justify President Barack Obama's decisions on such intelligence issues as drone strikes and whether to release the CIA Torture Report. She served there under CIA Director John Brennan. Obama apparently liked the job she did for him because in 2013, he named Haines deputy director of the CIA (DD/CIA).

Haines was the first woman to be named DD/CIA, and she served again under Brennan, who proved time and again that he was no fan of congressional oversight . Haines's attitude was similar to Brennan's: The CIA was going to do what it was going to do, and she would make no apologies for it.

There were three controversial areas where Haines made a name for herself and for which she should have to answer in a confirmation hearing: The CIA's refusal to release the Senate Torture Report and the decision to hack into the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer system; the CIA's decision to not punish those officers who carried out the hack and who killed and tortured prisoners beyond even what the Justice Department said was permissible; and the government's drone program, in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians were killed.

Drone "pilots" launch an MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle for a raid in the Middle East. (U.S. military)

Haines' Torture Cover-Up

You may recall that in December 2014, the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a heavily redacted version of the executive summary of the committee's torture report, the result of years of investigation using primary-source CIA documents. The executive summary was about 525 pages long, just a fraction of the nearly 6,000-page complete report. And the release of the 525 pages was the result of protracted negotiations between the committee and the CIA.

In the end, the public heard a few details of what the CIA's prisoners underwent at secret prisons around the world. But the full story was never made public. It likely never will be. And that's thanks to Avril Haines.

Earlier that year, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor in a very unusual display and accused CIA Director Brennan of spying on her committee's staff members. Specifically, Feinstein said that CIA officers had hacked into the Senate's computers to see what it was that committee investigators were focusing on.

The hacking was unprecedented, and Feinstein referred it to the Justice Department for prosecution. Attorney General Eric Holder, however, chose not to pursue the case. Brennan took responsibility for ordering the hacking and he made no apologies for it. But his top aide, his assistant, his legal adviser through the episode was Avril Haines. She has never explained her decisions in support of the hack.

Furthermore, it was Haines who overruled the CIA's inspector general and who decided not to punish those CIA officers who hacked into the committee's computers, or those CIA officers who had gone over and above what the Justice Department had authorized in its "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" program, killing and maiming prisoners.

In the end, not only were no CIA officers punished, but the leaders and most prominent officers in the torture program were promoted, in some cases into some of the most sought-after positions in the CIA. I know this to be true. I worked for them.

Haines and Drones

One area in which Haines has not received a great deal of media coverage has been her role in the drone program . When Haines was the National Security Council's top lawyer, Brennan was the keeper of the so-called kill list. It was Haines who took phone calls in the middle of the night asking her for legal authority -- permission -- to launch missile attacks from drones. She has never answered for her actions.

Now is the time for Americans to put down their collective foot on Biden's national security appointees. Morell was utterly inappropriate for a senior position in the Biden national security apparatus. Haines is, too. She has, very simply, committed crimes against humanity. I'm under no illusions that Biden is a progressive or that he will differ greatly from previous Democratic presidents on national security.

But I do believe that wrong is wrong. Avril Haines is exactly the kind of person we don't want running the Intelligence Community. This is the moment for opponents of her nomination to lobby senators on the Intelligence Committee. There's still time to defeat her.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act -- a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.



Cadogan Parry
, December 30, 2020 at 21:51

The Intercept (26-June-2020) reported Haines' consulting for controversial data-mining firm Palantir. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel is also an investor in Carbyne, co-owned by the late Jeffery Epstein and members of the Israeli political and intelligence establishment. Ties between Palantir and Carbyne were cemented when it opened a center in Israel in 2013. Hamutal Meridor, Palantir Israel's current head, served as senior director of Verint, with deep ties to Unit 8200. Verint was previously implicated in being one of two companies hired by the NSA to put a backdoor into US telecommunication systems and popular applications, ensuring it's immediate access.

Charlotte Sheasby-Coleman , December 29, 2020 at 21:21

I urge all who have read this article to watch "Silenced", a James Spione film about John Kiriakou, Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack -- whistleblowers who paid a very high price for their honesty and integrity (hXXp://silencedfilm.com). Mr. Kiriakou gave up a lucrative job and almost two years with his family for sharing the truth. His voice needs to be heard now . Avril Haines' record of ignoring tremendous human rights violations makes it clear that she should not hold a position of power in the intelligence community of the upcoming administration.

Anonymot , December 29, 2020 at 19:31

Mr. Biden is a male clone of Mrs. Clinton who is a mouthpiece for the CIA/MIC/WallSt. She is still the person who controls the Democrat National Committee (DNC) via Tom Perez and they control and advise old Joe. Joe is merely the puppet at the end of the inner organization's strings. They are all yes-men/women in the service of the shadow's mindset.

We will have another Obama puppet show.

After 4 years of the unique societal insanity ward that destroyed a maximum of the little remaining democracy, including the directorship and key personnel of every Washington bureau, there is little improvement to expect under the Biden Harris clone team. In the stupid intelligence area that Trump damaged even more deeply than is publicly known, Brennan and Clapper are back as Biden advisors.

Once again, the eagles have died, replaced by beagles sniffing out more war, more oil, and more empire.

[Jan 01, 2021] Spooky Western Journalists Regurgitate CIA and Collaborate With Spy Agencies - Antiwar.com Blog

Jan 01, 2021 | www.antiwar.com

Spooky Western Journalists Regurgitate CIA and Collaborate With Spy Agencies

Aaron Maté Posted on December 27, 2020

From The Grayzone :

Max Blumenthal, reporting from Venezuela, discusses with Aaron Maté and Ben Norton how Western corporate media outlets are full of stenographers for spy agencies, how the CIA and MI6 drive reporting on Russia, how the US and UK governments fund regime-change website Bellingcat and its deceptive articles on Syria and the OPCW, and how the British military censors journalism.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PQOs3tFcqUs

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[Jan 01, 2021] Military And Political Trends Of 2020 That Will Shape 2021 - ZeroHedge

Jan 01, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

The past year began with the assassination of the Iranian military genius General Qasem Soleimani by the United States, and it ended with the murder of the prominent scholar Mohsen Fakhrizadeh by the Israelis. In early January, Iran, expecting another aggressive action from the West, accidently shot down a Ukrainian civil aircraft that had inexplicably altered its course over Tehran without request nor authorization. Around the same time, Turkey confirmed the deployment of its military in Libya, beginning a new phase of confrontation in the region, and Egypt responding with airstrikes and additional shows of force. The situation in Yemen developed rapidly: taking advantage of the Sunni coalition's moral weakness, Ansar Allah achieved significant progress in forcing the Saudis out of the country in many regions. The state of warfare in northwestern Syria has significantly changed, transforming into the formal delineation of zones of influence of Turkey and the Russian-Iranian-Syrian coalition. This happened amid, and largely due to the weakening of U.S. influence in the region. Ankara is steadily increasing its military presence in the areas under its responsibility and along the contact line. It has taken measures to deter groups linked to Al-Qaeda and other radicals. As a result, the situation in the region is stabilizing, which has allowed Turkey to increasingly exert control over most of Greater Idlib.

ISIS cells remain active in the eastern and southern Syrian regions. Particular processes are taking place in Quneitra and Daraa provinces, where Russian peace initiatives were inconclusive by virtue of the direct destructive influence of Israel in these areas of Syria. In turn, the assassination of Qasem Soleimaniin resulted in a sharp increase in the targeting of American personnel, military and civil infrastructure in Iraq. The U.S. Army was forced to regroup its forces, effectively abandoning a number of its military installations and concentrating available forces at key bases. At the same time, Washington flatly rejected demands from Baghdad for a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops and promised to respond with full-fledged sanctions if Iraq continued to raise this issue. Afghanistan remains stable in its instability. Disturbing news comes from Latin America. Confrontation between China and India flared this year, resulting in sporadic border clashes. This situation seems far from over, as both countries have reinforced their military posture along the disputed border. The aggressive actions of the Trump administration against China deepen global crises, which has become obvious not only to specialists but also to the general public. The relationship between the collective West and the Russian Federation was re-enshrined in "the Cold War state", which seems to have been resurrected once again.

The turbulence of the first quarter of 2020 was overshadowed by a new socio-political process – the corona-crisis, the framework of which integrates various phenomena from the Sars-Cov2 epidemic itself and the subsequent exacerbation of the global economic crisis. The disclosure of substantial social differences that have accumulated in modern capitalist society, lead to a series of incessant protests across the globe. The year 2020 was accompanied by fierce clashes between protesters professing various causes and law enforcement forces in numerous countries. Although on the surface these societal clashes with the state appear disassociated, many share related root causes. A growing, immense wealth inequality, corruption of government at all levels, a lack of any meaningful input into political decision making, and the unmasking of massive censorship via big tech corporations and the main stream media all played a part in igniting societal unrest.

In late 2019 and early 2020 there was little reason for optimistic projections for the near future. However, hardly anyone could anticipate the number of crisis events and developments that had taken place during this year. These phenomena affected every region of the world to some extent.

Nevertheless, Middle East has remained the main source of instability, due to being an arena where global and regional power interests intertwine and clash. The most important line of confrontation is between US and Israel-led forces on the one hand, and Iran and its so called Axis of Resistance. The opposing sides have been locked in an endless spiral of mutual accusations, sanctions, military incidents, and proxy wars, and recently even crossed the threshold into a limited exchange of strikes due to the worsening state of regional confrontation. Russia and Turkey, the latter of which has been distancing itself from Washington due to growing disagreements with "NATO partners" and changes in global trends, also play an important role in the region without directly entering into the confrontation between pro-Israel forces and Iran.

As in the recent years, Syria and Iraq remain the greatest hot-spots. The destruction of ISIS as a terrorist state and the apparent killing of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not end its existence as a terror group. Many ISIS cells and supporting elements actively use regional instability as a chance to preserve the Khalifate's legacy. They remain active mainly along the Syria-Iraq border, and along the eastern bank of the Euphrates in Syria. Camps for the temporary displaced and for the families and relatives of ISIS militants on the territory controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in north-eastern Syria are also breeding grounds for terrorist ideology. Remarkably, these regions are also where there is direct presence of US forces, or, as in the case of SDF camps, presence of forces supported by the US.

The fertile soil for radicalism also consists of the inability to reach a comprehensive diplomatic solution that would end the Syrian conflict in a way acceptable to all parties. Washington is not interesting in stabilizing Syria because even should Assad leave, it would strengthen the Damascus government that would naturally be allied to Russia and Iran. Opposing Iran and supporting Israel became the cornerstone of US policy during the Trump administration. Consequently, Washington is supporting separatist sentiments of the Kurdish SDF leadership and even allowed it to participate in the plunder of Syrian oil wells in US coalition zone of control in which US firms linked to the Pentagon and US intelligence services are participating. US intelligence also aids Israel in its information and psychological warfare operations, as well as military strikes aimed at undermining Syria and Iranian forces located in the country. In spite of propaganda victories, in practice Israeli efforts had limited success in 2020 as Iran continued to strengthen its positions and military capabilities on its ally's territory. Iran's success in establishing and supporting a land corridor linking Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iraq, plays an important role. Constant expansion of Iran's military presence and infrastructure near the town of al-Bukamal, on the border of Iraq and Syria, demonstrates the importance of the project to Tehran. Tel-Aviv claims that Iran is using that corridor to equip pro-Iranian forces in southern Syria and Lebanon with modern weapons.

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The Palestinian question is also an important one for Israel's leadership and its lobby in Washington. The highly touted "deal of the century" turned out to be no more than an offer for the Palestinians to abandon their struggle for statehood. As expected, this initiative did not lead to a breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Rather the opposite, it gave an additional stimulus to Palestinian resistance to the demands that were being imposed. At the same time, Trump administration scored a diplomatic success by forcing the UAE and Bahrain to normalize their relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia to make its collaboration with Israel public. That was a historic victory for US-Israel policy in the Middle East. Public rapprochement of Arab monarchies and Israel strengthened the positions of Iran as the only country which not only declares itself as Palestine's and Islamic world's defender, but actually puts words into practice. Saudi Arabia's leadership will particularly suffer in terms of loss of popularity among its own population, already damaged by the failed war in Yemen and intensifying confrontation with UAE, both of which are already using their neighbor's weakness to lay a claim to leadership on the Arabian Peninsula.

The list of actors strengthening their positions in the Red Sea includes Russia. In late 2020 it became known that Russia reached an agreement with Sudan on establishing a naval support facility which has every possibility to become a full-blown naval base. This foothold will enable the Russian Navy to increase its presence on key maritime energy supply routes on the Red Sea itself and in the area between Aden and Oman straits. For Russia, which has not had naval infrastructure in that region since USSR's break-up, it is a significant diplomatic breakthrough. For its part. Sudan's leadership apparently views Russia's military presence as a security factor allowing it to balance potential harmful measures by the West.

During all of 2020, Moscow and Beijing continued collaboration on projects in Africa, gradually pushing out traditional post-colonial powers in several key areas. The presence of Russian military specialists in the Central African Republic where they assist the central government in strengthening its forces, escalation of local conflicts, and ensuring the security of Russian economic sectors, is now a universally known fact. Russian diplomacy and specialists are also active in Libya, where UAE and Egypt which support Field Marshal Khaftar, and Turkey which supports the Tripoli government, are clashing. Under the cover of declarations calling for peace and stability, foreign actors are busily carving up Libya's energy resources. For Egypt there's also the crucial matter of fighting terrorism and the presence of groups affiliated with Muslim Brotherhood which Cairo sees as a direct threat to national security.

The Sahel and the vicinity of Lake Chad remain areas where terror groups with links to al-Qaeda and ISIS remain highly active. France's limited military mission in the Sahara-Sahel region has been failure and could not ensure sufficient support for regional forces in order to stabilize the situation. ISIS and Boko-Haram continue to spread chaos in the border areas between Niger, Nigeria, Cameroun, and Chad. In spite of all the efforts by the region's governments, terrorists continue to control sizable territories and represent a significant threat to regional security. The renewed conflict in Ethiopia is a separate problem, in which the federal government was drawn into a civil war against the National Front for the Liberation of Tigray controlling that province. The ethno-feudal conflict between federal and regional elites threatens to destabilize the entire country if it continues.

The explosive situation in Africa shows that post-colonial European powers and the "Global Policeman" which dominated that continent for decades were not interested in addressing the continent's actual problem. Foreign actors were mainly focused on extracting resources and ensuring the interests of a narrow group of politicians and entities affiliated with foreign capitals. Now they are forced to compete with the informal China-Russia bloc which will use a different approach that may be a described as follows: Strengthening of regional stability to protect investments in economic projects. Thus it is no surprise that influential actors are gradually losing to new but more constructive forces.

Tensions within European countries have been on the rise during the past several years, due to both the crisis of the contemporary economic paradigm and to specific regional problems such as the migration crises and the failure of multiculturalism policies, with subsequent radicalization of society.

Unpleasant surprises included several countries' health care and social protection networks' inability to cope with the large number of COVID-19 patients. Entire systems of governance in a number of European countries proved incapable of coping with rapidly developing crises. This is true particularly for countries of southern Europe, such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Among eastern European countries, Hungary's and Romania's economies were particularly badly affected. At the same time, Poland's state institutions and economy showed considerable resilience in the face of crisis. While the Federal Republic of Germany suffered considerable economic damage in the second quarter of 2020, Merkel's government used the situation to inject huge sums of liquidity into the economy, enhanced Germany's position within Europe, and moreover Germany's health care and social protection institutions proved capable and sufficiently resilient.

Coronavirus and subsequent social developments led to the emergence of the so-called "Macron Doctrine" which amounts to an argument that EU must obtain strategic sovereignty. This is consistent with the aims of a significant portion of German national elites. Nevertheless, Berlin officially criticized Macron's statements and has shown willingness to enter into a strategic partnership with Biden Administration's United States as a junior partner. However, even FRG's current leadership understands the dangers of lack of strategic sovereignty in an era of America's decline as the world policeman. Against the backdrop of a global economic crisis, US-EU relations are ineluctably drifting from a state of partnership to one of competition or even rivalry. In general, the first half of 2020 demonstrated the vital necessity of further development of European institutions.

The second half of 2020 was marked by fierce mass protests in Germany, France, Great Britain, and other European countries. The level of violence employed by both the protesters and law enforcement was unprecedented and is not comparable to the level of violence seen during protests in Russia, Belarus, and even Kirgizstan. Mainstream media did their best to depreciate and conceal the scale of what was happening. If the situation continues to develop in the same vein, there is every chance that in the future, a reality that can be described as a digital concentration camp may form in Europe.

World media, for its part, paid particular attention to the situation in Belarus, where protests have entered their fourth month following the August 9, 2020 presidential elections. Belarusian protests have been characterized by their direction from outside the country and choreographed nature. The command center of protest activities is officially located in Poland. This fact is in and of itself unprecedented in Europe's contemporary history. Even during Ukraine's Euromaidan, external forces formally refused to act as puppetmasters.

Belarus' genuinely existing socio-economic problems have led to a rift within society that is now divided into two irreconcilable camps: proponents of reforms vs. adherents of the current government. Law enforcement forces which are recruited from among President Lukashenko's supporters, have acted forcefully and occasionally harshly. Still, the number of casualties is far lower than, for example, in protests in France or United States.

Ukraine itself, where Western-backed "democratic forces" have already won, remains the main point of instability in Eastern Europe. The Zelenskiy administration came to power under slogans about the need to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine and rebuild the country. In practice, the new government continued to pursue the policy aimed at maintaining military tension in the region in the interests of its external sponsors and personal enrichment.

For the United States, 2020 turned out to be a watershed year for both domestic and foreign policy. Events of this year were a reflection of Trump Administration's protectionist foreign policy and a national-oriented approach in domestic and economic policy, which ensured an intense clash with the majority of Washington Establishment acting in the interests of global capital.

In addition to the unresolved traditional problems, America's problems were made worse by two crises, COVID-19 spread and BLM movement protests. They ensured America's problems reached a state of critical mass.

One can and should have a critical attitude toward President Trump's actions, but one should not doubt the sincerity of his efforts to turn the slogan Make America Great Again into reality. One should likewise not doubt that his successor will adhere to other values. Whether it's Black Lives Matter or Make Global Moneymen Even Stronger, or Russia Must Be Destroyed, or something even more exotic, it will not change the fact America we've known in the last half century died in 2020. A telling sign of its death throes is the use of "orange revolution" technologies developed against inconvenient political regimes. This demonstrated that currently the United States is ruled not by national elites but by global investors to whom the interests of ordinary Americans are alien.

This puts the terrifying consequences of COVID-19 in a new light. The disease has struck the most vulnerable layers of US society. According to official statistics, United States has had about 20 million cases and over 330,000 deaths. The vast majority are low-income inhabitants of mega-cities. At the same time, the wealthiest Americans have greatly increased their wealth by exploiting the unfolding crisis for their own personal benefit. The level of polarization of US society has assumed frightening proportions. Conservatives against liberals, blacks against whites, LGBT against traditionalists, everything that used to be within the realm of public debate and peaceful protest has devolved into direct, often violent, clashes. One can observe unprecedented levels of aggression and violence from all sides.

In foreign policy, United States continued to undermine the international security system based on international treaties. There are now signs that one of the last legal bastions of international security, the New START treaty, is under attack. US international behavior has prompted criticism from NATO allies. There are growing differences of opinion on political matters with France and economic ones with Germany. The dialogue with Eastern Mediterranean's most powerful military actor Turkey periodically showed a sharp clash of interests.

Against that backdrop, United States spent 2020 continuously increasing its military presence in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea basin. Additional US forces and assets were deployed in direct proximity to Russia's borders. The number of offensive military exercises under US leadership or with US participation has considerably increased.

In the Arctic, the United States is acting as a spoiler, unhappy with the current state of affairs. It aims to extend its control over natural resources in the region, establish permanent presence in other countries' exclusive economic zones (EEZ) through the use of the so-called "freedom of navigation operations" (FONOPs), and continue to encircle Russia with ballistic missile defense (BMD) sites and platforms.

In view of the urgent and evident US preparations to be able to fight and prevail in a war against a nuclear adversary, by defeating the adversary's nuclear arsenal through the combination of precision non-nuclear strikes, Arctic becomes a key region in this military planning. The 2020 sortie by a force of US Navy BMD-capable AEGIS destroyers into the Barents Sea, the first such mission since the end of the Cold War over two decades ago, shows the interest United States has in projecting BMD capabilities into regions north of Russia's coastline, where they might be able to effect boost-phase interceptions of Russian ballistic missiles that would be launched in retaliatory strikes against the United States. US operational planning for the Arctic in all likelihood resembles that for South China Sea, with only a few corrections for climate.

In Latin America, the year of 2020 was marked by the intensification Washington efforts aimed at undermining the political regimes that it considered to be in the opposition to the existing world order.

Venezuela remained one of the main points of the US foreign policy agenda. During the entire year, the government of Nicolas Maduro was experiencing an increasing sanction, political and clandestine pressure. In May, Venezuelan security forces even neutralized a group of US mercenaries that sneaked into the country to stage the coup in the interests of the Washington-controlled opposition and its public leader Juan Guaido. However, despite the recognition of Guaido as the president of Venezuela by the US and its allies, regime-change attempts, and the deep economic crisis, the Maduro government survived.

This case demonstrated that the decisive leadership together having the support of a notable part of the population and working links with alternative global centers of power could allow any country to resist to globalists' attacks. The US leadership itself claims that instead of surrendering, Venezuela turned itself into a foothold of its geopolitical opponents: China, Russia, Iran and even Hezbollah. While this evaluation of the current situation in Venezuela is at least partly a propaganda exaggeration to demonize the 'anti-democratic regime' of Maduro, it highlights parts of the really existing situation.

The turbulence in Bolivia ended in a similar manner, when the right wing government that gained power as a result of the coup in 2019 demonstrated its inability to rule the country and lost power in 2020. The expelled president, Evo Morales, returned to the country and the Movement for Socialism secured their dominant position in Bolivia thanks to the wide-scale support from the indigenous population. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that these developments in Venezuela and Bolivia would allow to reverse the general trend towards the destabilization in South America.

The regional economic and social turbulence is strengthened by the high level of organized crime and the developing global crisis that sharpened the existing contradictions among key global and regional players. This creates conditions for the intensification of existing conflicts. For example, the peace process between the FARC and the federal government is on the brink of the collapse in Colombia. Local sources and media accuse the government and affiliated militias of detentions and killings of leaders of local communities and former FARC members in violation of the existing peace agreement. This violence undermine the fragile peace process and sets conditions for the resumption of the armed struggle by FARC and its supporters. Mexico remains the hub for illegal migration, drug and weapon trafficking just on the border with the United States. Large parts of the country are in the state of chaos and are in fact controlled by violent drug cartels and their mercenaries. Brazil is in the permanent state of political and economic crisis amid the rise of street crime.

These negative tendencies affect almost all states of the region. The deepening global economic crisis and the coronavirus panic add oil to the flame of instability.

Countries of South America are not the only one suffering from the crisis. It also shapes relations between global powers. Outcomes of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak and the global economic crisis contributed to the hardening of the standoff between the United States and China.

Washington and Beijing have insoluble contradictions. The main of them is that China has been slowly but steadily winning the race for the economic and technological dominance simultaneously boosting own military capabilities to defend the victory in the case of a military escalation. The sanction, tariff and diplomatic pressure campaign launched by the White House on China since the very start of the Trump Presidency is a result of the understanding of these contradictions by the Trump administration and its efforts to guarantee the leading US position in the face of the global economic recession. The US posture towards the South China Sea issues, the political situation in Hong Kong, human rights issues in Xinjiang, the unprecedented weapon sales to Taiwan, the support of the militarization of Japan and many other questions is a part of the ongoing standoff. Summing up, Washington has been seeking to isolate China through a network of local military alliances and contain its economic expansion through sanction, propaganda and clandestine operations.

The contradictions between Beijing and Washington regarding North Korea and its nuclear and ballistic missile programs are a part of the same chain of events. Despite the public rhetoric, the United States is not interested in the full settlement of the Korea conflict. Such a scenario that may include the reunion of the North and South will remove the formal justification of the US military buildup. This is why the White House opted to not fulfill its part of the deal with the North once again assuring the North Korean leadership that its decision to develop its nuclear and missile programs and further.

Statements of Chinese diplomats and top official demonstrate that Beijing fully understands the position of Washington. At the same time, China has proven that it is not going to abandon its policies aimed at gaining the position of the main leading power in the post-unipolar world. Therefore, the conflict between the sides will continue escalating in the coming years regardless the administration in the White House and the composition of the Senate and Congress. Joe Biden and forces behind his rigged victory in the presidential election will likely turn back from Trump's national-oriented economic policy and 'normalize' relations with China once again reconsidering Russia as Enemy #1. This will not help to remove the insoluble contradictions with China and reverse the trend towards the confrontation. However, the Biden administration with help from mainstream media will likely succeed in hiding this fact from the public by fueling the time-honored anti-Russian hysteria.

As to Russia itself, it ended the year of 2020 in its ordinary manner for the recent years: successful and relatively successful foreign policy actions amid the complicated economic, social and political situation inside the country. The sanction pressure, coronavirus-related restrictions and the global economic crisis slowed down the Russian economy and contributed to the dissatisfaction of the population with internal economic and social policies of the government. The crisis was also used by external actors that carried out a series of provocations and propaganda campaigns aimed at undermining the stability in the country ahead of the legislative election scheduled for September 2021. The trend on the increase of sanction pressure, including tapering large infrastructure projects like the Nord Stream 2, and expansion of public and clandestine destabilization efforts inside Russia was visible during the entire year and will likely increase in 2021. In the event of success, these efforts will not only reverse Russian foreign policy achievements of the previous years, but could also put in danger the existence of the Russian statehood in the current format.

Among the important foreign policy developments of 2020 underreported by mainstream media is the agreement on the creation of a Russian naval facility on the coast of the Red Sea in Sudan. If this project is fully implemented, this will contribute to the rapid growth of Russian influence in Africa. Russian naval forces will also be able to increase their presence in the Red Sea and in the area between the Gulf of Aden and the Gulf of Oman. Both of these areas are the core of the current maritime energy supply routes. The new base will also serve as a foothold of Russia in the case of a standoff with naval forces of NATO member states that actively use their military infrastructure in Djibouti to project power in the region. It is expected that the United States (regardless of the administration in the White House) will try to prevent the Russian expansion in the region at any cost. For an active foreign policy of Russia, the creation of the naval facility in Sudan surpasses all public and clandestine actions in Libya in recent years. From the point of view of protecting Russian national interests in the Global Oceans, this step is even more important than the creation of the permanent air and naval bases in Syria.

As well as its counterparts in Washington and Beijing, Moscow contributes notable efforts to the modernization of its military capabilities, with special attention to the strategic nuclear forces and hypersonic weapons. The Russians see their ability to inflict unacceptable damage on a potential enemy among the key factors preventing a full-scale military aggression against them from NATO. The United Sates, China and Russia are in fact now involved in the hypersonic weapon race that also includes the development of means and measures to counter a potential strike with hypersonic weapons.

The new war in Nagorno-Karabakh became an important factor shaping the balance of power in the South Caucasus. The Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc achieved a sweeping victory over Armenian forces and only the involvement of the Russian diplomacy the further deployment of the peacekeepers allowed to put an end to the violence and rescue the vestiges of the self-proclaimed Armenian Republic of Artsakh. Russia successfully played a role of mediator and officially established a military presence on the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan for the next 5 years. The new Karabakh war also gave an additional impulse in the Turkish-Azerbaijani economic and military cooperation, while the pro-Western regime in Armenia that expectedly led the Armenian nation to the tragedy is balancing on the brink of collapse.

The Central Asia traditionally remained one of the areas of instability around the world with the permanent threat of militancy and humanitarian crisis. Nonetheless, despite forecasts of some analysis, the year of 2020 did not become the year of the creation of ISIS' Caliphate 2.0 in the region. An important role in preventing this was played by the Taliban that additionally to securing its military victories over the US-led coalition and the US-backed Kabul government, was fiercely fighting ISIS cells appearing in Afghanistan. The Taliban, which controls a large part of Afghanistan, was also legalized on the international scene by direct talks with the United States. The role of the Taliban will grow and further with the reduction of the US military presence.

While some media already branded the year of 2020 as one of the worst in the modern history, there are no indications that the year of 2021 will be any brighter or the global crises and regional instability will magically disappear by themselves. Instead, most likely 2020 was just a prelude for the upcoming global shocks and the acute standoff for markets and resources in the environment of censorship, legalized total surveillance, violations of human rights under 'democratic' and 'social' slogans' and proxy wars.

The instability in Europe will likely be fueled by the increasing cultural-civilizational conflict and the new wave of newcomers that have acute ideological and cultural differences with the European civilization. The influx of newcomers is expected due to demographic factors and the complicated security, social situation in the Middle East and Africa. Europe will likely try to deal with the influx of newcomers by introducing new movement and border restrictions under the brand of fighting coronavirus. Nonetheless, the expected growth of the migration pressure will likely contribute to the negative tendencies that could blow up Europe from inside.

The collapse of the international security system, including key treaties limiting the development and deployment of strategic weapons, indicates that the new detente on the global scene will remain an improbable scenario. Instead, the world will likely move further towards the escalation scenario as at least a part of the current global leadership considers a large war a useful tool to overcome the economic crisis and capture new markets. Russia, with its large territories, rich resources, a relatively low population, seems to be a worthwhile target. At the same time, China will likely exploit the escalating conflict between Moscow and the US-led bloc to even further increase its global positions. In these conditions, many will depend on the new global order and main alliances within it that are appearing from the collapsing unipolar system. The United States has already lost its unconditional dominant role on the international scene, but the so-called multipolar world order has not appeared yet. The format of this new multipolar world will likely have a critical impact on the further developments around the globe and positions of key players involved in the never-ending Big Game.

* * *

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[Jan 01, 2021] Russia vs the Biden Administration by The Saker

Jan 01, 2021 | www.unz.com

It sure looks like Biden will take over the White House one way or another, and while Trump and his supporters might still try a few things, the political correlation of forces inside the US ruling classes is clearly against Trump. As for the "deplorables" – they have been neutralized by stealing the election. Which means that Russia will soon face the most rabidly russophobic gang of messianic Neocons in history. So what can the world expect next?

The Dems are not meaningfully different from the Republicans. True, the Dems blame Russia for everything, while the Republicans blame China. Not much of a difference here: it is all about hate and scapegoating. And both of these factions of the oligarchic Uniparty like to blame Iran for, well, being located in the "wrong" part of the world, the Middle-East, which all US politicians (and not to mention their Israeli masters) want to control. As for the Israel Lobby, it has been trying to trigger a US attack on Iran for many decades. Recent US moves of key personnel and bombers might indicate that discussions of an attack on Iran are still very much taking place.

I don't believe that these fundamental directions in US foreign policy will change much.

Why?

Primarily because the AngloZionist Empire and even the US as we knew them are basically dead, which means that irrespective of who is in control of the US, the objective means/capabilities of the Empire and the US will remain the same . In other words, when Biden promises to show Russia how tough and mighty he will be, he will not have any more capabilities to threaten Russia with than Trump had.

So the first thing we can expect is simply "more of the same".

Now, in the Empire of Illusions which the United States has become, appearances matter much more than facts . US politicians have two quasi-reflexive reactions to any problem: use violence or throw money at it. Of course, using violence against Russia (or China and Iran) would be extremely dangerous. So throwing money at a problem is the way chosen by the US political elites (see here for the, rather boring, details).

A lot of that money will also be spent on ideological nonsense like supporting trans-gender rights in Africa, woke-awareness in the Baltic, "critical race theory" in Japan (good luck with that!), "Holocaust studies" in Poland and the like.

What will happen next is that this money will be spread amongst a pretty large US and EU bureaucracy (and its subcontractors) to all sorts of political PR actions aimed at presenting modern Russia as "Putin's Mordor" whose "Nazguls" (scary GRU and/or SVR and/or FSB agents) run around the planet looking for more targets to infect with the totally ineffective, but still scary, "Novichok". In the past, much of that money was spent inside Russia by all sorts of CIA-run NGOs and much of it was also spent on various propaganda efforts outside Russia. Again, this will not change, if anything, expect even more money poured into what are in reality strategic PSYOP operations.

The sad truth is that US politicians know very little about Russia, a country which they hate and fear, but not a country they even begin to understand. In this case, what US politicians will not realize is that Russia herself has changed a great deal in the past years: many new laws and regulation (see machine translated example here ) were adopted which, in essence, "plugged" many political "holes" in the Russian legislation which allowed AngloZionist organizations to have a great deal of influence in Russia. As a result of these reforms, it has become far more difficult for western run NGOs to influence the Russian political scene.

As a direct result of these new rules, I expect that a higher ratio of money will stay allocated to activities situated in the West and less for Russian-based activities. In plain English, this means that more US printed money will be spent on completely useless activities. The only people benefitting from this will be the entire class of pseudo "Russia experts" whose only true expertise is on how to secure grant money. They will produce even more conferences and papers which nobody will care about, but which will allow the US Neocons and their deep state to show how "Biden is firm with Russia". The typical US cocktail of waste, mismanagement and fraud (and let's not forget good old corruption!).

Russia's response to that will also be "more of the same": Russian politicians will continue to express their disgust with their western "partners" (FYI – when Russians speak of "partners" it is understood by all that they mean this only sarcastically). Foreign Minister Lavrov and one of his deputies have recently made statements basically indicating that Russia will not seek any (!) form of dialog with the West, because, frankly, it is pretty clear to them that this is a total waste of time: Russia has nobody in the West to speak to: the only country with real agency (albeit severely limited by its subordination to Israel) would be the US, all the other countries of the West are really colonies and/or protectorates with no sovereignty at all.

What about all the many military provocations the Empire is organizing all around Russia? Do they concern Russia leaders or not?

Well, no and yes.

In purely military terms, US/NATO military capabilities are no real threat to Russia whose military is much smaller, but also much more capable than the western ones. Why? Simply because building a truly powerful military has been a core strategic priority for the Kremlin who needed a military actually capable of a) deterring the West from attacking Russia and b) defeating the West should deterrence fail. In sharp contrast, western militaries have not been training for real wars for decades already: most of what the US/NATO do is using western militaries for all sorts of propaganda purposes (like "sending messages" or "showing determination" etc.) and for counter-insurgency operations, not for fighting a real, major, wars.

Right now the Russian military is much more modern (about 80% of new gear on average across all military branches and services!) and much better trained for real combat operations. In sharp contrast, the US MIC is heavy on hot air (Space Force! Hypersonic missiles! Artificial Intelligence!) and short on any actually deployed and engageable weapon systems. Away from the propaganda machine (aka "corporate legacy ziomedia"), the reality is that the West is about 1.5-2 decades behind Russia in most critical military technologies.

Last, but not least, wars are not won by machines, computers or fancy engineering: they are won by soldiers, real men, who know what they are defending and why. The contrast between the typical Russian soldier (in any service or branch of the military) and his western counterpart could not be greater than it is today. Simply put: no western country can boast that it has soldiers like Russia has and, again, I don't mean the "super dooper" elite Spetsnaz operators, I am talking about your very average, garden variety, infantry soldier, like the ones who saved Russia in the Chechen conflict in spite of operating in truly horrible and totally chaotic circumstances. These guys might not look like much, but as soldiers they are the kind every commander dreams about.

All this is to say that Russians have nothing to fear from all the western sabre-rattling, except maybe one thing: the rogue officer, on either side, who would suddenly decide to open fire (for whatever reason) thereby creating a situation which could escalate into a full-scale war very rapidly.

The other thing which is objectively bad for Russia is the number of key treaties the US has now withdrawn from: these treaties are most needed, especially as confidence building measures. Right now there are very few treaties left and that means that the US is desperate to try to suck Russia into an arms race.

This won't work.

Why?

Putin himself explained it very well when he recently said that while the West throws huge sums of money at any problem, Russia allocates brains, not money. According to Putin, it is the use of brains, rather than wasting money, which allowed Russia to develop all the weapon systems mentioned by Putin for the first time in 2018. This made it possible for Russia to get ahead by a decade or more, while using only a small fraction of the kind of money the US, and other western countries, are allocating on "defense" (while not being threatened by anybody!). In the competition between the US money printing press and the Russian brains, you can be sure that the latter one will always prevail.

The bottom line is this: the US can spend many hundred billion dollars on " countering Russian (or Chinese) influence ", but this will do absolutely nothing to help the objective circumstances and capabilities of the Empire or the US.

So the real question is what will change on the level below direct military confrontation.

In a recent press conference, Putin mentioned something very interesting about the outgoing Trump administration. He said:

"The current administration introduced new sanctions against Russia 46 times – against our legal entities and economic operators. Forty-six times – this has never ever happened before. But at the same time, bilateral trade grew by 30 percent over the previous year, oddly enough, even despite those restrictions."

So if the putatively pro-Russian Trump Administration sanctioned Russia 46 times, it is normal for the Russians to look at Biden with equanimity or even a resigned fatalism: " the West has always hated us, the West still hates us and the West will always hate us " – this truism is all but unanimously accepted amongst Russian politicians.

Still, we can count on Biden and Harris to try to show how "tough" they are on Russia and Putin: they will show their prowess mostly by demanding that their NATO/EU colonies and protectorates continue "send messages" to Russia and show their "unity" and "solidarity" with each other, mostly by parroting self-evidently nonsensical Anglo and German propaganda. Will the bilateral trade between Russia and the US continue to grow? Probably not as the list of corporations and agencies the US declares to be under sanctions will only grow further. But never say never, especially with the comprehensively hypocritical Dems

How about the kind of self-evidently ridiculous stories about Russians using (a clearly ineffective) combat biological agent like the so-called "Novichok", trying to kill irrelevant bloggers and failing to do so, or some variation on "animal Assad" "poisoning his own people"? Will that nonsense also continue? Probably, mainly simply because this is something which the Empire has demonstratively proved that it has the ability to do. So why not continue, especially with a press corps willing to parrot even the most ridiculous nonsense.

The bottom line is this: to get a sense of what any actor could do next, one always has to multiply intentions by capabilities. If there is one thing which the outgoing Maga Administration has shown, is that its declared intentions and actual capabilities are not at all commensurate: hence the long list of countries Trump threatened, but never meaningfully attacked. "Biden" (and I use this term very loosely, meaning "Biden and his real handlers") will inherit the very same geostrategic toolkit Trump had at his disposal for four years and which did not make it possible for him to effectively flex muscles, not even against weak and nearby Venezuela! We can be pretty sure that the rhetoric about Russia will get even more hate-filled and paranoid. Petty harassment (such as arrest of nationals, closures of offices, expulsion from various international events, etc.) will also continue, not so much because they work, but because a lot of people depend on these for their salary.

How likely is a shooting war? In my personal opinion, not very likely at all. I think that the folks at the Pentagon are mostly aware of the real world out there, and they probably recognize that the US armed forces are in no condition to fight any halfway capable opponent.

How likely is it that the US will use a protectorate like the Ukraine or Georgia to reignite another local war? It is not impossible, especially since the US did support SBU infiltration of terrorists into Russia. Keep in mind that the sole goal of such (a, frankly, suicidal) attack would be to provoke Russia into a military response, not to actually achieve anything else. The main problem here is that the regular armed forces of the Ukraine and Georgia are in no condition to fight, and that the (US letter soup controlled) Ukrainian and Georgian special services have already tried this many times, and so far without success, mainly because, unlike all the western countries, Russia has the actual means to lock her borders when needed.

What about the reported plan to destabilize Russia by creating conflicts all along her periphery?

It would take way too long for me here to describe what is taking place in each of these countries right now, but I will offer just the following bullet points:

Southern Military District or the 58th Combined Arms Army in the region). Those who believe that Turkey strengthened its position in the region simply do not understand the outcome of the recent war (especially the very interesting drone war which showed that while Armenia could not deal with them, Russian EW literally destroyed Turkish drones in mid-air (this also happened in Syria, by the way). Central Asia is an inherently unstable region, mainly because these countries never succeeded in effectively transitioning from the Soviet period to full independence. And yes, the US has a great deal of influence in this region. But only Russia can provide effective security guarantees to the leaders of Central Asia, they all know that. Finally, Kazakhstan plays an important "buffer" role for Russia, putting distance between her and her chronically unstable southern neighbors . In the Far East, Russia and China are enjoying a long honeymoon in which their already very deep relationship only gets deeper and their collaboration stronger (in spite of western PSYOPs trying to scare Russians about how China wants to take Siberia, and other silly fairy tales). Russia is now even supplying key strategic defense technologies to China. Last, but most certainly not least, Russia has total superiority in the Arctic, where the West is many decades behind Russia. In fact, Russia is massively expanding her capabilities (civilian and military) in the Russian north, which will give her even more weight on our planet's very rich north.

Now ask yourself: do you see any of that changing in the next 4 years, even assuming a rabidly hostile Biden Administration? I sure don't.

Conclusion:

Yes, the political atmosphere between Russia and the Empire will get worse. Most of the "action" will take place in the public media space. The quasi simultaneous collapse of the Anglo-Zionist Empire and the United States (at least as we knew them before the election steal) will not give much time or energy to western leaders to pursue policies which have already failed in the past and for which they simply do not have the means.

Trump or Biden was never a meaningful choice for Russia (only the Russian court jester Zhirinovskii thought otherwise). It's not much of a choice today either. The most likely consequence of these collapses will be that the world will split in roughly two sections: "Section A" which will include all the countries of the "collective West" and which will be busy trying to survive a crisis which has only begun and "Section B": the rest of the world, which will try hard to decouple itself from the sinking West and try to develop itself in this rather unstable environment.

Also, many Russians remember the gerontocracy which ruled in the last years of the USSR and they know how such gerontocracies act (make no difference if the country is ruled by a Chernenko or a Biden – such rulers are always weak and clueless).

Biden or Trump – no real difference for Russia.

This is why most Russians don't care either way.


Notsofast , says: December 30, 2020 at 3:18 am GMT • 23.6 hours ago

i remember the late 80's when ronald reagan was declared a genius for single handedly spending the ussr into oblivion. when the reagan administration took over (with a little help from daddy bush working a deal with the iranians to hold on to the hostages until after the election) the national debt was $900,000,000,000. when he left office he had tripled that, a small price to pay for taking down the evil empire, they told me. in the 90's clinton and his best friend newt gingrich magically balanced the budget (by raiding the social security trust fund and leaving a rubber iou behind). when the skull and bones division of the neocons seized power the debt was $6,000,000,000,000. twenty years and several wars later we were at $23,000,000,000,000. we are about to reach $30,000,000,000,000 after a bad flu season this year. our military is exhausted, our equipment is so out dated and worn it isn't worth bringing back, (if we ever leave the middle east), the russians and chinese are decades ahead in technological terms. now tell me, who spent who into oblivion?

Felix Keverich , says: December 30, 2020 at 5:03 am GMT • 21.8 hours ago

Russia remains vulnerable to Western efforts at political subversion. And Democrats excel at this. Remember, it was during the presidency of Barack Obama when Putin faced toughest challenge to his rule. I'm talking, of course, about Bolotnaya protests.

These days millions of Russian kids watch political videos, promoted by Youtube, where they are being taught, that their country sucks and there is no hope for their lives whatsoever unless they overthrow Putin. Russian politicians do not use the internet and appear completely oblivious to this danger. They're a bit like Saker to be honest: obsessed with their tank divisions and rockets, dinosaurs preparing for yesterday's war. They risk finding themselves in Lukashenka's position.

Carlton Meyer , says: Website December 30, 2020 at 5:45 am GMT • 21.1 hours ago

Excellent article. Even the US Marine Corps is cutting infantry battalions to fund "information groups". A new video addresses this anti-Russian propaganda:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/WqBU8EyPSh8?feature=oembed

mike99588 , says: December 30, 2020 at 6:11 am GMT • 20.7 hours ago

Russia doesn't have the working bodies to be a world hegemon.
CCP China does.
The Russian workers (Moscow, Cyprus) I've seen were indolent compared to Chinese.

Infiltration? Even here, the CCP leaning faction is large.
China appears to be Biden's highest bidder, and largest "investor", so far

Either Trump drops the hammer before Jan 20, or we're fucked on China.
Probably so's Russia, on a longer schedule.

GomezAdddams , says: December 30, 2020 at 6:18 am GMT • 20.6 hours ago

Warsaw Pact was canclled –but NATO grew and grew and grew after Bush stating " We will never expand–honest" and then 911 arrived and Firechief exclaimng "We decided to PULL IT !" but othing had struck it and of course WMD in Iraq -- –

anonymous [400] Disclaimer , says: December 30, 2020 at 6:38 am GMT • 20.2 hours ago

It's improbable that there would be any direct military clash somewhere even though there's always the possibility of a mistake leading to a crisis. The US uses color revolutions, proxy wars, subversion, bribery, economic warfare, sanctions and varying forms of sabotage. It's been pretty successful so far with this all over the world but Russia is too big and self-sufficient to be forced to capitulate.

rhetoric about Russia will get even more hate-filled and paranoid

The US propaganda system always needs a boogeyman to scare the public with. Promotion of fear is an inherent part of the American system of engineering consent.

far more difficult for western run NGOs to influence the Russian political scene.

Big tech collusion in enforcing censorship here in the US has become heavy-handed and omnipresent. But one supposes there'll be complaints about lack of free speech in Russia.
Trump was verbally belligerent but stopped short of starting any new wars, placating the establishment with imposing sanctions, assassinating Soleimani, etc. Biden is a stupid, reckless incompetent who could easily stumble us into conflicts we can't handle. But then, it would be his handlers who actually pull the strings and they seem to be as cretinous as him.

Weston Waroda , says: December 30, 2020 at 6:52 am GMT • 20.0 hours ago

As for the "deplorables" – they have been neutralized by stealing the election.

Neutralized? No way José, the deplorables are mad as hornets about the stolen election and are just getting started. And they have their Second Amendment assets, and it's not even January 20th yet.

Seraphim , says: December 30, 2020 at 7:21 am GMT • 19.5 hours ago
@Felix Keverich

Do you see the 'YouTube' kids starting a revolution, storming the Kremlin, and the 'organs' watching them with arms crossed from the side? Wouldn't they rather send them to develop the Arctic?

goldgettin , says: December 30, 2020 at 7:46 am GMT • 19.1 hours ago
@Felix Keverich

You appear to assume a lot Got a horse in this race?
Curious about your qualifications as well.
Tell us more or, are you a ?

Priss Factor , says: Website December 30, 2020 at 8:45 am GMT • 18.1 hours ago

More kids? Destroy pop culture and hang the pimps & whores.

https://russia-insider.com/en/start-making-babies-or-youll-be-cleaning-chinese-boots-top-russian-priest-smirnov-dying-nation-video

Carlos22 , says: December 30, 2020 at 8:53 am GMT • 18.0 hours ago
@Felix Keverich

Unlike the 80s there is no official ideological differences except that Russia's ideology of national sovereignty, family and strength is in assendence while the US Marxist one of globo homo anti white hate thyself BLM is openly ridiculed by the quiet majority.

It is about the US that people openly talk about being on the verge of civil war not Russia these days.

Most Russians know it's a fight against subjugation there is no other way, defend itself or get eaten.

Besides under the Harris presidency in a year or two it will be white Americans who will be told officially they suck.

Dumbo , says: December 30, 2020 at 9:15 am GMT • 17.6 hours ago

These days millions of Russian kids watch political videos, promoted by Youtube, where they are being taught, that their country sucks and there is no hope for their lives whatsoever unless they overthrow Putin

The cleverest trick the Devil ever invented was to convince young (white) people that Globohomo, Blacks Lives Matter and Immigration are somehow a benefit to them and that they should fight for their own displacement

Ilya G Poimandres , says: December 30, 2020 at 9:24 am GMT • 17.5 hours ago

Biden has a lot of compromat and Harris is basically akin to a wigger in a black gang, who will need to prove her devotion when she takes the reigns after Biden.

Both will be like putty in their handler's hands.

Politicians start wars to make the public look away from domestic or personal crises. Biden already has his corruption probe, and whilst Trump made many errors, he did not fall for the trap of starting a major foreign policy disaster for personal political gain.

Both Biden and Harris would do that in a heartbeat. So whether that would be Iran or Ukraine, or pushing Taiwan too far, I'm pretty confident a war will start.

I always said with Trump the odd's are 80% civil war, 10% world war, 10% peace, whilst Biden is around 50% civil war, 45% world war, 5% peace.

Mikael_ , says: December 30, 2020 at 9:34 am GMT • 17.3 hours ago
@Felix Keverich

Nice display of your brainwashedness, from western propaganda.
You didn't follow Saker's link to the machine translated example , did you?

One would need a bit more than broad, completely unsubstantiated claims by you that Russian kids in large numbers actually believe those YT lies and similar.
And Lukashenko isn't doing so bad, currently.

Let it be... , says: December 30, 2020 at 11:07 am GMT • 15.8 hours ago
@Felix Keverich ng "dusty, dirty" -- a term used in 2nd-millennium BCE texts throughout the Fertile Crescent for people variously described as rebels, outlaws, raiders, mercenaries, bowmen, servants, slaves, and laborers"(Wikipedia).

The 2001 paper "Who are the Hîabiru of the Amarna Letters?" by retired professor (Andrews University) S. Douglas Waterhouse (2001) joined a lot of dots for me. A good stumble on, thanks, Guyénot and others who posted relevant comments etc. (A copy can be found here: https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/jats/vol12/iss1/3/ )

John Hagan , says: Website December 30, 2020 at 11:53 am GMT • 15.0 hours ago
@Carlos22 ashion. Yet that is what the US empire wants. It is hard to imagine the opportunity for satire could be greater.
Here is some preliminary ideas

https://www.youtube.com/embed/noIWQFMskG0?feature=oembed
I also did a satire on Bellingcat called Bellingbat that examines some of the same issues. Of course there is a fair amount of nudity involved as that is the US way when considering if powerful females can be trusted. Unlike Lautrec I was never allowed into the ballerina's dressing rooms even though I was a recognized well respected painter and would seek death should I betray a slack breast or two.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8Z9pggzVJ68?feature=oembed
Cheers all and have a happy new year.

Schuetze , says: December 30, 2020 at 12:13 pm GMT • 14.7 hours ago

"Last, but not least, wars are not won by machines, computers or fancy engineering: they are won by soldiers, real men, who know what they are defending and why."

Azerbaijan just ate Putin's lunch by crushing Armenia's entire AA systems and their piece by piece destruction of hundreds of T90's and all the Armenian artillery. Azerbaijan accomplished this through Israeli military technology, likely including remote drone piloting services.

Saker wants to pretend that it is the US that has Israel on a leash, but it is clearly the other way around. Israel has already hoovered up all of the US electronics and military patents and clearly any other patents that would be useful in a war, especially a war for Eretz Israel.

Azerbaijan took out all the Armenian armor and air defenses with Israeli drones like the Hovering Artillery Drones and Suicide drones. The amount of live film is staggering, and the T90's were picked off like sparrows sitting on an electric wire. Some of the drones Azerbaijan used were Turkish, but we can be certain that the technology is either licensed from Israel or Israel's gollum the JEWSA.

Added to this complete mastery of the traditional battlespace is the complete Heeb control over the bio-warfare space. Whether Putin allowed Russia to be circumcised while he played along to the Rabbi's Covid rituals, or whether Putin is playing it safe and vaccinating and closing its borders pre-emtively is irrellevant. Russia is being bullied like a lone teenage Swedish boy at muslim majority high school in Malmo.

And of course, Russia still has a Rothschild controlled Central Bank too.

So Putin, just like Biden, is going to do exactly what his Chabad Lubbovitz Rabbi's tell him he has to do. Both are Israel's Shabbez Bitches.

Moi , says: December 30, 2020 at 12:29 pm GMT • 14.4 hours ago
@mike99588

I pray to sweet Lord Jesus for the rise of China.

Tsigantes , says: December 30, 2020 at 12:31 pm GMT • 14.4 hours ago
@Felix Keverich everyone knows that the US and England hate Russia and Putin, thus whatever these 2 countries claim about either is dismissed with a laugh. As for Skripal (where are they now? dead?), Navalny, novichok, Assad gassing his own people ..a child can see through this stuff. Sorry!

Young people in Russia watching US propaganda against their country you honestly think they are going to agree with the country (USA) that has targeted them with missiles and nuclear bombs for 70 years? Do you think we can't see the corruption and stupidity?

But I'm wasting my time here. Facts, logic, is lost on a person so naive and brainwashedas yourself.

yurivku , says: December 30, 2020 at 12:53 pm GMT • 14.0 hours ago
@goldgettin

Tell us more or, are you a ?

he's pretending to be Russian intelligent, which I doubt – not his name nor his thoughts seem to be Russian.
He's right only in one thing – there's quite a big part of our society who think that Putin (despite his obvious achievements) has to go. And those aren't liberasts, but patriots. Putin is very deep in oligarchy swamp and he achieved max he could, i'm afraid.
Now he's just trying to keep the status quo.

Trickster , says: December 30, 2020 at 1:26 pm GMT • 13.4 hours ago
@Felix Keverich

I believe you have a serious problem. When the stork brought you, it must have dropped you on your head. Your comment is sheer nonsense. Do you really believe the shit you have written or do you have a vulgar desire for "replies".

You are either an idiot or an ass wash douche troll. Comment intelligently or not at all and for heavens sake, seek medical attention for the lump on your head ( and the one inside it as well)

Larchmonter420 , says: December 30, 2020 at 1:29 pm GMT • 13.4 hours ago
@John Hagan actors

And, my paraphrase of the above quote:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own drama . And while you're studying that drama -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new dramas , which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're drama's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Best regards,

Mohamed

Trickster , says: December 30, 2020 at 1:32 pm GMT • 13.3 hours ago
@Tsigantes

Dont be so hard on Felix the cat. He has been hiding under his mother;s bed surrounded by rolls of toilet paper and wearing a mask since March 2020. Self imposed solitary confinement does things to a person more so one who was retarded at birth.

Once he has his operation to remove his head from his ass his IQ should increase by 100% .from 2 to 4 !

[Jan 01, 2021] Weaponized courts- The $50 bn Yukos case may be the final straw for Russia, ending its cooperation with Western 'justice' -- R

Jan 01, 2021 | www.rt.com

Weaponized courts: The $50 bn Yukos case may be the final straw for Russia, ending its cooperation with Western 'justice' 17 Nov, 2020 11:24 Get short URL Weaponized courts: The $50 bn Yukos case may be the final straw for Russia, ending its cooperation with Western 'justice' FILE PHOTOS. © Getty Images / artisteer; © Wikipedia 38 1 Follow RT on RT

Patrick Armstrong spent 30 years as an analyst for the Canadian government, specializing in first the USSR and then Russia. He was a Political Counselor in the Canadian Embassy in Moscow from 1993 to 1996. Given the torrent of anti-Russian sentiment in the West, it's unlikely Moscow would get a fair hearing in legal proceedings overseen by Western courts. And recent hints suggest three decades of engagement may be coming to an end.

A Dutch court has just reversed another earlier Dutch court ruling that reversed an even earlier Dutch court ruling. Russia had been sued by a company representing the shareholders of erstwhile oil giant Yukos. The latest iteration, reversing the reversal and taking us back to the original judgment, demands that Russia pay $50 billion to its shareholders. Yukos was nationalized in the early 2000s, on the grounds of failure to pay tax arrears after the arrest of its CEO for tax evasion.

So, what should Moscow do? It has appealed, but perhaps it should think about whether it still wants to play the game.

Let's look at the behavior of other Dutch courts. In 2001, Slobodan Milošević appeared at the Hague charged with crimes against humanity, genocide – the full package. And, quite rightly, said most Westerners, because had not their media already named him the "butcher of the Balkans" ?

ALSO ON RT.COM Yukos case: Netherlands prepares for hearing in $50 billion plus legal battle over disgraced ex-oligarch's former oil empire

In 2016, the International Court of Justice ruled that maybe he hadn't been as guilty as first assumed. But it was too late: Milošević had died in his prison cell 10 years before, with the trial still rolling on.

The Netherlands is also in charge of the investigation into the destruction of the MH-17 flight over Ukraine in 2014. Again, we had immediate Western news assertions that Putin and Russia were responsible, and the personal assurance of former Secretary of State John Kerry that US intelligence resources had watched the whole thing unfold. And it's been a fact-free Gish gallop ever since.

After several investigations, suspiciously dependent on Ukrainian intelligence sources, social media, and the US-government funded agency Bellingcat, with no one asking where the "we saw it" was, the trial of four individuals began in March 2020 and has been proceeding at the same comfortable pace as the Milošević trial.
In 2018, Ukraine, without the least suspicion of a chain of evidence, produced some parts it claimed were from the surface-to-air missile said to have shot the plane down. The parts had numbers, numbers can be traced, and the missile factory traced them. They were parts of a missile shipped to an anti-aircraft unit in the west of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in December 1986.

ALSO ON RT.COM Investigation launched into claims that employees of ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky's media group took part in 2014 gang rape

The judges decided that the documents were irrelevant because they "may say something about where the missile was between [19]86 and 91, but they say nothing about where the missile was in July 2014." Presumably, a daring raid from Donetsk to an ammo dump in Western Ukraine had happened, which nobody noticed. So, one might ask what Russia can expect from any trial held in the Netherlands except an interminable process until the defendant dies.

Russians might then turn their attention to the practice of the rule of law in other Western countries today. Huawei's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, is approaching her third year of house arrest in Canada. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been in a British prison with one of the most severe regimes for the past 18 months and is approaching the second year of his extradition hearing. Maria Butina, convicted in 2018 of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Russia, was in a US prison for five months, often in solitary confinement, on very questionable charges. Senior French executive Frédéric Pierucci arrested in 2013 and later imprisoned in a US maximum-security facility for unwittingly breaching American bribery laws. Or the US's open-ended Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act – a federal law that, in 2017, imposed sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Or the huge fine imposed on Russia's Gazprom energy corporation in a Polish court just last month over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Or they might consider that Venezuela stored its national gold reserves in London for safekeeping but can't have it back (although that judgment has recently been reversed – for now). Or that the European Union extended its sanctions on Russia because it couldn't prove its innocence of the latest accusation over Ukraine. Russian observers might be forgiven if they regarded this as not rule of law but war of law – lawfare.

ALSO ON RT.COM Netherlands to take Russia to European Court of Human Rights over 'role' in MH17 crash

Moscow has generally played the game and accepted Western court rulings and, sometimes, they've gone its way: for example, the European Court of Human Rights' ruling of 2011 that the case against Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky had not been politically motivated. But, given the relentless cascade of accusations – redoubled in the past five years – perhaps Moscow should reconsider, on the grounds that Western 'justice' will never give it a fair shake.

Will it do so? Well, there have been some hints. At a conference of the Valdai Discussion Club think tank last month, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia no longer looked to Western Europe as an example and was not going to be its vassal. The constitution was recently amended to make Russian law primary. These would appear to be clues that Moscow is at least pondering the conclusion that Western courts are not an arbiter, but a weapon.

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[Jan 01, 2021] Russia can refuse to pay $50 billion bill to Yukos oligarchs, country's top court rules, as international legal battle rages

Jan 01, 2021 | www.rt.com

Moscow is set for a showdown with Western judges and 1990s Russian oligarchs, over a new ruling enabling the country to refuse to pay what is considered to be the biggest legal settlement in history, over a collapsed oil empire.

The Constitutional Court, one of Russia's highest judicial authorities, ruled on Friday that the decision of an international tribunal in the long-running dispute over the now-dissolved energy giant Yukos is incompatible with Russian law. The case has been heard by a court in The Hague, which claims jurisdiction under the terms of the Energy Charter Treaty, and awarded the company's former shareholders a $50-billion payout from the Russian government earlier this year. Moscow claimed a win in November on the other side of the Atlantic, when a US court, which had been hearing the case simultaneously, decided to throw it out.

However, as Russia signed but never ratified the Treaty, which hands powers to international tribunals, the Constitutional Court has now determined it is not bound by the terms of The Hague judgement. The ruling states that, while the country's government of the day began the process of signing up to the pact in 1994, they did not have the authority to make national laws inferior to international agreements, or to "challenge the competence" of Russian courts. Therefore, the jurists conclude, adhering to the Dutch court's demands would be "unconstitutional."

ALSO ON RT.COM New twist in $50bn Yukos battle as US court sides with Russia over oligarchs & suspends controversial case

The claimants in the case are oligarchs who lost cash when Yukos, once among Europe's largest firms, collapsed. They say that a multi-billion dollar tax bill and the arrest of its CEO and founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on fraud charges amounted to state 'appropriation' of its assets. However, Russian authorities insist that the shareholders cannot be considered "legitimate," and that the Dutch judges had steamrolled over the country's laws against corruption and fraud when ruling in their favour.

As far back as July 2014, The Hague ordered Moscow to cough up $50 billion to compensate the plaintiffs. After exhausting the appeals process in February this year, Russia's lawyers asked the Dutch Supreme Court to consider the case and overrule the decision. However, at the start of December, it similarly backed the oligarchs.

Russia has insisted that the judgements are "politically motivated," and in December the country's Justice Minister, Konstantin Chuychenko, told journalists that the case was part of a "legal war that has been declared on Russia." He added that "Russia must adequately defend itself and, sometimes, even attack back."

Now standing at around $50 billion, around the same ballpark as Russia's annual military budget, the colossal settlement is thought to be the largest award in history. If the country now rejects the bill, it would spark one of the most serious impasses in international legal history, and leave Western states deciding whether to respect Russia's constitutional ruling, or to enforce the demands by confiscating assets.

ALSO ON RT.COM Russian justice minister claims $50 billion Yukos case shows West waging 'legal war' on Moscow & says it should fight back

Yukos' former shareholders have already sought to have Western governments take control of Russian property overseas as an insurance policy in case Moscow refuses to pay up. However, in November, a judge in the simultaneous hearing in the US refused that request, saying that "the Russian Federation is a sovereign country with economic tendrils that cross the globe, not an insecure potential debtor that must be required to post security lest there be no assets to seize at a later date."

Not all countries have taken the same approach, however, and in 2015 Russia's diplomats slammed France and Belgium for confiscating state cash in overseas banks, and even buildings, to be held as collateral in the case. Moscow again rejected the court's authority and said their move was "an openly hostile act." Tim Osborne, a British lawyer representing the former shareholders, said at the time that such seizures were necessary because Russia "has no regard for international law or the rule of law."

READ MORE Yukos case: Netherlands prepares for hearing in $50 billion plus legal battle over disgraced ex-oligarch's former oil empire Yukos case: Netherlands prepares for hearing in $50 billion plus legal battle over disgraced ex-oligarch's former oil empire

At its height, Yukos produced 20 per cent of Russia's oil, placing it firmly among the ranks of the world's most valuable enterprises. It had been formed by the privatization of former state assets after the fall of the Soviet Union, with Khodorkovsky acquiring the assets for a fraction of their worth at an auction that one economist, Andrey Illarionov, called "the swindle of the century."

Khodorkovsky claims his arrest on fraud charges and the subsequent collapse of Yukos was tied to his political activism and his personal animosity towards Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin, however, claims that the oligarch, once said to be Russia's wealthiest man, had admitted his guilt to him privately in exchange for a pardon in 2013.

Khodorkovsky insists that he has renounced any claims to his former empire and that, should a settlement be reached in the Yukos case, he would not stand to benefit. However, Russian authorities are said to suspect that a number of claimants have close financial ties to the former oil magnate.

[Jan 01, 2021] Russian opposition figure Navalny to face new criminal case over alleged use of 'anti-corruption' donations 'for personal gai

Jan 01, 2021 | www.rt.com

The Investigative Committee of Russia announced on Tuesday that it has launched a fresh probe into the affairs of opposition activist Alexey Navalny, to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to charge him with fraud. According to prosecutors , Navalny spent around 356 million rubles ($4.8 million) of money raised for political and journalistic activities for "personal purposes" including "an acquisition of personal property, material assets and payment of expenses, including on trips abroad."

ALSO ON RT.COM A deadly cocktail: Spies, cell phone records and the poisoned Negroni behind Bellingcat's Navalny 'expose'

It alleges the funds came out of more than 588 million rubles ($5.9 million) in money given to groups connected to the prominent activist, including the Anti-Corruption Fund and the Fund for Organization and Coordination for Protecting Citizens' Rights. The Committee's spokesperson describes this as evidence of "fraud on a particularly large scale."

Navalny has previously been found guilty of financial misconduct and these convictions have hampered his attempts to stand for public office. In 2017, a Russian court refused to overturn a judicial decision in which he was found to have embezzled funds from a state-owned timber firm.

He had been allowed to run in the 2013 Moscow mayoral race while he appealed the verdict, attracting around 27 percent of the votes, compared to the 51 percent won by the eventual victor, Sergey Sobyanin.

Navalny has been in Germany since August, when he was transferred to Berlin's Charite hospital from a Siberian clinic. He took ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, in what his associates allege to be a poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok.

ALSO ON RT.COM Putin claims opposition figure Alexey Navalny working with American intelligence, says Kremlin not behind his alleged poisoning

Earlier this month, the US and UK state-funded investigative outlet Bellingcat claimed to have mobile phone data that placed state security agents within a few miles of Navalny the day before. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists that previous similar allegations, published in London's Sunday Times newspaper, were "bulls**t."

Earlier this week, Russia's Federal Prison Service informed Navalny that he must return to Russia to comply with the terms of his suspended prison sentence for a previous conviction. It argued that he is no longer receiving hospital care and, "therefore the convicted man is not fulfilling all the obligations placed on him by the court." Earlier this month, the activist said he would return to his home country when he could.

At his annual end-of-year press conference in December, President Vladimir Putin told reporters that Navalny had links to "American special services" and that, if the Kremlin had indeed wanted the opposition figure dead, the security services would have "finished the job."


Midnight10 1 day ago 29 Dec, 2020 04:23 PM

Not to worry, Navalny is protected by Merkel, who provided a private plane to bring him to Germany. Her toyboy just wanted to remove Putin, but in Russia, he wasn't very well known. Merkel gave him the status of supposedly being a real rival. If he does return to Russia and is arrested, they better watch the skies. Merkel wouldn't be above sending a helicopter in for a jail house rescue. She evidently had fun helping to depose governments in the ME. Since then, she has championed Guaido, from Venezuela, as well as Wong from Hong Kong. Soon she may retire and can spend more time with "her boys". However, she will have to use her money instead of the German citizen's money for her rescue attempts.
Count_Cash 1 day ago 29 Dec, 2020 04:01 PM
Navalny and Fraud go hand in hand, it's his stock and trade. He is the sort of criminal that just can't stop and definitely needs a good couple of years in prison to at least punish his continual fraud offences.
Galaxy31 Count_Cash 1 day ago 29 Dec, 2020 05:07 PM
He is a fraud and criminal for sure. Little character with big ego!
TheFishh Count_Cash 1 day ago 29 Dec, 2020 04:40 PM
I just wish Russia would stop beating around the bush and just charge navalny with sedition and issue an arrest warrant for him.

[Dec 30, 2020] The Long Roots of Our Russophobia

Mar 06, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
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For the last five years, the American media has been filled with scurrilous articles demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin has been accused of every crime imaginable, from shooting down airplanes, to assassinating opponents, to invading neighboring countries, to stealing money to manipulating the U.S. president and helping to rig the 2016 election.

Few of the accusations directed against Putin have ever been substantiated and the quality of journalism has been at the level of "yellow journalism."

In a desperate attempt to sustain their political careers, centrist Democrats like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton accused their adversaries of being Russian agents – again without proof.

And even the progressive hero Bernie Sanders – himself a victim of red-baiting – has engaged in Russia bashing and unsubstantiated accusations for which he offers no proof.

Guy Mettan's book, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017) provides needed historical context for our current political moment, showing how anti-Russian hysteria has long proliferated as a means of justifying Western imperialism.

Mettan is a Swiss journalist and member of parliament who learned about the corruption of the media business when his reporting on the world anticommunist league rankled his newspapers' shareholders, and when he realized that he was serving as a paid stenographer for the Bosnian Islamist leader Alija Izetbegovic in the early 1990s.

Mettan defines Russophobia as the promotion of negative stereotypes about Russia that associate the country with despotism, treachery, expansion, oppression and other negative character traits. In his view, it is "not linked to specific historical events" but "exists first in the head of the one who looks, not in the victim's alleged behavior or characteristics."

Like anti-semitism, Mettan writes, "Russophobia is a way of turning specific pseudo-facts into essential one-dimensional values, barbarity, despotism, and expansionism in the Russian case in order to justify stigmatization and ostracism."

The origins of Russophobic discourse date back to a schism in the Church during the Middle Ages when Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Roman empire and modified the Christian liturgy to introduce reforms execrated by the Eastern Orthodox Churches of the Byzantine empire.

Mettan writes that "the Europe of Charlemagne and of the year 1000 was in need of a foil in the East to rebuild herself, just as the Europe of the 2000s needs Russia to consolidate her union."

Before the schism, European rulers had no negative opinions of Russia. When Capetian King Henri I found himself a widower, he turned towards the prestigious Kiev kingdom two thousand miles away and married Vladimir's granddaughter, Princess Ann.

A main goal of the new liturgy adopted by Charlemagne was to undermine any Byzantine influence in Italy and Western Europe.

Over the next century, the schism evolved from a religious into a political one.

The Pope and the top Roman administration made documents disappear and truncated others in order to blame the Easterners.

Byzantium and Russia were in turn rebuked for their "caesaropapism," or "Oriental style despotism," which could be contrasted which the supposedly enlightened, democratic governing system in the West.

Russia was particularly hated because it had defied efforts of Western European countries to submit to their authority and impose Catholicism.

In the 1760s, French diplomats working with a variety of Ukrainian, Hungarian and Polish political figures produced a forged testament of Peter 1 ["The Great"] purporting to reveal Russia's 'grand design' to conquer most of Europe.

This document was still taken seriously by governments during the Napoleanic wars; and as late as the Cold War, President Harry Truman found it helpful in explaining Stalin.

In Britain, the Whigs, who represented the liberal bourgeois opposition to the Tory government and its program of free-trade imperialism, were the most virulent Russophobes, much like today's Democrats in the United States.

The British media also enflamed public opinion by taking hysterical positions against Russia – often on the eve of major military expeditions.

The London Times during the 1820s Greek Independence war editorialized that no "sane person" could "look with satisfaction at the immense and rapid overgrowth of Russian power." The same thing was being written in The New York Times in the 2010s.

A great example of the Orientalist stereotype was Bram Stoker's novel Dracula , whose main character was modeled after Russian ruler, Ivan the Terrible. As if no English ruler in history was cruel either.

The Nazis took Russo-phobic discourse to new heights during the 1930s and 1940s, combining it with a virulent anti-bolshevism and anti-semitism.

A survey of German high school texts in the 1960s found little change in the image of Russia. The Russians were still depicted as "primitive, simple, very violent, cruel, mean, inhuman, cupid and very stubborn."

The same stereotypes were displayed in many Hollywood films during the Cold War, where KGB figures were particularly maligned.

No wonder that when a former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, took power, people went insane.

Russophobia in the United States has been advanced most insidiously by the nation's foreign policy elite who have envisioned themselves as grand chess-masters seeking to checkmate their Russian adversary in order to control the Eurasian heartland.

This view is little different than European colonial strategists who had learned of the importance of molding public opinion through disinformation campaigns that depicted the Russian bear as a menace to Western civilization.

Guy Mettan has written a thought-provoking book that provides badly needed historical context for the anti-Russian delirium gripping our society.

Breaking the taboo on Russophobia is of vital importance in laying the groundwork for a more peaceful world order and genuinely progressive movement in the United States. Unfortunately, recent developments don't inspire much confidence that history will be transcended.

Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and Obama's Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).

[Dec 30, 2020] The Unaccountable Nation by Danny Sjursen

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Then the exceptionalist-triumphalist power inevitably runs off-the-rails, and -- especially when it feels threatened or insecure -- lashes out in fits of aggressive military, economic, religious, or racial chauvinism. This cycle tends to replay again and again until the empire collapses, usually through some combination of external power displacement and internal exhaustion or collapse. ..."
Mar 16, 2020 | www.truthdig.com
Exceptionalism, triumphalism, chauvinism. These characteristics define most empires, including, like it or not, these United States . The sequence matters. A people and national government that fancies itself exceptional -- an example for the rest of the world -- is apt to assert itself militarily, economically, and culturally around the globe. If that self-righteous state happens to possess prodigious power, as the U.S. has since the Second World War, then any perceived success will lead to a sense of triumphalism, and thus put into motion a feedback loop whereby national "achievement" justifies and validates that conception of exceptionalism.

Then the exceptionalist-triumphalist power inevitably runs off-the-rails, and -- especially when it feels threatened or insecure -- lashes out in fits of aggressive military, economic, religious, or racial chauvinism. This cycle tends to replay again and again until the empire collapses, usually through some combination of external power displacement and internal exhaustion or collapse.

Such imperial hyper-powers, particularly in their late-stages, often employ foot soldiers across vast swathes of the planet, and eventually either lose control of their actions or aren't concerned with their resultant atrocities in the first place. On that, the jury is perhaps still out. Regardless, the discomfiting fact is that by nearly any measure, the United States today coheres, to a remarkable degree, with each and every one of these tenets of empire evolution. This includes, despite the hysterical denials of sitting political and Pentagon leaders, the troubling truth that American soldiers and intelligence agents have committed war crimes across the Greater Middle East since 9/11 on a not so trivial number of occasions. These law of war violations also occurred during the Cold War generation -- notably in Korea and Vietnam -- and the one consistent strain has been the almost complete inability or unwillingness of the U.S. Government to hold perpetrators, and their enabling commanders, accountable.

Enter the International Criminal Court (ICC). First proposed , conceptually, in 1919 (and again in 1937, 1948, and 1971), in response to massive war crimes and human rights violations of the two world wars, the Hague-headquartered court finally opened for business in 2002. With more than 120 signatory member states (though not, any longer, the U.S.) the ICC has the jurisdiction to prosecute international violations including "genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression." A compliment, rather than a replacement, to sovereign national justice systems, the ICC is designed to be the "court of last resort," obliged to exercise jurisdiction only when a nation's courts prove unwilling or unable to prosecute such crimes.

All of which sounds both admirable and unthreatening (at least to reasonably well-behaved states with accountable, responsive justice systems), but to the contemporary American imperial hyper-power, the very existence of the ICC is viewed as a mortal threat. Matters demonstrably came to a head this past week when an ICC appeals court reversed a lower-level decision and allowed its special prosecutor -- whose visa Washington has already revoked -- to simply open an official investigation into alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan by all three major parties to the conflict: the Taliban, U.S., and U.S.-backed Kabul-based Afghan government. This decidedly mild decision, which only allows a multi-directional inquiry , unleashed an immediate firestorm in Washington.

The reflexive reactions and responses of current and former Trump officials was both instructive and totally in line with decades worth of bipartisan U.S. disavowal of the very notion of international norms and standards. Trump's recent hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton -- now an MSNBC-DNC darling for his apparent critique of the president in a new memoir -- has spearheaded opposition to the ICC since its inception, has asserted that the ICC is "illegitimate," and that the U.S. Government "will not sit quietly," if "the court comes after us." After the most recent ruling, Secretary of State (and former director of the very CIA that is likely to be implicated in said war crimes investigation) Mike Pompeo declared the ruling a "truly breathtaking action by an unaccountable, political institution masquerading as a legal body," adding, threateningly, that "we will take all necessary measures to protect our citizens from this renegade, unlawful, so-called court."

On that latter point, Pompeo is neither wrong, nor espousing a policy -- no matter how aggressive or rejectionist -- unique to Donald Trump's administration. Here, a brief bit of all but forgotten history is in order. In 1998, the UN General Assembly voted 120-7 to establish the ICC. The United States, in good company with a gaggle of criminally compromised states -- China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Yemen, and Qatar -- voted against the measure. Two years later, however, President Bill Clinton unenthusiastically signed onto this foundational Rome Statute , but with some dubiousness and the requisite American exceptionalist caveat that he "will not, and do not recommend that my successor, submit the treaty to the Senate for advice and consent until our fundamental concerns are satisfied."

Then came the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This tragedy turned (for then ascendant neoconservatives) opportunity for expanded U.S. military global assertiveness, ensured that Clinton's successor -- one George W. Bush -- wouldn't even consider ICC treaty submission to the Senate. Rather, in May 2002, Bush sent a note to the UN Secretary General informing him that the most powerful and influential country in the world no longer intended to ratify the Rome Statute or recognize any obligations to the ICC (which officially opened for business only two months later ). Never simply a morality tale of Republican villainy, Bush's disavowal didn't explain the half of it.

Far more disturbingly, a stunningly euphemistic American Service-members' Protection Act of 2001 amendment, first introduced just 15 days after the 9/11 attacks, to the Supplemental Appropriations Act for Further Recovery From and Response to Terrorist Attacks on the United States, was already under consideration in Congress. With broad bipartisan majorities, that legislation -- which authorized the U.S. president to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court" -- passed in the House a couple weeks after Bush sent his note to the UN, and the Senate just two weeks later. President Bush then signed this authorization for, up to and including military, force into law on August 2, 2002. Much of the world was appalled and international human rights organizations took to – quite appropriately – calling it the " Hague Invasion Act ." It remains in force today.

The timeline is instructive and itself tells a vital part of the story. Democrats and Republicans alike had chosen to "preempt" -- an internationally prohibited precedent that Bush would later invoke to invade Iraq -- the not yet in force ICC with this bill. They did so, I'd assert, because they knew a salient dirty secret: the U.S. was about to unleash martial fury across the Greater Middle East. In the process, inevitably, American troopers and intelligence spooks would push the limits of acceptable wartime behavior, and thus be vulnerable to international prosecution by the soon effective ICC.

This was unacceptable for an exceptionalist, triumphalist nation, about to undertake chauvinist actions the world over. That unilateral, world-order-be-damned national position held, and still holds, sway in the intervening 18 years. So, for all the Trump administration's coarse obtuseness in response to the opening of the latest ICC Afghan investigation, this is, at root, not (as the mainstream media will inevitably now claim) a Donald phenomenon.Three administrations, and multiple guard-changing Congresses, chose to not to touch the infamous Hague Invasion Act or realign the U.S. with the ICC or the spirit (or even the pretense) of international law.

The cast of elite characters, many still politically influential, who voted for the Hague Invasion Act is nothing short of astounding. The bill passed the House by a margin of 280-138, and counted such "yea" votes as House Intelligence Committee Chair -- top Trump opponent and Russiagate investigator -- Democrat Adam Schiff. Notably, especially in this ongoing electoral cycle, then Vermont Representative Bernie Sanders opposed the measure.In the Senate , an even larger portion of Democrats joined current Speaker Mitch McConnell (and most of his Republican caucus), to vote for the Act. These included such past and present notables as former Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, current Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and, then Foreign Relations Committee Chair, and now Democratic presidential frontrunner, Joe Biden. His vote, naturally, should come as scant surprise since even in early Senate committee hearings four years earlier, ranking minority member Biden was at best tepid, and at worst quite skeptical of the ICC – even finding unlikely points of agreement with the later Hague Invasion Bill's sponsor, and longtime unilateralist hawk, Republican Senator Jesse Helms.

Still, the swift, frenetic response of senior Trump officials to ICC decision is telling. I suspect that Pompeo and Bolton know the inconvenient truth – that U.S. national security forces have committed crimes in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) and that the U.S. Government hasn't ever truly held these select perpetrators sufficiently accountable. Contra Pompeo, Bolton, and other Trump officials' ardent public assertions, the U.S. military and intelligence community are, in fact – due to being demonstrably "unwilling or unable to prosecute such [war] crimes" – the perfect candidates for ICC investigation, and if evidentiary appropriate, prosecution. The U.S. has a historically abysmal record either of restraining or punishing wartime violations.

The rarely recounted record is an extensive as it is appalling:

Add to that the disconcerting fact that the U.S. crossed a rather macabre tipping point in 2019, whereby, for the first time, the American military and its Afghan allies killed more civilians than the Taliban, and this brings us full circle to an alarming present reality. The very figures who championed and supported the wildly chauvinistic "Hague Invasion" Act seem set to hold sway over, and in Biden's case serve as candidate for, the Democratic Party.In November, that faction will likely, then face off against a Trump team that vehemently opposes even a basic investigation into alleged American criminal misbehavior in the Afghan theater of its ongoing forever wars.

All of which demonstrates, once and for all, that human rights, and international law or norms were never of genuine interest to the United States. None of this will play well on the "Arab," or even broader global, "Street," and will – just like U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo – actually increase worldwide "terrorism" and anti-Americanism. None of which matters to, or greatly concerns, a Washington elite lacking even a modicum of self-awareness.

Because empires, like the United States, which peddle in exceptionalism, triumphalism, and chauvinism are, historically, the world's true rogue states .

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and a contributing editor at antiwar.com . His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . His forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War is now available for pre-order . Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet . Check out his professional website for contact info, scheduling speeches, and/or access to the full corpus of his writing and media appearances.

Danny Sjursen / Truthdig

[Dec 30, 2020] The Building Blocks of a Restraint Coalition by DANIEL LARISON

Notable quotes:
"... The most overrepresented group in Washington, the "hard power primacists," is also the one with the most destructive track record. This is the group that cheers on John Bolton and Mike Pompeo as they trash America's reputation while putting us at greater risk of pointless wars. Only 10% of the respondents belonged to this group, and even among Republicans they make up less than 25%. There is remarkably little popular support for the position that has become the default Republican Party agenda. ..."
"... The EGF survey likewise asked a question about American exceptionalism, but phrased it a bit differently. They asked if America was exceptional for what it had done in the world (20% agreed), exceptional because of what it represented (40%), or not exceptional (38%). While most of these respondents still affirmed some support for the idea, support is declining with each generation. While the president proposes "teaching American exceptionalism" in schools (whatever that might mean in practice), such lessons seem likely to fall on deaf ears. ..."
"... It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a myth of exceptionalism when our institutions are so faulty, our infrastructure so derelict, and our political leaders so inept. If each new generation is more disillusioned than the last with this myth, it is because they have seen how false it is in real life and they have seen how it has been used to rationalize some of the worst policies imaginable. ..."
Sep 23, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The American public is increasingly supportive of a foreign policy that is more engaged diplomatically and more restrained in its use of force. Large majorities want the U.S. to rejoin agreements and institutions that the U.S. has left over the last four years, but there is also substantial support for reducing America's military footprint in many other parts of the world. Most Americans don't care for the wrecking of successful agreements, including the nuclear deal with Iran, but many would welcome troop withdrawals from deployments overseas.

Those are some of the findings from the Eurasia Group Foundation's annual survey of what Americans think about U.S. foreign policy and our country's role in the world. There is a major constituency in both parties for a foreign policy that is less militarized and more involved in constructive international cooperation. This could be the foundation for a broad coalition in favor of greater restraint, and it shows that most of the public is not interested in maintaining the status quo of militarized hegemony.

The survey divides the respondents into four groupings based on their answers.

  1. There are the "traditional internationalists" that don't want to reduce U.S. forces overseas and want to remain in international institutions,
  2. And then there are the "hard power primacists" that have no use for institutions and treaties but want to dominate militarily.
  3. There are the "global ambassadors" that want deeper diplomatic engagement, but also want to reduce military forces overseas and move away from a militarized U.S. foreign policy.
  4. Finally, there are the respondents that the survey classified as so-called "genuine isolationists." The choice of isolationist here was unfortunate because even among these respondents the preference is for reduced engagement of all kinds, but not necessarily the separation from the world that the isolationist label implies. When push comes to shove, almost no one is a "genuine isolationist" in this country or anywhere else, and a more extensive survey might be able to tease out how these "isolationists" really think the U.S. should act in the world.

Out of these four, the "global ambassadors" made up the largest contingent: "The most popular position was that of the Global Ambassadors, who support active diplomacy and participation in international institutions, trade and treaties but oppose global military primacy." It would be fair to say that this position is closest to the views held by advocates of restraint. According to the survey, 38% of respondents fit this description, and they were pretty evenly distributed between different political affiliations. 40% of Democrats gave answers that put them in this group, and the same was true for 32% of Republicans.

There is a clear majority that doesn't support a strategy of primacy. As the report notes, "When "engagement" is split into military and non-military components, only three in ten Americans favor liberal hegemony." Between the "global ambassadors" and so-called "genuine isolationists," those opposed to primacy to one degree or another made up almost 60% of the total. These are potentially huge blocs of voters that prefer a more peaceful, less interventionist foreign policy, and they are woefully underrepresented in Washington today. This is a large audience that would seem to be receptive to what advocates of restraint have to say, and so we need to find more ways to reach them.

The most overrepresented group in Washington, the "hard power primacists," is also the one with the most destructive track record. This is the group that cheers on John Bolton and Mike Pompeo as they trash America's reputation while putting us at greater risk of pointless wars. Only 10% of the respondents belonged to this group, and even among Republicans they make up less than 25%. There is remarkably little popular support for the position that has become the default Republican Party agenda.

There is more popular support for bringing U.S. forces home from all over than there is for keeping them there. 44% say that the U.S. should decrease the number of troops it has in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and they also say that the U.S. should reduce its commitments to other countries in these regions. Only 31% were in favor of the status quo or an increase in troop levels. This is consistent with the findings of other surveys, including the new poll from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which found that 57% approved of the announced troop withdrawal from Germany, and another 16% wanted full withdrawal of all of the remaining troops.

One of the other interesting results that the Chicago Council survey found is the growing partisan gap over the question of "American exceptionalism." 80% Republicans are in agreement with the definition of exceptionalism the survey provided (the U.S. has a "unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world"), and only 35% of Democrats held the same view. It is possible that this gap is exaggerated by the fact that Democrats seem to have soured on the idea during Trump's presidency, and the numbers may go up again in the future, but there seems to be something more significant going on. Insofar as "American exceptionalism" has been turned into a motto for excusing U.S. rogue behavior in the world, it has become an increasingly loaded phrase that provokes strong reactions in both directions. The experience of the last twenty years would also give many people good reasons to doubt that the U.S. deserves to be called the greatest country.

The EGF survey likewise asked a question about American exceptionalism, but phrased it a bit differently. They asked if America was exceptional for what it had done in the world (20% agreed), exceptional because of what it represented (40%), or not exceptional (38%). While most of these respondents still affirmed some support for the idea, support is declining with each generation. While the president proposes "teaching American exceptionalism" in schools (whatever that might mean in practice), such lessons seem likely to fall on deaf ears.

It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a myth of exceptionalism when our institutions are so faulty, our infrastructure so derelict, and our political leaders so inept. If each new generation is more disillusioned than the last with this myth, it is because they have seen how false it is in real life and they have seen how it has been used to rationalize some of the worst policies imaginable.

Probably the most discouraging result in the EGF survey came in response to a question about war powers. There is a large majority that thinks that Congress has to authorize the use of force first, and that is something that advocates of restraint can build on, but it is disturbing that so many would support presidential overreach in matters of war. When asked if the president needed Congressional authorization before ordering military action abroad, 26% said that he didn't. While this is a distinctly minority view, it was supported by half of the Republican respondents, and it shows that roughly a quarter of the public holds an important part of the Constitution in contempt. When such a large group endorses illegal presidential warmaking, it is another sign that our political culture has been badly corrupted by decades of war and arbitrary presidential power grabs. The failure to prevent previous illegal wars and the failure to hold presidents accountable for trampling on the Constitution have paved the way for this.

Foreign policy tends to be a low priority for most voters, and few use these issues to determine their voting decisions, but public opinion still has to be kept in mind in any foreign policy debate. Most Americans are not paying close attention to what the government is doing in the world, but there are limits to what they will tolerate. The public also has fairly clear preferences for greater international cooperation without the unnecessary burdens of endless wars and excessive military commitments around the world. There is an opening here for a prudential and restrained internationalism that draws support from across the political spectrum, but to take advantage of that will require organizing these disparate groups of Americans to achieve greater influence in both parties.

Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC , where he also keeps a solo blog . He has been published in the New York Times Book Review , Dallas Morning News , World Politics Review , Politico Magazine , Orthodox Life , Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week . He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter .


kouroi 18 hours ago

Did it ever mattered what the majority of the US public thinks and wants?

Tom Riddle 17 hours ago • edited
Foreign policy tends to be a low priority for most voters, and few use these issues to determine their voting decisions

Unfortunately, I think this is the most important sentence in the article. The fact of the matter is FP stuff is a very low priority for most Americans and "supporting the troops" is often conflated with money for the pentagon.

Worst of all, Americans will oppose attacking Country X until the president says "We need to attack Country X" and then they are all for it. I mean, during all of 2017 half the country suddenly knew we absolutely needed to attack North Korea.

Alan Vanneman 8 hours ago

I agree with Tom. These polls rarely mean much on any topic, and when it's as low priority as foreign affairs, there's even less significance. There is some brave talk among Democrats about cutting defense spending, but in the past both parties have been happy to give the Pentagon as much, and frequently more, than it wants. And the military is devoted above all else to maintaining its global presence, so that all its toys can be given at least a veneer of purpose. Trump, with all his disgusting bluster, is clearly more risk averse than Obama, who stupidly cost his party the presidency by trying to play the hero in Libya. I'm am (pretty) sure that Biden will continue this restraint, but on the other hand his administration will almost surely be stocked with Wilsonian interventionists, who have learned nothing and forgot plenty.

Feral Finster 6 hours ago

The polls have been consistent for a long time now. But this is America - what the elites want, the elites get and since when did the voters start to matter?

rayray Feral Finster 2 hours ago

Agreed. But to be precise, the "elites" in this particular case are nothing other than the military brass, the military contractors, and the senators/reps they've purchased. Well funded and unbelievably well-placed to influence/leverage/etc. whoever is the President. And what powerful/wealthy interests are lobbying on the other side? Few, if any.

kouroi rayray 2 hours ago

Never mind the NSA that can blackmail everyone out there...

kouroi 6 hours ago

The building block is the UN Charter and agreed upon International Law. but while Russia 7 China & others would love to have those treaties respected, the US Gob wants to follow the "rules based order". Moon of Alabama and others talk about these very fundamental issues, and how the West in fact has lost all its legal and moral ground and became in fact Mordor ru by Sauron:

https://www.moonofalabama.o...

MPC 3 hours ago

The best thing that could happen to tilt American foreign policy more in the direction of restraint would be a consistently populist, in the true sense, political force. Interventionist foreign policy is a dream world and plaything of elites, for elite gain.

Right now you have way too many peace-inclined left wing people fighting peace-inclined right wing people, in a clear divide and conquer setup. Left and right identity politics are being used to preserve a decadent status quo a bit longer, including in foreign policy.

rayray MPC 2 hours ago

Agree with this as well...but the scorched earth identity politics of Trump have set back the dream of a centrist "peace party" for a quite a time.

[Dec 30, 2020] Prof John Mearsheimer - US Foreign Policy under President Biden

Dec 30, 2020 | www.youtube.com

IIEA

Professor Mearsheimer discusses the foreign policy agenda of the President Biden administration. He shares his insights on the likely continuities as well as differences between the Biden administration's policies and the policies pursued by President Trump over the past four years.

About the Speaker: John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point (1970), has a PhD in political science from Cornell University (1981), and has written extensively about security issues and international politics. Among his six books, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001, 2014) won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize; and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007), made the New York Times bestseller list.

His latest book is The Great Delusion: Liberal Ideals and International Realities (2018), which won the 2019 Best Book of the Year Award from the Valdai Discussion Conference, Moscow.

In 2020, he won the James Madison Award, which is given once every three years by the American Political Science Association to "an American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science." Recorded on the 17th of November 2020


Matthew Jackson , 1 day ago (edited)

His predictions here are coming true right now. I would also add that the polarization of politics in the US will have continued unpleasant domestic social ramifications. Do I want to stay and endure it ? Trump did try like hell to back the US out of long standing losing wars in the middle east. Nobody appreciates this though.

Lowen Blade , 1 month ago

It's delusional to think PRC could be "contained," but neocons just don't get it.


rollo clevich
, 1 week ago

Mearsheimer expects the Dems to give up on the mindless saber-rattling directed at Russia for the last four years. He may be right, the D's were likely cynically providing "boob bait for the bubbas." Taking a tough line vs China is more unlikely given that PRC is so closely tied to the Silicon Valley and Wall Street plutocrats who are the real base of the Democrat Party.

[Dec 29, 2020] Two completely different cases: Maria Butina never claimed to be a journalist, and didn't spread fake news about the USA. She didn't commit any crime, and served as an scapegoat to a bigger conspiracy.

Dec 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Dec 29 2020 1:58 utc | 26

@ Posted by: Antonym | Dec 29 2020 1:16 utc | 23

Nah, there is freedom of speech in China. The thing is China has its own internet ecosystem - its own social medias, own search engines, own newspapers, own websites etc. etc. - and they're all in Chinese.

What happens is the West doesn't know what is going on in China for the simple fact they don't read Chinese. This opens a flank for a "survivor bias" scenario, where the Western MSM decides which the Western people can know and which they can't know - and the lies they should believe. Westerners cannot double check for the source because they don't know Chinese.

--//--

@ Posted by: Piotr Berman | Dec 29 2020 1:32 utc | 25

Two completely different cases: Maria Butina never claimed to be a journalist, and didn't spread fake news about the USA. She didn't commit any crime, and served as an scapegoat to a bigger conspiracy.

Zhang Zhan is a Western (CIA) asset.

[Dec 29, 2020] Surprising uniformity of opinions about Steele dossier following by surprising uniformity of actions

Highly recommended!
Nov 28, 2020 | twitter.com

Commodore Allen Retweeted

C3
@C_3C_3
FBI knew the Dossier was FAKE
CIA knew the Dossier was FAKE
DOJ knew the Dossier was FAKE
ODNI knew the Dossier was FAKE
Media knew the Dossier was FAKE
Mueller knew the Dossier was FAKE
Congress knew the Dossier was FAKE
BO Admin knew the Dossier was FAKE

They were all in on it

[Dec 29, 2020] Der Spiegel, CNN, another media outlet and Bellingcat apparently paid Bitcoin or cryptocurrency of some sort to access the data from sources to whom the phone database information was "leaked".

Dec 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Dec 28 2020 20:34 utc | 11

I might have added @ 8 also that another Navalny groupie follower, Lyubov Sobol, also a lawyer, was arrested recently for invading the apartment of supposed FSB employee Konstantin Kudryavtsev's mother-in-law (after entering the building on false pretences) and filming around the apartment. Sobol was accompanied by people illegally wearing Rospotrebnadzor uniforms.

To date there's no clear evidence that Konstantin Kudryavtsev actually did speak to Navalny on the phone and the entire phone interview (during which Navalny was told that the FSB tried to kill him a second time by putting Novichok on his underwear) may have been a stunt pulled by people who stole parts of a phone database and the metadata attached to phone transactions on that database.

Der Spiegel, CNN, another media outlet and Bellingcat apparently paid Bitcoin or cryptocurrency of some sort to access the data from sources to whom the phone database information was "leaked".

Interestingly the British Lancet magazine released a report which reveals that 31 hours after Navalny was admitted to hospital in Omsk, a German medical crew had access to Navalny. This gives a whole day and seven hours for the FSB to do its dastardly work of trying to kill Navalny a second time while he was in intensive care and receiving (supposedly) intubation.

[Dec 29, 2020] The major media outlets all sing from the same hymn sheet and the CIA and other western intel operations

Dec 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Dork , Dec 28 2020 18:53 utc | 1

A study done a few years ago showed that over 2/3rds of international affairs stories in major European newspapers were basically reprints of NYT articles, tweaked lightly for localization purposes. The major media outlets all sing from the same hymn sheet and the CIA and other western intel operations knows that any story they feed into the system will be reproduced around the globe and taken as 'fact' by most of the newspapers' readers.

The media's incestuous nature and its infiltration by the intelligence services really became apparent during the Syrian Civil War and the Trump presidency. It is now clear that the western mainstream media works with the spooks to shape and mold opinion, and manufacture consent, rather than innocently informing its readers about world events.

The rise of the now often used insult "conspiracy theorist", which is really code for "dissenting opinion", is closely related to this. The western liberal democracies are going totalitarian in real time as the window of "acceptable" opinion continues to shrink and the establishment finds new ways to censor, ban and stifle heretical thinking.

[Dec 29, 2020] Denying the Holocaust threatens democracy. So does denying the election results

Dec 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Francis , Dec 29 2020 4:52 utc | 32

Denying the Holocaust threatens democracy. So does denying the election results.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/23/democracy-denial-holocaust-denial/

[Dec 29, 2020] Thoroughly recommend this very significant and totally damning exposure of the beast's lies and unholy war and WhiteHelmets propaganda campaign against Syria from the superb team at the Grayzone

Dec 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Barrie VV , Dec 29 2020 9:21 utc | 38

Thoroughly recommend this very significant and totally damning exposure of the beast's lies and unholy war and WhiteHelmets propaganda campaign against Syria from the superb team at the Grayzone: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/12/20/ex-uk-ambassador-war-on-syria-continues-with-us-occupation-sanctions-propaganda/

migueljose , Dec 29 2020 15:26 utc | 59

BarrieVV@38
Totally agree with your positive comment on the Grayzone and Aaron Mate's interview with former British ambassador to Syria: lots of good, accurate history with penetrating insights. B criticized Grayzone head Max Blumenthal for his initial criticism of Assaad's 2011 response to the "color revolution". I think B's arguement has some merit but overall the reports from the Grayzone are very good and I'm hoping B re-visits his position which was critical of Max Blumenthal.
Blumenthal, Mate and Anya Parampil all have interesting histories intertwined with The Nation, RT, DemocracyNOW, The Intercept and others. They are careful about their criticism of these "leftist" groups and I think their stories are very good: Syria, Europe, Bolivia, Venezuela especially.

[Dec 29, 2020] The Demise of American Exceptionalism by David Bromwich

Notable quotes:
"... Perils of Dominance ..."
"... standard maxim ..."
"... bear any burden ..."
"... David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of ..."
Dec 29, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

Before our national self-inquest on Donald Trump has run its course, we will be prompted to remember again that the world exists. President-elect Joe Biden's appointments at the departments of defense, state, and the national security council are likely to include some combination of Michele Flournoy, Jake Sullivan, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and others of the globalization group around Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. These people believe in the rightness of a world with the United States at its center, deploying commercial strength, trade agreements, diplomatic suasion, and military alliances in a judicious synthesis. Armed intervention, preferably multilateral, is held in reserve. They take on trust the global politics of neoliberalism. For them, the Trump presidency, though unanticipated, was merely a disagreeable hiatus. They have never stopped planning for their return.

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They did not study the catastrophe of Vietnam, and they have not learned from it. As Gareth Porter showed in Perils of Dominance , that war, whose atrocities the world remembers more vividly than Americans do, was protracted not from morbid credulity regarding the domino theory but rather a primitive fear of losing face. It was carried forward through presidencies in both parties with a maximum of deception. The War in Afghanistan has similarly extended over three presidencies; and yet, to the neoliberal establishment, Afghanistan in 2020 is a good deal like Vietnam in 1971. It must not be "abandoned." A recent New York Times story praised some generals for "tempering" the rashness of Donald Trump's attempt to withdraw once and for all.

For reasons of personality that hardly bear looking into, Trump in foreign policy represented a break from the militarized globalism the United States had adopted with the fall of the Soviet Union and the coming of a unipolar world. The laboratory for this approach was the Yugoslavia intervention commandeered by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The madness under the idealism was revealed in the bombing, invasion, and occupation of Iraq in 2003. That seems a long generation ago, to the short memory of Americans. Even more thoroughly forgotten has been the Libya War -- President Obama's disastrous bid to show support for the Arab Spring -- with all the destruction it wrought: the civil war that followed, the swollen mass migrations from North Africa to South Europe, the opening of slave markets in Libya itself. After Libya came Syria, in which the United States supported an Al Qaeda offshoot in another humanitarian cause. After Syria came the Obama-Trump support for the Saudi obliteration of Yemen.

The United States has long faced the peculiar choice -- messianic on both sides -- of serving the world as an exemplary nation or as an evangelical one. The former image was best drawn by Abraham Lincoln when he said that the proposition "all men are created equal" was meant as "a standard maxim for free society," which would be "constantly approximated" in the United States itself, "constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere." By contrast, the evangelical image was epitomized by John Kennedy's eloquent and dangerous inaugural address: "we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Lincoln's standard maxim meant the force of our example. Kennedy's bear any burden meant the force of our weapons.

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A new Cold War with Russia was dragged onto center stage in 2013–2014. The process began at the Sochi Olympics and was locked in by the American reaction to the Russian reaction to the coup in Ukraine. The neoliberal elite is deciding, at this moment, whether to prefer Russia or China as the number-one U.S. enemy on the horizon. But must we have one? "Faith in a fact can help create the fact," said William James. A named expectation of trouble creates the conditions for that trouble. And yet, informed citizens today in the United States, in China, and in Russia all know that such a return to the inveterate habits of the old Great Powers would be supremely irresponsible. Our most dire confrontation now is with the natural world, which, in the form of climate change, is taking its revenge on humanity for a century of abuse.

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If the fires and floods of the last many years, in Australia and California, in Prague and Houston, have nothing to say to you, it is not clear what planet you are fit to live on. The best thing the policy elite could do, for the United States and the world, would be to put themselves out of business. Begin a series of international agreements to cooperate in slowing the progress of climate change, and in anticipating and defending against the worst of its effects. Practically speaking, as a matter of course, this will require a new ethic of international cooperation. Not war, not even an enhanced trade war, and not with China and Russia most of all.

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of American Breakdown:

[Dec 28, 2020] Why Russia Saved the United States

Dec 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

arby , Dec 28 2020 0:24 utc | 58

I found this article interesting as well as the quote at the beginning.

Why Russia Saved the United States

[Dec 28, 2020] One of the leading Russian political scientists in his recent article stated that in fact, Russia was parting with any illusions about relations with the West.

Dec 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

alaff , Dec 27 2020 23:20 utc | 45

One of the leading Russian political scientists in his recent article stated that in fact, Russia was parting with any illusions about relations with the West. Well, it is quite a natural outcome of the outgoing year, given the behavior of "Western partners". Blind hatred, streams of endless lies and slander, frankly clownish amateur stagings like "Navalny's poisoning", a non-stop conveyor of illegitimate unilateral discriminatory measures (they call them sanctions), insane and unacceptable rhetoric of Western officials... Well, sooner or later any patience comes to an end.

[Dec 28, 2020] Unipolar Vs Multipolar- The Death Of McKinley The Loss Of America's Soul - ZeroHedge

Dec 28, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Unipolar Vs Multipolar: The Death Of McKinley & The Loss Of America's Soul BY TYLER DURDEN SATURDAY, DEC 26, 2020 - 23:30

Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Saker blog,

On December 17, 2020, a new US Maritime strategy was unveiled putting into practice the regressive concepts first outlined in the early National Defense Strategy 2020 doctrine which target China and Russia as the primary enemies of the USA and demanding that the USA be capable to " defeat our adversaries while we accelerate development of a modernized integrated all-domain naval force of the future".

The Pentagon's Advantages at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power continued by saying "China's and Russia's revisionist approaches in the maritime environment threaten US interests, undermine alliances and partnerships and degrade the free and open international order moreover, China's and Russia's aggressive naval growth and modernization are eroding US institutional advantages."

The document continued to describe that "we must operate more assertively to prevail in day-to-day competition as we uphold the rules-based order and deter our competitors from pursuing armed aggression ready, forward-deployed naval forces will adopt a more assertive posture in day to day operations"

For anyone who has been paying attention to the vast growth of the Pentagon's Full Spectrum containment policy around China's perimeter begun with Obama's Asia Pivot, it may appear as though these words are not new, but just a continuation of American unipolar agenda, Pacific war games, and psychological projection onto perceived enemies, that have been underway for years. While this is certainly true, it must be noted that they are occurring at a time that NATO 2030 has enshrined an anti-China military posture into the Trans Atlantic security doctrine which had formerly channeled most of its hate purely onto Russia.

The fact is those unipolar zombies programmed to think in no other terms but global post-nation state dominance are deathly afraid of the Russia-China bond of survival which has created a uniquely viable foundation for an alternative economic/security architecture for the world. This model is based on a system of finance that defines money not in speculative but rather long-term development of the real economic foundations of life. It also features a strong emphasis on win-win cooperation as opposed to Hobbesian zero-sum logic dominant among western powers, and it also finds itself driven by OPEN system economic practices shaped by unbounded scientific and technological progress that once upon a time guided America's better traditions.

With the obvious threat of nuclear war breaking out between a collapsing unipolar order in the west and an emergent Multipolar alliance, it is important to review what possible latent policy traditions may yet be revived within America's history which certain forces have worked very hard to scrub out of the historical record and memory. This study will take us to the incredible fights that arose over America's identity at the turn of the 20th century during the period of President William McKinley and the treasonous anglophile President of vice, Theodore Roosevelt.

Munroe Doctrine or Empire?

As Martin Sieff eloquently laid out in his recent article , President McKinley himself was an peacemaker, anti-imperialist of a higher order than most people realize. McKinley was also a strong supporter of two complementary policies: 1) Internally, he was a defender of Lincoln's "American system" of protectionism, internal improvements and black suffrage and 2) Externally, he was a defender of the Munroe Doctrine that defined America's anti-imperial foreign policy since 1823.

The Munroe Doctrine's architect John Quincy Adams laid out this principle eloquently on July 4, 1821:

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=830

"After fifty years the United States has, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own.

That the United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

That by involving itself in the internal affairs of other nations, the United States would destroy its own reason of existence; the fundamental maxims of her policy would become, then, no different than the empire America's revolution defeated. It would be, then, no longer the ruler of itself, but the dictator of the world."

America's march is the march of mind, not of conquest.

Colonial establishments are engines of wrong, and that in the progress of social improvement it will be the duty of the human family to abolish them".

It was an aging John Quincy Adams whom a young Abraham Lincoln collaborated with in ending the imperial Mexican-American war under Wall Street stooge James Polk in 1846. When Adams died in 1848, Lincoln picked up the torch he left behind as the London-directed "proto deep state" of the 19th century worked to dissolve the republic from within. The foreign policy conception laid out by Adams ensured that America's only concern was "staying out of foreign imperial entanglements" as Washington had earlier warned and keeping foreign imperial interests out of the Americas. The idea of projecting power onto the weak or subduing other cultures was anathema to this genuinely American principle.

A major battle which has been intentionally obscured from history books took place in the wake of Lincoln's murder and the re-ascension of the City of London-backed slave power during the decades after the Union victory of 1865. On the one hand America's role in the emerging global family of nations was being shaped by followers of Lincoln who wished to usher in an age of win-win cooperation. Such an anti-Darwinian system which Adams called " a community of principle " asserted that each nation had the right to sovereign banking controls over private finance, productive credit emissions tied to internal improvements with a focus on continental (rail/road) development, industrial progress and full spectrum economies. Adherents of this program included Russia's Sergei Witte and Alexander II, Germany's Otto von Bismarck, France's Sadi Carnot, and leading figures within Japan's Meiji Restoration.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/gYeVDjFKpOU

On the other hand, "eastern establishment families" of the USA more loyal to the gods of money, hereditary institutions and the vast international empire of Britain saw America's destiny tied to an imperial global partnership with the Mother country. These two opposing paradigms within America have defined two opposing views of "progress", "value", "self-interest" and "law" which have continued to shape the world over 150 years later.

William Gilpin vs Alfred Mahan: Two Paradigms Clash

A champion of the former traditionally American outlook who rose to the international scene was William Gilpin (1813-1894). Gilpin hailed from a patriotic family of nation builders whose patriarch Thomas Gilpin was a close ally of Benjamin Franklin and leading member of Franklin's Philosophical Society. William Gilpin was famous for his advocacy of America's trans continental railway whose construction he proselytized as early as 1845 (it was finally begun by Lincoln during the Civil War and completed in 1869 as I outlined in my previous paper How to Save a Dying Republic ).

In his thousands of speeches and writings, Gilpin made it known that he understood America's destiny to be inextricably tied to the ancient civilization of China- not to impose opium as the British and their American lackies were want to do, but to learn from and even emulate!

In 1852, Gilpin stated:

"Salvation must come to America from China, and this consists in the introduction of the "Chinese constitution" viz. the "patriarchal democracy of the Celestial Empire". The political life of the United States is through European influences, in a state of complete demoralization, and the Chinese Constitution alone contains elements of regeneration. For this reason, a railroad to the Pacific is of such vast importance, since by its means the Chinese trade will be conducted straight across the North American continent. This trade must bring in its train Chinese civilization. All that is usually alleged against China is mere calumny spread purposefully, just like those calumnies which are circulated in Europe about the United States".

With Lincoln's 1861 presidential victory, Gilpin became Lincoln's bodyguard and ensured the president survived his first assassination attempt en route to Washington from Illinois. During the Civil War, Gilpin was made Colorado's first Governor where he successfully stopped the southern power from opening up a western front during the war of secession (applying Lincoln's greenback system to finance his army on a state level) and winning the " Battle of Glorieta Pass ", thus saving the union.

After the war Gilpin became a leading advocate of the internationalization of the "American system of political economy" which Lincoln applied vigorously during his short-lived presidency. Citing the success of Lincoln's system, Gilpin said:

"No amount of argument will make America adopt old world theories To rely upon herself, to develop her own resources, to manufacture everything that can possibly be manufactured within her territory- this is and has been the policy of the USA from the time of Alexander Hamilton to that of Henry Clay and thence to our own days".

Throughout his speeches Gilpin emphasizes the role of a U.S.-Russia alliance:

"It is a simple and plain proposition that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of 2 or 3 hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations threw their now waste places, add a hundredfold to their wealth and power and influence"

And seeing in China's potential the means to re-enliven the world- including the decadent and corrupt culture of Europe:

"In Asia a civilization resting on a basis of remote antiquity has had, indeed, a long pause, but a certain civilization- although hitherto hermetically sealed up has continued to exist. The ancient Asiatic colossus, in a certain sense, needed only to be awakened to new life and European culture finds a basis there on which it can build future reforms."

In opposition to the outdated British controls of "chock points" on the seas which kept the world under the clutches of the might of London, Gilpin advocated loudly for a system of internal improvements, rail development, and growth of the innate goodness of all cultures and people through scientific and technological progress. Once a global system of mutual development of rail were established, Gilpin stated "in the shipment of many kinds of raw and manufactured goods, it will largely supersede the ocean traffic of Great Britain, in whose hands is now carrying the trade of the world."

Gilpin's vision was most clearly laid out in his 1890 magnum opus "The Cosmopolitan Railway" which featured designs for development corridors across all continents united by a "community of principle".

Echoing the win-win philosophy of Xi Jinping's New Silk Road today, Gilpin stated:

"The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress."

Mahan Derails America's Anti-Imperial Identity

Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) represented an opposing paradigm which true American statesmen like Lincoln, Secretary of State James Blaine, William Seward, President Grant, William Garfield, and McKinley detested. Sadly, with McKinley's murder ( run by an anarchist ring with ties to British Intelligence ) and the rise of Teddy Roosevelt in 1901, it was not Gilpin's but rather Mahan's worldview which became the dominant foreign policy doctrine for the next 120 years (despite a few brief respites under FDR and JFK).

Mahan is commonly credited for being a co-founder of modern geopolitics and an inspiration for Halford Mackinder. Having graduated from West Point's naval academy in 1859, Mahan soon became renowned as a total failure in actual combat having crashed warships repeatedly into moving and stationary objects during the Civil War. Since reality was not his forte, Mahan focused his post-war career on Ivory tower theorizing gushing over maps of the world and fawning over Britain's power as a force of world history.

His "Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 published in the same year that Gilpin published his Cosmopolitan Railway (1890) was a total break from the spirit of win-win cooperation that defined America's foreign policy. According to the Diplomat , this book soon "became the bible for many navies around the world" with the Kaiser of Germany (now released from the influence of the great rail-loving statesman Otto von Bismarck whom he fired in 1890) demanding all of his offers read. Later Teddy Roosevelt ordered copies for every member of Congress. In Mahan's book, the geopolitician continuously asserts his belief that it is America's destiny to succeed the British Empire.

Taking the British imperial definition of "commerce" which uses free trade as a cover for the military dominance of weak nations (open borders and turning off protectionism simply makes a people easier to rob), Mahan attempts to argue that America need not continue to adhere to "outdated" habits like the Munroe doctrine since the new order of world empires demands America stay relevant in a world of sea power and empire. Mahan writes : "The advance of Russia in Asia, in the division of Africa, in the colonial ambitions of France and in the British idea of Imperial Federation, now fast assuming concrete shape in practical combined action in South Africa" demands that the USA act accordingly.

Attempting to refute the "outdated habits" of rail development which consume so many foolish statesmen around the globe, Mahan states: "a railway competes in vain with a river because more facile and copious, water traffic is for equal distances much cheaper and because cheaper, more useful". Like those attacking today's Belt and Road Initiative, the power of railways is that their returns are not measurable by simple monetary terms, but are rather QUALITATIVE. The long-term construction of rail systems not only unite divided people, increase manufacturing and industrial corridors but also induce closer powers of association and interchange between agriculture and urban producers. These processes uplift national productive powers building full spectrum economies and also a culture's capacity for creative thought.

The attempt made to justify sea traffic merely because "larger amounts of goods can be shipped" is purely quantitative and monetaristic sophistry devoid of any science of real value.

While Gilpin celebrates the successful awakening of China and other great nations of the world, in the Problem of Asia (1901) Mahan says:

"It is scarcely desirable that so vast a proportion of mankind as the Chinese constitute should be animated by but one spirit". Should China "burst her barriers eastward, it would be impossible to exaggerate the momentous issues dependant upon a firm hold of the Hawaiian islands by a great civilized maritime power."

Mahan's adherence to social Darwinism is present throughout his works as he defines the political differences of the 3 primary branches of humanity (Teutonic, Slavic and Asiatic) as purely rooted in the intrinsic inferiority or superiority of their race saying: "There are well recognized racial divergencies which find concrete expression in differences equally marked of political institution, of social progress and of individual development. These differences are deep seated in the racial constitution and partly the result of the environment". Mahan goes onto restate his belief that unlike the superior Teutonics "the Oriental, whether national or individual does not change" and "the East does not progress".

Calling China a carcass to be devoured by an American eagle, Mahan writes: "If life departs, a carcass can be utilized only by dissection or for food; the gathering to it of the eagles is a natural law, of which it is bootless to complain the onward movement of the world has to be accepted as a fact."

Championing an Anglo American alliance needed to subdue and "civilize" China as part of the post-Boxer Rebellion, Mahan says " of all the nations we shall meet in the East, Great Britain is the one with which we have by far the most in common in the nature of our interests there and in our standards of law and justice".

In case there was any doubt in the minds of Mahan's readers as to the MEANS which America should assert its dominance onto China, Mahan makes clear his belief that progress is caused by 1) force and 2) war:

"That such a process should be underlain by force on the part of outside influences, force of opposition among the latter themselves [speaking of the colonial European monarchies racing to carve up China in 1901 -ed] may be regrettable, but it is only a repetition of all history Every step forward in the march that has opened in China to trade has been gained by pressure; the most important have been the result of actual war."

A Last Anti-Imperial Push

The chaos induced by the anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion of 1899 which spread quickly across China resulted a heated battle between imperial and anti-imperial forces in both Russia and the USA. Where Transport Minister Sergei Witte who spearheaded the development of the Trans Siberian rail line (1890-1905) tried to avoid military entanglement, McKinley was busy doing the same.

The boxers soon attacked the Manchurian rail connecting Russia to China by land and Witte succumbed to pressure to finally send in troops. The reformers of China who attempted to modernize with American and Russian assistance under Emperor Kuang Hsu and Li Hung Chang fell from power as total anarchy reigned. The outcome of the Boxer chaos involved the imperial powers of France, Germany and England demanding immense financial reparations, ownership of Chinese territory and mass executions of the Boxers.

While McKinley is often blamed for America's imperial turn, the reality is just the opposite.

The Spanish-American war begun in 1898 was actually launched unilaterally by Anglophilic racist Theodore Roosevelt who used the 4 hour window he had while Undersecretary of the Navy (while the actual Secretary was out of Washington) to send orders to Captain Dewey of the Pacific fleet to engage in a fight with the Spanish over their Philippine territories. McKinley had resisted the war hawks until that point but found himself finally bending to the momentum. In China, McKinley, like Witte worked desperately to reject taking territory resulting in great fears from the British oligarchy that a U.S.-Russia alliance led by McKinley and Witte was immanent.

The assassination of McKinley on September 18, 1901 catapulted Mahan-loving Vice President Teddy Roosevelt into high office, who enmeshed America into a new epoch of Anglo-American imperialism abroad, a growth of eugenics and segregation at home and the creation of an independent police state agency called the FBI .

As Sieff writes :

"Roosevelt devoted his next eight years in the presidency and the rest of his life to integrating the United States and the British Empire into a seamless web of racial imperialist oppression that dominated Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and that destroyed the cultural history and heritage of the Native North American nations."

In Russia, the 1902 Anglo-Japan Treaty led to the disastrous Japan-Russo war of 1905 which devastated the Russian navy, ended the political career of Sergei Witte and threw Russia into chaos leading to the fall of the Romanovs (Czar Nicholas II was the last statesman occupying high office that this author is aware of to have actively promoted the Bering Strait Tunnel rail connection in 1906 . It wasn't until FDR's Vice President Henry Wallace met with Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942 that the idea resurfaced once more ).

In his Two Peoples One Friendship , Wallace described his discussions with Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942 saying:

" Of all nations, Russia has the most powerful combination of a rapidly increasing population, great natural resources and immediate expansion in technological skills. Siberia and China will furnish the greatest frontier of tomorrow When Molotov [Russia's Foreign Minister] was in Washington in the spring of 1942 I spoke to him about the combined highway and airway which I hope someday will link Chicago and Moscow via Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Molotov, after observing that no one nation could do this job by itself, said that he and I would live to see the day of its accomplishment. It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East."

While the "open door" rape of the China was attempted by the Anglo-Americans, a fortunate rear guard maneuver orchestrated by another follower of Abraham Lincoln named Sun Yat-sen resulted in a surprise overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and the institution of the Republic of China with Sun Yat-sen as the acting President. While Sun Yat-sen sided with Gilpin and Lincoln in opposition to the Mahanists on the issue of rail and industrial development (illustrated in his extraordinary 1920 International Development of China program which called for 160 000 km of rail, water diversion projects, ports and 1.5 million km of paved roads- illustrated below), the intrigues that sank the world into World War I made any hopes of this early development of China impossible in Sun Yat-sen's lifetime.

Expressing his own deep understanding of these top down tactics of world history (and the recognition that the same British imperial forces that orchestrated the US Civil War were planning to do the same to China), Sun Yat-sen wrote in 1912:

"We understand too well that there are certain men of power -- not to include for the present, certain nations -- who would view with a greater or lesser satisfaction an internal rupture in the new Republic [of China]. They would welcome, as a move toward the accomplishment of their own ends and designs, a civil war between the provinces of the North and the South; just as, 50 years ago, there was applause in secret (in certain quarters) over the terrible civil strife in the United States.

Americans of today who were alive in those dark days of the great republic will remember the feelings in the hearts of the people -- the bitter and painful thoughts that arose from the knowledge that foreigners were hoping and praying for the destruction of the American Union.

Had the war been successful from the South's standpoint, and had two separate republics been established, is it not likely that perhaps half a dozen or more weak nations would have eventually been established? I believe that such would have been the result; and I further believe that with the one great nation divided politically and commercially, outsiders would have stepped in sooner or later and made of America their own. I do not believe that I am stating this too forcibly. If so, I have not read history nor studied men and nations intelligently.

And I feel that we have such enemies abroad as the American republic had; and that at certain capitals the most welcome announcement that would be made would be that of a rebellion in China against the constituted authorities.

This is a hard statement to make; but I believe in speaking the truth so that all the world may know and recognize it."

Today's Belt and Road Initiative , and strategic friendship established between Russia and China has re-awoken the forgotten vision of William Gilpin for a world of cooperating sovereign nation states. Does the USA have the moral ability to avoid disintegration by accepting a Russia-U.S.-China alliance needed to revive McKinley's American System or will we slip into a new Great Reset and World War?

[Dec 27, 2020] Welcome To RussiaGate 2.0, Right On Schedule - ZeroHedge

Dec 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Welcome To RussiaGate 2.0, Right On Schedule BY TYLER DURDEN SATURDAY, DEC 26, 2020 - 20:30

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,

Now that a majority of the country believes the election was fraudulent and the Supreme Court has completely abdicated its authority the next obstacle in front of President Trump is here.

And, as always, it comes from his complicit Secretary of State who undermines Trump with his every move to turn the State, Defense and Intelligence apparatuses of the U.S. against Russia.

Pompeo goes on Mark Levin's show, whose ratings are through the roof right now, to tell all the slavering normie-conservatives that it was definitely the Russians who hacked our government.

From Zerohedge:

Without offering any evidence or specifics, Pompeo said Russia was "pretty clearly" behind the cyberattack during an appearance on the conservative talk radio Mark Levin Show .

"I can't say much more, as we're still unpacking precisely what it is, and I'm sure some of it will remain classified. But suffice it to say there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of US government systems and it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well," Pompeo explained .

Notice how there is no evidence given, just the typical intelligence agency, "believe me" line, which is your first clue that whoever it was behind this attack the one group who was definitely NOT behind it was the Russians.

This week's cyber attack on the U.S. government was perfectly timed with the Electoral College submitting its votes to the Congress and Joe Biden claiming he's president-elect.

The reason why the release of this 'attack' on our government was perfectly timed is because it is a distraction from the growing unrest over the Democrats' having stolen the election and cowering the courts into irrelevance.

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This is classic CIA-level misdirection from what was more likely a Chinese or, dare I say it, homegrown operation for the very purpose of blaming the Russians to tamp down the anger and confuse the MAGA crowd.

And it resurrects the ghost of RussiaGate for the libs by putting Trump in a Catch-22.

Oh, and he has to respond to this while also fighting an uphill battle against the courts and his own bureaucracy to invoke his executive order involving outside interference into the election. And in classic Trump fashion he did:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1340333618691002368&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fwelcome-russiagate-20-right-schedule&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Provoking the exact reaction you'd expect from the BlueChecked Sneetches among the Twitterati. RussiaGate was an embarrassment that should have died years ago but it persists precisely because Trump refuses to formally concede and continues to give his people the opportunity to fight the Swamp.

The only way Putin and the Russians were behind this attack on the U.S. government was as a 5-d chess move where Trump invited them to do it on his behalf to 'prove' external interference in the election and allow Trump to cross the Rubicon, invoke the Insurrection Act and his 2018 EO on election interference.

Yeah, by the way, John Le Carre died this week, life ain't a movie and Trump isn't that savvy a player. Ye gods, I wish he was. That we are in this mess proves he isn't.

This pronouncement by Pompeo was just good ol' fashioned swamp double talk who continues his job of maintaining continuity of U.S. foreign policy on behalf of the Neoconservatives whose raison d'etre is the destruction of Russia to the exclusion of nearly every other consideration of any other human on the planet.

Don't be confused by this nonsense. Whoever was behind this attack wasn't the Russians. The motive for this operation lies squarely with China, The Davos Crowd , the Democrats and our own intelligence agencies trying to move the Overton Window away from the real problem, a stolen election.

Outing Solarwinds and tying it directly to Dominion Voting Systems is your smoking gun.

But the courts, as I said at the open, have left the building. Martin Armstrong pointed out the Supreme Court denied the 'shouting behind closed doors' because they met via Zoom call.

But they didn't deny the substance of the charge against them, that they bowed to political pressure thanks to the Democrats' open blackmail campaign of terror this past summer.

So, at this point there really is little hope of overturning the election. From what I've heard on the ground in Georgia the same Dominion Voting machines are in place there for the Senate runoffs. Those who voted didn't even get a receipt this time.

So the fix is in there too, folks.

There will be no victories in this fight. Every possible avenue of hope must be crushed if the Great Reset of The Davos Crowd is to occur. Pompeo plays his part just like everyone else in this pantomime, one day giving Trump supporters hope by saying he's preparing for a 2nd term, the next using that cache to undermine him with a far bigger betrayal.

This is how the Deep State works to protect itself and we have to be smart enough to see it for what it is: preparing the ground for the next phase of the greatest intelligence show on earth.

Same spook time, same spook channel.

* * *

Join my Patreon if you think Russia isn't the world's ultimate evil


President Joe Biden 1 hour ago

"
"most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics"

Russia made me say it.

gzorp 51 minutes ago remove link

Nope Obama did it

itstippy 1 hour ago

The Russians made the Check Engine light come on in my car today. Now I have to deal with that tomorrow, and it's colder than a witch's tit outside. I hate those guys.

JD Rock 1 hour ago

The incessant propaganda from the clever tribe is, so the 2 largest white nations dont align. That would set the zionists back 500 years.

MX_DOGG 58 minutes ago

... ironic that Russia will be our allies again. They know who their enemy is.

LibertarianMenace 9 minutes ago

Set them back permanently. Complete what Rome failed to.

No work on Sunday 49 minutes ago

Americans trust Russia and Putin more then ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CIA, FBI, swamp etc. that is a pitiful testament to how far the globalist agenda has gotten.

Doom Porn Star 55 minutes ago

"Russia SOMEHOW gained unrestricted access to all the back-doors in Microsoft enterprise software and MUST HAVE used their access to plant bugs in sensitive systems.

Bill gates and his cronies who CREATED the software and have always had access to all the back-doors in Microsoft enterprise software CERTAINLY DID NOT do it.

I'm the guy who told you earlier that I lie cheat and steal for a living . You can believe me . "

tion PREMIUM 1 hour ago (Edited)

'Russia' is quite literally used as a coverup code word for Israel. Hence why they declassified almost nothing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2020/10/15/sheldon-adelson-pumped-75-million-into-new-pro-trump-super-pac/?sh=26a7ad692ffe

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8041597/US-plotted-kill-Julian-Assange-make-look-like-accident.html

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/29/spanish-judge-sheldon-adelson-assange-spying/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/flynn-timeline-it-all-began-with-a-un-resolution-condemning-israeli-settlements/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/official-who-backed-fake-obama-wiretapping-theory-promoted-to-key-pentagon-post/

Really Ezra I hope you and the QuckTard do realize that the PEAD commentary wasn't exactly an invitation either, right.

Five_Black_Eyes_Intel_Agency 48 minutes ago (Edited)

Claiming to be playing 6D chess and keeping Pompeo on the team are mutually exclusive events.

Anyway, by now its clear as day that the Tweedle Dee Tweedle Dum American political system is a broken circus and not export-worthy.

On one side of the swamp, you have Team Blue, a Deep State subisdiary that pins the blame on Russia. On the other side you have Team Red, another Deep State subsidiary that pins the blame on China. Both however, agree fully on imperialism, fundamentalist Zionism and herding American cattle against their own interests.

How are you meant to reform this system by "voting"?>?>?

Mr. Apotheosis 55 minutes ago

Inside job, almost certainly.

tion PREMIUM 47 minutes ago

There is an extremist cult faction within the CIA that is attached to Mossad at the hip.

Snaffew 59 minutes ago remove link

Anyone that believes anything that comes out of the US "intelligence" agencies is part of the problem.

TheRealBilboBaggins 2 minutes ago

My first thought was . . . "inside job". Especially how quickly Russia was blamed with zero presentation of forensic evidence. Oh, I know, methods and sources must be protected. That usually means government criminals must be protected.

Do you ever ask yourself why the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DHS, get so little done that matters to Americans? Do you ever ask yourself how we possible still have organized crime, foreign gangs, and Antifa, with all the dough wasted on these "law enforcement agencies"? I do, and my conclusion is that these agencies are not about what they say they are. They are aimed at attacking various Americans as it helps the agencies.

Ms No PREMIUM 10 minutes ago

"This is classic CIA-level misdirection from what was more likely a Chinese or, dare I say it, homegrown operation"

Really?

You speak of misdirection and then go from Russia to suggesting CIA target China, because you know Trumpers have already figured out that is wasn't Russia, but still don't know they are manipulated in the same fashion about China?

That"s rich.

Simpson 1 minute ago

They spent 25 million 4 years on investigating the Russia hoax and came up with zero. With Hunter Biden they hid the evidence for two years till after the election. Images with under aged girls and smoking crack.

Democrats who sit on intelligence committees screwing a CCP Intelligence officer but nothing to see here.

FO with your gaslighting.

BendGuyhere 12 minutes ago

DC is in dire need of an attitude adjustment, as much for its own survival as the health of the country.

The more DC walls itself off from the rest of the country, the more likely becomes an explosive revolution that wipes their precious stats quo off the map.

Convulsively stabbing Trump in the back will not restore them, cargo cult style, to the glory days of Dubya, Clinton and Obama.

They've done a fabulous job impoverishing this country and enriching themselves.

[Dec 27, 2020] Roger Stone Announces $25M Lawsuit Against DOJ, Mueller, Comey, Barr And Brennan - ZeroHedge

Dec 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Longtime Trump ally Roger Stone announced on Friday that he will be filing a $25 million lawsuit against the department of Justice, along with former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and several other individuals, according to the Washington Examiner .

Stone was arrested in a 2019 pre-dawn raid (which CNN was alerted to in advance) and sentenced to 40 months in prison before President Trump commuted it in July, leaving stone with a fine and supervised release. Trump granted Stone a full presidential pardon on Wednesday.

" The terms of my pardon allow me to sue the Department of Justice, Robert Mueller, James Comey, John Brennan, Rod Rosenstein, Josnathan [sic] Kravis, Aaron 'Fat Ass' Zelinsky Jeannie Rhee and Michael Morando, " stone wrote on Parler . "My lawyers will be filing formal complaints for prosecutorial misconduct's with DOJ office of professional responsibility at the same time I file a 25 million dollar lawsuit against the DOJ and each of these individuals personally ."

Stone was found guilty of five separate counts of lying to the House Intelligence Committee during its own Russia investigation regarding his outreach to WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign, one count that he "corruptly influenced, obstructed, and impeded" the congressional investigation, and one count for attempting to "corruptly persuade" the congressional testimony of radio show host Randy Credico.

...

Also pardoned Wednesday were Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner's father . On Tuesday, George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan, also charged in connection with Mueller's Russia investigation, were granted full pardons . - Washington Examiner

"I have an enormous debt of gratitude to God almighty for giving the president the strength and the courage to recognize that my prosecution was a completely, politically motivated witch hunt and my trial was a Soviet-style show trial ," Stone said Wednesday evening, adding on Parler that he will add former Attorney General Bill Barr to the lawsuit - and that he would "handle his cross-examination personally."

_arrow 3

dging 1 hour ago

I'm not a lawyer, but does Stone any chance in the world of getting more than 10 minutes before a judge, let a long discovery, let alone inside a court room?

Lansman 3 hours ago

Somehow the court will declare that he doesn't have standing.

known unknown 2 hours ago

That's right a accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt.

anduka 2 hours ago (Edited)

If the president pardons you because he thinks you are innocent, what guilt could accepting that pardon possibly admit? Pardons have no formal, legal effect of declaring guilt.

known unknown 2 hours ago

It's the law. If you think you're innocent you don't accept a pardon then what exactly are you pardoning an innocent man.

anduka 2 hours ago (Edited)

You need to read up on Burdick v. United States 1915. If you think you're innocent you're free to reject the pardon and have your day in court. But if you're innocent you can also accept the pardon with no implication of guilt, to save yourself legal time and expense.

known unknown 2 hours ago

In 1915, the Supreme Court indeed said, of pardons, that "acceptance" carries "a confession of" guilt. Burdick v. United States (1915) . Other courts have echoed that since.

anduka 2 hours ago

You're reading it wrong. Burdick was about a different issue: the ability to turn down a pardon. But pardons have no formal, legal effect of declaring guilt.

LEEPERMAX 1 hour ago (Edited) remove link

Wikileaks just dumped all of their files online . . . Everything from Hillary Clinton's emails, McCain's being guilty, Vegas shooting done by an FBI sniper, Steve Jobs HIV letter, PedoPodesta, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Bilderberg, CIA agents arrested for rape, WHO pandemic. Happy Digging! Here you go, please read and pass it on ..
file.wikileaks.org/file/

These are Clinton's emails:

file.wikileaks.org/file/clinton-emails/

SabOObas 2 hours ago (Edited)

The WHOLE 4 yrs Trump was in office showed up the FBI, DOJ, THE SECRET FISA COURT - ALL OF IT - A DISGRACE ON THIS NATION. The criminal activity occurring during the OBAMA smash and grab. OMG

Unfortunately even if Stone won (which I don't believe he will) the damage to the reputation and credibility of these institutions won't recover. The shame was visible on a global scale. What was done to Flynn was a national tragedy.

At least he survived, unlike LaVoy Finicum.

Obama far exceeded any standard as the worst POTUS this country has ever seen. The damage to our institutions was a tragedy on a Greek scale.

[Dec 25, 2020] With Biden's New Threats, the Russia Discourse is More Reckless and Dangerous Than Ever - Glenn Greenwald

Dec 25, 2020 | greenwald.substack.com

With Biden's New Threats, the Russia Discourse is More Reckless and Dangerous Than Ever The U.S. media demands inflammatory claims be accepted with no evidence, while hacking behavior routinely engaged in by the U.S. is depicted as aberrational. Glenn Greenwald Dec 23 211 332


Then-Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Brookings Institute May 27, 2015 in Washington, DC spoke about the Russia-Ukraine conflict (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

To justify Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss to Donald Trump, leading Democrats and their key media allies for years competed with one another to depict what they called "Russia's interference in our elections" in the most apocalyptic terms possible. They fanatically rejected the view of the Russian Federation repeatedly expressed by President Obama -- that it is a weak regional power with an economy smaller than Italy's capable of only threatening its neighbors but not the U.S. -- and instead cast Moscow as a grave, even existential, threat to U.S. democracy, with its actions tantamount to the worst security breaches in U.S. history.

This post-2016 mania culminated with prominent liberal politicians and journalists ( as well as John McCain ) declaring Russia's activities surrounding the 2016 to be an "act of war" which, many of them insisted, was comparable to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack -- the two most traumatic attacks in modern U.S. history which both spawned years of savage and destructive war, among other things.

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Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) repeatedly demanded that Russia's 2016 "interference" be treated as "an act of war." Hillary Clinton described Russian hacking as "a cyber 9/11." And here is Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on MSNBC in early February, 2018, pronouncing Russia "a hostile foreign power" whose 2016 meddling was the "equivalent" of Pearl Harbor, "very much on par" with the "seriousness" of the 1941 attack in Hawaii that helped prompt four years of U.S. involvement in a world war.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1h94bBaME-w?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0

With the Democrats, under Joe Biden, just weeks away from assuming control of the White House and the U.S. military and foreign policy that goes along with it, the discourse from them and their media allies about Russia is becoming even more unhinged and dangerous. Moscow's alleged responsibility for the recently revealed, multi-pronged hack of U.S. Government agencies and various corporate servers is asserted -- despite not a shred of evidence, literally, having yet been presented -- as not merely proven fact, but as so obviously true that it is off-limits from doubt or questioning.

Any questioning of this claim will be instantly vilified by the Democrats' extremely militaristic media spokespeople as virtual treason. "Now the president is not just silent on Russia and the hack. He is deliberately running defense for the Kremlin by contradicting his own Secretary of State on Russian responsibility," pronounced CNN's national security reporter Jim Sciutto, who last week depicted Trump's attempted troop withdrawal from Syria and Germany as "ceding territory" and furnishing "gifts" to Putin. More alarmingly, both the rhetoric to describe the hack and the retaliation being threatened are rapidly spiraling out of control.

Democrats (along with some Republicans long obsessed with The Russian Threat, such as Mitt Romney) are casting the latest alleged hack by Moscow in the most melodramatic terms possible, ensuring that Biden will enter the White House with tensions sky-high with Russia and facing heavy pressure to retaliate aggressively. Biden's top national security advisers and now Biden himself have, with no evidence shown to the public, repeatedly threatened aggressive retaliation against the country with the world's second-largest nuclear stockpile.

Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO) -- one of the pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee who earlier this year joined with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to block Trump's plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan -- announced : "this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor," adding : "Our nation is under assault." The second-ranking Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin (D-IL), pronounced : "This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia."

Meanwhile, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who has for years been casting Russia as a grave threat to the U.S. while Democrats mocked him as a relic of the Cold War (before they copied and then surpassed him), described the latest hack as "the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country." The GOP's 2012 presidential nominee also blasted Trump for his failure to be "aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action," though -- like virtually every prominent figure demanding tough "retaliation" -- Romney failed to specify what he had in mind that would be sufficient retaliation for "the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country."

