The ban against domestic propaganda that had been in place since shortly after WW2 was
repealed in 2013. It was known as the Smith-Mundt Act. As part of the repeal, NDAA authorized
a huge grant program for NGOs, think tanks, civil society and other experts outside
government who are engaged in "counter-propaganda" related work. Sounds like doublespeak for
censorship and support for "fake news." I hope Glenn will investigate and connect the dots
some day.
omg. I read the whole article...and I'm not really that smart.
Best line: " ...but in journalism, evidence is required before news outlets can validly
start blaming some foreign government for the release of information. And none has ever been
presented."
Four years ago I was railing against Hillary Clinton on Facebook without any
censoring.
Tonight I watched an interview Tucker Carlson did with Glenn Greenwald regarding the
Hunter Biden/Joe Biden scandal and Tucker showed a poll revealing that 51% of those polled
believe this scandal is "Russian Disinformation" with ZERO evidence.
Why do those being polled believe this? Because the bulk of the MSM they watch have told
them so and the major tech platforms have ALL censored the pertinent information so there is
NO debate amongst the electorate. All of this less than one week from our national
election.
With Facebook and Twitter and Google's and the bulk of the MSM's heavy fingers on the
scales of public information there are only two words to describe this:
ELECTION INTERFERENCE.
And this with over 70 million voters already having cast their ballots!
Regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, these tech/media corporations should ALL be
brought down at least to the point where they can never be allowed to interfere in another
American election again, regardless of the higher-ups personal political preferences.
And this is the system the war-mongering DNC wants to "spread around the world" with their
"regime change wars"?!
Stephanie, why do you want Trump gone? Trump is bait. His presence is resulting in many,
many bad actors revealing themselves to be nefarious. Just look at Twitter/Facebook censoring
this blockbuster news (along with the rest of the media). We, The People, are finally seeing
first had the level of tyranny that's upon us. None of it has anything to do with Trump. But
it's Trump's existence in the White House that is bringing it to light. Without him, we would
have never seen it for what it is. Think about that.
I may disagree with your take on CIA involvement, but the above paragraph couldn't be more
accurate. Trump's election was like throwing a brick through a rotten, wasp-infested
beehive.
I'll second that. Though perhaps to be fair to the original sentiment, perhaps the brick has
only knicked the beehive, and then smashed a window or two along it's way. He is arguably
inevitable, even desirable from some perspective, but the degree of nuisance is not erased, so
much as outweighed, by the necessity. We would be living in a better world, by definition, if
someone like him had never been required to improve it.
Agreed. I have been telling Democrats all they need do is run better candidates - and
virtually every time, I get people trying to claim there was never anything wrong with Hillary
or Joe and also Trump is Literally Hitler Incarnate.
I grew up watching psychos in the Extreme Right talk that way about whoever THEY didn't like
politically. Arguing that Bill Clinton was going to send Janet Reno to take their guns and cart
them off to FEMA camps like a scene out of "Red Dawn" or something. But this isn't the fringes
talking anymore. It's the mainstream, and it's on the Left.
Glen, I just paid for a subscription so that I can say this one FACT. The PODESTA EMAILS
WERE NOT THE RESULT OF A HACK.
Please stop reporting this nonsense. The cover story was all part of the plan (approved by
HRC) to shift attention to a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that has always been fiction.
Guccifer 2.0 was created out of this same scheme. The meta data on the files prove that it's
impossible that those emails were hacked, they had to be downloaded on a local device
(thumbdrive most likely).
The FISA Abuse, the spying on Trump, The plan to implicate collusion, the Flynn frameup,
the Impeachment, The Mueller investigation were not the base crimes, those were all part of a
cover up. By you insinuating that the DNC server got hacked (which there is zero evidence
for), you are wittingly or unwittingly complicit in perpetuating the lie that it was. You're
missing a much, much bigger story here. The biden laptop isn't even the tip of the icebeg
here.
Ask yourself this; "Why would dozens of high level DOJ, FBI, CIA and Whitehouse officials
in the Obama Administration put their careers on the line and commit literally hundreds of
felonies all in an effort to obstruct/neutralize Trump?" That is first question any true
journo should be asking right now.
You mention in this article that the media is basically over-compensating for helping Trump
win in 2016. That is extremely naive on your part. The media/twitter/facebook/CNN/MSNBC, etc.
is too well orchestrated, too well coordinated to be operating even vaguely independently. This
is project Mockingbird happening on a scale almost unimaginable. Maybe even the Intercept was
intercepted. Why would the publication that you founded not allow you to publish this? If you
look back at 2016, the entire media industrial complex was just as coordinated as it is now,
they just got sloppy because they were certain Trump wasn't going to win. Who's being naive now
Kay?
I also get frustrated with what I see as a naive interpretation, by figures like Dan
Bongino, Tim Pool, etc. I wonder if there is a fear by some to point behind the curtain, that
they will be attacked and cancelled for "conspiracy theories."
Neither Tim or Dan are really journalists and besides, this story is so massive and so
incomprehensibly large in scope/scale/magnitude that we shouldn't get too frustrated.
The main point to remember here is that none of this has anything to do with Trump. Look at
the timeline in its entirety, the best we are able to do and then plot a graph of the Media
Industrial Complex's behavior. They were out to derail Trump from the moment he came down the
escalator and it's not because he's a womanizer or that he's a game show host. They couldn't
afford to have an non-establishment player come in and wreck their plans. The question is, what
the f#$% were their plans? Why did they risk so much to keep him out of the WH?
My view is that the constant sturm und drang about the corruption of the elections (voter
suppression, mail fraud, ballot harvesting, etc, etc) is a ploy to distract from the fact that
the real corruption already happened long before the election.
The real corruption is even mentioned by Glenn in his draft: the SELECTION process.
The media do what they're told, and what they are doing is keeping up the drumbeat of
election corruption. In other words, they've been told to distract all attention from the real
story.
The real story is that, to the people who control candidate selection, IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO
WINS.
That is the whole point of controlling the selection process. Oh yes, I know the media hates
Trump and so do the establishment. Really? The same establishment that just benefitted from the
greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history, during a pandemic panic, under Trump?
Bezos has gained over 70 billion in net worth this year, under Trump. You think he hates Trump?
Really?
You think Biden will do less? Or perhaps you think he would do more than the greatest upward
transfer of wealth in human history?
Republicans versus Democrats is a con game. It's a kabuki theatre of manipulation of
parochial tribalism, a Punch n Judy Show for the rubes.
As was once mentioned in the UT threads at Salon, isn't it time for a second political
party, Mr Greenwald?
It's not about their plans. It's just a non-violent (so far) class war. Trump is a vessel
for the working classes to carry their dissatisfaction of elite leadership. It's easier to
communicate directly to the people now due to social media, so the traditional media can't tell
the people how to vote (can't declare a candidate to be beyond the pale any more, squashing
their chances, and they used to have that power). The media are part of the elite leadership,
they don't like the working classes not listening to them, and they don't like the loss of
power. That's their agenda.
They have taken to "any means necessary" to keep that power, even though now it's basically
lying and obfuscation. They are trading off their legacy trustworthiness for short term
benefit, but they are destroying that foundation of trust as well. That happens slowly but
surely as more people see through them. Takes too long in the experience of everyone who is
reading this, because we're well ahead of the curve. The average mid level elite is a working
professional with kids too busy and not interested enough to dig to the next level and has been
taking their word - but they too see the truth every time they really look and over time that
is going to go as we all hope it will. It's just going to take a while.
"The guy who co-founded one of the current-day major online journalism outlets isn't really
a journalist" - Someone Posting to the Comments on an Article by a Guy Who Co-Founded One of
the Current-Day Major Online Journalism Outlets
There is good cause to question the Snowden story. He was CIA. Once a CIA agent, always a
CIA agent. It's plausible that he was inserted into booz allen hamilton in an attempt to harm
the NSA (on behalf of the CIA). Tell me this Glen, how did Snowden evade the largest
dragnet/manhunt ever on the planet to evade the authorities and make it to Moscow? Am I the
only one who finds this a little fishy? As someone who has been in software for 40 years, when
I heard him on Joe Rogan podcast about a year ago, I didn't find his backstory credible at all.
He sounds intelligent, but when you get beyond that and listen to him from a technological
perspective, his story doesn't add up. I find it hard to believe.
Why would a "patriot" doing work on behalf of the CIA be thrown to the wolves? Why wouldn't
they cover for him after it was released? I haven't been in software for 40 years, but I
believe that the Snowden story is extremely credible.
Snowden was a libertarian high school dropout hacker
The Deep State hired 800,000 employees/contractors around the Beltway after 9/11 on a war
footing, so anyone that was seen as clean and patriotic may not have needed a lot of standard
credentials by the usual bureaucratic managerial idiot types working for the Feds
I've been told that military field grade IT is all from the 1990s, dunno about national
security agencies, but unless you have actually worked with national security IT stuff I'm not
sure why your views should hold much weight
Senior people I know in the military and national security apparatus have told me that
corruption, waste and inefficiency are rampant (80-90%?)
Sorry, but I've heard that "anything CIA is automatically X" way too many times in my life.
Often from people trying to sell books about how we never landed on the Moon (you'd be amazed
how many ex-[alphabet agency] agents "back up" these claims with the worst sort of
pseudo-authoritative malarkey).
Hah! They "helped" Trump by running two billion dollars' worth of 95% negative coverage. It
made Trump look like the victim of a massive smear campaign by partisan hacks. What have they
been doing to "over-compensate", exactly? Make it 99%?
Whether or not they helped Trump, Greenwald's article claimst that journalists feel
responsible for Trump being elected last time so they are trying not to make the same
'mistake'. At least that's what Glenn is asserting here.
They're not wrong. They helped elect him with their sheer negativity. I've seen these people
argue the point, and they always point the finger at other journalists somehow NOT being
negative enough. It's never themselves.
So there's no collective soul-searching going on, no self-awareness, only a drive to be
angrier and finger-wagging with less concern for the actual facts of any given matter. They
don't realize how transparent it's become for those not already personally invested in the
extant narratives.
This, I think, is why we are seeing many more people defect to Trump rather than away from
him; when one is personally and deeply invested in a narrative, it's an article of faith.
Imagine you walk into church one day and the pastor says "this just in: the Archangel Gabriel
was a child molestor who felt up Baby Jesus". Next week, they accuse the Virgin Mary of the
same. Would a member of the faithful just roll with that, or consider moving to another church
altogether just to avoid the emotional whiplash?
More to the point, the head of Crowdstrike, the company run by a known Russia-hater the
Democrats sent their server to instead of the FBI, and who never provided that server to the
FBI, admitted in a Senate hearing that there was, in fact, no evidence of hacking. He was under
oath that time. Russiagate remains one of the most successful propaganda campaign in
history.
Just before or just after Trump's 2016 election I was in a Manhattan restaurant with my
domestic partner talking with strangers from DC. It turned out that they worked in the State
Dept. and they told us that since Trump questioned the veracity of some things the intelligence
establishment had said, they would absolutely bring him down. We were shocked but have
remembered this throughout the FISA debacle,the Mueller mess,the impeachment and this election
cycle.
Right. Thank you. I wrote to Matt T. about this same issue in his article. I'm hoping they
will do the investigation required for them to amend their articles. It really is a fundamental
mistake to perpetuate this propaganda.
It's literally in the Mueller report that the DNC server was hacked, without a shred of
evidence. As Fox Mulder said "Trust No One". Matt & Glen really need to get to the point
where they chuck everything they think they know and start over. Everything has been a lie. Why
would anyone believe ANYTHING the FBI or DOJ of Obama WH put out at this point? The MSM has no
credibility, FBI/DOJ/CIA? This cancer has metasticized to the point where the patient is on
life support.
We need to understand that Trump is Chemo. It takes an outsider to come in, someone who
didn't need this job, someone who couldn't be bought, to come in and kill that cancer.
Just to offer some confirmation for that, Here is a CNN article from the time: "A phishing
email sent to Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta may have been so sophisticated
that it fooled the campaign's own IT staffers, who at one point advised him it was a legitimate
warning to change his password."
However, they also report that the link was from " [email protected] ." I searched
for whether that email address had been reported as malicious on the day that the story broke.
Far from being "sophisticated", it was just a phishing link that was going around randomly, and
had already been reported to this spam reporting site:
So, despite (much of) the media converging on a "sophisticated spear phishing" narrative,
this looks to be a link that was sent to a large number of people over a long period, and just
a case of random spam phishing that got lucky.
re: "so sophisticated that it fooled the campaign's own IT staffers"
I'm not a google mail user, but in general it is pretty rare for a phishing email to NOT
have extended headers (server route log) that reveal a bogus or weird looking origin.
"Alleging" would be more accurate. They've been acting quite more brazenly as a
misinfo/disinfo arm of the DNC. Whether or not the DNC has deep enough connections with the CIA
to provide a useful and reliable data/policy bridge is another question, but both DNC and GOP
likely have enough connections to establish semi-functional "lamprey" networks just due to
their longevity and resulting personal/professional contacts therein.
Hi Frank. " The PODESTA EMAILS WERE NOT THE RESULT OF A HACK.
Please stop reporting this nonsense. The cover story was all part of the plan (approved by
HRC) to shift attention to a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that has always been fiction.
Guccifer 2.0 was created out of this same scheme. The meta data on the files prove that it's
impossible that those emails were hacked, they had to be downloaded on a local device
(thumbdrive most likely)."
Based on the forensics that was my conclusion but beware of these rabbit holes. It has never
been discussed that those details can also be faked (the meta data.) Certainly Gucifer which
seemed like damage control. I am unsure of the claims about his being backtracked tho.
So it's possible that the evidence is faked having accepted the conclusions of VIPS
analysts.
Could be. It would also mean that it was the first time Wikileaks published something that
wasn't authentic. Assange knows where the emails came from and he asserted that they didn't
come from Russia.
Note to all: You must use actual (historical) ISP speeds as of the specific months in
question. They increased a good deal in the months that followed in that area.
I agree that there was a massive fake Russia story created by GPS Fusion, the Clinton
campaign, Clinton allies, with the help of US intelligence, often willing and sometimes just
incompetent.
But there is definitely some evidence of a DNC hack. Among other things, the Dutch
intelligence services seem to have observed evidence in their spying on the Internet Research
Agency - reported by mutliple sources including Dutch media. What the nature of the hack was
and how it gibes with the evidence that there must have been a person on the ground to transfer
the data files that fast is of course fair to discuss.
There is also evidence, both purposely forgotten in media coverage after Jan 2017, of an
attempted RNC hack and the overt public hack and release of Colin Powell's email to embarass
and hurt Trump. There is plenty of other evidence of Internet Research Agency activity that was
pro-BLM and anti-Trump, making their more likely overall goal the sowing of chaos than only
supporting Trump. Thus the need for GPS/Clintonistas/Intelligence/Mueller's team to spin a
narrative.
I became a fan of yours when I was in law school at UC Hastings in 2003. Your the best, for
sure. But fuck...
I got to be honest...I'm glad the press is ignoring this story. There's just too much at
stake. Biden might be losing his edge, his family might be trading in his name, but who gives a
shit? The alternative is worse by light years.
And yeah, I don't trust the "people" out there to get it right. The "people" are rubes.
Those idiots voted for this piece of shit once before, they'll do it again, in a heartbeat.
More importantly, you really want to do Rudy Giuliani's work for him? I don't know, I don't
get it...why so eager to make the campaign's case for them? It's not a rhetorical question. I
just don't get it.
Alex: you are saying that we should not have independent press, that the media ought to be
agents of propaganda, consciously decieving the public for the greater good.
Maybe Biden is the lesser evil in this election. But without actual journalists like Glenn
we could never know.
I get the frustrations over Trump. He is a disaster. But the answer to that disaster does
not concist in advocating for more lies and propaganda.
I have yet to hear a reasonable case for Trump being either the greater evil or a disaster.
Many of the allegations against Trump have remained that - allegations - but in Biden's case
some of the same accusations (particular about racism) is in his Senate record. He was a
terrible candidate to position against Trump, and he picked as his veep the only person in the
entire primary season to get blown out by a single phrase from Tulsi Gabbard - who the rest of
the party's establishment absolutely despised because Hillary said so.
With Trump? Roaring economy brought to a halt not even by coronavirus, but massive economic
lockdowns that break the economy down to virtually Blue-State (down) / Red-State (up)
comparisons. Democrats were accusing Trump of "meddling" when he was still a candidate and
nonetheless pressured a Detroit factory into staying in the US. The man understands economic
leverage, and to ignore or deny that is like denying the Sun heats the Earth.
Three Middle East peace deals leading to an equal number of Nobel nominations. He is roasted
for de-escalating international tensions, lauded only when he fires missiles at nations
Democrats think need shooting at, and then castigated for killing a terrorist leader in the
same nation they were cheering him for firing missiles at.
I see very little criticism of Trump that isn't associated with bald-faced party-based
opposition, from establishment Republicans who hated his cockblocking of JEB BUSH FOR GODSAKE
to Democrats who still think Hillary's shit job as Secretary of State (ruining more nations
than Trump has cut peace deals for) is beyond reproach.
Speaking as a lifetime independent, please: the naked, incessant and baseless fury
demonstrated by Democrats and the Radical Left since 2016 has NOT been a selling point for
us.
Biden has been credibly accused of actually pinning a staffer against the wall and stuffing
his fingers up her vagina. The media didn't attack her story, but her college credentials, and
dumped the story after.
Biden has actually authored racist legislation and in recent years spoke of "being able to
work across the aisle" - with racist segregationists.
Trump's been merely ACCUSED of a shit-ton of things. But I don't join lynch-mobs. Same
reason the lynching of Justice Kavanaugh (seriously, you guys went after him over "I like beer"
and school calendars you had to try and reinterpret as codebooks?) made me see the Democratic
Party as a progressively more lunatic outfit. Reducing impeachment to "who needs criminal
charges? we really just hate the guy" wasn't a winner with us independents either, not just
speaking for myself there.
A pox on both your damned parties, and thank Trump for being that pox.
Gee Alex, elitist much? You don't like Trump so the people making an informed choice is not
a worthy goal? Anyone who disagrees with your world view is a rube who is not smart enough to
see the light - as defined by you? And you wonder why Trump won last time. The left is
populated by arrogant asses who think because they came out of college with a degree in some
worthless major, they are smarter than everyone else. Well, I went to college to but got a
degree in engineering vice sociology but I guess I'm just an educated rube.
Your law school tuition dollars were clearly wasted. Most of the people/rubes/idiots I know
and love learned the difference between "your" and "you're" in high school - and acquired
critical thinking skills at the same time. Too bad you missed out.
Yeah, we the people (rubes) are fn sick of the fn lawyers (especially from UC Hastings)
being in political control of our country and want a non-political person to clean up. What's
so hard for you to understand?
How's your guy doing you fucking rube? Great choice! Job well done!! If you ever wonder why
nobody gives a shit about your opinion, the fact that you chose a fucking reality star who ran
every business he ever owned into the ground, and fancies a bizarre hairdo, that's why no one
cares what you say. You're fucking stupid.
bahahahahaha...go crawl back into your fucking prol shit hole dwelling and latch onto
Tucker's teat. You're a fucking joke and always will be, no matter how special your dear leader
makes you feel.
Our local sanitation workers are much more thoughtful and respectful actually. I am voting
for Biden but I find this lawyer's response detestable. We need to grow up and stop with ad
hominem attacks that do nothing to advance the discussion.
Morals and ethics obviously mean nothing to a lawyer. If this was Don Jr, you would be out
for blood. As an independent voter, I want to know that I'm not voting for a piece of shit that
has been compromised by the Russians and Chinese! People like you, the FAKE NEWS media, and
antifa, etc are a major reason why I won't ever give my vote to Biden!
Elitists like Alex G. made the election of Donald Trump as president both inevitable and
necessary. The more he disses the "people" aka "rubes," the more President Trump's re-election
becomes equally inevitable and necessary. To borrow from Sen. Ted Cruz's exchange with Twitter
CEO Jack Dorsey, "Who the hell made Alex G. the final authority on how and what people should
think, say and do?"
One thing we know for sure is Alex G. never learned any humility or manners growing up. To
substantiate this, he stands condemned out of his own mouth. Last thing this country needs is
to have an authoritarian demagogue like him anywhere near the levers of power.
Please go back and fact check the old stories that made us hate Trump in the first place.
They've proven to be lies. He isn't perfect, but Biden will destroy this country. He's beyond
corrupt. Go look at the source materials.
Arrogant, smug D party loyalist goons and assholes like you are a very large part of why
people voted for Trump in 2016 and will vote for him in this election. T-R-0-L-L
I believe in the democratic system. The people may make mistakes, but so can anyone else. An
average of all the people is more accurate than randomly picking subsets of people to make
decisions. You say that you and your friends are not a random subset, you are better than
average. Your opponents say the same thing. We have a system for resolving these disputes.
Maybe you can invent a better one, but "I'm right and my opponents are wrong" is not a new
approach.
In answer to your "Why" question, perhaps Mr. Greenwald believes the same thing.
Glenn - new subscriber today (saw you with Tucker Carlson). As a conservative voter, I
support your new venture, not because your story is critical or suspicious of Biden, but
because we need more talented journalists willing to just investigate possible corruption and
inform the public. I also support Matt Taibbi for the same reason. The last line of your
article sums it up best for me.
"The whole point is that the press loses its way when it cares more about who benefits from
information than whether it's true."
Good luck, I hope you find this new path rewarding professionally and financially.
Agreed, I also like reading Quillette for it's equal publication of articles (they printed
that big article from the Environmentalist who demonized Environmentalism after he was banned
from his original publisher), and I also like reading Sharyl Attkisson as well.
I find it interesting how Glenn sees all the propoganda from these agencies in the media,
but fails to see the full extent of it in social media and therefore is unable to report on it
adequately. The DNC server hack is more of the same.
I paid for a subscription precisely because I believe that, despite what you may or may not
personally believe, you don't allow it to influence your pursuit of the truth. I want the truth
- nothing less and nothing more.
I just signed up, too, for that very reason. When those in positions of power put on a mask
and practice deception, they must be exposed. Sunlight is the cure for the disease of
corruption.
Personally, having read your work going back to Cato Institute and Volokh, I'm happy you're
independent and I can directly fund you. I'm willing to throw even more money at your projects.
Consider crowdfunding video documentary teams and other large projects. Your following after
all of this is going to be as large as ever.
I've supported him here as well because I think he is an important voice right now. There
are few journos out there right now who have Glenn's credibility who are willing to take on
media groupthink. But it is a tough environment. With NYT offering their digital for 4$ a month
that gives access to all of their writers/content, it is very difficult for writers like Glenn
to compete.
If this is humor, this is very dark humor. The saddest thing of all in this is that very
little of Glenn's excellent article is new. One of Donald Trump's presidency greatest
accomplishment has been to show me how the main stream media 'plays' its dirty games... The
entire mainstream media collectively abandoned its integrity during the last decade.
It's beyond what Orwell could have ever possibly imagined. Targeted gaslighting on an
individual basis using social media to brainwash people into believing whatever they want you
to believe?
I just paid for an annual subscription out of a total frustration with the current
outrageous, unfair, evil and dishonest media situation in the US (and elsewhere also).
Totalitarism is approaching and I have decided to participate in the fight against the
threatening darkness. Good luck.
"... I hope you don't mind me opining that the story as written is most likely to be a complete fiction, designed to hide the real source of the fantasy story book that is the Steele dossier. The main mission here being to admit that the dossier was indeed a pack of lies but with the important corollary that J Steele did indeed do some sort of research to dig up the dirt on Trump. Heaven forbid that it ever was discovered that himself, Pablo Miller and Sergei Skripal made the whole thing up over a meal of Zizzi's garlic bread and risotto, washed down with white wine and a bottle of Vodka over at the Mill. ..."
After more than four years of Russiagate we finally learn (paywalled
original ) where the Steele dossier allegations about nefarious relations between Trump and Russia came from:
A Wall Street Journal investigation provides an answer: a 40-year-old Russian public-relations executive named Olga Galkina
fed notes to a friend and former schoolmate who worked for Mr. Steele. The Journal relied on interviews, law-enforcement records,
declassified documents and the identification of Ms. Galkina by a former top U.S. national security official.
In 2016, Ms. Galkina was working in Cyprus at an affiliate of XBT Holding SA, a web-services company best known for its
Webzilla internet hosting unit. XBT is owned by Russian internet entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev.
That summer, she received a request from an employee of Mr. Steele to help unearth potentially compromising information
on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump 's links to Russia, according to people familiar with the matter. Ms. Galkina was
friends with the employee, Igor Danchenko, since their school days in Perm, a Russian provincial city near the Ural mountains.
Ms. Galkina often came drunk to work and eventually got fired by her company. She took revenge by alleging that the company
and its owner Gubarev were involved in the alleged hacking of the Democratic National Committee. A bunch of other false allegations
in the dossier were equally based on Ms. Galkina's fantasies.
So the Steele Dossier that kicked off 4 years of Russiagate hysteria among the US ruling class was cooked up by two Russian
alcoholics from Perm. "Gogolesque" does not begin to describe the grotesque credulity & stupidity of the American elites.
The tales in the dossier were real disinformation from Russians but not '
Russian disinformation ' of the
American Newspeak variant.
The FBI, and others involved, knew very early on that the Steele dossier was a bunch of lies. But the issue was kept in the
public eyes by continues leaks of additional nonsense. All this was to press Trump to take more and more anti-Russian measures
which he did with
unprecedented generosity . The accusations about a Trump-Russia connection were the 'Russia bad' narrative that pressed and
allowed Trump to continue the anti-Russian policies of the Obama/Biden administration.
A similar string of continuous policies from the Obama/Biden administration's 'Pivot to Asia' and throughout the four years
of Trump is the anti-China campaign.
We now hear a lot about Hunter and Joe Biden's
corrupt deals with Chinese entities. These accusations come with more evidence and are far more plausible than the stupid
Steele dossier claims. Their importance is again twofold. They will be used to press a potential President Joe Biden to act against
China but they will primarily be used to intensify a public anti-China narrative that creates public support for such policies.
I don't know how or at what level, but we are being played. A narrative is being aggressively rammed down our throats about
China in
exactly the same way it was being aggressively rammed down our throats about Russia four years ago;
two unabsorbed
nations
the US government has long had
plans to attack and undermine .
Russiagate was never really about Trump. It was never about his campaign staff meeting with Russians, it was never about a
pee tape, it was never about an investigation into any kind of hidden loyalties to the Kremlin. Russiagate was about
narrative managing the United States into a new cold war with Russia with
the ultimate target being its far more powerful ally China, and ensuring that Trump played along with that agenda.
...
If Biden gets in we can expect the same thing: a president who advances escalations against both Russia and China
while being accused of the other party of being soft on China. Both parties will have their foot on the gas toward brinkmanship
with a nuclear-armed nation, with no one's foot anywhere near the brakes.
""Gogolesque" does not begin to describe the grotesque credulity & stupidity of the American elites."
Not at all. The "elites" know what's going on; it's being done for their benefit, after all. It's the "normals" who are being
sheared of the little wool left on our backs. Just one more true grand larceny before the whole thing falls apart. And for this
we need a real enemy. From the great Antiwar.com:
It's like living in a "B" movie. Probably many of the same sorts of people behind it too. The lack of imagination and knowledge
in these propaganda narratives tells you a lot about the mediocrities behind them. In considering these US foreign policy excesses,
real and imagined, I keep thinking at some point reality is going to raise its ugly head and Washington will collapse in a puddle
of spite. I expect the next adminstration to be overwhelmed by its domestic problems, along with quite a few other countries.
I look at what is going on in Western societies today and I think of the movie Brazil.
I think this stuff will matter more if Trump wins than if Biden wins. (I'm thinking 3:2 odds in favor of Biden, by the way).
If Biden wins, Republicans will make a lot of noise, but that's about it. Without a huge majority of Congress, they can't do
even what little token effects Democrats had to "stop Trump". Then, whenever Harris takes over, she can just distance herself
from the whole thing.
If Trump wins, however, the flag humpers in the administration will have the ammunition they need in the fight over Russiagate.
Not to shut it down, but to take control of it for their own political ends, and perhaps take down someone famous in the media
and intimidate the rest - in a replay of the post-9/11 Bush era (not that it ever stopped). So you can thank Democrats for handing
them the setup to do all that, not to mention for nominating Biden, if that is the path we take.
More realistically, Trump still loses, but Dems might fail to get an effective majority in the Senate (something like a 51-49
majority might not be enough in practice, because the most conservative Democrats in the Senate vote Republican half the time.).
Again it makes no difference for foreign policy, but it could really change how the country responds to economic hardship, now
baked in due to the virus.
The MIC needs a Cold War to boost military expenditure. The bigger the boogeyman the more money will be spent the more profits
will be generated.
They don't want a hot war as all those profits are meaningless if you are reduced to ashes.
The last thing the MIC can afford is for peace and goodwill amongst nations to break out. There is absolutely no profit in
that.
Eisenhower warned against the rise of the MIC for this very reason. If war is profitable then to keep generating more profits
you need to keep on generating more wars.
Trump proposed to ally with Russia against China. MAGA clearly implies the US was, is weakening, one way out (classical) is
to ally (perhaps only lightly) with one of the other two strong powers. This was total anathema to part of the PTB, mostly represented
(officially) by Dems. An all-out attack on Trump thus took place (before he was elected, because all was known) as a stooge for
Russia, etc. Russia 3x, Russiagate, all of it clumsily made-up rubbish.
Surely now with Hunter's lap-top and the exposé of Biden-China ties (pay to play at the highest level, potentially billions,
not minor corruption chicken-sh*t..) it is possible to grasp that one faction of what some call the Deep State is more pro-China
i.e. the aspirations towards that type of society (I leave that aspect aside ..) and the opportunities for money extraction /
deals - see tech etc. / also sales (MIC, etc.) favor China. The noise about Chinese incursions (Tibet, sea.. etc.), Chinese human-rights
violations (Uighurs, etc.), and the OBOR initiative have always been somewhat glancing more pro-forma than anything else..
It was the 'Dem' faction of the duopoly, Obiman + Biden who 'did' Ukraine, an anti-Russian move (on the face of it. Perhaps
it was just an extraction scheme, Mafia style. Of course they had the keen involvement of Germany and support from France.)
I have boiled down complex issues to just one "narrative arc", a simplification if you will, I am aware there is much more
to it all
Question. There is a well-know board on which sit, amongst many others:
Mary T. Barra (CEO Gen. Mot.)
Carlos Ghosn (Renault etc.)
H. Kruger (BMW)
Elon Musk
Henry Paulson
Lloyd Blankfein
Laurence Fink (Blackrock)
M. L. Corbat (Citigroup)
Tim Cook
Michael Dell (Dell co.)
S. Nadella (Microsoft)
IMO, the current Imperial policy goals of the Outlaw US Empire will continue regardless who wins. IMO, the ultimate question is
if the Empire has enough power to continue on its current track. As most know, I see a drowning empire trying to disrupt the rapid
rise of two strategically bound nations and those allied with them. China just finished planning and publishing its 14th 5-year
plan. This Global Times editorial is supremely
confidant for good reason:
"The fifth plenary session of the 19th CPC Central Committee is leading the country forward. China has the capital and ability
to do so. In this turbulent world, the meeting has provided a practical and significant guide for our direction, goal and tactics.
Despite the many problems, China's political philosophy can constantly generate positive energy to solve the problems, instead
of letting the problems crush positive energy.
"At the moment, China is facing the most problems and challenges. However, the country is also the most confident now. Other
countries have posed many difficulties, but they provide reference and proof that we are doing better . As the world suffers
from shrinking demand and negative growth, we are demanding real and comprehensive growth to realize new achievements in six areas.
The country is self-driven ." [My Emphasis]
It's been announced that "The 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) will hold a press conference Friday
to introduce the guiding principles of its fifth plenary session."
As for Russia's direction, that was very clearly mapped out by Putin and Lavrov's recent Valdai Club speeches and Q & A sessions
and other interviews over the past ten days or so. Compared to the drowning Outlaw US Empire, China and Russia combine to offer
the world two not so different examples that are clearly superior to Neoliberal Parasitism. And the longstanding Imperial edict
of the Outlaw US Empire saying no threat of a better example can be allowed to exist forms the basis for the confrontation. However,
it's no longer just China and Russia that provide such threats as a majority of the world's nations want to join Win-Win and scupper
Zero-sum. So the already joined contest between two differing ideological blocs will escalate until the drowning Outlaw US Empire
finds it no longer possess the power to dominate outside its borders, but will still have its domestic populace to exploit until
they too revolt.
The similarities are there, except that Trump's investigation had not one document of compromat even after 3 years, whilst Biden's
already has many from day 1.
Yes, the deepstate attacks Russia from the left, and China from the right, but this does not imply that members of the body
politic are not subservient to either side, ever.
Only that Trump was never a Russian stooge, nor did they ever hold compromising documents over him, whilst Biden seems the
Cleon of the modern age, that his business partners say he is. Is this compromat? Maybe, but at the very least this is graft.
And that should be enough to send him into the gutter.
This is a good report as is usually the case here at MoA. Yet, there is nothing really new in this at all other than the details
of how the Western empire goes about enforcing its will on the world.
Sense August 6, 1945 the Imperial policy has been "Global full spectrum domination." and to that end it was determined that Russia
and China were to be considered one enemy and must be attacked simultaneously.
In the 75 years sense that date when the Western empire declared the world belonged to it and it alone to rule the Western empire
has slaughtered innocent people across the globe tens of millions of them, additionally in the last 20 years alone the Western
empire has displaced over 37 million people, kicked them out of their homes destroyed their towns and communities. For 75 years
non stop slaughter of innocent people.
Western Liberal Democracy and indeed Western civilization itself is an utter and contemptible failure irredeemable in any form
which we might recognize as "democracy'
Why do media corporations put out remake after remake of popular movies? Is it because they lack imagination, or is it that
audiences prefer the familiar.
They use the same war propaganda time after time because the audience falls for it more easily if they've heard it before.
I agree with Michael, however, that we are in dire planetary straits at this point.
Apparently, our ruling overlords are putting in a Hail Mary plan to slow down the destruction of the ecosystem. I don't believe
that it is the virus that made them screech the brakes on the global economy back in March. They have a plan to reset and scale
back consumption.
We all knew it couldn't last forever, anyway, right?
I'm not so sure about the overall conclusions, instead I'm sidetracked by the attempt to whitewash Russiagate. I guess they
finally figured out they had to come up with some kind of lame excuse to brush it off.
"It wasn't me! It was some crazy drunk Russian woman from Perm! She was angry!"
Well that explains everything. They must have been so scared :D
Because that's what people do when they get fired isn't it? Instead of getting a new job (or drinking a bit more, or sliding
down the slippery slope of society) they make up and tell stories about politicians in other countries. Not to blackmail anyone,
oh no, only to try to tarnish the reputation of the old boss to get revenge. Stuff like this is why watching soap operas (including
"Friends") is bad for you :)
"We need a scapegoat but we don't have any good ones available right now, however someone we know has an aunt in Perm who
will do anything for money"
It still doesn't make sense but now instead of a problem that doesn't make sense they have a solution that doesn't make sense.
They probably threw a party to celebrate how smart they were.
"A narrative is being aggressively rammed down our throats about China": I usually respect Caitlin's work a lot but how does
this jive with the MSM and Techno-platforms desperate attempts to block all circulation of anything to do with the Biden corruption
scandals? Digging deeper into these issues is toxic not just for Biden, but for a significant segment of the neoliberal elite.
The economic elites need time to decouple their profits from China before any real head-to-head battle commences, Biden (or
Kamala) will bark a lot but bite much less given the probable wealth-vaporization of increased hostilities with China.
P.S. the number of COVID cases in Sweden is exploding, so to quote one of my favourite movie reviewers (The Critical Drinker)
can the Sweden trolls please "just go away now".
I don't argue popularity, but strength. Trump is a weakling, both as a person and as a president IMO.
US presidential system won't allow true leaders but puppets (or easily manipulated persons), it is all I'm saying. Do we need
more than last 4 years of Trump's reign as a proof?
Because the U.S. public is close to brain dead We can't detect obvious lies no matter how brazen.
Let's suppose I told you something was absolutely true and I literally started out by saying, 'Once upon a time there was an
evil stepmother ...'. Or I told you about about a villainous neighbor while literally playing a sad song on a violin.
I do not consider myself a genius, in fact I was a neocon but good God, I could just tell I was being lied to just by the pattern
of the stories. I didn't know what the truth was but I knew they were lying.
A doozy with FOX promoting genocide against Iran
FOX news does a story about the terrorist attack in France and in the very next segment without any commercial breaks they
interview a Congressman about Iran. Now they did not say Iran was responsible but clearly this was a puppet show to make just
that association. In addition to the standard blood libel, the Congressman talked about a tweet the Ayatollah made in 2014, so
it was not as if there even was any newsworthy item to discuss about Iran. It was just to frame them for something they did not
do.
On top of the 2001 Sino-Russian Friendship Treaty, both nations also signed an agreement in 2008 officially ending all territorial
disputes between the two countries. With no exceptions, the border between Russia and China is fixed.
In addition northeast China (or that area historically known as Manchuria) is now
a rustbelt area and is deindustrialising.
People especially young people are moving away from this part of the country and into the cities farther south to find more job
opportunities. According to
this Mercatornet.com
article , fertility rates in this part of Northeast Asia across all ethnic groups are the lowest in the world and this part
of China is heading for demographic collapse.
Probably the only people in China and Russia who still have fantasies about seizing one another's territories in Northeast
China and the Russian Far East are gameboys who spend too much time playing computer games or nattering with one another on their
blogsites and who would suffer cardiac arrest the moment they step away from the screen (or who would suffer cardiac arrest anyway
from playing games two or three days straight).
US economy and US life in general is wholly dependent on China. Face masks or pharmaceuticals, car parts or building materials,
it comes from China. No, we cannot resume making these things in US, we do not know how. When 3M was told to get busy and make
masks under Defence Procurement authority all they could do was refer to Chinese subsidiary. Clear enough it is the "subsidiary"
that has the whip hand. What do we have for them? Treasury bonds? Or we can start handing over real estate. Maybe if we give them
the West Coast they will supply us for a time.
One of the big stalls with the Foxconn-Racine plant has been there are no American engineers to hire. Just none. All Chinese
staff would be easier. Or Chinese lords supervising American coolies.
US basically does not trade with Russia. They have unloaded US paper securities. All we get from them is service as a bogeyman.
If we needed another bogey we could get that easy, make up some shit as always.
Mostly true but it's not because the US cant make these products it's because the shareholder class decided long ago
their portfolios would be better enhanced by cheaper labor costs outside the US.
And just as important, the US consumer prefers a "bargain price" and wants cheap goods more than a living wage, especially
those consumers who own some stocks (52% of Amerikkkans own at least some shares, usually in a 401k plan) and believe they too
are participating in the global wealth machine.
BTW, nearly as much stuff is made in Mexico and exported into the US as is made in China and products from both countries are
made by multinational corporations whose ownership consists largely Amerikkkan/western elites.
The problem isn't national-based, it is class based and international .
They are only trying to trick us into believing the problem is we are lazier than the Chinese.
The Chinese authorities have been prosecuting corrupt officials for many years. The prospect of certain USAi officials like
the Biden family carpetbaggers and their Chinese associates being prosecuted in public courts in China with no plea bargaining
and all those other niceties would be a delight for eyes and ears.
Be careful with those threats USAi, it could come back to haunt you.
I hope you don't mind me opining that the story as written is most likely to be a complete fiction, designed to hide the
real source of the fantasy story book that is the Steele dossier. The main mission here being to admit that the dossier was
indeed a pack of lies but with the important corollary that J Steele did indeed do some sort of research to dig up the dirt
on Trump. Heaven forbid that it ever was discovered that himself, Pablo Miller and Sergei Skripal made the whole thing up over
a meal of Zizzi's garlic bread and risotto, washed down with white wine and a bottle of Vodka over at the Mill.
I am with you Corkie. That is about the strength of it. The WSJ is BS from front page to last.
Update (1745ET): President Trump just took a minute away from the campaign trail to weigh in
on the 'coming out' of Miles Taylor, the formerly "anonymous" op-ed writer and self-proclaimed
leader of the internal White House #resistance,
"Who is Miles Taylor?" President Trump wrote, before recounting Taylor's association with
various adversaries of the administration. He added that "they should fire, shame, and punish
everybody associated with this FRAUD on the American people" - a group that would presumably
include some members or former members of his own inner circle, as well as the editors of the
NYT.
A photo of Taylor and Trump has been circulating on Twitter since before Trump published his
tweet, and we imagine Trump's response to the inevitable reporter question will be his usual
"so what?".
Meanwhile, CNN has reportedly decided not to fire Taylor, even though he lied on air to one
of the network's anchors (anderson cooper, clip below) despite being a paid employee of the
company.
It's still unclear what Google's response will be.
* * *
Roughly two years have passed since an anonymous Trump Administration insider
published an op-ed - then later, a whole book - warning Americans how President Trump was a
danger to the nation, primarily due to his "lack of character".
Well, on Wednesday afternoon, with six days left until the big day, the MSM and their
political operative allies, orchestrated the public coming-out of Miles Taylor, a former senior
official within Trump's Homeland Security Department who, before today, was best known as the
first former senior administration official to endorse Joe Biden for president.
In the year since Taylor has left the White House, he has parlayed his national security
bona fides (which were burnished during a stint working for Dick Cheney in the Bush White
House) into a top job working for Google, as well as a lucrative contract to appear as a
talking head on CNN and...did we mention the book deal?
Shortly following a teaser from George Conway, who called his fellow conservative Republican
a "true patriot"....
...Buzzfeed Ben - excuse us, Ben Smith - the former top man at Buzzfeed who left that
struggling media company to take the coveted job as the NYT's media columnist (a position
formerly held by both Brian Stelter and, before him, the legendary American media reporter
David Carr), was the first to confirm Taylor's identity, followed by a tweet from Taylor
acknowledging that it was all true.
Taylor published a statement on his reasoning for "why I'm no longer 'anonymous'" via his
new Medium page, which is strange, considering he now works for CNN, technically. In the
statement, Taylor wrote that Trump "sees personal criticism as subversive" followed by a Teddy
Roosevelt quote condemning those who say the president must not be criticized as "not only
unpatriotic and servile, but...morally treasonable to the American public." Later in the piece,
he quoted Abraham Lincoln.
Though Taylor acknowledged that he has been a life-long Republican, and that he "wanted this
president to succeed", he said Trump is "a man without character", and "his personal defects
have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American
lives."
More than two years ago, I published an anonymous opinion piece in The New York Times about
Donald Trump's perilous presidency, while I was serving under him. He responded with a short
but telling tweet: "TREASON?" Trump sees personal criticism as subversive. I take a different
view.
As Theodore Roosevelt wrote, "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile,
but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about
him or anyone else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant,
about him than about anyone else." We do not owe the President our silence. We owe him and the
American people the truth. Make no mistake: I am a Republican, and I wanted this President to
succeed. That's why I came into the Administration with John Kelly, and it's why I stayed on as
Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security. But too often in times of crisis, I saw
Donald Trump prove he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in
leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives.
I witnessed Trump's inability to do his job over the course of two-and-a-half years.
Everyone saw it, though most were hesitant to speak up for fear of reprisals. So when I left
the Administration I wrote A Warning, a character study of the current Commander in Chief and a
caution to voters that it wasn't as bad as it looked inside the Trump Administration -- it was
worse. While I claim sole authorship of the work, the sentiments expressed within it were
widely held among officials at the highest levels of the federal government. In other words,
Trump's own lieutenants were alarmed by his instability.
Much has been made of the fact that these writings were published anonymously. The decision
wasn't easy, I wrestled with it, and I understand why some people consider it questionable to
levy such serious charges against a sitting President under the cover of anonymity. But my
reasoning was straightforward, and I stand by it. Issuing my critiques without attribution
forced the President to answer them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than
creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling. I wanted the attention to be on
the arguments themselves. At the time I asked, "What will he do when there is no person to
attack, only an idea?" We got the answer. He became unhinged. And the ideas stood on their own
two feet. To be clear, writing those works was not about eminence (they were published without
attribution), not about money (I declined a hefty monetary advance and pledged to donate the
bulk of the proceeds), and not about crafting a score-settling "tell all" (my focus was on the
President himself and his character, not denigrating former colleagues). Nevertheless, I made
clear I wasn't afraid to criticize the President under my name. In fact, I pledged to do so.
That is why I've already been vocal throughout the general election. I've tried to convey as
best I can -- based on my own experience -- how Donald Trump has made America less safe, less
certain of its identity and destiny, and less united. He has responded predictably, with
personal attacks meant to obscure the underlying message that he is unfit for the office he
holds. Yet Trump has failed to bury the truth.
Why? Because since the op-ed was published, I've been joined by an unprecedented number of
former colleagues who've chosen to speak out against the man they once served. Donald Trump's
character and record have now been challenged in myriad ways by his own former Chief of Staff,
National Security Advisor, Communications Director, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense,
Director of National Intelligence, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others he
personally appointed. History will also record the names of those souls who had everything to
lose but stood up anyway, including Trump officials Fiona Hill, Michael McKinley, John Mitnick,
Elizabeth Neumann, Bob Shanks, Olivia Troye, Josh Venable, Alexander Vindman, and many more. I
applaud their courage. These are not "Deep Staters" who conspired to thwart their boss. Many of
them were Trump supporters, and all of them are patriots who accepted great personal risks to
speak candidly about a man they've seen retaliate and even incite violence against his
opponents. (I've likewise experienced the cost of condemning the President, as doing so has
taken a considerable toll on my job, daily life, marriage, finances, and personal safety.)
These public servants were not intimidated. And you shouldn't be either. As descendants of
revolutionaries, honest dissent is part of our American character, and we must reject the
culture of political intimidation that's been cultivated by this President. That's why I'm
writing this note -- to urge you to speak out if you haven't.
While I hope a few more Trump officials will quickly find their consciences, your words are
now more important than theirs. It's time to come forward and shine a light on the discord
that's infected our public discourse. You can speak loudest with your vote and persuade others
with your voice. Don't be afraid of open debate. As I've said before, there is no better screen
test for truth than to see it audition next to delusion. This election is a two-part
referendum: first, on the character of a man, and second, on the character of our nation.
That's why I'm also urging fellow Republicans to put country over party, even if that means
supporting Trump's Democratic opponent. Although former Vice President Joe Biden is likely to
pursue progressive reforms that conservatives oppose (and rest assured, we will challenge them
in the loyal opposition), his policy agenda cannot equal the damage done by the current
President to the fabric of our Republic. I believe Joe Biden's decency will bring us back
together where Donald Trump's dishonesty has torn us apart.
Trump has been exactly what we conservatives always said government should NOT be:
expansive, wasteful, arbitrary, unpredictable, and prone to abuses of power. Worse still, as
I've noted previously, he's waged an all-out assault on reason, preferring to enthrone emotion
and impulse in the seat of government. The consequences have been calamitous, and if given four
more years, he will push the limits of his power further than the "high crimes and
misdemeanors" for which he was already impeached.
Trust me. We spent years trying to ameliorate Trump's poor decisions (often unsuccessfully),
many of which will be back with a vengeance in a second term. Recall, this is the man who told
us, "When somebody's president of the United States, the authority is total." I believe more
than ever that Trump unbound will mean a nation undone -- a continued downward slide into
social acrimony, with the United States fading into the background of a world stage it once
commanded, to say nothing of the damage to our democratic institutions.
I was wrong, however, about one major assertion in my original op-ed. The country cannot
rely on well-intentioned, unelected bureaucrats around the President to steer him toward what's
right. He has purged most of them anyway. Nor can they rely on Congress to deliver us from
Trump's wayward whims. The people themselves are the ultimate check on the nation's chief
executive. We alone must determine whether his behavior warrants continuance in office, and we
face a momentous decision, as our choice about Trump's future will affect our future for years
to come. With that in mind, he doesn't deserve a second term in office, and we don't deserve to
live through it.
Removing Trump will not be the end of our woes, unfortunately. While on the road visiting
swing states for the past month, it's become clear to me how far apart Americans have grown
from one another. We've perpetuated the seemingly endless hostility stoked by this divisive
President, so if we really want to restore vibrance to our civic life, the change must begin
with each of us, not just with the occupant of the Oval Office. Fortunately, past generations
have lit the way toward national reconciliation in even harder times.
On the brink of a civil war that literally split our nation in two, Abraham Lincoln called
on the people not to lose sight of one other. He said in his Inaugural Address:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it
must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every
battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land,
will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the
better angels of our nature.
Heed Lincoln's words. We must return to our founding principles. We must rediscover our
better angels. And we must reconcile with each other, repairing the bonds of affection that
make us fellow Americans.
Mere minutes after Taylor's big coming-out, the online backlash began. Even members of the
'#resistance' slammed Taylor for his involvement in executing Trump's child-separation policy,
and for waiting this long to speak up.
As it turns out, Google execs reportedly misled their own employees when they insisted that
Taylor wasn't involved with the child-separation policy, an issue that ranks as Trump's
paramount sin among denizens of Silicon Valley.
Many also complained about the NYT hyping up the identity of the "anonymous" insider to try
and suggest that he was a top-level staffer, prompting speculation about Rex Tillerson, John
Kelly or even James Mattis. Trump's current chief of staff Mark Meadows,
And journalist Judd Legum with the extended version of that explanation, in which he
denounces "Anonymous" as little more than a grifter, who played a "critical role" in the family
separation policy, now working to parlay his brief time in the Trump Administration into a
quick buck.
Some were incredulous that Taylor left the administration and now works for Google and
CNN.
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With Taylor now outed as a child prison guard, as we have no doubt he will be branded by the
left, we imagine Google will need to make a statement at some point about whether Taylor will
continue on in his role, or be...fired.
play_arrow Unknown User , 58 minutes ago
A typical Neoliberal incapable of comprehending loyalty and ready to sellout anyone for a
dollar.
Everybodys All American , 1 hour ago
This little man operates like a CIA agent. I'd be shocked if that's not the case. He
actually said he believes in Joe Biden's' decency. No one in their right mind is saying that
...
gmrpeabody , 50 minutes ago
Biden's decency..? Now THAT'S funny...
JLee2027 , 1 hour ago
Just another one who betrayed his country for bucks and fame. Hope it was worth it.
Perseus-Reflected , 1 hour ago
Looks like a latte-drinking little b!tch to me.
aspen1880 , 58 minutes ago
he "identifies" with bish
chelydra , 4 minutes ago
The epitome of an effete, preening dandy.
hot sauce technician , 1 hour ago
Everything the biden campaign is doing seems to backfire on it.
LVrunner , 58 minutes ago
Should be giving away puppies soon like Hilary did at this point.
Redhotfill , 1 hour ago
Working for Google, CNN, Book deal yeah Pay Offs! Surprised no Netflx stock options.
44magnum , 1 hour ago
Or a seat on the board
mrslippryFIST , 1 hour ago
The year isnt over yet.
OGAorSAD , 1 hour ago
And we care why? Should be a headline with Section 230 being repealed, and multiple
indictments of Biden's, Clinton's, and Obama's
nope-1004 , 54 minutes ago
Never heard of him.
The fact that he's a documented public liar and democrat makes complete sense though.
mrslippryFIST , 1 hour ago
Hah, little beta cuck didn't get his 15mins so he outs himself to get his 15 mins of
fame.
This is what participation ribbons gives you.
Willie the Pimp , 1 hour ago
What else would you expect from an obvious jizz guzzler? The LGBT have destroyed the
USSA.
pictur3plane , 1 hour ago
SOY BOY NOTHING BURGER.
JRobby , 52 minutes ago
Oh! Look! He shops at Amazon!!!
Pop this prick and dump him in a landfill
Friedrich not Salma , 54 minutes ago
DNC probably asked him to reveal himself to eat up Teevee time and distract from Hunter's
story.
Md4 , 53 minutes ago
Zactly.
Where's Hunter?
Boxed Merlot , 31 minutes ago
...Where's Hunter?...
Chillin with Mr. Corzine? You remember that guy don't you? He's another GS Vice President
and Mr. Obama's prized confidant in his financial wizardry that ripped off his "investors" to
the tune of frn1B and slunk out of the public eye.
Who are these people? Look at the way they dress. Look at the smug arrogant look on their
faces.
They are caught in a bubble and are totally divorced from reality.
It should be requirement of every individual who enters government to spend at least one
year unclogging apartment building sewer stoppages.
Having a basic grasp of reality and a first hand look at where sewage actually goes is
vital to a healthy reality based outlook on life.
Peace
Salsa Verde , 1 hour ago
Scumbags gonna scum.
EnoughBS21 , 56 minutes ago
How's it feel, little traitor? You threw Trump under the bus and now your "new friends"
are tossing you away.
A Mister nobody!
Md4 , 54 minutes ago
And was " anonymous".
Credible?
44magnum , 1 hour ago
Trump has no character and Biden is senile.
So he picks Biden and the whore? She is definitely a character.
I am more equal than others , 1 hour ago
Judging character from afar. It is an amazing skill that has never existed.
novictim , 46 minutes ago
On the scales of justice, Trump is light as a feather while these Leftist
infiltrator-traitors and grifters, China-stooges and bribe takers, are lead weights on the
American Republic. There is no parallel to the corruption that has been revealed about the
Russia-Collusion hoax and now the truth about Biden's sale of US' China-policy in return for
the CCP padding the Biden family nest egg.
Watergate has nothing on these latest scandals. And Trump comes away from all of this like
a shining star.
JmanSilver.Gold , 44 minutes ago
Just another leftwing swamprat.
Floki_Ragnarsson , 46 minutes ago
So this weasel turd creates the problem, whines about it, and then makes a book deal, bags
a CNN job, etc?
Obviously a slimy Democrud.
Teamtc321 , 51 minutes ago
***** shadow man talks about character? Typical Demshelvic POS.
Joe Biden is burning down.
zerozerosevenhedgeBow1 , 1 hour ago
Ahh... Wallet before country, honor and integrity. I see a trend of "Public Service".
Delete his security clearance before he tries to change genders, because politically then you
probably couldn't afterwards.
Hipneck911 , 45 minutes ago
So a minor level DHS obama holdover who is a lifelong democrat-donated to Obamas
campaign-and probably had all of maybe ONE meeting where the President was present. AKA
typical leftist LOSER.
Imagine That , 1 hour ago
Big fuss about a chicken-sh*t nobody, who the world will forget before he changes his silk
panties.
Pvt Joker , 45 minutes ago
"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies"
Yeah, Imma say this guy and any one who thinks like him is my enemy.
Occams_Razor_Trader_Part_Deux , 47 minutes ago
You had me till Vindman.................... you're an operative .....................
Blaster09 , 55 minutes ago
Another POS!!!
lwilland1012 , 1 hour ago
Give people enough time, and they will always show you their true colors. Just watch and
listen.
novictim , 42 minutes ago
But the election is on Tuesday. Millions have already voted.
The MSM has betrayed every American in ways unthinkable just a decade ago.
Dindu Nuffins , 45 minutes ago
Not worth changing the news cycle from the laptop. No one cares who this rat is,
undifferentiated as he is from the many others.
In the final debate, Joe Biden ensured that mudslinging and innuendo about Donald Trump
substituted for a discussion of what America's actual national interests are towards
Russia.
Final presidential debates have traditionally centered on national security, but the
October 22 showdown between President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden was
almost entirely devoid of any substantive foreign policy discussion. Instead, Biden launched
a fusillade of attacks on Trump about Russia that represented a seamless continuity with the
calumnies that many Democrats have directed at the president ever since he was first
elected.
There are a number of factors that make us suspicious of Russian involvement. Such an
operation would be consistent with Russian objectives, as outlined publicly and recently by the
Intelligence Community, to create political chaos in the United States and to deepen political
divisions here but also to undermine the candidacy of former Vice President Biden and thereby
help the candidacy of President Trump. For the Russians at this point, with Trump down in the
polls, there is incentive for Moscow to pull out the stops to do anything possible to help
Trump win and/or to weaken Biden should he win. A "laptop op" fits the bill, as the publication
of the emails are clearly designed to discredit Biden.
Such an operation would be consistent with some of the key methods Russia has used in its
now multi-year operation to interfere in our democracy – the hacking (via cyber
operations) and the dumping of accurate information or the distribution of inaccurate or
misinformation. Russia did both of these during the 2016 presidential election –
judgments shared by the US Intelligence Community, the investigation into Russian activities by
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and the entirety (all Republicans and Democrats) on the current
Senate Intelligence Committee.
Such an operation is also consistent with several data points. The Russians, according to
media reports and cybersecurity experts, targeted Burisma late last year for cyber collection
and gained access to its emails. And Ukrainian politician and businessman Adriy Derkach,
identified and sanctioned by the US Treasury Department for being a 10-year Russian agent
interfering in the 2020 election, passed purported materials on Burisma and Hunter Biden to
Giuliani.
Jim Clapper
Former Director of National Intelligence
Former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence
Former Director of the National Geospartal Intelligence Agency
Former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
Mike Hayden
Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency
Former Director, National Security Agency
Former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
Leon Panetta
Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency
Former Secretary of Defense
John Brennan
Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency
Former White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor
Former Director, Terrorism Threat Integration Center
Former Analyst and Operations Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
Thomas Finger
Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis
Former Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research, Department of State
Former Chair, National Intelligence Council
Rick Ledgett
Former Deputy Director, National Security Agency
John McLaughlin
Former Acting Director, Central Intelligence Agency
Former Deputy Director, Central Intelligence Agency
Former Director of Analysis, Central Intelligence Agency
Former Director, Slavic and Eurasian Analysis, Central Intelligence Agency
Michael Morell
Former Acting Director, Central Intelligence Agency
Former Deputy Director, Central Intelligence Agency
Former Director of Analysis, Central Intelligence Agency
"... When everything is fine, and the macro economic indicators are stable, various funds are building up their assets, consumption is on the rise and so on. In such times, you hear more and more that the state only stands in the way, and that a pure market economy would be more effective. But as soon as crises and challenges arise, everyone turns to the state, calling for the reinforcement of its supervisory functions. This goes on and on, like a sinusoidal curve. This is what happened during the preceding crises, including the recent ones, like in 2008. ..."
"... So, again, no model is pure or rigid, neither the market economy nor the command economy today, but we simply have to determine the level of the state's involvement in the economy. ..."
"... In the U.S., since 1980, money has increasingly become the source of political power. This is dictatorship. The U.S. has transformed itself from an imperfect democracy, into an almost perfect 'oligarchic dictatorship' where the corporations oversee the government, rather than the government overseeing the market. This is the very definition of fascism. And under such a system, the U.S.'s market economy has been transformed into an economy of serial monopolies. ..."
"... i continue to believe the planet is being screwed by big finance.. ..."
"... Very true jadan, your view on Putin, and every time I read an excerpt or a speech by him I notice he is far above our western "leaders" with their meaningless chatter and hollow phrases. ..."
Most of the commentators on yesterday's
post were right. It was the Russian President Vladimir Putin
who said this :
Many of us read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry when we were children and remember what the main character said:
"It's a question of discipline. When you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet. It's very tedious
work, but very easy."
I am sure that we must keep doing this "tedious work" if we want to preserve our common home for future generations. We must
tend our planet.
The subject of environmental protection has long become a fixture on the global agenda. But I would address it more broadly
to discuss also an important task of abandoning the practice of unrestrained and unlimited consumption – overconsumption – in
favour of judicious and reasonable sufficiency, when you do not live just for today but also think about tomorrow.
We often say that nature is extremely vulnerable to human activity. Especially when the use of natural resources is growing
to a global dimension. However, humanity is not safe from natural disasters, many of which are the result of anthropogenic interference.
By the way, some scientists believe that the recent outbreaks of dangerous diseases are a response to this interference. This
is why it is so important to develop harmonious relations between Man and Nature.
I found the excerpt remarkable because it included this, on might say, anti-capitalistic statement:
.. an important task of abandoning the practice of unrestrained and unlimited consumption – overconsumption – in favour of judicious
and reasonable sufficiency, when you do not live just for today but also think about tomorrow.
That 'green' statement will rile those people who argue for free markets and a right to sell bullshit in ever more flavors. In
their view the fight against such 'communists' thinking must be renewed.
As the full English transcript of Putin's speech and the two and a half hour Q&A
is now available I can also quote another interesting
passage where Putin talks about capitalism and the role of the state. His standpoint seems very pragmatic to me:
Question : Mr President, there has been much talk and debate, in the context of the global economic upheavals, about the
fact that the liberal market economy has ceased to be a reliable tool for the survival of states, their preservation, and for
their people.
Pope Francis said recently that capitalism has run its course. Russia has been living under capitalism for 30 years. Is it time
to search for an alternative? Is there an alternative? Could it be the revival of the left-wing idea or something radically new?
Putin: Lenin spoke about the birthmarks of capitalism, and so on. It cannot be said that we have lived these past 30
years in a full-fledged market economy. In fact, we are only gradually building it, and its institutions. [..]
You know, capitalism, the way you have described it, existed in a more or less pure form at the beginning of the previous century.
But everything changed after what happened in the global economy and in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, after World
War I. We have already discussed this on a number of occasions. I do not remember if I have mentioned this at Valdai Club meetings,
but experts who know this subject better than I do and with whom I regularly communicate, they are saying obvious and well-known
things.
When everything is fine, and the macro economic indicators are stable, various funds are building up their assets, consumption
is on the rise and so on. In such times, you hear more and more that the state only stands in the way, and that a pure market
economy would be more effective. But as soon as crises and challenges arise, everyone turns to the state, calling for the reinforcement
of its supervisory functions. This goes on and on, like a sinusoidal curve. This is what happened during the preceding crises,
including the recent ones, like in 2008.
I remember very well how the key shareholders of Russia's largest corporations that are also major European and global players
came to me proposing that the state buy their assets for one dollar or one ruble. They were afraid of assuming responsibility
for their employees, pressured by margin calls, and the like. This time, our businesses have acted differently. No one is seeking
to evade responsibility. On the contrary, they are even using their own funds, and are quite generous in doing so. The responses
may differ, but overall, businesses have been really committed to social responsibility, for which I am grateful to these people,
and I want them to know this.
Therefore, at present, we cannot really find a fully planned economy, can we? Take China. Is it a purely planned economy? No.
And there is not a single purely market economy either. Nevertheless, the government's regulatory functions are certainly important.
[..]
We just need to determine for ourselves the reasonable level of the state's involvement in the economy; how quickly that involvement
needs to be reduced, if at all, and where exactly. I often hear that Russia's economy is overregulated. But during crises like
this current pandemic, when we are forced to restrict business activity, and cargo traffic shrinks, and not only cargo traffic,
but passenger traffic as well, we have to ask ourselves – what do we do with aviation now that passengers avoid flying or fly
rarely, what do we do? Well, the state is a necessary fixture, there is no way they could do without state support.
So, again, no model is pure or rigid, neither the market economy nor the command economy today, but we simply have to determine
the level of the state's involvement in the economy. What do we use as a baseline for this decision? Expediency. We need
to avoid using any templates, and so far, we have successfully avoided that.
Then comes a paragraph that shows where Russia differs from the current 'western' economic policies of negative interest rates
and deflation:
Of course, the Central Bank and the Government are among the most important state institutions. Therefore, it was in fact through
the joint efforts of the Central Bank and the Government that inflation was reduced to 4 percent, because the Government invests
substantial resources through its social programmes and national projects and has an impact on our monetary policy. It went down
to 3.9 percent, and the Governor of the Central Bank has told me that we will most likely keep it around the estimated target
of around 4 percent. This is the regulating function of the state; there is no way around it. However, stifling development through
an excessive presence of the state in the economy or through excessive regulation would be fatal as well. You know, this is a
form of art, which the Government has been applying skilfully, at least for now.
Keeping inflation up by a bit will make it easier for Russian consumers and companies to pay back their loans. It is economically
healthier than the deflationary policies of western societies.
Russia is well on its way to overtake Germany as the fifth biggest economy. Putin's pragmatic positions towards the role of the
state in the economy and his relative generous policies of social programs and large national projects have contributed to that.
The many questions and answers on foreign policy in the Valdai talk show a similar pragmatism on other issues. For those interested
in those here is again the link to the transcript
.
Posted by b on October 24, 2020 at 18:00 UTC |
Permalink
Putin was (is) an important figure in rescuing Russia from the collapse, and western carpetbagging, of the nineties but in no
way has he moved Russia towards communism or prepared the path (structurally) for a future communist state. Despite everything
that Putin has achieved, in no way has he created a system that is separate from that of the west. The external impostion of sanctions
(by the west) has had much more effect than anything Putin has done (in terms of separting from western dogma).
This talk of "overconsumption" is totally irrelevant to Russia (Russians are still largely poor and "under"-consume) as well
as much of the rest of the world. And Russia is a huge producer of the resources (oil, gas, coal), and a huge consumer of these
same resources, that we are told are destroying the world. So Putin is not really addressing Russians or the majority of the world,
and western governments are used to hearing this kind of guff (because they say the same, frequently).
So, Putin is not referring to a Communist (economic) state; he is referring to a mixed economy just like every other western
state (yes you could also say "just like every other state in the world" but what I am demonstrating is that, at best, Putin desires
to adhere to conventional western economic dogma).
Putin is 68 and the average life expectancy on Russia is 72 (only 65 for males). Putin will be gone soon enough and what he
has built is a proud independent nation that is integrated into the world economy and is well able to defend itself. But he has
not changed the fundamental economic relations that were established in Russia after the collapse of the USSR.
So, this "remarkable...anti-capitalistic statement" is either meaningless or a signal of compliance to western/world capitalist
elites who, perhaps, wish to bring the free-market to an end and entrench their position as a permanent elite - and that would
not be communism, rather it would be feudalism.
With the advent of the industrial revolution, capitalism, mass education, democracy and then the proto-communist states it
was thought impossible (and undesireable) that social structures could regress. But, has the (within technical capacities) ability
to capture data on everyone all of the time (and analyze and interpret that data in real time) and deep understandings of behavoiuralism,
human psychology and sophisticated, convincing and all pervasive propaganda resulted in a fundamental change? In short, that it
is no longer held that all humans are free, can make their own choices, and are capable of organising society for and by themselves
(even as some kind of future objective) - and that this has been replaced by a belief that humanity is best run by a "benevolent"
elite.
I'm not sure that the concept of neo-liberalism is really applicable to Russia. What happened under Yeltsin was a simple pillage
of the state, as anyone would do if they can, as he was too drunk to notice. The same thing is happening today in UK.
Putin has spent his time trying to recover from that situation to more control, as a conservative nationalist, but its not
so easy.
"... I am confident that what makes a state strong, primarily, is the confidence it's citizens have in it. That is the
strength of a state. People are the source of power, we all know that."
Yes! 'People are the source of power' is the definition of democracy.
In the U.S., since 1980, money has increasingly become the source of political power. This is dictatorship. The U.S. has
transformed itself from an imperfect democracy, into an almost perfect 'oligarchic dictatorship' where the corporations oversee
the government, rather than the government overseeing the market. This is the very definition of fascism. And under such a system,
the U.S.'s market economy has been transformed into an economy of serial monopolies.
Russia is rapidly developing; the U.S. is rapidly failing. No need to wonder why!
Depending upon who you ask
, somewhere between 33% and 70% of Russia's economy is still state controlled. You can never say "we" when talking about
directing a capitalist market economy because "The Market" will always be boss. Though Russia suffered a catastrophic capitalist
counterrevolution, it is this large share of the economy that is not entirely subservient to market forces that gives Putin the
luxury of talking in terms of "we" , despite his submissive attitude towards capitalism.
The fact is that capitalism ( "The Market" ) cannot develop Russia. This has been the case for more than a hundred years,
which is why they had a revolution in the first place and why the privatizations have been halted and are now (grudgingly) being
reversed.
Putin's strength lies not in his ideology because his strength of conviction to that ideology is that of an overcooked noodle.
This happens to work out OK though because his ideology is neoliberal capitalism. Clinging to that ideology isn't serving any
leader in the world right now, as we can see in Europe and the US. Rather, Putin's strength is in his patriotic pragmatism. He
doesn't want to build "Socialism with Russian Characteristics" , but pragmatics forces him in that direction.
Russia will be moving to a progressive income tax regime from 2021 onwards. The current personal income tax regime is a flat
13%. From next year, individuals earning 5 million rubles or more annually will be subject to a 15% tax rate. Sounds like little
but these sorts of reforms have to take time and have to be done in small increments.
It's my understanding that the bulk of Russia's tax receipts currently come from the energy sector. I'm sure way back in 1998
Putin wrote a PhD dissertation on the use of natural resources as the basis of economic development and growth, and taxation of
energy companies would be one method of using land resources to achieve this growth.
Keeping inflation up by a bit will make it easier for Russian consumers and companies to pay back their loans. It is economically
healthier than the deflationary policies of western societies.
That's a great idea, except both government and household debt in Russia are among the lowest in the world (probably the lowest
of any industrialized country). Both Putin and the foreigners who fawn over him, including myself not very long ago, are the first
to tout this fact. This way inflation in the Russian economy means consumers get to enjoy rising costs of living, and the state
and companies rising costs of raw materials, energy etc. while there's virtually no debt on the other side of the equation for
inflation to devalue. There's still a lot of corporate sector debt in Russia, but the bulk of it is still, incredibly, denominated
in dollars, euros, Swiss franc, and so on. Ruble inflation and falling exchange rates don't make this debt to cheaper to service,
but of course the opposite.
It's a great thing that the rate of home ownership (without associated mortgage debt) is so high in Russia, and it's probably
the only result of the privatization drive that was actually a good outcome. There's no reason that Russians should now be loaded
up with huge debts in order to own a house or an apartment. Access to personal credit for things like a car is difficult and expensive
in Russia, which obviously means a lot of people can't afford a car, but on the other further helps to ensure the indebtedness
of households is kept low. At the same time, like Putin (and b) does here, many in Russia apparently want to pretend that their
economy is like a Western economy, and that accordingly its households are partially relieved financially by inflation when they
actually only suffer from increased prices. It's absolutely bizarre.
The reality is that Russia's leadership has an unparalleled commitment toward, and talent for, getting the worst of all worlds
economically. Thanks to them Russia is probably the only major economy in the world with high inflation but microscopic domestic
currency debt (and correspondingly low investment in the domestic economy). This way Russia has gotten to enjoy, historically,
very high inflation but much lower growth rates than other developing economies. (The high growth rates in the 2000's came from
high raw materials prices, resulting merely in accumulation of foreign exchange reserves which the Russian government itself then
said could not be efficiently converted into rubles and invested in the Russian economy. Growth in industrial and agricultural
production, or in fixed assets like infrastructure, was accordingly much smaller, if even existent.)
There's also the continuing Wild West capitalism where oligarchs have gotten to keep their stolen assets in potash, gold mining,
coal mining etc., even in strategic industrial sectors like steelmaking, power engineering or the automotive industry, while at
the same time even Chinese investors are discouraged from investing through opaque regulation and unpredictable Russian state
intervention. In other words, stability for the oligarchs who openly tried to destroy the Russian state and turn it into a Hong
Kong-style neo-feudal hellhole, and who today just as before continue to asset strip the last residues of Soviet-era manufacturing,
but a Great Wall against the Asians who want to come in and develop petrochemicals plants, e-commerce, timber industry or whatever.
Through the entire 2000-2012 era, the Russian government came down like a hawk on ruble-denominated debt, while corporations
(both private and state-owned) could take out basically unlimited loans in foreign currency. State-owned companies like Rosneft
actually led the foreign currency indebtedness, helping enormously to ensure that Russia's only real advantage and asset in the
post-Soviet era, the trade surplus resulting from its oil and gas exports, is sent out of the country as interest payments to
American and European banks, rather than (as China has done) paying for the imports of Western machinery and technologies to help
develop domestic manufacturing.
Certainly, Russian companies are now much more restricted in the amounts of foreign currency credit they can accept, but access
to ruble credit is highly limited as well. The result is of course austerity in the economy, with anemic growth and falling living
standards.
Another important "benefit" was that the West had an easy way to put pressure on the ruble. They simply forbade Russian companies
from rolling over their debt, forcing them to come up with huge sums of foreign currency in short order. That crashed the rouble,
thereby dramatically forcing up prices (and equivalently, inflation) in the, by its own design, almost completely import-dependent
Russian economy. The crash in oil prices (again, simply limiting Russia's income in dollar terms, much of which they needed simply
to pay back Western creditors anyway) was just icing on the cake.
One could keep going like this forever. If China and South Korea had political and corporate elites with this mentality, and
with this level of commitment to neo-liberalism and globalization, but (critically!) only to its worst aspects and outcomes, these
countries would have been very lucky to be at the level of development of Thailand today. That's the reality and attacking people
who raise these criticisms as enemies of Russia, as many did to me in the last thread about thread on these topics, does nothing
to help matters. In fact, with "friends" like you, maybe Russia does not need enemies.
I've been having fun listening and reading the reactions and selected excerpts in the media to the long, very long Putin conference,
three hours with the question and answer segment, the most substantial and interesting, but five hours total considering that
he appeared two hours late, no doubt preparing until the last minute and over the speech as could be seen in the notes that he
held and that somehow the sound technicians did not filter out completely, which was a bit annoying.
Checking out the chaotic notes that I took, there is one little detail that most surely won't get any attention, his recourse
to widely used popular expressions like when he asks himself rhetorically:
what is a strong state? What are its strengths?
The Russian word for strength could be translated as power too, and any an every Russian recalls the great hero of the dark
90's, the late Serguey Bodrov in the film "The Brother 2", partly filmed in Chicago, Bodrov asks a panicked businessman: Tell
me American, where is the power? is the power in money? I think the power is in truth . a phrase that everybody knows and
feels proud of in Russia.
Vlad not only plays complex accords for foreign consumption, he plays for the home team first, just in case .
Putin, like all politicians, is more about what he says and less about what he does.
Fair enough, i challenge anyone in his position to do better... I actually admire the man, but let's not delude ourselves.
Russia stands to benefit from global warming more than any other country in spite of all the damage it will still cause it. On
the overall balance, it will average out ahead of everyone else, in relative terms, so don't look to them for answers.
As for "the State"... so what if it's his mates who benefit instead of oligarchs, what is the difference when most of the people
in Russia are broke and have no realistic prospects or chances of progressing beyond their predetermined fates? The cynic in me
ultimately thinks he just wants the oligarchs to pay their taxes to make his job easier, keep the people happy, so he can get
reelected more easily.
@ Eric | Oct 24 2020 21:10 utc | 18.. eric, i was intrigued by your ideas in the previous thread and i am again here... how do
you come by this particular vantage point?? do you have a particular background in finances, or is it just a special interest
that you have cultivated to come by the position you share in your post here? i am genuinely curious! i don't have enough knowledge
to comment and wish someone like Michael Hudson could comment on this specific topic that you seem to excel at holding a very
specific and fairly negative outlook on with regard Russia... thanks for your comments either way.. it is above my pay grade to
respond with any authority..
i continue to believe the planet is being screwed by big finance.. it seems hard to see thru the maze a way out of
this... your suggestion that russia is also caught in this maze would not surprise me... what is the way out, if i might be so
bold??
I think your post points to a fundamental worrisome feature of Russia. It's very unclear who actually has a stake in the prosperity,
power or even existence of the Russian state in 50 or 100 years' time. People can pretend that the Russian Orthodox Church plays
this role but there's very little to suggest it really does. India, I think, unfortunately struggles with the same problem, but
the destruction of India at the hands of British goes a long way to explain it in my view. In China or Iran, with all the issues
of their own that those two countries have, there's however very little ambiguity in this regard.
I'm not even sure I would place the blame on Western-style representative democracy in Russia, as the same basic problem seems
to have been there both before the October Revolution and at the very least during the post-Stalin era of the Soviet Union. The
question is if Russia, despite everything, as a Christian civilization isn't ultimately a participant in the Western world's anomie
and decline.
Yes! Absolutely capitalism is rapidly destroying the planet. Of this there is no question. Nothing can be left alone: 'undeveloped'
land must be 'developed', i.e. forests cut down and replaced by subdivisions, parking lots, McDonald's, office buildings, etc.
Capitalism is truly insidious: look at how the once mighty Amazon rainforest has been utterly wiped out by greedy cattle farmers
looking for a quick buck with the blessing of Bolsonaro. Where there were once massive old growth forests across N. America, there
are now only 'tree museums', i.e. national parks which save less than 1% of what there once was before Europeans came and destroyed
everything–in the name of profit. Capitalism not only destroys natural resources, it destroys people: slavery has been replaced
by wage slavery: and the wage slave's earnings from his 'mcjob' invariably go to his landlord, or other parasites. Your employer
is your master in capitalism: he is your god and you serve him. Any excess profit you make all goes to him, not you. If you look
at him wrong, or have a bad attitude you are replaced–and NO good reference for you! What a miserable shit system craptialism
is.
I have been strongly influenced by Michael Hudson's writings over several years now. Basically everything in that post is either
a point he already made about Russia or a direct application of his overall thinking on Russia's economy. For this reason I was
very surprised by the hostility of certain commenters, in particular karlof1, who also could be called followers of Michael Hudson.
karlof1 even suggested I should spend a couple of years researching Russian economic development, even though I've quite obviously
already done that (which doesn't mean everyone has to agree with my conclusions). I have to wonder if he and Martyanov either
never came across Hudson's criticisms of Russian economic policy (one of the actually less harsh examples
here - if you search
his site michael-hudson.com you can find others) or consider him also an ignorant anti-Russian commentator but are able to appreciate
him in spite of that.
I wrote about this part of Putin's speech back on the 22nd when he made this appraisal:
" only a viable state can act effectively in a crisis ."
I bolded the text then and I've done so again because that's one of the most important points he raised, IMO, particularly
in relation to the clearly unviable Outlaw US Empire and EU. I even turned my commentary into a short article at my VK space that
will be expanded once I digest all the Q & A.
I recently made an observation about Russia's banking and finance systems in that they're controlled by the public via the
state, not by some private entities separate from the state doing all they can to avoid any type of regulation and oversight,
which was based on this item I linked here at the
time. I later made the observation that the moral/ethical grounding of who/what's in charge of those systems matters greatly when
it comes to making an equitable society--and it will matter even more as we get into the having steady-state economies as resource
depletion mounts into the crisis it will eventually become. Putin showed that he knows and understands all that, which is well
beyond the capacity of the vast majority of those known as politicians--especially those in Neoliberal nations. Putin used the
term "balance" 7 times, imbalance once, in his speech. I suggest readers use the CTRL-F function to search the text for that term
to see what it's in reference to so they can learn a bit more about the man and his mind and the importance of seeking balance
in attaining equitability.
At the tail end of the Q & A, Putin is asked: "what you can advise and offer to Russian youth?" Putin's answer conforms completely
with his policy toward the promotion of families and urging young people to strive for their aspirations -- unlike many Western
politicos, he backs his admonitions with robust policies to make them possible, something I've long admired about him. Here's
most of Putin's reply:
"But what can we offer? We believe we will give young people more opportunities for professional growth and create more
social lifts for them. We are building up these instruments and creating conditions for people to receive a good education,
make a career, start a family and receive enough income for a young family.
"We are drafting an increasing number of measures to support young families. Let me emphasise that even during the pandemic,
most of our support measures were designed for families with children. What are these families? They are young people for the
most part.
"We will continue doing this in the hope that young people will use their best traits – their daring striving to move
ahead without looking back at formalities that probably make older generations more reserved – for positive, creative endeavours.
Eventually, the younger generation will take the baton from the older generation and continue this relay race, and make Russia
stronger."
The difference in that regard between Putin's vision and his actions when compared to the Outlaw US Empire and other Neoliberal
nations is beyond stark--it's as if they inhabit two different solar systems.
The reason Putin's hated by the West is he took an unviable Russia and made it more than viable again. IMO, he's the unequaled
Dean of what few Statesmen exist in today's world, which makes him an asset for humanity.
There used to be a regular commenter at Mark Chapman's Kremlin Stooge / The New Kremlin Stooge - I forget his KS name but he
was a physicist (and not a very good-tempered one at that, he had regular shouting matches with one other commenter Yalensis there)
-- but he was of the opinion that interest rates set by the Central Bank of Russia have been too high and have discouraged small
business investment in Russia. The head of the CBR may still be Elvira Nabiullina -- I haven't checked lately. She and others
in the government who help set monetary policies in Russia are suspected of being neoliberal and Atlanticist in their outlook.
As President, Putin is not responsible for setting domestic policies - that's Prime Minister Mishustin's job.
Putin spoke all that in a very specific environment (in a room full of rabid liberals/pro-capitalists), so we should be care about
its content.
There are some incongruousness in his speech we must correct here:
1) It is a myth the State, during the golden age of liberalism (16th-19th Centuries) was "minimal". On the contrary: there
was a ton of State intervention in the people's daily life - including the right of the State to separate whole families and use
their children in servile labor. The difference here is that the gross of that intervention was directed to the dispossessed,
i.e. the working classes. There was also a ton of regulations over slave ownership. The age of classical liberalism is considered
one of minimum State because the freedom of the powerful slave owners and industrialists was almost zero; it's the History told
from the point of view of the capitalists. That's why Putin clearly said "[capitalism] the way you have described it [...]"
2) The mixed system between what he calls "State intervention" (welfare of the people, command or planned economy) and "free
market" is the scientific definition of socialism. Marx wasn't an idealist: he was a materialist. He knew a direct transition
to communism was impossible, therefore he imagined a system of transition, where communism and capitalism would exist together.
This transition system was called socialism. That's why China, still governed by a Marxist-Leninist Party, considers itself socialist
and not capitalist, or even "mixed" for that matter;
Another observation: the Western countries didn't enter deflation/low inflation because of ZIRP/NIRP. They were already suffering
from it before those policies. The opposite is the true: precisely because they were having a too low inflation, they resorted
to ZIRP/NIRP.
Yep re my comment @ 29: Nabiullina is still CBR head according to her Wikipedia entry. Since becoming CBR head back in 2012 or
2013, she has consistently followed a policy of tackling inflation first to the extent of keeping interest rates higher than they
perhaps should be. This probably helps explain some of the issues Eric @ 18 raises about Russians' access to personal credit.
Interestingly Nabiullina's Wikipedia entry shows she worked with Alexei Kudrin in the past. Kudrin has a reputation for preferring
neoliberal economic policies. Currently he is Inspector General in the Russian govt's audit office where he can mouth off all
he likes about how he'd reform Russian economic policies if he got the chance but not actually do much damage: a case of Putin
keeping potential enemies somewhere where they can be watched.
Eric does raise the issue about how Russian oligarchs were allowed to keep their gains and not be forced to pay back taxes
they owed way back in the early 2000s, but this was on condition that they not meddle in Russian federal politics and buy influence,
and pay all their future taxes and other obligations, like paying their employees, promptly and in accordance with Russian laws.
Those who refused ended up in prison (Khodorkovsky) or fled overseas (Berezovsky). Roman Abramovich paid an unusual penalty: he
was made Governor of Chukotka in far eastern Siberia near the Bering Sea for a couple of years at least. He paid for all that
territory's infrastructure improvements. Of course the people there must love him!
So why are not all barflies writing and thinking about the role of the state in the economy within the context of current private
control of finance in the West?
What is blinding you all to not state the obvious role issue of those that own global private finance not being any "state"
of transparency?
We are in a civilization war about the fact that a current state in our world, China, has a public finance core of government
which is opposed to the Western cult of global private finance. Wake up.
Reading the entrails of the Russian economy that has been ravaged for decades by the cult of private finance and its followers
in Russia does us no service to b's question of what role the state should have in the national and world economy. Because Russia
is still having to operate with the shit show called empire they are limited in their response. I was taught 50 years ago that
a 2% inflation rate was optimal but because Russia is trying to build its population, it is spending more money supporting that
segment of the overall population and saying the inflation rate is worth the investment.
The role of the state in the economy
History has shown positive results from what are called mixed economies. The US is a mixed economy with the state, at various
levels, supporting energy, transportation, USPS, water, sewage treatment, police and fire protection, education, SSI, regulations,
etc. There are and have been attempts to privatize all those things under the canard that the service can be provided "better"
with profit as the motive other than service to others.
There is no magic mixed economy formula for any one state and it will change over time like Russia is choosing to do. But the
state has limited control of the economy if the tools of finance are privately held and not integrated into state functionality....and
it is my understanding that the Central Bank in Russia for example is not entirely a sovereign entity...what sayest our most recent
barfly, Eric?
Please join in a more reasoned contextual discussion of our world. I am tired of reading about "ism"s. More reality please.
Thank you b for continuing this conversation. The speech and Q&A were most interesting. They were consistent with what Putin has
said before, but done so this time with more confidence as even the oppression of the covid situation was dealt with in honorable
fashion - if one can honor a virus, that is. It is always, with Putin, that the people come first, and he made that statement
at the beginning.
Countries, all countries, have that obligation in their governance that it be for the people's welfare. So, to him, whatever
system a country has is only important in that respect and each country, drawing on its own history and its assets, decides for
itself what that style of governance will be.
This is different from any outside system being touted as the ideal. There isn't an ideal. It all depends on how the people
wish to be governed, based on what they feel is important to them. That is democracy in its loosest terms. He said several times
that any philosophy of government imposed by outsiders will never work.
At the same time, his support for the UN system on a world wide basis is as unconditional as his first premise.
I meant to add that casting my mind back to the last debate, the one thing being said about the people was Biden intensely eyeing
us and telling us about the empty chair at the kitchen table - nice!
.. an important task of abandoning the practice of unrestrained and unlimited consumption – overconsumption – in favour of
judicious and reasonable sufficiency, when you do not live just for today but also think about tomorrow.
We need to land somewhere between North Korea and the US on consumption. John Judge used to talk about how 30 houses on a street
need 30 lawnmowers. Why not buy one lawnmower, share it and maintain it? I ditched my lawns long ago as that is also over consumption
but I use it as an example of what type of society we have built.
"... I am confident that what makes a state strong, primarily, is the confidence it's citizens have in it. That is the strength
of a state. People are the source of power, we all know that."
It is not just confidence it is having an educated competent citizenry. Our top education institutions, especially the ivy
league, are cranking out students trained to protect the status quo hence things will not changed easily.
Moon is going to end up on the Russian disinformation agitators list.
@ Posted by: psychohistorian | Oct 25 2020 0:05 utc | 32
This "mixed economies won the Cold War" is an old story already. Eric Hobsbawn left a letter claiming just before he died,
in 2012.
The problem with the Scandinavian economies is this: who's gonna do the dirty jobs? You cannot simply make a nation of designers
and white collar workers. The social-democracies of the post-war solved this problem with the Third World countries, but now those
countries are not accepting this role anymore.
Besides, there's the objective fact even the Scandinavian economies are declining, with inequality skyrocketing since the end
of the 1990s. They, too, are susceptible to the laws of capitalism.
"Strengthening our country and looking at what is happening in the world, in other countries, I want to say to those who are still
waiting for the gradual demise of Russia: in this case, we are only worried about one thing -- how not to catch a cold at your
funeral", Putin said on Thursday at a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.
That's an interesting question. How are the underclass workers (construction, janitors, street sweepers) wage and social benefits
in the Nordic countries in comparison with China, S. Korea and Japan?
Those are important points. It seems to be a common pattern in neoliberal economics. The answer to "why" that I pieced together
is this: It is all about the oligarchs in combination with their immediate overseas business partners. Typically they own a considerable
portion of the foreign-jurisdiction bonds lent to their own nations. It is a straightforward money laundering arrangement.
The Russian government cannot simply remove the domestic oligarchs**, no more than a US or EU government could do the same
against equivalent local business powers. Rather, they come to a livable equilibrium. Preventing investment from China, EU etc,
is, in addition to defending national sovereignty, also a case of the government defending the domestic oligarchs from foreign
rivals -- rivals who would have greater financial resources with the backing of their own larger home regions.
However, the big difference in the case of Russia, compared to most countries victimized by the neoliberal pattern, is that
the government is powerful enough to quite reliably protect the local oligarchs from their foreign rivals, including pretty much
anything that the foreign rival's home governments can possibly throw at them (i.e. the various regime change toolbox). This protection
is a massively valuable service. For this reason, the Russian government can, if it is halfway decent and perhaps above-average
in managing the difficult internal politics, negotiate a better (i.e. more long-term sustainable) arrangement with the local oligarchs,
in terms of how the citizens are affected.
[** but with all the sanctions etc, this balance of power actually shifts]
You do realize that the Russians have three (3) vaccines, and the Chinese one (1) in late stage 3 trials, with Sputnik V due to
complete theirs next month and to go into serial production shortly. Putin's strategy is to vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate.
Mishustin is busy holding trade fairs promoting the Russian arctic. Business residency for $$RUB$$$. Ski resorts on the Kola peninsula...
While his enemies implode under the second COVID-19 wave....
Thank you Alicia for putting up that interview. I like very much the articles Orlov writes, and many of them I find translated
in French. He has humour, unlike more well known geopolitics analysts. Try this one:
That Valdai speech / Q&A was a master class in governance.
While Putin thinks and talks like a sane man, Western leaders reveal daily that they are now not sanity-capable, not logic-capable,
not sanity-capable, not shame-capable.
Putin shows a commanding grasp of his nation's people, economy, culture, history, environment, geo-strategic needs, impressively
rattling off numbers, statistics, reason, rationale, logic and pragmatic good sense. In all that, he reminds me of that other
great world-class leader, Lee Kuan Yew, whom Kissinger once called the Wise Man of Asia. Russia is fortunate to be governed by a world-class leader and his team today, but good luck to the Great Toilet Bowl Stirrers
in the West.
Putin: "But I would address it more broadly to discuss also an important task of abandoning the practice of unrestrained and unlimited
consumption – overconsumption – in favour of judicious and reasonable sufficiency, when you do not live just for today but also
think about tomorrow..... After all, it is within our power to stop being egoistical, greedy, mindless and wasteful consumers....
We just need to open our eyes, look around us and see that the land, air and water are our common inheritance from above, and
we must learn to cherish them, just as we must cherish every human life, which is precious. This is the only way forward in this
complicated and beautiful world. I do not want to see the mistakes of the past repeated."
Was Putin talking about Russians? or about Americans? Who are those exceptional 4% of the global population who demands to consume 40% of global resources?
Putin: "So, we want the voice of our citizens to be decisive and to see constructive proposals and requests from different social
forces get implemented.... what you call your political system is immaterial...."
It doesn't matter if it is a 'democratic' or 'socialist', but governments that primarily serve the people's needs (not the
elite's greed) will listen to, and DO, the people's will. Out of that, the people give their CONSENT to be governed.
Today, ALL governments use a mix of democratic and socialist tools, eg. China, Russia, UK, USA. But, unlike the West, who boast
that their system is more perfect, China and Russia serve their people primarily.
As Deng said, it does not matter if the cat is black or white.
How much of America's policy's are run out of pure jealousy of Russia and China ?
Rather than being a supper power, they have regressed into immature petulant juvenile tantrums.
Self-distruction and self-harm.
Putin is a "statesman". A few squalid pretenders in the political class here may aspire to that title, but It is not a badge you
pin on yourself, it is awarded by general acclaim. Putin has stepped into the vacuum of world leadership left by the US Idiocracy
when Trump took over with the help of his free market, anti-government cohort, the Koch's, Robert Mercer, Paul Singer, and etc.
Putin is the champion of arms control, multilateralism & cooperation, and following this address certainly, environmentalism.
All attempts to demonize Putin on the part of the neoliberal US oligarchy collapse when the diminutive Russian Mongol begins to
speak. I join in the applause. It is so refreshing to listen to a leader talking sense for a change! I don't care if he is a benevolent
authoritarian anti-democrat, I am so grateful for his intelligent leadership that I salute! And I thank b for bringing this Valdai
event to our attention. The poverty and ideological blindness of our media conglomerates is just outrageous!
"Overconsumption" , in and of itself, isn't the problem. The problem is the distortion of value that capitalist empire
introduces. If the effort required to acquire some thing accurately reflected the effort to produce that thing then consumption
would be naturally self-limiting. After all, who could every day consume products containing two days worth of effort if they
had to work two days for every day worth of their consuming? "Overconsumption" can only occur because the empire expropriates
massive amounts of produced value from its vassals and uses that robbed value to buy off its domestic population. Likewise, capitalism
over-rewards certain portions of the domestic population (typically no-skill "professionals" such as journalists and middle
managers) who act as "insulation" for the elites from the working class.
Note that you don't see "overconsumption" among factory workers in Bangladesh or Malaysia. Child slave laborers working
on African cocoa plantations for your Hershey bars could never be accused of "overconsumption" . It would even be unjust
to accuse Chinese workers, as much as their standards of living have exploded over the last couple decades, of indulging in
"overconsumption" .
When China is successful in replacing the US$ with a scientifically managed "currency basket" for international trade
and currency reserve then the problem of "overconsumption" will correct itself and the Global North will go on a diet.
I am not sure that will be possible though without some "kinetic" events between now and then.
On the role of the state on the economy...and on everything else...things not discussed at Valdai, nor at MoA for that matter,
and which contribute to promote the disintegration of states so wished by the neorreactionaires due the lose of confidence of
citizens in the state-
Making the broth to fascism, on the verge of coming "curfews" to be stablished in Spain ,and other European countries...One
wonders why the hell Thiel & associated, those owners of hedge funds and managers of our personal data on behalf of already fascist
givernment like that in the US, need to follow trying to implant their so wished feudal state where the masses are submitted into
slavery, when all that is this already here...and without complaints from our part...
(...)A recent article by Carlota García Encina, an analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute, described the coronavirus pandemic
as "an opportunity for NATO." Specifically, it stated that "the universality of the coronavirus means that NATO must defend
the 30 as if they were one, going from" one for all and all for one "to" all for all ".
In 2003, and anticipating events like the cheating poker player who anticipates his results, NATO released - it was not
secret - the Urban Operations in the Year 2020 report, a socio-economic analysis of the situation in Europe where it anticipated
a crisis unprecedented in the history of capitalism, where urban poverty "could grow significantly in the future, leading to
possible uprisings, civil unrest and threats to security that will require the intervention of local authorities".
The analysis was only a preview of the crisis that the capitalist system was forging. The United Nations evaluated in 2019,
and counting on the data as of December 31, 2018 (that is, less than a year and a half after the "coronavirus crisis"), that
26.1% of the population in Spain, and 29.5% of those under 18 years of age were in a situation of poverty. That more than 55%
had difficulties to make ends meet, and that 5.4% had severe deficiencies (access to electricity, drinking water, heating,
etc.). Official unemployment was 13.78%, more than double the EU average, and youth unemployment was 30.51% among those under
25 years of age. We insist, before the State of Alarm decreed on March 14, 2020.(...)
(...)Any investigation of an event ("coronavirus crisis") has to start from the circumstances that surround it to obtain accurate
conclusions, and not the other way around. The origin of this crisis that is impoverishing millions of people cannot be limited
to March 14, 2020, because as we have seen, the problem came from long before.
If we add to this that many of the decisions that are transforming society towards a privatist model (locked up at home)
and individualistic (normalizing the suppression of rights) were made based on the criteria of a "committee of experts" that
has not existed, we can never set off an alarm that this is not just a "fucking virus."
But the second question that we need to verify is the deterrent effect of the exercise of those rights which imply these
decisions, because even the left is accepting the official account of the events with astonishing passivity.(...)
(...)Paul Von Hindenburg, who came to power thanks to his family fortune, and with credentials manufactured by that fortune,
ended the German Weimar Constitution of 1919 by signing the Reichstag Fire Decree and ushering in something that at the time
of being approved no one called fascism. In the current context, the succession of regulations of this "new exceptionality"
grants an extraordinary delegation of functions to the police or civil guard officers.
With this empowered power, there is no place to turn back. The curfew that will be established in the next few hours may
one day be eliminated from the BOE, but the meaning of this measure is that mass psychology incorporates a disciplined attitude
towards the reality that surrounds us into its behavior.
And what surrounds us is what we already know. Faced with the question of whether or not we should comply with the restrictions
imposed by the State (confinement, isolation, no meetings, no leisure), we must ask ourselves (as we should have done before
March 14) if we are willing to accept or not that poverty and repression are part of our lives .
The stock market crash of 1987, the savings and loan debacle, the tech bubble, the Asian tigers meltdown, the world "recession"
of 2008 and today's global slump (which preceded the pandemic, a point neglected by the apologists for capitalism,) show that
capitalism doesn't work as advertised, even on its own limited terrain. All claims about how "I" (whether it's Putin, Trump, Boris
Johnson, Macron, a miscellaneous German, whoever) am smart enough to solve the minor details of finance responsible have been
proven by history to be lies. Whether born of sincerely felt megalomania or calculated perfidy doesn't matter, instability and
inequality (which is a bad thing, not a good one, no matter what secret feelings may be harbored,) *are* the normal operations
of market economies.
When you add to that the way the global capitalist system is creating a global environmental crisis, the shamelessness of the
capitalist apologists is staggering. Putin is a fool.
The fraud Proyect seems to think Xi is actively commanding the Chinese economy in such a fashion as to be personally responsible
for, well, everything, conveniently omits that Xi is to be condemned precisely for *not* taking charge the way needed, for advancing
the power of the Chinese bourgeoisie even at the expense of the future of China. But then, Proyect is anticommunist/pro imperialist,
a champion of barbarism using pious phrases.
Lastly, the notion that "overconsumption" is the problem, is basically an attack on the masses of the people. The problem is
the accumulation of capital, of money, which is not consumed, but "invested" for yet more money. There's a fake left website called
Crooked Timer where the oh-so-refined-sensibilities of a clot of academics is offended by the rabble eating meat...but they're
not offended by billionaires having more money than they can spend! This is the same thing. The pursuit of money, profit, is not
overconsumption, but that, not overconsumption, distorts the economy. Starting with vague notions like overconsumption reflects
a deep ideological disorientation...or a commitment to capitalism, imperialism and ultimately barbarism.
Things not discussed at Valdai...on the "eco-scam", how the Spanish IBEX35 giants, private great corporations on energy, transports
and clothing, claim thousands of millions from European Funds ( which come from tax payers money, not from the private bank accounts
of European officials, do not forget...) on the alibi of "energetic transition" and "sustainability"....This is the new scam after
that of rescuing big banks in 2008, for the bailing out and profit of those of always while the population impoverishes at galloping
pace and without any prospect of recovery, austerity seems to be our only prospect...
On the "pipelines war", also discussed at Valdai, of which it is part the alleged "Navalny poisoning" also briefly discussed without
naming that unimportant, at Russian and world level, person, how to explain that Germany must cut off Nord Stream 2 pipeline
development on the grounds of not linking its energetic sovereignty to Russia, and then Europe must link its energetic sovereignty
to Israel, when the EU has been an historical defender of Palestinian people´s rights and with this link Europe will be submitted
to blackmail on the part of Israel anytime it dares criticize Israel´s apartheid measures against Palestinians?
After diplomatically recognizing Israel, the UAE signed a contract through the MRLB with the Israeli company EAPC (which manages
the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline) to transport crude oil to Europe without having to cross the Suez Canal
Very true jadan, your view on Putin, and every time I read an excerpt or a speech by him I notice he is far above our western
"leaders" with their meaningless chatter and hollow phrases. That's why you will never read the slightest alinea by Putin in der
Spiegel,le Monde ,or le Figaro.The vile venal journo's can't afford to print it and keep up their unmerited credibility at the
same time.Same for Lavrov,Assad,Xi and Khadafi.
American grocery stores - 80 pct of the items are not necessary and are likely harmful to some degree. Junk food outlets, it's
been known for decades that this stuff leads to obesity, diabetes, and who knows what else. The authorities could mandate changes
to low fat, sugar and salt contents that would apply to all of them with no real harm to their business, but it doesn't get done
because the right people get paid off.
Putin stands out like a shining light amongst what are called world leaders.
Some are just bosses of crime syndicates, follow my eyes (USA). Others are just hopeless idiot figure-heads, like Trudeau.
(I am biased, particularly dislike him. Macron is in the same bin.)
Putin's statements about the 'economy' are calculatedly 'judicious' and unassailable. Note, he only says one has to question
the role of the State in the 'economy' in the sense of control of it, with the State as a mega-regulator + law-maker wielding
authority from the top - not as negotiator, as far as I have understood Putin.
That 'State control' should be different in different conditions -- regions, epochs, etc., is a truism. Putin projects the
feel of 'reasonable control' and 'piloting' (encouraging xyz.. or the opposite..) which rejects both despotic, authoritarian stances,
often 'arbitrary' (or experienced as such), as well as, on the other side, anarchy and unbridled profiteering -> racketeering,
monopolies, cartels, fraud, violence, coercion, etc. Some call that capitalism, others gangsterism.
Russia, land + ressource rich, with a 'low' population density, with well-educated ppl (as compared to many others), its 'economy'
at least not plunging or even stagnant (GDP per capita or some such), is well positioned to put forward such 'reasonable' thoughts.
Humanity's dilemma or rather looming disaster sink-hole - see: ressource extraction, trashing the environment, irreversible
tipping points, 'peak oil' (gone out of fashion with fracking in the US), and other over-consumption (sand for ex.), destruction
(soils.. rivers.. ocean.. global warming..), over-population, global warming.. will not be reversed or in any way solved, by reasoned
Putin-type discourse. (see pnyzx at 4, vk 30, psychohistorian 32 and others..)
For sure, Putin's job is not to solve the world's problems but to protect and nurture Russia and its people and he does that
very well.
"while at the same time even Chinese investors are discouraged from investing through opaque regulation and unpredictable Russian
state intervention."
I wonder if they are becoming more open to western investors. Nordstream 2's financing is ~50% European, and this from Oilprice.com:
". . . .No wonder, then, that a number of banks have pledged a total of $9.5 billion in funding for Novatek's second LNG project,
the Arctic LNG 2. According to a Reuters report, the China Development Bank and German Euler Hermes are among the lenders that
have made pledges, and French Pbifrance is yet to decide on the funding. The China Development Bank is, unsurprisingly, the most
generous backer of the $21-billion Arctic LNG 2 project, with $5 billion.
Arctic LNG 2 will have a liquefaction capacity of $19.8 [sic] million tons of LNG annually divided among three liquefaction
trains."
PS - Good to see you posting after you were virtually assaulted last week.
Den lille Abe,
I nowadays start to read comments from the "bottom up" - in order not to fall into the traps of some trolls, some of those I know
by name, and this prevents me to read their comments. In other words, if you continue reading from top down, you don't know who's
comment you read...
Interesting transcript. Simple, no-frills English.
Judging from the English subtitles in Oliver Stone's 4-part series The Putin Interviews, Putin is no stranger to refreshingly
frank, clear and unambiguous communication, No wonder Russians love him.
Huge contrast with the mendacity of pseudo-Christian ratbags masquerading as Western Leaders on the world stage. Evidence of
the Scum Mo Government's laughably opaque and unaccountable corruption is seeping out of every crack in the facade of what passes
for 'democracy' in Oz.
China is looking at Russia like a hungry pork chop.
See Bear and the Dragon by Tom Clancy. But China has better tech and Russia *still* has
better snipers.
NachoLiebor , 36 minutes ago
Toria Nuland and Hilldawg tried to goad Russia into a war with the EU and US over the
Ukraine.
So, what's your point?
Revolution_starts_now , 32 minutes ago
operation "Jumping Jack Flash". Why should Trump not unleash some fica warrants on
Biden?
Even if he wins he is doomed before he takes office.
They did it to Trump, why not pass along the favor?
Magnum , 40 minutes ago
Highly recommended is a look at The Magnitsky Act
Specifically the role of Bill Browder, his history and involvement. Piraya Films created
this and it was banned. I believe you can still watch it. Obama admin was a complete
disaster. It is in everyone's interest to get along with Russians, who are different
culturally but mean no harm to us.
the Amish are compelled to pit Caucasian against Caucasian. The browns are easier to
control.
NachoLiebor , 44 minutes ago
Never again. Never ever again.
The people (and I use the term loosely) responsible for this fabricated Russian witch
hunt
against President Trump need to be put somewhere they can't hurt anyone ever again.
Ideology in Practice , 49 minutes ago
The crimes against Kavanaugh and Flynn were perhaps more heinous than the ones directly
carried out against Trump.
But he should seek vengeance at this point since every person they injure is a way of
injuring him too.
NachoLiebor , 17 minutes ago
Flynn was a lure and the [DS] swallowed him whole.
Xena fobe , 25 minutes ago
Republican and Trump supporter, Eric Early is challenging Adam Schiff. Early has a chance.
People are furious about rioting, covid lock downs, the homeless, etc.
Didymus , 40 minutes ago
" Authoritarian liberals "
Nimrod doesn't understand the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
Authority is good. Parents have authority. Marxist regimes are totalitarian. The USA is a
totalitarian neoliberal empire.
milo_hoffman , 13 minutes ago
It will continue and continue and continue until some very high ranking prep walks happen
or some people are put up against the wall.
Zorba's idea , 20 minutes ago
"When one chooses to decieve, what a tangled web they weave." That's as modestly as one
could explain the mountainous corruption and Tyrranical Lawlessness our constitutional
republic has been subjected too. Next comes Robespierre, I suppose. Jefferson's tree is
parched.
DonGenaro , 23 minutes ago
I've known for some 30+ years that the USG had devolved into a glorified crime
syndicate
(because nothing is beneath those that start wars for profit ).
Russiagate just made it obvious to all but the most willfully-ignorant.
bshirley1968 , 2 minutes ago
" All anybody (if they're a Democrat) has to do to escape accountability and justice for
very serious crimes is to shout "Russia!"
All anybody (if their republican) has to do to escape accountability and justice for any
crime or delinquency of responsibility is shout "Fake News!"
It's an old game......they call it the "blame game"......and it cuts both ways.
Just sayin'.
cjones1 , 16 minutes ago
The fabricated Russiagate investigation was a conspiracy used against the Trump campaign
and his administration by Obama administration officials who enga grrr ed in official
misconduct, corruption, and worse to keep a lid on investigating rampant national security
violations associated with the Clintons, Bidens, and who knows who engaged in money grubbing,
"pay to play" diplomacy.
The Obama administration's deal with the Iranians provided ample cash for Gen. Soleimani
to post bounties on U.S. personnel.
The Democratic party and their sympathizers in the MSM and Social Media have become a
clear and present danger to our 1st Amendment rights in enjoying a free press.
Good thing Trump came along because this undermining of the United States government by
the Democratic party's supporters in and outside of government is coming into clear view.
RNC's national spokesperson Liz Harrington battled CNN's Christiane Amanpour for
refusing to engage with allegations of corruption against Joe Biden and his family after years
of hyping unverified Trump-Russia allegations.
"Why don't you want to report this? This is one of the most powerful families in
Washington," she asked. "And you're okay with our interests being sold out to profit Joe Biden
and his family, while we're suffering during a pandemic from communist China?"
Russia is done with the European Union. At last week's Valdai Discussion Forum Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made this quite clear with this statement.
Those people in the West who are responsible for foreign policy and do not understand the
necessity of mutually respectable conversation–well, we must simply stop for a while
communicate with them. Especially since Ursula von der Leyen states that geopolitical
partnership with current Russia's leadership is impossible. If this is the way they want it,
so be it. (H/T Andrei Martyanov)
Lavrov's statements echo a number of statements made in recent months by Russian leadership
that there is no opportunity for diplomacy possible with the United States.
We can now add the European Union to that list. Pepe
Escobar's latest piece goes over Lavrov's comments about the European Union and they are
devastating, as devastating as when he and Putin described the U.S. as " Not
Agreement Capable " a few years ago.
Lavrov reiterated this with the following comments at Valdai last week.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/zV_W3b_4G50
But as badly as the U.S. has acted in recent years in international relations, unilaterally
abrogating treaty after treaty, nominally with the goal of remaking them to be more inclusive,
Lavrov's upbraiding of the current leadership of the European Union is far worse.
Because they have gone along with, if not openly assisted, every U.S.-backed provocation
against Russia for their own advantage. From Ukraine to MH-17, to Skripal to now Belarus and
the ridiculous Navalny poisoning, the EU has proved to be worse than the U.S.
Because there can be no doubt the U.S. views Russia as an antagonist. We're quite clear
about this. But Europe plays off U.S. aggression, hiding in the U.S.'s skirts while telling
Russia, usually through German Chancellor Angela Merkel, "Be patient, we are reluctantly going
along with this." But really they're happy about it.
You do not negotiate with monkeys, you treat them nicely, you make sure that they are not
abused, but you don't negotiate with them, same as you don't negotiate with toddlers. They
want to have their Navalny as their toy–let them. I call on Russia to start wrapping
economic activity up with EU for a long time. They buy Russia's hydrocarbons and hi-tech,
fine. Other than that, any other activity should be dramatically reduced and necessity of the
Iron Curtain must not be doubted anymore.
And the truth is that Russia is dealing with monkeys in the U.S. and toddlers in the EU. And
Martanyov's right that it's time Putin et.al. simply turn their backs on the West and move
forward.
Lavrov's statements at Valdai were momentous. They sent a clear signal that if Europe wants
a future relationship with Russia they will have to change how they do business.
The problem is however, that the EU is suffused with arrogance on the eve of the U.S.
election, mistakenly thinking Joe Biden will beat Trump.
Merkel has betrayed Putin at every turn since 2013. And Germany's appalling behavior over
the Alexei Navalny poisoning was the last straw.
That what was another sabotage effort to stop the Nordstream 2 pipeline and add grist to
Trump's re-election mill was given even a cursory glance by the highest levels of the German
government was insulting enough.
That Merkel allowed her Foreign Minister Heiko Maas to run his mouth on the subject, and
then throw the decision to sanction Russia (again) over this to the EU parliament and give it
any kind of political play was truly treacherous.
Germany has taken the lead in advancing "European integration" and therefore prioritizes
Eastern European member states that push for a more aggressive stance towards Russia.
Economic connectivity with Russia is no longer an instrument for building trust and
cooperation in the pan-European space, rather it was intended to strengthen Germany's
position as the center of the EU. Moscow should work with Berlin to construct Nord Stream 2,
but not forget why Nord Stream 1 was built while South Stream was blocked.
This is a point I've been making for years. Nordstream 2 is a political tool for Germany to
reroute gas coming in from Russia which Merkel can use as a political lever over Poland and the
Visegrads.
And it is the Poles who have consistently shot themselves in the foot by not reconciling
their relationship with Russia, banding together with its Eastern European brothers and
securing an independent source of Russian gas. Putin and Gazprom would happily provide it to
them, if they would but ask.
But they don't and instead turn to the U.S. to be their protectors from both Russia and
Germany, rather than conduct themselves as a sovereign nation.
That said, I think Mr. Diesen misses the larger point here. It is true Germany under Merkel
is looking to expand its control over the EU and set itself up as a superpower for the next
century. Putin himself acknowledged
that possibility at Valdai. That may be more to dig at the U.S. and warn Europe rather than
him actually believing it.
Because under Merkel and the EU Germany is losing its dynamism. And it may even lose control
over the EU if it isn't careful. If you look at the current situation from a German perspective
you realize that Germany's mighty export business is surrounded by hostile foreign powers.
Russia -- Merkel cut off the country from Russian markets. Even though some of the trade
with Russia has returned since sanctions over Crimea went into place in 2014 she hasn't
fought the U.S.'s hyper-aggressive use of sanctions to improve Germany's position.
The U.K. -- French President Emmanuel Macron looks like he's engineered a No-Deal Brexit
with Boris Johnson which will put up major export barriers for Germany into the U.K. cutting
them off from that market.
The U.S. – Trump has all but declared Germany an enemy and when he wins a second
term will tighten the screws on Merkel even tighter.
China – They know that the incoming Great Reset, which will have its Jahr Null
event in Europe likely next year, is all about consolidating power into Europe and sucking it
away from the U.S., a process Trump is dead-set against.
However, don't think for a second that the Commies that run the EU and the World Economic
Forum are teaming up with the Commies in China. Oh no, they have bigger plans than that.
And what's been pretty clear to me is Europe's delusions that it can subjugate the world
under its rubric, forcing its rules and standards on the rest of us, including China, again
allowing the U.S. to act as its proxy while it tries to maintain its standing.
I know what you're thinking. That sounds completely ludicrous.
And you're right, it is ludicrous.
But that doesn't mean it isn't true. This is clearly the mindset we're dealing with in The
Davos Crowd. They engineered a mostly-fake pandemic to accelerate their plans to remake the
world economy by burning it down.
The multi-polar world will see the fading U.S. and U.K. band together while Russia and China
continue to stitch together Asia into a coherent economic sphere. Trump is right to pull the
U.S. out of Central Asia and has gotten nothing but grief from the U.S. establishment while
Europe, through NATO, continues trying to expand to the Russian border, now with openly backing
the attempted coup in Belarus.
This was the dominant theme at Valdai and the focus of Putin's opening remarks.
Blaming Russia seems to be today's version of the dog ate my homework.
ariadnatheo, 1 day ago
I am disappointed that Russia once again interfered in the US elections without using
Novichok.
TrishArch, 1 day ago
Always Russia's Fault. Little wonder no one listens to biden.
The_Celotajs, 1 day ago
Like Russian President Vladimir Putin once said, Russia has no need to interfere in the
United States Elections when they have the Democrats doing it to themselves.
brianeg, 15 hours ago
There was of course an obvious Russian connection and that was the $3.5 million given by the
wife of the Mayor of Moscow to Hunter. Was this a birthday present or what?
Doodle_Dandy, 1 day ago
One wonders when Masha and the Bear will get the blame?
Many of us read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry when we were
children and remember what the main character said: "It's a question of discipline. When
you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet. It's very
tedious work, but very easy."
I am sure that we must keep doing this "tedious work" if we want to preserve our
common home for future generations. We must tend our planet.
The subject of environmental protection has long become a fixture on the global
agenda. But I would address it more broadly to discuss also an important task of
abandoning the practice of unrestrained and unlimited consumption – overconsumption
– in favour of judicious and reasonable sufficiency, when you do not live just for
today but also think about tomorrow.
We often say that nature is extremely vulnerable to human activity. Especially when
the use of natural resources is growing to a global dimension. However, humanity is not
safe from natural disasters, many of which are the result of anthropogenic interference.
By the way, some scientists believe that the recent outbreaks of dangerous diseases are a
response to this interference. This is why it is so important to develop harmonious
relations between Man and Nature.
No cheating please. Guess. Who said the above?
Please let us know your first guess in the comments.
Wow! What a mind blunder! Of course, it was VVP. Too much reading! Ha!! Pepe's article
has its own merits. Even more important is
this revealing editorial , "How Russophobia Wrought Death of the United States:"
"The surprise election in 2016 of Donald Trump to the White House so disturbed the
political class that it was compelled to delegitimize his presidency by alleging that it
was due to Russian interference. The relentless and irrational Russophobia to undermine
Trump by his domestic political enemies has only transpired to fatally weaken American
global power. The political squabbling and infighting has wreaked havoc on the moral
authority and legitimacy of American institutions of governance. The legislative
government, the presidency, the judiciary, the intelligence apparatus, the legacy media,
and so on. Every supposed pillar of American democracy has been eroded over the past four
years with alarming speed.
"A big part of this precipitous demise is due to Russophobia: the relentless sowing of
doubt and confusion in American institutions, primarily the presidency, with insinuations
of Russian interference. In their attempts to delegitimize Trump, his domestic enemies
among the U.S. establishment have ended up delegitimizing public esteem of American
democracy. How paradoxical! America's own worst enemy turns out to be itself ." [My
Emphasis]
I've long maintained that the enemies of the USA and its people are ALL Domestic
and have been from the outset. Lots of truth fit into that short essay!
The tone sounds like Vladimir Putin in English translation and the timing of B's post
suggests he said it during his closing speech at this year's Valdai Club meetings. Putin
has always been keen on conservation issues and often spends what free time he has in short
camping adventures. The Siberian tiger conservation program is a pet project of his.
The other possibility might be Chinese President Xi Jinping as the ideas of modest
consumption or consumption that fulfills a person's needs and of humans living in harmony
with nature appear in the speech, and these ideas have been incorporated into recent
Chinese government policies. The drive to eradicate poverty not only achieves one goal
(fulfilling people's needs) but also helps achieve the other, as impoverished communities
are often driven by forces beyond their control into marginal areas where they end up
upsetting the ecology and destroying in order to survive. Among other things his also
brings exotic pathogens in contact with humans through the disturbance of plant and animal
life (insects in particular) and the consumption of bushmeat and its trade.
Significantly in recent years much of the Earth's land surface as measured by satellites
that has become greener has been in China and India as a result of large-scale conservation
and tree-planting schemes and better use of land. This has sometimes involved relocating
entire rural communities in parts of China to areas where they can access services that
help to improve their lives. An example might be a community I read about recently that
lived on top of a small mountain or plateau where the only access to schools and markets
was through a winding series of narrow staircases cut into the mountain's sides. One child
did not start going to school until she was 11 years old because her mother was afraid that
she'd fall while using the stairs. The local authority later built a bridge connecting the
mountain to lower areas, cutting travel time from 3 hours to 1 hour. Recently the entire
community agreed to relocate and its old village on top of the mountain is to be preserved
and developed as a tourist attraction.
Note that not all the questions and answers after the speech have been transcribed
yet.
This is another of Mr.Putins masterpieces of common sense and analysis, courteously and
clearly telling truth as no global 'leader' even could let alone would.
It is an exceptionally important and wide-ranging analysis of the nature of humans, the
planet, and governance.
"... Vyacheslav Volodin, Speaker of the State Duma believes that Navalny has been too outspoken: "This guy is a competely shamless fraud." And pointing out how much was done to save his unworthy ass: From the pilots who emergency-landed the plane in Tomsk; to the doctors and nurses who fought ferociously to intubate him; to the President himself who personally gave permission to fly this recidivist to a prestigious German clinic Dante should have designed a special circle in Hell for such an ingrate, who now spits on the entire Russian nation. ..."
"... Putin's Press Secretary Peskov: "We should clarify that CIA specialists are working with Navalny, and give him various instructions. And moreover, this is not the first time, either." ..."
"... Navalny was upset by Peskov's words, he blustered back saying that Peskov is skating on very thin ice [little joke there], and said he planned to sue the man for libel: "He must prove that I actually have ties with American intelligence." Well, that's easy: Just ask Pompeo. ..."
"... Akopov himself believes that Navalny is more than just a "CIA project", he is more like a "joint venture" with all the Westie agencies. And this project also includes the Russian Neo-Liberal elite and the Westernizing section of the Oligarchy. ..."
"... Everybody who has studied Navalny and Navalniada, know what is actually going on here: Navalny and his neo-Liberal kreakle supporters represent that class of bourgeois intelligentsia who came along maybe 5 or 10 years too late to participate in the Yeltsinite plundering of the Russian people. ..."
"... They are only millionaires now, but they want to be billionaires. [yalensis: Although some evil tongues claim that Navalny has actually lost his fortune somehow and is fleeing from his creditors; hence the current crisis.] Putin stands in the way of the kreakles because he (and his caste of functionaries) have somewhat curbed the openly pirate proclivities of the Russian bourgeoisie; partially nationalized them, made them go to Church, and forced them to follow certain rules. ..."
Этот Германн, --
продолжал
Томский, -- лицо
истинно
романическое: у
него профиль
Наполеона, а
душа
Мефистофеля. Я
думаю, что на
его совести по
крайней мере
три злодейства.
Как вы
побледнели!..
"This Hermann fellow," Tomsky continued, -- "a truly romantic-era personality, the profile
of a Napoleon, and the soul of Mephistopheles. I believe that on his conscience lie at least
three crimes.
Oh my, you just turned pale!" -- Pushkin, The Queen of Spades "And that's not even counting
KirovLes!" Tomsky should have added.
Dear Readers: Today concluding my review of this piece by reporter/analyst Petr Akopov.
Where we left off, we saw that Navalny may have overstepped the line (just a tad) by
directly accusing Putin of poisoning him.
According to my blog-commenter James, Navalny is now busy on the talk-show circuit, doing a
full Ginsburg on all the imperialist propaganda media.
Describing what it feels like to be poisoned – "Ow! it hurt so much!" in full
pathos.
And Westie Navalny Goes Va Banque – burghers no doubt lapping up this farce because
it's more entertaining than the circus. –Meanwhile, back in Russia, members of the
government are not very happy with Navalny's wild improvised performance.
Vyacheslav Volodin, Speaker of the State Duma believes that Navalny has been too
outspoken: "This guy is a competely shamless fraud." And pointing out how much was done to save
his unworthy ass: From the pilots who emergency-landed the plane in Tomsk; to the doctors and
nurses who fought ferociously to intubate him; to the President himself who personally gave
permission to fly this recidivist to a prestigious German clinic Dante should have designed a
special circle in Hell for such an ingrate, who now spits on the entire Russian
nation.
For 7 long days, Navalny lay in a fake-coma does that work for the 7 card? Furthermore, in a
no-shit kind of epiphany, Volodin opines that this whole poisoning scenario was scripted by the
Westies: "In order to create tension within Russia, and to prevent Belorussia from asserting
its sovereignty." Captain Obvious concludes with: "Navalny himself clearly works with the
special services and organs of goverments of [various] Western countries."
After such a shocking utterance, the Kremlin felt the need to clarify: Uh, it's not so much
that Navalny works for the CIA; as the CIA works for him! Uh huh, that makes perfect sense. As
comedian Yakov Smirnov might say: In America, Secret Agent works for CIA. But in Russia, CIA
works for him!
Putin's Press Secretary Peskov: "We should clarify that CIA specialists are working with
Navalny, and give him various instructions. And moreover, this is not the first time,
either."
Navalny was upset by Peskov's words, he blustered back saying that Peskov is skating on
very thin ice [little joke there], and said he planned to sue the man for libel: "He must prove
that I actually have ties with American intelligence." Well, that's easy: Just ask
Pompeo.
Akopov himself believes that Navalny is more than just a "CIA project", he is more like
a "joint venture" with all the Westie agencies. And this project also includes the Russian
Neo-Liberal elite and the Westernizing section of the Oligarchy.
They are all in this together as partners. [yalensis: And these knuckle-heads couldn't come
up with anybody better than Navalny as their Leader?] Akopov would not even want to venture a
guess, which one of these "partners" holds the "controlling interest" in Mr.
Navalny's person.
Although it is plausible that shares might be redistributed during Navalny's stay in
Germany. The question du jour is whether or not Navalny will return to Russia. Gentlemen and
Countesses, you are free to place your bets on this one. Akopov believes that, yes, Navalny not
only will, but must, return to Russia. Why? To complete his Quest. What is his Quest? To change
the internal political structure and geopolitical vector of Russia.
Here is how Navalny himself describes the pathos of the current situation: "A struggle is
taking place between those who stand for Freedom, and those who wish to push us backwards. Into
the Past, into that strange Orthodox imitation of the Soviet Union, only decorated with
Capitalism and Oligarchs." "I win!" Hm I hate to admit it, but Navalny's words actually have a
ring of truth to them, which is why, if they were to come out of the mouth of a real
freedom-fighter, then they might bear some weight.
But you know what people say: If you want to sell a lie, then you have to sprinkle it with
truth.
Everybody who has studied Navalny and Navalniada, know what is actually going on here:
Navalny and his neo-Liberal kreakle supporters represent that class of bourgeois intelligentsia
who came along maybe 5 or 10 years too late to participate in the Yeltsinite plundering of the
Russian people.
They regret this, and wish for an opportunity to make their own fortunes, on the backs of
said Russian people.
They are only millionaires now, but they want to be billionaires. [yalensis: Although
some evil tongues claim that Navalny has actually lost his fortune somehow and is fleeing from
his creditors; hence the current crisis.] Putin stands in the way of the kreakles because he
(and his caste of functionaries) have somewhat curbed the openly pirate proclivities of the
Russian bourgeoisie; partially nationalized them, made them go to Church, and forced them to
follow certain rules.
This is what drives Navalny and his ilk crazy. They want it all, and they want it now!
Putin, for his part, in his endless balancing act, trying to maintain two incompatible things,
as Pushkin might have said (=capitalism and Russian patriotism) has scrambled to win the
support of the patriotic bourgeoisie and the clergy, the two pillars of the Lost Russia he
strives to re-build.
Navalny again:
"A part of society repeats Putin's rhetoric about how the country needs to follow its own
path. They are talking about restoring a kind of monarchy, based on certain spiritual values.
And against them stand such people as myself, who consider this to be a lie and hypocrisy, and
who are convinced that Russia must develop only according to the European model."
Ah, Navalny! You had me at "monarchy" but lost me at "European model" – you wretch!
"It's curtains for you, buster!"
Akopov, it goes without saying, is one of those intellectuals whom Navalny despises as
supporting the "Putinite" model of Russian development: Rely on a strong Russian state (which
Navalny mockingly calls an "imitation of the USSR"), lean on the Church, develop one's own
geo-political vector, etc.
Navalny and his crowd regard these types as complete zombies, whose proposed model is
worthless.
But the only thing that Navalny counter-punts are equally worn-out ideas of what Lenin would
call "the highest stages of capitalism" and which would, in reality, demote Russia to the level
of an American colony.
Same as the rest of Europe! Akopov concedes, however, that Navalny's "vision", if one could
call it that, of a European Russia imbued with "democratic values" does, in fact, enjoy mass
support -- among the Muscovite intelligentsia.
This kreakle mass [Akopov does not say, but there are estimates that the Navalnyite program
enjoys as much as 30% support among the residents of Moscow, not so much in the rest of the
country] believe in exactly the same things that Navalny does.
And have been "fighting" for this program (in one way or another) for the past 30 years.
This section of the Russian bourgeois intelligentsia punts against Putin's "national
project" and now awaits eagerly for the return of their poisoned, and poisonous, hero. [THE
END]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the General Services Administration (GSA)
undermined the Trump transition team by violating a memorandum of understanding between the
Trump transition team and the GSA - when they complied with requests from the FBI and special
counsel Robert Mueller's office to provide private records on members of Trump's team ,
according to a Senate report released on Friday.
The majority staff report from both the Senate Committee on Finance and the Committee on
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs claims that officials from both the FBI and
Mueller's office " secretly sought and received access to the private records of Donald J.
Trump's presidential transition team, Trump for America, Inc. "
"They did so," the report continues, "despite the terms of a memorandum of understanding
between the Trump transition team and the General Services Administration.. . -- the
executive agency responsible for providing services to both candidates' transition teams --
that those records were the transition team's private property that would not be retained at
the conclusion of the transition."
According to the report, the GSA - without notifying the White House - reached out
to the FBI following Michael Flynn's resignation as national security adviser and offered to
retain records from the Trump transition team in early 2017. The records compiled eventually
made their way into Mueller's office, according to the report.
"At bottom," continues the report, " the GSA and the FBI undermined the transition process
by preserving Trump transition team records contrary to the terms of the memorandum of
understanding, hiding that fact from the Trump transition team, and refusing to provide the
team with copies of its own records."
" These actions have called into question the GSA's role as a neutral service provider, and
those doubts have consequences ," the report reads. "Future presidential transition teams must
have confidence that their use of government resources and facilities for internal
communications and deliberations -- including key decisions such as nominations, staffing, and
significant policy changes -- will not expose them to exploitation by third parties, including
political opponents ."
1 play_arrow
911bodysnatchers322 , 4 hours ago
1) Was this illegal surveillance?
2) Was this spying before a FISA warrant was given?
3) Did this occur before the special council was incepted (ie before may 2017)?
4) Which attorneys on his team requested this information?
5) Which US employees at GSA approved the FBI's request?
6) Why did the GSA approve the request, despite the MOU from TTT?
7) Will the employees cry out for mommy or for God when they are executed for treason
(participants in seditious conspiracy against a lawful president)?
8) If they aren't executed, will president trump please give any us citizen a pre-pardon
for carrying out justice against these employees after they are fired, and the sum total of
their assets seized and divested to the us taxpayer base and they are homeless?
Thank you congressmen. Reclaiming our time
3O4jF"> Macho Latte play_arrow Mzhen , 5 hours ago
November 29, 2019 – The history of Flynn prosecutor Brandon Van Grack – from
the Special Counsel's Office to the prosecution of Flynn
It can't be repeated enough...the Weissman "investigation" and Clinton campaign were doing
exactly what President Trump was falsely accused of...using disinformation obtained from
RUSSIAN sources (the Steele Dossier) to influence an election and undermine the peaceful
transfer of power.
booboo , 4 hours ago
more specifically they knew the charge would not stick because you can't charge someone
for obstruction for calling out your prosecutor.
4whatitsworth , 3 hours ago
Mr Muller please confirm that the name of the firm that produced the Christopher Steele
dossier was Fusion GPS.. Muller hmmm Fusion GPS "I'm not familiar with that," - what a lying
peice of ****!
Metastatic Debt , 3 hours ago
Feds only solve crimes they manufacture or entrap for political gain, gain internally for
promos or externally for glory.
That agency was founded by a black mailing, cross dressing weirdo.
No wonder it's corrupt. That was Its core makeup.
UserLevel9000 , 4 hours ago
He was a frontman. He didn't even read the report. Didn't you see the interview?
Short of killing him, our government exhausted all resources in order to remove Trump.
What's the term? Ah yes, a ******* coup.