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/RdVQu18OWko?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0

For those keeping track at home: that's two separate "Pearl Harbors" in less than four years from Moscow (or, if you prefer, one Pearl Harbor and one 9/11). If Democrats actually believe that, it stands to reason that they will be eager to embrace a policy of belligerence and aggression toward Russia. Many of them are demanding this outright, mocking Trump for failing to attack Russia -- despite no evidence that they were responsible -- while their well-trained liberal flock is suggesting that the non-response constitutes some form of "high treason."

Indeed, the Biden team has been signalling that they intend to quickly fulfill demands for aggressive retaliation. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Biden "accused President Trump [] of 'irrational downplaying'" of the hack while "warning Russia that he would not allow the intrusion to 'go unanswered' after he takes office." Biden emphasized that once the intelligence assessment is complete, "we will respond, and probably respond in kind."

Threats and retaliation between the U.S. and Russia are always dangerous, but particularly so now. One of the key nuclear arms agreements between the two nuclear-armed nations, the New START treaty, will expire in February unless Putin and Biden can successfully negotiate a renewal: sixteen days after Biden is scheduled to take office. "That will force Mr. Biden to strike a deal to prevent one threat -- a nuclear arms race -- while simultaneously threatening retaliation on another," observed the Times.


This escalating rhetoric from Washington about Russia, and the resulting climate of heightened tensions, are dangerous in the extreme. They are also based in numerous myths, deceits and falsehoods:

First, absolutely no evidence of any kind has been presented to suggest, let alone prove, that Russia is responsible for these hacks. It goes without saying that it is perfectly plausible that Russia could have done this: it's the sort of thing that every large power from China and Iran to the U.S. and Russia have the capability to do and wield against virtually every other country including one another.

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But if we learned nothing else over the last several decades, we should know that accepting claims that emanate from the U.S. intelligence community about adversaries without a shred of evidence is madness of the highest order. We just had a glaring reminder of the importance of this rule: just weeks before the election, countless mainstream media outlets laundered and endorsed the utterly false claim that the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop were "Russian disinformation," only for officials to acknowledge once the harm was done that there was no evidence -- zero -- of Russian involvement.

Yet that is exactly what the overwhelming bulk of media outlets are doing again: asserting that Russia is behind these hacks despite having no evidence of its truth. The New York Times ' Michael Barbaro, host of the paper's popular The Daily podcast, asked his colleague , national security reporter David Sanger, what evidence exists to assert that Russia did this. As Barbaro put it, even Sanger is "allowing that early conclusions could all be wrong, but that it's doubtful." Indeed, Sanger acknowledged to Barbaro that they have no proof, asserting instead that the basis on which he is relying is that Russia possesses the sophistication to carry out such a hack (as do several other nation-states), along with claiming that the hack has what he calls the "markings" of Russian hackers.

But this tactic was exactly the same one used by former intelligence officials , echoed by these same media outlets, to circulate the false pre-election claim that the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop were "Russian disinformation": namely, they pronounced in lockstep, the material from Hunter's laptop "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." This was also exactly the same tactic used by the U.S. intelligence community in 2001 to falsely blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks , claiming that their chemical analysis revealed a substance that was "a trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program."

These media outlets will, if pressed, acknowledge their lack of proof that Russia did this. Despite this admitted lack of proof, media outlets are repeatedly stating Russian responsibility as proven fact .

"Scope of Russian Hacking Becomes Clear: Multiple U.S. Agencies Were Hit," one New York Times headline proclaimed, and the first line of that article, co-written by Sanger, stated definitively: "The scope of a hacking engineered by one of Russia's premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday." The Washington Post deluged the public with identically certain headlines:

Nobody in the government has been as definitive in asserting Russian responsibility as corporate media outlets. Even Trump's hawkish Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, crafted his accusation against Moscow with caveats and uncertainty : " I think it's the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity."

If actual evidence ultimately emerges demonstrating Russian responsibility, it would not alter how dangerous it is that -- less than twenty years after the Iraq WMD debacle and less than a couple of years after media endorsement of endless Russiagate falsehoods -- the most influential media outlets continue to mindlessly peddle as Truth whatever the intelligence community feeds them, without the need to see any evidence that what they're claiming is actually true. Even more alarmingly, large sectors of the public that venerate these outlets continue to believe that what they hear from them must be true, no matter how many times they betray that trust. The ease with which the CIA can disseminate whatever messaging it wants through friendly media outlets is stunning.

Second , the very idea that this hack could be compared to rogue and wildly aberrational events such as Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attack is utterly laughable on its face. One has to be drowning in endless amounts of jingoistic self-delusion to believe that this hack -- or, for that matter, the 2016 "election interference" -- is a radical departure from international norms as opposed to a perfect reflection of them.

Just as was true of 2016 fake Facebook pages and Twitter bots, it is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. Government engages in hacking attacks of this sort, and ones far more invasive, against virtually every country on the planet, including Russia, on a weekly basis. That does not mean that this kind of hacking is either justified or unjustified. It does mean, however, that depicting it as some particularly dastardly and incomparably immoral act that requires massive retaliation requires a degree of irrationality and gullibility that is bewildering to behold.

The NSA reporting enabled by Edward Snowden by itself proved that the NSA spies on virtually anyone it can . Indeed, after reviewing the archive back in 2013, I made the decision that I would not report on U.S. hacks of large adversary countries such as China and Russia because it was so commonplace for all of these countries to hack one another as aggressively and intrusively as they could that it was hardly newsworthy to report on this (the only exception was when there was a substantial reason to view such spying as independently newsworthy, such as Sweden's partnering with NSA to spy on Russia in direct violation of the denials Swedish officials voiced to their public).

Other news outlets who had access to Snowden documents, particularly The New York Times , were not nearly as circumspect in exposing U.S. spying on large nation-state adversaries. As a result, there is ample proof published by those outlets (sometimes provoking Snowden's strong objections) that the U.S. does exactly what Russia is alleged to have done here -- and far worse.

"Even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from [China's] Huawei, classified documents show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors -- directly into Huawei's networks," reported The New York Times ' David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in 2013, adding that "the agency pried its way into the servers in Huawei's sealed headquarters in Shenzhen, China's industrial heart."

In 2013, the Guardian revealed "an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow," and added: "foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts." Meanwhile, "Sweden has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia and its leadership, Swedish television said on Thursday," noted Reuters , citing what one NSA document described as "a unique collection on high-priority Russian targets, such as leadership, internal politics."

Other reports revealed that the U.S. had hacked into the Brazilian telecommunications system to collect data on the whole population, and was spying on Brazil's key leaders (including then-President Dilma Rousseff) as well as its most important companies such as its oil giant Petrobras and its Ministry of Mines and Energy. The Washington Post reported : "The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals -- and map their relationships -- in ways that would have been previously unimaginable." And on and on.

[One amazing though under-appreciated episode related to all this: the same New York Times reporter who revealed the details about massive NSA hacking of Chinese government and industry, Nicole Perlroth, subsequently urged (in tweets she has now deleted) that Snowden not be pardoned on the ground that, according to her, he revealed legitimate NSA spying on U.S. adversaries. In reality, it was actually she, Perlorth, not Snowden, who chose to expose NSA spying on China, provoking Snowden's angry objections when she did so based on his view this was a violation of the framework he created for what should and should not be revealed; in other words, not only did Perlroth urge the criminal prosecution of a source on which she herself relied, an absolutely astonishing thing for any reporter to do, but so much worse, she did so by falsely accusing that source of doing something that she, Perlroth, had done herself: namely, reveal extensive U.S. hacking of China ].

What all of this makes demonstrably clear is that only the most deluded and uninformed person could believe that Russian hacking of U.S. agencies and corporations -- if it happened -- is anything other than totally normal and common behavior between these countries. Harvard Law Professor and former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, reviewing growing demands for retaliation, wrote in an excellent article last week entitled "Self-Delusion on the Russia Hack : The U.S. regularly hacks foreign governmental computer systems on a massive scale":

The lack of self-awareness in these and similar reactions to the Russia breach is astounding. The U.S. government has no principled basis to complain about the Russia hack, much less retaliate for it with military means, since the U.S. government hacks foreign government networks on a huge scale every day. Indeed, a military response to the Russian hack would violate international law . . . .

As the revelations from leaks of information from Edward Snowden made plain, the United States regularly penetrates foreign governmental computer systems on a massive scale, often (as in the Russia hack) with the unwitting assistance of the private sector, for purposes of spying. It is almost certainly the world's leader in this practice, probably by a lot. The Snowden documents suggested as much, as does the NSA's probable budget. In 2016, after noting "problems with cyber intrusions from Russia," Obama boasted that the United States has "more capacity than anybody offensively" . . . .

Because of its own practices, the U.S. government has traditionally accepted the legitimacy of foreign governmental electronic spying in U.S. government networks. After the notorious Chinese hack of the Office of Personnel Management database, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said: "You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don't think we'd hesitate for a minute." The same Russian agency that appears to have carried out the hack revealed this week also hacked into unclassified emails in the White House and Defense and State Departments in 2014-2015. The Obama administration deemed it traditional espionage and did not retaliate. "It was information collection, which is what nation states -- including the United States -- do," said Obama administration cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel this week.

But over the last four years, Americans, particularly those who feed on liberal media outlets, have been drowned in so much mythology about the U.S. and Russia that they have no capacity to critically assess the claims being made, and -- just as they were led to believe about "Russia's 2016 interference in Our Sacred Elections" -- are easily convinced that what Russia did is some shocking and extreme crime the likes of which are rarely seen in international relations. In reality, their own government is the undisputed world champion in perpetrating these acts, and has been for years if not decades.

Third , these demands for "retaliation" are so reckless because they are almost always unaccompanied by any specifics. Even if Moscow's responsibility is demonstrated, what is the U.S. supposed to do in response? If your answer is that they should hack Russia back, rest assured the NSA and CIA are always trying to hack Russia as much as it possibly can, long before this event.

If the answer is more sanctions, that would be just performative and pointless, aside from wildly hypocritical. Any reprisals more severe than that would be beyond reckless, particularly with the need to renew nuclear arms control agreements looming. And if you are someone demanding retaliation, do you believe that Russia, China, Brazil and all the other countries invaded by NSA hackers have the same right of retaliation against the U.S., or does the U.S. occupy a special place with special entitlements that all other countries lack?

What we have here, yet again, is the classic operation of the intelligence community feeding serious accusations about a nuclear-armed power to an eagerly gullible corporate media, with the media mindlessly disseminating it without evidence, all toward ratcheting up tensions between these two nuclear-armed powers and fortifying a mythology of the U.S. as grand victim but never perpetrator.

If you ever find yourself wondering how massive military budgets and a posture of Endless War are seemingly invulnerable to challenge, this pathological behavior -- from a now-enduring union of the intelligence community, corporate media outlets, and the Democratic Party -- provides one key piece of the puzzle.

Update, Dec. 24, 2020, 7:36 a.m. ET: Although the tweets from The New York Times ' Nicole Perlroth referenced above were deleted by her, as indicated, an alert reader notes that a Politico article at the time referenced part of my exchange with her, one prompted by anger from Washington Post reporters over an editorial by their own paper that argued against a Snowden pardon, even though that paper reported extensively on Snowden's documents and won a Pulitzer for doing so:

The editorial is nothing if not a good excuse for a Twitter debate. Some journalists continued to air outrage yesterday over the editorial board's defenestration of Snowden, while others either agreed with the board's argument or at least defended its right to take a stand that it knew would no doubt rankle many in the Post's newsroom. In one of the more notable exchanges, New York Times reporter cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth tangled with Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Snowden/NSA story for The Guardian.

Perlroth: "Gotta say I agree w/ wapo. @Snowden leaked tens of thousands of docs that had nothing to do with privacy violations." http://bit.ly/2cLPeLY

Greenwald: "They can start an august club: Journalists In Favor of Criminal Prosecution For Our Sources" http://bit.ly/2cLLIRz

That's precisely what I was referencing here. It's utterly repugnant that Perlroth advocated that her own source be imprisoned on the ground that he leaked documents "that had nothing to do with privacy violations" when it was she, Perlroth, who decided to reveal details of NSA spying on China, angering Snowden in the process. Clicking on the above link to her tweet demonstrates that she since deleted it.

One last point: there is an outstanding op-ed in Thursday's New York Times about anger over the alleged Russian hack by Paul Kolbe, who served as a senior CIA clandestine operative for 25 years and is now director of the Intelligence Project at Harvard Kennedy School, entitled "With Hacking, the United States Needs to Stop Playing the Victim." It details that "the United States is, of course, engaged in the same type of operations at an even grander scale" and therefore "it's time for the United States to stop acting surprised and stop posturing."

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← Previous Randall Rose Dec 23

Greenwald is mistaken on one point. He discusses the aggressive, outraged words by American politicians and media about the recent spate of (allegedly) Russian hacking, and rushes to assume that it has a significant chance of escalating to nuclear war. Biden's language about wanting to "respond in kind" makes it clear enough that he's not going to do any sort of bombing, killing, invasion, or other equally warlike act in response. Likewise for Mitt Romney's language. Although I like just about everything else Greenwald says in this article, his repeated suggestions that the threats over this incident could end up going nuclear are difficult to believe.

Greenwald's perspective is that "Threats and retaliation between the U.S. and Russia are always dangerous" due to their massive stocks of nuclear weapons, particularly now that nuclear treaties have been weakened. Look, I get that escalation to nuclear war remains a serious danger, and that it would be better if the US and Russia didn't raise tensions. But as Greenwald knows, things like one country making off with another country's secret information are examples of the kind of aggressive action that it's very difficult to stop major powers from doing to other countries. And when a large or small country experiences this kind of aggressive action being done to it, isn't it inevitable that opinion leaders in that country are going to say: We won't stand for this, this is similar to an act of war, we must retaliate somehow? Most opinion leaders will always be upset when their own country is treated that way by another country, even if their own country has done the same thing and worse.

Greenwald seems to be looking for a world where opinion leaders in a major power like the US avoid encouraging retaliation, and avoid even portraying the hacking as an act of war. Nothing could stop opinion leaders as a group from doing that, unless maybe you could demonstrate to them that their rhetoric, and the retaliations it leads to, is too likely to encourage escalation to nuclear war. But the continuing pattern of major powers retaliating against each other by hacking and other relatively low-level aggression is not something we can realistically stop. The United States and other countries have come to accept that all major powers will carry out hacks and even low-level forms of violence directed at other major powers, that countries will express their outrage when another country does it to them, and that one country will retaliate at the same level when another country does these things. That's a pretty stable pattern, and there is no sign that anyone wants to disproportionately escalate their retaliation in a way that could lead to nuclear war. Given that, you can't reasonably convince opinion leaders to moderate their rhetoric further. The rhetoric coming from opinion leaders on this subject isn't particularly bloody anyway, at least by the standards of what historically leads to war. So for the short term at least, I just accept that opinion leaders are going to talk that way -- I do have long-term hopes of a more peaceful world, but there's no use pretending that the current less peaceful language puts us in imminent danger of nuclear holocaust.

The main reason why I am confident that outraged rhetoric about hacking secrets won't escalate into world war is because modern countries, and especially the United States, are vulnerable to cyber threats that are much worse than making off with information. It would be easy for an adversary to destroy most of American society by acts of massively lethal hacking and cyber sabotage. American decision-makers know that they must deter these kinds of attacks on the US by holding out the prospect of retaliating with nukes, world war, or similarly lethal cyber attacks. Since American leaders need to be able to use the prospect of massive retaliation to deter a cyber attack that would cause great destruction in the US, they can't risk using this kind of massive retaliation for hacking that just steals a lot of secrets. It has already been established that in the 21st century, countries routinely steal each other's secrets, so it's not possible to deter or compensate for another country's secret-stealing by threatening to escalate to bombing or killing or invasion.

Of the politicians that Greenwald quoted, the two whose rhetoric is most heated still stopped short of the kind of language that runs any risk of starting a nuclear war. Sen. Durbin said the hacking was "virtually a declaration of war", using an adverb that cooled down his point and being careful to avoid declaring himself that a war exists. The obscure Congressman Jason Crow said "Our nation is under assault" and that the hacking "could be" a "cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor", where again his point is moderated by the words "could be" and "cyber equivalent". Sorry, I don't see a danger of a civilization-ending war there, nor do I see it in the corporate media's language.

Although Greenwald is right to say that politicians and the media are overhyping threats here, Greenwald is also, in his own way, overhyping a different alleged threat, the idea that outrage over hacking secrets will escalate to nuclear war. That said, I do think we need to do more to prevent other pathways of escalation to nuclear war that are more realistic than the one Greenwald alludes to here, and I agree with Greenwald's other points.

Reply 46 replies by Glenn Greenwald and others Randall Rose Dec 23

Does anyone have screenshots of the deleted hypocrtiical tweets by NY Times reporter Nicole Perlroth that Greenwald mentioned in this article? You would normally expect him to post screenshots, but he doesn't include them or link to them. The paragraph of Greenwald's article where he brings up her hypocrisy shows some signs of maybe being unfinished, with awkward square brackets. He should have also included the link to the NY Times article where Perlroth does the same thing she later condemned -- the link for that is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-chinese-servers-seen-as-spy-peril.html

[Dec 25, 2020] Think of the breakneck speed Putin's trying to get Russia's national projects underway and completed

Dec 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Dec 24 2020 22:14 utc | 31

This Scott Ritter op/ed is a good read and puts much into perspective if you've been paying attention. For example, think of the breakneck speed Putin's trying to get Russia's national projects underway and completed. Think of the ongoing and quickening pace of Eurasian integration. The McFaul citation, "Russia is way more powerful today than it was 20 years ago, and it's way more powerful today than it was four years ago," is yet another consideration. Finally, Putin and Lavrov have spoken of the ever increasing need to negotiate an International Cyber Security Treaty for almost all of Trump's term. And I'll wager the USA's National Debt that Russia is very busily finishing its "for internal use only" internet that firewalls the energy, defense and communications portions of Russian infrastructure.

The hole Obama/Biden were busy digging from 2009-2017 is now much deeper and getting deeper daily. We've now seen the bipartisan rejection of the saner, larger, stimulus Trump and some Rs & Ds demanded for the commonfolk, which provides an excellent signal as to what's going to follow--nothing, aside from the hole deepening yet further. IMO, the economic draft will soon cease as who will want to defend something that's indefensible. IMO, a majority if not now will soon conclude that they no longer have a stake in this society, that they're being milked for all they're worth then discarded.

[Dec 24, 2020] America is now ruled by people older than the 'gerontocracy' of Soviet Union's twilight days by Nebojsa Malic

Dec 24, 2020 | www.rt.com

Nebojsa Malic

is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic 22 Dec, 2020 12:08 Joe Biden, set to be the oldest-ever US president, is actually on the younger side of people currently running the American political establishment, who show no sign of wanting to ever step aside for another generation.

It is often overlooked that Donald Trump currently holds the distinction of being the oldest-ever US president, being 70 at the time of his inauguration. Biden will take that trophy as well if he's inaugurated in January 2021, having turned 78 last month. Even so, he is actually younger than the current leaders of the House and the Senate!

Though all major power brokers in Washington are older than the "gerontocracy" that ruled the Soviet Union in the 1970s and the 1980s, you won't hear the US mainstream media make the comparison, as it wouldn't fit their Narrative.

ALSO ON RT.COM 'What about Biden?' Conservatives ask after New Yorker breaks story on Sen. Dianne Feinstein's 'COGNITIVE DECLINE'

Sure, there has been some carefully calibrated talk about the "cognitive decline" of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is 87. But Feinstein is from an overwhelmingly Democrat state and she can be easily replaced at the same time as Kamala Harris, Biden's running mate who still hasn't resigned her Senate seat.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) is 80, and has raised eyebrows herself with the whole "Good Morning. Sunday Morning" glitch-in-the-Matrix behavior during a TV appearance in September.

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Way back in 2018 , Pelosi insisted that any talk about wanting someone younger in the leadership position was "sexist," and went on to ruthlessly crush any opposition to her getting the gavel – and the power that went with it – inside the party. In the same interview, Pelosi blanked out on the name of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), calling him "whatshisname."

Born several months ahead of Biden in 1942, McConnell is 78 himself. He had a bout with polio when very young, and though successfully treated, he's had difficulty climbing stairs all his life. While he hasn't shown any signs of cognitive decline, his political choices as of late have certainly caused some Republicans to wonder if he's truly the legislative genius his supporters make him out to be.

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is "only" 70, but has actually been in Congress longer than McConnell, if one counts his 18 years in the House before he got elected to the Senate in 1998.

Only House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, 55, technically qualifies as a member of 'Generation X' rather than a Baby Boomer. Nor does he have any Cold War political baggage like the rest, having been in the House since only 2006. If the Republicans somehow win the House majority in 2022, he might gain more influence – but that's speculation at this point, on both counts.

Meanwhile, the young activist House members who came in with 2018's "Blue Wave," such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), are being kept in check by the old guard. Just last week, AOC was denied a spot on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, thwarting her plans to push for her "Green New Deal" proposal.

ALSO ON RT.COM We gotta talk about Joe Biden's cognitive decline because his US media cheerleaders won't it's so like the sad fate of Brezhnev

Compare this state of US politics with the notorious "gerontocracy" of the Soviet Union. Three aging Soviet leaders died in quick succession between 1982 and 1985, prompting then-US president Ronald Reagan to say "How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?" Yet Reagan was 74 at the time, older than all three.

Leonid Brezhnev was 54 when he took over the Communist Party in 1964. For the sake of political stability, he remained a figurehead after his 1975 stroke and "ruled" the USSR until his death in 1982, as no one in the party could agree on who ought to succeed him. His 18-year tenure was later dubbed the "Brezhnev stagnation."

Former KGB chief Yuri Andropov, part of a triumvirate running things for the better part of Brezhnev's latter years, died himself at the age of 70 in 1984. He had led the Soviet Union for less than 16 months. Konstantin Chernenko, 73, took over from Andropov – and died in March 1985, after only 13 months in charge. His successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, was 54 at the time, two years younger than Kamala Harris is now.

ALSO ON RT.COM Forget Joe Biden The big news is Kamala Harris, who is clearly being groomed to take over as president in 2024

In one of those strange intricacies of the American political system, Harris went from getting zero delegates in the Democrats' nomination process and dropping out before the first primary to being widely expected to take over from Biden sooner rather than later. One might say her relative youth and being a 'Woman Of Color' – an identity politics feature increasingly important to the Democrats – might spell the end of the Boomer dominance.

The thing to keep in mind, however, is that the "young reformer" Gorbachev managed to run the Soviet Union into the ground within five short years. In 1991, the old guard tried a military coup against him. Though Gorbachev survived the coup, the Soviet Union didn't. By the end of that year, the USSR had "dissolved," breaking up along Communist-drawn boundaries into independent and quasi-independent states.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


UKCitizen 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 08:34 AM

Not only American politics but much of USA public life too. I believe one facet of rule by a gerontocracy is maintenance of the status quo; another is less control over younger and more vigorous members of society. The two come together in the rise of Silicon Valley and dominance of USA affairs by corporate interests. But nothing lasts forever and there are long cycles too. Little will change in the short term but I predict at least four years of more serious decline in America. The turning point will be final disillusionment with liberal-left politics (see K/r theory) and the arrival of some younger leaders, not yet known. Liberal-leftism will fail eventually for the simple reason it is founded in utopian like fantasies, disconnection with the real life (however harsh,and probably because it is harsh) but above all an attempt to spread finite resources veneer thin and remove any effort to get them (free everything and equality for all). America will come round eventually but it will be painful and will require it to revise much of its political structure to becoming a true democracy, which even I have realised it isn't, and probably only has been fleetingly since its founding. K/r theory is magnificently expounded in the 'The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics' and long cycles in 'Biohistory'. The former rings true on just about every page.
KarlthePoet UKCitizen 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 11:35 AM
America is collapsing because its foundation is solidly built on lies. The US government and Wall Street are ultimately being controlled by the Jewish Banking Cartel. It cannot be denied. Take the Federal Reserve away and America collapses overnight. Trillions upon Trillions of dollars that are being printed out of thin air are keeping the failed system afloat, for now. A massive global economic collapse is imminent. Just watch. Happy Holidays
Thomas74 17 hours ago 23 Dec, 2020 03:46 AM
There are clear parallels between the USSR and USA. The question is whether the leadership in the USA's leader class has the same self-awareness that arose at the top of the USSR in its last years. Also whether the American people will tolerate the economic hardship that the former Soviet peoples endured in the transition. Is this what we're seeing now with the coronavirus situation? A gradual taking down of expectations in the West behind the smokescreen of a virus?
Anubis64 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:24 PM
Dear Nebojsa, So what? Andropov would have made a first-class statesman (give or take his infatuation with technocracy). Brezhnev was not only a hero but a capable statesman whose era is remembered with nostalgia. Let us focus on the fact that Russia's responses to the blows coming hard and fast are rather passive and lacking any historical vision. It is not age but will that matters.
Anubis64 Anubis64 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:53 PM
Then, a young scoundrel was brought in by the shady Yakovlev character and destroyed the greatest country in the world in less than a decade. May the same happen to the insufferable Americans.
Krieger 1 hour ago 23 Dec, 2020 08:34 PM
I think this is mostly apples and oranges. In the USSR, the "old guard" were patriots who wanted to preserve their country. The "young reformers" were traitors who wanted to destroy their own country to benefit their Western masters and personally enrich themselves. In the USA, on the other hand, both the young and old politicians are totally corrupt and want to maintain the status quo, which is slowly destroying the country from within.
Mira Golub 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 10:17 AM
America is ruled by mobster clans, the puppets are indeed resemble walking dead. Russian imbecile liberal pro Western 2% 'opposition' though are getting their jollies by calling Putin who is 68 'grandpa'. Bunch of degenerates.
Marek Weglinski 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 08:25 AM
Maybe it's a telltale that the Soviet-like demise for the US is near. Hopefully the American empire will not come to a SUPERNOVA-like ending (inflicting great damage to the rest of the world), before turning itself into a dwarf.
Ohhho Marek Weglinski 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 11:37 AM
The Evil empire will implode and take the rest of the world down with it, that's the problem! USSR had it's own economic system pretty much isolated from the Western world, and when that system collapsed the effect was felt all around the satellite countries for years!

[Dec 24, 2020] The Revenge Agenda by Philip Giraldi

Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is ..."
"... https://councilforthenationalinterest.org ..."
"... address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
Dec 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

The upcoming year should be interesting. The Establishment "Deep State" has won a major victory in the United States with the election of Joe Biden as president. What remains to be seen is whether or not there will be significant bloodletting as a consequence, revenge for the presumed misdeeds that constituted the core legacy of four years of Donald J. Trump as chief executive. Many in the Democratic Party harbor deep resentments that go back to the election of 2016, which spawned the myth that foreign interference by the Russians was responsible for the upset victory by the GOP candidate. Even at this distance, few if any Democrats are willing to admit that Hillary Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate whose condescension towards whole categories of voters ultimately inspired many "undecideds" to vote against her.

Indeed, Trump came closer to repeating his improbable victory in 2020 than anyone would have predicted and the stench of possible widespread fraud continues to hang over the result. Donald Trump entered office with a pledge to "drain the swamp," something that he found more difficult to actually do rather than just talk about doing. The Democrats will surely now work hard to methodically eliminate all political appointees in the vast bureaucracy guilty of Trumpism.

That replacement of bureaucrats is referred to as the "spoils systems" and it is to be expected, but there is something more sinister in the works with leading Democrats and some journalists calling for heads to roll, metaphorically to be sure but with real impact on the lives of those who supported the losing side. The Washington Post 's resident Trump-hating Zionist Jennifer Rubin summed it up nicely in a tweet three days after the election, posting "Any R now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into 'polite' society. We have a list."

And Bill Clinton's former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been even more explicit, tweeting a demand to create a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission." The commission borrows the name and would be modeled on the organization set up in South Africa after the fall of the apartheid government and the establishment of majority black rule, an exercise in attempted democratization that has nevertheless failed to put an end to extremely high levels of corruption and communal violence in the country.

Reich's objective is not limited to punishing the Trump White House's top officials who may have promoted policies considered anathema by the incoming Democratic administration. He has also tweeted "When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump's lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe." The Reich proposal would potentially mean punishing thousands of otherwise innocent individuals who had little influence over what happened during the past four years. "Enabled" covers a lot of ground, and is prone to devolve into something like a witch hunt.

One Reich supporter wrote in defense of the proposal "As long as unresolved historic injustices continue to fester in the world, there will be a demand for truth commissions" and there have been numerous comments on social media sites like Facebook insisting that "something be done" about the "deplorables" who voted for and supported Trump. Interestingly, even though the comments constitute actual threats, Facebook has not deleted them, unlike the elimination of posts that run afoul of the censors by questioning the validity of the election or challenging conventional wisdom on COVID-19.

Another commenter on twitter agreed with Reich, though complaining "But it doesn't go far enough, clearly. Trump's assets and those of his voters should be seized by the state through legislation and distributed to those he's harmed as reparations. Surely that's the only way to heal our nation. Land of the free!" And finally, still another cheerleader enthused "Robert you're right. And after we win we'll come for you all we're pretty much over trying to share a country with you anyway. Four years ago I thought you were people with bad ideas. I was wrong: YOU'RE BAD PEOPLE."

To be sure, Trump invited much of the hostile response to what he represents when he held rallies where supporters called out Hillary Clinton with chants of "Lock her up!" So the anger is there on both sides and momentum is building not just to replace or ignore Trump's associates and his supporters, but to punish them for their alleged inability to comprehend the many benefits derived from Democratic Party rule. As no mechanism actually exists to enable the new regime to punish supporters of the previous administration, unless they have actually committed a crime, one suspects the process of purging the bureaucracy and voters rolls will pretty much be improvised while Biden and Harris get settled in.

Donald Trump also does not help either himself or the cause he represents. His insults and abusive language invite hostility, having his tweets turn allies into enemies and making friends of the "revolution" that he represents wish that he would just shut up. Current media reports suggesting that he might not vacate the White House on January 20 th as he continues to be convinced that he won invite a nasty response from the Democrats. Ex-president Barack Obama has warned , possibly in jest, that Trump might need to be removed forcibly by Navy SEALS.

And, of course, violence could beget violence. If denigration of Trump supporters followed by a real purge does take place it will impact on the tens of millions of voters who still believe President Trump should have won re-election but for fraud. They are ready for a fight, and not necessarily limited to the metaphoric. As I said in the beginning, it could be an interesting year here in America.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]

Verymuchalive , says: December 22, 2020 at 11:03 am GMT • 16.3 hours ago

To be sure, Trump invited much of the hostile response to what he represents when he held rallies where supporters called out Hillary Clinton with chants of "Lock her up!"

So it's Trump's fault – not for anything he has said or done, but for what his supporters have said.

Indeed, Trump came closer to repeating his improbable victory in 2020 than anyone would have predicted and the stench of possible widespread fraud continues to hang over the result.

I could continue, but won't. Even when criticising the Democrats, his hostility towards Trump and his supporters never lets up. Any dispassionate observer can see that widespread electoral fraud was actual and likely swung the election Biden's way. Even honest leftist observers agree. Giraldi should have mentioned this, but didn't. Having perpetrated it once, the Democrats will do it again. The likelihood is that there will be no fair elections in future. So the Democrats will have the time to enforce their revenge agenda in perpetuity. Again Giraldi fails to mention this.

Sick of Orcs , says: December 22, 2020 at 11:04 am GMT • 16.3 hours ago

Donald Trump entered office with a pledge to "drain the swamp," something that he found more difficult to actually do rather than just talk about doing.

Especially when Trump himself hired nothing but nevertrumpers and swamp rats and listened to his know-nothing rat-in-law.

(Didn't this guy have a tv show for 13 years about hiring the best people?)

It's secession time, has been for years before Orange Golfbag. Don't worry about whether the federal mafia approves of the parting of ways, their new scamulus includes $300,000,000 to bring in more rapefugees aka your replacements.

[Dec 24, 2020] Reckless Threats and 'Restoring Deterrence' by DANIEL LARISON

Dec 24, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

DECEMBER 23, 2020

When hawks in the U.S. and Israeli governments talk about "restoring deterrence," what they really mean is that they want to commit acts of aggression but present them as defensive actions.

The president made more reckless threats against Iran today:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1341862955604975617&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theamericanconservative.com%2Fstate-of-the-union%2Freckless-threats-and-restoring-deterrence%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

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When the president illegally ordered the assassination of Soleimani in January of this year, administration officials eventually lined up behind the excuse that it was intended to "restore deterrence" against rocket attacks from Iranian-backed Iraqi militias. Even though these attacks have continued throughout the year much the same as before, we are back to the same old tired issuing of threats of military action in response to attacks that would not be happening if it were not for the president's own reckless actions. As the anniversary of the Soleimani assassination approaches, we are once again drifting towards an avoidable and unnecessary conflict.

Were it not for the president's "maximum pressure" campaign, U.S. forces in Iraq would face far fewer risks than they do today, and conflict between our governments would be much less likely. Had it not been for the president's decision to order the illegal and provocative attack that killed Soleimani and an Iraqi militia leader, tensions between the U.S. and Iran would not be as great as they are now. Trump's approach to Iran for the last two and a half years has been to pick a fight and then blame the other side for responding to his provocations. Far from deterring attacks from Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian military itself, the Trump administration has been provoking and inviting them. It is mostly a matter of luck that this has not yet triggered a larger conflict.

For its part, the Israeli government is also raising the temperature by sending one of its submarines through the Suez Canal to signal its readiness to respond to retaliation for its murder of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh:

An Israeli submarine has embarked for the Persian Gulf in possible preparation for any Iranian retaliation over the November assassination of a senior Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Israeli media reported.

The above-water, fully visible Israeli deployment into the Suez Canal and then the Red Sea was a rare move that was reportedly carried out with the acquiescence of Egyptian authorities and was seen as a clear warning to Iran that Israel was preparing for battle as hostilities continue to rise.

The deployment of the Israeli submarine is described as a "message of deterrence," but it is in fact the result of an ill-advised and illegal attack inside Iran. Had the Israelis not carried out a terrorist attack on Iranian soil, they would not now be worried about possible retaliation. This gets at a basic problem with the hawkish framing of our news coverage related to Iran and the constant misuse of the concept of deterrence by both the U.S. and Israeli governments.

First Panel, TAC's 7th Annual Foreign Policy Conference What Does 2020 Mean For Foreign Policy 00:07 / 01:00 3

When hawks in the U.S. and Israeli governments talk about "restoring deterrence," what they really mean is that they want to commit acts of aggression but present them as defensive actions. Blowing up Soleimani had nothing to do with deterring future attacks, and we can see that it has failed to deter them. Murdering Fakhrizadeh definitely had nothing to do with deterring anything. It was just a gratuitous killing that the Israel government did because they could. Now both the U.S. and Israel find that they have to make additional shows of force and issue new threats to ward off possible responses to these earlier aggressive acts. Instead of making them more secure, these aggressive acts have exposed Americans and Israelis to greater risks than they faced earlier on.

In light of reports that the president has asked for military options for attacking Iran and reports that Israel has been preparing for such an eventuality, we have to take the possibility of a U.S. or joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran seriously. There is absolutely no justification for such an attack, but that is no guarantee that it won't happen. It needs to be emphasized that none of this would be happening if the Trump administration had not taken the reckless and destructive step of reneging on the JCPOA and launching an economic war on Iran. Whatever happens in the next few weeks can be traced back to that, and the president is responsible for the consequences.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC , where he also keeps a solo blog . He has been published in the New York Times Book Review , Dallas Morning News , World Politics Review , Politico Magazine , Orthodox Life , Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week . He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter .

[Dec 24, 2020] 'Forward Defense' Has Nothing to Do with Defense -

Dec 24, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

he Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) recently released a lengthy report that predictably advocates for an aggressive and activist foreign policy that they euphemistically dub "defending forward." Like the British imperial "Forward Policy" that it calls to mind and resembles, so-called forward defense seeks to justify interventionism and open-ended warfare in far-flung parts of the world in the name of national security. The essays included in the report warn against "retrenchment" and repeatedly attack advocates of foreign policy restraint in dishonest and misleading ways, and they sound all the usual alarms about the supposed perils of extricating the U.S. from its many unnecessary foreign wars. These arguments are neither new nor particularly interesting, but they can't be ignored because of the significant influence that their purveyors continue to have in Washington and in the Republican Party in particular. If we are going to build a foreign policy of peace and restraint, these arguments have to be answered and discredited.

Panetta sets the tone for the document right away: "More than ever, Americans must go abroad to remain secure at home." This is the interventionists' axiom from which everything else follows, so it is important to start by explaining how wrong it is. To the extent that American security is threatened by other states and terrorist organizations, a forward policy invites more attacks and challenges and exacerbates the dangers it is supposedly combating. Our militarized engagement in many parts of the world is simultaneously destabilizing and provocative, and it makes us far more enemies than we would have otherwise.

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Forward deployments make U.S. troops targets, and those deployments then become ends in themselves. Putting these troops in harm's way for decades isn't making Americans any safer, and the "war on terror" has led to the metastasization of terrorist groups on two continents. The forward "defense" that interventionists believe is so critical to our security is at best a redundant waste of lives and resources. At worst, it is sowing seeds for future attacks on Americans and our allies, and it is doing so at enormous expense. Sending troops to the other side of the world is not necessary to keep Americans safe at home. "Defending forward" has nothing to do with defense and everything to do with power projection and domination.

H.R. McMaster joined FDD shortly after being fired from his position as National Security Advisor, and in the last two years he has been attacking restrainers and promoting aggressive policies in a number of prominent articles. His contribution to the FDD report is a previously published Foreign Affairs article called "The Retrenchment Syndrome." As the title suggests, McMaster sees advocates of restraint (or "retrenchment hard-liners" as he calls them) as suffering from a dangerous malady, and his only prescription is more foreign entanglements. I have previously answered McMaster's arguments here , but I will add a few more remarks. McMaster wrongly accuses restrainers of "national narcissism," but he demonstrates no ability to understand the views of his domestic opponents or the thinking of the foreign adversaries whose motives he claims to know. He supports U.S. dominance and power projection in the world, and so he assumes that other major powers must have the same goal, but this is just an alibi for pursuing the aggressive policies that he already favors.

Misunderstanding and misrepresenting the views of restrainers is a running theme in the report. Mark Dubowitz and Jonathan Schanzer are some of the worst offenders. They can't stop themselves from dubbing Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer "realists-cum-isolationists," which is as insulting to them as it is wildly inaccurate. Both of those scholars favor a strategy involving offshore balancing, and Mearsheimer is rather hawkish on China, but they want to reduce the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East and that is unacceptable to FDD. That is why they are branded with the i-word. Dubowitz and Schanzer also mock the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft for supposedly not understanding the foreign policy views of John Quincy Adams, but this just shows how eager they are to distort the views of non-interventionists both past and present. Their contribution is long on accusations of isolationism without offering any evidence, but then this is the point of the isolationist smear. It is never meant to describe, only to distort and vilify, and they resort to this because they are afraid to engage restrainer arguments on the merits.

Like some melodramatic villain from a superhero movie, they declare, "History, unfortunately, is a forever war." One gets the impression that they do not really regard this as misfortune, but rather see it as an opportunity. Yes, history is full of conflicts, but there is far more to our history than warfare, and one thing we should have learned from all those conflicts is how pointless and unnecessary most of them have been. At the very least, we should know to steer clear from aggressive policies that make such conflicts more likely. The Trump administration Iran policy that FDD has championed for years has done just that, and that is one of many reasons why we should regard their recommendations with suspicion.

First Panel, TAC's 7th Annual Foreign Policy Conference What Does 2020 Mean For Foreign Policy 00:06 / 01:00 1

Their account of the recent past is no better than their tedious comparisons with the 1930s. They write, "Al-Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks despite America's best efforts to steer clear of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda was and is based." This is mind-boggling revisionism, conveniently ignoring that the attacks were carried out in large part in response to the continued U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia and U.S. support for the despotic government there. Dubowitz and Schanzer point to the clearest example of disastrous blowback in modern U.S. history and then have the gall to say that this example supports their argument for keeping U.S. forces permanently deployed in other countries where they aren't wanted.

Not surprisingly, the consistent misreadings and distortions of history are some of the biggest flaws in the report. Bradley Bowman and Clifford May rattle off historical "facts" about wars throughout history that elide far more than they reveal. For instance, they speak of "Persian-Roman wars" running from the battle of Carrhae between the Roman Republic and the Parthians to the battle of Nineveh in the seventh century between the Byzantines and the Sasanians. That lumps together many different regimes and dynasties in very crude fashion, and it also misleads the reader into thinking that conflict was incessant when it was not.

While there were many wars between these two powers over the course of seven hundred years, these two states were at peace with each other for the vast majority of that period of time. Indeed, for most of Byzantine history, the emperors in Constantinople were wary of engaging in open warfare and sought to avoid it as much as possible because of the cost and the potential for disaster. This strategy did not invite aggression, and it succeeded in allowing the empire to husband its resources and preserve its strength. One could say that the Byzantines usually practiced responsible statecraft. That is one reason why their empire managed to endure for as long as it did.

Treating war as being essentially unavoidable, Bowman and May belittle restrainers for "stunning ignorance" in calling to end U.S. involvement in its foreign wars today. This amounts to little more than mindless fatalism in accepting that the U.S. is bound to be at war much more often than not. But constant warfare and the strategy that undergirds it are both choices. Vietnam was completely avoidable for the U.S. and also entirely unnecessary for U.S. security, just as our current wars are all wars of choice. Conflict may be an ineradicable part of the human condition, but it doesn't follow that any particular conflict has to happen or that we are fated to participate in it when it does.

There may always be some conflict somewhere (though there has been much less of it in recent decades), but nowhere is it written that a major power has to be at war all of the time, much less in multiple places around the globe. The empires that have engaged in constant warfare have tended to suffer bankruptcy and ruin. Many of these states were governed by men who also believed that peripheral interests were worth fighting over, and they ultimately exhausted themselves in fruitless conflicts.

The U.S. is unusual among great powers in history in that it is relatively separated from its rivals by great distance, but it still chooses to entangle itself in the affairs of distant regions instead of taking advantage of our favorable geography. While modern technologies have reduced the importance of that advantage, they have not eliminated it. America is, in fact, extraordinarily secure from foreign threats, and so it becomes necessary to inflate these threats and overstate the capabilities of other states to make the case for a "forward" policy.

Writing for The New Republic , Jacob Silverman sums up the report very well:

That is the purpose of "Defending Forward": to contort the English language to convince a war-weary public that there is no alternative but to continue the status quo of "forward defense-in-depth military deployments," as Leon Panetta, the former CIA director and defense secretary, euphemistically calls them. But the FDD publication succeeds only in reminding us that, after 19 years of a catastrophic, immoral, illegal war on terror, America's hawks are simply out of answers.

The U.S. has been following something like a "forward defense" strategy for decades. The results have been almost twenty years of expensive failed wars that have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The U.S. desperately needs to change its strategy and practice restraint in its use of force and the deployment of its armed forces. America does not need to police and dominate the world to be secure, and the sooner we all realize that the better it will be for our country and for the rest of the world. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC , where he also keeps a solo blog . He has been published in the New York Times Book Review , Dallas Morning News , World Politics Review , Politico Magazine , Orthodox Life , Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week . He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter .

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[Dec 23, 2020] China Russia listed as main rivals in new US maritime strategy aimed at shaping 'balance of power for the rest of the centu

Dec 23, 2020 | www.rt.com

Conversation 244 Comments Please read the RT Community Commenting Rules here Log In


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Ghanima223 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 03:27 AM

All power is in the end economic. The US can build 500 warships, the Chinese can easily match that, but unlike the US, they also can pay for it.
Tor Gjesdal Ghanima223 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 06:14 PM
No, hehe, all Powers are not all in the end economic. We can be good at economicing life some of us, but Most have no clue about all the real Powers.
KlausR922 Ghanima223 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 09:43 AM
Russia and China do not have enough fleet to populate the oceans around the US but have more immigrants in the US. Instead, attracting foreign funds or investors (even through mixed marriages) destabilizes their own economies. This suggests, however, that the 'balance of power' remains to the advantage of the US. In fact, if we are all capitalists, what is the significance of this balance?
Jewel Gyn 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 03:21 AM
"the two most significant threats to this era of global peace and prosperity," Look at yourself in the mirror. US is without doubt the biggest threat to global peace and prosperity. The only reason countries are silent is because of your military and economic might. But it won't be for long...
GorillaBalls Jewel Gyn 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 08:59 AM
USA is building useless junk more fitting to the times of Neanderthals and definitely obsolete in the 21st century with borrowed money. Nothing mighty about that.
GorillaBalls Jewel Gyn 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 08:54 AM
USA no longer has a mighty economy. Has the world's biggest debt mountain instead along with a permanently concussed military by Iran!! Clown.
Iwanasay 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 04:07 AM
This report says it all, the US objective is to dominate the world, not be a part of it, it also proves that the US is military dictatorship where politicians are only elected to channel huge sums of taxpayers money into the Pentagon and military industry purse. Hurry up China and Russia, form a military alliance and bankrupt the US as it wastes more & more against non-existent enemies
Fjack1415 Iwanasay 1 day ago 21 Dec, 2020 01:25 PM
Yeah, the Star Wars strategy supposedly used by Pres. Reagan to bankrupt Soviet Russia, now can be used against the US. The US needs to spend about ten times what Russia or China spend in order to achieve the same result (if that) and what is more, it is borrowed money.
GorillaBalls Iwanasay 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 09:27 AM
Joetex America is obsolete already.
Dachaguy 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 03:13 AM
Balance? The US has no interest at all in balance. The US focus is domination. It's what the Project for a New American Century was all about.
liana sammartino Dachaguy 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 09:05 AM
and that domination in this century will evaporate....
Isiah Steele Dachaguy 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 08:00 AM
Except, China and Russia and the rest of the real free world has their own plans for the future without the US!!!!
shadow1369 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 05:55 AM
Us regime calls its own relentless aggression 'assertive policy', and accuses anybody who resists their global tyranny a 'threat to peace'. Nothing new.
GorillaBalls 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 05:37 AM
USA has been saying the same thing and has been spending the most money on its military but the reality is it has never won a war with a major military beyond own shore.
Joetex GorillaBalls 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 07:04 AM
All wars the US has fought have been beyond its own Shores including WWI and WWII, which by the way were victorious.
GreenPizza804 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 05:03 AM
"Our actions in this decade will shape the maritime balance of power for the rest of this century." they think Russia and China don't have any plan to this ?
Joetex GreenPizza804 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 06:56 AM
It's to late Trumps Trillion Dollar Plan in 2018 went to Mostly Navy and Space Force. And Already is more Advanced than China and Russia Combined.
shadow1369 GreenPizza804 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 06:02 AM
In the Project for a New American Century, the US version of Mein Kampf, the warmongers preached 'full spectrum dominance'. They remind me of the last days of the nazis, deploying non existant armies to fend off the fast approaching allied powers. Any pretence of US global hegemony was destroyed in Syria.
wawya 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 05:36 AM
The USA is the greatest threat to all countries yet masquerades as a friend to many. Make no mistake, it is an ally only when it suits. China has asperations on having a blue water navy but is a fair way off. Russia, apart from its SSN & SSBN boats is very much a green water navy. The Americans are kidding themselves.
Mickey Mic 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 05:30 AM
Let's not forget, the central banks can't operate with the current market status, hence, the delay in Nancy's relief tactics. War is imminent for the survival of banking cartels, Trump denied the banks wars, so cheat Trump out of office was is the highest demand for the Federal Reserve banking system. They needed a compromised President to bend to their will, Joe was picked for the Job due to his corrupt career and dysfunctional mentality . Bernie was cheated (No charges) Trump has been surrounded by disloyal shape-shifting swamp monsters, his proof of voter Fraud is meaningless in the land of oil & vinegar. Biden was illegally installed to launch wars & secure the final stages of the Wuhan virus (Forced Vaccinations). Let's face it, Biden's choices for Cabinet positions line directly with Hillary Clinton's friends, he is not in charge to make any choices on his own. He is supplying an empty shell to fill the oval office for the shadow Gov. The majority of US leadership thinks they'll be safe inside Cheyenne Mountain to protect their own sacred seed from destruction. PS: From the counterfeit Supreme Court, to the Masonic lodges better known as the "House of senators & Congressman"...Lurks a perpetual centrifugal motion to consume their greedy desolation.
Galaxy31 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 03:32 AM
As US looses global dominance, the more desperate it becomes. This time though, it doesn't look it will work, but unfortunately because of this desperation, it may end up tragically for all of us human beings.
GorillaBalls Galaxy31 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 05:27 AM
"The US Navy will adopt a more 'assertive' approach to China and Russia, according to the country's new maritime strategy, which says that actions taken in the next decade will determine power dynamics for the rest of the century." Making big talk about the future with 20th century and OBSOLETE aircraft carries that can be quickly sent to the bottom with a few comparatively much cheaper hypersonic carrier killer missiles those tubs are DEFENCELESS against.
straightasarrow69 Galaxy31 18 December, 2020 18 Dec, 2020 05:15 AM
America spends more on their military than the next 10 nations combined. More engineers graduate in China every year than exist in the whole of America. America believes it needs to manufacture enemies to prop up its main export, death and destruction. This further explains why some American politicians have stated, "if an Israel did not exist we would have to invent one." Birds of a feather. Time to diversify Americas economy. China, Russia, and America are brothers.

[Dec 22, 2020] The transition of the yoke of the yoke of Russophobic activism in EU

Dec 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Virgile , Dec 21 2020 20:31 utc | 8

The UK counts on the Commonwealth countries and the usa to become its preferred partners.
Its visceral hatred for Russia will cease to influence the EU and the EU will do what it should have done years ago, partner with Russian and become a much more powerful block. Bye sick UK. Welcome healthy Russia...

BillB , Dec 21 2020 21:38 utc | 14

Virgile @8

The yoke of Russophobic activism will presumably be taken up by Poland, the Baltic states, and whoever else can be recruited into it.

[Dec 22, 2020] Snow job! SolarWinds Russian hack story proves the CIA writes US foreign policy, not the White House by Robert Bridge

Notable quotes:
"... the media – playing judge, jury and executioner – has leveled blame on the usual suspect. ..."
"... Did anyone actually believe that Russia would escape a major US election season without a ceremonial tarring and feathering by the media? It's almost as though frantic journalists, unable to sell the 'Trump Beats Biden with Kremlin Collusion' narrative, have dreamt up this latest work of pulp fiction to keep the ball of 'Russian villainy' bouncing into the next US administration. Heaven forbid if the media just sat by and let protracted peace break out between Washington and Moscow. ..."
"... By now it would seem that the mainstream media would use a bit more discretion before screaming 'Russia!' inside of a crowded planet every time a US computer system is hacked. After all, Russia is certainly not the only country in the world with a plethora of adventure-seeking hackers sitting around bored in their underwear, nor is it the only country in the world that may be tempted – theoretically speaking – to sneak a peek into Uncle Sam's software and, at the risk of sounding vulgar, hardware. ..."
"... Just ask Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell, who allowed himself to be lured into a honey trap by a Chinese Communist spy named – I kid you not – Fang Fang. Aside from making James Bond thrillers essential reading for all politicians, the Democrats may wish to inquire how a member of the House INTELLIGENCE Committee fell for such a scheme. More to the point, however, Swalwell was one of those deranged Democrats screaming 'Russian collusion!' at the height of the Mueller investigation, another waste of taxpayer funds that turned up zero evidence of collusion between Trump and the Kremlin ..."
Dec 21, 2020 | www.rt.com

As incoming nominees of a future Biden administration have stopped short in naming a culprit in the SolarWinds hack, the media – playing judge, jury and executioner – has leveled blame on the usual suspect.

Did anyone actually believe that Russia would escape a major US election season without a ceremonial tarring and feathering by the media? It's almost as though frantic journalists, unable to sell the 'Trump Beats Biden with Kremlin Collusion' narrative, have dreamt up this latest work of pulp fiction to keep the ball of 'Russian villainy' bouncing into the next US administration. Heaven forbid if the media just sat by and let protracted peace break out between Washington and Moscow.

Indeed, when SolarWinds – a software platform that counts among its clients the Pentagon, State Department, Justice Department, and the National Security Agency – suffered an alleged hack, the Washington Post jumped on the evil Russia connection faster than Ian Fleming.

SolarWinds hack: US Treasury's unclassified systems breached as Washington points finger at Russia and China

"The Russian hackers breached email systems," wrote Ellen Nakashima and Craig Timberg in the Post without offering a stitch of evidence (Timberg, readers may recall, is the journalist who relied on a shady outfit known as PropOrNot to report , wrongly, that some 200 news outlets were peddling Russian-inspired "fake news."). Quoting those always handy "people who spoke on the condition of anonymity," the tag team claimed that the "scale of the Russian espionage operation appears to be large."

Ironically, the most reliable real-life entity that Nakashima and Timberg quoted in their story comes by way of the Russian Embassy in Washington, which called the reports of Russian hacking "baseless."

But never mind. If the Bezos-empire publication says Russia is the guilty party then who are we mere mortals to ask any questions. So now we're off again to the 'blame Russia' races.

At this point, it must be asked: who is more responsible for writing US foreign policy, the mainstream media, with their never-ending supply of 'anonymous sources' to substantiate their fantastic assertions, or the US government? That question seems reasonable after listening to interviews with freshly appointed members of the Biden administration, who apparently never got the memo about 'Russian baddies'.

Jennifer Granholm, for example, the energy secretary nominee, committed the cardinal sin of not recognizing the 'Russian bogeyman' in an interview with ABC talking head, George Stephanopolous.

"We don't know fully what happened, the extent of it, and, quite frankly, we don't know fully for sure who did it," Granholm said , leaving Stephanopoulos, deprived of clickable Russophobic sound bites, looking dejected and forlorn.

Perhaps Stephanopoulos was anticipating that Granholm would simply regurgitate media talking points about Russia's unproven hack, like the absolutely reckless one put out by Reuters.

Reporting on the SolarWinds hack, the Reuters article screamed 'Russia' from the opening gates. Yet not a single living person is quoted from the incoming Biden administration to take responsibility for a claim that has real-life consequences, especially when some members of Congress are calling the electronic breach an "act of war."

"President-elect Joe Biden's team will consider several options to punish Russia for its suspected role in the unprecedented hacking of US government agencies and companies once he takes office, from new financial sanctions to cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, people familiar with the matter say."

Here we go again: Washington Post claims RUSSIA behind SolarWinds hack, citing same 'sources' as it did for Russiagate

The very same deplorable tactic was used in an interview 'Face the Nation' conducted with Ron Klain, the incoming White House chief of staff.

When pressed by the interviewer Margaret Brennan if there was "any doubt that Russia was behind [the hack]," Klain provided an answer that Brennan was clearly not satisfied with. In other words, Klain never mentioned the perennial villain Russia as a possible suspect.

"We should be hearing a clear and unambiguous allocation of responsibility from the White House, from the intelligence community," he said. "They're the ones who should be making those messages and delivering the ascertainment of responsibility."

Brennan was having none of it, however, and pushed on with the 'blame Russia' narrative.

"Well, the president-elect was pretty clear when he spoke to my colleague Stephen Colbert on CBS earlier this week, and he was asked about Russia and he said they'll be held accountable," Brennan remarked, desperate to hear Klain pronounce the name. "He said they'll face financial repercussions for what they did. Is that no longer the case? He no longer believes it's Russia?"

At this point, some very convenient technical problems helped to cut the pathetic excuse for journalism off the air.

By now it would seem that the mainstream media would use a bit more discretion before screaming 'Russia!' inside of a crowded planet every time a US computer system is hacked. After all, Russia is certainly not the only country in the world with a plethora of adventure-seeking hackers sitting around bored in their underwear, nor is it the only country in the world that may be tempted – theoretically speaking – to sneak a peek into Uncle Sam's software and, at the risk of sounding vulgar, hardware.

Just ask Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell, who allowed himself to be lured into a honey trap by a Chinese Communist spy named – I kid you not – Fang Fang. Aside from making James Bond thrillers essential reading for all politicians, the Democrats may wish to inquire how a member of the House INTELLIGENCE Committee fell for such a scheme. More to the point, however, Swalwell was one of those deranged Democrats screaming 'Russian collusion!' at the height of the Mueller investigation, another waste of taxpayer funds that turned up zero evidence of collusion between Trump and the Kremlin.

Dream of alliance from Lisbon to Vladivostok dies: German efforts to create a Europe without Russia forged a Europe against Russia

In conclusion, it is worth noting that the timing of the purported attack on SolarWinds, coming as it does just weeks before Inauguration Day when Joe Biden is expected to be sworn in as the 46th POTUS, is extremely suspicious in of itself. Not only is there a power struggle going on behind the scenes for the White House, with the Trump administration claiming the election was marred by massive fraud, but Joe Biden's own son Hunter has been accused of influence-peddling in places like Ukraine and China.

The Biden family, naturally, has rejected the claims, while the media has practically buried the story. Meanwhile, Russia, much like in 2016 when it was accused of hacking Hillary Clinton's emails, is being dragged into another American political drama, at the most crucial time, without rhyme or reason. At least when it comes to Russia the media can take credit for being very predictable, albeit absolutely reckless and dangerous in its tactics. Would it kill them to take five minutes off poking the Russian bear?

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of 'Midnight in the American Empire,'


Bill Spence 10 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 04:28 PM

We are dealing with compound fraud but it is not clear how anyone gains an advantage when the propaganda against Russia has saturated the public mind.
Fenianfromcork Bill Spence 5 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 08:45 PM
Simple magicians conjuring trick. Look here while Ido something else here.
DexterMont Bill Spence 9 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 05:19 PM
It's just self delusion in the American political class. No one else is paying any attention to it.
It's me 9 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 04:54 PM
Same old Same old, we don't have to prove Russians hacked the Election, because it was hacked. It's up to Russia to prove they didn't hack the Election.
VaimacaPiru 7 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 06:55 PM
Mr Bridge! Your title should be more accurate! 'The Transnational Corporate Class that own the media sets US foreign policy' Thank you!
Bill Spence VaimacaPiru 7 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 07:03 PM
Right now Donald Trump and Pompeo are setting the foreign policy not the transnational corporations who have no head. Generally the CIA and State Department set foreign policy not those corporations. The CIA has a different point of view, the national security point of view. Many of those corporations are happy trading with China. They have reached a contradictory position.
IslandT 2 hours ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:04 AM
According to the Trump administration, Russia is one of the actor behinds the dominion incident which helps Biden won the election, so if Trump continue in power, he might sanction Russia. And now we have this hacking incident under Trump administration, if you say this is a hoax and it comes from Biden camp, then this will not make sense at all because Biden has already won the election so he does not needs to use any hoax to down Trump anymore. If Russia is indeed hacking then those previous anti-Trump FBI and CIA directors should have used this as an issue to attack Russia and Trump before the election instead of creating the Afghan hoax which has no prove at all (did USA has proved on the hack? Nobody knows)! The present director for both FBI and CIA are all Trump men and thus I don't think Biden team is behinds this hacking incident hoax. I read the article and know that Trump team (especially Mike Pompeo) calls for maximum punishment on Russia, Russia needs to prepare and to avoid the worst case scenario before Biden takes power. I think there is no sense at all for deep state to hate Russia so much because all they want is profit, it is time for Russia to have a friendly chat with all those parties that involve in Russia-Hate campaign. You can't get blamed by everyone forever, this need to stop!
Jeffrey Perkins 9 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 05:00 PM
pentagon propoganda money can control the media in many ways
Atilla863 1 hour ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:50 AM
Just wonder why the EU politicians haven't joined the US - chorus yet condemning the Russians.
EthanCarterIII 1 hour ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:49 AM
Maybe they should put more time and effort into increasing their security instead of blaming people? It seems every other month there's another story about hackers getting into the systems, and frankly they need to start looking in the mirror. Oh, but then Hillary wants to be Secretary of Defense and left a private top secret server in her bathroom hacked by anybody and everybody, so maybe it isn't so much "hacking" as incompetence?
dangood013 30 minutes ago 22 Dec, 2020 02:05 AM
Nakashima and other do not make stuff up. They just regurgitate what their National Security sources tell them upon penalty of " losing access " to their precious sources.
Fuzzerbear 2 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 11:40 PM
oh no - not the Russians again. They are really bad bad bad - just as bad as Iran, Iraq, Syria . . . . . . .. Such a thorn for the USA, Israel, the 5 lies, etc. How boring will the reality be without all the fake news.
liarof1776 3 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 11:10 PM
america is having ashkenazic genetic problem: paranoia
Atilla863 1 hour ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:36 AM
Don't worry Russia is ALWAYS the convenient scapegoat. What a shame American politicians and their supporters have turned out to be!, life is meaningless without Russian phantoms. Sad
Solecismcles 7 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 06:41 PM
Cowhorts: Warshington & most media; though more overtly when Dem's have Executive influence. However, so much scum is entrenched throughout the bureaucracies that their evil lurks and preys regardless of which Party controls WH.

[Dec 22, 2020] Neoliberal MSM di not have enough of Russiagate, they again are playing judge, jury and executioner by Robert Bridge

Notable quotes:
"... the media – playing judge, jury and executioner – has leveled blame on the usual suspect. ..."
"... Did anyone actually believe that Russia would escape a major US election season without a ceremonial tarring and feathering by the media? It's almost as though frantic journalists, unable to sell the 'Trump Beats Biden with Kremlin Collusion' narrative, have dreamt up this latest work of pulp fiction to keep the ball of 'Russian villainy' bouncing into the next US administration. Heaven forbid if the media just sat by and let protracted peace break out between Washington and Moscow. ..."
Dec 21, 2020 | www.rt.com

As incoming nominees of a future Biden administration have stopped short in naming a culprit in the SolarWinds hack, the media – playing judge, jury and executioner – has leveled blame on the usual suspect.

Did anyone actually believe that Russia would escape a major US election season without a ceremonial tarring and feathering by the media? It's almost as though frantic journalists, unable to sell the 'Trump Beats Biden with Kremlin Collusion' narrative, have dreamt up this latest work of pulp fiction to keep the ball of 'Russian villainy' bouncing into the next US administration. Heaven forbid if the media just sat by and let protracted peace break out between Washington and Moscow.

[Dec 22, 2020] Those Russkies really kick butt. They are everywhere these days. The Onion puts out less ridiculous stories than the US "intelligence" agencies.

Dec 22, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

OlderOldPhart 9 hours ago

The only information taken that rattles US.gov is how corrupt everyone is. The fear is having that become irrefutably public,

flyonmywall 9 hours ago

Those Russkies really kick butt. They are everywhere these days.

Unknown User 8 hours ago

The Onion puts out less ridiculous stories than the US "intelligence" agencies.

Dzerzhhinsky 6 hours ago

The Chinese are in the dark because they won't buy Australian coal, the Russian superhackers cracked the uncrackable Tradewinds123 password, and Iran is doing something ?

It's all a diversion, don't look at me look over there.

The intensity of the disinformation is directly related to the upcoming US collapse.

yewtee 2 hours ago

Will there be civil war ?

Lee Bertin 56 minutes ago

Have you not noticed that it has been going on for four years

BGen. Jack Ripper 9 hours ago

No enemy is more terrifying than the one in our midst.

Krinkle Sach 8 hours ago

🇮🇱💩🇮🇱💩🇮🇱

Whiteman_Sachs 9 hours ago

There is another headquarters in VA, specifically Langley that's more likely the intruder. Imagine this....The penetration of this intrusion is so vast and widespread. Access to hundreds of companies, contractors, military, ect. I doubt the a foreign entity could get so far inside. Imagine if our new leader ship at the Def Dept decided to shut the backdoor. Cutoff access to the bad actors a CIA. They've already closed off operational assistance to the CIA. The response has been so predicable....Russia Russia blah blah. I think many things are going on behind the scene. I think Trump is kneecapping his rivals on what could be the way out.

thezone 9 hours ago

PLEASE remember MIT Romney and all the swamp elite decried Trump for firing Chris Krebs.

Mr. 'there's never been a more secure' election.

Now we hear that Russia has owned government systems for a full year right under his nose.

jwoop66 8 hours ago

I just spent two hours watching this. Krebs is in it talking about all the bad actors out there trying to subvert our elections, and that its the first thing he thinks of in the morning, and the last thing he thinks of before he goes to bed.

yes, and then he says "perfect election" within days. f'ing frauds.

https://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Weapon-David-Sanger/dp/B08L7FKH6M/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2LMHJNQR5O468&dchild=1&keywords=the+perfect+weapon+2020&qid=1608608846&s=instant-video&sprefix=the+perfect+weapon%2Cinstant-video%2C165&sr=1-1

MysterySheepdog 9 hours ago

That crap of an article brought me 2 or 3 minutes closer to death.

And hell doesn't want me, Satan has a restraining order.

DurdenRae 26 minutes ago

They don't really qualify for intelligence if they all they can come up with is that kind of malarkey...

aberfoyle_crumplehausen 7 hours ago

As an average dude, I consider my initial thoughts and reactions to things typical of most others. When I first heard of this latest 'Russian Hack' I instantly thought "so the transition is almost here and they launch their first psyop".

So I am obviously not alone in my intuition and this means the media is becoming laughably irrelevant to the common folk.

Babadook 7 hours ago

See what happens when you elect incompetent, inept fools to run your government, they only appoint incompetent, inept fools to run the country's military, FBI & intel services.

sp0rkovite 7 hours ago

Barr is a democrat now?

You_Cant_Quit_Me 8 hours ago

Has anyone considered the US was simultaneously attacked with a biological weapon known as Covid-19 and hacked around the same time frame? Maybe the US with its constant false allegations against Russia has forced Russia to align with China making the US the common enemy?

Russia was not behind the hack attack despite what we are being told. It is a false flag with someone trying to frame Russia.

Kreditanstalt 8 hours ago

The other wing of The Party has its own "CHINA! CHINA! CHINA! propaganda campaign too

JackOliver4 8 hours ago (Edited)

They hate Russia because Russia tells the TRUTH !

Everything Russia says is well thought out and makes sense !

Once the US got away with the FAKE moon landing BS - they were enabled - sad !

I caught a glimpse of a 'Who wants to be a millionaire' episode - question was 'How many people have walked on the MOON' ?

Apparently the answer is 12 !!

The brainwashing runs DEEP !!

RKKA 8 hours ago

It's not about who breaks the networks or who attacks Nord Stream 2. The fact is that today's situation is even more explosive than during the Cold War.

The NATO alliance already borders on Russia and all the lines that were previously "red" are not recognized by anyone, primarily by the West.

The situation, thanks to aggressive rhetoric and the movement of military units, has become much more dangerous than it was during the Cold War.
This is confirmed by the German Foreign Minister. Frank-Walter Steinmeier called the confrontation between the West and Russia much more dangerous than that which took place between NATO countries and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Five_Black_Eyes_Intel_Agency 8 hours ago (Edited)

"intelligence" agencies

LOL

This is yet more squirming by an empire that looks increasingly bloated and its own worst enemy. Good luck clowns, but you wouldn't know what to do with it.

Xena fobe 9 hours ago

Xiden doesn't know Russia exists. No, this is not being done to persuade Xiden.

Late onset ADHD 9 hours ago (Edited)

Without the 'right' enemy, a politician is a useless appendage.

transcendent_wannabe 5 minutes ago

This youtuber gives a pretty good insider view of what has occurred. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLhk_gqYaEg US TREASURY HACKED because of SOLARWINDS You have to watch all the way to the end to get the full picture.

Basically its our own good-ole-boy network of insiders stealing data to sell for money. Yeah, can you believe that our esteemed coke-addicted elite class would sell out their own country for cash? Heh, we always wanted full transparency in government, so now the data is exposed. I would expect the future to be sprinkled with embarrassing data revelations used to discredit various players. There has been too much secrecy in government anyways. Let the sun shine in on all those secrets.

Lee Bertin 52 minutes ago

This is just a distraction, just smoke and mirrors. Do not lose focus on the game that is played in front of your wide open eyes

Loanman26 1 hour ago

Dmitri Alperovitch.

Donde esta?

Theedrich 2 hours ago

From the article, " Pentagon, DHS, State Dept., 18,000 others possibly hacked by Russia, reports say ":

"While targets of the SolarWinds hack included the U.S. Treasury Department and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), there is no complete list of the government departments and agencies and U.S. companies compromised in the hack. Bloomberg reported U.S. government departments targeted included the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the State Department, the National Institute of Health (NIH) as well as some parts of the Department of Defense were targeted in the hack. The New York Times reported SolarWinds products are used throughout nearly all Fortune 500 companies, including the New York Times itself. The New York Times also reported SolarWinds is used by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which designs nuclear weapons, and by Boeing, a major U.S. defense contractor.

"Following the hack, the Verge reported SolarWinds deleted a list of high profile clients from its website, though an archived copy of the client page states 425 of the Fortune 500 companies use their products, as well as all branches of the U.S. military, the National Security Agency (NSA), and even the Office of the President of the United States. The company's software is also used by all of the top five U.S. accounting firms and hundreds of colleges and universities around the world. It is not immediately clear if these SolarWinds clients specifically used the affected products listed."

Since it now seems that the Dominion software used in the Nov. 3 presidential election was, contrary to law, connected to the internet, can we be sure that the election itself was unaffected?

As Hunter Biden would say: "Probably not."

apparently 5 hours ago

this is likely false, for the lack of specifics and associated journalist hot air.

amanfromMars 6 hours ago

Muddying the waters or clearing the air and the decks? With so many crazy actors dependent upon the continued existence of mad fields, one does have to expand one's horizons and include the full list of players in such great games. So ..... in praise of such a realisation and sensible development ......

amanfromMars 1 Mon 21 Dec 17:54 [2012211754] ........ being fair and inclusive on https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/12/21/solarwinds_sunburst_evolve/#c_4167885

Re: Pot and Kettle (again)........

Quote: "From the quality of the threat design, the range of techniques used, and the nature of its victims, this was a nation state at work and in MO and capabilities most likely Russia."
*
Rewrite required: "From the quality of the threat design, the range of techniques used, and the nature of its victims, this was a nation state at work. It could have been the NSA, GCHQ, the Russians or the Chinese. In MO most likely the NSA." ....... Anonymous Coward

You'll upset Israel if you leave them out of the picture, AC. And they'd love you to think they are capable of such a show of remote force even as they deny it straight to your face. They've built a tiny disparate nation upon such foundations. [More folk live in London than in Israel. That's how small it is]

The thing is, if it is none of the above and no nation state, is it something of an alien attack you didn't see coming, and that makes a lot of other vital things extremely vulnerable to similar unexpected events which can effortlessly deliver major catastrophic crises ....... flash market stock crashes.

It can be, and most probably more likely certainly is, given the fact there is no concrete evidence available to pin on a suspect and scapegoats, a wholly new APT Adept ACTive genre of disruptive mischief and creative destruction at ITs Work, Rest and Play.

APT.... Advanced Persistent Threat/Treat

ACT..... Advanced Cyber Threat/Treat

[Dec 22, 2020] Navalny Novichok BS keeps getting stupider and stupider

Notable quotes:
"... Didn't the Germans say they found the Novichok on Navalny's water bottle? Now Russians trolling Navalny said they put it in his panties. How did the Novichok get from Navalny's panties to his water bottle? ..."
"... Thanks guys, this Navalny Novichok BS keeps getting stupider and stupider. First of all, an FSB agent is so stupid as to answer the phone from someone he doesn't know and has never heard of and spill the beans about the whole plot. I'm sure that intelligence agencies must have safeguards against enemy spies spoofing and pretending to be the agency's own people. No intelligence agency is that stupid, and the FSB is one of the best. ..."
"... Next, has anyone noticed Putin's reaction. Putin basically laughed and said, "Trust me, this guy is as insignificant as an ant. He's not even worth going to the trouble of poisoning," which is what we had hypothesized all along. ..."
"... The Russians ran a huge toxin screen and found no toxins. Yet somehow the Germans run an even fancier screen that includes "Novichok," which they find. ..."
"... Also recall that a high-ranking Polish official called the Germans to ask what was up with the Navalny Novichok thing, and he was told it was a fake attack done to implicate Russia in a depraved crime (most false flags have this M.O.). As I recall, the phone call was recorded by the Russians and played on TV. ..."
"... In addition, this "attack" came mysteriously right before the negotiations were to be finalized on the final length of Nordstream in Germany, out of which much Russian gas will flow and which they US is trying frantically to stop. ..."
Dec 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Robert Lindsay , Dec 22 2020 10:02 utc | 52

Hey everybody!

Anyone have any comments about the latest "revelation" in the Navalny "Novichok" case?

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/21/europe/russia-navalny-poisoning-underpants-ward/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/21/navalny-russian-agent-novichok-death-plot

I don't know what to think about this? Anyone else? Bernard?

Jen , Dec 22 2020 10:46 utc | 56

Robert Lindsay @ 52:

The Navalny "poisoning" incident is turning into low farce.

In the meantime the Russians are expected to investigate the circumstances of Navalny's poisoning and to admit that they are responsible for Navalny falling ill on the plane and nearly dying from at least two botched poisoning attempts. How can the Russians do so, when the Germans refuse to hand over materials and information relevant to the investigation, and when the story keeps changing and becomes ever more fantastical?

Dr. George W Oprisko , Dec 22 2020 14:15 utc | 62

In the meantime the Russians are expected to investigate the circumstances of Navalny's poisoning and to admit that they are responsible for Navalny falling ill on the plane and nearly dying from at least two botched poisoning attempts. How can the Russians do so, when the Germans refuse to hand over materials and information relevant to the investigation, and when the story keeps changing and becomes ever more fantastical?

Expected by whom??? Exactly......????

If Navalny is a convicted felon..... out on parole..... Russia should put out a red notice on him... and demand his return to Russia for the purpose of completing his sentence... or.... destroy him in his house together with his family.... at 0200....

And..........

Dare NATO to do anything.....!

While.............

Cutting off all gas transit to NATO..........

Let them buy LNG........

INDY

William Gruff , Dec 22 2020 14:39 utc | 64

OT: Robert Lindsay @52 Re: Navalny farce

Didn't the Germans say they found the Novichok on Navalny's water bottle? Now Russians trolling Navalny said they put it in his panties. How did the Novichok get from Navalny's panties to his water bottle?

On second thought, maybe it's best not to think to deeply about that.

Robert Lindsay , Dec 22 2020 16:52 utc | 70

Thanks guys, this Navalny Novichok BS keeps getting stupider and stupider. First of all, an FSB agent is so stupid as to answer the phone from someone he doesn't know and has never heard of and spill the beans about the whole plot. I'm sure that intelligence agencies must have safeguards against enemy spies spoofing and pretending to be the agency's own people. No intelligence agency is that stupid, and the FSB is one of the best.

Next, has anyone noticed Putin's reaction. Putin basically laughed and said, "Trust me, this guy is as insignificant as an ant. He's not even worth going to the trouble of poisoning," which is what we had hypothesized all along.

Has anyone else ever noticed the giveaway in all of these endless NATO, US, and British false flags against Russia, Syria, etc. (mostly Russia) is that the story keeps changing? When something actually happens, the story doesn't usually change with the breeze. But in these provocations, lies, and false flags, the story changes every few weeks or so.

So far, Navalny was poisoned:

1. At the breakfast table in the airport in Russia
2. On the plane
3. Next, in his water bottle in his hotel room before the flight
4. And finally now, in his underwear!

Remember the man who invented Novichok said: It was made to be lethal, as lethal as an atomic weapon. It was never used anywhere and set aside for history. A normal dose that would always be used, is the size of a grain of salt. It kills the victim and anyone around him within minutes.

Navalny's symptoms did not resemble those of Novichok poisoning at all. In addition, even if Navalny had taken 1/200th of the standard dose (and no one would do that), his pupils would have been pinpointed when he woke up in the hospital, and they were not.

The Russians ran a huge toxin screen and found no toxins. Yet somehow the Germans run an even fancier screen that includes "Novichok," which they find.

Also recall that a high-ranking Polish official called the Germans to ask what was up with the Navalny Novichok thing, and he was told it was a fake attack done to implicate Russia in a depraved crime (most false flags have this M.O.). As I recall, the phone call was recorded by the Russians and played on TV.

In addition, this "attack" came mysteriously right before the negotiations were to be finalized on the final length of Nordstream in Germany, out of which much Russian gas will flow and which they US is trying frantically to stop.

You guys are right. Nothing adds up.

[Dec 21, 2020] Agenda 2021- Resist the U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination

Dec 21, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

BY AJAMU BARAKA

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The ascendancy of neoliberal forces to the executive branch of the U.S. state represents a development that potentially will be even a more dangerous period of aggression from the U.S. white supremacist settler state and its white supremacist colonial European allies.

Why is this so? The primary agenda of the right-wing neoliberal forces represented by the Biden Administration is to reassert U.S. global leadership by reconsolidating a common U.S.-European capitalist program of domination that was disrupted with the "America first" positions of the Trump Administration.

The Biden Administration is animated by the belief that the objective logic of overall Western hegemony is tied to finding a way for more effective collaboration around a common imperialist agenda. This belief is shared by Angela Merkel of Germany, and despite some contrary public declarations from French President Macron on issue of European independence, Macron sees an effective Western alliance as critical, even if it is under U.S. leadership once again.

The racialist character if these appeals are obvious to those of us who operate from a critical anti-colonialist frame that centers race and violence as the essential elements of the rise of the Pan-European white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchal project. The commitment to continued white colonial/capitalist global hegemonic dominance is clear. Biden's objective to revive a U.S. hegemonic role over the Western project of collective domination must be seen as a race project.

Trump's plan from the beginning of his administration was to complete the Obama pivot to Asia, but those efforts were undermined by the domestic political obstacles he faced in just trying to gain full control of the Executive Branch. And while Trump was eventually successful in winning over elements of the U.S. and European ruling classes to a more aggressive stance against China, his short-sighted, erratic "America first" policies and his inability to consolidate effective power over the U.S. state were a destabilizing force for the continued hegemony of the Western colonial/capitalist project.

The U.S.-EU unity project with its NATO military wing in the service of collective imperialism and under U.S. leadership is the neoliberal corrective strategy to Trump.

Biden's Intersectional Imperialism is Exposed

Obama represented the last stage of what Gramsci called a passive revolution where oppressive state mitigates the influence of antagonistic groups through "gradual but continuous absorption."

The U.S.-EU race and class project of unity adopted by the Biden Administration will face serious political and economic challenges. The clumsy attempt to utilize Obama's soft power ideological mystifications in the present circumstances of capitalist crisis together with a deep legitimation crisis will result in abject failure by the Biden administration on both the global and domestic levels.

First among the challenges facing the incoming administration is the competing economic interests among Western capitalists. The abrogation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) with Iran by the Trump Administration and the reimposition of sanctions that required economic disengagement from Iran by many European firms, was a major fissure in the Atlanta alliance.

The lost revenues by European firms as a result of economic disengagement with Iran and the efforts to undermine the Russian NORD stream two pipeline that alienated significant elements of German capital are just two of the issues that will weigh on the trust factor in U.S. political leadership going forward.

Moreover, there are two interrelated contradictions of this unity strategy that the Northern neoliberal capitalist class must confront but will be unable to resolve: first, the impact of the capitalist crisis exacerbated by COVID that has unleashed forces disruptive to the capitalist order from both the left and the right. And secondly, the attempt by the left and social democratic movements and nations to develop, however tentatively, from the obviously failed neoliberal capitalist model.

The U.S.-EU Unity Process Requires a Countervailing Peoples Unity Process

The strategic challenge for the left in Northern countries is countering these efforts with a coherent anti-capitalist, internationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist and pro-socialist popular movements and structures.

But in the U.S. and Europe, that is easier said than done. Along with the ideological and organizational fragmentation of the left, one of the main issues that undermines the ability for the left to cohere in the U.S. and Europe is the cultural and ideological influences of white supremacist ideology.

The inability to reject the fiction of a "Europe" and its civilizational superiority has thoroughly corrupted the worldviews and politics of Western leftism. In the face of the U.S/EU/NATO attacks and subversion on Syria, Libya to Venezuela and Bolivia, instead of anti-imperialist solidarity, the left engaged in torturous abstract "discussions" around the merits and mistakes made by these various Southern nations, not recognizing the arrogant white supremacist positionality of that approach.

Anti-imperialist marginalization is reflective of the shift in the consciousness not only of the public in various Western nations but of the putative left as well. Even among Black liberationist forces in the U.S., who have traditionally had internationalism and anti-imperialism at the center of their worldviews and politics, a strange U.S.-centrism has emerged. This tendency along with an ironic embryonic racial chauvinism that elevates a distinctive "African American" construction of so-called global anti-blackness as an intractable ontological phenomenon, has created serious ideological and political challenges for anti-imperialist coalitional work.

Yet, those challenges must be met by African/Black left and left forces in general. It is impossible for forces in the U.S. and Europe to avoid their unique responsibilities situated at the center of the colonial empires, to the peoples of the world who have the knee of collective imperialism on their necks.

Bringing this discussion closer to the territory referred to as the United States, anti-imperialism, and the struggle against U.S. chauvinism among the left must be taken up as an area of struggle. For African/Black revolutionaries, and indeed for the working and laboring classes, our gaze must extend beyond our local and national realities. Not because those realities are unimportant but because we are unable to understand local realities without understanding the full constellation of class, race and material forces that shape those structural realities nationally and locally.

Mobilizing our forces to confront and defeat the Pan-European project is not a call to abstractionism. The organizational challenge is to answer the question of how does local work, that is, building a real, concrete internationalism, look.

It is not enough to position ourselves in solidarity with the victims of U.S. imperialism. The base-building work that we engage in must reflect that mutual connection with the colonized.

That is why the Black internationalist stance is not some exotic addition to radical organizing but must be seen as fundamental to our movement building work. Understanding that we are immersed in a system of exploitation and oppression that is global, even though it has local manifestations, is critical for us to effectively address that perennial task of determining "what must be done" to advance our forces.

Confronting that question of what is to be done has become even more crucial today amid the irreversible decline of the capitalist order. And while we commit to building a mass movement of the exploited and oppressed, we must take account of some troubling developments over the last four years.

The unveiling of the left patriots who were concerned with "our democracy" and who enthusiastically propagated the talking points of neoliberalism while remaining silent on U.S. imperialism, and entered the intra-bourgeois class struggle as junior partners to neoliberal right, revealed once again that if the left is not prepared to defeat whiteness and the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination, it will join as the tail to the neoliberal right in the cross-class white supremacist fascist project led by neoliberals.

Our survival demands that we remain "woke" to that possibility and plan accordingly.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch magazine.

[Dec 21, 2020] A Pandemic of 'Russian Hacking' by Ray McGovern and Joe Lauria

Notable quotes:
"... The analysis the corporate press has relied on came from the private cyber-security firm FireEye. This question should be raised: Why has a private contractor at extra taxpayer expense carried out this cyber analysis rather than the already publicly-funded National Security Agency? ..."
"... Similarly, why did the private firm CrowdStrike, rather than the FBI, analyze the Democratic National Committee servers in 2016? ..."
"... Sanger is as active in blaming the Kremlin for hacking, as he and his erstwhile NYT colleague, neocon hero Judith Miller, were in insisting on the presence of (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, helping to facilitate a major invasion with mass loss of life. ..."
"... The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT, for short) needs credible "enemies" to justify unprecedentedly huge expenditures for arms -- the more so at a time when it is clearer than ever, that that the money would be far better spent at home. (MEDIA is in all caps because it is the sine-qua-non , the cornerstone to making the MICIMATT enterprise work.) ..."
"... Wasn't Fireeye the company that faced extremes of ridicule from the global IT community for trying to engage Hillary Clinton as their keynote speaker at a Cyber Defense Summit in 2019? ..."
"... Isn't this, just perhaps, precisely the fake news construct, planted in the minds of Americans ..."
"... As alluded to in the article, no-doubt part of the reason is because of the black-eye the intel agencies got (at least outside of The Beltway) in the 2003 Iraq WMDs debacle, which caused a lot of us (at least on the left-end of the political spectrum, who were already highly skeptical of US 'intelligence') to virtually completely disregard them as credible sources ..."
"... Not only will Americans be "stupid and or crazy enough" to believe this nonsense, but they will also attack anyone who questions their belief as a Putin apologist or conspiracy theorist. ..."
"... Always with the same mouthpieces, the same backdated investigations, the unnamed "official" sources. Phooey! ..."
"... The naked fear-mongering has become the stuff of jokes. I had a good laugh with my friends (over the phone) taking apart an article in the Guardian that claimed that Putin had surrounded himself with KGB agents. The article didn't mention that the KGB (and the USSR) have not existed in over a quarter century. Foreign policy narratives are great for laughs, ridicule, and satire. Too bad most so-called journalists are too ignorant or intellectually dishonest to come clean. ..."
Dec 21, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

Neither the actor, nor the motive, nor the damage done is known for certain in this latest scare story, write Ray McGovern and Joe Lauria.

The hyperbolic, evidence-free media reports on the "fresh outbreak" of the Russian-hacking disease seems an obvious attempt by intelligence to handcuff President-elect Joe Biden into a strong anti-Russian posture as he prepares to enter the White House. Biden might well need to be inoculated against the Russophobe fever.

There are obvious Biden intentions worrying the intelligence agencies, such as renewing the Iran nuclear deal and restarting talks on strategic arms limitation with Russia. Both carry the inherent "risk" of thawing the new Cold War.

Instead, New Cold Warriors are bent on preventing any such rapprochement with strong support from the intelligence community's mouthpiece media. U.S. hardliners are clearly still on the rise.

Interestingly, this latest hack story came out a day before the Electoral College formally elected Biden, and after the intelligence community, despite numerous previous warnings, said nothing about Russia interfering in the election. One wonders whether that would have been the assessment had Trump won.

Instead Russia decided to hack the U.S. government.

Except there is (typically) no hard evidence pinning it on Moscow.

Uncertainties

The official story is Russia hacked into U.S. "government networks, including in the Treasury and Commerce Departments," as David Sanger of The New York Times reported.

But plenty of things are uncertain. First, Sanger wrote last Sunday that "hackers have had free rein for much of the year, though it is not clear how many email and other systems they chose to enter."

The motive of the hack is uncertain, as well what damage may have been done.

"The motive for the attack on the agency and the Treasury Department remains elusive, two people familiar with the matter said," Sanger reported. "One government official said it was too soon to tell how damaging the attacks were and how much material was lost."

Sanger. (Wikimedia Commons)

On Friday, five days after the story first broke, in an article misleadingly headlined, "Suspected Russian hack is much worse than first feared," NBC News admitted:

" At this stage, it's not clear what the hackers have done beyond accessing top-secret government networks and monitoring data."

Who conducted the hack is also not certain.

NBC reported that the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency "has not said who it thinks is the 'advanced persistent threat actor' behind the 'significant and ongoing' campaign, but many experts are pointing to Russia."

At first Sanger was certain in his piece that Russia was behind the attack. He refers to FireEye, "a computer security firm that first raised the alarm about the Russian campaign after its own systems were pierced." But later in the same piece, Sanger loses his certainty: "If the Russia connection is confirmed," he writes.

In the absence of firm evidence that damage has been done, this may well be an intrusion into other governments' networks routinely carried out by intelligence agencies around the world, including, if not chiefly, by the United States. It is what spies do. So neither the actor, nor the motive, nor the damage done is known for certain.

Yet across the vast networks of powerful U.S. media the story has been portrayed as a major crisis brought on by a sinister Russian attack putting the security of the American people at risk.

In a second piece on Wednesday, Sanger added to the alarm by saying the hack "ranks among the greatest intelligence failures of modern times." And on Friday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed Russia was "pretty clearly" behind the cyber attacks. But he cautioned: " we're still unpacking precisely what it is, and I'm sure some of it will remain classified." In other words, trust us.

Ed Loomis, a former NSA technical director, believes the suspect list should extend beyond Russia to include China, Iran, and North Korea. Loomis also says the commercial cyber-security firms that have been studying the latest "attacks" have not been able to pinpoint the source.

Tom Bossert (Office of U.S. Executive)

In a New York Times op-ed , former Trump domestic security adviser Thomas Bossert on Wednesday called on Trump to "use whatever leverage he can muster to protect the United States and severely punish the Russians." And he said Biden "must begin his planning to take charge of this crisis."

[On Friday, Biden talked tough. He promised there would be "costs" and said: "A good defense isn't enough; we need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant cyberattacks in the first place. I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber-assaults on our nation."]

While asserting throughout his piece that, without question, Russia now "controls" U.S. government computer networks, Bossert's confidence suddenly evaporates by slipping in at one point, "If it is Russia."

The analysis the corporate press has relied on came from the private cyber-security firm FireEye. This question should be raised: Why has a private contractor at extra taxpayer expense carried out this cyber analysis rather than the already publicly-funded National Security Agency?

Similarly, why did the private firm CrowdStrike, rather than the FBI, analyze the Democratic National Committee servers in 2016?

Could it be to give government agencies plausible deniability if these analyses, as in the case of CrowdStrike, and very likely in this latest case of Russian "hacking," turn out to be wrong? This is a question someone on the intelligence committees should be asking.

Sanger is as active in blaming the Kremlin for hacking, as he and his erstwhile NYT colleague, neocon hero Judith Miller, were in insisting on the presence of (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, helping to facilitate a major invasion with mass loss of life.

The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT, for short) needs credible "enemies" to justify unprecedentedly huge expenditures for arms -- the more so at a time when it is clearer than ever, that that the money would be far better spent at home. (MEDIA is in all caps because it is the sine-qua-non , the cornerstone to making the MICIMATT enterprise work.)

Bad Flashback

In this latest media flurry, Sanger and other intel leakers' favorites are including as "flat fact" what "everybody knows": namely, that Russia hacked the infamous Hillary Clinton-damaging emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

Sanger wrote:

" the same group of [Russian] hackers went on to invade the systems of the Democratic National Committee and top officials in Hillary Clinton's campaign, touching off investigations and fears that permeated both the 2016 and 2020 contests. Another, more disruptive Russian intelligence agency, the G.R.U., is believed to be responsible for then making public the hacked emails at the D.N.C."

That accusation was devised as a magnificent distraction after the Clinton campaign learned that WikiLeaks was about to publish emails that showed how Clinton and the DNC had stacked the deck against Bernie Sanders. It was an emergency solution, but it had uncommon success.

There was no denying the authenticity of those DNC emails published by WikiLeaks . So the Democrats mounted an artful campaign, very strongly supported by Establishment media, to divert attention from the content of the emails. How to do that? Blame Russian "hacking." And for good measure, persuade then Senator John McCain to call it an "act of war."

One experienced observer, Consortium News columnist Patrick Lawrence, saw through the Democratic blame-Russia offensive from the start.

Artful as the blame-Russia maneuver was, many voters apparently saw through this clever and widely successful diversion, learned enough about the emails' contents, and decided not to vote for Hillary Clinton.

4 Years & 7 Days Ago

Henry at the International Security Forum, Vancouver, 2009.
(Hubert K, Flickr)

On Dec. 12, 2016, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) used sensitive intelligence revealed by Edward Snowden, the expertise of former NSA technical directors, and basic principles of physics to show that accusations that Russia hacked those embarrassing DNC emails were fraudulent.

A year later, on Dec. 5, 2017, Shawn Henry, the head of CrowdStrike, the cyber firm hired by the DNC to do the forensics, testified under oath that there was no technical evidence that the emails had been "exfiltrated"; that is, hacked from the DNC.

His testimony was kept hidden by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff until Schiff was forced to release it on May 7, 2020. That testimony is still being kept under wraps by Establishment media.

What VIPS wrote four years ago is worth re-reading -- particularly for those who still believe in science and have trusted the experienced intelligence professionals of VIPS with the group's unblemished, no-axes-to-grind record.

Most of the Memorandum 's embedded links are to TOP SECRET charts that Snowden made available -- icing on the cake -- and, as far as VIPS's former NSA technical directors were concerned, precisely what was to be demonstrated QED .

Many Democrats unfortunately still believe–or profess to believe–the hacking and the Trump campaign-Russia conspiracy story, the former debunked by Henry's testimony and the latter by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Both were legally obligated to tell the truth, while the intelligence agencies were not.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a Russian specialist and presidential briefer during his 27 years as a CIA analyst. In retirement he co-created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe , and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London and began his professional career as a stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe .

Please Contribute to Consortium News'
25th Anniversary Winter Fund Drive

Tags: David Sanger Donald Trump hacking Hillary Clinton Joe Biden Joe Lauria Judith Miller National Security Agency Ray McGovern Thomas Bossert


robert e williamson jr , December 21, 2020 at 10:30

I listened as the mouth piece talked about how very good the Rouskies were at this hacking thing.

Takes me back to the days of Bill Hamilton when the U.S. government stole his PROMIS software during the INSLAW Octopus scandal something Bill Barr was said to be involved in BTW.

Seems the idea of secret back doors in software that allowed the users to be monitored was very popular. So popular in fact that our government reps from DOJ and NSA quickly allowed the Israelis to have it. ????????????? I mean our government still trusts Lyin' BeeBEE. ?????????????

If you know nothing of this story wiki it and then start you research on the history of what all happened and when.

The first two places to look for these hackers are inside the U.S. and Israeli governments. Maybe this is why the intelligence community is loath to give us any real proof, you know that computer forensics stuff.

The U.S. governments love affair with Israel is killing our democracy.

As for Putti, he is still be winning even when his shill Trump lost.

Ray, Joe great stuff and an expose' on what happens when lies go unchallenged and become accepted as truth.

Thanks CN you must make Robert very proud.

PEACE

DH Fabian , December 21, 2020 at 09:39

Maybe we could launch a fund-raising campaign to purchase some anti-malware software for the government's (obviously unsecured) computers. If possible, we could raise enough money to hire a teacher to instruct them on basic computer security. (Thrifty suggestion: Hire some local high school teens). Apparently, some kids in Russia made a hobby of hacking into the Pentagon, itself (I know this, because I just made it up), so on Monday, we need to launch this story on MSNBC, the official media of the New Democrat Party.

alice slater , December 21, 2020 at 09:12

You might want to remind people that Putin had made an offer to Obama in 2009 to negotiate a treaty to ban cyberwar, which the US rejected. See https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/world/28cyber.html , U.S. and Russia Differ on a Treaty for Cyberspace
Thanks for this important article! Alice Slater

zhu , December 21, 2020 at 06:38

Was there any "hack" at all?

DH Fabian , December 21, 2020 at 09:45

Hacking attempts are routine, daily, and nearly always business-related. Few succeed, but when they do, it can be quite lucrative (until they're tracked down and arrested). Beyond that, the US has maintained its lead in efforts to hack into security computers of foreign countries. Of course, governments throughout history have used whatever tools they had, to track other governments, usually for their own security against aggressor states.

Tina Weiser , December 20, 2020 at 21:28

When I first heard of this Russian hacking and the story about Trump cavorting w Russians, I intuitively knew it was wrong and made up. It sounded too simplistic. What I can't fathom is how the public swallowed it. I didn't and a few friends didn't, but most folks did.

Gerald , December 20, 2020 at 17:32

Maybe it was the Russians, sending a message to Uncle Joe and the Dems, quite brilliant actually. It says, 'we own you' 'we know everything about you' and 'we can destroy you should you want a war' The Dems and Washington generally have been living in their own child like bubble for way too long, they need waking up and showing how far behind they are, military, technically and of course something we've all known a long time, morally. No damage was done during the hack (oh they could have been lots of damage) nothing was taken, or maybe not much. It was a warning and a wake up call, that's all it needed to be. Now we proceed to the negotiating table for START and maybe the Russians know a whole lot more than the US wishes it did. Putins press conference was quite interesting last week, normally he is quite shy about upsetting his 'western partners' this year he pulled no punches. When asked if it was true that Russian could destroy America in 30 minutes he replied 'No, actually quicker' and when goaded by the idiot BBC reporter about the farcical MI6 Navalny escapade, he said 'If the security services wanted Navalny dead he already would be'. Times are a changing. Things are warming up a little and the US are on the ropes in all spheres.

DH Fabian , December 21, 2020 at 09:50

No. I think most Americans today would be "outraged" to know how little interest Russia has in today's US. They had turned to the East years ago. The "dirty little secret" is that as the Western (US/UK) empire has been sinking for some years, most of the world has turned its attention Eastward (China, now Russia), as the light guiding the international community into the future.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , December 20, 2020 at 11:33

Yes, and it seems, if anything, a large-scale effort to collect information, not to damage anything.

Collecting information about others is what America's NSA, CIA, FBI, and other massive agencies do around the clock. Ditto, Britain's GCHQ and MI6.

The word "attack" only puts an unduly harsh name to the matter. I think it fair to say it is in keeping with America's now-always aggressive tone towards Russia, China, Iran, and others.

And still, we have no information at all about who is responsible with Trump claiming China and Pompeo claiming Russia, while neither of them has any information to support what he is saying. Israel is just as likely as any other candidate to be responsible for this. The US intelligence community recognizes Israel in private as extremely aggressive at collecting information.

Its name of course does not come up in our sanitized press, and if it proves true that it is responsible, we'll never see it reported.

Meanwhile, just as in the case of Skripal or Navalny, great fun can be had with Russia.

Realist , December 20, 2020 at 05:01

If any of Washington's designated enemies are NOT attempting to constantly monitor the byzantine genuine operative policies of America's Deep State they are being totally remiss. If all they had to go on were the strident public policies expressed and enacted by our leaders they would surely feel existentially threatened and compelled to launch defensive military actions just to preserve the continuity of their civilisations. Washington's endless effluvia of formal pronouncements, accusations, economic sanctions and provocative troop deployments fairly beg for the occasional miscalculation of a bellicose parry or counterpunch. Our chosen enemies need to know our real intentions and capabilities to PRECLUDE such eventualities. Moreover, the geeks in our cadre of spooks have been at the same game for the same reasons rather longer than theirs. It's probably safe to say we invented the game.

By way of example, Joe Biden constantly talks of making Russia "pay a price" for some list of imaginary offenses against American "interests," of which Special Prosecutor Mueller could not conjure up one example after nearly three years of investigation. If anyone "hacked the vote" last month, it was sure not the Russians who made Sleepy Joe the most popular president with the highest vote total ever elected. Talk about the implausible transformed into the new reality. Take another example, Mike Morell, probably the incoming head of the CIA, has on multiple occasions spoke of the need to "make Russians bleed" for attempting to limit the death and chaos inflicted upon Syria by American foreign policy and its cultivated mercenaries going by a different nom de guerre each week. JC did tell us that strange changes will happen in the vineyard, apparently even al Qaeda can reconcile with Uncle Sam. In the absence of detailed reliable information regarding the veracity of such narratives, President Putin (or Xi, or Rouhani) might feel constrained to be less tolerant, more aggressive and quicker to react against what can only be described as mostly baseless and far too numerous hostile American provocations. The bully struts around with a chip the size of a redwood on his shoulder. No one antagonizes him, they mostly try to give the crazy fellow a wide berth while keeping a vigilant eye on him. What's truly unfortunate is that Stephan F. Cohen is no longer on this Earth to keep the American public apprised of such truths, not that this world's most informed man on these subjects got any recent media exposure in the present climate of unhinged Russophrenia.

Tom Partridge , December 20, 2020 at 03:55

We know that governments and intelligence agencies tell us lies all the time. Lies that have justified the instigation of wars and lies that have precipitated wars by default. All of this is well documented in the written word and yet we continue to be fooled by the self same lies. Shame on us, but when the Doomsday Clock strikes midnight, it will be too late, there will be no one left to document the lies, there will be no more lies, instead there will be, just silence.

Eileen Coles , December 20, 2020 at 00:01

Wasn't Fireeye the company that faced extremes of ridicule from the global IT community for trying to engage Hillary Clinton as their keynote speaker at a Cyber Defense Summit in 2019?

michael888 , December 19, 2020 at 23:20

While I appreciate your article and agree with your conclusions, you are a voice crying in the wilderness or at least in a small bubble of like-minded people.
There is a part of the brain which is based on evidence-free, faith-based beliefs, and while religious impulses can be good (sometimes debatable), there is also a strong fear and hatred of the Other, and Russia has been elevated by Hillary, the DNC, the Intelligence Agencies, and the Establishment as the only acceptable Bogeyman. It is socially unacceptable to attack Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, or Chinese (remember "Hug a Chinaman!" at the critical juncture where Covid-19 could have been stopped by shutting borders in mid-January as Asian countries did?), but the RUSSIANS!! are an acceptable target of vitriol (even though the Clintons and any of our other politicians will quickly take $500,000 from Putin as the Clintons did when Hillary was Secretary of State in 2010). Calling someone a Russian asset, as our CIA has done repeatedly, can destroy people's careers, and minimally untrack their criticisms.

Software generally has intentional backdoors (Ghislaine Maxwell's father made a career of selling such software so Israel could monitor their customers). We don't get much software from Russia! China is economically and politically a bigger threat, though like Israel probably monitoring rather than interfering through their software (which is probably the rule for all Intelligence Agencies). However 12 year olds can probably get into these same program backdoors, hacking is a hobby for many.
The use of non-government companies to do to questionable work is akin to big corporations bringing in consultants; scapegoats when things go wrong!

GMCasey , December 19, 2020 at 22:44

It's very difficult to believe a lot of what passes for news in America. For example, I always thought that if the hacking of Hillary ever happened, it was because when she was SOS, she refused to go into a secure room to make important calls. Instead , she stood in the hallway, but didn't want to go into the secure room. Add to that, the use of a personal computer at her home, keeping all kinds of her government information on it , which was also being sent to her associate's husband's computer.

I also wondered why the Russians were blamed for poisoning spies in the UK -- - spies traded a decade before -- especially since exchanged spies lived near where the UK's poison center was. This was supposed to be an attempt to poison 2 Russians, and this latest Russia news story seems just as silly. I am sure that any decent spy from any nation who decided to poison a person -- than it would be done.

I am wondering why America seems to be living back in the 1950s when that McCarthy person was making havoc with creating so many
untruths in major media -- it's sad that myself, and many others no longer believe a lot of the major media news -- and that is a sad state for a in a said- to- be democratic republic

Em Sos , December 19, 2020 at 21:39

Re: "A Pandemic of 'Russian Hacking'"

Isn't this, just perhaps, precisely the fake news construct, planted in the minds of Americans, by Trump, to which he may now turn, as his last-ditch pretext, to protect the National Security interests of the State; by attempting to declare Martial Law, at the last moment, just prior to January 20th 2021?

Eddie S , December 19, 2020 at 18:43

Good article! Especially the mentioning of the VERY 'convenient' timing of the latest 'Red Scare', vis-a-vis the upcoming transition to a new POTUS who has made vague references to modest moves towards cooling down the Cold War II (which I have little-faith will happen anyway, given the Biden cabinet picks). Also the excellent point about these reports apparently coming from private organizations as opposed to the massive US intelligence agencies (ie; the 17 agencies in the USG doing intelligence work, with the CIA & NSA being two of the largest) -- WTF are we funding them with multi-billion dollar budgets for so that they can quote some private start-up intel-groups??

As alluded to in the article, no-doubt part of the reason is because of the black-eye the intel agencies got (at least outside of The Beltway) in the 2003 Iraq WMDs debacle, which caused a lot of us (at least on the left-end of the political spectrum, who were already highly skeptical of US 'intelligence') to virtually completely disregard them as credible sources for anything other than a right-wing indicator.

All the major powers spy on each other, and some of the minor ones too, and sometimes it's on putative allies (ie; recall the controversy a number of years ago when Israel was caught spying/bugging US transmissions I don't recall any bluster about THAT being 'an act of war!'). And I not-too-long-ago read how there are constant, daily attempts by numerous entities (most suspected to be private scammers) attempt to hack computers & networks of ALL users (government, business, NGO's, private parties) -- it's ongoing 'background noise'.

And while we should all be strengthening our computer defenses against these intrusions, let's be very skeptical when someone pulls 'something' (reputedly) out of that background noise and hysterically proclaims it to be so MAJOR EVENT.

Theo , December 20, 2020 at 09:21

I agree. There was an interesting article on the Theamericanconservative.com under the title " The Russian Cyber Pearl Harbor that wasn't ". Some time ago in Germany the computers of big insurance companies were hacked and huge amounts of personal data of the clients were stolen. Big issue in Germany. Russia was the top suspect. It turned out that the bad guy was a teenage German school boy living peacefully with his parents. He was found very quickly because he didn't cover up his trails in the web. He didn't do it for money or political reasons. He did it just for fun and to proof to himself: Yes I can. Now he faces a prison term.

Eric Arnow , December 19, 2020 at 16:30

The real story here is not the latest eye roller, here-we-go-again, episode of Russo phobia, but the likelihood that majority of the Washington Consensus, and more likely, the American people will be stupid enough or crazy enough or both, to believe this.

David , December 21, 2020 at 10:12

Not only will Americans be "stupid and or crazy enough" to believe this nonsense, but they will also attack anyone who questions their belief as a Putin apologist or conspiracy theorist. I'm deeply appreciative of Ray's and Joe's insights but Michael888 is right. His voice is a "cry in the wilderness" which is "heard only by a small bubble of like minded people." I admire his perseverance in the face of that harsh reality. Thank you, Ray and Joe.

Robert Emmett , December 19, 2020 at 16:19

Always with the same mouthpieces, the same backdated investigations, the unnamed "official" sources. Phooey!

Maybe while the propaganda is being propagated & then catapulted into the public realm, nobody in "official" media remembers to check vault 7 for the inevitable Cyrillic fingerprints until it's too late? Oops!

And "artful maneuver"? Yeah, maybe if you mean kindergarten art. Or perhaps it's a forgery that depends on millions of uncritical viewers' unquestioning acceptance of a fake rationale for unbinding Biden so he can veer from a direction that he never intended to follow in the first place?

Jonny James , December 19, 2020 at 12:01

We are thankful that CN continues the tradition of Robert Parry to debunk the New Cold War propaganda. The Russia Hysteria (New Red Scare without "the Reds") is a pathetic and transparent attempt to manipulate public opinion.

The naked fear-mongering has become the stuff of jokes. I had a good laugh with my friends (over the phone) taking apart an article in the Guardian that claimed that Putin had surrounded himself with KGB agents. The article didn't mention that the KGB (and the USSR) have not existed in over a quarter century. Foreign policy narratives are great for laughs, ridicule, and satire. Too bad most so-called journalists are too ignorant or intellectually dishonest to come clean.

Russia did not want to end the ABM treaty, the INF treaty etc. etc. but of course it was the US who shredded all the treaties. The US has engaged in massive illegal activity with impunity: fomenting coups, meddling heavily in the affairs of other nations, war crimes etc. The US appears now to be a desperate rogue empire, pathetically clutching at notions of Full Spectrum Dominance. No informed person should believe this latest Russia narrative – it is ridiculous on multiple levels, just as Mr. Lauria and McGovern have outlined.

To underline the utter silliness of the narrative: my handle has become "Jonski Jamesovich" (a common Russian name lol) and I introduce myself as a Russian Agent. I know it's puerile and silly but that's the level of discourse we are dealing with. This intelligence-insulting BS has grown tiresome already. My British friends and I "take the piss" (ridicule) the narratives: the comedy material is written for us!

Realist , December 20, 2020 at 05:53

Jonny, I think your Russian name would be Ivan. Jamesovich if your father's name is James. Your piece is brilliant.

A great characterisation of America for what it has become during my life of 73 years: an outlaw state. What Reagan used to call an "evil empire," by which he meant the Soviet Union. I'm sure he thought that he and Gorbachev had achieved a lasting peace between Russia and the US. They came within an eyelash of eliminating all nukes.

The so-called "realists" in the deep state would not allow that, but did leave several nuclear nonproliferation treaties in place, which our foolish contemporaries have trashed. Would he be shocked if he could be reanimated! The first step to putting things right again would be for Europe to stop enabling Washington's warmongering in every corner of the world and to disband NATO, the biggest threat to world peace after the US federal government.

[Dec 21, 2020] To Blame Russia For Cyber-Intrusions Is Delusional

Dec 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Simon , Dec 20 2020 11:33 utc | 55

Relentlessly, you go to stories in the New York Times. Like a dog returning to its excrement. Everybody knows it's an intelligence shill. Why do you bother? There are far more important things you could be reporting on.

[Dec 21, 2020] To Blame Russia For Cyber-Intrusions Is Delusional - A Treaty Is The Only Way To Prevent More Damage

Notable quotes:
"... In the issue of information security generally, including cyber-security and cyber-defence, it seems that there is one rule for the US and another for everyone else ..."
"... The US knows only one thing, and that is psychopathic schoolyard bullying. To have to work together with other nations, to have to accept other nations' rights to information and security, to recognise the need for compromise and continuous negotiation: all this is beyond the US ability to understand. ..."
"... Treaties would help no doubt but the only real solution is to not put things you want kept private on the internet. The internet is to publish stuff, not to store stuff securely. ..."
"... usa is not agreement capable.. they prove this time and time again, so any proposals of an agreement in any area is not realistic.. it is unfortunate.. ..."
"... the media will continue to be the service provider for the intel agencies and say whatever they want to say.. facts are irrelevant.. it is beyond naive to think that anything that gets said in the usa msm ( russia did it and etc. etc. ) have any relevance or value... ..."
"... the Wikileaks Vault 7 materials show clearly the US has tools to pin cybercrime on its 'enemies'. One thing we know for sure and that is the US government has one enemy above all others: the truth. ..."
"... The most obvious scenario is hiding in plain sight: FireEye is an corporation selling a defective, inferior product to the USG. To cut corners, it must employ a legion of non-unionized private contractors, who are a workforce of inferior quality and much lower morale (as they receive much lower salaries). In order to cut even more corners, most of these private contractors must receive a light version of clearance process, and must be more loosely managed. ..."
"... The USA is plagued with private contractors. They were the weapon of choice of the American capitalists and the USG to kill the unions and lower the value of the American labor power. When a random American tells you he/she works for, e.g. Microsoft, chances are he/she actually works for a private contractor who works for Microsoft - it's a process I like to call "domestic outsourcing": a process where, through political and structural reforms, the capitalist class of a given nation precarizes its own national labor power without literally exporting it to another country (e.g. telemarketing to India). ..."
"... enemy #1 of humanity are the global private finance elite, not Russia , nor China. ..."
"... I know quite a bit about those outages in Venezuela. I assure you that they were very well-planned. The people who did it were Venezuelan exiles in Canada and Houston, Texas (a lot of the opposition moved to Houston in addition to Miami). ..."
"... Is any evidence offered that there was any hack at all? Is the entire thing a fully fabricated false flag, yet another, in service of taking Nord Stream 2 down? ..."
"... Also note that the providers of the software are entirely responsible for making it easy to hack. As a software engineer, I have tried in vain for decades to convince companies producing critical infrastructure equipment to not use internet administration links, because they are not only hackable, but the encryption codes all have backdoors for "security" agencies. ..."
"... So no doubt SolarWinds did just that, got hacked by anybody anywhere, and is looking for an excuse to avoid losing their contract. ..."
"... The Germans and the Americans decided that it was worth to risk the entire German SCADA business to sting Iran and later Venezuela. Because that was what those attacks, in the absence of Iranian or Venezuelan capitulation meant, harm to German bussiness for no strategic gains. ..."
"... Ultimately, making a single software product secure will only achieve limited gains: Those gains evaporate in an instant one some junior cablemonkey plugs a secure server into the public DMZ using the wrong network interface. ..."
"... Where was the firewall admin in all this? Where was the Network administrator with his routing policies? ..."
"... Why, when SolarWinds has been a gaping security hole for more than 2 decades is it now all of a sudden the gateway for a massive attack from a foreign power? Shouldn't it have been a continuous vulnerability all along? By now, every vulnerable internet facing SW installation would have been wiped out ages ago due to the frequency of automated attacks carried out against infrastructure in general. ..."
"... We all know Micro$oft, Google, FB, Whatsapp, Instagram, ... are feeding US and Zionist intelligence agencies with all type of informations. Any international treaty on cyber-security would under this conditions be obsolete from the beginning. ..."
"... But it's just naive to think that CIA, NSA, Mossad are going to respect any international agreement in any area. Stuxnet virus and it's intrusion of the Iranian nuclear facilities or sabotage of Venezuelan power-grid facilities were not made by China, Russia or North Korea. ..."
"... These large, complicated, very expensive software "management" packages are largely butt-covering, to protect management from the threat of "doing nothing" when things go wrong. Some nice kickbacks in it too. ..."
"... I remember one "configuration management" package that was practically an operating system all by itself and absolutely a waste of time. Network management even more so. ..."
"... I haven't seen this level of propaganda since the buildup to the second Iraq war. They are obviously planning more aggression against Russia and have to keep the public at a fever pitch to get away with it. ..."
Dec 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

December 19, 2020 To Blame Russia For Cyber-Intrusions Is Delusional - A Treaty Is The Only Way To Prevent More Damage

The New York Times continues to provide anti-Russian propaganda and to incite against it:

Pompeo Says Russia Was Behind Cyberattack on U.S.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is the first member of the Trump administration to publicly link the Kremlin to the hacking of dozens of government and private systems.

The first paragraph:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday it was clear that Russia was behind the widespread hacking of government systems that officials this week called "a grave risk" to the United States.

That is a quite definite statement.

But it is very wrong. Pompous did not say "that it was clear that Russia was behind" the IT intrusions.

The third paragraph in the NYT story, which casual readers will miss, quotes Pompous and there he does not say what the Times opener claims:

"I think it's the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity," Mr. Pompeo said in an interview on "The Mark Levin Show."

Merriam Webster 's definition of 'pretty' as an adverb is "in some degree : moderately". The example it gives is "pretty cold weather". The temperature of pretty cold weather on a July day in Cairo obviously differs from the temperature of pretty cold weather during a December night in Siberia. "Pretty xxx" It is a relative expression, not an assertion of absolute facts.

The first paragraph of the Times statement tries to sell a vague statement as an factual claim.

Moreover - Pompous finds it amusing that the CIA lies, steals and cheats (vid). As a former CIA director he has not refrained from those habits. Whenever Pompous says something about a perceived U.S. 'enemy' it safe to assume that it he does not state the truth.

On top of that even his boss does not agree with his claim:

Contradicting his secretary of state and other top officials, President Donald Trump on Saturday suggested without evidence that China -- not Russia -- may be behind the cyberattack against the United States and tried to minimized its impact.

Trump AND Pompous both made their contradicting assertions "without evidence".

It is inappropriate for the media to accuse Russia - or China - of the recently discovered cyber-intrusion when there is zero evidence to support such a claim.

The Times did that at least twice without having any evidence to support the claim:

It also published a rather aggressive and stupid op-ed by Thomas A. Bossert, Trump's former cyber-security adviser:

The Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months. The Russian S.V.R. will surely have used its access to further exploit and gain administrative control over the networks it considered priority targets.
...
While all indicators point to the Russian government, the United States, and ideally its allies, must publicly and formally attribute responsibility for these hacks. If it is Russia, President Trump must make it clear to Vladimir Putin that these actions are unacceptable. The U.S. military and intelligence community must be placed on increased alert; all elements of national power must be placed on the table.

Where are the carriers? Man the guns! Put the nukes to Def Con 1!

Rep. Jason Crow @RepJasonCrow - 15:09 UTC · Dec 18, 2020

The situation is developing, but the more I learn this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor.

This is lunatic. From all we know so far the so called 'hack' was a quite nifty cyber-intrusion for the sole purpose of gathering information. The intrusion has, as far as we know, not even reached any systems on the specially protected 'secret' networks. This was a normal spying operation, not an attack. To compare it to a deadly military attack like Pearl Harbor is self-delusional nonsense :

The lack of self-awareness in these and similar reactions to the Russia breach is astounding. The U.S. government has no principled basis to complain about the Russia hack, much less retaliate for it with military means, since the U.S. government hacks foreign government networks on a huge scale every day. Indeed, a military response to the Russian hack would violate international law. The United States does have options, but none are terribly attractive.

The news reports have emphasized that the Russian operation thus far appears to be purely one of espionage -- entering systems quietly, lurking around, and exfiltrating information of interest. Peacetime government-to-government espionage is as old as the international system and is today widely practiced, especially via electronic surveillance. It can cause enormous damage to national security, as the Russian hack surely does. But it does not violate international law or norms.
...
Because of its own practices, the U.S. government has traditionally accepted the legitimacy of foreign governmental electronic spying in U.S. government networks. After the notorious Chinese hack of the Office of Personnel Management database, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said: "You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don't think we'd hesitate for a minute."

One can not spy on other countries and then complain when they do something similar to oneself. Responding by waging destruction against another country's IT systems only guarantees that there will be a response in kind. If one wants to avert cyber-espionage and cyber-attacks there is only one way out.

We do not know if Israel, China, Russia or someone else is responsible for the recently discovered intrusion. But it is safe to assume that Russia's SVR is working on comparable projects just like the spy services of most other countries do.

But Russia has, in contrast to others, for years asked for bi-lateral treaties to prohibit malicious cyber operations. In September President Putin again offered one :

One of today's major strategic challenges is the risk of a large-scale confrontation in the digital field. A special responsibility for its prevention lies on the key players in the field of ensuring international information security (IIS). In this regard, we would like to once again address the US with a suggestion to agree on a comprehensive program of practical measures to reboot our relations in the field of security in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs).
...
Third. To jointly develop and conclude a bilateral intergovernmental agreement on preventing incidents in the information space similarly to the Soviet-American Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents On and Over the High Seas in force since 25 May 1972.
...
We call on the US to greenlight the Russian-American professional expert dialogue on IIS without making it a hostage to our political disagreements.

Even conservative U.S. lawyers agree with Putin that such a treaty is the only way to protect the U.S. from potentially damaging operations:

Despite many tens of billions of dollars spent on cyber defense and deterrence and Defend Forward prevention, and despite one new strategy after another, the United States has failed miserably for decades in protecting its public and private digital networks. What it apparently has not done is to ask itself, in a serious way, how its aggressive digital practices abroad invite and justify digital attacks and infiltrations by our adversaries, and whether those practices are worth the costs. Relatedly, it has not seriously considered the traditional third option when defense and deterrence fail in the face of a foreign threat: mutual restraint , whereby the United States agrees to curb certain activities in foreign networks in exchange for forbearance by our adversaries in our networks. There are many serious hurdles to making such cooperation work, including precise agreement on each side's restraint, and verification. But given our deep digital dependency and the persistent failure of defense and deterrence to protect our digital systems, cooperation is at least worth exploring.

Dreams of being able to prevent intrusions on one's systems while insisting on intruding the opponent's systems are just that - dreams. There is likewise no reasonable way to deter an adversary from using such methods to gain an advantage.

To blame, without evidence, Russia for a 'hack' and to incite against it will not solve the above problems.

The only way to prevent potentially dangerous cyber-operations is too agree with adversaries on what is off-limits and to (verifiably) stick to that.

Posted by b on December 19, 2020 at 19:29 UTC | Permalink


Jen , Dec 19 2020 19:53 utc | 2
In the issue of information security generally, including cyber-security and cyber-defence, it seems that there is one rule for the US and another for everyone else: free and unfettered access to everyone's secrets for the US; and for everyone else, having to pay through the nose for anything the US deigns to dole out in amounts and at times of its own choosing.

The US knows only one thing, and that is psychopathic schoolyard bullying. To have to work together with other nations, to have to accept other nations' rights to information and security, to recognise the need for compromise and continuous negotiation: all this is beyond the US ability to understand.

Mao Cheng Ji , Dec 19 2020 20:06 utc | 3
Good post, but about this hypothetical treaty: how would you monitor and enforce that sort of thing? It seems to me the signatories are likely to continue doing it, and, assuming enough sophistication, proving a breach of the agreement seems virtually impossible...
dave , Dec 19 2020 20:40 utc | 4
Mao Cheng Ji: "virtually impossible" Good one :)

When I first read this story, I thought of the power outages in Venezuela the past year. Those attacks must have hit especially patients in hospitals or care residences that had no stand by generation.

I think Iran has been attacked a few times in this manner.

I can see the usefulness of treaty talks to address this issue. Talks between just two states, though, would leave a lot of would be targets, so United Nations might address the issue. If the Security Council, & United Nations generally, is supposed to mitigate violence of warfare, addressing cyber attacks must come under UNO purview.

I wonder if Lavrov, or a counterpart in another land, would find it useful to approach the United Nations on this.

karlof1 , Dec 19 2020 20:45 utc | 5
Mao Cheng JI @3--

Putin and Lavrov have pleaded for at least 5 years now going back to Obama/Biden about the need to negotiate a Cyber Treaty, and that it include as many nations as want to participate. But only silence is returned. It's entirely possible that this so-called series of hacks is no more than back-splash from some NSA or CIA hacking exercise. It certainly puts more wind in the sails for today's excursion back to the future by Pepe Escobar that's not behind a paywall. I will say there was one quote from it that stood out very far from the rest and is on the way to becoming reality. As the Outlaw US Empire falls further behind its competitors:

"the US will be able to bill itself as the first great post-industrial agrarian society."

I'm not so sure about the "great" part given our actual condition and direction.

Bemildred , Dec 19 2020 20:45 utc | 6
Treaties would help no doubt but the only real solution is to not put things you want kept private on the internet. The internet is to publish stuff, not to store stuff securely.
kooshy , Dec 19 2020 20:46 utc | 7
"The only way to prevent potentially dangerous cyber-operations is too agree with adversaries on what is off-limits and to (verifiably) stick to that."

Really? b with all due respect was, is, will be America ever capable or can it ever be trusted to hold to any a Treaty/ Agreement, this outlaw rogue regime in time of hypersonic missiles still believes she is protected by two oceans. Signing a treaty with this regime is a distasteful joke, not worth entertaining.

Canadian Cents , Dec 19 2020 20:48 utc | 8
Mao @3, had the same thought. Like the idea but how feasible is it?

I'd also like to see a Geneva Convention for the digital space (perhaps an expansion or update of the existing Geneva Conventions for the digital age.) So civilian cyber infrastructure (personal PCs, smartphones, tablets, routers, etc.) and civilian cyber content (social media, online dating profiles, forum posts, etc.) would be off-limits for state signatories. Again, not sure how feasible this is, but would like to see this.

Hoyeru , Dec 19 2020 20:51 utc | 9
I dont understand why people still waste their time writing article refuting USA's claims. Dont people understand already USA DOES NOT NEED NO STINKING EVIDENCE?

...back int he dark ages of in 1990 USA invented the story about Iraqi solders taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on the cold floor and sued that lie to attack Iraq

in 2001, USA immediately blamed Osam abin ALladin for the 9-11 attacks and used that like to attack and occupy Afghanistan.

in 2003, USA said Saddam has weapons of mass distraction and used that lie to attack Iraq for a 2nd time.

USA ALWAYS lies and uses that to do something.

Russia better prepare itself by buying a lot of lube and lube its collective asshole. It will get an ass fucking of a life time. and Russia deserves it by allowing Putin to act as a moronic wimp.

james , Dec 19 2020 21:03 utc | 10
thanks b... a few points...

usa is not agreement capable.. they prove this time and time again, so any proposals of an agreement in any area is not realistic.. it is unfortunate..

the media will continue to be the service provider for the intel agencies and say whatever they want to say.. facts are irrelevant.. it is beyond naive to think that anything that gets said in the usa msm ( russia did it and etc. etc. ) have any relevance or value...

it is the exact opposite.. expect more delusional ranting from these same wingnuts..the usa lost any integrity it had a long time ago.. getting it back is not going to happen quickly, or at all.. in fact, it is more likely the usa has to continue in its MAX 737 nosedive on all levels until they wake up and smell the coffee... until then - all bets are off for any light going off in the brains of usa leadership."

@ 4 dave... indeed.. the cardinal rule - 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you' is applicable here... for all the religious preaching from buffoons like pompous, the words and actions don't match the reality on the ground.. thanks for a clear reminder... it will be a long time before the usa gets its head out of its ass..

c1ue , Dec 19 2020 21:21 utc | 12
Sorry, folks, but as a practitioner in the field - the problem is systemic, not national or even international. Information Technology is a bloated mess. Banks, airports, utilities use software whose programmers are literally dying of old age and which literally have not been made for a generation.

Security is a laugh. You need $10M, ante, to have a moderately capable security program between expertise and tools - which means 90% of the companies will never be able to afford it.

Even among the 10% - the lack of even the most basic best practices mean that billion dollar companies constantly get tripped up or knocked flat by extremely simplistic attacks or accidents.

This is the real world of cyberspace: attackers are limited only by how much focus they want to put on any particular target.

The "attack" which brought about this latest session of Russo/Sino phobia - as b researched and documented well - did not employ any sophistication to gain entry. The subsequent activity was more sophisticated but even then, nothing more complex that $20K paid to a moderately capable programmer couldn't create.

gottlieb , Dec 19 2020 21:25 utc | 13
Cold War 2.0 to keep US enemies front and center is so the MIC can keep sucking the people dry. Additionally, the Wikileaks Vault 7 materials show clearly the US has tools to pin cybercrime on its 'enemies'. One thing we know for sure and that is the US government has one enemy above all others: the truth.
karlof1 , Dec 19 2020 21:29 utc | 14
gottlieb @13--

One thing we know for sure and that is the US government has one enemy above all others: the truth.

I hope you don't mind if I borrow your outstanding line of reason!!

vk , Dec 19 2020 21:31 utc | 15
Contradicting his secretary of state and other top officials, President Donald Trump on Saturday suggested without evidence that China -- not Russia -- may be behind the cyberattack against the United States and tried to minimized its impact.

Called it. FireEye purposefully chose the term "nation with top-tier offensive capabilities" so that they could please Greek and Trojans while at the same time exempting itself from delivering a defective commodity. Trump, for obvious reasons, chose to blame China; the establishment, for obvious reasons, chose to blame Russia. Trumpists will choose to blame China; Democrats and centrist Republicans will choose to blame Russia.

China or Russia - you can build your own narrative now!

The most obvious scenario is hiding in plain sight: FireEye is an corporation selling a defective, inferior product to the USG. To cut corners, it must employ a legion of non-unionized private contractors, who are a workforce of inferior quality and much lower morale (as they receive much lower salaries). In order to cut even more corners, most of these private contractors must receive a light version of clearance process, and must be more loosely managed.

Indeed, most of these smaller managers must also be private contractors themselves; maybe showing up one or two times per week in the workplace just to see if the private contractors workers are there and breathing. The whole thing must be a shitshow.

One of these private contractors probably sold the passwords or created a password which could be easily brute forced; or simply committed a rookie mistake (leaked e-mail, written password in the office's whiteboard, etc. etc.).

The USA is plagued with private contractors. They were the weapon of choice of the American capitalists and the USG to kill the unions and lower the value of the American labor power. When a random American tells you he/she works for, e.g. Microsoft, chances are he/she actually works for a private contractor who works for Microsoft - it's a process I like to call "domestic outsourcing": a process where, through political and structural reforms, the capitalist class of a given nation precarizes its own national labor power without literally exporting it to another country (e.g. telemarketing to India).

Mark Thomason , Dec 19 2020 21:34 utc | 16
A treaty would stop the US doing this to others. The US originated this. The US has every intention of doing this to many others. Those who complain the loudest are exactly the ones who have no intention of stopping.
Patroklos , Dec 19 2020 22:02 utc | 18
Aren't other things happening in the world more interesting than the soporific narcissism of what passes for 'politics' in the US?
uncle tungsten , Dec 19 2020 22:04 utc | 19
The USAi has been fleeced by an IT industry that is incapable of rendering a secure system! Well blow me down. What don't system buyers get from the words 'shonky thieves'. The USAi and its cosy bear partner UKi have perfected 'shonky thieves' as an industrial and financial strategy so dont be surprised when the thieves pick their pocket FROM WITHIN. It is the share sell off that is the clue - follow the money NOT the tabloids.

So far they have Russia being the most powerful IT centre on earth and the most hopeless CBW centre on earth. With IT they go everywhere yet with CBW they can't kill a fly.

uncle tungsten , Dec 19 2020 22:12 utc | 21
Patroklos #18

Other things and explore this site for a while. and another thing

psychohistorian , Dec 19 2020 22:19 utc | 22
@ Yahoodi | Dec 19 2020 22:12 utc | 20 who wrote

Why so much talk about Russia? China is enemy #1.

b doesn't like one liners much so he can delete my response as well to inform you that enemy #1 of humanity are the global private finance elite, not Russia , nor China.

norecovery , Dec 19 2020 22:20 utc | 23
Re: cybercriminal or rogue state tampering with power generation / power grids -- Why couldn't these computer systems be independent, isolated from the Internet and kept in high security lockdown? Besides, they operated just fine without computers in the past, when things were built to last.

These days, I wouldn't buy a new car that depends on sophisticated computer controls and diagnostic tools, let alone exclusive dealer service. Farmers lost their right to buy parts and service their own tractors independent of a dealer. How much would I bet the Chinese manufacturers will eventually take over that market ...as with almost every other market for durable goods short of proprietary military hardware? Unless of course, the Banksters prevent it for reasons of "national security."

uncle tungsten , Dec 19 2020 22:27 utc | 24
psychohistorian #22

Are you referring to these people as enemy #1 of humanity?

uncle tungsten , Dec 19 2020 22:34 utc | 25
Patroklas #18

First the world needs a treaty to dismantle this threat as it consumes millions in IT support and only delivers death.

Mark2 , Dec 19 2020 22:45 utc | 26
For years American governments have extracted profit from the US tax paying public, using the simple trick of giving them a series of imaginary external enemy's. Requiring ever more arms industry funding extra. Profit from paranoia !!

But here's the thing -- America has now backed itself into a corner re geopolitics. It would not surprise me if these cyberattacks are a joint effort by several nations. We could predict them. Just cause ya paranoid don't mean there not all out to get you.

Robert Lindsay , Dec 19 2020 23:47 utc | 27
@dave

I know quite a bit about those outages in Venezuela. I assure you that they were very well-planned. The people who did it were Venezuelan exiles in Canada and Houston, Texas (a lot of the opposition moved to Houston in addition to Miami). The opposition is very, very good and they sit up there in the US plotting schemes to destroy the economy. For instance, for a long time the fake exchange rate was being set by an opposition person in Houston who ran his own exchange rate site. He always deliberately inflated the street exchange rate in order to cause a currency crisis, which would devastate the economy. A lot of things caused that exchange rate crisis, but that guy sitting in Houston sabotaging the exchange rates to cause a monetary crisis was no small part of that.

The attacks were staged out of Canada and Houston. The people who did it had very intimate knowledge of those systems, mostly because those systems were using software made in Canada. The people in Canada had access to the source code of that software. Perhaps the company itself was in on the sabotage in the same way that the voting machine companies are in on rigging the voting machines to steal elections for Republicans. In that case, Rebuplican operatives have taken over the voting machine companies and the election hacking is done by those companies like E S & S themselves in coordination with people like Karl Rove and the Bush and Romney families. All of those computer machine companies are owned by the Bush and Romney families and Karl Rove also has a huge stake in them.

So it's quite possible that that Canadian software vendor was taken over by Venezuelan opposition people to gain access to the source code so they could hack those systems. With knowledge of that code, they hacked the systems from Canada and Houston. They were very good, excellent hackers. It's not known if they had state help from the US and Canadian governments, although I definitely would not rule it out.

Trudeau in particular has gone full fascist in his fanatical support for the Venezuelan opposition fascists.

Robert Lindsay , Dec 19 2020 23:52 utc | 28
The Venezuelan elite are classic Latin American elite fascists, a somewhat distinct type. Most of the elite down there has this "Latin American fascist" orientation.

It's generally not race-based, but the ruling elite tends to be lighter-skinned than the darker masses, even in Haiti. Instead, it's more like the "rightwing authoritarianism" or "rightwing dictatorships" that we saw so many of in the Cold War in Latin America and elsewhere.

These regimes were found most of Central America in Guatemala after 1954 and El Salvador and Honduras since forever, Nicaragua under the Somozas.

They were found in all of South America at one time or another. We can see them in the generals after 1964 in Brazil, the democratic facade duopoly regimes in Venezuela in Colombia (especially after 1947 and again in 1964, Ecuador, Peru until the generals' revolt in 1968, Bolivia under Banzer after 1953, Paraguay under Strausser, Argentina and Uruguay under the generals in the late 80's and early 90's, and Pinochet in Chile.

They were also seen in the Caribbean in Cuba under Bautista, the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, and Haiti under the Duvaliers.

In Southeast Asia, they were found in Thieu in South Vietnam, Sihanouk in Cambodia, the monarchy in Laos, the military regimes in Thailand, Suharto in Indonesia, the Sultan in Brunei, Marcos in the Philippines, and Taiwan under Chiang Kai Chek.

In Northeast Asia, a regime of this type was found in South Korea from 1947-on.

They were found South Asia with Pakistan under Generals like Zia, in Central Asia in the Shah of Iran, and in a sense, the Arab World with Saddam (Saddam was installed by the CIA), King Hassan in Morocco, the Gulf monarchies, and Jordan. Earlier, they were found in the monarchies in Libya and Egypt that were overthrown by Arab nationalists. Also, Israel played this sort of role with a democratic facade.

We also found them in the Near East in the military regimes in Turkey (especially Turgut Ozul) and for a while in Greece under the colonels in the late 1960's and early 1970's.

NATO formed the backbone of a "rightwing dictatorship" in the background of Western Europe (especially Italy), where Operation Gladio NATO intelligence essentially ran most of those countries as a Deep State behind the scenes. These regimes were found in Spain under Franco and in Portugal under Salazar along with its colonies.

These regimes were not so much in evidence in Africa except in South Africa and Rhodesia and most prominently, Mobutu in Zaire and Samuel Doe in Liberia.

The fascist forms of these rightwing dictatorships varied, most being nonracist fascism but a few being racist fascists (Turkey), and others being Mussolinists (Suharto in Indonesia with his "pangesila")

arby , Dec 19 2020 23:57 utc | 29
I can't say that I am a big Trump fan but I do like him for the very reason the Borg hates him. For saying things off script.

EG: "The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of....
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)"

John , Dec 20 2020 0:09 utc | 30
To one who has investigated cybercrime, this appears certain to be a complete fake by the Texas company SolarWinds. Investigating internet copyright racketeering, I found two networks of shell corporations with dozens of websites which took orders, did payments, or passed codes between those layers to obscure the connections. One of the prominent sites had the absurd name "TsarMedia.com" to look Russian, but was based in – you guessed it – Texas. Recall that the Ukraine cybercrime software routinely inserted Cyrillic characters and Russian historical names into headers to permit crooks to claim that the source was Russia. Texans too need all-purpose monsters on whom to blame their wrongdoing.

Note that all of the responsible US government agencies Refused to investigate those copyright racketeering operations, even when given the evidence, and were therefore likely involved, using hundreds of websites far outnumbering legitimate sources, offering political works for free with one click, to deny the authors their income source.

Also note that these warmonger scammers are dependents of the military industry and secret agencies, directly or indirectly, extreme tribalist primitives whose ideology is bullying, tyranny, and power-grabs by foul means, who are enemies of democracy let alone sane foreign policy, and will say anything at all to get their way.

Also note that the providers of the software are entirely responsible for making it easy to hack. As a software engineer, I have tried in vain for decades to convince companies producing critical infrastructure equipment to not use internet administration links, because they are not only hackable, but the encryption codes all have backdoors for "security" agencies. It is beyond foolishness to allow any system administrator to control anything from anywhere. So no doubt SolarWinds did just that, got hacked by anybody anywhere, and is looking for an excuse to avoid losing their contract. Being Texans in need of a big excuse, that excuse could only be Russia, the all-purpose monster behind every tree.

p , Dec 20 2020 1:49 utc | 35
@27 re Venezuela

iirc the software for the hydro station came from Canada, and ran on XP (Russian Col. 'Cassad' blog)

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov 2019:

"According to the country's legitimate government headed by President Nicolas Maduro, as well as information from other credible sources, the electricity sector of Venezuela came under attack from abroad on March 7 of this year We provide all necessary assistance to Venezuelan friends on the basis of requests from the legitimate government...[this was] comprehensive remote influence on the control and monitoring systems of the main power distribution stations where the equipment produced in one of the Western countries has been installed...

They and the instigators of sabotage are responsible for the deaths of people, including of those in hospitals which were left without electricity..."