Im 44yo but I hope I live long enough for the historians to connect the dots and write the
story. Much like JFK, all involved will be dead and will never pay for their crimes against
this country and attack on one of the most important protections we have as a Republic- a
peaceful transfer of power.
Mzhen , 4 hours ago
Who, specifically, has his name on the Mueller team letter to the GSA. Brandon Van Grack.
The same prosecutor who spent years persecuting General Flynn, before being forced to
withdraw from the case. The same Brandon Van Grack who was part of a failed sting operation
against George Papadopoulos.
Totally_Disillusioned , 3 hours ago
The ENTIRE bureaucracy was against Trump and made EVERY EFFORT to sabotage, obstruct and
deny President Trump's full authority over the Executive Branch.
High Vigilante , 4 hours ago
Another scandal by globalists and Demsheviks every single day. Each worse than
Watergate.
Contagion Deleverage , 4 hours ago
The implications of Mueller having access to SECRET information pertaining to Donal Trump
is remarkable and powerful. I believe that this is the source for leaking important and
damaging information on Trump, his closest advisors, and critically, their plans and
capabilities!
Reaper , 4 hours ago
The prosecutor was the criminal.
Secret Weapon , 5 hours ago
The trash in DC really hates the average American. I guess they meant it when they called
us "deplorable".
chubbar , 3 hours ago
When you say "GSA did this" or "FBI did that", you are being lazy in your reporting. There
are actual PEOPLE who made those decisions, not some nameless entity. What has to happen is
that these actual people need to be found, charged and tried for these crimes. Otherwise,
let's just call everything legal if no laws are to be enforced and quit bringing up the
details of their treachery.
ConanTheContrarian1 , 1 hour ago
Ever read a gov't document? "It was decided....", "It seemed best....", etc. NEVER "I
decided" or "Joe and Maxine decided". Ten thousand coverups and misdirections per
department.
getsometoo , 4 hours ago
How do these bureautards get off thinking they're going dispose a duly elected President?
Seriously, don't they understand the people would never allow it. What would it take for the
people to utterly wipe out the FBI? To execute every damn one of them for treason? There's
only around 35-40,000 of them. We could hang every damn one of them in a weekend.
Sonofabitches. These people must absolutely lose their jobs. Then the guilty leadership must
hang.
Sigh. , 4 hours ago
So. GSA is Deep State. Never would've figured that.
Barrock , 4 hours ago
Even the GSA is part of the swamp! Who would've figured? The USA needs to cut the annual
budget hugely. The government needs a complete rehaul.
Walking Turtle , 3 minutes ago
Seems Mr. Trump is positioned now to do pretty much that.
His recent creation per EO of GSA "Schedule F" employment lays waste to the "non-fireable"
Senior Executive Service's stranglehold on Executive Branch administrative process. Sched F
appointees are strictly at-will, serving at the sole pleasure of the President. Failure to
serve as directed carries severe consequences, including jail time.
Moreover, a Sched F appointee can reportedly be placed above the SES wonk at the head of a
recalcitrant agency. (Currently that means ALL of them - 80+ iirc.) Puts the BRIT-LOYAL
Senior Executive Service under actual Constitution-loyal Executive Branch supervision.
Betsy and Thomas d of American Intelligence Media (.mp3 podcast @link) have plenty good
reason LOVE this, as does YT. The SES Policy Wonk Armee, otoh,
does not .
Panic in DC. Long time coming; HERE NOW. DC-region dentists are gonna' clean right UP with
all the gnashing of teeth and consequent self-inflicted damage to the dentition of those
Swamp Rats imvho. And that is all. 0{;-)o[
Bigboot , 36 minutes ago
What happened to all the expos\'es of the Hunter Laptop we were told were coming out?
Isn't it amazing, stultifying and incredibly nightmarish that we are heading into the
election and NOT ONE of the Democrat criminals has been indicted? My God, there's
something
really rotten in the state of America (cf Shakespeare, I know America is not a state).
Total corruption at all levels. God save us from the Government and all its rotten
agencies.
gcjohns1971 , 40 minutes ago
Government does not believe in Democracy or in the Republic.
They work for other masters. And they assert exclusive right to choose which ones.
Good questions to ask include:
Which ones?
On what basis is their choosing?
What is in it for the rest of us?
Why should we continue to enable a "government" on such a self-serving basis?
Leguran , 44 minutes ago
These actions have called into question the GSA's role as a neutral service provider, and
those doubts have consequences?????
No ****! Who the hell is supposed to trust government when those in top positions feel
free to do exactly what they please. That MOU was an agreement, the government's word.
Republicans in the Senate, you are all dirt bags with no values. At least the Democrats do
not claim to have values.
That court order directed him to stop claiming the "Russian troll" company, Comcord (
their ads were typical clickbait , not 'meddling') was connected to the Russian
government - because he had produced no evidence at all to substantiate that.
He also would have had access to information that casted serious doubt on the alleged
hacking.. nevermind 'collusion' - they NEVER had any evidence of a hack.
How do we know, apart from the lack of any credible evidence ever actually produced?
Well, for one, the testimony of the president of CrowdStrike which Adam Schiff
deliberately suppressed during impeachment.
is a game and tech journalist from the US. Aside from writing for RT, he hosts the podcast
Micah and The Hatman, and is an independent comic book writer. Follow Micah at @MindofMicahC
It's safe to say that Hunter Biden, the son of former vice president and current
presidential candidate Joe Biden, is having a rough time. After the contents of his laptop,
including details of his international business dealings, came into the public domain, it
transpired that the computer had been the
subject of a subpoena in a money-laundering investigation. Now, former business partners
are beginning to turn on him, and one of them has said that he's turning "
everything " over to the FBI and the Senate. Another one claimed that Biden was
consulted with regard to Hunter's foreign deals.
During the second and final presidential debate, Biden made a key mistake when it came to
addressing these issues. Instead of simply stating that he had no comment to make, he decided
to
blame Russia for the fact that Hunter's emails had been leaked from the laptop's hard
drive. Ah yes. So we're back to that old 'reliable' narrative. I'm assuming that Joe may have
missed the embarrassment that was the Mueller
investigation .
Maybe Biden doesn't like Russia. Whether he does or doesn't is inconsequential. It is a very
bad idea to blame his problems on a foreign power. In fact, it's not the proper behavior of
someone who wants to be president. Here's the truth. Hunter Biden's dealings across the pond
likely had some issues. It's hard to say exactly what these might be, because there's an
ongoing investigation. I don't think that Biden is so dumb that he doesn't realize that this
hurts his chances of the presidency. However, there is a big lack of responsibility here.
Blaming what's happening on anyone except Hunter is a bit silly. I'd even argue that it's
incredibly irresponsible.
What's even more obvious is the desperation. Biden and the Democrats in general want this
story, whatever it is, to be squashed. It's why you have seen so little coverage on
left-leaning TV networks. If Donald Trump Jr was in a similar situation it would be a story on
every single one of them, and likely the subject of a Don Lemon lecture or five.
What Biden may not realize is that when voters see something being blamed on Russia, they
tend to roll their eyes. It invokes the image of Boris and Natasha grabbing a laptop in the
hopes of finally grabbing the moose and squirrel. It's cartoonish. And what happens if the
worst-case scenario for Biden comes true and his son is indicted for something? Well, at that
point it's more than just a ' Russian disinformation campaign' . It's very real
indeed.
And this is where Biden could end up with plenty of egg on his face. If he and his son are
in trouble, then no amount of blaming another country is going to change that. And it wouldn't
surprise me if this becomes a major factor in the upcoming election. Why would you vote for
someone who can't, or won't, take responsibility for what is going on with their own
family?
What Biden needs to do at this point is come clean on what his level of involvement was, and
simply be a dad to his son instead of a politician. Then again, Biden has been a politician
longer than he's been a father, so it's hard saying which hat he plans on wearing for the next
two weeks.
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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.
MakeAmericaFree 1 day ago The world is witness
to the blatant corruption and deceit at the highest levels of American government. Trump has
tried to clean things up and he has a lot more left to do. We should wish him well in those
efforts. I am starting to think Attorney General William Barr has capitulated though. Where are
all the indictments, Mr. Barr? Reply 14 ariadnatheo MakeAmericaFree 1 day ago Barr? The CIA
offspring? He does what he is told, not necessarily by his official boss SJMan333 1 day ago If
Joe is running against another regular Republican politician, Hunter Biden's corruption would
have been a non-issue. The US politics is a cesspool of corruption, money laundering, sex and
all forms of moral decay. Each politician is in it for self-serving purposes. Position, power,
money, etc etc. A big section of naive Americans believe their politicians are there to serve
the people's interests. Politicians from both sides of the aisle have a tacit understanding NOT
to cross a red line. They will never accuse their opponents of corruption. 'You make your
money, I make mine.' is their omerta. They put up huge shows of debating with each other in
public purportedly in defense of the people's welfare and benefits. Behind closed door, they
celebrate their loots from the nation's tax money and illegal brides from businesses in
camaraderie together. I don't like Trump. But his exposure of the alleged crimes of the Biden
family is something to be applauded, even he's doing it for self-serving purposes. DukeLeo 1
day ago Joe Biden is using Hillary's methods. Not wise. You don't use the same fraud twice.
shadow1369 DukeLeo 1 day ago Well the CIA have used the same lies for 75 years. White Elk
shadow1369 1 day ago Must be a bit worn out by now. Reply 2 shadow1369 White Elk 1 day ago You
would think so, you would also think that everybody would have seen through them by now, but
not at all. The CIA orchestrated coup in Kiev used exactly the same methods as the one they
orchestrated in Iran in 1953. The details of Operation Ajax are now publicly available, but few
bother to look into it. allan Kaplan White Elk 1 day ago Not worn out but perfected! Lois
Winters 1 day ago I am not surprised at anything Biden says after seeing his performance in
these debates. He is obviously a tired old man and relies on sheafs of notes with the same old
so called empathic statements to the citizens of America. It is a wonder that he's a
presidential candidate at all. After all the original candidates finally were eliminated, no
one but these two want this thankless job. allan Kaplan 1 day ago Now that the shameless "mind
managers" the msm propagandists are in the opens, we, the people (an old cliche) must start
making noises of holding these anti-American mouth pieces accountable. Compel to change the FCC
Rules to take away their broadcasting licensees, penalized those self proclaimed journalists of
zero integrities, jailed most of them, and never again allow such ego bloated nincompoops ever
to come near the radio and TV stations and banned them from entering any newspaper offices as
well. Other punitive measures must be enacted to deface and disregard these paid mouths of fake
news and disinformation msm Complex! I'm starting a business of manufacturing toilet bowls and
the pubic urinals with the faces impregnated into the ceramic of all those who exploited
American freedom of speech to advance their personal careers and that would certainly include
almost all the politicians and the tech giants etc. What do you think as a statement to test
the real FREE SPEECH?
The explosive claim comes from Lord Mark Sedwill, who until last month served as the most
senior adviser and head of the civil service in Johnson's cabinet. He held the same positions
under former prime minister Theresa May, during whose term the Salisbury affair unfolded.
Speaking to Times Radio, Sedwill
said Russia has "some vulnerabilities that we can exploit." So London's response to
the incident included not only publicly accusing Russia of being behind the attack and
expelling its diplomats, but also "a series of other discreet measures including tackling
some of the illicit money flows out of Russia, and covert measures as well, which obviously I
can't talk about," the former official said.
The Russians know that they had to pay a higher price than they had expected for that
operation.
Sedwill would not explain how stopping illicit money flowing out of Russia would hurt the
Russian government or why the UK didn't act sooner to crack down on those financial crimes.
Presumably, in his view, President Vladimir Putin's power relies on allowing crooked officials
and businessmen to siphon the Russian national wealth and the British government was content
with it as long as the UK was on the receiving end.
A different view is taken in Moscow, where officials have repeatedly accused the British
of harboring Russian criminals and welcoming illicitly gained cash.
The Times implied that the "covert measures" mentioned by Sedwill included the UK
using its cyber offensive capabilities against Russia.
The Salisbury poisoning happened in March 2018. Former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal
and his daughter were injured by what the British government described as a uniquely Russian
chemical weapon, but have since recovered. London identified two people from Russia as the
culprits, calling them agents of the Russian military intelligence.
Moscow denied any involvement in the poisoning and said London had stonewalled all attempts
to properly investigate what had happened.
This week's perhaps overly dramatic
announcement
Wednesday night
by the heads of multiple federal agencies - foremost among them Director of National
Intelligence John Ratcliffe - alleging new major efforts by Russia and Iran to interfere in the US presidential
election formed a key question and talking point by debate moderator Kristen Welker Thursday night.
Welker even referenced as somehow undisputed and settled "truth"
the
now debunked "Russian bounties" story
. Over a month ago the Pentagon and other intelligence heads
concluded after an exhaustive investigation that
there's
simply no evidence
to suggest Russian military intelligence paid Afghan fighters to target Americans.
Russia was certainly paying attention to the debate and was not amused. The Kremlin on Friday blasted what it said
was
"Russophobia"
at the center of the debate
.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov
told
journalists Friday that
"
competition
in Russophobia
has become a constant in all US electoral processes, regrettably."
"We are fully aware of this and can only express regret," he added as quoted in TASS.
"After all, probably, it is the American electorate who is the target audience of these debates, that is, common
Americans. It is up to them to decide who won the debate, not us," the spokesman said.
Indeed the American public is by and large likely growing tired of the endless Russia scapegoating too.
National security pundit and research fellow at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
Richard Hanania had this to say about just how vapid foreign policy questions have become in this election (when
they are offered at all):
Notice how the entire debate on foreign policy was about who was "nicer" to China, Russia, or some other
"enemy," not say whether we should go to war more or less often.
There's
a primitiveness and stupidity surrounding discussions of foreign policy that we don't accept elsewhere
,
he
pointed
out
.
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Over the years Putin himself has increasingly mocked and laughed about the degree to which he personally gets
blamed for almost all ills of American society - from election meddling to "weaponizing" race relations to
supposedly seeking to take out the national power grid.
An early example comes from 1992 when the then- Lithuanian Defence Minister called Russia a
country "with vague prospects" while at the same time asserting that "in about two years' time
[it] will present a great danger to Europe" (FBIS 22 May 92 p 69).
Vague prospects but great danger. Given the vague demographic
prospects of his own country , it was a rather ironic assertion given that Lithuania's
future would appear to be a few nursing homes surrounded by forest. But he said it in the days
of the full EU/NATO cargo cult. In 2014 U.S. President Obama immortalised this in an
interview :
But I do think it's important to keep perspective. Russia doesn't make anything.
Immigrants aren't rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the
Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking. And so we have to respond
with resolve in what are effectively regional challenges that Russia presents.
In the emerging post-Cold War-era Russia, no matter how poor it is in many key areas, can be
#2 in the world for many years to come. Only when China rises in the next 20 years or a new
kind of President emerges in the United States will that change. Until then Vladimir Putin can
play his games to his heart's content.
Of course all of these headscratchers assume that the exchange rate of the ruble is the true
measure of Russia's economy; which is a pretty silly and
misleading idea .
* * *
But at the same time Russia is an enormous, dangerous, existential threat functioning with
enormous effectiveness in all dimensions.
So, on the one hand Russia is a failing country, with a trivial economy, a greatly
over-rated military led by someone who is always facing a catastrophe at home. Nothing to worry
about there: presently weak and future uncertain. On the other hand, Russia has a tremendously
powerful military, an economy that does whatever its ever-young autocratic permanent ruler
wants it to. Its propaganda power is immense and unbeatable, the background determinant of the
world's action. Russophrenia.
And, out of the blue, COVID gives him another opportunity to bamboozle the helpless West and
undermine its precious Rules-Based International Order. Somehow. See if you can make sense
of this incoherence :
This should worry the West once the pandemic has passed. Not because Russia poses a
serious long-term threat to our interests; it doesn't, although Putin would prefer us to
think that his shrivelled realm does. But because Russia is not the only authoritarian state
seeking to learn lessons from the current crisis which could be used in a future
conflict.
Russophrenics are unaffected by reality. Russia's success? Forget maleficence and try
competence . Its military is designed to defend the country, not rule
the world : a less expensive and attainable aim. Its economy -- thanks to Western sanctions
-- has made it probably the only
autarky in the world . Election interference is a falsehood designed to damage Trump and
exculpate Clinton which has been picked up by Washington's puppies. But don't bother with mere
evidence; As the author of this New
Yorker piece explains :
Such externally guided operations exist, but to exaggerate their prevalence and potency
ends up eroding the idea of genuine bottom-up protest -- in a way that, ironically, is
entirely congenial to Putin's conspiratorial world view.
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Scott Adams understands the process perfectly:
Absence of evidence is evidence.
Pretty crazy isn't it? And getting crazier.
All this would be funny if it were Ruritania ranting at the Duchy of Strackenz.
But it isn't: it's the country with the most destructive military in the world and a proven
record of using it ad libitum that is sinking into this insanity. And that's not good for any
of us.
PGR88 , 7 hours ago
Russia merely wants to protect itself, its culture, and its interests from an increasingly
insane American globalist deep state.
teutonicate , 1 hour ago
Russophrenia... Or How A Collapsing Country Runs The World
Much as cabalist-run propaganda mill The Strategic Cultural Foundation would like it to be
true, Russia is not collapsing. The only thing wrong with Russia is that it is a
predominantly White Christian country that refuses to kowtow to Israel - and therefore in
cabaliist-dominated Western political circles it must be defined as the enemy - regardless of
reality.
It must really irk cabalist central bankers and globalists that Russia simply doesn't need
them. It is has a real economy that doesn't completely depend on being pumped up with an
endless supply of rapidly devaluing fiat.
Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar has called for defunding National Public Radio after the
outlet officially refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal (while happily peddling
anti-Trump rumors for years) - calling it a ' waste of
time. '
"It's time to defund @NPR. This is appalling. #DefundNPR," Gosar tweeted on Thursday.
Gosar joins a growing chorus of conservative voices who are furious over the outlet's
decision to censor perhaps the biggest political bombshell in decades .
NPR public editor Kelly McBride
published an inquiry on its website Thursday from a listener who did not understand why the
outlet was ignoring the story.
"Someone please explain why NPR has apparently not reported on the Joe Biden, Hunter Biden story in the last
week or so that Joe did know about Hunter's business connections in Europe that Joe had
previously denied having knowledge?" listener Carolyn Abbott asked.
McBride responded in saying there are "many, many red flags" in an investigation carried out
by the New York Post, which last week published reports that were sourced from the alleged
laptop hard drive. NPR then went on to repeat claims that Russia is attempting to interfere in
the election.
" Even if Russia can't be positively connected to this information, the story of how Trump
associates Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani came into a copy of this computer hard drive has not
been verified and seems suspect. And if that story could be verified, the NY Post did no
forensic work to convince consumers that the emails and photos that are the basis for their
report have not been altered," McBride said, adding: "But the biggest reason you haven't heard
much on NPR about the Post story is that the assertions don't amount to much."
Her response included a statement from NPR managing editor Terence Samuel.
" We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories , and we don't want
to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions. And quite
frankly, that's where we ended up, this was a politically driven event and we decided to treat
it that way," Samuel said.
The claims that the reports are part of a Russian disinformation plot were dismissed by
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe.
The FBI, meanwhile, did not dispute Ratcliffe's statements earlier this week.
FBI Assistant Director Jill C. Tyson sent a letter to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of
the Senate Homeland Security Committee, in response to Johnson's request for more information
about the emails, reports around which have alleged that Hunter Biden tried to introduce a
Ukrainian businessman to his father when he served as vice president in the Obama
administration. The law enforcement agency
said it has "nothing to add at this time" to Ratcliffe's statement.
A number of conservatives and allies of President Donald Trump criticized NPR following its
decision to publish the inquiry .
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" Wow. Foreign corruption from a major party is not considered news for taxpayer-funded
#fakenews NPR, " wrote the America First PAC on
Twitter in response.
It came as Twitter and Facebook also announced they would either block or limit the reach of
the NY Post's reports. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany's account and a Trump
campaign account were also blocked. The Senate Judiciary Committee, as a result, voted to issue
subpoenas on Thursday to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to appear
before the committee after raising concerns about censorship and election interference.
Biden's campaign has
denied that he ever met with a Ukrainian gas company official, which was allegedly revealed
in a trove of emails that purportedly were found on a laptop hard drive belonging to his son,
Hunter, who sat on the company's board while his father was the vice president. The NY Post
also obtained a hard drive containing the emails from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Other allegations have surfaced in recent reports over the days,
including from a former Hunter Biden associate who confirmed the legitimacy of an
email.
"The Attorney General of Delaware's office indicated that the FBI has 'ongoing
investigations regarding the veracity of this entire story.' And it would be unsurprising for
an investigation of a disinformation action involving Rudy Giuliani and those assisting him to
involve questions about money laundering, especially since there are other documented inquiries
into his dealings," the campaign said.
TheFederalistPapers , 22 minutes ago
I work way too hard to fund these ****ers. NPR is owned by the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting (CPB) and sneak a peek at their Board of Directors https://www.cpb.org/aboutcpb/leadership/board
"From the onset of the pandemic in Russia, we have focused on preserving lives and
ensuring safety of our people as our key values. This was an informed choice dictated by
our culture and spiritual traditions, and our complex, sometimes dramatic, history. If we
think back to the great demographic losses we suffered in the 20th century, we had no other
choice but to fight for every person and the future of every Russian family.
"So, we did our best to preserve the health and the lives of our people, to help parents
and children, as well as senior citizens and those who lost their jobs, to maintain
employment as much as possible, to minimise damage to the economy, to support millions of
entrepreneurs who run small or family businesses.
"Perhaps, like everyone else, you are closely following daily updates on the pandemic
around the world. Unfortunately, the coronavirus has not retreated and still poses a major
threat. Probably, this unsettling background intensifies the sense, like many people feel,
that a whole new era is about to begin and that we are not just on the verge of dramatic
changes, but an era of tectonic shifts in all areas of life.
"We see the rapidly, exponential development of the processes that we have repeatedly
discussed at the Valdai Club before. Thus, six years ago, in 2014, we spoke about this
issue when we discussed the theme The World Order: New Rules or a Game Without Rules. So,
what is happening now? Regrettably, the game without rules is becoming increasingly
horrifying and sometimes seems to be a fait accompli."
This is the 17th session of the Valdai Club, and I ask: Where is there an equivalent in
the so-called democracies of the West which are allegedly the guardians of free speech and
debate, where there supposedly exists a "marketplace of ideas"?
The Q & A portion of Putin's Valdai Club Speech transcript
have been posted, and they run longer than his speech. In his first query, I completely agree
with Putin that too many people have yet to learn the fundamental lesson the pandemic ought
to have taught:
"However, the pandemic is playing into our hands when it comes to raising our awareness of
the importance of joining forces against severe global crises. Unfortunately, it has not yet
taught humanity to come together completely, as we must do in such situations."
But his answer wasn't directed at ignorant citizens. Putin's ire was directed at the
Outlaw US Empire:
"I am not referring now to all these sanctions against Russia; forget about that, we will
get over it. But many other countries that have suffered and are still suffering from the
coronavirus do not even need any help that may come from outside, they just need the
restrictions lifted, at least in the humanitarian sphere, I repeat, concerning the supply of
medicines, equipment, credit resources, and the exchange of technologies. These are
humanitarian things in their purest form. But no, they have not abolished any
restrictions, citing some considerations that have nothing to do with the humanitarian
component – but at the same time, everyone is talking about humanism .
"I would say we need to be more honest with each other and abandon double standards. I am
sure that if people hear me now on the media, they are probably finding it difficult to
disagree with what I have just said, difficult to deny it. Deep down in their hearts, in
their minds, everyone is probably thinking, 'Yes, right, of course.' However, for
political reasons, publicly, they will still say, 'No, we must keep restrictions on Iran,
Venezuela, against Assad .' What does Assad even have to do with this when it is ordinary
people who suffer? At least, give them medicines, give them technology, at least a small,
targeted loan for medicine. No." [My Emphasis]
If I could speak to Putin, I'd tell him that they have no hearts, they are soulless,
completely bereft of any sense of morality, and cannot be reasoned with whatsoever. They are
ghouls, incapable of being shamed or made to feel guilt. You look at them and see a human,
but they're not human at all; they are parasites cloaked in human form. They differ little
from the Nazis of 75+ years ago and need to be eliminated once and for all. The pandemic has
fully exposed them for what they are.
@134 Has anybody seen a comment yet from the Honorable Chrystia Freeland or the Lima Group
regarding the election result in Bolivia? Maybe they are too busy strangling Venezuela.
There is considerable evidence that the American system of government may have been
victimized by an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S. intelligence and
national security community. Former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA
Director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey appear to have played critical
leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own.
Almost certainly what they may have done would have been explicitly authorized by the former
President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his national security team.
It must have seemed a simple operation for the experienced CIA covert action operatives. To
prevent the unreliable and unpredictable political upstart Donald Trump from being nominated as
the GOP presidential candidate or even elected it would be necessary to create suspicion that
he was the tool of a resurgent Russia, acting under direct orders from Vladimir Putin to
empower Trump and damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Even though none of the alleged
Kremlin plotters would have expected Trump to actually beat Hillary, it was plausible to
maintain that they would have hoped that a weakened Clinton would be less able to implement the
anti-Russian agenda that she had been promoting. Many observers in both Russia and the U.S.
believed that if she had been elected armed conflict with Moscow would have been inevitable,
particularly if she moved to follow her husband's example and push to have both Georgia and
Ukraine join NATO, which Russia would have regarded as an existential threat.
Trump's surprising victory forced a pivot, with Clapper, Brennan and Comey adjusting the
narrative to make it appear that Trump the traitor may have captured the White House due to
help from the Kremlin, making him a latter-day Manchurian Candidate. The lesser allegations of
Russian meddling were quickly elevated to devastating assertions that the Republican had only
won with Putin's assistance.
No substantive evidence for the claim of serious Russian meddling has ever been produced in
spite of years of investigation, but the real objective was to plant the story that would
plausibly convince a majority of Americans that the election of Donald Trump was somehow
illegitimate.
The national security team acted to protect their candidate Hillary Clinton, who represented
America's Deep State. In spite of considerable naysaying, the Deep State is real, not just a
wild conspiracy theory. Many Americans nevertheless do not believe that the Deep State exists,
that it is a politically driven media creation much like Russiagate itself was, but if one
changes the wording a bit and describes the Deep State as the Establishment, with its political
power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City, the argument that there
exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country becomes much more
plausible.
The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields
immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. It also operates through relationships that
are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity
will be exposed.
Nevertheless, some might even argue that having a Deep State is a healthy part of American
democracy, that it serves as a check or corrective element on a political system that has
largely been corrupted and which no longer serves national interests. But that assessment
surely might have been made before it became clear that many of the leaders of the nation's
intelligence and security agencies are no longer the people's honorable servants they pretend
to be. They have been heavily politicized since at least the time of Ronald Reagan and have
frequently succumbed to the lure of wealth and power while identifying with and promoting the
interests of the Deep State.
Indeed, a number of former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directors have implicitly or
even directly admitted to the existence of a Deep State that has as one of its roles keeping
presidents like Donald Trump in check. Most recently, John McLaughlin, responding to a question
about Donald Trump's concern over Deep State involvement in the ongoing impeachment process,
said unambiguously "Well, you know, thank God for the 'deep state' With all of the people who
knew what was going on here, it took an intelligence officer to step forward and say something
about it, which was the trigger that then unleashed everything else. This is the institution
within the U.S. government is institutionally committed to objectivity and telling the truth.
It is one of the few institutions in Washington that is not in a chain of command that makes or
implements policy. Its whole job is to speak the truth -- it's engraved in marble in the
lobby."
Well, John's dedication to truth is exemplary but how does he explain his own role in
support of the lies being promoted by his boss George "slam dunk" Tenet that led to the war
against Iraq, the greatest foreign policy disaster ever experienced by the United States? Or
Tenet's sitting in the U.N. directly behind Secretary of State Colin Powell in the debate over
Iraq, providing cover and credibility for what everyone inside the system knew to be a bundle
of lies? Or his close friend and colleague Michael Morell's description of Trump
as a Russian agent , a claim that was supported by zero evidence and which was given
credibility only by Morell's boast that "I ran the CIA."
Beyond that, more details have been revealed demonstrating exactly how Deep State associates
have attempted, with considerable success, to subvert the actual functioning of American
democracy. Words are one thing, but acting to interfere in an electoral process or to undermine
a serving president is a rather more serious matter.
It is
now known that President Barack Obama's CIA Director John Brennan created a Trump Task
Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force
played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the
Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to
this day. Working with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Brennan fabricated
the narrative that "Russia had interfered in the 2016 election." Brennan and Clapper promoted
that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a
broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the
past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and
substantively different even though the "evidence" produced to support that claim was and still
is weak to nonexistent.
The Russian "election interference" narrative went on steroids on January 6, 2017, shortly
before Trump was inaugurated, when an "Intelligence Community Assessment" (ICA) orchestrated by
Clapper and Brennan was published. The banner headline atop The New York Times, itself an
integral part of the Deep State, on the following day set the tone for what was to follow:
"Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says."
With the help of the Establishment media, Clapper and Brennan were able to pretend that the
ICA had been approved by "all 17 intelligence agencies" (as first claimed by Hillary Clinton).
After several months, however Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked
analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather
unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the
Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor,
whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA."
Task Force Trump was kept secret within the Agency itself because the CIA is not supposed to
spy on Americans. Its staff was pulled together by invitation-only. Specific case officers
(i.e., men and women who recruit and handle spies overseas), analysts and administrative
personnel were recruited, presumably based on their political reliability. Not everyone invited
accepted the offer. But many did because it came with promises of promotion and other
rewards.
And this was not a CIA-only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task
Force with the approval of then Director James Comey. Former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele's
FBI handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been one of those detailed to the Trump Task Force.
Steele, of course, prepared the notorious dossier that was surfaced shortly before Donald Trump
took office. It included considerable material intended to tie Trump to Russia, information
that was in many cases fabricated or unsourced.
So, what kind of things would this Task Force do? The case officers would work with foreign
intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on
identifying intelligence collection priorities that would implicate Trump and his associates in
illegal activity. And there is evidence that John Brennan himself would contact his
counterparts in allied intelligence services to obtain their discreet cooperation, something
they would be inclined to do in collegial fashion, ignoring whatever reservations they might
have about spying on a possible American presidential candidate.
Trump Task Force members could have also tasked the National Security Agency (NSA) to do
targeted collection. They also would have the ability to engage in complicated covert actions
that would further set up and entrap Trump and his staff in questionable activity, such as the
targeting of associate George Papadopoulos. If he is ever properly interviewed, Maltese citizen
Joseph Mifsud may be able to shed light on the CIA officers who met with him, briefed him on
operational objectives regarding Papadopoulos and helped arrange monitored meetings. It is
highly likely that Azra Turk, the woman who met with George Papadopoulos, was part of the CIA
Trump Task Force.
The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, sometimes using press or social
media placements to disseminate fabrications about Trump and his associates. Information
operations is a benign-sounding euphemism for propaganda fed through the Agency's friends in
the media, and computer network operations can be used to create false linkages and misdirect
inquiries. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 may have been a creation
of this Task Force.
In light of what has been learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower there should be a
serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at minimum,
reporting to them secretly after he was seconded to the National Security Council. All the CIA
and FBI officers involved in the Task Force had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the
United States, but nevertheless were involved in a conspiracy to first denigrate and then
possibly bring down a legally elected president. That effort continues with repeated assertions
regarding Moscow's malevolent intentions for the 2020 national elections. Some might reasonably
regard the whole Brennan affair, to include its spear carriers among the current and retired
national security state leadership, as a case of institutionalized treason, and it inevitably
leads to the question "What did Obama know?"
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow might halt dialogue with the
European Union, during the online presentation of the report of the international discussion
club "Valdai" on Tuesday.
"Those people who are responsible for foreign policy in the West and do not understand the
need for a mutually respectful conversation, perhaps we should just stop communicating with
them for a while, especially since [President of the European Commission] Ursula von der Leyen
says that with the current Russian authorities, the geopolitical partnership does not work.
So be it, if that's what they want," said the Russian Foreign Minister
m@84 the buzz about Navalny is that he and some partners were running an anti-corruption
blackmail racket getting compromising information on various enterprises and individuals and
Navalny decided to cash out without informing or consulting with his partners. Nothing to do
with the Russian government.
m@89 I got a rather detailed explanation from a Russian friend who just spent several
weeks there. Navalny started out as an anti corruption reformer but got involved with
partners that figured out how to monetize the dirt he was digging up. This is over a period
of years, not something recent. There is no conspiracy between the Russian government and the
Germans. Navalny was not a threat to governmental power in Russia - this was strictly a
business matter. See the RT article I linked to:
Which are the dumbest false flags of recent memory?
My selections are:
#1) Journalist Arkady Babchenko - he gets every prize!
He faked his death, complete with blood soaked pictures,
and then showed up the next day alive at a news conference.
They should name a drink after him, "Noah's Ark Ark Ark"- glacier water mixed
with glacier water, stirred not shaken.
#2) Saudi Intelligence Service - they air shipped printers
with incomplete bombs in them to the US and Britain from Yemen.
The Saudi agents revealed that they kept the tracking slips of the bombs!
I'll drink to that. And the Saudis played heroes by providing the tracking
numbers to the US and Britain in the nick of time. And I'll drink to that!
#3) Just this week CrowdStrike (yes, they still enjoy "credibility" in some circles)
let us know that Iranian hackers included a video with their email threats.
And that clever video:
"The video showed the hackers' computer screen as they typed in commands to purportedly hack
a voter registration system.
Investigators noticed snippets of revealing computer code, including file paths, file names
and an internet protocol (IP) address."
How does the Saudi Intelligence service say, "Skol!"?
Re: "...Thus, six years ago, in 2014, we spoke about this issue when we discussed the
theme The World Order: New Rules or a Game Without Rules. So, what is happening now?
Regrettably, the game without rules is becoming increasingly horrifying and sometimes
seems to be a fait accompli."
Putin said this virtually in the same breath directly after his previous paragraph you
excerpted where he speaks of the serious ongoing challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
What that says to me is that he is hinting with his trademark subtlety that he thinks the
CV pandemic may not be a naturally arising event. In other words, a plandemic.
Yes, that's the ongoing rhetorical battle between the Collectivist nations who uphold the
sanctity of International Law and the Neoliberal Nations controlled by Financial Parasites
that can't survive under a functional International Law System. That distinction is
constantly becoming clearer particularly to those residing within the Neoliberal nations as
they watch their lives being destroyed. IMO, we're on the cusp of entering the most critical
decade of this century which will determine humanity's condition when 2101 is reached.
"... The sustained tosh from the good old boys at state, cia, fbi & nsa isn't worthy of comment, given that it is 100% evidence-free accusations which surprise surprise 'just happens' to align with these provenly corrupt organisations' most prioritsed foreign policy goals. ..."
Last month, national security prosecutors at the Justice Department were told to look at any
ongoing investigations involving Iran or Iranian nationals with an eye toward making them
public.
The push to announce Iran-related cases has caused internal alarm, these people said, with
some law enforcement officials fearing that senior Justice Department officials want to
reveal the cases because the Trump administration would like Congress to impose new sanctions
on Iran.
U.S. officials on Wednesday night accused Iran of targeting American voters with faked but
menacing emails and warned that both Iran and Russia had obtained voter data that could be
used to endanger the upcoming election.
The disclosure by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe at a hastily called
news conference marked the first time this election cycle that a foreign adversary has been
accused of targeting specific voters in a bid to undermine democratic confidence -- just four
years after Russian online operations marred the 2016 presidential vote.
The claim that Iran was behind the email operation, which came into view on Tuesday as
Democrats in several states reported receiving emails demanding they vote for President
Trump, was leveled without specific evidence .
...
Metadata gathered from dozens of the emails pointed to the use of servers in Saudi Arabia,
Estonia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, according to numerous analysts.
The emails are under investigation, and one intelligence source said it was still unclear who
was behind them.
...
... the evidence remains inconclusive.
The claims that Iran is behind this are as stupid as the people who believe them.
I for one trust (not) those 50 former intelligence officials who say that all emails are
Russian disinformation. They are intended to 'sow discord' which is something the U.S. has
otherwise never ever had throughout its history.
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their
belief that the recent disclosure of emails ... "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian
information operation."
...
While the letter's signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security
experience had made them "deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant
role in this case" and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin's hand
at work.
"If we are right," they added, "this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in
this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this."
No, this doesn't make any sense. It is not supposed to do that.
Posted by b on October 22, 2020 at 7:21 UTC | Permalink
The sustained tosh from the good old boys at state, cia, fbi & nsa isn't worthy of
comment, given that it is 100% evidence-free accusations which surprise surprise 'just
happens' to align with these provenly corrupt organisations' most prioritsed foreign policy
goals.
We know that these yarns align in syncopation with
what the amerikan empire most wants to promulgate, yet bereft of even a a cunt hair's worth
of evidence, the only truth which can be inferred from this foggy bottom tosh is the obvious
one - that is that the empire is becoming so desperate they will happily toss their
credibility with the many to the winds if they can, please sir, just convince a few of the
few.
Stuff like this is a suitable test of how the media are supposed to represent our interests
and help us in not getting fooled. You report, and afterwards you test what your readers
believe.
Independently of questionable bias issues serious newspapers will defend news like this
with formal justifications of journalistic code
- neutrality and objectivity: we just report but don't judge.
- null hypothesis of trustworthiness: official sources are to be trusted unless proven
otherwise. At least, proven otherwise by someone we consider trustworthy.
The propaganda is already embedded in the lofty ethics codes journalists will proudly adhere
to.
"Other documents that have emerged include FBI paper work that reveals the bureau's
interactions with the shop's owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, who reported the laptop's contents
to authorities. The document shows that Isaac received a subpoena to testify before the U.S.
District Court in Delaware on Dec. 9, 2019 . One page appears to show the serial
number for a MacBook Pro laptop and a hard drive that were seized by the agency."
https://www.ibtimes.sg/signed-receipt-hunter-bidens-name-delaware-laptop-repair-store-surfaces-52672
So the FBI kept Hunter Biden's bomb shell HDDs under wraps for almost a year. Enough time
to figure out they where not filled with Russian kompromat.
If you needed a leaked email to understand why it was corrupt for Hunter Biden to be getting
50k a month to be on the board of a Ukranian energy company, then you are likely already so
propagandized that you will vote for Joe Biden no matter what gets printed.
Really this propaganda is a brilliant move for those who control what is in print. They
have a clear circle of blame in Russia, Iran, or China, who are to blame for everything, and
this allows the media to limit the scope of discussion greatly by suppressing real criticisms
towards actual problems (the Bidens being corrupt across multiple generations) and deflecting
that energy into hating Russia, China, and Iran, which are the main targets for imperialism.
It is also a crude and vague lie to use anonymous sources to blame foreign entities for these
types of things, which actually makes it an elegant argument for a simpleton as it is
difficult if not impossible to disprove.
Because the media is really owned and operated by so few people who all have a hive-mind
about money and power, the messages are consistent, even though ridiculous, and they resonate
with many of the readers who really ought to know better, but have become inured to the
damaging effects of the lies they have consumed for decades. Stories like these will keep
working for a long time. If one of the sources in the article reported 'Up is Down, Left is
Right!', there would be a wave of car accidents until they issued a retraction.
The Russians ( Putin / Lavrov) say ever so politely that the US is not agreement-capable.
I add that the US ( politicians, Wall Streeters, MSM, think tanks ) are:
-- not truth-capable;
-- not ethics-capable;
-- not shame-capable;
-- not honour-capable.
What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?
He turns into a ghoul without a soul, says I, a devil without human-ness!
How dare they call us deplorables when they are the despicables?
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining
their belief that the recent disclosure of emails ... "has all the classic earmarks of a
Russian information operation."
Do American journalists actually believe it's still in Russia interest to re-elect Trump?
Washington-Kremlin relations have deteriorated rapidly under Trump.
Posted by: Et Tu | Oct 22 2020 9:35 utc | 9 -- "In America, Truth is a Foreign Agent and
World Peace is a threat to National Security."
Nice one... Meet Mr Truth, un-registered foreign agent !!! and Mr World Peace, national
security threat !!!
American leadership would not be so despicable IF they do not pretend to be "spreading
freedom / democracy" when they wreak their global malice.
They do not even care for their own people (covid19 fiasco, anyone?), but pretend to care
for the Chinese people so much they would regime-change the CCP; they pretend to care for the
Russian people so much they would sooner shoot Putin's plane from the sky; they pretend to
care for the Iranian people so much they block their access to covid19 medicines.
Here's a part of a comment I posted back in February 2020 that none of you took
seriously.
Posted by: Circe | Feb 28 2020 20:29 utc | 124:
The planet of extremely bad karma SATURN is moving into Bloomberg's sign, Aquarius, right
after mid-March and forming a square to Biden's sign, Scorpio. This is a very malefic
aspect.
People under these two signs, Aquarius and Scorpio ie Bloomberg and Biden will
experience obstacles, setbacks and challenges, create hidden enemies , and aging
will be accelerated and serious health issues could emerge.
So I was criticized for injecting astrology into that election thread, mostly by
AntiSpin.
Turns out as usual I hit the mark.
Bloomberg lost close to a BILLION dollars and failed badly in the primaries. That's what I
call a major setback. However, as of December after a 6-month retrograde into Capricorn,
Saturn is returning to Aquarius, so it ain't over for Bloomberg and things will get
complicated for Biden , for the U.S. and the rest of the world.
I also stated back then that nominating Joe Biden would be a greater risk for Dems than
nominating Bernie Sanders because Joe Biden was heading for serious astrological head winds
relating to something unseen at the time involving a serious family issue.
While I was certain that whatever the issue was would come to light and could affect him
in the Presidential campaign, I couldn't figure out the family aspect at the time, since he
appears to have a solid marriage and tragedy is in the rear view now.
Last night however it all suddenly became clear and I've come to the realization that I
was 100% right when I wrote that comment back in February 2020. Tonight I realized that the
family issue...is Hunter Biden!
I was sounding the alarm that something bad would come to light because Saturn was headed
into Aquarius, Biden's Home and Family sector squaring Biden's sign.
However, to make matters worse, it turns out that Hunter Biden is an Aquarian and Saturn
the karmic taskmaster is headed on a collision course to upend his life.
At the time I wrote the comment I obviously couldn't predict exactly what would unfold,
how or the precise timing, only that it would be bad and that's why I warned back then that
Democrats should have chosen Bernie. I believed Bernie could beat Trump and I was right,
because Trump is in total mental meltdown and self-destructing with his handling of the
pandemic.
Now even if Saturn will square Biden's Scorpio that's not to say that Biden won't still
win, but we are approaching a very bad full moon on October 31st. There is massive tension
building, subterfuge lurking and the situation is going to get ugly. A battle royal is
brewing. This is a powder keg moment.
Trump will not behave at the debate today. Must see t.v. With Obama's scorching speech
yesterday seething in Trump's brain, and his Iran stunt unravelling and ineffective at
distracting from the spotlight from Obama and the laptop bone clenched between his teeth;
he's a rabid dog fit to be tied. Give him a padded cell, already.
As for the U.S. and the world: The pandemic started with Saturn crossing Pluto's path in
Capricorn and entering full force into Aquarius in March when the world shut down.
So what will happen when karmic Saturn crosses Pluto again on it's way out of Capricorn
and enters Aquarius for the next 3 years?
Fasten your seat belts everyone...we're heading into major turbulence. There's so much
karmic tension gathering steam; it's very scary.
How much does it cost to get a trip to the moon?
I'll get back to sleazy Giuliani and his Pandora's box. There's too much to unpack there
than meets the eye. Just know that when circumstances appear too convenient-it's because they
are.
Trump's dirty play is a day late and a dollar short plus he's not playing with a full
deck. Must be one of those Covid long-term effects.
It's time...to get these scum-sucking, misery mongers out of the damn White House
already!
You know the US government is suffering from severe Alzheimer's disease when it claims that
Iran (of all nations) sent threatening emails to Democrat voters demanding that they vote for
a President who authorised the murder of a popular Iranian military general back in early
January this year.
Brian Kilmeade and morning crew run the fake Iranian emails story by former CIA station
Chief Daniel Hoffman.
Kabuki Actor Hoffman:
'[Uses opportunity to say Iranian Mantra] Iran has been attacking us for years, they have
attacked our shipping in the Gulf (???, that's a new one) blah-blah-blah.
'Iran and Russia are attacking our democracy because that is what they fear most about
America. Democracy would be the end of both regimes (Iran has no other motive to dislike the
U.S. such as us killing their top General, the Stuxnet virus, murderous sanctions, ...)'
So they hate us because of our freedoms, a classic.
Kabuki Actor Kilmeade:
'Can't we do something about this?' [note, the U.S. is the perpetual victim, never the
bully]
'Can't we pushback?' [The aggrieved victim, the U.S. is defending itself]
'Iran is doing this, Russia is sending bombers, can't we blow up an oil well?'
Kabuki Actor Kilmeade represents the entire degenerate U.S. public, unable to process
information that views another country as having rational motives or our Intel agencies of
being deceptive.
God, if you exist, You must hate this more than I do. How long?
All that rubbish is distraction. Discussing it is just playing to Borg's music.
They come up with so outlandish and jaw dropping crap that half he people thinks "it is so
outlandish it gotta be true, who would lie so much?" and other half that knows better is in
such a shock and disbelief that it needs some time to come to its senses and start tearing
apart the lie piece by piece BUT.... Time is lost, distraction worked and MSM/Borg come up
with next outrageous lie for next round. Russia, China, Navalny etc. etc.
And while marry go round Borg is doing it's deeds in dark while people is obsessing with
Trump's knickers.
Barack oblamblam held off until as long as he possibly could, a move most likely connected to
two realities, (1) not wanting to contradict what he, oblamblam said back in march "do not
underestimate Joe's ability to screw anything up" and (2) Oblamblam's desire not to be
found to be associated with sleepy joe's blatant corruption. Mud sticks n all that. Oblamblam
was much more subtle in lining up wedges to be trousered. eg. Try as people might they have
yet to uncover how a community worker turned prez found the dough to purchase a 45 acre
Martha's vineyard estate off a notorious billionaire and Oblambam is reluctant to do anything
which could prompt those questions,
Hence it wasn't until the 2020 election was mostly over that some DNC extortionists
managed to convince oblam to say a few words, or else, to the Philadelphia african american
males who chose to stay home on election day 2016.
Barack can claim 'he paid his dues' whilst keeping as much space as he can organise
between himself and crooked joe, who has already brought oblamblam's prezdency into disrepute
with the shameless & ugly ukraine rort that he and his bagman hunter had concocted.
There we mentioned the philly speech oh rabid, irrationally superstitious dembot.
Here's my prediction
Trump re-elected I fortell will mean more racist murdering thugs on the street. an guess what
they'l be In uniform and directly or indirectly trained by Israel.
And then there's the military presence on your streets -- you ain't seen nothing yet.
Wake the f up your gunna be massively oppressed by a fascist govenment ya skin couloir won't
matter, nore who you voted for. You already live in a one party dictatorship.
ie the elite. Face it your redundant as a human being replaced by a micro-chip.
Revolt I tell you revolt !!
The greater American public are about to become the next oppressed Palistinians ! oppressed
devalued and slowly distroyed. Like a frog in a heated pan.
You won't notice till it's to late will you ?
No really, will you ?
Journalism love's that high minded nonsense.
They write what they are paid to write.
Looking at the guardian wrt Assange
these clowns are beneath contempt.
Don't know if you are familiar with the box populi blog.
There a very good set of chapters from a book about journalist ethics.
i'm just surprised they haven't brought in venezuela and bolivia yet. that's supposed to be
sarcasm, but reality keeps outstripping sarcasm. i am actually worried they are ramping up
for a war in biden's first 100 days, either against iran or some serious provocation of
russia like provoking some incident in azerbaijan and blaming armenia. they're f/n batshit.
mark2 i think you're correct about more jackbooted government thugs on the street, but that's
gonna happen under either trump or crime bill joe/copmala. you're right about the israeli
training too, they trained cops in that kneeling on the throat technique. field tested on
palestinians.
Idiotic.
The united States was once a nest of excellence in nearly everything. Now it s a hub of naked
idiocy.
The Russians have nothing to fear from the US or Nato, except in the economy but they can fix
it. The Iranians have enough of what it takes to keep the Zio anglos away and at bay:
thousands of missiles to target Israel, Saudiland, a 25 year economic alliance program with
Beijing.
And clearly the time and opportunity where it was possible to still erase in a single coup
the Iranian military might is over.
"Breaking WaPo: The U.S. government has concluded that Iran is behind a series of threatening
emails arriving this week in the inboxes of Democratic voters, according to two U.S.
officials. https://washingtonpost.com/technology/202"
Posted by: librul | Oct 22 2020 12:52 utc | 22 When you hear, "Russians", just substitute in
your mind "witches", the weight of evidence is the same.
Absolutely correct. You win the thread.
Neither Iran nor Russia nor China give a rat's ass about the US election. There may be
literally thousands of private enterprise hackers who want to breach US election servers
precisely to get the Personal Identifying Information which is coin of the realm on the Dark
Web, but they couldn't care less about the election itself. It's physically impossible for
any country outside of the US to significantly influence the election in a country of 300
million people - and every country knows that. The only country that *doesn't* know that is
the US, which is why it spends scores and hundreds of millions of dollars - up to five
billion in Ukraine, allegedly - to influence foreign elections. That's the level of effort
needed to influence a foreign election more than the influence of the actual inhabitants of
that nation. But every time some private group in Russia launches an ad campaign for a couple
hundred thousand bucks tops, with zero effect on the US election, Putin gets blamed for some
plan to mastermind the overthrow of "democracy."
I rather liked Obama's speech If for no other reason than the tone was completely
different from the two candidates.
1. I'm tired of Trump's narcissism .
2. Can't stand Biden's fake 'I'm one of you'. He is corrupt, feels guilty about it, and
has to reassure us that he's Lunch Box Joe .
I've noticed this about Biden for a while, he conjures up these fake memories ...
'You know what I'm talking about because I've been on that park bench at noon when you only
have 20 minutes to eat your lunch because that whistle going to blow and you have to run
back to your Tuna canning station or lose your job and with that your health insurance,
car, and home.'
Okay this is not a literal quotation but it is a pattern and you know what I'm talking
about :-)
Pretzelatack @ 26
Yes to all you say their.
Re-reading my above comments they sound pretty harsh !
I am sorry, and do apologise !
It was part desperation and part morbid humour in the spirit of b's post.
Comparing Americans to a frog in pan may be a bit much !
I am in the U.K. we had a gen election one year ago !
I WAS THAT FROG IN A PAN.
Now I live in a pox ridden bankrupt banana republic run by a bunch of Israel bootlickers.
I don't go down well at party's.
And it's not superstition when the facts start to align with planetary motion.
How do you explain the Moon's effect on nature?
You think it's the only celestial body in the Solar System that influences life on Earth?
That cosmic order is inescapable. Astrology is thousands of years old dating back to the
Babylonians and has evolved through centuries of study and cannot, should not be dismissed as
mere superstition.
I'm not an expert at all, but I recognize order and higher authority when I see it and
believe me those planets are there for a reason and they rule everything. They're like
carrots and sticks (IMHO mostly sticks). Now who put them there and to what ultimate purpose
besides order and evolution is another matter.
I don't often bring it into a discussion, especially not to throw a discussion off topic,
except when I intuitively feel fate present in important events both personally and on a
universal scale.
This is a time of fated/karmic events, the pandemic being the most important (lesson) of
these.
I think a more appropriate title would be "Fascist Season" . . . Fascism has come of age here
in the land of the fee. The "intelligence agencies" create disinformation campaigns to
overthrow the elected President while the "justice department" et al withhold evidence and
fail to prosecute all the oligarchs and crooks who are busy censoring
information and preparing to rig and disrupt the
impending presidential election.
But technology and the "progressive" (pun intended) destruction of the US Constitution has
led the dumbed-down US masses (don't forget Canada and Australia lol) into a whole new world
of Orwellian lock-downs and wholesale economic destruction aimed at finishing off what was
left of the US middle class. Soon we will have our cash taken away and replaced with a
digital currency that can
always be taken away or tailored for limited use, subject to negative interest rates that it
cannot escape, etc. And all this is ushered in via
hyperinflation leading to a collapse of the bond and equities markets, and finally the
collapse of the US dollar (and all other Western fiat currencies).
The USA is so naive. They have been interfering in so many elections using money,
blackmail,CIA operations. There was no way for other countries with less means to do the same
to the USA. Now with social media they can, and they are absolutely right to take their
revenge for all the troubles they got into with the USA plotting to promote a pro-US
leader.
Now the battle is equal and the USA does not have the monopoly of interfering in other
countries election!
Tit for tat...
All these stories are risible. Note the struggle to clarify who these 'malign'
Régimes are attacking the US, and why.
Russia-R-R for Trump, but Iran-Ir-Ir for Trump doesn't quite hit the spot so now Iran is
trying to damage Pres. Trump (from one of the articles..) .. is Iran trying to promote the
election of Kamala Harris? What? Russia is for Trump and Iran against ?
The fall-back is a blanket, these evil leaders are trying to 'undermine democracy',
influence 'US voters', meddle in 'our freedom-loving' politics, etc.
The attempt to stir up the spectre of threatening enemies far off is a hackneyed ploy. In
the case of the USA, it is now melded with the promotion and control of planned internal
strife, with internal enemies being natives (not islamist terrorists who sneak in and are
under cover before erupting in murderous madness..) - Color Revolution Style.
-- BLM + Antifa haven't been active recently (or not in MSM top stories) as the election
is approaching. Such would be upping the Trump vote for "law-and-order."
(imho from far off..) Many in the US don't take any of this seriously, it is just
game-playing, false alarm, pretend concern.
"Oh wow, Iran is targetting Trump, did you know, real serious, did you hear, tell me is
Zoe-chick divorcing that creep Edmond, I want to know, did you have that interview with Gov.
X for the job? Is she hot? How much "
The credentialised class and the movers and shakers just roll their eyeballs, and the poor
are in any case stuck in a desperado cycle of struggle against misery, what is going on with
Putin / Iran / Xi is off the radar.
Vilification of China (hate hate hate); claimed by the media and the pundits and our
"Fearless Covid Conquering Leader" and all the good little parrots, to be the source of evil
itself... Scapegoat extraordinaire... Hacking and Cheating and Aggressing and exercising
Brutality towards its own citizens... The worst of the worst per our "intelligence" apparatus
(and blind ideologues). Existential threat numero uno.
But wait!
The US is being attacked! Attacked they say; by all of the "bad" guys simultaneously.
The forces of evil out there are broad and out to get us. They hate our (imagined)
freedoms.
Evidence (not):
Justice Department pushing Iran-connected charges in HBO hack, other cases
U.S. government concludes Iran was behind threatening emails sent to Democrats
U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran, Russia have tried to interfere in 2020 election
Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say
Invariably in all cases, The Voice of "Intelligence" (not bloody likely from ANY of this
crew) deeply intoned to impart the "certainty", neatly encapsulated in the words "highly
likely", delivered without a scrap of proof but loud, prominent, regular, mind numbing
pontification.
Trust me! We lie, We cheat, We steal; and that is just the tip of the iceberg.
The US, all on its own, engenders distrust within the population because the US and all
its political and Executive, and Legislative and Judicial and "intelligence" bureaucracies
are corrupt to the core... Worse, they make no bones about it if you pay attention. And
Partisanship is nothing but distraction because they are ALL corrupt and morally bankrupt;
without empathy, remorse, sense of guilt or shame.
It was the US itself that thought it could subjugate the world through its faux
"democratic" business practices and its claim of natural superiority... Its self declared
Rules of Order instead of adhering to and supporting consensus established International
LAW... Hegemon pompously declaring it has a RIGHT to Full Spectrum Dominance and slavish
obedience.
Not the Iranians, not the Russians, not the Chinese, not the CCP, not the North Koreans,
not the Venezuelans; none of them are disrupting, threatening or meddling in the US
elections.
If you believe what the morons are smearing across the public consciousness through every
communication medium possible you are a sucker... Totally disconnected any critical thinking
faculties that may have been present. The very definition of sheeple... baaaa! (the sound
drowns out reason and thought).
The rest of the World beyond NATO and Five Eyes isn't attacking the US or its
institutions. They have all been attacked every which way from Sunday BY the US and its
Satraps (targets of, victims of, and willing accomplices to our sophisticated excessively
funded and supported global protection racquet).
The US, our Government, always blames our designated and non-compliant, non-obeisant
existential threats for all the things we do to them.
And all this cacophony of alleged evil "attacks" from outside right now?
Look!!! Look!!! Over here!
Don't pay any attention to who and what decided to put us in the position we find
ourselves in and what we have done to vast swaths of the world's populations "over
there".
Now go vote for one of two degenerate teams, both of which are headed by supremely
unqualified psychopaths.
The CIA really needs a new playbook. The Russia/Iran thing is laughable to the rest of the
world, and to many 'Americans' as well. Unfortunately Partisans run the country, and those
folks are addicted to the Kool Aid of MAGA – just different versions.
This October is like an Advent Calendar of October Surprises with plenty of time still on
the clock for some great Golden Shower or Democratic child orgy deep fakes. Who the hell
knows at this point – the acceleration of events this year makes Future Shock look like
an Ambien commercial.
Trump is toast and good riddance. And sure Biden et al are war criminals and corrupt
creatures of the Swamp. The Establishment is a much easier target to resist vis a vis policy
than a crazy cretin without any policy but his own self-aggrandizement.
"Astrology believers tend to selectively remember predictions that turn out to be true,
and do not remember those that turn out false. Astrology has not demonstrated its
effectiveness in controlled studies and has no scientific validity.[6]:85;[11] The study,
published in Nature in 1985, found that predictions based on natal astrology were no better
than chance, and that the testing "...clearly refutes the astrological hypothesis."[10] "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology
As for getting voter US state voter databases, most states allow people to purchase part of a
voter's information. Other parts like birth dates remain private. But the publicly available
list is probably enough as it identifies party affiliation, voting history as when dates they
voted (not how they voted). All the other private information is more useful to identity
thieves and Indian scam centers. And as one poster noted, those databases like gold on dark
web.
As for email addresses that implies those must be acquired through party officials and
candidates off donor lists. Off hand I do not know that an email address is required to
register to vote--I seriously doubt it. I know that Bernie famously refused to give his donor
database to Hillary. The emails imply some sort of inside job or some false flag.
Just read the story on Truthout of voters in Alaska & Florida, and possibly Pennsylvania
and Arizona receiving threatening messages if they should vote against Trump. "We know you're
a Democrat and we have access to your voting records..." Metadata indicates servers located
in the kingdoms of Israel's new friends...
Well, I just went to the Board of Elections website for my county here in Ohio and I can,
with a few clicks, generate a report from their site of a county listing of voters filtered
in over a half-dozen ways - i.e. by Party affiliation and including addresses. Comes under
the heading of "Voter and Candidate Tools."
So some concoct a tale which blames Iran, Russia, etc. for information freely available
from your State's BOE? This information has always been available, but not exploited before
in this way by US neo Nazis.
So, even though your ballot is secret, intimidation is easy to engage in based solely on
Party affiliation of record. If Trump loses, should some people expect bricks through their
windows, or perhaps fire-bombings? Trump and his supporters are certainly ratcheting up the
apocalyptic messaging, working themselves into a frenzy - that is obvious and not even
debatable.
I never read Dante; which circle of hell are we entering now?
Everyone here knows I was 100% behind Bernie Sanders for the Presidency because I felt he was
the right person for these times, but the mass is dumb and blind. I agree with the comment I
read on the previous thread I think by someone called Horseman that portrays Bernie's goal as
moving the Dem Party to the Left and not sheepdogging, but recognizing the stakes involved
superceded Left purity.
At the same time I was totally against Biden because he is much more Zionist than Bernie,
therefore more corrupt, as Zionism is counter-evolutionary being inherently supremacist,
entitled, and undemocratic.
However, Trump is exponentially worse! He is a fascist Zionist and totally depraved. There
is a choice here of monumental significance. Short term loss for greater future gain.
Biden is very flawed, but I'm inclined to view a man who suffered multiple life-altering
tragedies to reach this point and who is grappling with embracing a son, Hunter, who probably
was destroying his life, than a narcissistic less than evolved baby-man pig with a god
complex who squandered life and daddy's money on material and artificial pursuit and has no
notion of humanity, as the only sane choice.
Yes, Joe Biden should face his flaws and answer for whatever corruption exists in him, but
that laptop issue should not be a reason to stop people from getting Trump, the most corrupt
President in my lifetime next to Bush OUT. That goal is paramount. This is 2nd to the
pandemic in fated events. If people do not make the right choices and learn something from
these events then let this planet devolve into hell because that will be what is deserved!
The stakes right now are astronomical and super-fated!
Don't blow a singular opportunity to get rid of that Fascist pig Trump over a laptop
that's really a Pandora's box being used by Shmeagol Gollum Giuliani as a trap to unleash
misery for years to come.
This is clearly the Deep State and imperial establishment spouting obvious nonsense in order
to discredit themselves and therefore to help in Trump's reelection bid! Henry Kissinger told
me so! What incredibly subtle and intricate plans they have!
Or... maybe it is just a bunch of incompetent baboons in the Deep State control room
randomly flipping switches and pulling levers in the desperate hopes that something,
anything, works.
Nah! This is all part of the Great Plan! It just seems like abject stupidity because we
cannot grasp its intricate complexities.
All these new threads are defaulting to election threads. Sorry, b.
But I'll bite.
In the case of a Biden victory, which do you think will happen first?:
1) Renewed hostilities w/ Assad in Syria leading to his violent ousting and thrusting the
west into violent confrontation w/ Russia...
Or...
2) Forcible entry into the Armenian/Azerbaijan conflict and establishing a no-fly
zone...
Or...
3) a combination of both and would throw us into a direct confrontation with either Russia
or Iran or both?
It looks like the demonizing of Iran is ramping up with the mail-threats telling dims to
vote Trump or else. Dims don't like hostile, foreign powers helping the Don and swaying
elections. It's a nice tip-off as to what Biden and the dim establishment might consent to
once Obama-era sycophants and technocrats move back in to the White House.
Seems to be the year of anniversaries; another's being celebrated today but not by the Outlaw
US Empire. China
& North Korea Celebrate 70th Anniversary of China's intervention in Outlaw US Empire's
invasion of Korea , which is how it's being portrayed, "China, N. Korea stand together
'for self-protection against US hegemony' like 70 years ago" reads the headline at the link.
To mark the anniversary, China has published an official
history , explaining its decision "To resist US aggression and aid Korea, China had no
choice but to fight a war;" the 3-volume work is The War to Resist US Aggression and Aid
Korea . From China's perspective, it defeated Outlaw US Empire forces; so, it's not
"forgotten" at all. Xi's using the occasion to give a major speech, the subject of which
hasn't been disclosed.
Just 12 days to go until the refusals to abide by the outcome day arrives. If one wants to
look, there's lots of illegal foreign influence happening but from sources that go
unmentioned: Corporations that have foreign owners, which most do, who provided campaign
contributions in any form to any entity associated with the election.
HeHeHe!!! The first bits of Putin's appearance at the Valdai Club today
are being published . In a jab back at those accusing Russia of interfering in elections
and such Putin said:
"Strengthening our country and looking at what is happening in the world, in other
countries, I want to say to those who are still waiting for the gradual demise of Russia: in
this case, we are only worried about one thing -- how not to catch a cold at your
funeral."
There's more, although a transcript has yet to be published.
There's a thread right before this one on International Events. Why don't you go spew your
poisonous Trump Kool-Aid there instead of polluting with Trumpian-laced propaganda here?
I know-I know, Election threads raise the common sense factor further and that leads to
Trump's demise, so you can't help but rush in to correct that dangerous shift. Why
don't you do something equally meaningless like pounding sand down a rat hole?
After the Russiagate fiasco I thought the Americans had learned their lesson, but it seems I
was wrong.
Honestly, this may be the beginning of an irreversible process of ideological polarization
of the American Empire.
The thing is it's one thing to wage propaganda warfare against a foreign enemy to your
domestic audience: the foreign enemy will be destroyed either way, so they will never be able
to tell their version of the story, plus the domestic audience can give itself the luxury of
living the lie indefinitely as it doesn't affect their daily lives. Plus they'll directly
benefit from the conquest of a foreign enemy, e.g. cheaper gas to your car after the
destruction and conquest of Iraq; the abundance in the shelves of Walmarts after the
subjugation of China, and so on.
It's a completely different story when you wage propaganda warfare against yourself: the
Trump voter knows he/she didn't vote for Trump because of Russian influence, while the Hilary
Clinton/Joe Biden voter knows he/she didn't vote in either of them because of Chinese
influence. But each part will believe the half of the lie that benefits them against the
other, creating a vicious cycle of mistrust between the two halves.
Meanwhile, the American economy (capitalism) continues to decline. Time is running up:
It was a shock-and-awe moment when lawmakers gave the package a thumbs up. Yet in the
months since, the planned punch has not materialized.
The Treasury has allocated $195 billion to back Fed lending programs, less than half of
the allotted sum. The programs supported by that insurance have made just $20 billion in
loans, far less than the suggested trillions.
The programs have partly fallen victim to their own success: Markets calmed as the Fed
vowed to intervene, making the facilities less necessary as credit began to flow again.
So, the very announcement of the Fed it would lend indefinitely and unconditionally made
such loans unnecessary!
I didn't like it at the beginning, but the term "Late Capitalism" is growing on me.
MSM pushing the the Iran angle shows that they are more anti-Iran than anti-Trump.
What effect would Iran intend by sending fake threatening emails from right-wing guns nuts
to Democrats? I doubt it would discourage those Democrats from voting (for Biden), and I
doubt Iran would think it would. The only effect it would have is to increase the fear,
distrust, and disgust Democrats already have for those groups - which is "sowing discord",
not "meddling with elections".
The Trump regime pushes this because it makes Trump look good & makes Iran look bad
(at least the way it's been framed). MSM generally doesn't like Trump, but prints this
because hyping fear & loathing toward Iran matters more to them than dumping Trump.
Great that they are working on it, I was taking notes but kind of lousy its not easy to
listen and write at the same time. Started kind of nervous, but right now it is Putin at his
most relaxed and eloquent.
It is interesting to see how Putin is way more at ease when answering journalist's
questions than when exposing his part of the event. Right now they asked him about his image,
punk, criminal etc etc. Answer: my function is the main thing, and I do not take it
personally, now the chinese will ask.
In case the truth gets lost in your purposely misleading translation. This hare-brained
scheme was cooked up by Trump and his newly-appointed right-hand bootlicker RATcliffe, at DNI
and delivered to the American people by the latter as a desperate distraction minutes after
Obama smacked down Trump on every air wave.
It immediately gave off an offensive odor, as I stated previously, of Trump turd floating
in golden toilet.
And that's why Chris Wray looked so awkward and uneasy behind that RAT.
Three hours of serious talking about any and all world problems. I wonder how long Lunch Box
Joe could hold on his own. The orange man probably could do it, but just talking about
himself. The US need someone like VVP.
I ought to listen while also reading the Russian close-captioning so I can rebuild my
Russian language facility and catch the body language messages, but I still need to read/hear
it all in English. As for his response to questions, IMO Putin knows what to expect from
media reporters but not from other experts in the audience whose questions are usually more
complex. Then there's the need to remain tactful, although there are times when he does need
to get indignant, as with the issue of illegal sanctions that harm nations's abilities to
deal with the pandemic--the utter immorality and inhumanity of the Outlaw US Empire that
never gets the attention it deserves.
What would Iran gain by scaring lower end of the spectrum Democrats into voting for Trump,
is that desirable for Iran?
Ah ... but it was a pump fake, Iran thought that people would think that the emails were
genuine, arrest a few of the Proud Boys and this would hurt Trump by associating him with a
domestic terror group. Not only is this scenario convoluted but it is extremely risky because
it might scare a handful of impressionable Democrats into voting for Trump and any
investigation would uncover hacking of some kind.
Most likely suspect, Israel. They have the means to hack and the contacts in the U.S. to
suggest Iranian origin.
As Putin said, Russia was able to find "balance" in its reaction to COVID; and as with China
but unlike the Outlaw US Empire, it put the safety of the Russian people first and foremost.
The Empire is experiencing yet another big outbreak nationwide and has yet to put the
interests of its citizenry first.
Is Circe deranged?
I don't know but I doubt if she spends trillions of dollars each year on murdering inocent
men women and children.
Mmmmm
Perhaps to people living in a ''loony bin'' (America) people outside must seem quite strange
!
I live near Glastonbury finest bunch of people you'd ever meet. Not known for genocidel
tendency's.
Any ways Iran, Russia interfering in America's elections -- -- - pure paranoid delusion
(weaponised)
The Mighty Wurlitzer has
begun to sound more like the New York Philharmonic tuning up while riding the Empire State Express
as it crashes endlessly into Grand Central Station.
Dear Circe, each language is a world view, I wish I had the resources available today when
I was younger, I would speak as many as possible, I consider that with the means available
today speaking half a dozen would be no problem at all. You have the blessing and the curse
of speaking english, so no need for anything else, but that is your problem, you are so
relaxed about it that you're not able to spell correctly the name of one of your best known
cities, San Francisco, with a c before the s.
Again, come up with something else, the bot label is as primitive as your knowledge of your
own language and geography.
kiwiklown@14: They do not even care for their own people (covid19 fiasco, anyone?), but pretend to care
for the Chinese people so much they would regime-change the CCP; they pretend to care for the
Russian people so much they would sooner shoot Putin's plane from the sky; they pretend to
care for the Iranian people so much they block their access to covid19 medicines.
Well said, although rather sad! The last pretension reveals exactly the mentality that was
behind the genocide upon the Native American centuries ago, resorting to tactics such as
passing out smallpox infected blankets, dispensation of whisky, as well as outright
slaughters of course.
Gruffy @ 68
Maybe but she martches to a different drum beat. Not the trump drum beat of war that you
follow, and will lead you all over the cliff.
Don't get me wrong ! You'd have to squeeze my nuts pretty dam hard (tears in my eyes) before
I'd vote for Biden.
But you must know two things -- -
A. Trump is bat shit crazy and has his finger on the button whilst the Dems are money mad and
there is know profit in Armageddon.
And
B. I'm antifa my hobby is smashing the filthy fascists !!
Who's streets ? Our streets !!
Without mentioning its name, Putin in his speech pinned the tail on
the donkey regarding TrumpCo's pandemic failure:
"The values of mutual assistance, service and self-sacrifice proved to be most important.
This also applies to the responsibility, composure and honesty of the authorities, their
readiness to meet the demand of society and at the same time provide a clear-cut and
well-substantiated explanation of the logic and consistency of the adopted measures so as not
to allow fear to subdue and divide society but, on the contrary, to imbue it with confidence
that together we will overcome all trials no matter how difficult they may be.
"The struggle against the coronavirus threat has shown that only a viable state can act
effectively in a crisis ..." [My Emphasis]
Yes, it didn't begin with Trump, but he sure did accelerate the process of making the
domestic part of the Outlaw US Empire dysfunctional, which for me makes this "silly season"
even worse than usual.
I view this as shit-against-the-wall policy. You throw it up there. Sometimes it sticks,
sometimes it doesn't.
This is how lowly vermin do foreign policy nowadays.
Remember the story -- first reported as Russians, then Iranians -- paying bounty to the
Talibs to kill (as if they needed motivation) American soldiers?
Well, in that case, I guess neither story really stuck, but you see where I'm going with
this. It's all shite
And silly season continues with self-proclaimed anti-fascists who don't know what fascists
are.
Fascism doesn't necessarily have anything to do with race or religion. Is there any racial
difference between Ukropians and Russians? Fascism is simply a tool that capitalists use to
smash class consciousness. Literally any differences can be used by the capitalists to direct
the violent mobs at their victims, even differences that are completely imaginary and don't
really exist except in the group mind of the mob.
Now I wonder... who is it that will attack someone for saying "But ALL lives
matter!" ? Who is smashing class consciousness?
And this is why the USA is turning into a failed state and Russia isn't:
"Nevertheless, I am confident that what makes a state strong, primarily, is the
confidence its citizens have in it . That is the strength of a state. People are the
source of power , we all know that. And this recipe doesn't just involve going to the
polling station and voting, it implies people's willingness to delegate broad authority to
their elected government, to see the state, its bodies, civil servants, as their
representatives – those who are entrusted to make decisions, but who also bear full
responsibility for the performance of their duties .
"This kind of state can be set up any way you like. When I say 'any way,' I mean that what
you call your political system is immaterial. Each country has its own political culture,
traditions, and its own vision of their development. Trying to blindly imitate someone else's
agenda is pointless and harmful. The main thing is for the state and society to be in
harmony .
"And of course, confidence is the most solid foundation for the creative work of the
state and society. Only together will they be able to find an optimal balance of freedom and
security guarantees ." [My Emphasis]
What a brilliant collection of words emphasizing the absolute requirement for the state to
do its utmost to support and develop its human capital--its citizens--while also saying
citizens have their own duty to ensure the quality of the state, which means installing
representatives that will work for them and promote their interests first and foremost since
they are the backbone of the state. Don't feed and care for the citizenry as in the USA and
you'll have a corrupt, feeble state when it comes to keeping itself strong. And IMO the
primary difference that's making Russia stronger while the USA atrophies is that Russia
listens to its people and genuinely cares for and acts in their interests while in the USA
the demands of the citizenry have fallen on deaf ears for decades, regardless the political
party running the government.
Gruffy is trying to conflate perpetrator as opposed to the victim/ victems !
Classic -- -
US geo-politics.
Blame shifting fascist tactic.
Learned far right tactic.
Or
Psychopathic projection.
Example -- --
US attacks Iran &Russia but blames them for attacking The US.
Also Gruffy I note how you side step a point well made by
Asking a deliberately distracting question. Yawn
"Blame shifting" absolutely is part of smashing class consciousness. Shift the blame
for people's difficulties from capitalism to various parts of the working class. Those who
participate violently in this process are fascists and perpetrators. Of course, they are also
victims because they are destroying their own class consciousness. Class consciousness is
necessary if they are ever to be able to address the real issues causing them hardship.
When the question and answers segment comes online it is worth reading his opinion about
the Karabakh conflict and how it is a very difficult situation for Russia since both
countries involved, Armenia and Azerbaijan are part of a common family. The question implied
that Russia would unequivocally side with Armenia based on religion, to which Putin answered
that 15% of Russia population professes the islamic faith and that he considers Azerbaijan a
country as close to Russia as Armenia, with over two million nationals from each of the
warring countries living in Russia and as part of a very influential and productive
community.
Interesting too his take on Turkey, admitting that there are a lot of disagreements Putin
had good words for Erdogan admitting that he is independent and that he is someone able to
uphold his word, the Turk Stream project, it was agreed upon and completed, compared to the
europeans to whom he did not spare in his almost contemptuous words insinuating their lack of
sovereignty.
Gruffy error !!
In this context the 'mob'
Is trump followers.
The thugs in uniform.
The proud boys.
The US forces abroad and at home.
Gruffy 'you' ARE the mob.
I feel you watched to many cowboy films portraying native Americans as the bad guys! It
shows.
I won't be replying more. as I see your very shabby diversionary tactic. Nice try though. We
see you !! What you are and what you do.
Thanks for your reply! Even before the Q&A Putin skewers both the Empire and EU in
this paragraph:
"Genuine democracy and civil society cannot be imported.' I have said so many times. They
cannot be a product of the activities of foreign 'well-wishers,' even if they 'want the best
for us.' In theory, this is probably possible. But, frankly, I have not yet seen such a thing
and do not believe much in it. We see how such imported democracy models function. They are
nothing more than a shell or a front with nothing behind them, even a semblance of
sovereignty. People in the countries where such schemes have been implemented were never
asked for their opinion, and their respective leaders are mere vassals. As is known, the
overlord decides everything for the vassal . To reiterate, only the citizens of a
particular country can determine their public interest." [My Emphasis]
And that "particular country" is one where both the citizens and the government share
"confidence" in each other such that they work in "harmony." Thus the #1 goal of the Outlaw
US Empire to sow chaos within nations so such confidence and harmony can't be established;
and if they are, then destroyed.
No one has ever lied to American people more than the American regime and her terrorizing
intelligence community organization, Snowden is the living proof of this . Anyone still alive
and living on this planet if it ever believed a word on anything coming out of the USG not
only is a fool and a total idiot but his/her head must be seriously checked. Regardless of
their party affiliations they have no shame of lying cheating steeling those United
oligarchy' Secretary of State is the proof that.
This poster is on neither "side" . More like Putin looking in pain over Azerbaijan and
Armenia killing each other at the prompting of some third party that doesn't care about
either of them. This poster is neither faux left nor right wing; however, this poster's
grandmother was Cherokee. There is no anger directed your way for your failure to understand,
though.
If Americans had any backbone they would be on the streets protesting about this sham
election prior to the election, of false choice no choice.
You earn your democracy or you loose your democracy.
Iran, Russia bashing ! Just how low have you people sunk.
No hind sight, no insight and no foresight !
No hope. Spineless.
Totally weird! You all, please get behind re-electing Trump. He is doing such a good job of
destroying the US empire and its pretensions. If you are really a leftist, this is a GOO:-D
thing!
The alternative is to vote Independent or Green but they don't have a chance right
now.
Walking only 3 miles on Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles , going west I have counted 47 homeless
(male,females,wht,black,Asian)asking for handouts. These lost soles are the ones who have
paid the price for the for ever wars to secure the Israel' realm,
The propose of yesterday's security show at FBI was to convince the public that all negative
comments and cretics coming their way by internet blogs, email , media etc. is not really
from disfranchised Americans public, but rather foreign countries operation that they do not
like our democracy and way of life, It was solely meant to make people not to subscribe and
believe what negativity they hear or read on US( non existing)democracy ,
This is a cheap standard operation by totalitarian regimes.
53
That money went to the ESF,what else do you think is levitating stocks and bonds ?
You assumed wrongly, but Kudlow let slip they(ESF) were broke and actually stated the money
was going to them in a presser.
I dunno why I'm bothering to do this because astrology is such a lame easily disproven
superstition that gets by because there are just so many con artists making predictions that
occasionally some must be correct - the stopped clock effect, but here goes.
The moon's effect on our planet's oceans is proven to be caused by a known phenomenon,
gravity. These stars whose positions we are told influence our human lives (just another
anthrocentric load of bulldust what about beings on other planets?) are thousands of light
years away from earth, meaning when the con-artists draw up their star charts or WTF they
call 'em, they are looking at formations that happened thousands of years ago - all different
depending on a particular star's distance from earth.
Claiming to be able to predict anything rational from such a mish mash of incorrect data is
risible, sad really and goes much to explain the house dembot's mania.
As for oblammer in Miami? I guess the dnc know where quite a few oblammer bodies are
buried.
My view is changing, Biden is so crooked that even though if he wins, the corporate media
will try hard to leave him alone, but he's just too clumsy, so that some dems are going to
side with the rethugs to impeach him and fast, however that may be what the oligarchy is
counting on, as that brings bad karmala harris to the fore, a women so unpopular with dem
rank and file she withdrew from the primary before any votes were cast, how's that for
'democracy'.
This is the real issue, both dem & rethug prez candidates are crooks through and
through, if the dems win, then the spotlight the corporate media shone on orangeutan will be
turned off. At least some of trump's worst rorts were stopped by a fear of being found out,
but if the dems win dopey joe will have no such constraint - until he does something so over
the top eg kick off nuclear war, that the media finally wakes up. too late but at least now
they're awake.
Posted by: vinnieoh | Oct 22 2020 16:04 utc | 45 If Trump loses, should some people expect
bricks through their windows, or perhaps fire-bombings?
That is the threat. If either side loses, there will be massive civil unrest - at least
it's very likely that is (part of) "the plan" - whatever the plan actually is. In any event,
plan or not, it's predictable. Most of the preppers I follow on Youtube are urging everyone
to stock up on food and water because there's a good chance that everyone will be back on
movement restrictions of some sort, if not full-on martial law, within the next couple
months. As I said before, this country is going to start looking like Turkey or Italy in the
70's when the Grey Wolves and the Red Brigades were terrorizing those countries. It may not
be "civil war", but it's likely to be uglier than what happened this summer.
There will be cries of joy in the streets and maybe some celebratory looting, all from the
urban left.
Trump's supporters might assemble peacefully in a very sparse manner, but I would bet most
would simply take the newly alotted time from the Biden-victory to prep and ready a little
more before the real fireworks begin. Violence would only erupt from the urban left attacking
those demonstrations.
Real men are lying in wait. The city is not their playground any longer.
Posted by: Debsisdead | Oct 22 2020 11:21 utc | 19 -- "Barack can claim 'he paid his dues'
whilst keeping as much space as he can organise between himself and crooked joe, who has
already brought oblamblam's prezdency into disrepute with the shameless & ugly ukraine
rort that he and his bagman hunter had concocted."
Thanks for your astute observations. Am learning much.
A compromised man never escapes blackmail: he is but a tool in the hands of his owners. It
is not IF, but WHEN he will be used / abused. Over and over again, like a banker's boot
stomping on his arrogant face.
But then, who is to say that Obanger Obummer was unaware of his VP, that Basement-Biding
Bidet Biden's 'arrangements' for wealth accretion? And more (there is always more), who is to
say that Obanging Ohumming gets NO share therefrom at some 'convenient' time?
Evil thinks himself clever to hide in the dark, yet lives in daily fear of the light.
Thusly Obanging Ohummer's calculations that you noted above, and his dark demeanour these
days. He knows he is walking on a knife edge, with a sword hanging over his head, and a
safety net (those 17 intelligence agencies?) that can turn into a fowler's snare (sorry,
mixed metaphors!)
Yet, looking at the happier demeanour (she used to scowl all through 2017/2018) on that
shallow face called Michelle Ohummer, we can guess that she thinks they have escaped clean
with their 'rewards of office'.
Christian J. Chuba @17 asked, "How long?" I ask, how does an immoral leadership ever going
to turn moral? When does America get the leadership that she deserves?
@71 karlof1 - "only a viable state can act effectively in a crisis" - Putin
What a brilliant equation from Putin. Even more penetrating and useful than the formerly
existing observation that socialist-style societies have performed best in response to the
virus. Putin's criterion cuts exactly to the essence of the thing.
What the US has demonstrated from the virus response is that it is not a viable state. The
benchmark now exists. Thanks for bringing it over.
I have a friend of Cherokee ancestry. She told me how once she was speaking with an elder
woman of the tribe, and described herself as "one-eighth Cherokee".
The old woman shook her head and said, "The Cherokee spirit cannot be diluted."
Should any here be interested, Wikipedia has aa extensive listing of governmental scandals
for the 20th and 21st century administrations. Note the number of executive, legislative and
judicial scandals for each administration. Note also the volume of scandals as
administrations go from Franklin D. Roosevelt through to D.J. Trump for both executive and
legislative branches. The political parties of the malfeasant are of interest as well -
trending can be discerned, maybe, for the observant.
I'd have more hope for Russia if the Russian ruling class weren't so obsessed with the
West and didn't send their children to Western (woke) schools, etc.
theallseeinggod , 7 hours ago
They're not doing that well, but they're not repeating many of the west's mistakes.
Normal , 5 hours ago
Now the West has rules only for poor people.
Helg Saracen , 6 hours ago
Advice to Americans (for the sake of experiment): prohibit lobbying in US and the right of
citizens with dual citizenship to hold public office in US. I assure - you will be surprised
how quickly Russians go from non-kosher to kosher for Americans and how American politicians,
the media will convince Americans of this at every intersection. :) Ha ha ha
Nayel , 5 hours ago
If the [Vichy] Left in America weren't so determined to project their own Bolshevik
leanings on to a possible great ally that their ideology now fears, Russia would be just
that: a great ally that could help America shake the Bolsheviks that have infiltrated the
American government and plan the same program their Soviet forefathers once held over
Russia...
Arising 2.0 , 1 hour ago
Western zionist controlled propaganda reminds me of Mohamed Ali- he used to talk up the
******** so much before a fight that when the time came to fight the opponent was usually
traumatised or confused. Until Ali met with Joe Frazier (Russia) who didn't fall for all the
pre-fight BS.
ThePinkHole , 39 minutes ago
Time for a pop quiz! Name the two countries below:
Country A - competency, attention to first principles, planning based on reality,
consistency of purpose, and unity of execution.
Country B - incompetency, interfering in everything everywhere, planning based on hubris
and sloppy assumptions, confusion, and disunity.
(Source: Adapted from Patrick Armstrong)
foxenburg , 3 hours ago
This one is always good for a laugh....the Daily Telegraph's Con Coughlin explaining in
2015 how Putin will fail in Syria...
We have all this talk of the 'Ruskies' when in fact it is not the ordinary Russian people
but rather a geopolitical power struggle. The ordinary US citizen or European just wants to
maintain their liberty and be able to profit from their endeavours. The rich and powerful
globalists who hide behind their military are the ones that play these games. I am no friend
of Putin but equally I am no friend of our own political establishment that have been
captured by Wall Street. I care about Main Street and as the US dollar loses its privilege
there will be real pain to share amongst our economies. The last thing we need is for the
elites of the Western alliance to profit with cold/hot wars on the backs of ourselves.
Having been behind the iron curtain as a young Merchant Navy Officer I found ordinary
citizens fine and even organized football matches with the local communist parties. People
have the same desires and aspirations and whether rich or poor we should respect each others
cultures and territories. http://www.money-liberty.com/gallery/Predictions-2021.pdf
You would be justified in thinking that the various news conferences put on by US law
enforcement and intelligence officials in which foreign actors – Russia, China and Iran
are the usual suspects – are accused of meddling in all things American are little more
than a giant practical joke, a parody of how a government should behave, instead of the damning
indictment of reality that they are.
The most recent iteration of this embarrassing spectacle took place on Wednesday evening,
during a hastily convened press conference suspiciously timed to coincide with former president
Barack Obama's inaugural stump speech in support of Democratic presidential candidate Joe
Biden.
Normally, the citation of such coincidences would relegate any subsequent analysis to the
rabbit hole of conspiracy theory. However, we do not live in normal times. The press conference
was convened by the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, who was in turn
accompanied by the Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray.
Ratcliffe has come under fire from Congressional Democrats for his
selective declassification of documents pertaining to allegations of Russian involvement in
the 2016 US presidential campaign. Former CIA director John Brennan, who was the subject of
some of the leaked documents, accused Ratcliffe of releasing them to
"advance the political interests" of President Donald Trump ahead of the November 3
election.
The declassification caper was followed by Ratcliffe's
unsolicited intervention regarding the acquisition by the FBI of computer hard drives
allegedly belonging to Joe Biden's son, Hunter. Ratcliffe declared that the contents of the
drives were not part of a Russian disinformation campaign and thereby drew the ire of
Democrats, who view the sordid computer story as a smear campaign against the former vice
president.
The October 21 press conference followed in the path of Ratcliffe's prior interventions, and
appeared to be little more than an insufficiently sourced allegation wrapped in highly
politicized conclusions.
Ratcliffe claimed the US intelligence community had " confirmed that some voter
registration information has been obtained by Iran, and separately, by Russia ." This was
the gist of the press conference, and it added virtually nothing to the
statement released by Ratcliffe in August in which he noted that the US intelligence
community was " primarily concerned about the ongoing and potential activity by China,
Russia, and Iran ."
What made Ratcliffe's announcement even less spectacular was the fact that the data he
accused Iran and Russia of stealing was publicly available, leading some anonymous intelligence
officials to speculate that the hacking operations were little more than an effort to avoid
paying the fees associated with accessing this data. As far as crimes go, this one was
eminently forgettable.
Ratcliffe noted that the US officials " have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails
designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump ,"
referring to a scheme alleged to have been implemented by Iran, using this information,
to
disseminate emails to potential voters claiming to be from the controversial Proud Boys
organization, that threatened physical violence unless the recipient voted for Trump in the
coming election.
The purpose of this scheme appears to be less about actually changing votes (voting is done
in secret, so the sender of the letter would have no way of confirming an outcome, thereby
negating the threat) and more about undermining confidence in the electoral process as a whole.
Both Iran and the Proud Boys have denied any involvement in the letter writing campaign.
This latest incursion by the US intelligence community into the topic of election
interference by outside powers has been loudly condemned by the Democrats, with the House
Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, tweeting "
Ratcliffe has TOO OFTEN politicized the Intelligence Community to carry water for the
President ."
But Ratcliffe's actions only continue in the vein of a history of electioneering by the US
intelligence community during contentious presidential elections. Much of the Democrats'
current ire against Ratcliffe stems from his exposing documents that point to similar
politically motivated interventions by John Brennan and others during the 2016 election,
ostensibly for the purpose of undermining the campaign of then-candidate Trump.
The fact is, what passes for domestic US politics is virtually impossible to manipulate by
outside agencies. The effort by
Cambridge Analytica to predict voting preferences in 2016 by accessing the confidential
online data of millions of Americans has been shown to have been spectacularly ineffective, and
it exceeded by some way the sophistication and data collection activities attributed to foreign
powers such as Russia, China, and Iran.
The mind of the American voter is influenced by a wide variety of inputs that are highly
individualized and, in many instances, virtually unquantifiable. The notion that a
sophisticated data mining organization such as Cambridge Analytica, or the intelligence
services of any of those three nations, could succeed in doing over the course of months what
American political organizations have been struggling to achieve over two-plus centuries is not
only laughable, but insulting.
Yet the level of domestic political insecurity that exists today is such that both political
parties, lacking confidence in their own inherent messaging capability, have succumbed to the
psychosis of political victimhood, blaming others for their own inherent failures. By allowing
the work of the US intelligence community to be used as a foil in this self-destructive blame
game, a succession of US intelligence professionals, led by John Brennan, James Clapper, James
Comey, Richard Grenell, John Ratcliffe, and others, have turned the once respected profession
of intelligence into a politicized joke.
In this, however, it is in good company, joined by both political parties, the US media and,
frankly speaking, the US electorate. American democracy is a mirror image of the nation it
purports to serve, and, at the moment, the reflection displayed is a thoroughly tragic one.
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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.
For all practical purposes Biden work as a well paid lobbyist for China.
Notable quotes:
"... So Navalny was "poisoned by Putin" and sent to a Berlin hospital so that conclusion could be defined ? USSR was so incompetent with bio-weapons it cannot create a lethal organophosphate poison yet US/Uk can develop VX which worked definitively on King Jong-Un's half-brother ! ..."
So Navalny was "poisoned by Putin" and sent to a Berlin hospital so that conclusion could
be defined ? USSR was so incompetent with bio-weapons it cannot create a lethal
organophosphate poison yet US/Uk can develop VX which worked definitively on King Jong-Un's
half-brother !
Then again China can develop effective bio-weapons which expose the E=West and especially
NATO armed forces as unprepared, incompetent, ineffectual and in Chinese terms "paper
tigers"
So more and more sanctions on Russia and more and more orders for PPE and other goodies
from China.
Russia is Post-Communist but China is VERY VERY Communist.
Putin apparently "interferes in US elections" but China simply buys up one of the parties
and owns the candidate and his family
The Russians ( Putin / Lavrov) say ever so politely that the US is not
agreement-capable.
I add that the US ( politicians, Wall Streeters, MSM, think tanks ) are:
not truth-capable;
not ethics-capable;
not shame-capable;
not honour-capable.
What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul? He turns into a
ghoul without a soul, says I, a devil without human-ness! How dare they call us deplorables
when they are the despicables?
"... When the matter of truth is depicted as a possible threat to those that govern a country, you no longer have a democratic state. True, not everything can be disclosed to the public in real time, but we are sitting on a mountain of classified intelligence material that goes back more than 60 years. ..."
"... From this recognition, the whole matter of declassifying material around the Russigate scandal in real time, and not highly redacted 50 years from now, is essential to addressing this festering putrefaction that has been bubbling over since the heinous assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22nd, 1963 and to which we are still waiting for full disclosure of classified papers 57 years later. ..."
"... These intelligence bureaus need to be reviewed for what kind of method and standard they are upholding in collecting their "intelligence," that has supposedly justified the Mueller investigation and the never-ending Flynn investigation which have provided zero conclusive evidence to back up their allegations and which have massively infringed on the elected government's ability to make the changes that they had committed to the American people. ..."
"... Just like the Iraq and Libya war that was based off of cooked British intelligence (refer here and here ), Russiagate appears to have also had its impetus from our friends over at MI6 as well. It is no surprise that Sir Richard Dearlove, who was then MI6 chief (1999-2004) and who oversaw and stood by the fraudulent intelligence on Iraq stating they bought uranium from Niger to build a nuclear weapon, is the very same Sir Richard Dearlove who promoted the Christopher Steele dossier as something "credible" to American intelligence. ..."
"... In other words, the same man who is largely responsible for encouraging the illegal invasion of Iraq, which set off the never-ending wars on "terror," that was justified with cooked British intelligence is also responsible for encouraging the Russian spook witch-hunt that has been occurring within the US for the last four years over more cooked British intelligence, and the FBI and CIA are knowingly complicit in this. ..."
"... "The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s." [emphasis added] ..."
"... On Dec. 22, 1974, The New York Times published an article by Seymour Hersh exposing illegal operations conducted by the CIA, dubbed the "family jewels". This included, covert action programs involving assassination attempts on foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments, which were reported for the first time. In addition, the article discussed efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US citizens. ..."
"... Largely as a reaction to Hersh's findings, the creation of the Church Committee was approved on January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4 in the Senate. ..."
"... In addition, the Church Committee produced seven case studies on covert operations, but only the one on Chile was released, titled " Covert Action in Chile: 1963–1973 ". The rest were kept secret at the CIA's request. ..."
"... Among the most shocking revelation of the Church Committee was the discovery of Operation SHAMROCK , in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA from 1945 to the early 1970s. The information gathered in this operation fed directly into the NSA Watch List. It was found out during the committee investigations that Senator Frank Church, who was overseeing the committee, was among the prominent names under surveillance on this NSA Watch List. ..."
"... According to Garrison's team findings, there was reason to believe that the CIA was involved in the orchestrations of President Kennedy's assassination but access to classified material (which was nearly everything concerning the case) was necessary to continue such an investigation. ..."
"... Though Garrison's team lacked direct evidence, they were able to collect an immense amount of circumstantial evidence, which should have given the justification for access to classified material for further investigation. Instead the case was thrown out of court prematurely and is now treated as if it were a circus. [Refer to Garrison's book for further details and Oliver Stone's excellently researched movie JFK ] ..."
"... On Oct. 6th, 2020, President Trump ordered the declassification of the Russia Probe documents along with the classified documents on the findings concerning the Hillary Clinton emails. The release of these documents threatens to expose the entrapment of the Trump campaign by the Clinton campaign with help of the US intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Trey Gowdy, who was Chair of the House Oversight Committee from June 13th, 2017 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has stated in an interview on Oct. 7th, 2020 that he has never seen these documents. Devin Nunes, who was Chair of the House Intelligence Committee from Jan. 3rd, 2015 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has also said in a recent interview that he has never seen these documents. ..."
"... Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation . ..."
"Treason doth never prosper; what is the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it
treason." – Sir John Harrington.
As Shakespeare would state in his play Hamlet, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,"
like a fish that rots from head to tail, so do corrupt government systems rot from top to
bottom.
This is a reference to the ruling system of Denmark and not just the foul murder that King
Claudius has committed against his brother, Hamlet's father. This is showcased in the play by
reference to the economy of Denmark being in a state of shambles and that the Danish people are
ready to revolt since they are on the verge of starving. King Claudius has only been king for a
couple of months, and thus this state of affairs, though he inflames, did not originate with
him.
Thus, during our time of great upheaval we should ask ourselves; what constitutes the
persisting "ruling system," of the United States, and where do the injustices in its state of
affairs truly originate from?
The tragedy of Hamlet does not just lie in the action (or lack of action) of one man, but
rather, it is contained in the choices and actions of all its main characters. Each character
fails to see the longer term consequences of their own actions, which leads not only to their
ruin but towards the ultimate collapse of Denmark. The characters are so caught up in their
antagonism against one another that they fail to foresee that their very own destruction is
intertwined with the other.
This is a reflection of a failing system.
A system that, though it believes itself to be fighting tooth and nail for its very
survival, is only digging a deeper grave. A system that is incapable of generating any real
solutions to the problems it faces.
The only way out of this is to address that very fact. The most important issue that will
decide the fate of the country is what sort of changes are going to occur in the political and
intelligence apparatus, such that a continuation of this tyrannical treason is finally stopped
in its tracks and unable to sow further discord and chaos.
When the Matter of "Truth" Becomes a Threat to "National Security"
When the matter of truth is depicted as a possible threat to those that govern a
country, you no longer have a democratic state. True, not everything can be disclosed to the
public in real time, but we are sitting on a mountain of classified intelligence material that
goes back more than 60 years.
How much time needs to elapse before the American people have the right to know the truth
behind what their government agencies have been doing within their own country and abroad in
the name of the "free" world?
From this recognition, the whole matter of declassifying material around the Russigate
scandal in real time, and not highly redacted 50 years from now, is essential to addressing
this festering putrefaction that has been bubbling over since the
heinous assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22nd, 1963 and to which we are still
waiting for full disclosure of classified papers 57 years later.
If the American people really want to finally see who is standing behind that curtain in Oz,
now is the time.
These intelligence bureaus need to be reviewed for what kind of method and standard they
are upholding in collecting their "intelligence," that has supposedly justified the Mueller
investigation and the never-ending Flynn investigation which have provided zero conclusive
evidence to back up their allegations and which have massively infringed on the elected
government's ability to make the changes that they had committed to the American
people.
Just like the Iraq and Libya war that was based off of cooked British intelligence
(refer here
and here ),
Russiagate appears to have also had its impetus from our friends over at MI6 as well. It is no
surprise that Sir Richard Dearlove, who was then MI6 chief (1999-2004) and who
oversaw and stood by the fraudulent intelligence on Iraq stating they bought uranium from
Niger to build a nuclear weapon, is the very same Sir Richard Dearlove who promoted the
Christopher Steele dossier as something "credible" to American intelligence.
In other words, the same man who is largely responsible for encouraging the illegal
invasion of Iraq, which set off the never-ending wars on "terror," that was justified with
cooked British intelligence is also responsible for encouraging the Russian spook witch-hunt
that has been occurring within the US for the last four years over more cooked British
intelligence, and the FBI and CIA are knowingly complicit in this.
Neither the American people, nor the world as a whole, can afford to suffer any more of the
so-called "mistaken" intelligence bumblings. It is time that these intelligence bureaus are
held accountable for at best criminal negligence, at worst, treason against their own
country.
When Great Figures of Hope Are Targeted as Threats to "National Security"
The Family Jewels
report , which was an investigation conducted by the CIA to investigate itself, was spurred
by the Watergate Scandal and the CIA's unconstitutional role in the whole affair. This
investigation by the CIA reviewed its own conduct from the 1950s to mid-1970s.
The Family Jewels report was only partially declassified in June 25, 2007 (30
years later). Along with the release of the redacted report included a six-page summary with
the following introduction:
"The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of
illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led
to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s." [emphasis added]
Despite this acknowledged violation of its charter for 25 years, which is pretty much since
its inception, the details of this information were kept classified for 30 years from not just
the public but major governmental bodies and it was left to the agency itself to judge how best
to "reform" its ways.
On Dec. 22, 1974, The
New York Times published an article by Seymour Hersh exposing illegal operations conducted
by the CIA, dubbed the "family jewels". This included, covert action programs involving
assassination attempts on foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments,
which were reported for the first time. In addition, the article discussed efforts by
intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US
citizens.
Largely as a reaction to Hersh's findings, the creation of the Church Committee was
approved on January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4 in the Senate.
The Church Committee also published an interim
report titled "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders", which investigated
alleged attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Zaire, Rafael
Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile
and Fidel Castro of Cuba. President Ford attempted to withhold the report from the public, but
failed and reluctantly issued Executive
Order 11905 after pressure from the public and the Church Committee.
Executive Order 11905 is a United States Presidential Executive Order signed on February 18,
1976, by a very reluctant President Ford in an attempt to reform the United States Intelligence
Community, improve oversight on foreign intelligence activities, and ban political
assassination.
The attempt is now regarded as a failure and was largely undone by President Reagan who
issued Executive
Order 12333 , which extended the powers and responsibilities of US intelligence agencies
and directed leaders of the US federal agencies to co-operate fully with the CIA, which was the
original arrangement that CIA have full authority over clandestine operations (for more
information on this refer to my papers
here and
here ).
In addition, the Church Committee produced seven case studies on covert operations, but
only the one on Chile was released, titled " Covert Action in
Chile: 1963–1973 ". The rest were kept secret at the CIA's request.
Among the most shocking revelation of the Church Committee was the discovery of
Operation SHAMROCK ,
in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA from 1945 to
the early 1970s. The information gathered in this operation fed directly into the NSA Watch
List. It was found out during the committee investigations that Senator Frank Church, who was
overseeing the committee, was among the prominent
names under surveillance on this NSA Watch List.
In 1975, the Church Committee decided to unilaterally declassify the particulars of this
operation, against the objections of President Ford's administration (refer here and
here for more information).
The Church Committee's reports constitute the most extensive review of intelligence
activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but over
50,000 pages were declassified under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records
Collection Act of 1992.
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22nd, 1963. Two days before his
assassination a hate-Kennedy handbill (see picture) was circulated in Dallas accusing the
president of treasonous activities including being a communist sympathizer.
On March 1st, 1967 New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested and charged Clay Shaw
with conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy, with the help of David Ferrie and others.
After a little over a one month long trial, Shaw was found not guilty on March 1st, 1969.
David Ferrie, a controller of Lee Harvey Oswald, was going to be a key witness and would
have provided the "smoking gun" evidence linking himself to Clay Shaw, was likely murdered on
Feb. 22nd, 1967, less than a week after news of Garrison's investigation broke in the
media.
According to Garrison's team findings, there was reason to believe that the CIA was
involved in the orchestrations of President Kennedy's assassination but access to classified
material (which was nearly everything concerning the case) was necessary to continue such an
investigation.
Though Garrison's team lacked direct evidence, they were able to collect an immense
amount of circumstantial evidence, which should have given the justification for access to
classified material for further investigation. Instead the case was thrown out of court
prematurely and is now treated as if it were a circus. [Refer to Garrison's book for further details and
Oliver Stone's excellently researched movie JFK ]
To date, it is the only trial to be brought forward concerning the assassination of
President Kennedy.
The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was created in 1994 by the Congress enacted
President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that all
assassination-related material be housed in a single collection within the National Archives
and Records Administration. In July 1998, a staff report
released by the ARRB emphasized shortcomings in the original autopsy.
The
ARRB wrote , "One of the many tragedies of the assassination of President Kennedy has been
the incompleteness of the autopsy record and the suspicion caused by the shroud of secrecy that
has surrounded the records that do exist." [emphasis added]
Asked about the lunchroom episode [where he was overheard stating his notes of the autopsy
went missing] in a May 1996 deposition, Finck said he did not remember it. He was also vague
about how many notes he took during the autopsy but confirmed that 'after the autopsy I also
wrote notes' and that he turned over whatever notes he had to the chief autopsy physician,
James J. Humes.
It has long been known that Humes destroyed some original autopsy papers in a fireplace at
his home on Nov. 24, 1963. He told the Warren Commission that what he burned was an original
draft of his autopsy report. Under persistent questioning at a February 1996 deposition by
the Review Board, Humes said he destroyed the draft and his 'original notes.'
Shown official autopsy photographs of Kennedy from the National Archives, [Saundra K.]
Spencer [who worked in 'the White House lab'] said they were not the ones she helped process
and were printed on different paper. She said 'there was no blood or opening cavities' and
the wounds were much smaller in the pictures [than what she had] worked on
John T. Stringer, who said he was the only one to take photos during the autopsy itself,
said some of those were missing as well. He said that pictures he took of Kennedy's brain at
a 'supplementary autopsy' were different from the official set that was shown to him.
[emphasis added]
This not only shows that evidence tampering did indeed occur, as even the Warren
Commission acknowledges, but this puts into question the reliability of the entire
assassination record of John F. Kennedy and to what degree evidence tampering and forgery have
occurred in these records.
We would also do well to remember the numerous crimes that the FBI and CIA have been guilty
of committing upon the American people such as during the period of McCarthyism. That the FBI's
COINTELPRO has been implicated in covert operations against members of the civil rights
movement, including Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s. That FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
made no secret of his hostility towards Dr. King and his ludicrous belief that King was
influenced by communists, despite having no evidence to that effect.
King was assassinated on April 4th, 1968 and the civil rights movement took a major
blow.
In November 1975, as the Church Committee was completing its investigation, the Department
of Justice formed a Task Force to examine the FBI's program of harassment directed at Dr. King,
including the FBI's security investigations of him, his assassination and the FBI conducted
criminal investigation that followed. One aspect of the Task force study was to determine
"whether any action taken in relation to Dr. King by the FBI before the assassination had, or
might have had, an effect, direct or indirect, on that event."
In its report
, the Task Force criticized the FBI not for the opening, but for the protracted continuation
of, its security investigation of Dr. King:
"We think the security investigation which included both physical and technical
surveillance, should have been terminated in 1963. That it was intensified and augmented by a
COINTELPRO type campaign against Dr. King was unwarranted; the COINTELPRO type campaign,
moreover, was ultra vires and very probably felonious."
In 1999, King Family
v. Jowers civil suit in Memphis, Tennessee occurred, the full transcript of the trial can
be found here
. The jury found that Lloyd Jowers and unnamed others, including those in high ranking
positions within government agencies, participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King.
During the four week trial, it was pointed out that the rifle allegedly used to assassinate
King did not have a scope that was sighted, which meant you could not have hit the broad side
of a barn with that rifle, thus it could not have been the murder weapon.
This was only remarked on over 30 years after King was murdered and showed the level of
incompetence, or more likely, evidence tampering that was committed from previous
investigations conducted by the FBI.
The case of JFK and MLK are among the highest profile assassination cases in American
history, and it has been shown in both cases that evidence tampering has indeed occurred,
despite being in the center of the public eye. What are we then to expect as the standard of
investigation for all the other cases of malfeasance? What expectation can we have that justice
is ever upheld?
With a history of such blatant misconduct, it is clear that the present demand to declassify
the Russiagate papers now, and not 50 years later, needs to occur if we are to address the
level of criminality that is going on behind the scenes and which will determine the fate of
the country.
The American People Deserve to Know
Today we see the continuation of the over seven decades' long ruse, the targeting of
individuals as Russian agents without any basis, in order to remove them from the political
arena. The present effort to declassify the Russiagate papers and exonerate Michael Flynn, so
that he may freely speak of the intelligence he knows, is not a threat to national security, it
is a threat to those who have committed treason against their country.
On Oct. 6th, 2020, President Trump ordered the declassification of the Russia Probe
documents along with the classified documents on the findings concerning the Hillary Clinton
emails. The release of these documents threatens to expose the entrapment of the Trump campaign
by the Clinton campaign with help of the US intelligence agencies.
The Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe released some of these documents
recently, including former CIA Director John Brennan's handwritten notes for a meeting with former
President Obama, the notes revealing that Hillary Clinton approved a plan to "vilify Donald
Trump by stirring up scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service."
Trey Gowdy, who was Chair of the House Oversight Committee from June 13th, 2017 –
Jan. 3rd, 2019, has stated in an interview on Oct. 7th, 2020 that
he has never seen these documents. Devin Nunes, who was Chair of the House Intelligence
Committee from Jan. 3rd, 2015 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has also said in a recent interview that
he has never seen these documents.
And yet, both the FBI and CIA were aware and had access to these documents and sat on them
for four years, withholding their release from several government-led investigations that were
looking into the Russiagate scandal and who were requesting relevant material that was in the
possession of both intelligence bureaus. Do these intelligence bureaus sound like they are
working for the "national security" of the American people?
The truth must finally be brought to light, or the country will rot from its head to
tail.
"... Perhaps the plot extended beyond those who directly participated but I don't think it was a high level operation. Navalny took a gamble that his sponsors would have no choice but to follow his lead. It now makes no practical difference as to whom planned it. ..."
Alexey Navalny: It's a banned substance. I think for Putin– why– he's using
this chemical weapon to do– do both, kill me and, you know, terrify others. It's
something really scary, where the people just drop dead without– there are no gun.
There are no shots and in a couple of hours, you– you'll be dead and without any traces
on your body. It's something terrifying. And Putin is enjoying it.
So am I. It's very intriguing, the constant plot twists – Navalny is recorded live
'moaning in anguish' but he was not in any pain! Perhaps the very thought of such an amazing
human being and exceptional leader – himself, naturally – struck down in his
prime was just so sorrowful that he could not stifle his sadness.
It's 'something really scary', is it? Why? So far nearly everyone poisoned by it has
survived with no apparent medium-to-long-term damage. The deadliest toxin in the world by a
wide margin has so far managed to kill one barbag who was also a drug addict, and completely
incidentally – she was not ever a target.
According to the Russian record of its use as a murder weapon, though, on the sole known
occasion it was so used, it killed the target in just a few hours. It also killed his
secretary, who used the same phone to call an ambulance, and the pathologist who did his
autopsy.
So whoever is copying Novichok for its terror effects is not doing a very good job. Like
Porsche, there is no substitute.
The "moaning in anguish" was likely Navalny's theatrical assumption that Novichok creates
intense pain. When he learned, after his performance, that Novichok does not create intense
pain, he changed his story on the fly.
This, and a few other things, brings up an interesting conjecture. The Navalny stunt may
have been a free-lance operation done without prior knowledge of Western intelligence
agencies. He and his posse concocted the scheme betting that the the US and Germany would be
backed into a corner and had to play along. They really had no choice as they could not
abandon this asset without the entire "fearless opposition to the tyrant Putin" collapsing
into the cesspool it was built upon.
If so, it was an audacious move that only a sociopath could do. However, it does suggest
that Navalny is finished after the last bit of propaganda value is wrung out. His future
could be either termination under a convenient pretext (i.e. Putin finally got him) or to
become a professor of BS at some US University or the like. The main point is that he is too
unreliable to conduct further operations.
I think the whole thing was a carefully-concocted operation that Lyosha was fully
briefed-in on. His howls and screams would have been necessary in any case, with or without
pain, because it was imperative that all on board be convinced that a terrible event was
taking place and that emergency actions were absolutely called for. It's hard to imagine the
same dramatic effect could have been achieved by Navalny flopping out of the toilet like a
gaffed bass, and whispering to the flight attendant, "I just have this feeling that says
body, we are done". Everyone including the flight attendant would assume he was drunk or
something that was no particular cause for alarm, and maybe even for amusement. Until they
learned that the flight was being diverted so this fuckwad could get off.
I don't know and I don't care who's cuning plan this was. It's got him all the
publicity he needs and also those in the west with their standard 'no smoke without fire'
level of foreign policy 'evidence.' I think he's actually looking to sell his life story for
a Netflix series. Nothing else makes logical sense.
Yes, maybe -- apart from the fact that one of his posse is British agent who has been
controlling FBK investigations into corruption for quite a while now and apparently was stuck
to Navalny during his last foray into the provinces like shit to an army blanket.
To Mark and ME;
The Navalny show still has an ad hoc feel to it. Perhaps the plot extended beyond those
who directly participated but I don't think it was a high level operation. Navalny took a
gamble that his sponsors would have no choice but to follow his lead. It now makes no
practical difference as to whom planned it.
Navalny has complained that Trump has not condemned what happened to him
19.10.2020 | 07:59
Blogger Aleksei Navalny has expressed the opinion that US President Donald Trump should
have also condemned what happened to him, as did European politicians, TASS reports.
"I think it is especially important that everyone, including, and perhaps first and
foremost, the US president, speak out against the use of chemical weapons in the 21st
century", Navalny said.
["Я думаю, что
особенно важно,
чтобы все,
включая и,
возможно, в
первую очередь
президента США,
выступили
против
применения
химического
оружия в XXI
веке".]
On August 20, Navalny was taken to a hospital in Omsk after he had fallen ill on an
aeroplane. Omsk doctors said that the main diagnosis was metabolic disorders. Then Navalny
was transported to Germany. He was in a coma for two weeks. German doctors announced that he
had been poisoned with substances from the Novichok group. Russia has asked Berlin for more
detailed information on the test results, but has not yet received a response.
Currently, Navalny has been discharged from the hospital and is undergoing
rehabilitation.
Big gobbed gobshite shouting his big gob off -- or did his US controllers really urge him
to make that statement? Is the CIA really using him as part of the Democrats "Russiagate"
arsenal?
Got it in one; I was going to say, until I read your last couple of lines, that this is
further suggestion that Navalny is a Democratic project. The US State Department is full of
Democratic appointees. They want to get all the mileage out of him they can before interest
fades.
Miraculously, he recovered from the poison that is so dangerous people fear to mention its
name, for fear that doing so might encourage tongue cancer, and is today fit as a flea; can't
wait to return to Russia for Round Two. If they were wise, they'd kill Lyosha themselves for
his stem cells. Then world leaders could be protected against Russian assassination
attempts.
Certainly capitalizing on his new-found fame, isn't he? Now he feels comfortable telling
the US president how he ought to behave, and chiding him for not appropriately recognizing
Navalny's importance to the world. Dear God, what a swellheaded prat.
If the Chief Bullshitter really feels so concerned for the safety of his family, he will
leave them all abroad and return to Russia alone – I mean, he's not a bit afraid for
himself, he's said as much. Go on, Lyosha – go back home and rally the great restless
throng of oppressed ordinary Russians who cry out for your leadership!!
Not on your life. He's got the sweetest gig ever going on right there, newspapers beating
a path to his door to find out what he likes to eat for breakfast and whose shirts he wears,
no worries about income or housing, hobnobbing with world leaders who listen respectfully to
his opinions, and all he has to do is rant about Putin all day long. The Americans are
finally getting their money's worth out of Lyosha. Whereas what would happen if he went
home?
It would quickly become clear that his support still comes exclusively from the same group
– a few disaffected intelligentsia such as Boris Akunin, the Atlanticist liberatsi who
endlessly predict the collapse of Putin, and the angry kiddies who feel like they are part of
some great Thunberg-like global freedom movement that will bring them a comfortable life but
absolve them of responsibility for working for it – you know; the way they live in
America!
Authoritarian liberals have unleashed a censorious syndrome peculiar to our national
character, dating to 17th century Quaker hangings in Boston.
A n inhabitant of Twitterland named "Willow Inski" took to the keyboard on Oct. 11,
asking why anyone still accepts official accounts of the crucial theft of emails from the
Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta in the spring of
2016.
Excellently observed, Willow. And at just the right moment. At this point we are amid a
frenzy of what Hannah Arendt called "defactualization" in a 1971
essay she titled "Lying in Politics." Facts are fragile, Arendt astutely observed, because
they can so easily be manipulated to produce a desired image. "It is this fragility," she
wrote, "that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting."
The latest example of this phenom concerns the emails of Hunter Biden, candidate Joe's errant
son, which persuasively incriminate both in very profitable influence-peddling schemes when
Papa was Barack Obama's veep.
Nobody denies the facts as published last week in The New York Post , not even Biden
père et fils , but the facts are once again mutilated with assertions that it is
another case of the Rrrrrrussians spreading disinformation.
This is what we get after four years of the Russia collusion b.s., otherwise known as
Russiagate. Anything goes if implicating Russia solves a political problem for the Democrats
and keeps the war machine going for the Pentagon and the national security state. It defers the
moment -- at some point it will come -- when the press is exposed for its radically stupid
overinvestment in the Russiagate nonsense. The price America has already begun to pay is very
high.
Willow's expression of perplexity comes after an especially lively season of revelations as
regards what must count as the largest disinformation op in U.S. history. It is now six months
since the Russiagate hoax -- and I am fine with President Donald Trump's term for it -- began
its final crash into a pile of piffle. While it remains to be seen whether more evidence of
political chicanery is coming, what evidence we already have is more than sufficient to
identify Russiagate as the probable criminal fraud it was from the start.
I am refreshed that Willow Inski, who describes herself as an "attorney, wife, mother, proud
American," sees through this extravagant ruse. And yet, as she notes, a lot of people don't. A
lot of people are "still taking at face value" all the misinformation, disinformation, and
outright lies our newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters have purveyed incessantly for the
past four years.
Why is a very large question. All possible answers are disturbing. But here is another big
one we get to before that: When we consider together all its many consequences, has Russiagate
destroyed what remained of American democracy before illiberal liberals, spooks, law
enforcement, and the press colluded to erect the dreadful edifice?
The Damage Done
Your columnist's answer rests on the most scrupulously precise definition of Russiagate one
can manage: What we have witnessed these past four years is an attempted palace coup against a
sitting president.
Cold comfort it is that the gang that couldn't shoot straight bungled the job. It has also
created a Democratic default position: When wrongdoing by Democrats is credibly exposed,
automatically blame Russia. Among much else, that has led to unnecessary tension with a nuclear
power. This damage will long stay with us.
Russiagate's foundation stone -- baseless allegations that Moscow was responsible for the
2016 DNC email intrusions -- crumbled long ago. We've known since July 2017 that nobody hacked
the email servers in question.
This was confirmed by the Dec. 5, 2017, closed-door congressional
testimony of Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike, the firm the Democrats hired to examine
the DNC servers. It was made public only on May 7, 2020. Henry said under oath: "There's not
evidence that they [the emails] were actually exfiltrated. There's circumstantial evidence but
no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. "
The emails were most likely compromised by someone with direct access to them, probably a
DNC insider. 'Twas a leak, not a hack.
But incessant propaganda and a sloppy but effective coverup have kept the fable going
since then. All has been open game these past years, scabrous, apparent false-flag poisonings
-- the Skripals, Alexei Navalny --
baseless tales of Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers' heads. The press has reported this
sort of rubbish for years as if it were confirmed fact. Spectral evidence has reigned.
It is this coverup that has been falling
apart since last spring.
First came news that the collusion case against Michael Flynn, Trump's first national
security adviser, was bogus and that Flynn entered his two guilty pleas when prosecutors
threatened to indict his son if he refused. When the Justice Department dropped its case
against Flynn, it simultaneously forced the House Intelligence Committee to release documents
showing that no "evidence" of a Russian email hack ever existed, even as the Democrats, the
spooks, and the press missed no chance to bang on about it.
Those who got my goat at the time were people such as Adam Schiff, the Democratic
congressman from Hollywood and leader of the charge on Capitol Hill, who knew there was no
evidence of Russian involvement but repeatedly insisted they had seen it whenever they faced a
CNN camera.
You are right, Ms. Inski: Crowdstrike, the grossly corrupt firm that was supposed to have
all the evidence one could ever want, never had any. Former FBI Director James Comey admitted
in testimony that the FBI asked for but never gained possession of the DNC server, even though
this would be the "best practice." We can surmise that this was so, so that the bureau
could deny responsibility for what amounts to a psyop perpetrated against Americans. In June
2019 it was
reported that CrowdStrike also never gave the FBI a final report because none was ever
produced since the FBI never asked for one.
Among the congressional testimonies released last spring, two top Clinton campaign
operatives, Podesta and Jake Sullivan,
acknowledged that they met after Trump's election with the principals of Fusion GPS, the
infamous orchestrator of the Steele Dossier, to keep the Russiagate ball rolling. What a
difference speaking under oath makes.
Actually, what got my goat a second time was that none of this, as in none, was reported in
The New York Times or anywhere else in the mainstream media. Our once-but-no-more
newspaper of record has made an absolute dog's dinner of itself since its leadership decided to
buy into the Russiagate junk. At this point I am convinced its ties to the spooks are as dense
and corrupt as they were during the worst of the Cold War decades, when the publisher
signed a
covert agreement to cooperate with the CIA.
Clinton Approved Plan
As if any more reports were needed to deflate the Russiagate balloon, the evidence continues
to accumulate. At the end of September John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence,
informed Senator Lindsey Graham that intelligence agencies had information "alleging that
U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal
against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians'
hacking of the Democratic National Committee." Some of us
knew this four years ago.
While Ratcliffe's letter adds that spookworld "does not know the accuracy of this
allegation," it goes on to note that the intel in question was serious enough for John Brennan,
then the CIA director, to brief President Barack Obama about it and forward it to Comey and
Peter Strzok, respectively FBI director and deputy assistant director of counterintelligence at
the time. This is the referral, of course, that Comey now claims he
cannot recall a damn thing about.
Given the Podesta and Sullivan testimonies, the Ratcliffe disclosures stitch the case: In
my view, the Clinton campaign's active role in starting and prolonging the Russiagate
propaganda operation is now open-and-shut. (It was first reported
in October 2017 by Consortium News and
predicted by me in Salon on July 26, 2016 and three days before the
2016 election by CN 's editor).
I wrote back then in Salon :
"Making lemonade out of a lemon, the Clinton campaign now goes for a twofer. Watch as
it advances the Russians-did-it thesis on the basis of nothing, then shoots the messenger,
then associates Trump with its own mess -- and, finally, gets to ignore the nature of its
transgression (which any paying-attention person must consider grave)."
Declassifications Ignored
In the matter of goats, the Ratcliffe letter seems to have gotten Trump's. A week later he
took to Twitter
calling for the declassification , without redaction, of all documents related to the
Russiagate probes.
Although Trump did not issue an official order to this effect, this amounts to a direct
challenge to what he has been all along referring to as the Deep State. (Trump first "ordered"
the declassification, and was ignored, in September 2018.) Last Thursday Ratcliffe formally
requested an investigation of the "Intelligence Community Assessment" of January 2017, a
worthless put-up job that purported to confirm Russian "meddling." The CIA's inspector general
ignored an earlier such request.
Will more come out? Will the investigation Trump ordered earlier this year by Assistant U.S.
Attorney John Durham get all the way to the bottom? This is hard to say. We've since had
credible reports that CIA Director Gina Haspel, known for authorizing post–2001
torture and destroying evidence of it, has personally blocked the release of Russiagate-related
documents from the CIA's files. And the repellent Haspel may win this one, given the record in
such matters.
The Russiagate "narrative" is at this point so preposterous that these recent disclosures
have also gone either badly reported or unreported in mainstream media. We ought not expect
more in days to come. The press has only one alternative at this point: Either black it out or
allege that Russia is using people such as Ratcliffe, just as we're now asked to believe Moscow
is manipulating The New York Post .
What an ungodly mess Russiagate has made of our splendid republic.
We have watched an attempted coup not much different from the CIA's covert ops elsewhere
over the decades, then gave the coup plotters three years to investigate the plot, and no one,
as things now appear, will be brought to justice for these travesties.
Send in the historians. One hopes they're already here.
The CIA, in breach of its charter, has now licensed itself to operate on U.S. soil in a
probably unprecedented alliance with domestic law enforcement and a major political party. And
it has told us in open defiance that it has no intention of submitting itself to executive or
congressional control. No voice is raised, we must note with astonishment.
Government Without a Press
In 1787, when he was our new nation's minister in Paris, Jefferson wrote home to a friend that "were it left to
me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a
government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." We are stuck with a
government without newspapers now, given the ties our press has consolidated its ties with
political and bureaucratic power in the course of imposing the Russiagate ruse upon us.
They only look like newspapers now. The liberal media are now bulletin boards for those
they serve -- the Democratic Party, the spooks, and all the interests these two represent. Do
they think that, once Trump leaves office, they can cavalierly reclaim the credibility they
have profligately squandered in the service of Russiagate?
I see no chance of this. And here we have a silver lining: Russiagate will prove a key
moment in the emergence of independent media (such as Consortium News ) as important
sources of accurate information and perspectives. This is already evident. At this point The
New York Times is to sound reporting what Applebee's is to a proper tavern serving good
draft beer.
The worst consequence of Russiagate, in my view, is the swoon of hysteria it has sent
many Americans into, a syndrome peculiar to our national character dating to the Quaker
hangings in Boston during the early 1660s and repeated many times since. We are divided once
again between the paranoid and the rational.
And there is an ideological distinction here that we must not miss. Willow Inski is a
conservative and appears to be a Trumper. She addressed Paul Sperry, a New York Post
reporter closely following the Russiagate debacle and also a conservative.
The paranoids, the Puritan preachers, the witch hunters, those who think censorship is a
fine thing are this time one and all authoritarian liberals apparently determined to make
everyone think as they do or else see to their banishment from the circles of the elect.
Let us debate opinions until the kingdom comes. But these people propose to debate facts
because they understand the fragility Arendt noted all those years ago. This is not on.
"Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no
substitute," Arendt wrote. "No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced
liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to
cover the immensity of factuality."
One hopes Arendt turns out to be right. One hopes the immensity of factuality eventually
prevails. "Defactualization" in the service of all the Russiagate rubbish has gravely
undermined numerous of our key institutions. As things now stand, this leaves us well short of
what we need to reconstruct a working democracy.
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 (Yale). 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.
This do not have Congressmen Schiff so this version did not got traction. Yet. Because Boris
Johnson is generally very close, as his behaviour during Skripals false flag suggests. BTW why
they need to inflate "Russian threat" if their own people can be sufficient for the annihilation
of the United Kingdom. Still let's wait for the Guardian to tell us about those evil
Russians
On Monday the UK Ministry of Defence confirmed a hugely embarrassing incident involving a
security and operations lapse aboard the British nuclear submarine HMS Vigilant while it
temporarily was docked during a mission at a US naval base, specifically Naval Submarine Base
Kings Bay in Georgia.
The officer in charge of overseeing the vessel's nuclear warheads arrived to his shift
"staggering drunk" while strangely carrying a bag of barbecue chicken .
The scene immediately sparked concern that the officer, later identified as Lt. Commander
Len Louw "was not in a fit state to be in charge of nuclear weapons" as there was something
"seriously wrong" according to
UK media reports .
... ... ...
The BBC noted
that as the weapons engineering officer on the submarine he was "responsible for all weapons
and sensors on board." The sub is armed with Trident ballistic missiles and is thus subject to
stringent safety and security measures.
And more astounding, according to the Daily Mail , i
s that :
The Royal Navy officer had been preparing to start a shift during which they would offload
the 16 nuclear missiles - which each weigh 60 tons and have the combined power to kill almost
the entire population of the UK.
He reportedly clocked in for his shift after a full night of drinking aboard one of only
four submarines that make up the UK's nuclear deterrent.
A week ago the nuclear sub was in the news due to a reported COVID-19 outbreak after crew
members were caught
breaking port call rules to go to strip clubs and bars.
No doubt American military authorities at Kings Bay naval base will also have serious
questions, considering they've just witnessed a significant operations lapse aboard a foreign
allied 'top secret' nuclear submarine docked in US waters.
_arrow
No1uNo , 17 hours ago
I raced Yachts with a UK Submarine commander for over a decade, this story is so out of
sync with the character and personalities recruited into probably one of the most responsible
jobs in the world - that the narrative asks many more questions than the story.
- Either he was spiked with a narcotic behaviour cocktail or what's being asked of him is
not within his ethics code that something broke.
Freeman of the City , 17 hours ago
Well stated, Military Esprit de corps standard of officer conduct, period. No one rises to
this level of responsibility without deep long term vetting.
This 'news' story sounds more like agitprop to undermine confidence in elite UK submariner
forces. Sedition within the UK govt, from Labour or Marxists...
Propaganda Phil , 17 hours ago
It came out 6 years ago that most of everyone manning our missile silos were cheating on
testing and using drugs. 9 USAF officers fired and around 100 were caught cheating. It only
was discovered when 2 of the cheaters were caught in a drug investigation.
& Secret Service getting high and banging hookers in Colombia.
Getting guys wasted ain't new. He just got caught.
No1uNo , 17 hours ago
Missile silos are a very different thing, such people can be inspected observed or called
out as needed. Subs are gone for months at a time and decisions made on own recognisance. As
Freeman says the vetting process is lengthy and those who get through it are precise
thoughtful engineering types and committed team players. Aside of that Subs are frequently
used to pick up and drop off espionage packages in locations that would create international
incidents if caught. The recruitment process is very very careful, whatever one's views on
Nuclear subs or nation states. I feel he was 'got at'
No1uNo , 16 hours ago
I still find this story incredible, these guys are not that well paid, most take it v.
carefully before going to richer defence sector for a few years before retirement. The hammer
can drop on them when they realise who they were fighting as 'enemies' were really desperate
people pushed to the edge by geopolitical designs and greed acquisitions of Military
Industrial Intelligence Complex. More will come out: honey trap, interrogation and drugging
or possibly as Propaganda Phil says - he lost it - perhaps from a drunken epiphany that
caused him to doubt belief in what he was doing?
Doctor Faustus , 15 hours ago
Maybe there was a family connection somewhere that allowed this officer in. Remember
Hunter Biden? Got kicked out of the Navy for cocaine. Only way he got in was through his dad,
Joe Biden.
Propaganda Phil , 14 hours ago
Like wrongway McCain the disaster of a pilot and admiral's son.
indus creed , 14 hours ago
Didn't McCain cause some major damage on the deck with some deaths? The affair was all
hushed up. He reportedly was escorted away by Navy police, as the sailors onboard wanted to
kill him.
Arrow4Truth , 13 hours ago
"who they were fighting as 'enemies' were really desperate people pushed to the edge by
geopolitical designs and greed acquisitions of Military Industrial Intelligence Complex."