The civilian programmers are criminals, in the literal sense. When found, warrants must be placed with Interpol for their arrest.

With regard to government employees, in line with the Nuremburg trials, they cannot say they were acting on orders. They too, are criminally responsible. They could have refused orders, but didn't.

With regard to elected government officials, they carry diplomatic passports, and are immune while they do.

Lack of extradition treaties and the politicised and biased International Court of Justice means the politicians - murderers - will escape any punishment.

Notably, Blair, responsible for illegal aggression on a sovereign state resulting in mass murder of civilians, not only escaped any form of punishment, but has been made a very highly paid peace advisor.

ian , Dec 20 2020 1:56 utc | 36
I give zero weight to these opinions that only refer to anonymous 'experts' and never present any actual data. I get that the average NYT reader isn't an IT or cyber security expert, and has to let someone they trust interpret for them, but there are many people out there who are quite capable of looking at the data and drawing their own conclusions.
psychohistorian , Dec 20 2020 2:09 utc | 37
Reuters is now reporting a 2nd attempt of SolarWinds intrusion as described in the quote below

"Security experts told Reuters this second effort is known as "SUPERNOVA." It is a piece of malware that imitates SolarWinds' Orion product but it is not "digitally signed" like the other attack, suggesting this second group of hackers did not share access to the network management company's internal systems.

It is unclear whether SUPERNOVA has been deployed against any targets, such as customers of SolarWinds. The malware appears to have been created in late March, based on a review of the file's compile times.

The new finding shows how more than one sophisticated hacking group viewed SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas-based company that was not a household name until this month, as an important gateway to penetrate other targets."

j. casey , Dec 20 2020 2:24 utc | 38
Is any evidence offered that there was any hack at all? Is the entire thing a fully fabricated false flag, yet another, in service of taking Nord Stream 2 down?
CarlD , Dec 20 2020 3:10 utc | 39
Re Venezuela power outages.

When Maduro coalesced as a US target and his government was declared illegitimate, one of the first thing that happened was the destruction of the water turbines feeding the Venezuelan grid.

The US backed opposition claimed that this was the result of the Chavez and successors negligence towards thee maintenance of the generation equipment.

However, the Venezuelan Govt. had renovated all the dam equipment at the tune of 15+ billions with a German Firm in 2015.

Just as Stuxnet destroyed the Irani centrifuges, some entity derailed the governing system and led the Venezuelan turbines to death from overspeed.

Such hacking is lauded by the think tanks of the US. Was successful in causing widespread misery to millions.

But who gives a Flying F**k in the US about these things?

uncle tungsten , Dec 20 2020 3:23 utc | 40
psychohistorian #32
What an ugly way to run a society. Moving society to public finance and abolishing private finance is what is needed to save our species and what we can of the world we live in. I am with China in advocating for Ad Astra because we can see the end of our ability to live on this planet because of historical faith-based disrespect of it.

Thank you and it sure is ugly. Here is an interview with Kern Hudes for those interested.

On the IT story of the thread

Thank you to j. casey #38 for that question. Agreed the entire thing could be a hoax and the insider trading sting was the fee they got for going along with it.

Regardless of that the only way to ensure security is ably described by john #30:

Also note that the providers of the software are entirely responsible for making it easy to hack. As a software engineer, I have tried in vain for decades to convince companies producing critical infrastructure equipment to not use internet administration links, because they are not only hackable, but the encryption codes all have backdoors for "security" agencies.

It is beyond foolishness to allow any system administrator to control anything from anywhere. So no doubt SolarWinds did just that, got hacked by anybody anywhere, and is looking for an excuse to avoid losing their contract. Being Texans in need of a big excuse, that excuse could only be Russia, the all-purpose monster behind every tree.

Thank you for that brevity and deadly assassination of the idiots behind this.

Fyi , Dec 20 2020 3:36 utc | 41
Mr. CarlD

The Germans and the Americans decided that it was worth to risk the entire German SCADA business to sting Iran and later Venezuela. Because that was what those attacks, in the absence of Iranian or Venezuelan capitulation meant, harm to German bussiness for no strategic gains.

I suspect, like so much else that comes out of the Court of the Mad King and his minions, we are dealing with a form of Hubris: "We are the only suppliers of this type of equipment and we can abuse our customers..."

Hoarsewhisperer , Dec 20 2020 5:03 utc | 42
Yesterday, DW News compiled a report on Internet Anonymity focused on TOR as the most widely known example of anonymiser networks. They explained the mechanism by which one may access the www via the TOR network and shed one's own identity and replace it with one created in a TOR server, multiple times, until it becomes IMPOSSIBLE to trace the original identity.

The report was aired in the context of the current US cyber-intrusion claims and, although it didn't name names or point fingers, it concluded that anyone who says they know who expertly hacked their system is lying.

I thought it was jolly decent of DW to spell this out, considering all the US lap-doggish anti-Russia tropes the German govt has endorsed recently.

uncle tungsten , Dec 20 2020 5:15 utc | 43
Hoarsewhisperer #42

That is all very well fro DW to run that doco but TOR is not a wise choice to manufacture anonymity. There is a strong view that it is a flawed CIA construct. I am happy to be proven wrong but over the years some wise heads have urged caution.

Piotr Berman , Dec 20 2020 5:34 utc | 44
Sorry, folks, but as a practitioner in the field - the problem is systemic, not national or even international. Information Technology is a bloated mess.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 19 2020 21:21 utc | 12

I think that this is a classic case when we can productively ask "cui bono"?

Big software companies like Google and Microsoft have goals that are against the users, and they can do it because of monopoly powers and users do not knowing any better.

From browser side, one goal is to please advertisers by enabling takeovers of your hardware to track you, make displays that annoy you -- but at occasion entice you to spend money on something, freeze you computer with lame attempts to make dynamic displays and so on.

Because this is how browsers are money cows, operating systems support those shenanigans in an increasing variety of ways. So from security point of view we have a fortress with wide ramparts and massive walls that are riddled with tunnels, each tunnel having a rickety gate, and hordes of people improving padlocks on those gates with weekly security fixes. For those unfamiliar with rickety gates, when you have a fenced facility, it is easiest to climb over the gates, you can grab the frames, barbed wire is straight up (easier than the inclined wires on the rest of the fence, and if you are in a hurry, just hit the gate with the front bumper.)

Next, operating system have to be out of date in few years so you are forced to buy a new one or to buy a new computer (Apple model). Instability of systems prevent security fixes to be completed in the lifetime of a system.

Those are commercial motivation. Then there are deep state shenanigans, they want some openness to Trojan horses.

Arch Bungle , Dec 20 2020 5:41 utc | 45
Posted by: John | Dec 20 2020 0:09 utc | 30
Also note that the providers of the software are entirely responsible for making it easy to hack. As a software engineer, I have tried in vain for decades to convince companies producing critical infrastructure equipment to not use internet administration links, because they are not only hackable, but the encryption codes all have backdoors for "security" agencies. It is beyond foolishness to allow any system administrator to control anything from anywhere. So no doubt SolarWinds did just that, got hacked by anybody anywhere, and is looking for an excuse to avoid losing their contract. Being Texans in need of a big excuse, that excuse could only be Russia, the all-purpose monster behind every tree.

I would shift the bulk of the blame off the software manufacturers and onto the IT departments and integrators responsible for installing those products into their infrastructure, for the following general reasons:

Ultimately, making a single software product secure will only achieve limited gains: Those gains evaporate in an instant one some junior cablemonkey plugs a secure server into the public DMZ using the wrong network interface. No amount of code polishing, static analysis, secure software design is going to make even a dent when a careless admin sets the password to pass@123, disables TLS encryption and puts the management interface on the public network so he can easily run operations from the cafe' down the road.

Aside: I've had an on and off relationship with SolarWinds for 20 years, while it's been the running joke of IT admins the world over, exposing it's management interfaces to the public is something only the most amateurish IT departments would do. No, someone failed at the network administration layer: Where was the firewall admin in all this? Where was the Network administrator with his routing policies? Most of all the CTO/IT Director/IT managers clearly failed in the secure deployment and management of the product. Solarwinds doesn't put itself on the public Internet by accident!

Nothing really adds up about this whole story anyway:

- Why, when SolarWinds has been a gaping security hole for more than 2 decades is it now all of a sudden the gateway for a massive attack from a foreign power? Shouldn't it have been a continuous vulnerability all along? By now, every vulnerable internet facing SW installation would have been wiped out ages ago due to the frequency of automated attacks carried out against infrastructure in general.

Far from looking like an issue with SolarWinds, this looks like a massive and widespread failure in basic IT security by dozens of companies possibly connected by a single large service provider.

The media reporting around this issue also sounds to me like extreme coverup, take this WIRED magazine snippet:

"Over the past several years, the US has invested billions of dollars in Einstein, a system designed to detect digital intrusions. But because the SolarWinds hack was what's known as a "supply chain" attack, in which Russia compromised a trusted tool rather than using known malware to break in, Einstein failed spectacularly."

( https://www.wired.com/story/russia-solarwinds-hack-roundup/)

Really. They can't find any actual Russian malware, so instead it's "in which Russia compromised a trusted tool rather than using known malware to break in,"

Ha. Ha. Ha. Pull the other leg, Wired.

m , Dec 20 2020 8:25 utc | 46
China and Russia should conclude a cyber treaty among each other, work out the details of the verification mechanism (which is very difficult in this sphere)
and then invite other nations to join. Most other countries would probably eventually do that.

That wouldn't deter the USA or Israel from their maligne cyber activities, but it would make sure that any such move which becomes publicly known would come with a diplomatic cost.

Smith , Dec 20 2020 8:43 utc | 47
Now they are done with the anti-China phase, they are into anti-Russia?

Like clockwork, Russia should be careful though, it's by far the most vulnerable powers in the 3, US, China and Russia.

Framarz , Dec 20 2020 9:03 utc | 48
Bernhard: "The only way to prevent potentially dangerous cyber-operations is too agree with adversaries on what is off-limits and to (verifiably) stick to that."

One can not agree. We all know Micro$oft, Google, FB, Whatsapp, Instagram, ... are feeding US and Zionist intelligence agencies with all type of informations. Any international treaty on cyber-security would under this conditions be obsolete from the beginning.

Another matter is that as Bernhard correctly points out: "One can not spy on other countries and then complain when they do something similar to oneself. Responding by waging destruction against another country's IT systems only guarantees that there will be a response in kind. If one wants to avert cyber-espionage and cyber-attacks there is only one way out."

But it's just naive to think that CIA, NSA, Mossad are going to respect any international agreement in any area. Stuxnet virus and it's intrusion of the Iranian nuclear facilities or sabotage of Venezuelan power-grid facilities were not made by China, Russia or North Korea. US government and Zionist Apartheid regime did those, aiming to sabotage and do harm not only on facilities but also on humans. If we go back, the much praised (in western MSM) Stuxnet was the operation legitimizing all similar cyber attacks to follow in the future. ZioImperialists can not expect having free hands to physically terror other nations and not be considered as a legitim target by them.

Another issue is that by criminalizing whistle-blowing and whistle-blowers like Snowden, Manning et al, US government and Zionists shoot in their own knee. If the price of whistle-blowing of criminality is too high, then the whistle-blowers doesn't go public, he or she just provide the access to those who can cover the criminal acts from the distance.

Framarz , Dec 20 2020 10:11 utc | 49
About the "Russian", "Chinese" narrative, I admit, it's a bit strange that US government and MSM are still insisting on them. I find it somehow positive. They know who was behind, they blame it on someone else, this could mean: "We are not going to do anything about it!"

If this is the case, then it sound wise, who knows what is going to happen if they choose to act aggressive against one of many enemies while one of the enemies got access to among others the entire network of their energy security administration.

And, lets not forget that Zionists Apartheid regime put USA in the current humiliating position in the first place.
A very constructive approach by US government would be to drop all illegal sanctions against others, pull out of ME and focus on their own domestic business instead of servicing Zionist Apartheid regime.

peter , Dec 20 2020 11:12 utc | 53
"To blame, without evidence, Russia for a 'hack' and to incite against it will not solve the above problems."

Maybe this time it really was Russia, according to Doctorow:

"The allegations of Russian hacking made by the United States in the heat of Russia-gate were frivolous, appropriate to toddlers in a sandbox. Leaving fingerprints all over the supposed theft over the internet to get at Hillary's communications and tip the election in Trump's favor. Only a fool would think that the Kremlin operates at this level. And, as we know, there are plenty of fools in the USA, though it appears a disproportionate number of them are in the Democratic Party and its thought leaders like Chuck Schumer of New York and Rick Blumenthal of Connecticut.

This hacking was of a different scale and different nature entirely. It was massive. It had no friendly or other bear tags put on by the Ukrainians. It went straight for the jugular, the most secret and sensitive corners of the US government. And it apparently was not destructive, did nothing that could trigger a war, just make a point: gotcha!"

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2020/12/20/the-russians-did-it/

Sounds reasonable to me - if the US persists in threats with devastating cyber attacks against the RF because of those idiotic Russia Gate claims - demonstrate what the RF really can do and prevent any planned stupidity by the USA.

chu teh , Dec 20 2020 11:29 utc | 54

Fyi | Dec 20 2020 3:36 utc | 41

re... risk the entire German SCADA business to sting Iran and later Venezuela.

Well, an obedient/coerced? Siemens can figure nicely into the calculus if you have a minute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgzB4_Zw3RE

"How the US dominates Tech" As recommended recently by uncle tungsten | Dec 17 2020 23:55 utc | 46

Big shout-out to "Canadian Cents"

Simon , Dec 20 2020 11:33 utc | 55
Relentlessly, you go to stories in the New York Times. Like a dog returning to its excrement. Everybody knows it's an intelligence shill. Why do you bother? There are far more important things you could be reporting on.
Bemildred , Dec 20 2020 11:54 utc | 56
Posted by: Johny Conspiranoid | Dec 20 2020 10:21 utc | 51

"It makes no sense to connect something to the internet and then expect it to remain secret."

Indeed. And yet they have been doing it vigorously for 30 years now, making a few shallow assholes very very rich, wasting huge quantities of natural resources, allowing many feckless bureaucrats to pretend to do something for somebody, screwing the heck out of most everybody else, and making everybody - and I do mean everybody - less secure. But hey, your phone can tell you how to get to the store.

Mark2 , Dec 20 2020 12:33 utc | 57
We know beyond doubt that the top shelf of our society have no regard what so ever for law and order international or national. They will break the law with impunity, turn a blind eye to their colleagues breaking the rules. They will impose the law on the public like a sledgehammer to oppress us.

Wouldn't we just love to be a 'fly on the wall' when they get together and conspire to commit there criminality !! ZOOM The soft vonrable underbelly of your criminal elite.

Bemildred , Dec 20 2020 12:50 utc | 58
@Ghost Ship | Dec 20 2020 10:25 utc | 52

These large, complicated, very expensive software "management" packages are largely butt-covering, to protect management from the threat of "doing nothing" when things go wrong. Some nice kickbacks in it too. The usual effect is to make the sysadmins spend all their time trying to make the package work right. Security theater and treated like it too, fancy costumes out in front, bare wall behind the curtain. I remember one "configuration management" package that was practically an operating system all by itself and absolutely a waste of time. Network management even more so.

Norwegian , Dec 20 2020 12:56 utc | 59
@ james | Dec 19 2020 21:04 utc | 11
When did your moderator assignment here begin?
Norwegian , Dec 20 2020 13:04 utc | 60
@Hoyeru | Dec 19 2020 20:51 utc | 9
I dont understand why people still waste their time writing article refuting USA's claims. Dont people understand already USA DOES NOT NEED NO STINKING EVIDENCE?
That is plainly obvious, yes. The criminal US regime does what it does and their claims against other countries are almost universally without evidence. Spending energy refuting baseless claims can even provide an impression of legitimacy around those insane and baseless claims. The question is how to expose the lies without giving the liars legitimacy.
Norwegian , Dec 20 2020 13:14 utc | 61
@gottlieb | Dec 19 2020 21:25 utc | 13
One thing we know for sure and that is the US government has one enemy above all others: the truth.
Unfortunately, this is true not only for the US government, but for the "western" governments, establishments and media in general. To them, lies are no problem but truth is a deadly enemy. I could tell a personal story about that, but it would be off topic for this thread so I will not. But the observation that truth is the enemy to these people is key, even if it seems simplistic. The fact is that you cannot reason with people who have truth as their enemy.
Norwegian , Dec 20 2020 13:34 utc | 62
@j. casey | Dec 20 2020 2:24 utc | 38
Is any evidence offered that there was any hack at all? Is the entire thing a fully fabricated false flag, yet another, in service of taking Nord Stream 2 down?
That's a key question, I agree. The proper position to take is that it is all baseless lies unless verifiable evidence that the 'hack' actually occurred is presented. Never mind the claims of 'who did it' when there is no evidence that anything happened at all.

The situation in the west now is such that all information is centrally controlled, and face to face communication has been severely limited. It is not a coincidence.

pretzelattack , Dec 20 2020 13:39 utc | 63
I haven't seen this level of propaganda since the buildup to the second Iraq war. They are obviously planning more aggression against Russia and have to keep the public at a fever pitch to get away with it. it serves so many purposes, not just politically for the dnc and rnc, but for nato, the vastly overfunded intel community, etc. the domestic arm of the fake war on terror is of course the cops, and the various federal cops. Here the propaganda seems aimed mainly at republicans, with the "marxist blm" and "marxist fascist antifa" exciting the republican base into a frenzy, and the main foreign "villain" is said to be china. the propaganda aimed at the democrats focuses on russia; that product already has a proven track record of success with the democratic base, and the lies are aimed at whitewashing biden and harris and their abysmal records of support for police violence. nato and the us intel community have to justify their existence by stirring up the populace against imaginary foreign aggression, and it has succeeded spectacularly with the public in the u.s.

in short, these idiots want to take us to the edge of a major world war so they can continue to loot and control us, and they seem to think they will do just fine in a post nuclear war future.

Norwegian , Dec 20 2020 13:48 utc | 64
@Piotr Berman | Dec 20 2020 5:34 utc | 44
From browser side, one goal is to please advertisers by enabling takeovers of your hardware to track you, make displays that annoy you -- but at occasion entice you to spend money on something, freeze you computer with lame attempts to make dynamic displays and so on.
You have many good points, thanks. For the time being, I would recommend the Brave Browser https://brave.com/ as a countermove to these issues. It is super fast, ad free (or you can choose to get paid to see ads) and generally very good. I use it under Windows, Linux, Android and on my iPhone. As for operating systems becoming 'obsolete' forcing you to buy a new computer: Unless you have very special requirements, Linux Ubuntu will do all you need for free on your existing hardware. It is easy to install, very secure and virus free (the Windows virus business model does not work everywhere).
William Gruff , Dec 20 2020 14:04 utc | 65
Norwegian @60:
@gottlieb | Dec 19 2020 21:25 utc | 13
One thing we know for sure and that is the US government has one enemy above all others: the truth.

Unfortunately, this is true not only for the US government, but for the "western" governments, establishments and media in general.

It is worse even than that. The aversion to truth permeates western cultures. The obese American looks in the mirror and sees fitness. The educated fool looks in the mirror and sees wisdom. The boy raised to believe that being a white male is bad looks in the mirror and sees a virtuous girl trapped in the evil enemy's body, or even worse he sees a mountain panda. The young woman with no accomplishments but endless praise and petting of her ego looks in the mirror and sees vague exceptionality and formless superiority. The fascist looks in the mirror and sees a noble warrior for social justice.

The US government can get away with existing in denial because the population relies upon denial as well.

librul , Dec 20 2020 14:51 utc | 66
A fait accompli (fa) for headline readers.

On Reuters main webpage is a heading that reads: "Biden's options for Russian hacking punishment: sanctions, cyber retaliation"

The accusation, investigation and trial phases are as good as done, only the setting of the punishment phase remains.

It is for the benefit of headline readers. In the body of the article itself Reuters used the words "suspected hack" once. When will Reuters move the goal posts and quietly drop the word "suspected". It is guaranteed that they will, the question is how long before they weasel it away. The timing is certainly not dependent upon "evidence", more dependent upon how long until they think people won't notice the change.

(actually, there are two (fa) in the headline, Russia is guilty of hacking and Biden is President)

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-cyber-breach-biden/bidens-options-for-russian-hacking-punishment-sanctions-cyber-retaliation-idUSKBN28U0DV

---
---

(over the top idea, I hope it is just an idea)

A scary thought is that all this is prepping the American Sheeple for a vast shutdown of communication ("the Russian's did it!")
in the event the Deep State is not getting it's way with stealing this election.

Rao , Dec 20 2020 14:52 utc | 67
Norwegian@60
For those who wish to use linux from windows is there is puppylinux frugal install.
You can start from pendrive install with in 10 minutes.
Rao
pretzelattack , Dec 20 2020 14:52 utc | 68
i'm sure the most murderous cops look in the mirror and see noble warriors for social justice, just as many of them did when they were slaughtering Iraqis in the street from a helicopter or in fallujah.
vk , Dec 20 2020 15:07 utc | 70
The whole thing is already beginning to crumble: White House Backs Away From Issuing Statement Blaming Russia for 'Sunburst' Attack, Reports Say

This "backing down at the eleventh hour" came just after this: 2nd Hacking Group 'Affected' US SolarWinds Software, Microsoft Says as Trump Questions Russian Role

This time, SolarWinds didn't blame another nation. It just stated it was "investigating". Even for Trump's rabid anti-Sinicism, it was too much, so he toned down on his Twitter:

...discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!). There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA. @DNI_Ratcliffe @SecPompeo
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2020

From "it was China!" to "discussing the possibility that it may be China" there's an abyssal distance. Trump is also backing down.

There's a clear pattern here: the American Governments and MSM initiate a very virulent propaganda attack, based on outright fake news, against Russia and/or China. A burst of hysteria takes over the nation. Then it quickly, almost aggressively, backs down and tones down on the propaganda warfare.

Of course that there's an element of "bend but not break" here, as credibility is a finite resource the MSM and the USG have to use carefully and with moderation. Plausible deniability is a necessary tool in order to not spend your whole credibility at once and to replenish it, while also giving the masses a credible scenario (not perfect, not dystopian: in the middle of the road).

But there's also a nobler objective with this: to preserve the company's stock market prices. By creating a panacea over a foreign enemy, SolarWinds/FireEye calm down the shareholders and Wall Street, thus preserving or at least softening the blow to the realization their product is inferior in quality, even borderline useless. It's not that the shareholders and Wall St. don't know that, but that they are now ensured the masses won't know that.

We have a scenario here where the American MSM and the USG are now completely fused to Wall Street. As junior partners.

William Gruff , Dec 20 2020 15:41 utc | 71
pretzelattack @68

Denial is how so many Americans can live with themselves. It is why I despair of America saving itself.

William Gruff , Dec 20 2020 16:03 utc | 73
So Trump is attributing the obvious issues in the election to this hack attack? Now the pieces begin to fall together. I would say that evidence has been uncovered (but lot yet leaked) that the vote tabulation was altered and that is why we have suddenly been treated to the "Foreign baddies hacked us!" media spectacle while nothing has been said of what these hackers actually did: The public needs to be primed with the diversion before the leaks are sprung. Basically, the manipulation of the vote counts by the "We lie, we cheat, we steal!" gang has been uncovered and the suspicion that it was a domestic job has to be headed off. A narrative needs to be generated and installed in the public consciousness in which the evidence that the CIA was behind the hack was actually planted by clever Russian/Chinese/Iranian bad guys and the CIA is innocent.

A CYA operation for the CIA? That is what it is starting to look like to me.

chu teh , Dec 20 2020 17:51 utc | 77
Posted by: William Gruff | Dec 20 2020 15:41 utc | 71

re ...Denial is how so many Americans can live with themselves....

Indeed that is workably true. More broadly for all humans, might be restated as: Automatically creating justifications is how the mind* "protects" its owner from confronting being "wrong". *mind--whatever that is; there is much disagreement about that.

fyi , Dec 20 2020 18:19 utc | 78
Mr. chu teh

Yes, the stupid avarice at the Court of the Mad King is remarkable. It demonstrates a species of Hubris which assumes that no one can retaliate against them.

I note here that the Russians have now full legal and financial control of their aerospace firms and their new mid-size passenger jet does not have foreign content.

Basically, the Mad King has alerted other sovereigns in the world of their vulnerabilities and they are proceeding to address those items - likely taking 20 or 30 years.

pretzelattack , Dec 20 2020 19:45 utc | 79
denial is probably the way the cops who run down protestors, or shoot them in the back, live with themselves. and true, a lot of americans cheer those cops on, and pretend they are justified, just as many americans cheer on the troops overseas who are also thought to be protecting freedom, like those in the wikileaks video who shot at children in the street. "fighting terrorism for freedom" my ass. this kind of denial is certainly a lot more consequential than the tendency to deny one is overweight or losing their hair, and i don't think it is the same process.

i don't know about the republican caucus in iowa, but i know what the dnc rigged the cauces in iowa against sanders, so it's not like the process can't be interfered with, whether by an app that doesn't work or simple old fashioned cheating like pretending to flip a coin.

pretzelattack , Dec 20 2020 20:06 utc | 80
another thing about cops who are about to commit violence they can't justify; they often turn off their body cams, or claim they forgot to turn them on, or they weren't working. that's not denial; that's premeditation.
arby , Dec 20 2020 20:20 utc | 81
I read somewhere that human beings are not rational but rationalizing. Sounds about right to me.

c1ue , Dec 21 2020 1:59 utc | 82

@Piotr Berman #44

No, cui bono is irrelevant. IT is a mess because despite the pace of historical change, the effects on productivity are remarkable. If one can improve productivity by double digits with half-assed IT efforts - why bother with more coherent and considered planning or execution?

Now repeat this every 3 years or so. The result is an ungodly hodgepodge in very little time.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 21 2020 1:59 utc | 82

Antonym , Dec 21 2020 3:33 utc | 83
I see it now simple thus: Anglo Deep $tate cannot defeat China MIL plus Russia so it needs them split. That's how Kissinger "won" the Vietnam war by cozying up to Mao. Quite a Pyrrhic victory on the short (Vietnam) and the long (PR China today) run. Any crap is being hauled up to tar Russia, from MH17, via Skripal to cyber false flaggery.
James joseph , Dec 21 2020 4:17 utc | 84
For me, the incredible truth is that greed overcame all other emotions: patriotism? ...just a adman's final lever; exceptionalism could have no other end other than the bonfire of the vanities. Greed, by the very few ultra rich, the lucre flowing down to control all segments of the society, the body now being feasted on, until there are few specs left , worthy of the effort.

[Dec 21, 2020] It make sense to look for articles written by qualified specialists and ignore neoliberal MSM coverage

Dec 21, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

>

Kent Pete Barbeaux 2 days ago • edited

I disagree. What aggression did the Russians take? A Russian pilot flying over a US aircraft carrier and taking pictures is intelligence gathering. A Russian bomber trying to bomb a US aircraft carrier is an act of aggression.

By that definition, this is normal intelligence gathering. Not something that requires killing people.

Edited to add: Of course it was legitimately signed. Solarwinds signed it and pushed it out. That only means the software came from Solarwinds internal builds. Shame on Solarwinds for not maintaining simple checksum chains of its object code to insure it hasn't been overwritten. Shame on the defense department for not requiring Solarwinds to maintain secure source control.

sarsfield Kent 2 days ago

Shame on Solarwinds for not maintaining simple checksum chains of its object code to insure it hasn't been overwritten. Shame on the defense department for not requiring Solarwinds to maintain secure source control.

This is the first indication i have seen anywhere on this breach which suggests SolarWinds could have taken basic precautions in pushing out its firmware updates. I am going to look for articles written by Cyber people on this and ignore the press.


Tom Sadlowski
sarsfield 2 days ago

Yes, Tech in this current era, is neglecting the most foundational checks and balances. In a twenty-four span, we had the SolarWinds/Microsoft 365 Hack and the Google Cloud global failure, after having the entire world's internet stopping due to a bad mass deployed firmware update to the switches. Therefore, I believe the Federal Government is best to create its own proprietary system than outsourcing to Microsoft, Amazon, or Google.


kouroi
Pete Barbeaux a day ago

Some edits would be useful, like instead of: "containing a direct back door to the Russian military" one should have written "containing a direct back door to any knowledgeable hacker". Something that Snowden for YEARS has complained about. And this is why HUAWEI is so hated, because it doesn't offer backdoors to be exploited, in a handshake understanding with US intelligence corps.

some antigovernment lunatic 2 days ago

Until now all I've seen were anonymous sources claiming that it kind of feels like those dastardly Russkies were behind it again. Did I miss the part where actual evidence was provided?

[Dec 21, 2020] Boomerang returns: methods pioneered in Stuxnet and Flame return and bite the USA in the butt

CISA is an agency full of bureaucrats, not computer specialists. So any judgement is highly suspect. In my view "computer security bureaucrat" is typically a parasite or a charlatan. Traditionally computer security departments in large corporations often serve as a place to exile incompetent wannabes. I do not think the government is different. Real high quality programmers usually prefer to write their own software not to spend their time analyzing some obtuse malware code. Often high level honchos in such department are so obviously incompetent that it hurts. This is the same agency that declared Presidential election 2020 to be the most secure in history. So their statements are not worth the electrons used to put them on the screen, so say nothing about a ppar , if they manage to get into such rags as NYT or WaPo.
We need clear-eyed assessment from a real Windows OS specialists like for Stuxnet was Mark Russinovich , which is difficult in current circumstances.
Dec 21, 2020 | arstechnica.com

The supply chain attack used to breach federal agencies and at least one private company poses a "grave risk" to the United States, in part because the attackers likely used means other than just the SolarWinds backdoor to penetrate networks of interest, federal officials said on Thursday. One of those networks belongs to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for the Los Alamos and Sandia labs, according to a report from Politico .

"This adversary has demonstrated an ability to exploit software supply chains and shown significant knowledge of Windows networks," officials with the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency wrote in an alert . "It is likely that the adversary has additional initial access vectors and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that have not yet been discovered." CISA, as the agency is abbreviated, is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

Elsewhere, officials wrote: "CISA has determined that this threat poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations."

Reuters, meanwhile, reported that the attackers breached a separate major technology supplier and used the compromise to get into high-value final targets. The news services cited two people briefed on the matter.

FURTHER READING Premiere security firm FireEye says it was breached by nation-state hackers The attackers, whom CISA said began their operation no later than March, managed to remain undetected until last week when security firm FireEye reported that hackers backed by a nation-state had penetrated deep into its network . Early this week, FireEye said that the hackers were infecting targets using Orion, a widely used network management tool from SolarWinds. After taking control of the Orion update mechanism, the attackers were using it to install a backdoor that FireEye researchers are calling Sunburst. Advertisement

me title=

FURTHER READING Russian hackers hit US government using widespread supply chain attack Sunday was also when multiple news outlets, citing unnamed people, reported that the hackers had used the backdoor in Orion to breach networks belonging to the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and possibly other agencies. The Department of Homeland Security and the National Institutes of Health were later added to the list. Bleak assessment

Thursday's CISA alert provided an unusually bleak assessment of the hack; the threat it poses to government agencies at the national, state, and local levels; and the skill, persistence, and time that will be required to expel the attackers from networks they had penetrated for months undetected.

"This APT actor has demonstrated patience, operational security, and complex tradecraft in these intrusions," officials wrote in Thursday's alert. "CISA expects that removing this threat actor from compromised environments will be highly complex and challenging for organizations."

The officials went on to provide another bleak assessment: "CISA has evidence of additional initial access vectors, other than the SolarWinds Orion platform; however, these are still being investigated. CISA will update this Alert as new information becomes available."

The advisory didn't say what the additional vectors might be, but the officials went on to note the skill required to infect the SolarWinds software build platform, distribute backdoors to 18,000 customers, and then remain undetected in infected networks for months.

"This adversary has demonstrated an ability to exploit software supply chains and shown significant knowledge of Windows networks," they wrote. "It is likely that the adversary has additional initial access vectors and tactics, techniques, and procedures that have not yet been discovered."

Among the many federal agencies that used SolarWinds Orion, reportedly, was the Internal Revenue Service. On Thursday, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig asking that he provide a briefing on whether taxpayer data was compromised.

Advertisement

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They wrote:

The IRS appears to have been a customer of SolarWinds as recently as 2017. Given the extreme sensitivity of personal taxpayer information entrusted to the IRS, and the harm both to Americans' privacy and our national security that could result from the theft and exploitation of this data by our adversaries, it is imperative that we understand the extent to which the IRS may have been compromised. It is also critical that we understand what actions the IRS is taking to mitigate any potential damage, ensure that hackers do not still have access to internal IRS systems, and prevent future hacks of taxpayer data.

IRS representatives didn't immediately return a phone call seeking comment for this post.

The CISA alert said the key takeaways from its investigation so far are:

This is a patient, well-resourced, and focused adversary that has sustained long duration activity on victim networks The SolarWinds Orion supply chain compromise is not the only initial infection vector this APT actor leveraged Not all organizations that have the backdoor delivered through SolarWinds Orion have been targeted by the adversary with follow-on actions Organizations with suspected compromises need to be highly conscious of operational security, including when engaging in incident response activities and planning and implementing remediation plans

What has emerged so far is that this is an extraordinary hack whose full scope and effects won't be known for weeks or even months. Additional shoes are likely to drop early and often.

[Dec 21, 2020] Are you insinuating the fake news factory aka The NY Times is not a credible source ;)

When I see "cybersecurity specialist" on national TV I always suspect he/she is a crook ;-)
Dec 21, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

some antigovernment lunatic 2 days ago

Until now all I've seen were anonymous sources claiming that it kind of feels like those dastardly Russkies were behind it again. Did I miss the part where actual evidence was provided?

smallprint some antigovernment lunatic 2 days ago • edited

Are you insinuating the fake news factory aka The NY Times is not a credible source ;)

kouroi smallprint a day ago

https://www.livetube.tv/blo...

smallprint kouroi a day ago • edited

The NY Times used to have an entire department focusing on selling the Iraq war. Google "Judith Miller", who was the chief sell-Iraq-war propagandist and liar. The NY Times has a bad record of being the "publication of record" among the corporate mainstream media.

kouroi byersbewhere a day ago

4 years of Russiagate should make anyone a bit mistrustful, then WMD & Iraq War before that?

some antigovernment lunatic byersbewhere 19 hours ago • edited

"Your honor, you are quite right about the lack of evidence. The problem is...you shouldn't want me to show you the evidence! That would be tantamount to revealing my investigative techniques!"

"Well, when you put it that way..."

And of course the sources were anonymous. Don't you read the WaPo like a good citizen?

The Russian hackers, known by the nicknames APT29 or Cozy Bear, are part of that nation's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and they breached email systems in some cases, said the people familiar with the intrusions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter

https://www.washingtonpost....

Daniel Baker 2 days ago

Is there any precedent for declaring pure espionage/intelligence gathering, even on a very large scale, to be an armed attack warranting an armed response? I can't think of any.

A major breach of U.S. security calls for a robust law enforcement response and cybersecurity measures, and arguably even for the longstanding death penalty for espionage if the offenders are caught, but not for cries of "declaration of war," like Dick Durbin's.


Greengrocer
2 days ago

It's curious how all this official talk of cyber-spying never mentions one particular country that does a ton of it to us: Israel.


smallprint
Greengrocer 2 days ago

That's because God told them they own whatever they're stealing from the US. Ask any Palestinian, they'll tell you how it works.


Annie from Alaska
Rkramden66 2 days ago

We do not know whether the perps were Chinese or not. The claims of attribution are coming from motivated speakers and lack credibility.

butseriouslynow Annie from Alaska 2 days ago

I'm beginning to understand why conservatives in Alaska say they can see Russia from their back door.

smallprint Annie from Alaska 2 days ago • edited

That applies to the same sources "informing" us about the so-called Russian hack.
Remember when we were "informed" N. Korea hacked into Sonny's and "downloaded" an entire movie, which was not even released?! Turned out that was an inside job by a woman who had worked at Sonny for ten years. I smell the same BS from the likes of the NY Times.

[Dec 21, 2020] The Russian 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' That Wasn't

Dec 21, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Home / Articles / Policy / The Russian 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' That Wasn't POLICY The Russian 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' That Wasn't

The recent SolarWinds hack is no excuse for doomsday rhetoric, especially from those who have been leveling it for decades. (Shutterstock/solarseven)

DECEMBER 18, 2020

|

12:01 AM

SEAN LAWSON AND BRANDON VALERIANO

For almost three decades, we have awaited a mythical "cyber Pearl Harbor," the harbinger of digital doom that the U.S. cybersecurity community assumes to be inevitable. Strangely enough, some believe this cyber Pearl Harbor already happened twice within the last two months.

Though warnings of cyber Pearl Harbor emerged as early as 1991, former defense secretary Leon Panetta is perhaps best known for promoting the idea, warning in 2012 of an impending "cyber-Pearl Harbor that would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation." Such a grand event would be tough to miss.

me title=

Last week, Sidney Powell, a one-time member of the president's legal team, continued to promote her conspiracy theory that the Venezuelans, the Chinese, and "other countries" had exploited voting machines to rig the election for President-elect Joe Biden. This fictitious "attack," she told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, amounted to nothing less than "cyber Pearl Harbor." Apparently the rest of us just missed it.

Cybersecurity experts, including Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who was fired by President Trump in November, have refuted these claims. Krebs called them "farcical" and "nonsensical." Officials have said there was no interference with voting machines of the kind claimed by Trump supporters and that the election was "the most secure in American history."

This week began with the news of cybersecurity breaches at a growing list of private companies and government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and even the Pentagon, perpetrated by APT29 , the Russian SVR. Dubbed SolarWinds after the company whose software served as the vector for the intrusions, the scope of the operation and the fact that it impacted defense and intelligence agencies sparked an online debate as to whether it had constituted an "attack" on the United States. Others did not wait to learn the extent of the damage before declaring that the United States had been "hit with 'Cyber-Pearl Harbor.'" Senator Richard Durbin went so far as to call the hack "virtually a declaration of war."

National Review 's Jim Geraghty implied that the United States missed the SolarWinds intrusions because it failed to take the 2015 Office of Personnel Management (OPM) breach at the hands of Chinese hackers seriously enough, focusing instead on Russian disinformation in the wake of that country's interference in the 2016 presidential election. The OPM incident, he said, "was widely described as the 'cyber Pearl Harbor' and yet most Americans didn't notice."

me title=

00:11 / 01:00

Calling any of these incidents "cyber Pearl Harbor" is inaccurate at best and inherently dangerous. The impacts of the OPM and SolarWinds hacks in no way approximate the kind of death and destruction most often associated with the use of the "cyber Pearl Harbor" analogy. The whole point of a cyber Pearl Harbor is that we would not miss the significance of such a major catastrophe since it would lead to an inevitable reconstitution of the cyber security threat environment.

This continued use of doomsday rhetoric is dangerous because it distorts our understanding of the cyber threats we do face, the implications of real incidents when they occur, and our possible response options. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in 2015, the OPM breach was representative of the real cyber threats we face not because it was the fulfillment of a long-awaited " cyber Armageddon scenario ," but because it was not. It was not an "attack," he said, but an incident of the kind of cyber espionage we witness regularly. That the cyber domain is dominated by espionage and represents a wider intelligence contest demonstrates the continuing misapplication of strategic thought surrounding cyber security violations.

Five years later, it is still unhelpful to frame incidents like SolarWind as the arrival of digital apocalypse instead of another major incident of cyber espionage . Continued hyperbole surrounding every new cyber incident encourages the kind of craven misappropriation of fears of cyber doom by those who seek to inflate threats for political gain.

We do not know the scope of SolarWinds mainly because the domain has no conception of measuring impact. In an arena obsessed with battle damage estimates, the Department of Defense simply has no interest in measuring the impact of their operations and the utility of defend forward operations that provide little leverage against espionage operations.

The FY2021 NDAA contains the most significant cyber security legislation to date. Helping the government organize in order to deny operations in the cyber environment is a critical task. There are provisions for threat hunting, organizational coordination, and more funding for cyber operations to maintain and defend cyberspace. Yet the deeper challenge is how we defend against espionage.

The real lesson of Pearl Harbor is the desperation of Japan to preemptively eliminate the United States as a threat to Japanese operations in the Pacific and the U.S. intelligence failures that enabled the attack in the first place. Taking the analogy in the correct direction suggests that the U.S. needs to seek to deny attack options to prevent infiltrations such as the SolarWinds event. The U.S. also needs to do better of understanding the strategic motivations of our adversaries. In this case, being distracted by the possibility of a major hack during the 2020 election led to a comprehensive violation of almost every government agency.

Hyperbole needs to stop and rational consideration of the impact of the SolarWind operation will take time and sober thought, not instant hot takes. Infiltration and extracting information is not an act of war, but evidence of the typical espionage operations that are conducted against near peer adversaries. Denying future operations will require a sober assessment of how to enable the defense when the attacker has many attack options. This will likely not come solely through government action, but collaboration between industry, the private sector, and government agencies that provide for collective defense.

Sean Lawson is associate professor of Communication at the University of Utah and non-resident fellow at the Krulak Center at the Marine Corps University.

Brandon Valeriano is the Donald Bren Chair of Military Innovation at the Marine Corps University located at the Krulak Center. He also serves as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a senior advisor to the U.S. Cyber Solarium Commission.


Connecticut Farmer 2 days ago

Connecticut Farmer 2 days ago

Excellent article. Hyperbole is about the last thing we need at this point in time. Unfortunately, hyperbole is standard fare these days. The result? Misinformation and half-truths, followed by hasty (and often erroneous) conclusions, followed by incorrect remedies which, more often than not, tend to make what are already bad situations only worse.

M Orban Connecticut Farmer 2 days ago • edited

Unfortunately when it comes to cyber attacks, unlike an actual Pearl Harbor, the damage is invisible to most of us. So are the perpetrators. We can't directly see the trail of evidence that connects the crime to the suspects, so we have to rely on the testimony of experts.
Then we have political pressure groups that are interested in up or down playing the severity of the breach.
On top of all, we have a population that is utterly ignorant but 'been trained to distrust experience.
As I am typing this, I am less and less optimistic.

Sourpuss M Orban 2 days ago

Even worse, we have a severely alienated population that is tired of being played by elites with constant hype about alleged foreign enemies. We have a population that sees more immediate threat from its own elites than Russian spies. The headline reads like "Deep State has Russkies in its Shorts Again" and la dee dah, why do I even care? Are Russkies gonna take my job, lock me down, or cancel me? Too late, Vlad, I've already been done.

smallprint M Orban 2 days ago

What breach bro?!

[Dec 21, 2020] The USAID, Clintons and disaster capitalism in action

Notable quotes:
"... USAID led at that time by someone named Rajiv Khan, I think it was, and directed by Hill, comandeered the few landing spots at the airport for themselves preventing planes carrying Actual Aid -- you know, food, clothing, meds -- from landing and unloading. ..."
"... I have friends who lived in Haiti at the time and years after the disaster only 6 new residences had been built and the promised factories? As far as I know, never did get built. ..."
"... USAID seems to be about anything but AID. ..."
"... When pressed about the lack of progress made in the (housing) rebuilding efforts, including inabilities to provide shelter, Secretary of State Clinton said "Those who expect progress immediately are unrealistic and doing a disservice to the many people who are working so hard. ..."
Dec 21, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

NYCVG on Fri, 12/18/2020 - 1:55pm

USAID's misbehavior in Haiti

was mammoth and memorable.

USAID led at that time by someone named Rajiv Khan, I think it was, and directed by Hill, comandeered the few landing spots at the airport for themselves preventing planes carrying Actual Aid -- you know, food, clothing, meds -- from landing and unloading.

Then Bill was named "Ambassador to Haiti" and the situation Never improved.

I have friends who lived in Haiti at the time and years after the disaster only 6 new residences had been built and the promised factories? As far as I know, never did get built.

USAID seems to be about anything but AID.

wendy davis on Fri, 12/18/2020 - 4:58pm
oh, thank you for another

@NYCVG

good example! I vote Power and Sunstein to head USAID! i was a bit more than surprised that ann garrison never mentioned it's a CIA cut-out, to say the truth.

on edit: ach; you'd meant Bill Fuck over haiti Clinton!

' F*cking the Haitian 99%: Another Clinton Family Project ', October 27, 2015 by wendyedavis (longish, but this key excerpt)

"Sure, Bill and Hill love sweatshop industrial complexes (from nacla.org) more than houses for Haiti, and love HELP™ (comically ironic acronym):

"On September 20, Haitian prime minister Jean-Marc Bellerive, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the World Bank's International Finance Corporation announced their partnership with the South Korean garment firm Sae-A Trading Company to establish an industrial park that will create 10,000 garment assembly jobs in Haiti. Without a doubt, earthquake-ravaged Haiti needs jobs, mainly to provide the country's 1.3 million homeless with the means necessary to rebuild their destroyed homes.

While little progress has been made on Haiti's immense housing needs since the January 12 earthquake, Clinton assured the investing public that factory development was moving full steam ahead. These 10,000 jobs, she assured critics "are not just any jobs. These are good jobs with fair pay that adhere to international labor standards, . . . Haiti is open for business again."

Well, sure; at a $3.09 daily minimum wage (upped later to $5, but almost no one actually gets paid at that rate), what's not to love?

"When pressed about the lack of progress made in the (housing) rebuilding efforts, including inabilities to provide shelter, Secretary of State Clinton said "Those who expect progress immediately are unrealistic and doing a disservice to the many people who are working so hard."

Bill Clinton, UN Special Envoy to Haiti, has been equally optimistic about Haiti's cheap labor prospects, especially since the passing of the Haitian Economic Lift Program (HELP) in May. The bill would increase the amount of Haitian assembled goods that could be imported into the United States duty free. "This important step," Clinton said, "responds to the needs of the Haitian people for more tools to lift themselves from poverty, while standing to benefit U.S. consumers."

But my, oh, my; the Big Dog loves high-end resort tourism, too. The Marriott opening was well-attended by toffs, including Senn Penn, as I remember it.

[Dec 21, 2020] Beautiful new Russian word: naglosaxon

Dec 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Piotr Berman , Dec 21 2020 1:01 utc | 46

To refresh my second language, Russian, I watch videos in that language (some mixed with Ukrainian), and thus I heard the excepts of end-of-the-year news conference of the president of the Russian Federation. In comments I learned a beautiful new Russian word: naglosaxon == essentially, and Anglosaxon, but shameless/insolent (naglo- ).

[Dec 21, 2020] The US war against anything Russian is never ending

Dec 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Norwegian , Dec 21 2020 9:20 utc | 80

The US war against anything Russian is never ending
The Doping Scandal Against Russia Explained (ft Dmitry Babich)

[Dec 21, 2020] As for Navalny - the indestructible kid - the only prospect of his return to Moscow is in an American tank

Dec 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

bevin , Dec 21 2020 17:12 utc | 110

John Helmer assumes, for the sake of argument, that the Russian Hack did place.

http://johnhelmer.net/russian-code-supremacy-means-theres-only-one-secret-the-us-government-has-left-that-the-government-has-no-secrets-from-russia/#more-45694

In any case the last of the friends of the United States in high places, the fifth column in the Kremlin, are losing their last scraps of influence. Whether Russia "attacked" the US is debatable and unlikely but there is no doubt that, once again, the US has attacked Russia. It has closed down its last two consulates and is reducing the Embassy in Moscow to skeletal staff. All the indications are that they are preparing for war, as are their NATO allies. The hyenas in Ukraine and Poland are salivating over spoils of war coming their way.

As for Navalny-the indestructible kid- the only prospect of his return to Moscow is in an American tank

[Dec 20, 2020] American political theater is funny in a bleak way, now the republicans are trying to reclaim mccarthyism from the democrats; instead of russia cubed it's china cubed.

Dec 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
american political theater is funny in a bleak way, now the republicans are trying to reclaim mccarthyism from the democrats; instead of russia cubed it's china cubed. maybe they felt they were victims of cultural appropriation.

Posted by: pretzelattack | Dec 19 2020 13:45 utc | 42

librul , Dec 19 2020 14:09 utc | 43

How do you spell d.i.v.e.r.s.i.o.n.a.r.y tactic.

This most recent "attack by Russia" has helped push the 9/11 sized attack upon our Constitution
off the front pages.

How many times can they play the same diversionary trick and have it work?
Every time?

[Dec 20, 2020] In 2012 Kaspersky Russian Virus Lab detected, decrypted a unknown computer Virus which is now named the Flame Virus

Dec 20, 2020 | www.rt.com

A. Smith 23 hours ago 19 Dec, 2020 02:55 PM

In 2012 Kaspersky Russian Virus Lab detected, decrypted a unknown computer Virus which is now named the Flame Virus. It had been written by the CIA, Mossad and used a compromised Windows updater server to infect Windows servers globally. Kaspersky alerted the World to this threat. The US Gov then went all-out to punish Kaspersky AV Lab forbidding them from US Gov contracts.
A. Smith 23 hours ago 19 Dec, 2020 02:49 PM
In 2012 didn't the CIA,Mossad create the Flame computer virus using a Windows update server to globally infect Windows servers? Wasn't Obama and Joe Biden in Office and ordered it under the guise of attacking Iran? Its still infecting computers across US with backdoors. Now the same folks are blaming Russia for a similar act 8 years later?

[Dec 20, 2020] Caitlin Johnstone- Secret, invisible evidence of Russian hacking is not actually evidence by Caitlin Johnstone

Dec 18, 2020 | www.rt.com

By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

We've landed in a world where diplomacy, sanctions, even war can be decided by mere claims, and evidence is optional. Yet those proudly displaying the badge of 'public trust' are the worst of the serial, politically-driven liars.

The Communist Party of China has been covertly sending arms to extremist Antifa militants in the United States in preparation for the civil war which is expected to take place after Joe Biden declares himself President for Life and institutes a Marxist dictatorship. The weapons shipments include rocket launchers, directed energy weapons, nunchucks and ninja throwing stars.

Unfortunately I cannot provide evidence for this shocking revelation as doing so would compromise my sources and methods, but trust me it's definitely true and must be acted upon immediately. I recommend President Trump declare martial law without a moment's hesitation and begin planning a military response to these Chinese aggressions.

How does this make you feel? Was your first impulse to begin scanning for evidence of the incendiary claim I made in my opening paragraph?

It would be perfectly reasonable if it was. I am, after all, some random person on the internet whom you have probably never met, and you've no reason to accept any bold claim I might make on blind faith. It would make sense for you to want to see some verification of my claim, and then dismiss my claim as baseless hogwash when I failed to provide that verification.

If you're a more regular reader, it would have also been reasonable for you to guess that I was doing a bit. But imagine if I wasn't? Imagine if I really was claiming that the Chinese government is arming Antifa ninja warriors to kill patriotic Americans in the coming Biden Wars. How crazy would you have to be to believe what I was saying without my providing hard, verifiable evidence for my claims?

Now imagine further that this is something I've made false claims about many times in the past. If every few years I make a new claim about some naughty government arming Antifa super soldiers in a great communist uprising, which turns out later to have been bogus.

Well you'd dismiss me as a crackpot, wouldn't you? I wouldn't blame you. That would be the only reasonable response to such a ridiculous spectacle.

And yet if I were an employee of a US government agency making unproven incendiary claims about a government that isn't aligned with the US-centralized power alliance, the entire political/media class would be parroting what I said as though it's an established fact. Even though US government agencies have an extensive and well-documented history of lying about such things.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1339405363825807361&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F510107-russia-hacking-secret-evidence%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Today we're all expected to be freaking out about Russia again because Russia hacked the United States again right before a new president took office again, so now it's very important that we support new cold war escalations from both the outgoing president and the incoming president again. We're not allowed to see the evidence that this actually happened again, but it's of utmost importance that we trust and support new aggressions against Russia anyway. Again.

The New York Times has a viral op-ed going around titled "I Was the Homeland Security Adviser to Trump. We're Being Hacked. " The article's author Thomas P Bossert warns ominously that "the networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are compromised by a foreign nation" perpetrated by "the Russian intelligence agency known as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the most advanced in the world."

Rather than using its supreme tradecraft to interfere in the November election ensuring the victory of the president we've been told for years is a Russian asset by outlets like The New York Times , Bossert informs us that the SVR instead opted to hack a private American IT company called SolarWinds whose software is widely used by the US government.

"Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim's network," Bossert explains, saying that "The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate." Its magnitude is so great that Bossert says Trump must "severely punish the Russians" for perpetrating it, and cooperate with the incoming Biden team in helping to ensure that that punishment continues seamlessly between administrations.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1339287068120322051&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F510107-russia-hacking-secret-evidence%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

The problem is that, as usual, we've been given exactly zero evidence for any of this. As Moon of Alabama explains , the only technical analysis we've seen of the alleged hack (courtesy of cybersecurity firm FireEye) makes no claim that Russia was responsible for it, yet the mass media are flagrantly asserting as objective, verified fact that Russia is behind this far-reaching intrusion into US government networks, citing only anonymous sources if they cite anything at all.

And of course where the media class goes so too does the barely-separate political class. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin told CNN in a recent interview that this invisible, completely unproven cyberattack constitutes "virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States." Which is always soothing language to hear as the Russian government announces the development of new hypersonic missiles as part of a new nuclear arms race it attributes to US cold war escalations.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald is one of the few high-profile voices who've had the temerity to stick his head above the parapet and point out the fact that we have seen exactly zero evidence for these incendiary claims, for which he is of course currently being raked over the coals on Twitter.

"I know it doesn't matter. I know it's wrong to ask the question. I know asking the question raises grave doubts about one's loyalties and patriotism," Greenwald sarcastically tweeted . "But has there been any evidence publicly presented, let alone dispositive proof, that Russia is responsible for this hack?"

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1339564485598720000&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F510107-russia-hacking-secret-evidence%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

"Perhaps they have information sources they can't describe without compromising sources and methods?" chimed in Ars Technica 's Timothy B Lee in response to Greenwald's query, a textbook reply from establishment narrative managers whenever anyone questions where the evidence is for any of these invisible attacks on US sovereignty.

"Of course they can't show us the evidence!" proponents of establishment Russia hysteria always say. "They'd compromise their sources and methods if they did!"

US spook agencies always say this about evidence for US spook agency claims about governments long targeted for destruction by US spook agencies. We can't share the evidence with you because the evidence is classified. It's secret evidence. The evidence is invisible.

Which always works out very nicely for the US spook agencies, I must say.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-3&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1319827403594629122&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F510107-russia-hacking-secret-evidence%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Secret, invisible evidence is not evidence. If the public cannot see the evidence behind the claims being made by the powerful, then those claims are unproven. It would never be acceptable for anyone in power to say "This important thing with potentially world-altering consequences definitely happened, but you'll just have to trust us because the evidence is secret." In a post-Iraq invasion world it is orders of magnitude more unacceptable, and should therefore be dismissed until hard, verifiable evidence is provided.

Isn't it interesting how all the Pearl Harbors and 9/11s of our day are completely invisible to the public? We can't see cyber-intrusions for ourselves like we could see fallen buildings and smoking naval bases; they're entirely hidden from our view. Not only are they entirely hidden from our view, the evidence that they happened is kept secret from us as well. And the mass media just treat this as normal and fine. Government agencies with an extensive history of lying are allowed to make completely unsubstantiated and unverifiable claims about governments long targeted by those same government agencies, and the institutions responsible for informing the public about what's going on in the world simply repeat it as fact.

Sure it's possible that Russia hacked the US. It's possible that the US government has been in contact with extraterrestrials, too. It's possible that the Chinese government is covertly arming Antifa samurai in preparation for a civil war. But we do not imbue these things with the power of belief until we are provided with an amount of evidence that rises to the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world.

These people have not earned our trust, they have earned our pointed and aggressive skepticism. We must act accordingly.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.



Midnight10 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 03:03 PM

The US isn't know mm for its independent thought processes. The "secret, invisible evidence" comes right out of WADA's planbook for banning Russian athletes from the Olympics, by their use of "disappearing positives". It would be a mistake to consider the Pentagon any smarter then the WADA Committee. Remember Lance Armstrong was allowed to continue for seven years without a peep from WADA, or CAS, or the US doping agency. Not a peep. Must have used magic, like the Pentagon and WADA does now.
Frank Hood Midnight10 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 05:05 PM
Its astounding that U.S ath letes using ster.oids of some sort are not under the same rules as Rus sian athletes. To ex clude many of the worlds best and still continue to compete
Vikiiing Midnight10 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 04:36 PM
Armstrong was cuaght doping during his first tour win, twice! UCI and other clowns bought Drugstrongs excuse. And I mean bought 2 years later Dopestrong secretly gave the UCI over $100,000 for fighting doping....And dont forget Armstrong stole money intended for his charity....I'm sure he's waiting for an appropriate time to give it back....
Bill Spence 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 03:09 PM
Stealing a few secrets by hacking into US networks is very minor compared to the acts of war that the United States has committed against Iran Russia China and North Korea. The whole thing is boring because nothing was damaged according to the claims. Show me some damage or be silent.
Frank Hood Bill Spence 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 05:23 PM
Even if it is minor, proof would be nice. The people are just starting to question what we have been told for decades. Mind you Assange actually provided proof for all of us,but regardless the world still ignored the provided proof. Allegations are the name of the game, and a good enough reason to continue pressure on certain countries in the form of physical and economic war since WW2. BUT, "times are a changin" folks.
MotorSlug Bill Spence 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 03:18 PM
thanks to Vault 7 and Wikileaks, we know 99% of the shots are taken by the CIA
EarthBotV2 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 03:38 PM
Here's the question well-programmed Americans never think to ask: Who gains? A coup has occurred in the U.S.. The evidence of fraud is overwhelming. How do the coup perpetrators plan to dispose of this evidence? -- by blaming Russia! We'll be told that Russia manufactured the evidence, just as we were told that Russia manufactured Hunter Biden's laptop. And those who attempt to prosecute the fraudsters will be called "Russian Agents".
shadow1369 1 day ago 19 Dec, 2020 12:13 PM
Wikileaks Vault 77 disclosures revealed that US terrorist intelligence agencies can make a hack look like it coes from wherever they choose. Even before that, and the ease with which CGI can make dead people talk, we were living in an entirely fake paradigm created by corporate media.
DeathbyDissent 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 06:30 PM
If anyone doubts that the US would use this evidence-free false-flag as a pretext for attacking Russia, just go to Youtube and search Russian, Hack, Bolton. There, you will see John Bolton on MSNBC saying the US should "retaliate" in a many-fold worse way. Bolton is a representative of the deep state in the US; he is a neocon, and neocons have driven our foreign policy for over 20 years.
DeathbyDissent 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 05:34 PM
Whenever the US wants to commit crimes against other countries, it manufactures the reasons for doing so. it's been doing this for many decades. This "hack" is nothing more than a pretext for 1) demonizing Russia, and 2) advancing a foreign policy action in opposition to Russia. If you don't know that the United States is the main purveyor of lies in the world by now, you need a giant red pill.
Twills93 DeathbyDissent 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 05:43 PM
How many lies is too many?
Forgotten9 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 05:01 PM
2020 should go into genius records as the largest coincidental (propagated proxi) in the history of the world
Forgotten9 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 04:57 PM
The greatest question is why has the left administration lied, covered up, misinforming the american people of their global military actions? PROXI wars? Misuse of NATO assets for EU and personal gains... Allied with Xi Jinping , striking chinese assets to stimulate the cultural uprising that put Xi into power in 2012, turning full socialist communist in 2013, deploying a centralized military power to enforce the territory display in the new map of china presented December 2012, and full gov backed boycott of western goods, transitioned to cut trade fully with the western conventional allies china allowed its economy to fully contract... all covered up by liberal media and made public in their US conservative opponent's administration..
Forgotten9 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 03:53 PM
Did the EU push NATO integration of such technologies making NATO suspect?

[Dec 20, 2020] Another 'Russiagate' Like Trump Scandal Which Isn't One

Dec 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Haassaan , Dec 19 2020 0:48 utc | 20

Yes, this RussiaGate story will flame out, just like all the rest, but ultimately these stories aren't about Trump, but about setting the stage for the Biden Administration to attack Russia. It doesn't matter that they are all lies, what matters is that the big pile of lies as a whole creates a false reality in which anti-Russian propaganda is so overwhelming that nobody in the west can see outside of the delusion.


norecovery , Dec 19 2020 1:51 utc | 22

The neocon criminals have managed to take over foreign policy in the U.S., leveraging money power from their bankster backers. The latter is a tiny group of oligarchs and their network of highly-paid promoters that are motivated to force U.S. hegemony onto the world. They now have control over the U.S. Congress, Intelligence Agencies, and the MSM, and are increasingly exerting censorship over social media. Their latest gambit is the Coronavirus putsch using bio-warfare agents to undermine small-scale economies and autonomy, while imposing vast corporate ownership of property. Worldwide compliance is the goal using a wide range of military, financial, and media control measures to crush dissent. The pharma-promoted vaccinations that are questionable at best reinforce those controls and are part of the plot. We are witnessing a worldwide COUPS ATTEMPT, UBER-Fascism that exceeds all historical examples. Will it succeed?

Stumpy , Dec 19 2020 3:32 utc | 29

Posted by: Debsisdead | Dec 19 2020 2:44 utc | 27

"The dems biden gang would have been pulling similar stunts although they would have been asking for future favours hence the 'new' cabinet being chocka with K street whores."

Was the position of Secretary of State just a consolation prize for HRC as runner-up to the Obama race or the quid pro quo to enable her foundation to rake in millions in "favour funding" that quietly disappeared into the fog?

ak74 , Dec 19 2020 4:59 utc | 32

"Yes, he killed foreigners. But no U.S. president will ever be indicted for that. It is seen as a part of the job."

Yes, committing war crimes and "crimes against peace"--the supreme international crime as asserted by the Nuremberg Tribunal--is fundamental to the job description of being America's War-Criminal-in-Chief.

The fact that Americans and citizens in other self-styled "democracies" deny this uncomfortable reality, or support these war crimes, says a lot about their own criminality.

[Dec 20, 2020] Our politicians blow over a trillion dollars a year on US "security" and they can't figure out a way to keep hackers off of our hard drives?

How they can? They are too busy deploying Dominion voting systems all over the country...
Dec 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Censored1 2 hours ago

Our politicians blow over a trillion dollars a year on US "security" and they can't figure out a way to keep hackers off of our hard drives? This shows you the quality of the overpaid clowns in charge of our government. Now we can't even run an election fair and square and are in the same class as El Salvador, maybe worse.

captain noob 2 hours ago

The problem with money is that it doesn't necessarily buy you things of value

4Y_LURKER 2 hours ago

All some people see is a dollar amount

[Dec 20, 2020] Once the general attitude of disreputability has been established the secret services can sit back and relax really, the antirussian mindset gets a momentum of its own and generates its own new antirussian storylines.

Dec 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bemildred , Dec 17 2020 22:45 utc | 94

Further news on hacking attacks:

'They got into everything': Scale, threat of cyberattack on U.S. increasingly alarming

'The Iranians Are Waiting for the Israeli Response': Who Is Behind the Latest Cyberattack on Israeli Firms?

Apparently one of the apps which spreads the trojan is "New York Times News".

We will have to see how this develops, but from the "early reports" I am starting to be impressed.


windship , Dec 18 2020 8:11 utc | 95

If the Israelis spent all that time and energy to make 9/11 look like an al Qaeda plot, then it's a piece of cake to make this hack look like the work of Russians.
Tuyzentfloot , Dec 18 2020 8:28 utc | 96

I see no effort to make this hack look like a russian plot. It looks more organic. Once the general attitude of disreputability has been established the secret services can sit back and relax really, the antirussian mindset gets a momentum of its own and generates its own new antirussian storylines.

Tuyzentfloot , Dec 18 2020 15:36 utc | 97

Oh, microsoft boss talks about reckless hacking. That actually suggests the country which cannot be named or punished instead.

[Dec 20, 2020] Trump Blasts Exaggerated Media Claims Of -Russia, Russia, Russia- In Cyberattack After Seeing Intel - ZeroHedge

Dec 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Sean7k PREMIUM 3 hours ago

I want to know why we aren't hiring the Russians for everything? They appear to be the best, whether military equipment, spycraft, hacking, diplomacy, or global strategy. All we have are butthurt bureaucrats, gay entertainers and loudmouthed athletes always eager to bend a knee.

radical-extremist 3 hours ago

They were the best at honeypots too, until Swallwell fell for Fang Fang.

Dabooda 2 hours ago

Epstein and Mossad would be the gold standard for honeypots.

PrideOfMammon 2 hours ago

As I said, if Putin ran in a fair election in the USA, he would win hands down.

[Dec 20, 2020] The attainment of socioeconomic development goals in Syria is being hindered by the illegal (and even criminal in light of the COVID pandemic) unilateral sanctions adopted against Syria by the United States and some of its allies.

Dec 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Dec 18 2020 19:09 utc | 107

Lavrov welcomed to Moscow Syria's new Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates of the Syrian Arab Republic Faisal Mekdad, who took over after Walid Muallem's passing, and his delegation. The introduction was followed later by a presser that provided some reminders and updates:

"We confirmed Russia's unchanged stance in favour of unconditional respect for Syria's sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence as well as the right of the Syrian nation to determine its own fate and future. All these principles are clearly and unambiguously stated in UN Security Council Resolution 2254. All countries without exception must follow these principles ." [My Emphasis]

The bolded sentence is yet another direct demand for the Outlaw US Empire to change its ways and cease its illegal behaviors. That was quickly followed thusly:

"The attainment of socioeconomic development goals in Syria is being hindered by the illegal (and even criminal in light of the COVID pandemic) unilateral sanctions adopted against Syria by the United States and some of its allies.

"We reaffirm our condemnation of the continued illegal presence of foreign troops in Syria."

This has made the continuance of the "Astana three" a requirement since "[i]t is the only international assistance mechanism for the Syrian settlement that has actually proved its efficiency and relevance." On Syria's economy, 2021 looks like it will be a huge improvement over 2020:

"As for economic rehabilitation, in the past few weeks we have adopted a number of very serious decisions, which will greatly enhance Syria's opportunities to organise systemic work in this sphere. We continue providing humanitarian aid. We have delivered 100,000 tonnes of Russian grain. These deliveries will continue. We are discussing practical steps now. A comprehensive strategic programme for economic cooperation is being prepared.

"A new Syrian co-chair of the intergovernmental commission in trade and economic cooperation has been appointed this month. The commission is preparing for a full-scale meeting early next year, during which all these topics and joint practical actions will be discussed."

Lastly, Lavrov was asked to comment on Pompeo's most recent series of lies regarding Russia in Libya and the Mediterranean region. His 5 paragraph reply was as close to a tirade as Lavrov gets. Here's the first to give readers a taste:

"During the past four years of working with the current US administration, we have become used to the United States showing no desire, ability or skill when it comes to discussing their concerns openly and on the basis of facts during direct negotiations. The Americans and their Western allies have developed a trend of publicly accusing others without any facts, making these accusations part of the international agenda and, finally, presenting them as a proved matter. This is what they did and what they are doing regarding the US elections and the recent complaints about hackers. This is what they did in the case of the Skripals, and this is what they are doing in the Navalny case. They have no facts, not a single one, to prove their point."

Do please read the rest! It should be very clear by now after decades of lies, distortions, and the gamut of other prevarications that nothing uttered by anyone representing the Outlaw US Empire should be believed while also assuming the opposite is most likely true until refuted by genuine facts coming from an unbiased source.

[Dec 20, 2020] Putin: Haven't we faced difficulties in our recent history? Just now, in this meeting I remembered how hard life was in the 1990s and the early 2000s. It seemed at that time that there was no light at the end of the tunnel, that there was nothing. No army, no economy, a ruined social sphere and skyrocketing unemployment. One out of three lived below the poverty line, but look at what it is like now.

Dec 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Dec 19 2020 19:28 utc | 154

james @128--

Putin's presser transcript is finally complete.

As Putin and others noted, this was a most difficult year. I hadn't read his concluding remarks until just now. I'm going to copy/paste them along with the question that sparked them. And it most unequivocally answers a longstanding question Billy Joel asked at a time that seems like it was only yesterday:

"Viktor Sineok: Izvestia, Viktor Sineok.

"Mr President, we have heard many questions about many different problems but mine is a little different. Over the past year we have understood, we really felt what it meant to have a very hard time, including emotionally. You said at the press conference a few years ago that you put your emotions into your work. Here is my question: what sort of emotions have you felt in recent years, including this difficult year of 2020? And which emotions would you like to wish us in the coming year? Maybe you already know how you will toast the New Year?

"Vladimir Putin: Please, be seated.

"As to which prevailed – the good or the bad You know, each year brings issues we have to overcome, and each year brings us great joy – both family, and state, national achievements. Against all odds, we have great achievements that we can and should be proud of, and we are.

"Yes, the year was complicated, but what would I like to draw your attention to? You know, this is what I thought about when you were asking me this question. Haven't we faced difficulties in our recent history? Just now, in this meeting I remembered how hard life was in the 1990s and the early 2000s. It seemed at that time that there was no light at the end of the tunnel, that there was nothing. No army, no economy, a ruined social sphere and skyrocketing unemployment. One out of three lived below the poverty line, but look at what it is like now.

"Yes, there are problems. Yes, people are still living a very hard life, and there are very many such people. That said, the foundations of Russian statehood, the pillars of the Russian economy, and the potential of the state are incomparable with what they were in the 1990s and the early 2000s. This gives us tools we have never had before. This gives us an opportunity to focus on resolving the most important, most urgent problems without forgetting about the strategic development goals of the Russian Federation .

"As for toasts, like every person, every citizen, I always have toasts for the New Year. It is only important that the amount of champagne and other drinks you consume is limited. As for toasts, the number does not matter.

"Of course, we will all raise toasts to the people in our lives, our family, friends and colleagues. But I, my family and friends always have one main toast – 'To Russia.'

"Not to finish my remarks on this pathetic note but on something heart-felt, I would like to say the following: during this meeting, some of my colleagues asked me what we were planning to do to support families with children and whether we have plans for this. This is what I would like to say. Some volunteers told me recently that they have various ideas and initiatives on supporting children before the New Year. Unfortunately, this year large events like children's New Year parties have been cancelled due to the restrictions. Large events in theatres, children's studios and so on have been cancelled as well.

"But still, this is an unusual holiday. It comes with expectations and hopes for the future and, at the same time, with difficulties. Therefore, before coming here I consulted the Government and the Presidential Executive Office. We agreed that our country, our state will also give a gift to our children. It is a small, modest gift, but nevertheless, we will pay 5,000 rubles to all families with children under 7 years old; 5,000 will be paid for every child in this age group .

"I would like to thank all of you for our common work. I would also like to wish you all the best. I hope we have not worn each other out. I would like to hope that the people who listened to us for more than four hours, for four and a half hours, have found this useful and interesting.

"For my part, I would like to say that the meeting was very useful for me. We will do all we can to give the best possible response to all your questions, concerns and problems that are faced by the country and each Russian family.

"All the best to you!

"Thank you very much." [My Emphasis]

We now most certainly know that the Russians Love Their Children Too. However given the behavior of the Outlaw US Empire, I very much doubt the same can be said, which makes for a very dangerous situation. Putin has a truthful sincerity to him that is utterly vacant from every US President I've known in my life except for JFK--he made a very positive impression on my very young mind, something that was clearly missing from LBJ and Nixon prior to my rather abrupt awakening in 1970. Perhaps that's because none ever promised to do anything for Commonfolk as anything aimed at promoting the people's wellbeing was always opposed. I don't know how the average Russian feels about Putin's words, but I would be very proud to have such a leader as focused on the wellbeing of what makes his Nation great--its people.

[Dec 20, 2020] The western intelligence agencies systematic attempts to undermine the legitimacy of Russian government by fueling wild rumor about the level of corruption of its members, and first of all Putin

Dec 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Dec 18 2020 23:39 utc | 118

the main point should be that Putin is able to talk at length and just about any subject since it is very hard to think of a pre arranged setup à la 2016 debate when the questions to be posed had been previously provided to the Clinton team. Putin on western intelligence agiances attempts to discredit Russian leadership via network of controlled neoliberal MSM

Bemildred @115--

I wrote this for the next thread; but after reading your comment, it belongs here since the Trump thread didn't want to have it. "Provincials" as you said who in reality are gutter-scum.

This may appear to be about getting Trump, but it's more likely about keeping relations with Russia in the tank. For example, I remarked this morning that the only media report about Putin's annual, impressive presser was the highly convoluted answer Putin gave to some recent fake news reports about his family and how they connect to the Navalny crap. It appears the writing has similar qualities meaning it was produced by similar sources. There's only one way to properly illustrate this and that's to provide what Putin related.

The Question:

"Alexander Yunashev: Good afternoon, Mr President.

I will take the advice from the young reporter [from the previous question which is also of some importance]. A number of interesting investigative reports have been released lately, for example, about your daughter, your former son-in-law Shamalov and other people who are allegedly close to you. This week the Alexei Navalny investigation also came out. Could you tell us why a criminal investigation into his poisoning and who did it has not been launched until now?

Putin: "I see.

"It is no surprise that these fake news stories emerge. It has always been this way and always will. There is a battle unfolding in the media space. Nothing new here. Do you remember the terrible developments in the Caucasus and efforts to fight international terrorism? How was yours truly portrayed by the international media and, unfortunately, in Russia as well? Remember how they portrayed me with fangs? I remember all this very well. Still, I have invariably proceeded from the premise that I need to be doing what I believe to be right for our country. When I do something, I do it not for the sake of pleasing someone abroad. This is the first part of my answer.

"The second part has to do with my close ones. This report is impossible to read. I flipped through it, since it talks about me, it seems, but it is such a cut-and-paste job, with so many things piling up, that I was unable to finish reading it. What did I want to point out in this regard? The report keeps repeating 'the president's son-in-law' over and over again. At the end, however, he is referred to as the former son-in-law. This is the first thing I wanted to say. Still, in the text they keep driving home the message that he is my son-in-law. So this goes for point one.

"The second point is about 'President Putin forbidding the elite to hold overseas assets.' There is no ban preventing the elite from holding assets abroad. Public servants cannot have financial assets abroad. This was the right thing to do. They cannot hold accounts or other financial assets abroad. The company in question is 100-percent private. The state does not own a single share in it.

"The next question: who received shares in this company and how? It turns out that the company released a statement on this matter and what it thinks about these allegations. The company had a compensation scheme for its senior executives, and Mr Shamalov received stock just like all other senior executives. There are also other programmes for executives at a different level, and they received stock following a different scheme. Nothing special here.

"But ultimately, in my opinion, the most important thing is this: just now, aspiring journalist Shnurov asked about our hackers. What is written in the beginning? Note that it says that an unknown, anonymous person is pursuing goals we do not understand and then, apparently, this anonymous person is tracked down. What do I mean? It is said that what happened is similar to the events in 2016 when outlawed Russian hackers associated with Russian military intelligence hacked US Democratic Party members' emails. Here is your anonymous person. I think we know who that is. Who called these hackers outlaws associated with Russian military intelligence? It was the US Department of State and US intelligence agencies, which are in fact the authors. At any rate, it is completely obvious that it was done upon their instructions . This is the first thing.

"The second is that the reference to the insinuation that our hackers, as they believe, interfered with US domestic policy in 2016 means that the purpose of this is clear. The purpose is to take revenge and try to influence public opinion in our country in order to interfere, of course, with our domestic politics. This is absolutely obvious. It is absolutely obvious to me and, I think, it will also become clear to the majority of readers if they pay attention to the things I have just mentioned.

"But to this end, I would like to emphasise the following:

"One should be driven by now I want to address those who ordered these publications, not those who actually wrote them. I know that if they get an assignment from intelligence services they have to write it. But those who order these kinds of articles, should not be driven by revenge or act on the assumption of alleged exceptionalism; instead, they should develop relations with their international partners based on mutual respect and the fundamental standards of international law. Then we will be able to achieve shared success in the areas that are essential to all of us .

"Now, with regard to the patient of a Berlin clinic. I have already mentioned it many times, and can repeat only certain things. Mr Peskov told me just yesterday about the latest speculations in this regard concerning our special service officers' data and so on. Listen, we are perfectly aware of what this is all about. It is about legalisation the first time around and now. This is not about an investigation. This is about legalising the materials from the US special services .

"Do you really think we are unaware of the fact that they are tracking locations? Our special services understand this well and are aware of it. Officers of the FSB and other special services are aware of it and use telephones whenever they believe they should not be hiding their location, etc. But if this is so – and rest assured that this is so – it means that this patient of a Berlin clinic has the support of the special services, those of the United States in this particular case. And if this is the case, then it gets interesting and the special services should, of course, be looking after him. However, this does not mean at all that he must be poisoned. Who cares about him? If they really wanted to, they would have, most likely, carried it through . His wife addressed me, and I gave the green light to have him treated in Germany that very second.

"There is one important thing that the general public is not paying attention to. It is a trick to attack the people at the top. Those who perform it thus propel themselves up to a certain level where they can say: see who I am talking to? I am a person of the same calibre, so treat me as a person of nationwide importance. It is a well-known trick that is used in political dealings around the world.

"I think, though, that something else, not these tricks, should be used to gain people's respect and recognition. You need to prove your worth either by doing something important or by putting together a realistic programme with specific goals that can be implemented in a particular country, Russia, in this particular case .

"I urge the opponents to the current government and all political forces in our country to be led not by personal ambitions, but by the interests of the people of the Russian Federation, and to come up with a positive agenda in order to overcome the challenges facing the country. And we have many of them." [My Emphasis]

The rational flow is probably better in Russian with some key emphasis lost in translation. But Putin delivered the main point on the ordering and authorship, and IMO it's the same for much of the crap thrown our way since 1990. The only reason we aren't being treated to similar material about Biden is he's not one of the current targets, while legitimate anti-Biden stories are completely suppressed until they disappear under the rug. IMO, BigLie Media has become close to what State Media was in the USSR.


Paco , Dec 19 2020 7:44 utc | 138

@karlof1 | Dec 18 2020 23:39 utc | 118

IMO, BigLie Media has become close to what State Media was in the USSR.

With one big difference, the scope is global and the tools are well, like comparing a pencil with the most sophisticated printing press. Overall the translation sounds like what I heard, and the main point should be that Putin is able to talk at length and just about any subject since it is very hard to think of a pre arranged setup à la 2016 debate when the questions to be posed had been previously provided to the Clinton team.

Paco , Dec 19 2020 8:15 utc | 139

@karlof1 | Dec 18 2020 23:39 utc | 118

For next year conference, if all the players and myself are still around I'll try to take advantage of the open offer to pose a question on line, I found out too late but there was a very accesible setup to do it.

One of the questions was chosen by VVP or his team, and it was from a northern village resident, complaining about the local health services, claiming that there was a single 86 year old nurse in charge, and that she was unable to tell apart a tonsillitis from a hemorrhoid. I guess this part could have been prepared, to relax a bit a tense atmosphere. But it had consequences, the mentioned nurse has sued the daring patient, maybe he'll get his suppository orally, so as to heal his throat.

[Dec 18, 2020] Russia hasn't just hacked our computer systems. It's hacked our minds by Fareed Zakaria

Did this pressitute ever heard about Stixnet and Flame ? About Vault7 and who developed it? From Wikipedia "WikiLeaks said on 19 March 2017 on Twitter that the "CIA was secretly exploiting" a vulnerability in a huge range of Cisco router models discovered thanks to the Vault 7 documents.[93][94] The CIA had learned more than a year ago how to exploit flaws in Cisco's widely used internet switches, which direct electronic traffic, to enable eavesdropping. Cisco quickly reassigned staff from other projects to turn their focus solely on analyzing the attack and to figure out how the CIA hacking worked, so they could help customers patch their systems and prevent criminal hackers or spies from using similar methods.[95] On 20 March, Cisco researchers confirmed that their study of the Vault 7 documents showed the CIA had developed malware which could exploit a flaw found in 318 of Cisco's switch models and alter or take control of the network.[96] Cisco issued a warning on security risks, patches were not available, but Cisco provided mitigation advice.[94]
...On 8 April 2017, Cindy Cohn, executive director of the international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: "If the C.I.A. was walking past your front door and saw that your lock was broken, they should at least tell you and maybe even help you get it fixed." "And worse, they then lost track of the information they had kept from you so that now criminals and hostile foreign governments know about your broken lock." [109] Furthermore, she stated that the CIA had "failed to accurately assess the risk of not disclosing vulnerabilities. Even spy agencies like the CIA have a responsibility to protect the security and privacy of Americans."[110] "The freedom to have a private conversation – free from the worry that a hostile government, a rogue government agent or a competitor or a criminal are listening – is central to a free society". While not as strict as privacy laws in Europe, the Fourth Amendment to the US constitution does guarantee the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.[111]
Dec 17, 2020 | www.washingtonpost.com

The more we learn about the recent hack into dozens of America's most critical computer networks -- widely attributed to Russia -- the more it becomes clear that it is massive, unprecedented and crippling. Tom Bossert, who served as homeland security adviser to President Trump, writes , "It will take years to know for certain which networks the Russians control and which ones they just occupy." (We do know they successfully penetrated the Department of Homeland Security's systems as well as those of Treasury, Commerce and others.) Stanford's Alex Stamos describes it as "one of the most important hacking campaigns in history."

The New York Times' David E. Sanger, who has written several books on cyberweapons, co-wrote an article calling the breach "among the greatest intelligence failures of modern times."

Vladimir Putin's Russia has significantly expanded its hybrid warfare, using new methods to spread chaos among its adversaries. The United States will have to fortify its digital infrastructure and respond more robustly to the Kremlin's mounting cyberattacks. But what about the perhaps more insidious Russian efforts at disinformation, which have helped to reshape the information environment worldwide?

[Dec 18, 2020] Russian athletes will continue to compete normally - only without the Russian symbols.

Dec 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

jayc , Dec 17 2020 19:37 utc | 35

The WADA allegations against the Russian Federation's sporting establishment ultimately rely on the testimony of a single witness (who is also the chief culprit if the allegations are correct), and a tampering process which the manufacturer of the tamper-proof containers insists is impossible. The WADA investigation has been prosecuted by Canadian bureaucrats, who have been publicly outspoken in their animus towards Russia. It appears as another element in the informational war, moved into the sporting environment - one of the few truly international cooperative ventures humankind currently sustains. The recommended punishment, albeit, was halved. Most of the sporting doping these days involves "health" supplements which enjoy official exemption.

As for the Venezuelan gold - Guaido will soon have no standing as any kind of elected official. Will he be retained as some sort of "leader" anyway, or what is the future of the regime-change gambit?


vk , Dec 17 2020 15:54 utc | 9

Russia banned from using its name, flag at next two Olympics

Russia will not be able to use its name, flag and anthem at the next two Olympics or at any world championships for the next two years after a ruling Thursday by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

In other words: this doping scandal never existed; but it was never about sports: it is all - and always was - about propaganda. Russian athletes will continue to compete normally - only without the Russian symbols.

This is a clear attack against Russia.

LM , Dec 17 2020 17:45 utc | 22

@ vk | Dec 17 2020 15:54 utc | 9

" Russia banned from using its name, flag at next two Olympics"

"Russia will not be able to use its name, flag and anthem at the next two Olympics or at any world championships for the next two years after a ruling Thursday by the Court of Arbitration for Sport."

It's all about NordStream 2. Same as Skripals, Navalny, Hacking U.S. Treasury and other agencies, Interfering in U.S.elections. If NS2 comes on line Germany will have a source of clean energy and will receive income as a hub for pipelines to other European countries. Gazprom will be paid in Euros, not USD inviting others to follow suit. If that happens the U.S. is in serious trouble that is why it must stop NS2 at all costs.

[Dec 17, 2020] For Russiagate I have been waiting for the excuse makers to offer something like they did with "Saddam's own fault". That is, the Russians - Putin -, wanted the FBI, CIA, Hillary, MSM, etc to fall for Russiagate.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... No doubt that is on its way, but I think it would have been too difficult to pull off without full control over the government's top figurehead. Once Harris is enthroned then they will move on that, I am sure of it. ..."
Dec 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

librul , Dec 16 2020 18:23 utc | 140

But somehow the Satan candidate won. "Impossible!! It must be the Russians!"

@Posted by: William Gruff | Dec 16 2020 17:51 utc | 136

There is one Russiagate shoe that I am still waiting to hear drop (maybe it already did and I missed it).

In 2003 when the CIA succeeded in misleading this country into an invasion over non-existent WMD
the finger pointing began, to explain away the lies as simply a pack of errors.

One excuse that gained some traction was that it was Saddam's own fault, he had pretended to have WMD.

For Russiagate I have been waiting for the excuse makers to offer something like they did with "Saddam's own fault".
That is, the Russians - Putin -, wanted the FBI, CIA, Hillary, MSM, etc to fall for Russiagate.
Thus John Brennan did not attempt a coup (nor Comey, nor the FBI, CIA and the rest of the "17 intelligence agencies" the MSM
and the Democrats) by knowingly creating a false narrative about the Russians, it was the dastardly Russians (Putin)
themselves that are to blame. No attempted coup, simply a pack of errors seeded by the Russians themselves.

As the Durham investigation appears to be heading for the historical footnotes there will be no need for the
traitors to create excuses. And I do not expect to ever hear that shoe drop.

William Gruff , Dec 16 2020 18:49 utc | 143

librul @139: "I have been waiting for the excuse makers to offer something like they did with "Saddam's own fault". That is, the Russians - Putin -, wanted the FBI, CIA, Hillary, MSM, etc to fall for Russiagate."

No doubt that is on its way, but I think it would have been too difficult to pull off without full control over the government's top figurehead. Once Harris is enthroned then they will move on that, I am sure of it.

[Dec 17, 2020] The CIA had the ability to attach certain metadata to its own hacking activities, to insinuate that Russian or Chinese hackers were responsible (and thus put future investigators on a wrong trail away from the actual culprits)

Dec 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Dec 16 2020 19:44 utc | 4

Since Wikileaks first publicised its hacking of the infamous Vault 7 emails demonstrating that the CIA had the ability to attach certain metadata to its own hacking activities, to insinuate that Russian or Chinese hackers were responsible (and thus put future investigators on a wrong trail away from the actual culprits), I don't rule out that the CIA and possibly other intel agencies chummy with it may have penetrated FireEye. Especially as these hacking attempts appear to have specific targets and some investors in the companies affected by these hacking attempts seem to employ crystal ball gazers so they were able to divest themselves of huge numbers of shares and make tidy profits before news of the hacking came out which would have sent these hacked companies' share prices down into an abyss. Could some of the hackers themselves be shareholders in the hacked firms?

[Dec 17, 2020] Media Blame Russia For Cyber Intrusions Without Providing Evidence

Reminds me the attack on Iranian uranium enrichment infrastructure, which also used patches as the way to inject malware into the system. And who were the players in this attack?
Notable quotes:
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Next to the NSA and Britain's GHCQ there are at least Israel, China and maybe Russia which do have such capabilities. But whoever had the chutzpah to intrude the cybersecurity company FireEye ..."
"... 'People familiar with the issue' say 'Russia is believed to be responsible'. Well, some kids familiar with wobbly teeth believe in the tooth fairy. What is that 'believe' based on? ..."
"... Associated Press ..."
"... Atlantic Council ..."
Dec 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
To keep Moon of Alabama up and running is a significant effort. Please help me to sustain it . - b

As soon as someone hacked something the media start to blame Russia. This even when there is no evidence that Russia hacked anything.

On Tuesday, December 8, the network security company FireEye reported of a recent attack on its network :

Based on my 25 years in cyber security and responding to incidents, I've concluded we are witnessing an attack by a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities. This attack is different from the tens of thousands of incidents we have responded to throughout the years. The attackers tailored their world-class capabilities specifically to target and attack FireEye. They are highly trained in operational security and executed with discipline and focus. They operated clandestinely, using methods that counter security tools and forensic examination. They used a novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past.

We are actively investigating in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other key partners, including Microsoft. Their initial analysis supports our conclusion that this was the work of a highly sophisticated state-sponsored attacker utilizing novel techniques.

Intruding a cybersecurity company is a mistake as the chance of getting caught is significantly higher that during an intrusion into other environments. The intruders allegedly made off with some tools which likely can also be found in the wild.

On Sunday FireEye updated its analysis and provided technical details . This really was a sophisticated operation that must have cost significant resources :

We have identified a global campaign that introduces a compromise into the networks of public and private organizations through the software supply chain. This compromise is delivered through updates to a widely-used IT infrastructure management software -- the Orion network monitoring product from SolarWinds . The campaign demonstrates top-tier operational tradecraft and resourcing consistent with state-sponsored threat actors.

Based on our analysis, the attacks that we believe have been conducted as part of this campaign share certain common elements:

Based on our analysis, we have now identified multiple organizations where we see indications of compromise dating back to the Spring of 2020, and we are in the process of notifying those organizations. Our analysis indicates that these compromises are not self-propagating; each of the attacks require meticulous planning and manual interaction.

Neither FireEye nor Microsoft named any suspected actor behind the 'difficult-to-attribute' intrusion effort. Next to the NSA and Britain's GHCQ there are at least Israel, China and maybe Russia which do have such capabilities. But whoever had the chutzpah to intrude the cybersecurity company FireEye also blew up their own operation against many targets of much higher value. Years of work and millions of dollars went to waste because of that one mistake.

Despite the lack of evidence that points to a specific actor 'western' media immediately blamed Russia for the spying attempt.

As Reuters reported on Sunday :

Hackers believed to be working for Russia have been monitoring internal email traffic at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments, according to people familiar with the matter, adding they feared the hacks uncovered so far may be the tip of the iceberg.

The hack is so serious it led to a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Saturday, said one of the people familiar with the matter.
...
The U.S. government has not publicly identified who might be behind the hacking , but three of the people familiar with the investigation said Russia is currently believed to be responsible for the attack . Two of the people said that the breaches are connected to a broad campaign that also involved the recently disclosed hack on FireEye, a major U.S. cybersecurity company with government and commercial contracts.

In a statement posted here to Facebook, the Russian foreign ministry described the allegations as another unfounded attempt by the U.S. media to blame Russia for cyberattacks against U.S. agencies.

'People familiar with the issue' say 'Russia is believed to be responsible'. Well, some kids familiar with wobbly teeth believe in the tooth fairy. What is that 'believe' based on?

The Associated Press reported on the wider aspect of the intrusions and also blamed Russia:

Hackers broke into the networks of the Treasury and Commerce departments as part of a monthslong global cyberespionage campaign revealed Sunday, just days after the prominent cybersecurity firm FireEye said it had been breached in an attack that industry experts said bore the hallmarks of Russian tradecraft.

I have read FireEye's and Microsoft's detailed technical analysis of the intrusion and took a look at the code . As a (former) IT professional very familiar with network management, I have seen nothing in it that points to Russia. Who are those 'industry experts' who make such unfounded claims?

In response to what may be a large-scale penetration of U.S. government agencies, the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity arm issued an emergency directive calling on all federal civilian agencies to scour their networks for compromises.

The threat apparently came from the same cyberespionage campaign that has afflicted FireEye, foreign governments and major corporations, and the FBI was investigating.

"This can turn into one of the most impactful espionage campaigns on record," said cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch .

Ah - the AP talked to Alperovitch, the former chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike . The company which in 2016 claimed that Russia had stolen emails from the Democratic National Council but could not provide any evidence of that to the FBI. The company that admitted in Congress testimony that it did not see any exfiltration of emails from the DNC and had no evidence that Russia was involved. Alperovitch is also the 'industry expert' who falsely claimed that Russia hacked into an application used by the Ukrainian artillery. The same Alperovich who is a Senior Fellow of the anti-Russian lobbying organization Atlantic Council . Alperovitch apparently has never seen a software bug or malware that was not made by Russia.

Quoting an earlier version of the above AP story Max Abrams predicted:

Max Abrahms @MaxAbrahms - 3:20 UTC · Dec 14, 2020

"The U.S. government did not publicly identify Russia as the culprit behind the hacks, first reported by Reuters, and said little about who might be responsible."

You know this story will be retold as all 17 intel agencies 100% certain Putin is behind it.

That is indeed likely to happen.

Even while there is no hint in the intrusion software where it might have come from the media all started to blame Russia.

On Sunday, in its first report on the attack, the New York Times headlined:

Russian Hackers Broke Into Federal Agencies, U.S. Officials Suspect

Its chief propagandist David Sanger wrote:

The Trump administration acknowledged on Sunday that hackers acting on behalf of a foreign government -- almost certainly a Russian intelligence agency, according to federal and private experts -- broke into a range of key government networks, including in the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and had free access to their email systems.
...
News of the breach, reported earlier by Reuters , came less than a week after the National Security Agency, which is responsible for breaking into foreign computer networks and defending the most sensitive U.S. national security systems, issued a warning that "Russian state-sponsored actors" were exploiting flaws in a system broadly used in the federal government.

That warning by the NSA was about a known vulnerability in VMware, a software issue that is completely unrelated to the intrusions FireEye had detected and which targeted multiple government agencies.

Not bothering with facts the NYT continued its insinuations :

At the time, the N.S.A. refused to give further details of what had prompted the urgent warning. Shortly afterward, FireEye announced that hackers working for a state had stolen some of its prized tools for finding vulnerabilities in its clients' systems -- including the federal government's. That investigation also pointed toward the S.V.R., one of Russia's leading intelligence agencies. It is often called Cozy Bear or A.P.T. 29, and it is known as a traditional collector of intelligence.

No, the investigation by FireEye does not point in any direction. The company did not name a suspected actor and it did not mention Russia or the S.V.R. at all. The intrusion is also in no way similar to those phishing attempts that some have named Cozy Bear or APT 29.

The Times then further discredits itself by quoting the anti-Russian nutter Alperovich.

On Monday another NYT piece, co-written by Sanger, describes the wider attack and includes the word 'Russia' 23 times! But it does not provide any evidence for any Russian involvement in the case. This is the nearest it comes to:

The early assessments of the intrusions -- believed to be the work of Russia's S.V.R., a successor to the K.G.B. -- suggest that the hackers were highly selective about which victims they exploited for further access and data theft.

'Believed to be' the tooth fairy?

The piece also falsely insinuates that FireEye has linked the attack to Russia:

FireEye said that despite their widespread access, Russian hackers exploited only what was considered the most valuable targets.

Nowhere did FireEye say anything about Russian hackers. It only stated that the intrusions were specifically targeted. The implication of Russia only happened in the NYT writers' heads.

Reuters reports today :

On Monday, SolarWinds confirmed that Orion - its flagship network management software - had served as the unwitting conduit for a sprawling international cyberespionage operation. The hackers inserted malicious code into Orion software updates pushed out to nearly 18,000 customers.

And while the number of affected organizations is thought to be much more modest, the hackers have already parlayed their access into consequential breaches at the U.S. Treasury and Department of Commerce.

Three people familiar with the investigation have told Reuters that Russia is a top suspect, although others familiar with the inquiry have said it is still too early to tell.

As of now no one but the people behind the intrusion know where it has come from.

SolarWinds , the company behind the network management software that was abused to intrude agencies and companies, is known for a lack of security:

SolarWinds' security, meanwhile, has come under new scrutiny.

In one previously unreported issue, multiple criminals have offered to sell access to SolarWinds' computers through underground forums, according to two researchers who separately had access to those forums.

One of those offering claimed access over the Exploit forum in 2017 was known as "fxmsp" and is wanted by the FBI "for involvement in several high-profile incidents," said Mark Arena, chief executive of cybercrime intelligence firm Intel471. Arena informed his company's clients, which include U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Security researcher Vinoth Kumar told Reuters that, last year, he alerted the company that anyone could access SolarWinds' update server by using the password "solarwinds123"

"This could have been done by any attacker, easily," Kumar said.

And that's it.

Any significant actor with the necessary resources could have used the publicly known SolarWinds' password to sneak some malware into the Orion software update process to thereby intrude SolarWinds' customers and spy on them. Without further definitive evidence there is no reason to attribute the intrusions to Russia.

If anyone is to blame it is surely SolarWinds which has learned nothing from the attack. Monday night, days after it was warned, its infected software was still available on its servers . It seems that the SolarWinds people were busy with more important issues than their customers' security:

Top investors in SolarWinds, the Texas-based company whose software was breached in a major Russian cyberattack, sold millions of dollars in stock in the days before the intrusion was revealed.

The timing of the trades raises questions about whether the investors used inside information to avoid major losses related to the attack. SolarWinds's share price has plunged roughly 22 percent since the company disclosed its role in the breach Sunday night.

Note the casual use of 'Russian cyberattack', for which there is no evidence, in the very first sentence.

Silver Lake, a Silicon Valley investor with a history of high-profile tech deals including Airbnb, Dell and Twitter, sold $158 million in shares of SolarWinds on Dec. 7 -- six days before news of the breach became public. Thoma Bravo, a San Francisco-based private equity firm, also sold $128 million of its shares in SolarWinds on Dec. 7.

Together, the two investment firms own 70 percent of SolarWinds and control six of the company's board seats, giving the firms access to key information and making their stock trades subject to federal rules around financial disclosures.

Well, grifters are gonna grift.

And 'western' mainstream writers will blame Russia for anything completely independent of what really happened.

Posted by b on December 16, 2020 at 19:07 UTC | Permalink


Hoyeru , Dec 16 2020 19:24 utc | 1

since when has USA needed evidence? They blamed Saddam for years that he had "weapons of mass distraction". And back in 1990, they created the famous "Iraq solders took babies out fo incubators " lies. Some of us have lived longer than 30 years and we remember all the lies USA has said.

all part of the plan to cut Russia from the SWIFT in 2021.
once Biden becomes a president, he will call on all "democracies" to stand up to Russia. He and other "Western democracies" will hold a joint meeting sometime in 2021 where they will "condemn Russia for all the malign things Russia has done" and will press Belgium to cut Russia fro the SWIFT.
Whats wore, instead of doing anything, Russia is just sitting and watching them instead of warming Europe that this will mean Europe will freeze their collective asses next winter when they won't be able to get Russia gas. Even Iran is warning Russia that they will be cut off from the SWIFT.
Putin is getting old and sick, Russia desperately needs a leader who will stand up to those assholes and warn them to stop. Oh well, it's NOT my problem. Russia better get its asshole oiled up, it will need it. Putin is a weak and inefficient leader, and the SAker IS full of shit.

TH , Dec 16 2020 19:24 utc | 2
I believe that there are a few golden rules that can be applied to news stories:

1) If the first sentence contains a variation of the words "according to," then the story is at least partially bullsh*t
2) If a variation of "according to" is in the headline, then every word of the story is a lie

Roger , Dec 16 2020 19:39 utc | 3
@Hoyeru,

I have to agree with you, the deep state just cannot get over losing Russia to Putin and nationalism after the thought that they had turned it into their playground in the 1990s. They are hot to trot to take out Russia and make it bend the knee, whatever the risks are. Would not put it past them to pull the SWIFT option, although that would have huge implications for the Europeans who buy so much oil and gas from Russia.

It could end up as an own goal, as the Europeans join the Russian payments network and start paying in Euros convertible directly into Rubles (especially with Nordstream 2 in place). The Indians and Chinese are already setup for payments in local currencies. Right now China needs Russia as an ally, so they would also probably re-source oil imports to take more from Russia.

Russia has already made itself self sufficient in food etc., and has been working on payments in local currencies. They are not stupid, and see such a move coming.

iv> Since Wikileaks first publicised its hacking of the infamous Vault 7 emails demonstrating that the CIA had the ability to attach certain metadata to its own hacking activities, to insinuate that Russian or Chinese hackers were responsible (and thus put future investigators on a wrong trail away from the actual culprits), I don't rule out that the CIA and possibly other intel agencies chummy with it may have penetrated FireEye. Especially as these hacking attempts appear to have specific targets and some investors in the companies affected by these hacking attempts seem to employ crystal ball gazers so they were able to divest themselves of huge numbers of shares and make tidy profits before news of the hacking came out which would have sent these hacked companies' share prices down into an abyss. Could some of the hackers themselves be shareholders in the hacked firms?

Posted by: Jen , Dec 16 2020 19:44 utc | 4

Since Wikileaks first publicised its hacking of the infamous Vault 7 emails demonstrating that the CIA had the ability to attach certain metadata to its own hacking activities, to insinuate that Russian or Chinese hackers were responsible (and thus put future investigators on a wrong trail away from the actual culprits), I don't rule out that the CIA and possibly other intel agencies chummy with it may have penetrated FireEye. Especially as these hacking attempts appear to have specific targets and some investors in the companies affected by these hacking attempts seem to employ crystal ball gazers so they were able to divest themselves of huge numbers of shares and make tidy profits before news of the hacking came out which would have sent these hacked companies' share prices down into an abyss. Could some of the hackers themselves be shareholders in the hacked firms?

Posted by: Jen | Dec 16 2020 19:44 utc | 4

William Gruff , Dec 16 2020 19:46 utc | 5
Meanwhile in East Flatrock Tennessee a group of teens is laughing.

"They said our hack was 'an attack by a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities'! You hear that? We're a nation now! With 'top-tier offensive capabilities' at that! How awesome is that?"

gottlieb , Dec 16 2020 19:46 utc | 6
The CIA remains firmly in charge of US policy and the mainstream media.
Jen , Dec 16 2020 19:51 utc | 7
Hoyeru @ 1:

I believe the Russian President's annual Q&A session is taking place on 17 December 2020. It will be televised and probably videos of it will be uploaded to Youtube and other platforms over the next few days. The President's own website will feature transcripts of the session in Russian and English, and probably sevetal other languages. The Q&A session is usually a marathon affair running several hours. If you watch it, you will find out how ill Putin appears to be.

james , Dec 16 2020 19:54 utc | 8
b - master propaganda buster, lol... go get em b! i am surprised they aren't coming after you! maybe they figure you are a relatively obscure presence that will remain irrelevant for all intensive purposes... and they haven't figured out how to pull an assange or snowden on you - yet.... you better have some protection with the kgb and know how to speak a little russian!
vk , Dec 16 2020 19:55 utc | 9
Based on my 25 years in cyber security and responding to incidents, I've concluded we are witnessing an attack by a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities.

Translation: we fucked up and we're gonna blame either China or Russia, depending on the customer's preference (Republican or Democrat), in order to avoid blame and keep our stock prices from falling.

If you go to Fox News et al, I'm sure they'll be blaming China.

karlof1 , Dec 16 2020 20:14 utc | 10
If you've followed Lavrov's trail for the month of December, he's been in top form in his denunciations of the United States of Voldemort and its neverending illegalities and immoral actions. For the curious, the most recent are on the week in review thread. IMO, what constitutes the Outlaw US Empire's mainstream media lacks credibility across the spectrum of potential topics just as does the federal government. The planet will be a happier place if those two entities are just cast away and allowed to drift upon the endless sea of filth they generate daily.
JohninMK , Dec 16 2020 20:21 utc | 11
From what I have read there does not appear to be any malicious intent at any of the targeted organisations, but that might be wrong.

Maybe the attack on FireEye was an intentional way of exposing what they had done. It created some interesting press.

fyi , Dec 16 2020 20:24 utc | 12
Dear All:

The Russian Federation can annihilate the United States and US has no defenses against that.

So they indulge in such self-propaganda exercise, puffing up themselves and their population, and then they go home, knowing that RF can destroy them.

On the other hand, US can annihilate Iran and Iran cannot do anything about that either.

So they indulge in such self-propaganda exercise, puffing up themselves and their population, and then they go home, knowing that US can destroy them.

The only difference between Iran and Russia is that Iran is not a nuclear-armed state, targeting US cities.

I wonder what percentage of Americans are willing to nuke the Russian Federation - in contradistinction to the 59% who are willing to nuke Iran - per this M.I.T. report

https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ISEC_a_00284.

Framarz , Dec 16 2020 20:24 utc | 13
SL Ayatollah Khamenei by audience of General Soleimani family

"Ayatollah Khamenei said: The funeral of millions of martyrs of Soleimani was the first severe slap in the face to the Americans, but the more severe slap is "software overcoming the absurd hegemony of arrogance" and "expelling the United States from the region". It is definite whenever possible." Fars News Agency 16.12.20

iv> To be honest, this isn't even worth talking about. A non-story that doesn't deserve any oxygen at all.

Posted by: Clifton , Dec 16 2020 20:29 utc | 14

To be honest, this isn't even worth talking about. A non-story that doesn't deserve any oxygen at all.

Posted by: Clifton | Dec 16 2020 20:29 utc | 14

fyi , Dec 16 2020 20:31 utc | 15
Mr. Framarz

The funerals of the late Abu Mehdi Mohandess, the late Brigadier General Solimani and their companions have been unprecedent in the history of Shia Islam - to my knowledge.

Americans carried out an act that betrayed the extent of their hatred for Iran (as a country) and Shia (as a religion).

It was not the act of a sane sovereign - but as I have maintained for a long time - those of a Mad King.

That action, in my opinion, ended the possibility of the United States staying in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria, or in Lebanon.

I wonder how the Shia would react, overtime, in the Azerbaijan Republic, in Kuwait, in Bahrain to the United States in the future.

powerandpeople , Dec 16 2020 20:34 utc | 16
"Neither FireEye nor Microsoft named any suspected actor behind the 'difficult-to-attribute' intrusion effort. Next to the NSA and Britain's GHCQ there are at least Israel, China and maybe Russia which do have such capabilities. But whoever had the chutzpah to intrude the cybersecurity company FireEye also blew up their own operation against many targets of much higher value. Years of work and millions of dollars went to waste because of that one mistake."

Well if software+SolarWind+elections = manipulation => proven[before date]

then a country, either from the list of those with 'capabilities', or another whose capablities were until now unknown, will have invalidated the US election.

BIG - IF true.

A big IF.

fyi , Dec 16 2020 20:34 utc | 17
Mr. Clifton

Perhaps it may be not worthwhile to discuss the main topic of this thread but I think it is worthwhile to note it as an indication of the unwillingness to face the World as it is by many in the United States at all levels.

willie , Dec 16 2020 20:56 utc | 18
Now der spiegel,le monde and le figaro have info from Bellingcat about a team of eight FSB spies and chemical specialist following Navalny for years to take him out,yet not succeeding.Even the most gullible "Russia,Russia,Russia" consumers start to find this ridiculous,judging by the comments.Some indeed start to have concerns about a new war on russia ,that will obviously obliterate all of western-europe.

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/fall-alexej-nawalny-mutmassliche-taeter-eines-geheimdienstkommandos-enttarnt-a-19e6378b-1726-4fce-9058-f78adb197828

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/alexej-nawalny-der-kreml-und-der-anschlag-auf-wladimir-putins-angstgegner-a-00000000-0002-0001-0000-000172728796

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/alexej-nawalny-kreml-medien-verschweigen-neue-erkenntnisse-zum-giftanschlag-a-1f9bcbec-c454-48fd-9ed7-e9021e74651d

They had four articles about this in two days.Mockingbird in full speed.It is very clear to me now that Spiegel ex-journo Udo Ulfkotte was "heartattacked" for outing CIA mastering der Spiegel in his book.

Mao Cheng Ji , Dec 16 2020 21:04 utc | 19
"This attack is different from the tens of thousands of incidents we have responded to throughout the years.[...] ...this was the work of a highly sophisticated state-sponsored attacker utilizing novel techniques"

"Incidents we have responded to"? Meh. Also, this "attack" may or may not be different from the (likely) tens of thousands of incidents that they've never detected.

willie , Dec 16 2020 21:13 utc | 20
Facebook discovered and neutralized a troll farm's accounts related to the french army in Central African Republic and Mali,working against russian st.petersburg related trollfarm accounts,that they neutralized as well.This is all about the french countering russians (and chinese) getting foothold amongst africans,you know the people they threw napalm on in the fifties,like they did in Vietnam way before the americans,to pacify those people.

https://www.01net.com/actualites/facebook-demantele-un-reseau-de-trolls-de-l-armee-francaise-en-afrique-2019443.html

https://www.lefigaro.fr/secteur/high-tech/afrique-facebook-ferme-de-faux-comptes-de-desinformation-lies-a-l-armee-francaise-20201216


https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/l-ombre-des-services-secrets-russes-derriere-l-affaire-navalny-20201215

Norwegian , Dec 16 2020 21:14 utc | 21
Their initial analysis supports our conclusion that this was the work of a highly sophisticated state-sponsored attacker utilizing novel techniques.

So just fake or the CIA.

This is getting boring.

willie , Dec 16 2020 21:20 utc | 22
And of course Navalny is such a hot item that bellingcats's video on youtube got 10 million viewers within 48 hours.War on Russia,who is marching on Moscou,any volunteers?The germans and the french were not very lucky with that in the past,let the united americans have a try,after all its only europe that is meant for destruction either way.The Rotschilds will be proud of you.
Framarz , Dec 16 2020 21:21 utc | 23
@Norwegian 21

For me it was enough to read in the news that U.S. Treasury and Commerce department was among the targets to know who stand behind this operation. It must be very humiliating for US government, that's why the synchronous chorus about the "Russian Cyberattack", they know well that it was not Russia ...

U.S. Treasury and Commerce department is the driving force behind "maximum pressure" sanctions against Iran, terrorizing the Iranian population even blocking trade of medicine necessary for the treatment of kids with chronically illness.

Now Iranians sit with a complete list of U.S. Treasury and Commerce executives and their secrets, that would make it difficult for these economical terrorists to have a relaxing sleep at night. The extra bonus is what Iran got from all other US departments, useful for the future.
US need to restructure a whole lot of their IT network. protocols, hardware, even administrators at government and security level to repair at least part of the damage done.

Khameneie calls it a "sever slap" for the assassination of general Soleimani, one must agree a mind-blowing one indeed ...

uncle tungsten , Dec 16 2020 21:28 utc | 24
b reports FireEye saying
"We are actively investigating in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other key partners, including Microsoft. Their initial analysis supports our conclusion that this was the work of a highly sophisticated state-sponsored attacker utilizing novel techniques."

Interpreted as "we screwed up, that Microsoft Defender software is a POS and to think FireEye AND FBI relied on their crap upgrades - we had better blame Russia and save our total embarrassment.

uncle tungsten , Dec 16 2020 21:36 utc | 25
willie #18
They had four articles about this in two days.Mockingbird in full speed.It is very clear to me now that Spiegel ex-journo Udo Ulfkotte was "heartattacked" for outing CIA mastering der Spiegel in his book.

Thank you and I fully agree - 'heartbreaker herb' is native to a few eastern countries and known as an end of life choice of tea that is used by malign actors for centuries. Hard to find a reference to it these days as most search engines have hidden it. One used to be able to read of it.

karlof1 , Dec 16 2020 21:36 utc | 26
willie @22--

The "united americans" had their try during Russia's Civil War but didn't get very far. Then they tried carpetbagging neoliberal parasites, and they failed too, although they did considerable damage. Currently within the Outlaw US Empire, about as many people are out of work as reside within all of Russia, and their government cares not a whit what happens to them. On the other hand, President Putin has made it clear on many occasions that every Russian life is treasured by him and the Russian government, with more support given Russians than at any previous time by the USSR.

karlof1 , Dec 16 2020 21:41 utc | 27
Framarz @23--

The Outlaw US Empire is woeful when it comes to IT. Medicare today still runs on DOS, and it's likely many other departments do as well.

William Gruff , Dec 16 2020 21:42 utc | 28
Just so that everyone knows that what this => Framarz @23 poster says is entirely possible, back in the olden days when I was helping with Linux kernel space stuff Iran was one of the top five countries where code was being submitted from. Iran has more than just a few very sharp codesmiths.
Rob , Dec 16 2020 21:50 utc | 29
Regarding the David Sanger fantasy piece published in the NYT, I commented on the Times's website that Sanger made the claim of Russian culpability without providing a shred of actual evidence. Much to my surprise, my comment was accepted for publication. Shortly thereafter, it mysteriously vanished into the ether, no doubt having been read and removed by some editor or even by slimeball Sanger himself. Now that was not a surprise.
Framarz , Dec 16 2020 21:53 utc | 30
Thanks for your contribution but it's crystal clear that Khamenei took the responsibility for this operation today, looking at the eyes of Soleimani's daughter and saying what he said: (english text)

fna(dot)ir/f1cm2o

- looks like use of (ir) domain causing the text to be blocked, convert the dot

c1ue , Dec 16 2020 22:21 utc | 31
Indeed - if there's anything to be learned, it is that cyber security even in government intel agencies (Snowden), the military (Manning), political parties (Clinton emails) and now FireEye plus numerous other Solarwinds customers - is marked more for what it isn't than for what it is.
This on top of the damage caused by NotPetya and WannaCry - both of which did so much damage because clearly even Fortune 50 companies don't bother to segment their networks even between countries.
Incompetence and CYA rules the day.
iv> framarz link might show up later.. i just posted it, but it is in the cue to be released later, or not..

Posted by: james , Dec 16 2020 22:58 utc | 32

framarz link might show up later.. i just posted it, but it is in the cue to be released later, or not..

Posted by: james | Dec 16 2020 22:58 utc | 32

gm , Dec 16 2020 23:05 utc | 33
Re: They had four articles about this in two days.Mockingbird in full speed.It is very clear to me now that Spiegel ex-journo Udo Ulfkotte was "heartattacked" for outing CIA mastering der Spiegel in his book.

-Posted by: willie | Dec 16 2020 20:56 utc | 18

Didn't know that until you shared just now. Really terrible if true, but not that surprising given recent events. Wikipedia sez he died 13 January 2017 (aged 56). That would have happened during the Obama/Brennan period.

Lurk , Dec 16 2020 23:11 utc | 34
@ uncle tungsten | Dec 16 2020 21:36 utc | 25

If I understand correctly what you're hinting at, then I'll add that the alps and the nordic countries are also rife with it. It's principle active alkaloid is easily to determine port-mortem and if you're lucky, a good clinician will also diagnose it correctly before it's too late..

Less easy to pinpoint are the effects of targeted exposure with masers.

Peter AU1 , Dec 16 2020 23:37 utc | 35
"But whoever had the chutzpah to intrude the cybersecurity company FireEye also blew up their own operation against many targets of much higher value. Years of work and millions of dollars went to waste because of that one mistake."

yankistan propaganda always inserts a clause to show that hackers are bumblers. Reading the very short one sentence report in Reuters, the yanks got hit hard. pompus had to fly home and cut short his cold/hot war rabble rousing efforts.

arby , Dec 16 2020 23:56 utc | 36
Peter AU1 @ 35

I read that sentence as well and I assumed that b wrote that.

Michael , Dec 17 2020 0:31 utc | 37
@35 Peter

Thank you so much for "Yankistan". That sums it up nicely.

b's observation also gives a clue that it may very well be a white hat attack by the NSA. Lucky for us they could go the extra mile and give it some "positive" spin. Snark.

Bemildred , Dec 17 2020 0:34 utc | 38
The Register has some info on the hack:

US Treasury, Dept of Commerce hacks linked to SolarWinds IT monitoring software supply-chain attack

chu teh , Dec 17 2020 0:44 utc | 39
[This post not appear, so here it is without links]

Whatever is the definition of "intelligence", certainly it must be inclusive of this example, from Khamenei:

"Lifting sanctions is up to the enemy, but nullifying them is up to us'"

Also, he said "We must be strong in all areas, including economy, science, technology and defense, because as long as we do not grow strong, the enemies will not give up greed and aggression."

Now, compare that last to JV Stalin's 1931 speech in the run-up to WW 2:

"One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. ... All beat her -- because of her backwardness, because of her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity..."

Interesting, eh?

Hat-tip to Framarz | Dec 16 2020 21:53 utc | 30 for Khamenei link.
Stalin's speech link to follow...if it posts.

chu teh , Dec 17 2020 0:48 utc | 40
Here is link to JV Stalin speech in #40, above.


https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm

_K_C_ , Dec 17 2020 0:53 utc | 41
This cyber attack has NSA written all over it. Either that or the attackers had access to the tools that were leaked from the NSA trove. The tactics at least are very similar in some ways.

@willie - I posted a link to CNN's joint investigation with Bellingcat, Der Spiegel, and "The Insider" the other day in the open thread. Nobody seemed to have noticed. Looks like Russia has responded to them.

Quote: This report is funny to read.

I didn't have time to delve into all the different pages that comprise Bellingcat's allegations nor did I see anywhere in their stated methodology how they got access to these phone records that they're claiming correspond to the agents tailing Navalny. At least they didn't call him "opposition leader" this time - just "opposition activist" or something like that. LOL I'll be interested to see b's take on this affair once he's had time to digest it - and there is a lot to digest.

Clifton , Dec 17 2020 1:14 utc | 42
What is so cynical is that during the last three years of fake "Russian Collusion" certain politicians were colluding with the Chinese CCP, ie in actuality doing what they were accusing Trump of doing. Inevitable now that there is big trouble brewing in the US, I don't see how all the fraud evidence on every level can be disregarded, let alone apparent foreign involvement in the voting machines.
iv> Russians get blamed for everything:
https://fair.org/home/a-cia-officer-has-a-headache-media-blame-russia/
and via the lobster,
https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster80/lob80-view-from-the-bridge.pdf?cache=228
the killing of Gareth Williams of MI6
< https://tinyurl.com/y4t3dmuj>
We are very close to the point at which the lies http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56040.htm
become so ridiculous that they lose their power to confuse.
And there is bellingcat who now leads the front page of The Guardian with his fairy tales.
Luckily in addition to b we have http://johnhelmer.net/

Posted by: bevin , Dec 17 2020 1:30 utc | 43

Russians get blamed for everything:
https://fair.org/home/a-cia-officer-has-a-headache-media-blame-russia/
and via the lobster,
https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster80/lob80-view-from-the-bridge.pdf?cache=228
the killing of Gareth Williams of MI6
< https://tinyurl.com/y4t3dmuj>
We are very close to the point at which the lies http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56040.htm
become so ridiculous that they lose their power to confuse.
And there is bellingcat who now leads the front page of The Guardian with his fairy tales.
Luckily in addition to b we have http://johnhelmer.net/

Posted by: bevin | Dec 17 2020 1:30 utc | 43

bevin , Dec 17 2020 1:32 utc | 44
Sorry KC@41 I missed your comment which puts the point much better
snake , Dec 17 2020 1:40 utc | 45
western' mainstream writers will blame Russia for anything completely independent of what really happened.

can we get a list of these writers.. and store their names and aliases somewhere. a db.. is needed.


b - master propaganda buster, lol... go get em b! i am surprised the oligarch wealth and its minions haven't
figured out how to pull an assange or snowden on you - yet.... you better have some protection with the kgb
and know how to speak a little russian! by: james @ 8

James I think the propaganda monsters have discovered how to take b down, they
probably plan to ask B to self inject himself with one of their Gene Modifying
Vaccines(GMVs) with expectation that a mental giant will vegetate to a wimp.
.....
The CIA remains firmly in charge of US policy and the mainstream media. by: gottlieb @ 6

Not really, the people who support and control the CIA have firm control over politics,
finance, CIA, and media, remember the nine layers of control consist of but two layers
that are public. The CIA is the leg breaker arm of that oligarch cartel. .. .. but mr gottlieb
please list who in the CIA is the leg breaker in charge over US Policy and explain
how US Policy, CIA leg breaking, mainstream media, wall street execution are financed
marketed and coordinated. I suggest to you these are not government people but private
party marketers.

Just saying a bunch of puppets dressed in CIA suits are in charge is useless.. I will
bet when you identify to us, who it is you are talking about, it will be discovered the
person you think is in charge is not, but instead that person is executing orders given
by a private party someone else. Its the private party some one else that needs media exposure.

who (by name) do the puppets work for,
how can the string pullers be identified, and
Ill bet because the string pullers are not government at all, but private exploitative
persons, that can be legally tracked?

To Norwegian @ 21 fascinating The private parties most likely responsible (PPMLR) for the
cyber attack have been asked to investigate the victim of the cyber attack. The PPMLR's
initial findings support the victim pre investigation conclusion made before the investigation
was complete that the cyber attack was the work of a highly sophisticated state
sponsored attacker utilizing novel techniques? Not all of us were born yesterday?

psychohistorian , Dec 17 2020 2:14 utc | 46
What I haven't seen reported yet is that the voting machine company Dominion is a Solarwinds customer.....
....
....
think of the implications of that
J W , Dec 17 2020 2:41 utc | 47
If the Russians did it, usual sore loser antics by the US.
If the Russians didn't, usual propaganda lies by the US.

Either way, Yankistan still sucks.

gottlieb , Dec 17 2020 2:45 utc | 48
Snake@45..

You're not wrong... points taken. The nexus between the moneyed elite and 'intelligence' has always been there. Cheers.

[Dec 17, 2020] 'People familiar with the issue' say 'Russia is believed to be responsible'. Well, some kids familiar with wobbly teeth believe in the tooth fairy. What is that 'believe' based on?

Operation Mokingbird2: looks like the CIA remains firmly in charge of US policy and the mainstream media.
Notable quotes:
"... 1) If the first sentence contains a variation of the words "according to," then the story is at least partially bullsh*t . (2) If a variation of "according to" is in the headline, then every word of the story is a lie ..."
"... What is so cynical is that during the last three years of fake "Russian Collusion" certain politicians were colluding with the Chinese CCP, ie in actuality doing what they were accusing Trump of doing. ..."
Dec 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
TH , Dec 16 2020 19:24 utc | 2

I believe that there are a few golden rules that can be applied to news stories:

1) If the first sentence contains a variation of the words "according to," then the story is at least partially bullsh*t . (2) If a variation of "according to" is in the headline, then every word of the story is a lie


Clifton , Dec 17 2020 1:14 utc | 42

What is so cynical is that during the last three years of fake "Russian Collusion" certain politicians were colluding with the Chinese CCP, ie in actuality doing what they were accusing Trump of doing. Inevitable now that there is big trouble brewing in the US, I don't see how all the fraud evidence on every level can be disregarded, let alone apparent foreign involvement in the voting machines.

Rob , Dec 16 2020 21:50 utc | 29

Regarding the David Sanger fantasy piece published in the NYT, I commented on the Times's website that Sanger made the claim of Russian culpability without providing a shred of actual evidence. Much to my surprise, my comment was accepted for publication.

Shortly thereafter, it mysteriously vanished into the ether, no doubt having been read and removed by some editor or even by slimeball Sanger himself. Now that was not a surprise.

bevin , Dec 17 2020 1:30 utc | 43

Russians get blamed for everything:
https://fair.org/home/a-cia-officer-has-a-headache-media-blame-russia/
and via the lobster,
https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster80/lob80-view-from-the-bridge.pdf?cache=228
the killing of Gareth Williams of MI6
< https://tinyurl.com/y4t3dmuj>
We are very close to the point at which the lies http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56040.htm
become so ridiculous that they lose their power to confuse.

And there is bellingcat who now leads the front page of The Guardian with his fairy tales. Luckily in addition to b we have http://johnhelmer.net/

J W , Dec 17 2020 2:41 utc | 47

If the Russians did it, usual sore loser antics by the US.
If the Russians didn't, usual propaganda lies by the US.

Either way, Yankistan still sucks.

[Dec 17, 2020] The deep state just cannot get over losing Russia to Putin and nationalism after they had turned it into their playground in the 1990s. They are hot to trot to take out Russia and make it bend the knee, whatever the risks are.

Highly recommended!
Dec 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Hoyeru , Dec 16 2020 19:24 utc | 1

Since when has USA needed evidence? They blamed Saddam for years that he had "weapons of mass distraction". And back in 1990, they created the famous "Iraq solders took babies out fo incubators " lies. Some of us have lived longer than 30 years and we remember all the lies USA has said.

All part of the plan to cut Russia from the SWIFT in 2021. Once Biden becomes a president, he will call on all "democracies" to stand up to Russia. He and other "Western democracies" will hold a joint meeting sometime in 2021 where they will "condemn Russia for all the malign things Russia has done" and will press Belgium to cut Russia fro the SWIFT.

Whats wore, instead of doing anything, Russia is just sitting and watching them instead of warming Europe that this will mean Europe will freeze their collective asses next winter when they won't be able to get Russia gas. Even Iran is warning Russia that they will be cut off from the SWIFT...

Roger , Dec 16 2020 19:39 utc | 3

@Hoyeru,

I have to agree with you, the deep state just cannot get over losing Russia to Putin and nationalism after the thought that they had turned it into their playground in the 1990s. They are hot to trot to take out Russia and make it bend the knee, whatever the risks are. Would not put it past them to pull the SWIFT option, although that would have huge implications for the Europeans who buy so much oil and gas from Russia.

It could end up as an own goal, as the Europeans join the Russian payments network and start paying in Euros convertible directly into Rubles (especially with Nordstream 2 in place). The Indians and Chinese are already setup for payments in local currencies. Right now China needs Russia as an ally, so they would also probably re-source oil imports to take more from Russia.

Russia has already made itself self sufficient in food etc., and has been working on payments in local currencies. They are not stupid, and see such a move coming.

[Dec 13, 2020] German prisoners of war in the United States- wiki - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Dec 13, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"German prisoners of war in the United States" wiki

"There were insufficient American guards, especially German speakers. They mostly supervised the German officers and NCOs who strictly maintained discipline. [13] [25] [12] :33–34 [16] The Germans woke their own men, marched them to and from meals, and prepared them for work; [26] their routine successfully recreated the feel of military discipline for prisoners. [12] :34 Prisoners had friendly interaction with local civilians [26] and sometimes were allowed outside the camps without guards on the honor system [14] :104,223 (Black American guards noted that German prisoners could visit restaurants that they could not because of Jim Crow laws . [20] :52–53 ), luxuries such as beer and wine were sometimes available, and hobbies or sports were encouraged. [15] Alex Funke, a former POW at Camp Algona, wrote: "We all were positively impressed" by the U.S. and that "We all had been won over to friendly relations with" the U.S. [27] Indeed, unauthorized fraternization between American women and German prisoners was sometimes a problem. [24] [16] Several camps held social receptions with local American girls, and some Germans met their future wives as prisoners." wiki

-------------------

Well, pilgrims. I find this interesting. This could not be more different from the situation in the Borg/jihadi wars of the last 20 years.

My father was an officer in the US Army Service Forces in WW2. (logistics and base operations in CONUS) until he started training to be a military government official in Germany. He was stationed at several posts that had German POWs confined there. I found them fascinating. I watched them march to and from work singing in four part harmony. Their officers and NCOs marched them. They did the gardening around on-post housing. I often went out to watch them work and talk to them. My mother hated that, but then, she was a person of simple hatreds. The US MP guards watched but did not interfere. These prisoners were veterans of Panzerarmee Afrika, all captured at the surrender in Tunisia.. They told me so. A lot of them spoke excellent English, usually with a British accent that they had learned in school. There were a lot of family men who missed their children.

I find it particularly interesting that a few volunteered to fight Japan and that OKW arranged through the ICRC for them to receive constructive credits at German Universities for the courses that they taught each other.

A different world. pl

German prisoners of war in the United States - Wikipedia


turcopolier , 13 December 2020 at 11:13 AM

All

I was five or six when I knew these German POWs.

Deap , 13 December 2020 at 11:21 AM

One of the German POWs bagging groceries at the Camp Cook PX (now Vandenburg AFB) broke down and cried when he saw my little tow-haired 2 year old presence in line with my mother - I reminded him of his own little blonde daughter back home in Germany. So the family story goes.

Local German POW camp residuals in Central California - the water tower at a camp is still visible off Highway 101, a German School, at one time several local German restaurants and Delicatessen, and still the German-speaking but now aging, Edelweiss Choir.

Cortes , 13 December 2020 at 11:29 AM

Elmore Leonard's "Comfort to the Enemy" develops from an incident at one of the OK POW camps. And, if memory serves, there's at least one sequel set in Detroit, "Up in Honey's Room", involving the ethnic German community.

As ever with Leonard, great stories, superbly told.

Harry Hobbes , 13 December 2020 at 11:51 AM

Thank you for this article. I also find it fascinating, albeit through comparing the conditions of the German (and their allied) POWs in the USA vis-à-vis the conditions on the European continent experienced by Allied POWs.

"Daddy" went ashore with the Essex Scottish on RED BEACH at Dieppe, where he accumulated German steel fragments, some of which stayed with him through 2 1/2 years as a guest of the Wehrmacht and on to the grave.

Some six decades ago, I asked him if he hated Germans. His immediate retort was an emphatic "NO, I hate Nazis; but I love the German people."

Glad to learn that something similar was true in the USA at that time.

ex PFC Chuck , 13 December 2020 at 12:01 PM

Algona, Iowa, where the mentioned museum is and the POW camp was is about 40 miles SSE across the border from my hometown in Minnesota. We also had a camp for prisoners who worked on farms in the area. I dimly recall its barracks on the edge of town being pointed out to me. They were torn down shortly after the war and replaced with a drive-in theater. That is now also history.
In the '80s a co-worker who was 5-10 years older than I and who grew up on a farm in western MN that used POW labor recalled an "Oh S**t" moment from the era. His dad told his older brother, who was about 15 or so, to drive the pickup truck to the camp and get the crew for the day. The 5 or 6 guys piled into the back of the truck for the uneventful trip back to the farm. But when they arrived and he dropped the tailgate he was appalled to see his loaded 410 shotgun laying at their feet. He'd been rabbit hunting the evening before and had neglected to stow it properly when he had finished. My friend Herb said his brother swore him to secrecy, knowing their dad would let him have it if he knew.

Steven Willett , 13 December 2020 at 12:18 PM

After I was born on Dec. 7, 1941, my parents took me every summer to my maternal grandparents hop farm in Oregon. My grandfather Glen Hiltibrand was very strict but exceptionally honest in overseeing the neighborhood hop pickers in the 40s and 50s before hop picking machines existed and Mexican laborers came to help during the peak harvest months. In 1945 the government had posted a group of German prisoners to work on our hop farm under an American foreman. I used to play with the Germans during their breaks and enjoyed being carried around on their shoulders as I was transferred from one to the other. I learned later that the foreman who oversaw the prisoners was stealing their hourly pay. When my grandfather found that out, he confronted him and demanded that he return all the stolen payments to the prisoners and never steal from them again. The foreman complained bitterly that they were the enemy and deserved nothing from Americans. He was quickly and forcefully shut up. Somewhere in my Oregon house I have a picture of me straddling the shoulders of a prisoner and both of us smiling happily. I'm sure however that their feelings were on children, families and friends back home.

Laura Wilson , 13 December 2020 at 12:39 PM

Fascinating and little known. Thank you.

JohninMK , 13 December 2020 at 12:45 PM

Very humane treatment. Those prisoners were very lucky, they probably avoided the fate of the German PoWs in Europe.

In the UK they were used as slave labour until at least 1947. Our Ministry of Works made an estimated £24M profit a year (at 2.4 £/$) Must be over $1B in today's money. But at least they were not among the 100,000s who starved and died on the Rhine.

Your father would probably have been looking after civilians, perhaps I/C a town. Did you come to Europe with him Colonel?

turcopolier , 13 December 2020 at 01:16 PM

JohninMK

He went over six months earlier than my mother and I. He was always in financial affairs, dealt with contracting for agricultural goods for US forces all over Europe. He was a Finance Corps officer after he left the cavalry.

Mark Logan , 13 December 2020 at 02:02 PM

Steven,

A few years ago one of the prisoners held at Ft Lewis returned to say thanks to his captors. It was covered in the local TV news, but the Army Times wrote it up.

https://www.armytimes.com/news/2017/10/14/wwii-german-pow-returns-to-washington-state-to-say-thank-you/

What this article doesn't mention is what got the local TV news interested. After his visit to JBML he rode his bike over the pass to Yakima (a considerable feat for a man his age even with some electric assistance from that bike) to visit one of the hops/Timothy hay farms where he spent a fall working as a prisoner. Same family still owns it and they remembered him.

Fredw , 13 December 2020 at 02:02 PM

I have read these stories and am pleased that we acted honorably. But my only personal connection had a different flavor. My mother was an army nurse at a hospital that received wounded from Europe. She remembered the German prisoners as being arrogant. They seemed to think that no one could beat the Germans. Her family lived in an area of German farmers. They all spoke some German. That may have made a difference in her interactions.

Stueeeeeeeee , 13 December 2020 at 02:14 PM

Patton was right.

MidHudson Mary , 13 December 2020 at 02:35 PM

Dad (Hugh Hanley) flew as a bombardier with the 461st out of Italy. On December 17th his plane (theFlying Finger) was taken down over the Czech Republic. Four of the crew were killed and six bailed out. I grew up listening to stories about the conditions at Stalag Luft I... sawdust bread and cabbage soup, incredible cold, body lice and boredom. They dug a tunnel and the Germans knew it but let them keep themselves busy. It was filled in when they got to the fence. They took the prunes sent by the Red Cross and one of the farm boys made a batch of hooch. They all got drunk and hung over but it was something to do. Dad's anniversary is coming up and the family will remember and honor it. Before I retired from teaching, I made copies of his bluebook and shared it with my students. He was only 21 when he was shot down and this amazed my kids in high school. I hope they will remember. We must keep the memory alive.

Degringolade , 13 December 2020 at 03:19 PM

There were quite a few Italian prisoners of war along with the Germans in Ogden, Utah during the war....One of them ended up as my great uncle and was sworn in as a citizen the same year I graduated high school.

turcopolier , 13 December 2020 at 03:33 PM

Stueee

Means what?

Cortes , 13 December 2020 at 03:40 PM

The "slave labour" conditions in the UK referred to by JohninMK may have been the usual case of "pot luck" regarding the camps or off-site workplaces assigned to groups. The famous Manchester City goalkeeper "Bert" Trautmann

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Trautmann

is reported to have declined repatriation in 1948, having settled in the industrial NW of England.

My paper round in our village just outside Glasgow involved a daily "dice with death" or at minimum serious injury from the horrendously over-sprung steel gate into the property occupied by the family of a schoolmate; her dad had been a POW locally and remained. He always drove a VW, but otherwise appeared well-integrated.

Leith , 13 December 2020 at 04:22 PM

EscapeeS Gaertner and Rossmeisl were wise to to stay in the States. Unlike von Werra who successfuly escaped from Canada, returned to Germany and was KIA just nine months after escaping. The Brits made a film about him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy-_tqv5QkI

scott s. , 13 December 2020 at 05:04 PM

We only had a couple German POWs in Hawaii, probably more internees. But we did have several thousand Italian POWs, who contributed some art as well as building a Catholic chapel which also got some use by the small Catholic community in Honolulu.

Steve , 13 December 2020 at 05:27 PM

What a lovely story. Based on this, one would certainly expect that interred US citizens would enjoy an even higher standard of living.

Nothing has changed.

A.I.S. , 13 December 2020 at 06:14 PM

The USA in WW2 was the least bad place to be a pow in, by far.

Rheinwiesenlager were quite different though.

Being a pov of the Soviets was potluck. Some camps were fairly humane, other werent. Still, discounting those taken at Stalingrad (who, if they were troops, surrendered as walking corpses) your odds of surviving Soviet captivity as a German were around 8 to 9 in 10, with hunger being the main killer. This compared very favorably to survival rates of Soviets taken by Germans, let alone Chinese taken by Japanese. It should be added though that the USSR had a major famine in 1945 to 1947.

Stueeeeeeeee , 13 December 2020 at 06:38 PM

We fought the wrong enemy.

I find it interesting that Patton thought we had a choice.

Fred , 13 December 2020 at 07:21 PM

Steve,

Imperial Japan didn't treat them, their Filipino compatriots, or others, as well. I suspect you don't mean those Americans.

JerseyJeffersonian , 13 December 2020 at 08:14 PM

Colonel,

I have a recollection that Patton offered the opinion that we should have instead been fighting the Russian communists, at least he reached this conclusion after seeing the behavior of the Soviets inmediately following the end of the war in Europe. He considered them dangerously untrustworthy, and disinclined to permit the eastern Europeans to exercise their own judgment about their national futures. He was right about that, anyway.

[Dec 13, 2020] Western media condemns Soros US-government backed American NGO chief's expulsion from Russia, but ignores lobby group's fun

Dec 13, 2020 | www.rt.com

By Kit Klarenberg , an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow Kit on Twitter @KitKlarenberg Western journalists, rights groups and governments are concerned about the head of a foreign NGO being asked to leave Russia. However, serious discussion of the organization's background, and funding sources, is completely absent.

Last week, it was announced that Moscow had revoked the residency of Vanessa Kogan, a US national who heads the NGO Stichting Justice Initiative (SJI) in Russia. If her appeal against the decision isn't successful, she'll be forced to leave the country, where she has lived for over a decade, and has two children who are Russian nationals.