Well said. It's never, ever delivered in that package, but instead called "National defence"
as Freeman put it. When one determines that the scenario you described is true it blows the
national defense theory all to hell... but most never make that jump because the repetitive
indoctrination has been soooo effective. Any argument that they must be alert to the
possibility that the "nation" could be under attack at any moment loses all it's luster when
one realizes that the "national interest" is the cause.
Ex-Oligarch , 14 hours ago
Upvoted, not because this behavior is unthinkable for military officers, but because of
the idea that the officer may have been drugged, or intentionally removing himself from his
command position.
Something about this story stinks.
Let's start with this: why was a British submarine offloading its nuclear missiles in a US
port?
U4 eee aaa , 13 hours ago
Just blame Putin. They do it everywhere else.
tyberious , 17 hours ago
Damn Russians!
Helg Saracen , 17 hours ago
Was it Novichok? :)
Eyes Opened , 9 hours ago
Yeah ... he slept it off ... like the other "victims" ... 😷
aaronvta , 16 hours ago
It was later verified that he had been drinking vodka. Authorities are looking into the
possibility of Russian influence.
Peterus , 17 hours ago
Oh well, that's an unfortunate lapse. But the more important thing for continuous safety
and prosperity of UK is that army hit diversity quotas for 2022 in sex, sexual orientation
and bame categories.
land_of_the_few , 16 hours ago
Their army can have tr@nny parties with spin the bottle to decide who gets the clinic pass
to have their t1ts sliced off -to make them a small, tubby boy! for real, yeah! - and who
gets the testosterone syringe for their butt cheeks so they can be proper Barnum & Bailey
sideshow exhibits.
Maybe UK needs soldiers that are already used to elective mutilation and self-inflicted
degradation?
Dr. Bendover , 17 hours ago
Now maybe Hunter Biden has a place to look for a real job.
Eyes Opened , 9 hours ago
I bet he curses like a sailor.. and he has a pipe... sure he's halfway qualified already
!! 🧐
trysophistry , 17 hours ago
Coming to a theater near you, The Hunt for a Molson Blue October.
Westsail32 , 15 hours ago
The Royal Navy officer had been preparing to start a shift during which they would
offload the 16 nuclear missiles - which each weigh 60 tons and have the combined power to
kill almost the entire population of the UK.
Definitely a missed opportunity.
Alice-the-dog , 16 hours ago
So what? The Democratic Party is hoping you elect a senile old criminal who doesn't
remember where he is and has trouble forming a comprehensible sentence to be in charge of the
entirety of US nuclear weapons.
thunderchief , 17 hours ago
"His condition was as fitting and useful and also as waistful and reckless, at the same
time, as the UK's need for a nuclear armed submarine fleet."
My own comment.
koan , 15 hours ago
U.S.S Hunter Biden
Svastic , 16 hours ago
I am surprised he didn't turn up in full drag. It's in keeping with the British character.
Furthermore, officers are often picked for their political correctness and old-boy
connections. Many are ho-mos.
Yamaoka Tesshu , 17 hours ago
Love how the "Daily Mail" hams up the fake nuke fear by telling us each missile can kill
everyone in the UK. In truth the Vigilant can deliver less destructive power than a single
B-52. But it's far more effective at looting the taxpayer while at the same time holding him
hostage to the threat of annihilation.
Anyone seeing through the scamdemic can analyze that template and discover it fits nicely
over the nuclear weapons con job.
This is the only conspiracy theory that cheers people up. But they downvote anyway. Just
like telling gays AIDS is fake. They get mad when they should be relieved.
Mad Muppet , 8 hours ago
Let me guess: he was drinking Vodka. Russian Vodka!!!!
I just knew it was Putin's fault.
Herodotus , 15 hours ago
The Russians drugged him. DNA samples taken from the barbecue chicken places its origin in
or around the Duchy of Muscovy.
10LBS_SHIT_5LB_BAG , 15 hours ago
They also laced the BBQ bag with Novichocken.
Helg Saracen , 15 hours ago
Oy vey! :)
Smiddywesson , 13 hours ago
Drunk while returning to the ship is one thing, drunk on duty is another, a career ending
incident.
Genoves , 13 hours ago
I prefer officials drunks that officials killing people.
TheRecluse , 13 hours ago
So whats wrong with Barbecue chicken? It goes down great after getting drunk.
Captain Archer , 13 hours ago
"Big Bo" Can't be beat.
seryanhoj , 12 hours ago
He could reheat it real quick in the reactor.
oracle_man , 14 hours ago
Yo Ho Ho And A Bottle Of Rum Fifteen men on a dead man's chest Yo ho ho and a bottle of
rum Drink and the devil be done for the rest Yo ho ho and a bottle of Rum!
Is this 50 former Intel officials or 50 former national security parasites? Real Intel
officials should keep quite after retirement. National security parasites go to politics and
lobbying. One telling sign that a particular parson is a "national security parasite" is his
desire to play "Russian card"
From comments: "Did the 50 former intelligence officials find the Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction yet?"
Hours before Politico
reported the existence of a letter signed by '50 former senior intelligence officials' who say
the Hunter Biden laptop scandal "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information
operation" - providing "no new evidence," while they remain "deeply suspicious that the Russian
government played a significant role in this case," Tucker Carlson obliterated their (literal)
conspiracy theory .
According to the Fox News host, he's seen 'nonpublic information that proves it was Hunter's
laptop ,' adding " No one but Hunter could've known about or replicated this information ."
" This is not a Russian hoax. We are not speculating ."
TUCKER: "This afternoon, we received nonpublic information that proves it was Hunter's
laptop. No one but Hunter could've known about or replicated this information. This is not a
Russian hoax. We are not speculating." pic.twitter.com/cl2ktdmdVc
Meanwhile, the Delaware computer repair shop owner who believes Hunter dropped off three
MacBook Pros for data recovery has a signed work order bearing Hunter's signature . When
compared to the signature on a document in his paternity suit, while one looks more formal than
the other, they are a match.
Going back to the '50 former senior intelligence officials' and their latest Russia
fixation, one has to wonder - do they think Putin was able to compromise Biden's
former business associate , Bevan Cooney, who gave investigative journalist Peter Schweizer
his gmail password - revealing that Hunter and his partners were engaged in an
influence-peddling operation for rich Chinese who wanted access to the Obama
administration?
Did Putin further hack Joe Biden in 2011 to make him take a meeting with a Chinese
delegation with ties to the CCP - arranged by Hunter's group, two years they secured a massive
investment of Chinese money?
The implications boggle the mind.
Here's the clarifying sentences from the '50 former senior intelligence officials' that
exposes the utter farce of it all:
While the letter's signatories presented no new evidence , they said their national
security experience had made them "deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a
significant role in this case" and cited several elements of the story that suggested the
Kremlin's hand at work.
"If we are right," they added, "this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in
this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this."
"Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign."
And then there's the fact that no one from the Biden campaign has yet to deny any of the
'facts' in the emails. lay_arrow jin187 , 2 hours ago
Totally ridiculous. This ******** beating around the bush for both sides pisses me off.
Dump all the laptop contents on Wikileaks if it's real. Let the people sort it out. If you
say it's not real, prove it. If Biden wants me to believe it's not real, then stand behind a
podium, and say clear as day into a pile of cameras that's it's all a forgery, and that
you've done nothing wrong.
Instead we have Giuliani swearing he has a smoking gun, but as far as I can tell he's just
pointing his finger underneath his shirt. Biden on the other hand, keep using weasel words to
imply it's fake, but never denies it outright. It's almost like he's trying to hedge his bet
that no one will manage to prove it's real before he gets into office, and makes it
disappear.
Roacheforque , 7 hours ago
To play the "Russian Card" yet again should be beyond embarrassing. An insult to the
intelligence of anyone with an IQ over 80. And so it's harmful to the left wingnut
derangeables. Like Assad's chemical weapons and Saddam's WMDs, it is now code for pure
********. Not even code, just more like a signal.
A signal that say's "guilty as charged - we got nothin' but lies and BS over here".
East Indian , 4 hours ago
An insult to the intelligence of anyone with an IQ over 80.
They know their supporters wont find this insulting.
Kayman , 4 hours ago
@vulvishka.
538 ? North Korea has better propaganda.
Don't forget to go all in, like you did with Hillary.
Antedeluvian , 2 hours ago
Unfortunately, some very bright people are sucked into the conspiracy theory. I know one.
Very bright lawyer. She says, "I still think there is substantive evidence of Russian
collusion." I can point to a sky criss-crossed with chemtrails (when you see these
"contrails" crossing at the same altitude, this is one sure clue these are not from regular
passenger jet traffic) and she refuses to look up. She KNOWS I am an idiot (a PhD scientist
idiot at that) because I get news and analysis on the web from sites that just want to sell
me tee shirts and coffee mugs (well, she is partly right there!) whereas she gets her news
from MSNBC, a venerable and trustworthy news source.
4DegreesOfSeparation , 6 hours ago
More Than 50 Former Intel Officials Say Hunter Biden Smear Smells Like Russia
"If we are right," the group wrote in a letter, "this is Russia trying to influence how
Americans vote."
DescendantofthePatriots , 7 hours ago
That ****, James Clapper, signed his name at the top of this list.
Known liar, saboteur, and sneak.
The cognitive dissonance in our country is astounding. The fact that they would take these
people's opinion over hard fact is astounding.
No wonder why we're sliding down the steep, slippery slope.
strych10 , 8 hours ago
So... let me get this straight.
50, that's 10 times five, fifty former intelligence officials are going with a convoluted
narrative about a ludicrously complicated Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign
involving planted laptops and at least half a dozen patsies when the two words "crack
cocaine" explain the entire thing?
I'm not sure what's more terrifying; That these people think everyone else is dumb enough
to believe this or that they're actually retired intelligence officials
.
Who the actual **** is running this ****show? The bastard child of Barney Fife and
Inspector Clouseau?
Seriously, "Pink Panther Disinformation Operation" is more believable at this point.
Someone Else , 9 hours ago
This needs to get out, because a FAVORITE method of the Deep State, Democrats and the
media (but I repeat myself) is to parade some sort of a stupid letter with a bunch of
signature hoping to look impressive but that really don't mean a damn thing.
Notre Dame graduates against the Supreme Court nominee, Intelligence agents alleging
collusion, former State Department operatives against Trump. Its grandstanding that has been
overdone.
moneybots , 8 hours ago
The letter by 50 former intelligence officials is itself, disinformation.
otschelnik , 8 hours ago
Remember when Weiner's attorney turned over Huma's home laptop to SDNY/FBI with all of
Shillary's emails, and the FBI sat on it for a month and then Comey deep sixed them without
even looking at them?
So now the FBI subpeona'd Hunter's laptop and burried it? Deja vu all over again.
enough of this , 8 hours ago
The FBI and DOJ constantly hide behind self-serving excuses to refuse the release of
documents and, when forced to do so, they release heavily redacted files. They offer up the
usual pretexts to fend off public disclosure such as: the information you seek cannot be
disclosed because it involves an ongoing investigation, or the information you seek involves
national security, or our methods and sources will be jeopardized if the information you seek
is divulged to the public. But it seems the ones who would be most harmed by public
disclosure are the corrupt FBI and DOJ officials themselves
Cobra Commander , 7 hours ago
A short 4 years ago the FBI and CIA were all concerned about "Kompromat" the Ruskies might
have on Candidate Trump; concerned enough to spy on his campaign and open a
counter-intelligence operation.
There are troves of Kompromat material, actual emails and video, on Joe, Hunter, and the
whole Biden family; not made-up DNC-funded dossiers claiming a Russian consulate in
Miami.
Now when it's Candidate Biden, everyone be all like, "Meh."
Cobra!
The Fonz...before shark jump , 5 hours ago
we gotta listen to the 50 former intelligence agents...you know the ones that had lone
superpower status in the early 90s and then pissed it all away with 9/11 and infinity wars in
middle east hahahahah ok buddy lol... histories D students....
Occams_Razor_Trader_Part_Deux , 7 hours ago
Signed by James Clapper and John Brennan;
You mean, the 2 Bozos who under the threat of perjury said there was NO evidence of
Russian Collusion and the Trump campaign................. and 2 hours later called Trump
'Putin's puppet' on CNN.............
The current electoral campaign differs from that of 2016 in that the media, both
conventional and online, has realized its power and has been openly playing a major role in
what might well prove to be a victory across the board for the Democratic Party. At least that
is the expectation, bolstered by a flood of possibly suspect opinion polls that appear to make
the triumph of Joe Biden and company inevitable while at the same time denigrating President
Donald Trump and covering up for Democratic Party missteps.
Most Americans no longer trust what is being reported in the mainstream media but when they
look for "real" information they frequently turn to online resources that they believe to be
more politically objective. That has never been true, however, and what most newshounds are
actually seeking is commentary that reflects their own views. In reality, the news provided is
almost always either spun or distorted and sometimes completely blocked, note particularly the
resistance to reporting the tale of the shenanigans of Hunter Biden.
The New York Post
is claiming that a trove of emails from a laptop reveals that "Hunter Biden introduced his
father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than
a year before the elder Biden pressured
government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the
company."
The emails include a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board
of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the
oil company Burisma's board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month. "Dear Hunter, thank
you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some
time together. It's realty [sic] an honor and pleasure," the email reads. An earlier email from
May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma's No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for "advice on
how you could use your influence" on the company's behalf.
The correspondence, if authentic, disproves Joe Biden's claim that he's "
never spoken to his son about his overseas business dealings ." One would think that the
story would be a real blockbuster, welcomed by self-respecting journalists but the reality has
been that the mainstream media is doing its best to kill it. Facebook and Twitter
have both blocked it though Twitter has since relented, and much of the rest of the liberal
media is regarding it as a hoax .
Facebook has in fact become something of a leader in reversing its self-promotion as a site
for free exchange of ideas. It has removed large numbers of users and alleged suspect sites and
has blocked any
"denial or distortion" of the so-called holocaust in response to what it regards as a surge
in anti-Semitism. It has hired a former Israeli
government official to lead the censorship effort on the site.
As Facebook and Twitter are private companies, they can legally do whatever they want to set
the rules for the use of their sites, but when the two most powerful social media companies
choose to censor a major newspaper's story about a presidential candidate's possibly corrupt
son less than three weeks before the election it suggests a more sinister agenda. They are
quite likely banking on a Democratic victory and will expect to be rewarded afterwards.
Indeed, it should be assumed that Facebook and the other social media giants are
reconfiguring themselves for the post-electoral environment in expectation that they will be
more than ever politically and economically indispensable to aspiring politicians. This
willingness to engage with politically powerful forces has led to increased involvement in the
various mostly left-wing movements that have shaken the United States over the past five
months. Television and radio stations as well as corporations and local businesses have rushed
to endorse and even fund black lives matter without considering the damage that the group has
been doing to property and persons that have had the misfortune to cross its path, not to
mention some of the group's long-term more radical objectives. Individuals identified as blm
leaders have demanded mandatory training to reprogram whites as well as punitive reparations,
to include "white people"
turning over their homes to blacks.
Some of the developments are quite dangerous, most notably the compiling of lists of
organizations and individuals that are considered to be "enemies" of the new social justice
order that intends to take over the United States. One has noted the desire for revenge
permeating many of the comments on sites like Facebook (which claims to delete "threats" from
its commentary), to include some material in recent weeks that has called for the "elimination"
of Americans who do not go along with the new normal.
One of the most invidious steps taken by any of the corporate social media is
a recent decision by Yelp to allow Antifa to compile the raw material on so-called "fascist
businesses" that will be included on a list of "Businesses Accused of Racist Behavior Alerts."
The list itself was set up to appease demands coming from the blm movement.
Yelp is a review site that provides grades and commentary on a broad range of goods and
services, to include many businesses that cater to the public. The potential for abuse is
enormous as Yelp is an information site that has no capability to investigate whether
complaints of "racism" are true or not and Antifa, which is recognized as being at least in
part behind the devastating Portland riots, is far from an objective observer. In fact, this is
what Antifa has tweeted
about its new role , which will allow group members to submit names of "non-friendly"
businesses, defined as "also known as (AKA) any company that's hanging blue lives garbage in
their store or anything else that's anti the BLM movement."
The Antifa intention is clearly to put unfriendly shops and restaurants out of business, so
it will not exactly be interested in engaging in constructive criticism or changing behavior
through negotiation. Using the intimidation provided by the "Alerts" list and direct threats of
violence from Antifa and blm, businesses will be coerced into supporting radical groups lest
they be targeted. It is somewhat reminiscent of the old Mafia protection rackets, and who can
doubt that demands for money will follow on to the verbal threats?
The rise of the internet oligarchs might indeed do more serious damage to the freedoms that
still survive in the United States than will victory by either Biden or Trump. What Americans
are allowed to think and how they perceive themselves and the world have taken a serious hit
over the past twenty years and it can only get worse.
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] .
"It went on to target broadcasters, a ski resort, Olympic officials and sponsors of the
games in 2018. The GRU deployed data-deletion malware against the Winter Games IT systems and
targeted devices across the Republic of Korea using VPNFilter."
The Russian hackers' alleged attempt to cover their tracks included using certain
snippets of code and techniques to try to confuse investigators into think they were from
China and North Korea.
The UK's National Cyber Security Centre, a branch of GCHQ, believe Russia's aim was to
sabotage the running of the games, the Foreign Office said .
####
So as usual, nothing but the Foreign Orifice's word and they wouldn't make stuff up,
especially on order when the government is under heavy domestic pressure? No. Never.
I wonder if Tokyo has been asked for comment or given 'evidence?' Again, absence of
information gives it away.
Other outlets are putting out this FO press release with little comment, as usual.
"The Russian hackers' alleged attempt to cover their tracks included using certain
snippets of code and techniques to try to confuse investigators into think they were from
China and North Korea."
Just by the most marvelous coincidence, other bogus source codes in the Marble Framework
tickle trunk are those of China, North Korea and Iran.
If this is the caliber of the workforce that currently inhabits our intel agencies, someone
explain to me why they still deserve to exist.
Apparently, 50 former intel agents have run to Politico to sign a letter, a favorite tactic
during the Trump era to push non-authoritative nonsense as authoritative, claiming that the
Hunter Biden email scandal is actually Russian misinformation.
... ... ..
Oh, it has all the classic earmarks? Well, that settles it, right? I mean, who needs actual
evidence of to push a wild, partisan conspiracy theory when you are trying to counter a myriad
of evidence to the contrary, including an actual receipt that shows the laptop was dropped off
at the repair shop by Hunter Biden.
"... "The whole point of the Intelligence Community since the end of World War II was that whatever propaganda the CIA produces, whatever disinformation campaigns they engaged were never supposed to be directed domestically," he said. "That was the point of the NSA, the CIA, and all those intelligence communities." ..."
"... "What we have seen since 2016 going back to the 2016 campaign is incessant involvement in U.S. domestic politics. Working with journalists to disseminate purely for partisan ends. If you want to talk about things like violating norms, and dangers to democracy, what's more dangerous than allowing the CIA constantly to be manipulating our politics by making cover for the Biden campaign by claiming anonymously that the Russians are behind the story and therefore you disregard it. Even if the Russians why does that alleviate the responsibility of journalists to evaluate the emails and to examine whether or not Joe Biden actually engaged in misconduct?" Greenwald asked. ..."
Glenn Greenwald appeared on Tucker Carlson's FOX News show Monday night to criticize
the media for its lack of response to the Hunter Biden laptop story. Greenwald also criticized
intel community activity in domestic elections and posed the question that even if Russians are
behind the story it just requires journalistic investigation in case Biden is compromised.
"Adam Schiff is seriously the most pathological liar in all of American politics that I've seen in all of my time covering
politics and journalism," Greenwald said on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.' "He just fabricates accusations at the drop of the hat at
the other people change underwear. He's simply lying when he just asserts over and over that the Russians or the Kremlin are
behind the story. He has no idea whether or not that is true. There is no evidence to support it."
"And what makes it so much worse is that the reason that the Bidens aren't answering basic
questions about the story," Greenwald said. "Basic questions like did Hunter Biden drop that
laptop off of the repair shop? Are the emails authentic? Do you know denied that they are. Do
you claim that any have been altered or are any of them fabricated? Did you in fact meet with
Barisma executives? The reason they don't answer the questions is because the media has
signaled that they don't have to. That journalists will be attacked and vilified simply for
asking."
Victor Davis Hanson: Will Our Next Revolution Be French, Russian, Maoist, Or
American?
Glenn Greenwald: Media and Intel Community Working Together To Manipulate The American
People
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"The whole point of the Intelligence Community since the end of World War II was that
whatever propaganda the CIA produces, whatever disinformation campaigns they engaged were never
supposed to be directed domestically," he said. "That was the point of the NSA, the CIA, and
all those intelligence communities."
"What we have seen since 2016 going back to the 2016 campaign is incessant involvement
in U.S. domestic politics. Working with journalists to disseminate purely for partisan ends. If
you want to talk about things like violating norms, and dangers to democracy, what's more
dangerous than allowing the CIA constantly to be manipulating our politics by making cover for
the Biden campaign by claiming anonymously that the Russians are behind the story and therefore
you disregard it. Even if the Russians why does that alleviate the responsibility of
journalists to evaluate the emails and to examine whether or not Joe Biden actually engaged in
misconduct?" Greenwald asked.
"The much bigger point is the way that the information is being disseminated," he said. "It
is a union of journalists who have decided that their only goal is to defend Joe Biden and
election him president of the United States working with the FBI, CIA, NSA not to manipulate
our adversaries or foreign governments, but to manipulate the American people for their own
ends. It's been going on for four straight years now and there's no sign of it stopping anytime
soon." Related Videos
Update (1930ET) : In yet another death blow to Adam Schiff and the '50 former senior
intelligence officers' "Russia, Russia, Russia" claims, the FBI and DOJ have told a Fox News
producer that they do not believe that Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents are part of a
Russian disinformation campaign , confirming that the 'current' intelligence community agrees
with DNI Ratcliffe's comments yesterday.
We look forward to the reporting from other mainstream media news agencies now that federal
law enforcement has confirmed this is not a 'hoax' and we assume that the NYPost will once
again be allowed to tweet since this is now as 'factual' as anything thrown at Trump for the
last five years.
y_arrow Fizzy Head , 9 hours ago
Excuse me, but Who cares what these "former" senior officials think? I want names and
party affiliations, that will tell the tale.
and furthermore, if these former guys can muster up a letter why can't the real officials
muster up something, anything? They've known for months!! This is growing more ridiculous as
time goes by.
Han Cholo , 8 hours ago
"former" -- Meaning they are mostly looking from the outside in and have no clue.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dropped a bombshell on Tuesday,
warning that Russia might halt all dialogue with the European Union. Mr. Lavrov offered no
explanation for what was probably the most severe public statement on the EU of his career.
Perhaps he was reacting to extended talks he recently held with EU Foreign Minister Josep
Borrell -- talks that, by all appearances, did not go well.
Naturally, the EU will respond to his statement with great displeasure and indignation, but
Lavrov's comment was actually rooted in a process that began long before the current crisis,
all the way back to when Russian-EU relations looked positively upbeat and promising.
Common, but shaky ground
The modern Russian state and the EU came into existence at practically the same time -- the
former in late December 1991 and the latter in February 1992 -- and they soon laid the
groundwork for their mutual relations. The two parties signed a Partnership and Cooperation
Agreement in 1994 -- and ratified it in 1997 -- that made their relations so close as to be
considered "strategic" at one point.
This differs significantly from the slogan of a "Europe stretching from Lisbon to
Vladivostok" that former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev coined in 1989 to connote a common
European homeland that, in reality, had no document or agreement to back it up.
By contrast, the Russian-EU partnership was based firmly on the idea of integration. While
Brussels never offered Russia full EU membership, it offered general, though indefinite
assurances that its eastern neighbor would play a suitably substantial role in the "Greater
Europe" that was then being built.
At the core of this "Greater Europe," as it was then envisioned, was a rapidly expanding
European Union that wound up more than doubling in size from 1992 to 2007 -- and which, it was
expected, would eventually include Russia as well as other Soviet republics. A sort of
pan-European space was created, although Russia's status in that new entity was never described
or even discussed. Both sides simply assumed that Russia would be part of Europe. NEWS
EU Sanctions FSB Chief, Senior Kremlin Officials Over Navalny Poisoning READ
MORE
In hindsight, it seems that Russia and the EU understood that partnership differently.
However, they agreed at the time that everything from the structure of the state to economic
regulation should be based on the legal and regulatory framework of the EU -- which they both
considered clearly superior. Ideally, every country that was included in that European space
would have adopted European rules and regulations, after which they would either become EU
members -- some, strictly due to their size -- or else, as in the case of Russia and Ukraine,
associate members. Every newcomer was expected to bring its laws and regulations into line with
the European standard.
And in this regard, it differed fundamentally from Gorbachev's idea of a "Europe stretching
from Lisbon to Vladivostok." Although the Soviet leader did not offer any details regarding the
pan-European homeland, he clearly anticipated a partnership of equals.
The Soviet leader looked to a coming convergence, a mutual rapprochement in which each
player -- the Soviet Union, the European Community and the West as a whole -- would contribute
their strongest qualities, each somehow coming together in a whole that was more than the sum
of its parts. In was, in a word, utopia, but not a tenable plan.
Significantly, it was not former President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s who made the greatest
efforts to achieve Russia's integration into the European space based on European principles,
but President Vladimir Putin during his first term in the early 2000s.
Yeltsin had to overcome Russia's internal crisis before there could be any talk of
integrating with Europe. By the 2000s, when the state and its apparatus had stabilized and oil
revenues filled government coffers, Putin searched diligently for an opportunity to implement
the partnership with the EU and to further rapprochement. This continued from 2001 until as
late as 2006.
The honeymoon had ended
Russia's potential had grown significantly by that time, as had its expectations for the
role it would play in a partnership with the EU.
Russia rejected as illegitimate the expectation that it comply unquestionably with European
norms and felt that any partnership must be based, if not on strictly equal terms, then at
least on special conditions. However, the EU never even considered Russia a special case,
arguing that any reconsideration of its rules violated the very principles of European
integration.
For this reason, the very idea of a strategic and integration partnership between Russia and
the EU began eroding around the mid-2000s. This erosion occurred very gradually, not only
because Russia's domestic and foreign policy had begun to change significantly, but also
because the EU unexpectedly faced a crisis, one that reached full force in the early 2010s.
By that time, although the partnership agreement first drawn up in the early 1990s remained
unchanged -- as it does today -- the reality of Russia's relationship with Europe increasingly
diverged from its original configuration. Both sides' objectives and, more importantly, their
self-perceptions, grew further and further apart. NEWS EU's Navalny
Sanctions Miss the Mark READ MORE
The most striking illustration of this was the obvious disconnect between the words spoken
at the final Russia-EU Summit, held in Brussels in late January 2014, and the reality on the
ground.
The Maidan protests were raging in Kiev, only three weeks remained before Ukrainian
President Viktor Yanukovych would flee and new authorities would come to power, and relations
between Russia and the EU -- that stood on opposite sides of those barricades in Kiev -- could
not have been worse.
While President Putin and EU Commission President Manuel Barroso stood before the cameras
and repeated the very same mantras they had been uttering for years, even decades, about
partnership, a common space, road maps and so on, their faces betrayed what they were really
thinking -- namely, that nothing of the sort was going to happen.
But they had no other options on the table. Pure inertia from the process begun in the early
1990s compelled them to repeat the same tired calls for a close future partnership.
Then came the game-changing events in Ukraine, and much more besides. The long-standing
framework for Russian-EU relations turned into an anachronism overnight, giving way to heated
antagonism and competitiveness. Nevertheless, both sides continued paying lip service to
partnership, dialogue and, in general, a state of affairs that had last existed 25 years
earlier.
Fast forward to the present, and we have Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indirectly
acknowledging how bad things have actually become. In effect, he has simply stated what
everyone already knew -- namely, that the old framework for Russian-EU relations no longer
exists.
This does not mean an end to all relations, only an end to relations as they were.
The same, only different
A new framework is needed now, but it will probably be a long time in coming. And the
framework Russia might want for its relations with Europe will not materialize for the very
reasons mentioned above: present circumstances are simply too unfavorable.
Of course, no new Iron Curtain between Russia and the EU will fall from the sky. Their
mutual humanitarian and economic relations remain very strong, despite some damage from
sanctions, and cultural and even political ties remain intact. However, these are strictly
utilitarian relations, without any pretense of common goals, and they take a backseat to
Moscow's bilateral relations with individual European countries. Russia and Europe are
devolving into coolly polite neighbors that have no real interest in each other, but who are
forced to interact simply because they live next door to each other.
In fact, Russia must now focus more on its main neighbor, China. Although Russia's quarrel
with the West plays some role in this pivot eastward, it is the enormously long Russian-Chinese
border and the fact that China is rapidly becoming, if not a world hegemon, then at least one
of the two pillars of the new world order that compels Moscow to devote far more attention to
this neighbor than it is accustomed to.
More importantly, and what will cause fundamental change to Russia's relations with Europe,
is the fact that, for better or worse, the global balance is shifting towards Asia. As a
result, the focus that Russia has had on Europe and West for the past 300 years no longer
corresponds to the global reality. Russia cannot afford to treat Asia as a secondary priority,
although it often still does. If Moscow continues in this way, Russia could find itself facing
a creeping expansionism from the east.
In any case, Russia's former model of relations with the European Union has clearly ceased
to function, and one way or another, the two sides have started to acknowledge this openly.
Article 275 of the Criminal Code "High treason" certainly applies as regards the
actions of Lyosha Navalny , as does article 128.1 of the Russian Criminal Code on
"Slander"
But as I have already said more than once, if Alyosha is issued with a foreign passport
by the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation, and Alyosha himself repeatedly
violates laws and remains free whilst concurrently serving two suspended sentences, this
means that someone needs him -- so much so that even these mountains of shit, which thanks to
his diligence have been poured on Russia in recent months, also do not count.
There is such a term "protest sewerage". It was born of German politicians in the '50s
of the last century as a tool to counter protests against social injustice and
militarization. And it proved to be surprisingly effective. Roughly speaking, individual
cadres were allowed a lot in exchange for their discrediting protest movements. In Russia,
Navalny has long been playing this role, whilst feathering his own nest here and there. And
as time passed, a big problem for Lyosha's curators was his close work with the CIA. And the
threat through Navalny to such a global project as Nord Stream 2 makes not only Navalny
himself, but also these very "curators" traitors to the Motherland.
Not aimed at the Russian audience, definitely not.
It serves as a pretext for more sanctions for those looking for any excuse and to force
public officials to "condemn" Russia. I am 100% sure Trump is on to the game so his decision
will be solely based on political expediency. If he believes he can win the election, he is
likely thinking that he can not jump on the bandwagon thus will not join the Putin bashing
party.
Easy to say, but I'm pretty sure if you were accused of something heinous and knew you
were not guilty, that ample evidence was available to prove it but that it was being kept
from you while the accusations went on and on that establishing your innocence would be a
priority for you. Even when your attempts fell on deaf ears. Because perhaps the hardest
thing, for a group or individual accused of something, is to know you did not do it, but keep
silent and allow your accusers a free hand.
I imagine Washington would love to declare Navalny the 'legitimate President of the
Russian Federation", and its musing on what a wonderful world it would be if Joe Biden was
President of the United States and Navalny was President of Russia might well b e a tentative
trial balloon to see what public opinion makes of it. But it is not a very realistic
possibility, for a couple of reasons. One, Washington already has a pair of
governments-in-waiting that it is supporting, to little or no effect, and adding another
risks introducing too many balls for the juggler to keep in the air, plus the resulting loss
of confidence in Washington as a game-changer that makes its own rules. Two, whatever blabber
the media generates, the real power-brokers know Navalny has no significant support at home,
and that trying to foist him on the Russian people over their clear preference for the
present leader has no hope of succeeding.
They will have to continue with the make-believe for yet awhile, and hope for an
opportunity.
These guys flying jet packs that require use of hands to point the auxiliary jets for a
modicum of control will be more vulnerable than clay pigeons. The noise alone will alert any
vessels within a few miles that they are coming.
I suppose that they could board a very large vessel at night that has been commandeered by
a few pirates without certainty of being shot down.
A far more useful application would be as part of a rescue team to bring aboard a small
vessel in distress urgently needed supplies or a trained EMT. Seems like a drone could do the
same.
Wow. You can fly in still or light airs from a carrier vessel that is right alongside
– I wonder what prospective boarding candidate is going to permit that? Added to the
criticism you have already pointed out that the 'iron man' is already quite busy controlling
his direction and altitude, and is essentially defenseless. A speed of 200 mph or less is
like an engraved invitation to a Gatling-gun style air defense system like Phalanx or
Goalkeeper, and you would not have to hit a man in a rubber suit very often with a 20mm round
to make him lose interest – Goalkeeper is a 30mm system if I remember correctly, and
consequently would be even less encouraging. For purposes of comparison, a .50 cal round that
would lift you right out of your shoes is a .127mm.
There's no denying it is interesting technology that should stimulate discussion and
ideas, but a clever new system which will revolutionize opposed boarding it is not, not yet.
There might be rescue applications as you suggested, but it does not look like the system has
enough lift to carry the operator plus average deadweight.
The Iron Man flyboys work well in sunny weather with little wind but I wonder how well
they will fare in heavier weather when visibility will be poor and landing platforms may not
be stable. Shouldn't these Iron Man pilots also have better face and eye protection against
the elements?
The US Army is developing a new cannon it claims will have a range of more than 1,000
miles, writes Popular Mechanics.
The Strategic Long Range Cannon (SLRC) is touted as potentially being able to strike targets
at up to 1,150 miles (1,850 km) away and fire 50 times farther than existing guns.
Earlier, the outlet had published leaked photos of the SLRC, touted as able to bring
about a revolutionary breakthrough in artillery warfare.
Super duper long range artillery has been tried in the past:
A 1,000 mile range would require a trajectory that would peak at hundreds of miles. The
shell must use rocket assist and include various electronics for guidance. It would required
heat shielding to resist high temperatures during reentry into the atmosphere. The shell may
leave the muzzle at a few thousand mph but need to accelerate to a much high velocity using a
rocket. If the shell weighs, say, 200 pounds, then warhead certainly could not weigh more
than 50 pounds with the balance being the rocket, heat shield, fins and actuators for
steering and guidance electronics.
You'd think they would have learned their lessons from the Zumwalt destroyer long range
gun debacle:
The CIA's domestic propaganda campaign has been massively successful over the past four
years. There are tens of millions who literally believe that Trump is a Russian agent. They
believe that everyone should wear masks on their faces, forever, and they believe there are
Nazis everywhere. They believe there were no riots this summer, that thousands of blacks are
murdered every year by police, and that Christians are trying to establish a theocracy in the
US. They believe that little children should be able to have their genitals surgically
removed. They believe that the 2016 election was stolen, but that the one coming up cannot
be, even if ballots without postmarks show up on trucks ten days after November 3rd.
These are just a few of their insane beliefs that have been put into their heads through
social media and television.
Trump never had any power to stop this. Both the Democrats and Republicans are completely
in thrall to the intelligence and police agencies. It's all an act. There's no democracy left
in this country and there is no chance of reforming this system, ever. It has to collapse or
be seized and turned mercilessly against those who are perpetrating this horror show.
Dragonlord , 59 minutes ago
FBI and CIA betraying the country is no longer surprising, what surprising is how fast
tech giants jump onto the scum train even though some only exist less than 20 years. This
reveal why quickly the globalists can turn anyone into scumbags.
Finally, depths of Biden corruption proves our hypothesis that the so called ruling class
like Nancy, Obama, Clinton, etc, are not at the top echelon, there is a group or class of
people higher than them. They are probably the overlord class of the globalists.
philmannwright , 56 minutes ago
The FBI has always been a tool. Recall J Edgar.
Big Tech has enabled all of this. NSA/Data collection - Big brother goodbye freedom. seems
like a natural progression.
Gold Pedant , 1 hour ago
Hahaha, William Colby is the third man in the newspaper clipping above, but he isn't even
mentioned. Well after he retired from the CIA, he was assassinated to send a message. Look up
"WHO MURDERED THE CIA CHIEF?" It's a good quick read.
"Colby was fired on Nov. 2, 1975, as head of the CIA after being accused of talking too
much. He was said to have been too candid in testimony to congressional investigators; he had
long ago aroused the ire of the agency's old guard for trying to channel more effort into the
gathering, evaluation and analysis of information and less into covert operation."
And Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, Weissman, Sally Yates, Bruce And Nellie Ord, James Baker,
Comey, Rosenstein, the entire brench of the FISA Court, and about 500 Senators and
Congressmen out of 535. It's a start.
Eastern Whale , 1 hour ago
"National Security" in the US is the get out of free card for politicians and the rich
with clout. paedophile, corruption, murder you name it.
PigmanExecutioner , 23 minutes ago
Anytime I hear "Russia" or "Democracy" these days, I have to ponder for the fate of
mankind. Imagine being that infantile in one's worldview and devoid of the ability to
critically analyze information? "National Security" is a made up term to excuse criminal
actions that somehow leaked out through unauthorized channels.
philmannwright , 1 hour ago
So, we have all been educated on how when the Democrats accuse, they are most likely
projecting upon their target their own behavior. Over and over again we see the blatant and
obvious hypocrisy in almost everything we hear from the likes of Hillary, Pelosi, Schumer,
Shiff, Obama, and on and on.
It stands to reason then, that what is going on now is no different and involves all of
them, including the left wing media - they are actually and in reality agents of the
Kremlin/China/the communist world order, aligned in agenda, and working toward tipping the
largest Domino, and I believe they have the U.S. teetering on the ropes.
It seems like it's either 1) the left is a national security risk or 2) Trumpers, welcome
to reeducation camp.
kudocast , 46 minutes ago
Yes we agree that JFK and MLK were assassinated by a group including the CIA, NSA, FBI,
Mafia, Nixon, LBJ, Bush and more.
But to suggest that Trump is in a similar situation as JFK and MLK, and on their moral,
intellectual, and visionary level is ludicrous.
Trump's a criminal, looting, lying, incompetent idiot. Why would the CIA, NSA, FBI, and
others waste their time trying to destroy Trump? Fat Orange Man accomplishes that all by
himself, no assistance required.
PigmanExecutioner , 31 minutes ago
Imagine thinking that the US was any different than the Soviet Union all these decades?
They just hid the tyranny better due to all the material distractions.
KGB, CIA.............All the same demons.
Automatic Choke , 23 minutes ago
my aha moment came when i started subscribing to John Williams "Shadow Govt Statistics" to
track the markets.....way back nearly 20 years ago. it quickly became clear that our trusted
government financial agencies were no more trustworthy than the old soviet "5 year plans"
that we all (in the US) used to laugh at. a mirror is a painful thing.
turkey george palmer , 54 minutes ago
empire looks pretty shaky. suppose a lot will go wrong. at least we have bill and melinda
talking about basic human rights are a threat to the population and only those who are
billionaires can decide what goes in your body. ok sure.
they say there will be a trade your debt for ubi. give up personal property. live where
and how by state dictate. unplanned breeding a crime. isolation camps for non compliance.
wonder where all the property will end up. I know there's only one type of person they all
say are the bad ones just one color. mein
A grand jury in Pennsylvania indicted the six men for "conspiracy, computer hacking,
wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and false registration of a domain name," the DOJ
announced on Monday, describing them as officers in Unit 74455 of the Russian Main
Intelligence Directorate, or GRU.
The indictment identifies them as Yuriy Sergeyevich Andrienko, Sergey Vladimirovich
Detistov, Pavel Valeryevich Frolov, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, Artem Valeryevich
Ochichenko and Petr Nikolayevich Pliskin.
According to the charges, they used malware like KillDisk, Industroyer, NotPetya and
Olympic Destroyer to attack everything from networks in Ukraine and Georgia to the Olympics
held in PyeongChang two years ago – in which Russian athletes were not allowed to
participate under their national flag, due to doping allegations made by a disgruntled
doctor.
The six are also accused of undermining "efforts to hold Russia accountable for its use
of a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok, on foreign soil" – referring to the March
2018 claims by the British government that Russia "highly likely" used the toxin
against a former spy and his daughter, an accusation Moscow repeatedly denied.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers has
claimed that "No country has weaponized its cyber capabilities as maliciously or
irresponsibly as Russia, wantonly causing unprecedented damage to pursue small tactical
advantages and to satisfy fits of spite."
Monday's indictment is hardly a surprise, considering that NATO and US officials have
blamed the 2017 NotPetya outbreak on Moscow for years, even though the malware struck
numerous Russian companies – from the central bank to the oil giant Rosneft and
metal-maker Evraz – as well.
The October 2019 Georgia attack was "in line with Russian tactics,"declared
CrowdStrike, the same security company that was tasked with dealing with the 2016
"hack" of the Democratic National Committee. CrowdStrike's president had secretly
admitted to Congress that they had no actual evidence of the hack itself.
The indictment also accuses the "GRU officers" of trying to breach the Organisation
for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The international body faced a scandal after
whistleblowers revealed that a report blaming chemical attacks in Syria on the country's
government omitted details that did not fall in line with the narrative pushed by the US and
the UK.
In announcing the indictment, the DOJ thanked the authorities in Ukraine, Georgia, New
Zealand, South Korea, and UK "intelligence services" – as well as Google,
Facebook and Twitter – for "significant cooperation and assistance" with the
investigation.
The same "GRU unit" and Kovalev specifically were previously indicted by Special
Counsel Robert Mueller for alleged "meddling" in 2016 US elections. As with Mueller's
indictments, Monday's charges have largely symbolic value; the accused are not likely to ever
see the inside of a US courtroom. The only indictment that was actually contested in court
– against the so-called IRA troll farm – was dropped by the DOJ in
March, due to lack of evidence.
Russia's military intelligence has not gone by the name of GRU since 2010.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
And that's by design. False flags like Scripal Novichok saga are just a smoke screen over UK
problems, the ciursi of neoliberalism in the country, delegitimization of neoliberal elites and
its subservience to the USA global neoliberal empire, which wants to devour Russia like it
plundered the USSR in the past.
But why outgoing MI6 chief decided to tell us the truth? This is not in the traditions of the
agency.
After years of focusing on combating terrorism, US Special Forces are preparing to turn
their attention to the possibility of future conflict with adversaries Russia and China. The
outgoing head of MI6, the UK's clandestine intelligence service, says that the perceived threat
posed by Russia and China against the UK is overstated and distract from addressing the UK's
domestic problems. Meanwhile, his replacement insists that the threat posed by Russia and China
is real and is growing in complexity. Rick Sanchez explains. Then former US diplomat Jim Jatras
and "Going Underground" host Afshin Rattansi share their insights.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is meeting for a for a final day of deliberations before the
confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump's controversial pick for the US
Supreme Court. RT America's Faran Fronczak reports. RT America's Trinity Chavez reports on the
skyrocketing poverty across the US as coronavirus relief funds dry up and the White House
stalls on additional stimulus. RT America's John Huddy reports on the backlash against Facebook
and Twitter for their suppression of an incendiary new report about Democratic nominee Joe
Biden's son Hunter Biden and his foreign entanglements.
Fight it all you want, but there's nothing you can do. "The emails are Russian" is going to
be the official dominant narrative in mainstream political discourse, and there's nothing you
can do to stop it. Resistance is futile.
Like the Russian hacking narrative, the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the Russian
bounties in Afghanistan narrative, and any other evidence-free framing of events that
simultaneously advances pre-planned cold war agendas, is politically convenient for the
Democratic party and generates clicks and ratings, the narrative that the New York Post
publication of Hunter Biden's emails is a Russian operation is going to be hammered and
hammered and hammered until it becomes the mainstream consensus. This will happen regardless of
facts and evidence, up to and including rock solid evidence that Hunter Biden's emails were not
published as a result of a Russian operation.
This is happening. It's following the same formula all the other fact-free Russia hysteria
narratives have followed. The same media tour by pundits and political operatives saying with
no evidence but very assertive voices that Russia is most certainly behind this occurrence and
we should all be very upset about it.
"To me, this is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work," Russiagate founder
and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is heard assuring CNN's audience .
"Joe Biden – and all of us – SHOULD be furious that media outlets are spreading
what is very likely Russian propaganda," begins and eight-part thread by Democratic Senator
Chris Murphy, who claims the emails are "Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda."
"It's not really surprising at all, this was always the play, but still kind of
head-spinning to watch all the players from 2016 run exactly the same hack-leak-smear op in
2020. Even with everyone knowing exactly what's happening this time," tweets MSNBC's Chris
Hayes.
"How are you all circling the wagons instead of being embarrassed for peddling Russian ops
18 days before the election. It's not enough that you all haven't learned from your atrocious
handling of 2016 -- you are doubling down," Democratic Party think tanker Neera Tanden
tweeted in admonishment of
journalists who dare to report on or ask questions about the emails.
Virtually the entirety of the Democratic Party-aligned political/media class has streamlined
this narrative of Russian influence into the American consciousness with very little inertia,
despite the fact that neither Joe nor Hunter Biden has disputed the authenticity of the emails
and despite a complete absence of evidence for Russian involvement in their publication.
This is surely the first time, at least in recent memory, that we have ever seen such a
broad consensus within the mass media that it is the civic duty of news reporters to try and
influence the outcome of a presidential general election by withholding negative news coverage
for one candidate. There was a lot of fascinated hatred for Trump in 2016, but people still
reported on Hillary Clinton's various scandals and didn't attack one another for doing so. In
2020 that has changed, and mainstream news reporters have now largely coalesced along the
doctrine that they must avoid any reporting which might be detrimental to the Biden
campaign.
"Dem Party hacks (and many of their media allies) genuinely believe it's immoral to report
on or even discuss stories that reflect poorly on Biden. In reality, it's the responsibility of
journalists to ignore their vapid whining and ask about newsworthy stories, even about Biden,"
tweeted The Intercept 's Glenn
Greenwald recently.
"You don't even have to think the Hunter Biden materials constitute some kind of
earth-shattering story to be absolutely repulsed at the authoritarian propaganda offensive
being waged to discredit them -- primarily by journalists who behave like compliant little
trained robots ," tweeted journalist Michael
Tracey.
Last month The Spectator 's Stephen L Miller described how the consensus
formed among the mainstream press since Clinton's 2016 loss that it is their moral duty to
be uncritical of Trump's opponent.
"For almost four years now, journalists have shamed their colleagues and themselves over
what I will call the 'but her emails' dilemma," Miller writes. "Those who reported dutifully on
the ill-timed federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server and spillage of
classified information have been cast out and shunted away from the journalist cool kids'
table. Focusing so much on what was, at the time, a considerable scandal, has been written off
by many in the media as a blunder. They believe their friends and colleagues helped put Trump
in the White House by focusing on a nothing-burger of a Clinton scandal when they should have
been highlighting Trump's foibles. It's an error no journalist wants to repeat."
So "the emails are Russian" narrative serves the interests of political convenience,
partisan media ratings, and the national security state's pre-planned agenda to continue
escalating against Russia as part of its
slow motion third world war against nations which refuse to bow to US dictates, and you've
got essentially no critical mainstream news coverage putting the brakes on any of it. This
means this narrative is going to become mainstream orthodoxy and treated as an established
fact, despite the fact that there is no actual, tangible evidence for it.
Joe Biden could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and the mainstream
press would crucify any journalist who so much as tweeted about it. Very
little journalism is going into vetting and challenging him, and a great deal of the energy
that would normally be doing so is going into ensuring that he slides right into the White
House.
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If the mainstream news really existed to tell you the truth about what's going on, everyone
would know about every questionable decision that Joe Biden has ever made, Russiagate would
never have happened, we'd all be acutely aware of the fact that powerful forces are pushing us
into increasingly aggressive confrontations with two nuclear-armed nations, and Trump would be
grilled about
Yemen in every press conference.
But the mainstream news does not exist to tell you the truth about the world. The mainstream
news exists to advance the interests of its wealthy owners and the status quo upon which they
have built their kingdoms. That's why it's
so very, very important that we find ways to break away from it and share information with
each other that isn't tainted by corrupt and powerful interests.
* * *
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see
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Debunking 'fattest lie in modern political history' (Full show) 14 Oct, 2020 23:31 16
Follow RT on
Newly declassified documents continue to demolish "Russiagate," the discredited conspiracy
theory that US President Trump "colluded" with Russia to win the 2016 election. The documents
show how circular reporting, unverified gossip and conflicts of interest all worked to create
the years-long "Russiagate" frenzy. RT America's Alex Mihailovich has the details. Then former
UK MP George Galloway joins Rick Sanchez to share his analysis.
US Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett faces her final day of questions before US
senators on Wednesday. RT America's Faran Fronczak has the details. Twitter has unveiled a new
set of policies to try to stem misinformation from spreading on its platform during the 2020 US
presidential election. RT America's John Huddy has the details. The legal and media analyst
Lionel of Lionel Media and conservative commentator Steve Malzberg weigh in. Plus, RT America's
Natasha Sweatte reports on NASA's search for "super-habitable" planets outside the Solar
System.
It appears the "Russia, Russia, Russia" cries from Adam Schiff and his dutiful media peons
is dead (we can only hope) as Director of National Intel John Ratcliffe just confirmed to Foxx
Business' Maria Bartiromo that:
"Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign."
As Politico's Quint Forgey details
(@QuintForgey) , DNI Ratcliffe is asked directly whether accusations leveled against the
Bidens in recent days are part of a Russian disinformation effort.
He says no:
"Let me be clear. The intelligence community doesn't believe that because there is no
intelligence that supports that."
" We have shared no intelligence with Chairman Schiff or any other member of Congress that
Hunter Biden's laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign. It's simply not true.
"
"And this is exactly what I said would I stop when I became the director of national
intelligence, and that's people using the intelligence community to leverage some political
narrative."
"And in this case, apparently Chairman Schiff wants anything against his preferred
political candidate to be deemed as not real and as using the intelligence community or
attempting to use the intelligence community to say there's nothing to see here."
"Don't drag the intelligence community into this. Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of
some Russian disinformation campaign. And I think it's clear that the American people know
that."
So "the emails are Russian" narrative serves the interests of political convenience,
partisan media ratings, and the national security state's pre-planned agenda to continue
escalating against Russia as part of its
slow motion third world war against nations which refuse to bow to US dictates, and
you've got essentially no critical mainstream news coverage putting the brakes on any of it.
This means this narrative is going to become mainstream orthodoxy and treated as an
established fact, despite the fact that there is no actual, tangible evidence for it.
Joe Biden could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and the mainstream
press would crucify any journalist who so much as tweeted about it. Very
little journalism is going into vetting and challenging him, and a great deal of the
energy that would normally be doing so is going into ensuring that he slides right into the
White House.
If the mainstream news really existed to tell you the truth about what's going on,
everyone would know about every questionable decision that Joe Biden has ever made,
Russiagate would never have happened, we'd all be acutely aware of the fact that powerful
forces are pushing us into increasingly aggressive confrontations with two nuclear-armed
nations, and Trump would be grilled about
Yemen in every press conference.
But the mainstream news does not exist to tell you the truth about the world. The
mainstream news exists to advance the interests of its wealthy owners and the status quo upon
which they have built their kingdoms. That's why it's
so very, very important that we find ways to break away from it and share information
with each other that isn't tainted by corrupt and powerful interests.
As we detailed previously, as the Hunter Biden laptop scandal threatens to throw the 2020
election into chaos with what appears to be solid, undisputed evidence of high-level corruption
by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, the same crowd which peddled the
Trump-Russia hoax is now suggesting that Russia is behind it all .
To wit, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who swore on National television
that he had evidence Trump was colluding with Russia - now says that President Trump is handing
the Kremlin a "propaganda coup from Vladimir Putin."
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) has gone full tin-foil , suggesting that Giuliani was a 'key
target' of 'Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda.'
2/ Russia knew it had to play a different game than 2016. So it built an operation to cull
virulently pro-Trump Americans as pseudo-assets, so blind in their allegiance to Trump that
they'll willingly launder Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda.
Yet, if one looks at the actual facts of the case - in particular, that Hunter Biden appears
to have dropped his own laptops off at a computer repair shop, signed a service ticket , and
the shop owner approached the FBI first and Rudy Giuliani last after Biden failed to pick them
up, the left's latest Russia conspiracy theory is quickly debunked .
This is the story of an American patriot, an honorable man, John Paul Mac Issac, who tried
to do the right thing and is now being unfairly and maliciously slandered as an agent of
foreign intelligence, specifically Russia. He is not an agent or spy for anyone. He is his own
man. How do I know? I have known his dad for more than 20 years. I've known John Paul's dad as
Mac. Mac is a decorated Vietnam Veteran, who flew gunships in Vietnam. And he continued his
military service with an impeccable record until he retired as an Air Force Colonel. The crews
of those gunships have an annual reunion and Mac usually takes John Paul along, who volunteers
his computer and video skills to record and compile the stories of those brave men who served
their country in a difficult war.
This story is very simple – Hunter Biden dropped off three computers with liquid
damage at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware on April 12, 2019. The owner, John Mac Issac,
examined the three and determined that one was beyond recovery, one was okay and the data on
the harddrive of the third could be recovered. Hunter signed the service ticket and John Paul
Mac Issac repaired the hard drive and down loaded the data . During this process he saw some
disturbing images and a number of emails that concerned Ukraine, Burisma, China and other
issues . With the work completed, Mr. Mac Issac prepared an invoice, sent it to Hunter Biden
and notified him that the computer was ready to be retrieved. H unter did not respond . In the
ensuing four months (May, June, July and August), Mr. Mac Issac made repeated efforts to
contact Hunter Biden. Biden never answered and never responded. More importantly, Biden stiffed
John Paul Mac Issac–i.e., he did not pay the bill.
When the manufactured Ukraine crisis surfaced in August 2019, John Paul realized he was
sitting on radioactive material that might be relevant to the investigation. After conferring
with his father, Mac and John Paul decided that Mac would take the information to the FBI
office in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mac walked into the Albuquerque FBI office and spoke with an
agent who refused to give his name. Mac explained the material he had, but was rebuffed by the
FBI. He was told basically, get lost . This was mid-September 2019.
Two months passed and then, out of the blue, the FBI contacted John Paul Mac Issac. Two FBI
agents from the Wilmington FBI office–Joshua Williams and Mike Dzielak–came to John
Paul's business . He offered immediately to give them the hard drive, no strings attached.
Agents Williams and Dzielak declined to take the device .
Two weeks later, the intrepid agents called and asked to come and image the hard drive. John
Paul agreed but, instead of taking the hard drive or imaging the drive, they gave him a
subpoena. It was part of a grand jury proceeding but neither agent said anything about the
purpose of the grand jury. John Paul complied with the subpoena and turned over the hard drive
and the computer.
In the ensuing months, starting with the impeachment trial of President Trump, he heard
nothing from the FBI and knew that none of the evidence from the hard drive had been shared
with President Trump's defense team.
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The lack of action and communication with the FBI led John Paul to make the fateful decision
to contact Rudy Giuliani's office and offer a copy of the drive to the former mayor. We now
know that Rudy accepted John Paul's offer and that Rudy's team shared the information with the
New York Post.
John Paul Mac Issac is not responsible for the emails, images and videos recovered from
Hunter Biden's computer. He was hired to do a job, he did the job and submitted an invoice for
the work. Hunter Biden, for some unexplained reason, never responded and never asked for the
computer. But that changed last Tuesday, October 13, 2020. A person claiming to be Hunter
Biden's lawyer called John Paul Mac Issac and asked for the computer to be returned. Too late.
That horse had left the barn and was with the FBI.
John Paul, acting under Delaware law, understood that Hunter's computer became the property
of his business 90 days after it had been abandoned.
At no time did John Paul approach any media outlet or tabloid offering to sell salacious
material . A person of lesser character might have tried to profit. But that is not the essence
of John Paul Mac Issac. He had information in his possession that he learned, thanks to events
subsequent to receiving the computer for a repair job, was relevant to the security of our
nation. He did what any clear thinking American would do–he, through his father,
contacted the FBI. When the FBI finally responded to his call for help, John cooperated fully
and turned over all material requested .
The failure here is not John Paul's . He did his job. The FBI dropped the ball and, by
extension, the Department of Justice. Sadly, this is becoming a disturbing, repeating
theme–the FBI through incompetence or malfeasance is not doing its job.
Any news outlet that is publishing the damnable lie that John Paul is part of some
subversive effort to interfere in the United States Presidential election is on notice. That is
slander and defamation. Fortunately, the evidence from Hunter Biden's computer is in the hands
of the FBI and Rudy Giuliani and, I suspect, the U.S. Senate. Those with the power to do
something must act. John Paul Mac Issac's honor is intact. We cannot say the same for those
government officials who have a duty to deal with this information.
"... The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies. ..."
"... One of the best ways to lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually impose martial law in the name of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony at home. ..."
The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic
repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and
British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical
thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies.
One of the best ways to lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually
impose martial law in the name of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony
at home.
After several color revolutions succeeded, the Russiagate/Spygate op was carried out in
the US, with British assistance. This op has been largely successful, though there has been
limited resistance against its whole fake edifice as well as with the logic of Cold War2.0.
Nevertheless, Spygate has shocked many tens of millions of Dems into a stupor, while millions
more are dazed and manipulated by the Chinese bogeyman being manufactured by Trump.
The most dangerous result of the martial law lite mentality caused by Spygate and its MSM
purveyors is the growing support for censorship of free speech coming mostly from the Dems,
such as Schiff and Warner. The danger inherent in this trend became very clear when FaceBook
and Twitter engaged in massive and unprecedented arbitrary censorship of the New York Post
and of various Trump-related accounts.
This is the kind of thing you do during Stage 1 of a coup. Surely it was at least in part
an experiment to see how various power points in the US would respond. Even though Twitter
ended the censorship later, it was probably a successful experiment designed to gauge
reactions and areas of resistance.
In November, there could be further, more serious experiments/ops. If so, the current
expansionist movements being made and planned by the US and NATO may well be integral parts
of a new non-democratic model of "American-style democracy" -- not constitution-based but
"rules-based."
"As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"
I ask myself this question seemingly every day. Could U.S bureaucrats be so short sighted
where they cannot see the culture they are creating? Any sane follower of international
relations understands that poking a nuclear power with a stick is the work of fools. My
nightmare, that I have feared since I was a child, is a nuclear confrontation that would
result in the end of the human race.
Does rationality and common sense ever win out in Washington? I fear that our "endgame"
will result in a mushroom cloud....
Not sure who this Andrei Martyanov is, but underlying all the comments is the proposition
that Putin-managed capitalism works great, will work great forever, will not have a crisis
ever and will make Russia totally independent in all ways. Stated so forthrightly, no doubt
it sounds too stupid to admit to. Nonetheless this is the claim. I say capitalist restoration
did not improve the Russian economy in the way implied by Martyanov. Putin is still a
Yeltsinite, even if he is sober enough to pass for competent.
I take the opposite view: Looking from today, Russia is lucky that the USSR collapsed in
1991. It shed its debt, its currency passed through hyperinflation, and their economy
collapsed and rebuilt. The US and most Western countries still have that coming for them, and
soon.
Plus beyond that the strict Communist/Marxist atheism over 70+ years lead to a rebirth of
Christian values in Russia, their biggest advantage in this cultural war. And they practice
science, not scientism.
Note: Russia and China are more capitalist than the US, for quite some time now. (12+
years)
@110 Abe as far as I understand it, the economic argument goes like this: take the number of
rubles generated/spent/whatever in Russian economic activity, then use the current conversion
rate to convert that into an "equivalent" amount of US dollars.
Then see what you can buy with that many US dollars.
If you went shopping in the USA, the answer would be that this many US dollars doesn't buy
you much, ergo, Russian economic activity is pathetically low.
An example: the Russian government might budget xxx (fill in the figure) rubles to buy new
T-90 tanks. In Washington they would convert that into US dollars, and then declare that this
is chicken-feed. Hardly enough to buy less than 10 Abrams tanks.
Only the Russians aren't buying Abrams tanks from the USA, and are not spending dollars.
They are buying T-90 tanks, and for the amount of rubles spent they'll get 50 tanks.
Every metric the US analyst are using tells them that the USA is vastly, vastly
outspending the Russians on military equipment, to the point where it is obvious that the
Russian military must be destitute and decrepit.
But if they every took the time to look they'll see 50 brand-spanking new T-90 main battle
tanks. Weapons that their assumptions say that the Russians can't afford, and would wonder
"Huh? Where'd they come from?"
@ Posted by: Andrei Martyanov | Oct 18 2020 4:11 utc | 96
I agree that comparing Russia's economy with the likes of Italy and Spain is ridiculous,
but it's not that simple. Capitalism is not what is appears to be.
If a (capitalist) nation wants to get something from another (capitalist) nation, it needs
to export something. There's no free lunch in international trade: if you want to import, you
have to export or issue sovereign debt bonds (treasury bonds).
In this scenario, either Russia produces everything it needs in its own territory or it
will have to export in order to import the technology it needs to do whatever it needs to do.
Remember: the Russian Federation is a capitalist nation-state, it has to follow the laws of
motion of capitalism, which take precedence over whatever Putin wants. To ignore that
economic laws exist is to deny any kind of theory of collapse; nation-states would then be
eternal, natural entities with no entropy.
Even if Russia produces everything it needs in its own territory, it is still capitalist.
It would need, in order to "substitute imports", to super-exploit its own labor force
(working class) in order to extract surpluses for its industrialization efforts. That's what
the USSR did during Stalin.
If Russia is doing the imports substitution in the classical way (the way Latin America
did during the liberal dictatorships of the 1950s-1980s), then it is trying to sell
commodities to industrialized countries in order to import technology and machinery necessary
to industrialize its own territory. That is probably the case here.
Assuming this more probable case, then I'm sorry to tell you it won't work. It may work in
the short or even medium term, but it will ultimately fail in the long term. The thing is
that, in a system of capitalist exchange between an agrarian and an industrial nation-state,
the industrial nation-state will always have the advantage (i.e. have a trade surplus).
That's because of Marx's labor theory of value: industrialized commodities ("manufactured
goods") have more intrinsic value than agrarian/raw material commodities - just think about
how many kilos of bananas Brazil would have to export to the USA in order to import one
single unit of an iPhone 12, to use an contemporary example. As a social result,
industrialized countries have a higher organic composition of capital (OCC) than agrarian
countries, as they need more value to just keep themselves afloat (as a metaphor: it's more
expensive to keep a big mansion than a little flat in a stationary state). Value (wealth)
then tends to flow from lower OCC to the higher OCC, this is the material base that divides
the First and Third World countries until today.
To make things even worse, raw materials/agricultural products have an inelastic demand,
which means their prices fall when production rises, and their prices rise when production
falls, relative to overall demand. You will pay whatever the water company will charge you
for the cubic meter of water - but you won't consume more or less water because of its price,
hence the term "inelastic": demand tends to be more or less constant on a macroeconomic
level. The same problem suffers the commodity exporter nations: there will come a stage where
their exports' overall value will collapse vis-a-vis the machinery and technology they need
to import.
As a result, the commodity exporter nations will have to get more debt overseas, by
issuing more T-bonds, just to keep the trade balance afloat. What was the quest for progress
becomes a vicious battle for mere survival. A debt crisis is brewed.
And that's exactly what happened to the Latin American countries in the 1980s-1990s: their
debt exploded and they were put to their knees by the USA (the country that issues the
universal fiat currency). The USA then charged their debt, which triggered a wave of
privatizations of everything those countries had built over decades. This is what will happen
to Russia if it falls for the lure of imports substitution.
That's why I urge the Russians to review their concepts and try to get back to the Soviet
times. It doesn't need to be exactly how it was before: you can make the due reforms and
adopt a more or less Chinese model of socialism. That's the only way out, if the Russian
people doesn't want to be enslaved by the liberals (capitalists).
@vk from what i'm reading (stephen cohen: soviet fates and lost alternatives) the chinese
adopted something like bukharin's nep policies, which stalin did his best to wipe out in the
ussr. i've got some problems with cohen's last book, "war with russia?" but he has a lot of
good information on the history of the ussr.
@ Posted by: pretzelattack | Oct 18 2020 15:14 utc | 118
On the surface, yes: the comparison between Reform and Opening Up and NEP are
irresistible. But it is not precise: the only merit it has is in the fact that it is fairer
than simply classifying Deng Xiaoping's reforms as neoliberalism (Trotskysts, Austrian
School) or capitalism (liberals).
The key here is the difference of the nature of the Chinese peasant class and the Russian
peasant class. The Chinese peasant class, besides suffering a lot (millions of dead by
famine) in the hands of a liberal government for decades (Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist
Government) (while the Russian equivalent - the "February Revolution" - only lasted a few
months, engulfed by their insistence on continuing with the meat-grinder of WWI), had a
different historical subtract.
Chinese late feudalism was much more developed, much more manufactured-centered than
Russian late feudalism. As a result, the Chinese peasant was much more proletarian-minded
than the feudal Russian peasant. Also, the Chinese didn't have the kulak problem (peasant
petite-bourgeoisie) - instead, they had regional warlords who self-destructed during the
chaotic republican period (1911-1949). When the warlords were gone, what was left was a much
more proletarian-minded, egalitarian-minded, small peasantry. This peasantry didn't bother to
migrate to the cities to work in the industry or to start their own factories in the
countryside itself. That's why Deng Xiaoping's Reform and Opening Up was successful - not
because of his genius, but because he was backed up by a capable people.
The Chinese peasantry, for example, didn't hoard or directed their grain surplus to
exports in order to starve the proletariat to death in the cities - they sold it to the
Chinese market. The Chinese peasantry also trusted their central government (CCP) and saw
itself as part of the project - in complete opposition to the feudal-minded Russian kulak,
who saw his piece of land as essentially an independent and self-sufficient
cell/ecosystem.
That's why the Reform and Opening Up was successful (it survives until the present times)
and the NEP soon failed - following the good harvest of 1924, came the awful harvest of 1926,
which triggered a shit show where the peasantry hoarded the grain and almost starved the USSR
to extinction, and which led to Stalin's ascension and the dekulakization process (forced
collectivization).
i should add that i know little about the actual history of communism, but capitalism is
revealing itself as a monstrous failure, and not all the propaganda in the world is
succeeding at covering that up.
I know how economic reasoning comes to that conclusion, but IRL comparing such different
countries only by GDP metric is insane and beyond stupid.
Eg. Russia has GDP similar to California!
Yes, in US centric GDP metrics that favors and cheats US itself (surprise!).
But. One of those countries sent man in space, produces everything, has vast resources and
is self sufficient nuclear superpower.
Other one cant even feed and provider water to its population without outside help.
GDP means nothing when sh*t hits the fan. What will "richer" country do if it goes to war
with "poorer"? Throw money at them while they launch nukes at it?
@ Posted by: pretzelattack | Oct 18 2020 16:11 utc | 122
There certainly are similarities between the NEP and the Reform and Opening Up. It's very
possible Deng Xiaoping took Lenin as inspiration.
Forgot to mention the Scissors Crisis, which erupted in 1923, and triggered the NEP. That
crisis is one more evidence that shows manufactured products are inherently more valuable
than raw materials/agrarian products.
Again, for products of Western "education" basic logic and ability for a basic
extrapolation seem beyond the grasp: there are no issues for Russia to produce anything,
other than time and some money. Country which produces best hi-tech weapons in the world,
dominates world's nuclear energy market (this is not your iPhone "hi tech") and has a full
enclosed cycle for aerospace industry, among many other things, will have little trouble in
substituting pretty much anything. I remember a bunch of morons, who pass for "analysts",
from either WSJ or WaPo declaring 6 years ago that sanctions will deny Russia access to
Western extraction technologies. Sure, for a country whose space program alone will crush
whole economies of UK or Germany should they ever try to recreate it, will have "problems"
producing compressor or drill equipment with the level of Russia's metallurgy and material
science. Generally speaking, West's present pathetic state is a direct result of utter
incompetence across the board in a number of key fields of human activity and your post, most
likely based on some BS by Western media, is a good demonstration of this state of the
affairs.
Per immigration policy, you can easily find a a truck load of resources, especially on the
web-sites of Russian diplomatic missions (Embassies, Consulates etc.), easily available. Per
cats--Russian love for cats is boundless and intense. You may say that Russia is a
cat-obsessed country;)
vk@120 posits a mystical cultural difference in Russian and Chinese peasants, which
unfortunately has pretty much the same content as the hypothesis of a racial difference. That
the morally superior race is supposed to be Chinese doesn't really help. As often, some
strange assertions of facts that aren't so accompany such bizarre thinking. The rich peasants
in China (what would be kulaks in Russian history,) were notorious for moneylending. As ever,
the inevitable arrears ended in the moneylender's family taking the land. Collectivization
came early in China, well along the way by 1956. And a key aspect of it was the struggle
against the Chinese equivalent of the kulak class. As for the insistence that private farming
is superior, the growth of inequality in land drove millions, a hundred million or more, into
the cities. Without residence permits this floating proletariat was effectively
superexploited by the new capitalist elements, as Deng meant them to do. Nor did the warlords
discredit themselves, not as a group. If anything the young warlord who forced Chiang to
reject active war against the Communists, in order to fight the Japanese invaders, was the
one who kept the GMD (KMT in Wade-Giles,) from discrediting itself. [Xian incident] And what
warlords had to do with the Chinese rich peasantry *after* the Revolution is a complete
mystery.
Socially, the deliberate uneven development promoted by Deng and his successors, is
eroding the social fabric of the larger countryside. This, in addition to the neocolonial
concessions, the growing links to the Chinese bourgeoisie of the diaspora suggest that as
Dengists may go even back/forward to a new form of warlordism. The thing about comparing
Bukharism/NEP to Dengism/the "Opening" is that Bukharin's program failed spectacularly. But
modern China is not next door to Nazi Germany. Even more to the point, Stalin's victory over
Hitler has provided a kind of moral shield for China, even under Deng, inspiring fear of
losing a general war. If Bukharin had beaten Stalin, we can be as sure as any hypothetical
can be, the USSR would have been defeated, not victorious. In modern China, the Bukharin won.
There is an excellent chance the national government of today's China will be defeated.
That article describes a 110 MW turbine that has now finally been put into production
(while Siemens, General Electric etc. produce utility-class gas turbines up to about 600 MW,
with far higher efficiency and most likely reliability). The article further describes 40 GW
of thermal electrical production to be "modernized" until 2031 (11 years from now), and
apparently a microscopic 2 GW of new capacity from "domestic and localized" 65 MW turbines to
be commissioned 2026-2028. (I don't understand Russian so I had to rely on Yandex's machine
translation.) That's admittedly some kind of progress, but is simply not going to cut it.
Nowhere close.
Imagine if China set the ambition to build its own semiconductors and its own turbofans
for its stealth fighters sometime around 2040. Imagine if China was still producing a third
of the amount of electricity of the United States instead of about double, etc., and
considered this to be adequate. It would be akin to abandoning its ambitions for
technological and industrial independence from the West, and that is exactly what Russia is
doing in the realm of gas turbines. There is apparently no capability and no seriousness
going into translating Russia's world-class research and science into actual large-scale,
modern industrial production, and everything points to this continuing, while you can blather
on all you want about people with "Western education" simply not getting anything.
That's admittedly some kind of progress, but is simply not going to cut it. Nowhere close.
That's admittedly you switching on "I am dense" mode and trying to up the ante with 600
MW, which are a unique product, while you somehow miss the point that 110 MWt MGT-110 of
fully Russian production has completed a full cycle of industrial tests and operations (an
equivalent of military IOC--Initial Operational Capability) and is in a serial production.
But instead of studying the issue (even if through Yandex translate) with Siemens which when
learning about MGT-110 offered Russia 100% localization with technology transfer, Russians
declined, you go into generalizations without having even minimal set of facts and
situational awareness. In fact 110 MWt turbines are most in demand product for a variety of
applications. Get acquainted with this.
I am not going to waste my time explaining to you (you will play dense again) what IOC
means and how it relates to serial production, I am sure you will find a bunch of unrealted
"argumentation".
Imagine if China
I don't need to imagine anything, as well as draw irrelevant parallels with China.
There is apparently no capability and no seriousness going into translating Russia's
world-class research and science into actual large-scale, modern industrial production, and
everything points to this continuing, while you can blather on all you want about people
with "Western education" simply not getting anything.
This is exactly what I am talking about. Hollow declarations by people who can not even
develop basic factual base.
It's great to see you here with your excellent facts and perspectives on Russia. I'm sorry
you have to deal with people whose minds are too small to grasp the immense scale of Russia -
scale in physical size, civilizational depth and importance to the balance of power in the
world.
Russia alone stopped the creeping gray hegemony from the west that had looked like it
would just ooze over the whole world and suffocate it in bullshit and tribute payments. And
then China joined in the fun. The world has a future now, when a decade ago this didn't seem
possible, at least from my view in the US. Geopolitically, Russia gave us this future, and
China has come to show us how much fun it's going to be.
@ Posted by: steven t johnson | Oct 18 2020 20:05 utc | 127
There's no mysticism here because we know how the kulaks emerged in Russia: they were the
result of the catastrophic capitalist reforms of the 1860s, which completely warped the old
feudal relations of the Russian Empire.
The reforms of the 1860s were catastrophic for two reasons:
1) it freed the peasants slowly. The State serfs - the last who gained their freedom -
were left with no land. A complex partition system of the land, based on each administrative
region, created a distorted division of land, where very few peasants got huge chunks of land
(the future kulaks) and most received almost nothing (as Lenin demonstrated, see his first
book of his Complete Works, below the rate of subsistence);
2) it tried to preserve the old feudal privileges and powers of the absolutist
monarchy.
As a result, the Russian Empire had a bizarre economic system, a mixed economy with the
worst of the two words: the inequality and absolute misery of capitalism and the backwardness
and lack of social mobility of feudalism.
But yes, you're right when you state Mao's era was not an economic failure. His early era
really saw an attempt by the CCP to make an alliance with the "national bourgeoisie", and
this alliance was indeed a failure. This certainly led to a more radical approach by the CCP,
still in the Mao era (collectivization). Life quality in China greatly increased after 1949,
until the recession of the Great Leap Forward (which was not a famine, but threw back some
socioeconomic indicators temporarily back to the WWII era). When the Great Leap Forward was
abandoned, China continued to improve afterwards.
All of this doesn't change the fact that China's "NEP" was a success, while the original
NEP wasn't. Of course, there are many factors that explain this, but it is wrong to call late
Qing China as even similar to the late Romanov Russia.
I'm not saying Stalin's reform were a failure. Without them, they wouldn't be able to
quickly import the Fordist (Taylorist) method they needed to industrialize. The USSR became a
superpower in just 19 years - a world record. The first Five-Year Plan was a huge morale
boost and success for the Soviet people - specially because it happened at the same time as
the capitalist meltdown of 1929.
--//--
@ Posted by: Eric | Oct 18 2020 20:53 utc | 128
The thing with semiconductors (and other very advanced technologies) is that it is an
industry that only makes sense for a given nation to dominate if they're going to mass
produce it. That usually means said production must be export oriented, which means competing
against already well-established competitors.
China doesn't want to drain the State's coffers to fund an industry that won't at least
pay for itself. It has to change the wheels with the car moving. That's why it is still
negotiating the Huawei contracts in the West first, why it still is trying to keep the
Taiwanese product flowing first, only to then gradually start the heavy investment needed to
dominate the semiconductor technology and production process.
They learned with the Soviets in this sense. When computers became a thing in the West,
the USSR immediately poured resources to build them. They were able to dominate the main
frame technology, and they were successfully implemented in their economy. Then came the
personal computers, and, this time, the Soviets weren't able to make it integrate in their
economy. The problem wasn't that the Soviets didn't know how to build a personal computer
(they did), but that every new technology is born for a reason, and only makes sense in a
given social context. You can't just blindly copy your enemy's technology and hope for the
best.
The world has a future now, when a decade ago this didn't seem possible, at least from my
view in the US. Geopolitically, Russia gave us this future, and China has come to show us
how much fun it's going to be. Many thanks to you and your people.
Thank you for your kind words. As my personal experience (my third book is coming out
soon)shows--explaining economic reality to people who have been "educated" (that is confused,
ripped off for huge tuition and given worthless piece of paper with MBA or some "economics"
Bachelor of "Science" on it) in Western pseudo-economic "theory" that this "global"
"rules-based order" is over, is pretty much an exercise in futility. And if a catastrophe of
Boeing is any indication (I will omit here NATO's military-industrial complex)--dividends,
stocks and "capitalization" is a figment of imagination of people who never left their office
and infantile state of development and swallowed BS economic narrative hook, line and sinker
without even trying to look out of the window. They still buy this BS of US having "largest
GDP in the world" (in reality it is much smaller than that of China), the
de-industrialization of the United States is catastrophic (they never bothered to look at
2018 Inter-agency Report to POTUS specifically about that)and its industrial base is
shrinking with a lighting speed, same goes to Germany which for now retains some residual
industrial capability and competences but:
This is before COVID-19, after it Germany's economy shrank worst among Western nations,
worse even than the US. It is a long story, but as Michael Hudson stated not for once in his
books and interviews, what is "taught" as economics in the West is basically a
pseudo-science. Well, it is. Or, as same Hudson stated earlier this year:"The gunboats don't
appear in your economics textbooks. I bet your price theory didn't have gun boats in them, or
the crime sector. And probably they didn't have debt in it either." And then they wonder in
Germany (or EU)how come that EU structures are filled with pedophiles, "Green" fanatics and
multiculturalists. Well, because Germany (and EU) are occupied territories who made their
choice. And this is just the start. What many do not understand here is that overwhelming
majority of Russians do not want to deal with Europe and calls for new Iron Curtain are
louder and louder and the process has started. Of course, there is a lot of both contempt and
schadenfreude on Russian part. As Napoleon stated, the nation which doesn't want to feed own
army, will feed someone else's. Very true. Modern West worked hard for it, let it "enjoy"
now.
It's good to see you commenting here as barflies seem more inclined to listen to you than
me. Did you watch Russian documentary on
The Wall , which I learned about from Lavrov's meeting with those doing business
within Russia on 5 Oct? I asked The Saker if his translation team would take on the task of
providing English subtitles or a voice over but never got a reply one way or the other. IMO,
for Russia to avoid the West's fate it must change its banking and financial system from the
private to the public realm as Hudson advocates most recently in this podcast . As for Mr.
Lavrov, he surprised the radio station interviewers by citing Semyon Slepakov's song "America
Doesn't Like Us," of which barfly Paco thankfully provided a translation of the
lyrics.С наилучшими
пожеланиями
крепкого
здоровья и
долгих лет
жизни!
I think you an Grieved misunderstand somewhat where I am coming from here. Michael Hudson
would be (and has been) the first to describe how Russia's elites (and to a large extent it
seems also the people) bought into a bogus neoliberal ideology teaching that somehow Russia
needs to earn the money it needs to build its own economy in the form of foreign currency
through export revenues. Apparently these economists and politicians in Russia never bothered
to look how Western economies actually operate (as opposed to what they preach to countries
they want to destroy), or for that matter how China has developed its economy (in all of
these countries, the necessary credit is created on a keyboard.) The export revenues that
Russia earns in the form of dollars and euros are sold to the central bank for the roubles
that Russia's government needs to function. Bizarrely, this creates just as much inflation as
it would if the central bank had just created the roubles without "backing" foreign currency.
In fact, there is more inflation created, because in times of high oil prices, corresponding
amounts of roubles are suddenly thrown into a domestic market that is underdeveloped, for
example in its infrastructure and its food processing. There are reasons why China can expand
its money supply by much greater proportions each year and still suffer far less inflation
than Russia.
Unlike China, Russia had already attained much of the technological expertise for the
equipment that it later decided it was unable to produce inside the country. A good example
of this are the turboexpanders whose design was perfected (though the basic idea was a bit
older) by Pyotr Kapisa in the 1930's in the USSR. This same technology went into the
turbopumps of the rocket engines in the Energia boosters. These engines are still to this
day, 30 years after the Soviet collapse, imported by the United States. As these rocket
engines including the turbopumps are still produced in Russia, the know-how to manufacture
was obviously not lost.
I read just the other day that as part of its import substitution program, Russia is
considering to produce the turboexpanders for processing natural gas (separating methane from
ethane) inside the country. Russia, with the world's largest natural gas reserves and
production, and as I described already possessing the expertise to produce the turboexpanders
needed for cryogenic separation, chose to hand over possibly billions of dollars to the West
to import this machinery over the years, only to be helpless when the West introduced
technological sanctions against its oil and gas sector. Very likely, in a couple of years we
will receive the announcement that the drive to produce them domestically has been abandoned,
after it was realized that their production will require new factories and new machinery,
which do not fall out of the sky in Russia as they apparently do in the West and in China.
Putin will announce that great business awaits whichever Western investor ready to provide
the funds. (Spoiler: They won't! The West is not very interested in investing into building
up Russia's industrial capabilities, preferring instead to loot its natural resources and to
suck out its skilled worked and scientists.)
While Russia sits and waits for higher oil prices or foreign dollar credit on the one
hand, and with unemployed skilled labor and rotting industrial infrastructure on the other
hand, China spends the equivalent of trillions of dollars (in yuan, obviously) into fixed
capital (not least infrastructure) each year. The funds for this are all created by
keystrokes by the PBOC and provide employment for the domestic workforce. You don't have to
ponder long on which model has been hugely successful, and which has been an unmitigated
disaster.
I can't find the exact figures right now, but Russia produces something like 300,000 STEM
graduates every year, more than the United States. (I may very well have read this originally
on your blog, by the way.) Many of them will still be forced to emigrate to find gainful
employment, even 20 years after the 1990's ended and Putin became President. These graduates
remain even in post-Soviet times of a very high quality, and undergraduate students in Russia
are trained at a higher level in mathematics and physics than in particular Americans are
even as post-graduates. By refusing to invest in its own scientific infrastructure and
industry the way China has done and does, Russia gives away all the education and training
that were provided to these students, especially to the same Western countries that are
seeking to destroy Russia. This is completely unforgivable.
I should add that I myself study physics in Germany. I have great appreciation for the
Russian methods of teaching mathematics and physics, as many do here. I have learned,
preferentially, mathematical analysis from Zorich, mechanics, electrodynamics etc. from
Landau-Lifschitz, much about Fourier series from Tolstov, and so on, and have very often been
awestruck and inspired in a mystical fashion by these works. I am not somehow unaware of the
unparalleled quality (in particular after the destruction of Germany in WWII) of the USSR's
and Russia's math/physics education or unfamiliar with the achievements of the USSR in
science and engineering. It's precisely because I am familar with them that it
frustrates me immensely how Russia's potential is needlessly wasted.
What many do not understand here is that overwhelming majority of Russians do not want to
deal with Europe and calls for new Iron Curtain are louder and louder and the process has
started. Of course, there is a lot of both contempt and schadenfreude on Russian part.
Andrei (132), do you have a link to an opinion poll that supports this? Thanks
in advance.
@ Digby | Oct 19 2020 0:28 utc | 136.. if you haven't already listened to the lavrov
interview that b linked to in his main post - it is a question and answer thing - you would
benefit from doing so and it would help answer you question some too.. see b's post at this
spot -"In a wide ranging interview with Russian radio stations" and hit that link
@ james (137)
Well, I looked into the interview. While it is informative in its own right (at some point it
briefly touches on Russo-Japanese relations), and some of the interviewers do show some
concerns, I'm still not sure how it helps answer my question (maybe I missed something?). My
initial impression was that Mr. Martyanov was referring to Russian civilians - not just radio
interviewers.
Thanks anyway for the heads up.
@ 138 digby... my impression was the radio interviewers questions were a reflection of the
general sentiment of the public.. i could be wrong, but it seems to me they have completely
given up on the west based on what they ask and say in their questions to lavrov...
on another note, you might enjoy engaging andrei more directly on his website which i will
share here...
The moment the New York Post reported on some of the sleazy, corrupt details contained on
Hunter Biden's hard drive, Twitter and Facebook, the social media giants most closely connected
to the way Americans exchange political information, went into overdrive to suppress the
information and protect Joe Biden. In the case of Facebook, though, perhaps one of those
protectors was, in fact, protecting herself.
The person currently in charge of Facebook's election integrity program is Anna Makanju .
That name probably doesn't mean a lot to you, but it should mean a lot – and in a
comforting way -- to Joe Biden.
Before ending up at Facebook, Makanju was a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic
Council. The Atlantic Council is an ostensibly non-partisan think tank that deals with
international affairs. In fact, it's a decidedly partisan organization.
In 2009, James L. Jones, the Atlantic Council's chairman left the organization to be
President Obama's National Security Advisor. Susan Rice, Richard Holbrooke, Eric Shinseki,
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Chuck Hagel, and Brent Scowcroft also were all affiliated with the Atlantic Council
before they ended up in the Obama administration.
The Atlantic Council has received massive amounts of foreign funding over the years. Here's
one that should interest everyone: Burisma Holdings donated $300,000
dollars to the Atlantic Council, over the course of three consecutive years, beginning in
2016. The information below may explain why it began paying that money to the Council.
Not only was the Atlantic Council sending people into the Obama-Biden administration, but it
was also serving as an outside advisor. And that gets us back to Anna Makanju, the person
heading Facebook's misleadingly titled "election integrity program."
Makanju also worked at the Atlantic Council. The following is the relevant part of Makanju's
professional bio from her page at the Atlantic Council
(emphasis mine):
Anna Makanju is a nonresident senior fellow with the Transatlantic Security Initiative.
She is a public policy and legal expert working at Facebook, where she leads efforts to
ensure election integrity on the platform. Previously, she was the special policy adviser for
Europe and Eurasia to former US Vice President Joe Biden , senior policy adviser to
Ambassador Samantha Power at the United States Mission to the United Nations, director for
Russia at the National Security Council, and the chief of staff for European and NATO Policy
in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She has also taught at the Woodrow Wilson School
at Princeton University and worked as a consultant to a leading company focused on space
technologies.
Makanju was a player in the faux Ukraine impeachment. Early in December 2019, when the
Democrats were gearing up for the impeachment, Glenn Kessler
mentioned her in an article assuring Washington Post readers that, contrary to the Trump
administration's claims, there was nothing corrupt about Biden's dealings with Ukraine. He made
the point then that Biden now raises as a defense: Biden didn't pressure Ukraine to fire
prosecutor Viktor Shokin to protect Burisma; he did it because Shokin wasn't doing his job when
it came to investigating corruption.
Kessler writes that, on the same day in February 2016 that then-Ukrainian President
Poroshenko announced that Shokin had offered his resignation, Biden spoke to both Poroshenko
and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. The White House version is that Biden gave both men pep
talks about reforming the government and fighting corruption. And that's where Makanju comes
in:
Anna Makanju, Biden's senior policy adviser for Ukraine at the time, also listened to the
calls and said release of the transcripts would only strengthen Biden's case that he acted
properly. She helped Biden prepare for the conversations and said they operated at a high
level, with Biden using language such as Poroshenko's government being "nation builders for a
transformation of Ukraine."
A reference to a private company such as Burisma would be "too fine a level of
granularity" for a call between Biden and the president of another country, Makanju told The
Fact Checker. Instead, she said, the conversation focused on reforms demanded by the
International Monetary Fund, methods to tackle corruption and military assistance. An
investigation of "Burisma was just not significant enough" to mention, she said.
Let me remind you, in case you forgot, that Burisma started paying the Atlantic Council a
lot of money in 2016, right when Makanju was advising Biden regarding getting rid of
Shokin.
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
That's right folks, the Facebook executive currently blocking all of the negative evidence
of Hunter and Joe Biden's corrupt activity in Ukraine is the same person who was coordinating
the corrupt activity between the Biden family payoffs and Ukraine.
You just cannot make this stuff up folks.
The incestuous networking between Democrats in the White House, Congress, the Deep State,
the media, and Big Tech never ends. That's why the American people wanted and still want Trump,
the true outsider, to head the government. They know that Democrats have turned American
politics into one giant Augean Stable and that Trump is
the Hercules who (we hope) can clean it out.
"... Russia is militarily secure and the 'west' knows that. It is one reason for the anti-Russian frenzy. Russia does not need to bother with the unprecedented hostility coming from Brussels and Washington. It can ignore it while taking care of its interests. ..."
"... As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint? ..."
"... The nightmare scenario for the Anglo-Americans is a Germany-Russia-China triangle. If that happens it is game over! ..."
"... They don't want an actual war. They just ratchet up the tensions to keep Europe subdued and obedient and Russia off balance and thereby prevent any rapprochement between the two. ..."
"... The strong hatred and hostility coming from the US and the EU are due to the understanding that they don't have much time, and they must act now, or tomorrow it will be too late. ..."
"... Years ago Barack Obama gave speech to West Point graduates, proclaiming US moral and racial superiority (because they mix'n's*it) over whole world, Goebbels would be proud. Germany has long history of hating all those Slavs, and Israel... Lets not go there with how they threat those inferior brown people. ..."
"... Of course that end-point is money for military contractors and power for the FP elite in government and think-tanks which also means money. Yes, there are true-believers who see a mighty struggle between "good" (the USA) an "evil" (Russia/China) but they are incompetent. As for the American people they will believe whatever the NY Times says since they are militantly ignorant of history, geography, foreign affairs in general, and, above all, political science. ..."
"... The USA is lucky the USSR collapsed in 1991. If it managed to somehow survive for mere 17 years more, it would catch the 2008 capitalist meltdown ..."
"... It looks like the USA imported the Irish and imported their luck, too. ..."
"... This loathing was made blatantly manifest during WWII, of course, but it didn't die out because that generation and more likely their children remain with us. Ditto the generational Anglo-American hatred of Russians (yes, for the UK, and their haute bourgeoisie, it has deeper historical roots than the 20thC) and the USSR even more... ..."
"... "Maas added that Germany takes decisions related to its energy policy and energy supply 'here in Europe', saying that Berlin accepts ' the fact that the US had more than doubled its oil imports from Russia last year and is now the world's second largest importer of Russian heavy oil .'" [My Emphasis] ..."
"... The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies. ..."
"... One of the best ways to lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually impose martial law in the name of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony at home. ..."
"... At the time, I thought it was just Trump and his followers freaking out, now I think it's the NatSec people, who have finally seen the truth of their situation. As one can see in the Atlantic Council piece B posted, they are still trying to keep the old narrative patched together too. ..."
"... As I've said numerous times -- Fuck the US Empire and it's minion bitches. Jesse Ventura commented this past week that EVERY US Incumbent politician should be voted out of office this election. 99% of them are scum. ..."
"... That was the whole point of the first Cold War. It is the whole point of creating a Cold War 2.0. Absolutely nothing has changed. ..."
"... If the Russian Federation really has an ongoing imports substitution program, then this explains everything. Germany is an exports-oriented economy. It wants to integrate with the Russian economy in the sense to keep it as an agrarian-extrativist economy to feed it with cheap commodities to feed their industry. Germany's ideal Russia is Brazil. ..."
"... A Russia that also exports high-value commodities (manufactured commodities) is a direct threat to Germany, as it competes with it directly in the international market. That's the reason Germany doesn't want the BRI to come to Europe, as Merkel once said: Europe must not become China's peninsula. China is Germany's main competitor, as it is also a big manufacturing exporter. ..."
"... Perhaps the US only has one script in the playbook: to balkanise, disrupt and foster 5th columns until their opponent becomes a dysfunctional or failed state. ..."
"... The US and EU attempts to break Russia's independent foreign policy are just stepping stones to the eventual goal of a breakup Russia itself, never forget Albright's comments in the 90s about how Siberia shouldn't belong to Russia alone. ..."
"... We may yet see a Cuban missile crisis scenario but it looks more likely to be caused by arms sales to Taiwan than conflict in the Caucasus. ..."
"... I also think its naive to see these as "fires burning at Russia's borders" instead of as deliberately set bear traps . Azerbaijan is in a strategic location between Russia and Iran and the conflict with Armenia comes just before Russia is about to sell advanced weapons to Iran. ..."
Over the last years the U.S. and its EU puppies have ratcheted up their pressure on Russia.
They seem to believe that they can compel Russia to follow their diktat. They can't. But the
illusion that Russia will finally snap, if only a few more sanctions ar applied or a few more
houses in Russia's neighborhood are set on fire, never goes away.
The fires burning at Russia's borders in the Caucasus are an add-on to the disorder and
conflict on its Western border in neighboring Belarus, where fuel is poured on daily by
pyromaniacs at the head of the European Union acting surely in concert with Washington.
Yesterday we learned of the decision of the European Council to impose sanctions on
President Lukashenko, a nearly unprecedented action when directed against the head of state
of a sovereign nation.
...
It is easy enough to see that the real intent of the sanctions is to put pressure on the
Kremlin, which is Lukashenko's guarantor in power, to compound the several other measures
being implemented simultaneously in the hope that Putin and his entourage will finally crack
and submit to American global hegemony as Europe did long ago.
...
The anti-Russia full tilt ahead policy outlined above is going on against a background of the
U.S. presidential electoral campaigns. The Democrats continue to try to depict Donald Trump
as "Putin's puppy," as if the President has been kindly to his fellow autocrat while in
office. Of course, under the dictates of the Democrat-controlled House and with the
complicity of the anti-Russian staff in the State Department, in the Pentagon, American
policy towards Russia over the entire period of Trump's presidency has been one of never
ending ratcheting up of military, informational, economic and other pressures in the hope
that Vladimir Putin or his entourage would crack. Were it not for the nerves of steel of Mr.
Putin and his close advisers , the irresponsible pressure policies outlined above could
result in aggressive behavior and risk taking by Russia that would make the Cuban missile
crisis look like child's play.
The U.S. arms industry lobby, in form of the Atlantic Council, confirms
the 'western' strategy Doctorow describes. It calls for 'ramping up on Russia' with even more
sanctions:
Key to raising the costs to Russia is a more proactive transatlantic strategy for sanctions
against the Russian economy and Putin's power base, together with other steps to reduce
Russian energy leverage and export revenue. A new NATO Russia policy should be pursued in
tandem with the European Union (EU), which sets European sanctions policy and faces the same
threats from Russian cyberattacks and disinformation. At a minimum, EU sanctions resulting
from hostilities in Ukraine should be extended, like the Crimea sanctions, for one year
rather than every six months. Better yet, allies and EU members should tighten sanctions
further and extend them on an indefinite basis until Russia ends its aggression and takes
concrete steps toward de-escalation.
It also wants Europe to pay for weapons in the Ukraine and Georgia:
A more dynamic NATO strategy for Russia should go hand in hand with a more proactive policy
toward Ukraine and Georgia in the framework of an enhanced Black Sea strategy. The goal
should be to boost both partners' deterrence capacity and reduce Moscow's ability to
undermine their sovereignty even as NATO membership remains on the back burner for the time
being.
As part of this expanded effort, European allies should do more to bolster Ukraine and
Georgia's ground, air, and naval capabilities, complementing the United States' and Canada's
efforts that began in 2014.
The purpose of the whole campaign against Russia, explains the Atlantic Council author, is
to subordinate it to U.S. demands:
Relations between the West and Moscow had begun to deteriorate even before Russia's watershed
invasion of Ukraine, driven principally by Moscow's fear of the encroachment of Western
values and their potential to undermine the Putin regime. With the possibility of a further
sixteen years of Putin's rule, most experts believe relations are likely to remain
confrontational for years to come. They argue that the best the United States and its allies
can do is manage this competition and discourage aggressive actions from Moscow. However, by
pushing back against Russia more forcefully in the near and medium term, allies are more
likely to eventually convince Moscow to return to compliance with the rules of the liberal
international order and to mutually beneficial cooperation as envisaged under the 1997
NATO-Russia Founding Act.
The 'rules of the liberal international order' are of course whatever the U.S. claims they
are. They may change at any moment and without notice to whatever new rules are the most
convenient for U.S. foreign policy.
But as Doctorow said above, Putin and his advisors stay calm and ignore such trash despite
all the hostility expressed against them.
One of Putin's close advisors is of course Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In a
wide
ranging interview with Russian radio stations he recently touched on many of the issues
Doctorow also mentions. With regards to U.S. strategy towards Russia Lavrov diagnoses
:
Sergey Lavrov : [...] You mentioned in one of your previous questions that no matter what we
do, the West will try to hobble and restrain us, and undermine our efforts in the economy,
politics, and technology. These are all elements of one approach.
Question : Their national security strategy states that they will do so.
Sergey Lavrov : Of course it does, but it is articulated in a way that decent people can
still let go unnoticed, but it is being implemented in a manner that is nothing short of
outrageous.
Question : You, too, can articulate things in a way that is different from what you would
really like to say, correct?
Sergey Lavrov : It's the other way round. I can use the language I'm not usually using to
get the point across. However, they clearly want to throw us off balance , and not only by
direct attacks on Russia in all possible and conceivable spheres by way of unscrupulous
competition, illegitimate sanctions and the like, but also by unbalancing the situation near
our borders, thus preventing us from focusing on creative activities. Nevertheless,
regardless of the human instincts and the temptations to respond in the same vein, I'm
convinced that we must abide by international law.
Russia does not accept the fidgety 'rules of the liberal international order'. Russia
sticks to the law which is, in my view, a much stronger position. Yes, international law often
gets broken. But as Lavrov
said elsewhere , one does not abandon traffic rules only because of road accidents.
Russia stays calm, no matter what outrageous nonsense the U.S. and EU come up with. It can
do that because it knows that it not only has moral superiority by sticking to the law but it
also has the capability to win a fight. At one point the interviewer even jokes
about that :
Question : As we say, if you don't listen to Lavrov, you will listen to [Defense Minister]
Shoigu.
Sergey Lavrov : I did see a T-shirt with that on it. Yes, it's about that.
Yes, it's about that. Russia is militarily secure and the 'west' knows that. It is one
reason for the anti-Russian frenzy. Russia does not need to bother with the unprecedented
hostility coming from Brussels and Washington. It can ignore it while taking care of its
interests.
As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?
Posted by b on October 17, 2020 at 16:31 UTC | Permalink
thanks b.... that lavrov interview that karlof1 linked to previously is
worth its weight in gold...
it gives a clear understanding of how russia sees what is
happening here on the world stage... as you note cheap talk from the atlantic council 'rules
of the liberal international order' is no substitute for 'international law' which is what
russia stands on.... as for the usa campaign to tar russia and claim trump is putins puppet..
apparently this stupidity really sells in the usa.. in fact, i have a close friend here in
canada from the usa with family in the usa has bought this hook, line and sinker as well..
and he is ordinarily a bright guy!
as for the endpoint - the usa and the people of the usa don't mind themselves about
endpoints... it is all about being in the moment, living a hollywood fantasy off the ongoing
party of wall st... the thought this circus will end, is not something many of them
contemplate.. that is what it looks like to me.. maga, lol...
Belarus - this is happenstance, not long term planning. Like Venezuela - indeed neither
original Presidential candidate nor his wife had a Wikipedia entry a week or so before being
announced as candidate (much like Guaido 2 weeks before Trump "made" him President.
Yes the Western media make the most of it, and yes there are many in place in and besides the
media whose job it is to maximise any noise. But little is happening in Belarus. Sanctioning
is all anyone can do now. (Sanctions = punishment therefore proof of guilt without trial or
evidence).
US pressure is based on the Dem vs Rep "I am tougher on Russia than you" game spurred on
by the MIC.
European pressure is based on the Euro Defence force concept and a low key but real desire to
rid itself of Nato. So again we have Nato saying "without US/us Europe would be soft on
Russia" and Europe saying we are tough on Russia whatever.
What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?
It is about driving a wedge between Europe and Russia. The nightmare scenario for the
Anglo-Americans is a Germany-Russia-China triangle. If that happens it is game
over!
They don't want an actual war. They just ratchet up the tensions to keep Europe subdued
and obedient and Russia off balance and thereby prevent any rapprochement between the
two.
Putin has repeatedly stated he wants a Lisbon to Vladivostok free trade area.
The Anglo-Americans will never permit that. That Europe is committed to a course that is
against their own best interest shows just how subservient they are to the
Anglo-Americans.
I think it was the first head of NATO that said the purpose of the organization is to
"keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the US in"
There is no endpoint. Those who argue for it, the Western think-tank industry and security
and intelligence industry, are recipients of huge sums of money. It is bread and butter for
large numbers of people. And the acceptance of the conclusions and advice of the immense
stacks of papers thus produced mean money towards the defense industry and the cyber warfare
industry. In the end, all this is driven by elites' fear of their own populations. Sowing FUD
(Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) makes these populations docile. Rinse and repeat.
>>As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is.
The reason was probably the new Russian Constitution, which is basically a declaration of
independence from the West. This has caused serious triggerings in western elites, although
their reaction took some time to crystalise due to the Covid Pandemic.
>>What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?
The endpoint is - EU and NATO move into Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, Georgia, Belarus,
Armenia.
A puppet government of someone like Navalny is installed Russia. That government further
gives up Crimea, Kaliningrad and Northen Caucasus. In the long run, a soft partition of Russia into 3 parts follows (as per the Grand
Chessboard 1997).
The possibility for that happening is overall negative, as the West is on a long term
decline, that is, it will be weaker in 2030, and even weaker in 2040 or 2050.
OECD economies were 66 % of the world economy in 2010 but that share is estimated to drop
to 38 % of the world economy in 2050 (with further drops after that).
The strong hatred and hostility coming from the US and the EU are due to the understanding
that they don't have much time, and they must act now, or tomorrow it will be too
late.
Well, the hostility in "western" "elite" (rulers) towards Russia is on much more primal level
than money and power IMO. It is pure racial hatred combined with Übermensch God complex.
Main controllers in modern "west" are US, Israel and Germany.
Years ago Barack Obama gave speech to West Point graduates, proclaiming US moral and
racial superiority (because they mix'n's*it) over whole world, Goebbels would be proud.
Germany has long history of hating all those Slavs, and Israel... Lets not go there with how
they threat those inferior brown people.
"What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"
Of course that end-point is money for military contractors and power for the FP elite in
government and think-tanks which also means money. Yes, there are true-believers who see a
mighty struggle between "good" (the USA) an "evil" (Russia/China) but they are incompetent.
As for the American people they will believe whatever the NY Times says since they are
militantly ignorant of history, geography, foreign affairs in general, and, above all,
political science.
The problem as I see it is Europe generally, and Germany in particular. Why do they follow
Washington diktats?
Well let's see, the USA is $30 trillion in debt and counting, faces an upcoming economic
depression to rival the 'great' one, with a citizenry on the brink of civil war and a
political system that makes a 'banana republic' look like ancient Greece. Desperate is as
desperate does.
As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?
For a very simple reason: there's no other option. Capitalism can only work in one way. There's a limit to how much capitalism can reform
within itself without self-destructing.
The West is also suffering from the "Whale in a Swimming Pool" dilemma: it has grown so
hegemonic, so big and so gloated that its strategic options have narrowed sharply. It has not
much more room for maneuver left, its bluffs become less and less effective. As a result, its
strategies have become increasingly linear, extremely predictable. The "whale in a pool
dilemma" is not a problem when your inner workings (domestic economy) is flourishing; but it
becomes one when the economy begins to stagnate and, ultimately, decline (albeit slowly).
On a side note, it's incredible how History is non-linear, full of surprises. The Russian
Federation is inferior to the Soviet Union in every aspect imaginable. Except for one factor:
it now has an ascendant China on its side in a time where the West is declining. (Historical)
context is everything.
The USA is lucky the USSR collapsed in 1991. If it managed to somehow survive for mere 17
years more, it would catch the 2008 capitalist meltdown and have an opportunity to gain the
upper hand over capitalism (plus have a strong China on its side). Socialism/communism
wouldn't have been demoralized the way it was in the 1990s, opening a huge flank for
revolutions in the Western Hemisphere (specially Latin America). NATO would be much weaker.
Since the USSR was closed to capitalism, the USA wouldn't be able to enforce as crippling
economic sanctions on China and the USSR. The USSR would be able to "reform and open up" in a
much safer environment (by copying China, instead of Yeltsin's neoliberalism), thus gaining
the opportunity to make a Perestroika that could actually work.
But it didn't happen. Well, what can I say? It looks like the USA imported the Irish and imported their luck,
too.
Abe @7 - I would agree and have raised somewhere (old age?) that part of what we are seeing
in this latest western-NATO cooked up charade re Navalny is, in part at least, a deep
historical supremacist loathing of the Slavs an in general and the Russians in particular by
the haute bourgeois Germans. This loathing was made blatantly manifest during WWII, of
course, but it didn't die out because that generation and more likely their children remain
with us. Ditto the generational Anglo-American hatred of Russians (yes, for the UK, and their
haute bourgeoisie, it has deeper historical roots than the 20thC) and the USSR even more...
The pressure on Russia is enormous and I would enlarge on the economic sanctions aspect
(siege warfare): Belarus, Armenia-Azerbaijan (Erdogan once again playing his role for the
US/NATO - in this business, Iran is also a target), Kyrgyzstan - all on or very close to
Russia's borders and thus dividing and draining (intention) Russia's focus and $$$$ (the
Brzezinski game) in order to open it up to the western corporate-capitalist bloodsuckers. And
I suspect that as the US (and UK) economies drain away, so these border country "revolts,"
"protests" etc. will grow...
Russia really needs to join with China in full comity. Bugger the west - they do not
respect the rights of either country to their own culture, societal structures, mores,
perspectives...nor apparently even those countries' rights to their own coastal waters, air
space...
One wonders how the USA would react to Chinese and/or Russian warships in the Gulf or
traversing (lengthwise) the Atlantic or Pacific????
"Maas added that Germany takes decisions related to its energy policy and energy supply 'here in Europe', saying
that Berlin accepts ' the fact that the US had more than doubled its oil imports from Russia last year and is now the
world's second largest importer of Russian heavy oil .'" [My Emphasis]
Now isn't that the interesting bit of news!! The greatest fracking nation on the planet needs to import heavy oil (likely
Iranian, unlikely Venezuelan) from its #1 adversary. As for the end game, I've written many times what I see as the goal and
don't see any need to add more.
"The Russians are coming' is a long standing fear built the American psyche almost from the
very start.
Russian colonization of the California Territory outnumbered the US population.
The Monroe Doctrine was all about that,not S.America at all. The Brits ruled S.America by
mercantile means until
WWI cut the sea lanes, then and only then did it fall into the sphere of Yankee control.
Then there is Alaska. The Sewards Folly documents are almost certainly fakes, the verified
Russian copy says a 100year LEASE,not a sale. The National Archives refuses examination by any
but its own experts. Unless they are forgeries and they know it there can be no real reason for
their stance.
There is much more background to the antipathy than many are aware.
@bjd (4) You nailed it, my friend. Cold wars are immensely profitable for certain sectors of
the economy and the parasites who run them. The supreme imperative is always to have
enemies--really big, bad, dangerous enemies--whether real or imagined. I will be voting for
Biden, but I don't have much hope for positive change in American foreign policy. Russia,
China, Iran, Venezuela, etc. will continue to be vilified as nations to be feared and hated.
The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic
repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and
British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical
thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies.
One of the best ways to
lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually impose martial law in the name
of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony at home.
After several color
revolutions succeeded, the Russiagate/Spygate op was carried out in the US, with British
assistance. This op has been largely successful, though there has been limited resistance
against its whole fake edifice as well as with the logic of Cold War2.0. Nevertheless,
Spygate has shocked many tens of millions of Dems into a stupor, while millions more are
dazed and manipulated by the Chinese bogeyman being manufactured by Trump. The most dangerous
result of the martial law lite mentality caused by Spygate and its MSM purveyors is the
growing support for censorship of free speech coming mostly from the Dems, such as Schiff and
Warner. The danger inherent in this trend became very clear when FaceBook and Twitter engaged
in massive and unprecedented arbitrary censorship of the New York Post and of various
Trump-related accounts. This is the kind of thing you do during Stage 1 of a coup. Surely it
was at least in part an experiment to see how various power points in the US would respond.
Even though Twitter ended the censorship later, it was probably a successful experiment
designed to gauge reactions and areas of resistance. In November, there could be further,
more serious experiments/ops. If so, the current expansionist movements being made and
planned by the US and NATO may well be integral parts of a new non-democratic model of
"American-style democracy" -- not constitution-based but "rules-based."
"As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"
I think the answer is clear. The US economy is collapsing and likewise those wedded to the US
dollar system. The USA spent 90% more than it received last year.
They are desperate to have access to Russia's largely untapped resources and it doesn't want
any competition for its position as world hegemon. Thus Russia and China are in the
crosshairs.
Fortunately the corruption in the USA has resulted in a weaker military capability over time
and they are reduced to behaving in clandestine and terroristic ways to try and achieve this.
The turmoil enveloping the USA is scape goated on Trump and Covid19 but is ultimately due to
their faltering economy and a big helping of financial corruption. Talk about your chickens
coming home to roost
Sounds like thunder, all those chickens. I appeared to me that whomever is in charge here, they started pulling all the levers they
could lay a hand on a couple weeks back in terms of stirring up trouble. Throwing sand in the
eyes of ones enemy.
At the time, I thought it was just Trump and his followers freaking out, now I think it's
the NatSec people, who have finally seen the truth of their situation. As one can see in the
Atlantic Council piece B posted, they are still trying to keep the old narrative patched
together too.
Politfiction, or what could have happened if is an entertaining but futile exercise.
Everybody agrees, there was no need for the USSR to dissolve, it was like a big jackpot for
an amazed rival that rushed to declare himself the winner. The price has been high, on both
sides of the fence but of course with a lot more victims and destruction on the other side of
the fallen wall. Gorbachov a tragic figure and Yelstyn a sinister one, in spite of his being
a clown, a tragic one at that, bombing his parliament and laughing at the world together with
the degenerate Clinton, the 90's were somber indeed. The west paid its price, a self declared
victory that did not bring any benefit, the peace dividend never was, to the contrary,
military budgets never stopped growing year after year. The end of history was proclaimed, no
need to match or better the rival ideology, there is none, so proles you better stop
complaining, or else and that's where we are.
Just to repeat the obvious, for the US actually to go to war is out of the question these
days -- the US public would not tolerate the casualties. Therefore other methods have to be
found to achieve the same objectives -- the maintenance of an eternal enemy in 1984 style, to
keep up military budgets and world hegemony, neither of which are the elite ready to abandon.
Economic sanctions have been the weapon of choice in the age of Trump, but there isn't really
any other. Sometimes they are better aimed and sometimes not.
In any case I am not sure I agree that the EU is really submissive to the US in this
respect. They don't want to offend the US, and some leaders have genuinely swallowed the
Kool-Aid, but others haven't, and the continuation of Nordstream 2 is where they haven't.
Doctorow wrote "Of course, under the dictates of the Democrat-controlled House and with the
complicity of the anti-Russian staff in the State Department, in the Pentagon, American
policy towards Russia over the entire period of Trump's presidency..."
The Senate is more
important for foreign affairs and has been Republican for Trump's entire term. The House was
also Republican for half of Trump's term. Lastly the "staff" is not really able to run things
in the presence of a minimally competent administrator, at the head of the State Department,
acting under leadership of a competent, energetic president. There is no sign Doctorow is
particularly intelligent or insightful.
I have long ago lost track of where the bar's consensus on Turkey is, whether the failing
US means Erdogan must become the follower of the skilled, brave and indefatigable Putin...or
whether his sultanship is suicidally persisting in thinking Russia cannot actually deliver
anything his sultanship really needs and wants. At any rate it is entirely unclear what
"international law" Lavrov thinks supports Russia.
As to the China Russia "alliance," the difficulty is that Putin has so very little to
offer.
I can hazard a guess to answer your final question. I think corruption is probably the main
reason. Those involved in this are mostly interested in self-enrichment through the
gullibility of their societies. I don't think the stenographers and the hot-heads neo liberals
pushing for a show-down with Russia are intent on committing suicide by igniting a hot war
with Russia, but they hope that Moscow could be intimidated and surrender eventually. As you
rightly said, it is a pipe dream of course, but they get paid heavily for the hot air they
emit.
'As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?'
The endpoint is quite clear: 'Global Governance, by Global Institutions under control of
the 'Globalists' (i.e. the Davos crowd).' For this, the 'Globalists' must subdue Russia.
Russia is not only blocking the 'Globalist's' plans in its own right, but, since 2013, it
has been protecting other nations from falling prey to 'Globalist' colonization (Syria,
Eastern Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela, Libya, Belarus, etc.). And Russia is the lynch-pin to
enable the 'Globalists' to corner China.
In addition, together with China, Russia is offering the world an alternative to
'Globalism', a 'Multi-Polar World Order' that is much more attractive than becoming a
'Globalist' vassal.
For the 'Globalists' time has become critical. They are facing revolts in their home
countries (Trump, Brexit, Gilets-Jaunes, etc.). The main source of their geo-political power,
(since they can no longer challenge Russia and China militarily) the U.S. dollar, is on the
verge of collapse as the World's reserve currency. And the economic growth of China means
that China has become the most important trading partner for most of the World's nations.
The window of opportunity for the 'Globalists' to create their 'Global Governance' system
may have already closed. But, as usual, the losers of any war are usually the last to know.
The desperation with which the 'Globalists' are fighting their last battles, against Trump,
against Russia, against Brexit, is testimony to the fact that for the 'Globalists' losing
this war means their extinction as a ruling elite.
c'mon steve.... what is the usa offering
turkey here?? they could give a rats ass about turkey, or any other country in the middle
east, excluding their 24/7 darling israel... the usa presence on the world stage is meant to
sabotage any and all who don't bow down to the exceptional nations philosophy of 'might makes
right'... the obvious benefits of russia-china synergy are apparent to both countries and
they continue to capitalize on this, in spite of what you read in the usa msm.. russia as a
lot to offer china... the fact that the nation apparently masquerading as a gas station has
so much to offer is also the reason that all the pillage of the 90's hasn't turned out the
way the harvard boys had envisioned... that you can't see the vast wealth and value of russia
has nothing to do with the reality on the ground... keep the blinders on, lol...
The EU's attitude to the US is much like its attitude to Britain and Brexit. They don't want
to split with the US, because, after all, there might be war, and NATO would be needed, but
it's becoming increasingly less likely. In the same way, they would have preferred to stay in
good relations with Britain, until Britain insisted on a hostile Brexit. Basic interests come
first, and that will also be the case in the future with the US.
Russia and China are already de-facto alliance. Militarily they cooperate at every level
and will soon extend shared anti ballistic shield over China too. It is clear to any outside
enemy (except for most retarded ones) that nuclear attack on one will be treated as attack on
both of them. Not having formal alliance is somewhat an advantage (eg. limited attack on one
of them by enemy that can be easily handled will not complicate situation) as it controls
escalation. Lack of escalation control led to WW1 so...
Apart for military, Russia is one of rare fully self sufficient countries in the world.
Having vast natural resources and territory, knowledge and industrial capacity to built
EVERYTHING they need, they can afford to be sanctioned by whole world and close borders
completely if needed. Having 100% secure land borders with China and already huge (and
increasing) trade, including oil & gas, only make Russia's self sufficiency even more
stable. It also strategically benefits China, as its main weakness is lack of those same
resources Russia has in abundance and is willing to share.
So, if sh*t hits the fan, and Russia and China say f*ck it and close borders to rest of
the world (even though China trade profits wouldn't be happy), both countries form self
sufficient symbiosis that can carry on for centuries.
Which brings me to all those little fires US is starting in Russia's neighborhood. They
don't matter. Unlike USSR, Russia's mission is self preservation only, not changing whole
world into communist utopia (even though @VK here repeatedly fails to acknowledge it). And
survive it will. All it needs is to wait few generations.
Unlike Russia, collective west is going down the drain. Soon enough, all those Slav hating
in Bundestag, UK parlament and elsewhere will have more urgent problem of Islamic head
choppers that became majority in their countries, while US will have problem to recruit
enough men,women and "others" from pool of rainbow colored too-fat and unfit, godless faggot
from broken family snowflakes.
As China has been mentioned, I think it is worth saying that although I have full confidence
that Putin will maintain his usual good sense in international conflicts, I have more doubts
about the Chinese regime. I don't really understand their policy, which is becoming more
nationalistic and edgy. I don't see why. They have great economic success; they should be
more relaxed, but they aren't. The first signs came with their attitude towards the Muslims
in China. One, the concentration camps in Xinjiang - in that case the Uyghur jihadists in Syria
must have provoked anxiety in Beijing. But also increasing pressure on the Hui Muslims in
central China (who are native Han) to become more "national". Some years ago they weren't
bothered. Now they are.
This suggests that the question of Taiwan could blow up, apart from HongKong. They are
less tolerant in Beijing.
It is about driving a wedge between Europe and Russia. The nightmare scenario for the
Anglo-Americans is a Germany-Russia-China triangle. If that happens it is game
over!
It is a tired and false concept. There cannot be a "triangle" which includes Germany, due
to Germany's increasingly diminishing status. Moreover, Russians do not view Europe as a
viable part of Russia's future--the cultural gap is gigantic and continues to grow--the only
place of Europe in general, and Germany in particular, in Russian plans is that of a market
for Russia's hydrocarbons and other exports. A rather successful program of
export-substitution in Russia in the last 6 years dropped technological importance of Germany
for Russia dramatically. In some fields, such as high-power turbines made Germany irrelevant,
as Siemens learned the hard way recently.
"U.S. and its EU puppies have ratcheted up their pressure...
The 'rules of the liberal international order' are of course whatever the U.S. claims they
are. They may change at any moment and without notice to whatever new rules are the most
convenient for U.S. foreign policy."
Outstanding assessment and thank you for addressing it.
As I've said numerous times -- Fuck the US Empire and it's minion bitches. Jesse Ventura
commented this past week that EVERY US Incumbent politician should be voted out of office
this election. 99% of them are scum.
Every politician, corporate CEO Banker and Media whore, Judge, CIA filth should have a
pitchfork held to their throat and be tried for treason and war crimes. MIC/Pentagon should
be destroyed. Majority of Americans are propagandized dumbfucks. Sounds a bit like an
American Cultural Revolution is exactly the medicine.
There will come a day for reckoning and true justice, hopefully it is sooner than later.
There should be no mercy. For those committing their treasonous crimes, they know better but
have chosen poorly, they should be broken.
Russia, Putin and Lavrov have remained the adults in the room while the Empire Brats
tantrum themselves.
Anyone else notice that the Anti-Russia rhetoric increased after Snowden was trapped in
Russia?
I agree with Ike and others who think the US money situation is the problem. But I also
think that the underlying endpoint is hyperinflation, not just the loss of the dollars'
"reserve status." Hyperinflation is when so much "money" has been produced that it no longer
has any value and the Central Bank cannot control what comes next.
There is a point at which people want to get rid of dollars and panic buy or "invest" in
assets, or anything solid or simply anything (Gold, land etc. bread) At which time the money
they want to get rid of looses value continuously, as others don't want it either. A Rush for
the exits happens.
Who has the MOST money - the Rich and the sovereign Nations? (Althought the latter may
also be in the same situation as the US.) Russia has more or less got rid of all it's US
holdings. The Chinese must be alarmed by the thought of the Fed issuing ONLY new-digicoins,
and then the US simply refusing to pay debts to the Chinese at some future point. They might
want out now. Not so much dumping everything but a steady reduction of US denominated
"assets" or reserves.
Most of this becomes self-sustaining panic, as happened in the Weimar Rep. What can be
considered "assets" to grab? ie Russia, minerals and it's Gold, China and its Gold. Then the
choice might be to invest in the US military and use it while there is a residue of belief in
the Dollar.
The only thing about a panic exit is that it happens very quickly. About a month or two
between when the first bright sparks try to get out and when everyone else tries to grab part
of a rapidly restricted choice of things to buy with an unending pile of "empty" dollars.
Germany should've been conquered by the Soviet Union entirely as it was won with Soviet,
largely Russian, blood. Germany is increasingly irrelevant to Russia's needs now as Martyanov
points out above. Germany's existence today should be that of a Russian oblast, same with
Eastern Ukraine from Kharkiv to Mariupol and Belarus.
Ask yourself what Germany produces that Russia can't produce for itself with import
substitution schemes or similar schemes within a 10 year period. Russia's GDP by PPP is the
size of Germany's already and depending on how it deals with the impact of COVID, may
continue an upward year-on-year growth trend (People's Republic of China is the only major
economy forecast to expand in fiscal quarter this year). The fact of the matter is that
Russia's population is much larger, its industrial base, at least in heavy industry, is
nearly self sufficient (not much light industry to speak of) and Germany depends on Russian
oil and gas to keep its lights on. Russia can carry on without Germany just fine. There may
be a noticeable impact now if Russia were cornered into doing that, but it's nothing that
can't be overcome in short order.
Thank you, b, and before reading comments, I will give my take on your last question:
As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?
The whole 'rules based order' became very clear when the Trans Pacific Partnership, TPP,
was being debated,and what happened then is what many have noted, the 'rules' were all to
advantage the US. So, you might say that was the beginning of the end for the oligarchy. And
the partnership reformed after it had taken out that problem, to be fair to all participants.
All the oligarchy can do is keep on keeping on until it can't. This is really about survival
for that class of individuals who intend to keep on being in charge here in the US and
wherever its tentacles have reached. The only endpoint they see is their continuance. And I
suppose their fear is that it is simply not possible for that to be the case.
Hopefully there will just come a point where, as in Plato's Republic, the dialogue simply
moves on. There, it begins in the home of the ancient one, Cephalus, with a polite
discussion, and the old man says his piece, to which Socrates responds:
"What you say is very fine indeed, Cephalus...but as to this very thing, justice, shall
we so simply assert that it is the truth and giving back what a man has taken from another,
or is to do these very things sometimes just and sometimes unjust? Take this case as an
example of what I mean: everyone would surely say that if a man takes weapons from a friend
when the latter is of sound mind, and the friend demands them back when he is mad, one
shouldn't give back such things, and the man who gives them back would not be just, and
moreover, one should not be willing to tell someone in this state the whole truth."
"What you say is right," he said.
[Allan Bloom translation]
In the dialogue, the old man leaves to 'look after the sacrifices', handing down the
argument to his heir, Polymarchus. To me, Socrates has adroitly caused this to come about in
much the fashion that Lavrov answers his press questioners in the link b provides. That is,
he has done so with diplomacy, and a lesson to his younger companions which perhaps Cephalus
is no longer able to understand. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Yet in your disparaging comments of Europe and Germany in particular you proceed to show
how successful the Anglo-Americans have been in creating a wedge between Europe and Russia
actually validating my original point.
"Keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the US in"
That was the whole point of the first Cold War. It is the whole point of creating a Cold War 2.0. Absolutely nothing has changed.
By whom exactly? US & several euro puppets? Typical racist thinking that Europe and
its former colonies are somehow "the world" or "the international community".
Meanwhile opinion of Russia is positive in India (1,3 billion people, more than the whole
West combined) and China (1,4 billion, more than the whole West combined).
Those who don't spend for their own weapons, spend for their master's weapons (like
europuppets).
Btw your master (US) spends on weapons too. What are you going to do about it?
As was rightly pointed out in that discussion, British foreign policy towards Europe was
to ensure that no single power was to be allowed to achieve hegemony over Europe. The famous
"balance of power"
@ Posted by: Andrei Martyanov | Oct 17 2020 19:41 utc | 36
If the Russian Federation really has an ongoing imports substitution program, then this
explains everything. Germany is an exports-oriented economy. It wants to integrate with the Russian economy in
the sense to keep it as an agrarian-extrativist economy to feed it with cheap commodities to
feed their industry. Germany's ideal Russia is Brazil.
A Russia that also exports high-value commodities (manufactured commodities) is a direct
threat to Germany, as it competes with it directly in the international market. That's the
reason Germany doesn't want the BRI to come to Europe, as Merkel once said: Europe must not
become China's peninsula. China is Germany's main competitor, as it is also a big
manufacturing exporter.
Unlike China, Russia lacks the weight of population and reliance on the globalist capitalist
system to throw around, China will not shut itself up for Russia when it can trade with EU
& Turkey instead.
Russia is increasingly put into weak position, where Russian troops are sent to do the
dying, while the Chinese business whoop in afterwards to get all the juicy business deals. In
other words, Russia does the dying while China enriches itself.
Russia only hope is that it becomes friendly with the EU, otherwise, it is going to be
crushed between two superpowers, the EU and China.
I think the point of the sanctions and all the pressure on Russia is an appeal to Russian
elite, Just a reminder that they are isolated from the rest of the elite and hope that it
would help them throw Russian nationalists from power. I think this might succeed as Putin
did no really take on the new Russian capitalist class, and that will probably be his
undoing.
@vk 36 That's the reason Germany doesn't want the BRI to come to Europe
BRI in Europe - 16 countries:
Austria*, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy,
Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Ukraine
* shaky
SCMP - Aug 17, 2020:
China's rail shipments to Europe set records as demand surges for Chinese goods amid
coronavirus
> July saw 1,232 cargo trains travel from Chinese cities to European destinations –
the most ever in a single month > Once regarded as merely ornamental, freight service along belt and road trade routes has
become increasingly important as exporters turn to railway transport. . .
here
Lavrov, Shoigu and Putin are calm, but the domestic economic situation is not.
While I have noted before that Russia is better positioned to survive low oil prices than
Saudi Arabia - it doesn't mean this is fun.
Couple that with COVID-19 economic losses, and stresses on the domestic Russian economy are
enormous.
Among other signs: after bouncing around in the 60s for some time, the ruble just hit 80 to
the USD. Anecdotally, I am hearing a lot of direct personal accounts of businesses not being
able to pay their people because their own customers aren't paying.
Russia has done relatively little extra to assist with COVID-19 related economic harms, so
this isn't great either.
@ laguerre -- The interview with Pepe Escobar deals with the whole range of issues in the
hybrid war against China, but the information you're looking for Regarding the suppression
and re-education of Muslim terrorists starts just past the 1-hour point.
the Chinese regime. I don't really understand their policy, which is becoming more
nationalistic and edgy.
No, it's become more multi-national and sensible. Take the BRI: Launched in 2013, it was
initially planned to revive ancient Silk Road trade routes between Eurasia and China, but the
scope of the BRI (Belt & Road Initiative) has since extended to cover 138 countries,
including 38 in sub-Saharan Africa and 18 in Latin America and the Caribbean.
they should be more relaxed
China has been an open target for the US, which doesn't even mention China any more (Pompeo)
but dumps on the "CCP" (Chinese Communist Party). China (like Russia) has not responded in
kind.
their attitude towards the Muslims in China
The US State Dept slash CIA has been fomenting terrorism in Xinjiang for years and China has
had to contend with it.
the question of Taiwan could blow up
Taiwan like some other places in the world, including Hong Kong, has been another place where
the US has fomented instability. This has increased recently with Taiwan "president" Tsai
declaring that Taiwan (January this year, BBC interview) is a separate country, which it
isn't. China is being pushed to do his Abe Lincoln thing and save the union.
They are less tolerant in Beijing
Chinese by nature are tolerant, and Beijing has been tolerant in the face of US naval fleets
and bomber visits in their near seas, plus political attacks, sanctions and tariffs.
66 watch what they do and have done and not what they.
Construction started four years ago on enlarging and modernization of the railway marshaling
yards in Duisburg.
The volume of Chinese freight trains arriving daily is already quite amazing and planned to
increase to one every hour next month 24/7.They are not returning empty. The oil and gas
pipeline corridors also had ten plus railway tracks built alongside .Germany is already at the
center of the BRI expansion into Germany and it started four years ago.
@ Posted by: H.Schmatz | Oct 17 2020 21:40 utc | 60
That's why Germany is not full anti-China.
--//--
@ Posted by: Don Bacon | Oct 17 2020 22:12 utc | 66
Just because Germany doesn't want it, it doesn't mean it's not getting.
--//--
@ Posted by: c1ue | Oct 17 2020 22:18 utc | 67
I agree. Capitalism is a dead end for Russia. It's all about when Putin dies. After he dies, it will be a coin flip for Russia: it could
continue its course or it could get another Yeltsin.
Germany being against BRI is news to me. Any proof? And it is very unlikely that China will be able to fool the europeans lile the
american. The EU has regulations and aren't purely about profit.
Perhaps the US only has one script in the playbook: to balkanise, disrupt and foster 5th
columns until their opponent becomes a dysfunctional or failed state. Then send in the
acronyms (IMF etc), establish a provisional administration under trusted local elites but
commandeer resource-rich areas under direct provincial command. That's US imperialism and it
won't stop until they encounter opposition effective enough to resist it. That's why they'll
never forgive Putin for Syria. In the end they want to finish doing to Russia (by other
means...) what the Germans began in '41; and not just Russia, but anywhere their markets are
prevented from calling the shots.
thank you, @72. the chinese learned much from their century of humiliation & clearly one
of the important lessons was trade both ways, rather than take their silver, sell them tea,
silks & porcelain & need nothing they offered.
That's an excellent observation, and a concept I had not encountered before. Thank you.
How consciously China holds that narrative, if at all, I couldn't say.
But it's a great dynamic - kind of like keeping your enemies close. And if the German
increase in reciprocal railroad trade with China is as it was stated up-thread, it would seem
to be working.
@78, thank you, grieved...i've long admired you. in times such as these it can be a challenge
to keep sight of the positive but as china prospers & wishes her trading partners to as
well, & so long as russia continues to strive toward the high road rather than descend to
the barroom floor perhaps we can also learn to rise...i'm reminded of a sufi saying: 'rise in
love do not fall'. may we all.