Authorities had been mounting pressure on the organization for some time -- one of its branches was deemed a foreign agent in 2019, and the group's offices in Dagestan, Moscow, and Ingushetia have been raided by officials in recent months.

ALSO ON RT.COM Moscow moves to expel Soros-linked US activist as ex-president Medvedev warns foreign NGOs trying to sow discord in Russia

Condemnation from Western media and rights groups was immediate, with the issue framed as just the latest example of an ongoing autocratic crackdown on rights activists in Russia. The censures were intriguing for what they both did and didn't say.

Perhaps predictably, references to its almost entirely foreign-borne history, composition, finances -- which includes support from George Soros' Open Society Foundation (OSF) -- and ties to dubious Washington-based regime change entities were entirely absent.

Curiouser and curiouser

Mainstream outlets such as the UK's Guardian newspaper universally referred to Kogan and SJI as "prominent" and/or "well-known" , a somewhat peculiar characterizations given neither she nor the organization received virtually any media attention whatsoever in its nigh-on 20 years of operation, prior to her residency being revoked. Perhaps she and SJI are only familiar to the small community of Western journalists and activists in the Russian capital.

In any event, several genuinely high-profile organizations and figures, such as Peter Stano, European Commission lead spokesperson for external affairs, slammed Kogan's expulsion on Twitter - SJI's own account on the social network is largely dormant, having accrued just 231 followers in its four-and-half years on the platform.

Conversely, the numerous mainstream articles on the move made virtually no reference to the organization's funding sources -- The Guardian perhaps went furthest, at least hinting SJI receives financial support "from abroad" .

A joint statement signed by six NGOs was similarly opaque on the former question, merely noting SJI was "one of the most active in Russia in bringing cases" to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and had secured over 250 judgements in favor of complainants. Curiously, there was no mention of the intimate ties between SJI and two of the cosignatories, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, an oversight one might think unethical.

The sextet moreover alleged SJI "has always been open and transparent about its work" , a claim difficult to square with the paucity of information on its official website.

A section on the organization's finances sparingly notes it "raises funds from institutional and government donors" . Financial statements are provided, but only from 2010 - 2017, and aren't at all informative, merely noting SJI's yearly income, and what it was spent on. Still, they indicate the vast bulk of its budget is goes on salaries, and grants have accounted for up to 99 percent of the organization's yearly funding.

The organization's annual reports are somewhat more illuminating, although they're only available from 2006 - 2011, and the final instalment isn't even publicly listed. They reveal SJI has at least previously been funded by a number of controversial Western 'philanthropic' organizations, including Soros' aforementioned OSF.

This vehicle, which bankrolls civil society groups the world over to the tune of many millions, has been embroiled in countless controversies since its establishment in 1993.

Mounting suspicion of OSF internationally may at least partially explain why SJI has become ever-increasingly unwilling to divulge who and what is bankrolling it over time. Recent years have seen numerous governments investigate and curtail the foundation's activities, if not outright ban it from operating on their soil - among them Russia, after Moscow ruled the organization represented a threat to national security in November 2015.

SJI's fiscal opacity is assisted by being based in the Netherlands - as its name implies, it's a 'Stichting', or foundation. While not registered as a charity, it's characterised as being "without commercial enterprise" , so isn't required to file accounts under Dutch law.

'Stichtings' are openly advertised as ideal ways for wealthy individuals and corporations to minimize tax liabilities and discretely distribute funds internationally.

Murky, incestuous web

The organization's 2011 annual report reveals SJI was established in 2001 by a trio of Dutchmen, Diederik Lohman, the director of Human Rights Watch's health division, Jan ter Laak, a theologian, and Egbert Wesselink, a senior advisor at PAX, a Netherlands-based NGO.

Further underlining SJI's foreign nature, its governing board boasts only one Russian member, Alexandra Koulaeva. Previously an activist with Moscow-based civil rights group Memorial, she has since relocated to Paris to work for the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).

ALSO ON RT.COM 'Merkel's surrender & worst of all possible worlds': Soros pens angry op-ed over Polish-Hungarian victory in EU budget talks

FIDH likewise receives OSF funding, along with financial support from the European Union, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and a variety of Western governments. Wesselink also sits on the board -- PAX has the same correspondence address as SJI, a post office box in Utrecht, and also gets OSF funding.

The rest of the board is comprised of Ole Solvang, of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Tanya Mazur, director of Amnesty International Ukraine, and Viviana Krstecevic, of the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL).

The Council is bankrolled by numerous European states, while CEJIL has a variety of international donors, among them OSF, and the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

When covert becomes overt

The connection between NED and SJI is supremely striking for more reasons than one. Firstly, NED was banned in Russia July 2015 on the same grounds as OSF -- the move was widely lambasted at the time, but any consideration of the organization's shadowy history and activities, and the role they played in motivating Moscow's decision, was conspicuously missing.

NED was founded in November 1983 - then-Central Intelligence Agency Director William Casey and senior CIA covert operations specialist Walter Raymond Jr. were instrumental in its creation.

They sought to construct a mechanism to support groups inside foreign countries that would engage in propaganda and political action the CIA had historically organized and paid for in secret. In 1991, senior NED official Allen Weinstein acknowledged "a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA" .

The specifics of CEJIL's activities on behalf of NED, for which it has reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars over decades, may be relevant to assessing SJI's own work.

In September 2003, the organization granted CEJIL US$83,000 to train citizens in launching legal action against Caracas via the Inter-American Commission and Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a little-known yet extremely powerful Washington and Costa Rica-based legal nexus that claims jurisdiction over the entirety of the Americas, with the agreement of the Organization of American States.

READ MORE San Francisco man arrested for vehicle theft for 14th time in 18 months as Soros-linked DA claims too many people are in jail San Francisco man arrested for vehicle theft for 14th time in 18 months as Soros-linked DA claims too many people are in jail

The grant led to a dramatic increase in frivolous claims brought against the Venezuelan government by opposition activists, all of which circumvented the country's legal system and undermined its sovereignty, granting power of judgment to a potentially sympathetic foreign body.

SJI board member Viviana Krsticevic's official biography on CEJIL's website notes she has litigated cases before both the Inter-American Commission and Inter-American Court of Human Rights, strongly suggesting she was involved in these very NED-funded anti-Chavez efforts.

SJI says its purpose is to provide legal support to residents of the North Caucasus who seek justice for alleged human rights abuses through international bodies such as the ECHR.

When Chechnya declared independence from Russia in 1991, the region became a haven for criminals, kidnappers, and Islamist warlords, and over the course of two extremely brutal wars, December 1994 – August 1996, August 1999 - May 2000), enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings, torture and unfair trial became routine.

Such crimes continue intermittently to this day, and few would surely argue with the moral necessity of bringing those responsible to justice and securing redress for those affected.

Nonetheless, the risk of at least some cases being without foundation and/or politically motivated is significant, a prospect demonstrably magnified when there is a financial incentive for individuals to bring cases, and organizations specifically seek out individuals to represent in such legal actions.

For example, in February 2017 award winning British lawyer Phil Shiner, who'd played a leading role in bringing legal action against British troops for their maltreatment of Iraqis following the 2003 invasion, was struck off the solicitors' register. It had been revealed he paid middlemen to seek out claimants, and made "unsolicited direct approaches" to potential clients.

Could SJI have helped facilitate potentially vexatious claims against Russia in the ECHR? Krsticevic's position on the organization's board suggests this is a possibility, and the organization's 2010 annual report makes clear the organization specifically sought out young Russian lawyers and trained them to bring cases to the Court, and boasts of how financial rewards paid to out its claimants had almost doubled over the past decade, to an average of €60,000 - 70,000.

At the very least, the same document makes clear "forcing structural change in Russian law and policy" was a key objective of its founders from the beginning.

As such, SJI is just one example of how Western powers quietly and surreptitiously influence politics and policy in "enemy" states via NGOs, under the aegis of democracy and human rights promotion. While the aims of the foreign funded organizations in question may be benign, the goals of those bankrolling them are often far from benevolent, and all too frequently left unexamined.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


francismd 1 day ago 12 Dec, 2020 09:11 AM

what surprises me is Russia allowing NGOs to operate in their country. NGO is a trojan horse. do you actually believe that these NGOs have good intentions. There is no such thing as free.
DoubleKnot 1 day ago 12 Dec, 2020 09:02 AM
,...Her expulsion is just Russia's auto-immune system in function.
shadow1369 1 day ago 12 Dec, 2020 07:43 AM
If corporate media is rattled that is proof absolute that Kogan was doing their dirty work. Maybe she should not be expelled, but rather prosecuted for sedition. NATO routinely uses fake 'journalists' and NGOs to undermine any country which stands against US tyranny.
Ohhho 1 day ago 12 Dec, 2020 12:10 PM
A memo for the Russian government: if the Western MSM condemns your actions then you did the right thing. If it prizes whatever you did: repent and reverse!
gswew 1 day ago 12 Dec, 2020 09:55 AM
huh? you evicted 1 person but the NGO is still open? why???? Close down all of them!!!!
Jeff_P 1 day ago 12 Dec, 2020 12:22 PM
I'm stunned that other countries allow foreign "NGO's" to operate in their countries. Many are naught but moles operating to undermine the countries in which they operate. Especially if that CIA front operation NED is in any way involved.
AnnaMR 1 day ago 12 Dec, 2020 11:36 AM
Oh, poor "prominent" Kogan. How about the sadistic imprisonment/torture of the political prisoner and great journalist Julian Assange? As for Ms. Alexandra Koulaeva, a former "activist with Moscow-based civil rights group," who relocated to Paris to "work for the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)," does she have a shred of decency to tell a word or two to her FIDH' bosses about the imprisonment of Julian Assange? No? Then Ms. Alexandra Koulaeva is a presstitute, a regular opportunistic hypocrite with no brains and no soul.
Srinivas Injeti 15 hours ago 13 Dec, 2020 05:12 AM
99% of these NGO do anti-national activities in the garb of social and welfare activities. They are also used for spying and creating unrest and sponsoring terrorist and subversive activities. They are used to create uprisings against the ruling parties which do not bow down to the diktat of the US and its western stooges. It is better to ban all these NGOs and their affiliations.
NonDucorDuco 15 hours ago 13 Dec, 2020 05:07 AM
What else could one expect from the Dutch, known for being huge hypocrites with double standards. They have their mouth full of Human Rights, but are one of the EU countries known for the highest rate of discrimination against immigrants and treating their own nationals in the Caribbean part of their kingdom as 3rd class citizens. The Dutch politicians volunteered to become a loyal sheepdog for the US regime, misusing their Caribbean territorial waters to provide cover for the destabilizing covert US regime OPS against neighboring Venezuela ~ against the will of the Caribbean natives whom have strong family ties with Venezuela. Another example is the biased report on the downing of the NH-17 flight, which was clearly a False Flag OPS.
Jewel Gyn 16 hours ago 13 Dec, 2020 05:07 AM
US is so full of crap and double standards you can't take it seriously. Ditto all these state-sponsored rights group. They acted immediately when their interests are threatened but vanish and lay low when it don't suit their narratives.

[Dec 13, 2020] "The Century of The Common Man"

Dec 13, 2020 | archive.org

"The march of freedom of the past one hundred and fifty years has been a long-drawn-out people's revolution. In this Great Revolution of the people, there were the American Revolution of 1775, The French Revolution of 1792, The Latin-American revolutions of the Bolivarian era, The German Revolution of 1848, and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Each spoke for the common man in terms of blood on the battlefield. Some went to excess. But the significant thing is that the people groped their way to the light. More of them learned to think and work together....

"The people are on the march toward even fuller freedom than the most fortunate peoples of the earth have hitherto enjoyed. No Nazi counter-revolution will stop it. The common man will smoke the Hitler stooges out into the open in the United States, in Latin America, and in India. He will destroy their influence. No Lavals, no Mussolinis will be tolerated in a Free World.

"The people, in their millennial and revolutionary march toward manifesting here on earth the dignity that is in every human soul, hold as their credo the Four Freedoms enunciated by President Roosevelt in his message to Congress on January 6, 1941. These four freedoms are the very core of the revolution for which the United Nations have taken their stand. We who live in the United States may think there is nothing very revolutionary about freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom from the fear of secret police. But when we begin to think about the significance of freedom from want for the average man, then we know that the revolution of the past one hundred and fifty years has not been completed, either here in the United States or in any other nation in the world. We know that this revolution can not stop until freedom from want has actually been attained .

"And now, as we move forward toward realizing the Four Freedoms of this people's revolution, I would like to speak about four duties. It is my belief that every freedom, every right, every privilege has its price, its corresponding duty without which it can not be enjoyed. The four duties of the people's revolution, as I see them today, are these:

1. The duty to produce the limit.
2. The duty to transport as rapidly as possible to the field of battle.
3. The duty to fight with all that is in us.
4. The duty to build a peace -- just, charitable and enduring.

"The fourth duty is that which inspires the other three ."

Wallace laments about the failure after WW1; but when he spoke, few knew the actual reasons for the war, although Wallace was correct that it wasn't to serve the Common Man's interest. To solve the basic problem that in reality goes back 4-5,000 years. Wallace then drives the nail home:

"We did not build a peace treaty on the fundamental doctrine of the people's revolution. We did not strive whole-heartedly to create a world where there could be freedom from want for all peoples . But by our very errors we learned much, and after this war we shall be in position to utilize our knowledge in building a world which is economically, politically and, I hope, spiritually sound."

The United Nations contained within it the above vision that it could become the vehicle for attaining the goals enunciated in that last sentence. It's now 75 years later, and it appears we might have an opportunity to attain Wallace's, FDR's, and numerous others dream goal of an unfettered people living in harmony while enjoying those four basic freedoms, but most importantly, the freedom from want and the chains of debt that attends it always .

Wallace knew about banks and finance from the farmer's POV for he was a member of a longstanding Iowa farming family--the Iowa Asgards. And he knew about the Devilish threats within the USA to the Four Freedoms as he noted in his speech. Although the focus was on Germany, Wallace knew the Nazi Devil lived in many places:

"Through the leaders of the Nazi revolution, Satan now is trying to lead the common man of the whole world back into slavery and darkness. For the stark truth is that the violence preached by the Nazis is the devil's own religion of darkness. So also is the doctrine that one race or one class is by heredity superior and that all other races or classes are supposed to be slaves . THE belief in one Satan-inspired Fuhrer, with his Quislings, his Lavals, and his Mussolinis -- his "gauleiters" in every nation in the world -- is the last and ultimate darkness. Is there any hell hotter than that of being a Quisling, unless it is that of being a Laval or a Mussolini?" (Quisling was a Norwegian Fascist executed in 1945 for treason.) [My Emphasis]

Wallace knew and he displayed his knowledge in a very famous op/ed written at the request of the NY Times and vetted by FDR, "The Dangers of American Fascism," published 9 April 1944. Besides that message, Wallace's most powerful message was spoken toward the conclusion of his speech which provides an excellent benchmark to measure just how far we've come and how much farther we need to go:

"Some [Henry Luce] have spoken of the 'American Century.' I say that the century on which we are entering -- The century which will come out of this war -- can be and must be the century of the common man. Perhaps it will be America's opportunity to suggest that Freedoms and duties by which the common man must live. Everywhere the common man must learn to build his own industries with his own hands is a practical fashion. Everywhere the common man must learn to increase his productivity so that he and his children can eventually pay to the world community all that they have received. No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism . The methods of the nineteenth century will not work in the people's century which is now about to begin. India, China, and Latin America have a tremendous stake in the people's century. As their masses learn to read and write, and as they become productive mechanics, their standard of living will double and treble. Modern science, when devoted whole-heartedly to the general welfare, has in it potentialities of which we do not yet dream.

"And modern science must be released from German slavery. International cartels that serve American greed and the German will to power must go. Cartels in the peace to come must be subjected to international control for the common man, as well as being under adequate control by the respective home governments . In this way, we can prevent the Germans from again building a war machine while we sleep. With international monopoly pools under control, it will be possible for inventions to serve all the people instead of only a few.

"Yes, and when the time of peace comes, The citizen will again have a duty, The supreme duty of sacrificing the lesser interest for the greater interest of the general welfare. Those who write the peace must think of the whole world. There can be no privileged peoples. We ourselves in the United States are no more a master race than the Nazis. And we can not perpetuate economic warfare without planting the seeds of military warfare. We must use our power at the peace table to build an economic peace that is just, charitable and enduring .

"If we really believe that we are fighting for a people's peace, all the rest becomes easy." [All Emphasis Mine]

Reading between the lines, we can sense Wallace's apprehensions about what the USA will become; and as we've witnessed, he was quite correct in his suspicions. But the people were quickly duped and he didn't have any chance of besting Truman in 1948 being attacked in media by those who supported him and FDR during the Depression and war--very much like the attacks on Sanders during the last two election cycles. As Wallace feared, something very similar to Nazism took hold within the USA quickly after the war. Behind it then as now stood Private Finance and the Neoliberals went to work, their goal to privatize everything and ensure the Common Folk owned nothing but the debt that enslaved him/her. No other political-economic example was to be allowed to exist; their one greatest failure and the only reason we're now on the path to the better world we should have already attained if the sort of Christian Commonwealth vision Wallace had and many shared could have arisen instead of the latent fascism within the USA gaining control.

Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 13 2020 23:01 utc | 49

[Dec 13, 2020] New Documents Show How The British Government Secretly Created 'Regime Change' Protests In Lebanon

Dec 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Three month ago we reported on documents obtained from of 'Her Majesties Government' in Britain which revealed the intense involvement of the UK government in organizing, financing and propagandizing 'Syrian rebels' since the start of the war on Syria. These programs were coordinated with the CIA's and the Gulf Arab's arming of the various Jihadis:

Most of the documents are detailed company responses to several solicitations from the Foreign Office for global and local campaigns in support of the 'moderate rebels' who are fighting against the Syrian government and people.

The documents lay out large scale campaigns which have on-the-ground elements in Syria, training and arming efforts in neighboring countries, command and control elements in Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, as well as global propaganda efforts. These operations were wide spread.
...
Most of the documents are from 2016 to 2019. They detail the organization of such operations and also portray persons involved in these projects. They often refer back to previous campaigns that have been run from 2011/2012 onward. This is where the documents are probably the most interesting. They reveal what an immense effort was and is waged to fill the information space with pro-rebel/pro-Islamist propaganda.

For any informed person who had watched the development of the war on Syria it was no surprise that such programs existed. But the immense extend of these was really astonishing. Consider what ARK, one of the involved companies run by 'former' British spies, organized as part of a British government 'Strategic Communication' program:

ARK,as a company that has specialised in Syria programming for more than three years, has access to a wide-range of networks in Syria. ARK has trained over 1,400 beneficiaries representing over 210 beneficiary organisations in more than 130 workshops, and disbursed more than 53,000 individual pieces of equipment. This network reaches into all of Syria's 14 governorates (see map below), including liberated, regime-and extremist-controlled areas, and ranges from the most senior Syrian opposition politicians, to armed groups, civil society organisations and ordinary Syrians. This includes but is not limited to:

bigger

Keep in mind that these were not social programs for the benefit of Syrians but part of a number of clandestine support measure for a violent international Jihadi movement organized to overthrow the Syrian government.

While such a program may be rationalized as part of a war it is astonishing to find that very similar measures are also used against 'friendly' governments.

New documents obtained from the British government and published here and here (complete download here ) reveal an intense British 'Strategic Communications' program that is directed against the government of Lebanon.

Those who obtained the files, they use the 'Anonymous' label, introduce the new cache:

Cont. reading: New Documents Show How The British Government Secretly Created 'Regime Change' Protests In Lebanon

[Dec 13, 2020] The most unfortunate aspect of these large scale disruption and regime change operations exploit actual grievances and truly indigenous civil society reform movements, thereby compromising even the most authentic efforts by the people

Highly recommended!
Money quote: "First thing to do when 'unrest rears its ugly head' is shut down external communications and kick out any of the Five Eyes operating an embassy in your country. It happnens so often."
Dec 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Merlin2 , Dec 12 2020 22:35 utc | 15

The most unfortunate aspect of these large scale disruption and regime change operations exploit actual grievances and truly indigenous civil society reform movements, thereby compromising even the most authentic efforts by the people. Not only that but this casts serious doubt on both authenticity and goals of all kind of demonstrations and civil unrest, even in more developed countries, including ostensibly First World.

Take the HK demonstrations for example - how much of it was real, genuine unrest caused by this or that more heavy handed China policy? truth is we don't know because by definition, the exploitation of such protest movements - almost always led by supposedly disaffected youth - includes a very sophisticated propaganda handbook that seeks to effectively "erase" the controlling hands behind the scenes.

Or, even the BLM movement - a lot that happened with these protests seem to jive with the instruction manuals per the ARK. Notice how these could be turned on and off - in this or that city, made to appear organic, when in fact those invisible hands from behind directed much of the action.

Another aspect that is very noticeable for both the HK and BLM movements is the way they were directed at some very specific issue that most people would have a hard time disagreeing with - on its face. Be it political "freedom", new "rules", new "taxes" and/or police brutality - there are numerous commonalities - too many to dismiss as mere coincidences.

At the same time, much care seems to have been taken to not allow these protests to be directed at the actual ruling class, the 1%, the elites, big finance and the corporatocracy. I always thought it was kind of funny the way these BLM protesters somehow were not there when Bernie sanders ran his campaign, even though Bernie had their grievances near the top of his list on the official platform (police brutality, uneven criminal justice system and prison reform were huge issues for him). Yes, there were plenty of black youths who voted with the Sanders movement in the primary (the one that was basically a fraudulent one, due to outright vote flipping, as was exposed by several credible analysts). But the BLM protests only came into being following the one GF killing and were directed mostly against police in large cities, and, of course against anything the federal government could try and do.

Now that Biden is all but declared as 'elect", those protests have died down (except for a few flare-up points like Portland, where they seem to have taken permanent residence). Funny that....must be that the "defund the police" was successful and black people no longer suffer from unequal law enforcement.....so all is well now.....


david , Dec 12 2020 23:29 utc | 18

Sometimes I thought something like this happened in Libya. Libyan army cleared this town, that city, next town, moving east to west, then just before Benghazi, we get our consent manufacturing message that Gaddafi said there would be a slaughter in Benghazi. So NATO just had to attack, to save Benghazi.

After Libya was smashed, turns out a whole gang of British "diplomats & SAS" were in Benghazi.

james , Dec 12 2020 19:01 utc | 2

thanks b! informative... this ARK is not noahs or boris's... who is behind this grand scheme?? it seems the idea of keeping lebannon and syria in a state of tension is the goal.. whose purpose does this serve? it seems like an agenda written in tel aviv, or is it washington?? who is behind all this?? it seems clear enough that the goal is to coddle israel... take this money and make sure israel continues to dominate in the middle east and all other countries are destabilized basket cases... these are sick people behind all this.. that much is very clear... who would spend money like this??

the really shocking thing is the UK gov't is in on it, but don't want it to appear this way.. the people in the UK sure are a weird lot.. i think they are weirder then the people in the USA!

Jen , Dec 12 2020 19:33 utc | 6

James @ 2:

ARK (Analysis Research Knowledge) has a website and its founder, former British diplomat Alistair Harris has a LinkedIn account you can look up on Google or whatever search engine you normally use. The company is based in Dubai.

Among ARK's various activities in Syria was managing the Facebook page and probably other PR for the White Helmets. The propaganda surrounding Bana Alabed and other Syrian children seems to be of a type similar to White Helmets propaganda - designed to appeal to people's emotions, particularly women's emotions - so there is a possibility all this rubbish was being generated by the same organisation.

In the end the target audience for all this propaganda is us, as our support is needed to justify an eventual US or NATO invasion of Syria and Lebanon.

Trauma2000 , Dec 12 2020 19:09 utc | 3

First thing to do when 'unrest rears its ugly head' is shut down external communications and kick out any of the Five Eyes operating an emmbasy in your country. It happnens so often. Kick Out the Five Eyes (I live in one of them). Media Communications (the industry I work in) is the publicly acceptable term for Information Program, Propaganda, Information Warfare. It's all the same thing, with Event Management being the sister of and information program.

I've worked in both areas; external media communications programs and event coordination and management , often dovetailing the two and switching between roles in order to 'maximise stakeholder value' for the benefit of the client. Who is the client..? If the client isn't obvious then Follow the money. It is always the person paying the bill. Follow the money people... follow the money and you will understand the objectives of even the most obtuse communications programs.

As an aside, with all the hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons being pumped into the MENA, 'no one in Government' is able to 'shut down the wars. It's a joke, Government can track your spending down to the last cent and hit you up with a fine for 'incorrect tax return' but they 'can't follow the hundreds of billions of dollars' in weapons that gets flown around the world. Follow the money people. Follow the money and you'll catch the culprit.

[Dec 12, 2020] Biden puts lipstick on another pig.

Dec 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Dec 11 2020 21:42 utc | 12

John Kerry is playing a con game with USA psuedo green sycophants to go to war with Russia to save the environment. And they love him.

The announcement drew praise from many professional climate activists and groups, perhaps assuming that Kerry was taking his lead from Bernie Sanders, who has for years been saying the same thing. Executive Director of the Sunrise Movement, Varshini Prakash said his statement was an "encouraging move," while 350.org's Bill McKibben, predicted Kerry would be an excellent climate czar. Yet, as media critic Adam Johnson argued, Kerry's proclamation should deeply concern progressive activists and will likely lead to expanding the already bloated military budget.

Kerry is a founding member of the Washington think tank, the American Security Project (ASP), whose board is a who's who of retired generals, admirals and senators. The ASP also hailed the appointment of their man, explaining, in a little-read report, exactly what treating the climate as a national security threat entails. And it is nothing like what Sanders advocates.

For the ASP, climate change constitutes an "accelerant of instability" and a "threat multiplier" that will "affect the operating environment," and notes that Kerry will have three priorities in his role as President Biden's right-hand man. What were those three priorities? Making sure people in the Global South could eat and have access to safe drinking water? Reparations? Disaster relief or response teams? Cutting back on fossil fuel use? Indeed not. For the ASP, the primary objectives were:

A huge rebuilding of the United States' military bases,
Countering China in the Pacific,
Preparing for a war with Russia in the newly-melted Arctic.

Biden puts lipstick on another pig.

[Dec 12, 2020] The Steele Dossier was real. -The protests were peaceful. -The Hunter Biden story was Russian disinformation. And now? They tell you we shouldn't ask questions about the integrity of the 2020 election

Suddenly "election integrity" became a dirty word...
Dec 12, 2020 | twitter.com

Rep. Jim Jordan @Jim_Jordan 22h

They told you: -The Steele Dossier was real. -The protests were peaceful. -The Hunter Biden story was Russian disinformation. And now? They tell you we shouldn't ask questions about the integrity of the 2020 election.

22h

JustTheTweets - America First @JustTheTweets17 Dec 10
One anonymous whistle blower was OK to impeach the President of the United States but, 1000's of sworn affidavits of election fraud is not enough to investigate?

[Dec 11, 2020] After entanglement with Chinese spy, Eric Swalwell warned of 'influx of Russians' in US politics under Trump - Fox News

Dec 11, 2020 | www.foxnews.com

Rep. Eric Swalwell was one of several politicians involved in an expansive Chinese spying operation and even after he was briefed on the foreign interference he experienced first-hand, he kept his focus publicly on Russia during the Trump presidency.

me title=

Axios reported that a Chinese national named Fang Fang or Christine Fang targeted up-and-coming local politicians, including Swalwell, D-Calif.

Current and former intelligence officials told the outlet that Fang used campaign fundraising, networking, rallies and romantic relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors to gain proximity to political power.

Fang reportedly took part in fundraising for Swalwell's 2014 reelection campaign although she did not make donations nor was there evidence of illegal contributions.

FBI STEPPED IN AFTER SUSPECTED CHINESE SPY GOT CLOSE TO SWALWELL, OTHER POLITICIANS, REPORT FINDS

According to Axios, investigators became so alarmed by Fang's behavior and activities that they alerted Swalwell in 2015 to their concerns, and gave him a "defensive briefing." Swalwell then cut off all ties with Fang and has not been accused of any wrongdoing, according to an official who spoke to the outlet.

Fang went on to leave the country in mid-2015.

"Rep. Swalwell, long ago, provided information about this person -- whom he met more than eight years ago, and whom he hasn't seen in nearly six years -- to the FBI," Swalwell's office told Axios in a statement. "To protect information that might be classified, he will not participate in your story."

me title=

His office did not provide any further comment to Fox News.

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., brings up the separation of families at the border during a joint hearing of the House Committee on the Judiciary and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform examining the Inspector General's report of the FBI's Clinton email probe, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, June 19, 2018 in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

The former 2020 presidential candidate had become best known in recent years for his outspokenness of the Russia investigation. He repeatedly insisted that Russians colluded with the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, something Special Counsel Robert Mueller ultimately put to bed.

However, during a 2018 interview with The Hill, long after he had received a "defensive briefing" on the suspected Chinese spy that infiltrated his office, Swalwell sounded the alarm about the Russians' involvement in American politics after suspected Russian spy Maria Butina pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government after her attempts to infiltrate the NRA and GOP circles.

BIDEN CABINET PICK HYPED DOSSIER, PROMOTED CONSPIRACY THEORY ABOUT RUSSIAN HACKERS CHANGING VOTES

"The Maria Butina plea today, you know, represents that over the past two years, our country has seen just an influx of Russians into our political bloodstream and that's something that did not exist until Donald Trump came on the scene," Swalwell said at the time. "I mean, when you look at the 16 Trump family members, campaign officials, and administration folks who had contacts with Russians throughout the campaign."

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He continued, "If you look at the Butina plea deal, you see an eagerness and a willingness to work with a traditional American adversary and I think that's dangerous for our national security. It represents poor judgment and, as Bob Mueller is showing, it also is a crime. And so it's all the more reason that a new Congress, you know, can put a balance of power on these abuses that we continue to see from the Trump administration."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

me title=

Swalwell isn't the only Democratic lawmaker who was swept up by this newly-surfaced alleged Chinese espionage. Fang also volunteered for the 2014 House bid of Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and a 2013 fundraiser for Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii. Khanna's office said the congressman saw Fang at several gatherings but had no further contact, while Gabbard's office told the outlet she "has no recollection of ever meeting or talking with [Fang], nor any recollection of her playing a major role at the fundraiser."

Fox News' Adam Shaw contributed to this report.

[Dec 11, 2020] There is no 'Russian secret war' on the US, but WaPo fantasy risks Biden starting a very real one by Nebojsa Malic

Notable quotes:
"... Last but not least, Exhibit D is the assertion that the "Democratic National Committee's computers were raided by Russian military intelligence to disrupt the 2016 election." That is another assertion, based on allegations listed in indictments by special counsel Robert Mueller. As a federal judge helpfully reminded Mueller in another 'Russiagate' case, which the government later dropped, allegations made in indictments aren't statements of fact. ..."
"... If the phrase "consistent with" jumps out at you here, that's no accident. Notice there is no actual evidence offered for any of these claims, only an insinuation that these alleged attacks would be "consistent" with what the US spies, anonymous sources and mainstream media think might be Russian objectives. That's exactly the claim made by the infamous January 2017 "intelligence community assessment," which the media falsely attributed to "17 intelligence agencies" instead of a hand-picked team involved in spying on the Trump campaign at the time. ..."
"... Now, the Post editors may be privileged people, living comfortably off of Jeff Bezos's Amazon fortune even as their country collapses under pandemic lockdowns. However, it would be a mistake to write off this editorial as a mere product of their vivid and feverish imaginations. After four years of Russiagate hysteria that even the Trump administration has internalized, this kind of rhetoric is actually dangerous . ..."
Dec 11, 2020 | www.rt.com

Airplanes paint the sky in the colors of the Russian flag during a Kremlin flyover, June 24, 2020 © Nina Zotina via REUTERS 3 Follow RT on In a normal world, the Washington Post claiming the existence of a Russian 'secret war' against the US based on far-fetched conjecture and debunked conspiracy theories would be a laughing matter. We don't live in such a world.

Democrat Joe Biden, anointed by the US mainstream media and Silicon Valley as the next president, "must call out Putin's secret war against the United States" when he assumes office, the Post's editorial board argued this week.

But this "secret war" exists only in their feverish imagination. Each and every one of the things they list as examples of it consists of assertions based on insinuation at best, or has otherwise been debunked as outright fake news.

Exhibit A is the "mysterious attacks" that supposedly "targeted" US diplomats and spies in Cuba, China, Australia and Taiwan. This 'Havana Syndrome' was blamed on Russia last week in a coordinated media campaign, but the "scientific" paper it was based on carefully avoids actual attribution, saying only that the vague symptoms were "consistent" with a posited microwave weapon.

This is an evolution of the original story, which claimed that Russia had used "sonic weapons," not microwave ones. Even the New York Times later admitted that the headaches, sleep deprivation and other problems were more likely caused by the loud chirping of Cuban crickets.

Who caused 'Havana syndrome'? With latest research naming no culprit, MSM rushes to declare Russia 'microwave' exposure mastermind

Exhibit B is another doozy, the infamous "Russian bounties" story. The New York Times claimed in June that some money captured from local mobsters in Afghanistan was somehow proof that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill US soldiers – again, not on the basis of actual evidence, but on conjecture that this was "consistent" with what the CIA and US military said were Russian objectives.

Thing is, neither the US intelligence community nor the Pentagon were ever able to confirm the story, having investigated it for months. It just so happened that it was brought up just as the DC establishment sought to torpedo President Donald Trump's plan to pull out of Afghanistan and end the 20-year war that has long since forgotten its purpose.

Exhibit C is the "looting of valuable hacking tools" from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, announced earlier this week. FireEye itself never named the culprit, with its CEO Kevin Mandia only saying it was "consistent with a nation-state cyber-espionage effort."

That didn't stop the Post from claiming that "spies with Russia's foreign intelligence service" are "believed" to have hacked FireEye, citing "people familiar with the matter." Well there you go, anonymous and unverifiable sources asserted it, therefore it must be true!

Last but not least, Exhibit D is the assertion that the "Democratic National Committee's computers were raided by Russian military intelligence to disrupt the 2016 election." That is another assertion, based on allegations listed in indictments by special counsel Robert Mueller. As a federal judge helpfully reminded Mueller in another 'Russiagate' case, which the government later dropped, allegations made in indictments aren't statements of fact.Another nail in Russiagate coffin? Federal judge destroys key Mueller report claim

If the phrase "consistent with" jumps out at you here, that's no accident. Notice there is no actual evidence offered for any of these claims, only an insinuation that these alleged attacks would be "consistent" with what the US spies, anonymous sources and mainstream media think might be Russian objectives. That's exactly the claim made by the infamous January 2017 "intelligence community assessment," which the media falsely attributed to "17 intelligence agencies" instead of a hand-picked team involved in spying on the Trump campaign at the time.

Keep in mind that these are the same spies and media that never saw the demise of the Soviet Union coming, and have been predicting Russia's impending collapse any day now – for the past 20 years. So much for their actual knowledge of Russian goals or thinking.

Speaking of 'Russiagate,' the Post has been on the leading edge of that conspiracy theory from the start. It won Pulitzers for pushing it on the American public. It also played a key role in smearing Trump's first national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, so he would be fired – and later cheered his railroading by Mueller. At least they're consistent , so to speak.

Now, the Post editors may be privileged people, living comfortably off of Jeff Bezos's Amazon fortune even as their country collapses under pandemic lockdowns. However, it would be a mistake to write off this editorial as a mere product of their vivid and feverish imaginations. After four years of Russiagate hysteria that even the Trump administration has internalized, this kind of rhetoric is actually dangerous .

That's because the Post is literally in bed with what Trump called the Washington "swamp," the entrenched US political establishment. What they print is what that establishment thinks and wants Americans to believe. With Joe Biden in the White House, the objectives of that establishment and the official US government would be, to use their own phrase, consistent .

Which is why the Post's "secret war" fantasy is, shall we say, highly likely to become an actual shooting war with Moscow. As the US and Russia have enough nuclear weapons between themselves to destroy the world several times over, that can't possibly be good for Amazon's bottom line. Someone ought to tell Bezos.

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Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Dec 11, 2020] Is The Media Burying The Russiagater Swalwell Story

Dec 11, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We often discuss media coverage and accuracy on developing legal and political controversies. Much of this discussion recently has focused on the bias shown by the media in the last four years. I have worked for the media as a legal analyst and columnist for years, but I have never before seen this raw and open bias in major media. At the same time, academics are rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy.

This morning, Fox News called out all of the networks for zero coverage of the bombshell story from Axios that Rep. Eric Swalwell may have had a close relationship with a suspected Chinese spy who fled to China a few years ago. Many of us were struck by the lack of coverage, particularly given the position of Swalwell on the House Intelligence Committee and his former bid for the presidency. It was particularly striking when the media is now reluctantly covering the Hunter Biden story after a long blackout before the election. Yet, the most stark comparison is with the exhaustive coverage given the highly analogous story involving an alleged spy, Maria Butina, who had an affair with a high-ranking figure in the National Rifle Association.

Swalwell is alleged to have had a close relationship with Chinese national, Fang Fang or Christine Fang, who not only raised money for him but placed at least one intern in Swalwell's congressional office, according to Axios . Bizarrely, Swalwell has refused to confirm or deny that he had an intimate relationship with his office claiming that such an answer could compromise classified information. Even that ridiculous comment did not prompt ABC, NBC, or CBS to cover the story. Obviously, Fang and the Chinese already know if she had a sexual relationship with Swalwell. The only people in the dark are the voters.

Swalwell himself explained why this is news.

The congressman was one of the most vocal voices calling out a June 2016 meeting that President Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., with Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was accused of being an asset for the Russian government.

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Swalwell declared on MSNBC in January 2019:

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

" Stated plainly, the President's son met with a Russian spy. We now have the best evidence of that in our minority report the Democrats put out that Ms. Veselnitskaya was going all over the world and bumping into Dana Rohrabacher, which is a sign of a spy, someone who tries to create a coincidence encounter, and now we know that she was working at the behest of the Russian government. "

Not even the utter hypocrisy of Swalwell's position or the lunacy of his classification claim was enough to generate minimal coverage. There is also no interest in Swalwell remaining on the intelligence committee given his ill-considered relationship.

Swalwell says that he cooperated with the FBI and cut off ties with Fang, who fled to China years ago. There is no indication that he compromised classified information, but such assets are used to often influence powerful leaders or acquire useful background information on other leaders.

MSNBC and other news outlets could not get enough of that story about Trump Jr. but has an effective blackout on the same allegation of Swalwell not just "bumping" into a spy but carrying on a long relationship and even allowing her to raise money for him and help put an intern in his congressional office.

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Yet, the greatest contrast is with the NRA story which was endlessly covered. Even when NRA moved to address the relationship between Butina and 57-year-old Republican activist named Paul Erickson. Hundreds of stories ran on every deal and media explored whether a Russian activist influenced powerful figures or shared information .

The FBI Director just gave a public speech on the extensive and growing espionage efforts of China. Yet, the success of planting an agent with Swalwell and a couple of other politicians has been given virtual Hunter Biden treatment. Where a host of legal expert called for charges for treason and other crimes against Trump Jr., there is nothing but crickets when a liberal Democrats members is accused of far more extensive contacts with a Chinese spy. Why?



PrintCash 6 hours ago (Edited)

Does a bear poop in the woods?

Its the sole purpose and desire of the ultra partisan types in the media to control the narrative, control the messaging, control your life. It's what they LIVE for.

Hikikomori 6 hours ago

Swalwell was accusing Trump of colluding with Putin while at the same time Swalwell was screwing a ChiCom spy - you couldn'tmake this up.

Floki_Ragnarsson 6 hours ago

Right out of a Tom Clancy novel.

Lord Raglan 5 hours ago remove link

Swalwell was boinking the Chi-Com Honey Pot in 2015 and maybe earlier, before Trump even announced his run and yet it is all Trump's fault.

There is no lie that is too malignantly preposterous for people on the Left.

Flankspeed60 4 hours ago

The Chinese are not actually our enemy here. When you go to Yellowstone, you're warned not to feed the bears. Same for dragons. Hang raw meat on a clothesline, and expect all the downwind carnivores and blowflies to show up. In our case, corrupt politicians made themselves readily accessible to any and every gomer with large bundles of cash. Even real-life whores are more discerning in their choice of johns than the low-life bacterium we elected to congress-it is THEY AND THEY ALONE who are to blame for selling this country out. The Chinese have nothing but contempt for these dregs, and no one should blame them for paying relative pennies for solid gold bars in return. In fact, our government does exactly the same to countless other countries, so the stampeding hypocrisy of our government in crying 'foul' simply reeks. The Chicoms would most likely shoot, and have shot their own corrupt sell-outs for far less than the crimes committed by our treasonous scumbags. And, until we adopt similar measures against our worthless SOB's, our Swamp will simply continue to get deeper and slimier............

precarryus 4 hours ago

Yet Swill-well says Adam Schiff and Pelosi were aware of his activities, implying ... ...(Surprised?

American2 5 hours ago remove link

Perhaps Peter Strozk can be the defense's rock-solid moral character witness at Eric Swalwell's federal trial.

surf@jm 5 hours ago

The Chinese own Hollywood and the media.....

The Chinese were the main force for the Russia collusion horsehockey through their political whores in congress....

Schroedingers Cat 5 hours ago

Hillary, Brennan, Obama, Chris Hayes, Maddow, Comey, Zucker and many other swamp state freaks are responsible for Russiagate.

The CHinese CCP are definitely up to no good but let's not excuse traitors and chalk it up to Chinese spies. Swalwell is 100% responsible for his own behavior. They ALL ARE. Chinese spies can't corrupt real American Patriots.

Son of Captain Nemo 5 hours ago

Last I checked so was Joe and Hunter Biden along with China?...

And Hunter is doing great things with his money buying under age prostitutes in Ukraine and China making vids of it while sucking on a crack pipe... While the young ladies "suck" something else "off"!!!

Willie the Pimp 6 hours ago remove link

The media? No such thing. CIA propaganda.

John Couger 3 hours ago

This slimy piece of excrement attacked our president for 4 years over the Russia hoax all while being compromised by the communist Chinese

BinAnunnaki 4 hours ago

The Presstitute media is an extension of the Democratic Party.

Cobra Commander 4 hours ago remove link

Precisely. Why pay money to be misinformed? Biden up by 17 in Wisconsin, Hunter laptop media blackout, panning away from ANY mention of voter and election fraud.

OCnStiggs 6 hours ago

"Swallowell" is a lying, prevaricating, stupid POS.

The very first thing they do to you when you get a high security clearance is brief you on people and techniques used to compromise you. Period. Dot. This ****** either skipped the brief or ignored it. Simply associating with people who might be a compromise threat is unlawful. Ignorance is no excuse.

Just sayin'.

Cobra Commander 4 hours ago

Penalties for Inaccurate or False Statements (security clearance)

United States Criminal Code (title 18, section 1001) provides that knowingly falsifying or concealing a material fact is a felony which may result in fines of up to $10,000, and/or 5 years imprisonment, or both.

If you have a security clearance, you agree to report all foreign contacts and relationships. When you submit your clearance request, you attest that all is true, correct, and complete to the best of your knowledge.

Intentionally submitting false information on a clearance request or renewal is subject to criminal prosecution.

Cobra!

[Dec 10, 2020] Chidems and Russiagate: The pot calling the kettle black

So some rabid Russiagaters slept with with women who are suspected to be Chine agents of influence; Others like Biden took money from china while instigating and promoting RussiaGate . So nice
Dec 10, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Arthur Schwartz @ArthurSchwartz · Dec 8 If @RepSwalwell hadn't been banging the Chinese communist spy, he would be doing wall to wall MSNBC hits claiming that this was a Russian disinformation campaign. Instead, all he can say is "it's classified." No one is buying it, Eric. Jack Posobiec @JackPosobiec · Dec 8 I'm told the unreleased portion of the Swalwell report is far, far worse for the Congressman and he is actively fighting to obstruct its release to the American people Nick Short @PoliticalShort · 14h China owns Hollywood, the media, our supply chains, etc. It's idiotic to believe they wouldn't also own a good portion of those in Congress. The question is, how big of a portion? Donald Trump Jr. @DonaldJTrumpJr · 16h How'd that one work out Fartwell? Quote Tweet Eric Swalwell @ericswalwell · Jan 8, 2019 "Stated plainly, the President's son met with a Russian spy." On @DeadlineWH about #NataliaVeselnitskaya 8.2K 12.1K 46.6K

As Donald Trump Jr noted so poignantly on Twitter:

Does anyone else notice that the Chinese Spies seem to always attach themselves to Democrats while simultaneously always attacking Republicans? That should tell us all we need to know about who's fighting for who. Democrats are the party of China!

[Dec 10, 2020] The end of Ostpolitik- Dream of Europe 'whole free' over as Russian-German friendship fades Moscow pivots to Asia

Dec 10, 2020 | www.rt.com

By Fyodor Lukyanov , the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director of the Valdai International Discussion Club. This Monday marked 50 years since one of the 20th century's most iconic moments, when German Chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees in Warsaw, emotionally apologizing for the horrors the Nazis had unleashed on Eastern Europe.

It was one of the milestones of the Neue Ostpolitik – Bonn's policy aimed at normalizing relations with the USSR and its East European satellites. On the day of this anniversary, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas wrote the following: "Unlike Brandt, we no longer have to go via Moscow to talk to our eastern neighbors nowadays. Many partners in Eastern and Central Europe now view Russia very critically – and German foreign policy must take our neighbors' concerns seriously. In addition to offers of dialogue, clear German positions vis-à-vis Moscow are therefore important for maintaining trust in Eastern Europe."

A clear testimony to the fact that, compared to other Eastern European states, Russia is now of secondary importance to Berlin. This is perhaps the first time it's been stated so explicitly.

ALSO ON RT.COM EXCLUSIVE: West working to 'deprive Russia of right to determine its future' & is pushing for 'regime change,' Lavrov tells RT

A day later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made several important statements about relations between Russia and the EU, including the EU's locomotive, Germany. At the annual meeting of the Russian International Affairs Council, Lavrov pointed out that "apparently, the European Union has given up any attempts to become one of the centers in the emerging multipolar world order and is now simply taking its cues from the US. Germany's policy on a number of issues tells us that this is the course Berlin has chosen, as it reaffirms its intention to preserve Germany's undisputed leadership within the EU. France's position is somewhat different. The prevailing notion is that the European Union is now giving up any ambitions of becoming a center of power in a multipolar world. And if France itself decides to compete for this role well, we'll see how it goes."

Lavrov also mentioned the concept of a "sham multiculturalism that the Germans and the French concocted," which they "are promoting, presenting the EU's policies and initiatives to the world as beyond reproach, a shining example for everyone to see."

Right after that, Russia's top diplomat headed to a meeting with members of the Alternative for Germany parliamentary party. Lavrov sent a clear message, basically saying that this visit was his response to the political steps taken by official Berlin. "As for us, we don't have any objections when German politicians communicate with the Russian opposition, and we never get in the way of such contacts. Interestingly, Berlin officials prefer meetings with opposition activists who work outside the system and do not represent parliamentary parties " Obviously, a nod to the red carpet welcome that Alexey Navalny, a comparatively marginal opposition figure back home, received in Germany.

While the meeting with a right-wing German party was more of a symbolic gesture, the Foreign Minister's statement about the EU giving up its independent voice and Germany being the main driver in this process reflected Moscow's official stance. The Kremlin has decided that it no longer has any special relations with Berlin.

There is little hope that this connection will be restored in the foreseeable future, since Angela Merkel's potential successors are even less likely to promote these special ties. The Navalny case was just the last straw, with the Kremlin astonished by the irrational nature of Berlin's actions.

ALSO ON RT.COM EXCLUSIVE: West working to 'deprive Russia of right to determine its future' & is pushing for 'regime change,' Lavrov tells RT

Viewed from Russia, it seemed absolutely unnecessary to go against the pragmatic interests that both countries seemed to have shared in the past. However, the Moscow-Berlin axis, once viewed as something special, began to deteriorate a long time ago. Now it's over, along with Russia's dreams about continental Europe changing its allegiances in the new world order and moving away from its Transatlantic identity towards a more independent role.

And Germany has become the main obstacle for this hypothetical emancipation. That's why France was mentioned, although the remark was also somewhat sarcastic.

Two months ago, Sergey Lavrov said that Russia was prepared to suspend its dialogue with the EU, because it wasn't yielding any results. But he was talking about European institutions, not the continent itself. Now relations with separate European countries are being revised, based on their stance towards Russia and their role within the European Union. This concludes a very important phase in Russia's foreign policy that began after the collapse of the Soviet Union (or, to some degree, even before that) and signifies a transition to a different, probably a lot less Eurocentric, approach.

The dialogue between Russia and the West, with Germany being a major participant, has now reached a dead end – there is nothing of substance left to discuss. All the talk about common values, which has been a focal point ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has accomplished nothing. Back then it was believed that the whole of Europe, including Russia, was a space of shared values that rested on the foundation of Western liberalism.

Since the 1990s, Russia has been publicly accused of departing from these values, which was interpreted as evidence that Russia is, overall, unprepared for meaningful cooperation with the rest of Europe. There are various assessments of the changes Russian politics has undergone in this period, but it is apparent that it has moved away from the ideological commitments of 30 years ago. And Russia will not go back to them: not just because its own evolution as a state has made this impossible, but because the old value system is growing obsolete and is no longer perceived as universal.

The world has entered a new era, where pluralism of morals and values is becoming the new normal, no matter how the European Union feels about it. International relations can no longer be based on countries demanding their partners to conform to a certain set of values.

In this respect, Russia would gladly return to the time when internal political mechanisms of individual states were not brought up as talking points in negotiations with their foreign partners. Ideally, Russia would want to go back to the start of the Ostpolitik era – the first half of the 1970s, before the Helsinki Accords and its "third basket" provisions, which made respecting human rights and freedoms an integral part of all international discussions. Back then, it was unthinkable for an expensive and strategically important project, such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, to be jeopardized because of the personal history of a single political figure – no matter how well regarded he is by Western leaders.

ALSO ON RT.COM US & NATO preparing for 'invasion' of Crimea, warns local parliamentarian, as US-Russia tensions in Black Sea region soar

For 30 years after the end of the Cold War, relations between Russia and the West have been determined (to a lesser and lesser extent with every passing year) by the principles established during the confrontation period – principles that were to be transformed into a new form of international cooperation. However, this project has been abandoned, as have been all attempts to adapt international institutions created in the second half of the 20th century to the realities of the 21st century.

Stability and cooperation in the late Cold War period were dictated primarily by the need to strengthen global security and prevent open confrontation. This was perceived as an absolute priority. Today, Russia and the West no longer attach such importance to their relations (although the perception persisted for a time, on both sides, even after the Cold War).

The EU is now busy dealing with its own issues. The United States also has problems to tend to at home, on top of its efforts to contain China. Thus, Russia needs to redefine its priorities and work out a proper new model of international relations – one that would have Asia at the center and China as Russia's new key partner.

Simplified, the model of Russian-German relations in 2020 looks like this: Germany, as the de-facto leader of the EU, no longer views promoting the 'European model' eastward as a priority. And Russia, which had long viewed its relationship with Western Europe as intrinsically valuable, has ceased to do so and is seeking closer cooperation with the nations of Asia.

So, the specific circumstances that brought about the current crisis are just the trigger, not the underlying causes of the change. Russia and the West are growing increasingly apart in terms of their priorities. This is happening for objective reasons, but is also compounded by subjective perceptions.

All of this does not mean, however, that the trend cannot be reversed. Russia, as the largest country in Eurasia and a bearer of European culture, and Germany, as the strongest European economy and a country that will have to redefine its identity in the coming years, will have need of each other again, some day. But this cannot happen until a new world order is fully formed – one that has little in common with the ways of the last century. The notion of Ostpolitik was an integral part of the old model, and as one faded away into the past, the other followed.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Dec 10, 2020] That was really quick: before November 3 we have a full blown Russian collision and now magically we have such a fair election that even question of investigating "irregularities" is preposterous

Dec 10, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Slaytheist 1 hour ago

Russian collusion disappeared quicker than BLM after the election.

ominous 1 hour ago

one is returning soon

High Vigilante 16 minutes ago

Demsheviks: "There was never Russia collusion, and we have always been in peace with Eastasia"

LevelHeadedMan 26 minutes ago

Russia narrative was a scapegoat for the real cause. The Democrats lost the working class. They became the party of the coastal suburbanite liberal middle class. And now they are the party of fraud. lay_arrow

Francis Marximus 1 hour ago (Edited) remove link

I guess all the countries that have a higher GDP then Russia the US has in their pockets. Hence...Russia has to be the fall guy.

The media and Democrats need simple minded people, people who are easily fooled and people with no conscience to exist

ominous 1 hour ago

why would Russia interfere?

we're doing a bang-up job ******* things up on our own.

divide_by_zero 1 hour ago

Putin should announce his candidate has won, just to **** either as Soros will run our gov otherwise

NotGonnaTakeItAnymore 1 hour ago

Let's all recall that genius of the senate from CT, Chris Murphy, who took every opportunity to stand before anyone who would listen and had a camera, as repeatedly stating that Russia was involved with Trump and with Hunter's laptop.

And now he's remarkably quiet.

Hey Chris, can you show me the Russians now??? You are so going to lose you next election. We are sick of your games.

Baba Yaga 1 34 minutes ago

The American election is a farce in itself. Puppeteers from the Deep State have pushed Biden's candidacy by all means. The American people are just extras in these elections, nothing depends on them. This is the American way of democracy.

with extra foam 32 minutes ago remove link

That moment of clarity when you realize that modern America is no different than Soviet Russia.

Bobby Farrell Can Dance 23 minutes ago (Edited)

With much worse propaganda and a bigger budget. Meaning the fall will be harder.

monty42 14 minutes ago

Worse in some ways. The devil that poses as an angel of light is actually more dangerous.

Ms No 1 hour ago (Edited)

I have to pat the CIA on the back. This has dual purpose.

Both China and Maduro are accused of meddling in this election. They got Russia last time. Amidst it all, thinking people are demoralized by the assholes who actually believe any of that absurdity. It's a hideous and cruel weapon.

Well played.

youshallnotkill 1 hour ago

According to Rudy is was Chavez, don't cha know. Guy apparently just faked his death ... /s

ouluoulu 24 minutes ago remove link

I am watching the death throes of the news business, newspapers, television and magazines. Blogs, newsletters and individuals releasing their own videos will finally kill it off.

Investigative reporting is nonexistent, replaced by fake news that answers to the "Big Club" that George Carlin referred to when he said "It's a big club and you ain't in it, you and I are not in it."

Bobby Farrell Can Dance 18 minutes ago

Western MSM is all paid shilling, fully compromised by 5 Eyes + Mossad intel agency staffers. The last place I would want to learn about the way the world works, but the first place I would look to see their projections.

[Dec 10, 2020] US Election -Success-... And Hey Presto -Russian Interference- Disappears -

Dec 10, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

US Election "Success"... And Hey Presto "Russian Interference" Disappears by Tyler Durden Sun, 12/06/2020 - 00:00 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The United States' election victory of Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has yet to be officially confirmed. That requires the 500-plus Electoral College comprising the 50 federal states to cast the final vote when the constitutional body meets on December 14. Biden holds a commanding lead of over 300 delegates in the Electoral College, more than 70 above Donald Trump's quota and decisively more than the 270 threshold required for election to the White House.

Nonetheless, already one thing is indisputably clear. Biden's nominal victory from the popular vote tallies is glaring proof that Russia did not interfere in the American presidential ballot. Not in 2020. And not, we may discern, in 2016, nor in any other election. Yet the silence in US media over this obvious conclusion is deafening.

Four years of frenetic and unsubstantiated allegations of "Russian interference" have disappeared overnight, it seems. Poof! Gone! As if by a magic conjuring trick. Now you see it, now you don't, so to speak.

The New York Times has declared the recent presidential contest a "great election.. a resounding success free of fraud" . The Department of Homeland Security pronounced the election to be the "most secure in American history." Other US media outlets have jettisoned supposed political neutrality and can barely contain their elation at Biden's electoral victory.

But hold on a moment.

In the months and weeks leading up to the November election, there was a fever pitch in US media among politicians, national security chiefs, pundits and anonymous intelligence sources that Russia was allegedly stepping up "interference efforts" to get Trump re-elected.

Those evidence-free claims were predicated on the equally absurd assertion that Trump was a Manchurian candidate for the Kremlin. That "Russiagate" fable was first spun in 2016 and for the past four years elaborated into a tangled web to "explain" how a maverick former reality TV star had been elected to the White House.

Suddenly, however, the Democrats and supportive US media are now asserting that the voting process was impeccable and unblemished by any malfeasance. Of course they would say that in order to bolster legitimacy of Biden's win against the Republican White House incumbent Donald Trump. But the thundering takeaway which the US political class and media are bizarrely ignoring is that Russia did not interfere not in the 2020 race nor in any other election. Russia has always categorically said it is not meddling in US politics and its electoral process. Turns out that Russia is de facto vindicated in its protestations against American slander.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

The "Russiagate" nonsense was hatched by Democrats, their supportive media and intelligence agencies because they could not come to terms with the reality of why Trump beat the then establishment-ordained candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016. Could it have been because Clinton and the Democrat party was repudiated by popular sentiment due to perceived corruption and overseas wars? No, another "explanation" had to be found. And the US political establishment came up with the "Russian interference" narrative.

No matter that the Mueller investigation found after 22 months of probing and hundreds of millions of taxpayer-dollars spent that there was no evidence of "Russia collusion" with the Trump campaign. Nevertheless, Mueller and the Democrats, their media and intelligence backers, persisted in the spurious notion that Russia meddled in the 2016 election and, allegedly, was continuing to meddle, purportedly with even more sophisticated, nefarious techniques.

How can US politicians, intelligence officials and media credibly claim that Russia interfered in 2016 and in mid-term congressional elections in 2018, but now in 2020 it evidently did not? The most logical explanation is simply that Russia never did.

Four years of hysterical American accusations against Russia have transpired to just that: bogus hysteria . US politicians, media and so-called intelligence gurus should be held to account for fabricating what is perhaps the biggest hoax ever played on the American public.

Though, one can be sure that they won't be held accountable in a formal way. Venal power doesn't work like that. And the US political system has built-in layers of self-protection for the political class never to be prosecuted. But in an informal no less real way, the system is being held to account by the wider public who are increasingly holding it in contempt and distrust. The political class and their plaything media are losing the moral authority to govern. This goes beyond mere Trump Derangement Syndrome. The systematic lying and deception over alleged Russian interference perpetrated on such a grand scale has fatally damaged the credibility of American institutions. Not just in the US, but around the world too.

Equally lamentable is the corrosive, damaging effect that the bogus hysteria has had on bilateral US-Russia relations and international tensions. Relations are at a dangerous all time low comparable to the depth of the Cold War. This has in turn sabotaged diplomatic efforts to strengthen arms controls and global security. The anti-Russia hysteria has led to the US abandonment of key nuclear weapons treaties, the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and soon the New START.

The Russophobia that has been whipped up as a political weapon against Trump over the past four years is not something that can be easily put aside. It has engendered deep-seated hostility against Russia. During the presidential debates, Joe Biden vowed that the would take a tough stand against Russia for "interfering" in US politics. The incoming administration is being mentally held hostage by its own Russophobia which was cultivated on entirely false grounds.

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It is disturbing how the US nation has been dragged into an obsession about alleged Russian malign activities, an obsession which turns out to be a mirage. Not for the first time either. Recall the Cold War Red Scares and McCarthyite witch-hunts which poisoned American society.

The implications are daunting. How can bilateral relations with Russia be restored? How can an intelligent dialogue be conducted with a nation whose leaders are so self-deluded and irrational?

Moreover, this is a nation whose leaders presume to have the prerogative to use overwhelming military force whenever they deem so. It is not unlike the driver of a juggernaut vehicle on a precipice who is hurtling along while out of his brain on misconceptions.

[Dec 06, 2020] Russiagate vs Swampgate

Highly recommended!
Dec 06, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

lux , 05 December 2020 at 02:51 PM

There is a future out there on the time beam ... I somewhat agree with Turley, that Russiagate vs Swampgate, I seem to forget how I labeled the other side of the pole over the years--Obama-Clinton-Gate???---should be investigated--:

Appointment Of Special Counsel Leaves Biden and Democrats In A Muddle

https://jonathanturley.org/2020/12/04/barrs-appointment-of-special-counsel-leaves-biden-and-democrats-in-a-muddle/

Can or should Barr also appoint a special counsel into Hunter-Gate?

[Dec 05, 2020] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 3 DECEMBER 2020 by Patrick Armstrong - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Dec 05, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 3 DECEMBER 2020 by Patrick Armstrong

RUSSIA AND COVID-19. I wonder whether Xi suspected at first (at first) that COVID might (might) have been a biowar attack and communicated that possibility to Putin. ( There are probably people in Beijing who think the US used biowar in Korea. ) I think they quickly decided that it wasn't but the possibility was put into their minds. (Remember the so-called Thucydides Trap ?) I thought this up as an explanation of why, as far as I know, only Russia and China have built new permanent isolation hospitals. Just in case. Any way, four new ones just opened in Russia with another one coming later this month. Putin announced the beginning of large-scale vaccinations yesterday, key workers have the priority. Shoygu announced a vaccination program for the military .

KARABAKH. The ceasefire is holding, refugees are returning . " It is worth noting that international actors [he means Western ones, of course] have been completely sidelined from mediation... " Well, what do they bring to the table and who would trust them? The world is changing.

PUTIN. On his last legs again . Again.

SPACE STATION. An Energia executive says that the ISS is breaking down and suggests it has only about five years left . Meanwhile Beijing says China will start to build its own orbital station in 2021 . (A Chinese probe just landed on the Moon .) Do I see a joint venture coming?

NAVAL INCIDENT. Peter the Great Bay is near Vladivostok and Russia claims the straight line from cape to cape; the US does not recognise that. A US warship on a "freedom of the seas" trip entered it and was chased off. Not that the USN would ever bow to foreign intimidation ; (entertaining read that: the facts are that the US ship entered, the Russian ship told it to leave, it did – but nobody made it leave!!!) The Russian and Chinese navies should do a FONOP in the Gulf of Mexico. But that would be a silly and dangerous provocation without any real point, wouldn't it?

ARCTIC. Rosneft announces that the Zvezda shipyard in Primorskiy Region has begun constructing the first of 15 icebreaker LNG carriers of the Arc7 class for its Arctic LNG 2 project. There is already a fleet of South Korean-built icebreaker LNG ships operating in Yamal . The Arctic is a Russian lake.

SHARON TENNISON. Interview with her here : worth your time. She's been tirelessly working to improve American-Russian relations for three decades: ordinary people, face-to-face. Probably the greatest thing she has achieved is that Putin – whom she met way back then – certainly knows what she is doing and I'm sure that he feels he has had enough of Americans, he thinks of her and tries again.

NATO is again concerned by how close to its bases Russia puts its country .

NAVALNIY. More confusion and contradictions revealed in the German story .

SKRIPALMANIA. Yulia phoned home, on a burner it seems ; living apart, she's OK, dad has a tracheostomy tube; dad never wrote to Putin asking to come back and did not give interviews to Urban .

WESTERN VALUES™. The country that judges other countries' elections just had an election. Somebody won. One day a court will tell us who. Lots of evidence of fraud: here , here , here and here . And who would contract out their elections to machines that can be hacked by anyone ? (Note the date and source of the video – three years later, in CNN-land, the machines have become 100% solid.)

AMERICA-HYSTERICA. Bubbles continue to burst. Too late, of course – the damage has been done. The only way to get to the truth is to sue. Gee maybe Moscow didn't fund the Brexit campaign as we told you. Carter Page is suing Comey and others . Now that Flynn is pardoned maybe he'll sue too.

OPEN SKIES. The USA has formally left it . The irony is that it was Eisenhower's idea .

PUTIN DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. A revealing ad for a Russian correspondent for the NYT – in essence, ya gotta believe all the anti-Russian propaganda or we won't hire you . But what I don't get is why pay the housing and transportation costs? They can make up this stuff more easily from home. BELARUS inches towards a solution: Lukashenka just said he will not be President under the new constitution which is expected to appear in 2021.

UKRAINE. Ukrainian historians continue their work: Joe Biden is the descendent of a Ukrainian noble and " culinary deceptions " are the newest Russian "hybrid warfare". Meanwhile, in the real world, Ukrainians are getting out when they can. The seventh anniversary of Maidan – war, poverty , industrial decline , population fleeing, birthrate collapsing , a comedian in powerless power, the oligarchs looting what little is left, nonsense enshrined . And let's not even think about this .

[Dec 05, 2020] Butina blowback results in tightening of Russian FARA act

Dec 05, 2020 | www.rt.com

The Russian government is set to expel a prominent human-rights activist, with former president Dmitry Medvedev claiming there's a co-ordinated campaign by international organizations to stoke unrest in the world's largest state.

Vanessa Kogan, the director of the Stichting Justice Initiative project, told Britain's Guardian newspaper that Russian authorities had notified her of the revocation of her residency permit. She will now have two weeks to leave the country, where she has lived for more than ten years. She also has two children with a Russian national.

The Stichting Justice Initiative is an NGO which, it says, provides legal support to Russians in cases of perceived human rights abuses. It has been less open about its funding in recent years, but in 2010 and 2011, it was bankrolled by the Dutch government and the Hungarian billionaire George Soros. via his 'Open Society' pressure group, which has been banned in Russia and declared "undesirable."

ALSO ON RT.COM Prosecutors ban Soros Foundation as 'threat to Russian national security'

Kogan's work has previously focused on the North Caucasus region, where her group has represented people alleging victimization at the hands of authorities. Its activity in the majority Muslim area has reportedly brought tensions with local leaders, such as Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Republic of Chechnya.

Now the Deputy Chairman of Russia's Security Council, Medvedev, who has also served as Russia's prime minister, told reporters on Thursday that well-funded foreign groups were using networks in Russia to "exacerbate the internal political situation in certain regions, including through Russian non-profit groups they associate with."

He went on to add that these NGOs "depend on internet media, and use various far-fetched reasons for rewriting the events of our national history." He called this a "large-scale information campaign, being conducted to discredit the leadership of some specific territories and Federal Subjects."

In November, the country's State Duma debated new legislation that would expand the definition of foreign agents, enabling the label to be applied not only to NGOs and media organizations, but also to ordinary citizensIn 2018, the United States imprisoned a Russian citizen, Maria Butina, claiming that she was a foreign agent operating on behalf of Moscow. Authorities allege that she had infiltrated conservative-leaning organizations to promote better ties between Washington and the Kremlin. She served five months in prison, some of it in solitary confinement, before being deported back to Russia.


Zeta029 43 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:01 PM

This is a most dangerous situation. Being unable to openly defeat Russia on a battlefield (not that they didnt try, most recently in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria), the Empire is focusing on certain NGO and people like Navalny to weaken the leadership of Russian Federation. This is the undisputed truth and so these measures should be swift and harsh, for National Security sake.
cangoroo Zeta029 16 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:28 PM
And those NGOs are funded with "printed money" in the Empire. Now Australia has joined the money-printing party of their big-brother US; at the rate of $5billion a week. Money-printing means PIRATING money from the holders of their money, including foreign CentralBnks like China's. It was SEA-PIRACY on which the Empire Britannia was built during the reign of QE1 in the 16th century. Genes, I guess.
Count_Cash Zeta029 18 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:26 PM
It's a multifaceted interference in Russia. The biggest play is economic , the next play is internal friction based on wealth disparity, the third is to create perception that westerners have better rights. The medium is external media, internal media, external courts, attacks on internal courts and political institutions - But there is one thing the western strategists haven't figured - nuclear weapons and their deterrent is aimed at preventing not only military attacks but also other attacks that attempt to politically and economically dominate Russia. While the west think all this activity has no cost, as was shown in the places you reference, there can be a military cost for the western games of interference and pushed far enough it could be a nuclear one. Nuclear Weapons their not just for countering military threats!
TheFishh 40 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:04 PM
Funded by Soros and Dutch government? There you have it. I wonder what Netherlands and the US would do, if some organizations operating there were getting money from Moscow. They'd lock up everyone involved in it. They wouldn't just be told to go back to Russia.
Nonenity TheFishh 16 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:28 PM
They ought to be in OP and making their reports on the war crimes and human rights abuses there - ongoing since before 1948...
Madbovineuk 1 hour ago 3 Dec, 2020 12:58 PM
Expel all NGOs from Russia especially those with American ties
WhoWantsAIDS Madbovineuk 13 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:31 PM
As an American if Putin wants to send Soros workers or sympathizers home in a box he would be doing the world a favor. 💯🔮
Count_Cash Madbovineuk 25 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:19 PM
Yes just boot her and the rest out. They are just trouble makers, if they were straight up they would be running to Iraq or Afghanistan to help people abused by the US.
Timothy-Allen Albertson 1 hour ago 3 Dec, 2020 12:56 PM
Soros, the nazi, needs to be hanged for Crimes Against Humanity. Too bad the Russian Federation did not imprison this Soros agitator for a long term at hard labor.
Zeta029 Timothy-Allen Albertson 41 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:03 PM
She should work all her life, and still I dont think she would repay the harm she did.
Badgecub 1 hour ago 3 Dec, 2020 01:25 PM
Kogan, if you are worried about human rights abuses go to the UK and help Julian Assage
Nonenity Badgecub 18 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:26 PM
And all of those many, many US folks in prison for long periods, mostly for minor offences, because it was their third time stealing a slice of pizza. You don't hear/read/see it on the MSM, but these prisoners are all but slave labor and usually for multinational companies like S...bucks... Indeed in at least two states they are slave labor because they do not even get the cents (well under a dollar) per hour that prisoners in most states do. And should the prisoners refuse to do this labor, they often end up in solitary confinement - well known to be psychological torture...And there are political prisoners as well (not called that, of course, given who and where they are)...not to mention Guantanamo and the various Black Sites around the world and controlled by the CIA.... Stephen Kinzer's book on The Poisoner in Chief...a good read about the post war decades and the human rights abuses by the exceptionalist nation...
TheFishh Badgecub 35 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:09 PM
Yes. And these sorts of contradictions is what gives away these so-called western human rights organizations as a bunch of nefarious fakes.
DoubleKnot 1 hour ago 3 Dec, 2020 01:14 PM
NGO - Non-Gentile Organization
TheFishh DoubleKnot 37 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:07 PM
BING!
Marko Podganjek 15 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:29 PM
I thought that such organizations and people were expelled from Russia long ago. Because on west they want to imprison people that were just on trip in Russia. Not to say if somebody would get money from Russia. The relations and approaches here has to be comparable on both sides.
Smanz 20 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:24 PM
Anything linked to Soros generally only exists to create chaos and ruin the country it is in.
dunkie56 8 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:36 PM
i will say it again...throw the West and it's agents provocateurs out of Russia...all Western companies must leave forthwith and restrict who comes into Russia and tighten the borders! Preferably raise up the iron curtain once again!
SrJustice 5 minutes ago 3 Dec, 2020 02:39 PM
Politicians in the US think that improving relations with other countries is a bad thing because they need enemies, enemies are better than friends to have for Washington, very twisted minds. They just want to scare their people so they can suck more tax money and spend on the weapons manufacturers, where most of those politician invest their money.

[Dec 02, 2020] German 'Novichok poisoning' claims over Navalny will prompt familiar circus of sanctions Russia demonisation. But who benef

Dec 02, 2020 | www.rt.com

German 'Novichok poisoning' claims over Navalny will prompt familiar circus of sanctions & Russia demonisation. But who benefits? George Galloway George Galloway

was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator. Follow him on Twitter @georgegalloway 2 Sep, 2020 17:55 Get short URL German 'Novichok poisoning' claims over Navalny will prompt familiar circus of sanctions & Russia demonisation. But who benefits? FILE PHOTO: Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny © REUTERS / Shamil Zhumatov 135 Follow RT on RT The bizarre events surrounding Alexey Navalny, who lies stricken in a coma in Berlin, will bring forth more Cold War-style calls to isolate Russia, at the cost of further consolidating relations between Moscow and Beijing.

Ever since the man – always wrongly billed as " the Russian Opposition leader ," when in fact he polls 2% of the vote, and the actual opposition leader is a Communist who still has mass support – took ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow, the securocratic lobby in western countries has been primed.

Today, with the statement from the German government that Navalny is yet another victim of 'Novichok'-class chemical agents, active measures are already underway.

ALSO ON RT.COM Novichok-like chemical agent used to poison Russian opposition figure Navalny, German government claims

Former British intelligence officer Philip Ingram MBE, whom I interviewed today for my Sputnik TV show, had to hurry me up because " the Germans have just spoken the word Novichok and I expect to be busy with other interviews ."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1301168741049405441&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F499721-navalny-novichok-germany-russia%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Wearisome though it may be to point out the bleeding obvious, I must do so.

If the Russian state had attempted to assassinate Navalny, they would never have allowed his stricken comatose body to be flown out of the country to Germany in the first place. He would have died on the operating table in Russia, where nobody could "detect traces of Novichok" in a NATO capital.

If the Russian state was responsible for trying to kill Navalny, surely the LAST weapon in the whole world it would have chosen with which to do so would be Novichok?

A butter knife, a gun, a speeding car, a car crash – any one of a hundred methods would surely have been preferable in the post-Skripal era. And more reliable, it would appear: Navalny, for now mercifully, is the THIRD Russian in a row to be attacked by a DEADLY " military-grade nerve agent " and mysteriously fail to die.

But just like with the Skripals, we come up against the question asked in every murder mystery: Cui Bono? Who benefits?

ALSO ON RT.COM Kremlin says Germany didn't inform Moscow of data showing opposition figure Navalny was poisoned with Novichok-like nerve agent

What conceivable gain would the Kremlin stand to make in the killing by Novichok of Alexey Navalny?

And the huge contradiction, the biggest of all, is that the West wants us to believe Vladimir Putin is at one and the same time a dazzling Mephistopheles capable of arranging elections in America and Britain, fixing Brexit, and fomenting separatism from Scotland to Spain, whilst at the same time being a blithering, self-harming idiot. The cop that couldn't shoot straight. The man who brought the whole western world down on his head through not one, but two failed attempts to dispose of utterly harmless marginal critics – who, in the case of Alexey Navalny, would be incapable of winning a single seat in a provincial local authority.

ALSO ON RT.COM If Navalny was poisoned, unlikely it was by Putin: Italian professor pours cold water on 'state-sponsored assassination' theory

I'm travelling at the moment, filming my forthcoming documentary on the strange death of Dr David Kelly – the British weapons inspector caught up in the Blair War on Iraq – who was found stone dead at the height of the publicity surrounding him. So I don't have my crystal ball to consult. But I nonetheless predict that what will now happen will be the familiar circus of diplomatic expulsions, sanctions and ostracism. Further demonisation of Russia. Tit for tat. As the world faces a deadly pandemic and economic collapse. Just what the doctor ordered...

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


The_Chosenites 2 September, 2020 2 Sep, 2020 03:23 PM

I'll tell you who benefits. Anyone who is seeking to debase modern societies. East vs West, Isam vs Christianity vs Judaism vs, black vs white, rich vs poor, man vs woman vs ?, left vs right and the destruction of the family units in the West is all but complete. So if you are person seeking to destabilize society on nearly all fronts, there's your benefactor cause that appears to be the goal here.
Jeff_P 2 September, 2020 2 Sep, 2020 07:36 PM
Oh puleeze! It should be intuitively obvious to the most casual of observers who benefits. The American wannabe imperium. These sort of events keep the vassal states in line and losing their shirts on US directed sanctions to play the role of US canon fodder. And the best part is that the US doesn't even have to come up with new excuses over and over again. We've been telling the same old tired lies for decades and the Europeans simply aren't smart enough to see it for what it is.
Blue8ball713 2 September, 2020 2 Sep, 2020 03:34 PM
Novichok , right from Porton Down chemical weapon lab.
Skeptic 2 September, 2020 2 Sep, 2020 02:55 PM
Apparently Russians don't die of novichok! Not so deadly after all.
Doodle_Dandy 3 September, 2020 3 Sep, 2020 03:11 AM
OPCW says it is TRUE. Must be factual...
Slavko 17 September, 2020 17 Sep, 2020 11:38 AM
Western Military Industrial Complex; as called by late most celebrater US Army general and President Eisenhower; 1% own more than 90% of western population; they own Banks, Media, The Complex with NATO, and Politicians; The wars and sanctions are means of money making for them!
Slavko 17 September, 2020 17 Sep, 2020 11:38 AM
Western Military Industrial Complex; as called by late most celebrater US Army general and President Eisenhower; 1% own more than 90% of western population; they own Banks, Media, The Complex with NATO, and Politicians; The wars and sanctions are means of money making for them!
Rohil Koovappara 3 September, 2020 3 Sep, 2020 11:07 AM
Sure the white supremacist Alexei Navalny is an "opposition leader"!!! Please that evil fascist polls from about 0-4% and has no support in Russia 🇷🇺 at all!!!!

[Dec 01, 2020] After Trump's Lies, the Establishment's Tripe and Self-Deception -

Dec 01, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

or Donald Trump, truth is a matter of convenience, with facts entirely optional and plenty of space allowed for make-believe. Yet in American public life, our current president is far from being the sole purveyor of fictions and falsehoods. The very institutions that citizens count on to distinguish between fact and fable engage in their own forms of mythmaking. While they may steer clear of telling outright lies, they dispense no small amount of drivel, concealing actual truth behind a veil of illusion.

Allow me to offer an illustrative example in the form of a recent column by the Washington Post's David Von Drehle, a seasoned journalist now installed in that paper's stable of political commentators and called upon twice weekly to reflect on the fate of humankind.

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The title of Von Drehle's essay poses a question: "Joe Biden says America is back. Back to what?" Von Drehle then proceeds to spell out his own answer to that what. Yet in doing so, he packages his views in a specific historical context. It's that context that is instructive.

Let us acknowledge that the Biden team is no more likely to take its cues from some garden-variety pundit than from members of the outgoing administration. Van Drehle's policy recommendations -- that Biden should "end the mollycoddling" of Saudi Arabia, insist that China "play by the rules," and knit "the Americas into a hemisphere of happiness" -- carry about as much weight with the incoming administration as do Mike Pompeo's opinions, i.e. next to none whatsoever.

Yet this is not to say that Von Drehle's column is just so much hot air. From his perch at the Post, he is a small, but not inconsequential player in a grand project to which members of the foreign policy establishment swear fealty. The aim of that project is to salvage and rejuvenate claims of American Exceptionalism that Donald Trump mangled and trashed nearly beyond recognition.

The establishment's preferred version of exceptionalism emphasizes not America as exemplar -- that's for sissies -- but America as the instrument chosen by God or Providence to direct history itself. Pumping new life into this hoary old notion requires persuading Americans today that before Trump screwed things up, the United States had history well in hand, with the world taking its cues from Washington.

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https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.426.0_en.html#goog_738456037 Ad ends in 15s

Von Drehle purports to believe that such a world actually existed. Furthermore, he believes that a sufficiently savvy U.S. president can restore that world -- all that's required is assertive American leadership. Nor is he alone in entertaining the prospect of going "back" to that triumphal time, before Trump appeared on the scene and messed everything up. Indeed, take Biden's rhetoric at face value and our next president may well share in this fantasy.

So of considerably greater significance than Von Drehle's policy prescriptions is the historical wrapping in which they arrive. It's history with a specific and carefully selected time horizon. For Von Drehle (and probably for Biden), the history that matters begins with the end of World War II, a moment that ostensibly inaugurated "seven decades of bipartisan [foreign policy] consensus." Providing a foundation for that consensus was a "win-win view of America's role in the world." Generations of postwar leaders, according to Von Drehle, understood that "the long-term interests of Americans were best served by the gradual expansion of peace and prosperity worldwide." The result was "an expansive, internationalist approach" to basic policy. This, in sum, is the past that Von Drehle is selling as a roadmap to a happy future.

Now such assertions may not qualify as bald-faced lies in a Trumpian sense, but taken together they amount to a fairy tale. The postwar bipartisan consensus was never more than partial and tentative at best. When put to the test -- with Vietnam as the most vivid example -- it gave way. Nor did the Cold War and the accompanying nuclear arms race reflect a win-win view of America's role in the world. The Cold War was a zero-sum game, pitting us against them -- "better dead than Red," remember?

As for the United States promoting the gradual expansion of peace and prosperity worldwide, that claim is difficult to square with Washington's marriages of convenience with sundry dictators, involvement in numerous coups and assassination plots, and the U.S. penchant for killing people in faraway places, unmatched by any other nation on the planet. Since 9/11 in particular, war and disorder rather than peace and prosperity have been America's principal exports. All of this predated Trump.

Von Drehle is eager for the United States to resume "its rightful place in the world order" as "the friend of freedom and the scourge of tyrants." Forget just for a second that the United States befriended a long list of tyrants: Batista, Somoza, Marcos, Noriega, the Shah of Iran, Mubarak of Egypt, and, until 1990, Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Of greater relevance to the present moment is this question: who or what assigns nations their rightful place in the world order? This is not a matter upon which columnists in the employ of the Washington Post are inclined to reflect, preferring to assume that history's decision is irreversible: we are Numero Uno. Period. Full stop. Been that way forever.

Yet this is a form of madness, as utterly detached from reality as Trump's insistence that he won Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Von Drehle is peddling tripe. He pays no price for doing so. In some respects, doing so defines the essence of his job. In a couple of days, he will produce another column, further embellishing the nation's achievements as friend of freedom and scourge of tyrants, as will his various counterparts at the Post, the Times, the Wall Street Journal , and other prestige outlets.

They will collaborate in minimizing the moral ambiguity that permeates America's past. They will shrug off crimes or lock them away in a box labeled "Sorry. Didn't Mean To." They will inhibit learning and bury truth.

And they will get away with it.

Andrew Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and TAC's writer-at-large.


cjl 6 hours ago • edited

I'm not sure that "they" can continue to "get away with it." The US financial situation is not good. The US government is dysfunctional, and US society as a whole, the combination of capital and people, is no longer particularly competitive. No matter what Biden, et al, think they are going to do with respect to leading the world, it's not clear that the world will pay any attention, or that the the US can even afford it.
It's a tragic, in the classic sense, situation, as almost everything that has weakened the US empire has been self inflicted.

YT14 cjl 4 hours ago

How dare you criticise Biden et al who are such world-class geniuses, lol. Do you question his ability to stop the tide, like King Canute?

kouroi 6 hours ago

All true. To see a better reflection of America, maybe one should read Serghei Lavrov's interviews and press conferences:
https://thesaker.is/foreign...

or see how the Chinese are trolling Australia in the aftermath of the scandal of the Aussie special forces killing (with intent) scores of civilians (probably far less than the US troops) in Afghanistan - just as a fast track on how Americans are regarded outside their border...

While Mr. Von Drehle sees and praises Dorian Gray, the world at large watches with fascination another patch of horror coming up on his portrait...

Vhailor 5 hours ago

I totally agree with Bacevich. There is really nothing that generates global more resentment than this kind of American hubris, American arrogance:

The establishment's preferred version of exceptionalism emphasizes not America as exemplar -- that's for sissies -- but America as the instrument chosen by God or Providence to direct history itself.

disgustoo 4 hours ago

"Yet this is a form of madness, as utterly detached from reality as Trump's insistence that he won Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Von Drehle is peddling tripe. He pays no price for doing so. In some respects, doing so defines the essence of his job. In a couple of days, he will produce another column..."

As will Andrew J. And you can be sure Bacevich will use any topic at hand to slip in as many backhands against President Trump as he can muster. Once a RINO, always a RINO. But despite all the snide slurs against the President here & elsewhere, Bacevich's preferred candidate, stately Joe Biden may soon dignify the Oval Office (maybe); & then Andrew can spend the next four years defending him, just like Von Drehle.

Let'sGo 2 hours ago

This website is for the grandest losers.

alan 2 hours ago

America HAS NO memory, particularly regarding the heinous aspects of its past. Who remembers the Indian removals, Chinese and Japanese exclusion acts, or the Philippine insurrection?

John Achterhof 41 minutes ago • edited

As success and comfort displace esteem and integrity and corruption turns pervasive the virtuous order of society is overturned: independent, principled, talented spirits are typically encountered only well away of the mainstreams of media while middling obsequiousness and venality rise above their betters in pubic view.

Jaded_Prole 25 minutes ago • edited

Tripe, deception and corrupton are what one can expect from corporate governance no matter which wing s dominant. We haven't seen the worst of it yet, though we are getting there faster than we thought.

chris chuba 21 minutes ago

I agree w/Bacevich. I love how R's and D's pretend they are different.

'The America First policy is gone' scream the Laura Ingraham's as she (and the other Republican Hawks) lament a possible decrease in hostility with China and Iran. The Democrats pronounce, 'America is back, now we are really going to get tough with Russia and do regime change in Venezuela right!'

Here is the new boss, same as the new boss. We will continue to waste our treasure and energy harming other countries and neglect ourselves until we are spent.

[Dec 01, 2020] Bomb Libya and take its oil- Biden budget chief pick Neera Tanden agreed with Trump - The Grayzone

Dec 01, 2020 | thegrayzone.com

Editor's note : US President-elect Joe Biden nominated Neera Tanden, a close ally of Hillary Clinton and president of neoliberal DC think tank the Center for American Progress, on November 29 to serve as director of his administration's Office of Management and Budget. Tanden is notorious on Twitter for her aggressive attacks on the left.

In response to the nomination, The Grayzone is reprinting this June 20, 2016 report by Ben Norton.


"Unless we take the oil from Libya, I have no interest in Libya," Donald Trump declared in an April 2011 interview on CNN's "Newsroom."

The U.S. government was considering military intervention in the oil-rich North African nation at the time. Trump said he would only participate if Washington exploited Libya's natural resources in return.

"Libya is only good as far I'm concerned for one thing -- this country takes the oil. If we're not taking the oil, no interest," he added.

NATO claimed its U.S.-backed bombing campaign was meant to protect Libyans who were protesting the regime of longtime dictator Muammar Qadhafi. Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, used NATO's own materials to show that this was false.

"In truth, the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start," Zenko wrote in an exposé in Foreign Policy in March.

Trump was not the only figure to propose taking Libya's oil in return for bombing it, however. Neera Tanden, the president of the pro-Clinton think tank the Center for American Progress, proposed this same policy a few months after Trump.

"We have a giant deficit. They have a lot of oil," Tanden wrote in an October 2011 email titled "Should Libya pay us back?"

"Most Americans would choose not to engage in the world because of that deficit. If we want to continue to engage in the world, gestures like having oil rich countries partially pay us back doesn't seem crazy to me," she added in the message, which was obtained and first published by The Intercept .

neera tanden libya oil email

Liberal hawkishness

Tanden is a close ally of Hillary Clinton, and is frequently named as a likely chief-of-staff in a Hillary Clinton White House. The Center for American Progress, which Tanden leads, was founded by John Podesta, a key figure in the Clinton machine.

Podesta is the chairman of Hillary's 2016 presidential campaign, and he previously served as chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. With his brother Tony, John also co-founded the Podesta Group, a public affairs firm that has lobbied for Saudi Arabia , among other countries.

Tanden has expressed hawkish views, although in a statement to Salon she strongly opposed being described as hawkish. The New York Times has described Hillary Clinton as more hawkish than her Republican rivals , although it still endorsed her for president.

The Center for American Progress president invited hard-line right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak in Washington, D.C. in November, after he had spent months aggressively trying to jeopardize the Iran nuclear deal.

Tanden does not comment on international affairs much, but her tweets provide some insight into her hawkish views, which do not reflect the official policy of the Center for American Progress.

In September 2013, when the Obama administration was preparing to bomb Syria, she tweeted support, writing, "On Syria, while I don't want to be the world's policeman, an unpoliced world is dangerous. The US may be the only adult in the room left."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=BenjaminNorton&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=374251840323334144&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2020%2F11%2F30%2Ftrump-neera-tanden-libya-oil%2F&siteScreenName=TheGrayzoneNews&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Just over a week later, the administration backed off of its plans, in response to enormous backlash -- and in fear that it would end up with another Libya on its hands.

During the lead-up to the war in Libya, Tanden expressed support for military intervention. She suggested that Americans should be "chanting" for Qadhafi's ouster.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=BenjaminNorton&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=39456866715181056&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2020%2F11%2F30%2Ftrump-neera-tanden-libya-oil%2F&siteScreenName=TheGrayzoneNews&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Days after the NATO operation was launched, she wrote , "To liberal friends worried re Libya, is there better reason 4 use of US power than 2 protect innocent civilians from slaughter by a madman?"

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=BenjaminNorton&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-3&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=52565661326643201&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2020%2F11%2F30%2Ftrump-neera-tanden-libya-oil%2F&siteScreenName=TheGrayzoneNews&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Less than a month later, Tanden conceded , "This whole Libya thing doesn't seem to be working out so well."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=BenjaminNorton&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-4&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=60933317385662464&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2020%2F11%2F30%2Ftrump-neera-tanden-libya-oil%2F&siteScreenName=TheGrayzoneNews&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Like many liberal figures who supported the NATO bombing of Libya, she stopped talking about the country between 2011 and 2014, while it was roiled by violent chaos and extremism.

These tweets came before the October email in which Tanden suggested taking Libya's oil in return for bombing it. Trump made the same proposal several months before, in April.

After this article was published, Tanden stressed in a statement to Salon that her views do not reflect those of the Center for American Progress, which did not take a position on Libya.

She claimed being labeled "a hawk is a ridiculous caricature," adding, "I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning." Tanden noted that the Center for American Progress "was among the first think tanks to lay out concrete plans for ending the war in Iraq." She also said that she does not support putting U.S. troops in Syria.

"CAP is a think tank," Tanden stressed, referring to the organization by its acronym. "We have internal discussions and dialogues all the time on a variety of issues. We encourage the deliberation of ideas to spur conversation, push thinking and spark debate. We do this in meetings, on phone calls and yes, over e-mail. One internal e-mail exchange among colleagues -- which was leaked to another organization -- or a few tweets does not constitute a published, official policy position."

Salon never once stated that Tanden's views reflect the Center for American Progress' official policy, but Tanden accused Salon of implying this.

Leftist critics have long lambasted the Democratic Party's militaristic foreign policy, arguing it is not much different than the GOP's. This exploitative idea proposed by both Trump and Tanden lends further credence to the argument that, when it comes to the U.S. empire, the Democratic and Republican parties are much more similar than their adherents make them out to be.

A strange mix

At the time of his April 2011 CNN interview, Trump was considering running as a Republican in the 2012 election. His nationalistic rhetoric then was very consistent to that of today.

Trump lamented that the U.S. was "just not respected" and had become "a laughing stock throughout the world." He hoped that he could reverse this supposed trend, just as he now promises to "make America great again."

Trump's proposal on Libya was consistent with his views on Iraq. He declared at the American Conservative Union's 40th Conservative Political Action Conference, in 2013, that the U.S. should "take" $1.5 trillion worth of Iraq's oil to pay for the illegal war.

In his presidential campaign today, Trump has made similar proposals. His foreign policy is a strange mix of skeptical non-interventionism and hawkishness.

In the 2011 CNN interview, Trump expressed skepticism about the rebels in Libya. "They make the rebels sound like they're from 'Gone With the Wind,' very glamorous," Trump said. "I hear they're controlled by Iran. I hear they're controlled by al-Qaeda."

The rebels had very little to do with Iran. Iran did express support for the opposition to Qadhafi's dictatorship, but it staunchly opposed Western military intervention, which it warned was hypocritical, neocolonial in nature and motivated by Libya's large oil reserves.

By no means were all of the rebels extremists, but there were al-Qaeda-linked elements in the opposition to Qadhafi. Human rights groups documented atrocities committed by extremist rebels, including ethnic cleansing of black Libyans .

After the NATO war toppled Qadhafi, the country was thrown into chaos. Rivaled forces, including extremist groups such as Ansar al-Sharia and eventually ISIS, seized control of swaths of the country, and weapons from Qadhafi's enormous cache ended up in the hands of extremist groups throughout the region. To this day, large parts of Libya are not under the control of the internationally recognized government.

Disastrous Libya war

Hillary Clinton played the leading role in rallying up U.S. support for the NATO war. Reports have since shown that the Pentagon was skeptical of U.S. involvement at the time, but, under the leadership of Secretary of State Clinton, the Obama administration portrayed it as a humanitarian mission.

President Obama insisted at the beginning of the intervention, "Broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake." The State Department likewise said "President Obama has been equally firm that our military operation has a narrowly defined mission that does not include regime change."

Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates later told The New York Times, "I can't recall any specific decision that said, 'Well, let's just take him out,'" referring to Qadhafi.

Micah Zenko, the Council on Foreign Relations scholar, showed this to be false. "This is scarcely believable," Zenko rejoined in his detailed report . "Given that decapitation strikes against Qaddafi were employed early and often, there almost certainly was a decision by the civilian heads of government of the NATO coalition to 'take him out' from the very beginning of the intervention."

"The threat posed by the Libyan regime's military and paramilitary forces to civilian-populated areas was diminished by NATO airstrikes and rebel ground movements within the first 10 days," he explained. "Afterward, NATO began providing direct close-air support for advancing rebel forces by attacking government troops that were actually in retreat and had abandoned their vehicles." The military intervention continued for more than seven months.

Rebel forces went on to brutally murder Qadhafi, sodomizing him with a bayonet. When then-Sec. Clinton heard that he had been killed, she rejoiced in front of TV cameras, joking, "We came, we saw, he died!"

In April, Obama singled out U.S. support for the NATO war in Libya as the worst decision of his presidency.

Zenko warned that the "intervention in Libya shows that the slippery slope of allegedly limited interventions is most steep when there's a significant gap between what policymakers say their objectives are and the orders they issue for the battlefield."

"Unfortunately, duplicity of this sort is a common practice in the U.S. military," he added.

Interestingly, Trump himself cautioned in an interview on Fox News' "Fox & Friends" in March 2011 that U.S. intervention in Syria would be a "slippery slope."

"It is a slippery slope and more and more, you realize that we're over there fighting wars to open up these governments and they would have opened up themselves," Trump said, expressing skepticism about U.S. military involvement very early on in the war.

Clinton called for the exact opposite in Syria. She would go on to oppose diplomacy and insist the U.S. should support the "hard men with the guns."

DNC hack

Trump's unusual mix of anti-interventionist and exploitative foreign policy views are highlighted in the Democratic National Committee's alleged opposition research.

A hacker broke into the computer network of the DNC and leaked its opposition research on Trump. A 210-page document that appears to be this report highlights Trump's past remarks on Libya, Syria, Iraq and more.

Also revealed in the report is that Trump bragged that he "screwed" Muammar Qadhafi with an unfair business deal.

U.S. media outlets immediately blamed the DNC hack on the Russian government. Soon after, however, they quietly backed away from the hasty conclusions they made based on what progressive media watchdog Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting pointed out was incredibly flimsy evidence.


BEN NORTON

Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @ BenjaminNorton .


[Dec 01, 2020] Discredited Intel "Professionals" Push Lie About Russian Interference by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Dec 01, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

A letter published today ( Monday, October 19, 2020 ) with the signatures of 50 "former intelligence" officials is a self-inflicted wound of comedy and absurdity wrapped in the specious claim of special expertise. Thank God none of these clowns still hold a position anywhere in the national security bureaucracy. Their inability to grasp basic facts and engage in simple reasoning perhaps explains why the Obama team abandoned American military and intelligence officials at Benghazi in September 2012 and why they considered ISIS as "a junior varsity" team.

Basically, this group of mediocrities are sure that the Hunter Biden emails are part of some nasty Rooskie plot:

. . . we write to say that the arrival on the US political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden's son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.

There is only one teeny, tiny problem. They have no facts to back up their deluded judgment, supposedly based on years of experience. Just goes to show that experience without real intelligence is no substitute for competence.

Let us start with the facts that are documented:

1. Hunter Biden signs a work order on 12 April 2019 with The Mac Shop in Wilmington, Delaware to recover data on the hard drive of a Mac Laptop damaged by water.

2. The repair is completed on the 17th of April. Hunter Biden is notified by email and phone that the laptop and hard drive are ready to be picked up. Total cost--$85. Hunter did not respond. (Running the recovery on the hard drive apparently was not an expensive proposition).

3. In September of 2019, the owner of the Mac Shop talked with his dad about the Biden computer and the fact that it had material that might be relevant to the Ukraine issue. Father and son decided the best course of action was to approach the FBI. The father, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, volunteered to make the approach.

4. Steve Mac Isaac, father of John Paul Mac Isaac, goes to the FBI field office in Albuquerque in mid-September and offers the hard drive and work order to the FBI. The FBI only makes a copy of the work order and asks Mr. Mac Isaac to leave. The FBI volunteers no further actions on the part of the Mac Isaacs.

5. November 2019, the FBI suddenly reaches out to the Mac Isaac's and visits the shop in Wilmington, Delaware. John Paul Mac Isaac asks the FBI to take the computer and the hard drive. They refuse and leave.

6. Early December 2019, the FBI returns to the Mac Shop and presents a grand jury subpoena for the computer and the hard drive. John Paul Mac Isaac happily surrenders the items to the FBI.

7. John Paul Mac Isaac watched and wondered from December 2019 thru August 2020, expecting the FBI would do something with the information on the computer and the hard drive. But nothing happened. John Paul turned over a copy of the hard drive to Rudy Giuliani's attorney in early September 2020.

The New York Post stories based on the contents of the hard drive came from Rudy Giuliani and his team, not from John Paul Mac Isaac.

The Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe , declared on the record on Monday, October 19th, that the info on the Hunter Biden computer is not Russian disinformation. He specifically stated that there was no intelligence to support such a conclusion.

Today (Tuesday, October 20) the FBI and the Department of Justice confirmed the DNI's declaration :

ONE senior federal law enforcement official says:

1-The FBI and DOJ concur with DNI Ratcliffe's assessment that Hunter Biden's laptop and emails in question were not part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

2-The FBI DOES have possession of the Hunter Biden laptop in question.

If this was a Russian operation, it would mean the Russians have the most amazing and powerful intelligence capability in the world. Specifically, it would mean the following:

  1. The Russians knew months in advance of April 2019 that Joe Biden was going to declare as a candidate for President and then managed to give an actual Hunter Biden laptop to the computer repair shop in Delaware.
  2. The Russians knew that the FBI would take possession of the lap top and the hard drive in December 2019--more than five months before Joe Biden secured the Democrat nomination for President--and that they could control what the FBI did and what John Paul Mac Isaac did.

If the emails published from the material Rudy Giuliani supplied to the New York Post differed from those on the lap top and hard drive in the possession of the FBI, it would be easy to discredit Rudy. The FBI would simply have to state that no such emails exist on the Hunter Biden computer and hard drive.

There is no evidence that John Paul Mac Isaac acted at the behest of any outside power to give the Hunter Biden hard drive to Rudy Giuliani. What we do know is that John Paul Mac Isaac never tried to sell the hard drive to the tabloid media nor did he try to give it to any member of the press. John Paul is a true patriot. He trusted the FBI and thought the system would do the right thing.

So there you have it. Proven liars like Jim Clapper and John Brennan, along with the likes of Mike Hayden, are claiming without one shred of evidence that emails validated by the FBI are somehow a magical Russian disinformation campaign. As I noted at the outset, it would be laughable were the claim not so dangerous to the security of the United States. They are the ones meddling in the Presidential election by using their status as former top intel officials as a platform for spreading a lie about Russian interference in hopes of persuading uninformed voters to accept this mendacity as fact.

This has nothing to do with Russians, except for the millions a wealthy Russian oligarch paid to Hunter. The truth of the matter is the Joe Biden used his son, Hunter, to enrich himself and his family. While Democrats continuously insist that Donald Trump is corrupt and unethical, the Hunter Biden emails provide devastating evidence that it is the Bidens, not the Trumps, who are engaged in corrupt and slimy business deals. Those are the facts.


eakens , 21 October 2020 at 10:59 AM

Hayden, Clapper, Brennan, and Schiff, amongst many others need to be sent to the gallows. Who will send them there?

Diana L Croissant , 21 October 2020 at 01:02 PM

I am so very happy I am NOT related to the Biden family.

I just received confirmation from my County Clerk and Recorder that my completed ballot was received in her office after being retrieved from the lock box in which I submitted by ballot. I did NOT vote for Joe.

Deap , 21 October 2020 at 01:26 PM

All named parties should be under Barr-Durham's radar for Russiagate alone. One more reason to re-elect Trump: Finish the Barr-Durham Probe.

How will this story end. Then move on to investigate why nothing was done about Hunter Biden's computers held in FBI hands since Dec 2019.

Meanwhile, make your case independent of these ongoing investigations, why and how will America get back on track after you are re-elected? Hungry to hear the good news.

j. casey , 21 October 2020 at 01:34 PM

So Hunter is Joe's bagman for pay to play schemes? Probably I am being naive, but wouldn't it be prudent to keep your bagman slightly further at arm's length than your troubled, drug-using, teen-diddling son?

james , 21 October 2020 at 01:35 PM

thanks larry... have to keep up the russia plot, lol... if you haven't seen patrick armstrongs article yet, it is worth the read..
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/10/20/russophrenia-or-how-a-collapsing-country-runs-the-world/

TV , 21 October 2020 at 02:04 PM

Nothing will happen - no consequences, no punishment.
Bill Barr's (a swamp creature in good standing) mask is dropping - the phony Durham "investigation," documents held by the FBI NEVER released to Congress despite numerous requests (not that the Senate seems overly curious, more like going through the motions), ignoring the Biden crimes, Antifa/BLM running wild and no investigations, indictments.
The swamp is winning.
The message: "Don't question us, don't argue with us. WE run this country, not Trump, not you. Now shut up and wear a mask."
And the sad irony: the swamp is grossly inept.
If these "mediocrities" rose to the top, imagine the losers below them?

blue peacock , 21 October 2020 at 04:07 PM

The FBI sat on this for over a year. Trump nominees have run the FBI & DOJ for 4 years.

What would change in his second term?

turcopolier , 21 October 2020 at 06:53 PM

BP New People

Bill H , 22 October 2020 at 01:46 AM

Deap
"Finish the Barr-Durham Probe?" The Barr-Durham Probe is finished. One trivial indictment. Done.

Teakwoodkite , 23 October 2020 at 11:01 PM

As the deal takes shape in 2017, Mr. Bobulinski begins to question what Hunter will contribute besides his name, and worries that he was "kicked out of US Navy for cocaine use." Mr. Gilliar acknowledges "skill sets [sic] missing" and observes that Hunter "has a few demons." He explains that "in brand [Hunter is] imperative but right know [sic] he's not essential for adding input." Mr. Bobulinski writes that he appreciates "the name/leverage being used" but thinks the economic "upside" should go to the team doing the actual work. Mr. Gilliar reminds him that those on the Chinese side "are intelligence so they understand the value added."

LJ am I to understand that Mr.Gilliar KNEW he was dealing with Chinese intelligence and still went all in?

TeakWoodKite , 23 October 2020 at 11:06 PM

The quote is from WSJ

Larry C Johnson , 23 October 2020 at 11:09 PM

Teak,
Yes. He knew. Awful.

TeakWoodKite , 24 October 2020 at 12:09 AM

Along those lines I find this which puts meat on those crackhead bones
A National Security Threat !

https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2020/10/23/jaw-dropping-report-details-chinese-state-owned-companys-partnership-with-biden-kerry-families-n267739
The Chinese have no qualms about pissing off a few billion if it can buy the Vice President of the United States.
Them whores ain't cheap.

[Dec 01, 2020] How DHS and FBI officials spun a dubious Russian election threat days before voting - The Grayzone

Dec 01, 2020 | thegrayzone.com

A Department of Homeland Security election alert spawning new Russia fears was so incoherent and inconsistent with previous findings, it suggested a state of political panic inside the agency.

Just days before the 2020 election the bureaucratic forces behind the original claim of Russian hacking of state election-related websites in 2016 launched a new drive to spawn fears of Moscow-made political chaos in the wake of the voting.

The new narrative was not consistent with information previously published by the the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security's new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), however. It was so incoherent, in fact, that it suggested a state of panic on the part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials worried about a possible transition to a Joe Biden administration.

On October 20, Christopher Krebs, the head of CISA, issued a video statement expressing confidence that "it would be incredibly difficult for them to change the outcome of an election at the national level." Then he abruptly changed his tone, adding, "But that doesn't mean various actors won't try to introduce chaos in our elections and make sensational claims that overstate their capabilities. In fact, the days and weeks just before and after Election Day is the perfect time for our adversaries to launch efforts intended to undermine your confidence in the integrity of the electoral process."

Krebs' warning of a possible Russian announcement that hackers had succeeded in disrupting the result of the U.S. election was so removed from reality that it suggested internal panic DHS over the failure of Russian hackers to do anything that could be cited as interfering in the election.

Two days after Krebs' dubious warning, the FBI and the DHS's new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an "alert" reporting that "a Russian state-sponsored APT [Advanced Persistent Threat] actor" known as "Berserk Bear" had "conducted a campaign against a wide variety of U.S. targets."

Since "at least September," according to the DHS alert, the DHS warning claimed that it had targeted "dozens" of "U.S. state, local, territorial and tribal government networks." It even claimed that the supposed Russian campaign had compromised the network infrastructure of several official organizations and "exfiltrated data from at least two victims servers." At the same time, it acknowledged there was "no indication" that any government operations had been "intentionally disrupted."

The report went on to suggest, "[T]here may be some risk to elections information housed on SLTT [state, local territorial and tribal] government networks." And then it abruptly shifted tone and level of analysis to offer the speculation that the Russian government "may be seeking access to obtain future disruption options, to influence U.S. policies or actions", or to "delegitimize" the "government entities".

On October 28, Krebs elaborated on the latter theme in an interview with the PBS NewsHour . Referring inaccurately to government warnings about "Russian interference, some of which targeted voter registration," which the FBI-CISA alert had never mentioned, PBS interviewer William Brangham asked, "Do you worry at all that there might be infiltration that we are not aware of?"

Instead of correcting Brangham's inaccurate suggestion, Krebs responded that "infiltration" into voter registration files was "certainly possible," but that "[W]e have improved the ability to detect compromises or anomalous activity."

Krebs then homed in on a scenario he obviously wanted the public to focus on: "[Y]ou might see various actors, foreign powers, claim that they were able to accomplish something, [that] they were able to hack a database or hack the vote count. And it's simply not true."

Although the October 22 alert did not assert any deliberate Russian government hack of election-related sites, Krebs sought to keep speculation about both Russian capabilities and intent alive.

The buried alert that undermined the frightening official assessment

Eleven days before Krebs debuted his speculation about Russia claiming to have hacked U.S. elections, the FBI and CISA issued a separate alert that seriously undercut his questionable claims.

The earlier document was clearly referring to the very same efforts by hackers to break into various websites addressed in the October 22 alert. It not only referred to the same state and local government networks and to the wider range of targets affected but also mentioned precisely the same technical vulnerabilities that were targeted in the series of hacks.

The alert further stated that, "[I]t does not appear these targets are being selected because of their proximity to elections information ." In other words, the two US agencies conceded they had no basis for attributing the hacks in question to any election interference plot.

The most striking difference between the two alerts, however, was that the October 9 alert did not refer to any "Russian state-sponsored APT actor" as the October 22 one did. Instead, it simply pointed to "APT actors" in the plural, indicating that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence indicating a single actor was at work, let alone one that was "Russian-state sponsored."

Contrary to the impression that U.S. officials may have conveyed in referencing an "Advance Persistent Threat," or APT, it is now widely understood by cybersecurity specialists that this term no longer refers to a state-sponsored actor. That is because the sophisticated tools and techniques once associated with state-sponsored hacking have now become available to a much wider range of cyber actors. Indeed, the codes for such high-end tools have been identified in the Shadow Brokers and Vault 7 leaks, and the tools have been marketed widely at affordable prices on the dark web.

The October 9 alert firmly established the dearth of evidence on the part of CISA and FBI about a Russian state-sponsored hacking team planning elections-related operations in the U.S. The sudden pivot days later to an unqualified claim that a single state-sponsored APT had been responsible for the same very large range of operations should have been accompanied by claims of substantial new intelligence, or at least a reference to the evidence underlying the dramatic new reversal. But no such proof ever arrived.

Scott McConnell, the spokesman for CISA, promised the Grazyzone on October 29 that he would provide someone to answer questions about the October 22 alert by the close of business Friday. In the end, however, no one from CISA responded, and there was no answer on McConnell's line.

The peculiar reversal by the DHS and CISA on the hacking claims raise questions about the institutional considerations taken by these agencies. Did indications that President Donald Trump's campaign was faltering inform their decision to issue a more stridently anti-Russian assessment in hopes of surviving a political transition?

The US officials who drew up the initial pre-election alert seemed keenly aware that despite that drumbeat of over the past two years, no state-sponsored Russian hacking of election institutions was underway. But as the Trump campaign sputtered, they had their own careers to consider. Days later, DHS and CISA declared the wily Russians guilty of yet another malign operations -- one that would not require them to have slightest evidence to support, and that would be impossible for them to explain.


[Dec 01, 2020] Biden pick for OMB director has a Steele dossier problem

Dec 01, 2020 | www.washingtonexaminer.com

P resident-elect Joe Biden's pick to run the Office of Management and Budget has a history of defending British ex-spy Christopher Steele's discredited anti-Trump dossier.

Years of controversial claims about the Trump-Russia controversy, particularly about the dossier funded in part by Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, presents one of several obstacles for Neera Tanden, a longtime Democratic operative, to achieve Senate confirmation next year.

A significant question that remains is how the two Senate runoff races in Georgia shake out in January, with control of the upper chamber hanging in the balance. Tanden is sure to meet stiff opposition from Republicans, who will be led by Sen. Mitch McConnell, whom Tanden derisively tweeted in August 2019, "Stacey Abrams just called McConnell 'Moscow Mitch.' Love it."

In selecting Tanden on Monday, Biden described the president of the left-wing Center for American Progress as "a leading architect and advocate of policies designed to support working families." Tanden worked on Bill Clinton's successful run in 1992 and Barack Obama's successful presidential run in 2008. She was also an adviser on Hillary Clinton's successful Democratic primary effort in 2016 and the failed general election run that November.

Not mentioned in her Biden transition team biography was the role Tanden played in promoting unsubstantiated claims throughout the Trump-Russia controversy.

Tanden launched the "Moscow Project" in 2017, and after Buzzfeed published Steele's dossier in January 2017, Tanden's think tank released a statement saying, "The intelligence dossier presents profoundly disturbing allegations; ones that should shake every American to the core." Tanden went on to defend the Steele dossier repeatedly on Twitter, attacking those who critiqued the FBI for relying on its claims to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authority against former Trump campaign associate Carter Page and implying that critics of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation were doing Russia's bidding.

"Make Chris Steele the next James Bond," Tanden tweeted in January 2017.

In a tweet about Rep. Devin Nunes's FISA memo in February 2018, which criticized the FBI's surveillance of Page and its use of the dossier, the Washington Examiner's Byron York noted that "no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information." Tanden responded by saying, "Even if this is true, hasn't the dossier been mostly proven to be true? It's amazing how comfortable the likes of Byron York are happy to run interference for Russians intervening in our elections." Tanden followed up with another tweet claiming that the "dossier has been mostly established as right."

Tanden's "Moscow Project" also released a flawed critique of the Republican FISA memo, with Tanden defending the FBI's surveillance. In addition, Tanden tweeted in April 2018 that the dossier was "started with funding by a GOP megadonor."

Although the conservative Free Beacon had hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, it said in October 2017 that it "had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier." It later emerged that Steele was not commissioned by Fusion GPS (and did not begin compiling his dossier) until Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias hired Fusion.

"What parts of the dossier have been disproven?" Tanden tweeted in January 2019. "I will wait."

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz's December 2019 report and subsequent declassifications undermined Steele's claims in the dossier. Horowitz said the Trump-Russia investigation concealed exculpatory information from the FISA court, and he criticized the Justice Department and FBI for at least 17 "significant errors and omissions" related to the FISA warrants against Page and for the bureau's reliance on Steele. Declassified footnotes show the FBI knew Steele's dossier may have been compromised by Russian disinformation . Horowitz said FBI interviews with Steele's main source, U.S.-based and Russian-trained lawyer Igor Danchenko, "raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting."

FBI Director Christopher Wray called the FISA findings "utterly unacceptable" this year and concurred with the DOJ's conclusions that at least two of the four FISA warrants against Page amounted to illegal surveillance.

Nearly all the FISA signatories -- Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates , Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein , fired FBI Director James Comey , and fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe -- indicated under oath they wouldn't have signed off on the surveillance if they knew then what they know now, and a declassified FBI spreadsheet showed the lack of corroboration for Steele's claims.

Other Russia-related claims Tanden has made could present sticking points during her confirmation process.

She tweeted on Oct. 31, 2016, that President Trump was a Russian "puppet" in part because there was a "Trump server connected to Russian bank" and tweeted again in December 2016 that Trump may have gotten "talking points from the server at Trump Tower connected to Russia."

The claim that a Russian Alfa Bank server was secretly communicating with a server at Trump Tower, also pushed by Steele, emerged in 2016, but Horowitz noted the FBI "concluded by early February 2017 that there were no such links," and the Senate Intelligence Committee's August report did not find "covert communications between Alfa Bank and Trump Organization personnel." Jake Sullivan, Biden's pick for national security adviser, also pushed the refuted Alfa Bank claim in 2016.

The week after Trump's victory, following reports that Russian cyberactors had targeted a number of state election systems, Tanden mused, "Why would hackers hack in unless they could change results?" The next day, she pushed back against criticism she received, tweeting, "Funny, I don't remember saying Russian hackers stole Hillary's victory." There is no evidence that Russian hackers changed any votes in 2016.

"Mueller found Russian interference in the election. He also found Trump coordinated with Russia. These are facts," Tanden tweeted in October.

Although Mueller's investigation concluded in 2019 that the Russian government interfered in a "sweeping and systematic fashion," the report "did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

After the report's release, Tanden tweeted that "Mueller has failed the country" and "Adam Schiff > Robert Mueller." Earlier this year, Schiff released dozens of House Intelligence Committee witness interviews that showed Obama's top national security officials testified they hadn't seen direct evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.

[Dec 01, 2020] Tony Blinken Replaces Mike Pompeo by Philip Giraldi

Dec 01, 2020 | www.unz.com

Tony Blinken Replaces Mike Pompeo Israel's friends will enjoy four more years in power PHILIP GIRALDI DECEMBER 1, 2020 1,900 WORDS 1 COMMENT REPLY Tweet Reddit Share Share Email Print More RSS

I for one am getting really excited by the staff that Honest Joe Biden is pulling together for the White House. When I first heard the name Tony Blinken during the Obama kleptocracy I assumed that he was one of those Ivy League lawyer types that proliferate in Washington, likely affiliated with the firm of Winken, Blinken and Nod, which we all know to be in partnership with Dewey, Cheatem and Howe. But I was wrong. He actually was affiliated to a much bigger fraternity, which one might call Zionists in government. You know, those nice well educated, always polite Jewish boys and sometimes girls who have self-designated as foreign policy experts and who work their way up through the various levels of power that might lead to the most coveted positions at the top in the state department and national security apparatus. Blinken was one such striver, and I began to feel the pricking in my thumbs that was telling me that something evil this way was coming when he was mentioned now and again as a former close adviser to the already beatified Barack Obama. And some in the media had observed with approval that he had more recently been briefing Joe Biden, particularly about Israel and the Middle East.

In an interview in the Times of Israel Blinken confirmed Biden's position on possibly reducing aid to Israel if the Jewish state were to do things that damaged U.S. interests. Blinken " reiterated Biden's position that he would not condition aid to Israel. He [Biden] is resolutely opposed to it. He would not tie military assistance to Israel to any political decisions it makes, full stop."

The question of withholding aid is itself moot as Israel does nothing but "do things" that damage U.S. interests, knowing that no president or the Congress would dare to turn off the money tap, but it is an interesting unambiguous admission from Blinken that both he and Joe Biden put Israeli interests ahead of those of the United States.

Blinken's personal view of unfettered support for Israel allegedly derives from his stepfather having claimed to be a survivor of the so-called holocaust, a tale that he invoked several times during his acceptance speech on November 24 th . The Times interview concludes with Blinken asserting that "One of the things that's really shaped the vice president's career-long support for Israel and its security is the lesson of the Holocaust. He believes strongly that a secure Jewish homeland in Israel is the single best guarantee to ensure that never again will the Jewish people be threatened with destruction."

The indefatigable Israel-firster Tony Blinken has also served as a "conduit" to those in government for Israel advocacy groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). And now that we have Tony Blinken as Secretary of State Designate the door will soon be wide open to the Israel Lobby.

If you need to know more about what Tony Blinken is all about you only have to look at his friends and his track record. Israel was inevitably quick off the mark in saluting the appointment, both in its media and through its mouthpieces in the United States. Stalwart Canadian Zionist Mark Dubowitz, who heads the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), tweeted that Blinken would be part of a " superb national security team. The country will be very fortunate to have them in public service."

The signal from FDD is particularly important as the organization is directed by the Israeli Embassy in Washington. FDD is the leading neoconservative bastion seeking a war with Iran, Israel's bête noir . Its Leadership Council has featured former CIA Director James Woolsey, Senator Joe Lieberman, and Bill Kristol. Its advisors and experts are mostly Jewish and most of its funding comes from Jewish oligarchs.

A recent expose by al-Jazeera exposed how FDD and other Lobby groups work directly with the Israeli government, collecting information on U.S. citizens, spying on legal organizations, and both planning and executing disinformation at Israeli direction, making it an Israeli agent by the definition of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA). Unfortunately, the Department of Justice has never sought to compel FDD to register under FARA. In fact, the U.S. government has never compelled any part of the vast and powerful Israel Lobby to register.

Tony, inevitably a Harvard graduate plus a JD from Columbia who has never served in the U.S. military, is inevitably a chicken-hawk because that is what America's Zionists and their political neocon wing are made of. It is a phenomenon that has often been noted. In 2017, Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Tzipi Hotovely called out American Jews as "people that never send their children to fight for their country, most of the Jews don't have children serving as soldiers, going to the Marines, going to Afghanistan, or to Iraq. Most of them are having quite convenient lives " Of 1,300,000 active duty personnel in the U.S. armed forces, only 4,515 are Jewish.

This is how it works: instead of actually fighting in the wars you are promoting, you have your tax-exempt "educational foundations" pour tons of money into a project to go to war and corrupt the politicians to issue the necessary orders so unemployed kids from Arkansas and North Dakota can go off and die for Israel. You yourself remain safe at home, free to deliver bellicose speeches about how Iran threatens the world through its "meddling" in the Middle East. And, of course, about how the dumbass Palestinians have failed to accept the hand of Israel offered in peace.

That is what Tony's record demonstrates. Blinken has come a long way with Biden, all the way back to the Clinton Administration. And he he has always been there for the Jewish state. During the Obama Administration when relations with Israel were often strained, Blinken was the contact point for "Jewish leaders [differentiating] him from others in the White House at the time who weren't as sympathetic to Israel's position." Dennis Ross, often described as Israel's lawyer, praises him for having " an instinctive emotional attachment to Israel," referring to Blinken's frequently cited Jewish and refugee roots.

Other media reporting indicates that "Blinken was a top aide to Biden when the then-Sen­a­tor vot­ed to autho­rize the U.S. inva­sion of Iraq, and Blinken helped Biden devel­op a pro­pos­al to par­ti­tion Iraq into three sep­a­rate regions based on eth­nic and sec­tar­i­an iden­ti­ty. As deputy nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er, Blinken sup­port­ed the dis­as­trous mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in Libya in 2011, and in 2018 he helped launch Wes­t­Ex­ec Advi­sors, a ​'strate­gic advi­so­ry firm' that is secre­tive about its clients, along with oth­er Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion alum­ni like Michèle Flournoy. Jonathan Guy­er writes in The Amer­i­can Prospect , ​'I learned that Blinken and Flournoy used their net­works to build a large client base at the inter­sec­tion of tech and defense. An Israeli sur­veil­lance start­up turned to them. So did a major U.S. defense com­pa­ny."

Beyond the intersection of government policy and personal profit exhibited by Blinken, the Washington Post in 2013 described Blinken as "[o]ne of the government's key players in drafting Syria policy" and he recalled that "This is a little bit personal to me, and any of us -- and I start with myself -- who had any responsibility for our Syria policy in the last administration has to acknowledge that we failed. Not for want of trying, but we failed." What Tony failed at was overthrowing Syria's legitimate government and turning the country over to the terrorist linked groups that he and Hillary and Obama were supporting.

The Democrats are particularly good at coming up with secretaries of state that one would like to forget, and that is saying quite a lot given the recent appointees by the Republicans. One recalls immediately the big-hearted Madeleine Albright, who found the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children by sanctions "worth it," or Hillary Clinton, who laughed out loud as she recalled the death of Libya ruler Muammar Ghaddafi by having a bayonet inserted up his anus. Clinton, who more than anyone launched the war against Africa's most developed nation, paraphrased Julius Caesar, who, upon returning from a rapid victory in Asia during the Rome's Second Civil war, described the event as "Veni, vidi, vici," in English "I came, I saw, I conquered." For the laughing Hillary it was "I came, I saw, he died!" The anarchy in Libya persists to this day and it included the payback killing of four U.S. Embassy employees in Benghazi in 2012, with Hillary and Susan Rice at the helm. It is generally believed that both Clinton and Rice might well have senior positions in the incoming Biden Administration.

But back to Blinken. Israel loved the way the Trump Administration showered favors upon it, nearly always without any quid pro quo . But for all his Dispensationalist fervor, salesmen like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were little more than goys who had been seduced by the myth of Israel. They were, as Lenin would have described it, little more than "useful idiots," which is allegedly an expression that certain Israeli politicians have used to describe their passionate Christian Zionist supporters in the U.S. Now, with Blinken, the Israeli hard liners will have the "real thing," a convincing Jewish boy who fatuously describes an apartheid Israel as "the anchor and foundation for democracy in the region." Tony believes in the Zionist cause and will do the Jewish state's bidding with a malleable Joe Biden. And if Joe should go, there is always Kamala Harris, who is married to a Jewish lawyer lobbyist. Win-win either way.

Even though it's early days, Blinken joins a number of other American Jews already tagged for senior positions, including Alejandro Mayorkas, the nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security who is a Latino Jew. Ron Klain, Biden's Chief of Staff and Janet Yellen, his pick for Treasury Secretary, are also Jewish. The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports how "Having Jewish men and women in prominent government positions is so standard that it's barely even a talking point " before observing that "The fact that some of President-elect Joe Biden's top cabinet picks are Jewish should be a source of pride for the community 'These people are being chosen because they're incredibly competent, because they're incredibly talented, because they're incredibly experienced,' Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told Haaretz in a phone interview." Indeed, if one believes Greenblatt pressure from the Israel Lobby, the media and billionaire donors as well as networking by the Jewish mafia inside the government itself have nothing to do with it.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected] .

Majority of One , says: December 1, 2020 at 5:22 am GMT • 58 minutes ago

Only good thing that could come out of this development, should the Harris-Biden selectees actually come into power is that this massive infusion of rabid Zionists into high levels in the Demo administration is so blatant that the awakeners will increase in numbers and in determination.

[Dec 01, 2020] Biden's pick for budget director once championed funding social spending by MAKING LIBYA PAY for regime-change bombing campaign

Dec 01, 2020 | www.rt.com

Self-proclaimed President-elect Joe Biden has chosen a budget director, Neera Tanden, who once argued the US should ease funding shortages for left-wing social programs by making countries like Libya pay for being bombed. Biden's transition team on Monday announced its nominations for the six people selected to fill key economic roles in the incoming administration, led by former Federal Reserve Bank Chair Janet Yellen as treasury secretary. Tanden, a Hillary Clinton loyalist who currently heads the Center for American Progress, will be director of the Office of Management and Budget if Biden's media-declared election victory withstands legal challenges from President Donald Trump.

This crisis-tested team will help lift America out of our current economic downturn and build back better -- creating an economy that gives every single American a fair shot and an equal chance to get ahead. https://t.co/F6JMBHUgVx

-- Biden-Harris Presidential Transition (@Transition46) November 30, 2020

However, critics have already recalled an example of her unusual budgeting philosophy. In a 2011 email that was made public by WikiLeaks, Tanden said Libya should be made to pay for the bombing campaign that helped to topple Muammar Gaddafi's government, which would help balance the US domestic budget.

"We have a giant deficit, they have a lot of oil," Tanden said. "Most Americans would choose not to engage in the world because of that deficit."

If we want to continue to engage in the world, gestures like having oil-rich countries partially pay us back doesn't seem crazy to me.

[Nov 30, 2020] Former Overstock CEO Paying 'Team Of Hackers And Cybersleuths' To Prove Trump Won Election

This guy was involved in Butina case and played in it a very dirty role.
Nov 30, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

That's accusations. where are the facts?

The 57-year-old multimillionaire also appeared on several podcasts, including a November 23 appearance in which he said: "I'm a free agent, and I'm self-funded, and I'm funding this army of various odd people," according to the Daily Beast .

"It's really going to make a great movie someday," he added.

Byrne claims he's funding teams of "hackers and crackers" who realized all the way back in August that Dominion voting machines could be used to steal the election from Trump . Since the election, those voting machines have figured prominently in Trump supporters' allegations of fraud, despite the company's repeated denials and any actual proof the voting tallies were changed. - Daily Beast

Byrne says he's been communicating with former Trump attorney Sidney Powell for weeks - who last week filed two lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia alleging massive schemes to rig the election for Joe Biden.

According to Powell's Georgia lawsuit: "Old-fashioned ballot-stuffing" has been " amplified and rendered virtually invisible by computer software created and run by domestic and foreign actors for that very purpose," adding that "Mathematical and statistical anomalies rising to the level of impossibilities, as shown by affidavits of multiple witnesses, documentation, and expert testimony evince this scheme across the state of Georgia."

In Michigan, Powell claims that "hundreds of thousands of illegal, ineligible, duplicate, or purely fictitious ballots" enabled by "massive election fraud" facilitated Biden's win in the state.

The suit claimed that election software and hardware from Dominion Voting Systems used by the Michigan Board of State Canvassers helped facilitate the fraud.

More via Natural News :

Speaking to Christopher McDonald of The McFiles in a recent interview, the former head of a $200 billion e-commerce company that has never once gotten hacked revealed that Dominion Voting Systems were used to perform a "Drop and Roll" technique of voter fraud that slyly padded the vote for Biden in at least five key swing areas of the country.

Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix) were all rigged prior to election day to strip President Trump of his rightful win in each of these states. Byrne also mentioned Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas) as another election fraud locale, though this one was more secondary.

According to Byrne, who is not a supporter of President Trump but rather a "small l" libertarian, these five (or six if you include Clark County) areas are where a bulk of the election fraud took place. It did not have to be widespread because these were the key swing areas that Biden needed to "win" in order to steal the election.

" By cheating those five counties, you flip five key states, you flip the electoral college, " Byrne says. " In places where Trump lost by 10,000, there may be 300,000 fake, illegal votes for Biden. So this isn't even close. "

He further contends that the election systems that govern elections in America "are a joke," especially those run by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic software.

* * *

Is Byrne's 'army' Sidney Powell's research team?

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MadameDeficit , 4 hours ago

Do you really believe she was a Russian guns rights activist?

Doom Porn Star , 2 hours ago

Does it matter what I think about Butina? What matters is what I think about Byrne.

WHY did the FBI / DOJ need Byrne to spy for them?

What did Byrne get out of it? We may not know who Butina was working for; but, we sure do know who Byrne said he was working for.

Trump did NOT get money for speeches in Russia. -Bill Clinton did.

Trump did NOT get money from the wife of the Mayor of Moscow. -Hunter Biden did.

Trump did NOT sell off Uranium assets in the USA to Russian businessmen. -Hillary Clinton did.

Trump Jr. did NOT get a high paying no show gig @ Bursima. -Hunter Biden did.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/overstock-ceo-resigns-maria-butina

"In a strange, post-Mueller twist, the conviction of Maria Butina , the redheaded gun nerd and unregistered Russian agent , has led to the resignation of a prominent e-commerce executive. On Thursday, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne announced that he would step down from the company he founded, days after releasing a bizarre statement describing his involvement with Butina, the "Deep State," "Men in Black," and Russian-linked "political espionage" campaigns against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In a letter to shareholders, Byrne lamented that his continued presence at the company "may affect and complicate all manner of business relationships."

"While I believe that I did what was necessary for the good of the country, for the good of the firm, I am in the sad position of having to sever ties with Overstock, both as CEO and board member," Byrne said in the statement. The company's stock price had plummeted more than 40% in the days after Byrne first revealed his participation, earlier this month, in what he called a "political espionage" case involving Russia. Following his resignation, the company's market capitalization soared more than 8% .

It was an ignominious end for Byrne, a celebrity in Libertarian circles, whose labyrinthine involvement in the Russia scandal is difficult to verify. In an interview with journalist and Fox News contributor Sara Carter published last month, Byrne said he had been approached by Butina at FreedomFest in 2015, and came to suspect that she might be a Russian agent. Byrne reached out to the FBI to share his concerns, but, he said, was told to carry on with the relationship and report back. Over the next three years, he and Butina had a sporadic intimate relationship.

The story gets weirder from there. Byrne said he came to have doubts about his "nonstandard" relationship with the FBI and the intelligence community. He told Carter that he believed he "was being used in some sort of soft coup" against Trump. (Butina's lawyer confirmed the two had a relationship, while the Department of Justice said it could not comment.)

It wasn't until Byrne appeared on Fox Business Network, about two weeks later, that investors got spooked. Byrne claimed to have turned over evidence of a conspiracy involving Clinton and Trump. "I think we're about to see the biggest scandal in American history," Byrne told host David Asman. "Everything you think you know about Russia and Clinton investigations is a lie.... it was all political espionage. I think [Attorney General William Barr ] has gotten to the bottom of it."

"

SO, Patrick Byrne the Deep State tool is back with another bombshell?

What happened to the last bombshell?

ALL Byrne has done so far is get in bed with the FBI / DOJ Russiagate team and get a Russian woman he was ckufing sent to prison and deported.

MadameDeficit , 2 hours ago

It's definitely a strange situation and relevant in terms of Byrne's potential motivation, but who she was working for is the most important question.

The whole thing reeks of Deep State entrapment so...I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for now.

Misesmissesme , 7 hours ago

So sad, that with all this evidence, a private citizen has to go to these lengths because Barr and Wray are so far in the pockets of the deep state.

Edit: by pockets, I meant a$$

TruthDetector , 4 hours ago

https://ncrenegade.com/editorial/general-mcinerney-us-military-personnel-killed-in-frankfurt-cia-server-farm-raid/

"There are many questions that are currently unanswered but there is one fact:

IF military personnel were killed by the CIA,

THEN the civil war between the people, the Deep State (and by extension, Russia, China & Iran) has started."

Doom Porn Star , 7 hours ago

Patrick Byrne wasn't a free agent when he helped the FBI send Russian guns rights activist Maria Butina to prison as part of the RussiaGate hysteria that was initiated by Hillary Clinton to discredit and villainize Trump.

littlewing , 7 hours ago

Barr is a Bushie.

Go watch the Bush Sr. funeral again and the cards they got during.

https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/060/262/801/original/5e88d8021ea1bbbf.mp4

Watch Biden get a card too, because the Bush Dynasty was both parties.

Clinton, Obama were also part of it.

Carter wondering why he didn't get one, turns to his wife and she didn't get one.

Notice Pence gets a card too, he is part of it.

Notice **** Cheney very aware of what is happening.

Dave Janda who worked in GHW Bush admin said he was a really bad guy and was involved in human trafficking too.

Sick Monkey , 6 hours ago

The boards on these machines are quite simple like a phone. They were reset asap along with any server data.

Nothing to see here unless operators are complete idiots. You need one of the boards to check for wireless device maybe but I doubt it.

One of Gulliani's witnesses said he witnessed usb dives inserted 24 times without proper chain of custody.

That's about as close as anyone will get to anything useful on the hardware.

Son of Loki , 7 hours ago

Dominion execs testified in Congress twice their machines could easily be hacked. Given the data we have so far, there is zero probability that Biden won with legal votes.

Someone Else , 6 hours ago

This is all catching on like wild fire for many people. Sadly not for many others. If you watch MSM (if you must) they still preface everything with "without evidence" and "baseless". We know that simply isn't the case but a lot of people who hear this enough believe it.

This is sewing discord between us who know and those kept in the dark. And its going to get real ugly. It's a crime what the MSM is doing. Almost like programming mindless soldiers with the WRONG program.

Doom Porn Star , 7 hours ago

Patrick Byrne, former CEO of Overstock.com , is an FBI stooge. He set up Maria Butina as part of the RussiaGate disinfo campaign.

Leftsmasher , 6 hours ago

570,000 Pennsylvania votes For Biden in two hours in the early morning is not "slyly" when the machines count 3000 per hour.

Ceickets feom Barr, busy getting ready for his next gig.

ze_vodka , 4 hours ago

At this point, we all need to realize that the election was entirely fake... and that they are never going to let the fraud be pulled back.

There are two choices left:

1. Accept their dystopian future for us Deplorables (across the globe, not just the USA)

2. Start doing something about it... start small and locally.

Onthebeach6 , 7 hours ago

The IT evidence is now overwhelming and I imagine it will be explained in detail to each of the Legislatures.

If Biden stood down now it might save the Democrats but I doubt Xi would contemplate the suggestion.

johnny two shoes , 7 hours ago

Of course that daily beast article frames it differently-

Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne left behind a cloud of confusion when he resigned in 2019 from the internet retailer he'd founded after panicking investors with his bizarre claims that he had romanced a Russian agent at the behest of "Men in Black" working for the United States government.

Now he's back...

but it's noteworthy that the narrative has been breached at the daily beast- that Trump might be able to prove fraud.

philipat , 6 hours ago

It's a bit late for hackers isn't it? The machines are already off-line and probably already wiped in most cases ('in compliance with standard operating procedures").

MAYBE, the CIA machines seized in the DOD raids in Frankfurt and Barcelona might confirm "intervention" but we're running out of time. We'll see. Very soon.

philipat , 6 hours ago

He's also dodgier than a 3 Dollar Bill and has a VERY chequered past with allegations of CIA involvement. It should be of concern that he is involved/

SurfingUSA , 7 hours ago

You know who could SERIOUSLY use a donation, since Matt Braynard also seems well-funded, as well as Sidney Powell. Is Right Side Broadcasting, the ONLY outfit that is covering the PA & AZ Legislative hearings.

SurfingUSA , 7 hours ago

https://rsbnetwork.com/support-rsbn/

JaxPavan , 7 hours ago

We need an accurate, trustworthy voting system, no matter whether both "major" parties are a fake uniparty and both candidates suck.

ReadyForHillary , 7 hours ago

And all results must be open to full audit by independent parties. Otherwise, no deal.

Machines, code, ballots, signatures, everything. Individuals should be able to go online and check that their vote (or lack thereof) is accurate.

B52Minot , 7 hours ago

I am surprised as others about the silence of Barr....and Durham....two folks who should be all over this sorted and corrupt elections in which the Dem-China folks STOLE the election....and the evidence is THERE yet the Feds are so SO silent......makes no sense...and even Trump is wonder where they are when these folks work for HIM. Either Trump is play acting and the Barr/Durham folks are presenting something HUGE or their sense of defending our Republic and Constitution from these thieves is beyond distorted...it would be so SO un-Patriotic and un-American......Either they are silent doing God's work to defend this Country(and will show it soon) or they truly have lost their faith in this Great Nation.

Doom Porn Star , 35 minutes ago

I'm quite familiar with DeepCapture.

Byrne has been kvetching about Overstock being being the target of naked short selling and such for years. Old news. He's supposed to have plenty of money. I guess they didn't short his stack or he figured out how to hedge his position.

IMO, the guy is limited hangout or diversion/disinfo.

He quarterbacks for the swamp. Then he doesn't?

Known for running a successful honeypot trap for the Deep State.

Walking around with almost as much money as Jeffery Epstein?

[Nov 30, 2020] Declassify America's Dirty Secrets in Syria to Stop a Biden War Consortiumnews

Nov 30, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

Jim Bovard urges Trump to open the files to provide activism ammo for the vast numbers of Americans who vehemently oppose forever wars.

Sen. Kamala Harris, at left, accepts the Democratic Party's nomination as vice president, Wilmington, Delaware, Aug. 19, 2020. (Lawrence Jackson, Biden for President, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By James Bovar d
The American Conservative

H ow many Syrians did you vote to kill on Election Day? Thanks to our perverse political system, the answer will be revealed over the next four years if the Biden administration drags the U.S. back into the Syrian Civil War. But there are steps that President Donald Trump can take in his final months in office to deter such follies.

Syria was not an issue in the presidential campaign and there were no foreign policy questions in the two presidential debates. That won't stop the Biden team from claiming a mandate to spread truth and justice via bombs and bribes any place on the globe.

The Biden campaign promised to "increase pressure" on Syrian presiden t Bashar al-Assad – presumably by providing more arms and money to his violent opponents. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris declared that the U.S. government "will once again stand with civil society and pro-democracy partners in Syria and help advance a political settlement where the Syrian people have a voice."

Northeastern University professor Max Abrahms observed, "Every foreign policy 'expert' being floated for Biden's cabinet supported toppling the governments in Iraq, Libya and Syria, helping Al Qaeda and jihadist friends , ravaging the countries, uprooting millions of refugees from their homes."

Syria policy has long exemplified the depravity of Washington politicians and policymakers and the venality of much of the American media.

The same "Hitler storyline" that American politicians invoked to justify ravaging Serbia, Iraq and Libya was applied to Assad by Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013. Once a foreign leader is irrevocably tagged with the scarlet H, the U.S. government is automatically entitled to take any action against his nation that would purportedly undermine his regime.

Every side in the Syrian civil war committed atrocities, but the Obama administration acted as if there was only one bad guy.

Much of Raqqa, Syria, suffered extensive damage during the battle of June–October 2017. (Mahmoud Bali, Voice of America, Wikimedia Commons)

Trump attempted to extract the U.S. from the Syrian conflict, but his sporadic, often unfocused efforts were largely thwarted by the permanent bureaucracy in the Pentagon, State Department and other agencies. Considering the likelihood that the Biden administration will rev up the Syrian conflict by targeting Assad, recapping how America got involved in this mess to begin with is worthwhile.

President Barack Obama promised 16 times that he would never put U.S. "boots on the ground" in the four-sided Syrian civil war. He quietly abandoned that pledge and, starting in 2014, launched more than 5,000 airstrikes that dropped more than 15,000 bombs in Syria.

Lying and killing are often two sides of the same political coin. The U.S. government provided cash and a massive amount of military weaponry to terrorist groups seeking to topple the Assad regime. The fig leaf for the policy was that the U.S. government was merely arming "moderate" rebels -- which apparently meant groups that opposed Assad but which refrained from making grisly videos of beheadings.

U.S. policy in Syria became so bollixed that Pentagon-backed Syrian rebels openly battled CIA-backed rebels. The U.S. government spent billions aiding and training Syrian forces who either quickly collapsed on the battlefield or teamed up with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or al-Qaeda-linked forces.

Federal law prohibiting providing material support to terrorist groups was not permitted to impede Obama's Syrian crusade. Evan McMullin, a 2016 presidential candidate, admitted on Twitter: "My role in the CIA was to go out & convince Al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=765322182054383616&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2020%2F11%2F25%2Fdeclassify-americas-dirty-secrets-in-syria-to-stop-a-biden-war%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Most of the media outlets that shamelessly regurgitated the George W. Bush administration's false claims linking Iraq to Al Qaeda to justify a 2003 invasion ignored how the Obama administration began aiding and abetting terrorist groups. The Intercept's Mehdi Hasan lamented last year that those who warned that the U.S. government "providing money and weapons to such rebels would backfire were smeared as genocide apologists , Assad stooges, Iran supporters."

A Turkish think tank analyzed the violent groups committing atrocities in Syria after the start of the Turkish invasion in 2019: " Out of the 28 factions , 21 were previously supported by the United States, three of them via the Pentagon's program to combat [ISIS]. Eighteen of these factions were supplied by the CIA."

American policy in Syria has been incorrigible in part because most of the media coverage of the conflict has been like a fairy tale that sometimes showcased our national goodness. Trump's finest hour, according to the American media, occurred when he launched missile strikes on the Syrian government in April 2017 after allegations that President Bashar al-Assad's forces had used chemical weapons.

MSNBC host Brian Williams gushed over the video footage of the attacks: "I am guided by the beauty of our weapons." Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan groused that " praise flowed like wedding champagne -- especially on cable news."

President Donald Trump meeting with advisers at his estate in Mar-a-Lago on April 6, 2017, regarding his decision to launch missile strikes against Syria. Items in the image were altered for security purposes. (White House, Shealah Craighead)

That wasn't the only time that top-tier media celebrated carnage. Later in 2017, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius proudly cited an estimate from a "knowledgeable official" that "CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years."

Ignatius did not reveal if his inside source also provided an estimate of how many Syrian women and children had been slaughtered by CIA-backed terrorists.

Capitol Hill has been worse than useless on Syria. When Trump announced plans to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, the House of Representatives condemned his move by a 354 to 60 vote.

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, blathered, "At President Trump's hands, American leadership has been laid low." Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who was elected after lying to voters by claiming he fought in the Vietnam War, said he felt " horror and shame " over Trump's action.

Congress showed more outrage about a troop pullback than it had shown about the loss of all the American soldiers' lives in pointless conflicts over the past 18 years.

April 9, 2019: The family of U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jonathan Farmer attend his military funeral. The deceased was killed in Manbij, Syria on Jan. 16, 2019. (Arlington National Cemetery, Flickr)

Foreign policy "experts" are Washington's most respected con artists . It will be no surprise if Biden appointees repeat the same too-clever-by-half routine of the Obama years, bankrolling terrorists to torment a nation ruled by someone who Washington disapproves of.

If the Biden administration commences bombing Syria to topple Assad, Americans would be naive to expect to learn the facts from cable news or their morning newspapers. Syrian children who die in U.S. airstrikes will be as invisible as Hunter Biden's laptop in the vast majority of American media coverage. The media will also continue to ignore the slaughter of Syrian Christians, one of the largest and least recognized victims of the civil war.

The best hope to prevent a new round of mistakes, lies, and atrocities is an epic disclosure of prior U.S. mistakes, lies and crimes in Syria. There is an old saying that sunshine is the best disinfectant. For U.S. policy in Syria, what is needed is an acid burn that permanently sullies the reputations of any government official involved in creating, perpetuating or covering up debacles.

Any U.S. government official involved in arming the "moderate" rebels deserves to be ridiculed in perpetuity.

(James Bovard)

The vast majority of records on U.S. intervention in Syria are likely classified as military or national security secrets. But the president is authorized to disclose as he chooses. Perhaps what is needed is a WikiLeaks -style massive dump of documents with only the names of innocent Syrians redacted.

Almost 20 years ago, Washingtonians were riveted by the last-minute pardons that Bill Clinton uncorked until almost the final moment of his presidency. Trump could do the same thing with deluges of disclosures on Syria and other quagmires until the moment that Biden leaves his basement for swearing-in.

If blanket revelations are not possible, then selective disclosures with high entertainment value would include the cozy ties between federal agencies and journalists and think tanks who won official favor by shamelessly recycling official lies.

Revealing the strings that foreign governments pulled to propel or perpetuate U.S. intervention could vaccinate Americans against similar ploys in the future. The Israeli government admitted last year (after years of denials) that it had long provided military aid to radical Muslim Syrian groups fighting Assad.

With the Obama administration's approval, the Saudis poured massive amounts of arms and money into the hands of terrorist groups fighting the Assad regime. Both the Israeli and Saudi military aid made the Syrian assignment more perilous for American troops. Other governments helped sow chaos and carnage in Syria while the Obama administration pretended that the main or sole problem was Assad.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir meet on Dec. 14, 2015, at the French Foreign Ministry in Paris before a multinational meeting to discuss the future of Syria. (State Department)

Sweeping disclosures could also enable Trump to settle scores with appointees who subverted his policies. Trump appointed a Never-Trumper letter signer, Jim Jeffrey, as his special envoy for Syria. Last week, Jeffrey explained how he and others thwarted Trump's efforts to disengage in Syria: "We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there."

The actual number was far higher than the 200 Trump thought would be left in the country. The charade on troop deployments was a "success story" for Jeffrey, Defense One noted, because it "ended with U.S. troops still operating in Syria, denying Russian and Syrian territorial gains."

But denying "Syrian territorial gains" to Syrians was not the policy Trump touted. Washington Post reporter Liz Sly savored the charade: "US officials have been lying to Trump – and the American people – about the true number of US troops in Syria in order to deter him from withdrawing them, according to the outgoing Syria envoy. Trump thinks it's 200."

Sly added two laughing emojis after that line. (No word on whether the Post will add laughing emojis to its "Democracy Dies in Darkness" motto.)

James F. Jeffrey swears in as special representative for Syria engagement, Aug. 17, 2018. (State Department, Ron Przysucha)

Opening the files on Syria would provide the ammo for activism by vast numbers of Americans who vehemently oppose new wars. In August 2013, Obama was on the verge of bombing the Assad regime after allegations it had used chemical weapons.

A vast outcry against intervention, including a dramatic protest outside the White House while Obama was making a Saturday speech on his Syrian plans, temporarily deterred further U.S. escalation (beheading videos were the Aladdin's Lamp for interventionists). There is far more evidence of the folly of U.S. intervening in Syria now than there was in 2013 and probably more folks today ready to raise hell.

America can no longer afford to cloak its foreign carnage in the shroud of good intentions. There is no transcendent national interest that justifies pointlessly killing more Arabs in Syria or elsewhere. Americans need to scoff at those who portray keeping U.S. boots on foreign necks as a triumph of idealism.

James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights , Attention Deficit Democracy , and Public Policy Hooligan . He is also a USA Today columnist. Follow him on Twitter @JimBovard .

This article is from The American Conservative .

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.


Carlton Meyer , November 26, 2020 at 22:50

None of this is secret if one bothers to search the Internet to find stories such as this, or this short video "The Covert War on Syria".

hXXps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ours_8ygO0A

Stephen Verchinski , November 26, 2020 at 18:59

65,000 new military officers are, with advise and consent of the Senate are beought in every two years. How are these supposed to earn stars and bars without illegal unconstitutional undeclared wars?

Defund all illegal unconstitutional undeclared wars. U.S. Representatives who fail to do so need removal.

Ray McGovern , November 25, 2020 at 18:50

To James Bovard:

Great idea and, as usual, well presented.

Only cursory allusion to Israel, though. I find myself wondering if your editors censored what you know so well and what should be an integral part of any attempt to enlighten readers about the main factor driving what the U.S. has been doing in Syria. It is a rather clear case of Washington doing Israel's bidding. Even the NY Times, on one bright shining morning (Sept. 6, 2013), made that clear when its Jerusalem bureau chief reported what she hear from senior Israeli officials about Israeli [and of course, lemmingly, U.S.] objectives in Syria.

That day the headline of the lead article "Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria" provoked little more than a yawn. But those readers who read down the column, and were familiar with NYT usual coverage of Israel, were in for a shock.

With more dogs of prolonged war about to let slip out of the kennel, Jodi Rudoren, then NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief -- to her credit -- sought informed views on Israel's objectives for Syria. Rudoren got unusually candid responses from senior Israeli officials, when she asked them about Israel's preferred outcome in Syria. Rudoren minced few words in reporting Israel's view that the best outcome for Syria's civil war was "no outcome".

She wrote:

"For Jerusalem, the status quo, horrific as it may be from a humanitarian perspective, seems preferable to either a victory by Mr. Assad's government and his Iranian backers or a strengthening of rebel groups, increasingly dominated by Sunni jihadis.

"'This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don't want one to win -- we'll settle for a tie,' said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York. 'Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that's the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria.'"

Three years later Obama he told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg how proud he was at having resisted strong pressure from virtually all his advisors to launch cruise missiles on Syria in Sept. 2013. Obama waxed eloquent that he had for once not adhered to what he derisively called the "Washington Playbook" (in this context, read "U.S.-Israeli Playbook"). Instead, Obama chose to take advantage of Russian President Vladimir Putin's offer to get the Syrians to surrender their chemical weapons for destruction, verified by the U.N., aboard a U.S. ship configured for such destruction.

Let's hope Biden remembers all that, AND how it took only five months for the neocons to scuttle the emerging trust between Putin and Obama by mounting the coup in Ukraine and then demonizing Putin for his JFK-Cuban-missile-crisis-type response.

Regards,

Ray

Andy , November 26, 2020 at 09:41

This is crux of the problem, if you were to speak these truths in the UK you would be called antisemetic.
I just can't see how things will ever change when AIPAC and other related lobby groups have so much influence
in Capitol Hill.

David Otness , November 26, 2020 at 17:12

Thank you, Ray. That needed saying. This quote too is all-telling of the morality structure of this Israeli-induced quagmire:

'Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that's the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria.'"

The above quote illustrates why and how the U.S. and Israel find such ease of comity in the misery they both inflict on mostly innocents.
Pure Madeline Albright re: the 500,000 murdered by sanctions Iraqi infants and toddlers: "We felt it was worth it."

Do tell, Maddie, do tell .

Andrew Peter Nichols , November 25, 2020 at 17:01

"Once a foreign leader is irrevocably tagged with the scarlet H, the U.S. government is automatically entitled to take any action against his nation that would purportedly undermine his regime."

..and sanction anyone or nation who doesnt follow suit

JOHN CHUCKMAN , November 25, 2020 at 16:30

Here is good idea that will not happen, just as so many good ideas fail in America.

Trump has been quite servile towards Israel's interests.

And what was the Syrian horror really about?

Bulldozing part of Israel's neighborhood in a 1960s-style "slum clearance" project. Only this project took 600,000 lives and continues taking them.

it is hardly likely Trump would act against what Israel regards as its interests as he leaves office.

Please note how he has illegally kept troops in the NE to deprive Syria's government of oil revenue for reconstruction. The US troops are also working on encouraging the local Kurds to fight the national government.

The US is also very active in discouraging the return of refugees that Russia encourages to help rebuild the country.

This war was not a civil war. That was a façade for a hybrid war on a beautiful and historic place, one Israel hates.

jo6pac , November 25, 2020 at 18:57

Nailed it, this was never a civil war. I thank the Russian Govt. and others that have help the Syrian people in the fight to save their country.

Sadly biden will continue the endless wars

Dennis Hanna , November 26, 2020 at 15:26

The truth must always be kept well hidden.

Yes, the archaic
so-called "Military Industrial ( original draft Congressional ) Complex [ modern, current construct: Military, Industrial Surveillance, Security State – M.I.S.S.S. ] did accrue some financial benefit.

But, that "benefit" was the magician's distraction, deception and misdirection away from the real party and people to whom accrued the benefit.

The Zionist colonial, settlement entity, Zionists, Christian Zionists, and Neo-conservatives were and are the true beneficiaries of so-called Middle East Policy.

Always have been and always will be.

A short history:

Did it start with:

"A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm"
First neocon report calling for Iraq invasion. Delivered to Israel in 1996.

hXXps://zfacts.com/p/139.html
[ further reading from different perspectives:
hXXps://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-01/short-history-neocon-clean-break-grand-design-regime-change-disasters-it-has-fostere

hXXps://mondoweiss.net/2014/06/about-though-israel/amp/ ]

Did it start with:

Yinon Plan

hXXps://youtu.be/0ax3KVr9CQE

Did it start with:

"Of course, we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they (Palestinians & Arabs) don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace." – Senator Chuck Schumer's speech at AIPAC.

2,079
8:52 PM – Mar 6, 2018

Did it start with:

Wesley Clark 7 counties in 5 years

Did it start with the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

"His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

( The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during World War I announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. )

Did it start with:

The First Zionist Congress was held in Basel (Basle), Switzerland, from August 29 to August 31, 1897.

Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine. For the attainment of this purpose, the Congress considers the following means serviceable:
1. The promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and tradesmen in Palestine.
2. The federation of all Jews into local or general groups, according to the laws of the various countries.
3. The strengthening of the Jewish feeling and consciousness.
4. Preparatory steps for the attainment of those governmental grants which are necessary to the achievement of the Zionist purpose.
1. Israel consisting of the so -called "Biblical" reality of Israel from East bank of the Nile River, including Cairo, to the West Bank it the Euphrates River, South to
the Red Sea and North to at least all of Lebanon, if not a large part of Turkey and limitless borders as promised by the Hebrew God.
(References)
Genesis 15:18-21; Exodus 23:31; Numbers 34:1-15; and Deuteronomy 19:8, which claims limitless borders, "And if the Lord thy God enlarge thy coast, as he hath sworn unto thy fathers, and give thee all the land which he promised to give unto thy fathers; (K.J.V.)
-- ?Formula adopted by the First Zionist Congress

Did it start with:

Book 5 of the Torah
Attributed to a Moses
So-called: Deuteronomy 20:10-17
King James Version (KJV)

10 When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.
11 And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.
12 And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it:
13 And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword:
14 But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee.
15 Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations.
16 But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee:

[ Traditionally understood as the words of a "god" as spoke to a Moses delivered before the conquest of Canaan. ]

Why am I wrong?
dennis hanna

Realist , November 26, 2020 at 07:26

It might be likened to Washington recruiting, arming and training a bunch of Québec separatists and encouraging them to invade and occupy large swaths of the Maritime provinces and Eastern Ontario because the American deep state recognises that many of the spoils(I mean resources) must be seized (I mean protected), like control of the St. Laurence Seaway, the Grand Banks fisheries and most of the world's production of maple syrup. If the "moderate" Québécoise can't get the job done, Washington could always turn to recruiting from among the hard core psychopaths in its supermax prisons. Mind you, this would only be done out of strict altruistic principles to bring freedom and democracy to the locals. And, if they are ungrateful for our meddling (I mean intercession), they can always migrate to Nunavut and live on the dole. Don't think of it as conquering, ravaging and exploiting another country, consider it more like renovating the place.

Anne , November 26, 2020 at 09:36

Oh So True, Mr Chuckman, so barbarically true And equally true is that the vast majority of those among the comfortably off who voted in this latest election (laughingly called democratic) really do not give a bugger about what the US, via any of its MICI arms, does to peoples, cultures, societies, countries across the seas They might as well not exist and then there are those folks who work for the MIC (clearly no consciences) and those whose pension plans benefit nicely from the manufacture and use of all that materiel

David J Valachovic , November 25, 2020 at 16:26

Why would anyone think declassifying any Syria documents would make a difference.? The 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency document, inadvertently released, acknowledged that the "opposition to Assad has been driven by Al Qaida" and that it was likely a Salafist state would emerge, something the US favored because "It would be a valuable strategic asset to be used against Assad" was of no consequence whatsoever. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons engineers report that was leaked revealed that the "chemical weapons attack" that precipitated the launching of scores of cruise missiles against Syria was a false flag and the OPCW itself has been corrupted by the United States. That was a story of immense importance that got zero coverage in any of the media sources relied upon by the American public. The US ostensibly has a "free press" but the fact is, it serves as nothing other than the propaganda arm of the US government. Syria's best hope is that the Russians make it plain to the US that further intervention in Syria will be met with resistance.

Guy , November 25, 2020 at 16:13

How could anyone disagree with such an article .If reparations for the death of innocents and damage to the country's infrastructure are out of the question for the perpetrators of this totally useless carnage then the least that could be done is bring the troops home and let the country rebuild . The old saying states ,lead,follow or get the hell out of the way .

Herman Schmidt , November 25, 2020 at 15:55

The following quote is just one example of the futile battle to stop the juggernaut that drives endless wars.

"Sweeping disclosures could also enable Trump to settle scores with appointees who subverted his policies. Trump appointed a Never-Trumper letter signer, Jim Jeffrey, as his special envoy for Syria. Last week, Jeffrey explained how he and others thwarted Trump's efforts to disengage in Syria: "We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there."

Trump is a complex fellow. In some ways he tried to get and keep us out of quagmires, in other like Iran and now China, he appears to fall in line or even make it worse.

Bovard idea is a great one. Put it all out there. It's worth a try. Maybe Trump is bitter enough to do it. And maybe his drive for nomalization between the Jews and Arabs might result in unintended consequences that are positive, even for the Palesstinians.

Me my self , November 25, 2020 at 15:17

"Declassify America's Dirty Secrets"

I second the notion!

And while you're at it the clean ones as well.

Tell the truth so help you god! Because no one else will.

[Nov 28, 2020] During the campaign it was an unconvincing display of the leopard desperately trying to change its spots; now it is clearly business as usual by Binoy KAMPMARK

Nov 28, 2020 | orientalreview.org

Nov 27, 2020

Biden's Promise- America Is Back(wards) – OrientalReview.org

With President Donald Trump all but conceding to the transition team that will take over after January next year, interest now shifts to President-elect Joe Biden's choices for cabinet. On the national security front, the imperial-military lobby will have reasons to be satisfied. If Trump promised to rein in, if not put the brakes on the US imperium, Biden promises a cocktail of energising stimulants.

While campaigning for the Democratic nomination, Biden tried to give a different impression. Biden the militarist was gone. "It time to end the Forever Wars, which have cost us untold blood and treasure," he stated in July 2019. Pinching a leaf or two out of Trump's own playbook, he insisted on bringing "the vast majority of our troops home – from the wars on Afghanistan and the Middle East". Missions would be more narrowly focused on Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Support would also be withdrawn from the unpardonable Saudi-led war in Yemen. "So I will make it my mission – to restore American leadership – and elevate diplomacy as our principal tool of foreign policy."

This was an unconvincing display of the leopard desperately trying to change its striking spots. During the Obama administration, the Vice-President found war sweet, despite subsequent attempts to distance himself from collective cabinet responsibility. These included the current war in Yemen, the assault on Libya that crippled the country and turned it into a terrorist wonderland, and that "forever war" in Afghanistan. In 2016, Biden claimed to be the sage in the administration, warning President Barack Obama against the Libyan intervention. An impression of combative wisdom was offered. He had "argued strongly" in the White House "against going to Libya," a position at odds with the hawkish Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who insisted on something a bit more than going to Libya. After the demise of Muammar Gaddafi, what then? "Doesn't the country disintegrate? What happens then? Doesn't it become a place where it becomes a – petri dish for the growth of extremism?" So many questions, so few answers.

The Iraq War is another stubborn stain on Biden's garments. His approval of the invasion of Iraq has been feebly justified as benign ignorance. As he explained to NPR in September last year, he had received "a commitment from President [George W.] Bush he was not going to go to war in Iraq." Bush looked him "in the eye at the Oval Office; he said he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program." Then came the invasion: "we had a shock and awe". For Iraqis, it was a bit more than shock and awe.

With the warring efforts of the US in Iraq turning sour, Biden entertained a proposal reminiscent of Europe's old imperial planners: the establishment of "three largely autonomous regions" for each of Iraq's ethnic and confessional groups, governed by Baghdad in the execrable policy of "unity through autonomy". Not exactly an enlightened suggestion but consistent with previous conventions of dismemberment that have marked Middle Eastern politics.

In considering Biden's record on Iraq, Spencer Ackerman of The Daily Beast was clear in describing an erratic, bumbling and egregious performance. "Reviewing Biden's record on Iraq is like rewinding footage of a car crash to identify the fateful decisions that arrayed people at the bloody intersection."

Biden's Promise Now, we forward ourselves to November 2020. The Trump administration has given a good cover to the incoming Democratic administration. Considered putatively wicked, all that follows the orange ogre will be good. In introducing some of his key appointments, Biden's crusted choices stood to attention like storm troopers-elect, an effect helped by face masks, solemn lighting and their sense of wonder. "America is back," declared Biden. A collective global shudder could be felt. The Beltway establishment, mocked by Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes as "the Blob," had returned.

In the cast are such figures from the past as former Deputy Secretary of State and former Deputy National Security Adviser, Tony Blinken. He will serve as Secretary of State. National Security adviser: former Hillary Clinton aide and senior adviser Jake Sullivan. Director of National Intelligence: Avril Haines ("a reliable expert leading our intelligence community," remarked CNN's unflinching militarist Samantha Vinograd of CNN, herself another former Obama stable hand from the National Security Council). Secretary of Defence: most probably Michèle Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defence for Policy.

Blinken, it should be remembered, was the one who encouraged Biden to embrace the antediluvian, near criminal project of partitioning Iraq. This does not worry The Guardian, which praises his "urbane bilingual charm" which will be indispensable in "soothing the frayed nerves of western allies, reassuring them that the US is back as a conventional team player." He is a "born internationalist" who likes soccer and played a weekly game with US officials, diplomats and journalists before joining the Obama administration.

Johannes Lang, writing in the Harvard Political Review, is a touch sharper, noting that Blinken "is a committed internationalist with a penchant for interventionism." The two often go together. As Blinken recently told The New York Times (members of the UN General Assembly, take note), "Whether we like it or not, the world simply does not organize itself."

Flournoy and Blinken have been spending time during the Trump years drawing sustenance through their co-founded outfit WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm promising to bring "the Situation Room to the Board Room." Revolving door rhetoric is used unabashedly: We knew power; we can show you how to exploit it. Having served in a presidential administration, these individuals are keen to use "scenario development and table-top exercises to test ideas or enhance preparedness for a future contingency". The consultants are willing to give their clients "higher confidence in their business decisions," as Flournoy puts it, in times of "historic levels of turmoil and uncertainty around the world".

The Flournoy set have also been the beneficiaries of the US defence funding complex, fronting think tanks that have received generous largesse. In a report for the Center for International Policy, Ben Freeman notes that, "Think tanks very considerably in terms of their objectives and organization, but many think tanks in Washington D.C. share a common trait: they receive substantial financial support from the US government and private businesses that work for the US government, most notably defense contractors." Flournoy's own Center for a New American Security now ranks second to the RAND Corporation in the cash it gets from defence contractors and US government sources.

Biden's Department of Defense agency review team, tasked with informing what is hoped will be a "smooth transfer of power," has its fair complement of those from entities either part of the weapons industry or beneficiaries of it. According to In These Times , they make up at least eight of the 23 people in that team. Think tanks with Biden advisory personnel include the militarily minded Center for Strategic and International Studies, which boasts funding from Raytheon, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation and General Dynamics Corporation.

America – at least a version of it – is back, well and truly. The stench of wars continuous, and interventions compulsive, is upon us.

[Nov 28, 2020] U.S. Election 'Success' And Hey Presto 'Russian Interference' Disappears

Nov 28, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

The United States' election victory of Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has yet to be officially confirmed. That requires the 500-plus Electoral College comprising the 50 federal states to cast the final vote when the constitutional body meets on December 14. Biden holds a commanding lead of over 300 delegates in the Electoral College, more than 70 above Donald Trump's quota and decisively more than the 270 threshold required for election to the White House.

Nonetheless, already one thing is indisputably clear. Biden's nominal victory from the popular vote tallies is glaring proof that Russia did not interfere in the American presidential ballot. Not in 2020. And not, we may discern, in 2016, nor in any other election. Yet the silence in US media over this obvious conclusion is deafening.

Four years of frenetic and unsubstantiated allegations of "Russian interference" have disappeared overnight, it seems. Poof! Gone! As if by a magic conjuring trick. Now you see it, now you don't, so to speak.

The New York Times has declared the recent presidential contest a "great election.. a resounding success free of fraud". The Department of Homeland Security pronounced the election to be the "most secure in American history." Other US media outlets have jettisoned supposed political neutrality and can barely contain their elation at Biden's electoral victory.

But hold on a moment. In the months and weeks leading up to the November election, there was a fever pitch in US media among politicians, national security chiefs, pundits and anonymous intelligence sources that Russia was allegedly stepping up "interference efforts" to get Trump re-elected. Those evidence-free claims were predicated on the equally absurd assertion that Trump was a Manchurian candidate for the Kremlin. That "Russiagate" fable was first spun in 2016 and for the past four years elaborated into a tangled web to "explain" how a maverick former reality TV star had been elected to the White House.

Suddenly, however, the Democrats and supportive US media are now asserting that the voting process was impeccable and unblemished by any malfeasance. Of course they would say that in order to bolster legitimacy of Biden's win against the Republican White House incumbent Donald Trump. But the thundering takeaway which the US political class and media are bizarrely ignoring is that Russia did not interfere not in the 2020 race nor in any other election. Russia has always categorically said it is not meddling in US politics and its electoral process. Turns out that Russia is de facto vindicated in its protestations against American slander.

The "Russiagate" nonsense was hatched by Democrats, their supportive media and intelligence agencies because they could not come to terms with the reality of why Trump beat the then establishment-ordained candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016. Could it have been because Clinton and the Democrat party was repudiated by popular sentiment due to perceived corruption and overseas wars? No, another "explanation" had to be found. And the US political establishment came up with the "Russian interference" narrative.

No matter that the Mueller investigation found after 22 months of probing and hundreds of millions of taxpayer-dollars spent that there was no evidence of "Russia collusion" with the Trump campaign. Nevertheless, Mueller and the Democrats, their media and intelligence backers, persisted in the spurious notion that Russia meddled in the 2016 election and, allegedly, was continuing to meddle, purportedly with even more sophisticated, nefarious techniques.

How can US politicians, intelligence officials and media credibly claim that Russia interfered in 2016 and in mid-term congressional elections in 2018, but now in 2020 it evidently did not? The most logical explanation is simply that Russia never did.

Four years of hysterical American accusations against Russia have transpired to just that: bogus hysteria. US politicians, media and so-called intelligence gurus should be held to account for fabricating what is perhaps the biggest hoax ever played on the American public.

Though, one can be sure that they won't be held accountable in a formal way. Venal power doesn't work like that. And the US political system has built-in layers of self-protection for the political class never to be prosecuted. But in an informal no less real way, the system is being held to account by the wider public who are increasingly holding it in contempt and distrust. The political class and their plaything media are losing the moral authority to govern. This goes beyond mere Trump Derangement Syndrome. The systematic lying and deception over alleged Russian interference perpetrated on such a grand scale has fatally damaged the credibility of American institutions. Not just in the US, but around the world too.

Equally lamentable is the corrosive, damaging effect that the bogus hysteria has had on bilateral US-Russia relations and international tensions. Relations are at a dangerous all time low comparable to the depth of the Cold War. This has in turn sabotaged diplomatic efforts to strengthen arms controls and global security. The anti-Russia hysteria has led to the US abandonment of key nuclear weapons treaties, the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and soon the New START.

The Russophobia that has been whipped up as a political weapon against Trump over the past four years is not something that can be easily put aside. It has engendered deep-seated hostility against Russia. During the presidential debates, Joe Biden vowed that the would take a tough stand against Russia for "interfering" in US politics. The incoming administration is being mentally held hostage by its own Russophobia which was cultivated on entirely false grounds.

It is disturbing how the US nation has been dragged into an obsession about alleged Russian malign activities, an obsession which turns out to be a mirage. Not for the first time either. Recall the Cold War Red Scares and McCarthyite witch-hunts which poisoned American society.

The implications are daunting. How can bilateral relations with Russia be restored? How can an intelligent dialogue be conducted with a nation whose leaders are so self-deluded and irrational?

Moreover, this is a nation whose leaders presume to have the prerogative to use overwhelming military force whenever they deem so. It is not unlike the driver of a juggernaut vehicle on a precipice who is hurtling along while out of his brain on misconceptions.

[Nov 28, 2020] Who is Patrick Burne

Nov 28, 2020 | off-guardian.org

US Election- A Color Revolution 'Comes Home to Roost' – OffGuardian

Nov 26, 2020 4:14 PM

It seems that most of the information provided by Sidney Powell on Dominion voting machines in the press conference on Nov 19 was provided by Patrick Byrne and a team of hackers he had assembled.

Patrick Byrne is straight out of a novel. Clever, gutsy, rich, ready to take on the powers that be, but there's a loose screw or two at the same time as something very genuine.

When, some years ago, I was researching short selling and in particular naked short selling (when you sell masses of shares that do not exist) I came across a website called deep capture. Patrick's company Overstock had been hit by a massive attack of naked short selling by dodgy hedge funds and the share price crashed. Patrick was furious and was determined to get to the bottom of what had happened.

This time he assembled a team of investigative journalists and they went to work. On deepcapture there was a short analysis of a hedge fund attack on a Spanish company – Afinsa – which I had been investigating in some depth and the conclusions coincided with mine. This earned my respect and trust. But the site started to become a bit unhinged and wild claims started to be made about Russian mafias infiltrating Wall Street, as if Patrick was trying to ingratiate himself into the intelligence community. And the whole thing just ground to a halt as far as I can remember. But he provided the most in depth study of naked short selling, naming the names, that I have ever found.

Then there's the wild affair with Maria Butina which I think is quite fairly written up in Rolling Stone.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/maria-butina-russia-spy-fbi-860256/

So to judge from Patrick's MO the claims about the "hackability" of Dominion voting machines will be correct. The claims about Venezuela and Chavez using them less so. 8 -1 Reply


Researcher , Nov 26, 2020 5:22 PM Reply to Molinos

Lol

Patrick Byrne is part of the cryptocracy. He was involved in the Maria Butina set up and the faux Russiagate plot.

The naked shorting lawsuit was to give him credibility as opposition against the Wall
St corruption and to promote blockchain, something which the NSA created with Bitcoin after it probably stole the idea from the patent office that SERCO control.

More smoke and mirrors to confuse the dumb public, just like everything the cryptocracy control, including the fake election and faux government.

If you believe Patrick Byrne is for real,
there's some swamp land you can purchase ahead of the IMF seizing it back from you by force.

Molinos , Nov 26, 2020 5:40 PM Reply to Researcher

I beg to disagree, but unlike you I do so respectfully and as one who has dedicated years researching the nefarious activities of hedge funds for a PHD. So I know what I am talking about when I say deep capture was a very valuable resource and the only other people on the planet (that I know of) who were researching this subject from a critical point of view at that time.

Researcher , Nov 26, 2020 8:16 PM Reply to Molinos

Rolling Stone and Taibbi are printing the same lies about Russiagate that have already been disproven when it was shown years ago that Hakluyt operatives connected to Trump and the cryptocracy in a global psy-op co-ordinated through the US, Australia, Russia and London were behind the Russiagate plot which was obviously not even real in any way and as fake as the impeachment that resulted from Ukraine. or the fake investigation by Mueller who was also involved in 9-11. And Comey who sits on the board of multiple cryptocracy front companies.

Just another unbelievable farce for faux political drama in the media to create the appearance of faux enmity to get out the vote and make it appear that the Deep State is out to get Trump, King of the Swamp.

An absolute joke. Believe any fairy tale you like but don't pretend that naked shorting isn't happening everyday because millions know the markets are rigged, the indices aren't real, there's trillions in fake financial products floating around, including bonds, stocks and commodities, and the central bankers own the Fed and the Treasury, The IRS, Cede & Co, DTCC, retail banks, and all the exchanges. Just like they own and control the major portion of the 1,000 corporations which are members of the IMF's new special drawing rights global digital currency.

I was investigating HFT, front running and naked shorting pre 2008.

Molinos , Nov 26, 2020 9:19 PM Reply to Researcher

Researcher,

I am glad you were researching naked shorting pre-2008 and I would have consulted you if I had known. When did I say naked shorting is not happening every day? What I am saying is that Patrick Byrne is a bit of a maverick and I guess I chucked the Rolling Stone in to present a bit of a drama to OffGuardian readers to lighten up their and my gloomy night. Don't be so serious and preachy because it detracts from a lot of the good points you make.

Researcher , Nov 26, 2020 11:40 PM Reply to Molinos

He's a liar and a phony. He already admitted on his blog that he lied and may have set up Butina. He admitted that Roger Stone offered to back him in a political race.

Look at where Byrne went to College. He's 100% cryptocracy. They all are. We don't get to hear about people that are not part of their closed circle of corruption. It was obvious his lawsuit against JPM was to supply him some future credibility on the issue of Wall St corruption. His company and many others just like them are massive money laundering fronts.

I find it hard to believe that you fell for that low rent shtick. And then you hyped him with terms like gutsy and maverick. You came off like his PR assistant.

And how you interpret my comments is your problem. There's so much trolling here and unremitting bullshit, I don't have time to pander to people's misperceptions with delicately worded critiques in case they misinterpret my mood. Especially if they are paid shills who like to troll for fun using half a dozen names a day.

You can interpret my attitude as this and this only; one big eye roll at your fanboying Patrick Byrne.


Voxi Pop
, Nov 27, 2020 2:18 AM Reply to Molinos

I read the Maria Butina story in Deep Capture, and was entertained. I think he held back a lot, but it shows that he has played a role as some type of Deeper State asset.

You cannot assume that he is the sole source of Powell's evidence, in fact Dr. Krishna is easily googled and has done extensive work with a team on the subject. There will be numerous other less "peacock" type programmers and software engineers at Powell's disposal as well.

[Nov 28, 2020] In Memory of Stephen Cohen - NYU Jordan Center

Nov 28, 2020 | jordanrussiacenter.org

In Memory of Stephen Cohen All the Russias


Earlier this year, our friend and colleague Stephen Cohen passed away. His contributions to the field of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies will be felt for years to come. Professor Cohen was a historian, but his legacy extends far beyond his scholarly work. Every year, the Stephen Cohen Fellowship -- established on Professor Cohen's initiative and supported by Katrina vanden Heuvel and the Kat Foundation -- funds the graduate education for master's students in the Department of Russian & Slavic Studies at NYU. Professor Cohen has also helped enable doctoral students to conduct dissertation research in Russia through the Cohen-Tucker Fellowship .

As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving in the United States, we give thanks to Stephen Cohen for not only his work in the REEES field but for the generosity he, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and the Kat Foundation have shown to budding Russia scholars. We honor him today by publishing the testimonials of some of current and former students who have benefitted from Cohen Fellowships.

Natasha Bluth (Cohen Fellowship)

The Stephen Cohen Fellowship enabled me to continue my studies of the former Soviet Union, not only easing the financial burden of graduate school, but also providing the opportunity to merge journalistic training with area studies, engage with a wide range of scholars and regional specialists, and conduct field research in Ukraine. The support and encouragement Stephen Cohen offered at our annual fellowship alumni dinners also inspired me to pursue a PhD in sociology in order to explore post-Soviet civil society, nationalism, and gender from a social-scientific perspective.

Michael Coates (Cohen-Tucker Fellowship)

During the 2018-19 academic year, I held a Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Fellowship, which I used to fund over a year of archival research in Russia on the history of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The fellowship allowed me to visit more than a dozen archives in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and to copy thousands of pages of original documents. Had I not been able to carry out this archival work, I would not have been able to write my dissertation. The travel that the Fellowship enabled was also personally significant to me, because I had never been to Russia before I arrived in Moscow for my research year, even though I had already been studying the country and its language for several years. It is one thing to read books about a particular place, but actually experiencing life there first-hand is quite another, and has been essential to the development of my understanding of the region. I am extremely grateful to Prof. Cohen and Ms. vanden Heuvel for their generosity in funding the next generation of Russia specialists.

John V. Walsh • a day ago

Stephen F. Cohen performed a great service in the last four years as he relentlessly refuted the great Russiagate hoax which not only distorted our political life but seriously wounded US-Russia relations for years to come. That hoax is a threat to world peace and Prof. Cohen from the very first saw through it. Both in his writings for The Nation and his near weekly conversations with John Batchelor of ABC radio rebutted it clearly, eloquently and at times with good humor. How very much he is missed.

[Nov 26, 2020] Big Lie that Won't Die- Russiagate Still Around by Stephen Lendman

Notable quotes:
"... If Trump's legal action against brazen election fraud to deny him a second term succeeds -- what's highly unlikely but possible -- will a phony DJT/Russia connection again make headline news? ..."
Nov 24, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca

The scheme was cooked up by Obama/Biden regime Russophobes John Brennan, Hillary and the DNC -- to smear Russia and discredit Trump at the same time.

It aimed to maintain and escalate US hostility toward the Russian Federation – for its sovereign independence, advocacy for world peace, opposition to Washington's imperial agenda, and having foiled its aim to transform Syria into another US vassal state.

It also relates to Sino/Russian unity – representing the only obstacle to Washington's aim for unchallenged global dominance.

Probes by special counsel Robert Mueller, as well as House and Senate committees found no evidence of Russian US meddling.

Nor did the US intelligence community. Claims otherwise without corroborating evidence were and remain baseless.

In US criminal judicial proceedings, evidence beyond a reasonable doubt is required for convictions.

Without it, fairly and impartially adjudicated cases would be dismissed.

Time and again, Russia was falsely accused of US election meddling, notably in the run-up to Trump v. Hillary in 2016.

To this day, no credible evidence ever proved accusations because none exists.

The Russiagate hoax remains one of the most shameful political chapters in US history, exceeding the worst of McCarthyism because despite its exposed Big Lies, it's still around.

Yet in 2018 testimony before House Intelligence Committee members, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (2010 – 2017) said the following:

"I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting (or) conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election."

"I do not recall any instance when I had direct evidence of the content of" alleged Trump team-Russia collusion.

Remarks like the above, along with failure of probes by Mueller, House and Senate members to present evidence of Russian US election meddling should have ended the Russiagate witch-hunt once and for all.

While largely dormant in the run-up to and aftermath of US Election 2020, it could resurface any time in old or new form.

In following NYT reports on other issues, most recently with regard to Trump v. Biden/Harris, I haven't seen a Russiagate report in its online editions for some time.

Belatedly I discovered an August 2020 mini-book-length article in the NYT Magazine (online), a publication I don't follow.

It discusses a classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of various geopolitical issues, this one prepared in July 2019.

The Times: "According to multiple officials who saw it, the document discussed Russia's ongoing efforts to influence US elections: the 2020 presidential contest and 2024's as well (sic)."

Its so-called "interest" is much the same as in other nations.

"Interest" has nothing to do with meddling. No credible evidence ever surfaced to show US election interference by any nations.

It's in sharp contrast to credible evidence of US meddling in scores of elections abroad throughout the post-WW II period and earlier.

According to "key judgments" of US intelligence officials, "Russia favored the current president: Donald Trump," adding:

Ahead of the summer 2020 party national conventions, "Russia worked in support of the (Dem) presidential candidate Bernie Sanders," said the Times, based on the NIE report.

It wasn't "genuine" support for Sanders, just an effort "to weaken that party and ultimately help the current US president (sic)."

The Times: "Just as this article was going to press," the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) claimed the following:

Moscow "is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former (Joe) Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia 'establishment (sic).' "

The ODNI accused Moscow of "sophisticated election-disrupting capabilities (sic)."

An unnamed intelligence community source familiar with the NIE was quoted, saying it's "100 percent reliable (sic)."

Left unexplained by the Times was that from inception to the present day, Russiagate was and remains a colossal hoax.

No evidence ever surfaced to suggest Kremlin US election meddling, nor by any other foreign country.

What the NIE allegedly called "100 percent reliable" defied reality. It's part of longstanding Russia bashing.

In January 2017, a US intelligence community report titled "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution" -- claiming Trump v. Hillary election meddling -- included no evidence proving it.

None existed then or now to present day.

When Vladimir Putin was asked if he wanted Trump to win in 2016 -- at a joint Helsinki, Finland news conference with DJT in July 2018 -- he replied: "Yes, I did."

His preference for Trump over Hillary was unrelated to election meddling.

If other foreign leaders expressed a preference for one US presidential candidate over another, the same logic holds.

One thing has nothing to do with the other. Implying otherwise is an act of deception, a longstanding US intelligence community and Times specialty.

Trump was justifiably skeptical about accusations of Russian US election meddling that favored him over Hillary in 2016 or over Biden/Harris this month.

According to the Times, Trump's objections to claims about alleged Russia US election meddling "alarm(ed) the intelligence community."

Former acting CIA director/Hillary campaign advisor Michael Morell was quoted calling Trump "an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."

He's a political novice, geopolitical know-nothing, first ever US reality TV president.

He's no witting or unwitting Russian agent.

Separately, Morell defied reality, claiming:

Election 2016 was "the only time in American history when we've been attacked by a foreign country and not come together as a nation," adding:

"In fact, it split us further apart."

"It was an inexpensive, relatively easy to carry out covert mission." It deepened our divisions."

"I'm absolutely convinced that those Russian intelligence officers who put together and managed the attack on our democracy (sic) in 2016 all received medals personally from Vladimir Putin (sic)."

The above claims and others about a DJT/Russia connection et al are pure rubbish.

The lengthy Times magazine piece was all about smearing Russia, falsely claiming Kremlin US election meddling, and demeaning Trump for defeating media darling Hillary.

No evidence was included to back any of the above claims. None exists.

In the run-up to and aftermath of US election 2020, Russiagate simmers largely below the surface.

If Trump's legal action against brazen election fraud to deny him a second term succeeds -- what's highly unlikely but possible -- will a phony DJT/Russia connection again make headline news?

Will there be claims of Kremlin involvement in backing litigation to discredit Biden/Harris?

No matter how often the Russiagate Big Lie was debunked before, it may never die.

It may be around as long as the Russian Federation and China remain Washington's favorite national security threats.

Real ones don't exist so they're invented as pretexts to advance US imperial interests.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected] . He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

[Nov 26, 2020] The historic Trump presidency emasculated globalism by Patrick J. Buchanan

Nov 26, 2020 | www.wnd.com

The historic Trump presidency emasculated globalism Pat Buchanan notes how the elite Bush-type Republicans have been silenced Patrick J. Buchanan By Patrick J. Buchanan Published November 26, 2020 at 6:39pm Share on Facebook Tweet P Share Email Print In the first two decades of the century, President-elect Joe Biden's choice for secretary of state supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. He was an ever-reliable liberal interventionist.

This same Antony Blinken could spend the first years of a Biden presidency helping extricate our country from the misbegotten wars he championed. What establishment Democrats like Biden and Blinken helped to do in previous administrations, they will likely now have to undo.

Who effected this sea change in national thinking?

Donald Trump. Much that was said and believed before he came down the escalator in 2015 is no longer said or believed by the majority of Americans.

And no institution has been more altered than the Republican Party.

How I beat election fraud in America's most corrupt state TRENDING: Employees melt down after learning company is publishing prominent conservative Jordan Peterson's book: Report

George H.W. Bush's vision of a "New World Order," launched at the after-party of his Gulf War victory, died with his presidency.

George W. Bush's crusade for global democracy to "end tyranny in our world" has been forgotten. Bush Republicans no longer speak for the party on foreign policy, trade or immigration.

NATO will never be the same again after Trump rudely demanded that freeloading nations pay their fair share of the collective defense or the Americans would pack up and come home from Europe.

Former Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis may call for the ash-canning of the phrase "America First." He will fail. For, as both national motto and national policy, the slogan has put down roots in American soil because it comports with the will of the silent majority.

Whatever the establishment believes, in the clash between nationalism and globalism, globalism has lost America.

Moreover, the world is going this way.

Does not Xi Jinping put his own country first as he claims for China all the waters and islands for hundreds of miles into the East and South China seas? Does not Vladimir Putin put his own country first as he seeks to bring back under Moscow's wing the former republics of the Russian federation?

Does not President Erdogan put Turkey first as he sends arms and troops to pursue his country's interests in Libya, Syria, Cyprus, the South Caucasus and the Eastern Mediterranean in clashes with Greece?

What does Bibi Netanyahu put first, if not his own country, Israel?

If country and nation are not first in the hearts and minds of Americans, what should replace them? Some nonexistent New World Order? The U.N.? NATO? A multilateral caucus of global institutions?

Under Trump, economic nationalism has displaced free trade globalism as the trade policy of the party and government.

The GOP elite that backed Bill Clinton on NAFTA, supported a new transnational World Trade Organization, invited China to join the club and accorded Beijing most-favored-nation trade status is now silent.

Tariffs to force open foreign markets and punish predator-traders who take advantage of American workers have replaced the free trade fundamentalism that had been dogma since Dwight Eisenhower's days.

Nor is the Republican Party likely to return to free trade, as long as "China First" is the undeclared policy pursued by the nation that has now displaced us as the world's leading manufacturing power.

The George Bush-John McCain Republican Party was for amnesty for illegals and open borders for new migrants. Today's GOP supports the deportation of illegals and the 30-foot Trump Wall on the Mexican border.

[Nov 26, 2020] Did Jews fail to deliver- by Israel Shamir

Nov 26, 2020 | www.unz.com

Did Jews Fail to Deliver? ISRAEL SHAMIR NOVEMBER 18, 2020 2,300 WORDS 161 COMMENTS REPLY Tweet Reddit Share Share Email Print More

President Trump gave to Israel all she could wish for; he hoped that in return, the Jews would give him America to rule another term. A simple give-and-take, but it didn't work out as intended. If he were to run for the presidency of Israel, he would have it. If Brooklyn were to decide who'd inhabit the White House, he would be the Chosen one. But Trump's plan to bribe US Jews by bearing gifts to Israel failed completely.

East Europeans define the difference between Jews and Hungarians (or Poles) as follows. All of these would sell their grandmother for a fistful of coins; but only a Jew would deliver. This non-delivery of America will be remembered by future US presidents. Perhaps we witness a defining moment for the downturn in American support of Israel, in direct contradiction to the main thesis of our colleague Philip Giraldi who said this week that "Israel's Power Is Unlimited". Why did it happen? The US Jews didn't take the bait. And now for details.

"Zionist" is a euphemism for "Jew", isn't it? Up to a point. Zionists, that is Jews (and others) who care and work for Israel, are strongly supportive of the US President, but Jews that matter, that is elite liberal progressive US Jews, won't support Trump even if he were to pave Tel Aviv with golden bricks. Three out of four US Jews voted for Joe Biden , about the same proportion of Jews who voted for Barack Obama, though Obama was quite critical towards Israel, while Trump did all the Israelis could wish for.

The Jews that cared more about Israel voted for Trump, but they are powerless. They have money, they have good positions in society, but they aren't top dogs. The Orthodox Jews are for Trump; not so much for the sake of Israel but rather for his conservative agenda. They do not like gay parades, do not care for transgenderism, and for them, Black Lives do not matter much. Social justice is not their credo.They have little influence outside their own milieu. They voted 77 to 23 for Trump. Right-wing Jews are strongly Zionist and support Trump. Their publication FrontPage Magazine is all out for Trump. But they would be for Trump even if he hadn't left Iran agreement.

Polls of Jewish voters show that they do not care much about the steps taken by Trump in order to please Israel. They are worried about Covid pandemics, about medical care, while economics occupies fifth place in their concerns, and Israeli-related acts are at the very bottom. The only place where one can notice some positive change is Florida, where Jews actually shifted in noticeable numbers to Republicans. But even there it seems to be a part of a Latino shift rather than a separate phenomenon.

Elite Jews voted for Biden and for Dems as advised by the NY Times. For them, Trump's friendship with PM Netanyahu was a drawback rather than an advantage. If they care for Israel, they would prefer a quieter approach as usual, within the Two States paradigm. None of what Trump did for Israel found a response in their hearts.

According to the AJC (American Jewish Committee) Biden bested Trump on every issue including handling the coronavirus pandemic, 78%-19%; combatting terrorism, 71%-26%; dealing with Iran, 71%-27%; handling crime, 72%-24%, and strengthening U.S.-Israel relations, 54%-42%. (The Republican Jewish Coalition has slightly better numbers, as they polled older Jews.) Trump has expressed frustration that his Israel decisions have not garnered greater support in the Jewish community, and many activists have spoken of "treason".

If Trump had known in advance that courting Jews would bring neither votes nor political profit, probably he would have wasted less time in the Zionist cul-de-sac. Jews are connected with the Dem Party, remember! All Jewish congressmen but two are Democrats; strongly pro-Israel Senator Chuck Schumer, the Dem leader in the Senate, is as hostile to Trump as any man. Only those Jews really matter; only those Jews have their unique access to media, movies, art, politics, and universities. Perhaps they would act differently if Israel were in danger; but thanks to the generous politics of Donald Trump they didn't need to worry about Israel. (Preceding American presidents were aware of this catch, and were careful not to give too much to Israel. This was also the view of Dr Kissinger).

Israeli Jews are much more pro-Trump than their American cousins. If Israel were a US state, it would be deep red. They feel gratitude to the man who moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem and recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. They appreciate his drive for normalisation with the Arab states; his non-interference in the Palestinian issue; his recognition of the Golan Heights. Being more conservative, they are on the same page as Trump on many issues. However, even before Trump, the majority of Israeli Likud-voters are and have been for the Republicans for many years. They did not like Obama and Clinton, and they do not care for Biden. A prominent high tech Israeli personality prophesied that Biden would bring disaster for Israel.

However, in Israel, too, there is a sharp division between elites and Deplorable masses. The Deplorables support Netanyahu and Trump, vote domestically for Likud or religious parties. The Deplorables rule Israel for over twenty years; Netanyahu is the Israeli Trump who succeeded to keep power.

The Israeli elites support Biden. For them Trump is a mirror image of their own PM Netanyahu, the man they hate with gusto. The problem with Israeli elites is that they have lost their ability to govern. Their parties disintegrate; their causes are lost. If there is a common cause for Israeli elites it is rejection of PM Netanyahu mirroring the NeverTrump spirit of American elites, and their belief that they are elites and destined to govern.

They want to get rid of Netanyahu, like the US elites wanted to get rid of Trump. This desire caused three rounds of national elections in the last year, but despite trying hard, they could not vote him out. Now they hope he will be removed by the Supreme Court, and by massive demonstrations near the PM's residence. They say he is corrupt, that he takes bribes, that he didn't save Israel from Coronavirus – just like the Dems had tried to impeach Trump for ridiculous reasons. They want Netanyahu to die in jail, just like the Dems hope to see Trump rotting in Guantanamo. (There are hundreds of women ready to swear Trump almost-raped them fifty years ago when they were underage.)

The case against Netanyahu is feeble at best. He received a pack of cigars and a box of champagne from an American film producer; he promised to help a newspaper publisher if he would stop attacking him. A murky case connects him to a German submarine sale, but it is too opaque even for Netanyahu haters.The PM had been indicted by the state attorney, but by Israeli law, he does not have to resign unless found guilty. Israel is experiencing huge and violent demos against Netanyahu almost daily. But the deplorables still support their Bibi, and vote for him. As opposed to Trump, Netanyahu has a newspaper, and it makes a lot of difference.

It would be nice if there were some positive differences between the Israeli Left and Right on important issues. No such luck. There is practically no difference between Likud and the liberal parties regarding the really important Palestinian question. The Left-wing and Right-wing Jews are on the same page: they do not want to grant equality to non-Jews. They treat Palestinians much worse than the Blacks were treated in Alabama a hundred years ago. They aren't even interested in Palestinians.

The Israeli liberal left is interested in Lesbians and Gays; the main point of the election campaign of the once-radical-left Meretz (I was their spokesman 40 years ago) was gay adoption and access to surrogate mothers. And that in a society where workers earn less and less every year, while houses cost more and more; where regular employment is a dream for workers; where trade unions collapsed, and instead of employment, workers are offered a contract with unlimited working hours, no holidays and no security at all. All in a country where Palestinians are not allowed even to bathe in the sea a few miles from their besieged villages.

Another topic of the liberal elite is their fight against religion.They are equal haters, hating religious Jews as well as Christians and Muslims. The outbreak of Covid provided them with a new reason to hate the believing Jews: they go to synagogues instead of staying at home or going to demos against Netanyahu. I do not know any redeeming feature of this group, but they are quite similar to liberal elites elsewhere.

In France, too, the ruling elite hates Islam and promotes Charlie Hebdo; but they hate Christianity, too. The first thing Macron did in the present lockdown was to ban the Mass. And his support groups, the elite liberals, were mighty pleased. In this video , you can see young liberals asking police to disperse Catholics praying outside of Church. The same happens in Israel, and in New York, where police have interfered with praying Jews.

The main difference between the populists of Netanyahu and the elitists is in their attitude to ordinary people. The populists exude empathy while elitists just deplore. At the practical level, they do not differ. Both are equally bad for workers, for ordinary Jews and Palestinians. Populists waste public money on Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, while elitists offer free Nepalese surrogate mothers for every gay.

As for Covid lockdowns, the elitists approve of them, just like Biden and his Dems do. The deplorables dislike them greatly, for they lose their jobs, and they can't afford it, but they still do not rebel.

In the US, the populists of Trump did not get much from his first cadence. A possible solution would be the integration of left populists and right populists, of Trump taking Tulsi Gabbard as his VP or at least as Secretary of State, of Trump giving every American citizen medical care as in Europe, of him providing quality education free, of him taxing billionaires and supporting workers. Such a ticket would be unbeatable. And stop bothering with the Jews and Israel; they have nuisance value, but nothing more.

Now we can explain why the Trump Zionist Offensive didn't help him. The US (as well as US Jews and Israel) is split into incompetent but cocksure elites and gullible but angry Deplorables. The vote in the recent elections was a test of loyalty: are you with the elites or with the Deplorables (in Hebrew, עמך)? In the US, where many Jews actually belong to elites, even those outside accept elite values and narratives and still hope to get invited in. A US Jew has to despair to join Trump and his counter-élites, and they are still hopeful.

The Jewish newspaper Forward tells of "two young Jewish political activists who formed the Jewish Unity PAC and raised all of $31,000, and every cent of it was spent supporting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris." It's not that they care for Biden, but these young people know where their bright future may lie.

In Israel, the elites are against Netanyahu, but the majority of Israelis, Jews or non-Jews, have already despaired of being invited into the traditional elites. So they have no problem voting for Netanyahu or supporting Trump. However, the Israel of Netanyahu and his Deplorables is much less attractive to US Jews than the old elitist Labour-ruled Ashkenazi Israel. They do not admit it; certainly not in writing, but there is no social lift for a US Jew in going to Israel or even in supporting Israel. Thus Zionism as a cause has lost its attraction for US Jews. And probably this change is irreversible: the old Ashkenazi elite of Israel is gone, and it won't come back. It has been supplanted by Oriental Jews, by religious folk, by the Ashkenazi counter-elites of Likud. There is no profit in courting Israel as much as Trump did.

If Trump does, despite enormous odds, gain his second term, perhaps he will learn the lesson and treat Israel as Jewish Liberia. It would be a great relief for the US and for the people of Israel. Being cut off from the US supply pipeline, Israel may yet make peace with Palestinians and become a normal Middle Eastern state. The US won't be driven into far-away wars. It would be better if Trump had understood earlier, but better late than never.

American support is as dangerous for Israel as Russian support is for Armenia. Armenians had 30 years to make peace with their neighbours but they didn't for they were sure of Russian support. Israelis had 50 years, but they didn't because of the US support. Armenians already came to grief, and for Israel it is coming, unless they will disengage from their protective superpower. So the special relations between the US elites and Israel are fully exhausted for both sides.

And meanwhile, Israel sits on the fence. "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose not to refer to Joe Biden as president-elect during a press conference Monday, saying instead that Biden was "supposed to be appointed the next president", reported Haaretz .

Israel Shamir can be reached at [email protected]

This article was first published at The Unz Review .


Altai , says: November 18, 2020 at 2:16 pm GMT • 8.3 days ago

though Obama was quite critical towards Israel

https://www.youtube.com/embed/NIgfiSzCy1o?feature=oembed

Fixed that for you.

though Obama was less vocally supportive towards Israel

TG , says: November 18, 2020 at 3:07 pm GMT • 8.3 days ago

But one must remember: both parties are completely totally pro-Israel. Meaning the there is no reward for a politician in supporting Israel, only punishment for those that don't.

And while this might or might not completely apply to Trump, most modern American politicians don't care all that much about winning elections. They care about doing the bidding of their wealthy patrons, and getting rewarded on the side. It's about putting on a show for the masses, and as in professional wrestling, both the 'winners' and the 'losers' get paid. Sitting on corporate boards, distinguished positions in academia, cushy book contracts, the press treating them like senior statesmen, awards and accolades, that sort of thing.

Consider also: Trump presumably will continue to run businesses and will need contacts and support etc from other wealthy people, many of whom of course will be Jewish. Not pissing off the Jews might still be critical to him in the days to come

BuelahMan , says: November 18, 2020 at 3:51 pm GMT • 8.3 days ago

I find it most difficult to believe what a jew says that jews think, especially when it is geared towards goy.

Of course, only because I am antisemitic not that jews lie with abandon, covering for the tribe in some way.

saggy , says: Website November 18, 2020 at 5:01 pm GMT • 8.2 days ago

Jews were the prime movers in the effort to impeach Clinton as told by David Brock in 'Blinded by the Right', and Jews were the prime movers in the effort to impeach Trump as was widely publicized, and yet the response of Clinton and Trump was to redouble their efforts to please the Jews . probably to 'follow the money'.

A123 , says: November 18, 2020 at 6:07 pm GMT • 8.2 days ago

Did Jews Fail to Deliver?

Which Jews Failed to Deliver What?

The article is much better than the headline.

The author concedes that there is no "Jewish Side" and in fact details how there are significant numbers of Jews on opposing sides.

However, in Israel, too, there is a sharp division between elites and Deplorable masses. The Deplorables support Netanyahu and Trump, vote domestically for Likud or religious parties.

The Israeli elites support Biden. For them Trump is a mirror image of their own PM Netanyahu, the man they hate with gusto. The problem with Israeli elites is that they have lost their ability to govern

The virulent Anti-Semitism of Islam is aggressively trying to contaminate certain western parties such as Labour and the DNC. However, movements like Muslim BLM are generating so much backlash that they are already losing traction. In the U.S.:

-- Conservatives are likely to join the Orthodox, majority voting for GOP Populism and workers.
-- Reform and Reconstructionist are likely to stay aligned against workers with the Blue SJW Elites of the Globalist DNC.

I find it baffling that Jews openly oppose Judeo-Christian values by staying with SJW "woke" apostasy. However, it is a fact that huge numbers of Jews act against their own self interest.

It is not unique to them. Huge numbers of Christians make the same mistake siding with SJW deviancy.

PEACE

RealAmerican , says: November 18, 2020 at 6:15 pm GMT • 8.2 days ago
@BuelahMan

You cannot be serious BuelahMan? Take your blinders off.
Those that you speak of are indeed many, but not so Mr. Shamir.
Great read Mr. Shamir. Thank you!

Ann Nonny Mouse , says: Website November 18, 2020 at 8:28 pm GMT • 8.1 days ago
@BuelahMan

Israel Shamir is not a Jew.

No Friend Of The Devil , says: November 18, 2020 at 9:22 pm GMT • 8.0 days ago

Republicans are not courting American Jews in order to win their votes. Republicans are courting American Jews in order to win their wallets and positive press coverage. There are not enough Rebublican Jews to sway an election, but there is enough Republican Jewish money and Republican Jewish media for the Republican Party to pay attention to them.

Andrea Iravani

Chris Moore , says: Website November 19, 2020 at 12:10 am GMT • 7.9 days ago
@No Friend Of The Devil Bingo. Plus, to fend of the inevitable, demagogic "anti-Semitism" accusations from liberals, leftists and Democrats, and their stooges in MSM.

The "anti-Semitism" accusation has paid off well for Jews. It's kind of like the "Holocaust" wail -- the gift that keeps on giving. Someday, all that Jewish dogma will be recognized as the grift it's always been. Not today, but maybe tomorrow, or the day after

Then we can watch ALL the grifters scramble for cover. Maybe they'll hide in an attic. Then they'll make up some story of epic persecution and start the cycle over again.

How many times will Charlie Brown fall for it? How many times will Charlie Chan fall for it? We'll find out.

Anonymous [208] Disclaimer , says: November 19, 2020 at 5:24 am GMT • 7.7 days ago

Ah but you forget that Trump's political base is Evangelical Christians and they are Zionists.

The big money may come from conservative Jews (like Adelson) but his popular support is from Christians.

anon [321] Disclaimer , says: November 19, 2020 at 5:50 am GMT • 7.7 days ago

Jews dumped Trump for Biden because he didn't do enough. With Biden they get even more support for Israel, including putting more troops in Syria to finally take out Assad, and perhaps finally going to war with Iran, which Trump wouldn't do. Plus Biden will give them billions of taxpayer money to run the Diversity Industrial Complex, with every government agency now requiring diversity training, and lots more diversity and race initiatives everywhere, all rackets run by Jews, with a few token blacks. And then there's media censorship, which Trump won't give them but Biden/Harris are already putting on the agenda.

niceland , says: November 19, 2020 at 5:58 am GMT • 7.7 days ago

Interesting article. Thanks Mr Shamir.

JWalters , says: November 19, 2020 at 6:05 am GMT • 7.7 days ago

"Biden bested Trump on every issue including strengthening U.S.-Israel relations, 54%-42%."

Biden puts a more "civilized" face on Israel's inhumane ethnic cleansing. Trump was so obvious and garish about it. Trump ran the risk of calling too much attention to Israel's crimes. But "both sides" were still willing to have Israel grab all that Trump was "giving" (though illegal and not Trump's to give). As others have noted, Trump's payoff may come after he is out of office. Much is theater.

Zarathustra , says: November 19, 2020 at 6:14 am GMT • 7.7 days ago

Come to think about it Trump could make good money opening a TV station. all sane Americans would watch it. The advertisement money would just be poring in. This would be excellent thing.
Trump has many followers. Trump would give his followers some hope.

Justsaying , says: November 19, 2020 at 6:24 am GMT • 7.7 days ago

The purported failure of Jews to deliver presupposes Jews are under some sort of obligation to deliver. Jews are in total control. They have the sworn, unsolicited and total subservience of any American presidential candidate of substance. Quite the contrary, it is the Jewish colony of America that must deliver to its colonial master.

Zarathustra , says: November 19, 2020 at 6:31 am GMT • 7.6 days ago
@Zarathustra

Also from there he could criticize Biden's administration and make Biden miserable for all four years.

RedpilledAF , says: November 19, 2020 at 6:33 am GMT • 7.6 days ago

A Jewish dialectic. By design and effort. That's what it always comes down to. That is the vicious cycle that needs to broken. Jewish thesis, Jewish antithesis, Jewish synthesis, rinse and repeat.

Ghali , says: November 19, 2020 at 6:48 am GMT • 7.6 days ago

It is true that Democrats are bought and owned by Jews. But, I have to agree with Andre Joyce. Jews are very unreliable people, possibly the most unreliable of backers. Trump exhausted his usefulness to Jews and they threw him under the bus. Jews want someone as racist Zionist as Biden.

In Biden Jews find a long time obedient Gentile servant. Biden will do what Obama and Trump refused to do. He is a well-known war criminal and he will leash war on the Middle East.

Clay Alexander , says: November 19, 2020 at 6:50 am GMT • 7.6 days ago

Great article. Did the Jews deliver ? The question should be did any one group deliver ? Trump was way to erratic and made way to many enemies and always seemed to say the first thing that popped into his head. A good example of one of the stranger incidents was in Oct. 2018 when Rap star and mental defective Kanye West sat in the Oval Office and went a non-stop, rambling, incoherent tirade. The President of the United States sat there like a moron nodding approvingly it made Trump look foolish and cheapened all Americans. He sunk himself with his big mouth and his tantrums. As far as the voting went it brings to mind the Joe Pesci character from Casino in the end they all had enough.

Hiram of Tyre , says: November 19, 2020 at 6:52 am GMT • 7.6 days ago
@Chris Moore

Anti-semitism , Holocaust ; "it's a trick" .

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9DKeLLlaws8?feature=oembed

chris , says: November 19, 2020 at 7:00 am GMT • 7.6 days ago

Yeah, liberal Jews profess universal values, they keep their fervent support for Israel hidden, because that gives away the fact that they are hypocrits. It's like the whore that they're banging at every opportunity. And now Trump comes out and admonishes them in the open to vote for him because of the jewlery and boob job he's bought her – as much as they like it, they are profoundly mortified by his crude appeal. . and of course they know that she's being taken care through all the institutions they're supporting.

In some sense, Trump missing the boat on this issue is like Hillary selling herself as a war hawk, when that didn't actually sell anymore; she had missed the boat by 40 years.

gT , says: November 19, 2020 at 7:40 am GMT • 7.6 days ago

No, the Jews did not fail to deliver. Jews always support both sides in any conflict so that whoever wins they can claim to have supported / made the winning side...

AnonStarter , says: November 19, 2020 at 9:54 am GMT • 7.5 days ago

It would be nice if there were some positive differences between the Israeli Left and Right on important issues. No such luck. There is practically no difference between Likud and the liberal parties regarding the really important Palestinian question.

I don't find it all that different here.

Quite a few Jews on the American left expose their Zionist underbelly whenever the question of Palestine arises...

Verymuchalive , says: November 19, 2020 at 10:12 am GMT • 7.5 days ago

American support is as dangerous for Israel as Russian support is for Armenia. Armenians had 30 years to make peace with their neighbours but they didn't for they were sure of Russian support. Israelis had 50 years, but they didn't because of the US support. Armenians already came to grief, and for Israel it is coming, unless they will disengage from their protective superpower. So the special relations between the US elites and Israel are fully exhausted for both sides.

Excellent article, sticking more or less dispassionately to the facts. Also, it draws the logical inference of these facts, as outlined above. The economic collapse of America is only a matter of time, and with it the collapse of its subsidies to Israel. History is full of instances of small states encouraged in their intransigence by their patrons, whether intentionally or indirectly. With the loss of the patrons, their clients are then forced to agree terms at very unfavourable conditions, compared to what they would have got, had they negotiated previously.

God's Fool , says: November 19, 2020 at 12:58 pm GMT • 7.4 days ago

Obama critical of Israel? Are you kidding or may be misleading? Ehud Barak is on record (Charlie Rose Show now defunct) stating unequivocally that the other Barak had done more for Israel than any other American president before him.

No matter how you cut it, Jews alone have a way too much power in the U. S Take for example a mundane decision to cap number of people that should get together for the Thanksgiving: not 9 or 11 but exactly 10, per Dr. Ranit Mishori (she is an Israeli woman) on PBS Newshour last night. Her explanation was very disarming when asked about it. Oh, she said, "they" decided that ten was the right number guess how many people does it take to form a "community of Israel" or the so called Minyan?" TEN! It's all about Jews and Israel even at the freaking NIH (the National Institute of Health).

Ron T, , says: November 19, 2020 at 2:28 pm GMT • 7.3 days ago

Unquestioning and unequivocal support for Israel has become a part of the Republican platform, mostly a result of Evangelical Christians, a large denomination of dupes who believe that the modern state of Israel, established by European colonists in Palestine, is somehow related to the biblical Israel and biblical prophecy.

Jews voted the same way the have for generations as they are assured that Biden is going to provide unquestioning support to Israel too.

Their Jewish votes hardly matter as they are mostly concentrated in New York and California, which are not swing states. It is Jewish power in media and campaign donations that matter, which both candidates could not do without.

76239 , says: November 19, 2020 at 8:17 pm GMT • 7.1 days ago

"If Trump does, despite enormous odds, gain his second term, perhaps he will learn the lesson and treat Israel as Jewish Liberia. It would be a great relief for the US and for the people of Israel. Being cut off from the US supply pipeline, Israel may yet make peace with Palestinians and become a normal Middle Eastern state. The US won't be driven into far-away wars. It would be better if Trump had understood earlier, but better late than never"

I doubt this. The irony is that the same deep state that pushed regime change hook or crook in Bolivia, Iran, and Venezuela is the same deep state that pushed for regime change in the USA against Trump in 2016 (Russia controls Trump bs) and again with the voting fraud of 2020. And yet Trump seems to like regime change when it benefits his Israeli and Saudi patrons. You live by the sword; you die by the sword.

There is the well reasoned narrative that the last US president who took on the CIA with vengeance had his head blown apart in Dallas. The real power in Washington is with the merging of the military, intelligence, silicon valley tech community. The civilian leadership from both parties in the US are mere order takers from this oligarchy.

Government is just a means for the elite to impoverish the public and strip every liberty from them. They are not part of the answer. They are part of the problem.

Iva , says: November 19, 2020 at 11:46 pm GMT • 6.9 days ago

Trump condemns globalism, touts nationalistic view of foreign affairs at U.N."The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots," Trump said. "The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations who protect their citizens, respect their neighbors and honor the differences that make each country special and unique." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-touts-nationalistic-view-of-foreign-affairs-at-un/2019/09/24/e4a8486a-ded2-11e9-8fd3-d943b4ed57e0_story.html This is why Jews and pro globalists want Biden and Harris. Barbra Lerner Spectre speaks about multiculti and Israel expels black Jews giving them the one way tickets, because "they do not mix well with other Israelis' ' . Hypocrisy in full spectrum. They just want other countries ( not Israel) to lose their traditions, customs and values. When the society is divided and broken it is easier to rule throwing various groups against each other's throats. While groups fight with each other, they pursue their agendas unnoticed. Today Trump's lawyers were talking about lawyers who wanted to represent Trump getting threats, even death treats. How did this happen in the US? Who's "accomplishment" this is?

geokat62 , says: November 21, 2020 at 2:27 pm GMT • 5.3 days ago
@Occasional lurker ss="comment-text">

Mostly Jews vaguely support Israel For most liberal Jews, Israel is deep, deep down on their political agenda.

You must've missed this headline in the Jerusalem Post:

US Jews strongly support Israel, new poll shows

94% say that if Jewish state "no longer existed tomorrow," it would be a "tragedy."

https://m.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/US-Jews-strongly-support-Israel-new-poll-shows

anon [235] Disclaimer , says: November 22, 2020 at 3:53 pm GMT • 4.3 days ago
@Occasional lurker

Obama did a lot .He tolerated Israeli attacks on Gaza. He offered 40 billions worth of new dole to israel in exchange for Israel delaying the commission of the illegal activity ( postponing of the settlement for 3-4 month ).
He made sure Sisi was not opposed and Morsi was deposed . He got USA involved in Syria and tolerated open advocacy for war by AIPAC against Syria . He tolerated the opposition to Park 51 construction mounted by Neocons . In his time Islamophobia introduced by the neocons skyrocketed .
He campaigned for anti-American charlatan like Joe Liberman . Israel got him do a lot of damages to Iran economically and physically

Buzz Baldrin , says: November 23, 2020 at 8:39 am GMT • 3.6 days ago

I missed the part about Sheldon Adelson's series of campaign contributions to Trump

[Nov 26, 2020] the Israeli/Zionist goal of breaking physical connection between Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. That has surely been the underlying motive for Israeli/Zionist antagonism towards a unified, independent Syria

Nov 26, 2020 | www.unz.com

Syd Walker , says: Website November 19, 2020 at 4:25 pm GMT • 7.2 days ago

Another very interesting read, Israel.

I did notice what I think is a surprising omission.

You didn't mention once the Israeli/Zionist goal of breaking physical connection between Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. That has surely been the underlying motive for Israeli/Zionist antagonism towards a unified, independent Syria and has explained worldwide Zionist support for the ongoing foreign-backed assault on Syria that's been underway now for nine years.

Trump tried to buy Israeli/Zionist support by concessions to Israel such as recognizing annexation of the Golan Heights and moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. But he baulked at taking on Russia in Syria – and indeed indicated his lack of enthusiasm for conflict with Russia as early as the 2016 Primaries. It was one thing that lifted his popularity with voters – and made many more conventional Zionist Republicans distrust him.

So Trump hasn't really let the Zionists down. They just wanted more. The Golans were a nice snack, but they were already in the pocket. Completing the destruction of independent, unified and anti-Zionist Syria – now that would be something worth switching sides to support. I suspect – and fear – they have reason to believe it more likely that Biden/Harris will deliver their more prized objective.

[Nov 26, 2020] when considering "GENOCIDE," one must ponder the results

Nov 26, 2020 | www.unz.com

Question for Shamir , says: November 19, 2020 at 11:13 am GMT • 7.5 days ago

A QUESTION FOR MISTER SHAMIR APROPOS THE ARMENIANS AND THE QUESTION OF GENOCIDE:

Question for Shamir: when will the prophecy be fulfilled? When will Russia liberate Constantinople??? There are certain Holy Elders of the Orthodox Church who prophesied that, when the Tsar returns, a great war will ensue and Constantinople will be liberated

p.s. "Genocide" is a relative term. One must look at the results. Anatolia was 20% Christian before WWI. Now it is 0.2% Christian. Stalin gave Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan against the will of the local Armenian majority. Compare this to the Balkans. The Balkan Muslims like to adopt victim status in Bosnia and Kosovo and complain of "genocide" at the hands of Serbs and others. But despite the "genocide" in Bosnia, Muslims are 50% of Bosnia, 20% of Montenegro, 3% of Serbia, 60% of Albania, probably up to 5% in Greece, 30% in Macedonia, 8% in Bulgaria, 95% in Kosovo

Now remember, Israel, these were lands that the native Christian Slavs and Greeks liberated at great cost, centuries of passive and active resistance.

So when we consider the word "GENOCIDE," think of the results. If the Yugoslavs and Bulgarians and Greeks had adopted the brutal and unscrupulous tactics of the Turks, there would be no Muslims in the Balkans today. Yet, they equal rights, the Mufti of Sandzak is a regular guest on Serbian television. This doesn't exist in Turkey. The Greeks and Armenians in Istanbul are second class citizens. The Greeks in Istanbul cannot even re-open the Halki seminary on the Princes' Islands. The Suriani Christians in Mardin and Midyat live in fear of their lives from Islamist Kurds. 90% have left for Sweden.

So yes, when considering "GENOCIDE," one must ponder the results. The complete eradication of all Christian communities in Turkey, whether Greek, Suriani, Armenian, versus the persistent presence of strong Muslim minorities in places like Thrace or Montenegro, which suffered centuries of brutal Ottoman occupation.

[Nov 26, 2020] A Trump win will make Israel more open more reckless more racist and more strongly and vaingloriously a terrorist entity.

Nov 26, 2020 | www.unz.com

Anon [241] Disclaimer , says: November 26, 2020 at 1:54 pm GMT • 5.2 hours ago

@A123 onducting unconventional warfare. That form of combat is defined by the U.S. government's National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 as "activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow an occupying power or government by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary or guerrilla force in a denied area" in the pursuit of various security-related strategic objectives.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-just-admitted-arming-anti-assad-syrian-rebels-big-mistake-1.6894850

[Nov 26, 2020] Who's kidding who?

Nov 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

donten , Nov 26 2020 17:15 utc | 14

Biden: 'America Is Back,' 'Ready To Lead World'

USA won't even take care of its own people, and the world does not need a wannabe King of the Hill. Get ready for a complete tragedy...

Flournoy, Haines, and Haspel, who's kidding who?

[Nov 26, 2020] Trump vs Biden- Will the Future Belong to the Patriots or the Globalists

Nov 26, 2020 | off-guardian.org

t is an undeniable fact that the republic has entered one of the most dangerous crises of its short existence. This is not only due to the disputed election results of November 3 rd , but also to a multitude of other factors beyond American borders, including the global financial crisis which a certain pandemic has unleashed upon the world, and slide towards a major world war between great powers that has accelerated chaotically in recent years.

As unpopular as it might be to state in polite society, as of this writing it is still impossible to state with 100% certainty that Joe Biden will in fact be inaugurated on January 20, 2021. The simple reason for this is that verifiable evidence of vast partisan vote fraud tied to the highest echelons of British Intelligence have mounted with every passing day with Dominion voting systems most recently accused of erasing 2.7 million Trump votes across the nation , and giving 220 000 pro-Trump votes to Biden in Pennsylvania (along with hundreds of other vote counting anomalies and technology glitches across all major swing states).

These and other major signs of mass vote fraud have giving rise to reasonable questions of the validity of the official results which will be taken to the courts as Gen. Michael Flynn's Attorney Sidney Powell eloquently laid out recently.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/SFCXPw1t17o?feature=oembed TRUMP, BIDEN AND THE ONCOMING MELTDOWN

By now most people reading this are aware (or should be aware) that the trans Atlantic financial system has been set to melt down under a $1.5 quadrillion derivatives time bomb being held together by a mix of wishful thinking, hyperinflationary money printing and vast unpayable securitized debts waiting to default. It should also come as no surprise that the Great Reset Agenda designed to coordinate the "post-COVID world order" has nothing to do with any actual pandemic, and everything to do with imposing a new bankers' dictatorship onto the nations of the earth.

If you are uncertain about these claims, I invite you to read my recent study "What the Great Reset Architects Don't Want you to Know About Economics".

Both Trump and Biden profess to support American leadership to the world going into this storm, but both men operate on very much opposing paradigms of what this means, and what foreign policy tradition should be activated.

Where Biden has championed the idea that "America should lead the world" in opposition to the dangerous rise in "authoritarianism, nationalism and illiberalism" giving the reigns of foreign policy over to a team packed with hawkish representatives of the Military Industrial Complex, Trump has done something different.

On November 9 the incumbent president fired Mark Esper (possibly to subvert a planned coup) and instated General Christopher Miller to the position of Defense Secretary who has called for a total end to the 19 year Afghan war stating :

we are not a people of perpetual war. It is the antithesis of everything for which we stand and for which our ancestors fought. All wars must end."

Having vocalized his desires to return the USA to its traditional protectionist, non-interventionist agenda repeatedly over four years, Trump famously characterized the battle at hand as one of "patriots against the globalists."

And yet, despite these facts, many apparently intelligent people have celebrated that the "bad orange man" has finally been ousted and normality may once again occur.

Hogwash.

In an April 2020 Foreign Policy article , Joe Biden called for the re-assertion of American leadership of the world order stating that "for over 70 years, the United States under democratic and republican presidents, played a leading role in writing the rules" of the world order. Predicting the two possible scenarios that will befall the world should the USA continue to "abdicate our leadership" as Trump has done, Biden says that either: 1) Someone else takes America's place as global hegemon that doesn't "advance our interests and values or 2) "No one will and chaos will ensue".

But wait a minute!

Shouldn't there be a third option in Biden's crystal ball? What about the option of a world defined by sovereign nations working in win-win cooperation and mutual self interest? Sadly, from a zero-sum mind that can only think in "balance of power" terms, this third scenario cannot exist.

The paradox for such little minds, however, is that the very essence of America's emerging from WWII in a leading position that Biden praises is entirely premised on the understanding that the world is more than a zero-sum system.

THE FORGOTTEN MULTI-POLAR TRADITIONS OF THE USA

From the drafting of the UN Charter in 1941, the formulation of the Bretton Woods system in 1944, to the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, there is no doubt that there is very little that America has not directly influenced.

While this leadership is undeniable and often objectively destructive as sin, it is too easily forgotten that the UN Charter, as outlined by Franklin Roosevelt was premised on the belief that America must never become an empire but merely help those in need by providing the means of industrial development. This was essentially understood as the internationalization of the New Deal which included social safety nets, bank regulation, productive work guarantees and infrastructure projects to all other nations aspiring independence across Africa, Asia and the Americas or struggling the heal from the destructive effects of the war.

FDR's vision for the IMF/World Bank mandates were never to reconquer poor nations under a new system of debt slavery and conditionalities, but to extend productive credit for long term megaprojects that were in the common aims of mankind and which angered Churchill immensely.

Most importantly, this vision was premised on the need for a trust-based U.S.-Russia-China alliance that never would have permitted the emergence of a bipolar Cold War.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3VRRQO1bRjQ?feature=oembed

Working alongside such anti-imperial co-thinkers as Republican leader Wendell Willkie, Vice President Henry Wallace, economist Harry Dexter White, confidante Harry Hopkins, Asst. Secretary of State Sumner Welles and Attorney General Robert Jackson (to name a few), this small but powerful group of patriots representing both parties, worked vigorously to ensure not only that the Wall Street/City of London Frankenstein Monster of Nazism would be put down but that Churchill's vision of a restored British Imperial system would not succeed.

THE TRUE SPIRIT OF THE UNITED NATIONS

Unlike the earlier "League of Nations" which intended to destroy all national sovereignty in the wake of WWI, the United Nations was always meant to become a platform for dialogue, and economic multilateral trust-building much more in harmony with the multipolar alliance now sweeping the world (and scaring the hell out of the thing that controls Joe Biden).

If this is hard to believe, let me cite article one :

To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;

To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;

To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and

To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

These principles were expanded even further to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948 which re-iterated the founding principles of America's Declaration of Independence- extending those unalienable rights to all mankind as FDR envisioned stating in its preamble :

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

These were the ideas that were meant to give life to the "Four Freedoms" first enunciated by President Roosvelt in 1941 and re-asserted by his anti-imperial Vice President Henry Wallace in 1942.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_p2TQaUf3pQ?feature=oembed

Now admittedly this positive American foreign policy outlook which launched the post-war age is a far cry from anything the world has come to recognize in the USA since the emergence of the Cold War and especially since the murder of John F Kennedy who had done much to resist America's full takeover by this newly revised British Empire (which some have chosen in recent years to label "the deep state").

Much like the US Constitution itself, these principles largely remained ink on parchment as a new age of Cold Warriors, Rhodes Scholars and Fabians directed from British Intelligence created NATO , divided the world among the lighter skinned haves and darker skinned have nots while unleashing a system of endless wars onto the earth under a new Pax Americana.

These are the forces like Lord Mark Malloch Brown and George Soros who together have poured billions of dollars into promoting the post-nation state order using anti-UN Charter doctrines like Responsibility to Protect (R2P), overthrowing governments with color revolutions and running a current coup against President Trump .

Today a small window is still open for a renewal of the forgotten traditions of the American republican traditions that were upheld by such leaders as John Quincy Adams, Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, FDR and JFK. President Trump has clearly taken a stand in opposition to the reconquest of the republic by the deep state and it remains to be seen if the American people have the fortitude to do everything in their power to organize themselves in defense of the republic and civilization more generally.

Originally published at Strategic Culture .

Antonym , Nov 24, 2020 4:12 AM

"OR"
There are also middle ways: my ideal would be a real United Nations without dominant bullies, capable of reigning in globalist MNCs, governments or religions.
Population numbers will have to weight in much more for voting power and no SC privileges for amassing nuclear bombs.

Melvin Logan , Nov 23, 2020 1:08 PM

This essay includes McKinley as a defender of "Republican traditions," and of course it's hard to argue against that position, seeing as how McKinley was a tool of the Big City corrupt political system. That he fraudulently used the sinking of the "Maine" to declare war on Spain, and then put down an insurgent revolt by natives of the Philippines by allowing U.S.soldiers to garott them, is simply in the tradition of Republicans. We agree.

Doctortrinate , Nov 22, 2020 9:41 PM

who will the future belong to ?

not to those, who repeatedly ignore the past.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/xQOekCIEEhc?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

Paul Vonharnish , Nov 23, 2020 1:02 AM Reply to Doctortrinate

Excellent scripting in the court scene. I remember seeing this film when it was first released. Made goose bumps
The public has been drummed down to the point where they refuse to question what props up the fake wigs on the court jesters

Doctortrinate , Nov 23, 2020 5:02 AM Reply to Paul Vonharnish

yes, It was an eclectic time examination post experimentation perhaps .and there was room for it, uncrowded by the weight of obligation – keeping it at distance was comfortable even held the sense that the destructive order was being outrun, until..the reconditioning ascent of a harpy and it's handbag,

those wigs.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/U1wcDiOuo6Q?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

Binra , Nov 23, 2020 11:52 AM Reply to Paul Vonharnish

The cess-pit beneath our seeming foundation, is become a source for self-righteous vengeance – coming into our very private chambers after we seemed to 'save face' or raise it over and against the hateful in conquest.

The presumption to be free of the evil that one has set ones face against is the generating of the 'cess-pit' as something to be eradicated, lidded over, cancelled, such as to preserve the 'order' that runs above its denial.

Self-revulsion as a concept, can be opined about, but human self-hatred is a hell indeed if not a final fact.

The revealing of us to ourselves can be the dis-illusioning of what we thought to be and truly believed but was never true – even though lived.
or the tarrying in such illusion as the exploiting of its underlying themes of 'getting' for a self set apart from the life it represents.

richard , Nov 22, 2020 9:02 PM

"THE TRUE SPIRIT OF THE UNITED NATIONS
Unlike the earlier "League of Nations" which intended to destroy all national sovereignty in the wake of WWI, the United Nations was always meant to become a platform for dialogue, and economic multilateral trust-building much more in harmony with the multipolar alliance now sweeping the world "

Oh really? hear are some U.N. quotes:

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism, and religious dogmas." – Brock Adams, Director UN Health Organization

"A world government can intervene militarily in the internal affairs of any nation when it disapproves of their activities." – Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary General

"Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order [referring to the 1991 LA Riot]. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond [i.e., an "extraterrestrial" invasion], whether real or *promulgated* [emphasis mine], that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this *scenario*, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government."
Dr. Henry Kissinger, Bilderberger Conference, Evians, France, 1991

"No one will enter the New World Order unless he or she will make a pledge to worship Lucifer. No one will enter the New Age unless he will take a Luciferian Initiation."
David Spangler, Director of Planetary Initiative, United Nations

"The UN is but a long-range, international banking apparatus clearly set up for financial and economic profit by a small group of powerful One-World revolutionaries, hungry for profit and power.
"The depression was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World Money powers, triggered by the planned sudden shortage of supply of call money in the New York money market .The One World Government leaders and their ever close bankers have now acquired full control of the money and credit machinery of the U.S. via the creation of the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank."
Curtis Dall, FDR's son-in-law as quoted in his book, My Exploited Father-in-Law

"The planning of UN can be traced to the 'secret steering committee' established by Secretary [of State Cordell] Hull in January 1943. All of the members of this secret committee, with the exception of Hull, a Tennessee politician, were members of the Council on Foreign Relations. They saw Hull regularly to plan, select, and guide the labors of the [State] Department's Advisory Committee. It was, in effect, the coordinating agency for all the State Department's postwar planning."
Professors Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, writing in their study of the CFR, "Imperial Brain Trust: The CFR and United States Foreign Policy." (Monthly Review Press, 1977).

"The most powerful clique in these (CFR) groups have one objective in common: they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the U.S. They want to end national boundaries and racial and ethnic loyalties supposedly to increase business and ensure world peace. What they strive for would inevitably lead to dictatorship and loss of freedoms by the people. The CFR was founded for "the purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government."
Harpers, July l958

Paul Vonharnish , Nov 23, 2020 12:47 AM Reply to richard

Hello richard: Excellent listing of verifiable quotes. Thanks!
The establishment of the United Nations has done more to dis-unite the world than any other singular effort. Yet civilians are still looking for some daddy authority to straighten out the sticky fuzz they found in their navels

Dave Patterson , Nov 23, 2020 3:49 AM Reply to Paul Vonharnish

I don't know, I think the US going around the world for the last 100+ years bombing anyone who threatened their capitalist hegemony can pick up a pretty good share of the blame for an unstable world

paul , Nov 22, 2020 6:02 PM

Neither will win. As always, the only real winners will be a certain Levantine minority. Heads they win, tails you lose.
The great mock battle to choose Israel Puppet 46 will play out over the next few weeks as pure theatre, with Creepy Joe picking up Trumpo's somewhat tarnished crown in due course. For all the difference it makes. Creepy Joe will be marginally even more of a puppet than Trumpo.
The court challenges are going nowhere. Some have already been dropped or dismissed, and the rest soon will be, irrespective of vote rigging and ballot stuffing on an epic scale. Likewise, there will be no attempt to reverse the current outcome at the electoral college next month. Nothing's going to happen. Nada. Zilch. It's all pure kabuki.
Clowns and court jesters like Alex Jones or Giuliani will caper about making an exhibition of themselves, peddling their vitamin supplements and lining their pockets.
Trump will squeeze whatever cash he can from his gullible base to pay off his campaign debts. But none of this is serious. Trumpo has gone AWOL. He is not holding any public events. The lawsuits have been dropped. He is not putting any of his own money into them. The electoral college delegates will not go rogue to keep him in power. Georgia is gone. He is not going to flip Michigan or Pennsylvania.
Trumpo deserved to lose, whether he actually did or not. He abandoned his base the minute he was elected, and served out his time as a Zio Shill.
He built a grand total of 4 miles of his Big Beautiful Wall. Some of it has already fallen down. That only leaves 1,996 miles for the Beaner Illegal Immigrant Hordes to walk through. Obomber deported far more illegal immigrants than Trumpo, 1.1 million v. 800,000. His idea of draining The Swamp was to appoint Bolton, Abrams, Pompeo, Haspel, and half of Goldman Sachs to all the senior posts in his administration. The same goes for Bringing The Troops Home. None will actually be withdrawn from Afghanistan, despite the latest announcement. Like Rebuilding The Infrastructure.
Trumpo is a con man, a Bunko Artist. He achieved nothing. Because he never intended to. He never even tried. He was just another Mitt Romney.
Trumpism will just provide him with a meal ticket for some time to come. He needs to find another $400 million from somewhere to pay off his debts. The GOP will go full on Zionism, Globalism, Faggots, Trannies, Globo Homo, Open Borders, Amnesties.
One of Trumpo's last of many favours for Israel is to pardon the traitor and Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. He will soon be on his way home to a hero's welcome in Kosherstan.
Biden's new administration will be virtually 100% kosher, apart from a few token black/ gay/ trannie/ vagina/ shabbos goys.
Chief of staff, Attorney General, Treasury, all Chosen Folk.
Trumpo was never more than a Zionist puppet, just like Wilders, Orban, Salvini, AFD, Duterte. All 100% Faux Right Controlled Opposition created by the Chosen Folk.

Jean Wilson , Nov 22, 2020 7:57 PM Reply to paul

Thanks Paul, for that excellent description of Trump and what we can expect from Biden until he leaves/dies and we have Kamala. The policies will remain virtually unchanged as the President is irrelevant.

Researcher , Nov 22, 2020 5:58 PM

Bankers have been running the world for centuries, not empires, not presidents, not parties, not nations.

They provide nation states with two (or more) parties with seemingly oppositional values, but who are controlled behind the scenes by the same banking cabal. Trump is working with the cabal, just as closely as his predecessors, Obama, Bush, Clinton etc., to create the illusion of opposition, the illusion of difference, the illusion of choice and the illusion of hope.

Just as the election was obviously stolen, so too it was planned to create internal conflict and violence. Both parties play the game of electioneering to obfuscate the theft of civil rights and assets from the populace without opposition. The media enhances the process of obfuscation. The voters are too busy fighting amongst themselves to see the outright theft of their real assets.

There are no individuals or groups who attain positions of power in any government or nation who oppose the banking cartel that rules the world, owns and controls all the largest corporations, security state apparatus, the militaries and defense sectors of all nations.

There are no heroes coming to anyone's rescue. No white hats, no black hats. They are all agents of the cryptocracy, because the goal has always been the enslavement of humanity, and that goal was attained long ago and has never wavered.

The New World Order was achieved with the formation of the United Nations as a front for the cryptocracy (banking cartel) to further its objectives through the cooperation of governments individuality and collectively controlling their populations.

Whether our enslavement was achieved using a kindler, gentler slavery called "capitalism", based on the consumption of poorly made goods exploiting cheap labor by corporate entities majority owned and controlled by the cryptocracy, in faux democracies, using the fake two party system, or whether slavery was achieved by force through communism where an appearance of state ownership obfuscated cryptocracy ownership and control, so wages could be lowered and people more tightly controlled, both political systems were a sham. Both systems were always controlled by the same cryptocracy; the banking cartel.

The cryptocracy ruled the capitalist West and the communist Eastern bloc with ease.

Researcher , Nov 22, 2020 6:06 PM Reply to Researcher

Just as all political parties are false enemies who work together behind the scenes, so too is the enmity between nation states and the supposedly opposed political and nation state blocs and alliances.

Opposition is created as a facade and pretext to facilitate immensely profitable skirmishes, occupations, hot wars, cold wars and civil conflicts. These methods of manufactured conflict accomplish control and ownership for the cryptocracy of large tracts of land with rare earth minerals and energy reserves as well as the labor and industry of large and small populations plus access to the taxes and wealth of all nation states.

These faux oppositional forces whether they be internal or external, create an illusion of a divided, hostile and fractured world for the unknowing and distracted public, who have had their history altered and rewritten, indoctrinated with propaganda in a Prussian model of education as 'learning by rote' instead of learning through exploration, reason, logic, invention and experimentation. As such, 'educated' populations have become another tool of the controllers where they are largely ignorant of the inextricable links between politics, energy, economies, the monetary system, wars, governments, crime, industry and human enslavement.

The false appearance of separation of these issues into compartmentalized subjects, compartmentalized thinking, are further enhanced and driven through sound bites using the cryptocracy owned corporate media.

Binary choices, compartmentalized issues, and supposed random events are sold to humanity to corral thinking, coerce conformity, limit options and choices within illusory paradigms where full spectrum dominance is fulfilled. Subsequently, all resources on earth including populations can be easily exploited for the purpose of profiteering, while simultaneously inflicting unnecessary misery and suffering through the leverage of usury and forced taxes within the monetary system.

Researcher , Nov 22, 2020 6:10 PM Reply to Researcher

The banking cartel (BIS, IMF, World Bank) own the major energy corporations, green and carbon based and that is why there has been a decades long push for carbon control and capture, using climate change pseudo science and propaganda as a way to control and limit our individual, national and collective energy consumption and output.

Since energy is the real currency that runs the world, and energy is also the way which we as humans and living creatures survive, innovate, create and function – as electrical and energetic beings – the cryptocracy believe that all energy, including our physical and neuronal bodily functions be wholly controlled by them, and them only. The cryptocracy already control our external energy and power systems and grids, and all oil, coal, gas, wind, hydro, nuclear, solar and hydrogen, which fuel human and economic activity.

The cryptocracy are not content to let us decide our own fates, occupations, business dealings, economies, health or lives using our inherent freedom as thinking, sentient and independent beings who are born free. They seek to further enslave our every thought, function and action through the technocracy and the biometric control and data grid they have built around us for the last century.

In the beginning of the 20th century, the banking cartel through their control of the chemical industry, extended their model of human slavery to include profiteering from destroying people's health, by controlling genetic and epigenetic expression through increased toxic exposure to external radiation, a poisoned and altered food chain, deficient soil, a poisoned fluoridated water supply, increased exposure to carcinogens, endocrine disruptive chemicals and unnecessary vaccines that wrought irreversible, long term negative effects.

The medical industrial complex and vaccine industry sought to claim credit for the eradication of diseases that had already been quelled through proper sanitation, plumbing, better nutrition and improved living conditions.

The control grid of populations through the economic system, military industrial complex, monetary system, faux governments, and the medical industrial complex has merged into a totalitarian model of complete control of all human behavior, health and bodily functions using faux pandemics, where governments coordinate terror operations against the citizenry.

The bankers are transitioning away from the current monetary, economic Ponzi scheme using the US petro dollar fractional reserve banking system, which could only function for a limited time, in a debt expansionary environment, underpinned by constant economic expansion and population growth.

Researcher , Nov 22, 2020 6:13 PM Reply to Researcher

A number of factors including increased standards of living, women entering the workforce, contraception and immunocontraception and cultural changes have inhibited population growth in developed nations, so that expansionary model has reached its 'limits of growth'. Governments have been hiding the lack of population growth using immigration. They've been hiding the contracting economic activity in developed nations by creating fake financial products and accounting frauds, banking fraud, rigged market indices and markets. The cryptocracy knowing this economic model would eventually collapse at their discretion, created unseen enemies to unite us against, be it a fictional virus, or fictional global warming, the result being a coordinated, top-down authoritarian monitoring, control of populations, economies and individuals.

The bankers, governments and industrialists are forcing humanity to transition to a technocracy controlled economy based on humans as capital, the collection, collation and control of all organic and non organic resources on earth including our biometric data and behavioral obedience, while they simultaneously enforce a liquidation of assets phase.

We are their assets and we are being liquidated.

At the end of every transitory economic cycle or created currency or financial crisis, the banking cartel and their minions facilitate a global catastrophe, whether that's a planned war between nations, civil unrest or a manufactured terror event. This serves as a cover for the harm that their planned economic transition (and failure) creates. These planned failures of economic systems created by the cryptocracy provide additional profits for the banking cartel where real assets are stripped from citizens in the form of savings, land, property, assets, businesses and redistributed by force, upwards to the oligarchs and cryptocracy.

That is the purpose of the lockdown and the faux pandemic. A continued and further redistribution of the global wealth of the majority of citizens to the 0.01% so that bankers, industrialists and governments who already control our food and energy supply, can force the majority into compliance with the vaccine program. The vaccine program creates a legal and cost efficient liquidation of the majority of humanity and the biometric enslavement of the remaining youth who manage to survive, while transitioning to the new economic model of a global digital currency based on physical human enslavement, human data management, with central command control using Artificial Intelligence.

Jean Wilson , Nov 22, 2020 8:07 PM Reply to Researcher

Thank you Researcher. Brilliant writing!

Lost in a dark wood , Nov 22, 2020 4:41 PM

No wonder the CIA hates Trump!

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/361227-us-begins-bombing-taliban-opium-plants-in-afghanistan
US begins bombing Taliban CIA opium plants in Afghanistan
11/20/17
The U.S. military has begun bombing opium production plants in Afghanistan as part of a new strategy targeting Taliban revenue, a top general said Monday. "Last night, we conducted strikes in northern Helmand [Province] to hit the Taliban where it hurts, in their narcotics financing," said Gen. John Nicholson, commander of the NATO-led Operation Resolute Support in the country.
--

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/11/21/merkels-germany-tells-trump-not-to-bring-troops-home-from-afghanistan/
Merkel's Germany Tells Trump Not to Bring Troops Home from Afghanistan
21 Nov 2020
The German government has come out in opposition to President Donald Trump's plan to bring American troops home from Afghanistan, arguing that putting an end to America's longest war would be too "hasty".

sharon marlowe , Nov 22, 2020 6:03 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

What has happened to people? If the U.S. says it is bombing an opium production plant, that means they're lying. First thing I think of is who did the U.S./CIA/Trump want killed and why? But you interpret it as Trump trying to stop the opium business of the CIA?

And then you follow it with Trump, after four years of bombing Afghanistan, is somehow being pressured by Germany to continue bombing Afghanistan?

This is pro-Trump propaganda.

wardropper , Nov 22, 2020 7:03 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Frankly, I don't think we have any idea what the CIA thinks of Trump.

Researcher , Nov 22, 2020 7:32 PM Reply to wardropper

They must think he's the greatest actor on earth, since apparently some who understand the bankers are in league with and controlling governments, the UN, WHO and the WEF against humanity, yet they also believe that Trump is standing up for the Constitution against the banking cartel, the military and the vaccine industry.

Except he isn't and hasn't.

By declaring a fake emergency and continuing that emergency, while creating OPERATION WARP SPEED, he handed the country over to the military, PhRMA and FEMA.

He has no intention of handing it back to the citizens and he's had every means and every opportunity.

I think a great majority of people are simply in denial on the left and the right because they don't want to believe they've spent their entire lives being conned by bankers, politicians and oligarchs using cheap tricks, third rate acting, fake science and obvious monetary fraud and gangster governments.

The veil of their human enslavement has been lifted off their faces and they still refuse to see the obvious truth.

Instead they hide behind masks, false enemies and the lies they tell themselves. It'd be sad if it wasn't so pathetic.

wardropper , Nov 22, 2020 7:58 PM Reply to Researcher

I agree with all that, but the CIA is not renowned for advertising what it 'thinks'

Moneycircus , Nov 22, 2020 11:08 PM Reply to wardropper

The CIA does not 'think'. It was set up by Wall Street and the bankers as the muscle of Wall Street and the bankers


paul
, Nov 24, 2020 12:58 PM Reply to Kit Knightly

Trumpo deserves to be put on trial and executed after a suitably fair trial if only for his actions in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Palestine and elsewhere. For the murder of General Soleimani and 30 others, for all the children who have died in those countries as a result of US economic terrorism and actual terrorism on his watch. It doesn't matter if he failed to control others who were allowed to pursue their own agenda. A commander who loses control of his troops is fully liable when they run amok.
Their is very little to be said in his favour. We have come very close to war on a colossal scale on several occasions over the past two years as a result of his actions. The fact that this did not come to pass and disaster was avoided in no way goes to his credit. This should be attributed to the Grace of God or my lucky rabbit's foot. And the fact that Russia, China, and even Iran and North Korea have incomparably better and more responsible leadership than we do.
Western leadership, Obama, Clinton, Trump, Sarkozy, Macron, Merkel, May, Cameron, Johnson, is the worst in its history. Arrogant, venal, corrupt, irredeemably ignorant, delusional and ideologically driven.
So can anything positive at all about Trump's legacy?
Biden may be even worse.
Clinton, rabid and deranged, and even more dishonest, certainly would have been.
But we deserve something better than the choice between a dogshit sandwich or a catshit sandwich.
Trump has at least exposed the MSM for what it is, and forced the deep state to take off the mask of sham democracy and reveal its true ugly face.
But it's not much of a legacy for four years.

John Goss , Nov 22, 2020 1:08 PM

The Second World War was the turning point here in the UK and in the US, When the war finished there was a Labour Party which was actually a Labour Party. For some years before that the US Democratic Party had been and was a Democratic Party, When paper ballots mitigated against fraud Franklin D, Roosevelt was elected for an amazing 4 terms. He died days before the end of the war having introduced welfare reforms that endeared him to people.

It has been pretty much downhill since then, ending up with Keir Starmer at the head of the Labour Party and Joe Biden at the head of the Democratic Party. Need I write more?

el Gallinazo , Nov 22, 2020 3:19 PM Reply to John Goss

Problem>reaction>solution. The Great Depression in the USA was triggered by the banksters being instructed to create a vast credit bubble in the 20's with their fractional reserve system (being able to lend 9 fake dollars for every one they actually owned) and then instructed to withdraw credit very rapidly, creating a cascade of defaults.. That is a historical fact easily researched.

This article's view of recent history is among the most superficial I have ever read. I do not believe in democracy being an Agorist, because democracy is a trick of the predator class. When I see a government which does not enforce its rules through the barrel of a gun and cages, I may be tempted to re-evalute my views. Still waiting however. That said, the one thing that I agree with in this article is that Trump won the election handily based on legal and valid votes and the apparent Biden win was based on huge fraud. One should never underestimate Sydney Powell, even with her sweet Georgia Plantation accent. She may be the first competent snd trustworthy hire Trump has ever made in the last four years, and one may ask why this is. On one level, the fraud was designed to put Biden in the White House. On a deeper level, it was designed to rip the country apart. I would recommend that the American people rushing to the giant box stores (which are permitted to stay open while the various governors' blatantly illegal EO's have shut down their mom and pop competitors) to buy toilet paper for the coming Darkest Winter of the fake scamdemic, would be wise to load up also on beer and popcorn so they can watch this shitshow on their giant plasma TV's from the sofa.

Melvin Logan , Nov 23, 2020 1:34 PM Reply to el Gallinazo

The notion of "fraud" in the election is a charade. Research the Dominion voting system and you will discover that Ms. Powell, despite the high regard she has attained, is blowing smoke. Her entire case against Dominion from Chavez to German vote counting is a fat joke. On her, and on us. Why is she doing this? We will find out in due time.

[Nov 26, 2020] The Ruling Elite's War on Truth by Chris Hedges

Notable quotes:
"... Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires. ..."
"... Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn't done to protect democracy. It was done because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their interests. ..."
"... Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN during this campaign that Russian disinformation efforts are "more problematic" than in 2016. He warned that "this time around, the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to spread their propaganda in the mainstream media." ..."
"... This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious redbaiting campaign without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show on Russia-funded RT America ..."
"... Voice of America ..."
"... World Socialist Web Site, ..."
"... We let these companies get this monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they're exercising that power. ..."
"... In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a chance. ..."
"... The New York Times, ..."
"... The Dallas Morning News ..."
"... The Christian Science Monitor ..."
Nov 23, 2020 | scheerpost.com
40 Comments on Chris Hedges: The Ruling Elite's War on Truth American political leaders display a widening disconnect from reality intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by global corporations and billionaires. By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

Joe Biden's victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party's longstanding charge that Russia was hijacking and compromising US elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people.

But imagine if Donald Trump had been reelected. Would the Democrats and pundits at The New York Time s , CNN and MSNBC pay homage to a fair electoral process? Or, having spent four years trying to impugn the integrity of the 2016 presidential race, would they once again haul out the blunt instrument of Russian interference to paint Trump as Vladimir Putin's Manchurian candidate?

Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires.

... ... ...

The two warring factions within the ruling elite, which fight primarily over the spoils of power while abjectly serving corporate interests, peddle alternative realities. If the deep state and Venezuelan socialists or Russia intelligence operatives are pulling the strings no one in power is accountable for the rage and alienation caused by the social inequality, the unassailability of corporate power, the legalized bribery that defines our political process, the endless wars, austerity and de-industrialization. The social breakdown is, instead, the fault of shadowy phantom enemies manipulating groups such as Black Lives Matters or the Green Party.

"The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of us – black and white – rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal, and mismanagement," Matt Taibbi writes.

These fictional narratives are dangerous. They erode the credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics. They posit that news and facts are no longer true or false. Information is accepted or discarded based on whether it hurts or promotes one faction over another. While outlets such as Fox News have always existed as an arm of the Republican Party, this partisanship has now infected nearly all news organizations, including publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post , along with the major tech platforms that disseminate information and news. A fragmented public with no common narrative believes whatever it wants to believe.

... ... ...

The flagrant partisanship and discrediting of truth across the political spectrum are swiftly fueling the rise of an authoritarian state. The credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics, already deeply corrupted by PACs, the electoral college, lobbyists, the disenfranchisement of third-party candidates, gerrymandering and voter suppression, is being eviscerated.

Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn't done to protect democracy. It was done because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their interests.

The press, meanwhile, has largely given up on journalism. It has retreated into competing echo chambers that only speak to true believers. This catering exclusively to one demographic, which it sets against another demographic, is commercially profitable. But it also guarantees the balkanization of the United States and edges us closer and closer to fratricide.

When Trump leaves the White House millions of his enraged supports, hermetically sealed inside hyperventilating media platforms that feed back to them their rage and hate, will see the vote as fraudulent, the political system as rigged, and the establishment press as propaganda. They will target, I fear, through violence, the Democratic Party politicians, mainstream media outlets and those they demonize as conspiratorial members of the deep state, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Democratic Party is as much to blame for this disintegration as Trump and the Republican Party.

The election of Biden is also very bad news for journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley, Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey St. Clair or Robert Scheer who refuse to be courtiers to the ruling elites. Journalists that do not spew the approved narrative of the right-wing, or, alternatively, the approved narrative of the Democratic Party, have a credibility the ruling elite fears.

The worse things get – and they will get worse as the pandemic leaves hundreds of thousands dead and thrusts millions of Americans into severe economic distress –the more those who seek to hold the ruling elites, and in particular the Democratic Party, accountable will be targeted and censored in ways familiar to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, now in a London prison and facing possible extradition to the United States and life imprisonment.

Barack Obama's assault on civil liberties, which included the repeated misuse of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, the passage of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to permit the military to act as a domestic police force and the ordering of the assassination of U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists in Yemen, was far worse than those of George W. Bush. Biden's assault on civil liberties, I suspect, will surpass those of the Obama administration.

The censorship was heavy handed during the campaign. Digital media platforms, including Google, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, along with the establishment press worked shamelessly as propaganda arms for the Biden campaign. They were determined not to make the "mistake" they made in 2016 when they reported on the damaging emails, released by WikiLeaks, from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. Although the emails were genuine, papers such as The New York Times routinely refer to the Podesta emails as "disinformation." This, no doubt, pleases its readership, 91 percent of whom identify as Democrats according to the Pew Research Center. But it is another example of journalistic malfeasance.

Following the election of Trump, the media outlets that cater to a Democratic Party readership made amends. The New York Times was one of the principal platforms that amplified Russiagate conspiracies, most of which turned out to be false. At the same time, the paper largely ignored the plight of the disposed working class that supported Trump. When the Russiagate story collapsed, the paper pivoted to focus on race, embodied in the 1619 Project. The root cause of social disintegration -- the neoliberal order, austerity and deindustrialization -- was ignored since naming it would alienate the paper's corporate advertisers and the elites on whom the paper depends for access.

Once the 2020 election started, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets censored and discredited information that could hurt Biden, including a tape of Joe Biden speaking with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which appears to be authentic. They gave credibility to any rumor, however spurious, which was unfavorable to Trump. Twitter and Facebook blocked access to a New York Post story about the emails allegedly found on Hunter Biden's discarded laptop.

Twitter locked the New York Post out of its own account for over a week. Glenn Greenwald, whose article on Hunter Biden was censored by his editors at The Intercept, which he helped found, resigned. He released the email exchanges with his editors over his article. Ignoring the textual evidence of censorship, editors and writers at The Intercept engaged in a public campaign of character assassination against Greenwald. This sordid behavior by self-identified progressive journalists is a page out of the Trump playbook and a sad commentary on the collapse of journalistic integrity.

The censorship and manipulation of information was honed and perfected against WikiLeaks. When WikiLeaks tries to release information, it is hit with botnets or distributed denial of service attacks. Malware attacks WikiLeaks' domain and website. The WikiLeaks site is routinely shut down or unable to serve its content to its readers. Attempts by WikiLeaks to hold press conferences see the audio distorted and the visual images corrupted. Links to WikiLeaks events are delayed or cut. Algorithms block the dissemination of WikiLeaks content. Hosting services, including Amazon, removed WikiLeaks from its servers. Julian Assange, after releasing the Iraqi war logs, saw his bank accounts and credit cards frozen. WikiLeaks' PayPal accounts were disabled to cut off donations. The Freedom of the Press Foundation in December 2017 closed down the anonymous funding channel to WikiLeaks which was set up to protect the anonymity of donors. A well-orchestrated smear campaign against Assange was amplified and given credibility by the mass media and filmmakers such as Alex Gibney. Assange and WikiLeaks were first. We are next.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN during this campaign that Russian disinformation efforts are "more problematic" than in 2016. He warned that "this time around, the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to spread their propaganda in the mainstream media."

This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious redbaiting campaign without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show on Russia-funded RT America is the same reason Vaclav Havel could only be heard on the US-funded Voice of America during the communist control of Czechoslovakia. I did not choose to leave the mainstream media. I was pushed out. And once anyone is pushed out, the ruling elite is relentless about discrediting the few platforms left willing to give them, and the issues they raise, a hearing.

"If the problem is 'American citizens' being cultivated as 'assets' trying to put 'interference' in the mainstream media, the logical next step is to start asking Internet platforms to shut down accounts belonging to any American journalist with the temerity to report material leaked by foreigners (the wrong foreigners, of course – it will continue to be okay to report things like the 'black ledger')," writes Taibbi , who has done some of the best reporting on the emerging censorship. "From Fox or the Daily Caller on the right , to left-leaning outlets like Consortium or the World Socialist Web Site, to writers like me even – we're all now clearly in range of new speech restrictions, even if we stick to long-ago-established factual standards."

Taibbi argues that the precedent for overt censorship took place when the major digital platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Spotify, YouTube – in a coordinated move blacklisted the right-wing talk show host Alex Jones.

"Liberal America cheered," Taibbi told me when I interviewed him for my show, " On Contact ":

They said 'Well this is a noxious figure. This is a great thing. Finally, someone's taking action.' What they didn't realize is that we were trading an old system of speech regulation for a new one without any public discussion. You and I were raised in a system where you got punished for speech if you committed libel or slander or if there was imminent incitement to lawless action, right? That was the standard that the Supreme Court set, but that was done through litigation. There was an open process where you had a chance to rebut charges. That is all gone now.

Now, basically there's a handful of these tech distribution platforms that control how people get their media.

They've been pressured by the Senate, which has called all of their CEOs in, and basically ordered them, 'We need you to come up with a plan to prevent the sowing of discord and spreading of misinformation.' This has finally come into fruition. You see a major reputable news organization like the New York Post -- with a 200-year history -- locked out of its own Twitter account.

The story [Hunter Biden's emails] has not been disproven. It's not disinformation or misinformation. It's been suppressed as it would be suppressed in a Third World country. It's a remarkable historic moment. The danger is that we end up with a one-party informational system. There's going to be approved dialogue and unapproved dialogue that you can only get through certain fringe avenues. That's the problem. We let these companies get this monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they're exercising that power.

In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a chance.


[Chris Hedges writes a regular original column for ScheerPost every two weeks. Click here to sign up for email alerts.]

Chris Hedges Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News , The Christian Science Monitor , and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. paul easton NOVEMBER 23, 2020 AT 10:28 AM

It seems like the masters are just as deluded as the slaves. But the situation is unsustainable. When many millions of slaves become homeless and hungry that reality will become unavoidable. Who will they blame? Will they attack one another or will they revolt against the system? Soon we will see. Carolyn L Zaremba NOVEMBER 24, 2020 AT 10:30 AM

I share only alternative media since I don't trust "mainstream" media one iota. I post articles from the World Socialist Web Site, Consortium News, the Grayzone, Caitlin Johnstone and others all the time. I am a socialist. I was only banned from posting on FB once, for criticizing Israel. No surprise there. But I suspect FB of shadow banning, i.e., making it look like you've posted an article but making it invisible to others in their news feeds. I first learned of this practice from Craig Murray, another whose articles I post regularly. paul easton NOVEMBER 25, 2020 AT 1:35 AM

That is a chilling thought. I was shadow banned by medium.com a few years ago. It appeared to me that my posts and comments went in, but no one else could see them. At least with them I could tell something was wrong because I had regular conversations with some people. With FB I don't know if you could ever be sure. R Zwarich NOVEMBER 25, 2020 AT 5:37 AM

Mr. Easton is indeed correct. It is VERY chilling, especially if people would imagine what THEY would do, if they had our Enemy's morally depraved motivations, and if they had the control our Enemy has over ALL our communications switches.

There are three basic types of mass communications. One to many. Many to one. And many to many.

The Enemy has complete access to 'one to many' communications, and complete control over anyone's else's access to same. Many to one communications are ineffective for intrinsic reasons. Many to many communications offer myriad methods of cunningly creative control.

If we send out group emails, for example, in simple old-fashioned list-serves, they who control the switches could easily 'filter', to determine who among addressees gets any message, and who doesn't.

I used to write comments in the Boston Globe, the wholly owned plaything of a VERY weird old Billionaire and his proud and beautiful young trophy wife. (Less than half his age, of course). At first I thought the Globe NEVER censored. I could write anything, and it would post. Ahh but then I learned that the Globe is a HEAVY handed censor, but was clever enough to put a 'cookie' in your browser folder to tell their server to let you see your own comments, so you would not even know that no one else could see them. It was 'stealth censorship'.

We should try to remember that these people are morally depraved, in their constant paroxysms of raw Greed and raw Lust. No force exists any longer in our nation to restrain them. Anything we can 'see' that they CAN do, we can pretty much figure they already DO do, or else sooner or later will. Carol Shapiro NOVEMBER 23, 2020 AT 1:44 PM

While I don't agree with you, Chris Hedges, all the time, I believe you are our one. true. journalist. Thankful for your honesty. Insight. Huge intellect. Global experience. I am an "unenrolled" voter -- an extremely disillusioned former Bernie Sanders supporter. Truly, I feel like he would have been our closest attempt to achieving a real "citizen government". What a laughable term that is these days. Bernie never would have had a chance running as a Democrat – absurd. He should have walked out of that convention four years ago and taken his supporters with him. Oh wait- you said that. Never NOVEMBER 23, 2020 AT 2:59 PM

Don't forget that the selective coverage by the NY Times in this campaign didn't start when Biden became the nominee. Up to that time, the Times ran one or two articles on Sanders it seems. Whatever the number, it was miniscule. They almost completely ignored one of the most significant campaigns in modern history, thus helping to ensure it died on the vine. And when they did cover it one or two times, it was always negative.

Thank you, Chris, for your tireless work in defense of our stolen democracy. yuri NOVEMBER 23, 2020 AT 4:37 PM

US liberals more fascist than conservatives–long observed by historians/social philosophers
"amerikans do not converse as Tocqueville wrote, amerikans entertain each other. amerikans do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. the problem w amerikans is not Orwellian–it is huxleyan: amerikans love their oppression: Neil Postman Stephen Morrell NOVEMBER 24, 2020 AT 1:18 AM

Glenn Greenwald's points need stressing: (i) some of the most vociferous proponents of online censorship are mainstream and 'alternative' 'journalists' who on repeated occasions have egged on the carriers to shut sites, pages, accounts or postings; (ii) these 'journalists' aren't just serving the narrowest band of oligarchic media empires in history, but also are ivy-league bourgeois brats with no interest at all in exposing the injustices or malfeasance of bourgeois society, unlike many journalists of the past; and (iii) that it's not in the immediate material interests of the carriers to conduct the censorship, especially in the longterm, since it consumes resources and lowers traffic and profits. They'd much rather the government do it and for them to be compensated at taxpayer expense.

To avoid future potential government antitrust measures or nationalisation (heaven forbid!), Zuckerberg and his ilk have been censoring in heavyhanded and hamfisted ways that aren't so 'autonomous' but for the moment at least can be traced along the usual Democrat-controlled thinktank and CIA/FBI lines, which of course also are beyond public scrutiny. Despite the prospects for freedom of reach (and reach is what it's really about) apparently growing dimmer with each senate committee appearance by the carrier oligarchs, ways and means will be found to circumvent their draconian measures. While alternative non-censoring platforms have yet to gain significant traction, it likely won't take much for one to catch on, perhaps sparked by an outrageous event of suppression, that turns Facebook, Twitter, etc, into museum pieces. One might imagine, for instance, Wikileaks-style YouTube, Facebook, Twitter equivalents that act as true carriers, purely machine-based and devoid of human interference, that precludes them becoming the 'moral guardians' that Twitter, Facebook etc, are quickly metamorphising into.

As increasing swathes of the population appear not to be aligning within the bourgeoisie's preset ideological 'tribal' boundaries, there's a certain schadenfreude in seeing the rulers in dread of the truth getting out and spreading uncontrollably. Their tailored counter-narratives simply are too enfeebled and slight to square with the hard reality that's hitting everyone, from the most educated and brainwashed to the least. That ivy-league stenographers are being pressed into the service of censorship gives some indication of the desperation of the rulers. We all know, as do they but can never admit it publicly, that censorship and repression are frank admissions that they've lost all 'arguments' for their very existence.

To an extent, Trump has been responsible for letting the genie out of the bottle, as the first president probably since before Andrew Jackson to have failed, repeatedly, to put lipstick on the racist, capitalist imperial pig. The efforts by the ruling class at censorship and naked suppression of freedom of reach and of access to sources of truthful information will only increase in desperation as their myth-making narratives become ever more unable to rationalise a crisis that's they're beginning to see as intractable and endangering their rule.

[Nov 26, 2020] Propaganda, Election Fraud and the Death of Journalism

Nov 26, 2020 | www.realclearpolitics.com

COMMENTARY

By Frank Miele
RealClearPolitics

Easy question: Is it illegal to steal an election or not?

You would have to assume that it is no big deal based on the response to claims of widespread fraud in the contest between President Trump and Joe Biden. Big Media says the evidence just doesn't exist, and most Americans seem to be lost in a blue haze of blind acceptance that whatever they are told by the talking heads on TV must be true.

This kind of unthinking obedience to authority is a frightening harbinger of an America that is no longer a nation of laws, but rather a nation of edicts. You can already see that unfolding in the sheep-like acceptance of COVID-19 restrictions that blatantly ignore the Constitution. But if you dare do your own independent assessment of facts -- whether regarding the efficacy of mask use in preventing spread of coronavirus or regarding the security of electronic voting -- you will quickly come to a different conclusion than that which is approved by Big Tech, Big Media and Big Money.

Unfortunately, most people don't take the time to do their own research. They simply believe whatever is told to them. For those in thrall to the establishment media, that means they believe that Trump's allegations of election fraud are "baseless." Remember, the media made that declaration within hours of the election, long before any evidence had been presented in a court of law and before analysis had begun on the raw vote totals. Once that narrative was established, it didn't matter how many affidavits were presented, how many witnesses came forward, or how much analysis suggested that the vote count may have been manipulated. The jury of the American people had already been tainted by Big Media to believe the narrative that Trump is a sore loser.

Don't forget, the mainstream media -- in the interests of public enlightenment (now known as wokeness) -- have spent the past four years reporting as fact that the duly elected president of the United States is a liar, a tax cheat, a Russian puppet, and a racist. In other words, he is a con man who never should have been anywhere near the Oval Office in the first place. So why would anyone now believe his claims that Democrats used phony mail ballots, vote-counting software and foreign manipulation to steal the election? Most of the media is pretending that there is not even a real story to report in what, if true, would be one of the gravest constitutional crises in the history of our republic.

As Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said in his press conference Thursday, "The coverage of this has been almost as dishonest as the scheme itself. The American people are entitled to know this," he warned the press. "You don't have a right to keep it from them. You don't have a right to lie about it."

But, the newsrooms at CNN and MSNBC are keeping it from the public. They refused to even carry Giuliani's press conference laying out the evidence of election fraud. As for Fox News, they covered it, and then put a reporter on the air to say the claims were "simply not true" or "baseless." Clearly, we are not going to get the truth from the media. Has there been even one reporter for a mainstream outlet such as the Washington Post asking questions about the vulnerability of electronic voting systems to hacking or manipulation? Is any news organization demanding that the Justice Department or FBI get to the bottom of the story?

The loss of a free and neutral press means that democracy cannot work even if its elections were completely above board. The capacity of the people to self-govern is dependent on their access to true and accurate information. Sadly, the opposite principle applies as well. When journalism abandons objectivity in favor of an agenda, then the people are in the position of cattle being led to slaughter.

Thomas Jefferson described the abuses of a free press in 1814 in a letter to his friend Walter Jones:

"I deplore the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity and the mendacious spirit of those who write for them These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief This has, in a great degree, been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit."

Ouch! Take that, New York Times! Take that, CNN!

Of course, it is just such a malign "party spirit" that informs almost all mainstream journalism in the Age of Trump -- a spirit that is visible in the hostility towards Trump himself, but also in the accommodation towards Democrats such as Joe Biden. Last Monday's Biden press conference was a stunning abdication of responsibility by the media for its much-vaunted role of "speaking truth to power" -- or at least asking tough questions.

Three of the first four queries were merely anti-Trump questions asked in a new way. Instead of asking Trump "How do you justify your unprecedented attempt to obstruct and delay a smooth transfer of power?" the reporters merely asked Biden what he thought about Trump's "unprecedented attempt" blah blah blah. Then the next three questions were about COVID, which after six months of campaigning, even Sleepy Joe Biden could answer with his eyes closed.

Isn't the media going to hold Biden accountable just like they claimed to hold Trump accountable? Why not ask about the curious patterns of vote counting in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia that make millions of people think Biden tried to steal the election? Shouldn't he be asked to support a full investigation to prove his victory was legitimate? How about a question about whether Hunter Biden will come out of hiding now that the election is over? How about asking the "president-in-waiting" to condemn the BLM and antifa violence that sent several innocent Trump supporters to the hospital two weeks ago?

How about our celebrity journalists celebrate their own crucial role as defenders of democracy? If they don't want to "render themselves useless," they need to swear allegiance to facts, wherever they lead, and not to one party. Or as Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana put it more indelicately, "They have to be equal opportunity assholes."

But they aren't -- and sooner or later the American people will get tired of being manipulated. Journalism is supposed to give an honest account of the facts so that people can make up their own minds what they believe to be true. Propaganda, on the other hand, is a dishonest attempt to persuade people not to examine the facts for themselves. Journalism starts with facts and allows people to reach their own conclusion. Propaganda starts with a conclusion and manipulates people into accepting it as fact. You can decide for yourself whether what we have today is journalism or propaganda.

But the bottom line is this: Whether or not Donald Trump can prove his case in court should be irrelevant to the job of the press. What honest reporters ought to recognize is the significance of the allegation itself, the historical nature of the crime being alleged, and the importance to the future of our republic that the case must be heard.

Too bad there are so few honest reporters left.

[Nov 25, 2020] How Joe Biden Plans to Make The American Empire Great Again

Nov 25, 2020 | www.mintpressnews.com


hroughout his campaign, Joe Biden railed against Donald Trump's 'America First' foreign policy, claiming it weakened the United States and left the world in disarray.

He pledged to reverse this decline and recover the damage Trump did to America's reputation. While Donald Trump called to make America Great Again, Biden seeks to Make the American Empire Great Again.

Among the president-elect's pledges is to end the so-called forever wars – the decades-long imperial projects in Afghanistan and Iraq that began under the Bush administration.

Yet Biden – a fervent supporter of those wars – will task ending them to the most neoconservative elements of the Democratic party and ideologues of permanent war.

Michele Flournoy and Tony Blinken sit atop Biden's thousands-strong foreign policy brain trust and have played central roles in every U.S. war going back to the Clinton administration.

In the Trump era, they've cashed in, founding Westexec Advisors – a corporate consulting firm that has become home for Obama administration officials awaiting a return to government.

Flournoy is Biden's leading pick for secretary of defense and Blinken is expected to be national security advisor.

Biden's foxes guard the henhouse

Since the 1990s, Flournoy and Blinken have steadily risen through the ranks of the military-industrial complex, shuffling back and forth between the Pentagon and hawkish think-tanks funded by the U.S. government, weapons companies, and oil giants.

Under Bill Clinton, Flournoy was the principal author of the 1996 Quadrinellial Defense Review, the document that outlined the U.S. military's doctrine of permanent war – what it called "full spectrum dominance."

Flournoy called for "unilateral use of military power" to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources."

As Bush administration officials lied to the world about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD's, Flournoy remarked that "In some cases, preemptive strikes against an adversary's [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities may be the best or only option we have to avert a catastrophic attack against the United States."

Meet the Filthy Rich War Hawks That Make up the Joe Biden Foreign Policy Team Meet the filthy rich war hawks, including Susan Rice and Michele Flournoy, that make up the foreign policy team of President-elect Joe Biden. MintPress News | Alan Macleod | Nov 13

Tony Blinken was a top advisor to then-Senate foreign relations committee chair Joe Biden, who played a key role in shoring up support among the Democrat-controlled Senate for Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq.

As Iraq was plunged into chaos and bloodshed, Flournoy was among the authors of a paper titled "Progressive Internationalism" that called for a "smarter and better" style of permanent war. The paper chastised the anti-war left and stated that "Democrats will maintain the world's most capable and technologically advanced military, and we will not flinch from using it to defend our interests anywhere in the world."

With Bush winning a second term, Flournoy advocated for more troop deployments from the sidelines.

In 2005, Flournoy signed onto a letter from the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, asking Congress to "increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps (by) at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years."

In 2007, she leveraged her Pentagon experience and contacts to found what would become one of the premier Washington think tanks advocating endless war across the globe: the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

CNAS is funded by the U.S. government, arms manufacturers, oil giants, Silicon Valley tech giants, billionaire-funded foundations, and big banks.

Flournoy joined the Obama administration and was appointed as under secretary of defense for policy, the position considered the "brains" of the Pentagon.

She was keenly aware that the public was wary of more quagmires. In the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, she crafted a new concept of warfare that would expand the permanent war state while giving the appearance of a drawdown.

Flournoy wrote that "unmanned systems hold great promise" – a reference to the CIA's drone assassination program.

This was the Obama-era military doctrine of hybrid war. It called for the U.S. to be able to simultaneously wage war on numerous fronts through secret warfare, clandestine weapons transfers to proxies, drone strikes, and cyber-attacks – all buttressed with propaganda campaigns targeting the American public through the internet and corporate news media.

Architects of America's Hybrid wars

Flournoy continued to champion the endless wars that began in the Bush-era and was a key architect of Obama's disastrous troop surge in Afghanistan. As U.S. soldiers returned in body bags and insurgent attacks and suicide bombings increased some 65% from 2009 and 2010, she deceived the Senate Armed Services Committee, claiming that the U.S. was beginning to turn the tide against the Taliban.

Even with her lie that the U.S. and Afghan government were starting to beat the Taliban back, Flournoy assured the senate that the U.S. would have to remain in Afghanistan long into the future.

Ten years later – as the Afghan death toll passed 150,000 – Flournoy continued to argue against a U.S. withdrawal.

That's the person Joe Biden has tasked with ending the forever war in Afghanistan. But in Biden's own words, he'll "bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan" implying some number of American troops will remain, and the forever war will be just that. Michele Flournoy explained that even if a political settlement were reached, the U.S. would maintain a presence.

In 2011, the Obama-era doctrine of smart and sophisticated warfare was unveiled in the NATO regime-change war on Libya.

Moammar Gaddafi – the former adversary who sought warm relations with the U.S. and had given up his nuclear weapons program – was deposed and sodomized with a bayonet.

Flournoy, Hillary Clinton's State Department, and corporate media were in lockstep as they waged an extensive propaganda campaign to deceive the U.S. public that Gadaffi's soldiers were on a Viagra-fueled rape and murder spree that demanded a U.S. intervention.

All of this was based on a report from Al Jazeera – the media outlet owned by the Qatari monarchy that was arming extremist militias to overthrow the government.

Yet an investigation by the United Nations called the rape claims "hysteria." Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found no credible evidence of even a single rape.

Even after Libya was descended into strife and the deception of Gadaffi's forces committing rape was debunked, Michele Flournoy stood by her support for the war.

Tony Blinken, then Obama's deputy national security advisor, also pushed for regime change in Libya. He became Obama's point man on Syria, pushed to arm the so-called "moderate rebels" that fought alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, and designed the red line strategy to trigger a full-on U.S. intervention. Syria, he told the public, wasn't anything like the other wars the U.S. had waging for more than a decade.

Despite Blinken's promises that it would be a short affair, the war on Syria is now in its ninth year. An estimated half a million people have been killed as a result and the country is facing famine,

Largely thanks to the policy of using "wheat to apply pressure" – a recommendation of Flournoy and Blinken's CNAS think tank.

https://cdn.iframe.ly/PqnRfT3?playerjs=1&click_to_play=true


When the Trump administration launched airstrikes on Syria based on mere accusations of a chemical attack, Tony Blinken praised the bombing, claiming Assad had used the weapon of mass destruction sarin. Yet there was no evidence for this claim, something even then-secretary of Defense James Mattis admitted.

While jihadist mercenaries armed with U..S-supplied weapons took over large swaths of Syria, Tony Blinken played a central role in a coup d'etat in Ukraine that saw a pro-Russia government overthrown in a U.S.-orchestrated color revolution with neo-fascist elements agitating on the ground.

At the time, he was ambivalent about sending lethal weapons to Ukraine, instead opting for economic pressure.

Since then, fascist militias have been incorporated into Ukraine's armed forces. And Tony Blinken urged Trump to send them deadly weapons – something Obama had declined to do.

Trump obliged.

The Third Offset

While the U.S. fuelled wars in Syria and Ukraine, the Pentagon announced a major shift called the Third Offset strategy – a reference to the cold war era strategies the U.S. used to maintain its military supremacy over the Soviet Union.

The Third Offset strategy shifted the focus from counterinsurgency and the war on terror to great power competition against China and Russia, seeking to ensure that the U.S. could win a war against China in Asia. It called for a technological revolution in warfighting capabilities, development of futuristic and autonomous weapons, swarms of undersea and airborne drones, hypersonic weapons, cyber warfare, machine-enhanced soldiers, and artificial intelligence making unimaginably complex battlefield decisions at speeds incomprehensible to the human mind. All of this would be predicated on the Pentagon deepening its relationship with Silicon Valley giants that it birthed decades before: Google and Facebook.

The author of the Third Offset, former undersecretary of defense Robert Work, is a partner of Flournoy and Blinken's at WestExec Advisors. And Flournoy has been a leading proponent of this dangerous new escalation.

In June, Flournoy published a lengthy commentary laying out her strategy called "Sharpening the U.S. Military's Edge: Critical Steps for the Next Administration".

She warned that the United States is losing its military technological advantage and reversing that must be the Pentagon's priority. Without it, Flournoy warned that the U.S. might not be able to defeat China in Asia.

While Flournoy has called for ramping up U.S. military presence and exercises with allied forces in the region, she went so far as to call for the U.S. to increase its destructive capabilities so much that it could launch a blitzkrieg style-attack that would wipe out the entire Chinese navy and all civilian merchant ships in the South China Sea. Not only a blatant war crime but a direct attack on a nuclear power that would spell the third world war.

At the same time, Biden has announced he'll take an even more aggressive and confrontational stance against Russia, a position Flournoy shares.

As for ending the forever wars, Tony Blinken says not so fast.

The end of forever wars?

So Biden will end the forever wars, but not really end them. Secret wars that the public doesn't even know the U.S. is involved in – those are here to stay.

In fact, leaving teams of special forces in place throughout the Middle East is part and parcel of the Pentagon's shift away from counterinsurgency and towards great power competition.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy explains that "Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia are the principal priorities" and the U.S. will "consolidate gains in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving to a more resource-sustainable approach."