Do they even think about an endpoint? Is it really on their radar?
Or is this all being done because they are spoilt, and are throwing a tantrum because they
aren't getting their way?
I assume that there are sober heads in the Pentagon that wargame possible "endpoints". If
not sober at the beginning then sober when the results play out to their bitter end.
Or... maybe not. Post-retirement board seats are at stake, dammit! Full steam ahead and
damn the torpedoes!
I'm truly astonished that you don't know the truth of Xinjaing - in sum, that the
concentration camps are a huge lie that can be revealed as such by any satellite, and that
China has developed a progressive and worthy solution to the foreign-provoked terrorism
within its border.
Fortunately, Qiao Collective, a great expert source on China, has recently compiled a
treasure trove of links to know the truth:
Based on a handful of think tank reports and witness testimonies, Western governments
have levied false allegations of genocide and slavery in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
A closer look makes clear that the politicization of China's anti-terrorism policies in
Xinjiang is another front of the U.S.-led hybrid war on China.
This resource compilation provides a starting point for critical inquiry into the
historical context and international response to China's policies in Xinjiang, providing a
counter-perspective to misinformation that abounds in mainstream coverage of the autonomous
region.
Posted by: Andrei Martyanov | Oct 17 2020 19:41 utc | 36
Andrei
A good justification on Russian German transitional relation, and we hope Russia is not
fooled again, by hopes. Those of us who hope for containing and reducing western dominance
over the world affairs, politics and economy, hope that Russians have learned from their
experience of the 90's joining G7, seat at NATO, joining western sanctions on smaller powers,
etc. all those efforts were the carrots thrown at Russia to tame the bear, one would think up
to Georgian war, it worked, that war perhaps woke the bear. Russians felt they are part of
Europe,part of western community of privileged nations (first world) but all that was a decoy
to move the NATO to Russian borders. I hope Russians once for all have learned, as long as
they have a big modern military and plenty of energy resources that is not under the western
(you read US) control they will never be accepted as a "western" country, Ironically, Russia
is the largest European country.
As a strategist you know better than most to circumvent western power and to bring back
the rule of international law, it would be impossible without having the Russian defensive
political and military power (as in Syria) on the side of resistance. We just hope you are
right Russia, will not be bought out again. IMO as you say, is just impossible for Germany,
or even France to decouple from the US grip on europe.
Seems to me its been terribly effective.
Russian economy pretty weak heavily reliant on raw materials, fracturing at the periphery.
China and Russia seem less than alies.
Seems US has Germany, France by the short hairs.
US had to bail them out in 2009.
Europe is having some problems with solvency and cohesion - whats a bureaucrat to do?
Its not really about the sovereigns, that's only for appearances.
@ 77
The Century of Humiliation from 1842 to 1949 and the contemporary discourse around it are a
driving narrative of contemporary Chinese history, foreign policy, and militarization of its
surrounding regions like the South China Sea. The expansion of the Chinese navy in numbers,
mission, and aggression is directly fueled by China's previous weakness and exploitation at
the hands of western nations. . . .
here
The US economy is definitely in trouble, but the US has spent roughly $2 trillion this year
to help its economy = a bit under 10% of 2019 GDP.
The difference is structural. The US economy is a service one - and lockdowns are literally
the best way to damage it.
The Russian economy is still heavily dependent on natural gas and oil sales. Despite the
initial devaluation, ongoing low oil prices plus increasing competition in natural gas (for
example, Azerbaijan is now selling natural gas to Italy) is hurting its economy.
Nor has Russia spent much to compensate for COVID-19 losses beyond its existing health and
social safety nets - the Russian plan was $73B / 5 trillion rubles = 4.3% of 2019 GDP.
I am anti-war and I am an anti-war crimes liberal (examples of war crimes: ethnic cleansing,
proof of genocide, torture, collective punishment via deprivation and occupation of
dispossessed land). Yet, I am also a non-interventionist except in extreme circumstances but
I am against regime change for the sake of neutralizing competing powers or converting them
religiously or politically.
All this implies exercising the highest integrity and blocking out all external influence
and pressure if one is a true liberal, and relying solely on conscience and wisdom.
Therefore, I don't like the term liberal sullied and usurped by fake liberals,
neoliberals and Zionist liberals, and I also take offense to the way liberal as a
general term is denigrated in this article.
Germany is an exports-oriented economy. It wants to integrate with the
Russian economy in the sense to keep it as an agrarian-extrativist economy to feed it with
cheap commodities to feed their industry. Germany's ideal Russia is Brazil.
True, it was about 10 years ago. Economic reality, of course, is such that Germany already
beat the record by consecutive 20 months of real economy shrinkage. In general, Germany's
energy policy is suicidal and Russia is increasingly independent from imports.
A lot to be
done in the future yet, of course, but as the whole comedy with high-power turbines and
Siemens demonstrated, Russia can do it on her own, plus General Electric is always there,
sanctions or no sanctions. It is a complicated matter, but it is Germany which increasingly
becomes irrelevant for Russia as an old image of technologically-advanced Germans getting
their hands on Russia's resources and ruling the world--this image is utterly obsolete,
completely false and doesn't correspond to the reality "on the ground".
It is really a simple
thing which many Westerners cannot wrap their brains around, that the country which has a
space program which operates ISS and second fully operational global satellite navigation
constellation, or which produces hypersonic weapons and whose shipbuilding dwarfs that of
Germany will have relatively little troubles in developing other crucial industries and
removing Western interests from those. Simple as that.
@90 Very true. Every time I read someone proclaiming that the Russian economy is no bigger
than Italy's, or Spain's, or ..... (fill in the blanks) I simply think to myself: "This word,
I do not think it means what you think it means".
Because it should be obvious to everyone that Italy can not produce all the things that
Russia produces.
Equally, Spain can not produce all the things that Russia produces.
So if someone has measured "economy" in such a way that the numbers for Russia are the
same as the number for Italy - or Spain - is simply admitting that their economic models are
flawed.
The US and EU attempts to break Russia's independent foreign policy are just stepping stones
to the eventual goal of a breakup Russia itself, never forget Albright's comments in the 90s
about how Siberia shouldn't belong to Russia alone.
Ultimately, though the US and EU nation
states are nothing more than tools of the globalist elite whose dream of a fully economically
integrated world where the power of labour is completely crushed by the power of capital to
move instantly across the planet is already falling apart. The economic elite have already
pillaged all of the minor nations in the world and the two grand prizes, Russia and China are
too powerful to attack directly now. unable to control their unbridled greed they've begone
the process of auto-self cannibalism, destroying their own states (or killing their hosts as
Michael Huddson would say) in order to completely centralize all capital within the 0.1%.
This will make them very rich, however hundreds of millions of Americans, Australians,
Canadians, Japanese and Europeans will be impoverished in order to do this. When this is
eventually realized by the majority of the people in these states, the economic elite will be
lucky if they "just" lose everything but their lives in mass nationalization campaigns. I see
very little evidence that the Russian or Chinese states would be willing to offer safe harbour for the criminal oligarchs of the West, like London has offered to criminal Oligarchs
fleeing justice in Russia
Before posting here monetarist propaganda BS form Western "economic" sources learn to
distinguish monetary expression of product and actual product in terms of quantity and
quality.
Just to demonstrate to you: for $100,000 in a desirable place in the US you will be
able to buy a roach-infested shack in a community known for meth-labs and high crime, for
exactly the same money in Russia you will buy a superb brand-new house in a desirable
location.
To demonstrate even more, for a price of a single Columbia-class SSBN ($8 billion+)
which does not exist other than on paper yet, Russia financed and produced her 8-hulls state
of the strategic missile submarines.
UK economy is dwarfed by Russia even in accordance by
IMF and World Bank, in fact, it is, once one excludes still relevant RR and few other
manufacturers, is down right third world economy. I am not going to post here all data from
IMF, but even this can explain why you posted a BS. Anyone "counting" real economic sector in
USD and Nominal GDP has to have head examined and is probably dumbed down through "economics"
programs in Western madrasas, aka universities.
In related news, learn what Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) is and check
energy consumption and production of Germany and Russia, just for shits and giggles.
And of course, Martyanov @96 is absolutely correct - the relative values of currencies are
proved to be nothing more than the entries of bookkeepers and bankers, all "sound and fury,
signifying nothing." What matters is what the home unit of currency will buy at home.
A better question is as Andrei suggests, what does it cost for Russia to produce something
that works, as opposed to what it costs the US to produce something that doesn't work because
of theft and cost inflation in the delivery chain?
The ultimate - MAD - question that the US should ask itself is this: How much does it
cost Russia to destroy the US, compared with the cost involved for the US to destroy
Russia?
~~
The cost of living is higher in the US. The cost of doing anything is higher. But none of
that means the quality of the result is greater - I certainly don't hear anyone lately saying
the living is good, compared to what people pay for it.
Were it not for the nerves of steel of Mr. Putin and his close advisers, the
irresponsible pressure policies outlined above could result in aggressive behavior and risk
taking by Russia that would make the Cuban missile crisis look like child's play.
We may yet see a Cuban missile crisis scenario but it looks more likely to be caused by arms
sales to Taiwan than conflict in the Caucasus.
I also think its naive to see these as "fires burning at Russia's borders" instead of as
deliberately set bear traps . Azerbaijan is in a strategic location between Russia and
Iran and the conflict with Armenia comes just before Russia is about to sell advanced weapons
to Iran.
Much of importance is emanating from Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs via Lavrov and
Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. As reported by TASS :
"The statement made by German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, in which he said that the
situation around Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny does not form part of
Russian-Germany bilateral agenda is a ploy to hide Berlin's course to destroy relations with
Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said during Thursday's
briefing.
"'We consider such statements as some tactical ploy that serves to hide Germany's course
for destruction of bilateral ties. I would like to remind you that it was Berlin that used
this situation to put forward unfounded accusations, ultimatums and threats against our
country, openly disregarding its own international legal obligations on providing practical
aid to Russia in the investigation of the incident with the Russian citizen. Once again, it
is acting as the locomotive of new anti-Russian sanctions within the EU and other
multilateral structures,' Zakharova pointed out."
That followed on the heels of yesterday's activities involving FM Lavrov. I previously
linked to Lavrov's interview with several Russian radio stations, and to that I add
the joint presser following his session with Italy's FM:
"Question: In response to the European sanctions, which I believe will follow in the wake
of the 'Navalny case,' you said yesterday that Russia will have to suspend its contacts with
European foreign ministers. Does this mean that today's meeting with Luigi Di Maio may be the
last with an EU foreign minister?
"Sergey Lavrov: The EU is increasingly replacing the art of diplomacy with sanctions.
Clearly, the bad example of the United States is contagious. We see this not just as a bad
example by the Americans, but also as a result of direct US pressure on its European allies
and colleagues. Indeed, what we are saying now is that we want to understand what the EU is
trying to accomplish. But this EU policy will not remain without consequences....
"With this EU approach in mind, where it completely ignores the real state of affairs
regarding the implementation of the Minsk agreements and the fact that they have been blocked
by official Kiev, we cannot disregard the statements coming from Brussels. In particular,
President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said that Russia has adopted a
position that openly undermines EU interests, and that restoring the strategic partnership
between Russia and the EU is out of the question before Russia changes its behaviour. I have
already covered the Ukraine crisis, which is one of the key crises now, as it unfolds, and
who precisely is blocking the implementation of the peace agreements.
"We are seeing similarly unfounded accusations in the case of Mr Navalny, which you
mentioned. We hear our partners say that establishing the facts is of paramount importance.
The trouble is that the facts concerning Mr Navalny's time in Russia, on a Russian plane and
in the Omsk hospital are well known and have been established by us inasmuch as we could,
since several people involved in this incident have fled to Great Britain and Germany, and we
do not know of their whereabouts. We are asking to be granted access to these people, but no
constructive response is coming our way. We do not have the necessary facts. The West has
them, but we are denied access to them. Yesterday, during a conversation with EU High
Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, and today during talks
with Luigi Di Maio, we heard a reiteration of the need to establish the facts. First off, the
other side has no facts. Second, as we know, during a Monday meeting of the EU Foreign
Affairs Council, the participants discussed the need for imposing sanctions, but Mr
Borrell assured me that before such a decision can be made, it is imperative to study the
facts that Germany and France promised to provide as part of a certain technical group that
is now being created . We very much hope that these facts will be presented not only to a
narrow group of European countries, but also directly to the party that is being, without
proof, accused of all conceivable sins and crimes." [My Emphasis]
Today sanctions were applied without the promised examination of the facts. As reported by TASS , a partial
response was made by Zakharova:
"'We call on the German foreign minister to refrain from interfering in domestic affairs
of our union nation, either in word or in deed. We are convinced that the Belarusians need no
instructions either from Berlin or any other capital city to reach accord on socially
important matters they are concerned about,' she said. 'Aggressive interventions of the
collective West in the internal political processes in third countries only entail the
emergence of more crisis foci on the global map.'"
Thanks for posting russian official reactions to recent geopolitical issues with the EU,
so that people can understand what is happening. And what is happening is that the EU has
defined itself as enemy of Russia. Something many people could not believe it is
happening.
In connection with that, i will repost a discussion of mine from another place.
Me: "Anyone who was talking about "independent EU", or "russian-german alliance", "EU
rebellion against US", "Europe joining Russia and China", "European Army independent from
NATO" has shit for brains and does not understand politics at all, no matter what his name or
education or job was."
Commenter: "By this token, does it mean Patrick Lawrence has "sh*t for brains" for writing
this piece? (About Europe allegedly moving closer to Russia in recent days)
Me: "I actually saw that article of him before several days and i wondered whether to make
a comment on that too, as an example of an "analyst" who does not understand at all what is
happening.
Point 1: Nord Stream 2. He fails to understand that this is not a divorce with the US,
rather an old german policy to buy russian energy. For example Germany approved pipelines
from the USSR over Reagan's objections in the 80s. Did that mean that Germany was not hostile
to the Soviet Union? Was not part of the Western block? No. It was a part of NATO containment
strategies against the USSR and hoped to take over Eastern Europe after the USSR loses the
Cold War.
Not to mention that there is talk that the pipeline will only be used at half
capacity.
The fact that someone (Europe) likes money does not mean that that same someone does not
secretly hate you, and will not stab you in the back as soon as it is safe to do so.
Point 2: more and more evidence emerges that Germany organised the Novichok incident with
Navalny (see John Helmer on that).
Point 3 - failed to understand that it was Germany who pushed for sanctions on Russia
after the Ukraine affair. Not to mention that Germany was involved in the anti-russian coup
in Ukraine, as part of its old strategy of "drang nach osten" - "pressure to the east" - to
take over Eastern Europe and its labor pool and use it the way the US uses Latin America.
Point 4 - failed to understand that the biggest force behind the colour revolution in
Belarus was the EU, playing far bigger role than the US. Now, who tries to take over a
russian populated country, near Moscow, histrorically part of the Russian Empire, where
millions of russians died to stop the german invasion, a situation that will also seriously
imperil the Kaliningrad enclave? Only someone who is hostile to Russia. This is a strategic
act of hostility towards Russia.
Point 5 - failed to notice that France and Sweden recently put sanctions on aviation and
industrial equipment for Russia.
Point 6 - is not aware that anti-chinese hatred in Europe has increased to all time highs,
according to recent surveys.
Point 7 - mentions several empty statements from Merkel and Macron as a sign of
"rebellion" without mentioning many other statements countering that - such as France and
Germany saying that Russia should not be allowed back in G-7, or that Borrell (EU foreign
policy chief) called Russia an old enemy of Europe, or that the french EU minister recently
called on Europe to unite against Russia, or that the EU comission chief called for Europe to
stand up to Russia, or that the European Parliament called the russian constitution "illegal"
and called for the "democratisation of Russia" (aka colour revolution), or Germany stating
recently that no european army independent from NATO is possible or will be supported by
Germany, or the 5 german parties that begged the US not to withdraw troops from Germany.
Point 8 - has no idea of recent official russian statements on the EU, meaning that he
lives in an alternate Universe.
"France and Germany are now leading the anti-russian block within Europe".
"There will be no more business as usual between Russia and France and Germany".
"Russia will not follow EU and US rules".
"Russia will no longer be dependent on the EU".
"Europeans have delusions of grandeur".
"Those people in the West who are responsible for foreign policy and do not understand the
necessity of mutually respectable conversation--well, we must simply stop for a while
communicate with them. Especially since Ursula von der Leyen states that geopolitical
partnership with current Russia's leadership is impossible. If this is the way they want it,
so be it. "
These are all statements by Lavrov and Zacharova.
So Lawrence does not even understand that there is a decoupling between Russia and EU
taking place, and worsening of relations, instead of them getting closer, as he dreams in the
daylight.
Analysts who understood the hostility of the EU towards Russia are M. K. Bhadrakumar and
Alastair Crooke, and they wrote plenty on that recently."
One part is particularly worth keeping in mind and that is the physical condition of
Navalny before leaving for Germany is known to the Russians. Note the alchohol and the
massive internal formation of acetone in the body
Acute metabolic disorder....
- - - -
(repeat of my post on the last open thread. No. 333)
In the meantime in Omsk, where two days of blood, urine and other biomarkers were recorded
for Navalny, Alexander Sabaev issued a report on Navalny's prior medical conditions and his
biomarkers after the alleged poisoning. Sabaev is head of the acute poisoning department of
the Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1, chief toxicologist of the Omsk region and of the Siberian
Federal District.
According to Sabaev, Navalny's blood levels were "six times higher than the norm for
amylase, sugar and serum lactate; twice the normal level of leukocytosis, and the maximum
level of acetonuria. In addition, alcohol (0.2 ppm) was found in the urine ...These are the
metabolites, the substances which have been produced. These substances in large quantities
cause pathological changes." According to Sabaev, "Navalny did not suffer from diabetes, so
the tests showed that he had an acute metabolic disorder. 'An increase in the level of
lactate and lactic acid, its excessive formation makes acidification of the blood. It should
not be in such a quantity. There should be an indicator, let's say of 2; but we had an
indicator of 12, that is six times more,' he said. According to the doctor, the level of
internal acetone in Navalny's body was at maximum... Normally, acetone should be negative;
that is, it should be excreted from the body, the specialist added. 'In this case, the
carbohydrate metabolism suffered and completely different scenarios of development occurred.
The body began to destroy itself from the inside."
_________
The Germans are being trained to transport US nukes in the newest NATO exercise called
"steadfast moon". I wonder what is really going on and if the total lockdown is in
expectation to the programmed start to a False-flag.
(Striking Syria because of the upcoming White helmets chlorine FF, or somewhere else?)
Alex Gibney's new, four-hour documentary on election meddling does little to seek the facts,
and descends into conspiracy. Vladimir Putin meddles in the 2016 election.
(By Willrow Hood/Shutterstock)
With the U.S. presidential election only several weeks away, the specter of Russian election
interference has again become a mainstay media topic. Four years removed from the 2016
election, researchers and politicians are still trying to make sense of what happened: what
exactly did the Russians do, and what lessons are we to draw from it? Filmmaker Alex Gibney --
who is enjoying a rising profile with his hotly anticipated COVID-19 documentary Totally
Under Control -- has applied himself to these questions with a freshly released deepdive
into Russian election meddling.
Agents of Chaos is an epic-length documentary, spanning four hours across two
episodes, released last month on HBO. The first episode opens with a prelude of sorts. To
explain the roots of Russian information warfare, Gibney walks us through the 2014 Euromaidan
Revolution in Ukraine, Russia's subsequent annexation of Crimea, and the outbreak of the
ongoing Donbass War. The Ukrainian conflict, claims Gibney, was the stomping ground for a
nascent industry of Russian internet trolls looking to smear the new government in Kiev as
'fascists' and 'neo-nazis.'
The Ukraine tie-in is thought-provoking, but altogether unsatisfying in its execution. For
one, the strategic circumstances are not at all the same. The film is anchored around the idea
that Russia wants to sow chaos, but the Kremlin's approach to Ukraine was guided by concrete
policy goals that involved supporting specific politicians and parties. It is also comically
shortsighted to claim that Russian internet trolls sought to "drive a wedge" between eastern
and western Ukraine, when the country's two halves are already separated by centuries of
Imperial
history and the bitter legacy of two world wars. To the
extent that Russian trolls were "targeting" eastern Ukrainians, they were already speaking to
an overwhelmingly pro-Russian and anti-Maidan audience. None of this bears any resemblance to
the trolls' activities in America. Without so much as an attempt to square these circles, the
Ukraine analogy feels contrived.
Drawing on the help of cybersecurity researcher Camille François and several Russians
with first-hand knowledge, Gibney proceeds to outline the Russian internet trolling operation.
Almost all of the work was done from the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a chaste office on the
outskirts of St. Petersburg. The film tells us little that we don't already know from the
Mueller investigation and Senate intelligence committee report: there was a concerted effort by
certain Russian nationals to impersonate American activists, political groups, and media
outlets for the purpose of undermining "Americans' trust in democratic institutions." The goal
was not necessarily to elect Donald Trump, but to strain the American political system by
facilitating conflict between polarized factions.
But how much did the Kremlin know of, and to what extent did they endorse, the IRA's
activities? Agents of Chaos provides no substantive answers. The film's only evidence of
a link between the IRA and the Kremlin is that the former received funding from Yevgeny
Prigozhin, a major Russian businessman with ties to Vladimir Putin. Not only is there no proof
that the IRA coordinated directly with any Russian government agency, but it's not even clear
to what extent Prigozhin himself oversaw the IRA's agenda. Gibney admits as much, but claims
it's all part of a plausible deniability ploy: Putin shields himself by delegating unsavory,
extra-legal tasks to private cronies who technically don't work for him. This is probably true
in a general sense, but it doesn't get us any closer to understanding the level on which
specific decisions to interfere in U.S. politics were made.
A similar problem emerges in Gibney's discussion of Fancy Bear, a Russian cyber espionage
group. Gibney proceeds on the assumption that Fancy Bear is the hacking arm of Russian military
intelligence (GRU), which itself has not been conclusively established with publicly verifiable
information. Gibney posits that Fancy Bear's American activities were conducted with blessing
from the Kremlin, an even more flimsy assumption. A responsible analysis of Russian election
interference has to grapple with countless nuances: were the actual hacks conducted by GRU
personnel, or contractors? Was there an order to target the DNC, or did an overeager operator
make a unilateral decision? If the former, on what level was the order given? Who set Fancy
Bear's agenda, and how closely did they stick to said agenda? Was the Kremlin truly interested
in destroying American institutions, or was it perhaps driven by the more pragmatic goal of
signaling its cyber capabilities to Washington as a deterrent against future American meddling
in Russian politics?
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To truly understand what the Russians did, we have to understand how and by whom the orders
were given, how they trickled down the chain of command, and how closely they were followed by
field operators. You have to understand institutional forces, like the longstanding rivalry
between the GRU and SVR that could lead the former to take unsanctioned risks. You also have to
consider that, as with any Caesarist system,
Putin's many subordinates sometimes take the initiative in doing things to please him that he
himself would never have approved of.
Gibney jettisons all these complexities, instead resigning himself to a convenient
abstraction: the "Russians" did it. And who are the "Russians?" Well, it all boils down to the
guy in charge. This conceit of an omnipresent leader is simply not a realistic view of how any
political system, let alone Putin's Russia, operates, but it is all too often used by
journalists and politicians as a substitute for serious Russia analysis.
The rest of the film is a fairly linear exploration of the major milestones in the Russian
meddling saga: the Assange-DNC imbroglio, the FBI counterintelligence investigation into the
Trump campaign, and a précis of Trump's questionable contacts with Russians. It is here
that the film's editorial stance is fully laid bare: the Obama administration and U.S.
intelligence community are portrayed as patriots doing their best to foil a foreign plot on
American soil -- their only mistake is not going far enough in prosecuting the Trump campaign
(and, in Comey's case, having the gall to announce an investigation into Hillary's use of
private email servers).
Trump and the Trump campaign, meanwhile, are de facto -- if not de de jure -- traitors who
colluded with a foreign government to win the election. Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew
McCabe was given a sympathetic platform to dismiss serious objections to the FBI's behavior,
especially concerning the FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign associate Carter Page. McCabe
was not asked to comment on FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded
guilty to submitting falsified documents to renew a surveillance warrant against Page.
Page, meanwhile, was maligned as an eccentric stooge too "unsophisticated" to realize that he
was being used by his "Russian spy handlers" to establish a backchannel with the Trump
campaign.
The film offers an uncritical platform to some of the more outrageous Trump-Russia
conspiracies that even the mainstream news networks were reluctant to publish, including the
notion that the Kremlin wanted to use Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort as an intermediary to
secure a deal with a potential Trump administration for the partition of Ukraine.
Gibney proceeds to recount all the stations of the cross of the Russiagate narrative; these
include the Trump Tower meeting, Trump's infamous request for Russians to hack Hillary Clinton,
alleged Russian efforts to suppress the black vote, and alleged coordination between wikileaks
and the Trump campaign. That part of the film feels less like a critical-minded documentary and
more like a heartfelt homage to the old 'stab in the back' theory of the 2016 election --
namely, the idea that Clinton never really lost, but was instead betrayed by fellow Americans
who conspired against her with a hostile foreign power.
Agents of Chaos was branded as a fresh look at Russian election interference, cutting
past the fog surrounding intelligence work to uncover the truth of what really happened in
2016. What we got instead was a summa of Russiagate's greatest hits, packaged and
presented with all the slick polish that can be expected from an award-winning filmmaker.
"National security," concludes Gibney in his closing narration, "isn't just about our
enemies. It's also about us. National security starts at home, with our own resilience, our own
politics, and the honor of our leaders." I commend these words without reserve. Nevertheless,
there is room for a nuanced discussion about Russian interference in 2016 and what can be done
to deter foreign meddling in the future. Whether or not Agents of Chaos adds anything of
value to that discussion is a rather different matter.
If the film offers any unique strain of thinking, it lies in Gibney's poignant observation
that Russian interference only worked to the extent that it did because we are needlessly
vulnerable to such incursions. Any foreign agent working to destabilize American society would
find no shortage of socio-political faultlines to exploit, of bitter resentments to manipulate.
The Russians didn't do that -- we did that to ourselves. Mending our torn social fabric is, in
this sense, one of the foremost national security challenges of our time.
Mark Episkopos writes on defense and international relations issues. He is also a PhD
student in History at American University .
What we , the general public know , is that Manafort would not disclose all of what he
did with the Russians. We know that he was deeply indebted to them. That he was fearful for
the safety of his family. And ultimately fell on his sword, rather than come clean.
He did not do it to save Trump. Trump did not understand That Manafort was more evil
than he was. Stone got to Trump to hire Manafort. Manafort was the best source for the
interference. He got deep into the politics of the Russians and others.
Trump was just a stooge. Carter,et al were wannabes. Flynn was corrupt, but wanted to be
a powerful player on the national scene. He like everyone else in Trump's orbit , played
Trump. The Russian thing got out of control because of Session's misstatements. If he had
conducted the investigation, the whole Russia gate would have been buried.
The interference was simply the clever use of social media.. and the gullibility of too
many ordinary citizens. Who wanted to think that they knew the secret. Never minding that
there were no secrets.
Just ordinary politicians, their handlers, the misfits and a few savvy operatives that
took advantage of the simpleton in the oval office. How we could have elected Trump is the
disgrace of the matter. We did this because the citizenry hated Clinton more than we
understood. Pretty simple.
Facebook pages are easy to monetize when large enough. IRA was a profitable company
using that business model, mostly on Russian social network VK.
"... IRA's Facebook spending between 2015 and 2017 at just $73,711.
Russian-linked accounts spent $4,700 on [Google] platforms in 2016"
Far from proving the Russian threat, it proves the hard work of American domestic
agencies and the media on their own propaganda operation.
I would add that this sort of highly effective professional gaslighting beats any
Stalinist system of propaganda and censorship. I don't know if America can still consider
itself a free country with such top-effort malicious missinformation
The 2016 election debacle is a self-inflicted wound, but the democrats and deep states
elites can't bear to look in the mirror at their own corrupt natures, so they concoct a
Russia straw-man to bear the blame.
The average Joe Shmuck in the street is too stupid to realize he has been conned, so the
elites get away with their appalling conduct.
Careers were made on the basis of this dis-information imbroglio called, Russian
interference. The victors in this information war waged upon the American people by the
stalwart "liberal press," have inflicted damage on the American psyche which is
incalculable.
Sounds like it's an apologia for US intervention in the Ukraine fomenting a coup in
2014. News for Gibney: the coup installed government in the Ukraine was in fact heavily
supported by extreme neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalist factions. That's not Russia-bot
dis-info. I have better things to do with 4 hours of my life.
I know people who fought and died on both sides of the war in Ukraine. Many of those who
fought for the US-backed junta were actual live neonazis. By contrast, my friends who
fought for Donbass are the best people that I know.
Now I have learned that this is all Russian propaganda. Whom should I believe? Alex
Gibney or my own lying eyes and ears?
It could only be treason that caused Hilary Clinton not to be acclaimed as Madame
Presidente. Russian mind control rays created the zombie Deplorables who thwarted her
assured victory. Hell Hath No Fury like a Clinton scorned.
This is a simple story. The American empire took advantage of the end of the Cold War by
marching eastward and adding nations to its collection of vassal states. It wanted Ukraine,
but its democratically elected President refused. The Obama team organized coup that led to
much violence, so Russia was blamed. The people of Crimea disliked the turmoil so 94% voted
to rejoin Russia. Russia reannexed Crimea as requested. Russian troops did not invade, they
were already there for a century. More here:
Indeed. Russia built the Crimea. It was an Ottoman backwater before Catherine the Great
and Potemkin began building new cities and ports, and it was only an accident of internal
USSR border manipulations in the '50s that caused it to be part of the Ukraine instead of
Russia after 1991. Russia in 2014 just reclaiming what is rightfully its territory.
"But how much did the Kremlin know of, and to what extent did they endorse, the IRA's
activities?"
You have got to be joking. Every intelligence agency in the world knows that the IRA is
an FSB front organization. Most do not even consider this to be a secret. I conclude that
the author is either willfully blind or himself in Russian pay.
I thought Taxi to the Darkside, by Alex Gibney, was pretty good. From this overview at
any rate, his Russia-gate film sounds very poorly researched -- at best. For goodness
sakes, all you have to do is look at the electoral choices of Ukrainians since their
independence in 1991 to see the stark geographic division in that country, something every
competent political scientist has known since forever. And yet, for Gibney, that stark
east-west division was a fiction created by Russian bots?
"ABC's George Stephanopoulos Fails to Ask Joe Biden About Hunter Biden Emails"
Why do the Republicans go on moaning about media bias?? Are they pathologically naive??
The media are an ideological movement - who run the Democrat party as their political wing.
They don't hide it. They are totally open about it. [Since 2016, they don't even bother with
"polite formalities".]
The Republicans need to adjust themselves to reality...
More than a dozen young visiting scholars from China had their visas abruptly terminated in
a
letter from administration of the University of North Texas (UNT), Denton, on August 26, in
a letter dated August 26! The letter informed the students that they could return to campus
from their lodgings to pick up belongings, but all other access was closed to them. The
students and fellows were
given no explanation . They were left with no legal basis to be in the U.S. and began
scrambling for the very few and very expensive flights back to China.
At first the UNT administration simply stated that all those funded by the Chinese
Scholarship Council (CSC) were terminated. According to Wikipedia , the CSC is the main
Chinese agency for funding Chinese students abroad (currently 65,000 with 26,000 of them in the
US) and an equal number of foreign students in China, some from the US. (Americans interested
in CSC scholarships to study in China can easily find information here . There is nothing secret or nefarious about CSC; the
US has agencies that offer similar aid to scholars.)
The University at last offered an explanation of sorts in a statement by its spokesperson,
the Vice President for Brand Strategy and Communication (VP for BS and C) as
reported on September 10 by the North Texas Daily: "UNT took this action based upon
specific and credible information following detailed briefings from federal and local law
enforcement." The VP for BS and C was "unable" to provide more details. Local police later
denied any role in such briefings. It was the feds who provoked the discharges.
If these young students were doing something illegal or in violation of University rules,
then they should be told what it is and presented with evidence so they could answer such
charges. That is what we in the U.S. claim to believe in. If their crime is simply soaking up
ideas, that is what education is all about and most assuredly that is what science is all
about. If certain areas of research are classified, then scholars working in those areas should
be screened and get classifications. And if the US does not want CSC-sponsored students here,
then reasons should be given and no more visas allowed. None of that has been done. The
students were found guilty of something, they know not what, and dismissed!
Although UNT may not be well known nationally, it is rated
as an
"R1" or top tier research university , one of about 130 institutions falling into that top
category and receiving federal research funding. It is troubling that such action by an
institution in this category and the beneficiary of federal largesse has not drawn more
condemnation for its action. And it is even more troubling that this occurs in an atmosphere of
anti-Chinese hostility in the wake of Covid-19, marked by physical attacks on Chinese
Americans.
Have we forgotten the racism directed against Chinese and codified into federal law the
Chinese Exclusion
act of 1882 , the only U.S. law ever enacted to prevent all members of a specific
ethnic or national group from immigrating to the U.S.? Other such legislation followed, such as
the Immigration Act of 1924 which effectively barred all immigration from Asia, including of
course Chinese. The rationale given by the politicians for all such heinous legislation was
that Chinese were stealing "our jobs". Sound familiar? Notoriously the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882 gave rise to the "Driving Out" period where Chinese were physically attacked to the point
of brutal massacres designed to drive Chinese out of unwelcoming communities, the most infamous
being the Rock Springs and Hells Canyon Massacres.
The anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment has continued down the years in one form or
another but it has had a resurgence recently with the meme that China's prosperity has been at
the expense of Americans. This narrative does not remind us that U.S. corporations and
investors offshore jobs for greater "returns," but claims that Chinese are pilfering our
technology.
Up to 2008,
Chinese were 17% of the total defendants charged under the EEA; from 2009-2015 under Obama this
percentage tripled to 52%. 21% of Chinese were never convicted of espionage, twice the
rate for non-Asians. In roughly half the cases involving Chinese the alleged beneficiary of the
espionage was an American entity; roughly one third had an alleged Chinese beneficiary.
In sum a much higher rate of indictment for Chinese but a lower rate of convictions. So the
additional "attention" given Chinese was not warranted. It seems that something changed after
2009. What was it? This time was the period when Obama's Asian Pivot was put into play. The
Pivot targeted China both militarily by moving 60% of US Naval forces to the Western Pacific
and economically with the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) designed to isolate China from its
neighbors. Is the increased harassment of Chinese under the EEA another aspect of the strategy
expressed openly in the Pivot?
This legal attack on Chinese has continued under the present administration, but the NTU
case adds a new wrinkle. Here there was no legal action, but an action apparently taken by the
University. However, hidden pressure to oust the students came from a federal agency or
agencies. This should be no surprise since it fits in with FBI Director Christopher Wray's
"Whole of Society" approach to confronting China unveiled last February and
reiterated din July when he said, "We're also working more closely than ever with partner
agencies here in the U.S. and our partners abroad. We can't do it on our own; we need a
whole-of-society response. That's why we in the intelligence and law enforcement communities
are working harder than ever to give companies, universities , and the American people
themselves the information they need to make their own informed decisions and protect their
most valuable assets." (Emphasis, jw) It looks like the FBI and or its "partner agencies" gave
UNT officials "the information they needed" to throw out the Chinese students without any
reason given or charge made.
Consider the position of those UNT officials when they found themselves visited by federal
"authorities" and "asked' to cooperate. When the FBI "asks" for cooperation, it is making an
offer that is perilous to refuse. It would take considerable courage to say "no". But that is
precisely what the UNT administrators should have done if they were to live up to the presumed
values and ideals of our society and universities. The question also arises as to how many
other universities have been approached to take similar steps. It seems unlikely that UNT is
alone. But it is very likely that other Universities, wealthier and with a bevy of VP's for BS
and C, might have handled the whole matter in a discrete way and in a way that makes it appear
that such suspensions are not a wholesale matter. Perhaps other more "polished" university
authorities would not own up to the dirty deeds but keep them as secret as possible.
Let us take it a step further. What if you were approached by one of these federal agents
and "requested" to keep an eye on a Chinese colleague, friend, neighbor or co-worker. Would you
have the courage to refuse? And as the confrontation with China heats up, a peace movement is
arising to counter it. In fact, anti-interventionists are popping up across the spectrum on
left and right to oppose policies that take us on the road to war with China. Will the peace
advocates be targeted in the same way, on the sly as well as within a "legal" framework by the
FBI and other federal agencies? And will the precedent established in cases like the UNT case
make such federal actions more acceptable? Will those working for peace be labeled as puppets
of Xi?
"First they came for the Chinese," it might be said. And in the future, under the "Whole of
Society" approach, they may come for anyone who chooses to work for peace with China rather
than take a path to war. Anti-Chinese racism, repugnant in and of itself, is also one part of
setting the stage for a new and more dangerous McCarthyism. It is time to stop the madness
before it devours us all.
C-SPAN has suspended anti-Trump debate moderator Steve Scully indefinitely after he admitted
to lying about his Twitter feed being hacked following an awkward incident in which he appeared
to accidentally tweet an intended private message to former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci.
According to
AP , Scully's suspension comes on the day he was set to moderate the now-canceled second
presidential debate , which was to be 'a career highlight for the 30-year C-SPAN veteran' (and
former Biden staffer).
After Scully tweeted "@Scaramucci should I respond to Trump," Frank Fahrenkopf, co-chairman
for the Commission on Presidential Debates relayed Scully's lie that his Twitter account was
hacked . C-SPAN similarly issued a statement , confidently claiming "Steve Scully did not
originate the tweet and believes his account has been hacked."
Shortly after
Scully's 'hack' lie was peddled across the MSM by prominent voices, former Hillary Clinton
staffer Yashar Ali noted that the C-SPAN veteran had previously blamed hacks twice before .
Scully said that when he saw his tweet had created a controversy, " I falsely claimed that
my Twitter account had been hacked. "
He had been frustrated by Trump's comments and several weeks of criticism on social media
and conservative news outlets about his role as moderator, including attacks directed at his
family, he said.
" These were both errors in judgement for which I am totally responsible for," Scully
said. "I apologize. "
Scully acknowledged that he let his C-SPAN colleagues down, along with fellow news
professionals and the debate commission.
"I ask for their forgiveness as I try to move forward in a moment of reflection and
disappointment in myself," he added.
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C-SPAN, meanwhile, said: "He understands that he made a serious mistake," adding "We were
very saddened by this news and do not condone his actions."
In any event, who on the Trump team let this happen in the first place? Scully's anti-Trump
bias has been known for some time.
I'll join the chorus calling New York Times columnist Bret Stephens "brave" for last week's
takedown of his
newspaper's "1619 Project." But I'd also like to ask him: What took you so long?
The 100-page collection of 18 articles that infamously claimed America's "true founding"
date is not 1776, but 1619 – the year enslaved Africans were first brought to these
shores – has received withering criticism since it was published
in August 2019 .
Ten months ago some of the nation's leading historians – including Pulitzer
Prize winners Gordon Wood and James McPherson –
wrote the Times to challenge a wide array of its claims, which the newspaper and its
partner, The Pulitzer Center, were disseminating free of charge
in the nation's classrooms . The historians were especially troubled by its assertion that
the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery and the project's near total erasure of
the contributions of whites to dismantling slavery and working for freedom. Their letter
described these failings as "a displacement of historical understanding by ideology."
Their criticisms were
echoed and extended by others including
Leslie M. Harris, an African American professor of history at Northwestern University, who said
she "vigorously disputed" some central claims of the project when she helped fact-check it
before publication. "Despite my advice," she
wrote in Politico seven months ago , "the Times published the incorrect statement about the
American Revolution anyway."
Stephens' sharply written broadside breaks no new ground. What it does provide is a skillful
synthesis and endorsement of these voluminous critiques in the Times – by a Timesman.
That is significant. But his decision to write the essay so long after the project's mistruths
have been laid bare – and months after it was honored with a George Polk Award and a
Pulitzer Prize – suggests more rot at the Gray Lady and in American journalism.
As Stephens (pictured) himself suggests, the precipitating event was Phillip W. Magness'
Sept. 19 article in
Quillette , which revealed that the Times has "taken to quietly altering the published text
of the project itself after one of its claims came under intense criticism." Most significant,
the paper had scrubbed the claim that 1619 was "our true founding" from the online text without
acknowledgment.
This is not mere editing, but stealthy expurgation intended to cover up the paper's
journalistic malpractice.
This sketchy conduct, presumably approved by New York Times Magazine Editor Jake Silverstein
and others, warrants far more than a column. It demands a published response from the paper's
executive editor, Dean Baquet, that acknowledges the misdeed and states whether Baquet knew of
and/or approved the secret changes. Baquet must also detail the paper's response and explain
why the Times still stands by the project, given the need for such major corrections.
In this context, a column by someone with no authority at the Times beyond his opinion seems
part of a strategy to acknowledge a problem without fixing it. For all his bravery in writing
this piece, Stephens is the perfect foil for the Times, one that creates an escape hatch for
1619 acolytes.
It is relevant that Stephens – a conservative who came to the Times after a Pulitzer
Prize-winning stint at the Wall Street Journal – is the columnist whom so many liberal
Times subscribers love to hate. One of the few scribes at the paper who does not incessantly
preach to its woke choir, he has generated strong pushback from colleagues and readers for his
opinions on
climate change and the
Middle East . This may explain why the
New York Times Guild initially felt comfortable sending a now deleted Tweet criticizing the
editors for running Stephens' 1619 piece, which, it said, "reeks."
Stephens' standing makes it easier for many Times readers to dismiss or ignore his
devastating critique. Imagine the impact a similar piece might have had if it been written by
David Brooks or Nicholas Kristof.
Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger appears to be unconcerned by the allegations. The man who
forced editorial page editor James Bennet to resign because he ran a
controversial op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton , issued a brief statement
Sunday that ignored the journalistic and factual issues raised by Stephens and others, and
instead insisted that the 1619 Project was "a journalistic triumph" whose publication is "the
proudest accomplishment of my tenure as publisher."
[ Baquet echoed Sulzberger's
comments in a note to his staff on Oct. 13, when this column was posted. Without directly
addressing the ethical and factual issues raised, he asserted that "the project fell fully
within our standards as a news organization" and that it "fill(s) me with pride."]
The deeper issue raised by Stephens' column is that the 1619 Project is just one example of
the degree to which the Times and other mainstream news outlets have displaced traditional
journalistic practice with ideology. Informed by the tenets of social justice and
critical race theory that have long dominated the humanities departments at leading
universities, journalists have abandoned a commitment to the elusive ideal of objectivity for a
naked embrace of results-oriented activism masquerading as reportage. In this regard,
journalism is a symptom, rather than cause, of the deep-seated cultural relativism that
pervades American culture.
The essence of the 1619 Project is the idea that America is a permanently racist nation
whose founding ideals were lies. This is the capital T truth it seeks to advance. It dismisses
facts that undermine that narrative, distorting the historical record because they are seen as
roadblocks in the arc that bends toward justice. This approach relies on one of the most
dangerous engines of dishonesty in human history: the notion that the means justify the
ends.
That the Pulitzer board would bestow its prize for commentary to the lead writer of the 1619
Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, despite damning scholarly critiques, suggests how deeply this
activist approach has infected journalism.
This impulse now drives much of the coverage in the Times, the Washington Post, the New
Yorker, NPR, and other prestigious news organizations. The clearest example is reporting on
Donald Trump, whom the left sees as an existential threat. This is the capital T truth they
advance through stories that insistently eschew nuance to portray the president as a
monster.
From climate change to identity politics, examples of their tendentious coverage are legion.
But none is more thoroughgoing and dishonest than the years-long coverage claiming Trump
colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
My RealClearInvestigations colleagues are among those
who followed the leads and dug up the facts mainstream outlets refused to and, so, got the
story right. Tom Kuntz, a former Times editor who leads RCI,
detailed how the Times and the Post relied on untrustworthy anonymous sources, unfair
innuendo and cherry-picked facts to advance this narrative in a series of stories that won both
papers a Pulitzer Prize in 2018.
This effort to distort the truth continues unbowed and unabated. Last week,
New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins wrote that Christopher Steele's dossier – opposition
research paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign that claimed the Russians had been
cultivating Trump as an asset for decades – "has been neither proved nor
disproved."
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In fact, much of it has been debunked and the key parts of it that haven't been probably
never will because you can't prove a negative – one can't ever prove that there is no
videotape showing Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on a Moscow hotel bed the Obamas had
slept in.
Shane Harris of the Washington Post encapsulated the ongoing dishonesty in an article last
week acknowledging, after a fashion, damning new intelligence tying the Clinton campaign to
Russiagate. In a single paragraph he both denied overwhelming evidence that the Clinton
campaign helped generate that now debunked scandal while also insisting that the conspiracy
theory was legitimate. Harris wrote:
"Trump allies have seized on the intelligence as evidence that Clinton was in some way
involved in ginning up an investigation of Trump to tie his campaign to Russia. The president
has consistently denied the charge as a 'hoax,' even though multiple investigations have
documented numerous instances in which his campaign sought Russian assistance in damaging
Clinton."
There is hardly any evidence that the Trump campaign "sought" such assistance. The most that
can be said is that it was receptive to offers of dirt on Clinton at the infamous
June 2016 Trump Tower meeting . Her campaign, by contrast, used people like Steele to
actively seek compromising material on Trump, which appears to have included Russian
disinformation.
Such reporting is so brazen that it suggests a far deeper problem than any one story.
Indeed, the deeply misleading Trump/Russia coverage and the 1619 Project are not deviations
from the norm. They are the new standard at prestigious outlets that are committed to pursuing
their notion of the capital T truth – inconvenient facts be damned.
The problem with American imperialism that like tiger it can't change its spots. In this
sense Trump vs Biden is false dilemma. "Bothe aare worse" as Stalin quipped on the other
occasion. Both still profess "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine at the expense of the standard of
living of the USA people (outside of top 10 or 20%)
The problem with Putin statement is that both candidates are marionette of more powerful
forces. Trump is a hostage of Izreal lobby, which in the USA are mostly consist of rabid
Russophobes (look art Schiff, Schumer and other members of this gang). Biden is a classic
neoliberal warmonger, much like Hillary was, who voted for Iraq war, contributed to color
revolution in Ukraine, and was instrumental in the conversion of Dems into the second war party.
So there is zero choice in the coming election unless you want to punish Trump for the betrayal
of his electorate, which probably is the oonly valid reason to vote for Biden in key states;
otherwise you san safely ignore the elections as youn; influence anythng. In a deep sense this is
a simply legitimization procedure for the role of the "Deep State", not so much real elections as
both cadidates were already vetted by neoliberal establishment
The key problem with voting for Bide is that this way you essentially legitimizing Obama
administration RussiaGate false flag operation. But as Putin said, chances for extending the
Start treaty might worse this self-betrayal.
Like much of the American public, the Russian public is no doubt weary of the prior couple
years of non-stop 'Russiagate' headlines and wild accusations out of Western press, which all
are now pretty much in complete agreement came to absolutely nothing. This is also why the
whole issue has been conspicuously dropped by the Biden campaign and as a talking point among
the Democrats, though in some corners there's been meek attempts to revive it, especially
related to claims of "expected" Kremlin interference in the impending presidential
election.
Apparently seeing in this an opportunity for some epic trolling, Russian President Vladimir
Putin in an interview with Rossiya 1 TV days ago said it was actually the Democratic Party and
the Communist Party which have most in common.
Putin was speaking in terms of historic Soviet communism in the recent interview (Wednesday)
detailed in Newsweek. "The Democratic Party is traditionally closer to the so-called liberal
values, closer to social democratic ideas," Putin began. "And it was from the social democratic
environment that the Communist Party evolved."
"After all, I was a member of the Soviet Communist Party for nearly 20 years" Putin added.
"I was a rank-and-file member, but it can be said that I believed in the party's ideas. I
still like many of these left-wing values. Equality and fraternity. What is bad about them?
In fact, they are akin to Christian values."
"Yes, they are difficult to implement, but they are very attractive, nevertheless. In
other words, this can be seen as an ideological basis for developing contacts with the
Democratic representative."
The Russian president also invoked that historically Russian communists in the Soviet era
would have been fully on board the Black Lives Matter movement and other civil rights related
causes. "So, this is something that can be seen, to a degree, as common values, if not a
unifying agent for us," the Russian president said. "People of my generation remember a time
when huge portraits of Angela Davis, a member of the U.S. Communist Party and an ardent fighter
for the rights of African Americans, were on view around the Soviet Union."
So there it is: Putin is saying his own personal ideological past could be a basis of
"shared values" with a Biden presidency, again, it what appears to be a sophisticated bit of
trolling that he knows Biden won't welcome one bit. Or let's call it a 'Russian endorsement
Putin style'. The Associated Press and others described it as Putin "hedging his bets",
however.
Another interesting part of the interview is where the Russian TV presenter asked Putin the
following question:
"The entire world is watching the final stage of the US presidential race. Much has
happened there, including things we could never imagine happening before but the one constant
in recent years is that your name is mentioned all the time," Zarubin said. "Moreover, during
the latest debates, which have provoked a public outcry, presidential candidate Biden called
candidate Trump 'Putin's puppy.'"
"Since they keep talking about you, I would like to ask a question which you probably will
not want to answer," the interviewer continued. "Nevertheless, here it is: Whose position in
this race, Trump's or Biden's, appeals to you more?"
And here's Putin's response:
"Everything that is happening in the United States is the result of the country's internal
political processes and problems," Putin said. "By the way, when anyone tries to humiliate or
insult the incumbent head of state, in this case in the context you have mentioned, this
actually enhances our prestige, because they are talking about our incredible influence and
power. In a way, it could be said that they are playing into our hands, as the saying
goes."
But on a more serious note Putin pointed out that contrary to the notion some level of
sympathy between the Trump administration and the Kremlin, much less the charge of "collusion",
it remains that US-Russia relations have reached a low-point in recent history under Trump. The
record bears this out.
Putin underscored that "the greatest number of various kinds of restrictions and sanctions
were introduced [against Russia] during the Trump presidency."
"Decisions on imposing new sanctions or expanding previous ones were made 46 times. The
incumbent's administration withdrew from the INF treaty. That was a very drastic step. After
2002, when the Bush administration withdrew from the ABM treaty, that was the second major
step. And I believe it is a big danger to international stability and security," Putin
explained.
"Now the US has announced the beginning of the procedure for withdrawing from the Open
Skies Treaty. We have good reason to be concerned about that, too. A number of our joint
projects, modest, but viable, have not been implemented – the business council project,
expert council, and so on," he concluded.
But then on Biden specifically Putin said that despite "rather sharp anti-Russian rhetoric"
from the Democratic nominee, it remains "Candidate Biden has said openly that he was ready to
extend the New START or to sign a new strategic offensive reductions treaty."
"This is already a very significant element of our potential future cooperation," Putin
added of a potential Biden presidency.
Before the first Trump-Biden debate, moderator Chris Wallace listed the six subjects that
would be covered:
The Trump and Biden records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race and violence in
our cities, and the integrity of the election.
According to a recent Gallup survey, Wallace's topics tracked the public's concerns -- the
top seven of which were the coronavirus, government leadership, race relations, the economy,
crime and violence, the judicial system, morality and family decline.
As an issue, national security did not even break Gallup's Top 10. It ranked below education
and homelessness, just above climate change.
Which raises a question?
Can a nation as divided as we are and as distracted as we are by the most lethal pandemic in
100 years, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the worst racial crisis
since the 1960s, conduct a global policy to contain the ambitions of two rival great powers on
the other side of the world and to create a U.S.-led democratic world order?
Can we build, lead and sustain alliances of dozens of nations to contain Vladimir Putin's
Russia and Xi Jinping's China as we did the Soviet Union during more than 40 years of the Cold
War?
Are we still up to it? And must we Americans do it?
Or should we let the internal problems and pressures on these two nations do the primary
work of containing their external ambitions?
Case in point: Vladimir Putin's Russia. While our Beltway elites are obsessed with Russia
and Putin, seeing in them a mortal threat to our democracy, close observers are seeing
something else.
"Putin, Long the Sower of Instability, Is Now Surrounded by It," runs a headline in
Thursday's New York Times. The theme also appears in The Financial Times in a story headlined,
"Putin Watches as Flames Engulf Neighborhood."
Consider the situation today in Russia's "near abroad," the former republics of the USSR
that broke from Moscow's rule between 1989 and 1991.
The Baltic States -- Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia -- are already in the U.S.-led NATO
alliance. Georgia in the Central Caucasus, the birthplace of Stalin, fought a war against its
Russian neighbor in 2008 and is now a friend and de facto ally of the United States.
Ukraine, the most populous of the 14 republics to break away from Moscow, is now the most
hostile to Moscow, having watched its Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea be amputated by Putin
in 2014.
Now, Belarus, Russia's closest neighbor to the west, is in a political crisis with weekly
demonstrations demanding the ouster of Putin's ally, longtime autocrat Alexander Lukashenko,
after a fraudulent election.
Putin could be forced to do what he has no desire to do -- forcefully intervene to put down
a popular uprising that could cause Belarus to follow Ukraine into the Western camp.
Now, in the South Caucasus, two former republics of the USSR, Azerbaijan and Armenia, are
again in an open war over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave wholly within Azerbaijan.
While Armenia, an ally of Russia, is pleading for intervention by Moscow to halt the war,
Turkey is aiding the Azeris militarily, and they seem to be gaining the upper hand.
Four thousand miles away, in Russia's Far East, in the city of Khabarovsk, which is as close
to China as Dulles Airport is to D.C., anti-Putin rallies have become a constant feature of
politics.
Last summer, Putin's political rival Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a nerve
agent developed in Soviet laboratories. Navalny has now become a live martyr and more potent
adversary as the Kremlin has failed to come up with a satisfactory explanation for what appears
to have been an attempted assassination. New German and French sanctions on Russian officials
could be forthcoming.
Russians are tiring of Putin's 20-year rule. His popularity, though high by European
standards, is near its nadir. And Russians have suffered mightily from the coronavirus and what
it has done to their economy.
Now, the pro-Putin regime in Kyrgyzstan on the Chinese border appears to have been
overthrown after another fraudulent election, and Beijing is telling everyone to stay out.
And how have Putin's imperial adventures gone?
While his intervention in Syria saved the regime of Bashar Assad and Russia's sole naval
base in the Mediterranean, the war continues to bleed Mother Russia.
Putin's intervention on the side of the rebels in Libya, however, has not gone well. Last
year's rebel drive to capture the capital of Tripoli failed, and the rebel forces have been
forced to retreat back to the east.
Meanwhile, Russia's economy remains only one-tenth the size of China's economy, and its
population is also only one-tenth that of China.
Perhaps time is on America's side in the rivalry with Russia, and war avoidance remains as
wise a policy as it was during the Cold War.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and
Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
I couldn't finish this article. The notion that Russia has any "expansionist aims" is so
far-fetched that I wonder what the weather is like on "Planet Pat." Pat, to summarize, has no
real problems with a drive for American hegemony, but just thinks that it ought to be
achieved for less.
Pat was right and I was wrong back in the 1990s when he saw the threat of outsourcing. Now
he's wrong about Russia and Vladimir Putin. I saw a recent press conference in which Putin
did an on-the-spot translation of a question asked by a German journalist (in German) into
Russian for his Russian audience. Can anyone imagine the clowns that we've see on our screens
in these "debates" doing anything like that? Russia is governed by serious men who are doing
their best, although they make mistakes like everyone else. The United States is governed by
freaks that should be in a circus sideshow.
Though Buchanan has had a great career as a sceptic of yankee imperialism, some times his
views are infected by the remnants of a belief in it he has been unable to fully shake.
He cultivates a reputation for "non-interventionism," but Mr. Buchanan has been
fundamentally faithful to the Establishment, always careful to leave Russia and China cast as
enemies.
It's been a while since he has taken a break from carnival barking the next Most Important
Election Ever with an Exceptional!, RussiaBadChinaToo column like this one. The propaganda
pronouns, personalization of the autocratic bad guys, and cliché buzzwords are
many , and it's important to pull back a bit to examine how "Mr. Paleoconservative"
wraps them in his faux dissidence:
Can a nation as divided as we are and as distracted as we are by the most
lethal pandemic in 100 years, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the
worst racial crisis since the 1960s, conduct a global policy to contain the
ambitions of two rival great powers on the other side of the world and to
create a U.S.-led democratic world order ?
Can we build, lead and sustain alliances of dozens of nations to
contain Vladimir Putin's Russia and Xi Jinping's China as we
did the Soviet Union during more than 40 years of the Cold War?
Are we still up to it? And must we Americans do it?
Or should we let the internal problems and pressures on these two nations do the
primary work of containing their external ambitions?
See how it works? Uncle Sam's ( our ) prophylactic goodness goes unquestioned, the
evil "ambitions" of others presumed. By suggesting that maybe "we" can't afford to protect
the rest of the world so much these days, Mr. Buchanan endorses the narrative.
It's telling that Mr. Buchanan remains on record endorsing the bipartisan Beltway premise
that (July 7, 2017) "Americans are rightly angry that Russia hacked the presidential election
of 2016." (That bit's omitted in today's column, what with the more immediate need to herd
enough GOP sheep back to the polls to legitimatize the system.) The columns and comment
threads of July 20 and 24, 2018, and May 31, 2019 -- where I first asked Mr. Buchanan's fans
why he seemed willfully ignorant of the observations of people like William Binney -- are
further evidence.
His fans rationalize that he's doing what he can without losing his platform, but Mr.
Buchanan effectively serves Washington. Look around and think critically for yourself and
you'll see that when it comes to electoral politics he's Stagehand Right in the puppet show,
and in discussions of US imperialism the Right sash of the Overton window.
Russia is not threatening or bothering anyone, the USA is threatening and bothering pretty
well everyone. the people of Crimea overwhelmingly wanted and voted to leave Ukraine, Russia
did not TAKE it. Get over it children.
Pat Buchanan is correct: "war avoidance remains as wise a policy as it was during the Cold
War."
But it is a difficult policy when neither Washington nor Moscow has the control they had
during the Cold War, especially with the hegemonic rise of China. Chaos is producing the
conditions where any nation will have to go to war: existential threat. Ordering the world
can avert our destruction – in theory – but only by accepting some harsh
realities. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
I've always had a soft spot for Pat Buchanan. But lately (the last few years) his articles
appear more and more workmanlike. In other words just going through the motioms.
In this article he seems to have accepted the official narrative on almost everything.
"Last summer, Putin's political rival Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Novichok,"
Novichok appears to be the most inefficient lethal poiaon in existence with around 75%
survival rate, yet Buchanan accepts the narrative without question. Pat Buchanan up to the
90's would have laughed at this.
There is a liberal democratic strain in Russia with some power that wants what the west
has, celebrations for homosexuals, radical feminism and maybe women with penises too. I have
met a few young Russians that don't like Putin. We will see. If by some miracle the US can
continue to run an economy not thru work but by having the Federal Reserve creating money and
distributing it, then maybe Russia will lose Putin and start looking more like a multi-culti
western country too. But more likely, the US will suffer a major economic fall and then
perhaps Russia will think twice before turning Russian beauties into western style women
telling men to stop "mansplaining".
What Putin has to do if he hopes to keep Russia from turning into a Cultural Marxist
cesspool is find someone that believes in and can continue his policies but if he's like
Trump and is surrounded by people that want to be far left, Russia will become a western
style country too after Putin leaves office. If Russia wants to stay Russian and Europe has
any hope of turning the tide against its destruction, a new international movement has to be
popularized that values European / Western traditions and values the different peoples and
cultures of the world. The western European countries will first need to develop some self
respect so they have a reason to preserve their peoples and traditions.
This article is surprising in its comprehensive lack of factuality.
1. A gallop poll (not referenced) tells us what we already know: The American public does
not think like the elite tell them to think. How rude. Well, our government might be 'of, by,
and for' somebody, but it ain't 'The people.'
2. Contain Russia? And the Soviet Union and China did not serve to contain the US?
3. Are we still up to it? Up to what? American exceptionalism? The rest of the world is
starting to take issue with that. A century of 'Yankee Go Home' has grown teeth.
4. The Baltic states are as much use to Russia as they were to Sweden. Don't overestimate
their importance as anything other than a springboard for another group that does not
represent its populace: NATO.
5. Georgia 'fought a war against Russia ' and lost.
6. Ukraine suffered a violet coup. Crimea 'self-amputated' via legal referendum.
7. Belarus. Well, now. Belarus is like Ukraine pre-Maidan. The fog of diplomacy is much too
thick and oily to really see who is pulling whose strings there.
8. Putin could be forced to do anything. Time will tell what he and Mr. Lavrov have in mind.
Let's not limit his set of options and condemn him for something he hasn't done yet. That's
political TINA.
9. Azerbaijan and Armenia are suddenly at war. Again, at whose instigation? Why now? Is this
a resurrection of the Crusades since it is a Muslim country fighting a Christian country? Old
bigotry drug out of history's spare room and repurposed? Again, do either the Azerbaijanis or
the Armenians personally want any of this? Maybe Gallup can take a poll.
10. Khabarovsk is in an uprising? Again, who says? Why now? And aren't the same things going
on in American cities? You keep talking about sudden unprovoked uprisings as if they are
popular revolutions. I don't think that word means what you think it means.
11. Navalny does Novichok. Really? The dissident with less than five percent popularity in
Russia? The political court jester with Western style health issues taken down by the deadly
poison genetically modified to miss its target? This is a joke, right?
12. You've got a point about Russians being tired of Putin. I was there for three weeks in
2018 on a trip across Siberia on the Trans Siberian Railroad and spoke to people in places
like Ulan Ude (as close to Mongolia as Dulles is the D.C.) and Khabarovsk (ditto.) I found
that how people perceive Putin depends on which side of the 'Crazy Nineties' they sit. People
who remembered the Soviet era and reconstruction were more likely to support Putin
unconditionally, including a school teacher I spoke with who remembered trading lessons for
lunch, whereas younger people acknowledged what he did for Russia but just wanted a change of
face in the Kremlin. One man admitted that there are no alternatives worth considering.
Hardly a stinging repudiation. By the way, I was also in Vladivostok, as close to North Korea
as Dulles is to , well, you know. Not much dissent there. Yes, it's a military town but is as
secular as any western jarhead city.
13. Russia 'remains' one tenth the size of China? How imprudent.
14. Putin's imperial adventures are 'failing' and 'bleeding' Mother Russia? And how have ours
been doing lately?
15. Time is on America's side? Time is a fickle ally and has a habit of switching sides in
the long run.
This article contains significant spin with little or no analysis. Did you have someone do
your homework for you?
Exactly. The Pat Buchanan of the 1990's or even the 00's would rather have asked:
"Is it in America's interest to have either Russia or China so unstable and backed into
a corner by NATO expansion or other U.S. policy that they and their large nuclear arsenals
might come under the command and control of more desperate and unstable men than their
current leaders?"
As a previous commenter notes above, it's as is someone else is writing these columns
under Pat's byline now.
Russia has many nukes but it won't do them any good. All the forces in WW II had extensive
supplies for gas warfare. All had masks and elaborate tactics ready. No one used gas attacks
because they knew about the gas horrors from WW I. Even facing destruction of an army or city
no one wanted to release that genie from the bottle. Russia could let loose a nuclear barrage
then quickly witness the end of Russia. The Chinese are sensible as they refrain from wasting
money for a massive nuclear arsenal.
Can we build, lead and sustain alliances of dozens of nations to contain Vladimir
Putin's Russia and Xi Jinping's China
Russia is not expanding. Rather, as pointed out, it's the US/NATO that has expanded all
the way up to the Russian border, a threatening move. China is a competitor, not a militarily
expansionist country. With their economy they can wheel and deal better than the US but whose
fault is that?
forcefully intervene to put down a popular uprising that could cause Belarus to follow
Ukraine into the Western camp.
Just another made in the US color revolution, not popular at all. Ukraine is hardly an
example to follow. Much of the rest is about how Russia is collapsing, people rising up
against Putin, etc etc. All stuff that's been said for the past hundred years. Before it was
because they were communist. Now it's because what?
Perhaps time is on America's side
No. Demographics, Mr Buchanan, demographics. The US has turned itself into a semi-Brazil
where a good third of the population is non-white and getting larger. The greatest resource
of any country is it's people and in this regard the US has diversified itself into chaos and
a downward spiral.
Seldom have so many commentators agreed in their criticism of a post. Seldom has a post on
UR been so inept, so unfit for publication. Maybe the truth is quite banal: aging
commentators who once used to be intellectual powerhouses have simply succumbed to senile
infantilism. In addition to Pat Buchanan, another obvious example is Michel Chossudovsky.