As for the catastrophic war on Yemen, Biden has said he'll end U.S. support, but in 2019, Michele Flournoy argued against ending arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Biden Signals a Desire To End the Yemen War. Here's Why Yemenis Aren't Buying It Joe Biden has a real chance to add ending one of the twenty-first century's most violent conflicts: the war in Yemen. MintPress News | Ahmed Abdulkareem | Nov 13

Biden pledged he will rejoin the Iran deal as a starting point for new negotiations. However, Trump's withdrawal from the deal discredited the Iranian reformists who seek engagement with the west and empowered the principlists who see the JCPOA as a deal with the devil.

In Latin America, Biden will revive the so-called anti-corruption campaigns that were used as a cover to oust the popular social democrat Brazilian president Lula da Silva.

His Venezuela policy will be almost identical to Trump's – sanctions and regime change.

In Central America, Biden has proposed a 4 billion dollar package to support corrupt right-wing governments and neoliberal privatization projects that create even more destabilization and send vulnerable masses fleeing north to the United States.

Behind their rhetoric, Biden, Flournoy, and Blinken will seek nothing less than global supremacy, escalating a new and even more dangerous arms race that risks the destruction of humanity. That's what Joe Biden calls "decency" and "normalcy."

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera for MintPress News

Dan Cohen is a journalist and filmmaker. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. Dan is a correspondent at RT America and tweets at @ DanCohen3000 .

[Nov 25, 2020] A military fiasco of the United States might be needed in order to bring "cruise missile liberals" to understand the need of of abandoning Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

Nov 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

One Too Many , Nov 25 2020 6:24 utc | 93

This is nothing new, the war machine keeps going and going. I actually found an individual that has the same outlook on stopping the behavior of the United States as I do. International lawyer Christopher Black in this interview had the following to say.

A Biden Administration Will Be Dominated by More U.S. Aggression

Question: What in your view needs to change in order to make U.S. foreign conduct abide by international law and therefore enhance the prospects for world peace?

Christopher Black: It will require a revolution in the United States to do that, an overthrow of the economic powers that control the machinery of the state, but there is no prospect of that happening. There is really no effective opposition to these policies in the U.S. The peace movement is weak and fragmented, dominated by the "cruise missile liberals". The voices of reason have no power, no real influence among the masses of the people which are dominated by a sophisticated propaganda machine known as the "media". Censorship is increasing and the few critical voices that exist are being silenced.

It will take, in my view, a military defeat of the United States in order to bring about the conditions necessary for the required changes. And, perhaps that will happen, as China has stated time and again, that if Washington decides to take direct control of their island of Taiwan and the Americans interfere or if they are attacked in the South China Sea, they will defeat the U.S. But such a war would have world consequences and would cause realignments of power not only in the USA, if we all survive it.


Line Islands , Nov 25 2020 11:05 utc | 103

Biden is a tent revival for the aptly named "cruise missile liberals" and some of the more shadowy neo-conservative forces in retreat and determined to bring democracy building home after their colonial expeditions extinguished it at home, hastening the rise of America's own Saddam in Trump. Biden's own instincts may be decisive, however, and he was against war in Libya while also in favor of splitting Iraq. The dementia rumors are nonsense; Biden is a canny and often mendacious operator, and while I think Trump is a fascist and quite possibly a Russian mafia sub-boss, Biden may well be the restoration of more homegrown, American mafia rule. An argument that Giuliani has made in so many words, standing as he does on the Russian side and yelling into the shifting parapolitical winds.

William Gruff , Nov 25 2020 11:59 utc | 104

Line Islands @102

It's not really that complicated for China. They have no interest in or need to strike the American mainland. That would only be necessary if they were seeking global hegemony like the US, which they are not. Their strategic nuclear capabilities are strictly deterrence. All China has to do is survive the coming conflict arising from the Thucydides Trap that the US and China are caught in with minimal damage to their industrial capacity, infrastructure, and population.

That I specified "survive" and not "win" is not a mistake. The default outcome if nothing is done is that China ascends to uncontested sole global economic superpower status. That is not necessarily their intention but rather the natural outcome of China continuing the development of their domestic human capital and quality of life for 1.4 billion people. China doesn't have to take the fight to the US to end up on top, and the US has no choice but to somehow turn back the economic clock in China to keep its position as global imperial hegemon. Color revolution attempts, trade war, and bioweapon attacks have all failed the empire miserably, so all the US has left is to go kinetic.

The "US aircraft carrier force projection model" is effectively nullified by China, but those assets are still protected by America's delusional reality exclusion zone: "Destroying our carriers is unthinkable! No one would ever dare do that!" . That defense will prove inadequate against China's variety of "carrier killer" missiles.

As for America's stealth aircraft, China's defenses will likely be a surprise to many in the American empire. Furthermore, America's only stealth aircraft with sufficient range to reach China's mainland on anything other than a one way suicide mission would be the B-2 bomber, of which America only has 21. Those 21 will not last long in a kinetic conflict. Quite a few will likely simply be destroyed on the runway in Diego Garcia while the survivors will get to find out how well China's nifty new quantum radar works. The F-22 and F-35 would require refueling to get from carrier stand-off distance to the mainland and refueling again to get back, with America's aerial tankers needing to loiter within range of China's air defenses... not a good battle plan for the empire. Those stealth aircraft will not shift the advantage in the empire's favor, and attrition will be much higher than expected among them.

It must be repeated that China doesn't need to destroy the United States. They are not playing the board game "Risk" after all. China just needs to defeat the American empire's military force projection capabilities in their own neighborhood, and China already has that capacity right now. Every day that elapses shifts the advantage further into China's favor, so the empire needs to act while they still have the ability to do so. Trump's unwillingness to do more than bark loudly and his resistance to going kinetic is why the imperial elites had to fraud the elections so openly to get a more compliant figurehead into office ASAP. That the empire couldn't wait another four years means that we will see "interesting times" (yeah, even more interesting than the preceding twelve months!) real soon now.

Bemildred , Nov 25 2020 13:29 utc | 111

"A cornered dog will bite, even if it is obvious that it cannot win."

So will I, so what?

"It was never China's nor Iran's intention to "corner" the empire. That is simply the situation that America finds itself in now that its economy is in "late capitalism" decline. It is really not even anyone's fault, not even Trump or Reagan or any of the other usual suspects."

I agree, but again, so what? I'm not concerned with who is morally correct, I'm mainly concerned with whether there is going to be a big war and what happens if there is, that's not a moral question. I've been waiting around 40 years to watch our collapse, and I still think there is enough that is/was good here to be worth hoping for a soft landing. That's probably better for the rest of the planet too, but it's arguable.

Neither Iran of China is cornered, they are well-prepared, well-supported by "partners", and on their home turf. WE are not ready. We are vunerable. But we are not cornered either, nobody is going to come over here and interfere while we fight among ourselves.

Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 25 2020 13:10 utc | 109

oldhippie , Nov 25 2020 13:34 utc | 112

What scares me about Blinken and Sullivan is the career trajectory. Both had completely unearned and unreasonable success every step of their lives. There is never any explanation for this manner of success but family connections. Neither has done anything of note other than to occupy positions of power.

Sullivan is all of 43 years old, has been a mover and shaker since his twenties. Any who have never read Halberstam's Best and Brightest might look at that now. We are in for a shit show. Biden is not going to do anything but take his meds and take a lot of naps. Already he is not to be seen. The crew named so far will steamroller Kamala, she is no more than a figurehead.

Likely she won't even stay in the room when it gets serious. Best possible outcome is that kids who have never done anything but suck up won't know what to do when they are left in charge with no adult supervision. Or there will be shadowy figures in background who steady the rudder.

More likely is war.

William Gruff , Nov 25 2020 13:45 utc | 114

Bemildred @111

Yes, it is not a moral question, it is an economic one. Wars have never been about morality.

That said, China has for a number of years now been preparing for a minimally damaging escape from the Thucydides Trap, and by "minimally damaging" I mean for the US as well. As I said above the Chinese are not at all interested in hurting the US.

The plan is to "spring" the Thucydides Trap in the South China Sea and hopefully confine most of the damage to that area. If successful then the empire gets its soft landing (albeit with significant amounts of military materiel and personnel sacrificed) and humanity moves beyond the Trap.

I have my fingers crossed that the plan works.

Piotr Berman , Nov 25 2020 14:31 utc | 116

@ PB 75
visible costs of vassaldom . . costs of American presence....decreasing the national security. . .participating in sanctions
Yes, plus a primary reason . . .Cost of buying US military junk like F-35. Foreign military sales is a mainstay of the US economy.

Posted by: Don Bacon | Nov 25 2020 3:43 utc | 83

When you add the numbers, "military junk" has notable prestige -- with matching prices, but the total loot of American companies is probably many times larger. For example, Trump waged a series of trade wars to perpetuate negligible taxation of "technology giants" like Google or Amazon. "Intellectual property" was a stumbling block in the trade war with China, with dire consequences for soy growing farmers in USA (and a boon to their colleagues in South America). Then there is pharma. It seems that the really big companies are comfortable being in relative shadow behind arms makers, and discourse on security threats and needs --because Russian use trolls to interfere with elections, we (all countries that cherish what is good and precious) need new generations of nukes, planes, ships and toilet seats. However illogical, it is more noble sounding than preventing the likes of Apple from more than nominal taxation.

[Nov 25, 2020] A complete schism from reality by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Because people are a lot more likely to click, read and share information which validates their pre-existing opinions and follow people who do the same, social media is notorious for the way it creates tightly insulated echo chambers which masturbate our confirmation bias and hide any information which might cause us cognitive dissonance by contradicting it. Whole media careers were built on this phenomenon during the years of Russiagate hysteria, and we see it play out in spheres from imperialism to Covid-19 commentary to economic policy. ..."
"... Someone benefits from this dynamic, and it isn't you. As we've discussed previously, we know from WikiLeaks documents that powerful people actively seek to build ideological echo chambers for the purpose of propaganda and indoctrination, and there is surely a lot more study going into the subject than we've seen been shown. Splitting the public up into two oppositional factions who barely interact and can't even communicate with each other because they don't share a common reality keeps the populace impotent, ignorant, and powerless to stop the unfolding of the agendas of the powerful. ..."
"... It's just people manipulating you away from your natural, healthy inclination toward peace. Get out of your echo chamber, look at the raw information instead of the narratives, and stop letting the sociopaths manipulate you. ..."
"... Hate is the only thing that holds the American Empire together. Without its Two Minutes of Hate, America will break up apart into a million pieces. ..."
Nov 25, 2020 | caitlinjohnstone.com

This Is Your Brain On Echo Chambers -- Right Calls Biden A Xi Puppet As He Packs His Cabinet With China Hawks – by Caitlin Johnston

... ... ...

This complete schism from reality, where you've got an incoming administration stacked with Beltway insiders who want to attack Chinese interests running alongside an alternate imaginary universe in which Biden is a subservient CCP lackey, is only made possible with the existence of media echo chambers. It's the same exact dynamic that made it possible for liberals to spend four years shrieking conspiracy theories about the executive branch of the US government being run by a literal Russian agent even as Trump advanced mountains of world-threatening cold war escalations against Moscow in the real world.

You see this dynamic at work in conventional media, where plutocrat-controlled outlets like Breitbart are still frantically pushing the Russiagate sequel narrative that Hunter Biden's activities in China mean that his father is a CCP asset. You also see it in social media, where, as explained by journalist Jonathan Cook in an article about the documentary The Social Dilemma , "as we get herded into our echo chambers of self-reinforcing information, we lose more and more sense of the real world and of each other."

"We live in different information universes, chosen for us by algorithms whose only criterion is how to maximise our attention for advertisers' products to generate greater profits for the internet giants," writes Cook.

Because people are a lot more likely to click, read and share information which validates their pre-existing opinions and follow people who do the same, social media is notorious for the way it creates tightly insulated echo chambers which masturbate our confirmation bias and hide any information which might cause us cognitive dissonance by contradicting it. Whole media careers were built on this phenomenon during the years of Russiagate hysteria, and we see it play out in spheres from imperialism to Covid-19 commentary to economic policy.

Someone benefits from this dynamic, and it isn't you. As we've discussed previously, we know from WikiLeaks documents that powerful people actively seek to build ideological echo chambers for the purpose of propaganda and indoctrination, and there is surely a lot more study going into the subject than we've seen been shown. Splitting the public up into two oppositional factions who barely interact and can't even communicate with each other because they don't share a common reality keeps the populace impotent, ignorant, and powerless to stop the unfolding of the agendas of the powerful.

You should not be afraid of your government being too nice to China. What you should worry about is the US-centralized power alliance advancing a multifront new cold war conducted simultaneously against two nuclear-armed nations for the first time ever in human history. There are far, far too many small moving parts in such a cold war for things to happen in a safely predictable manner, which means there are far, far too many chances for something to go very, very wrong.

Whenever someone tells you that a US president is going to be "soft" on a nation the US government has marked as an enemy, you are being played. Always, always, always, always. It's just people manipulating you away from your natural, healthy inclination toward peace. Get out of your echo chamber, look at the raw information instead of the narratives, and stop letting the sociopaths manipulate you.

By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz


USA-MA BIN LADEN / NOVEMBER 25, 2020

America desperately needs its Two Minutes of Hate against other countries like a meth addict needs his next hit.

Hate is the only thing that holds the American Empire together. Without its Two Minutes of Hate, America will break up apart into a million pieces.

Deep down, Americans know that – and that is why they so readily engage in these spittle-flecked campaigns.

Welcome to the Orwellian world of America where the same American Empire that bombs, invades, sanctions, regime changes, encircles, or colonizes multiple nations around the world whines like a triggered little snowflake that poor innocent war criminal America is being "threatened"!

Truly pathetic.

CHRISTIAN J. CHUBA / NOVEMBER 24, 2020

There are many good websites (in addition to this one of course). I'd always tell someone, just look to see what speaks to you my list some are 'out there' I'll summarize.

  1. https://www.antiwar.com/ – Kind of like a drudgereport for decent people on world events. They go through the effort of summarizing AP and other official news outlet stories rather than mindlessly link to them. Just hearing the same stories minus the slavish propaganda will deprogram many people.
  2. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/author/ppillar/ – Ron Pillar, I'm a groupie. Does investigative journalism, along the lines of Cailtlin.
  3. https://thegrayzone.com/ – Max Blumenthal contributes here, U.S. imperialism in South America.
  4. https://www.mintpressnews.com/ – M.E., Yemen, if your friend is very sensitive to anything that insinuates that Israel is not the celestial city he might be offended.
  5. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/daniel-larison/ – If your friend has a conservative bent, foreign policy restraint. This Larison is passionately against our atrocities in Yemen but polite about it.
  6. https://southfront.org/ – Ah .. on our State Dept list of Russian disinfo. Discuss military conflicts, sympathetic to the countries at the receiving end of our attention.
  7. http://thesaker.is/ – Saker was an intel guy from the 'other side' during the Cold War, values decency, Orthodox Christian, only site that regularly publishes speeches from Nasrallah, does military analysis, arrogant but I always feel like I learned something.
  8. http://www.moonofalabama.org – anonymous analyst, German Intel guy, writes very well. I put him last because he has been on a pro-Trump binge lately. I think they are secret lovers. Given what he normally writes about I have no idea what he sees in him.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE (AUTHOR) / NOVEMBER 25, 2020

"I listen to the entire political spectrum, from Republican warmongering corporatists all the way to Democratic warmongering corporatists!"

[Nov 25, 2020] New York Times job listing shows how Western propaganda operates by Caitlin Johnstone -

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Once you've learned a bit more you realize it's not quite happening that way. Most mainstream news reporters are not really witting propagandists – those are to be found more in plutocrat-funded think tanks and other narrative management firms, and in the opaque government agencies which feed news media outlets information designed to advance their interests. The predominant reason mainstream news reporters say things that aren't true is because in order to be hired by mainstream news outlets, you need to jack your mind into a power-serving worldview that is not based in truth. ..."
"... Mainstream establishment orthodoxy is essentially a religion, as fake and power-serving as any other, and if you want to work in mainstream politics or media you need to demonstrate that you are a member of that religion. ..."
"... That's all you're ever seeing when you notice blue-checkmarked reporters tweeting in promotion of imperialist interests and status quo politics. They are not laboring under the delusion that they are saying anything new or insightful that a hundred other people aren't saying at the exact same time; they are signaling. ..."
Nov 21, 2020 | caitlinjohnstone.com

By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

People who are only just beginning to research what's wrong with the world often hold an assumption that mainstream news reporters are just knowingly propagandizing people all the time.

That they sit around scheming up ways to deceive their audiences into supporting war, oligarchy and oppression for the benefit of their plutocratic masters.

Once you've learned a bit more you realize it's not quite happening that way. Most mainstream news reporters are not really witting propagandists – those are to be found more in plutocrat-funded think tanks and other narrative management firms, and in the opaque government agencies which feed news media outlets information designed to advance their interests. The predominant reason mainstream news reporters say things that aren't true is because in order to be hired by mainstream news outlets, you need to jack your mind into a power-serving worldview that is not based in truth.

A recent job listing for a New York Times Russia Correspondent which was flagged by Russia-based journalist Bryan MacDonald illustrates this dynamic perfectly. The listing reads as follows:

"Vladimir Putin's Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world.

It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his villa.

If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe Bureau Chief early next year."

Does this sound like the sort of job someone with a less than hostile attitude toward the Russian government would apply to? Is it a job listing that indicates it might welcome someone who sees mainstream Russia hysteria as cartoonish hyperbole designed to advance the longstanding geostrategic interests of Western power structures against a government which has long resisted bowing to the dictates of those power structures? Someone who voices skepticism about the plot hole - riddled establishment narratives of Russian election meddling and Novichok assassinations ? Someone who, as Moon of Alabama notes , might point out that Putin is in fact at work in the Kremlin right now and not "hiding out" in a "villa" ?

Of course not. In order to get a job at the New York Times, you need to demonstrate that you subscribe to the mainstream oligarchic imperialist worldview which forms the entirety of Western mass media output. You need to demonstrate that you have been properly indoctrinated, and that you can be guided into toeing the imperial line with simple attaboys and tisk-tisks from your superiors rather than being explicitly told to knowingly lie.

Because if they did tell you to knowingly lie to the public to advance the interests of the powerful, that would be propaganda. And propaganda is what happens in evil backwards countries like Russia.

Mainstream establishment orthodoxy is essentially a religion, as fake and power-serving as any other, and if you want to work in mainstream politics or media you need to demonstrate that you are a member of that religion.

That's all you're ever seeing when you notice blue-checkmarked reporters tweeting in promotion of imperialist interests and status quo politics. They are not laboring under the delusion that they are saying anything new or insightful that a hundred other people aren't saying at the exact same time; they are signaling. They are letting current and prospective peers and employers know, "I am a believer. I am a member of the faith." This way they are ensured the continued advancement of their careers in mainstream news media.

This is why you have labels for anyone expressing skepticism of establishment narratives like "conspiracy theorist," "useful idiot," "Russian asset" or "Assadist" ; the powerful people who understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world need labels to separate the faithful from the heathens. It means the same thing as "heretic . "

The fast and easy way to get rich and famous has always been to promote the interests of the powerful. This is as true in every other sector as it is in media. For this reason, those who pour their energy into criticizing existing power structures and shining a bright light on their dynamics aren't likely to be living in fancy mansions or going to ritzy parties any time soon, while those who do the opposite actually will. And yet when someone sets up a Substack or a Patreon account to make criticizing the powerful their life's work, it is they who will get called money-grubbing grifters by the propagandized.

www.youtube.com/embed/Y2EPgix5_5w

The faces you see thrust onto screens by the plutocratic media are not spouting falsehoods while being aware of their deception, any more than any preacher is knowingly lying when they say you'll burn for eternity if you don't accept the gospel. Most of them believe everything they are saying , because they have been propagandized into becoming good acolytes and proselytizers of the faith.

The most propagandized people on earth are those who are responsible for promulgating propaganda.


Naughtylus 15 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 04:08 AM

Spot on article. Journalists in MSM media constantly brag about their independence, impartiality, truthfulness, etc. and I always wanted to ask them how long they think they would keep their job if they simply questioned the established narrative of their company. People hired in the media these days are not hired for the job of informing or being journalists, but to act as a mere transmission for opinion manipulation campaigns, devised by those in real power circles.
KennethKeen 15 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 04:18 AM
Excellent explanation. I would add an additional method of climbing the career ladder. If you do something criminal, that others in the system are aware of, then you can soar up the ranks, as they are guaranteed the possibility of blackmailing you. That is how the house of cards is held in place.
1justssayn 12 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 07:26 AM
Absolutely spot on. It applies to a lot of other occupations as well.
shadow1369 15 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 04:27 AM
The strange thing is that while not a single statement in the NYT summary was true of Russia, they cvould all be applied to the us. I guess that is the point, applicants must be prepared to simply substitute the Russia for the US whenever thery describe crimes against humanity. So zero intelligence is required, but more importantly zero integrity either.
Fenianfromcork 12 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 07:47 AM
Sounds more like an add for joining the CIA.
Insulyn Fenianfromcork 9 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 10:11 AM
I wonder just how many who are hired either work for the CIA already or start working for the CIA soon after? The add was possibly written with CIA direction. Embedded propagandists. The ad just shows how journalism simply doesn't matter to the MSM, it's all narrative and spin.
Geo Graphy 12 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 07:50 AM
The fourth estate has let their ego override their common sense. They are not an elected representation of any portion of the American or any other country's public. They are employees of organizations that operate for profit. They do not have a public mandate to provide their opinion as news. They are incapable of reporting news without slanting the view they present. Since it is slanted, it is not news, it is garbage. What the media presents to the public is pure propaganda made up by the staff and management of the so called news organizations. If the fourth estate will not return to reporting the news, then they rightfully belong on the trash heap of history.
PhillisStein 8 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 12:04 PM
'The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.' - Edward Bernays In other words, democracy is a 'majority rules' model and, since, in our current consciousness, you can fool most of the people most of the time, then democracy is able to be easily manipulated, and thus is not true democracy. We cannot have anything approaching civil society until we are able to exercise our free will with informed consent, which requires objective information. Sadly, everything is based upon the 'victim' model, which treats us as children - 'don't worry, we'll just do all your thinking for you and just tell you what to think.'
bos000 11 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 08:23 AM
Propaganda for americans: "US army "heroes" are around the world to protect america,s freedom and democracy", by killing innocents in other countries, when no one ever attack US.
Smythe_Mogg 7 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 12:38 PM
Perhaps journalists are not responsible for the content of propaganda but they are complicit in its transmission. Journalism for the most part, if ever it was, is not a profession with respect to practitioners upholding standards they refuse to deviate from. 'Hacks' working for the popular press are commonly derided. These days it is those employed by 'broadsheet' papers (and equivalent digital media) who truly merit opprobrium. The days when the Times fielded gentlemen are long gone. Few independent thinkers are to be found among prominent journalists. 'Broadsheet' decline has far more serious consequences than the worst the popular press can do. The popular press always has catered for 'low brow' and 'middle brow' readers; its lower reaches being little more than scandal sheets with titillating pictures. These readers are not movers and shakers: they are followers. The educated class, nowadays sadly depleted, relies on news outlets to be under editorial control capable of picking wheat from amidst chaff of no consequence and seeking accurate reporting thereof. A concomitant is choosing informed individuals to offer opinion pieces; top of this pile is the editorial which at one time could shake government. Lack of a properly informed upper tier of the population capable of challenging the self-styled political elite (and their owners) betokens descent into oligarchy and thereby kakistocracy.
OneGenericUser Gatineau25deA 15 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 04:50 AM
I have a somewhat cliche' opinion. I don't care Americans want their country to rule the world, I want the world to have a choice on wether they want America as a leader, and I bet the majority of countries don't. If you're impose your "leadership" then you're not a leader, you're a dictator.

[Nov 25, 2020] When it comes to the real enemy of the Neocons and Neoliberals, it is Russia, not China.

Nov 25, 2020 | caitlinjohnstone.com

SOCRATIC TRUTH / NOVEMBER 24, 2020

Caitlin, when it comes to the real enemy of the Neocons and Neoliberals, Russia is the real enemy, not China. You have to understand GLOBALIZATION. China is Part of the Globalization project that started over 30 years ago. It's a complex parasitic relationship. The Globalist elites in the US are working towards the "Great Reset" using the Coronavirus pseudemic that started in China and use it as an excuse to move towards a society that will resemble the totalitarian, repressive communist one like in China. A lot of our big corporations are still doing great business there. However they are not in Russia. Russia was kicked out of the G8 years ago, because they were not going to go along with the Globalization project and the New World Order enslavement project of the G7 (without Russia now). Trump was bad enough as a president, but he was not really part of the "Globalist Club". I assure you Mr BIDEN is totally compromised by the NWO evil Globalists comprised of the MIS, Transnational corporations & International Finance, and will try to act "tough" with China, but this will be just a distraction. The US Shadow Government elites control him totally, something they could not always do with Idiot Trump. Here's an example how they worked with our "enemy" Communist China:

Gates, Fauci, CCP, Big Pharma, international Bankers, they have all colluded with the WHO to create the Coronavirus "pseudemic".


(the NIH, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, sent $3.7 million to the Wuhan lab in 2014, and then showered the Chinese scientists at this lab with another $3.7 million in 2019 to keep their work going, the work of developing a bat virus that could attack people. Two back-to-back 5-year projects that took $7.4 million out of taxpayer pockets and out of the United States).

WHO is a globalist institution and so are the actors that are colluding with it.

How Joe Biden was 'recruited' to become agent of Chinese Communist party

While Joe was cutting deals with China, the Chinese Communist party was putting its hooks into him:

https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/how-joe-biden-was-recruited-to-become-agent-of-chinese-communist-party

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE (AUTHOR) / NOVEMBER 24, 2020

You are wrong. You are a victim of the echo chamber dynamic described in this article. China was temporarily courted to pull it away from the USSR and a bunch of plutocrats rode a lot of wealth on that move, but it insists on its own sovereignty and an agenda to halt its rise and roll back its power has long been in the works. Obama got the ball rolling on this years ago. Biden will continue ramping up the same anti-China agendas as his predecessors Trump and Obama, and I will document those escalations in this space. When that happens, you need to make sure you re-evaluate your incorrect position based on the new evidence presented. You should already be beginning that re-evaluation based on the information I just gave you about his cabinet picks.

REALIST / NOVEMBER 24, 2020

Right. That's what the "Pivot to Asia" foreign policy during the Obomber administration was all about. The US thought it was going to pick off as new allies all the countries surrounding China and make them antagonists rather than partners with the Chinese and their grand plans like the BRI. This was pretty much the same strategy that had been employed against Russia and its former satellites and Soviet republics in Eastern Europe. Vietnam and the Philippines were supposed to be the new Georgia and Ukraine set in the Orient.
~
Washington's oft repeated big trick is to dangle beaucoup bucks before the leaders of third rate powers to get them to change allegiances and to play on age old resentments that small regional powers often have against the local monolith like Russia or China. Ego-driven lightweights like Poroshenko and Duterte are often susceptible to Yankee flattery that they can wield some real power under the American umbrella.
~
So, Washington promises Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei etc that it will bring "justice" and support their claims for sundry rocks in the South China Sea, especially the ones fortified by China to ensure shipping lanes stay upon under potential aggression from the Americans (who else would be a threat?)
~
That Washington would preach the usual bullshit about peace and harmony while actually pursuing treachery and bloodshed is no surprise, however, one must snap to attention over the ballsy evolution of its attitude of unconcern about who knows and understands this disconnect. I don't doubt that Russia and China have always known that Washington is totally untrustworthy. The Russians even coined a new term to describe this state of complete and absolute American unreliability, which I don't remember because I don't speak their language. But today, most of the American people also must know, they must know that America drafts very real plans to eradicate the entire Chinese fleet off their own coast within a 72-hour time frame all for pursuing nothing more than their own national interests. They know unless they have been living under a rock for the entirety of the 21st century or have thoroughly perfected the art of Orwellian Double Think.

JOHN DAY / NOVEMBER 24, 2020

It's competition for tribute. China has a long history of receiving tribute from all of the world which it knew. This is Chinese world history. It's how Chinese rulers naturally see the world. Russia is historically Byzantine (Greek) in it's diplomacy and somewhat isolationist militarily, defending in depth, then counter-attacking decisively.
Our owners cannot get their new demotion worked out amongst themselves and plan to squeeze us for blood and dominate the rest of the world, which is bigger and more complex than China and Russia, and more flexible to adapt against the empire.
How much more hubris shall the world receive?

ANARCISSIE / NOVEMBER 24, 2020

I think the provocations against China, like those against Russia, have been largely theatrical. There _was_ a plan to push the Russians out of the Caucasus, Ukraine, and Syria in order to dominate the Black Sea and the Middle East, but the US had no intention of applying serious military muscle to it (which could have led to a major war). The US actually has no problems with Russia, and they have a common interest in keeping Muslims tamped down in the Middle East. Likewise, the US will play at constructing a ring of hostile states around China, but this is unlikely to succeed, and when it fails, the US plan is to retreat to Australia and India, or possibly Africa if things go very badly. Again, the US has no actual conflicts with China; the pseudo-war with China is 90% prolefeed. This was all laid out pretty well by George Orwell in _1984_: 'We have always been at war with Eastasia,' etc.

JP JUDE / NOVEMBER 24, 2020

I sort of agree with you, Ms Johnstone, but have you considered you might be in an echo chamber? I say this because I read your article the same day I read about the new Asian trade deal. It's huge with everyone, China to Australia in it. And, after I read about Xi wanting to end global poverty; China has officially ended national poverty, and wants to end global poverty. It kind of puts the altercations with India in a new light; they've long had a caste system which is like class–which they're supposed to end but haven't, and reminds me of the States being classless but not really. I think if you follow the money sotta speak, the Americans have a real problem and a lot of the war propaganda is them trying to be relevant to a world that has moved on. I don't know if it's anti-globalization but the thing about the Americans going to war is the reality they're doing it for a buck. Weapons sales and all that, just real war is now fought via technology. The Chinese, Russians even the Indians, can fight that kind of war; the Americans can't as evidence by the proliferation of weapons and number of friendly fire accidents demonstrates. They're all brawn in a more cerebral world. I think the argument has changed.

NEWTON FINN / NOVEMBER 24, 2020

Thanks for a different and intriguing slant.

[Nov 25, 2020] Nagorno-Karabakh is Tragic but Not America's Problem - Antiwar.com Original

Nov 25, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

Nagorno-Karabakh is Tragic but Not America's Problem

Let Other Governments Try To Resolve the Intractable Conflict

by Doug Bandow Posted on November 25, 2020

In Washington foreign conflicts are to policymakers what lights are to moths. The desire to take the U.S. into every political dispute, social collapse, civil war, foreign conflict, and full-scale war seems to only get stronger as America's failures accumulate.

There may be no better example than the battle between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the latter's claim to the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, contained within Azerbaijan but largely populated by ethnic Armenians. Distant from the US and Europe, the struggle matters most to nearby Georgia, Turkey, Iran, and Russia.

The impact on Americans is minor and indirect at best. Yet there is wailing and gnashing of teeth in Washington that the US is "absent" from this fight. Send in the bombers! Or at least the diplomats! Candidate Joe Biden predictably insisted that America should be leading a peace effort "together with our European partners," without indicating what that would mean in practice.

The roots of the conflict, like so many others, go back centuries. Control of largely Muslim Azerbaijan and Christian Armenia passed among Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Russian Empire. After the Russian Revolution the two were independent and fought over N-K's status, before both were absorbed by the Soviet Union. Nagorno-Karabakh's ethnic Armenian population began pressing for transfer to Armenia during the U.S.S.R.'s waning days. After the latter collapsed in 1992 the two newly independent nations again fought, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees, and Armenia grabbed the disputed land as well as even larger adjacent territory filled with ethnic Azerbaijanis.

A ceasefire froze the bitter conflict, leaving the conquered territory under Armenian control. Although Yerevan's gain was tenuous, unrecognized by the rest of the world and dependent upon a geographic corridor between Armenia and N-K, the government, largely in response to internal political pressures, grew steadily more aggressive and unwilling to honor previous commitments. Violent clashes mixed with ineffective talks between the two states.

With no prospect of resolution, despite long-standing diplomatic efforts through the so-called Minsk Process, involving America and France, among others, Azerbaijani forces, relying on Turkey, employing Syrian mercenaries, and utilizing Israeli-made drones, launched an offensive in September. With Yerevan losing troops and territory, Moscow brokered a new ceasefire, which required Armenia's withdrawal from areas conquered a quarter century ago. The transportation corridor is to be policed by Russian peacekeeping forces; Turkish officials will help monitor the ceasefire.

The result was jubilation in Baku and riots in Yerevan. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, under political siege, declared: "This is not a victory, but there is no defeat until you consider yourself defeated, we will never consider ourselves defeated and this shall become a new start of an era of our national unity and rebirth." More accurate was Azerbaijani President Ilham Alyev's assessment: "This [ceasefire] statement constitutes Armenia's capitulation. This statement puts an end to the years-long occupation. This statement is our Glorious Victory." With Pashinyan's authority in tatters and Alyev triumphantly enjoying a surge in popular support, hostilities could easily explode again.

Why would any sane American want to get in the middle of this fight?

Demands that Washington "do something" ignore three important realities. The first is that the conflict has nothing to do with the US and threatens no serious American interests. The fighting is tragic, of course, as are similar battles around the world. However, this volatile region is dominated by Iran, Russia, and Turkey. Iran previously supported Armenia, Turkey strongly backed Azerbaijan, and Russia has good relations with both, including a defense treaty with Yerevan which Moscow deemed not to cover contested territory, meaning N-K.

Which of these powers, all essentially American adversaries – despite Ankara's continued membership in the transatlantic alliance – dominates which neighbor is a matter of indifference to Washington. It simply doesn't matter, and certainly isn't worth fighting over. Once US officials would have preferred Turkey over Iran and Russia, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken his nation in an Islamist and authoritarian direction, warmed relations with Russia, the only serious target of NATO, and begun aggressively expanding Turkish influence and control in Syria, Libya, and the eastern Mediterranean. Ankara encouraged the current military round by enhancing Azerbaijani capabilities.

Georgia also shares a border with both combatants but is only a bit player in the ongoing drama. However, it has lobbyists in Washington whose mission is to get Tbilisi into NATO and thus turn Georgia into another US defense dependent. Doing so would create a direct border conflict with Russia, made much more dangerous by the volatility of Georgian politics. The irresponsible and reckless President Mikheil Saakashvili triggered the brief yet disastrous 2008 war with Russia and remains active politically. Tbilisi's dubious role is another reason for the US to avoid deeper involvement in the region's disputatious politics.

The second point is that there is nothing sensible America for do, despite cacophonous demands otherwise. In October Washington Post columnist David Ignatius complained: "The global power vacuum invites mischief. The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan has escalated over 10 days of fighting. Armenian leaders initially hoped that US diplomacy could produce a ceasefire; now they look to Moscow."

Translated, Yerevan wanted Washington to save Armenia from both its original aggression and later intransigence. Like many other governments have desired in other conflicts. But how was the US to restrain Azerbaijan, which was able to recover long-lost territory only by resorting to force? America's regional policy has been a disaster. Washington already demonstrated its impotence in Ankara as Erdogan charted an independent course. The US turned a difficult relationship with Moscow into a mini-Cold War. The Trump administration foolishly declared economic war on Iran, creating regional instability and precluding negotiation.

As for Azerbaijan, military intervention would risk war for no good reason. Economic sanctions would punish Baku, but to what end? So far, the president's constant resort to "maximum pressure" has failed to induce political surrender in Havana, Caracas, Damascus, Pyongyang, or Moscow. Whatever the economic price, Aliyeh could ill afford to retreat and anger an entire population currently celebrating his triumph. Anyway, the issue is not worth another failed American attempt at global social engineering. Which means Washington had nothing to offer but words.

Certainly the US should encourage a peaceful settlement and negotiation, but this is a conflict for which there is no obvious diplomatic answer. It is easy to insist that Baku should not have restarted hostilities, but the Alyev government struck because diplomacy had frozen along with the dispute. And Baku's success dramatically reshaped the balance of power, leaving Armenia in a far worse position than before. Creative mediation might help, but Azerbaijan, on offense, showed no interest in such an effort. Nor has Washington demonstrated the ability to reign in Baku's main backer, Turkey, anywhere else. Washington is filled with magical thinking, the belief that the president merely need whisper his command and the entire world will snap to attention. Alas, America long ago lost that ability, if it ever had it.

Moreover, US officials share some blame: On the presumption that Azerbaijan was committed to a peaceful settlement, Washington provided it with arms and aid to combat terrorism. Unfortunately, weaponry, like money, is fungible. And that mistake cannot be unmade.

An equally mistaken belief in the Trump administration's commitment also might have helped lead Armenia astray. Since taking power in the Velvet Revolution two years ago, Pashinyan sought to move westward. However, in the present crisis neither America nor Europe did anything to assist Yerevan – whose occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh remains illegal under international law. Some US interest groups attempted to turn Armenia into a cause celebre of religious persecution, but the Muslim-Christian clash is incidental to broader geopolitics which little concerned the West.

The horrid genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against ethnic Armenians a century ago is constantly cited but remains irrelevant to today's conflict. Around three decades ago Armenia invaded Azerbaijan to seize incontestably Azerbaijani land. Baku struck back for reasons of nationalism, not religion. The essential irrelevance of religion is reflected in Christian Russia's good relations with Muslim Azerbaijan, Jewish Israel arming Muslim Azerbaijan, and Muslim Iran's long backing for Christian Armenia, though these ties ebbed in the last couple years. The US should no more be a crusading Christian republic than a crusading republic.

Finally, Russia demonstrated that other powers have an interest in peace and stability and are able to act. That is a tough lesson for the denizens of Washington to learn, given their irrational hatred of Russia. Vladimir Putin is no cuddly liberal but most American policymakers make hypocrisy and sanctimony the foundations of their approach to Moscow. After all, Putin has killed fewer innocent people than Trump administration's favorite dictator, Mohammed bin Salman, whose aggression against Yemen has resulted in more than five years of murder and mayhem and created the worst humanitarian disaster on the planet. Yet Washington continues to sell Saudi Arabia more weapons and munitions with which to kill more Yemeni civilians.

Moreover, though Moscow has behaved badly, in Georgia and Ukraine in particular, so has the US in Russia's eyes. Washington misled Moscow over NATO expansion, dismantled longtime Russian friend Serbia, pushed NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, embraced Tbilisi, which fired on Russian troops guaranteeing security in neighboring secessionist territory, encouraged a street putsch against an elected, Russophile government in Kiev, and sought to push Moscow out of Syria, an ally of nearly 70 years. The expectation of American policymakers that they can use military force to push the Monroe Doctrine up to Russia's border without triggering a sharp response is unrealistic at best, deadly at worst.

Of course, the Russia-brokered accord was a clear diplomatic triumph and likely will solidify Moscow's influence. However, with success has come responsibility, which could prove costly to Moscow. The accord remains fragile and unstable, and might collapse.

By its nature the agreement is short-term and does not address the fundamental issue, the status of N-K. Indeed, on its own terms either party, which would most likely be Azerbaijan in this case, can order the withdrawal of Russian monitors in five years. However, the modus vivendi might not last even that long. Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev posited: "I hope that today's ceasefire and our further plans to normalize relations with Armenia, if perceived positively by the Armenian side, can create a new situation in the region, a situation of cooperation, a situation of strengthening stability and security." With Yerevan aflame after angry mobs took over the National Assembly building, severely beat that body's speaker, trashed the prime minister's home, and forced him into hiding, "positive" probably is not the right word to describe Armenians' perception of the settlement. In fact, those who abandoned their homes in territory turned over to Azerbaijan adopted a scorched earth policy, destroying everything.

Both sides probably view the latest agreement a bit like French Gen. Ferdinand Foch presciently saw the Versailles Treaty: "This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years." Only the N-K time frame might be much shorter. Nevertheless, no one else has offered any better alternative. Unfortunately, zero-sum disputes over territory are among the most difficult disputes to resolve. Either Armenia or Azerbaijan will control N-K. Either ethnic Armenians or Azerbaijanis will live in N-K. Yes, the ideal would be people from both lands to live together in a democratic state, joining hands around a bonfire to sing Kumbaya every night. However, no one believes that is even a remote possibility.

With nothing meaningful to offer to solve the current firefight, it was best for Washington to stay out. In fact, Armenia's old guard, pushed out of power by Pashinyan two years ago in the Velvet Revolution, blame their nation's defeat on his government's subsequent turn West, from which it received little support. Brokering the current defeat would merely have reinforced anger against America.

Russia acted because it has far more at stake. Let it undertake the burden of seeking a settlement. Let it accept the cost of enforcing a settlement. Let it bear the blame if the system again crashes.

US policymakers have trouble imagining a world in which a sparrow falls to earth, to borrow Biblical imagery, without the US responding. If the bird falls in Nagorno-Karabakh, at least, Americans should allow someone else to pick it up. It is not Washington's purpose to make every conflict on earth America's own.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire .

[Nov 25, 2020] Dangerous Precedent- Military Force Works (For Some) - Antiwar.com Original

Nov 25, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

Dangerous Precedent: Military Force Works (For Some)

by Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.) Posted on November 25, 2020

Predictions are tricky matters in world affairs – and as it turns out, prescience produces little in the way of public or personal vindication. There's scant satisfaction when one's subjects tend towards the tragic. Take the (for now) paused 44-day war in the South Caucasus. Back in an October interview , I offered this (then) seemingly provocative prognosis:

"If this thing gets solved, or put back in the freezer, which is about the best we can hope for right now, it will be Putin playing King Solomon and cutting the Nagorno-Karabakh baby in half."

Think Moscow will merit plaudits from mainstream media? After all, four weeks ago, a U.S.-brokered truce held a whole few hours !

Snark aside, intellectual merriment loses luster when it amounts to dancing on thousands of fresh graves filled with family members of the tens of thousands more newly displaced . Only the implications of the ceasefire's terms – under which Armenian troops withdraw from Nagorno-Karabakh after a 26 years occupation and replaced by Russian peacekeepers – are also disturbing. The outcome also set potentially long-lasting precedents.

Make no mistake this was no small victory for the initiator – if not aggressor – nation of Azerbaijan. That under the agreement , Azeri troops stay in place within areas of Nagorno-Karabakh they seized in battle, has profound ramifications. War worked. Furthermore, seven odd weeks of combat proved – once again – that it often does, at least in certain contexts.

What are those (not-so) special situations, you ask? Easy: be in the esteemed and wealthy Western camp. Kow-tow diplomatically and play ball economically – especially in energy sales – with multinational corporations headquartered in North American and European capitals. Thus, win powerful friends and influence prominent people and nearly anything is permissible.

Anyway, both people and leaders in Baku – especially the mini-Stalinist Aliyev dynasty running the family fiefdom – are thrilled with the outcome. Same goes for folks in Ankara, and madcap Erdogan – the man who would be sultan – himself. Instructively, there's no less enthusiasm in Tel Aviv – not just by Bibi Netanyahu's dominant rightist ethnocrats . Because this much you can't make up: pro-Baku rallies and the waving of Azeri flags in Israel!

Look, Ankara hates their Armenian late genocide victims for surviving to tell the Turk-indicting tale. Besides, Erdogan is pursuing neo-Ottoman adventurism region-wide, and more than happy to tap in into ethno-Turkic and co-religionist solidarity to grease those grandiose wheels. Israel's self-styled Jewish and Democratic hybrid state support for Shia Islamic majority Azerbaijan seems stranger – unless one's in the know on the lengthy and sordid ties between Bibi and Baku.

Not so among Armenians in Yerevan – where protesters stormed the parliament, physically accosted the speaker and reportedly looted the prime minister's own office. Something tells me we haven't heard the last of Armenia's army in Nagorno-Karabakh – given the soreness and inherent instability of losing sides in long-standing and externally-escalated ethno-religious conflicts.

And here's the troubling rub: if not quite smoking guns there's plenty of smoke indicating that Turkey – and to a lesser but significant extent, Israel – conspired with Azerbaijan's petty autocrats to conquer (or reconquer) Nagorno-Karabakh. The preparatory collusion was years in the making, ramped up mightily in the months before D-Day – yet unfolded largely under the U.S. and broader international radar. Consider a cursory recitation of the salient sequence.

Ankara's support for its Azeri Turkic-brethren has grown gradually more overt for years. So have its long-standing arms-sales to Baku. Then came a decisive pivot – according to one report , a six-fold jump in weapon's transfers to Azerbaijan over the last year. Then, this past summer, Turkish troops trained and did joint exercises with Azeri forces. Consider it a pre-invasion capstone.

Finally – now here's a cute catalyst – Ankara reportedly moved those implausibly-deniable Syrian mercenaries into Azerbaijan two weeks before Baku's attack. Don't take my radical word for it, though. Consider the conclusions of the decidedly establishment-friendly Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's resident Caucasus expert. Fellow longtime NK-watcher Tom de Waal was as clear as he was concise:

"It's pretty obvious that Azerbaijan has been preparing for this. Azerbaijan decided it wanted to change the status quo and that the Armenian side had no interest in a war " and "Clearly, the decisive factor in this conflict is Turkey's intervention on Azerbaijan's side. They seem to be heavily coordinating the war effort."

All told, that indirect intervention, coordination, and the combat- proven capabilities of allied arms sales bonanzas – especially Turkish Bayraktar TB2 and Israeli kamikaze drones – were decisive. Thousands of Yerevan's troops were killed, about a third of its tanks were destroyed, and at least 50,000 Armenians have fled in the face of Azeri gains.

Then, in the eleventh hour breach – as if to force friendly peace terms from Russia – Turkey threatened to intervene outright. Just how did big, bad, unhinged and the 10-foot-tall Putin of Democrat-delusions respond to Erdogan's provocation? Well, he essentially folded – or settled – in the interest of temporary tranquility in Russia's restive near-abroad. Recall that Moscow eschewed even much menacing – let alone actual intervention – on behalf of its official Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) Armenian ally.

That this was all so represents nothing less than a paradigm-shifting precedent-setter. Or at least a reminder of force's forever utility for some. Boost your batch of backers, gather the tech-savvy arsenal that's thus available, and ready your patron-trained troops for war. Invade only once the green-light comes from on-external-high, and the "rules-based" international order that isn't – but is dominated (for now) by Washington – will avert eyes long enough to enable Nuremberg's " supreme crime " of armed aggression to work its magic.

So force pays if your government has coveted energy resources, the cash they produce, the weapons they buy – plus powerful patrons willing to sell you the cutting edge stuff. Just ask sundry Gulf Arab autocrats! (Though it rarely turns out as well for internal – especially Shia dissidents or, you know, Yemeni kids).

To take it a step further, maybe your benefactor even tosses in some third-party mercenaries, trains and advises your army just before game-time, and threatens outright intervention if your little-bro-government doesn't get it's way. It also helps if your patron's patron is still a hyper-hegemon that bullies – I mean, "leads" by principled example – much of the wealthy world into silence or complicity, and looks the other way long enough for facts on the ground to turn your way. Now there's a formula for force as solution to frozen conflicts!

No doubt other parties paid attention. Heck, they want in on the violent game-changing game! Believe you me, there are plenty of neo-fascists, adventurist American "allies," and frenemies – all in need of a little citizen-distraction from Covid, corruption, and economic collapse – who are all in for applying the new NK-formula. Ukrainian fascists, Georgian Euro-aspirants, frightened and ever-opportunist Baltic bros or Taiwanese troops, Egypt's military coup-artists, Arabian princely theocrats, and no doubt Israel's Bibi bunch – yea, they all took careful Caucasus-notes.

So where does America's president-elect, Joe Biden, stand on the Russian-brokered truce, you ask? About as you'd suspect from a fella inside the beltway cult of "collusion." Biden picked partisan point-scoring over principled consistency. He " slammed " Trump's supposed slow response to the NK-fighting and accused him of "delegating the diplomacy to Moscow." In fact, his campaign's initial statement singled out Moscow's ostensibly "cynical" arms sales to both conflict parties and failed to name even once the war's Beetlejuice of bellicosity – Turkey.

Never known for nuance, the gut-player-elect failed to couch his rather bold critique with admissions of US security assistance to both sides, acknowledge the Tel Aviv and Ankara accelerants, nor the circumscribed options for any administration in an unfrozen conflict in which Washington has no real " dog in the fight ." Well, that's strange – seeing as the Russian-led settlement pushed past achieving one of Biden's publicly stated goals: to "make clear to Armenia that regions surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh cannot be occupied indefinitely."

Well, so it goes with Russia-obsessed Democratic administrations beset with the clinical -narcissism of American exceptionalism. No matter how distant the conflict, no matter how far off the citizenry's obscurity-radar: the maelstrom must be about us . See everything, everywhere , is apparently about US interests, anxieties, and obsessions. Today's obsessive flavor of the moment – and for most of the century since Bolshevik Red October – is Moscow.

Therein lies the problem, and what I've been boy-who-cried-wolfing about regarding the real risk regarding the coming Democratic administration. That is, after making everything about Trump and Russia for four years, they might begin believing their own exaggerated alarmism and follow through with legit escalation and acceleration of theater numero uno of a dual-front, Eurasia-spanning Cold War encore. If Moscow and Beijing are forever branded bad boys – in motive and machinations – then on shall continually churn the war state, with all the pecuniary and professional benefits to both the outgoing Trump team and incoming Biden bunch alike.

Few Americans will notice, or bother to bother themselves about it – pandemic preoccupied and social media distracted as they be – until the fruits of folly flash in front of their eyes (pun intended).

Forget Condi Rice's farcical foreboding of a mushroom cloud as smoking gun . Even the Bushies' bald-faced lies rarely reached past Saddam's singular nuclear blasts – Washington and Moscow might end the world in an afternoon.

So permit me one final prediction: if they do, some staunch US"ally" learned-of the latest Caucasus-conclusions will be the one to drag us down to oblivion.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy (CIP), contributing editor at Antiwar.com , and director of the new Eisenhower Media Network (EMN). His work has appeared in the NY Times, LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, The American Conservative, Mother Jones, Scheer Post and Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge and Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War . Along with fellow vet Chris "Henri" Henriksen, he co-hosts the podcast " Fortress on a Hill ." Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet and on his website for media requests and past publications.

Copyright 2020 Danny Sjursen

[Nov 25, 2020] Bidens's "Cruise missile liberals" will bring "democracy builking" back to the homeland. That should scare most of US people, if we judge by thier results in Ukrain, Syria and Libya

Highly recommended!
Nov 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Line Islands , Nov 25 2020 11:05 utc | 103

Vicky left fake democracy promotion was always about expanding and sustaining controlled from Washinton global neoliberal empire. It is a part and parcel of Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine implementation. So it will lean to further drop of the standard of living on the majority of US people.

Biden is a tent revival for the aptly named "cruise missile liberals" and some of the more shadowy neo-conservative forces are in retreat and determined to bring democracy building home after their colonial expeditions extinguished it

[Nov 25, 2020] America desperately needs its Two Minutes of Hate against other countries like a meth addict needs his next hit

Notable quotes:
"... Hate is the only thing that holds the American Empire together. Without its Two Minutes of Hate, America will break up apart into a million pieces. ..."
Nov 25, 2020 | caitlinjohnstone.com

USA-MA BIN LADEN / NOVEMBER 25, 2020

America desperately needs its Two Minutes of Hate against other countries like a meth addict needs his next hit.

For Democrats and their ilk, Hate Russia was their unifying and mobilizing ideology. For Republicans and their ilk, Hate China is their unifying and mobilizing ideology.

Hate is the only thing that holds the American Empire together. Without its Two Minutes of Hate, America will break up apart into a million pieces.

[Nov 25, 2020] Biden's foxes guard the henhouse

You can't find better smarter neocons to pursue the Full Spectrum Dominance Doctrine to the total decimation of the standard of living of ordinary Americans ;-)
Nov 25, 2020 | thegrayzone.com

Since the 1990s, Flournoy and Blinken have steadily risen through the ranks of the military-industrial complex, shuffling back and forth between the Pentagon and hawkish think-tanks funded by the U.S. government, weapons companies, and oil giants.

Under Bill Clinton, Flournoy was the principal author of the 1996 Quadrinellial Defense Review, the document that outlined the U.S. military's doctrine of permanent war – what it called "full spectrum dominance."

Flournoy called for "unilateral use of military power" to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources."

... During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Biden declared, "In my judgment, President Bush is right to be concerned about Saddam Hussein's relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction"

As Iraq was plunged into chaos and bloodshed, Flournoy was among the authors of a paper titled "Progressive Internationalism" that called for a "smarter and better" style of permanent war. The paper chastised the anti-war left and stated that "Democrats will maintain the world's most capable and technologically advanced military, and we will not flinch from using it to defend our interests anywhere in the world."

... In 2005, Flournoy signed onto a letter from the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, asking Congress to "increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps (by) at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years."

[Nov 25, 2020] Biden NSA Pick Called Steele Dossier 'Perfectly Appropriate' - Newsmax.com

Nov 25, 2020 | www.newsmax.com

Joe Biden's national security adviser pick defended the anti-Trump dossier in 2018 as "perfectly appropriate."

Many news outlets have declared Biden the president-elect. Newsmax has yet to project a winner, citing legal challenges in several key battleground states.

Jake Sullivan, who worked for Biden when he served as vice president in the Obama administration and as a senior foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton during her presidential race in 2016, made the comments on a podcast interview with David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Obama's presidential campaigns.

"I mean, I believe that it is perfectly appropriate and responsible if we get wind, or if people associated with the campaign get wind, that there may be real questions about the connections between Donald Trump, his organization, his campaign and Russia that that be explored fully," he said at the time, The Daily Caller reported.

https://274b4c66c3248245933d19a14f4d7121.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Sullivan worked for Clinton when a law firm representing her campaign hired an opposition research firm to investigate Trump's possible ties to Russia. The firm hired Christopher Steele, the author behind the dossier alleging a "well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russian government."

Special counsel Robert Mueller later found those claims to be unfounded during his probe into Russian interference in the election, writing in his report "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

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[Nov 25, 2020] ELECTION 2020- What President Biden Won't Touch Consortiumnews

Nov 25, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

ELECTION 2020: What President Biden Won't Touch November 24, 2020 Save

Considering the think-tank imperialists in the bunch Biden is naming to direct U.S. foreign policy, Danny Sjursen expects little to change in the essence of the war-state.

Military aircraft streaming red, white and blue during the welcoming ceremony for President Donald Trump, May 2017, King Khalid International Airport, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (White House, Andrea Hanks)

By Danny Sjursen
Tom's Dispatch

I n this mystifying moment, the post-electoral sentiments of most Americans can be summed up either as "Ding dong! The witch is dead!" or "We got robbed!" Both are problematic, not because the two candidates were intellectually indistinguishable or ethically equivalent, but because each jingle is laden with a dubious assumption: that President Donald Trump's demise would provide either decisive deliverance or prove an utter disaster.

While there were indeed areas where his ability to cause disastrous harm lent truth to such a belief -- race relations, climate change, and the courts come to mind -- in others, it was distinctly (to use a dangerous phrase) overkill. Nowhere was that more true than with America's expeditionary version of militarism, its forever wars of this century, and the venal system that continues to feed it.

For nearly two years, We the People were coached to believe that the 2020 election would mean everything, that Nov. 3 would be democracy's ultimate judgment day. What if, however, when it comes to issues of war, peace, and empire, " Decision 2020 " proves barely meaningful?

After all, in the election campaign just past, Donald Trump's sweeping war-peace rhetoric and Joe Biden's hedging aside, neither nuclear-code aspirant bothered to broach the most uncomfortable questions about America's uniquely intrusive global role. Neither dared dissent from normative notions about America's posture and policy "over there," nor challenge the essence of the war-state, a sacred cow if ever there was one.

U.S. presidential debate, Sept. 29, 2020.

That blessed bovine has enshrined permanent policies that seem beyond challenge: Uncle Sam's right and duty to forward deploy troops just about anywhere on the planet; garrison the globe; carry out aerial assassinations; and unilaterally implement starvation sanctions . Likewise the systemic structures that implement and incentivize such rogue-state behavior are never questioned, especially the existence of a sprawling military-industrial complex that has infiltrated every aspect of public life, while stealing money that might have improved America's infrastructure or wellbeing. It has engorged itself at the taxpayer's expense, while peddling American blood money -- and blood -- on absurd foreign adventures and autocratic allies, even as it corrupted nearly every prominent public paymaster and policymaker.

This election season, neither Democrats nor Republicans challenged the cultural components justifying the great game, which is evidence of one thing: empires come home, folks, even if the troops never seem to.

The Company He Keeps

As the election neared, it became impolite to play the canary in American militarism's coal mine or risk raising Biden's record -- or probable prospects -- on minor matters like war and peace. After all, his opponent was a monster, so noting the holes in Biden's block of Swiss cheese presumably amounted to useful idiocy -- if not sinister collusion -- when it came to Trump's reelection. Doing so was a surefire way to jettison professional opportunities and find yourself permanently uninvited to the coolest Beltway cocktail parties or interviews on cable TV.

George Orwell warned of the dangers of such "intellectual cowardice" more than 70 years ago in a proposed preface to his classic novel Animal Farm . "At any given moment," he wrote, "there is an orthodoxy that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."

And that's precisely what progressive paragon Cornel West warned against seven months ago after his man, Sen. Bernie Sanders -- briefly, the Democratic frontrunner -- suddenly proved a dead candidate walking. "Vote for Biden, but don't lie about who he really is," the stalwart scholar suggested . It seems just enough Americans did the former (phew!), but mainstream media makers and consumers mostly forgot about the salient second part of his sentiment.

Cornel West speaking at a house party for Sen. Bernie Sanders in Des Moines, Iowa, Jan. 15, 2020. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

With the electoral outcome now apparent -- if not yet accepted in Trump World -- perhaps such politeness (and the policing that goes with it) will fade away, ushering in a renaissance of Fourth Estate oppositional truth-telling. In that way -- in my dreams at least -- persistently energized progressives might send President Joe Biden down dovish alternative avenues, perhaps even landing some appointments in an executive branch that now drives foreign policy (though, if I'm honest, I'm hardly hopeful on either count).

One look at Uncle Joe's inbound nieces and nephews brings to mind Aesop's fabled moral: "You are judged by the company you keep."

Think-Tank Imperialists

One thing is already far too clear: Biden's shadow national security team will be a distinctly status-quo squad. To know where future policymakers might head, it always helps to know where they came from. And when it comes to Biden's foreign policy crew , including a striking number of women and a fair number of Obama administration and Clinton 2016 campaign retreads -- they were mostly in Trump-era holding patterns in the connected worlds of strategic consulting and hawkish think tanking.

In fact, the national security bio of the archetypal Biden bro (or sis ) would go something like this: she (he) sprang from an Ivy League school, became a congressional staffer, got appointed to a mid-tier role on Barack Obama's national security council, consulted for WestExec Advisors (an Obama alumni-founded outfit linking tech firms and the Department of Defense), was a fellow at the Center for New American Security (CNAS), had some defense contractor ties , and married someone who's also in the game .

It helps as well to follow the money. In other words, how did the Biden bunch make it and who pays the outfits that have been paying them in the Trump years? None of this is a secret: their two most common think-tank homes -- CNAS and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) -- are the second- and sixth-highest recipients, respectively, of U.S. government and defense-contractor funding . The top donors to CNAS are Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and the Department of Defense. Most CSIS largesse comes from Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon.

How the inevitable conflicts of interest play out is hardly better concealed. To take just one example, in 2016, Michèle Flournoy, CNAS co-founder, ex-Pentagon official, and " odds-on favorite " to become Biden's secretary of defense, exchanged emails with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ambassador in Washington. She pitched a project whereby CNAS analysts would, well, analyze whether Washington should maintain drone-sales restrictions in a non-binding multilateral " missile technology control " agreement. The UAE's autocratic government then paid CNAS $250,000 to draft a report that (you won't be surprised to learn) argued for amending the agreement to allow that country to purchase American-manufactured drones.

Michèle Flournoy, at right, on front of WestExec Advisors homepage.

Which is just what Flournoy and company's supposed nemeses in the Trump administration then did this very July past. Again, no surprise. American drones seem to have a way of ending up in the hands of Gulf theocracies -- states with abhorrent human rights records that use such planes to surveil and brutally bomb Yemeni civilians .

If it's too much to claim that a future Defense Secretary Flournoy would be the UAE's (wo)man in Washington, you at least have to wonder. Worse still, with those think-tank, security-consulting, and defense-industry ties of hers, she's anything but alone among Biden's top prospects and nominees. Just consider a few other abridged resumes:

Tony Blinken, on left, with President Barack Obama, on WestExec Advisors homepage. Tony Blinken , [named secretary of state on Monday] a longtime foreign policy adviser, to serve as secretary of State; frontrunner for national security adviser: CSIS; WestExec (which he co-founded with Flournoy); and CNN analyst. Jake Sullivan , [named national security adviser on Monday]: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ("peace," in this case, being funded by 10 military agencies and defense contractors) and Macro Advisory Partners, a strategic consultancy run by former British spy chiefs. Avril Haines [named director of national intelligence on Monday]: CNAS-the Brookings Institution; WestExec; and Palantir Technologies , a controversial, CIA-seeded, NSA-linked data-mining firm. Kathleen Hicks , probable deputy secretary of defense: CSIS and the Aerospace Corporation , a federally funded research and development center that lobbies on defense issues.

An extra note about Hicks: she's the head of Biden's Department of Defense transition team and also a senior vice president at CSIS. There, she hosts that think tank's "Defense 2020" podcast. In case anyone's still wondering where CSIS's bread is buttered, here's how Hicks opens each episode:

"This podcast is made possible by contributions from BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the Thales Group."

In other words, given what we already know about Joe Biden's previous gut-driven policies that pass for "middle of the road" in this anything but middling country of ours, the experiences and affiliations of his " A-Team " don't bode well for systemic-change seekers. Remember, this is a president-elect who assured rich donors that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he were elected. Should he indeed stock his national security team with such a conflicts-of-interest-ridden crowd, consider America's sacred cows of foreign policy all but saved.

Biden's outfit is headed for office, it seems, to right the Titanic, not rock the boat.

Off the Table: A Paradigm Shift

President Barack Obama meeting with his national security team, April 25, 2011. Michèle Flournoy, as under secretary of defense for policy. is on the president's right, seated against wall. (White House, Flickr, Pete Souza)

In this context, join me in thinking about what won't be on the next presidential menu when it comes to the militarization of American foreign policy.

Don't expect major changes when it comes to:

One-sided support for Israel that enables permanent Palestinian oppression and foments undying ire across the Greater Middle East. Tony Blinken put it this way: as president, Joe Biden "would not tie military assistance to Israel to things like annexation [of all or large portions of the occupied West Bank] or other decisions by the Israeli government with which we might disagree." Unapologetic support for various Gulf State autocracies and theocracies that, as they cynically collude with Israel, will only continue to heighten tensions with Iran and facilitate yet more grim war crimes in Yemen. Beyond Michèle Flournoy's professional connections with the UAE, Gulf kingdoms generously fund the very think tanks that so many Biden prospects have populated. Saudi Arabia, for example, offers annual donations to Brookings and the Rand Corporation; the UAE, $1 million for a new CSIS office building ; and Qatar, $14.8 million to Brookings. America's historically unprecedented and provocative expeditionary military posture globally, including at least 800 bases in 80 countries , seems likely to be altered only in marginal ways. As Jake Sullivan put it in a June CSIS interview : "I'm not arguing for getting out of every base in the Middle East. There is a military posture dimension to this as a reduced footprint."

Above all, it's obvious that the Biden bunch has no desire to slow down, no less halt, the " revolving door " that connects national security work in the government and jobs or security consulting positions in the defense industry. The same goes for the think tanks that the arms producers amply fund to justify the whole circus.

In such a context, count on this: the militarization of American society and the "thank-you-for-your-service" fetishization of American soldiers will continue to thrive, exhibit A being the way Biden now closes almost any speech with "May God protect our troops."

All of this makes for a rather discouraging portrait of an old man's coming administration. Still, consider it a version of truth in advertising. Joe and company are likely to continue to be who they've always been and who they continue to say they are. After all, transformational presidencies and unexpected pivots are historically rare phenomena. Expecting the moon from a man mostly offering MoonPies almost guarantees disappointment.

Obama Encore or Worse?

Tony Blinken, at right, as deputy national security advisor, with President Barack Obama, Sept. 19, 2014. (White House, Pete Souza)

Don't misunderstand me: a Biden presidency will certainly leave some maneuvering room at the margins of national security strategy. Think nuclear treaties with the Russians (which the Trump administration had been systematically tearing up) and the possible thawing of at least some of the tensions with Tehran.

Nor should even the most cynical among us underestimate the significance of having a president who actually accepts the reality of climate change and the need to switch to alternative energy sources as quickly as possible. Noam Chomsky's bold assertion that the human species couldn't endure a second Trump term, thanks to the environmental catastrophe, nuclear brinksmanship, and pandemic negligence he represents, was anything but hyperbole. Yet recall that he was also crystal clear about the need "for an organized public" to demand change and "impose pressures" on the new administration the moment the new president is inaugurated.

Yet, in the coming Biden years, there is also a danger that empowered Democrats in an imperial presidency (when it comes to foreign policy) will actually escalate a two-front New Cold War with China and Russia. And there's always the worry that the ascension of a more genteel emperor could co-opt -- or at least quiet -- a growing movement of anti-Trumpers, including the vets of this country's forever wars who are increasingly dressing in antiwar clothing.

What seems certain is that, as ever, salvation won't spring from the top. Don't count on Status-quo Joe to slaughter Washington's sacred cows of foreign policy or on his national security team to topple the golden calves of American empire. In fact, the defense industry seems bullish on Biden. As Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes recently put it , "Obviously, there is a concern that defense spending will go way down if there is a Biden administration, but frankly I think that's ridiculous." Or consider retired Marine Corps major general turned defense consultant Arnold Punaro who recently said of Biden's coming tenure, "I think the industry will have, when it comes to national security, a very positive view."

Given the evidence that business-as-usual will continue in the Biden years, perhaps it's time to take that advice from Cornel West, absorb the truth about Biden's future national security squad, and act accordingly. There's no top-down salvation on the agenda -- not from Joe or his crew of consummate insiders. Pressure and change will flow from the grassroots or it won't come at all.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and contributing editor at antiwar.com . His work has appeared in the LA Times , The Nation , Huff Post , T he Hill , Salon , Truthdig , Tom Dispatch , among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . His latest book is Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War . Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet . Check out his professional website for contact info, scheduling speeches, and/or access to the full corpus of his writing and media appearances.

This article is from Tom's Dispatch .

[Nov 25, 2020] Another Look At Joe Biden's Foreign Policy Team

Nov 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Sakineh Bagoom , Nov 24 2020 16:37 utc | 1

The choices the incoming president Joe Biden has made so far are not great at all. The people he so far selected are staunch interventionists who will want to continue the wars they have started during their previous time in office.

Tony Blinken will become Secretary of State. (It was probably thought to be too hard to get Senate confirmation for the similar bad Susan Rice.) In 2013 the Washington Post described his high flying pedigree :

Blinken is deputy national security adviser to President Obama, who has also invoked the Holocaust as his administration wrestles, often painfully, with how to respond to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons. One of the government's key players in drafting Syria policy, the 51-year-old Blinken has Clinton administration credentials and deep ties to Vice President Biden and the foreign policy and national security establishment in Washington. He has drawn attention in Situation Room photos, including the iconic one during the May 2011 raid of Osama bin Laden's compound, for his stylishly wavy salt-and-pepper hair. But what sets him apart from the other intellectual powerhouses in the inner sanctum is a life story that reads like a Jewish high-society screenplay that the onetime aspiring film producer may have once dreamed of making. There's his father, a giant in venture capital; his mother, the arts patron; and his stepfather, who survived the Holocaust to become of one of the most influential lawyers on the global stage. It is a bildungsroman for young Blinken -- playing in a Parisian jazz band, debating politics with statesmen -- with a supporting cast of characters that includes, among others, Leonard Bernstein, John Lennon, Mark Rothko, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Abel Ferrara and Christo.

The man is a war mongering psycho:

Blinken surprised some in the Situation Room by breaking with Biden to support military action in Libya, administration officials said, and he advocated for American action in Syria after Obama's reelection. These sources said that Blinken was less enthusiastic than Biden about Obama's decision to seek congressional approval for a strike in Syria, but is now -- perhaps out of necessity -- onboard and a backer of diplomatic negotiations with Russia. While less of an ideologue than Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (a job for which he was considered), he not surprisingly shares her belief that global powers such as the United States have a "responsibility to protect" against atrocities.

He has since shown no remorse about those foreign policy failures:

Blinken maintains that the failure of U.S. policy in Syria was that our government did not employ enough force. He stands by the false argument that Biden's vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq was a "vote for tough diplomacy." He was reportedly in favor of the Libyan intervention, which Biden opposed, and he was initially a defender and advocate for U.S. support for the Saudi coalition war on Yemen. In short, Blinken has agreed with some of the biggest foreign policy mistakes that Biden and Obama made, and he has tended to be more of an interventionist than both of them.

Jake Sullivan will become National Security Advisor. He is a Hillary Clinton figure :

If you can't quite place Jake Sullivan, he's was a long-serving aide to Hillary Clinton, starting with her 2008 race against Barack Obama, then serving as her deputy chief of staff and director of the State Department's Office of Policy Planning when Clinton was Obama's secretary of state. (...) In 2016, during her failed presidential campaign, Sullivan once again teamed up with Clinton, and he was widely expected to have been named to serve as her national security adviser or even secretary of state had she won.

Since 2016, and since the creation of NSA, Sullivan has emerged as a kind of foreign policy scold, gently -- and sometimes not so gently -- criticizing those who reflexively oppose American intervention abroad and who disparage the idea of American "exceptionalism." Indeed, in an article in the January-February issue of The Atlantic, "What Donald Trump and Dick Cheney Got Wrong About America," Sullivan explicitly says that he's intent on "rescuing the idea of American exceptionalism" and presents the "case for a new American exceptionalism".

Sullivan send classified documents to Hillary Clinton's private email server. He wrote to her that Al Qaida is "on our side in Syria." He also hyped fake Trump-Russia collusion allegations.

It is yet unknown who will become Secretary of Defense. Michèle Flournoy is the most named option but there is some opposition to her nomination :

[B]ackers of Michèle Flournoy, his likely pick for defense secretary, are trying to head off a last-minute push by some left-leaning Democrats trying to derail her selection, with many progressives seeing her nomination as a continuation of what critics refer to as America's "forever wars."

I expect that the progressive will lose the fight and that either Flournoy or some other hawkish figure will get that weapon lobbyist position.

Progressives also lost on the Treasury position. Biden's nomination for that is Janet Yellen who is known to be an inflation hawk. She is unlikely to support large spending on progressive priorities.

As usual with a Democratic election win the people who brought the decisive votes and engagement, those who argue for more socialist and peaceful policies, will be cut off from the levers of power.

In three years they will again be called upon to fall for another bait and switch.

Posted by b on November 24, 2020 at 16:32 UTC | Permalink

There are so many creatures that the swamp holds. Don't be surprised by what comes next.


gottlieb , Nov 24 2020 16:54 utc | 4

The entire project for Democrats in this election cycle was to get rid of Trump. There was never any vision for the future or a presentation of policy to gain voters. It was all "Trump is an existential threat and the only priority is to defeat him at the polls." Bernie Sanders made this all quite clear as he again led his legion of lemmings off a cliff and into an ocean of Neoliberal/neoconservative Forever Empire.

But hey, it's all worth it to get rid of The Man With The Golden Toilet.

Meanwhile, yeah, it's back to future with more of the same as far as the eye can see. Which, with an economy in shambles, and a populace with a death wish, might not be as long as one thinks.

Geoff , Nov 24 2020 17:03 utc | 6

At the very least "gravitas" will have been restored to its venerable and "sacred" institution. And a good portion of the american population can heave a huge sigh of relief, and go about their business of profound ritualistic conformity.

Gravitas restored by an aging old man, potentially on the verge of dementia, which is a sad condition by any measure. A collection of Human beings about as bereft of solutions of philosophy of spiritual comprehension as possible, at this point in human history. We all have an enormous amount to look forward to!

Josh , Nov 24 2020 17:08 utc | 7
It's a veritable who's who of the same criminals who instigated and executed the covert (and sometimes overt) military and economic aggressions across several regions of the globe, to include North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
Josh , Nov 24 2020 17:11 utc | 8
Furthermore,
https://journal-neo.org/2020/11/23/the-murky-foreign-actors-behind-us-election-fraud/
The same faction tried to pull the exact same nonsense last time, but some rather serious elements of the intelligence, military, and security services elected to not allow it (via real time monitoring and enforcement).

[Nov 25, 2020] Biden might walk away from a confrontation with China

Nov 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Nov 25 2020 0:52 utc | 73

US-based companies doing business in/with China are also very pleased at the prospect that Trump's draconian trade restrictions will soon be lifted:

"US multinationals aim to clear away a stumbling block, the Trump administration's protectionism and anti-globalism, to push forward their international plans, in particular their exploration of the Chinese market, experts said. They made the comments in response to news that New York business leaders signed a letter urging the Trump administration to start the power transition to the incoming Biden administration.

"They also predicted that many of the prejudicial and disruptive policies launched by the Trump administration against China, like sanctions on Huawei and tariff hikes, will be corrected once Biden becomes the new US president.

"More than 160 top US executives have signed a letter pressing the Trump administration to acknowledge Joe Biden as the president-elect and begin the transition to the new administration, according to a report by The New York Times. Most of the executives come from US multinationals including Mastercard, Visa, Condé Nast, WeWork and American International Group.

"Many top executives from US financial companies have signed the letter, including David Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs and Jon Gray, Blackstone's president."

Such an attitude might sway Biden away from a confrontation first policy with China since the overall balance of power has changed greatly since he was Vice-President. Perhaps the Neocons will finally learn Peace is more profitable than war.

Don Bacon , Nov 25 2020 1:57 utc | 79

@ karlof 73
Trump's draconian trade restrictions will soon be lifted

wiki: The trade war has negatively impacted the economies of both the United States and China. In the United States, it has led to higher prices for consumers and financial difficulties for farmers. In China, the trade war contributed to a slowdown in the rate of economic and industrial output growth, which had already been on a decline. Many American companies have shifted supply chains to elsewhere in Asia, bringing fears that the trade war would lead to a US-China economic 'decoupling'. In other countries the trade war has also caused economic damage, though some countries have benefited from increased manufacturing to fill the gaps. It has also led to stock market instability. Governments around the world have taken steps to address some of the damage caused by the economic conflict.//

As on war, and many other issues, the corrupt US Congress has allowed "executive privilege" to enact measures and programs that would never be allowed in a real "democratic" country, governed by citizens with availability to a free press.

Edward Abbey: "Democracy--rule by the people--sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America."

[Nov 25, 2020] Biden's getting the Obama band back together again for an encore performance celebrating nostalgia for a never-was golden age

Nov 25, 2020 | www.rt.com

The incoming Biden administration's cabinet carries a strong whiff of deja vu, and that's no accident – the uninspiring president-elect is staking everything on evoking a lost utopia that never existed under ex-president Obama.

The Biden campaign's rule of thumb for his cabinet appointments seems to be to channel the Obama administration – with an extra helping of wokeness where possible. This has seen him float Pentagon veteran and dyed-in-the-wool megahawk Michele Flournoy as the first-ever female Secretary of Defense and former DACA czar Alejandro Mayorkas as the first Latino-Jewish head of the Department of Homeland Security.

ALSO ON RT.COM Biden signals US return to full-on globalism and foreign meddling by picking interventionist Anthony Blinken as secretary of state

There's also the rumor he's planning to pick Obama's former Fed chair Janet Yellen as the first-ever female Treasury Secretary – but even if she's not the lucky lady, fellow former Clinton adviser Lael Brainard could get the nod, or one of two black candidates – one of whom happens to be gay. Whoever he picks, they'll be a "first" – and, given their institutional history as reliable servants of the ruling class under Obama, a dependable source of more-of-the-same fiscal policies.

Lest all this wokeness turn off the Republicans who defected to Biden out of distaste for President Donald Trump's determination to upset the military-industrial applecart, the presumed president has also brought back ex-Secretary of State John Kerry, who'll be returning to Washington to serve as a 'climate czar' on the National Security Council. While Kerry would be the first person to hold such a position, which will allow him to skip a Senate confirmation that could be unfriendly given the chamber's Republican control, Kerry's time at the head of the State Department saw the Obama administration continue digging the US deeper into its portfolio of ill-advised wars. And Kerry was the man who signed the Paris Climate Accords on behalf of Washington in 2016, a treaty President Donald Trump wasted no time removing the US from. He should go down plenty smooth indeed.

Most of the Biden picks were second-stringers during the Obama years and thus haven't quite become household names yet. This is likely to be a point in their favor – if the history of would-be Secretary of State Antony Blinken is any indication, Biden has good reason for picking relative unknowns. A report from the American Prospect revealed Blinken had spent the post-Obama years getting rich quick at consulting firm WestExec – which coincidentally (or not) was co-founded by would-be Pentagon chief Flournoy after her most recent stint at the Pentagon. The firm focuses on "helping new companies navigate the complex bureaucracy of winning Pentagon contracts" – suggesting a Biden presidency won't just deliver a fatter Pentagon budget, but new wars to go with it.

ALSO ON RT.COM Michele Flournoy might be breaking a glass ceiling as Pentagon chief, but even feminists aren't buying

It's no surprise, then, that Washington-watchers are sinking into deja vu. Biden was elected as the "anti-Trump," a return to some vague fantasy of "normalcy" . Except the nostalgia for the Obama era that helped shoehorn Biden into office earlier this month was based on a wholly synthetic reimagining of the eight years in which the career politician served as vice president.

Obama may have inherited George W. Bush's financial crisis in 2008, born of rapacious investment banks that mistook people's life savings for free chips from a casino, but the " recovery " he claimed as his own never bothered to lift up most working- and middle-class Americans . Many of these lost their homes, and if they didn't, their children "failed to launch," in no position to strike out on their own. The younger generation were either mired in student debt or merely unable to afford even the cheapest 'starter homes' due to an absence of living-wage jobs open to young adults entering the workplace.

ALSO ON RT.COM Biden puts Homeland Security in hands of Alejandro Mayorkas, the Cuban-American lawyer who championed citizenship for immigrants

Biden made it clear repeatedly in the run-up to this month's election that he had no interest in feeling these people's pain. "I have no empathy for it – give me a break," he said, complaining that millennials had been given everything by his own generation, the Baby Boomers. In reality, those "whiners" so loathed by the president-to-be made 20 percent less than Biden's generation at the same age at best – assuming they were lucky enough to have a job at all. Back when it was still considered acceptable to trash Biden, most establishment outlets raked him over the coals for such tone-deaf comments. But such negativity was memory-holed when the Democrats crowned Biden their pick to run against Trump – speaking ill of the anointed one got progressives labeled Trump supporters or Nazis or worse.

Those whose rose-colored glasses let them see Biden as the second coming of Obama forget that "Bush in a black-man suit" turned two wars into seven, allowed Citibank – one of the worst offenders of the 2008 financial crisis – to shape his cabinet, and passed a mockery of "universal healthcare" that forced the lower-middle-class to purchase health insurance they couldn't afford or shoulder a tax penalty they also couldn't afford. Biden has promised to reignite the war in Syria, veto the actual universal healthcare policy that is Medicare for All, and ensure nothing will fundamentally change for his fat-cat Wall Street donors – and those donors seem to be picking his cabinet just like they did his boss' in 2008.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

ALSO ON RT.COM Familiar faces: Biden picks Obama's Secretary of State John Kerry as his climate czar & finds job for ex-CIA deputy Avril Haines

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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Robin Olsen 13 hours ago 23 Nov, 2020 10:23 PM

Restarting the war in Syria will take a major false flag that is bullet proof in order to get Russia to withdraw...not one false flag chemical attack staged by Obama and Biden actually worked in the past. Trump's failed too. The world is onto America's false flag strategy...To get Americans behind another 20 years of forever wars is also gonna take significant false flag. Americans will fall for it, they always do...but no one else will...not this time. Without international support he cannot restart anything, the British are not enough to counter Russian interference and I don't think Bojo will survive the next election anyways.
HypoxiaMasks 17 hours ago 23 Nov, 2020 06:17 PM
With any luck he will bless us with Hillary, Comey, Brennan, the corpse of McCain and as an added bonus Lil Bush and both Obamas
DukeLeo HypoxiaMasks 9 hours ago 24 Nov, 2020 02:50 AM
Biden has not officially been pronounced winner in the elections, and he already has picked a neocon team. What a big surprise. Makes you wonder how many people who voted for him really knew what they were doing.
Ibmekon 17 hours ago 23 Nov, 2020 06:34 PM
When Trump got into power he soon overtook Obama record of 26171 bombs in 2016. Trump since 2015 has dropped over 133,000 bombs . Trump tried to get troops out - the MIC just sent them back in. Joey Biden and new secretary of state are committed to keep the troops out occupying countries around the world - which requires the bombs to keep falling, one every 12 mins. Because nobody actually wants the USA military in their country (apart from a few well bribed military/religious dictators) We have no number for those murdered - the USA refuses to keep any count.

[Nov 25, 2020] The relationship with Russia, under Trump, is fully under control of Kaganate of Nuland

Nov 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Piotr Berman , Nov 25 2020 0:59 utc | 75

Annoying Russians with a destroyer 10 miles or so from Vladivostok under good old Trump. Apparently, after a series of moves that replaced some top figures in Pentagon. The relationship with Russia, under Trump, is fully under control of Kaganate of Nulandia, or whatever we see on the top of that iceberg -- and try to make a search what it would take to change the course of an iceberg from Antarctics (people were investigating it as a way of bringing fresh water to Arabian peninsula where money is plentiful but water is scarce).

There are two important aspects there. Local trade is more profitable than distant trade when consider in totality, i.e. including the products that you would never make profit after crossing oceans. Second aspect is that Far East is a cultural zone like Europe -- lots of animosities collected over centuries, but even more commonalities in culture. As USA imposes various types of tribute on allies/vassals, centripetal forces in various continents should increase. Among visible costs of vassaldom:

1. paying costs of American presence
2. annoying China beyond the national needs, thus decreasing the national security
3. participating in sanctions imposed by USA, directly and indirectly (through resulting conflicts) reducing profits in economies that are struggling

[Nov 24, 2020] Will the Biden Team Be Warmongers or Peacemakers- - CounterPunch.org

Notable quotes:
"... U.S. cabinet positions are positions of power that can drastically affect the lives of millions of Americans and billions of our neighbors overseas. If Biden is surrounded by people who, against all the evidence of past decades, still believe in the illegal threat and use of military force as key foundations of American foreign policy, then the international cooperation the whole world so desperately needs will be undermined by four more years of war, hostility and international tensions, and our most serious problems will remain unresolved. ..."
"... Medea Benjamin is ..."
"... of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection . Nicolas J. S. Davies is a writer for Consortium News and a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq ..."
Nov 24, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

NOVEMBER 11, 2020 Will the Biden Team Be Warmongers or Peacemakers? BY MEDEA BENJAMIN - NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES Facebook Twitter Reddit Email

Photograph Source: Steve Jurvetson – CC BY 2.0

Congratulations to Joe Biden on his election as America's next president! People all over this pandemic-infested, war-torn and poverty-stricken world were shocked by the brutality and racism of the Trump administration, and are anxiously wondering whether Biden's presidency will open the door to the kind of international cooperation that we need to confront the serious problems facing humanity in this century.

For progressives everywhere, the knowledge that "another world is possible" has sustained us through decades of greed, extreme inequality and war, as U.S.-led neoliberalism has repackaged and force-fed 19th century laissez-faire capitalism to the people of the 21st century. The Trump experience has revealed, in stark relief, where these policies can lead.

Joe Biden has certainly paid his dues to and reaped rewards from the same corrupt political and economic system as Trump, as the latter delightedly trumpeted in every stump speech. But Biden must understand that the young voters who turned out in unprecedented numbers to put him in the White House have lived their whole lives under this neoliberal system, and did not vote for "more of the same." Nor do they naively think that deeply-rooted problems of American society like racism, militarism and corrupt corporate politics began with Trump.

During his election campaign, Biden has relied on foreign policy advisors from past administrations, particularly the Obama administration, and seems to be considering some of them for top cabinet posts. For the most part, they are members of the "Washington blob" who represent a dangerous continuity with past policies rooted in militarism and other abuses of power.

These include interventions in Libya and Syria, support for the Saudi war in Yemen, drone warfare, indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo, prosecutions of whistleblowers and whitewashing torture. Some of these people have also cashed in on their government contacts to make hefty salaries in consulting firms and other private sector ventures that feed off government contracts.

– As former Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy National Security Advisor to Obama, Tony Blinken played a leading role in all Obama's aggressive policies. Then he co-founded WestExec Advisors to profit from negotiating contracts between corporations and the Pentagon, including one for Google to develop Artificial Intelligence technology for drone targeting, which was only stopped by a rebellion among outraged Google employees.

– Since the Clinton administration, Michele Flournoy has been a principal architect of the U.S.'s illegal, imperialist doctrine of global war and military occupation. As Obama's Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, she helped to engineer his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and interventions in Libya and Syria. Between jobs at the Pentagon, she has worked the infamous revolving door to consult for firms seeking Pentagon contracts, to co-found a military-industrial think tank called the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and now to join Tony Blinken at WestExec Advisors.

Nicholas Burns was U.S. Ambassador to NATO during the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 2008, he has worked for former Defense Secretary William Cohen's lobbying firm The Cohen Group, which is a major global lobbyist for the U.S. arms industry. Burns is a hawk on Russia and China and has condemned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a "traitor."

– As a legal adviser to Obama and the State Department and then as Deputy CIA Director and Deputy National Security Advisor, Avril Haines provided legal cover and worked closely with Obama and CIA Director John Brennan on Obama's tenfold expansion of drone killings.

Samantha Power served under Obama as UN Ambassador and Human Rights Director at the National Security Council. She supported U.S. interventions in Libya and Syria, as well as the Saudi-led war on Yemen . And despite her human rights portfolio, she never spoke out against Israeli attacks on Gaza that happened under her tenure or Obama's dramatic use of drones that left hundreds of civilians dead.

– Former Hillary Clinton aide Jake Sullivan played a leading role in unleashing U.S. covert and proxy wars in Libya and Syria .

– As UN Ambassador in Obama's first term, Susan Rice obtained UN cover for his disastrous intervention in Libya. As National Security Advisor in Obama's second term, Rice also defended Israel's savage bombardment of Gaza in 2014, bragged about the U.S. "crippling sanctions" on Iran and North Korea, and supported an aggressive stance toward Russia and China.

A foreign policy team led by such individuals will only perpetuate the endless wars, Pentagon overreach and CIA-misled chaos that we -- and the world -- have endured for the past two decades of the War on Terror.

Making diplomacy "the premier tool of our global engagement."

Biden will take office amid some of the greatest challenges the human race has ever faced -- from extreme inequality, debt and poverty caused by neoliberalism , to intractable wars and the existential danger of nuclear war, to the climate crisis, mass extinction and the Covid-19 pandemic.

These problems won't be solved by the same people, and the same mindsets, that got us into these predicaments. When it comes to foreign policy, there is a desperate need for personnel and policies rooted in an understanding that the greatest dangers we face are problems that affect the whole world, and that they can only be solved by genuine international collaboration, not by conflict or coercion.

During the campaign, Joe Biden's website declared, "As president, Biden will elevate diplomacy as the premier tool of our global engagement. He will rebuild a modern, agile U.S. Department of State -- investing in and re-empowering the finest diplomatic corps in the world and leveraging the full talent and richness of America's diversity."

This implies that Biden's foreign policy must be managed primarily by the State Department, not the Pentagon. The Cold War and American post-Cold War triumphalism led to a reversal of these roles, with the Pentagon and CIA taking the lead and the State Department trailing behind them (with only 5% of their budget), trying to clean up the mess and restore a veneer of order to countries destroyed by American bombs or destabilized by U.S. sanctions , coups and death squads .

In the Trump era, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reduced the State Department to little more than a sales team for the military-industrial complex to ink lucrative arms deals with India, Taiwan , Saudi Arabia, the UAE and countries around the world.

What we need is a foreign policy led by a State Department that resolves differences with our neighbors through diplomacy and negotiations, as international law in fact requires , and a Department of Defense that defends the United States and deters international aggression against us, instead of threatening and committing aggression against our neighbors around the world.

As the saying goes, "personnel is policy," so whomever Biden picks for top foreign policy posts will be key in shaping its direction. While our personal preferences would be to put top foreign policy positions in the hands of people who have spent their lives actively pursuing peace and opposing U.S. military aggression, that's just not in the cards with this middle-of-the-road Biden administration.

But there are appointments Biden could make to give his foreign policy the emphasis on diplomacy and negotiation that he says he wants. These are American diplomats who have successfully negotiated important international agreements, warned U.S. leaders of the dangers of aggressive militarism and developed valuable expertise in critical areas like arms control.

William Burns was Deputy Secretary of State under Obama, the # 2 position at the State Department, and he is now the director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As Under Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs in 2002, Burns gave Secretary of State Powell a prescient and detailed but unheeded warning that the invasion of Iraq could "unravel" and create a "perfect storm" for American interests. Burns also served as U.S. Ambassador to Jordan and then Russia.

Wendy Sherman was Obama's Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, the # 4 position at the State Department, and was briefly Acting Deputy Secretary of State after Burns retired. Sherman was the lead negotiator for both the1994 Framework Agreement with North Korea and the negotiations with Iran that led to the Iran nuclear agreement in 2015. This is surely the kind of experience Biden needs in senior positions if he is serious about reinvigorating American diplomacy.

Tom Countryman is currently the Chair of the Arms Control Association . In the Obama administration, Countryman served as Undersecretary of State for International Security Affairs, Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs. He also served at U.S. embassies in Belgrade, Cairo, Rome and Athens, and as foreign policy advisor to the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. Countryman's expertise could be critical in reducing or even removing the danger of nuclear war. It would also please the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, since Tom supported Senator Bernie Sanders for president.

In addition to these professional diplomats, there are also Members of Congress who have expertise in foreign policy and could play important roles in a Biden foreign policy team. One is Representative Ro Khanna , who has been a champion of ending U.S. support for the war in Yemen, resolving the conflict with North Korea and reclaiming Congress's constitutional authority over the use of military force.

Another is Representative Karen Bass , who is the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and also of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Human Rights, and International Organizations .

If the Republicans hold their majority in the Senate, it will be harder to get appointments confirmed than if the Democrats win the two Georgia seats that are headed for run-offs , or than if they had run more progressive campaigns in Iowa, Maine or North Carolina and won at least one of those seats. But this will be a long two years if we let Joe Biden take cover behind Mitch McConnell on critical appointments, policies and legislation. Biden's initial cabinet appointments will be an early test of whether Biden will be the consummate insider or whether he is willing to fight for real solutions to our country's most serious problems.

Conclusion

U.S. cabinet positions are positions of power that can drastically affect the lives of millions of Americans and billions of our neighbors overseas. If Biden is surrounded by people who, against all the evidence of past decades, still believe in the illegal threat and use of military force as key foundations of American foreign policy, then the international cooperation the whole world so desperately needs will be undermined by four more years of war, hostility and international tensions, and our most serious problems will remain unresolved.

That's why we must vigorously advocate for a team that would put an end to the normalization of war and make diplomatic engagement in the pursuit of international peace and cooperation our number one foreign policy priority.

Whomever President-elect Biden chooses to be part of his foreign policy team, he -- and they -- will be pushed by people beyond the White House fence who are calling for demilitarization, including cuts in military spending, and for reinvestment in our country's peaceful economic development.

It will be our job to hold President Biden and his team accountable whenever they fail to turn the page on war and militarism, and to keep pushing them to build friendly relations with all our neighbors on this small planet that we share.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection . Nicolas J. S. Davies is a writer for Consortium News and a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq

[Nov 24, 2020] Grading candidates for Biden's foreign policy team- William Burns -- Nonzero

Nov 24, 2020 | nonzero.org

By Robert Wright and Connor Echols , Nov 22 2020

Background: Burns, a career diplomat who has served as ambassador to Russia and as deputy secretary of state, gets particularly high marks for cognitive empathy -- understanding the perspectives and motivations of international actors.

For our grading criteria, click here .

Military restraint (B)

Few if any contenders for foreign policy positions in the Biden administration surpass Burns when it comes to appreciating one tenet of progressive realism: military interventions have a way of leading to bad things. In a ten-page memo Burns wrote to Secretary of State Colin Powell, then his boss, during the runup to the Iraq War, he laid out a cornucopia of possible unintended consequences, including some that became all too real. (Like: Iran feels threatened and acts accordingly.)

Even highly surgical uses of violence, Burns recognizes, can have blowback. Last year he wrote that, during the Obama administration, as "drone strikes and special operations grew exponentially," they were "often highly successful in narrow military terms" but at the cost of "complicating political relationships and inadvertently causing civilian casualties and fueling terrorist recruitment."

So it's not surprising that Burns has often pushed for non-military solutions to foreign policy problems. Still, he has supported dubious interventions -- such as America's joining allies in arming Syrian rebels, a policy hatched while Burns was deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration.

In retrospect, it's not shocking that this policy only succeeded in amplifying the killing and chaos, given the conflicting agendas of our allies and the divergent aims of the various rebel groups -- not to mention the aforementioned inherent unpredictability of military action. Yet, even with years of hindsight, Burns confined his criticism of this proxy intervention to matters of timing and execution. In his 2019 book The Back Channel , he said we should have given more aid to the rebels earlier. But Burns does, at least, get credit for considering Obama's public demand for regime change ("Assad must go") unwise, and for having initially hoped for more open-ended negotiations than that demand permitted.

Cognitive empathy (A)

Burns is adept at seeing the perspectives of international actors, as demonstrated in particular by his views on Russia. He has a history of dealing effectively with the country, and he takes Moscow's interests seriously. Unlike many in the foreign policy establishment, Burns doubts the wisdom of NATO expansion -- including its early phases but especially its later ones. When the US "pushed open the door for formal NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia," he has said , "I think that fed Putin's narrative that the United States was out to keep Russia down, to undermine Russia and what he saw to be its entitlement, its sphere of influence."

Burns believes that, though Putin clearly sees the US as an adversary, he doesn't see the US-Russia relationship in purely zero-sum terms; Putin is capable of seeing "those few areas where we might be able to work together. He is capable of juggling apparent contradictions."

Burns is very aware -- as many US officials over the years have not been -- that hectoring foreign countries about how they should behave can be counterproductive. "I've always felt we get a lot further in the world with the power of our example than we do with the power of our preaching," he said in a New Yorker interview. "Americans can sometimes... be awfully patronizing overseas."

Respect for international law (B)

Burns is generally a strong advocate of international law. And in the course of his career he has often had occasion to invoke it -- as when, in 2014, he said disputes over islands in the South China Sea should be resolved via adjudicatory mechanisms outlined in the Law of the Sea Convention. (Had he not been speaking for the US government, he might have added that, regrettably, America itself has not ratified that convention.)

Unfortunately, Burns seems to have adopted the habit, widespread in the foreign policy establishment, of being more fastidious in applying international law to adversaries than to the US. In The Back Channel he offers some practical criticisms of America's 2011 intervention in Libya, but he doesn't note that when the mission shifted from defending imperiled civilian populations to overthrowing the regime, it arguably violated the letter of the authorizing UN resolution and certainly violated its spirit. Similarly, his discussion in that book of Obama's arming of Syrian rebels evinces no concern about the fact that this intervention, according to common legal reckoning , violated the UN Charter.

Support for international governance (A)

Burns certainly supports international governance of a progressive sort -- agreements and institutions that address climate change and arms control, for example, and the inclusion of labor and environmental provisions in trade agreements. And he has been deeply involved in multilateral problem solving, such as the Iran nuclear deal.

But what sets Burns apart from your typical progressive supporter of international governance is his understanding of the need to expand it beyond these traditional areas. He recognizes, for example, that if work in artificial intelligence and genetic engineering proceeds without restraint in a context of intense international competition, bad things could happen. So he wants to "create workable international rules of the road" in these areas, and he wants the US State Department to "take the lead -- just as it did during the nuclear age -- building legal and normative frameworks."

Universal engagement (A-)

As a quintessential diplomat, Burns believes that the U.S. should be open to relations with any country willing to talk. He is especially emphatic about the importance of maintaining diplomatic and economic engagement with China; he criticizes those who "assume too much about the feasibility of decoupling and containment -- and about the inevitability of confrontation. Our tendency, as it was during the height of the Cold War, is to overhype the threat, over-prove our hawkish bona fides, over-militarize our approach, and reduce the political and diplomatic space required to manage great-power competition." And Burns recognizes one of the biggest payoffs of engagement with China: to "preserve space for cooperation on global challenges."

Burns eschews a Cold War not just with China but with authoritarian states more broadly. He is refreshingly skeptical of proposals -- fashionable in neoconservative and some liberal circles -- to form a "league" or "concert" of democracies that would fight "techno-authoritarianism."

Burns doesn't seem to have expressed the degree of skepticism about America's promiscuous use of economic sanctions that a progressive realist might like. But he gets points for at least recognizing the inconsistency of their application. "We focus our criticism on Maduro, in Venezuela, who richly deserves it, and then pull punches with Mohammed bin Salman, in Saudi Arabia," he said in a New Yorker interview.

Burns also recognizes that the foreign policy establishment's obsession with Iran is, well, obsessive. Tehran has "an outsized hold on our imagination," he says . Yes, he believes, Iran poses threats to American friends and interests, but those threats are manageable, in part because, contrary to a common American view, Iran is "not 10 feet tall."

Miscellaneous

(1) After leaving the government, Burns became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That's a highly and rightly respected position. But it should be noted -- since any good progressive realist wants to root out the influence of the military industrial complex -- that Carnegie has taken money from Northrup Grumman ( as well as from such foreign countries as Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates and from NATO).

(2) Burns deserves credit for seeing that the foreign policy establishment, confronted by Trump's jarringly disruptive policies, is in danger of mindlessly retreating to pre-Trump policies that in fact need sharp revision. Recounting (and embracing) the bipartisan opposition to Trump's abrupt withdrawal of military support for Kurds in Syria, he adds , "If all this episode engenders, however, is a bipartisan dip in the warm waters of self-righteous criticism, it will be a tragedy We have to come to grips with the deeper and more consequential betrayal of common sense -- the notion that the only antidote to Trump's fumbling attempts to disentangle the United States from the region is a retreat to the magical thinking that has animated so much of America's moment in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War." This magical thinking, he continues, involves "the persistent tendency to assume too much about our influence and too little about the obstacles in our path and the agency of other actors."

Overall grade: A-


Illustration by Nikita Petrov .

[Nov 24, 2020] 'Manipulative BULLS--T'- Glenn Greenwald defends calling NBC a CIA mouthpiece, mocks accusation of 'endangering journalists'

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Greenwald earlier this week said NBC "has always existed to disseminate US government, CIA and corporate propaganda." ..."
"... NBC also helped the CIA sell the Iraq War on its Meet the Press program, and sister network MSNBC was "ground zero for mindless CIA stenography of the most unhinged Russiagate conspiracy theories," he said. ..."
"... The C.I.A. owns anyone of any significance in the media. -William Colby. Former Director of the CIA. In 1974, the Rockefeller Commission was established to investigate shennanigans carried out by the Agency. President Ford fired William Colby and replaced him with George Herbert Walker Bush. Why? Because Gerald Ford thought that Colby was being too honest with the Commission about CIA wrong doings. ..."
"... Interestingly, Gerald Ford was often referred to as "The CIA's Best Friend in The Senate", which would explain his old appointment to the Warren Commission. It was Ford who ordered JFK's bullet wound in the back to be raised six inches up to his neck, thus allowing Arlen Specter to float his "Magic bullet Theory" ..."
"... As is not generally known, Bush I was lifetime CIA and became I believe the first CIA President. There is a little known picture of a young Bush standing outside the Texas Book Depository on the day of the assassination. ..."
"... The CIA controls the media in subtle ways. Blacklists for instance. I have experience after one of my buddies fell for the spiel of an agent provocateur. Never trust anyone, always assume they could be CIA and assess what damage they can do to you (and your associates) before you interact with them. Misleading them would be best. ..."
"... As shocking as it may sound, Glenn is stating the obvious. Even AFP and Reuters are CIA mouthpieces. Look up Operation Mockingbird. Look up "propaganda multiplier" by the Swiss policy research. ..."
"... Interesting that nobody even tried to deny it, they just come up with the same line they used to attack Wikileaks for telling the truth: exposing this might put out operatives at risk. ..."
"... Perilous Environments because the CIA is probably manipulating another of its regimes change, to very undemocratically put someone they control into office. Surely you remember Poroshenko? ..."
"... Operation Mockingbird was a secret CIA effort to influence and control the American media. The first report of the program came in 1979 in the biography of Katharine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, written by Deborah Davis. Davis wrote that the program was established by Frank Wisner, the director of the Office of Policy Coordination, a covert operations unit created under the National Security Council. ..."
"... Reporters who work for the CIA are not spies, because the CIA is a lying agency, not a spying agency. If a terrorist accuses you of being a CIA agent, you can honestly reply that the CIA is the terrorist's friend. ..."
"... The CIA wants the world to believe that China, Russia and Iran are the leading state sponsors of terrorism, and that those seeking the overthrow of Syria's Bashar al-Assad are freedom fighters, not terrorists... ..."
Nov 22, 2020 | www.rt.com

Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald torched accusations that he endangered reporters by saying NBC News spouts CIA propaganda, saying he only spoke of a well-known fact, and the effort to shame him was "manipulative bulls**t."

"Profoundly sorry for endangering the lives of NBC executives and TV personalities by spilling the extremely well-kept secret of their close working relationship with the CIA," Greenwald tweeted sarcastically on Saturday. His message showed a picture of a headline about NBC's 2018 hiring of ex-CIA chief John Brennan as an NBC and MSNBC contributor.

Greenwald's retort came in reply to reporter Sulome Anderson, who accused him of endangering journalists who work in places where any CIA affiliation is "life-threatening." Greenwald earlier this week said NBC "has always existed to disseminate US government, CIA and corporate propaganda."

"This crosses a line," Anderson said. "Like some of his proteges, Glenn is endangering journalists working in perilous environments by telling his massive following that they are mouthpieces for US intelligence."

Greenwald said on Saturday that NBC has a "long-standing role" in spouting CIA propaganda, as evidenced by its hiring of Ken Dilanian, who was accused of sharing stories with the CIA press office prior to publication while working as a Los Angeles Times reporter. NBC also helped the CIA sell the Iraq War on its Meet the Press program, and sister network MSNBC was "ground zero for mindless CIA stenography of the most unhinged Russiagate conspiracy theories," he said.

"If you don't want to be known as a CIA outpost, then don't be one," Greenwald tweeted. He added that NBC hired "John Brennan, Ken Dilanian and every other operative puked up by the security state. People already know."

Anderson has written at least two opinion pieces on Lebanon for NBC in recent months. She has been critical of Hezbollah, designated a terrorist group by the US government, but also has interviewed some of its fighters.

Anderson, who said she is "morally opposed" to journalists working as intelligence agents, may have good reason for her sensitivity about alleged CIA ties. Her parents were both journalists who covered Lebanon's 15-year civil war, and she said her father was kidnapped by terrorists.

"They tortured him again and again for years, calling him CIA," she said Saturday on Twitter. "'I am not a spy,' he would scream. 'I am a reporter.' It never stopped them."

Anderson acknowledged journalists being used as intelligence-agency assets, but said such cases are rare. "Time and again, American hostages – journalists and otherwise – have been falsely called spies, tortured and killed," she said. "I have been in many situations where I've had to convince the very dangerous men I am with that I am not a spy. My saving grace has always been that I am not."

Greenwald came to international fame by breaking the Edward Snowden NSA whistleblower story in 2013. He later co-founded the Intercept but quit the outlet last month after saying editors there suppressed his coverage of Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden.


fezzie035fezzm 19 hours ago 21 Nov, 2020 11:52 PM

The C.I.A. owns anyone of any significance in the media. -William Colby. Former Director of the CIA. In 1974, the Rockefeller Commission was established to investigate shennanigans carried out by the Agency. President Ford fired William Colby and replaced him with George Herbert Walker Bush. Why? Because Gerald Ford thought that Colby was being too honest with the Commission about CIA wrong doings.

Bush, as the new Director, stonewalled the hearings and put the lid on any information coming out, which would explain why CIA Headquarters in Langley was named after Bush. Colby is no longer among the living. Let's just say that he didn't die from "natural causes".

Interestingly, Gerald Ford was often referred to as "The CIA's Best Friend in The Senate", which would explain his old appointment to the Warren Commission. It was Ford who ordered JFK's bullet wound in the back to be raised six inches up to his neck, thus allowing Arlen Specter to float his "Magic bullet Theory"

JOHNCHUCKMAN fezzie035fezzm 1 hour ago 22 Nov, 2020 05:48 PM
Yes, Colby was an unusually frank man at times. He also told us about the ghastly Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, a CIA run assassination scheme of village leaders and prominent men. They killed 30 or 40 thousand people by sending in belly-crawling special forces guys to enter villages at night and cut throats.

As is not generally known, Bush I was lifetime CIA and became I believe the first CIA President. There is a little known picture of a young Bush standing outside the Texas Book Depository on the day of the assassination. You'll find it on my site Chuckman's Words in Comments on Wordpress. Its title to search is: A REMARKABLE DULL LITTLE PHOTOGRAPH OF GEORGE H W BUSH WITH EXPLOSIVE SUGGESTIONS. Sorry, but RT doesn't like links.

Of course, Colby himself may have been assassinated. He had a very odd boating accident.

Ally Hauptmann-Gurski 20 hours ago 21 Nov, 2020 11:14 PM
The CIA controls the media in subtle ways. Blacklists for instance. I have experience after one of my buddies fell for the spiel of an agent provocateur. Never trust anyone, always assume they could be CIA and assess what damage they can do to you (and your associates) before you interact with them. Misleading them would be best.
Enorm 22 hours ago 21 Nov, 2020 09:01 PM
NBC operatives don't have an opinion. They follow da money,. I feel sorry for folks glued to propaganda TV.
Oregon Observer Enorm 21 hours ago 21 Nov, 2020 09:41 PM
WikiLeaks and other investigative outfits have looked at the conglomerates over the years and over half of them are CIA "assets"...
Chris Cottrell 22 hours ago 21 Nov, 2020 08:25 PM
Are they spies? Probably not. Are they tools of the CIA even if unwittingly, yes.
Oregon Observer Chris Cottrell 21 hours ago 21 Nov, 2020 09:43 PM
Most ARE spies in every sense of the term. They look for specific information that they pass onto their handler(s). It bears noting that the FBI and the 10,000 or so outfits that contract with them and NSA and DHS and the pentagon and the various state Fusion programs are as bad or worse and every stinking one if those outfits recruits reporters.
fakiho2 21 hours ago 21 Nov, 2020 09:28 PM
As shocking as it may sound, Glenn is stating the obvious. Even AFP and Reuters are CIA mouthpieces. Look up Operation Mockingbird. Look up "propaganda multiplier" by the Swiss policy research.
shadow1369 fakiho2 6 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 12:30 PM
Interesting that nobody even tried to deny it, they just come up with the same line they used to attack Wikileaks for telling the truth: exposing this might put out operatives at risk. My response to that is good, time to have these roaches taken out.
Edward698 18 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 01:43 AM
You can bet on Glenn to tell you the truth unlike the main stream media which fed us with lots of non sense on Syria. Read his interview with "Democracy now": .... Glenn Greenwald on "Submissive" Media's Drumbeat for War and "Despicable" Anti-Muslim Scapegoating By Democracy Now! ....

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, that clip is unbelievable. It is literally one of the three most important military officials of the entire war on terror, General Flynn, who was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He's saying that the U.S. government knew that by creating a vacuum in Syria and then flooding that region with arms and money, that it was likely to result in the establishment of a caliphate by Islamic extremists in eastern Syria -- which is, of course, exactly what happened.

They knew that that was going to happen, and they proceeded to do it anyway. So when the U.S. government starts trying to point the finger at other people for helping ISIS, they really need to have a mirror put in front of them, because, by their own documents, as that extraordinary clip demonstrates, they bear huge responsibility for that happening, to say nothing of the fact that, as I said, their closest allies in the region actually fund it.

Debra Edward698 14 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 05:37 AM
The US was not only counting on their ISIS creation to destabilize Syria in the hope of an Assad exit but also to decimate the Hezbollah. I credit the Hezbollah for saving Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, but they suffered heavy, heavy losses. "So when the U.S. government starts trying to point the finger at other people for helping ISIS, they really need to have a mirror put in front of them, because, by their own documents, as that extraordinary clip demonstrates, they bear huge responsibility for that happening, to say nothing of the fact that, as I said, their closest allies in the region actually fund it."
frankfalseflag 19 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 12:08 AM
** "Glenn is endangering journalists working in perilous environments by telling. . ." ** . . Perilous Environments because the CIA is probably manipulating another of its regimes change, to very undemocratically put someone they control into office. Surely you remember Poroshenko? ...
pogohere 21 hours ago 21 Nov, 2020 10:16 PM
Operation Mockingbird was a secret CIA effort to influence and control the American media. The first report of the program came in 1979 in the biography of Katharine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, written by Deborah Davis. Davis wrote that the program was established by Frank Wisner, the director of the Office of Policy Coordination, a covert operations unit created under the National Security Council.

According to Davis, Wisner recruited Philip Graham of the Washington Post to head the project within the media industry. Davis wrote that, "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."

Davis also writes that Allen Dulles convinced Cord Meyer, who later became Mockingbird's "principal operative," to join the CIA in 1951.

The Taliban Won the War 7 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 12:28 PM
It is true and it is an undisputed fact that all Western governments use Journalists, aid workers and so called human relief organisations as cover for espionage, undercover and dark operations. Not just that, they also use exchange teachers and students, they use priests and pastors. They use anything and anyone that can hid
Isiah Steele 8 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 11:45 AM
The Motion Picture Industry of Hollywood, too are CIA! Propagates: war and constant US Military dominated narratives.
Sergio Weigel 16 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 03:31 AM
I'm pretty sure that most journalists don't know, or don't wanna know, the dirty open secret that editorial lines of most outlets are indeed determined or influenced by the CIA. The trouble is their working conditions. There are far more journalists than job openings, and they already earn badly. In order to keep the job, they just play ball, and as humans are, they make themselves believe that what they were doing was just right. Cognitive dissonance, and the result is outrage and defensive anger when someone points out their hypocrisy. That is also why they avoid to even read alternative media, they don't have their noses pointed to it. In a way, we can pity them. Then again, why become a journalist these days?
shadow1369 Sergio Weigel 7 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 12:43 PM
I used to think maybe 'journalists' were simply misled, but the narrative on too many stories, from 9/11 to Iraq, from Syria to the ukraine, from the Skripals to Navalny, was so ludicrous that a five year old could see through the lies. Nope, they know full well that they are lying, and do so regardless. A great example was when some bbc l!cksp!ttle was interviewing a general about events in Syria. Somehow they got the wrong guy, or he had not been properly briefed, because his responses were factual and balanced. After trying to challenge him, the interviewer finally said 'Don't you realise this is an informatioon war'.
Debra 4 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 03:11 PM
This is another warning for people: Over the last two years Facebook has been advertising for viewers to join Facebook groups. Many political groups on Facebook are set up by CIA and FBI agents. Facebook is full of agents, and that is why the ones in Michigan were caught in their attempted coup against the Michigan governor...
Quick Draw 22 hours ago 21 Nov, 2020 09:46 PM
Just NBC?
imnotarobot22 16 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 03:05 AM
google 'Udo Ulfkotte' ex editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine - he'll tell you about it.
Richard Burden 2 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 05:07 PM
Reporters who work for the CIA are not spies, because the CIA is a lying agency, not a spying agency. If a terrorist accuses you of being a CIA agent, you can honestly reply that the CIA is the terrorist's friend.

The CIA wants the world to believe that China, Russia and Iran are the leading state sponsors of terrorism, and that those seeking the overthrow of Syria's Bashar al-Assad are freedom fighters, not terrorists...

[Nov 23, 2020] Neocon chickenhawks are back in power

Full spectrum dominance theorists are dusted off and put in key positions in new administration. Instead of punishment and jail terms Russiagaters got promotion.
Nov 23, 2020 | www.rt.com

Biden signals US return to full-on globalism and foreign meddling by picking interventionist Anthony Blinken as secretary of state

Joe Biden has named Anthony Blinken – an advocate for isolating Russia, cozying up to China and intervening in Syria – as secretary of state, cementing a foreign policy built on military forays and multi-national motivations.

Biden, the nominal president-elect, announced his selection of Blinken along with other members of his foreign-policy and national-security team, which is filled with such veteran Washington insiders as John Kerry, the new climate czar and formerly secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration.

READ MORE: Biden supporters rush to defend reported Sec-of-State pick Antony Blinken, who 'got rich off corporate consulting'

Blinken, a long-time adviser to Biden and deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama, has been hailed by fellow Democrats and globalists, such as retired General Barry McCaffrey, as an experienced bureaucrat with "global contacts and respect." Enrico Letta, dean of the Paris School of International Affairs, called Biden's choice the "right step to relaunch transatlantic ties."

He was even praised for a 2016 appearance on the Sesame Street children's television program, where he explained to the show's 'Grover' character the benefits of accepting refugees.

While some critics focused on how Blinken " got rich working for corporate clients " during President Donald Trump's term in office, the new foreign-affairs chief's neoconservative policy recommendations might be cause for greater concern. He advocated for the Iraq War and the bombings of such countries as Libya and Yemen.

ALSO ON RT.COM Michele Flournoy might be breaking a glass ceiling as Pentagon chief, but even feminists aren't buying

Blinken is still arguing for a resurgence in Washington's military intervention in Syria. He lamented in a May interview that the Obama-Biden administration hadn't done enough to prevent a "horrific situation" in Syria, and he faulted Trump for squandering what remaining leverage the US had on the Bashar Assad regime by pulling troops out of the country.

"Our leverage is vastly even less than it was, but I think we do have points of leverage to try to effectuate some more positive developments," Blinken said. For instance, US special forces in northeast Syria are located near Syrian oil fields. "The Syrian government would love to have dominion over those resources. We should not give that up for free."

Blinken also sees Biden strengthening NATO, isolating Russia politically and " confronting Mr. [President Vladimir] Putin for his aggressions."

ALSO ON RT.COM The return of the Obama 'adults' in a Joe Biden administration is likely to spell ruin for America

As for China, Blinken has said Washington needs to look for ways to cooperate with Beijing. Reinvesting in international alliances that were weakened by Trump will help the Biden administration deal with China "from a position of strength" as it pushes back against the Chinese Communist Party's human-rights abuses, he said.

[Nov 23, 2020] Administrations change but Full Spectrum Dominance Doctine and the desire to portect and emand global neoliberal empire controlled from Washinton is intact. It will eventually banrupt the country much like was the case with the British Empire

Highly recommended!
Neocons still dominate both the State Department and NSC. That's bad.
Nov 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Top Biden Advisors Flournoy & Blinken Promise More Secretive 'Permanent War' Policy - Zero Hedge

Authored by Dan Cohen via TheGrayZone.com,

Throughout his campaign, Joe Biden railed against Donald Trump's 'America First' foreign policy, claiming it weakened the United States and left the world in disarray. "Donald Trump's brand of America First has too often led to America alone," Biden proclaimed.

He pledged to reverse this decline and recover the damage Trump did to America's reputation. While Donald Trump called for making America Great Again, Biden seeks to Make the American Empire Great Again .

Joe Biden: "Tonight, the whole world is watching America. And I believe at our best, America is a beacon for the globe. We will lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example."

Among the president-elect's pledges is to end the so-called forever wars – the decades-long imperial projects in Afghanistan and Iraq that began under the Bush administration.

"It's long past time we end the forever wars which have cost us untold blood and treasure," Biden has said.

Yet Biden – a fervent supporter of those wars – will delegate that duty to the most neoconservative elements of the Democratic Party and ideologues of permanent war .

Michele Flournoy and Tony Blinken sit atop Biden's thousands-strong foreign policy brain trust and have played central roles in every U.S. war dating back to the Bill Clinton administration.

During the Trump era, they've cashed in through WestExec Advisors – a corporate consulting firm that has become home for Obama administration officials awaiting a return to government.

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Flournoy is Biden's leading pick for Secretary of Defense and Blinken is expected to be the president's National Security Advisor.

Biden's foxes guard the henhouse

Since the 1990s, Flournoy and Blinken have steadily risen through the ranks of the military-industrial complex, shuffling back and forth between the Pentagon and hawkish think-tanks funded by the U.S. government, weapons companies, and oil giants.

Under Bill Clinton, Flournoy was the principal author of the 1996 Quadrinellial Defense Review, the document that outlined the U.S. military's doctrine of permanent war – what it called "full spectrum dominance."

Flournoy called for "unilateral use of military power" to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ivFFZ95EQvY

This video report was originally published at Behind The Headlines . Support the independent journalism initiative here .

As Bush administration officials lied to the world about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD's, Flournoy remarked that "In some cases, preemptive strikes against an adversary's [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities may be the best or only option we have to avert a catastrophic attack against the United States."

Tony Blinken was a top advisor to then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Joe Biden, who played a key role in shoring up support among the Democrat-controlled Senate for Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq.

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Biden declared, "In my judgment, President Bush is right to be concerned about Saddam Hussein's relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction."

As Iraq was plunged into chaos and bloodshed, Flournoy was among the authors of a paper titled "Progressive Internationalism" that called for a "smarter and better" style of permanent war . The paper chastised the anti-war left and stated that "Democrats will maintain the world's most capable and technologically advanced military, and we will not flinch from using it to defend our interests anywhere in the world."

With Bush winning a second term, Flournoy advocated for more troop deployments from the sidelines.

In 2005, Flournoy signed onto a letter from the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, asking Congress to "increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps (by) at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years."

In 2007, she leveraged her Pentagon experience and contacts to found what would become one of the premier Washington think tanks advocating endless war across the globe: the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). CNAS is funded by the U.S. government, arms manufacturers, oil giants, Silicon Valley tech giants, billionaire-funded foundations, and big banks.

Flournoy joined the Obama administration and was appointed as under secretary of defense for policy, the position considered the "brains" of the Pentagon. She was keenly aware that the public was wary of more quagmires. In the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, she crafted a new concept of warfare that would expand the permanent war state while giving the appearance of a drawdown.

Flournoy wrote that "unmanned systems hold great promise" – a reference to the CIA's drone assassination program. This was the Obama-era military doctrine of hybrid war. It called for the U.S. to be able to simultaneously wage war on numerous fronts through secret warfare, clandestine weapons transfers to proxies, drone strikes, and cyber-attacks – all buttressed with propaganda campaigns targeting the American public through the internet and corporate news media.

Architects of America's Hybrid wars

Flournoy continued to champion the endless wars that began in the Bush-era and was a key architect of Obama's disastrous troop surge in Afghanistan. As U.S. soldiers returned in body bags and insurgent attacks and suicide bombings increased some 65% from 2009 and 2010, she deceived the Senate Armed Services Committee, claiming that the U.S. was beginning to turn the tide against the Taliban: "We are beginning to regain the initiative and the insurgency is beginning to lose momentum."

Even with her lie that the U.S. and Afghan government were starting to beat the Taliban back, Flournoy assured the senate that the U.S. would have to remain in Afghanistan long into the future: "We are not leaving any time soon even though the nature and the complexion of the commitment may change over time."

Ten years later – as the Afghan death toll passed 150,000 – Flournoy continued to argue against a U.S. withdrawal: "I would certainly not advocate a US or NATO departure short of a political settlement being in place."

That's the person Joe Biden has tasked with ending the forever war in Afghanistan. But in Biden's own words, he'll "bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan" implying some number of American troops will remain, and the forever war will be just that. Michele Flournoy explained that even if a political settlement were reached, the U.S. would maintain a presence.

Michele Flournoy: "If we are fortunate enough to see a political settlement reached, it doesn't mean that the US role or the international community is over. Afghanistan without outside investment is not a society that is going to survive and thrive. In no case are we going to be able to wash our hands of Afghanistan and walk away nor should we want to. This is something where we're going to have to continue to be engaged, just the form of engagement may change."

In 2011, the Obama-era doctrine of smart and sophisticated warfare was unveiled in the NATO regime-change war on Libya.

Moammar Gaddafi – the former adversary who sought warm relations with the U.S. and had given up his nuclear weapons program – was deposed and sodomized with a bayonet.

Flournoy, Hillary Clinton's State Department, and corporate media were in lockstep as they waged an elaborate propaganda campaign to deceive the U.S. public that Gadaffi's soldiers were on a Viagra-fueled rape and murder spree that demanded a U.S. intervention.

Fox News: "Susan Rice reportedly told a security council meeting that Libyan troops are being given viagra and are engaging in sexual violence."

MSNBC jumped on the propaganda bandwagon, claiming: "New reports emerge that the LIbyan dictator gave soldiers viagra-type pills to rape women who are opposed to the government."

So did CNN.

As the Libyan ambassador to the US alleged "raping, killing, mass graves," ICC Chief Prosecutor Manuel Ocampo claimed: "It's like a machete. Viagra is a tool of massive rapes."

All of this was based on a report from Al Jazeera – the media outlet owned by the Qatari monarchy that was arming extremist militias in Libya to overthrow the government.

Yet an investigation by the United Nations called the rape claims "hysteria." Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found no credible evidence of even a single rape.

Even after Libya was descended into strife and the deception of Gadaffi's forces committing rape was debunked, Michele Flournoy stood by her support for the war: "I supported the intervention in Libya on humanitarian grounds. I think we were right to do it."

Tony Blinken, then Obama's deputy national security advisor, also pushed for regime change in Libya. He became Obama's point man on Syria, pushed to arm the so-called "moderate rebels" that fought alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, and designed the red line strategy to trigger a full-on U.S. intervention. Syria, he told the public, wasn't anything like the other wars the U.S. had waging for more than a decade.

Tony Blinken: "We are doing this in a very different way than in the past. We're not sending in hundreds of thousands of American troops. We're not spending trillions of American dollars. We're being smart about this. This is a sustainable way to get at the terrorists and it's also a more effective way."

Blinken added: "This is not open-ended, this is not boots on the ground, this is not Iraq, it's not Afghanistan, it's not even Libya. The more people understand that, the more they'll understand the need for us to take this limited but effective action ."

Despite Blinken's promises that it would be a short affair, the war on Syria is now in its ninth year. An estimated half a million people have been killed as a result and the country is facing famine.

Largely thanks to the policy of using "wheat to apply pressure" – a recommendation of Flournoy and Blinken's CNAS think tank.

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When the Trump administration launched airstrikes on Syria based on mere accusations of a chemical attack, Tony Blinken praised the bombing, claiming Assad had used the weapon of mass destruction sarin. Yet there was no evidence for this claim, something even then-secretary of Defense James Mattis admitted: "So I can not tell you that we had evidence even though we had a lot of media and social media indicators that either chlorine or sarin were used ."

While jihadist mercenaries armed with U..S-supplied weapons took over large swaths of Syria, Tony Blinken played a central role in a coup d'etat in Ukraine that saw a pro-Russia government overthrown in a U.S.-orchestrated color revolution with neo-fascist elements agitating on the ground.

At the time, he was ambivalent about sending lethal weapons to Ukraine, instead opting for economic pressure.

Tony Blinken: "We're working, as I said, to make sure that there's a cost exacted of Russia and indeed that it feels the pressure. That's what we're working on. And when it comes to military assistance, we're looking at it. The facts are these: Even if assistance were to go to Ukraine that would be very unlikely to change Russia's calculus or prevent an invasion."

Since then, fascist militias have been incorporated into Ukraine's armed forces. And Tony Blinken urged Trump to send them deadly weapons – something Obama had declined to do.

But Trump obliged.

The Third Offset

While the U.S. fueled wars in Syria and Ukraine, the Pentagon announced a major shift called the Third Offset strategy – a reference to the cold war era strategies the U.S. used to maintain its military supremacy over the Soviet Union.

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The Third Offset strategy shifted the focus from counterinsurgency and the war on terror to great power competition against China and Russia. It called for a technological revolution in warfighting capabilities, development of futuristic and autonomous weapons, swarms of undersea and airborne drones, hypersonic weapons, cyber warfare, machine-enhanced soldiers, and artificial intelligence making unimaginably complex battlefield decisions at speeds incomprehensible to the human mind. All of this would be predicated on the Pentagon deepening its relationship with Silicon Valley giants that it birthed decades before: Google and Facebook.

The author of the Third Offset, former undersecretary of defense Robert Work, is a partner of Flournoy and Blinken's at WestExec Advisors. And Flournoy has been a leading proponent of this dangerous new escalation .

In June, Flournoy published a lengthy commentary laying out her strategy called " Sharpening the U.S. Military's Edge: Critical Steps for the Next Administration ."

She warned that the United States is losing its military technological advantage and reversing that must be the Pentagon's priority. Without it, Flournoy warned that the U.S. might not be able to defeat China in Asia: "That technological investment is still very important for the United States to be able to offset what will be quantitative advantages and home theater advantages for a country like China if we ever had to deal with a conflict in Asia, in their backyard."

While Flournoy has called for ramping up U.S. military presence and exercises with allied forces in the region, she went so far as to call for the U.S. to increase its destructive capabilities so much that it could launch a blitzkrieg style-attack that would wipe out the entire Chinese navy and all civilian merchant ships in the South China Sea . Not only a blatant war crime but a direct attack on a nuclear power that would spell the third world war.

At the same time, Biden has announced he'll take an even more aggressive and confrontational stance against Russia , a position Flournoy shares: "We need to invest to ensure that we maintain the military edge that we will need in certain critical areas like cyber and electronic warfare and precision strike, to again underwrite deterrence, to make sure Vladimir Putin does not miscalculate and think that he can cross a border into Europe or cross a border and threaten us militarily."

As for ending the forever wars, Tony Blinken says not so fast: "Large scale, open-ended deployment of large standing US forces in conflict zones with no clear strategy should end and will end under his watch . But we also need to distinguish between, for example, these endless wars with the large scale open ended deployment of US forces with, for example, discreet, small-scale sustainable operations, maybe led by special forces, to support local actors In ending the endless wars I think we have to be careful to not paint with too broad a brush stroke."

The end of forever wars?

So Biden will end the forever wars, but not really end them. Secret wars that the public doesn't even know the U.S. is involved in – those are here to stay.

In fact, leaving teams of special forces in place throughout the Middle East is part and parcel of the Pentagon's shift away from counterinsurgency and towards great power competition.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy explains that, "Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia are the principal priorities" and the U.S. will "consolidate gains in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving to a more resource-sustainable approach."

As for the catastrophic war on Yemen, Biden has said he'll end U.S. support; but in 2019, Michele Flournoy argued against ending arms sales to Saudi Arabia .

Biden pledged he will rejoin the Iran deal as a starting point for new negotiations. However, Trump's withdrawal from the deal discredited the Iranian reformists who seek engagement with the west and empowered the principlists who see the JCPOA as a deal with the devil.

In Latin America, Biden will revive the so-called anti-corruption campaigns that were used as a cover to oust the popular social democrat Brazilian president Lula da Silva.

His Venezuela policy appears little different from Trump's – sanctions and regime change.

In Central America, Biden has presided over a four billion dollar package to support corrupt right-wing governments and neoliberal privatization projects, fueling destabilization and sending vulnerable masses fleeing north to the United States.

Behind their rhetoric, Biden, Flournoy, and Blinken will seek nothing less than global supremacy , escalating a new and even more dangerous arms race that risks the destruction of humanity. That's what Joe Biden calls "decency" and "normalcy."

naughty.boy , 14 hours ago

deep state will bankrupt the USA with forever wars.

Distant_Star , 14 hours ago

Yes. As a bonus neither of these Deep State wretches has even seen a shot fired in anger. They are too "important" to be at risk.

[Nov 23, 2020] Biden to Name Russia Hoaxer, CNN Analyst Tony Blinken Secretary of State

Nov 23, 2020 | www.breitbart.com

Former Vice President Joe Biden is reportedly set to announce this week that Tony Blinken, who supported the idea of "Russia collusion," would be his Secretary of State.

Bloomberg News reported Sunday evening:

President-elect Joe Biden intends to name his longtime adviser Antony Blinken as secretary of State, according to three people familiar with the matter, setting out to assemble his cabinet even before Donald Trump concedes defeat.

In addition, Jake Sullivan, formerly one of Hillary Clinton's closest aides, is likely to be named Biden's national security adviser, according to two people familiar with the matter. An announcement is expected Tuesday, the people said.

Blinken, who served as deputy secretary of state and deputy national security advisor under President Barack Obama, has also been a New York Times opinion writer and a "global affairs analyst" for CNN. In that capacity, he supported the "Russia collusion" hoax.

As Breitbart News reported in 2017, Blinken told CNN: "The president's ongoing collusion with Russia's plans is really striking, intentional or not." He said that Russia had sown doubt about American elections and institutions.

(Subsequently, an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of any collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.)

Blinken also apologized earlier this year to left-wing anti-Israel radical Linda Sarsour, regarded by many critics ( even on the left) as an antisemite, after the Biden campaign tried to distance itself from her views.

He is also married to Evan Ryan, a former aide to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. Ryan worked for Clinton at a time when Clinton's chief of staff, Margaret Williams, acknowledged accepting a campaign donation from entrepreneur Johnny Chien Chuen Chung.

Chung said that the donation was meant to help Clinton pay for Christmas receptions for the Democratic National Committee at the White House, in exchange for "VIP treatment for a delegation of visiting Chinese businessmen," according to the Los Angeles Times .

Biden is expected to name several potential Cabinet nominees in the coming days.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump's Presidency . His recent book, RED NOVEMBER , tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak .

[Nov 23, 2020] The Trump trap: Biden's own rhetoric has cornered him into carrying on Trump's foreign policy

Nov 23, 2020 | www.rt.com

Scott Ritter Scott Ritter

is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ' SCORPION KING : America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter 21 Nov, 2020 13:52 Joe Biden thinks he can save America and the world from four years of Donald Trump. Instead, Biden will find himself in a foreign policy trap where his tough guy rhetoric compels him to finish what Trump started.

If one listens to Joe Biden and his closest national security advisors, all it will take to undo four years of Trump-era foreign policy is a few dozen strokes of the pen. According to the plan, the presumptive president-elect will sign off on a series of executive orders which reverse the course charted by Trump, returning America back to the path of greatness derived from undisputed global leadership that had been the trademark of the Obama years, when Biden reigned as vice president and Barack's right-hand man.

Rejoining the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran nuclear agreement and the World Health Organization are all actions Biden can take as soon as he takes office. Reversing Trump's troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and halting the redeployment of US forces from Germany are also high on Biden's 'to do' list. However, simply reversing a decision made over the course of the past four years does not reset the clock; for example, the world has moved on regarding climate change, with nations like China taking the lead in promulgating plans for reaching a "carbon zero" posture by 2060. Biden claims he can do this by 2050, but American domestic political reality, shaped by an economy fine-tuned by Trump and inherently resistant to the kind of economic change that would need to occur to make the Biden climate change plan viable, may have something to say about that timetable.

The Iran deal

The Iran nuclear deal finds Biden trapped by his own hardline rhetoric, setting conditions that are as unrealistic as they are unobtainable (for instance, requiring Iran to renegotiate key aspects of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as a pre-condition for the US rejoining that pact). Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, recognizing the bad position Biden's mouth has placed its owner in, has wisely noted that Iran can return to its JCPOA commitments simply by Biden signing an executive order cancelling the Trump sanctions. This is one executive order Biden likely will not sign, because it requires him to certify the JCPOA as being good as written, something he has already articulated against.

ALSO ON RT.COM Israel lovers Pompeo and Trump are burying Palestine as they know Joe Biden won't have the power to dig the nation up again Afghanistan withdrawal

One of the first decisions Biden will be compelled to make upon assuming the presidency is how to proceed on the issue of US troops in Afghanistan. If the Trump reductions are completed as planned by January 15 (a big 'if', given the proclivity of the US military to lie to Trump about actual troop deployments), Biden will be pressured by the Pentagon to immediately redeploy up to 5,000 troops in order to create the force structure the Pentagon believes necessary to ensure stability while Afghanistan transitions to peace. This, of course, would kill the peace plan the US has in place with the Taliban, setting the stage for even more 'forever war'.

Regime change and more war

Other regional issues jump out – the ongoing effort to oust Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and the ongoing Saudi-led war in Yemen, to name two. Biden's anti-Maduro rhetoric is every bit as strong as Trump's, meaning there is little chance of a policy re-direct on this front. Likewise, if Trump fulfils threats to name the Houthi rebels in Yemen as a terrorist organization, it will be difficult for Biden politically to reverse that decision, or else be doing the bidding of Iran. Yemen will become another example of a 'forever war' living up to its name.

Awkward in Europe

Another issue Biden will be called upon to deal with is the ongoing American redeployment of troops out of Germany. Trump has committed to sending thousands of these redeployed troops to Poland, a move Biden will have difficulty reversing. In the end, Biden will be pressured to not only halt the withdrawal of US forces from Germany, but also find fresh troops to replace those headed for Poland. But such a commitment must be measured in relation to the ongoing controversy over the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline connecting Russia with Europe. Trump has put in place sanctions designed to halt the pipeline from being completed; Biden is likewise opposed to the pipeline reaching fruition. Getting Germany to commit to taking in US troops while blatantly interfering with German economic sovereignty is a balancing act Biden may not be up to carrying out.

Arms control deadlock

Likewise, Biden has indicated that he would be inclined to sign an extension to the soon-to-expire New START Treaty. Russia has long insisted that future arms control agreements must consider missile defense issues. The Trump administration has just tested a missile interceptor integral to the Aegis Ashore anti-missile system deployed in Romania and Poland in an anti-intercontinental ballistic missile configuration. The likelihood of Russia agreeing to any new arms control measures without a commitment on the part of a Biden administration to reduce and/or eliminate European-based missile defense systems is zero. So, too, is are the odds of a Biden administration doing away with missile defense in Europe. The result is an expensive arms race at a time when the US can afford it least.

ALSO ON RT.COM US' successful ICBM intercept test brings us closer to a nuclear war and proves Moscow's concerns were well grounded No thaw in the new Cold War

Finally, Biden inherits a policy posture toward both Russia and China which is as hostile a relationship as has existed since the Cold War. Russia's force posture in Europe is such that NATO would need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to be in a realistic position to take on the Russian military in any conventional ground war in Europe. Moreover, it is unlikely Europe will agree to either the formal endorsement of such an objective, or the economic commitment needed to underwrite it. Complicating matters further is that China and Russia have reacted to the aggressive policies of the US, which pre-dated the Trump era, by considering the possibility of a formal alliance against what they term "western hegemony." Such an alliance would complicate any effort on the part of a Biden administration to back up the president-elect's pusillanimous rhetoric with actual muscle, since any conflict in Europe would automatically trigger a Pacific response, and vice versa.

China's dominance

Regardless of anything else, perhaps the biggest challenge facing a Biden administration will be in dealing with the consequences of Trump's decision to withdraw from the Obama-era Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an abortive free trade agreement designed to keep China out while promoting American economic leadership. China, together with 14 other Asia-Pacific nations, recently signed what amounts to the world's largest free trade agreement. The signatories to this agreement, known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), include the 10 countries comprising the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), along with China, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia, and together account for around 30 percent of global GDP. The RCEP cements China's status as the dominant economic power in the Asia-Pacific regions, and represents a stunning reversal of fortune for the US, whose precipitous withdrawal from the TPP in 2017 paved the way for China's stunning diplomatic coup.

READ MORE Trump won, regardless of the election outcome because Trumpism is here to stay Trump won, regardless of the election outcome because Trumpism is here to stay

The collapse of the TPP, when combined with the economic crisis brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, made the RCEP attractive to nations who looked to trade with China as the only viable means of rebuilding their stricken economies. The RCEP helps solidify the regional geopolitical objectives of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative by opening the economies of the Asia-Pacific region to Chinese-funded development projects. The diplomatic victory of China in bringing the RCEP to fruition represents a stunning defeat for the US, which had been seeking regional support in its ongoing trade war with China. Moreover, given the linkage between economic and security issues, the fact that major regional allies such as Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia have so decisively joined their economies to China's undermines ongoing US efforts to build a regional coalition designed to contain and eventually roll-back China's presence in the South China Sea. While President-elect Joe Biden has reached out to Japan and South Korea in an effort to reassure them of his administration's commitment to their security, a future Biden administration is ill-positioned to counter the economic influence China has locked itself into through the RCEP. From an economic perspective, the US 'pivot to Asia' has been effectively halted, with the Asia-Pacific nations now firmly in China's court.

From Europe, to South America, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and on to the Pacific, President Joe Biden will be inheriting a world transformed by four years of Trump policies. While Biden has indicated that he is inclined to reverse many, if not all, of the Trump foreign policy "disasters" as soon as practical after assuming office, the reality is that he will find his hands tied by the combined impact of his own aggressive rhetoric, which in many instances paralleled the policies undertaken by Trump, or the fact that the geopolitical situation that exists today does not permit a return to the foreign policy of yore.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


[Nov 22, 2020] The Unfinished Work of the Church Committee, by Marisol Nostromo

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Thanks for reading. If you find this material interesting, perhaps you might contact Twitter and ask them why ..."
"... my account was suspended ..."
"... on June 30 of this year. I would very much like to find out the reason. ..."
Nov 08, 2020 | marisol-nostromo.medium.com

According to Merriam-Webster , a "secret police" is "a police organization that is run by a governm e nt and that operates in a secret way to control the actions of people who oppose the government." Of course, in this day and age, it's not easy to define "the government". We live in an oligarchical society. There are elected officials, including the President, who stay in office for a fixed amount of time and have a certain amount of power to change the way that things are done. But on the other hand, there are permanent institutions, both within the government itself and within society at large, that also wield significant power and are responsible for safeguarding the interests of the oligarchy, should they be threatened by the policies of the temporary, elected government.

There are various ways to describe this superstructure of oligarchic rule. One term which has become popular of late is "Deep State." Because the term has been used by Donald Trump, it has been ridiculed in the press as a "conspiracy theory," an expression which is often used to identify an "unauthorized narrative". A more technical term, favored by the British and the neocons , is "Continuity of Government" (COG.) There has been plenty of analysis of this concept, some well-founded, some highly speculative.

But a few things are self-evident here. One is that there is a huge number of career civil servants working in all branches of government who don't leave their jobs at the end of a 4- or 8-year presidential term. They remain, offering their professional experience, as well as their established political allegiances and ideological habits, to the incoming administration. Secondly, these career professionals are connected in multiple ways to non-governmental institutions with which they have formed closed working relationships, such as the media and the financial community, or the arms industry (the famed " Military Industrial Complex .")

Agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) devote much of their efforts to covert activity, and these agencies have at times clashed with elected officials. There have been allegations that these agencies are more loyal to permanent oligarchic power centers than to any temporary occupant of the White House. There are even compelling reasons to believe that these secretive agencies have been deployed against U.S. elected officials and even presidents .

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Senator Frank Church

In the early 1970s there were troubling revelations about covert operations, including illegal spying on American citizens and assassinations of dissident leaders such as Fred Hampton. Growing public concern about these abuses led to the formation of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee after its chairman, Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Creation of the Committee was approved on January 27, 1975 by the U.S. Senate. It published an extensive final report in April of 1976.

The Committee investigated the activities of the CIA and FBI, as well as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). It investigated assassinations of foreign leaders, unauthorized surveillance of U.S. citizens, and other covert operations. Efforts were made by political leaders, including President Gerald Ford, to keep these findings secret. These efforts were only partially successful.

Some of the projects which were exposed by the Church Committee included:

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Edward Snowden

Typically, the agencies under investigation would issue a mea culpa and assure the public that these naughty activities had all been discontinued. However, new revelations over the past decades have demonstrated that nothing could be further from the truth. Of particular interest is the case of Edward Snowden , the NSA whistleblower who revealed the truly staggering extent of the unlawful surveillance being carried out on American citizens.

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Some things which were once done with utmost discretion, such as the infiltration of the news media by the CIA under Operation Mockingbird, are now done completely out in the open without the public batting an eye. For example, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who both lied under oath to the US Congress about illegal activity by the CIA and NSA, now hold high-profile positions at MSNBC and CNN respectively.

It was Russiagate that brought into sharp relief the depth and breadth of CIA/NSA/FBI involvement in the manipulation of domestic politics. It originated in London, the great mecca of the neocons, with the preparation of the "Steele Dossier" by a "former" operative of MI6. For four years in the U.S., Russiagate was propagated through regular leaks of anonymous "assessments" from members of the "intel community" to their assets in the media, some of whom were themselves ostensibly retirees from the "intel community."

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These leakers were dutifully characterized in the media as courageous, patriotic whistleblowers, unlike those individuals such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange who revealed material that was embarrassing to the neocons. The condemnation of those latter persons by intel community appendage Congressman Adam Schiff, who had his own personal whistleblower on tap for his impeachment effort, is also illuminating.

One organization which has earned the gratitude of the American public for shedding light on the malignant activities of the "intel community" is group of genuine, high-profile whistleblowers that calls itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). They have played an important role in debunking the story that Russia "hacked" the DNC servers and furnished information on DNC misconduct to Wikileaks. A particularly insightful voice is that of Ray McGovern , who was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, and in the 1980s chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President's Daily Brief.

But what has come out of the shadows and into full view during the past four years is a new sort of complex, where the covert agencies, the media, and the corporations which now monopolize social media, join forces to create an unprecedented, "total immersion" propaganda environment. Initially, the internet and social media appeared to be a "wild west" sort of venue where anyone could say anything. Much of the population soon began to prefer this as a source for news over the corporate media, and the neocons cried foul. Facebook hastened to accomodate them , bringing in the vociferously neocon Atlantic Council and the mother of all Regime Change organizations, the National Endowment for Democracy, as consultants in 2018 to help decide which voices should be silenced.

Not to be outdone, Twitter hired a part-time officer in the British Army's psychological warfare unit as senior executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East in 2019. The following year Facebook upped the ante by hiring the former Director-General of Israel's Justice Ministry , a specialist in censorship, as a member of its new "oversight board."

The FBI joined the fun, seizing over 100 internet domains in late 2020 and claiming that they were operated by Iran. This included the site for the American Herald Tribune , an alternative press organ with a substantial following. The FBI Special Agent in charge issued a statement, saying that "Thanks to our ongoing collaboration with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the FBI was able to disrupt this Iranian propaganda campaign and we will continue to pursue any attempts by foreign actors to spread disinformation in our country."

However, it doesn't stop with propaganda and censorship. During the presidential election of 2020, there was an escalated intervention by the secret police agencies into the electoral process. A few courageous individuals spoke out against this.

When election day arrived, numerous vote-counting anomalies were reported all around the country , partially obscured by deliberate disinformation, "fact-checking", and general hysteria. One particularly noteworthy allegation was made by Sidney Powell, an attorney who has represented General Michael Flynn. She alleged that computer programs called HAMMER and SCORECARD, which had been developed for the intelligence agencies for use in rigging elections in other countries, had been used to benefit Biden in the election. Former NSA senior analyst and member of VIPS, Kirk Wiebe, explained the use of these cyber-weapons, and reported that the man who developed them, Dennis Montgomery, was prepared to testify to this effect:

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Why would the covert agencies attack Trump, who supposedly is a hardline right-winger? Well, apparently he is not regarded as such in establishment circles. One of the preeminent establishment megaphones, The Atlantic , published a very revealing article in which they compared Trump to Henry Wallace, who served as Vice President under FDR and went on to found the Progressive Party. Wallace opposed the Cold War, and Trump's reluctance to embrace the Cold War 2.0 that began with the neocon-sponsored 2014 coup in Ukraine appears to be what put him on the enemies list.

The many allegations of fraud in the 2020 election may be the subject of controversy, litigation, and even civil unrest for possibly years to come. As Republicans so often do, Sidney Powell has damaged her credibility by alleging that the Venezuelan government and assorted communists played a role in orchestrating vote fraud, a red herring on a par with Democratic Party claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. If the CIA and/or NSA did in fact use cyber-warfare techniques to manipulate the outcome, they most certainly did not do so at the behest of Hugo Chavez. And if they did tamper with the vote totals, they will have ample opportunity to wipe the evidence.

But at this point, can anyone argue that it is not urgent for the Congress to resume an investigation of misconduct by our secret police agencies, and that this time they not be satisfied with polite assurances that the bad behavior will cease? Trump has many warts, but there is a proper way to remove him from office, if that is what the electorate wants. A color revolution , or any other form of coup run by secret police agencies, is odious.

Thanks for reading. If you find this material interesting, perhaps you might contact Twitter and ask them why my account was suspended on June 30 of this year. I would very much like to find out the reason.

[Nov 22, 2020] How NYT Select Their Foreign Correspondents

Nov 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bart Hansen , Nov 20 2020 23:47 utc | 30

The winning candidate will be issued little stickies for her computer screen including "Russian Aggression", "Annexed Crimea" and "Poisoned the Skripals"

[Nov 22, 2020] Biden's transition team is filled with war profiteers, Beltway chickenhawks, and corporate consultants by KEVIN GOSZTOLA

Nov 14, 2020 | thegrayzone.com

An eye-popping array of corporate consultants, war profiteers, and national security hawks have been appointed by President-elect Joe Biden to agency review teams that will set the agenda for his administration. A substantial percentage of them worked in the United States government when Barack Obama was president.

The appointments should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration could be pressured to move in a progressive direction, especially on foreign policy.

If the agency teams are any indication, Biden will be firmly insulated from any pressure to depart from the neoliberal status quo, which the former vice president has pledged to restore. Instead, he is likely to be pushed in an opposite direction, towards an interventionist foreign policy dictated by elite Beltway interests and consumed by Cold War fever.

[Nov 22, 2020] Gates Stands By Statement That Biden Has Been Wrong On Nearly Every Major Foreign Policy Question - Video - RealClearPolitics

Nov 22, 2020 | www.realclearpolitics.com

Gates Stands By Statement That Biden Has Been Wrong On Nearly Every Major Foreign Policy Question Posted By Tim Hains
On Date May 13, 2019

Gates Stands By Statement That Biden Has Been Wrong On Nearly Every Major Foreign Policy Question

https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.426.0_en.html#goog_451601550

Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary for the Obama administration, paused for a moment and said "I don't know" in an interview Sunday when asked if he thinks former VP Joe Biden would be a good president.

CBS's "Face The Nation" host Margaret Brennan asked Gates if he stood by a statement from his memoir that Biden has "been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." Recommended

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me title=

MARGARET BRENNAN: I was rereading your memoir before we sat down to talk and you said in your memoir, Joe Biden is impossible not to like.

Quote: "He's a man of integrity, incapable of hiding what he really thinks, and one of those rare people you know you could turn to for help in a personal crisis. Still, I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."

Would he be an effective commander-in-chief?

ROBERT GATES: I-- I don't know. I don't know. I-- I think I stand by that statement. He and I agreed on some key issues in the Obama administration. We disagreed significantly on Afghanistan and some other issues. I think that the vice president had some issues with the military. So how he would get along with the senior military, and what that relationship would be, I just-- I think, it-- it would depend on the personalities at the time.

MARGARET BRENNAN: He's a peer of yours. Does that mean you're older?

ROBERT GATES: Yes.

MARGARET BRENNAN: You think he's right for this moment?

ROBERT GATES: I think I'm pretty busy and pretty active but I think-- I think having a President who is somebody our age or older, in the case of Senator Sanders, is- I think it's problematic. I think that you don't have the kind of energy that I think is required to be President. I think-- I'm not sure you have the intellectual acuity that you might have had in your sixties. So, I mean it's just a personal view. For me, the thought of taking on those responsibilities at this point in my life would be pretty daunting.

Watch the full interview:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/aUWvITlpKd4



[Nov 22, 2020] The truth about the Dem patchy honchos

Nov 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

J W , Nov 21 2020 9:19 utc | 52

American libs are just as fundamentally imperialist as the right, and their obsession with IdenPol garbage is just a smokescreen to pretend that they aren't.

[Nov 22, 2020] Biden's Deep State -

Nov 22, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Biden's Deep State


by Tyler Durden Sat, 11/21/2020 - 17:00 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Steve Brown via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote about the banality of evil , and there's never been a more banal bunch than the foreign policy and security state crew Barak Obama surrounded himself with for eight years beside the possible exception of Bush's own Neocons .

Now after three years screaming about "Russian collusion" it appears the Evil Empire is about to regain its lost ground, championing new wars and more interventionist expansionism with a much greater role for the US military in the world.

Let's name names.

Pentagon

For the defense chief post, the Washington Post has portrayed the banal face of Michele Flournoy as the pick to 'restore stability' to the Pentagon , an entirely false assertion. Recall that Fluornoy promotes unilateral global US military intervention, and advocated the destruction of Libya in 2011. By the military-industrial revolving door , Flournoy enabled many Corporate weaponry contracts amounting to tens of millions. Likewise Fluornoy is on the Booz-Hamilton board, where the swamp cannot get any deeper. As if this wretched example of an agent-provocateur for war and destruction were not bad enough, Biden is reportedly considering Lockheed-Martin banal kingpin Jeh Johnson for the DoD position, too.

Lockheed director Johnson was employed by Rob Reiner and Atlantic editor arch-Neocon David Frum to run the Committee to Investigate Russia which mysteriously blew up as soon as the Mueller Report was released. Jeh Johnson has continued to warn of "Russian interference" in the US presidential election until now. Biden's anointing as president-elect has ended that. As Homeland Security head, Johnson authorized cages for holding immigrant children. He also supported the assassination of General Suleimani, and has voiced support for US wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

State

From Libya to Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and beyond, the banality of evil is perhaps best personified by Susan Rice – apparently Biden's premiere pick for Secretary. Rice was an abject failure at the United Nations, but all seems forgiven, probably at the behest of Biden's donors. After her failure at the UN, Obama kicked Rice upstairs to be his National Security Advisor, a position that does not require Senate approval.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

An obvious war hawk in the mold of the Democrat's donor class, a Rice appointment could reinforce the liberal mantra that women can be just as good at interventionism as men, and ensure full re-establishment of the Neoliberal agenda in Washington. John Kerry has been flagged as a potential for State (again) too, but at age 77 and subsequent to the failure of the JCPOA Kerry is an unlikely pick.

Another potential pick among the banal Daughters of Darkness is Victoria Kagan-Nuland , architect of the 2014 debacle in Ukraine (among other things). Outed at State in an embarrassing act of what she called impressive statecraft and other embarrassing incidents, Nuland seems an unlikely choice. But Kagan-Nuland is as banal as banal can be, and Biden may somehow wish to reinforce his solidarity with the JTF and his donor class, on Israel.

National Security Advisor

Banality is certainly the mark of the beast here, in the form of Tony Blinken. Well in with Michele Flournoy (above) Blinken typifies the type of banality the Deep State engages in to promote its evil, with Blinken as successful as any other Deep State actor. A major hawk on Russia and war hawk in general, Blinken is an apologist for Israel . Blinken is a war hawk on Afghanistan and Syria too, and Blinken was directly involved in CIA operation Timber Sycamore . Oh, the banality.

Another model of banality is Leon CIA Panetta who so far claims that cruising the Monterey peninsula is more fun that being in Washington. But we know that's false and Panetta would be a logical pick. Besides being a hawk on everything, and laughing about the fact he has no idea how many wars Obama's America was fighting – because he lost count – Panetta is simply another sycophant for evil like Hannah Arendt portrayed in her study of Adolf Eichmann.

CIA

Banal of the banal is of course Mike Morell. This incredibly vacuous excuse for a human being has been hate-mongering for years. Beside his blatant pandering support for another banal and brutal warmonger – Hillary Clinton – Mike Morell is one Neoliberal who still maintains that Saddam Hussein actively aided and abetted al Qaeda with regard to the 911 attacks. But Morell simply and ultimately represents the banality of evil, just as Arendt depicted Adolf Eichmann, but in Morell's case succinctly summarized here by Ray McGovern .

United Nations

Outing the banality of the banal would be incomplete without mentioning Jen Psaki . Although a potential pick for White House Communications Director, why not promote an accomplished liar to a venue where accomplished lying really matters?

Conclusion

There is no indication that the United States as an entrenched warfare state will ever change its course until forced to. Mr Trump was incapable of enforcing that change. Sidelined by Russiagate psychosis , as a Beltway Neophyte and his own worst enemy at times, that sank Trump's agenda. The actions of Mr Trump now – to end the wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen -- should have been undertaken in earnest and without compromise years ago. Point being that Mr Trump's new appointments to the Pentagon – and let's hope CIA – will hopefully blunt the efficacy of Biden's bad actors going forward.

Regardless, characters the same or similar to the ones listed above will definitely infest Washington's infernal Beltway cesspool once again via Joe Biden make no mistake. And they will be meaner and nastier than ever before! Guaranteed.


Creative_Destruct , 2 hours ago

And the same old swamp slime (Morell, et al) waits eagerly to burst back in through the doors of power. New boss, same as the old(er) boss(es). Uuuuuuggh.

EndofTimes , 5 hours ago

Obama's 3rd Term. Swamp will grow like a tumor. These demons are shaking with excitement to get into office and fulfill the desires of the founders of the UN. Kill off America and establish a global government

truth or go home , 4 hours ago

Biden is 100% deep state puppet. He will say and do whatever they tell him to.

Dominion = Scytl = CIA = Deep State = Swamp

CIA threw the election. Trump team caught them.

Trump has already cut the CIA off at the knees. Getting ready to fill up Guantanamo again...

Giant war going on inside the gov right now - Biden enjoying the limelight before he is retired to his rocking chair.

CatInTheHat , 5 hours ago

NICE JOB Biden voters!!

You MORONS electing Obama 2.0 on STEROIDS is WHY we got a Trump in the first place

To Hell In A Handbasket , 4 hours ago

The USSA electorate are idiots, and divided idiots at that. You got Trump because the electorate was desperate, and you got Biden because the other half was desperate. That adds up to a desperate population. Your enemy is not voters from the other side of the Uniparty. Please get off the GOP vs DEMOCRAT horse$h1t.

Bay of Pigs , 3 hours ago

Quite an impressive list of Neoliberal globalist ****bags.

SabOObas , 3 hours ago

The establishment demonizes Trump for 4 years.

The sheeple voted to put the guy with 40 years of corruption under his belt in office, because the establishment said its good for you.

Jgault , 2 hours ago

It is always the small man, the inept man, the insecure man who has a need to demonstrate to the world his bravado with reckless and senseless gestures.

Biden and his brothel of advisors he surrounds himself with have perhaps the worst track record of international policy since Jimmy Carter, absolute proven failures and disasters in Ukraine, Syria, Lybia, and Egypt. This is the group that laid the intellectual groundwork for what would become the largest refugee crisis and humanitarian disaster in nearly 50 years.

Laughably, now the MSM is doing a complete 180 in their editorial view of troops in Afghanistan and Syria...what a shock!

Lacking foresight, insecure, lacking ethical standards and being given the ability to order troops, how could this possibly go wrong?

Trump was the first President in 30 years not to provoke any new millitary interventions, yet the world criticized him for his style. Let's see how long it takes for the world to start looking back to a more stable past.

ReadyForHillary , 3 hours ago

The Democrat party is the WAR party.

RumbleGuts , 4 hours ago

Another article that doesn't realize red and blue are the same team. Make no mistake, big baby bonespurs is in deep with the deep state. Think epstein. ;-)

Someone Else , 2 hours ago

Mike Morell, the most evil man to ever draw a breath, as CIA Director?

A Biden Presidency can never be allowed to happen.

flawse , 2 hours ago

There will not be a Biden presidency. There is obviously some other plan.

DebbieDowner , 3 hours ago

This author's last paragraph fails to acknowledge that the CIA and FBI has not obeyed Trump's (or any President's) orders in quite some time. Now is the time for someone to finally make a change and it took such a massive plan to expose them all to drain the swamp.


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Little Johnny Jewel , 5 hours ago

Caitlin Johnstone covered this a week ago

swampy war mongerers

[Nov 22, 2020] America's "Color Revolution". For those readers who may be unfamiliar - by Marisol Nostromo - Medium

Notable quotes:
"... not on those issues ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... The Atlantic. ..."
"... New York Post ..."
"... Nota Bene: the author of this article was subsequently ..."
"... suspended from Twitter ..."
"... without explanation. Contact @TwitterSupport and ask them why. ..."
Nov 22, 2020 | marisol-nostromo.medium.com

For those readers who may be unfamiliar with the term "Color Revolution", it refers to what has now become the standard technique for promoting "regime change" in targeted nations.

Image for post

The term may have its origins in the works of Gene Sharp , who wrote some guidebooks on how to organize popular revolts using Madison Avenue-style marketing techniques. He recommended to the sponsors that rather than confusing or boring the participants with too much political theory, they should motivate their budding revolutionaries with pop culture, using catchy, content-free slogans, logos, and team colors.

Color R e volutions are expensive ( $5 billion in the case of Ukraine ) and are typically orchestrated by a public-private partnership comprised of government agencies such as the State Department and MI6 and/or CIA, combined with private funding and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

The most famous organization of this sort is the National Endowment For Democracy, a curious entity that is funded by the US Government through USAID (as well as by donations from major neocon private foundations), and has two sub-organizations that disseminate the funds to various Regime Change projects: the International Republican Institute, affiliated with the Republican Party, and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, affiliated with the Democrats. Both organizations carry out the same activity, which underscores the fact that on matters of subverting and bullying the rest of the world, there is a lot more bipartisanship in the US than people are inclined to think.

Another name associated with funding and orchestration is George Soros , whose various tax-exempt organizations such as the Open Society Foundations invariably pump money into the latest Color Revolutions, for reasons that are often more commercial than strictly political.

After the September 11 attacks in 2001, the neocons fanned the flames of indignation and xenophobia, and were able to exploit them in order to assume a dominant role in most American institutions, particularly the political parties and the media. Regime Change fever swept the foreign policy establishment, and anyone who looked cross-eyed at a neocon became a target.

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama embraced the neocon ethos and gave them virtual carte blanche to carry out Color Revolutions around the world. The advent of social media, which fosters communication in the form of short, catchy slogans and images that can be made to "go viral," was particularly conducive to Gene Sharp's formula of organizing the masses around advertising copy and team colors. The Color Revolution techniques were used on a large scale in the former Soviet Union, such as in the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia or the 2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

If the targeted populations can't be organized effectively to overthrow their leaders, there is always the fall back option of arming mercenary groups to seize power by violence, or if that fails, out and out military aggression by the US or NATO. The most reliable method seems to be a combination of non-violent and violent action, such as in the case of Ukraine's second Color Revolution in 2014 (a coup which was comically dubbed the "Revolution of Dignity" by its neocon sponsors, who know that a successful marketing campaign must never be understated.) A similar case was the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, where gang violence was deployed in hopes of provoking a crackdown by the state which could then be exploited for propaganda purposes.

But it was inevitable that these techniques would eventually be used on the US itself. Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of reducing US reliance on Regime Change wars and NATO "out-of-area deployments" as a centerpiece of foreign policy. This was anathema to the neocons. Once in office, Trump vacillated, bringing prominent neocons into his cabinet and allowing them to launch multiple Regime Change operations. However, Trump was not a doctrinaire neocon, and he angered them by advocating better relations with North Korea, Russia and China. And for the neocons, anything short of total allegiance to their ideology is tantamount to betrayal.

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The standard methodology was put into play the moment Trump was inaugurated. The team color was pink, in the form of the pink "pussy hats" (these ostensibly called attention to Trump's sexual vulgarity and libertine lifestyle, which lacked the charm of Bill Clinton's.) The buzzword was #Resistance, which was intended to conjure up images of the struggle by nations which had been conquered by Nazi aggression during World War II. Oddly enough, however, the aggressive moves by Trump against other nations were not #Resisted. In fact, those were the only instances where he received hearty praise from the corporate media.

But it's not possible to mobilize a population with hats and hashtags alone. There had to be some minimal political content, and herein lay the dilemma for the organizers of America's Color Revolution. There was widespread popular discontent with what has become known as the "forever war" policy, as well as the neoliberal economics which have produced an unprecedented income disparity between the 1% and the 99%, and this popular discontent was key in electing Trump. The neocons wanted discontent, but not on those issues , since they had no intention of changing those policies.

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Instead, they opted for a revival of the Cold War. Americans seem to have a particular susceptibility to jingoism, and the demonization of the former communist powers, which had already begun in 2014 with the neocon-sponsored coup in Ukraine, was cranked up to full volume in the corporate media, using all the imagery and sloganeering that had proved so effective during the 1950s.

This involved some spectacular feats of cognitive dissonance. Despite Trump's outbursts of bellicosity toward Russia and other neocon targets, Trump was portrayed as being "soft," an appeaser, or an outright enemy agent. The Democratic Party, which is considered to be the more liberal of the two parties and had in decades past expressed some nominal opposition to military adventures in Vietnam and elsewhere, swung way to the right of the Republicans in the jingoism derby.

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The secret police agencies and their pet journalists concocted what will be admired by historians as one of the most preposterous conspiracy theories in recorded history, the tale of Russia manipulating the 2016 election with a computer hack which somehow cannot be detected by the NSA , and puppy pages on Facebook .

There was also a big focus on Trump's personality, which is admittedly none too winsome. This is consistent with the neocon "Hitler of the Month Club" formula, where each new nemesis, from Manuel Noriega to Saddam Hussein to Muammar Gaddafi to Vladimir Putin, is depicted as the most brutish, authoritarian dictator ever to walk the face of the planet.

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They succeeded in impeaching Trump in December 2019, almost three years into his first term in office. They did not actually charge Trump with an impeachable crime, but rather offered the rationale that he had allegedly used the power of his office in ways that could benefit his re-election campaign (something that no other American president would ever dream of doing.) This was a far cry from the much sexier, hoped-for rationale of "collusion" with the Bolshevik Foe, which had been shot down by the Mueller Report. However, impeachment maven Adam Schiff managed to insinuate that this Collusion was the real basis for impeachment, every time he saw a TV camera. We faced the surreal spectacle of liberals begging John Bolton to testify, as the role of the neocons in orchestrating the #Resistance became ever more explicit.

The impeachment passed the House on purely partisan lines, and Senate voted not to convict on purely partisan lines as well. There has been much speculation that popular pushback to the whole spectacle may actually benefit Trump in this year's election. We shall see.

Meanwhile, with the massively FUBAR Iowa caucuses of February 2020, questions were once again raised once again about the Democratic nominating process. Bernie Sanders was emerging as a new threat to neocon dominance, this time from within the Democratic Party.

During the days leading up to Super Tuesday, there was a remarkable development. Every prominent neocon, from Bill Kristol to Max Boot to David Frum to Susan Rice, acted with synchronized, military precision to endorse Joe Biden. Several neocon-friendly Democratic presidential candidates abruptly withdrew from the race to endorse him as well. There was an immediate Pavlovian response from cable news pundits and other putative journalists. Russiagate was dusted off and started up again, this time for use against Sanders. On April 8, Sanders capitulated and withdrew from the race.

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No one in their right mind believed that the confused and incoherent Biden could defeat the also incoherent, but clever and confident Trump. But at this point, it was more important to the neocons that they keep control over at least one of the two parties, and a decision was made that it were better to throw the election to Trump rather than to allow Sanders' brand of left-populism to become ascendant in the Democratic Party.

But then the neocons saw a fresh opportunity, following the May 25 murder of African-American George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. Protest demonstrations by the Black community intersected the anxieties of a population frightened and frustrated by the one-two punch of economic collapse combined with public health isolation to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Violent groups from the Antifa milieiu, predominately white and possibly assets of the FBI's COINTELPRO progam, initiated vandalism and looting. Neocons were salivating at the prospect of Maidan-style chaos.

The beleaguered Trump had already been showing signs of psychological fatigue, and there had been significant lapses in his already questionable judgement. In addition to mishandling the public health measures and the economic crisis, he had capitulated once more to the neocons and went on an anti-China tirade. Then, when the social unrest began in the wake of the George Floyd killing, all of Trump's political flaws came into play.

The neocons triumphantly hit the airwaves and the digital arena. Their great oracle, The Atlantic , published an article that serendipitously confirms the central theme of the article you are presently reading. Neocon high priestess Susan Rice suggested that the Russians were to blame for the rioting. Trump's every misstep was amplified by neocon pundits. Suddenly the idea of electing Biden was no longer so implausible, as long as he could be kept away from live microphones.

It's important to bear in mind that the neocons are not in the least concerned with Trump's mishandling of COVID-19 pandemic or civil unrest. They were delighted when he ranted against China. But when he advocated reducing U.S. troop deployments in Germany and Afghanistan, they were livid. On June 26, the New York Times published yet another story based on anonymous leaks from the "intelligence community". This one claimed that the Taliban needed some incentives after being occupied by a foreign power after 20 years and was now accepting "bounties" from Russia in exchange for fighting the US military. In mid-September, General Frank McKenzie, Commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News that no evidence had been found to support this claim. Neocons continued to speak of it as established fact.

Although the corporate press continued to depict Trump as a fanatical right-winger in coverage intended for the rubes, within the citadels of neoconservatism he was regarded as something entirely different. On September 30, 2020, the Atlantic published another revelatory article entitled " What a Second Trump Term Would Mean for the World ." Author Thomas Wright drops a few bombshells like this one, likening Trump to the great Progressive leader Henry Wallace (who is regarded by neocons as a close relative of Satan):

Looking back on U.S. diplomatic history, one of the great counterfactuals is what would have happened if Franklin D. Roosevelt had not replaced his vice president Henry Wallace with Harry Truman in 1944. Wallace was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and became an ardent opponent of the Cold War. If he had become president when FDR died, in April 1945, the next half century could have gone very differently -- likely no NATO, no Marshall Plan, no alliance with Japan, no overseas troop presence, and no European Union.

The U.S. is now teetering on another historically important moment. With Trump, we would not only be deprived of our Truman. We would be saddled with our Wallace -- a leader whose instincts and actions are diametrically opposed to what the moment requires.

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The good news is that the neocons are not omnipotent. They are adept at conning the public and they have the full cooperation of the corporate media, but the public is volatile and increasingly skeptical of the official "narratives." This is why the neocons are growing more and more hysterical in their public proclamations about "conspiracy theories" and "disinformation." They are in fact strongly in favor of conspiracy theories and disinformation, provided that it is their own conspiracy theories and not someone else's.

Neocons are demanding censorship of social media , to drive everyone into the arms of CNN and The Atlantic. As the election approaches, these demands have become increasingly more vociferous, leading to a major controversy with the decision by both Facebook and Twitter to censor the New York Post coverage of leaked email correspondence between Joe Biden's son and executives of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma (which employed him at a rather remarkable salary). The rationale offered by the two social media giants, that the sourcing of the emails was unclear, did not impress media critics, who pointed out that if that policy were applied in an even-handed fashion, Russiagate could never have happened.

As long as the option is open, follow alternative news sources online. I recommend the Grayzone and Consortium News , both of which I have found to be quiet reliable. The neocons are frightened; they worry about what John Durham's investigation, or the declassification of documents ordered by Trump, may reveal about their methods of manipulation. Frightened people make tactical errors. We must keep our wits about us and find ways to turn those errors to our advantage.

Nota Bene: the author of this article was subsequently suspended from Twitter without explanation. Contact @TwitterSupport and ask them why.

[Nov 21, 2020] How 'Western' Media Select Their Foreign Correspondents

Nov 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

How 'Western' Media Select Their Foreign Correspondents gottlieb , Nov 20 2020 19:21 utc | 1

Did you ever wonder why 'western' mainstream media get stories about Russia and other foreign countries so wrong?

It is simple. They hire the most brainwashed, biased and cynic writers they can get for the job. Those who are corrupt enough to tell any lie required to support the world view of their editors and media owners.

They are quite upfront about it.

Here is evidence in form of a New York Times job description for a foreign correspondent position in Moscow:

Russia Correspondent

Job Description

Vladimir Putin's Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world.

It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his villa.

If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe Bureau Chief early next year.


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To be allowed to write for the Times one must see the Russian Federation as a country that is ruled by just one man.

One must be a fervent believer in MI6 produced Novichok hogwash. One must also believe in Russiagate and in the multiple idiocies it produced even after all of them have been debunked.

One must know that vote counts in Russia are always wrong while U.S. vote counting is the most reliable ever. Russian private military contractors (which one must know to be evil men) are 'secretly deployed' to wherever the editors claim them to be. Russia's hospitals are of cause always much worse than ours.

Even when it is easy to check that Vladimir Putin (the most evil man ever) is at work in the Kremlin the job will require one to claim that he is hiding in a villa.

Most people writing for the Times will actually not believe the above nonsense. But the description is not for a position that requires one to weight and report the facts. It is for a job that requires one to lie. That the Times lists all the recent nonsense about Russia right at the top of the job description makes it clear that only people who support those past lies will be considered adequate to tell future lies about Russia.

No honest unbiased person will want such a job. But as it comes with social prestige, a good paycheck and a probably nice flat in Moscow the New York Times will surely find a number of people who are willing to sell their souls to take it.

Interestingly the job advertisement does not list Russian language capabilities as a requirement. It only says that 'Fluency in Russian is preferred'.

'Western' mainstream media are filled with such biased, cynic and self-censoring correspondents who have little if any knowledge of the country they are reporting from. It is therefore not astonishing that 'western' populations as well as their politicians have often no knowledge of what is really happening in the world.

Hilarious. Don't need no stinking Operation Mockingbird anymore. Just put out a want-ad and plenty of brainwashed folks will come flocking. Propaganda works.

powerandpeople , Nov 20 2020 19:29 utc | 2

Soomeone said:

"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations."

In this case "everything else is propaganda."

The job title is really 'Anti-Russia Propagandist'.

Jen , Nov 20 2020 19:31 utc | 3
This is such an odd job description with very few specific requirements and none detailing how much experience or what level of knowledge or skill is required (in the form of X number of years worked in some area requiring Russian language skills or university qualifications obtained) that I almost wonder if this advertisement is for real.

One notices also that "Vladimir Putin's Russia" is presented as a story. Everything else that follows in the second paragraph of the advertisement is also a story. Indeed everything in the news media industry is a "story" as if instead of employing investigative reporters on the beat grimly searching for hard facts like old pulp fiction detectives, the media now only wants Hollywood script writers or graduates straight out of creative writing courses.

But then I suppose whoever gets the job at the NYT can hardly do worse than what the hack Luke Harding did as The Fraudian's Moscow correspondent nearly 15 years ago, so much so that the Russian govt must have suspected that he was more than just a bad paranoid plagiarist ... he must have been a spy as well, that it would initially refuse to renew his visa. One would like to see the job specifications for the position of The Fraudian's Moscow reporter that Harding held for a number of years.

JimmyG. , Nov 20 2020 19:32 utc | 4
Incredible. What the acronym 'SMH' (shake my head) was invented for.

It's no wonder I switched off CBC radio, our national broadcaster here in Canada. Their music programs were okay, but every hour they had a news update, and those were stomach-turning. Superficial, biased, Empire-friendly nonsense...

Don Bacon , Nov 20 2020 19:32 utc | 5

Norman Solomon wrote about this problem fifteen years ago in his book "War Made Easy, How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death"
. . .from Amazon: In War Made Easy, nationally syndicated columnist, media critic, and author Norman Solomon cuts through the dense web of spin to probe and scrutinize the key "perception management" techniques that have played huge rolls in the promotion of American wars in recent decades.

p.116

. . .The attitudes of reporters covering U.S. foreign policy officials are generally similar to the attitudes of those officials. "Most journalists who get plum foreign assignments already accept the assumptions of empire," according to longtime foreign correspondent Reese Erlick. He added, "I didn't meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the U.S. and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraq government by force. They disagreed only about timing, whether the action should be unilateral, and whether a long-term occupation is practical." After decades of freelancing for major U.S. news organizations, Erlich offered this blunt conclusion: "Money, prestige, career options, ideological predilections--combined with the down sides of filing stories unpopular with the government--all cast their influence on foreign correspondents. You don't win a Pulitzer prize for challenging the basic assumptions of empire."
uncle tungsten , Nov 20 2020 20:02 utc | 9

Thank you b.

Now here is a fine journalist they could simply contract for sane reporting on China . Plus excellent Russian analysis as well.

Good read with a link or two to consider.

Canadian Cents , Nov 20 2020 20:21 utc | 12

> social prestige, a good paycheck and a probably nice flat

The term that Paul Craig Roberts often uses, " presstitute ", comes to mind.

Echoing JimmyG. @4 and spudski @7, in Canada, our taxpayer-funded state news agency's flagship program "The National" gives us regular Two Minutes Hate pieces currently being churned out every two weeks or so by Moscow correspondent Chris Brown who fits this article's description to a T.

I've lost count of how many times he and CBC The National's editors have singled out Russia's handling of COVID-19 for criticism, when so many other countries have far worse per capita fatality numbers than Russia.

While decrying Russia's COVID-19 deaths, they, of course, never mention the fact that Canada has had more COVID-19 deaths per capita than Russia ...

Jpc , Nov 20 2020 21:00 utc | 15

It's absolutely pathetic.
5 years ago the truly great journalist Robert Fisk made the following observations during an interview with the journal.ie amongst others.
Back's up everything you have pointed out about the sheer disappearance of any impartial reportage from the NYT and printed media in general.

"Most newspapers that have lost circulation, particularly in the States, it's not because of the internet, it's because those newspapers were simply no good. When I go to San Francisco the coverage of the Middle East in its papers is frightened, cowardly, pathetic, there's no serious foreign coverage at all."

"Newspapers themselves are to blame for the deterioration in their readership. I read the New York Times when its free, period, it doesn't deserve to be paid for. It's not worth it.
It doesn't matter whether it's online or not. If a paper's not worth buying you'll read for free online regardless"

William Gruff , Nov 20 2020 21:03 utc | 17

"Most people writing for the Times will actually not believe the above nonsense."

Our host is much too charitable to the presstitutes. Those in the "Mockingbird" mass media eat their own effluent like a sort of group ouroboric scatophagia. To maintain their perverse form of "mental hygiene" they studiously avoid information sources outside of their own circular reprocessing of yesterday's delusions into fresh steaming piles for today's consumption. They have become so accustomed to feeding off their own delusions that if a hint of reality were to intrude into their looped intellectual food chain their minds would reject it like poison. They would likely exhibit physical symptoms, which doubtless would be attributed to evil Soviet mind rays from Havana.

Canadian Cents , Nov 20 2020 21:16 utc | 18

Quite scary how Western mainstream media are all marching in unison to the same beat.

Unfortunately it sounds like this creeping facism could get even worse:

Biden State Media Appointee Advocated Using Propaganda Against Americans

Stengel stated clearly that a "news cartel" of mainstream corporate media outlets had long dominated US society, but he bemoaned that those "cartels don't have hegemony like they used to."

Stengel made it clear that his mission is to counter the alternative perspectives given a voice by foreign media platforms that challenge the US-dominated media landscape.

"The bad actors use journalistic objectivity against us."

Wow ...

I clicked on the New York Times job link, and journalistic objectivity and integrity are nowhere to be found in the job descripton. But I did notice these lines that add to the ones that b brought to our attention:

We are looking for someone who will embrace the prospect of traversing 11 time zones to track a populace that is growing increasingly frustrated with an economy dragged down by corruption, cronyism and excessive reliance on natural resources. This posting offers the chance to chronicle the continuing reign of one of the world's most charismatic leaders, President Vladimir V. Putin.

Not to mention, Putin ushered in changes to the constitution, so he will likely stay in power for many years to come.

And, of course, we are on the cusp of a new, less Putin-friendly president in the US, which should only raise the temperature between Washington and Moscow.

Wow again ...

Don Bacon , Nov 20 2020 21:19 utc | 19

It's not Russia it's "Vladimir Putin's Russia," so that's one mandatory term checked off, i.e. personalizing the appointed enemy. But then we read "It sends out hit squads. . ." instead of the usual obligatory: 'The regime' . . . . .but the Times can't get everything right.

Paco , Nov 20 2020 21:21 utc | 20

A flat in Moscow!!! A soul could sold for it... but, there are job openings in Russia, here, a farmer is recruiting:

https://youtu.be/8HZ4DnVfWYQ

Kooshy , Nov 20 2020 22:07 utc | 24

The amount of hourly propaganda directed at and leveled at American people is unprecedented, I had not seen it this intense in past years it reminds me of my High school days in Shah's Iran. This kind and this intense of control on news can only be due to instability of the regime. IMO in coming Biden Adminstration regime will impose new rules for control of internet and access to foreign news. Currently using my Mobil cellular I can't access any Iranian news site.

kiwiklown , Nov 21 2020 1:30 utc | 37

"Those who are corrupt enough to tell any lie required to support the world view of their editors and media owners."

C S Lewis called this type bastards.

I agree, and hope they are reading this right now.

Oz , Nov 21 2020 0:32 utc | 36

https://marisol-nostromo.medium.com/the-unfinished-work-of-the-church-committee-f702ac8f94b1

[Nov 20, 2020] Why Biden Will Keep the US-Imposed Cold War Rolling

Nov 20, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

Trump's Isolationism Masks Sinister Alliances

Was Trump an isolationist? Not really, though it's easy to see how he got this reputation, at first glance of his foreign policy.

He had an aggressive posture against Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, with his illegal sanctions policy against these countries. He demonstrated total fealty to the Israeli project to annihilate Palestine. His "trade war" against China is sold as a way to rebuild the U.S. economy, but it is also about maintaining U.S. power; for what other purpose could instruments such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation and América Crece be used when they have been designed to advantage U.S. companies around the world?

Trump certainly attacked the Western military alliance system, trying to force NATO members to spend more on their military. But at the same time, Trump developed other military alliances: one of these, first developed by George W. Bush in 2007, is the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, which draws Australia, India, and Japan into a military alliance against China. At the same time, Trump drove an agenda in Latin America -- through the Lima Group (established in 2017) -- to create an alliance against Venezuela.

Why Biden Is Not a Multilateralist

The liberal media portrays Biden as a multilateralist -- but the evidence for this speculation on the president-elect's foreign policy is problematic, to say the least.

Biden wants to rebuild the Western military alliance system that Trump has eroded. An indication of Biden's enthusiasm was an early phone call to French President Emmanuel Macron, to suggest that the United States is back as a player in Europe. This is not an advance toward a multilateral world order, but rather a return to the old alliance system where the United States (with its Canadian and European allies) attempts to dominate the world system by the use of its military, diplomatic, and economic power.

Further evidence offered for Biden's multilateralism is his commitment to return the United States to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (or the Iran deal) and the 2016 Paris Agreement.

Why does Biden wish to return the United States to its commitments toward Iran? Obama entered this deal because the Europeans were desperate for a source of energy after the United States and France destroyed access to Libyan oil in NATO's 2011 war and hurt access to Russian natural gas because of the Ukraine conflict in 2014. Obama agreed to the Iran deal because the Europeans were desperate, not to line up with the demands of international law; Biden will give the Europeans this gift, welcomed by the Iranian people, in order to cement the Western alliance system. Meanwhile, Biden continues to talk about suffocating the Iranian people.

On climate, during the negotiations that resulted in the Paris deal during Obama's presidency, the United States watered down the text of the agreement, preventing a truly multilateral deal that would have accepted Western responsibility for a century of fossil fuel use. Again, there is no major commitment to save the planet in Biden's pledge to return to the Paris Agreement; the main agenda is to strengthen and subordinate the European countries to the U.S.-led alliance system.

Primacy Remains the U.S. Goal

The U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff wrote in the early years of the Cold War, "To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat. Preponderant power must be the object of U.S. policy." This desire for primacy remains the explicit U.S. policy. Trump, in his four years as president, did not depart from this policy. Nor has Biden in his five decades in public office. They might differ in their tone or in their strategy, but not in the pursuit of this goal. Biden's adviser Charles Kupchan has written a new book called Isolationism , which offers a clichéd view of U.S. foreign policy, and then concludes, "[T]he United States must reclaim its exceptionalist mantle"; this means that the United States must continue to seek primacy.

This goal of primacy has made it difficult for the U.S. elites to come to terms with the fact of the slow attrition of U.S. power since the illegal war on Iraq (2003) and the credit crisis (2007). Failure to acknowledge that the world will no longer tolerate one single superpower has led the United States to impose a warlike situation against China. This begins with Obama's "pivot" to Asia in 2015, and intensifies with Trump's "trade war."

Cold War on China Looms

Since 2015, not one U.S. Silicon Valley CEO has made a robust statement for comity between the United States and China. Apple's Tim Cook held a meeting with Trump in August 2019 merely to allow Apple to better compete with Samsung, which was not hit by the U.S. tariffs. There was no broad statement about Trump's "trade war," with which Cook seemed quite pleased.

Silicon Valley firms know that on certain technological developments -- such as 5G, robotics, GPS, and soon microchips -- Chinese firms have clearly produced next-generation technologies, and in many cases have leapfrogged over their U.S. counterparts. Silicon Valley companies are quite happy for the U.S. government to put the entire weight of the state against Chinese firms. This includes using the security apparatus to accuse Huawei of being involved in Chinese government espionage. It is a curiosity that none of the Silicon Valley firms worry about privacy per se, because -- according to the Edward Snowden revelations -- the National Security Agency uses the PRISM program to collect data freely from Silicon Valley internet firms; but the U.S. uses the privacy and espionage arguments to try to hurt Chinese tech firms and protect the intellectual property and market advantages of Silicon Valley. Since this is the real cause of the trade war, there is every likelihood -- and Biden has said so -- that a Biden administration would continue to prosecute the trade war.

In 2013, the Chinese government set up the One Belt, One Road (now Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI) to extend its commercial links across the world. The Obama administration responded in 2015 with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a platform to break China's commercial ties along the Pacific Rim. Trump jettisoned the TPP and went for a more direct trade war. To counter the trillions of dollars that China will mobilize for the BRI, the United States used the Millennium Challenge Corporation (set up in 2004) and América Crece (2019) to funnel billions of dollars to countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. All of this is a desperate attempt to undermine China and maintain U.S. primacy.

The United States is not yet prepared to acknowledge the changed world situation. This will take time. Short of that, it is important for people to speak up against an escalation of hostilities.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad's most recent book is No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015).

[Nov 20, 2020] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 19 NOVEMBER 2020 by Patrick Armstrong - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Nov 20, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 19 NOVEMBER 2020 by Patrick Armstrong


KARABAKH. This ceasefire should last. Russian troops have been moved to the points of contact and secure the road link from Karabakh to Armenia proper. ( Deployment positions and General Staff briefing ). Baku recovered a lot of territory that had been taken in the first war and can justifiably claim to have won. Armenia, which officially was not involved at all, under its present somewhat colour revolution leadership has lost – but avoided a greater defeat – and Pashinyan is now under considerable pressure to quit. Ankara has once again extended itself but come up short . Moscow has demonstrated that it is the indispensable element in the area. However, it is important to recognise that the final status of Karabakh itself remains undecided and this will be a difficult problem to solve. But it will likely be settled with Moscow's efforts and not that of outsiders.

NO MORE EMPIRE. Dmitriy Trenin explains to Americans that Russia is just Russia . Moscow knows exceptionalism is a waste and that empire is too .

COVID. A curfew in Moscow at 2300 . Phase III trial results of the vaccine are said to be good . To my cynical surprise, Reuters has pretty balanced coverage of the Western reaction to the Sputnik vaccine .

E-VISAS. A quick, easy and cheap visa system goes into effect next year for citizens of 52 countries . None of the "Five Eyes" is included . This move has been in the works since the great success of the quick visas for the World Cup.

ISS. Russia finally loses its taxi monopoly .

RED SEA. It is reported that a small naval logistics base will be constructed in Sudan . Not sure I understand why: I don't see how this fits into Russia's defensive posture. Although it might be connected to supporting Iran which is in Moscow's interest (the enemy of my enemy is my friend).

GUNS. Washington realises its air defence has holes (Tehran's " black cygnet "). US comms aren't reliable . Strategic bombers and their weapons loads . Lasers on fighter planes . New nuclear war command bunker . The US State Department fears that the Russian Poseidon weapon underwater nuclear drones could unleash 'radioactive tsunami' on US. Well... that's what they're designed to do; maybe it's time to reconsider your policy on Russia. I reiterate – Russia just has to counter .

WESTERN VALUES™. The country that judges other countries' elections just had an election. Somebody won. One day a court will tell us who. Apparently it's easy to lose track of votes and takes a long time to find them . There's a box around here somewhere .

RUSSIA AND THE WEST. I speculate that Moscow is giving up on the West and Western courts .

THE EMPTINESS OF FORMER FLAPS. Remember all we were told about how weak US election security was and how Russia could easily change results? Well, forget it, Russia was shut out this year and US elections are solid as a rock . (Not that these people would give credit to Trump for the alleged re-securing.) Although those pesky Russians are still busy sowing , won't congratulate and are disinforming .

WITHDRAWALS. The new US Defence Secretary says US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will be reduced to 2500 each by 15 Jan 2021 and that " All wars must end ". Good luck with that: we've just heard a deep state operative boasting about defying Trump on this issue . And there's opposition from the usual quarters: "leaving too soon" , Russia will " fill the vacuum " (but hasn't Moscow been there and done that?). I guess they think doubling the Soviet record isn't enough – Washington should go for the triple.

NEW NWO. 15 Asia-Pacific nations have signed onto the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership : a third of the world economy. And poof goes Obama's Asian pivot and Trump's isolate China attempts. The grouping include two of the Five Eyes as well as Japan and South Korea. The world is changing.

UKRAINE. Remember when Putin allegedly told Bush that Ukraine wasn't even a country ? What he meant was that it is a territory assembled out of parts of other countries by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev (not the people I'd personally pick to design my country) and deeply divided. It still is in the post-Maidan nightmare. A recent poll in " the poorest country in Europe " shows it After all the propaganda, only 41% want to join NATO, 37% want non-alignment, 13% want to join the Russian-led security grouping. 57% expect relations with Russia to get better, 30% do not. Results vary with location. ( Here's the original ). All that suffering and misery to remain where they were and not much change on the " cultural map " either. As I said at the beginning, Ukraine no longer exists : the West broke the First Rule of Ukraine.


Paul Damascene , 19 November 2020 at 06:12 PM

Patrick,
Any thoughts on why RF is not part of RCEP. Eurasian country on the Pacific. Any reason to think they weren't eligible or deliberately excluded. Multilateralists that they appear to be ... BRICS, CSTO, SCO, BRI...

Patrick Armstrong , 19 November 2020 at 07:32 PM

@Paul D My GUESS is that this is stage 1 and Russia (and Iran) and some Central Asians will come along in stage 2

Deap , 19 November 2020 at 09:22 PM

Best I could figure from the "good" Russian covid vaccine study:
Started with 40,000 but only observed 16,000 - huge drop out rate. Why?

Only 20 actual cases of covid among the 16,000 observed cases - a 0.001% active disease incidence rate - how did these 16 covid cases break down between the placebo group and the treated group.

Demographics of the groups and the active cases are missing. But the headlines claim 92% success rate. The real story is still missing. Same criteria will be applied to US claims - who are also very coy about the details.

English Outsider , 20 November 2020 at 06:13 AM


No satisfaction in what has happened In the Ukraine since May 2014, but there must be some quiet satisfaction, Mr Armstrong, in having got it dead right that early. Might I put in a couple of queries?

1. On the school in Sevastopol, the specs didn't show any conversion to military use and the work done was in any case similar to work done by the US Navy in other parts of Eastern Europe. Also converting a school for military use before the coup would have been announcing to the Russians "We're coming", which is unlikely.

So I reckoned at the time that that school renovation was nothing to do with any intention of NATO forces taking over Sebastopol but was simply a "hearts and minds" gesture. I see there was a EUVOM statement later put out confirming this. The school renovation was a "humanitarian facilitation project."

https://tass.com/world/729468

But Lada Ray, writing back in 2014, has a different take -

"One of the high schools (a gymnasium) in Sevastopol the Kiev authorities were about to sell to the US to be repurposed as a school for spies, targeting Russia. It was planned that the kids going to that school would be learning languages and spying techniques since an early age."

https://futuristrendcast.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/breaking-us-planned-to-turn-crimea-into-military-base-against-russia/

Now more is presumably known, was Lada Ray's statement merely part of the wash of speculation around at that time or have documents come to light since that authenticate this story?

2. The involvement of the EU is mentioned. Sakwa, the writer I take as the most authoritative on the EU negotiations with the Ukraine, does not touch on EU liason with NATO forces. Nor, if I remember correctly, does he go into the complex relationship between Brussels and the constituent EU countries.

From what little I've picked up it seems the EU negotiating team was deeply involved in the internal politics of pre-coup Ukraine, though having slightly different objectives from NATO. As for who drove EU policy, it's quite certain that we can't speak of a "Brussels policy" here when looking at the EU pre-coup negotiations but rather that the EU approach to the Ukraine was mostly driven by two main players, Germany and France.

Mr Armstrong - any chance of your sorting this tangle out and giving us a bird's eye view of who was up to what in that confused pre-coup period?


[Nov 20, 2020] Why Facebook, Twitter, Google, Fox News, CNN, and more giant corporations keep screaming at us that there was no election fraud

Because they are part of it ;-)
Pretty damning condemnation of fake news at 51:50
Nov 20, 2020 | www.nytimes.com
DNC PoliticalPrisoner 31 minutes ago Many wouldn't have believed there was election fraud except the media and Big Tech keep insisting that there wasn't. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Fox News, CNN, and more giant corporations keep screaming at us via notifications, messages, and broadcasts that there was no election fraud. Now, we're starting to think maybe there is something fishy going on.

[Nov 19, 2020] Why the Military Establishment Backed Biden

Nov 19, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca

By Chloe Rafferty Global Research, November 18, 2020 Red Flag Australia 10 November 2020 Region: USA Theme: Intelligence In-depth Report: U.S. Elections

https://apis.google.com/u/0/se/0/_/+1/fastbutton?usegapi=1&size=medium&count=true&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.globalresearch.ca&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.globalresearch.ca%2Fwhy-military-establishment-backed-biden%2F5729822&gsrc=3p&jsh=m%3B%2F_%2Fscs%2Fapps-static%2F_%2Fjs%2Fk%3Doz.gapi.en.Q1xYtA4iqvc.O%2Fam%3DwQE%2Fd%3D1%2Fct%3Dzgms%2Frs%3DAGLTcCPKs8DxrNe3iASWYEotlIa2jibGLg%2Fm%3D__features__#_methods=onPlusOne%2C_ready%2C_close%2C_open%2C_resizeMe%2C_renderstart%2Concircled%2Cdrefresh%2Cerefresh&id=I0_1605760168054&_gfid=I0_1605760168054&parent=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.globalresearch.ca&pfname=&rpctoken=14519820 47 US

The US military establishment will breathe a sigh of relief at Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election. Nearly 800 former high-ranking military and security officials penned an open letter in support of the Democratic candidate during the campaign. A who's who of former generals, ambassadors, admirals and senior national security advisers -- from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright to four-star admiral and Bush-era Deputy Homeland Security Advisor Steve Abbot -- backed Biden as the best bet to revive US power. A month earlier, 70 national security officials who served in Republican administrations threw their weight behind Biden (the list soon grew to 130), arguing that, on foreign policy, Trump "has failed our country" .

Why was Biden the war criminals' candidate of choice? The foreign policy chaos and controversy of the Trump years were a symptom of a global superpower in relative decline, with no real strategy out of the quagmire.

The US empire is at a turning point. It is the world's undisputed superpower; its reach is global, both militarily and economically . The US has been the world's largest economy since 1871, and its military has close to 800 installations in 80 countries around the world. But today, it is facing a growing economic rival in China, and several lesser powers challenging its ability to call the shots in every corner of the globe, most notably Iran and Russia.

The War on Terror, launched by the administration of George W. Bush , resulted in the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. It killed more than a million people and cost upwards of US$2.4 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For the people of the Middle East, it was a massacre. For US empire, it was a disaster. The destabilisation of Iraq led to the expansion of Iranian influence across the region, rather than the regime change in Tehran the Pentagon dreamed of. The intervention in Iraq was meant to secure US dominance. It instead exposed the weaknesses and limits of US power right at the moment when China's dramatic economic expansion was beginning.

Tensions between the US and China have been increasing for years. Since its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, China has built its economic power, its diplomatic power and its military power, while the US became bogged down in endless wars and suffered economic crisis and depression with the 2008 financial crisis.

Barack Obama's "pivot to Asia", with its plan to increase US naval forces in the Asia-Pacific, was a signal that the US ruling class wanted to contain and encircle China. Obama's then classified Air-Sea Battle doctrine was an effort to create an operational plan for a possible military confrontation. Leaked cables made public by WikiLeaks reveal that Australia was in lockstep with US imperial strategy. In conversation with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd confirmed Australia's willingness to "deploy force if everything goes wrong". But Obama's strategy was too little too late for containment. China became more aggressive in pressing claims in the South China Sea while beginning to close the enormous gap in military capabilities with the United States, engaging in the most rapid peacetime arms build-up in history.

Under Trump, these tensions further increased. Trump's confrontational rhetoric and trade war were a sharp break from the decades-long US strategy of integrating China into the international liberal order. Since the Republican administration of Richard Nixon -- who in 1972 became the first US president to visit Beijing -- the US ruling class thought it could ensure global supremacy by incorporating China into the world system. For a while, it appeared to work. China became the world's sweatshop and a key site of investment for US companies such as Apple and General Motors. But the strategy could be mutually enriching for only so long. Today, China is leveraging its meteoric growth to challenge the United States' leadership in the Asia-Pacific.

Obama's signature containment strategy was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP would have been the largest free trade deal in history, lowering tariffs and other non-tariff barriers to trade between eleven Pacific countries and the US. Its goal was to lock out China and further integrate Pacific countries with the US economy. Obama's Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said that the TPP was "as important as another aircraft carrier".

But just a few years later, Donald Trump tore up the TPP. The move was at odds with the consensus among the US economic and military elite, but the new president had his own ideas about how to contain China. Trump railed against the US trade deficit, accused Beijing of currency manipulation and, as Obama did, of stealing technology from US companies. In the 2019 State of the Union address he said, "We are now making it clear to China that after years of targeting our industries and stealing our intellectual property, the theft of American jobs and wealth has come to an end".

By August this year, Trump had slapped tariffs on $550 billion of Chinese goods, with a targeted campaign against tech giant Huawei, which had been tipped to overtake Apple in global phone sales. While Republican and Democratic politicians have backed a hardline approach to China, Trump's erratic protectionist approach to trade has alienated large sections of the capitalist class otherwise happy with domestic tax cuts and deregulation. A Bloomberg Economics report, released before the pandemic gripped the country, estimated that the escalating tariffs on China would cost the US economy $316 billion by the end of this year.

More worryingly for the US establishment, Trump adopted a dismissive attitude towards US allies, particularly the European Union. Trump prided himself on his ability to cut deals with other nations that favoured the US. He signalled that the multilateral approach to trade was over when he tore up the TPP, and followed that by applying tariffs on German cars, Canadian steel and French luxury goods. For much of the US elite, these moves have simply created a void that Beijing is attempting to fill with its own free trade deals and the $1 trillion Belt and Road initiative, which aims to incorporate more than 138 countries into trade routes and production chains centred on China.

The International Monetary Fund, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the UN and other international institutions project US dominance by drawing allied nations behind US leadership. Trump's presidency delegitimised or sidelined those institutions as he focused on an "America first" posture. The military establishment believes that this has threatened, rather than strengthened, US power -- although there is now an acknowledgement that those institutions failed to keep China in check, something a Biden presidency will also grapple with.

The war criminals hope that Biden will restore political legitimacy to the office by rehabilitating the liberal ideology that manufactures consent for American imperialism, pitching US aggression as necessary to "make the world safe for democracy" and defending the "rules-based liberal world order". Above all, the US establishment hopes that Biden will restore relationships with US allies and construct a coalition of nations to confront China, after a disastrous four years that called into question US global leadership. As the National Security Leaders for Biden open letter bemoaned: "Our allies no longer trust or respect us, and our enemies no longer fear us".

Biden has a proven record as a hawkish proponent of US empire. For decades, he served on the Senate foreign relations committee. He was an early proponent of the expansion of NATO to project US influence into the former eastern bloc after the fall of the USSR. He backed US intervention in the Balkan war, supported the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, voted for the war on Iraq in 2003 and, as vice president, backed the US intervention in Libya.

There is consensus within the US ruling class over the need to "get tough" with China. The military establishment expects Biden to turn the screws. On the campaign trail, he accused Trump of "getting played" by Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom he called a "thug". This is consistent with Democratic Party practice in the Congress, which is to criticise Trump for not being tough enough. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, for example, accused Trump of "selling out" by cutting a trade deal with China. Schumer also spearheaded legislation to implement bans on Huawei when Trump appeared to back down.

Since his first days in Congress, Biden has also made a name for himself as a staunch supporter of the apartheid state of Israel. According to Israeli publication Haaretz , Biden is said to have a "real friendship" with Israel's far-right president, Benjamin Netanyahu. He was vice president when the US signed a $38 billion military aid deal with Netanyahu, which the State Department called the "single largest pledge of bilateral military assistance in US history". So while Trump pushed pro-Israeli rhetoric far to the right, abandoning any pretence of support for Palestinian statehood, Biden put his money where his mouth is when it came to propping up Israeli apartheid in Palestine.

On Afghanistan, Biden may prove to be to the right of Trump. As vice president, he supported an enduring US military presence in the country. Trump, by contrast, shocked the US military when he announced on Twitter that he wants all troops out by Christmas. In contrast, Biden in an interview with Stars and Stripes , a military newspaper, said he would maintain a troop presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Anti-imperialists need to judge Biden by his blood-soaked record in Congress and by the company he keeps. The bulk of the US military establishment has backed Biden precisely because they think his multilateral approach will restore credibility to US interventions. It's for this reason that Forbes magazine senior contributor Loren Thompson predicted last month: "A Biden presidency would be more likely to use US military forces overseas than President Trump has been".

Global capitalism is facing a profound crisis that is reshaping international relations and putting pressure on the fault lines of existing conflicts. Open imperialist rivalry will be a feature of the coming period, along with wars over regional disputes. There is no length to which the US ruling class won't go to safeguard its position as global superpower. And Joe Biden is the commander-in-chief. He is now the most dangerous man in the world.

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[Nov 19, 2020] Biden's beholden to big money defense industries Sanders' brother

Nov 19, 2020 | www.rt.com

While probably "less aggressively nasty" than Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden is still a "conventional politician," but it won't be easy for him to dismiss his party's progressive wing, Larry Sanders told RT's Going Underground.

Brother to US Senator Bernie Sanders and the Green Party Spokesperson on Health and Social Care (England & Wales), Larry Sanders told RT's Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi that while Biden was not his "choice" for president, he prefers him over the current incumbent, President Donald Trump.

... ... ...

As a fixture of the establishment, Biden will follow the interests of corporate money and the military-industrial complex rather than anybody else's, Sanders noted.

"Biden is a conventional politician, he is beholden to big money, he is beholden to defense industries,


joe_go 13 hours ago 19 Nov, 2020 07:03 AM

If no one in America went to vote the country would still look the way it looks today. The big money and military industry would run the country the way it runs it when people vote and think it matters.
Spirgily_Klump 20 hours ago 19 Nov, 2020 12:46 AM
Do you know after Biden was out of the VP office the Chinese communist party had donated $70 million to one of his foundations at the University of Pennsylvania from which Joe drew a salary of over $900,000 per year? With his benefiting from the hundreds of millions his family took in from foreign powers and persons how can he gain the security clearance necessary for the presidency? The president needs the highest clearance. Even an applicant to the CIA get polygraphed.
shadow1369 Spirgily_Klump 9 hours ago 19 Nov, 2020 11:00 AM
Just one of many skeletons jangling in Bidet's closet, they will be used by his controllers to keep him on track.
Iwanasay 19 hours ago 19 Nov, 2020 01:22 AM
It doesn't matter who is in power, America's destiny has been chosen by other behind the scene faces
RedDragon 15 hours ago 19 Nov, 2020 05:27 AM
All USA presidents are beholden to big money entities, inclusive incoming Biden presidency. Trump is beholden to the Jewish money powers etc..

[Nov 18, 2020] Hawley Bucks Trend, Backs Afghanistan Exit

Hawlwy wrote to the acting Defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller. "The costs of the war in Afghanistan continue to mount, and they are borne disproportionately by working Americans. For these reasons, majorities of Americans, including veterans of the war itself, have long called for an end to the war in Afghanistan. Yet most of our nation's policymakers have ignored them."
Nov 17, 2020 | hawley.senate.gov

By siding with Trump's push to leave the country, the rising star senator distinguishes himself on the right.

CURT MILLS

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., allied himself with the White House and those calling for a swift exit from Afghanistan on Tuesday.

"I write to express my support for President Trump's plan for the prompt withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan," Hawley wrote to the acting Defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller. "The costs of the war in Afghanistan continue to mount, and they are borne disproportionately by working Americans. For these reasons, majorities of Americans, including veterans of the war itself, have long called for an end to the war in Afghanistan. Yet most of our nation's policymakers have ignored them."

Hawley's signaling is significant because it runs counter to the political assault on the Hill by Republicans to stop President Trump's plot to exit from the troubled theater in his administration's closing days. On Monday, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed, in no uncertain terms, his vociferous opposition to a further drawdown: "A rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan now would hurt our allies and delight the people who wish us harm."

McConnell was joined by Michael McCaul, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, among others, in expressing his displeasure with recent developments in President Trump's national security team. An embattled Trump has suddenly cleaned house at the Pentagon , in a maneuver widely described as essentially outlaw.

Trump's moves at DoD are seen as part score-settling -- and part delivering on a major campaign promise. If he sticks the landing, Trump's acolytes insist drawing down further in Afghanistan cracks the door open still wider for a potential 2024 repeat run.

"You wrote recently, 'All wars must end,'" Hawley wrote to Miller. "The time has come to end the war in Afghanistan. I urge you to stand with President Trump and bring our troops home as expeditiously as possible."

Hawley has now staked out new territory, putting finishing touches on a Afghanistan policy he has been developing for some time. In September, he told this magazine : "It's time for a strategic refocus. We have spent too much time on adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere that do not serve our strategic aims and place enormous burdens on the class of working men and women who fight our wars."

Notably, Hawley's statements stand apart from other Republican senators, who are keen to enhance their bona fides to become the leader of a future, "realigned" Republican Party.

Echoing McConnell, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida told Politico : "The concern would be it would turn into a Saigon-type of situation where it would fall very quickly and then our ability to conduct operations against terrorist elements in the region could be compromised. That's my primary concern right now."

But the leadership class in Republican Washington continues to mostly diverge from those reading the tea leaves on the future of the party. Rubio was not joined by Sen. Tom Cotton, who is traditionally seen as the most hawkish of the trio. Cotton has previously noted that he shares Trump's frustration with the war. And Ted Cruz, another 2024 contender, has so far been silent.


dragnet20 a day ago ,

Nice rhetoric, but I'll believe it when I see it.

In any case, Hawley is the only GOP hopeful on the scene right now I could remotely contemplate voting for in 2024. Will continue watching him with interest.

Royal Oaks dragnet20 a day ago ,

"I'll believe it when I see it."

Me too. Too many Israeli and Saudi meddlers in Washington. They get what they want, and they don't want Americans coming home.

Rkramden66 a day ago ,

Wake me up when Hawley renounces his opposition to labor unions.

CPT a day ago ,

That's good to see. I like Hawley a lot on domestic policy, but he's stuck to a more or less pre-Trump GOP foreign policy up till now. He needs to drop the deranged hostility to Iran to really win my support, but supporting a drawdown of our Middle Eastern wars is better than the neocons banging the drums for indefinite occupations.

CPT a day ago ,

That's good to see. I like Hawley a lot on domestic policy, but he's stuck to a more or less pre-Trump GOP foreign policy up till now. He needs to drop the deranged hostility to Iran to really win my support, but supporting a drawdown of our Middle Eastern wars is better than the neocons banging the drums for indefinite occupations.

Feral Finster a day ago ,

According to Reuters, citing Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan will be reduced, but not a full withdrawal.

Once again, a failed Trump pullout. Such a pathetic little cuck.

marku52 Feral Finster 7 hours ago ,

Really. Just write the damned document. Withdraw within 2 weeks. Get it over. This war is old enough to vote, for Dog's sake.

kouroi a day ago ,

Removal of troops from Syria should be the first step, since the illegality of that occupation is the most obvious, and then Iraq. Afghanistan is somewhat prioritize because it is less important strategically right now and more cumbersome to deal with...

But the US would rather have its diplomatic missions in every country replaced with military bases...Superpowers!


ZizaNiam
kouroi 20 hours ago
,

Israel needs the US troops there to facilitate the genocide of Syria's Christians, which General Soleimani and Hezbollah, along with the Syrian Arab Army, were protecting.

kouroi ZizaNiam 19 hours ago ,

Oh, nothing so base. It's about the Golan Heights and preserving and maybe even extending land holdings Israel has secured, including in Jordan...

PR Doucette a day ago ,

The saddest thing about this whole affair is that it is a sham to make it look as if Trump has kept his promise to bring US troops home and then blame Biden for supporting endless wars if he has to send US troops back in to protect the troops that were left behind. As the graduate of an elite law school Hawley is bright enough to know that terrorism is not going to abate in Afghanistan or the Middle East or in parts of Africa but he also realizes that the great grandparents of the people who voted for him were skeptical about the US entering WWI, had grandparents who did not see any reason to enter WWII until Pearl Harbor, and parents who did not think invading Afghanistan made sense until 9/11. If you are thinking of running for president in 2024 this may seem like a reasonable political move but ultimately really shows how facile Hawley's understanding of international affairs really is and a basic dishonesty about what is really involved in maintaining US global power.

I Don't Matter • a day ago ,

Trump only had 3 years and 10 months to do this. If only he were interested in ending wars as opposed to trying hard to start new ones.

[Nov 18, 2020] Turns out war-enablers and war-profiteers are kosher so long as they're "woke" warmongers!

Nov 18, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

Max Boot's Revenge: Biden's 'A-Team' in Their Own Words

by Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.) Posted on November 17, 2020

Beware savvy, sophisticate liberals bearing gifts of evasive and ethically empty prose. Having, for my sins, spent a few weeks reading just about everything on offer from what unrepentant neocon zealot – and born-again Washington Post columnist – Max Boot dubbed Joe Biden's foreign policy "A-Team," I can vouch for the new transition team's vapidity and verisimilitude. Put another way, Boot's favored Biden Posse – the Iran nuke channeling , P4 (Tony Blinken, Avril Haines, Jake Sullivan, and Nicholas Burns) +1 (Michèle Flournoy) – have a rare gift for typing tons but saying little.

Worse still, what they do let slip drips with subtext of status quo-hawkishness – Biden's shadow team of five ground hogs spotting their shadows and predicting four more years of warfare winter. Moreover, these aren't just any Washington lowland creatures – they're being groomed , respectively, for national security adviser, director of national intelligence, a senior diplomatic role, possible secretary of state, and probable secretary of defense.

Only you're not supposed to look under the lid of Biden's national security transition team, because, well uh, Trump was worse, and there's, like, lots of ladies in the lineup. No really, "serious" people are saying that . With straight faces. And clear consciences. With no consequences. What a world!

This column's immediate genesis, though, was Glenn Greenwald 's vicious and vital responsive -evisceration of MSNBC contributor – and self-described "thriver on chaos" – Mieke Eoyang's recent nonsense Newspeak tweet . Here's her attempt to silence through shaming – and signaling by buzzword:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=Antiwarcom&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1327300779183644672&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D2012341368&siteScreenName=Antiwarcom&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

[Nov 18, 2020] A small but important correction in terminology: when they say "Joe Biden's Foreign Policy Team" they actually means "Citibank's foreign policy Team"

Notable quotes:
"... Citibank's foreign policy Team would be much more accurate wouldn't it ? ..."
Nov 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

dave , Nov 17 2020 20:08 utc | 33

"Joe Biden's Foreign Policy Team"

Citibank's foreign policy Team would be much more accurate wouldn't it ?

That's like saying Obomber or Bush had their own foreign and economic policy.

... ... ...

[Nov 18, 2020] China will be a problem for Biden, as he can't pursue rapprochement without being labeled as China stooge and bought politician

Nov 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

ptb , Nov 17 2020 22:04 utc | 60

If the Chinese decide to really mess with the Biden administration, I'd imagine they would do something like build a road or even a pipeline in Afghanistan, even though it is completely unnecessary, simply to force the US to stay longer. Doesn't seem like their style, though.

In regards to Russia, same as most of the last 100 years, really. If anything big happens at all, it would be Putin retiring. In that case, CNN will have wild fantasies about Boris Yeltsin 2.0, while in reality Russian oligarchs may have some kind of trial moment to figure out whether his successor can continue to enforce a balance or not, which is a big question. Team Biden brings nothing to the table in that situation other than talking sh#t and creating confusion. The EU on the other hand could, but it's looking less and less likely. Especially as they will likely be immersed in a post covid political crisis and renewed challenge from right wing parties.

Last but not least, look for Biden to be nominated for Nobel Peace Prize before lunch on his first day in.

[Nov 13, 2020] Neocons Poised to Join New Government by Phil Geraldi

Notable quotes:
"... It would not be overstating the case to suggest that the neoconservative movement has now been born again, though the enemy is now the unreliable Trumpean-dominated Republican Party rather than Saddam Hussein or Ayatollah Khomeini. ..."
"... The transition has also been aided by a more aggressive shift among the Democrats themselves, with Russiagate and other “foreign interference” being blamed for the party’s failure in 2016. ..."
"... The unifying principle that ties many of the mostly Jewish neocons together is, of course, unconditional defense of Israel and everything it does, which leads them to support a policy of American global military dominance which they presume will inter alia serve as a security umbrella for the Jewish state. ..."
"... That change has now occurred and the surge of neocons to take up senior positions in the defense, intelligence and foreign policy agencies will soon take place. In my notes on the neocon revival, I have dubbed the brave new world that the neocons hope to create in Washington as the “Kaganate of Nulandia” after two of the more prominent neocon aspirants, Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland. ..."
"... A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. Her efforts were backed by a $5 billion budget, but she is perhaps most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea. ..."
"... A lot of the neocons are Russian Jews who grew up in households that were Bolshevik communists. They're idea of spreading democracy goes back to Trotsky who tried to spread communism through the Soviet Union. Their hatred toward Russia dates back to their ancestors feudal days under the Tsars and the pogroms they suffered and the ice pick Trotsky got to the head. ..."
"... Obama's deep state lied, people died: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/11/outgoing-syria-envoy-admits-hiding-us-troop-numbers-praises-trumps-mideast-record/170012/ ..."
"... I've never quite figured out the "neocon" ideology, beyond the fact that neocons seem devoted to the sort of status quo present in Washington, D.C. during the three administrations prior to Trump. Military adventurism, nation-building, and interventionist foreign policy, all based on nebulous concepts which are applied unevenly around the world. ..."
"... The Neocon movement seems to have morphed into nothing more than a club for bullies trying to one up each other. ..."
"... "It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way." ..."
"... Neocons don't really prefer war, so much as they prefer overseas "engagements" that may look like war and smell like war. All that's missing in neocon military operations is a defined end state. ..."
Nov 13, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Donald Trump was much troubled during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns by so-called conservatives who rallied behind the #NeverTrump banner, presumably in opposition to his stated intention to end or at least diminish America’s role in wars in the Middle East and Asia. Those individuals are generally described as neoconservatives but the label is itself somewhat misleading and they might more properly be described as liberal warmongers as they are closer to the Democrats than the Republicans on most social issues and are now warming up even more as the new Joe Biden Administration prepares to take office.

To be sure, some neocons stuck with the Republicans, to include the highly controversial Elliott Abrams, who initially opposed Trump but is now the point man for dealing with both Venezuela and Iran. Abrams’ conversion reportedly took place when he realized that the new president genuinely embraced unrelenting hostility towards Iran as exemplified by the ending of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. John Bolton was also a neocon in the White House fold, though he is now a frenemy having been fired by the president and written a book.

Even though the NeverTrumper neocons did not succeed in blocking Donald Trump in 2016, they have been maintaining relevancy by slowly drifting back towards the Democratic Party, which is where they originated back in the 1970s in the office of the Senator from Boeing Henry “Scoop” Jackson. A number of them started their political careers there, to include leading neocon Richard Perle.

It would not be overstating the case to suggest that the neoconservative movement has now been born again, though the enemy is now the unreliable Trumpean-dominated Republican Party rather than Saddam Hussein or Ayatollah Khomeini.

The transition has also been aided by a more aggressive shift among the Democrats themselves, with Russiagate and other “foreign interference” being blamed for the party’s failure in 2016. Given that mutual intense hostility to Trump, the doors to previously shunned liberal media outlets have now opened wide to the stream of foreign policy “experts” who want to “restore a sense of the heroic” to U.S. national security policy. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum are favored contributors to the Atlantic while Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss were together at the New York Times prior to Weiss’s recent resignation.

Jennifer Rubin, who wrote in 2016 that “It is time for some moral straight talk: Trump is evil incarnate,” is a frequent columnist for The Washington Post while both she and William Kristol appear regularly on MSNBC.

The unifying principle that ties many of the mostly Jewish neocons together is, of course, unconditional defense of Israel and everything it does, which leads them to support a policy of American global military dominance which they presume will inter alia serve as a security umbrella for the Jewish state. In the post-9/11 world, the neocon media’s leading publication The Weekly Standard virtually invented the concept of “Islamofascism” to justify endless war in the Middle East, a development that has killed millions of Muslims, destroyed at least three nations, and cost the U.S. taxpayer more than $5 trillion. The Israel connection has also resulted in neocon support for an aggressive policy against Russia due to its involvement in Syria and has led to repeated calls for the U.S. to attack Iran and destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon. In Eastern Europe, neocon ideologues have aggressively sought “democracy promotion,” which, not coincidentally, has also been a major Democratic Party foreign policy objective.

The neocons are involved in a number of foundations, the most prominent of which is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), that are funded by Jewish billionaires. FDD is headed by Canadian Mark Dubowitz and it is reported that the group takes direction coming from officials in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Other major neocon incubators are the American Enterprise Institute, which currently is the home of Paul Wolfowitz, and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at John Hopkins University. The neocon opposition has been sniping against Trump over the past four years but has been biding its time and building new alliances, waiting for what it has perceived to be an inevitable regime change in Washington.

That change has now occurred and the surge of neocons to take up senior positions in the defense, intelligence and foreign policy agencies will soon take place. In my notes on the neocon revival, I have dubbed the brave new world that the neocons hope to create in Washington as the “Kaganate of Nulandia” after two of the more prominent neocon aspirants, Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland.

Robert was one of the first neocons to get on the NeverTrump band wagon back in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and spoke at a Washington fundraiser for her, complaining about the “isolationist” tendency in the Republican Party exemplified by Trump. His wife Victoria Nuland is perhaps better known. She was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters.

A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. Her efforts were backed by a $5 billion budget, but she is perhaps most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.

And, to be sure, beyond regime change in places like Ukraine, President Barack Obama was no slouch when it came to starting actual shooting wars in places like Libya and Syria while also killing people, including American citizens, using drones. Biden appears poised to inherit many former Obama White House senior officials, who would consider the eager-to-please neoconservatives a comfortable fit as fellow foot soldiers in the new administration. Foreign policy hawks expected to have senior positions in the Biden Administration include Antony Blinken, Nicholas Burns, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, Samantha Power and, most important of all the hawkish Michele Flournoy, who has been cited as a possible secretary of defense. And don’t count Hillary Clinton out. Biden is reportedly getting his briefings on the Middle East from Dan Shapiro, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, who now lives in the Jewish state and is reportedly working for an Israeli government supported think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies.

Nowhere in Biden’s possible foreign policy circle does one find anyone who is resistant to the idea of worldwide interventionism in support of claimed humanitarian objectives, even if it would lead to a new cold war with major competitor powers like Russia and China. In fact, Biden himself appears to embrace an extremely bellicose view on a proper relationship with both Moscow and Beijing “claiming that he is defending democracy against its enemies.” His language is unrelenting, so much so that it is Donald Trump who could plausibly be described as the peace candidate in the recently completed election, having said at the Republican National Convention in August “Joe Biden spent his entire career outsourcing their dreams and the dreams of American workers, offshoring their jobs, opening their borders and sending their sons and daughters to fight in endless foreign wars, wars that never ended.”

Polish Janitor , 13 November 2020 at 11:34 AM

It should be noted that the return of "neocons" does not mean the return of people like Wolfowitz, Ladeen, Feith, Kristol who are more "straussian" than "liberal/internationalist", but those like Nuland, Rice, Sam Powell, Petraeus, Flournoy, heck even Hilary Clinton as UN Ambassador who are CFR-type liberal interventionist than pure military hawks such as Bolton or Mike Flynn.

These liberal internationalists, as opposed to straussian neocons, will intervene in collaboration with EU/NATO/QUAD (i.e. multilaterally) in the name upholding human rights and toppling authoritarianism, rather than for oil, WMDs, or similar concrete objectives. In very simple terms, the new Biden administration's foreign policy will be none other than the return to "endless wars" for nation-building purposes first and last.

fakebot , 13 November 2020 at 11:43 AM

The name Kagan is the Russianized version of the name Cohen. He was going to be McCain's NSA had he been elected. They pulled a stunt with the Bush admin to make Obama look weak by pushing Georgia into war with Russia in 2008. Sakaasvili, the president of Georgia, was literally eating his own tie:

https://cdn1.img.sputniknews.com/img/102445/69/1024456927_0:98:1000:639_1000x541_80_0_0_d2bb118481dc653ec7d2a8b170b8f6bf.jpg

A lot of the neocons are Russian Jews who grew up in households that were Bolshevik communists. They're idea of spreading democracy goes back to Trotsky who tried to spread communism through the Soviet Union. Their hatred toward Russia dates back to their ancestors feudal days under the Tsars and the pogroms they suffered and the ice pick Trotsky got to the head.

I don't think they have that much influence. They pushed a lot of nonsense in the late 70/early 80s about how the Taliban were George Washingtons and here we are today, they're worst than the Comanche. The last time I saw Richard Perle make a TV appearance, he was crying like a baby. Robert Novak, the prince of darkness, was a Ron Paul supporter. The only ones really kicking around are Bill Kristol and Jennifer Rubin, but Kristol was almost alone when he was talking about putting 50,000 boots on the ground in Syria. Rubin is a harpie who only got crazier and crazier. Kagan had his foot in the door with Hillary only because of his wife. Those two might get back in with Biden on Ukraine, but Biden would do well to keep them at a distance.

Mark K Logan , 13 November 2020 at 11:57 AM

Thanks.

The lone bright spot is Biden's stated intention of restoring the JCPOA. And, I guess, the pending defenestration of Pompeo The Great.

I suspect the condition of the US economy and the massive deficits will assist in discouraging rash actions elsewhere. Have to wait and see.

Fred , 13 November 2020 at 12:36 PM

Obama's deep state lied, people died: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/11/outgoing-syria-envoy-admits-hiding-us-troop-numbers-praises-trumps-mideast-record/170012/

It's great when career professionals sabotage the elected president's foreign policy.

JM Gavin , 13 November 2020 at 01:00 PM

I've never quite figured out the "neocon" ideology, beyond the fact that neocons seem devoted to the sort of status quo present in Washington, D.C. during the three administrations prior to Trump. Military adventurism, nation-building, and interventionist foreign policy, all based on nebulous concepts which are applied unevenly around the world.

It seems now that there is a new breed of neocons, unified by opposition to Trump's messaging, but not much else. Odd to find people like Samantha Power, John Bolton, Jim Mattis, and Paul Wolfowitz marching together in perfect step.

The Beaver , 13 November 2020 at 02:49 PM

Mr Geraldi

A good perspective by Philip Weiss on the same subject. Eliot A Cohen must be communicating a lot with the Kagan brothers , Dennis Ross and Perle to see who can be parachuted either to the WH or Foggy Bottom.

https://mondoweiss.net/2020/10/neoconservatives-are-flocking-to-biden-and-lets-forget-about-the-iran-deal/

BrianC , 13 November 2020 at 03:08 PM

@JM Gavin

I've never quite figured out the "neocon" ideology

The revolutionary spirit (see E. Michael Jones' work). From communism to neoconservatism it's ultimately an attack on the Beatitudes and Christ's Sermon on the Mount. "The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war" -- Servant of God Dorothy Day

Mark K Logan , 13 November 2020 at 03:23 PM

JM Gavin,

Sir,

I hold the Cold Warriors like Scoop a species distinct from those of the post-USSR era. The current version started at the end of the cold war. We felt like kings of the world after Gulf War 1 and the shoe seemed to fit.

The HW Bush administration pondered how best to use this power for good. I've read some things which report there was a debate within the administration on whether to clean up Yugoslavia or Somalia first. They got Ron to "do the honors" for the invasion of Somalia at Oxford: About 20 minutes in. https://www.c-span.org/video/?35586-1/arising-ashes-world-order

That was played as part of the pep-talk on the Juneau off the coast of Somalia. Stirring stuff.

In some small way I never stopped sipping that Kool Aid. It's hard to stand by and watch unspeakable evil go down when you have the power to stop it...or think you do. Time will tell if the Neocons are capable of perceiving the limits of force. Certainly had some hard lessons in the last few decades.

EEngineer , 13 November 2020 at 03:57 PM

@JM Gavin

Hogs lining up for a spot at the trough? The Neocon movement seems to have morphed into nothing more than a club for bullies trying to one up each other.

Dan , 13 November 2020 at 04:35 PM

I think its generally shocking that Trump or the republicans didn't make a bigger issue of Biden's history of supporting disastrous intervention, especially his Iraq War vote. Maybe they felt like its not a winning issue, that they would lose as many votes as they gain by appearing more isolationist. But overall, Trump favoring diplomacy over cruise missiles should have been a bigger point in his favor in the election.

jerseycityjoan , 13 November 2020 at 04:52 PM

It is distressing to read that we will have people in the government who are looking for a fight. That is especially true in view of China's aggression in recent years and the responses we will have to make to that. I think we will have more than enough to do to handle China. What do the neocons want to do about China?

Here is an article about China that really startled me and made me realize how much of a threat is was becoming. The Air Force chief of staff talks about the challenges of countries trying to compete militarily with us in ways that have not occurred for awhile. Here are two quotes that really got me:

"Tomorrow's Airmen are more likely to fight in highly contested environments, and must be prepared to fight through combat attrition rates and risks to the nation that are more akin to the World War II era than the uncontested environments to which we have since become accustomed," Brown writes."

And

"Wargames and modeling have repeatedly shown that if the Air Force fails to adapt, there will be mission failure, Brown warns. Rules-based international order may "disintegrate and our national interests will be significantly challenged," according to the memo."

https://www.airforcemag.com/brown-air-force-must-speed-up-change-or-face-harsh-consequences/#.X02DjeMiZQM.mailto

The article doesn't say we will have another arms race but that is an obvious response to China's competition with us. I thought all that was done and gone. I do not want to resume it. I don't want another period of foreign entanglements, period. We still haven't paid for the War Against Terrorism. I look into the future and all I see is us racking up bills that we have no ability to pay. And then there is the human cost of all this, I don't want to even think about that.

turcopolier , 13 November 2020 at 05:40 PM

jerseycityjoan

"I thought all that was done and gone. I do not want to resume it." Childish. "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

JM Gavin , 13 November 2020 at 05:54 PM

EEngineer,

Snouts in the trough accounts for a certain amount of neocons, I'm sure. There is, however, a unifying vision beyond that which puzzles me, given the very different political orientations of various neocons. Neocons are found in academia and the media as well. Those types are less dependent on taxpayer dollars in exchange for their views (they'll get whatever tax money gets pushed their way in grants, etc regardless).

I find Polish Janitor's "straussian" and "liberal/internationalist" flavors of neocon intriguing, as I hadn't considered that before.

JMG

JM Gavin , 13 November 2020 at 05:59 PM

COL Lang's quote from Plato reminds me of another (from Cormac McCarthy): "It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."

Neocons don't really prefer war, so much as they prefer overseas "engagements" that may look like war and smell like war. All that's missing in neocon military operations is a defined end state.

JMG

JM Gavin , 13 November 2020 at 06:10 PM

Mark K. Logan,

I concur with your thoughts about standing by as evil occurs. We just have a habit of jumping into complex situations we don't understand, and making things worse. I suspect you feel the same way.

The military misadventures during my career (Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria) were marked by our own black and white thinking. The more successful adventures (Colombia, Nepal) were marked by our appreciation (to a certain extent) of the complex nature of the environments we were getting involved in...and the fact that we weren't involved in nation-building in the latter two locales. There were viable governments in place, and we weren't trying to replace them.

JMG

Deap , 13 November 2020 at 06:53 PM

Here is another Biden clip that should have been exploited too - way back when - when the media was a little more trusted, but no less pompous. However, Biden The Plagerizer had it coming.

Now tell me America is not the Land of Opportunity, when one can continuously shoot themselves in the foot and then rise from the dead yet again, and again: https://rumble.com/vb3c09-resurfaced-video-of-joe-biden-should-destroy-him.html?mref=23gga&mrefc=2

Though I am warming more and more to Trump Media becoming the real soul of America. Plus someone, in time. will need to pick up Rush Limbaugh's empire. America needs a counter-weight to fake news more than it needs the keys to the White House, with all its entangling webs, palace intrigues, chains and pitfalls.

Godspeed President Trump. If someone with as few talents s Biden can rise like Lazarus, just think what you can do with your little finger. No wonder the Democrats want Trump destroyed; not just defeated in a re-election. We have your back, Mr President.

TV , 13 November 2020 at 07:03 PM

Mark Logan:
Iran celebrates "Death to America" as a national day.
So let's give them a path to nuclear weapons.

Deap , 13 November 2020 at 07:11 PM

Ex-CIA analyst, Mich Rep. Elissa Slotkin refuses to back Pelosi for Speaker - anyone know her? https://www.newsmax.com/politics/elissa-slotkin-nancy-pelosi-democrat-house/2020/11/13/id/996905/ She wants more mid-West, and less Calif and NY, as the new face of the Democrat Party.

Fred , 13 November 2020 at 07:14 PM

Mark,

"It's hard to stand by and watch unspeakable evil go down when you have the power to stop it...."


I hear Trump is evil/Hitler/worse. I wonder if anyone who thinks that is true has the power to rig an election, or thinks they do?

jerseycityjoan , 13 November 2020 at 07:50 PM

Colonel,

You are right of course.

Are the people of America up for another arms race and a more or less cold war with China? I think the Chinese will give us a lot more trouble than the Soviets ever did.

And yet we allow their students to come here and learn all we know and their elites to bring their dirty money here and we give them green cards and citizenship and protect the money they took from the Chinese people. Not so smart on our part.

I am very concerned about all of this.

Serge , 13 November 2020 at 07:57 PM

What is the next theater of war that Biden's new friends will involve us in? I noticed lots of Cold War era conflicts are heating up lately, Ethiopia Morocco Armenia being recent examples. IS in Syria/Iraq is still castrated due to the continued mass internment of their population base in the dozens of camps, but they have established thriving franchises in Africa and their other provinces continue to smolder.

[Nov 06, 2020] Biden- A War Cabinet? by Mariamne Everet

Nov 06, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

"Let's bring decency and integrity back to the White House." I can't count the number of times I have heard and read this phrase uttered by U.S. expats here in Paris, France. As one of many American expats living here, of course I share in the desire for an end to a Donald Trump presidency. But at what cost? And will a Biden presidency – which promises a return to "normalcy" – really merit the sigh of relief that so many think it will? Below I summarize some of the most troubling information I have uncovered about some of the most likely foreign policy picks for key positions in a Biden cabinet.

Susan Rice for Secretary of State

Susan Rice, who was also reportedly being considered for the role of Biden's Vice President, served as United States Ambassador to the United Nations and as National Security Advisor, both under the Obama administration.

While Benghazi has been the focus of much criticism of Rice, she has received virtually no scrutiny for her backing of the invasion of Iraq and claiming that there were WMDs there. Some of her statements:

"I think he [then Secretary of State Colin Powell] has proved that Iraq has these weapons and is hiding them, and I don't think many informed people doubted that." (NPR, Feb. 6, 2003)

"It's clear that Iraq poses a major threat. It's clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that's the path we're on. I think the question becomes whether we can keep the diplomatic balls in the air and not drop any, even as we move forward, as we must, on the military side." (NPR, Dec. 20, 2002)

"I think the United States government has been clear since the first Bush administration about the threat that Iraq and Saddam Hussein poses. The United States policy has been regime change for many, many years, going well back into the Clinton administration. So it's a question of timing and tactics. We do not necessarily need a further Council resolution before we can enforce this and previous resolutions." (NPR, Nov. 11, 2002; requests for audio of Rice's statements on NPR were declined by the publicly funded network.)

She has also been criticized extensively for her record on the African continent, which judging by the following quote at the beginning of the 1994 Rwandan genocide seems to have been to adopt a "laissez faire" attitude : "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?"

Susan Rice's past rhetoric also includes choice generous words for African dictators . One great example is former prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, a man who ordered security services to open fire on protesters during its controversial 2005 election, has a track record of imprisoning journalists , used food aid as a political tool and stole land in south Ethiopia. In her speech at his funeral, Susan Rice described him as "brilliant" and a "close friend ".

Although Rice has often been portrayed as someone who is anti-Israel , her mild criticisms pale in comparison to her staunch record and discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

In a speech given at the AIPAC Synagogue Initiative Lunch back in 2012, Rice boasted about vetoing a UN resolution that would deem Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land as illegal, and further characterized the Goldstone Report as "flawed" and "insisted on Israel's right to defend itself and maintained that Israel's democratic institutions could credibly investigate any possible abuses." Her position has changed little since then, as recently as 2016, she proclaimed that "Israel's security isn't a Democratic interest or a Republican interest -- it's an enduring American interest."

Tony Blinken for National Security Adviser

Tony Blinken is also an old member of the Obama administration, having served first as VP Biden's National Security Advisor from 2009 to 2013, Deputy National Security Advisor from 2013 to 2015 and then as United States Deputy Secretary of State from 2015 to 2017.

Blinken had immense influence over Biden in his role as Deputy National Security Advisor, helping formulate Biden's approach and support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"For Biden ", he argued , "and for a number of others who voted for the resolution, it was a vote for tough diplomacy." He added "It is more likely that diplomacy will succeed, if the other side knows military action is possible."

The two of them were responsible for delivering on Obama's campaign promise to get American troops out of Iraq, a process so oversimplified and poorly handled that it led to even more chaos than the initial occupation and insurgency.

Blinken seems to be of the view that it is up to the US, and only the US, to take charge of world affairs : "On leadership, whether we like it or not, the world just doesn't organize itself. And until this [Trump] administration, the US had played a lead role in doing a lot of that organizing, helping to write the rules, to shape the norms and animate the institutions that govern relations among nations. When we're not engaged, when we don't lead, then one or two things is likely to happen. Either some other country tries to take our place – but probably not in a way that advances our interests or values – or no one does. And then you get chaos or a vacuum filled by bad things before it's filled by good things. Either way, that's bad for us."

Blinken also appears to be steering Biden's pro-Israel agenda, recently stating that Biden "would not tie military assistance to Israel to any political decisions that it makes, period, full stop," which includes an all out rejection of BDS , the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions Movement against Israel's occupation of Palestine.

Michèle Flournoy for Secretary of Defense

Michele Flournoy was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2009 to 2012 in the Obama administration under Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.

Flournoy, in writing the Quadrennial Defense Review during her time as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy under President Clinton, has paved the way for the U.S.'s endless and costly wars which prevent us from investing in life saving and necessary programs like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. It has effectively granted the US permission to no longer be bound by the UN Charter's prohibition against the threat or use of military force. It declared that, "when the interests at stake are vital, we should do whatever it takes to defend them, including, when necessary, the unilateral use of military power."

While working at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a "Top Defense and National Security Think Tank" based in Washington D.C., in June 2002, as the Bush administration was threatening aggression towards Iraq, she declared , that the United States would "need to strike preemptively before a crisis erupts to destroy an adversary's weapons stockpile" before it "could erect defenses to protect those weapons, or simply disperse them." She continued along this path even in 2009, after the Bush administration, in a speech for the CSIS : "The second key challenge I want to highlight is the proliferation – continued proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, as these also pose increasing threats to our security. We have to respond to states such as Iran, North Korea, who are seeking to develop nuclear weapons technologies, and in a globalized world there is also an increased risk that non-state actors will find ways to obtain these materials or weapons."

It is extremely important to note that Flournoy and Blinken co-founded the strategic consulting firm, WestExec Advisors, where the two use their large database of governmental, military, venture capitalists and corporate leader contacts to help companies win big Pentagon contracts. One such client being Jigsaw, a technology incubator created by Google that describes itself on its website as "a unit within Google that forecasts and confronts emerging threats, creating future-defining research and technology to keep our world safer." Their partnership on the AI initiative entitled Project Maven led to a rebellion by Google workers who opposed their technology being used by military and police operations.

Furthermore, Flournoy and Blinken, in their jobs at WestExec Advisors, co-chaired the biannual meeting of the liberal organization Foreign Policy for America. Over 50 representatives of national-security groups were in attendance. Most of the attendees supported "ask(ing) Congress to halt U.S. military involvement in the (Yemen) conflict." Flournoy did not. She said that the weapons should be sold under certain conditions and that Saudi Arabia needed these advanced patriot missiles to defend itself.

Conclusion

If a return to "normalcy" means having the same old politicians that are responsible for endless wars, that work for the corporate elite, that lack the courage to implement real structural change required for major issues such as healthcare and the environment, then a call for "normalcy" is nothing more than a call to return to the same deprived conditions that led to our current crisis. Such a return with amplified conditions and circumstances, could set the stage for the return of an administration with dangers that could possibly even exceed those posed by the current one in terms of launching new wars.

Mariamne Everett is an intern at the Institute for Public Accuracy currently living in France.

[Sep 20, 2020] NYT First Reinforces, Then Silently Debunks Its False Claims About Russia's Covid-19 Vaccine

Vaccine against coronaviruses is a very tricky business as the virus tend to mutate with time. Still it looks like Russian found some nw avenue to tackle this problem which might be more efficient then alternatives.
Notable quotes:
"... Science Magazine ..."
"... Science Magazine ..."
Sep 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Western reporters to not like to correct their own false reporting. They rather reinforce it as much as possible. Only when overwhelmed by the facts will they silently admit that they were wrong in the first place. Here is a prime example of how that's done.

In mid-August we exposed how 'western' media lied about the approval for phase-3 testing of the Russian Sputnik vaccine against Covid-19. They said that Russia claimed the vaccine was ready to go population wide. That never was the case.

'Western' Media Falsely Claim That Russia's Covid-19 Vaccine Is Ready To Go

Russia has not approved a vaccine against Covid-19 and it is not skipping large-scale clinical trials. The Russia regulator gave a preliminary approval for a vaccine candidate to start the large-scale clinical trial. [...]

Science Magazine is one of the few media who got it right : ...

One of the false reports we pointed out was by the New York Times Moscow correspondent Andrew E. Kramer:

Russia Approves Coronavirus Vaccine Before Completing Tests

Russia has become the first country in the world to approve a vaccine for the coronavirus, President Vladimir V. Putin announced on Tuesday, though global health authorities say the vaccine has yet to complete critical, late-stage clinical trials to determine its safety and effectiveness.
...
By skipping large-scale clinical trials, the Russian dash for a vaccine has raised widespread concern that it is circumventing vital steps -- and potentially endangering people -- in order to score global propaganda points.

Russia had, as we and Science Magazine reported, never the intent to skip large-scale clinical trials. Kramer made that up.

In new report today Kramer reinforces his previous false and disproven claims to lament about an alleged slow distribution of the Sputnik vaccine in Russia:

Russia Is Slow to Administer Virus Vaccine Despite Kremlin's Approval

More than a month after becoming the first country to approve a coronavirus vaccine, Russia has yet to administer it to a large population outside a clinical trial, health officials and outside experts say.

The approval, which came with much fanfare, occurred before Russia had tested the vaccine in late-stage trials for possible side effects and for its disease-fighting ability. It was seen as a political gesture by President Vladimir V. Putin to assert victory in the global race for a vaccine.

It is not clear whether the slow start to the vaccination campaign is a result of limited production capacity or second thoughts about inoculating the population with an unproven product.

The Times author reinforces his own lie that Russia had declared its vaccine ready for population wide application. It had never done that. The official registration of the vaccine by the relevant authorities was only a necessary precondition to start the large scale phase-3 testing of the vaccine. There never was a Russian intent to distribute the vaccine to a large population without phase-3 testing.

In the bottom third of his long piece Kramer comes near to admitting that. There he describes that the Sputnik phase-3 testing is now ongoing. That contradicts all of his previous reporting on the issues though he himself never says that. But even now he is getting the details wrong:

The trial in Russia began on Sept. 9, and Russian officials have said they expect early results before the end of the year, though the Gamaleya Institute, the scientific body that developed the vaccine, has scheduled the trial to continue until May.

That timeline is similar to the testing schedules announced by the three pharmaceutical companies testing potential vaccines in the United States, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer.
...
The Russian late-stage, or Phase 3, clinical trial is being carried out entirely in Moscow, where 30,000 people will receive the vaccine and 10,000 will get a placebo.

Yevgenia Zubova, a spokeswoman for the Moscow city health department, said in an interview that the vaccine was available only to trial participants.

Those last two paragraphs, which completely debunk Kramer's original reporting, should have been at the very top of the piece. They are buried down in paragraph 23 and 24 of a 29 paragraphs story that starts out with an epic repeat of the previously made false claims.

Kramer is wrong to say that the testing is limited to Moscow. As explained on the Sputnik Vaccine website :

Post-registration clinical trials involving more than 40,000 people in Russia will be launched in a week starting from August, 24. A number of countries, such as UAE, Saudi Arabia, Philippines and possibly India or Brazil will join the clinical trials of Sputnik V locally. [...] Mass production of the vaccine is expected to start in September 2020.

That testing of Sputnik V will also happen outside of Moscow has been confirmed by recent reports :

Russia's sovereign wealth fund will supply 100 million doses of its potential coronavirus vaccine to Indian drug company Dr Reddy's Laboratories, the fund said on Wednesday, as Moscow speeds up plans to distribute its shot abroad.
...
Dr Reddy's, one of India's top pharmaceutical companies, will carry out Phase III clinical trials of Sputnik-V in India, RDIF said.

It is not Russia that is fudging the testing of its vaccine. It is the Trump administration that is planning to do so out of political reasons:

Eric Topol @EricTopol - 18:10 UTC · Sep 19, 2020

We have the protocols. Now we know how there will very likely be an Emergency Use Approval (EUA) for a vaccine prior to November 3. The company and political motivations are fully aligned.

The criteria for an EUA is that it "may be effective" https://fda.gov/regulatory-inf ...
...
16. If there was any doubt about @HHSgov @SecAzar's plan to make sure there is an EUA for a vaccine before Nov 3 (see 10. above), then you can read this by @BySheilaKaplan In 'Power Grab,' Health Secretary Azar Asserts Authority Over F.D.A.

In contrast to the U.S. the Russian testing of its Sputnik vaccine will be -as usual- of high integrity and will strictly follow the protocols such trials are supposed to follow. In paragraph 29, the very last one in today's NYT story, the author at last admits as much :

[W]hen medicines are tested, Russia has an exceptionally good track record on managing clinical trials , according to a database of U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspections of clinical trials around the world. The F.D.A. found a lower percentage of trials with problems in Russia than in any other European country or the United States.

If I get the chance to chose a vaccine for myself I will rather take the one which was developed by a highly qualified state financed research institution and approved in Russia than one developed by some profit oriented pharmaceutic conglomerate that is in cahoots with a politicized regulator under the Trump administration.

Posted by b on September 20, 2020 at 12:12 UTC | Permalink


foolisholdman , Sep 20 2020 12:21 utc | 1

Very interestng clarification of well-muddied waters! Thank you for that b.
vk , Sep 20 2020 12:53 utc | 2
If I get the chance to chose a vaccine for myself I will rather take the one which was developed by a highly qualified state financed research institution and approved in Russia than one developed by some profit oriented pharmaceutic conglomerate that is in cahoots with a politicized regulator under the Trump administration.

To top it off, Gamaleya's vaccine simply has the better science behind it. It uses two human adenoviruses, in opposition to the single chimpanzee adenovirus used by the AstraZeneca one (the Chinese one also uses only one adenovirus, but I don't remember if it is human or chimpanzee).

No other laboratory in the world is using Gamaleya's technology - which it already dominates. Two American laboratories (Moderna and one more that I forgot the name) are testing the untried and dangerous mRNA technology. It is very unlikely those two mRNA vaccines will ever come out to the public; those two labs probably just cashed in their USD 2 billion checks they received from the USG.

This gives force to my original hypothesis: the Anglo-Saxon laboratories are exploiting exotic technologies for their vaccines because they want something the can patent, thus charging astronomical prices to the national governments and thus emerge from this pandemic even richer.

--//--

Speaking of AstraZeneca (Oxford), it released its blueprints yesterday after "public pressure":

A Phase III Randomized, Double-blind, Placebo-controlled Multicenter Study in Adults to Determine the Safety, Efficacy, and Immunogenicity of AZD1222, a Non-replicating ChAdOx1 Vector Vaccine, for the Prevention of COVID-19

The USG is, behind the scenes (I already posted the link here in the open thread), extremely worried about this vaccine.

AstraZeneca will try to get what it can get, but the fact is it's game over for them. The thing here is that the Gamaleya alternative is better and if the USA (where the vaccine makers will really make money) wants to get political, it will simply opt for one of the many American vaccines that will come out - ready or not, satisfactory or not - next year. As a British vaccine, AstraZeneca-Oxford will, at best, have to do with the British market, which is very tiny for a big pharmaceutical company.

It is better if they just cancel the trials and abandon production.

jo6pac , Sep 20 2020 13:07 utc | 3
If I had money I'd fly to Russia for their vaccine. They made theirs for the people and in Amerika we make it for profits and protect the makes from lawsuits.

Thanks b and vk

Clueless Joe , Sep 20 2020 13:19 utc | 4
To be frank, at this point, ironically, it's Big Pharma's own self-interest that might help us to counter Trump's lunacy. There are enough anti-vaxxers around for them not to want a screwed up vaccine and a big scandal that would only comfort the vaxxers and sow mistrust among the population. They need people to assume vaccines are well done and mostly harmless if they want to keep making profit with them. Trump is only interested in a victory in the next few weeks, Pharma business is interested in making profits for the next decades.
That's quite a damning indictment of our Western system, but then 2020 is a milestone, the threshold beyond which it won't be possible to consider the Western liberal capitalistic system as the superior one, if not the best one possible - quite the opposite.
Tuyzentfloot , Sep 20 2020 13:22 utc | 5
The Kramer reporting is highly unusual. Normally the important information should be in the third paragraph from the end and now it's in the sixth and seventh last.

Anyway, while I agree that this vaccine should be treated as an entirely legitimate effort I want to add:
- phase 1/2 testing did appear a too lightweight and the article on it in the Lancet has been criticized by russian scientists ( https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/09/08/leading-scientists-question-highly-improbable-russian-vaccine-results-published-in-lancet-a71384).
- one family of vaccines can be more controversial and experimental than another and the judgement of the testers can take this in account when considering shortcuts.
- One should distinguish what the makers of the vaccine claim with the political (exaggerated) statements from Putin about it .
- The statements on testing on the Sputnikvaccine have changed over time. In the beginning it said 2000 people in Russia and it listed 4 more countries(UAE, KSA, Brazil,Mexico). That was insufficient. Several of these countries have been omitted since, and others have been added. One can say that the intent to do decent testing was always there but the confirmed planning was not.
- rollout to large population was impossible anyway at an early stage because the production capacity was limited.

pnyx , Sep 20 2020 14:02 utc | 6
Kramer is not wrong, he simply lies. In the Relotius media this is standard practice when covering politically sensitive topics, combined with omissions.
Of course, many well-researched and truthful articles are published in the nyt, faz, nzz etc. That is exactly what makes these media so refined and what they base their claim to be quality media on. One lies and distort as little and as targeted as possible.
Steve , Sep 20 2020 14:05 utc | 7
The Europena and Australian vassals of the USA would not be given a choice to choose the more authetic option of the vaccine. But Israel would probably opt for the Russian version without consequence. It's over for the West!
morongobill , Sep 20 2020 14:10 utc | 8
Get your covid 19 news here folks!
Kramer vs Kramer , Sep 20 2020 14:15 utc | 9
Kramer appears to have the right kind of nose. It is all that matters
vk , Sep 20 2020 14:22 utc | 10
@ Posted by: Tuyzentfloot | Sep 20 2020 13:22 utc | 5

Nobody is saying the Gamaleya vaccine will be the second coming of the polio vaccine. Whichever COVID-19 vaccine comes out will inevitably be imperfect (in relation to the already tested and tried vaccines everybody takes nowadays).

Your worries are all legitimate. Indeed, Gamaleya publicly admitted phases 1 and 2 of its trials has small samples of subjects.

However, you also have to take into account that the science is solid (two human adenoviruses, a tested and tried technology) and that Gamaleya is the center of excellence in adenovirus vaccine technology. That's why - and not because it is Russian - we can trust Gamaleya's vaccine is, given the circumstances (pandemic), reliable. The fact Gamaleya already dominated the adenovirus technology also explains why it was the first laboratory to come out with a solution - it simply used a tested and tried method it already dominated, while the other pharmaceuticals are basically having to relearn how to develop a vaccine and/or are adventuring in uncharted territory because they want something they can patent.

So yes, we can search and find defects in Gamaleya's trials - but the strongest argument in its favor is not the trials, it's the solid science and technology behind it.

Jackrabbit , Sep 20 2020 14:34 utc | 11
What will the astro-turfed libertarian mob say about vaccines?

My guess: they will support them vociferously.

Because freedumb. And Big Pharma $$$ in their pockets.

!!

Anne , Sep 20 2020 14:54 utc | 12
Vk and the wabbit - right on. And Thanks to you, B, for this clear and straightforwardly informative piece (as usual).

Is it any surprise that the NYT uses the usual propaganda format of truth (when it accords with the ruling elites perspective) and lies (when "reporting on" what is happening in those "bad hat" countries)? And might I add that NPR and the BBC World Service do exactly the same thing, boosting the US-UK-NATO worldview (which equals the western corporate-captitalist-imperialist, oh so exceptional, ruling elites world position) while denigrating Russia, China, Iran (and now Lukashenko - indeed the Beeb refuses to pronounce his name properly, always reducing it to the feminine form, and believe me, as born and raised Brit, that's deliberate) via lies, lies and more lies. And via those weasely words: "likely," "Highly likely" and so on and on ....

All that this latest vaccine competition (western) will produce is more anti-vaxxers. And this time round, sensibly so.

JohnH , Sep 20 2020 14:57 utc | 13
Tuyzefot (5): it is common for the NYT to lead with propaganda and bury the facts at the end of the article.

I noticed it decades ago in articles covering Palestine. I learned to skip whatever was printed on the front page and immediately jump to the final five paragraphs found deep within the paper. I guess they print the facts at all there only as a bizarre way of covering their asses in a feeble attempt at integrity.

vk , Sep 20 2020 15:22 utc | 14
Just saw this, should've posted here earlier. Highly recommend reading in full:

Kirill Dmitriev: Questions on Sputnik V Vaccine Answered, Critics need to Look for Plank in Own Eyes

Highlights:

The vaccine uses a unique two-vector human adenovirus technology which no-one else in the world currently has for COVID-19.

[...]

On the surface the Sputnik V trial with 76 participants seems smaller in size compared to 1,077 people that, for example, AstraZeneca had in its Phase 1-2 studies. However, the design of the Sputnik V trial was much more efficient and based on better assumptions.

[...]

The post-registration studies involving more than 40,000 people started in Russia on August 26, before AstraZeneca has started its Phase 3 trial in the U.S. with 30,000 participants. Clinical trials in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Philippines, India and Brazil will begin this month. The preliminary results of the Phase 3 trial will be published in October-November 2020.

[...]

Q.: Why has the Sputnik V vaccine already become eligible for emergency use registration?

Because of the very positive results of the Phase 1-2 trials and because the human adenoviral vector-based delivery platform has been proven the safest vaccine delivery platform over decades including through 75 international scientific publications and in more than 250 clinical trials.

[...]

Some other companies are using human adenoviral vector-based platforms for their COVID-19 vaccines. For example, Johnson & Johnson uses only Ad26 vector and China's CanSino only Ad5 while Sputnik V uses both of these vectors. The work of Johnson & Johnson and CanSino not only validates the Russian approach but also shows Sputnik V's advantage as studies have demonstrated that two different vectors produce better results than one.

[...]

The monkey adenovirus and mRNA vaccines have never been used and approved before and their research is lagging the proven human adenoviral vector-based platform by at least 20 years. However, their developers have already secured supply contracts worth billions of dollars from Western governments and may potentially apply for fast-track registration -- while receiving full indemnity at the same time.

At the end of the Q&A, Dmitriev counters his Western colleagues:

Question 1: Are there any long-term studies of mRNA and monkey adenovirus vector-based technologies for carcinogenic effects and impact on fertility? (Hint: there are none)

Question 2: Could their absence be the reason why some of the leading pharmaceutical firms making COVID-19 vaccines based on these technologies pushed the countries buying their vaccines for full indemnification from lawsuits if something goes wrong?

Question 3: Why is Western media not reporting a lack of long term studies for mRNA and monkey adenoviral vector-based vaccines?

Those are good questions. Very good questions.


Mark Thomason , Sep 20 2020 15:42 utc | 15
The constant Russia bashing is a disconnect from the truth and the real world.

It is annoying to wade through.

Far more important, it is crippling for a nation if its leadership actually does disconnect from reality and believe its own fantasy.

Disconnect from reality, belief in convenient fantasy, is exactly how the Democrats went from losing with Hillary to running again with Hillary II, the same donors and advisers and influence peddlers pushing the same right wing triangulation by the Democratic Party.

Maybe they can squeak out a win this time. It should not be close.

Far more important, there are things that need doing, things that would win like health care for all, that they simply won't offer or run on. We are not going to get from them what we need, we know that, and that is why they again have a squeaker election even against a joke like Trump.

Patrick Armstrong , Sep 20 2020 15:54 utc | 16
Perfect example of the free and unfettered press at work. What do you mean we're just a propaganda rag? See, right down at the bottom, the bit you didn't bother to read down to, right next to the denture ad, we told the truth. So there! Balanced and accurate reporting!
Kooshy , Sep 20 2020 16:21 utc | 17
Here in US we are getting 737maxed again this time with FDA
Kooshy , Sep 20 2020 16:28 utc | 18
Trump's "national security" state has managed to kill 200000 by him the autocrat in chief to come out and tell the truth as he admitted so to Woodward. This fucking American national security phobia is costing American lives more than all past 70 years of national security wars.
aquadraht , Sep 20 2020 18:14 utc | 19
The sick transatlantic mindset is exposed here:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/08/31/china-covid-19-vaccine-first-401636

Nice to read the comment on Global Times:
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1199658.shtml

Tuyzentfloot , Sep 20 2020 19:34 utc | 20
@JohnH 13 , it was hm, a joke. There is indeed rule of thumb that you have to look fore the third to last paragraph. I upgraded it into something of a law, which is then violated in this case.
Tuyzentfloot , Sep 20 2020 20:10 utc | 21
@vk 10, I wouldn't call it my worries, just that I think B. posted a version which was too simple and rosy. In the meantime I saw your post 14 which I roughly expected but hadn't read about yet.
Jen , Sep 20 2020 20:17 utc | 22
Andrew Kramer's reporting on the Sputnik V vaccine is deliberately written to discredit the Russians and anything and everything they do, which includes the way they conduct scientific and medical research (because it's govt-funded, not funded by global pharmaceutical corporations) and the way they run their healthcare system (not privatised).

First, Kramer says the Kremlin approved the vaccine: this is to set up Moscow and Putin in particular as rash, so that the supposed "roll-out" of the vaccine can be (secondly) portrayed as inefficient.

Kramer knows he is lying which is why his piece is long (he knows most NYT readers are time-poor and want the celebrity news and baseball results) and the most important information is squeezed into the last two paragraphs of his article.

Jen , Sep 20 2020 20:24 utc | 23
Tuyzentfloot @ 5:

I tried linking to that Moscow Times article at your link and either I hit a dead end or the newspaper removed the article, which does not surprise me since that newspaper is as credible as The New York Times. It used to be given away f o r free in Moscow but I believe it now exists only as an online paper.

Tuyzentfloot , Sep 20 2020 20:32 utc | 24
@Jen, you have to remove the last two characters ').' because I omitted a space. The article in the moscow times is ok and not too alarming. It is also not discrediting the lancet article. Just raising concerns.

[Jun 29, 2020] The bounties could be a false flag: the Taliban doesn t need a Russian bounty to kill American soldiers

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Taliban doesn't need a Russian bounty to kill American soldiers. It would be a waste of money to pay for something the Taliban do anyway. Does the NYT believe the Taliban are motivated only by money? ..."
"... Any deal they make will necessitate that the the Taliban not spread their message north of the Afghan border into the former Soviet-stans that Moscow considers as within its sphere of influence. ..."
"... the bounties could be a false flag as someone else here mentioned. Pakistani ISI? Al-Qaeda? The Pakistani branch of the Taliban? ..."
"... Given the timing of the story, its more plausible that someone in the Intel community took a weak source, perhaps a single POW making an unverifiable claim and leaked it to make it harder for Trump to do any of the following ... ..."
"... Who was the "source" of the leak? It seems that as Ric Grenell noted. There was some raw intel that on investigation didn't meet the smell test. Someone who had access to that and is a buddy to a favorite Times reporter gave them something to spin to further the narrative that Trump is beholden to Putin. ..."
"... The problem with thinking of people like TTG is that for Russia, the USA presence in Afghanistan is actually useful. As in "never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake". Afghanistan occupation is a part of "Full Spectrum Dominance" play and, as such is a blunder. The USA simply does not has the resources for world control, despite the dominance of neocons who are ready to fight for it to the last dollar. ..."
"... I read this story as nothing more than a garden variety election year dirty trick using democratic party contacts in the print media and intel services. ..."
"... It can retroactively appear to wipe egg off their faces for their embarrassingly inept if not outright illegal Russiagate hoax which hobbled the entire country and world for three whole years, because it will be unassailable other than through denial and bolster the farago of Russia collusion suspicions simply by repetition. ..."
"... All sorts of nonsensical "corroborating" tall tales can and almost certainly will be spun. Without such an evil Russia story at hand they, the dems, would leave themselves open to being lambasted by Trump for subjecting him to three years of humiliation based on an inane, middle school level "dossier" (don't you love that? how sneaky cute to enoble it with such a word for the poor rubes) written by a reputed to be former member of "British Intelligence" (think Kim Philby if you need a clue) turned character assassin for hire. ..."
"... I tend to agree. If it is dead GIs the Russians want then all they need to do is to run guns to the Taliban. It's not as if the Taliban will then take those guns, say "gee, thanks", and then go out duck-hunting. They'd be after bigger game. But this? A bounty, which would require a payment on proof of a kill? As Larry Johnson so sarcastically said: "Yeah, that makes total sense. Russians are stupid, don't cha know." I don't believe it. ..."
"... It makes about as much sense as Russia's equally-sarcastic insinuation that an uptick in dead GIs may be the result of a CIA protecting its illegal drug business like a Mafia Don. At least the Russians have some reason to take offense. The USA, eh, perhaps less so. ..."
astutenews.com

Larry Johnson , 28 June 2020 at 09:55 PM

TTG, Your claims about US drug trafficking via the Contras is a leftwing myth. Fascinated that you'd fall for the crap.

I actually have a lot of first hand knowledge about that, having worked the Central American Task Force at CIA, having been the senior Regional Analyst for Central America, and my business relationship with the former head of DEA's International Ops and the Agent in charge of the undercover money laundering ops in NYC.

Eden Pastora's involvement in drug trafficking was taking place outside the control of the CIA. Gary Webb's delusional claims were without foundation. You, for some reason, seem to accept them at face value. Why?

optimax , 28 June 2020 at 10:00 PM
The Taliban doesn't need a Russian bounty to kill American soldiers. It would be a waste of money to pay for something the Taliban do anyway. Does the NYT believe the Taliban are motivated only by money?
JP Billen , 28 June 2020 at 10:13 PM
Revenge is not the only possible motive. Disruption of the US/Taliban/AfghanGov peace negotiations allows the Russian peace negotiations for Afghanistan to go forward. Those negotiations have been going on and off for three years.

As Leith mentioned above Russian support to the Taliban started about three years ago. Coincidence? By the way Rex Tillerson when he was SecState also claimed the Russians were arming the Taliban. Anyway if the US peace negotiations fail and the Russians succeed it is a win-win for Moscow's world rep. Of course they want to mess up any US deal with the Taliban to give their own deal a chance of success.

Any deal they make will necessitate that the the Taliban not spread their message north of the Afghan border into the former Soviet-stans that Moscow considers as within its sphere of influence.

That may work for the current crop of Taliban but it may turn out shortsighted as there are some small Uzbeki-Afghan and Tajik-Afghan Taliban factions that may never want to stop spreading Sharia.

Or the bounties could be a false flag as someone else here mentioned. Pakistani ISI? Al-Qaeda? The Pakistani branch of the Taliban?

China allegedly has unofficial relations with the Taliban but with their problem in Xinjiang you would think they would never actively support Islamic fundamentalists. Qatar? They were accused of supporting Taliban terrorism in Afghanistan, but their accuser was Saudi Arabia so is probably BS IMHO.

Christian J. Chuba , 29 June 2020 at 01:18 AM
"The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Sky News back up the NYT reporting through their sources."
Does this mean that each one contacted different source in the govt to verify the story or that they verified that the NYT contact was actually a govt employee and not the Easter Bunny?

Given the timing of the story, its more plausible that someone in the Intel community took a weak source, perhaps a single POW making an unverifiable claim and leaked it to make it harder for Trump to do any of the following ...

  1. Withdraw troops from Germany,
  2. Make the G7 into the G8 by letting Russia back in,
  3. Reinforce the Russians are despicable narrative (always a win).

Everyone in the MSM accepts this as an indisputable fact. It must be intoxicating to be able to leak a story and have everyone accept it without challenge.

And I'll add ... the NATO countries in Europe would be more willing to pay a premium for U.S. and Qatar LNG vs Russian NG if they find out that Russia is using their money to kill their soldiers.

The ONLY rational reason I heard why Russia would do this came from what I consider a marginal website, Veterans today. Gordon Duff said that the Russians did this to deter madman Trump from killing more Russians in Syria. I don't buy the theory but at least it proposes a rational motive while the MSM didn't even need a rational motive.

Jack , 29 June 2020 at 02:27 AM
Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP. Possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax, maybe by the Fake News @nytimesbooks, wanting to make Republicans look bad!!!

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1277431695248183298?s=21

Who was the "source" of the leak? It seems that as Ric Grenell noted. There was some raw intel that on investigation didn't meet the smell test. Someone who had access to that and is a buddy to a favorite Times reporter gave them something to spin to further the narrative that Trump is beholden to Putin.

likbez , 29 June 2020 at 02:52 AM

@ancientarcher | 28 June 2020 at 08:16 AM

Now you want to portray NYT as the paragon of truth-telling!! .

...But then isn't your ancestry from Lithuania. Your hatred is strong. I get that - I see that all time with people from the ex-Soviet republics formerly ruled by Russia. Hope others see that too.

You hit the nail. TTG sometimes sounds really like a Ukrainian nationalist on those issues. That means that TTG simply can't think strategically in this case due to his bias.

If Russia wanted to hurt the USA in Afghanistan then Strela launchers would be in hands of Taliban long ago with plausible deniability that they obtained them from Libya.

The problem with thinking of people like TTG is that for Russia, the USA presence in Afghanistan is actually useful. As in "never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake". Afghanistan occupation is a part of "Full Spectrum Dominance" play and, as such is a blunder. The USA simply does not has the resources for world control, despite the dominance of neocons who are ready to fight for it to the last dollar.

The especially prominent attitude in the State Department and NSC (Bolton is a nice example of those MIC bottom-feeders)

It drains the USA resources, and it turns the people of Asian xUSSR republics (so called Stans) against the USA and as such, makes neocolonialist policies in xUSSR republics more difficult.

Fourth and Long , 29 June 2020 at 03:13 AM

I read this story as nothing more than a garden variety election year dirty trick using democratic party contacts in the print media and intel services.

They were rehearsing their checklist litany of egregious faults of Donald Trump as president - corona, resulting recession/depression, etcetera - insert your picks, and decided they needed another one -- did nothing about Rooskies bribing Taliban to kill American soldiers.

It can retroactively appear to wipe egg off their faces for their embarrassingly inept if not outright illegal Russiagate hoax which hobbled the entire country and world for three whole years, because it will be unassailable other than through denial and bolster the farago of Russia collusion suspicions simply by repetition.

All sorts of nonsensical "corroborating" tall tales can and almost certainly will be spun. Without such an evil Russia story at hand they, the dems, would leave themselves open to being lambasted by Trump for subjecting him to three years of humiliation based on an inane, middle school level "dossier" (don't you love that? how sneaky cute to enoble it with such a word for the poor rubes) written by a reputed to be former member of "British Intelligence" (think Kim Philby if you need a clue) turned character assassin for hire.

J , 29 June 2020 at 03:30 AM

President Trump tweeted on Sunday night that U.S. intelligence "just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or [Vice President Mike Pence]". The Taliban have also ridiculed the report.

Yeah, Right , 29 June 2020 at 04:21 AM

Personanongrata,

I tend to agree. If it is dead GIs the Russians want then all they need to do is to run guns to the Taliban. It's not as if the Taliban will then take those guns, say "gee, thanks", and then go out duck-hunting. They'd be after bigger game. But this? A bounty, which would require a payment on proof of a kill? As Larry Johnson so sarcastically said: "Yeah, that makes total sense. Russians are stupid, don't cha know." I don't believe it.

It makes about as much sense as Russia's equally-sarcastic insinuation that an uptick in dead GIs may be the result of a CIA protecting its illegal drug business like a Mafia Don. At least the Russians have some reason to take offense. The USA, eh, perhaps less so.

Fred , 29 June 2020 at 08:06 AM

TTG,

"undermining US political and social unity"

I can't wait to see a story on what the Chinese have been up to in doing precisely that with billions in investment funds to children of prominent politicians, bribes to academics, NGO cultural centers, operatives sent to the using 'student' as cover, or work via H1B visa holders.

[Jun 25, 2020] COVID-19 China Reseeded with COVID-20 by Larry Romanoff

Notable quotes:
"... Before this new outbreak, Beijing had been virus-free for nearly 60 days, meaning there were no local viruses and that this new pathogen was definitely an import (or an American export). On June 19, China's CDC experts, after intensive investigations of the Xinfadi market, announced what they termed "a groundbreaking virus tracing discovery", which was that the strain of the new virus in Beijing was the same as that in much of Europe – but much older than those in Europe, and "had been around for quite some time" – and that can mean only that it came from the US because that was the source of all the original varieties many months ago. [4] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192146.shtml ..."
"... For a long time, Russia had only a few infections, rising steadily by only five or ten per day, then suddenly it exploded, rising by 5,000, then 10,000 and 20,000 per day. Virus outbreaks don't normally manifest that way. The normal process upon an outbreak is a rapid acceleration in the number of infections until it peaks, as happened with all other countries. ..."
"... And on June 20, 2020, the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) revealed that they had discovered that COVID-19 was present in water samples dating back to mid-December of 2019 ..."
"... And it wasn't only Italy. Dutch researchers discovered COVID-19 RNA in a wastewater plant in the Utrecht, Netherlands, city of Amersfoort. French scientists detected "high concentrations" of COVID-19 RNA in samples of sewage water from greater Paris that were obtained before Paris first recorded any deaths. ..."
"... The Irish Mirror reported on June 19 that "many countries are beginning to use wastewater sampling to track the spread of the disease", scientists claiming these detections were "consistent with evidence emerging in other countries" that COVID-19 was circulating around the world long before China reported its first cases ..."
"... Covid's here to stay – irrespective of the fact that it has never and will never satisfy Koch's Postulates. Why? Two reasons. First, because it has proved itself to be a highly effective means of controlling first world populations. Second, because now that it's been rolled out, it'll be impossible to roll it back without waking up the normies. You don't turn off the gas before the frog's been boiled. ..."
"... The Chinese analyzed the new outbreak and determined the genome was that of a strain that existed only in the US & Europe, but not heretofore in China. The Chinese have identified many different strains of this virus, seven or more. ..."
"... This covid19 with its growing number of strains seems likely to have escaped from a lab and it is most probably a product of US ingenuity, with cleverly engineered gain of function, but to leap to the conclusion that the US has deployed this bioweapon against China and Russia goes too far. Why would the US target its own population in the process? ..."
Jun 25, 2020 | www.unz.com

From the date of the initial outbreak in Wuhan I watched carefully on a daily basis the dispersion and progression of the coronavirus in China and then abroad, collecting as much data as were available on each location. By late May of 2020, China had been infection-free for many weeks, the concern turning to the identification and quarantine of imported cases. At the same time, the US became once again 'the leader of the world', this time in virus infections and deaths, producing 20,000 to 30,000 new cases and around 1,000 deaths per day. At the time, American hostility toward China's success in stopping the virus was palpable, with many nasty media articles and White House accusations about China's false statistics and blaming China for "spreading the virus" to the US. CNN stated, "Chinese state media has repeatedly touted China's effective measures in containing the virus as the number of infections and deaths surged abroad, contrasting its success with the failures of Western governments, especially the United States." [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/15/asia/coronavirus-...x.html Clearly there was much surprise and bitterness at China's success and America's failure, this coated in a sticky layer of resentment based partly on a justified suspicion that the Chinese were not overly distressed at the Americans enjoying the fruits of their own labor.

But even then I had a sense of an apparition, a version of Dickens' 'ghost of coronavirus past', accompanied by an uncomfortable feeling the Americans were sufficiently bitter (and vicious) to deny the Chinese their apparently easy victory. My fear was that the Americans would try to reseed China as they did Russia, and it would seem my fears were not unjustified. The new virus that broke out at the Xinfadi market in Beijing was a different strain than any previously existing in China, one that existed only in the US and Europe and could only have been brought in from the outside. And once again at a seafood market with no identifiable patient zero, no clear epidemiology (source and distribution) of a virus that did not exist in China. It almost had to be deliberately seeded, the odds against being infinitesimally small.

In terms of what I am calling COVID-20 (to differentiate it from the initial outbreak), China may have been fortunate to detect and corral this new pathogen before it could spread. The outbreak did expand to three other provinces but in single digits and the medical authorities have taken extreme action to prevent further spread since this variety – which again did not exist in China and had to be seeded from another country, appears to be much more contagious than the original COVID-19. [2] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1191598.shtml In response, Beijing has locked down everything and sent a group of experts to guide the fight against this new potential epidemic, so far with good success. Nucleic acid testing has been initiated on a massive scale, already many millions of people tested, and all those in contact with the Xinfadi market being in quarantine. Many residential compounds in the city strictly prohibit anyone from entering or leaving, with residents having their temperatures checked and reported on a daily basis, and their food and daily necessities delivered. [3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/asia/coronavirus-beij...x.html

Before this new outbreak, Beijing had been virus-free for nearly 60 days, meaning there were no local viruses and that this new pathogen was definitely an import (or an American export). On June 19, China's CDC experts, after intensive investigations of the Xinfadi market, announced what they termed "a groundbreaking virus tracing discovery", which was that the strain of the new virus in Beijing was the same as that in much of Europe – but much older than those in Europe, and "had been around for quite some time" – and that can mean only that it came from the US because that was the source of all the original varieties many months ago. [4] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192146.shtml

The investigators said they obtained so many positive samples that the entire market was "severely contaminated by the virus", but also that no one should form the conclusion that the market was the origin merely because the outbreak took place there. More importantly, they also said "Beijing's outbreak gives us the opportunity to re-examine our previous speculation that the virus originated from wildlife", because unlike Wuhan, "the possibility of wildlife causing Beijing's latest outbreak is slim." Their conclusion was that "an infected individual or object contaminated with the virus entered the wet market, and the market only gave it an environment to multiply". [3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/asia/coronavirus-beij...x.html The authorities have already produced the genome sequence and are now establishing when and how the virus was likely imported into China, and how long was the transmission chain. There is no question this pathogen was brought into China "by people", the question being the identity of those people and their purpose. [5] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202006/15/WS5ee6b33d...9.html And, what better way to "teach those smug Chinese a lesson" and attempt to derail China's rapid economic recovery.

Russia Re-seeded

There is something equally strange about the virus in Russia. For a long time, Russia had only a few infections, rising steadily by only five or ten per day, then suddenly it exploded, rising by 5,000, then 10,000 and 20,000 per day. Virus outbreaks don't normally manifest that way. The normal process upon an outbreak is a rapid acceleration in the number of infections until it peaks, as happened with all other countries.

But with Russia, the infections were minor for a long time, steady at very low numbers, with all the indications of an unsuccessful epidemic, and the Russian government took strict measures to control the spread. The US government was clearly resentful at the failure of the virus to devastate Russia and the US media bemoaned the fact that Russia's death rate was so low.

I would be very interested to see the genome sequences from the first infections in January and February, and for those happening in April and May. I haven't any definitive proof, but I am certain Russia, as China, was seeded again with another variety for a second attempt.

Virus Distribution

But to return to our main point, it isn't necessary for us to determine the physical origin of the virus. We know the virus originated in bats; that much is confirmed, but the more important issue is the epidemiology, particularly the incidence and distribution. First of all, for China and most other nations originally infected, there were so many multiple and simultaneous sources that locating a patient zero was a hopeless task. Virus outbreaks, left to their own natural devices, do not behave in this fashion, but begin with one person in a tightly localised situation and provably spreading from that point. Equally distressing is that we have the truly unprecedented "two waves" of worldwide infections. For this, let's review my observations from an earlier article [6] COVID-19 – Two Major 'Waves' of Global Infection; https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/05/covid-19-two-...l.html and take a quick look at those two waves of infections that circled the globe.

The First Wave simultaneously infected 25 nations within a few days centered on January 25. One month later, the Second Wave simultaneously infected 85 nations within a few days centered on February 25. A natural virus hasn't the ability to simultaneously (within three days) infect 85 different countries on all continents of the world. More peculiar is that these countries were not all infected with the same variety of the virus, and that most reported simultaneous outbreaks in multiple locations. Considering the above information in light of the basics of virus transmission, the only theory that fits all the known facts is that these waves resulted from many people leaving Fort Detrick on the same day carrying a pail of different live viruses, because those multiple varieties at the time existed only in the US. It could not possibly have resulted from air travel because that timing would have been scattered. When 85 countries experience a virus outbreak on virtually the same day, this can happen only with human assistance. The Americans have steadfastly refused to address this point.

Experts on biological weapons are in unanimous agreement that eruptions in a human population of a new and unusual pathogen in multiple locations simultaneously, with no clear idea of source and cases with no proven links, is virtually prima facie evidence of a pathogen deliberately released, since natural outbreaks can almost always be resolved to one location and one patient zero. But with COVID-19 (or COVID-20), not one country out of 200 has been able to do this.

It should be firmly noted that this new infection in Beijing is not a "second wave" as termed by the Western media. This is an entirely new and different infection by a new virus and totally unrelated to anything prior, a strain of a new and different virus that was deliberately carried to Beijing and flooded in the Xinfadi Market. This infection is not related to COVID-19 but is the seeding of yet another biological pathogen in China, making that now seven different biological attacks on China in two years. And China has suffered others similar. One of the most notable was the H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic – and which was extinct for decades – but which suddenly appeared in 1977 in both China and Russia causing a global pandemic, prompting immediate claims by the Americans that it "escaped from a Chinese lab". But the only sensible explanation is that the H1N1 virus 'escaped' from the Americans because there were persistent reports that the US military had found or saved samples of the original 'Spanish Flu' virus and were attempting to re-activate it. There was never a shred of evidence that either China or Russia had anything to do with this, and both were taken entirely by surprise.

It is my view that the world needs to stop pretending that COVID-19 was an accident of nature. Consider China's recent experience. In addition to SARS – which was indisputably man-made, China has suffered repeated viral pandemics in the past two years. February 15, 2018: H7N4 bird flu. June, 2018: H7N9 bird flu. August, 2018: outbreak of African swine flu. May 24, 2019: massive infestation of armyworms. December, 2019: COVID-19. January, 2020: A "highly pathogenic" strain of bird flu. June, 2020: China is hit with COVID-20. Are we to tell ourselves it was merely a run of bad luck that China was the only nation in the world to be hit repeatedly with so many different biological pathogens in such a short time? And merely more 'bad luck' that China became the only country in the world that was domestically virus-free and was suddenly hit again with a foreign strain in another wet market? This assumption is too ridiculous to bother refuting.

It is unfortunate that so much of our information today comes to us in a passive receptance from the mass media because one result is the loss of our ability to examine information critically and use our minds to assess the presentation. As an example, it was very clever for the Americans to use a wet market as a distribution point for a virus and for the media to give this point massive air time, because we instinctively associate such markets with at least a possibility of germs and bacteria and thus passively accept the claims as true without the necessary evidence and thus avoid using our brains as intended. Our assessment of wet markets as unsanitary may be correct, but common germs and bacteria are a very different thing from a coronavirus that makes its home in bats and has no business being in a vegetable market. It isn't important for our purposes to decide if COVID-19 was created in a lab; the important point is that a coronavirus has no means of transportation from bat caves in Sichuan to a market in Wuhan, nor the ability to mutate itself in such a way as to be energetically contagious to humans, and much less the conscious intelligence to choose China's largest passenger transportation hub as the distribution point and the Eve of the Chinese New Year as the best time to attack. For these, the coronavirus required a helping 'black hand'.

The Noose Tightens on the US

There is almost daily an increase in the volume of evidence that COVID-19 was circulating in the US far earlier than admitted, and serving as incriminating proof that the CDC's deliberate (and threatening) forbidding of testing was to bury this evidence. The most recent example is headlines in the US media on June 21, 2020, stating, "Over 40 mysterious respiratory deaths in California could dramatically rewrite narrative of COVID-19" in the US. [7] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192389.shtml The LA Times reported on "a cluster of mysterious respiratory deaths" beginning in December of 2019. The local news website www.bakersfield.com stated this meant that COVID-19 was circulating in California "way earlier than we knew". And let's not forget too quickly that Japanese tourists were infected in Hawaii in September of 2019.

And on June 20, 2020, the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) revealed that they had discovered that COVID-19 was present in water samples dating back to mid-December of 2019. The results were confirmed by two separate labs that used two entirely different testing methods, and also showed that environmental wastewater from Milan, Turin and Bologna returned positive traces of the virus dating back to December if not earlier. Apparently, the RNA from COVID-19 does not readily dissolve or disintegrate in water and polymerase chain reaction testing allows scientists to identify the RNA after many months. [8] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronaviru...23Q1J9 [9] https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/ita...5a35e3

And it wasn't only Italy. Dutch researchers discovered COVID-19 RNA in a wastewater plant in the Utrecht, Netherlands, city of Amersfoort. French scientists detected "high concentrations" of COVID-19 RNA in samples of sewage water from greater Paris that were obtained before Paris first recorded any deaths. Sputnik News reported in May that a Paris hospital confirmed it had treated Amirouche Hammar, the country's first COVID-19 patient, on December 27, 2019 – one month before France's first announcement of infections and four days before the WHO China bureau was informed of a "pneumonia of unknown etiology" on December 31. [10] https://sputniknews.com/europe/202006191079667103-sc...break/

The Irish Mirror reported on June 19 that "many countries are beginning to use wastewater sampling to track the spread of the disease", scientists claiming these detections were "consistent with evidence emerging in other countries" that COVID-19 was circulating around the world long before China reported its first cases, all of which would of necessity have had to have originated in the US and transported around the world. It is now beginning to appear that many countries were seeded at approximately the same time, perhaps in their water distribution systems. Following these discoveries, the ISS told Reuters it intends to launch a new study of the wastewater of Italian tourist resorts. I suspect other nations will follow.

And it would seem the NYT, WSJ, WP, CNN, ABC, NBC, National Post, Globe & Mail , have no knowledge of this. The Chinese and Europeans know, but the Americans and Canadians don't know because the owners of their major newspapers and TV networks don't want them to know.

A Brief Update

If you look at the graph (courtesy of CNN ), you can see the European infection pattern (in pink) and the American (in green). The Europeans followed China's protocols in varying degrees, and thus with varying degrees of success. Europe's infections peaked at around 30,000 per day then descended to around 2,000 near the end of June, while the Americans, led by a man who is living proof that democracy is the worst possible form of government, saw their infections peak at the same level, slightly decrease, then revert to 30,000 infections and around 1,000 deaths per day where they will now remain until the virus surges through the entire population. Twenty-six states are already experiencing dramatic spikes reaching new records each day, so Trump ordered the CDC to "stop testing" because it makes him look bad.

The next graphic is a list of the top ten nations for COVID-19 infections. Missing from this picture is a comparison I want to make about leadership and competence, to say nothing of intelligence. Shanghai is a city only two hours from Wuhan and, when the infections exploded, had no warning and almost no time to prepare, but acted so quickly and decisively that the city had only 26 infections and 7 deaths. Missing from the graphic is Canada, with a population very similar to Shanghai, and who, with months to plan and prepare, had 101,000 infections and 8,400 deaths. Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau is also living proof of democracy's vast failings.

The Americans elected a pathetic buffoon who lives in outer space, while the Canadians elected a bullied child so painfully unintelligent and indecisive his wife would have to tell him to call the fire department if his house were burning down. I would include here the Brazilians who, with excessive assistance from the Americans, elected an arrogant sociopath who said famously, "It's not my fault. What do you want me to do about it?"

In all three countries the leaderless pandemic results are the same, with infections and deaths likely increasing until at least the end of the year. China, with a population of more than 1.4 billion people, had about 80,000 infections and little more than 4,000 deaths, and stopped the virus cold in about three months. But according to the NYT, WSJ, WP, and Canada's terminally-obnoxious National Post , the "free-market capitalist" countries are God's first choice while "socialist authoritarian" China should incur yet more sanctions for all its mistakes.

Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes:


Anon [320] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:01 am GMT
This flu like outbreak in July '19 in VA that killed two and sent 18 to the hospital in a nursing home in Springfield, VA, should be fully investigate, it could explain the origin of the virus:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/11/us/virginia-retirement-community-respiratory-illness-outbreak/index.html

Springfield, VA, where this nursing home was located, is about an hour south east of Ft. Detrick, the bioweapons lab that was shut down by CDC at around the same time after it failed a safety inspection in June, 2019.

Mustapha Mond , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:12 am GMT
To think the evil geniuses that would create such nasty pathogens would not have a whole panoply of similar bugs to release would seem naive. I suspect the future strains will only become more virulent, thus insuring a very complacent and fearful populace for unlimited vaccinating, microchipping and contact tracing, all to the PTB's delight and profits. Not to mention the ease with which the American populace will have their anger, fears and frustrations twisted into hatred for all things Chinese. How convenient!

What is currently amusing is watching how deftly the Chinese government is dealing with these assaults, both biological and economic, and how impotent and visibly frustrated the US powerbrokers are with the efficiency and effectiveness of the Chinese responses.

If the Chinese continue to effectively fend off the future attacks, whether they be biological or financial/trade, one can expect that these same evil geniuses, having been frustrated over and over, will only continue their escalations. Expect the anti-China rhetoric from the West's political puppets and the MSM to reach fever pitch just before things turn 'hot' in the new cold war against Chinese ascendancy. Whether it will eventually (or inevitably) go nuclear is the real $64,000 question that leaves many of us concerned observers awake at night ..

Rahan , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:06 am GMT
So what we have here, if we accept the basic discourse of this highly interesting article, is therefore likely the following:

China got hit by various "flu weapons" and "livestock diseases" over the last twenty years, to keep the "dirty commies" from "getting too uppity", but, not counting SARS, only became capable of keeping an accurate tally of the different jabs and pokes over the last five years.

At some point, the Chinese government decided that enough is enough. Their think-tanks recommended the following strategy as the only feasible one: the next time they get seeded, the instantly pounce on the new pathogen, and blow it out of all proportion, causing a) the whole world to panic, and b) the whole world to start paying attention to the issue of new and old pathogens floating around.

In this sense, the "it's just the flu bro" people are correct, meaning that this is not really some apocalyptic plague that justifies shutting down the world. But on the other hand, it was used by Beijing as an example to point out that this crap is happening, and that they know it's happening, and that this game can't be played like this anymore.

In effect they "pulled a Trump". Through their bombastic overreaction, they forced the whole world to notice and discuss the issue they wanted noticed and discussed.

So from now on, the whole world -- except the Anglospherical powers completely taken over by the GloboHomo alliance of corporations, deep state, and baizuo (and where the heritage white demographic replacement has gone farthest) -- will also be super careful about these things, and evidence will begin to accumulate through this "forced crowd-sourcing".

refl , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:12 am GMT

authorities have taken extreme action to prevent further spread since this variety – which again did not exist in China and had to be seeded from another country, appears to be much more contagious than the original COVID-19.[2] In response
( )
Many residential compounds in the city strictly prohibit anyone from entering or leaving, with residents having their temperatures checked and reported on a daily basis, and their food and daily necessities delivered.[3]

So this is how the new shamdemic of COVID-20 will cement and perfect the destruction of freedom across the world?
We will have discussion on fictious body counts and false statistics here at UR for ever more with COVID-20, -21, -22 and so on?

This pattern makes sense, because the victory over the populace who have given up their freedom to lead anything that can be called a life worth living is just to great to be allowed to be ephimeral.
The total destruction of freedom only makes sense, if there is a follow up until all the deluded hoaxers who believe that their is a life beyond feeling sick kill themselves. Then it will be lockdowns and quarantines for ever more and families will have online celebrations when the newborns will get their masks sealed on their seventh day on earth, before they are handed over to the overlords.

As for this authorities conclusions: It should be known by now that when you interpret bogus data, above all when you do so with bad intentions, you will find any conclusions that suite your purpose. Of course, COVID-19 has been found in older samples, as by now the testing has been so well established that they can find it anywhere. Next, they will find it in eghiptian mumies.
This author is a management consultant. He has done missinterpreting statistics for a living and should know how to reasonably sell bad advice.

Quinsat , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:20 am GMT
@Priss Factor

Covid's here to stay – irrespective of the fact that it has never and will never satisfy Koch's Postulates. Why? Two reasons. First, because it has proved itself to be a highly effective means of controlling first world populations. Second, because now that it's been rolled out, it'll be impossible to roll it back without waking up the normies. You don't turn off the gas before the frog's been boiled.

Ditto the assault on 'white privilege'. Like Covid, it's only going to get worse – not better.

Plan accordingly, friends.

Bombercommand , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 7:17 am GMT
Ten citations, and three are from "The Global Times", one from "China Daily", and one is an article penned by the author himself. Impressive scholarship, Mr Romanoff, very impressive scholarship.
Ann Nonny Mouse , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 7:31 am GMT
The 5-Eyes governments all need to be told that the USA attacked them, launched bio-warfare against them, is their real enemy.
Hippopotamusdrome , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 7:50 am GMT

Virus outbreaks don't normally manifest that way. The normal process upon an outbreak is a rapid acceleration in the number of infections until it peaks

Occams Razor. It's a hoax or else the virus is violating the laws of Nature.

Brás Cubas , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 8:51 am GMT

I would include here the Brazilians who, with excessive assistance from the Americans, elected an arrogant sociopath who said famously, "It's not my fault. What do you want me to do about it?"

In Brazil, the Supreme Court has decided that governors don't have to obey the federal government on local health policies. So, it really makes no difference whether the President is Mother Theresa or Jason Voorhees. It's true that Bolsonaro tries once in a while to enact some federal regulations, but he seems to fail every time. It's odd that you don't know that fact, seeing as in the U.S. I hear things are quite similar. As for Brazilian governors, they oddly don't get the same international flak as Bolsonaro does, despite many of them being suspected of using the pandemic as an opportunity for stealing.

This kind of inexactitude immediately throws the rest of the article under heavy suspicion. When people start spewing words like 'sociopath', it is clear to me that they have an agenda.

PetrOldSack , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 9:07 am GMT

It is unfortunate that so much of our information today comes to us in a passive receptance from the mass media because one result is the loss of our ability to examine information critically and use our minds to assess the presentation. As an example, it was very clever for the Americans to use a wet market as a distribution point for a virus and for the media to give this point massive air time, because we instinctively associate such markets with at least a possibility of germs and bacteria and thus passively accept the claims as true without the necessary evidence and thus avoid using our brains as intended.

Rewrite: "it is unfortunate that alternative media distill their take on the news, based on data fed into the public domain. As much as MSM do. Garbage in, garbage out. Sorting garbage, no avail. This article is just another layer of meaningless deft. If any statement here is true, it would be by accident.

In that, of course, it follows the enforcing of the media rule: keep a grasp on the surplus population by manipulating the frequency and number of tainted information. All data in the public domain are probably useless by now. All data on Covid are willfully manipulated. The author of course knows this, and his dump is intentional. The immediate reason, middle class making a living, book pushing, bread-writing, self-promotion, retirement gig, no more. Summer months in the media year, another step-in. Jewish by hazard?

skrik , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:51 am GMT
@Cat If you wish to contest

We know the virus originated in bats; that much is confirmed

then it'd only be fair for you to inform us of your alternate explanation, giving convincing proof [assuming you'd have some?]

FYI there exists a bat-coronavirus genetic sequence RaTG13 which agrees with 96.2% of Covid-19, and an even closer match in RmYN02 at 93.3% agreement. Thesis: That someone took RaTG13 [see 1st and 3rd parts in image below; the RaTG13 spike is so far a 'best fit'] and force-evolved it by infecting cultures of human cells in an evolution-enabling environment, collecting any 'survivors' then repeating this process [a possible proof being the Covid-19 attack disabling victims' sense of smell, indicating 'force-evolving' in cultures of human nerve cells]. In addition, I've seen suggested, that infecting animals with some human-similar traits [here, ferrets with ACE2, say] could have evolved the virus to attack via ACE2 in humans. Then, there's the *unique* inclusion of RPPA in the Covid-19 spike, both enabling infection and that with greatly enhanced pathogenicity [compared to SARS-1, say]. rgds PS An interesting extension to some ideas in the article, is that since the virus infections have gone global, IF it was human-made [my best tip] THEN whoever made it [= clearly rogue-state operatives] contributed to killing 100s of 1000s, *including their own people* ! brrr

Avery , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:40 am GMT
{The Americans elected a pathetic buffoon who lives in outer space,}

He may or may not be a pathetic buffoon*, but he is smart enough to parlay inherited wealth to become a Billionaire, he is POTUS, he lives in the White House or Mar-a-Lago with a model-wife, and will be remembered as such long after you are forgotten.

Aside from that, who would you have Americans elect? The Hildabeast?
But it's not too late: if enough Americans lose their minds and elect The DementiaMan, we will be subjected to the non-buffoon experience of Hildabeast 2.0.

Biden will be a near complete vegetable in a year or two, and the chosen female radical left, Antifa (sic) ** embracing VP will run the show. America as it was founded will be no more.

_____________________
* Lookup Scott Adams' discussions on how Trump manipulates and influences.
Scott predicted way back that Trump would be POTUS.
Note: Scott is a trained hypnotist, and recognizes classic 'tells' of hypnosis in Trump's seemingly "buffoonish" behaviour.

** Despite their cleverly chosen moniker, these violent thugs are the real Fascists: their behaviour and tactics are an exact copy of Mussolini's Blackshirts.

Nixon Scraypes , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:07 pm GMT
Don't viruses mutate anyway? See science direct.com ~ covid in France in December. Also an acquaintance of mine had a horrible virus in December in England.
jadan , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:30 pm GMT
The Chinese analyzed the new outbreak and determined the genome was that of a strain that existed only in the US & Europe, but not heretofore in China. The Chinese have identified many different strains of this virus, seven or more.

But the author goes on to say later in his diatribe: " This is an entirely new and different infection by a new virus and totally unrelated to anything prior, a strain of a new and different virus that was deliberately carried to Beijing and flooded in the Xinfadi Market. "

This covid19 with its growing number of strains seems likely to have escaped from a lab and it is most probably a product of US ingenuity, with cleverly engineered gain of function, but to leap to the conclusion that the US has deployed this bioweapon against China and Russia goes too far. Why would the US target its own population in the process?

If, as Ron Unz speculates, this virus is a botched attack on China and other enemies by stupid people in a stupid administration that has had unanticipated blowback hitting the US, then these same stupid perps would not launch another such aggression!

This notion of a secret biological aggression does not hold water, but the Chinese probably appreciate Larry Romanoff's efforts.

mike99588 , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:53 pm GMT
@Godfree Roberts

Where have you been? The examples of massive cheating and common reckless are decades long. The melamine-milk scandals and falling down buildings were not merely "one-off" but a commonplace for the Chinese themselves.

I myself have examples of deal-breaking cheating that cost them bigger opportunities, and shake my head. Yes, they can do world class, sometimes.

We will probably never know how much has been copied. It's been so pervasive at all scales.

With borg like eavesdropping and acquisition systems gobbling everything up, 4x our population, with our declining high quality population, we may yet see how much they can or can't innovate.

They have a lot of stripped assets and resources now to command impoverished Americas' hopes and attention, against prior experiences.

Bombercommand , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:59 pm GMT
@Godfree Roberts

Even Chinese are skeptical of anything "Made In China". Last year, in a Canadian Tire store I saw a Chinese couple. Hubby had selected an item for possible purchase. His wife tore into him, speaking rapidly and scornfully in Chinese. I do not understand Chinese, but didn't need to, as she repeatedly dropped in the English phrase "Made In China", in a sarcastic tone of voice. Hubby put the item back on the shelf and they walked away. China is a deeply cracked culture. My friend Meng(female), who was born in China and married to a Chinese guy, put it to me bluntly: "In China, 90% of marriages are without love".

denk , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:08 pm GMT
@yuribezmenoff

they work hardly to overthrow the western democratic institutions,

Cough cough cough cough .

SteveK9 , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:09 pm GMT
Here's a novel solution do nothing. It works for Belarus. Some 80-year-olds die and society goes on as usual problem solved. Spoken by someone getting closer to 80.
Agent76 , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:27 pm GMT
Jun 22, 2020 CELEBRATED SCIENTIST: '80% NOT SUSCEPTIBLE TO COVID"

Named the "most influential" brain scientist of our time, Dr. Karl Friston, made waves when he published his study mapping the real susceptibility of contracting Coronavirus. His results are staggering and challenge the rationale for a lockdown like no other.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3jKGD7XnbRc?feature=oembed

Jun 15, 2020 The Collapse of the COVID-1984 Narrative

Now that the major institutions pushing the COVID panic are now admitting that the virus is not an existential threat and the lockdowns were not necessary, what does this mean for the future of the COVID-1984 police state and the ushering in of the new "biosecurity" paradigm?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/M3OOBXwtojo?feature=oembed

Emslander , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:27 pm GMT
@Mustapha Mond In any complex, highly planned operation such as you describe, where motives of such depth and perception are necessary, there are going to have to be real persons with real names. You can't go on saying that "evil geniuses" at Fort Deitrich or wherever engineered and executed so deftly these multilayered "seedings" without getting orders or authorization from someone we all know. Is it Trump, Pompeo, Hilary, Biden, Obama or Amy Semple McPherson?

It's like the Germans and the Holocaust. You'd have to have so many evil players with superhuman capacity to hold onto their secret motives and actions that we still can't pin them down. I don't think there are so many such people in our stupid federal government. Even our brave and feared John Bolton, when he reveals himself, is just an oversensitive weeny.

This article suffers from many fundamental misunderstandings of government weenies. Those people in Northern Virginia who are "seeding" foreign nations with new strains of virus every sixty days on some diabolically precise motivational dynamic live in boring suburbs and fix awful chicken on their barbecues. They drink watery beer and watch "Wheel of Fortune". Give me a break!

Ann Nonny Mouse , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:39 pm GMT
@Bombercommand If they are Chinese travellers exploring Canada and Canadian culture it would be silly of them to buy something made in China as though it was Canadian. Your reasoning does not hold up.
Mustapha Mond , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:11 pm GMT
@Emslander Hannah Arendt noted the 'banality of evil' long ago. It's pretty common, sad to say.

The military is filled with 'ordinary' people who apparently have no qualms about murdering anyone their 'superiors' point to and say, "Kill!" They are just following orders, after all.

The number of 'evil players' is simply staggering, whether we want to admit it or not. And yes, they DO drink watery beer and watch "Wheel of Fortune" and have bar-b-ques. John Wayne Gacy comes to mind immediately. Who knows who our neighbors really are, deep down inside?

As for naming names, gosh, I seem to have lost my DARPA personnel directory of evil geniuses, and my CIA directory of same as well.

(But as for who REALLY controls things and gives the orders, I think you may have nailed it with Sister Aimee. And she was HOT in her day, and apparently knew how to have a good time. Hallelujah, brother ..)

Republic , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:19 pm GMT
@SteveK9 There are reports that the US is currently engaged in a color revolution in Belarus. See Moon of Alabama for details
Bombercommand , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:21 pm GMT
@Anon So the "flu like outbreak" skipped Frederick, Maryland, the town Fort Detrick is located in to strike Springfield, Virginia which is very close to Washington DC, as well as not striking other communities between Frederick, Maryland and Springfield, Virginia including Washington DC. I like how your brain works, you should be working at The Global Times or perhaps you already are .
denk , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:42 pm GMT
@Old and Grumpy https://www.globalresearch.ca/from-1945-until-today-20-to-30-million-people-killed-by-the-usa/5660519

Considering that you've been targeting residential area, market places, wedding dinner, mosques, churches, you've prolly vaporised 20-30M dogs and cats, those are the lucky ones, many more were left maimed and paralyzed.

Ayatollah Smith , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:55 pm GMT
19.Brás Cubas says:

"I would include here the Brazilians who, with excessive assistance from the Americans, elected an arrogant sociopath who said famously, "It's not my fault. What do you want me to do about it?""

"In Brazil, the Supreme Court has decided that governors don't have to obey the federal government on local health policies. So, it really makes no difference whether the President is Mother Theresa or Jason Voorhees. It's true that Bolsonaro tries once in a while to enact some federal regulations, but he seems to fail every time. It's odd that you don't know that fact, seeing as in the U.S. I hear things are quite similar. As for Brazilian governors, they oddly don't get the same international flak as Bolsonaro does, despite many of them being suspected of using the pandemic as an opportunity for stealing."

"This kind of inexactitude immediately throws the rest of the article under heavy suspicion. When people start spewing words like 'sociopath', it is clear to me that they have an agenda."

.

I don't normally respond to rubbish, but readers might care to look at this one because it's a classic of dishonest misrepresentation.

First, M. Cubas quotes from the article about Bolsonaro being a sociopath. He (or she, or it) then turns the subject to Brazilian governors not having to obey the federal government. Who cares? Where did that come from? Relevant to what?

Then, the author is chastised for "not knowing this fact", although we have no idea if he does or doesn't know, because this was never discussed.

M. Cubas then converts the author's supposed 'lack of knowledge' of this irrelevant bit of information, to claim that "This kind of inexactitude immediately throws the rest of the article under heavy suspicion." That is to say that if I fail to mention the process for deep-frying chicken in a conversation about bridge construction, you should assume I know nothing about deep-frying chicken, and furthermore that my failure to mention deep-frying chicken in a conversation about bridge construction should make you suspect everything I say. You got that?

Then, the word sociopath is 'spewed', and anyone who uses that word must have an 'agenda'.

But, with Bolsonaro in Brazil, when the man offers no leadership, trivialises a pandemic, takes no action to protect the population, watches more than one million citizens become infected and more than 50,000 of them die, and then says, "It's not my fault. What do you want me to do about it?", I think we have a sociopath on our hands.

And who has the 'agenda' in this case, M. Cubas?

skrik , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:51 pm GMT
@jadan

This covid19 with its growing number of strains seems likely to have escaped from a lab and it is most probably a product of US ingenuity, with cleverly engineered gain of function, but to leap to the conclusion that the US has deployed this bioweapon against China and Russia goes too far. Why would the US target its own population in the process?

To answer the last bit 1st, the rogue-state operators did not expect USA to get bitten, due to a) already having a mild form active there, and b) SARS-CoV-1 was largely contained in Asia (84% of all deaths in Mainland China and Hong Kong).

Note that Forster found only a few occurrences of the A-strain, closest may have been 50km SE of Wuhan; the overwhelming majority of Chinese infections being B-strain. Now a new-to-China strain has somehow 'arrived' in Beijing (termed 'older' in headline article). The people who 'built' the Covid-19 causing virus = SARS-CoV-2 know exactly what they've done, and it is my thesis that when the PRRA insert was recognised in Wuhan, that was the moment the Chinese knew they were under attack, and the rest of the chaos ensued. Any alleging 'scam' must explain why Russia and Iran, say, play along. rgds

Robert Dolan , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:15 pm GMT
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/06/gary-d-barnett/they-have-ruined-this-country-and-are-now-coming-for-your-property-mind-and-soul-defend-yourself/
Mefobills , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:16 pm GMT
@Mustapha Mond Good comment Mustapha.

The banality of evil is often not known until revisionist historians are able to make connections post facto. In the moment people do not have enough information to make informed decisions.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Karl_Rove

"That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

For example, during the French Revolution most of the participants had no idea of what a Jacobian was.

Or, during the Bolshevik Revolution, most participants had no idea of who Kuhn and Loeb was.

Or, before WW1 was the machinations of the Milner Group known?

Or, before WW2, the machinations of Zionists to get Balfour.

Or, how Focus group had gotten to Churchill with loans.

Why the evil? It is usually hidden string pullers who are afraid of losing their vaunted position in ruling hierarchy. They may actually think they are doing good, because doing good is defined as "what is good for me, or my in-group."

Jake , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:19 pm GMT
@Nikola Zrinski The ADL and SPLC always raise funds by paying people, virtually all of them Jews, to write or orate things like your comment. They then send the 'anti-Semitic' outburst to the hordes of gullible Jews and white liberals and ask for money that is required to fight anti-Semitism.
Sam J. , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:26 pm GMT
@Mustapha Mond

If we or the Chinese are going to stop this we're going to have to get rid of the Jews. The Jews are the only people that profit from this. If this or one of their other viruses kills one of your family then the Jews have directly killed your family.

A vast amount of the problems we have could be sewed up in very quick order if we got rid of the Jews.

Curmudgeon , says: Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:26 pm GMT
@mike99588 I'm not keen on a lot of stuff from China, but your comment lacks perspective.
What happened with the melamine milk scandal that killed 6 and damaged approximately 300k? The perp was tried and executed. What has happened in the US with oxyContin which has caused tens of thousands of deaths and ruined up to a million more? Nothing of consequence. The lead paint in/on Marx toys? China – people responsible committed suicide knowing they would be executed. US – Gee we didn't know, why would we test products to ensure they were being made properly?

China today is where Japan was in the late 60s and Korea in the late 80s. Huge capacity not so good quality. Japanese and Korean cars used to be crap, now they are the most reliable. US cars used to be the most reliable, now they are crap. The same goes for electronics and even washing machines today.
China will only get better, just as the Japanese and Koreans did. The orientals have a better sense of "the whole" of the population benefiting. The US, and most of (((the West))) lost that concept long ago.

Current Commenter

[Jun 13, 2020] We Don't Need No Stinking Vaccine For COVID-19

Jun 13, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jeff Harris via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity, A Glaring Omission

With the 24/7 media circus coverage of Covid-19 I find it particularly interesting that there is an obvious glaring omission of some extremely important facts relative to dealing with a virus, especially one that is allegedly so virulent like this one. Yes, I read all about the critical need to shelter in place, stay inside away from other people, wash your hands constantly, avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth, wear your face mask and by all means observe social distancing if you MUST venture outside for food!

Then it's repeated ad infinitum that the ONLY hope we have of ever returning to a semblance of normalcy is to have a vaccine to protect us! Then to add some drama to this narrative the media highlights their death-o-meter scoreboard with the implied threat that you'll be next IF you don't obey the rules as dictated by the "experts".

But what is assiduously avoided at all cost is any reference to our most potent defense against any virus; our body's natural immune system. Try as I might I couldn't find anything about this first line of defense on the World Health Organizations (WHO) website or Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website. It's as if it doesn't exist and is completely irrelevant.

If these organizations were genuinely concerned about the health of citizens they would obviously discuss the vital role a healthy immune system plays in protecting us from illnesses. But since they don't its obvious some other motive is at work, at least to me, and I strongly suspect to other critical thinkers as well.

We now know from the science and data that over 90% of the people exposed to Covid-19 have no symptoms at all or at worst a mild cold. The flu vaccines we have are only effective 30% to 60% of the time and the bugs change regularly so a vaccine that worked OK last year may barely work at all this year. Let's learn some more about our body's immune system.

Virus protection without a vaccine

There is an enlightening article on Web MD titled: "How to use Your Immune System to Stay Healthy". That's a pretty straight forward title now isn't it? Early on Bruce Polsky, MD, interim chairman department of medicine and chief division of infectious disease at St. Lukes-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City says:

"We are endowed with a great immune system that has been designed evolutionarily to keep us healthy."

The article goes on. . .

"The immune system is your body's natural defense system. It's an intricate network of cells, tissues and organs that band together to defend your body against invaders. Those invaders can include bacteria, viruses, parasites, even fungus, all with the potential to make us sick. They are everywhere-in our homes, offices and backyards. . . "

The truth is no amount of social distancing, hand washing or face mask wearing is going to eliminate our exposure to these various bugs. That's why we were created with this amazing first line of natural defense.

Here's more from Web MD . . .

"The immune system can recognize millions of different antigens. And it can produce what it needs to eradicate nearly all of them. When it's working properly, this elaborate defense system can keep health problems ranging from cancer to the common cold at bay. . . "

Wow! That's pretty amazing stuff isn't it! According to Web MD a properly functioning immune system can "keep health problems ranging from cancer to the common cold at bay." So why isn't this "science" being included in all the other health recommendations we're being bombarded with daily? It seems to me that any "expert" worth their salt would be talking about the importance of a healthy immune system to stay healthy.

But there's more . . .

The Web MD article noted that failure to eat a healthy diet, sitting around not exercising, not getting enough sleep and chronic stress can all lead to a compromised immune system. To quote Dr. Polsky again:

". . . Lifestyle aspects are very, very important."

So if our lifestyle is very, very important to staying healthy as the good doctor says ask yourself this question? Based on the Web M.D. article virtually all the results of the lockdown serve to weaken our immune systems. The stress of unemployment, constant harping about infections and rising death rates, lack of exercise and now a crack in our food distribution system all are known to weaken the human immune system.

I also find it quite interesting that large groups of people can shop at Walmart, Home Depot or other big box stores but they can't attend their local church even if it's a "drive through" service?

Web M.D. says:

"Research shows that people with close friendships and strong support systems tend to be healthier than those who lack such supports."

During times of crisis people need encouragement and their faith built up more than ever before. Mandating people huddle in fear in their homes with constant media reports of infections and death bombarding them continually is there any wonder peoples immune systems are under severe stress?

[May 13, 2020] John Brennan Concealed 'High-Quality' Intelligence That Russia Wanted Hillary Clinton To Win

May 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Likklemore , May 13 2020 16:41 utc | 14

The scoundrels who plotted Russiagate need to lawyer up:

John Brennan Concealed 'High-Quality' Intelligence That Russia Wanted Hillary Clinton To Win:

Former CIA director John Brennan suppressed intelligence which indicated that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win because "she was a known quantity," vs. the unpredictable Donald Trump, according to Fox News' Ed Henry.[.]

==========

Never mind the prosecutorial misdeeds - FBI Can't prove guilt. Judge Sullivan is delaying DOJ's move to drop the case against General Flynn.
LINK and LINK

[Apr 25, 2020] Did This Virus Come From a Lab? Maybe Not But It Exposes the Threat of a Biowarfare Arms Race by Sam Husseini

Highly recommended!
Apr 25, 2020 | salon.com

Dangerous pathogens are captured in the wild and made deadlier in government biowarfare labs. Did that happen here?

There has been no scientific finding that the novel coronavirus was bioengineered, but its origins are not entirely clear. Deadly pathogens discovered in the wild are sometimes studied in labs – and sometimes made more dangerous. That possibility, and other plausible scenarios, have been incorrectly dismissed in remarks by some scientists and government officials, and in the coverage of most major media outlets.

Regardless of the source of this pandemic, there is considerable documentation that a global biological arms race going on outside of public view could produce even more deadly pandemics in the future.

While much of the media and political establishment have minimized the threat from such lab work, some hawks on the American right like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark ., have singled out Chinese biodefense researchers as uniquely dangerous.

But there is every indication that U.S. lab work is every bit as threatening as that in Chinese labs. American labs also operate in secret, and are also known to be accident-prone .

The current dynamics of the biological arms race have been driven by US government decisions that extend back decades. In December 2009, Reuters reported that the Obama administration was refusing even to negotiate the possible monitoring of biological weapons.

Much of the left in the US now appears unwilling to scrutinize the origin of the pandemic – or the wider issue of biowarfare – perhaps because portions of the anti-Chinese right have been so vocal in making unfounded allegations.

Governments that participate in such biological weapon research generally distinguish between "biowarfare" and "biodefense," as if to paint such "defense" programs as necessary. But this is rhetorical sleight-of-hand; the two concepts are largely indistinguishable.

"Biodefense" implies tacit biowarfare, breeding more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding a way to fight them. While this work appears to have succeeded in creating deadly and infectious agents, including deadlier flu strains, such "defense" research is impotent in its ability to defend us from this pandemic.

The legal scholar who drafted the main US law on the subject, Francis Boyle, warned in his 2005 book " Biowarfare and Terrorism " that an "illegal biological arms race with potentially catastrophic consequences" was underway, largely driven by the US government.

For years, many scientists have raised concerns regarding bioweapons/biodefense lab work, and specifically about the fact that huge increases in funding have taken place since 9/11. This was especially true after the anthrax-by-mail attacks that killed five people in the weeks after 9/11, which the FBI ultimately blamed on a US government biodefense scientist. A 2013 study found that biodefense funding since 2001 had totaled at least $78 billion , and more has surely been spent since then. This has led to a proliferation of laboratories , scientists and new organisms, effectively setting off a biological arms race.

Following the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 2014, the US government paused funding for what are known as "gain-of-function" research on certain organisms. This work actually seeks to make deadly pathogens deadlier, in some cases making pathogens airborne that previously were not. With little notice outside the field, the pause on such research was lifted in late 2017 .

During this pause, exceptions for funding were made for dangerous gain-of-function lab work. This included work jointly done by US scientists from the University of North Carolina, Harvard and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This work – which had funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance not originally acknowledged – was published in 2015 in Nature Medicine .

A different Nature Medicine article about the origin of the current pandemic, authored by five scientists and published on March 17, has been touted by major media outlet and some officials – including current National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins – as definitively disproving a lab origin for the novel coronavirus. That journal article, titled "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2," stated unequivocally: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus." This is a subtly misleading sentence. While the scientists state that there is no known laboratory "signature" in the SARS-Cov-2 RNA, their argument fails to take account of other lab methods that could have created coronavirus mutations without leaving such a signature.

Indeed, there is also the question of conflict of interest in the Nature Medicine article. Some of the authors of that article, as well as a February 2020 Lancet letter condemning "conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" – which seemed calculated to minimize outside scrutiny of biodefense lab work – have troubling ties to the biodefense complex, as well as to the US government. Notably, neither of these articles makes clear that a virus can have a natural origin and then be captured and studied in a controlled laboratory setting before being let loose, either intentionally or accidentally – which is clearly a possibility in the case of the coronavirus.

Facts as "rumors"

This reporter raised questions about the subject at a news conference with a Center for Disease Control (CDC) representative at the now-shuttered National Press Club on Feb. 11. I asked if it was a "complete coincidence" that the pandemic had started in Wuhan, the only place in China with a declared biosafety level 4 (BSL4) laboratory. BSL4 laboratories have the most stringent safety mechanisms, but handle the most deadly pathogens. As I mentioned, it was odd that the ostensible origin of the novel coronavirus was bat caves in Yunnan province – more than 1,000 miles from Wuhan. I noted that "gain-of-function" lab work can results in more deadly pathogens, and that major labs, including some in the US, have had accidental releases .

CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat said that based on the information she had seen, the virus was of "zoonotic origin." She also stated, regarding gain-of-function lab work, that it is important to "protect researchers and their laboratory workers as well as the community around them and that we use science for the benefit of people."

I followed up by asking whether an alleged natural origin did not preclude the possibility that this virus came through a lab, since a lab could have acquired a bat virus and been working on it. Schuchat replied to the assembled journalists that "it is very common for rumors to emerge that can take on life of their own," but did not directly answer the question. She noted that in the 2014 Ebola outbreak some observers had pointed to nearby labs as the possible cause, claiming this "was a key rumor that had to be overcome in order to help control the outbreak." She reiterated: "So based on everything that I know right now, I can tell you the circumstances of the origin really look like animals-to-human. But your question, I heard."

This is no rumor. It's a fact: Labs work with dangerous pathogens. The US and China each have dual-use biowarfare/biodefense programs. China has major facilities at Wuhan – a biosafety level 4 lab and a biosafety level 2 lab. There are leaks from labs. (See " Preventing a Biological Arms Race ," MIT Press, 1990, edited by Susan Wright; also, a partial review in Journal of International Law from October 1992.)

Much of the discussion of this deadly serious subject is marred with snark that avoids or dodges the "gain-of-function" question. ABC ran a story on March 27 titled "Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists. Study Concludes COVID-19 'Is Not a Laboratory Construct.'" That story did not address the possibility that the virus could have been found in the wild, studied in a lab and then released.

On March 21, USA Today published a piece headlined "Fact Check: Did the Coronavirus Originate In a Chinese Laboratory?" – and rated it "FALSE."

That USA Today story relied on the Washington Post, which published a widely cited article on Feb. 17 headlined, "Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked." That article quoted public comments from Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright, but out of context and only in part. Specifically, the story quoted from Ebright's tweet that the coronavirus was not an "engineered bioweapon." In fact, his full quote included the clarification that the virus could have " entered human population through lab accident ." (An email requesting clarification sent to Post reporter Paulina Firozi was met with silence.)

Bioengineered ≠ From a lab

Other pieces in the Post since then ( some heavily sourced to US government officials ) have conveyed Ebright's thinking, but it gets worse. In a private exchange, Ebright – who, again, has said clearly that the novel coronavirus was not technically bioengineered using known coronavirus sequences – stated that other forms of lab manipulation could have been responsible for the current pandemic. This runs counter to much reporting, which is perhaps too scientifically illiterate to perceive the difference.

In response to the suggestion that the novel coronavirus could have come about through various methods besides bioengineering – made by Dr. Meryl Nass , who has done groundbreaking work on biowarfare – Ebright responded in an email:

The genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 has no signatures of human manipulation.

This rules out the kinds of gain-of-function (GoF) research that leave signatures of human manipulation in genome sequences (e.g., use of recombinant DNA methods to construct chimeric viruses), but does not rule out kinds of GoF research that do not leave signatures (e.g., serial passage in animals). [emphasis added]

Very easy to imagine the equivalent of the Fouchier's "10 passages in ferrets" with H5N1 influenza virus, but, in this case, with 10 passages in non-human primates with bat coronavirus RaTG13 or bat coronavirus KP876546.

That last paragraph is very important. It refers to virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, who performed research on intentionally increasing rates of viral mutation rate by spreading a virus from one animal to another in a sequence. The New York Times wrote about this in an editorial in January 2012, warning of "An Engineered Doomsday."

"Now scientists financed by the National Institutes of Health" have created a "virus that could kill tens or hundreds of millions of people" if it escaped confinement, the Times wrote. The story continued:

Working with ferrets, the animal that is most like humans in responding to influenza, the researchers found that a mere five genetic mutations allowed the virus to spread through the air from one ferret to another while maintaining its lethality. A separate study at the University of Wisconsin, about which little is known publicly, produced a virus that is thought to be less virulent.

The word "engineering" in the New York Times headline is technically incorrect, since passing a virus through animals is not "genetic engineering." This same distinction has hindered some from understanding the possible origins of the current pandemic.

Fouchier's flu work, in which an H5N1 virus was made more virulent by transmitting it repeatedly between individual ferrets, briefly sent shockwaves through the media. "Locked up in the bowels of the medical faculty building here and accessible to only a handful of scientists lies a man-made flu virus that could change world history if it were ever set free," wrote Science magazine in 2011 in a story titled "Scientists Brace for Media Storm Around Controversial Flu Studies." It continues:

The virus is an H5N1 avian influenza strain that has been genetically altered and is now easily transmissible between ferrets, the animals that most closely mimic the human response to flu. Scientists believe it's likely that the pathogen, if it emerged in nature or were released, would trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths.

In a 17th floor office in the same building, virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center calmly explains why his team created what he says is "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make" – and why he wants to publish a paper describing how they did it. Fouchier is also bracing for a media storm. After he talked to ScienceInsider yesterday, he had an appointment with an institutional press officer to chart a communication strategy.

Fouchier's paper is one of two studies that have triggered an intense debate about the limits of scientific freedom and that could portend changes in the way U.S. researchers handle so-called dual-use research: studies that have a potential public health benefit but could also be useful for nefarious purposes like biowarfare or bioterrorism.

Despite objections, Fouchier's article was published by Science in June 2012 . Titled "Airborne Transmission of Influenza A/H5N1 Virus Between Ferrets," it summarized how Fouchier's research team made the pathogen more virulent:

Highly pathogenic avian influenza A/H5N1 virus can cause morbidity and mortality in humans but thus far has not acquired the ability to be transmitted by aerosol or respiratory droplet ("airborne transmission") between humans. To address the concern that the virus could acquire this ability under natural conditions, we genetically modified A/H5N1 virus by site-directed mutagenesis and subsequent serial passage in ferrets. The genetically modified A/H5N1 virus acquired mutations during passage in ferrets, ultimately becoming airborne transmissible in ferrets.

In other words, Fouchier's research took a flu virus that did not exhibit airborne transmission, then infected a number of ferrets until it mutated to the point that it was transmissible by air.

In that same year, 2012, a similar study by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin was published in Nature :

Highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza A viruses occasionally infect humans, but currently do not transmit efficiently among humans. Here we assess the molecular changes that would allow a virus to be transmissible among mammals. We identified a virus with four mutations and the remaining seven gene segments from a 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus – that was capable of droplet transmission in a ferret model.

In 2014, Marc Lipsitch of Harvard and Alison P. Galvani of Yale wrote regarding Fouchier and Kawaoka's work :

Recent experiments that create novel, highly virulent and transmissible pathogens against which there is no human immunity are unethical they impose a risk of accidental and deliberate release that, if it led to extensive spread of the new agent, could cost many lives. While such a release is unlikely in a specific laboratory conducting research under strict biosafety procedures, even a low likelihood should be taken seriously, given the scale of destruction if such an unlikely event were to occur. Furthermore, the likelihood of risk is multiplied as the number of laboratories conducting such research increases around the globe.

Given this risk, ethical principles, such as those embodied in the Nuremberg Code , dictate that such experiments would be permissible only if they provide humanitarian benefits commensurate with the risk, and if these benefits cannot be achieved by less risky means.

We argue that the two main benefits claimed for these experiments – improved vaccine design and improved interpretation of surveillance – are unlikely to be achieved by the creation of potential pandemic pathogens (PPP), often termed "gain-of-function" (GOF) experiments.

There may be a widespread notion that there is scientific consensus that the pandemic did not come out of a lab. But in fact many of the most knowledgeable scientists in the field are notably silent. This includes Lipsitch at Harvard, Jonathan A. King at MIT and many others.

Just last year, Lynn Klotz of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation wrote a paper in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists entitled "Human Error in High-biocontainment Labs: A Likely Pandemic Threat." Wrote Klotz:

Incidents causing potential exposures to pathogens occur frequently in the high security laboratories often known by their acronyms, BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) and BSL4. Lab incidents that lead to undetected or unreported laboratory-acquired infections can lead to the release of a disease into the community outside the lab; lab workers with such infections will leave work carrying the pathogen with them. If the agent involved were a potential pandemic pathogen, such a community release could lead to a worldwide pandemic with many fatalities. Of greatest concern is a release of a lab-created, mammalian-airborne- transmissible, highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, such as the airborne-transmissible H5N1 viruses created in the laboratories of Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka in Madison, Wisconsin.

"Crazy, dangerous"

Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois , has condemned Fouchier, Kawaoka and others – including at least one of the authors of the recent Nature Medicine article in the strongest terms, calling such work a "criminal enterprise." While Boyle has been embroiled in numerous controversies, he's been especially dismissed by many on this issue. The "fact-checking" website Snopes has described him as "a lawyer with no formal training in virology" – without noting that he wrote the relevant U.S. law.

As Boyle said in 2015 :

Since September 11, 2001, we have spent around $100 billion on biological warfare. Effectively we now have an Offensive Biological Warfare Industry in this country that violates the Biological Weapons Convention and my Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 .

The law Boyle drafted states: "Whoever knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers, acquires, retains, or possesses any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system for use as a weapon, or knowingly assists a foreign state or any organization to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both. There is extraterritorial Federal jurisdiction over an offense under this section committed by or against a national of the United States."

Boyle also warned:

Russia and China have undoubtedly reached the same conclusions I have derived from the same open and public sources, and have responded in kind. So what the world now witnesses is an all-out offensive biological warfare arms race among the major military powers of the world: United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, inter alia.

We have reconstructed the Offensive Biological Warfare Industry that we had deployed in this county before its prohibition by the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, described by Seymour Hersh in his groundbreaking expose " Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal ." (1968)

Boyle now states that he has been "blackballed" in the media on this issue, despite his having written the relevant statute. The group he worked with on the law, the Council for Responsible Genetics, went under several years ago, making Boyle's views against "biodefense" even more marginal as government money for dual use work poured into the field and critics within the scientific community have fallen silent. In turn, his denunciations have grown more sweeping.

In the 1990 book " Preventing a Biological Arms Race ," scholar Susan Wright argued that current laws regarding bioweapons were insufficient, as there were "projects in which offensive and defensive aspects can be distinguished only by claimed motive." Boyle notes, correctly, that current law he drafted does not make an exception for "defensive" work, but only for "prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes."

While Boyle is particularly vociferous in his condemnations, he is not alone. There has been irregular, but occasional media attention to this threat. The Guardian ran a piece in 2014, " Scientists condemn 'crazy, dangerous' creation of deadly airborne flu virus ," after Kawaoka created a life-threatening virus that "closely resembles the 1918 Spanish flu strain that killed an estimated 50m people":

"The work they are doing is absolutely crazy. The whole thing is exceedingly dangerous," said Lord May, the former president of the Royal Society and one time chief science adviser to the UK government. "Yes, there is a danger, but it's not arising from the viruses out there in the animals, it's arising from the labs of grossly ambitious people."

Boyle's charges beginning early this year that the coronavirus was bioengineered – allegations recently mirrored by French virologist and Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier – have not been corroborated by any publicly produced findings of any US scientist. Boyle even charges that scientists like Ebright, who is at Rutgers, are compromised because the university got a biosafety level 3 lab in 2017 – though Ebright is perhaps the most vocal eminent critic of this research, among US scientists. These and other controversies aside, Boyle's concerns about the dangers of biowarfare are legitimate; indeed, Ebright shares them.

Some of the most vocal voices to discuss the origins of the novel coronavirus have been eager to minimize the dangers of lab work, or have focused almost exclusively on "wet markets" or "exotic" animals as the likely cause.

The media celebrated Laurie Garrett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, when she declared on Twitter on March 3 (in a since-deleted tweet) that the origin of the pandemic was discovered: "It's pangolins. #COVID19 Researchers studied lung tissue from 12 of the scaled mammals that were illegally trafficked in Asia and found #SARSCoV2 in 3. The animals were found in Guangxi, China. Another virus+ smuggled sample found in Guangzhou."

She was swiftly corrected by Ebright: "Arrant nonsense. Did you even read the paper? Reported pangolin coronavirus is not SARS-CoV-2 and is not even particularly close to SARS-CoV-2. Bat coronavirus RaTG13 is much closer to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% identical) than reported pangolin coronavirus (92.4% identical)." He added: "No reason to invoke pangolin as intermediate. When A is much closer than B to C, in the absence of additional data, there is no rational basis to favor pathway A>B>C over pathway A>C." When someone asked what Garrett was saying, Ebright responded : "She is saying she is scientifically illiterate."

The following day, Garrett corrected herself ( without acknowledging Ebright ): "I blew it on the #Pangolins paper, & then took a few hours break from Twitter. It did NOT prove the species = source of #SARSCoV2. There's a torrent of critique now, deservedly denouncing me & my posting. A lot of the critique is super-informative so leaving it all up 4 while."

At least one Chinese government official has responded to the allegation that the labs in Wuhan could be the source for the pandemic by alleging that perhaps the US is responsible instead. In American mainstream media, that has been reflexively treated as even more ridiculous than the original allegation that the virus could have come from a lab.

Obviously the Chinese government's allegations should not be taken at face value, but neither should US government claims – especially considering that US government labs were the apparent source for the anthrax attacks in 2001 . Those attacks sent panic through the US and shut down Congress, allowing the Bush administration to enact the PATRIOT Act and ramp up the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, in October 2001, media darlings like Richard Butler and Andrew Sullivan propagandized for war with Iraq because of the anthrax attacks. (Neither Iraq nor al-Qaida was involved.)

The 2001 anthrax attacks also provided much of the pretext for the surge in biolab spending since then, even though they apparently originated in a US or U.S.-allied lab. Indeed, those attacks remain shrouded in mystery .

The US government has also come up with elaborate cover stories to distract from its bioweapons work. For instance, the US government infamously claimed the 1953 death of Frank Olson, a scientist at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was an LSD experiment gone wrong; it now appears to have been an execution to cover up for US biological warfare.

Regardless of the cause of the current pandemic, these biowarfare/biodefense labs need far more scrutiny. The call to shut them down by Boyle and others needs to be clearly heard – and light must be shone on precisely what research is being conducted.

The secrecy of these labs may prevent us ever knowing with certainty the origins of the current pandemic. What we do know is this kind of lab work comes with real dangers. One might make a comparison to climate change: We cannot attribute an individual hurricane to man-made climate disruption, yet science tells us that human activity makes stronger hurricanes more likely. That brings us back to the imperative to cease the kinds of activities that produce such dangers in the first place.

If that doesn't happen, the people of the planet will be at the mercy of the machinations and mistakes of state actors who are playing with fire for their geopolitical interests.

Sam Husseini is senior analyst at the Institute for Public Accuracy . He's also set up VotePact.org – which helps break out of the two party bind. His latest personal writings are at http://husseini.posthaven.com/ and tweets at http://twitter.com/samhusseini . Reprinted from Salon with permission.

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[Dec 21, 2018] Trump End the Syria War Now by Eric Margolis

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[Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

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[Dec 02, 2018] Muller investigation has all the appearance of an investigation looking for a crime

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[Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

[Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

[Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

[Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

[Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

[Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)

[Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

[Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

[Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

[Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

[Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

[Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

[Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)

[Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

[Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill

[Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill

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[Nov 12, 2018] Obama s CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

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[Nov 10, 2018] The Reasons for Netanyahu's Panic by Alastair Crooke

[Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

[Nov 12, 2018] Obama s CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

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[Nov 10, 2018] US Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Killed 500,000 by Jason Ditz

[Nov 10, 2018] The Reasons for Netanyahu's Panic by Alastair Crooke

[Nov 10, 2018] US Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Killed 500,000 by Jason Ditz

[Oct 25, 2018] DNC Emails--A Seth Attack Not a Russian Hack by Publius Tacitus

[Oct 25, 2018] Putin jokes with Bolton: Did the eagle eaten all the olives

[Oct 25, 2018] Putin jokes with Bolton: Did the eagle eaten all the olives

[Oct 25, 2018] DNC Emails--A Seth Attack Not a Russian Hack by Publius Tacitus

[Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

[Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

[Oct 18, 2018] Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Goes Neocon by Robert W. Merry

[Oct 18, 2018] Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Goes Neocon by Robert W. Merry

[Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case

[Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight

[Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

[Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case

[Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight

[Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

[Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement

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[Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

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[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda

[Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement

[Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

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[Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

[Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

[Sep 15, 2018] Why the US Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran by Patrick Lawrence

[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda

[Sep 15, 2018] Why the US Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran by Patrick Lawrence

[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda

[Sep 11, 2018] Is Donald Trump Going to Do the Syria Backflip by Publius Tacitus

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[Sep 11, 2018] Is Donald Trump Going to Do the Syria Backflip by Publius Tacitus

[Sep 11, 2018] If you believe Trump is trying to remove neocons(Deep State) from the government, explain Bolton and many other Deep State denizens Trump has appointed

[Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

[Sep 02, 2018] Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia.

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

[Sep 11, 2018] Is Donald Trump Going to Do the Syria Backflip by Publius Tacitus

[Sep 11, 2018] If you believe Trump is trying to remove neocons(Deep State) from the government, explain Bolton and many other Deep State denizens Trump has appointed

[Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

[Sep 02, 2018] Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia.

[Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

[Sep 02, 2018] Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia.

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

[Aug 17, 2018] What if Russiagate is the New WMDs

[Aug 14, 2018] I think one of Mueller s deeply embedded character flaw is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

[Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

[Aug 08, 2018] Sergei Skripal was linked to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence

[Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

[Aug 14, 2018] I think one of Mueller s deeply embedded character flaw is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed

[Aug 14, 2018] I think one of Mueller s deeply embedded character flaw is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

[Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

[Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

[Aug 08, 2018] Sergei Skripal was linked to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence

[Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

[May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

[Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

[Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

[Jul 28, 2018] American Society Would Collapse If It Were not For These 8 Myths by Lee Camp

[Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

[Jul 28, 2018] American Society Would Collapse If It Were not For These 8 Myths by Lee Camp

[Jul 20, 2018] So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don t question the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven t been laggards in adding fuel to the fire by the whole novichok hoax

[Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer

[Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent

[Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

[Jul 28, 2018] American Society Would Collapse If It Were not For These 8 Myths by Lee Camp

[Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer

[Jul 20, 2018] So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don t question the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven t been laggards in adding fuel to the fire by the whole novichok hoax

[Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent

[Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.

[Jul 16, 2018] Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400K To Clinton Campaign Zero Hedge

[Jul 16, 2018] Five Things That Would Make The CIA-CNN Russia Narrative More Believable

[Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland

[Jul 15, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis HILLARY CLINTON S COMPROMISED EMAILS WERE GOING TO A FOREIGN ENTITY – NOT RUSSIA! FBI Agent Ignored Evide

[Jul 15, 2018] Peter Strzok Ignored Evidence Of Clinton Server Breach

[Jul 15, 2018] Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU by Publius Tacitus

[Jul 15, 2018] As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?

[Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

[Jul 05, 2018] Britain's Most Censored Stories (Non-Military)

[Jul 03, 2018] Russia has a lot of information about Lybia that could dig a political grave for Hillary. They did not release it

[Jul 03, 2018] Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence

[Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions

[Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent

[Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer

[Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.

[Jul 16, 2018] Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400K To Clinton Campaign Zero Hedge

[Jul 16, 2018] Five Things That Would Make The CIA-CNN Russia Narrative More Believable

[Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.

[Jul 16, 2018] Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400K To Clinton Campaign Zero Hedge

[Jul 16, 2018] Five Things That Would Make The CIA-CNN Russia Narrative More Believable

[Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland

[Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland

[Jul 15, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis HILLARY CLINTON S COMPROMISED EMAILS WERE GOING TO A FOREIGN ENTITY – NOT RUSSIA! FBI Agent Ignored Evide

[Jul 15, 2018] Peter Strzok Ignored Evidence Of Clinton Server Breach

[Jul 15, 2018] Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU by Publius Tacitus

[Jul 15, 2018] As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?

[Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

[Jul 15, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis HILLARY CLINTON S COMPROMISED EMAILS WERE GOING TO A FOREIGN ENTITY – NOT RUSSIA! FBI Agent Ignored Evide

[Jul 15, 2018] Peter Strzok Ignored Evidence Of Clinton Server Breach

[Jul 15, 2018] Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU by Publius Tacitus

[Jul 15, 2018] As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?

[Jul 05, 2018] Britain's Most Censored Stories (Non-Military)

[Jul 03, 2018] Russia has a lot of information about Lybia that could dig a political grave for Hillary. They did not release it

[Jul 03, 2018] Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence

[Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions

[Jul 05, 2018] Britain's Most Censored Stories (Non-Military)

[Jul 03, 2018] Russia has a lot of information about Lybia that could dig a political grave for Hillary. They did not release it

[Jul 03, 2018] Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence

[Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions

[Jun 19, 2018] How The Last Superpower Was Unchained by Tom Engelhardt

[Jun 17, 2018] Mattis Putin Is Trying To Undermine America s Moral Authority by Caitlin Johnstone

[Jun 17, 2018] the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia

[Jun 17, 2018] The Necessity of a Trump-Putin Summit by Stephen F. Cohen

[Jun 13, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today by Philip M. GIRALDI

[Jun 19, 2018] How The Last Superpower Was Unchained by Tom Engelhardt

[Jun 17, 2018] Mattis Putin Is Trying To Undermine America s Moral Authority by Caitlin Johnstone

[Jun 17, 2018] the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia

[Jun 17, 2018] The Necessity of a Trump-Putin Summit by Stephen F. Cohen

[Jun 13, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today by Philip M. GIRALDI

[Jun 12, 2018] The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream media

[Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

[Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

[Jun 19, 2018] How The Last Superpower Was Unchained by Tom Engelhardt

[Jun 17, 2018] Mattis Putin Is Trying To Undermine America s Moral Authority by Caitlin Johnstone

[Jun 17, 2018] the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia

[Jun 17, 2018] The Necessity of a Trump-Putin Summit by Stephen F. Cohen

[Jun 14, 2018] Problem with US and British MSM control of narrative

[Jun 06, 2018] Trump Voters, Your Savior Is Betraying You by Nicholas Kristof

[May 31, 2018] Journalists and academics expose UK's criminal actions in the Middle East by Julie Hyland

[Jun 13, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today by Philip M. GIRALDI

[Jun 12, 2018] The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream media

[Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

[Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

[Jun 06, 2018] Trump Voters, Your Savior Is Betraying You by Nicholas Kristof

[May 31, 2018] Journalists and academics expose UK's criminal actions in the Middle East by Julie Hyland

[May 27, 2018] America's Fifth Column Will Destroy Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[May 27, 2018] Northwestern University roundtable discusses regime change in Russia Defend Democracy Press

[Jun 12, 2018] The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream media

[May 27, 2018] America's Fifth Column Will Destroy Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[May 27, 2018] Northwestern University roundtable discusses regime change in Russia Defend Democracy Press

[May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence

[May 24, 2018] The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy

[May 23, 2018] Mueller role as a hatchet man is now firmly established. Rosenstein key role in applointing Mueller without any evidence became also more clear with time. Was he coerced or did it voluntarily is unclear by Lambert Strether

[May 23, 2018] If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump

[May 09, 2018] Trotskyist Delusions, by Diana Johnstone

[Jun 06, 2018] Trump Voters, Your Savior Is Betraying You by Nicholas Kristof

[May 31, 2018] Journalists and academics expose UK's criminal actions in the Middle East by Julie Hyland

[May 27, 2018] America's Fifth Column Will Destroy Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[May 27, 2018] Northwestern University roundtable discusses regime change in Russia Defend Democracy Press

[May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence

[May 24, 2018] The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy

[May 23, 2018] Mueller role as a hatchet man is now firmly established. Rosenstein key role in applointing Mueller without any evidence became also more clear with time. Was he coerced or did it voluntarily is unclear by Lambert Strether

[May 23, 2018] If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump

[May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence

[May 24, 2018] The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy

[May 23, 2018] Mueller role as a hatchet man is now firmly established. Rosenstein key role in applointing Mueller without any evidence became also more clear with time. Was he coerced or did it voluntarily is unclear by Lambert Strether

[May 23, 2018] If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump

[May 09, 2018] Trotskyist Delusions, by Diana Johnstone

[May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

[May 03, 2018] Mueller's questions to Trump more those of a prosecuting attorney than of an impartial investigator by Alexander Mercouris

[May 03, 2018] Skripal case British confirm they have no suspect; Yulia Skripal vanishes, no word of Sergey Skripal by Alexander Mercouris

[May 03, 2018] Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it

[May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

[May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

[May 03, 2018] Mueller's questions to Trump more those of a prosecuting attorney than of an impartial investigator by Alexander Mercouris

[May 03, 2018] Skripal case British confirm they have no suspect; Yulia Skripal vanishes, no word of Sergey Skripal by Alexander Mercouris

[May 03, 2018] Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it

[May 03, 2018] Mueller's questions to Trump more those of a prosecuting attorney than of an impartial investigator by Alexander Mercouris

[May 03, 2018] Skripal case British confirm they have no suspect; Yulia Skripal vanishes, no word of Sergey Skripal by Alexander Mercouris

[May 03, 2018] Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it

[May 03, 2018] The 'Libya model' Trump's top bloodthirsty neocon indirectly admits that N. Korea will be invaded and destroyed as soon as it gives up its nukes by system failure

[Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

[Apr 24, 2018] America's Men Without Chests by Paul Grenier

[Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

[Apr 24, 2018] America's Men Without Chests by Paul Grenier

[Apr 23, 2018] The Tony Blair Rule: The Truth Takes 15 Years to Come Out, Skripal Countdown Starts Now - Simonyan

[Apr 22, 2018] The Crisis Is Only In Its Beginning Stages by Paul Craig Roberts

[Apr 21, 2018] Amazingly BBC newsnight just started preparing viewers for the possibility that there was no sarin attack, and the missile strikes might just have been for show

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

[Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

[Apr 24, 2018] America's Men Without Chests by Paul Grenier

[Apr 23, 2018] The Tony Blair Rule: The Truth Takes 15 Years to Come Out, Skripal Countdown Starts Now - Simonyan

[Apr 22, 2018] The Crisis Is Only In Its Beginning Stages by Paul Craig Roberts

[Apr 21, 2018] Amazingly BBC newsnight just started preparing viewers for the possibility that there was no sarin attack, and the missile strikes might just have been for show

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

[Apr 20, 2018] Stench of hypocrisy British 'war on terror' strategic ties with radical Islam by John Wight

[Apr 23, 2018] The Tony Blair Rule: The Truth Takes 15 Years to Come Out, Skripal Countdown Starts Now - Simonyan

[Apr 22, 2018] The Crisis Is Only In Its Beginning Stages by Paul Craig Roberts

[Apr 21, 2018] Amazingly BBC newsnight just started preparing viewers for the possibility that there was no sarin attack, and the missile strikes might just have been for show

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

[Apr 20, 2018] Stench of hypocrisy British 'war on terror' strategic ties with radical Islam by John Wight

[Apr 19, 2018] The Neocons Are Selling Koolaid Again! by W. Patrick Lang

[Apr 18, 2018] The Great American Unspooling Is Upon Us

[Apr 17, 2018] Probable sequence of event in Douma false flag operation

[Apr 17, 2018] Poor Alex

[Apr 16, 2018] British Propaganda and Disinformation An Imperial and Colonial Tradition by Wayne MADSEN

[Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts

[Apr 11, 2018] It is long passed the time when any thinking person took Trump tweets seriously

[Apr 20, 2018] Stench of hypocrisy British 'war on terror' strategic ties with radical Islam by John Wight

[Apr 19, 2018] The Neocons Are Selling Koolaid Again! by W. Patrick Lang

[Apr 19, 2018] The Neocons Are Selling Koolaid Again! by W. Patrick Lang

[Apr 18, 2018] The Great American Unspooling Is Upon Us

[Apr 17, 2018] Probable sequence of event in Douma false flag operation

[Apr 17, 2018] Poor Alex

[Apr 16, 2018] British Propaganda and Disinformation An Imperial and Colonial Tradition by Wayne MADSEN

[Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts

[Apr 11, 2018] It is long passed the time when any thinking person took Trump tweets seriously

[Apr 18, 2018] The Great American Unspooling Is Upon Us

[Apr 17, 2018] Probable sequence of event in Douma false flag operation

[Apr 17, 2018] Poor Alex

[Apr 16, 2018] British Propaganda and Disinformation An Imperial and Colonial Tradition by Wayne MADSEN

[Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts

[Apr 11, 2018] It is long passed the time when any thinking person took Trump tweets seriously

[Apr 10, 2018] The Ghouta Massacre near Damascus on Aug 21, 2013 was not a sarin rocket attack carried out by Assad or his supporters. It was a false-flag stunt carried out by the insurgents using carbon monoxide or cyanide to murder children and use their corpses as bait to lure the Americans into attacking Assad.

[Apr 09, 2018] When Military Leaders Have Reckless Disregard for the Truth by Bruce Fein

[Apr 09, 2018] Trump Is He Stupid or Dangerously Crazy by Justin Raimondo

[Apr 05, 2018] The Three Most Important Aspects of the Skripal Case so Far and Where They by Rob Slane

[Apr 05, 2018] An Interview with Retired Russian General Evgeny Buzhinsky The National Interest

[Apr 03, 2018] This Washington Post Headline Is Fake News

[Apr 03, 2018] Exercise TOXIC DAGGER - the sharp end of chemical warfare

[Apr 02, 2018] Russophobia Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy by A. Tsygankov

[Apr 02, 2018] Russia 'Novichok' Hysteria Proves Politicians and Media Haven't Learned the Lessons of Iraq by Patrick Henningsen

[Apr 02, 2018] The Litvinenko Conspiracy

[Apr 01, 2018] Big American Money, Not Russia, Put Trump in the White House: Reflections on a Recent Report by Paul Street

[Apr 01, 2018] Does the average user care if s/he is micro-targetted by political advertisements based on what they already believe?

[Apr 01, 2018] UK may have staged Skripal poisoning to rally people against Russia, Moscow believes

[Mar 31, 2018] FBI Director Mueller testified to Congress that Saddam Hussein was responsible for anthrax attack! That was Mueller's role in selling the "intelligence" to invade Iraq.

[Mar 27, 2018] Perfidious Albion The Fatally Wounded British Beast Lashes Out by Barbara Boyd

[Mar 25, 2018] Cambridge Analytica Scandal Rockets to Watergate Proportions and Beyond by Adam Garrie

[Mar 24, 2018] Why the UK, the EU and the US Gang-Up on Russia by James Petras

[Mar 24, 2018] Did Trump cut a deal on the collusion charge by Mike Whitney

[Mar 23, 2018] Inglorious end of career of neocon McMaster

[Mar 22, 2018] Vladimir Putin: nonsense to think Russia would poison spy in UK

[Mar 21, 2018] Former CIA Chief Brennan Running Scared by Ray McGovern

[Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

[Mar 21, 2018] Arafat and Litvinenko: an Interesting Turn to a Mysterious Story

[Mar 21, 2018] Washington's Invasion of Iraq at Fifteen

[Mar 21, 2018] Whataboutism Is A Nonsensical Propaganda Term Used To Defend The Failed Status Quo by Mike Krieger

[Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation

[Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

[Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

[Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence

[Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation

[Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

[Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

[Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence

[Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

[Mar 02, 2018] The main reason much of the highest echelons of American power are united against Trump might be that they're terrified that -- unlike Obama -- he's a really bad salesman for the US led neoliberal empire. This threatens the continuance of their well oiled and exceedingly corrupt gravy train

[Mar 02, 2018] Fatal Delusions of Western Man by Pat Buchanan

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected

[Mar 16, 2018] Corbyn Calls for Evidence in Escalating Poison Row

[Mar 16, 2018] NATO to display common front in Skripal case

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation

[Mar 14, 2018] Russian UN anvoy> alleged the Salisbury attack was a false-flag attack, possibly by the UK itself, intended to harm Russia s reputation by Julian Borger

[Mar 14, 2018] UNSC holds urgent meeting over Salisbury attack

[Mar 12, 2018] New Huge Anti-Russian Provocation ahead of Russian election by Robert Stevens

[Mar 12, 2018] State Department's War on Political Dissent

[Mar 11, 2018] Reality Check: The Guardian Restarts Push for Regime Change in Russia by Kit

[Mar 11, 2018] The Elephant In The Room by Craig Murray

[Mar 11, 2018] It is highly probably that Steele and Skripal knew each other

[Mar 11, 2018] Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack

[Mar 10, 2018] From Yeltsin to Putin: Chubais, Liberal Pathology, and Harvard's Criminal Record

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

[Mar 08, 2018] We don t have the evidence yet because Mueller hasn t found it yet! is a classic argument from ignorance, in that is assumes without evidence (there s that pesky word again!) that there is something to be found

[Mar 08, 2018] Cue bono question in Scripal case?

[Mar 08, 2018] In recent years, there has been ample evidence that US policy-makers and, equally important, mainstream media commentators do not bother to read what Putin says, or at least not more than snatches from click-bait wire-service reports.

[Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence

[Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

[Mar 02, 2018] The main reason much of the highest echelons of American power are united against Trump might be that they're terrified that -- unlike Obama -- he's a really bad salesman for the US led neoliberal empire. This threatens the continuance of their well oiled and exceedingly corrupt gravy train

[Mar 06, 2018] The U.S. Returns to 'Great Power Competition,' With a Dangerous New Edge

[Mar 06, 2018] The current anti-Russian sentiment in the West as hysterical. But this hysteria is concentrated at the top level of media elite and neocons. Behind it is no deep sense of unity or national resolve. In fact we see the reverse - most Western countries are deeply divided within themselves due to the crisis of neolineralism.

[Mar 04, 2018] Generals who now are running the USA foreign policy represents a great danger. These men seem incapable of rising above the Russophobia that grew in the atmosphere of the Cold War. They yearn for world hegemony for the US and to see Russia and to a lesser extent China and Iran as obstacles to that dominion for the "city on a hill

[Mar 02, 2018] The main reason much of the highest echelons of American power are united against Trump might be that they're terrified that -- unlike Obama -- he's a really bad salesman for the US led neoliberal empire. This threatens the continuance of their well oiled and exceedingly corrupt gravy train

[Mar 02, 2018] Fatal Delusions of Western Man by Pat Buchanan

[Feb 08, 2018] Try Googling Riggs Bank – a lot of interesting information emerges, on matters such as their involvement with Prince Bandar. So, what we are dealing with is a joint Anglo-American attempt to create a comprador oligarchy who could loot Russia s raw materials resources

[Feb 04, 2018] DNC collusion with Ukrainian IT Security company Crowdstrike tied to the Atlantic Council to push false narrative of DNC hack and malware to influence US election

[Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

[Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

[Mar 02, 2018] Fatal Delusions of Western Man by Pat Buchanan

[Mar 02, 2018] Contradictions In Seth Rich Murder Continue To Challenge Hacking Narrative

[Feb 28, 2018] Perjury traps to manufacture indictments to pressure people to testify against others is a new tool of justice in a surveillance state

[Feb 26, 2018] Democrat Memo Lays Egg by Publius Tacitus

[Feb 26, 2018] Why one war when we can heve two! by Eric Margolis

[Feb 25, 2018] Russia would not do anything nearing the level of self-harm inflicted by the US elites.

[Feb 23, 2018] NSA Genius Debunks Russiagate Once For All

[Feb 22, 2018] Bill Binney explodes the rile of 17 agances security assessment memo in launching the Russia witch-hunt

[Feb 20, 2018] For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia

[Feb 20, 2018] Russophobia is a futile bid to conceal US, European demise by Finian Cunningham

[Feb 19, 2018] Nunes FBI and DOJ Perps Could Be Put on Trial by Ray McGovern

[Feb 19, 2018] The Russiagate Intelligence Wars What We Do and Don't Know

[Feb 19, 2018] Russian Meddling Was a Drop in an Ocean of American-made Discord by AMANDA TAUB and MAX FISHER

[Feb 18, 2018] This dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia is extremely lucrative for the war profiteers, the retired generals intelligence members who prostitute themselves as media pundits, the members of Congress who get $$$ from the war profiteers, and the corporate media which thrives on links to the war profiteers as well as on war reporting

[Feb 08, 2018] Try Googling Riggs Bank – a lot of interesting information emerges, on matters such as their involvement with Prince Bandar. So, what we are dealing with is a joint Anglo-American attempt to create a comprador oligarchy who could loot Russia s raw materials resources

[Feb 04, 2018] DNC collusion with Ukrainian IT Security company Crowdstrike tied to the Atlantic Council to push false narrative of DNC hack and malware to influence US election

[Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

[Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

[Feb 16, 2018] The Deep Staters care first and foremost about themselves.

[Feb 14, 2018] Recused Judge in Flynn Prosecution Served on FISA Court

[Feb 14, 2018] The Anti-Trump Coup by Michael S. Rozeff

[Feb 14, 2018] A Russian Trump by Israel Shamir

[Feb 12, 2018] Too many sport disciplines, too much cheating, too much money and too many politics involved in the Olympic

[Feb 12, 2018] Ike's Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Is Alive and Very Well by William J. Astore

[Feb 11, 2018] How Russiagate fiasco destroys Kremlin moderates, accelerating danger for a hot war

[Feb 10, 2018] The generals are not Borgists. They are something worse ...

[Feb 10, 2018] More on neoliberal newspeak of US propaganda machine

[Feb 09, 2018] Professor Stephen F. Cohen Rethinking Putin – A critical reading, by The Saker - The Unz Review

[Feb 08, 2018] Control of narrative means that creation of the simplistic picture in which the complexities of the world are elided in favor of 'good guys' vs. 'bad guys' dichotomy

[Jan 30, 2018] Washington Reaches New Heights of Insanity with the "Kremlin Report" by Paul Craig Roberts

[Jan 30, 2018] The Unseen Wars of America the Empire The American Conservative

[Jan 29, 2018] It is OK for an empire to be hated and feared, it doesn t work so good when Glory slowly fades and he empire instead becomes hated and despised

[Jan 27, 2018] The Rich Also Cry by Israel Shamir

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

[Jan 27, 2018] As of January 2018 Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, is starting to look like something Trump should have done sooner.

[Jan 27, 2018] In a Trump Hunt, Beware the Perjury Trap by Pat Buchanan

[Jan 26, 2018] Warns The Russiagate Stakes Are Extreme by Paul Craig Roberts

[Jan 25, 2018] Russiagate as Kafka 2.0

[Jan 24, 2018] Brazen Plot To Exonerate Hillary Clinton And Frame Trump Unraveling, Says Former Fed Prosecutor

[Jan 22, 2018] Pentagon Unveils Strategy for Military Confrontation With Russia and China by Bill Van Auken

[Jan 22, 2018] Trump s Illegal War in Syria by Daniel Larison

[Jan 22, 2018] Clapper may have been the one behind using British intelligence to spy on Trump.

[Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised

[Jan 21, 2018] America Sleepwalks Towards a Clash With the Turks in Syria by Patrick J. Buchanan

[Jan 19, 2018] #ReleaseTheMemo Extensive FISA abuse memo could destroy the entire Mueller Russia investigation by Alex Christoforou

[Jan 19, 2018] No Foreign Bases Challenging the Footprint of US Empire by Kevin B. Zeese and Margaret Flowers

[Jan 17, 2018] Neoconning the Trump White House by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

[Jan 16, 2018] The Russia Explainer

[Jan 14, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis The Trump Dossier Timeline, A Democrat Disaster Looming by Publius Tacitus

[May 11, 2019] Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart -- Say Hello to Fancy Bear

[Jan 08, 2018] Someone Spoofed Michael Wolff s Book About Trump And It s Comedy Gold

[Jan 06, 2018] Russia-gate Breeds Establishment McCarthyism by Robert Parry

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

[Jan 02, 2018] The Still-Missing Evidence of Russia-gate by Dennis J. Bernstein

[Jan 02, 2018] Some investigators ask a sensible question: "It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?"

[Jan 02, 2018] Neocon warmongers should be treated as rapists by Andrew J. Bacevich

[Jan 02, 2018] What We Don t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking by Jackson Lears

[Jan 02, 2018] Jill Stein in the Cross-hairs by Mike Whitney

[Jan 02, 2018] Who Is the Real Enemy by Philip Giraldi

[Jan 02, 2018] American exceptionalism extracts a price from common citizens

[Jan 01, 2018] Putin Foresaw Death of US Global Power by Finian Cunningham

[Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma

[Jun 23, 2020] Identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ( soft neoliberals ) to counter the defection of trade union members from the party

[Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump administration sanction companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around the arrival point.

[Dec 21, 2019] Lessons of the past: all changed in 1999 with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump comes clean from world s policeman to thug running a global protection racket by Finian Cunningham

[Dec 21, 2019] Time to Terminate Washington's Defense Welfare

[Dec 21, 2019] The Pentagon s New Map War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

[Dec 21, 2019] We are all Palestinians: possible connection between neocons and Pentagon

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

[Dec 21, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

[Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson

[Dec 20, 2019] NSA Whistleblower: "Mueller Report based on fabricated evidence" Former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says it looked like the CIA did this, and made it look like the Russians were doing the hack to implicate Russians by Eric Zuesse

[Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump administration sanction companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around the arrival point.

[Dec 21, 2019] Lessons of the past: all changed in 1999 with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump comes clean from world s policeman to thug running a global protection racket by Finian Cunningham

[Dec 21, 2019] Time to Terminate Washington's Defense Welfare

[Dec 21, 2019] The Pentagon s New Map War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

[Dec 21, 2019] We are all Palestinians: possible connection between neocons and Pentagon

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

[Dec 21, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

[Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson

[Dec 20, 2019] NSA Whistleblower: "Mueller Report based on fabricated evidence" Former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says it looked like the CIA did this, and made it look like the Russians were doing the hack to implicate Russians by Eric Zuesse

[Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc

[Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

[Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

[Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

[Dec 18, 2019] Rudy Giuliani Yovanovitch Was Part Of The Cover-Up, She Had To Be Ousted

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

[Dec 17, 2019] Judge Denies Flynn's Requests For Exculpatory Information, Case Dismissal by Peter Svab

[Dec 17, 2019] History Doesn t Repeat, But It Often Rhymes: Wilson in UK was subjected to the similar attack by rogue elements in MI5 as Trump in the USA

[Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

[Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

[Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

[Dec 17, 2019] Judge Denies Flynn's Requests For Exculpatory Information, Case Dismissal by Peter Svab

[Dec 17, 2019] History Doesn t Repeat, But It Often Rhymes: Wilson in UK was subjected to the similar attack by rogue elements in MI5 as Trump in the USA

[Dec 15, 2019] The infinity war - The Washington Post by Samuel Moyn, Stephen Wertheim

[Dec 15, 2019] The infinity war - The Washington Post by Samuel Moyn, Stephen Wertheim

[Dec 14, 2019] Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation

[Dec 14, 2019] A Determined Effort to Undermine Russia

[Dec 14, 2019] Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation

[Dec 14, 2019] A Determined Effort to Undermine Russia

[Dec 12, 2019] Threat Inflation Poisons Our Foreign Policy by Daniel Larison

[Dec 12, 2019] Threat Inflation Poisons Our Foreign Policy by Daniel Larison

[Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.

[Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

[Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.

[Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

[Dec 06, 2019] Who Is Making US Foreign Policy by Stephen F. Cohen

[Dec 04, 2019] Responding to Lt. Col. Vindman about my Ukraine columns with the facts John Solomon Reports

[Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

[Dec 04, 2019] America's War Exceptionalism Is Killing the Planet by William Astore

[Dec 06, 2019] Who Is Making US Foreign Policy by Stephen F. Cohen

[Dec 04, 2019] Responding to Lt. Col. Vindman about my Ukraine columns with the facts John Solomon Reports

[Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

[Dec 04, 2019] America's War Exceptionalism Is Killing the Planet by William Astore

[Dec 02, 2019] The cost of militarism cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame

[Dec 02, 2019] A Think Tank Dedicated to Peace and Restraint

[Dec 02, 2019] The cost of militarism cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame

[Dec 02, 2019] A Think Tank Dedicated to Peace and Restraint

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

[Nov 28, 2019] WSJ story reopens the claim Comey had a report there was an email exchange between Loretta Lynch and Clinton claiming Lynch promised her the DOJ would go easy on Clinton.

[Nov 27, 2019] Could your county use some extra money?

[Nov 26, 2019] John Solomon Everything Changes In The Ukraine Scandal If Trump Releases These Documents

[Nov 24, 2019] Mark Blyth - Global Trumpism and the Future of the Global Economy

[Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests

[Nov 13, 2019] Understanding What Sidney Powell is Doing to Kill the Case Against Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson

[Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos

[Nov 03, 2019] How Controlling Syria s Oil Serves Washington s Strategic Objectives by Nauman Sadiq

[Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy

[Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev

[Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces

[Oct 28, 2019] National Neolibralism destroyed the World Trade Organisation by John Quiggin

[Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says

[Oct 24, 2019] Empire Interventionism Versus Republic Noninterventionism by Jacob Hornberger

[Oct 24, 2019] Joltin' Jack Keane wants your kids to fight Russia and Syria over Syrian oil by Colonel Patrick Lang

[Oct 24, 2019] Trump is now proven war criminal: WikiLeaks Releases New Documents Questioning Syria Chemical Attack Narrative

[Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 20, 2019] How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion

[Oct 20, 2019] Putin sarcastic remark on Western neoliberal multiculturalism

[Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed

[Oct 19, 2019] Kunstler One Big Reason Why America Is Driving Itself Bat$hit Crazy

[Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice

[Sep 23, 2019] Apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact

[Sep 22, 2019] US reconnaissance plane operated drones that attacked Hmeymim

[Sep 22, 2019] It was neoliberalism that won the cold war

[Sep 18, 2019] To End Endless Wars, We Must Give Up Hegemony by Daniel Larison

[Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin

[Sep 15, 2019] How the UK Security Services neutralised the country s leading liberal newspaper by Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis

[Sep 12, 2019] The Brain-Dead Maximalism of [neocon] Hard-liners by Daniel Larison

[Sep 11, 2019] John Brennan's and Jim Clappers' Last Gasp by Larry C Johnson

[Sep 10, 2019] Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein by Larry C Johnsons

[Sep 10, 2019] The idea tha the USA won the Cold War is questionable

[Sep 10, 2019] It s all about Gene Sharp and seeping neoliberal regime change using Western logistical support, money, NGO and intelligence agencies and MSM as the leverage

[Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda

[Aug 24, 2019] George Kennan on Russia Insights and Recommendations

[Aug 22, 2019] Trump Doesn t Know How to Negotiate by Daniel Larison

[Aug 21, 2019] Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed

[Aug 20, 2019] Trump is about the agony. The agony of the US centered global neoliberal empire.

[Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen

[Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)

[Aug 16, 2019] Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly

[Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury

[Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized

[Jul 29, 2019] Looks like Epstein turned informant for Mueller s FBI in 2008. Likely earlier

[Jul 29, 2019] The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone

[Jul 28, 2019] Mueller Crumbles Under Questioning by Barbara Boland

[Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

[Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!

[Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson

[Jul 26, 2019] Tucker What should happen to those who lied about Russian collusion

[Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened

[Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed

[Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

[Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow

[Jul 23, 2019] Ukraine Election - Voters Defeat Second Color Revolution

[Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

[Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

[Jul 09, 2019] Ex-FBI, CIA Officials Draw Withering Fire on Russiagate by Ray McGovern

[Jul 06, 2019] Why is Iran such a high priority for US elite? Because Iran successfully booted out the CIA and CIA-imposed regime out of their country and successfully remained independent since then

[Jul 06, 2019] In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy

[Jul 06, 2019] Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax by Lucy Komisar

[Jun 29, 2019] Latest Weapon Of US Imperialism Liquified Natural Gas

[Jun 27, 2019] The Ongoing Restructuring of the Greater Middle East by C.J. Hopkins

[Jun 23, 2019] The return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a radicalized form of neoliberalism

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

[Nov 28, 2019] WSJ story reopens the claim Comey had a report there was an email exchange between Loretta Lynch and Clinton claiming Lynch promised her the DOJ would go easy on Clinton.

[Nov 27, 2019] Could your county use some extra money?

[Nov 26, 2019] John Solomon Everything Changes In The Ukraine Scandal If Trump Releases These Documents

[Nov 24, 2019] Mark Blyth - Global Trumpism and the Future of the Global Economy

[Nov 23, 2019] Is Fiona Hill a Sleeper Agent

[Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests

[Nov 13, 2019] Understanding What Sidney Powell is Doing to Kill the Case Against Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson

[Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos

[Nov 03, 2019] How Controlling Syria s Oil Serves Washington s Strategic Objectives by Nauman Sadiq

[Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy

[Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev

[Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces

[Oct 28, 2019] National Neolibralism destroyed the World Trade Organisation by John Quiggin

[Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says

[Oct 24, 2019] Empire Interventionism Versus Republic Noninterventionism by Jacob Hornberger

[Oct 24, 2019] Joltin' Jack Keane wants your kids to fight Russia and Syria over Syrian oil by Colonel Patrick Lang

[Oct 24, 2019] Trump is now proven war criminal: WikiLeaks Releases New Documents Questioning Syria Chemical Attack Narrative

[Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 20, 2019] Putin sarcastic remark on Western neoliberal multiculturalism

[Oct 20, 2019] How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion

[Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed

[Oct 19, 2019] Kunstler One Big Reason Why America Is Driving Itself Bat$hit Crazy

[Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice

[Sep 23, 2019] Apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact

[Sep 22, 2019] US reconnaissance plane operated drones that attacked Hmeymim

[Sep 22, 2019] It was neoliberalism that won the cold war

[Sep 18, 2019] To End Endless Wars, We Must Give Up Hegemony by Daniel Larison

[Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin

[Sep 15, 2019] How the UK Security Services neutralised the country s leading liberal newspaper by Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis

[Sep 12, 2019] The Brain-Dead Maximalism of [neocon] Hard-liners by Daniel Larison

[Sep 11, 2019] John Brennan's and Jim Clappers' Last Gasp by Larry C Johnson

[Sep 10, 2019] Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein by Larry C Johnsons

[Sep 10, 2019] The idea tha the USA won the Cold War is questionable

[Sep 10, 2019] It s all about Gene Sharp and seeping neoliberal regime change using Western logistical support, money, NGO and intelligence agencies and MSM as the leverage

[Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda

[Aug 24, 2019] George Kennan on Russia Insights and Recommendations

[Aug 22, 2019] Trump Doesn t Know How to Negotiate by Daniel Larison

[Aug 21, 2019] Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed

[Aug 20, 2019] Trump is about the agony. The agony of the US centered global neoliberal empire.

[Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)

[Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen

[Aug 16, 2019] Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly

[Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury

[Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized

[Jul 29, 2019] Looks like Epstein turned informant for Mueller s FBI in 2008. Likely earlier

[Jul 29, 2019] The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone

[Jul 28, 2019] Mueller Crumbles Under Questioning by Barbara Boland

[Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

[Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!

[Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson

[Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened

[Jul 26, 2019] Tucker What should happen to those who lied about Russian collusion

[Jun 22, 2019] Why The Empire Is Failing The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine by Doug Bandow

[Aug 19, 2020] Some Shocking Facts on the Concentration of Ownership of the US Economy

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

[Nov 10, 2018] US Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Killed 500,000 by Jason Ditz

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

[Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

[Jul 23, 2019] Ukraine Election - Voters Defeat Second Color Revolution

[Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

[Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

[Jul 09, 2019] Ex-FBI, CIA Officials Draw Withering Fire on Russiagate by Ray McGovern

[Jul 06, 2019] Why is Iran such a high priority for US elite? Because Iran successfully booted out the CIA and CIA-imposed regime out of their country and successfully remained independent since then

[Jul 06, 2019] In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy

[Jul 06, 2019] Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax by Lucy Komisar

[Jun 29, 2019] Latest Weapon Of US Imperialism Liquified Natural Gas

[Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton

[Jun 27, 2019] The Ongoing Restructuring of the Greater Middle East by C.J. Hopkins

[Dec 02, 2019] A Think Tank Dedicated to Peace and Restraint

[Jun 23, 2019] The return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a radicalized form of neoliberalism

[Jun 22, 2019] Why The Empire Is Failing The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine by Doug Bandow

[Jun 22, 2019] Bolton Calls For Forceful Iranian Response To Continuing US Aggression

[Jun 21, 2019] America's Confrontation With Iran Goes Deeper Than Trump by Trita Parsi

[Jun 21, 2019] Russia accuses U.S. of pushing Iran situation to brink of war RIA - Reuters

[Jun 20, 2019] Chuck Schumer 'The American People Deserve A President Who Can More Credibly Justify War With Iran'

[Jun 22, 2019] Bolton Calls For Forceful Iranian Response To Continuing US Aggression

[Jun 21, 2019] America's Confrontation With Iran Goes Deeper Than Trump by Trita Parsi

[Jun 21, 2019] Russia accuses U.S. of pushing Iran situation to brink of war RIA - Reuters

[Jun 19, 2019] Investigation Nation Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics by Jim Kavanagh

[Jun 19, 2019] Bias bias the inclination to accuse people of bias by James Thompson

[Jun 14, 2019] Comments on Yasha Levin article: With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite

[Jun 09, 2019] The looming 100-year US-China conflict by Martin Wolf

[Jun 05, 2019] Do Spies Run the World by Israel Shamir

[May 29, 2019] With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite by Yasha Levine

[May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.

[May 25, 2019] The Belligerence Of Empire by Kenn Orphan

[May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries

[May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"

[May 19, 2019] How Russiagate replaced Analysis of the 2016 Election by Rick Sterling

[May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

[May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins

[May 15, 2019] Russia-gate s Monstrous Offspring

[May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics

[May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan

[May 13, 2019] Angry Bear Senate Democratic Jackasses and Elmer Fudd

[May 13, 2019] In defense of Maria Butina Spectator USA by Michael Tracey

[May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

[May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond

[May 11, 2019] Just worth noting that in the hand-written notes taken by Bruce Ohr after meetings with Chris Steele, there is the comment that the majority of the Steele Dossier was obtained from an expat Russian living in the US, and not from actual Russian sources in Russia

[May 11, 2019] Crowdstrike planted the malware on DNC systems, which they discovered later discovered and attributed to Russians later

[May 11, 2019] Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart -- Say Hello to Fancy Bear

[May 11, 2019] Whitney Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan

[May 11, 2019] Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson

[May 11, 2019] Doug Ross @ Journal A TIMELINE OF TREASON How the DNC and FBI Leadership Tried to Fix a Presidential Election [Updated]

[May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

[May 11, 2019] Nunes Memo Details Weaponization of FISA Court for Political Advantage by Elizabeth Lea Vos

[May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

[May 10, 2019] Biden is up to neck in Spygate dirt by Jeff Carlson

[May 10, 2019] Obama administration raced to obtain FICA warrant on Carter Page before Rogers investigation closes on them and that was definitely an obstruction of justice and interference with the ongoing investigation

[May 10, 2019] What was the meaning of the term "insurance policy" in Stzok messages to Lisa Page

[May 10, 2019] The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe

[May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

[May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors

[May 05, 2019] Did Mueller substituted Russia for Israel in his report

[May 03, 2019] The Wheels Of Real Justice Are In Motion Now Kunstler Fears The Desperate Resistance Next Move...

[May 02, 2019] Neoliberalism and the Globalization of War. America s Hegemonic Project by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

[May 02, 2019] Checkmate - How President Trump s Legal Team Outfoxed Mueller by Will Chamberlain

[Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

[Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

[Apr 28, 2019] Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work!

[Apr 28, 2019] On Contact Russiagate Mueller Report w- Aaron Mate

[Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi

[Apr 26, 2019] Intelligence agencies meddling in elections

[Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

[Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

[Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond

[Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

[Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

[Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

[Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer

[Apr 20, 2019] Sure, blame those guys over there for Hillary fiasco and hire Mueller to get the goods . That s the ultimate the dog ate my homework excuse.

[Apr 17, 2019] The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status

[Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

[Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

[Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

[Apr 15, 2019] I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military

[Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc

[Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

[Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

[Apr 08, 2019] Aaron Maté Was Also Right About Russiagate

[Apr 07, 2019] Nunes The Russian Collusion Hoax Meets An Unbelievbable End

[Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES

[Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard

[Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney

[Apr 04, 2019] Was John Brennan The Russia Lie Ringleader

[Apr 03, 2019] Jewish Power Rolls Over Washington by Philip Giraldi

[Apr 03, 2019] Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the US

[Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

[Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books

[Mar 31, 2019] A Reprise of the Iraq-WMD Fiasco by James W Carden

[Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?

[Mar 30, 2019] The US desperately needs Venezuelan oil

[Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate

[Mar 30, 2019] You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.

[Mar 29, 2019] I challenge anyone to find anything done by congress or Trump that was done for average Americans

[Mar 25, 2019] Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism by Jonathan Cook

[Mar 25, 2019] Meet The Kushners First Couple In-Waiting by Ilana Mercer

[Mar 25, 2019] Spygate The True Story of Collusion (plus Infographic) by Jeff Carlson

[Mar 25, 2019] Nuland role in Russiagate

[Mar 25, 2019] Another SIGINT compromise ...

[Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

[Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr.

[Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary

[Mar 24, 2019] One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.

[Mar 24, 2019] One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates.

[Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed

[Mar 23, 2019] Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel.

[Mar 22, 2019] Glenn Greenwald on Twitter The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away

[Mar 20, 2019] In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts

[Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

[Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19

[Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

[Mar 17, 2019] Mueller uses the same old false flag scams, just different packaging of his forensics-free findings

[Mar 17, 2019] VIPS- Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings

[Mar 15, 2019] Will Democrats Go Full Hawk by Jack Hunter

[Mar 06, 2019] Disinformation destroys reality

[Feb 22, 2019] Neo-McCarthyism is used to defend the US imperial policies. Branding dissidents as Russian stooges is a loophole that allow to suppress dissident opinions

[Feb 21, 2019] The Empire Now or Never by Fred Reed

[Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds

[Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube

[Feb 19, 2019] Charles Schumer and questioning the foreign policy choices of the American Empire's ruling class

[Feb 17, 2019] Was Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest?

[Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

[Feb 16, 2019] MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle by Caitlin Johnstone

[Feb 16, 2019] Death Of Russiagate: Mueller Team Tied To Mifsud s Network

[Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished

[Feb 13, 2019] Making Globalism Great Again by C.J. Hopkins

[Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber

[Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

[Feb 08, 2019] To understand Steele and the five eyes involvement in the Russia hoax you need to go to the library

[Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back

[Feb 02, 2019] According to the recipes devised by Reagan: why the methods which successfully destroyed the USSR do not work with modern Russia? by Alexey Makurin

[Jan 22, 2019] War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate

[Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

[Jan 20, 2019] Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever.

[Jan 19, 2019] Coincidence - Chief Nurse Of British Army Was First Person To Arrive At Novichoked Skripal Scene

[Jan 13, 2019] As FBI Ramped Up Witch Hunt When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke

[Jan 12, 2019] Tucker Carlson Mitt Romney supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it's infuriating Fox News

[Jan 12, 2019] Tucker Carlson has sparked the most interesting debate in conservative politics by Jane Coaston

[Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames

[Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

[Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

[Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

[Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

[Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

[Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

[Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

[Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

[Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

[Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray

[Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

[Dec 21, 2018] Trump End the Syria War Now by Eric Margolis

[Dec 21, 2018] Virtually no one in neoliberal MSM is paying attention to the fact that a group of Pakistani muslims, working for a Jewish Congresswoman from Florida, had full computer access to a large number of Democrat Representatives. Most of the press is disinterested in pursuing this matter

[Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

[Dec 09, 2018] Die Weltwoche Weltwoche Online – www.weltwoche.ch Tucker Carlson Trump is not capable Die Weltwoche, Ausgabe 49-2018

[Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

[Dec 02, 2018] Muller investigation has all the appearance of an investigation looking for a crime

[Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

[Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

[Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

[Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

[Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

[Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)

[Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

[Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill

[Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

[Nov 12, 2018] Obama s CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

[Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

[Nov 11, 2018] Trump's Iran Policy Cannot Succeed Without Allies The National Interest by James Clapper & Thomas Pickering

[Nov 10, 2018] US Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Killed 500,000 by Jason Ditz

[Nov 10, 2018] The Reasons for Netanyahu's Panic by Alastair Crooke

[Oct 25, 2018] DNC Emails--A Seth Attack Not a Russian Hack by Publius Tacitus

[Oct 25, 2018] Putin jokes with Bolton: Did the eagle eaten all the olives

[Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

[Oct 18, 2018] Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Goes Neocon by Robert W. Merry

[Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case

[Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight

[Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

[Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement

[Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

[Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

[Sep 15, 2018] Why the US Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran by Patrick Lawrence

[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda

[Sep 11, 2018] Is Donald Trump Going to Do the Syria Backflip by Publius Tacitus

[Sep 11, 2018] If you believe Trump is trying to remove neocons(Deep State) from the government, explain Bolton and many other Deep State denizens Trump has appointed

[Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

[Sep 02, 2018] Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia.

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

[Aug 14, 2018] I think one of Mueller s deeply embedded character flaw is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

[Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

[Aug 08, 2018] Sergei Skripal was linked to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence

[Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

[Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

[Jul 28, 2018] American Society Would Collapse If It Were not For These 8 Myths by Lee Camp

[Jul 20, 2018] So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don t question the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven t been laggards in adding fuel to the fire by the whole novichok hoax

[Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer

[Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent

[Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.

[Jul 16, 2018] Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400K To Clinton Campaign Zero Hedge

[Jul 16, 2018] Five Things That Would Make The CIA-CNN Russia Narrative More Believable

[Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland

[Jul 15, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis HILLARY CLINTON S COMPROMISED EMAILS WERE GOING TO A FOREIGN ENTITY – NOT RUSSIA! FBI Agent Ignored Evide

[Jul 15, 2018] Peter Strzok Ignored Evidence Of Clinton Server Breach

[Jul 15, 2018] Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU by Publius Tacitus

[Jul 15, 2018] As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?

[Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

[Jul 05, 2018] Britain's Most Censored Stories (Non-Military)

[Jul 03, 2018] Russia has a lot of information about Lybia that could dig a political grave for Hillary. They did not release it

[Jul 03, 2018] Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence

[Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions

[Jun 19, 2018] How The Last Superpower Was Unchained by Tom Engelhardt

[Jun 17, 2018] Mattis Putin Is Trying To Undermine America s Moral Authority by Caitlin Johnstone

[Jun 17, 2018] the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia

[Jun 17, 2018] The Necessity of a Trump-Putin Summit by Stephen F. Cohen

[Jun 13, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today by Philip M. GIRALDI

[Jun 12, 2018] The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream media

[Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

[Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

[Jun 06, 2018] Trump Voters, Your Savior Is Betraying You by Nicholas Kristof

[May 31, 2018] Journalists and academics expose UK's criminal actions in the Middle East by Julie Hyland

[May 27, 2018] America's Fifth Column Will Destroy Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[May 27, 2018] Northwestern University roundtable discusses regime change in Russia Defend Democracy Press

[May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence

[May 24, 2018] The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy

[May 23, 2018] Mueller role as a hatchet man is now firmly established. Rosenstein key role in applointing Mueller without any evidence became also more clear with time. Was he coerced or did it voluntarily is unclear by Lambert Strether

[May 23, 2018] If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump

[May 09, 2018] Trotskyist Delusions, by Diana Johnstone

[May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

[May 03, 2018] Mueller's questions to Trump more those of a prosecuting attorney than of an impartial investigator by Alexander Mercouris

[May 03, 2018] Skripal case British confirm they have no suspect; Yulia Skripal vanishes, no word of Sergey Skripal by Alexander Mercouris

[May 03, 2018] Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it

[Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

[Apr 24, 2018] America's Men Without Chests by Paul Grenier

[Apr 23, 2018] The Tony Blair Rule: The Truth Takes 15 Years to Come Out, Skripal Countdown Starts Now - Simonyan

[Apr 22, 2018] The Crisis Is Only In Its Beginning Stages by Paul Craig Roberts

[Apr 21, 2018] Amazingly BBC newsnight just started preparing viewers for the possibility that there was no sarin attack, and the missile strikes might just have been for show

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

[Apr 20, 2018] Stench of hypocrisy British 'war on terror' strategic ties with radical Islam by John Wight

[Apr 19, 2018] The Neocons Are Selling Koolaid Again! by W. Patrick Lang

[Apr 18, 2018] The Great American Unspooling Is Upon Us

[Apr 17, 2018] Probable sequence of event in Douma false flag operation

[Apr 17, 2018] Poor Alex

[Apr 16, 2018] British Propaganda and Disinformation An Imperial and Colonial Tradition by Wayne MADSEN

[Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts

[Apr 11, 2018] It is long passed the time when any thinking person took Trump tweets seriously

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation

[Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

[Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

[Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence

[Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

[Mar 02, 2018] The main reason much of the highest echelons of American power are united against Trump might be that they're terrified that -- unlike Obama -- he's a really bad salesman for the US led neoliberal empire. This threatens the continuance of their well oiled and exceedingly corrupt gravy train

[Mar 02, 2018] Fatal Delusions of Western Man by Pat Buchanan

[Feb 08, 2018] Try Googling Riggs Bank – a lot of interesting information emerges, on matters such as their involvement with Prince Bandar. So, what we are dealing with is a joint Anglo-American attempt to create a comprador oligarchy who could loot Russia s raw materials resources

[Feb 04, 2018] DNC collusion with Ukrainian IT Security company Crowdstrike tied to the Atlantic Council to push false narrative of DNC hack and malware to influence US election

[Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

[Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

[Dec 22, 2017] When Sanity Fails - The Mindset of the Ideological Drone by The Saker

[Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

[Aug 30, 2017] Weather Underground Members Speak Out on the Media, Imperialism and Solidarity in the Age of Trump

[Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

[Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

[Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

[Sep 26, 2016] War as a Business Opportunity

[Feb 28, 2020] Media s Deafening Silence On Latest WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal by Caitlin Johnstone

[Feb 28, 2020] Chas Freeman America in Distress The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change

[Jun 20, 2019] Chuck Schumer 'The American People Deserve A President Who Can More Credibly Justify War With Iran'

[Jun 19, 2019] Investigation Nation Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics by Jim Kavanagh

[Jun 19, 2019] Bias bias the inclination to accuse people of bias by James Thompson

[Jun 14, 2019] Comments on Yasha Levin article: With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite

[Jun 09, 2019] The looming 100-year US-China conflict by Martin Wolf

[Jun 05, 2019] Do Spies Run the World by Israel Shamir

[May 29, 2019] With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite by Yasha Levine

[May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.

[May 25, 2019] The Belligerence Of Empire by Kenn Orphan

[May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries

[May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"

[May 19, 2019] How Russiagate replaced Analysis of the 2016 Election by Rick Sterling

[May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

[May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins

[May 15, 2019] Russia-gate s Monstrous Offspring

[May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics

[May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan

[May 13, 2019] Angry Bear Senate Democratic Jackasses and Elmer Fudd

[May 13, 2019] In defense of Maria Butina Spectator USA by Michael Tracey

[May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

[May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond

[May 11, 2019] Just worth noting that in the hand-written notes taken by Bruce Ohr after meetings with Chris Steele, there is the comment that the majority of the Steele Dossier was obtained from an expat Russian living in the US, and not from actual Russian sources in Russia

[May 11, 2019] Crowdstrike planted the malware on DNC systems, which they discovered later discovered and attributed to Russians later

[May 11, 2019] Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart -- Say Hello to Fancy Bear

[May 11, 2019] Whitney Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan

[May 11, 2019] Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson

[May 11, 2019] Doug Ross @ Journal A TIMELINE OF TREASON How the DNC and FBI Leadership Tried to Fix a Presidential Election [Updated]

[May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

[May 11, 2019] Nunes Memo Details Weaponization of FISA Court for Political Advantage by Elizabeth Lea Vos

[May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

[May 10, 2019] Biden is up to neck in Spygate dirt by Jeff Carlson

[May 10, 2019] Obama administration raced to obtain FICA warrant on Carter Page before Rogers investigation closes on them and that was definitely an obstruction of justice and interference with the ongoing investigation

[May 10, 2019] What was the meaning of the term "insurance policy" in Stzok messages to Lisa Page

[May 10, 2019] The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe

[May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

[May 07, 2019] Look! A whale!

[May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors

[May 05, 2019] Did Mueller substituted Russia for Israel in his report

[May 03, 2019] The Wheels Of Real Justice Are In Motion Now Kunstler Fears The Desperate Resistance Next Move...

[May 02, 2019] Neoliberalism and the Globalization of War. America s Hegemonic Project by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

[May 02, 2019] Checkmate - How President Trump s Legal Team Outfoxed Mueller by Will Chamberlain

[May 02, 2019] Neoliberalism and the Globalization of War. America s Hegemonic Project by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

[Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

[Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

[Apr 28, 2019] Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work!

[Apr 28, 2019] On Contact Russiagate Mueller Report w- Aaron Mate

[Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi

[Apr 26, 2019] Intelligence agencies meddling in elections

[Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

[Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

[Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond

[Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

[Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

[Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

[Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer

[Apr 20, 2019] Sure, blame those guys over there for Hillary fiasco and hire Mueller to get the goods . That s the ultimate the dog ate my homework excuse.

[Apr 17, 2019] The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status

[Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

[Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

[Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

[Apr 15, 2019] I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military

[Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

[Apr 15, 2019] I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military

[Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc

[Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

[Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

[Apr 08, 2019] Aaron Maté Was Also Right About Russiagate

[Apr 07, 2019] Nunes The Russian Collusion Hoax Meets An Unbelievbable End

[Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES

[Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard

[Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney

[Apr 04, 2019] Was John Brennan The Russia Lie Ringleader

[Apr 03, 2019] Jewish Power Rolls Over Washington by Philip Giraldi

[Apr 03, 2019] Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the US

[Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

[Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books

[Mar 31, 2019] A Reprise of the Iraq-WMD Fiasco by James W Carden

[Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?

[Mar 30, 2019] The US desperately needs Venezuelan oil

[Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate

[Mar 30, 2019] You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.

[Mar 29, 2019] I challenge anyone to find anything done by congress or Trump that was done for average Americans

[Mar 25, 2019] Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism by Jonathan Cook

[Mar 25, 2019] Meet The Kushners First Couple In-Waiting by Ilana Mercer

[Mar 25, 2019] Spygate The True Story of Collusion (plus Infographic) by Jeff Carlson

[Mar 25, 2019] Nuland role in Russiagate

[Mar 25, 2019] Another SIGINT compromise ...

[Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

[Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr.

[Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary

[Mar 24, 2019] One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.

[Mar 24, 2019] One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates.

[Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed

[Mar 23, 2019] Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel.

[Mar 22, 2019] Glenn Greenwald on Twitter The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away

[Mar 20, 2019] In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts

[Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

[Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19

[Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

[Mar 17, 2019] Mueller uses the same old false flag scams, just different packaging of his forensics-free findings

[Mar 17, 2019] VIPS- Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings

[Mar 15, 2019] Will Democrats Go Full Hawk by Jack Hunter

[Mar 06, 2019] Disinformation destroys reality

[Feb 22, 2019] Neo-McCarthyism is used to defend the US imperial policies. Branding dissidents as Russian stooges is a loophole that allow to suppress dissident opinions

[Feb 21, 2019] The Empire Now or Never by Fred Reed

[Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds

[Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube

[Feb 19, 2019] Charles Schumer and questioning the foreign policy choices of the American Empire's ruling class

[Feb 17, 2019] Was Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest?

[Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

[Feb 16, 2019] MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle by Caitlin Johnstone

[Feb 16, 2019] Death Of Russiagate: Mueller Team Tied To Mifsud s Network

[Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished

[Feb 13, 2019] Making Globalism Great Again by C.J. Hopkins

[Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber

[Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

[Feb 08, 2019] To understand Steele and the five eyes involvement in the Russia hoax you need to go to the library

[Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back

[Feb 02, 2019] According to the recipes devised by Reagan: why the methods which successfully destroyed the USSR do not work with modern Russia? by Alexey Makurin

[Jan 22, 2019] War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate

[Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

[Jan 20, 2019] Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever.

[Jan 19, 2019] Coincidence - Chief Nurse Of British Army Was First Person To Arrive At Novichoked Skripal Scene

[Jan 13, 2019] As FBI Ramped Up Witch Hunt When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke

[Jan 12, 2019] Tucker Carlson Mitt Romney supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it's infuriating Fox News

[Jan 12, 2019] Tucker Carlson has sparked the most interesting debate in conservative politics by Jane Coaston

[Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames

[Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

[Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

[Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

[Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

[Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

[Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

[Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

[Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

[Nov 18, 2020] When any Washington Swamp creature talks about "threats to US national security" in reality they are talking about threats to the USA global hegemony

[Nov 18, 2020] A short summary of Trump achivements: Good -- a cut of State department regime change budget; Bad -- extra 149 billion to MIC via Pentagon budget

[Nov 17, 2020] November 14, 2020 at 5:03 am

[Nov 15, 2020] The War Is Over...GloboCap Triumphs! by C.J. Hopkins

[Nov 12, 2020] Initiators or Russiagate panicking about the possibility of additional disclosure

[Nov 12, 2020] Caitlin Johnstone- Americans didn't vote against Trump, they voted against more media psychological abuse by Caitlin Johnstone

[Nov 06, 2020] Can a Biden presidency put an end to Russiagate, or will Democrats continue to wield Neo-McCarthyism to consolidate power- -- RT Russia Former Soviet Union

[Nov 06, 2020] Did the Iraq War Cause the Great Recession?'

[Oct 28, 2020] Wall Street Banks, And Their Employees, Now Officially Lean Democrat

[Oct 23, 2020] The key difference between China and Russia as for US election influence: Putin apparently "interferes in US elections" but China simply buys up one of the parties and owns the candidate and his family

[Oct 21, 2020] How Trump Got Played By The Military-Industrial Complex by Akbar Shahid Ahmed

[Oct 21, 2020] This Is Not A Russian Hoax 'Nonpublic Information' Debunks Letter From '50 Former Intel Officials'

[Oct 20, 2020] Glenn Greenwald- Media and Intel Community Working Together To Manipulate The American People - Video - RealClearPolitics

[Oct 19, 2020] The Emails Are Russian- Will Be The Narrative, Regardless Of Facts Or Evidence by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 19, 2020] The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism and anti-Russian hysteria has many purposes, but one is surely domestic repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and British people

[Oct 19, 2020] New report shows more than $1B from war industry and govt. going to top 50 think tanks

[Oct 11, 2020] Putin on the US Presidential race and the myth that Trump, one of the most hostile to Russia presidents in history, is somehow a "Putin puppet"

[Oct 01, 2020] Steve's insistence on speaking the truth about Ukraine and US-Russia relations cost him -- but he never gave up by Lev Golinkin

[Sep 30, 2020] DNI Letter Supports Allegation That Hillary Clinton Created 'Russiagate' by b

[Sep 28, 2020] No wonder Pompey and his friend Jeffries won't give up on Syria! No wonder

[Sep 26, 2020] Galloway- Lying industry may be the only sector of Western economies still in full production TAXPAYERS pay for it

[Sep 25, 2020] US standard "negotiating" techniques

[Sep 23, 2020] How fake media actually works: reporter are given the narrative and they should rehash their stories to fit it

[Sep 23, 2020] The deviousness of Russians is completly off the charts.

[Sep 21, 2020] How the west lost by Anatol Lieven

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen- The Ukrainian Crisis - It s not All Putin s Fault

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen Cohen at the AJC 2017 Forum, about Russia and Terrorism

[Sep 20, 2020] CJ Hopkins Exposes The Final Act In 'The War On Populism'

[Sep 20, 2020] Darren Beattie Tucker Carlson Discuss Color Revolutions The Plot To Oust President Trump

[Sep 20, 2020] Norm Eisen And The Colour Revolution Playbook!

[Sep 20, 2020] THE TAKE-DOWN OF TRUMP ALA THE "COLOR REVOLUTION"- NORM EISEN'S REVOLUTIONARY PLAYBOOK A Deeply Embedded (Demster) Lawfare Operative; Regime Change Professionals More. What's Going On- Conservative Firing Line

[Sep 17, 2020] Why the Blob Needs an Enemy by ARTA MOEINI

[Sep 17, 2020] Military desperados and Mattis "military messiah syndrome" by Scott Ritter

[Sep 09, 2020] Proof of collusion at last! - IRRUSSIANALITY

[Sep 01, 2020] Are We Deliberately Trying to Provoke a Military Crisis With Russia by Ted Galen Carpenter

[Sep 01, 2020] How Democrats and Republicans made deals to pass Magnitsky Act by Lucy Komisar

[Sep 17, 2020] Why the Blob Needs an Enemy by ARTA MOEINI

[Aug 27, 2020] The Ceaseless Lies of Eva Bartlett; or, The Partisan Scrubbing of Western Consciousness. The New Kremlin Stooge

[Aug 23, 2020] Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda by Ray McGovern

[Aug 19, 2020] Some Shocking Facts on the Concentration of Ownership of the US Economy

[Aug 19, 2020] The Republican led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence repeats the lies about Guccifer 2.0

[Aug 19, 2020] American imperialism vs. EU imperialism: Pushed into the Ukrainian adventure by the US? Rubbish. The EU and its constituent members were attempting to play their own hand and were not merely following the US lead submissively.

[Aug 17, 2020] Who's Afraid of QAnon- by Gregory Hood

[Aug 08, 2020] Russia Hoax- Are We All Being Played- Put Up Or Shut Up! - Zero Hedge

[Aug 04, 2020] Russia never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend by The Saker

[Aug 03, 2020] Natalie Wynn also refers to Jo Freeman's 1976 piece on "Trashing," in which she describes her experience of being ostracized by fellow feminists for alleged ideological deviation. The dynamic of cancellation predates the internet.

[Aug 03, 2020] KEEPING YOUR MOUTH SHUT by James L. Gibson & Joseph L. Sutherland

[Aug 03, 2020] Trump DID commit obstruction of justice... he refused to force HIS Dept of Justice to indict Hillary, Comey, Brennan and Clapper

[Aug 02, 2020] Russiagate, Nazis, and the CIA by ROB URIE

[Aug 01, 2020] Executed Turkish general exposed misuse of Qatari funds for Syria extremists- Report - Al Arabiya English

[Jul 31, 2020] Tucker Carlson calls Obama 'one of the sleaziest and most dishonest figures' in US political history

[Jul 23, 2020] Opinion - Defund the Pentagon- The Liberal Case - POLITICO

[Jul 23, 2020] Demorats defeat amedment ot cut Defence by 10%

[Jul 23, 2020] This is a biggie: Egypt's parliament approves troop deployment to Libya

[Jul 21, 2020] This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier.

[Jul 20, 2020] The Real 'Russian Playbook' Is Written in English -- Strategic Culture

[Jul 19, 2020] What the MSM cliche According to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter actually means

[Jul 18, 2020] Divide We Fall -- America Has Been Blacklisted and McCarthyism Refashioned for a New Age

[Jul 13, 2020] George Washington Tried To Warn Americans About Foreign Policy Today by Doug Bandow

[Jul 07, 2020] Mutiny on the Bounties by RAY McGOVERN

[Jul 06, 2020] US claim of 'Russian Bounty' plot in Afghanistan is dubious and dangerous - The Grayzone

[Jul 01, 2020] Putin s economic and social policies have a neoliberal bent but Putin is far from a classic neoliberal

[Jul 01, 2020] Control freaks that cannot even control their own criminal impulses!

[Jun 30, 2020] Russophobia- Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy- Tsygankov, A.- 9781349378418- Amazon.com- Books

[Jun 28, 2020] Evidence Free Press Release Claims 'Russia Did Bad, Trump Did Not Respond' - NYT, WaPo Publish It

[Jun 28, 2020] Russian position for Start talks: "We don't believe the US in its current shape is a counterpart that is reliable, so we have no confidence, no trust whatsoever".

[Jun 23, 2020] Identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ( soft neoliberals ) to counter the defection of trade union members from the party

[Jun 23, 2020] Surely 'legitimacy' goes to the victor. Once you've won you can build a sort of legitimacy that the majority will agree with (whether its real or not)

[Jun 23, 2020] Putin Tries To Set Record Straight by

[Jun 21, 2020] Paul R. Pillar who pointed out that U.S. sanctions are frequently peddled as a peaceful alternative to war fit the definition of 'crimes against peace'.

[Jun 20, 2020] Fatal mistake of the USSR in the WWII

[Jun 19, 2020] The USG' s definition of Dictator

[Jun 15, 2020] Full Special Investigation - Donald Trump vs The Deep State

[Jun 14, 2020] Jeane J. Kirkpatrick 30 Years Unheeded

[Jun 13, 2020] Korea is just another distraction: false conflicts with China, North Korea, Russia and Iran are needed to keep support for MIC and Security State which cost 1.2 trillion a year

[Jun 03, 2020] Mueller investigation was never about Trump colluding with Russia. It was always about Trump obstructing the investigation of the collusion with Russia that the investigation was not about

[Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed

[Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow

[Jun 03, 2020] The first rule of political hypocrisy: Justify your actions by the need to protect the weak and vulnerable

[Jun 03, 2020] Internet Users Who Call For Attacking Other Countries Will Now Be Enlisted In The Military Automatically

[Jun 03, 2020] Requiem to Russiagate: this was the largest and the most successful attempt to gaslight the whole US population ever attempted by CIA and Clinton wing of Dems by CJ Hopkins

[Jun 03, 2020] RussiaGate for neoliberal Dems and MSM honchos is the way to avoid the necessity to look into the camera and say, I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump

[Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson

[Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson

[Jun 01, 2020] This is one war party -- war party, imperial party of militarism, conquest and killing of civilians

[May 31, 2020] We Are Combat Vets, and We Want America to Reboot Memorial Day by Matthew Hoh and Danny Sjursen

[May 26, 2020] News Stories Avoid Naming Israel by Philip Giraldi

[May 24, 2020] Obamagate as the reaction of managerial class neoliberals on the crisis of neoliberalism

[May 24, 2020] Unable to communicate in Arabic and with no relevant experience or appropriate educational training

[May 23, 2020] China is still in great danger. Of the existing 30 or so high-tech productive chains, China only enjoys superiority at 2 or 3

[May 22, 2020] No US president who can withdraw the USA from the Forever Wars

[May 21, 2020] The 'Clean Break' Doctrine OffGuardian

[May 20, 2020] The American Mission and the Evil Empire The Crusade for a Free Russia Since 1881 by Foglesong

[May 20, 2020] McGovern Turn Out The Lights, Russiagate Is Over by Ray McGovern

[May 19, 2020] Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump

[May 17, 2020] General Flynn investigation 'has tarnished Obama's legacy' - YouTube

[May 16, 2020] Bought MSM experts typically are just MIC prostitutes: most are neocons and "Russiagaters"

[May 16, 2020] Putin's Call For A New System and the 1944 Battle Of Bretton Woods

[May 15, 2020] The Complete Collusion Against Trump Timeline

[May 13, 2020] Dramatic change of direction for Syrian envoy

[May 13, 2020] From RussiaGate To ObamaGate The End Of Boomerville by Tom Luongo

[May 11, 2020] Lee Zeldin Adam Schiff 'should resign today' for role in Russia investigation by Dominick Mastrangelo

[May 11, 2020] Twin Pillars of Russiagate Crumble by Ray McGovern

[May 10, 2020] Did the FBI target Michael Flynn to protect Obama's policies, not national security by Kevin R. Brock

[May 10, 2020] Does Obama now feels his potential liability for staging coup d' tat and gaslighting the whole nation?

[May 08, 2020] Thiefs stole from a Russian fifth column critter: NY Times Accused Of Ripping Off Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stories From Russian Journalists For 2nd Time

[May 07, 2020] Media Malpractice Is Criminalizing Better Relations With Russia by Stephen F. Cohen

[May 07, 2020] There's No Question It's A Fraud Fmr Trump Attorney Says Mueller Badly Misled White House, Schiff Is Nancy's Liar Zero

[May 07, 2020] Angry Bear " "cannot remember a single International Crisis in which the United States had no global presence at all"

[May 05, 2020] Newly released FBI documents show Israel intervened in 2016 election to help Trump

[May 05, 2020] Is there a "6th column" trying to subvert Russia, by The Saker

[May 05, 2020] UK government experince with the White Helmets and the Skripal affair definitly halps in anti-china propaganda.

[Apr 29, 2020] Trump, despite pretty slick deception during his election campaign, is an typical imperialist and rabid militarist. His administration continuredand in some areas exceeded the hostility of Obama couse against Russia

[Apr 25, 2020] Did This Virus Come From a Lab? Maybe Not But It Exposes the Threat of a Biowarfare Arms Race by Sam Husseini

[Apr 24, 2020] Please Tell the Establishment That U.S. Hegemony is Over by Daniel Larison

[Apr 22, 2020] Especially as the insane neoliberal economy we live in, we are ruled by a group of kleptocrats and vicious stooges. Which make allegations against Biden deserving a closer look but that does not make them automatically credible

[Apr 17, 2020] Declassified Horowitz Footnotes Show Obama Officials Knew Steele Dossier Was Russian Disinfo Designed To Target Trump Zero He

[Apr 17, 2020] Barr just said the Russia collusion probe was a travesty, had no basis and was intended to sabotage Trump.

[Apr 11, 2020] 'Never in my country': COVID-19 and American exceptionalism by Jeanne Morefield

[Apr 05, 2020] Esper tone deafness: a sad illustration of wildly misplaced priorities of military industrial complex

[Apr 02, 2020] Bloomberg spent north of $500 millions to become president with zero results, and you want me to believe that Russians spent 1% of that and got better results

[Apr 02, 2020] We have two discredited old parties, incapable of dealing with the crises facing them, attempting to revive the only ideas that have ever galvanised the US public in their lifetimes: opposition to communism and the racism which underlay just about every US military adventure since 1945

[Mar 28, 2020] Russians again were outsmarted by the US intelligence agencies

[Mar 28, 2020] Why You Should Never Watch RT -- Ever!

[Mar 24, 2020] This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda

[Mar 21, 2020] When reading any article concerning current events (ie. Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, or Coronavirus) consider how the The Seven Principles of Propaganda may apply

[Mar 17, 2020] DOJ drops charges against Russian trolls after they dared demand evidence in US court -- RT USA News

[Mar 13, 2020] US send 20,000 soldiers to Europe for killing practice (Defender Europe) while locking down US. Are they immune? How

[Mar 13, 2020] Daffy Duck. cartoon was made in 1953 and like many Looney Tune cartoon's, they are an extreme parody of life. It dawned on me that this cartoon is an almost perfect description of US Military policy and action.

[Mar 12, 2020] The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia by Bill Blum

[Mar 12, 2020] The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia by Bill Blum

[Mar 05, 2020] Intelligence Officials Sow Discord By Stoking Fear of Russian Election Meddling by Dave DeCamp

[Mar 04, 2020] Russiagate should be viewed as classic, textbook case of gaslighting and projecting election interference

[Mar 04, 2020] Why Are We Being Charged? Surprise Bills From Coronavirus Testing Spark Calls for Government to Cover All Costs by Jake Johnson

[Mar 03, 2020] Russia isn't backing Sanders and Trump as much as hoping for chaos

[Mar 03, 2020] Whacking Rich is a reminder to Sanders what the party establishmen is capable of

[Mar 01, 2020] Countering Nationalist Oligarchy by Ganesh Sitaraman

[Feb 29, 2020] A very interesting and though provoking presentation by Ambassador Chas Freeman "America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change"

[Feb 29, 2020] Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny. Who s Really In Charge Of The US Military by Cynthia Chung

[Feb 28, 2020] Chas Freeman America in Distress The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change

[Feb 28, 2020] Media s Deafening Silence On Latest WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal by Caitlin Johnstone

[Feb 24, 2020] Seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse by Van Badham

[Feb 23, 2020] Welcome to the American Regime

[Feb 23, 2020] Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler The Last General To Criticize US Imperialism by Danny Sjursen

[Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

[Feb 19, 2020] During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d' tat) changed sides and betrayed the working class

[Feb 19, 2020] On Michael Lind's "The New Class War" by Gregor Baszak

[Feb 16, 2020] An Illegal Assassination and the Lawless President by Daniel Larison

[Feb 14, 2020] Is Apartheid the Inevitable Outcome of Zionism? by Henry Siegman

[Feb 09, 2020] The Deeper Story Behind The Assassination Of Soleimani

[Feb 08, 2020] Is Iraq About To Switch From US to Russia

[Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

[Feb 03, 2020] White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War

[Feb 02, 2020] The most interesting issue is the role of NSC in this impeachment story

[Feb 29, 2020] A very interesting and though provoking presentation by Ambassador Chas Freeman "America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change"

[Apr 05, 2020] Esper tone deafness: a sad illustration of wildly misplaced priorities of military industrial complex

[Apr 02, 2020] We have two discredited old parties, incapable of dealing with the crises facing them, attempting to revive the only ideas that have ever galvanised the US public in their lifetimes: opposition to communism and the racism which underlay just about every US military adventure since 1945

[Apr 02, 2020] Bloomberg spent north of $500 millions to become president with zero results, and you want me to believe that Russians spent 1% of that and got better results

[Mar 28, 2020] Why You Should Never Watch RT -- Ever!

[Mar 28, 2020] Russians again were outsmarted by the US intelligence agencies

[Mar 24, 2020] This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda

[Mar 21, 2020] When reading any article concerning current events (ie. Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, or Coronavirus) consider how the The Seven Principles of Propaganda may apply

[Mar 17, 2020] DOJ drops charges against Russian trolls after they dared demand evidence in US court -- RT USA News

[Mar 13, 2020] US send 20,000 soldiers to Europe for killing practice (Defender Europe) while locking down US. Are they immune? How

[Mar 13, 2020] Daffy Duck. cartoon was made in 1953 and like many Looney Tune cartoon's, they are an extreme parody of life. It dawned on me that this cartoon is an almost perfect description of US Military policy and action.

[Mar 12, 2020] The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia by Bill Blum

[Mar 12, 2020] The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia by Bill Blum

[Mar 05, 2020] Intelligence Officials Sow Discord By Stoking Fear of Russian Election Meddling by Dave DeCamp

[Mar 04, 2020] Russiagate should be viewed as classic, textbook case of gaslighting and projecting election interference

[Mar 04, 2020] Why Are We Being Charged? Surprise Bills From Coronavirus Testing Spark Calls for Government to Cover All Costs by Jake Johnson

[Mar 03, 2020] Russia isn't backing Sanders and Trump as much as hoping for chaos

[Mar 03, 2020] Whacking Rich is a reminder to Sanders what the party establishmen is capable of

[Mar 01, 2020] Countering Nationalist Oligarchy by Ganesh Sitaraman

[Feb 29, 2020] Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny. Who s Really In Charge Of The US Military by Cynthia Chung

[Feb 28, 2020] Media s Deafening Silence On Latest WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal by Caitlin Johnstone

[Feb 28, 2020] Chas Freeman America in Distress The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change

[Feb 24, 2020] Seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse by Van Badham

[Feb 23, 2020] Welcome to the American Regime

[Feb 23, 2020] Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler The Last General To Criticize US Imperialism by Danny Sjursen

[Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

[Feb 19, 2020] During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d' tat) changed sides and betrayed the working class

[Feb 19, 2020] On Michael Lind's "The New Class War" by Gregor Baszak

[Feb 16, 2020] An Illegal Assassination and the Lawless President by Daniel Larison

[Feb 14, 2020] Is Apartheid the Inevitable Outcome of Zionism? by Henry Siegman

[Feb 09, 2020] The Deeper Story Behind The Assassination Of Soleimani

[Feb 08, 2020] Is Iraq About To Switch From US to Russia

[Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

[Feb 03, 2020] White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War

[Feb 02, 2020] The most interesting issue is the role of NSC in this impeachment story

[Jan 29, 2020] Campaign Promises and Ending Wars

[Jan 29, 2020] For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia

[Jan 24, 2020] How Are Iran and the "Axis of the Resistance" Affected by the US Assassination of Soleimani by Elijah J. Magnier

[Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie

[Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment

[Jan 24, 2020] Lawrence Wilkerson Lambasts 'the Beast of the National Security State' by Adam Dick

[Jan 20, 2020] Fake Investigations... Designed To Fool by Bryce Buchanan

[Jan 19, 2020] The frantic attempt to deflect attention from US foreign wars and mainly derisive media coverage of Tulsi Gabbard is a case in point. Is she the harbinger of a growing political movement aiming to dismantle the military empire project?

[Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world

[Jan 18, 2020] The joke is on us: Without the USSR the USA oligarchy resorted to cannibalism and devour the American people

[Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government

[Jan 14, 2020] Impeachment Of President Trump An Imperial War Game by By Barbara Boyd

[Jan 12, 2020] MIC along with Wall Street controls the government and the country

[Jan 12, 2020] Why the West Falsifies the History of World War II -- Strategic Culture

[Jan 12, 2020] US has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying.

[Jan 10, 2020] The Saker interviews Michael Hudson

[Jan 09, 2020] It looks like UK and the USA intelligences agencies run the contest to see who can come up with the most surreal anti-Russian propaganda psy-ops

[Jan 09, 2020] Opposing War With Iran: Three Reasons by Anthony DiMaggio

[Jan 08, 2020] I can't quite understand how gratuitous US piracy and adventurism in places on the globe beyond the knowledge and reach of most Americans could possibly be compared to Iranian actions securing their immediate regional borders and interests.

[Jan 08, 2020] Iraqi Journalist: Killing Soleimani "Ended An Era In Which Iran And The United States Coexisted In Iraq" by Tim Hains

[Jan 08, 2020] Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge?

[Jan 08, 2020] If we assume that Pompeo persuaded Trump to order to kill a diplomatic envoy, Trump is now a dead man walking as after Iran responce Pelosi impeachment gambit now have legs

[Jan 06, 2020] I am tired of giving Trump a free pass, just because Hillary would have been worse. Trump needs to go.

[Jan 06, 2020] How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda by Nathan J. Robinson

[Jan 06, 2020] Neocon Pompeo pushed Trump to kill Soleimani; Looks like West Point educated military contactor mafia to which Pompeo and Esper belongs controls the President, although Trump malleability and recklessness are inexcusable

[Jan 06, 2020] The Soleimani Assassination by Philip Giraldi

[Jan 06, 2020] The threat of General Soleimani - TTG

[Jan 06, 2020] Diplomacy Trump-style. Al Capone probably would be allow himself to fall that low

[Jan 05, 2020] The USA is now at war, de-facto and de-jure, with BOTH Iraq and Iran (UPDATED 6X) The Vineyard of the Saker

[Jan 05, 2020] Trump is wholly responsible for his own actions, but he -- just like the Ayatollah -- is being pushed in a direction where it's impossible to back down and still "save face". Neither men can afford to do so by Andrew Korybko

[Jan 04, 2020] American Meddling in the Ukraine by Publius Tacitus

[Jan 04, 2020] Trump Is Doing the Bidding of Washington's Most Vile Cabal

[Jan 04, 2020] Will Trump welcome the ejection of the US from Iraq - He should by Colonel Lang

[Jan 04, 2020] Talking about revenge is stupid and juvenile: Iran needs to pull back and focus on making themselves stronger in economy and technology and for strong ties with other responsible players

[Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump administration sanction companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around the arrival point.

[Dec 21, 2019] Lessons of the past: all changed in 1999 with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump comes clean from world s policeman to thug running a global protection racket by Finian Cunningham

[Dec 21, 2019] Time to Terminate Washington's Defense Welfare

[Dec 21, 2019] The Pentagon s New Map War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

[Dec 21, 2019] We are all Palestinians: possible connection between neocons and Pentagon

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

[Dec 21, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

[Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson

[Dec 20, 2019] NSA Whistleblower: "Mueller Report based on fabricated evidence" Former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says it looked like the CIA did this, and made it look like the Russians were doing the hack to implicate Russians by Eric Zuesse

[Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc

[Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

[Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

[Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

[Dec 17, 2019] Judge Denies Flynn's Requests For Exculpatory Information, Case Dismissal by Peter Svab

[Dec 17, 2019] History Doesn t Repeat, But It Often Rhymes: Wilson in UK was subjected to the similar attack by rogue elements in MI5 as Trump in the USA

[Dec 15, 2019] The infinity war - The Washington Post by Samuel Moyn, Stephen Wertheim

[Dec 14, 2019] Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation

[Dec 14, 2019] A Determined Effort to Undermine Russia

[Dec 12, 2019] Threat Inflation Poisons Our Foreign Policy by Daniel Larison

[Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.

[Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

[Dec 06, 2019] Who Is Making US Foreign Policy by Stephen F. Cohen

[Dec 04, 2019] Responding to Lt. Col. Vindman about my Ukraine columns with the facts John Solomon Reports

[Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

[Dec 04, 2019] America's War Exceptionalism Is Killing the Planet by William Astore

[Feb 28, 2020] Chas Freeman America in Distress The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change

[Jan 29, 2020] Campaign Promises and Ending Wars

[Jan 29, 2020] For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia

[Jan 24, 2020] How Are Iran and the "Axis of the Resistance" Affected by the US Assassination of Soleimani by Elijah J. Magnier

[Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie

[Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment

[Jan 24, 2020] Lawrence Wilkerson Lambasts 'the Beast of the National Security State' by Adam Dick

[Jan 20, 2020] Fake Investigations... Designed To Fool by Bryce Buchanan

[Jan 19, 2020] The frantic attempt to deflect attention from US foreign wars and mainly derisive media coverage of Tulsi Gabbard is a case in point. Is she the harbinger of a growing political movement aiming to dismantle the military empire project?

[Jan 18, 2020] The joke is on us: Without the USSR the USA oligarchy resorted to cannibalism and devour the American people

[Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government

[Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world

[Jan 14, 2020] Impeachment Of President Trump An Imperial War Game by By Barbara Boyd

[Jan 12, 2020] MIC along with Wall Street controls the government and the country

[Jan 12, 2020] Why the West Falsifies the History of World War II -- Strategic Culture

[Jan 12, 2020] US has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying.

[Jan 10, 2020] The Saker interviews Michael Hudson

[Jan 09, 2020] It looks like UK and the USA intelligences agencies run the contest to see who can come up with the most surreal anti-Russian propaganda psy-ops

[Jan 09, 2020] Opposing War With Iran: Three Reasons by Anthony DiMaggio

[Jan 08, 2020] I can't quite understand how gratuitous US piracy and adventurism in places on the globe beyond the knowledge and reach of most Americans could possibly be compared to Iranian actions securing their immediate regional borders and interests.

[Jan 08, 2020] Iraqi Journalist: Killing Soleimani "Ended An Era In Which Iran And The United States Coexisted In Iraq" by Tim Hains

[Jan 08, 2020] Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge?

[Jan 08, 2020] If we assume that Pompeo persuaded Trump to order to kill a diplomatic envoy, Trump is now a dead man walking as after Iran responce Pelosi impeachment gambit now have legs

[Jan 06, 2020] Diplomacy Trump-style. Al Capone probably would be allow himself to fall that low

[Jan 06, 2020] I am tired of giving Trump a free pass, just because Hillary would have been worse. Trump needs to go.

[Jan 06, 2020] How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda by Nathan J. Robinson

[Jan 06, 2020] Neocon Pompeo pushed Trump to kill Soleimani; Looks like West Point educated military contactor mafia to which Pompeo and Esper belongs controls the President, although Trump malleability and recklessness are inexcusable

[Jan 06, 2020] The Soleimani Assassination by Philip Giraldi

[Jan 06, 2020] The threat of General Soleimani - TTG

[Jan 05, 2020] The USA is now at war, de-facto and de-jure, with BOTH Iraq and Iran (UPDATED 6X) The Vineyard of the Saker

[Jan 05, 2020] Trump is wholly responsible for his own actions, but he -- just like the Ayatollah -- is being pushed in a direction where it's impossible to back down and still "save face". Neither men can afford to do so by Andrew Korybko

[Jan 04, 2020] American Meddling in the Ukraine by Publius Tacitus

[Jan 04, 2020] Trump Is Doing the Bidding of Washington's Most Vile Cabal

[Jan 04, 2020] Will Trump welcome the ejection of the US from Iraq - He should by Colonel Lang

[Jan 04, 2020] Talking about revenge is stupid and juvenile: Iran needs to pull back and focus on making themselves stronger in economy and technology and for strong ties with other responsible players

[Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma

Sites



Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotesSomerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose BierceBernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOSProgramming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC developmentScripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-MonthHow to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D


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Last modified: July, 29, 2021