Paul Craig Roberts is also not doing well. Like great athletes, they simply don't know when
to quit.
I don't see any deviation in Buchanan's argument (since he turned "paleo right wing") that
the USA should mind its own business and stay out of foreign entanglements.
Biden will surely win the US presidency over the dopey Trump. Biden is the perfect tool of
the "deep state," elements of which arranged for his winning of the Democrat's nomination.
Expect a hot war with Iran, the revival of the "Trans Pacific Partnership," mass amnesty,
continued loss of industry, curtailment of constitutional rights and much more money thrown
at the educational establishment to train up the population for the "jobs of tomorrow" etc
etc.
@No Friend Of
The Devil
href="https://russia-insider.com/en/new-constitution-means-russias-political-stability-strong-while-west-sinks/ri30819">
https://russia-insider.com/en/new-constitution-means-russias-political-stability-strong-while-west-sinks/ri30819
@Petermx
left" (the Russian far left would rather send all trannies to the Gulag), but the "liberals",
which in Russia is what they call the deregulation-obsessed corporate right wing.
A "liberal" means someone larping as a local Tory, in the sense of wanting to privatize
everything, sell it off, and then let in all of Central Asia as cheap workers. These days
they are also the ones who will accept child trannies in exchange for offshore perks. Not the
far left. The Russian far left would hang the Western far left on lamp posts, and send their
families to fell wood in Siberia.
Putin's political rival Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent
developed in Soviet laboratories. Navalny has now become a live martyr and more potent
adversary as the Kremlin has failed to come up with a satisfactory explanation for
what appears to have been an attempted assassination.
Just as they've failed to "come up with a satisfactory explanation" for the Skripal
obvious lies and idiocy.
Ditto the MH17 lies and idiocy
or the 'Russian hacking' lies and idiocy
or the 'Russian aggression in Ukraine' lies and idiocy..
Is that the way it works now Pat, you simply parrot the puerile piles of puke put out by
the ((narrative machine)) as if it was all God's truth?
When we all know it's the opposite.
Perhaps time is on America's side in the rivalry with Russia,
You're not Pat Buchannan.
Buchannan simply could not have uttered such an egregiously grotesque gargantuan infamy of
perfidious, pusillanimous palaver- even if he tried.
He'd choke on such words, (I'd hope ; )
"America's side"
If this is America's side, then God speed to Vlad Putin!
@TGD s a
comeuppance for 'four hundred years of slavery, genocide and a systemic racism that has had
the White man's knee on POC's necks for four hundred years and counting..
All of that ends in January, 2021.
A packed SC will end the Second Amendment, and it will be all she wrote.
So why does Buchannan allow an article full of horseshit about Putin and Russia to get
published in his name? When the reason for the 'most important election ever', is wokeness',
and the war on Iran (and possibly Russia) that will come when ((wokeness) is firmly in power
again?
@Patricus re
MAD.
• further, the US refused to denounce "first use of nuclear weapons" with a no first
use policy. This indicated(s) their intention. Russia still has a no first use policy with
caveats. US is the aggressor here.
• if you understand the above, then all other US plays come into focus. Why they killed
the INF treaty in order to move into Europe nuclear missiles of that prohibited range, why
they have started to try and reduce nuclear payload so that they can use nuclear weapons
without triggering the nuclear threshold of nuclear retaliation by pleading low yield etc.
I thought I was the only one who cringed when Paul Roberts mixed in his obviously
misguided opinions in with obvious facts. Seems Giraldi is the last man standing. We need new
authorities on truth.
I have been a fan of Pat Buchanan's most of my life. But since the Trump phenomenon began
I can't for the life of me understand what has happened to him. It's as if he has drunk the
Qanon Kool-Aid.
Not sure if Pat is writing his own articles these days but this sure qualifies as
establishment drivel. It's America that has troops in Poland near Russia's border as well as
trying to topple leaders in the region that are friendly to Putin and Russia. If Putin moved
troops and missile batteries near the Rio Grande the American establishment would literally
have a coronary.
Pat writes as if Putin is on a worldwide offensive against America and its interests but
it's been thankfully stymied. Most of what Putin and Russia have done and are doing has been
a reaction and in response to the unrest and instability that American actions have helped
bring to certain countries and regions.
What with the proven sterling safety record that Novichok has demonstrated in recent
assassination attempts, I understand it is now in Phase #3 trials as a treatment for
covid.
Yes! Well said, Rurik! I haven't read such great alliteration since Spiro Agnew's
"nattering nabobs of negativity" when referring to the Nixon hating press. (Speech written by
William Safire).
Why have you become an Old Cold Warrior again, Pat?
One is reminded – that pretty much all of the problems that Russia faces in its
'near abroad' – Ukraine, Belorussia, etc. – have been deliberately created by the
west. Given that Russia could still obliterate the west if it really felt that it had been
backed into a corner, is that wise?
What with the proven sterling safety record that Novichok has demonstrated in recent
assassination attempts, I understand it is now in Phase #3 trials as a treatment for
covid.
@Patricus
much as I think it does, they'd be willing to launch if we foolishly backed them into a
corner. It was seriously discussed in the Kremlin in the 1980's.
China's smaller arsenal is not a matter of the supposed uselessness of nukes. China has
advantages over Russia in population, wealth and production, sea routes, and a number of
other factors which make nukes less of a necessity, and they're also building on their own
past legacy as a poor nation, while Putin's Russia is hanging on to the arsenal of a
superpower whose infrastructure was laid down when the USSR had more resources and manpower
to call on than Russia does today. Apple-Orange.
This actually sounds like someone telling the truth for once about Russia and the Putin
regime!
Unfortunately there's been far to much blather about Putin over the years,oh and all his
hyperbole about super weapons
The Russian economy is not just one tenth of china its also not particularly
competitive,languishing in 30 th position in terms of global business rating
Its demographics are terrible without any chance of recovery
And to cap it all China will soon try and claim parts of eastern Russia as Chinese
Buchanan is 82 years old next month. For several years now, the input of his "assistants"
has been more and more noticeable. This article, however, appears to have been entirely ghost
written by one or more of them. It sounds entirely out of character with what Buchanan was
writing even last year.
Buchanan must retire immediately. If he does not, more ghost written articles like this will
irremediably taint his legacy.
I have held Mr Buchanan in high regard ever since I became aware of him in the 1990s. Sadly,
I will not read any new articles "written" by him.
I am pretty ignorant about poisons, and I'm a bit allergic to conspiracy theories, but on
this Novichok business I can't help wondering, If the stuff is really so toxic as is claimed,
then why is it that more than one supposed victim has survived?
To the contrary, Patrick hit a home run with this post. Putin still uses his KGB tactics
and allies to do his dirty work for him, especially poisoning political opponents and
cracking down on the media. Putin has enriched himself and his oligarch pals under the guise
of muscular Orthodoxism. Putin has always put into play policies designed to expand "Mother
Russia".
You are just too damn stubborn to admit these facts.
Russia and the Putin regime have set themselves against the USA,therefore why should
Buchanan agree with a regime who have people pushing for the destruction of America and the
US led international order????
Wouldn't that simply make Buchanan a traitor by supporting a foreign regime ?
I would have loved to see the faces of John McCain and "F the EU" Nuland if Putin had done
so. The Russian forces would have mopped up the coup leaders in a week, and Obama/Biden could
have done nothing but complain to the UN. It's very likely that many Ukrainian lives would
have been saved.
Buchanan's incredible statement that Putin "amputated" the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine,
when the vast majority of those who lived there voted to return to Mother Russia, is patently
ridiculous. C'mon Pat, return to your senses or it's time to retire.
Speaking of ghost writers, the Tom Parsons (1984) act here is a little too much for the
real Corvinus. The "home run" and "damn" are out of character, too.
Next time, aim more for that Unitarian Sunday School teacher voice.
"Speaking of ghost writers, the Tom Parsons (1984) act here is a little too much for the
real Corvinus. The "home run" and "damn" are out of character, too."
Right on cue is the Russian bot. I guess your programming does not tire in trying to
denigrate your social betters.
"Next time, aim more for that Unitarian Sunday School teacher voice."
As to Russian aggressiveness, you have to admit they did have the temerity to expand right
up to their own borders, thereby surrounding us on all sides: our NATO in the west, our
Ukraine and Georgia in the south, our arctic in the north, and our Japan and South Korea in
the east.
Fester suggests USA should take preemptive action and drain the USA nuclear stockpile for
the sake of South Chicago–the pinnacle of USA freedom -- democracy and societal values.
Then when global cooling returns to USA -- re-open the coal mines and build gas guzzlers.
Powerful nations tend to expand. I guess Pat is saying Russia is weak to make major
expansions. They did destroy Syria and annexed Crimea, that is it for now. His assessment of
Russia's weakness is ok. I doubt though Putin poisoned the opposition leader, not because he
cannot be mean. But because it seems amateurish. Russia failing to poison and kill an
individual? I don't know.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
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and political analytics.
The Insider has received numerous international awards, including the Council of Europe
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everyone who wants to support our publication to subscribe to regular donations.
"The Insider" is a Russian online publication. Founded in November 2013 by a member of
the movement
"Solidarity", a journalist and political activist of liberal-democratic
orientation
Roman Dobrokhotov, who is the editor-in-chief of the publication.
Dobrokhotov. As I live and breathe -- a "kreakl"!!!!
In September 2018, in collaboration with "Bellingcat" Eliot Higgins, "The Insider"
conducted an investigation, allegedly publishing copies of official documents of the Russian
Federal migration service for passport application in the name of Alexander Petrov, one of
the suspects of the British authorities in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which
may indicate his connection with the Russian special services.
In February 2020, "The Insider", jointly with "Bellingcat"and "Der Spiegel", conducted
an investigation and stated that the murder of Zelimkhan khangoshvili in Berlin in August
2019 was organized by the special unit of the FSB "Vimpel". They said that the FSB special
assignment Centre was preparing a repeat killer, Vadim Krasikov, for this murder, and they
also gave some details of Krasikov's movements around Europe.
On November 10, 2017, "The Insider" received from"The World Forum for Democracy"an award for innovation in democracy with the following wording:
"'The Insider' is an investigative publication that seeks to provide its readers with
information about the current political, economic and social situation in Russia, while
promoting democratic values and highlighting issues related to human rights and civil
society. In addition, 'The Insider' carries out the project 'Antifake', the task of which is
to systematically expose false news in the Russian media, which helps its audience to
distinguish real information from false news and propaganda".
In 2019, "The Insider" and "Bellingcat" received the European Press Prize for
establishing the identity of the two men allegedly responsible for the poisoning of Sergei
and Yulia Skripal .
How drole! "The insider" likes to shout out "Fake!" yet seems to work closely with
"Bellingcat".
By the way, further to the Pevchikh saga, another twist to the tale has turned up
in the Russian media concerning those allegedly "Novichok" contaminated bottles that she
dutifully retrieved from Navalny's hotel room in Tomsk as soon she heard that his Moscow
bound flight was making an unplanned landing at Omsk.
She couldn't fly directly to Omsk from Tomsk, so she claims she drove from Tomsk to
Novosibirsk, whence she flew to Omsk, where she boarded the aircraft kindly provided by the
Germans and which took Navalny and her and the bottles to Berlin.
Small problem: the investigations that have been taking place concerning her claims
reveal that she had no bottles with her, either on her person or in her baggage, at the
Novosibirsk and at Omsk airports when she went through security there. And there is video
evidence of her baggage being opened and searched there. No bottles. But she handed over
these bottles, she says, to the German authorities, which bottles were then sent to the
Bundeswehr labs in Munich, allegedly.
And get this: Navalny and Pevchikh claim there was a bomb scare at Omsk airport that was
intended to prevent the aircraft on board which the US agent was howling and screaming.
though he wasn't in pain, he says,
This planting of a bomb at Omsk airport, according to the bullshitter, was done so that
he would not be hospitalized in Omsk and would therefore die on board the aircraft.
It now turns out, according to the cops, that there had been a call claiming that a
bomb had been planted at Omsk airport. And the call originated in Berlin. Nothing in the
Western media about this, of course, though plenty in the Russian media.
I'd provide links but I can't be arsed because I'm writing this in bed on my iPhone.
Well. Those certainly are interesting developments. Not that it would make any difference
in the mainstream media, where the narrative die is already cast – just more of
Russia's 'pathetic evasions' as it tries to twist out from under the weight of accumulated
evidence against it.
08 October 2020 16:21 Transport police: "Navalny's bottles" were not in the luggage, the airport was "mined"
from Germany
[the Russian term for placing a bomb somewhere. e.g. as a terrorist act, is "to mine" a
place -- ME]
The office of the Siberian Transport Prosecutor has questions for an employee of the
Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) Maria Pevchikh to answer as regards the case of the
hospitalization of Aleksei Navalny. However, she evaded giving evidence and flew from Omsk to
Germany. Despite a summons and communication with her lawyer, Pevchikh has not appeared at
the preliminary investigation.
Maria Pevchikh has not replied to the investigator's questions about how the items
allegedly taken from Navalny's room in a Tomsk hotel were removed. The transport police have
reconstructed the Pevchikh route and got together all their videos concerning this, Interfax
reports. And then the surprises begin, which do not fit in with the version that Maria
Pevchikh took from Tomsk to Berlin a bottle, on which traces of a neuroparalytic poisonous
substance from the Novichok group were later allegedly found .
Firstly, after Navalny's hospitalization, Maria Pevchikh travelled from Tomsk to
Novosibirsk by car together with Georgy Alburov [Alburov is the one who, allegedly, was
an FBK front man, posing as head of the investigatory section of Navalny's "fund", but
Pevchik, it seems, was really the investigation boss, very likely directing investigations
into corruption in "Putin's Mafia State" under the guidance of MI6, though nobody had ever
heard of her at FBK until questions started being asked about her role after she had flown to
Germany from Omsk with the Bullshitter -- ME] , and then flew to Omsk.
Secondly, at Novosibirsk Tolmachevo airport , during pre-flight checks, there were no
containers and bottles of more than 100 milliliters in Maria Pevchikh's suitcase and
rucksack. She did buy, however, a half-litre bottle of "Svyatoy Istochnik" ["Holy Spring"
NOT "Saint Spring"! -- ME] water in the sterile zone [namely after having passed
through baggage and security checks and before boarding her flight -- ME], with which she
flew to Omsk.
Earlier, Anton Timofeev had said that after Navalny had been hospitalized, the people
accompanying him seized three bottles of water from his room, which were given to Georgy
Alburov. Alburov then flew from Novosibirsk to Omsk together with the Pevchikh. But there
were no bottles in his luggage either. The moment of the acquisition of a bottle of "Holy
Spring" water by Pevchikh, as well as images from the X-ray scanner installation at the
airport, prove this.
In addition, Sergey Potapov, deputy head of the transport investigation department of
the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Siberian Federal District, announced that
on the day of Navalny's hospitalization, an anonymous message had been received about the
mining of Omsk airport. It was sent via a free e-mail service whose servers are located in
Germany. On this issue, Russia then addressed Germany in order to establish the identity of
the person who sent the message. The police believe that the message about the
pseudo-mining [i.e. a bomb scare -- ME] of the airport came in order to prevent the
aircraft with Navalny on board from urgently landing at Omsk. Aleksei Navalny himself thanked
the pilots who landed the aircraft at Omsk, although the airport had been "mined". And here
is another inconsistency: information about the "mining" of the Omsk airport was closed and
was not disclosed to anyone.
[Shooting his big gob off again, see! -- ME]
The police have also to check how Aleksei Navalny, who was in a coma at the Berlin
Charité clinic, got hold of this information about the "mining" of Omsk airport, at a
time when he had already lost consciousness whilst on board an aircraft on August 20 and was
subsequently unconscious until September 7.
180 visitors and 58 employees were evacuated from the [Omsk] airport building,
excluding flight safety services. In the e-mail that arrived at an e-mail address in the
district of the Omsk Leninsky District Court, there was information about the mining of the
buildings of the district court, the railway station, banks, the post office and the airport.
After that, a criminal case was initiated under Part 2 of Article 207 of the Criminal Code of
Russia ("Knowingly falsely reporting of an act of terrorism").
The German government has said that Aleksei Navalny was poisoned with a chemical
warfare agent from the Novichok group. Allegedly, in addition to the Bundeswehr laboratory,
traces of Novichok were found in his analyses by military chemists in Sweden and France.
Berlin sent the data of these tests to the OPCW, but ignored all Russian requests for
cooperation in investigating the incident with the blogger [i.e. Navalny -- M E] . And
on September 22, Aleksei Navalny was discharged from the hospital after his so-called
"poisoning" with a "military grade poison". Navalny has estimated that his treatment at the
Berlin hospital will cost 70 thousand euros. [Rattling his collection box already! -- ME]. He
is still in Berlin as a special guest of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Moscow,
meanwhile, has invited OPCW experts to familiarize themselves with the samples that were
taken from Aleksei Navalny before leaving for Germany. It is curious that the doctors of the
Berlin clinic also did not find traces of toxic substances in the analyses of their
patient.
[A point often omitted in the free Western press: it was the Bundeswehr that stated
that the Bullshitter had been poisoned by a Novichok type agent, as did the Swedish and
French military -- ME.]
The above article is biased, of course, because it refers to the gobshite Navalny as a
"blogger" and not as a "politician" or "leader of the opposition" etc.
But here's a source that can in no way be described as being biased against "Putin's
fiercest critic": "Radio Freedom" no less!
08 October 2020 Interior Ministry: there was no water bottle in the luggage of Navalny's colleague Maria
Pevchikh
The Department of Transport of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the
Siberian Federal District, which is conducting a pre-investigation check into the
circumstances of the hospitalization of the head of the Anti-Corruption Fund, Aleksei
Navalny, in the Omsk hospital on August 20, published on Thursday a report on the work that
has been done. According to the department, an e-mail with a message about the mining of Omsk
airport, from which Navalny was taken to the hospital, was sent from a free postal service,
whose server is located in Germany.
The department claims that it had addressed the law enforcement agencies of Germany
with a request to provide legal assistance and to determine the owner of the email address,
but had not received an answer. "We do not understand and do not accept the inaction of our
foreign colleagues", the Interior Ministry said in a report.
Earlier, Navalny's associates suggested that the false mining of the Omsk airport had
been carried out in order to delay the hospitalization of the oppositionist, who was on the
verge of life and death -- the aircraft with Navalny on board made an emergency landing in
Omsk after a sudden sharp deterioration in his condition. It is known that on August 20, in
connection with an anonymous report about the bomb, the police evacuated all visitors and
employees from the airport building. RBC, in turn, notes that on the morning of August 20,
false reports of mining were received not only in Omsk, but also in the cities of the the
Novosibirsk region, the Perm and Krasnoyarsk territories, as well as the Volga region: one of
the bombs, in particular, was allegedly planted on the territory of the Samara International
airport "Kurumoch".
In addition to information related to false mining, the report of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs claims that in the luggage of Navalny's colleagues Maria Pevchikh (in the
original version of the message she was named Marina) and Georgy Alburov, who, after reports
of the hospitalization of the head of the FBK, examined his hotel room in Tomsk and
confiscated from there several objects, and then flew to Omsk themselves, no liquids with a
volume of more than 100 milliliters hd been found.
As is now known, Pevchikh subsequently transported a bottle of water to Berlin, from
which Navalny had drunk in a Tomsk hotel, and on which traces of a chemical warfare agent had
allegedly been later found. In a report by the Ministry of Internal Affairs about Pevchikh,
it is said that "for the investigation, communication with this citizen is of great
interest", but she has not been responding to our summons.
Earlier, Navalny's companions, talking about the things they collected from Navalny's
room, said that they were taken to Omsk to be sent to Germany in different ways (according to
Maria Pevchikh, "they were strategically packaged in different places"), that is, by no means
necessary, that it was Pevchikh who carried the bottle from Tomsk to Omsk.
And now, the same story from "The Insider", which most definitely is biased against the
"Putin regime" and those dastardly Orcs, albeit written by an Orc, it seems:
Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation fake: Maria Pevchikh did not
take out of Russia a bottle from which Navalny had drunk
8 October 2020
[Right in your face it shouts FAKE! -- ME]
Russian media outlets are retelling a statement made by the Transport Directorate of
the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Siberian Federal District under the
heading "Investigation in connection with Navalny's hospitalization continues", which
says:
According to information published in the media, there has been carried out on the
territory of Germany a toxicological study of a bottle of water that had been handed over for
investigation by Maria Pevchikh and on which the presence of a nerve agent has been allegedly
found.
Also in the media there was information about the transportation of these items by car
and aeroplane from Tomsk to Germany. At the same time, the investigating authorities have
objectively established that Maria Pevchikh together with Georgy Alburov, after Navalny's
hospitalization, proceeded from the city of Tomsk to the city of Novosibirsk by road, and
then by air to the city of Omsk. During the pre-flight inspection of Maria Pevchikh at
Tolmachevo airport (Novosibirsk), there were no containers with a volume of more than 100 ml
in her suitcase and rucksack, and no bottle of water. After having passed through pre-flight
checks, whilst in the airport transit zone Maria Pevchikh then bought from a vending machine
a 500 ml bottle of "Holy Spring" water, with which she flew to the city of Omsk.
According to a video posted on the Internet, after Navalny had been hospitalized,
persons who had accompanied him seized from the hotel room where he had bben staying three
bottles of water. In accordance with the explanation of one of the indicated persons –
Anton Timofeev – he handed the seized items to Georgy Alburov, who flew with Maria
Pevchikh from Tolmachevo airport (Novosibirsk) to the city of Omsk. During the inspection of
Alburov's belongings at the airport, bottles with a volume of more than 100 ml were also not
found.
This is confirmed by photographs from the airport security cameras, which captured the
moment Maria Pevchikh bought a bottle of water, as well as from the X-ray scanner
installation at the airport, where Pevchikh and Alburov went through baggage
inspection.
It is worth noting the wording about "containers with a volume of more than 100 ml".
There are rules restricting the carriage of liquids on aeroplanes: they can only be
transported in hand luggage in containers of no more than 100 ml. Therefore, hand luggage is
inspected for the presence of prohibited containers, but not luggage in which liquids can be
carried freely. The bottles taken from Navalny's room in the Tomsk hotel were most likely
carried by Maria Pevchikh in her luggage, which could have been taken away during the
inspection of her hand luggage.
Baggage at an airport is screened using an X-ray scanner. Of course, people don't pay
attention to water bottles. There is a technical ability to save images from the scanner, but
there is no information about its use in practice: the luggage is scanned and examined in
real time, and when suspicious objects are found, they are immediately opened. It makes no
sense to store a huge amount of X-ray images of every piece of baggage passing through an
airport.
The CCTV footage of Maria Pevchikh buying a bottle of water from a vending machine
proves practically nothing.
Thirsty MI6 operative Pevchikh at Omsk airport -- ME
Firstly, it is not clear what kind of drink she is buying. It is unlikely that a Coca
Cola vending machine exclusively sells "Holy Spring". If the Ministry of Internal Affairs has
not provided footage allowing it to be established exactly what Pevchikh bought, then most
likely it does not have such information at all and the statement about the 500 ml bottle of
"Holy Spring" is not based on anything -- except for the fact that it is on such a bottle
that traces of "Novichok" were found. Even the statement that Pevchikh brought a bottle she
bought at the Novosibirsk airport to Omsk cannot be called reliable: it is likely that she,
after having drunk the water, left the bottle on the aeroplane.
Secondly, FBK employees took away not one, but three bottles from Tomsk, which the
Ministry of Internal Affairs also admits. If the Ministry of Internal Affairs had footage
proving that Pevchikh and Alburov had purchased three bottles, it would hardly conceal
them.
The certainty with which the Ministry of Internal Affairs makes statements that cannot
be substantiated raises doubts about its message as a whole.
Sort of like the certainty with which Navalny makes statements that cannot be
substantiated as regards Putin trying to murder him with "Novichok" or the statements made by
the German authorities about his having also been poisoned by "Novichok" without their
providing any substantiation?
Should these statements also raise doubts in an enquiring mind, I wonder.
I thought 2020 can't get any crazier – – but this tweet from CIA John Brennan
. is right up there
https://twitter.com/JohnBrennan/status/1314587438568833025?s=20
John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) Tweeted: Imagine prospects for world peace, prosperity, &
security if Joe Biden were President of the United States & Alexei Navalny the President
of Russia. We'll soon be halfway there.
"Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You, you may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one"
Hmmm So Navalny is indeed a CIA asset as those lying Russians claimed.
And this impartial government official, source of unbiased intelligence, is endorsing
Biden? If the above tweet is authentic, this country has reached maximum discord, betrayal
and treason.
Ministry of Internal Affairs: the "bottle from Navalny's room" was bought by Pevchikh
at the airport
The Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Transport in the Siberian
Federal District has stated that Aleksey Navalny's associate Maria Pevchikh had not taken
away bottles of water from his hotel room in Tomsk. These bottles, as reported earlier, the
German authorities had handed over for investigation, which had found traces of
poison.
The police said in a statement that Pevchikh had no bottles in her luggage during the
security check at Tolmachevo airport. After having gone through the security check, she
bought "a 0.5 litre bottle of water from a vending machine whilst in transit at the airport"
and with which bottle she flew to the city of Omsk".
And here is the very bottle (only its top is visible) that Maria Pevchikh was
secretly carrying.
The "deadly poison" was lying amongst cosmetics, laptops and underwear (it does not
seem that the bottle was considered to be "deadly dangerous").. According to the data that we
have available, there were no other bottles, neither with Pevchikh's nor Navalny's things.
This is an X-ray of the only suitcase in which a bottle can be seen.
Earlier, the German government had stated that, amongst other things, traces of
"Novichok" had been found on a bottle of water out of which Navalny had drunk.
15:17, 8 October 2020 During a search of Navalny's colleague, the alleged bottle with "Novichok" was not
found
During a search at Novosibirsk airport, Alexei Navalny's comrade-in-arms Maria Pevchikh
was not found to have a bottle, which, allegedly, had traces of poison from the Novichok
group. This has been stated by Sergei Potapov, deputy head of the Investigation Department of
the Transport Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Siberian
Federal District, TASS reports.
8 October 2020 15:45 The alleged bottle with "Novichok" was not found on Maria Pevchikh during a security
check
The bottle with which she flew to Omsk had been bought in the transit zone
Oh shit!
I suppose this story is now being reported in the USA, UK, French, German, Polish,
Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian press etc., etc.
By the way, if you "Google" the following: "Pevchikh -- bottles -- airport" or similar, at
the top of the list of links presented is one to "The Insider" article that screams out
FAKE.
Only by scrolling down the list do you find Russian media articles on the Ministry of the
Interior (Siberia) statement concerning Pevchikh and the bottles and the uncanny way the
Bullshitter knew about the "mining" of Omsk airport even though the email from Germany
warning that bombs had been planted there was closed information and when it was sent, the
"Oppositionsführer" was in a state of a medically induced coma.
It time to make him accountable at the election box. Not that it matter much as Biden is yet another neocon and Zionist, but
stil...
American people are tied of sliding standard of living, permanent wars and jingoism. Trump might share Hillary fate in 2020,
because any illusion that he is for common fold, who voted for him in 2016 now disappeared. So he is not better then neocon Biden and Biden is new bastard. So why vote for the old bastard if we have new, who might be
slightly better in the long run
This is a very expensive foreign policy, that doesn't benefit the USA. It has potential to
raise the price of oil significantly.
Notable quotes:
"... Behind the move was pressure from the Zionist lobby. President Trump is in need of campaign funds and the lobby provides those. ..."
"... I can also see this green lighting Israeli or joint American-Israeli strikes on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons development sites and other military and petro-state assets. ..."
"... It's disgusting to watch the people of the US/UK/EU go along with this. Western elites are fat, lazy, vicious, and cruel. ..."
"... Paul wrote: "Perhaps a Biden administration would be just as much a Zionist captive as the Trump administration." Yes at least as much or more zionist. Nothing about Harris or Biden (or the DNC) says they won't be. ..."
"... I nominate president Eisenhower as slightly less zionist on one occasion: during the Anglo,French, Zionist Suez invasion of 1956 Eisenhower remarked after numerous UN resolutions condemning the bandit state's aggression ' Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal?' ..."
"... "The EU is trying to prop up the US Empire in response to its decline, instead of trying to free itself. " ..."
"... Donald Trump talked up his Iran policy in a profanity-laden tirade on Friday, telling conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh that Tehran knows the consequences of undermining the United States. ..."
"... "Iran knows that, and they've been put on notice: if you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before." ..."
The U.S. has imposed
new sanctions on Iran which will make ANY trade with the country very difficult:
[T]he Trump administration has decided to impose yet further sanctions on the country ,
this time targeting the entirety of the Iranian financial sector. These new measures carry
biting secondary sanctions effects that cut off third parties' access to the U.S. financial
sector if they engage with Iran's financial sector.
Since the idea was first floated publicly , many have argued that sanctioning Iran's
financial sector would eviscerate what humanitarian trade has survived the heavy hand of
existing U.S. sanctions.
Behind the move was pressure from the Zionist lobby. President Trump is in need of
campaign funds and the lobby provides those. The move is also designed to preempt any
attempts by a potentially new administration to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran:
This idea appears to have first been introduced into public discourse in an
Aug. 25, 2020, Wall Street Journal article by Mark Dubowitz and Richard Goldberg urging
the Trump administration to "[b]uild an Iranian [s]anctions [w]all" to prevent any future
Biden administration from returning to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the
nuclear accord between Iran and the world's major powers on which President Donald Trump
reneged in May 2018.
The new sanctions will stop all trade between the 'western' countries and Iran.
The Foreign Minister of Iran responded with defiance:
Amid Covid19 pandemic, U.S. regime wants to blow up our remaining channels to pay for food
& medicine.
Iranians WILL survive this latest of cruelties.
But conspiring to starve a population is a crime against humanity. Culprits & enablers
-- who block our money -- WILL face justice.
In response Iran will continue its turn to the east. Russia, China and probably India will
keep payment channels with Iran open or will make barter deals.
The Europeans, who so far have not dared to counter U.S. sanctions on Iran, are likely to be
again shown as the feckless U.S. ass kissers they have always been. They will thereby lose out
in a market with 85 million people that has the resources to pay for their high value products.
If they stop trade of humanitarian goods with Iran they will also show that their much vaunted
'values' mean nothing.
The European Union claims that it wants to be an independent actor on the world stage. If
that is to be taken seriously this would be the moment to demonstrate it.
Posted by b on October 9, 2020 at 16:37 UTC | Permalink
Unconscionable but what is new with pompass and his ghouls; treasury dept responsible for
cranking up the sanctions program was formerly headed by a dual citizen woman who resigned
suddenly after being exposed as an Israeli citizen-not hard to understand that sentiment in
that dept has not changed.
The other aspect here is the FDD as key supporter of these severe sanctions; very virulent
anti-Iranian vipers nest of ziocons with money bags from zionist oligarch funders.
Ho-hum. As I wrote earlier, just the daily breaking of laws meaning business as usual. As
noted, Russia has really upped the diplomatic heat on EU and France/Germany in particular,
and that heat will be further merited if the response is as b predicts from their past,
deplorable, behavior.
Much talk/writing recently about our current crisis being similar in
many ways to those that led to WW1, but with the Outlaw US Empire taking Britain's role. I
expect Iran's Iraqi proxies to escalate their attacks aimed at driving out the occupiers.
IMO, we ought to contemplate the message within this Strategic Culture editorial when it comes to the hegemonic relationship between
the Outlaw US Empire and the EU/NATO and the aims of both. The EU decided not to continue
fighting against the completion of Nord Stream, but that IMO will be its last friendly act
until it severs its relations with the Outlaw US Empire. With the Wall moved to Russia's
Western borders, the Cold War will resume. That will also affect Iran.
thanks b... it is interesting what a pivotal role israel plays in all of this... and why
would there be concern that biden would be any different then trump in revoking the jcpoa? to
my way of thinking, it is just pouring more cement and sealing the fate of the usa either
way, as an empire in real decline and resorting to more of the same financial sanctions as a
possible precursor to war.. frankly i can't see a war with iran, as the usa would have to
contend with russia and china at this point... russia and china must surely know the game
plan is exactly the same for them here as well.. as for europe, canada, australia and the
other poodles - they are all hopeless on this front as i see it... lets all bow down to the
great zionist plan, lol...
Yeah but at least Trump didn't start any new wars. /s
The Eurotools in Brussels are absolutely disgusting. A weaker bunch of feckless,
milquetoast satraps is difficult to imagine. The EU perfectly embodies the 21st century
liberal ethic: spout virtue signaling nonsense about peace, freedom, human rights and the
"rules based international order" while licking the boots of Uncle Scam and the Ziofascists
and going along with their war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Russia and China need to step up their game and boldly circumvent the collective
punishment sanctions that are choking the life out of Iran, Syria and Venezuela. They still
let the rogue states of the west get away with far too much.
The Teheran men will not surrender to the yankee herds and hordes. And less so the
telavivian.
It s easy to see that in the medium run this cruelly extended crime plays in chinese, russian
and shia hands.
And they must start immediately a backlash handing hundreds of special forces and weapons
opver to the Houthi hands.
Of course there is a war on, and it has been gathering force for some time.
Iran is but one more skirmish or battle. However, Xi and Putin are using what I call the
"Papou yes". You must always say "yes" as this way you avoid direct conflict, but then you
go and do exactly what you were going to do in the first place . The person who does the
demanding - having had his/her demands "met" has nothing further to add and will go away. (I
have seen this effective technique in action).
At the moment it appears that the aim of the subversive (military/CIA/NGO) wings of the
Empire are to start as many conflicts as possible. To isolate and overextend Russia, leading
to it's collapse. (As they claim to have done before.)
The "Alternative axis" is just carrying on with it's own plan to overextend and eventually
let the US dissolve into its own morasss. The opposition are trying to follow their own plan
without giving an opening for the US/NATO to use its numerical military advantage, by not
taking the bait.
The ultimate battle is for financial control of the worlds currency, or in the case of the
US, to halt the loss of it's financial power. To avoid that The next step could be the
introduction of a Fed. owned controlled and issued "digi-dollar", When all outstanding
"dollar assets" are re-denominated into virtual misty-money which is created exclusively by
the Fed. Banks become unnecessary as the Fed becomes the only "lender" available, Congress
redundant, debts no longer matter and so on. Who cares about the reserves held by China and
overseas "investors" if their use or even existence can be dictated by the Fed?
They have already published a "trial balloon" about introducing a digi-dollar.
Iran? the US is throwing ALL its cards into what looks like it's final battle to preserve
the dollars supremacy. Why cut ALL the Iranian financial system out of their sphere of
influence? Because it (thinks) it can and by doing so cower the wavering into obeying.
Thanks 'b', very well timed. I was actually heading to the open thread with this article
until I saw your piece. This Asia Times
article focuses on three key points:
- Iran has replaced the dollar with the Yuan as its main foreign currency
"This may become the east wind for the renminbi (yuan) and provide a new oil currency option
for traders in oil-producing countries, including Iran," an editorial on qq.com said. "
- Several large banks in Iran are developing a gold encrypted digital currency called
PayMon and had issued more than 1,000 crypto-currency mining licenses, which could promote
the development of crude oil. Domestic traders use cryptocurrency to import goods and bypass
American banks.
- The Iranian-Swiss Joint Chamber of Commerce
"Switzerland had received a special exemption from US supervisory authorities to allow the
SHTA operations."
It remains to be seen how effective the Swiss Humanitarian Trade Agreement actually is.
Some say it is nothing but a US propaganda stunt. Hopefully, that is not the case.
What does Iran need that they cannot get from China and Russia? The USA has cheap corn, and
the EU has... what, cheese? Other than that I don't see why Iran needs to trade with the
empire and its more servile vassals anyway.
Strange, that ther is a jewish or Israeki ´ animosity agains Iran (or agains tthe
Medtans -- as thy are all named in all Greek records(H, that theer is a jewish animosity
against, that ther is a jewish anikisit agains Iran (or the Medtans -- as thy are old ptt in
all Greek Strenge(Hellemistic) tales, Cyrur+s the Great is reported to have liberatet the
Jews of Babilon end sent them back to Jerusalem . So, "PRIMO SON VENETANO, SECUNDO SON
CHRISTANO" -- STILL A COMMONLY ACCEPTED SAYING INVENEZIA WHEB I VISITED ABD AKED IT IN THE
THE YEAR OF 1´2917! Iran (or the Medtans -- as thy are old ptt in all Greek
Strenge(Hellemistic) tales, Cyrur+s the Great is reorted to have liberatet te´he Jews
of Babilon end sent them back to Jerusalem . So, "PRIMO SON VENETANO, SECUNDO SON CHRISTANO"
-- STILL A COMMONLY ACCEPTED SAYING INVENEZIA WHEB I VISITED ABD AKED IT IN THE THE YEAR OF
1´2917! ellenistic) tales, Cyrur+s the Great is reorted to have liberatet te´he
Jews of Babylon end sent them back to Jerusalem . So, "PRIMO SON VENETANO, SECUNDO SON
CHRISTANO" -- STILL A COMMONLY ACCEPTED SAYING INVENEZIA WHEB I VISITED ABD AKED IT IN THE
THE YEAR OF 2017
Quite impressed with all the theories about Europe and its behavior. The answer is very
simple, Europe is occupied by a foreign power, it is a colony. And all the qualifiers are
quaint.
I disagree. What did the EU did on Iran, compared to Russia and China? It stopped most trade with Iran, including the purchase of iranian oil, and it stopped all
investment projects. INSTEX is a joke. Meanwhile Germany recently banned Hezbollah.
Yes, they did vote for the JCPOA in the UN. I look at actions rather than words though,
and EU has imposed de facto sanctions on Iran.
Moreover, German FM Maas told Israel recently that efforts are underway to keep the Iran
arms embargo. (He is also a big "Russia fan" - sarc off)
In other words, we "support" the JCPOA, but in practice with arms and trade embargoes on
Iran continuing.
Yeah right.
Posted by: powerandpeople | Oct 9 2020 20:15 utc | 24
No, its not so simple, unless you claim that european russophobia started with the US and
did not exist before it. Guy Mettan has a good book on it. It is a thousand years old issue,
involving Catholicism, France, Germany, Sweden, Britain, and others.
Yes, the US wants to divide the EU and Russia. But the EU itself is rotten from
within.
Politics are more important than the economy, German Chancellor Merkel said in relation to
Russia.
"Drang nach Osten" - "Drive to the East".
Germany dreams of capturing Eastern Europe and using is as some sort of colonised labor
pool similar to what Latin America is for the US.
And this is why the EU, without any prodding, eagerly took the lead in the attempt of
colour revolution in Belarus, where it played far bigger role than the US.
Signing and adhearing to the JCPOA turned Europe and Iran from opponents into partners.
This is a great diplomatic achievement. However, no part of the JCPOA made the two allies or
obliged the European side to wage an economic war with the USA on behalf of Iran. On the
contrary, the Iranians would be the first to say they are no friends of Europa. They have
been complaining about "Western meddling" in their region for years. (Note that they don`t
differentiate but always speak collectively of "the West").
So that`s their chance to show the world how much of a sovereign nation they are and that
they can handle their problems without the "meddling" of the "despicable" Europeans. There is
no obligation - neither legal nor moral - for Europe to take the side of Iran in the US-Iran
conflict.
And actually it is both sides - both Iran and the USA - who are unhappy with the current
European neutrality.
Thanks to MoA for being one of the only honest brokers of news on Iran in the English
language. As an American citizen living abroad (in EU) I have a more jaded and at the same
time worried feeling about this.
Along with all the other stuff, including the current threat to close the U.S. embassy in
the Iraqi "Green Zone" and the accompanying military maneuvers, which would spark war in the
region, I see this hardening and expansion of sanctions as yet the next clue that the U.S.
and Donald Trump's regime are looking toward re-election and a hot war with/on Iran. Rattling
the cage ever more and backing Iran into the corner with brutal, all-encompassing sanctions
is already an act of war, usually the first prior to bombs falling. I can also see this green lighting Israeli or joint American-Israeli strikes on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons
development sites and other military and petro-state assets.
I hope I'm wrong but we've all seen this before and it never ends well. If the EU shows a
spine, or more likely Russia and/or China step in directly, perhaps the long desired
neocon/neolib/Zionist hot war against Iran can be avoided.
I think it is very important for the US to kill another 500,000 children via sanctions, in
order to demonstrate the importance of freedom and democracy and observing international law.
While reading this post I was thinking what MoA wrote in the last two paragraphs. And also
that Iran will just continue to turn to China, Russia, and others in the East.
It's disgusting to watch the people of the US/UK/EU go along with this. Western elites are
fat, lazy, vicious, and cruel.
"Europeans can not be helped. Ironically, it is their own rejection of their WW2 past that
causes them to reject the multipolar world and sovereignty as "primitive things from the
past"
plus, as you point out elsewhere, there are longer histories at play: the Crusades against
the Slavs, the Moors and the Turks (and the Arabs, in fact), the invention of "western
civilization" in the 19th century (Arians vs Semites, Europe vs Asia, ecc) ...
plus, there is the persisting aspiration for world domination, partly frustrated by WW1
and the upheavals of the XXth century, which transformed the UK and the whole of Europe (with
Japan, Australia, etc) in a junior partner of the new US Empire
(that's the other lesson learned from WW2: no single european power could dominate the
continent and the world, but they could dominate as junior partners under the new young
leader of the wolf pack, the US)
plus, there are is a class war that can be better fought, by national oligarchies, within
globalist rethoric and rules
plus, there are the US deep state instruments of domination over european national
states
but Europeans (and Usaians) do understand the language of force, and they have - at the
moment - encountered a wall in their attempts at expansion, in Iran, China, Russia,
Venezuela, ecc; an alternative multipolar alliance is taking shape
so they might attempt to win a nuclear war by 20 million deaths to 2 (or 200 to 20, who
cares), but they might also decide to tune down their ambitions and return to reality;
maybe
@m (#35)
EU promised to uphold JCPOA. They can't because of the US and they are doing next to nothing
to change that. EU isn't neutral. They are stooges. Iran is right to complain about it, the
US isn't.
Trump is a man of peace, he hasn't started any new wars - whatever that means, lol.
As far as
I know economic blocade is tantamount to war. If he wins reelection expect renewed kinetic
attacks on venezuela and Iran. He's already lined up his zionist coalition with arabic
satraps to launch his Iran quagmire. Trump is a deal maker, he understands the economy and
will bring back manufacturing jobs to Murikkka, lol. I'm sure Boeing execs in deep trouble
would love to sell plane to the Iranians but Mr. MIGA just made that impossible. Nothing to
worry about, there's always the next socialist bailout for Boeing funded by taxpayers -
suckers as Trump would call them. So much for winning, can't fix deplorable and stupid...
Btw b, Trump's opposition to the Iran deal has nothing to do with money or the zionist
lobby. Stable genius opposed JCPOA in 2015 even before announcing his run for the presidency.
It's not about the mula but all about the mollah's, lol: The Donald in his own words at a tea
party event in 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIDNonMDSo8
Ever since the Iranian revolution of 1979 multiple US regimes in DC have been totally
successful in making majority Iranian people everywhere in the world, understand that the US
is their chronic strategic enemy for decades to come. At same time, these US regimes have
equally been as successful in making American people believe Iran is their enemy.
The difference between this two side's belief is, that, Iranian people by experiencing US
regime' conducts have come to their belief, but the American people' belief was made by their
own regime' propaganda machinery. For this reason, just like the people to people relation
between the US and Russian people, Before and after the fall of USSR the relation between US
and Iran in next few generations will not come to or even develop to anything substantial or
meaningful. One can see this same trajectory in US Chinese relations, or US Cuban. Noticeably
all these countries relation with US become terminally irreparable after their revolutions,
regardless of the maturity or termination of the revolution. As much as US loves color
revolutions, US hates real revolutions. The animosity no longer is just strategic it has
become people to people, and the reason and blame goes to Americans since they never were
ready to accept the revolutions that made nations self-servient to their interests. The
bottom line truth is the US / and her poodles in europe know, ever since the revolution Iran
no longer will be subservient to US interests.
This is leverage to bargain away the oil pipeline to germany. That is what is behind it. You
scratch my back, the US is saying to the EU, in particular, Germany....
It's an
Economy based on Plunder! , so that's why sanctions here, there and everywhere!! But the
real problem is we aren't participating in the Plunder!! Sometimes you gotta use extreme
sarcasm to explain the truth of a situation, and that's what Max and Stacey do in their show
at the link. 13 minutes of honest reporting about the fraudulent world in which we live. As
for Jerome Powell, current Fed Chair, he's complicit in the ongoing criminal activity just as
much as the high ranking politicos. Bastiat laid it out 180 years ago, but we're living what
he described now. And that's all part of what I wrote @40 above. The moral breakdown occurred
long ago but took time to perfect.
I think it is crazy that EU allows US to manage SWIFT to the point they invent new entities
to sidestep SWIFT and US sanctions (which are weak and ineffective, but that is the
trajectory of their weak attempts at independence). Force SWIFT to equally service all legal
transactions according to EU law, and let US cut itself off from all international financial
transfers if it doesn't like using EU's SWIFT. US corps won't allow that to happen, it's just
that EU refuses to call US bluff. Of course they are now praying for Biden presidency, but if
they can't assert themselves it is all ultimately the same thing.
These 'foreign policy experts' think the trade war with China has been a mistake. But they
think Trump is too soft on Russia and he hasn't been tough enough on NK, Iran and Venezuela.
It has become a standard trick for outgoing US administrations to saddle the incoming
administration with set in stone policies and judicial appointments.
"Behind the move was pressure from the Zionist lobby. President Trump is in need of
campaign funds and the lobby provides those. The move is also designed to preempt any
attempts by a potentially new administration to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran."
Perhaps a Biden administration would be just as much a Zionist captive as the Trump
administration.
The danger for the world is the Trump administration may go even further than additional
sanctions. So I refer to the previous post, US policy remains the same whatever bunch are the
frontmen.
When that attempt failed they worked on convincing the Sultan of Turkey to give them
someone else's homeland. The Zionist Zealot Mr Kalvariski became the administrator of the
Palestine Jewish Colonization Association with the aim of establishing a jewish suprematist
ghetto. Following that flop the Zionists turned to the hapless British and were rewarded by
Balfour with his notorious British government double cross of the Arabs. Now it's the turn of
the US and assorted captive nations to uphold and support tyranny and Talmudic
violence.
I am SLOWLY coming to the conclusion that DaTrumpster understands DaDeepState better than any
of us armchair pundits. His patient - and yes, perhaps faulty strategy - he's still standing
after ALL DaCrap that's been thrown at him.
All the 'EXPURTS' - including MoA - can only see part of DaPicture at best.
I've been as hard on DaTrumpster as anyone on DaConservative side - but I am SLOWLY coming to
understand WTF just might be going on.
Point - don't be too sure of your immediate inclinations - we ALL see through DaGlass DARKLY!
SWIFT is only a messaging system – SWIFT does not hold any funds or securities, nor
does it manage client accounts. Behind most international money and security transfers is the
Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system. SWIFT is a vast
messaging network used by banks and other financial institutions to quickly, accurately, and
securely send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions.
Paul wrote:
"Perhaps a Biden administration would be just as much a Zionist captive as the Trump
administration." Yes at least as much or more zionist. Nothing about Harris or Biden (or the DNC) says they won't be.
And hasn't it always been that way from one president to the the next? Was there ever one
that was less zionist than the predecessor? (Maybe they're all so close this is an impossible
question to answer, that too could be the case).
The sitting executive branch gives the favors right now and anyone incoming gives the
favors after they win and thus each election becomes a double windfall for the lobby
group?
A zionist double dip . Maybe most US voters could grasp it like that.
I can't back this up (much like my previous comment in this thread) but it's my
impression. It would probably take a lot of work to make sure it's right; one would have to
scrutinize so much over so many decades.
I nominate president Eisenhower as slightly less zionist on one occasion: during the
Anglo,French, Zionist Suez invasion of 1956 Eisenhower remarked after numerous UN resolutions
condemning the bandit state's aggression ' Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign
territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its
withdrawal?'
This could be a useful quote for todays world.
Later, in 1964, Eisenhower approved his hand picked emissary's US $150 million so called
Johnston Plan to steal the waters of the Jordan River and further marginalize the Palestine
Arabs and surrounding Arab states.
Sanctions aren't the story. Once all the players have left the JCPOA, either Israel or the US
can claim Iranians are at the point of producing a nuclear weapon. Without the JCPOA and
inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities it will be impossible to prove or deny the
allegations. Thus giving either the US or Israel justification it wants to conduct military
strikes against Iran. The only things stopping this from happening is if the EU stays in the
JCPOA...
Exactly the aim. I said so in an earlier post. This is all part of the program to create a
false justification to conduct military strikes inside Iran. At this point, I'm really
surprised that the U.S. even tries to construct these narratives after Obama's Syria and
Libya operations didn't even really bother, save for a few probably fake "chemical weapons"
attack they alleged Assad committed. Libya I don't remember hearing anything. The embassy
maybe? After the Soleimani strike and the shootdown of the U.S. drone, not to mention the
alleged Iranian attacks on ARAMCO's oil facilities, I'm really quite surprised something more
serious (not to minimize the awful acts of war which the sanctions definitely are) hasn't
already happened. It will soon, especially if Trump gets re-elected. Wonder what all of his
"no new wars" supporters will say then?
Everybody reading knows what SWIFT is. That's a nice attempt to circumscribe the overall
sanctions regime and paint it as "no big deal."
Crush Limpbro - Checked out your site. You've got a long way to go before you can
criticize MoA. Hope that comment draws a few clicks to keep you going, but I would caution
other barflies to use a proxy; could be a honey trap to collect IP addresses.
This United States imposed and Zionist inspired siege on Iran and its people will only
further strengthen the political and economic bonds with Russia and China. Meanwhile, the US
collapses from its internal social limitations and its abandonment of public healthcare
responses to the Corvid 19 pandemic. Europe it close behind the US in this respect.
What exactly is this 'Justification'.. . 'to conduct military strikes against Iran' that
you refer to hasbara boy? Failure to obey foreign imposed zionist diktats?
Would this 'justification' apply to the bandit state if it refused to abide by the NNPT
for example?
No double standards pass the test here.
Yet another proof that "Western values" and their "rules based international order" mean
exactly nothing.
In the past, the West at least kept up some pretense that it was wrong to target unarmed
civilians (still, they flattened Driesden; Hiroshima; North Korea, Vietnam, Laos). Today,
they do not care to be seen openly, cruelly, brutally, sadistically killing civvies. These
American bastards say, "... it is not killing if the victims drop dead later, like, not right
now. " Or, "... it became necessary to destroy Iran in order to save Iran."
Iran is perfectly correct to call this a crime against humanity for the West to starve a
population of food and medicine. This will boomerang just as the opium-pushing in China will
boomerang on the West.
Meanwhile, just as those drug-pushing English bastards earned themselves lordships and
knighthoods; just as presidential bastards retire to their Martha Vineyard mansions; so the
current crop of bastards in American leadership will retire to yet more mansions, leaving the
next couple generations to meet Persian wrath. The American way is to "win" until they are
tired of winning, no?
But in truth, in objective reality, only those who have lost their human-ness are capable
of crimes against humanity.
The US is cruising for a bruising in the middle east fucking with Iran like this. Not that the US hasn't deserved a good knockout punch the past 19 years since invading and
destroying Afghanistan and Iraq, etc, etc. Regardless of their rhetoric, how the European rogues and rascals (France, Germany and the
UK) can sleep at night is beyond me.
Yes Psychochistorian @ 1, At the nation state level, EU support for blockade terror and
sanction torture (BT&ST), against reluctant nation states and non compliant individuals
within those nation states, logically suggests EU nation states are not independent sovereign
countries <=EU nation states exist in name only? Maybe its just like in the USA, these
private monopoly powered Oligarcks (PMPO), own everything (privately owned copyrights,
patents, and property) made possible by rules nation states turn into law. The citizens of
those privately owned EU nation states are victims <=in condition=exploitable. Maybe PMPOs
use nation states <=as profit support weapons, to be directed against <=any and all
<=competition, whereever and however <=competition appears.
The hidden suspects <=capital market linked crowds through out the world..
Media is 92% owned by six private individuals, of the seven typical nation state layers of
authority and power: 5 are private and two are public. Additionally, few in the international
organizations have allegiance to historic cultures of the nation state governed masses. It is
as if, the named nation states are <=threatened by knee breaking thugs, but maybe its not
threat, its actual PMPO ownership.
If one accepts PMPO <=to be in control of all of USA and all of allied nation state,
one can explain <=current BT&ST events. But private Oligarch scenarios <=raise
obvious questions, why have not the PMPO challenged East eliminated <=Israel, MSM
propaganda repeatedly blames or points to Israel <=to excuse the USA leaders for their
BT&ST policies. Seems the PMPO are <=using the nation states, they own <=to
eliminate non complying competition.
What is holding the East back? Russia and China each have sufficient oil, gas and
technology to keep things functional, so why has not the competition in the East taken Israel
out, if Israel is directing the USA to apply BT&ST against its competitors? Why is the
white House so sure, its BT&ST policies will not end up destroying Israel? Maybe because
Israel has no real interest <=in the BT&ST policy <=Israel is deceptions:fall guy?
The world needs to pin the tail on the party driving USA application of BT&ST because no
visible net gain to Governed Americans seems possible from BT&ST policies?
I think Passer @ 17 has hit the nail on its head. "The EU is trying to prop up the US
Empire in response to its decline, instead of trying to free itself. "
Sanctions aren't the story. Once all the players have left the JCPOA, either Israel or the
US can claim Iranians are at the point of producing a nuclear weapon.
So you put that forward as a justification for attacking Iran militarily, but that means
according to your logic you also have justification for attacking Israel or the US
militarily. The rules are the same for all, right?
Economic warfare is certainly effective. However, time is running out for these weapons as
America's lock on the world economy grows weaker. With a rapidly approaching expiry date, the
word out may be to use em or lose em.
In a zero-sum great game, it makes sense to deploy such weapons now insofar as an
opponent's loss is always a gain for oneself.
Donald Trump talked up his Iran policy in a profanity-laden tirade on Friday, telling
conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh that Tehran knows the consequences of undermining the
United States.
"Iran knows that, and they've been put on notice: if you fuck around with us, if you do
something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done
before."
What a shit show we are seeing. What is the next phase of this civilization war that is not
a war because there are not enough dead bodies for some I guess?...but it sure looks like
war to me.
Well for the first time in history Iran's symbolic "Red Flag" is still flying above the
popular Jamkaran Mosque Holy dome. Perhaps the USA and its running dogs body count has risen
in Iraq and Afghanistan? How would we know. These things are disguised from the fearless
press in those countries ;)
Perhaps the dead and mangled are many but we do know that the US chief killer in
Afghanistan was reduced to ashes immediately following General Shahid Qassem Suleimanis
murder by the USA whilst on a diplomatic mission in Iraq.
In respect of b's observation above, the illegal occupier of Palestine is more likely
tipping millions into the Harris Presidency as well as the possible Trump Presidency. I doubt
either Harris or the biden bait and switch stooge would restore the JCPOA. Besides they would
not be invited to sit at the table any time soon IMO. They would likely refuse to any
conditions of reversing the sanctions and then carry on about all that 'unreasonable demands
by a terrorist state' stuff etc etc.
No, Iran will be getting on with its future in a multilateral world where the United
Nations has been reduced to pile of chicken dung by the USA while most other nations go along
with global lunacy.
You know what's telling about the bootlickers who hem and haw about U.S. policy with the T
Administration, but never mention Trump as the real source of it even when profuse Zionist
shit spills from his mouth on Limbaugh's show proving he's a Ziofascist pig?
What's telling is that these usual suspects jumped all over ARI @64 for zeroing in on
Trump's precise intentions with Iran but they gave a pass to the real HASBARIST in the room,
Crush Limbraw @60, exposing himself, putting his HARD-ON FOR TRUMP on full display.
@60 we ALL see through DaGlass DARKLY!
Speak for yourself- you Zionist MORON!
Ahhhhhh, you can always count on the DUPLICITY of MOA'S weathervane james and friends. Me,
I ain't here to win a popularity contest like weathervane; I'm here to kick ass when I
witness duplicity in action. My friend here is the truth that I'll defend to the grave.
********
Noooo, dum-dums Putin will not come to Iran's rescue when he's warm in bed with his
Zionist Oligarchs and Russian squatters whom he pays homage to from time to time when he
visits Ziolandia thanking them for choosing the stolen West Bank over Russia.
Iran knows that, and they've been put on notice. That's Trump blowhard
driving the drumbeat.
Just rescue me from my self-destructive self for 4 more years, oh kings of Zion and
Wall Street, and I'll give you WAR!!! all in CAPS with three exclamation points. The GREATEST
war you've ever seen.
When I read the Great Reset article on the World Economic Forum website it seems to me that
the western Globalists, in concert align the US and EU. That accounts for the basic vassal
arrangements that predominate but allow for some nonalignments on certain issues.
That is precisely what the Belarusian authorities announced when Tikhanovskaya left Minsk,
that she was helped in her way out, but we know how the MSM acts, they stick to their own
script, just like a Hollywood movie.
The Belarusians must be watching with great attention what is happening in Kirguizia,
riots and complete chaos, and thinking how lucky they were to avoid the color rev that was in
the menu for them, which the same methods, discredit the oncoming election, claim fraud after
it, use similar symbols like the clenched fist and the heart, new flag, start transliterating
family and geographical names to a mythical and spoken by a very small minority language and
then nobody knows if to spell Tikhanovskaya, Tsikhanouskaya or like the politically incorrect
but street wise Luka called her, Guaidikha. And that is Kirguizia, how about a shooting war
in Armenia and Azerbaijan, all those conflicts were unimaginable when the USSR existed, but
the empire even on his way down is insatiable.
There is over a million jews of Russian origin living in Israel, 20% of the population,
with deep roots in Russia, language, culture and relatives. Do not let partisanship for the
Dems blind you, a true successful leader is someone that defends his country's interests
while at the same time tries to have good relations with everybody else, obviously that
balance is not easy to achieve in a world full of conflicting interests, but so far Putin
seems to be balancing his act while not loosing sight of the main thing, Russia.
Putin will not come to Iran's rescue when he's warm in bed with his Zionist
Oligarchs
If Putin is so close to Zionists, then why does Russia block the Zionist regime-change in
Syria? Why has Russia denied Israel and USA entreaties to allow them to bomb Iran?
Not as strange as a mythological demigoddess that turned sailors into swain and that now
enjoys to plunge into the mud with her creatures. A bot, what an easy label, it has lost any
meaning.
special beings who was born with two extra eyes...in the back of my head.
Alaska yellow fin sole, not bad, from Bristol Bay, but the Melva -a tunafish species with
more oil in its meat- I cooked for lunch, just caught, has a lot more fish oil with its rich
contents of vitamin D, add sunny Mediterranean weather and that is my pill for today, trying
to keep the bug at bay.
Circe, why don't you do what your namesake would have done and whip yourself up some meds to
calm down? You're starting to lapse into excessive use of upper case, italics, exclamation
points, bolding, profanity, and of course, insults.
This may help. It looks like the orange man is in fact going down, so you will soon have
Joe and Kamal empowered to dismantle the evil Putin-Netanyahu-Trump axis, and put the US back
on the path to truth and justice.
The unilateral and illegal-under-JCPOA sanctions mean it's time for EU to either confront the
extraterritorial US policy it has clearly rejected in principle, or (more likely) acknowlege
that it remains in practice just a collection of 'client states'. A sad moment for me, but
useful for clarity.
Hard to understand but you guys are incapable of spelling the name of a once great US
city, San Francisco. I heard it has changed a lot, got to see long time ago, before the
digital craze.
This is a brief but subtle post by b, with quiet but telling headline. Perhaps, just
guessing, a new take on the post he was having difficulty with earlier? The question of the
EU is an interesting one - not to be considered as virulent as the former Soviet Union, but
somehow as tugged at by the components thereof...
Sanctions on Iran? We do know what Iran is capable of; surely we have not forgotten?
Indeed, by pressing these sanctions at this late date, the Trump administration surely has
not forgotten either the effect sanctions had on Russia. They were postive to that country's
independent survival, though the immediate effect was demonstrably harsh. So now, sanctions
on Iran? One doesn't have to be a world leader to suppose similar cause, similar effect.
Ah, Paco has a wonderful meal of a beneficial fish called the Melva! Bravo, Paco; all is
not lost! But you have hooked the sea-serpent as well -- take care! That one - carefully
remove the hook and set it free ;)
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"... The myth that Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin's puppet just won't die, even though ample evidence demonstrates that the president's policy toward Russia has actually been surprisingly hardline and confrontational. Such pervasive paranoia has led to a rebirth of McCarthyism in the United States and is preventing a badly needed reassessment of U.S. foreign policy. In short, threat inflation with respect to Russia and an obsession with the phantom danger of presidential treason continues to poison our discourse. ..."
The consequences of the last McCarthy era were steep and lasted a generation; we can't afford a repeat.
The myth that Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin's puppet just won't die, even though ample evidence demonstrates that the president's
policy toward Russia has actually been
surprisingly hardline and confrontational. Such pervasive paranoia has led to a rebirth of McCarthyism in the United States and
is preventing a badly needed reassessment of U.S. foreign policy. In short, threat inflation with respect to Russia and an obsession
with the phantom danger of presidential treason continues to poison our discourse.
The end of the exhaustive FBI and Mueller commission investigations into "Russia collusion" was never going to put the treason
innuendoes to rest. Subsequent developments, such as
unsupported charges that Moscow paid financial bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, served to keep the
narrative alive. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi epitomized the ongoing efforts to make imputations of disloyalty stick. "With [Trump],
all roads lead to Putin,"
Pelosi said in late June 2020. "I don't know what the Russians have on the president, politically, personally, or financially."
In a September 21 Washington Postop-ed ,
former New York Times correspondent Tim Weiner echoed Pelosi's perspective. He asserted that
despite the investigation by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, despite the work of congressional intelligence committees
and inspectors general -- and despite impeachment -- we still don't know why the president kowtows to Vladimir Putin, broadcasts
Russian disinformation, bends foreign policy to suit the Kremlin and brushes off reports of Russians bounty-hunting American soldiers.
We still don't know whether Putin has something on him. And we need to know the answers -- urgently. Knowing could be devastating.
Not knowing is far worse. Not knowing is a threat to a functioning democracy.
Only visceral hatred of Donald Trump combined with equally unreasoning suspicions about Russia, much of it inherited from the
days of the Cold War, could account for the persistence of such an implausible argument. Yet an impressive array of media and political
heavyweights have adopted that perspective.
As during the McCarthy era in the 1950s, challenging the dominant narrative entails the risk of severe damage to reputation and
career. In September 2020, TheIntercept 's Glenn Greenwald disclosed in an interview with Megyn Kelly that
he had been blacklisted at MSNBC, primarily because he'd disputed the network's unbridled credulity about Russia's alleged menace
and President Trump's collusion with it. When Kelly asked him how he knew he was banned, Greenwald responded: "I have tons of friends
there. I used to go on all the time. I have producers who tried to book me and they get told, 'No. He's on the no-book list.'"
Although an MSNBC spokesperson denied that there was any official ban, the last time Greenwald had appeared on a network program
regarding any issue was in December 2016, just as the Russia collusion scandal was gaining traction. The timing was a striking coincidence.
Greenwald insisted that he was told about being on the no-book list by two different producers, and he charged that his situation
was not unique: "[I]t's not just me but several liberal-left journalists -- including Matt Taibbi and Jeremy Scahill -- who used
to regularly appear there and stopped once they expressed criticism of MSNBC's Russiagate coverage and skepticism generally about
the narrative."
It would be bad enough if blows to careers were the extent of the damage that paranoia about Russia and Trump had caused. But
that mentality is inhibiting any effort to improve relations with a significant international geostrategic player that possesses
several thousand nuclear weapons.
The opposition to any conciliatory moves toward Russia has reached absurd and toxic levels. Critics even condemned the Trump administration's
April 2020 decision to issue a joint declaration with the Kremlin to mark the date when Soviet and U.S. forces linked up at the Elbe
River during World War II, thereby cutting Nazi Germany into two segments. The larger purpose of the declaration was to highlight
"nations overcoming their differences in pursuit of a greater cause." The U.S. and Russian governments stressed that a similar standard
should apply to efforts to combat the coronavirus. It should have been noncontroversial, but some
condemned it as "playing into Putin's hands."
That theme has been even more prominent since Trump's decision to move some U.S. troops out of Germany. Even some members of the
president's own party seem susceptible to the argument. During recent House Armed Services Committee hearings, Congressman Bradley
Byrne invoked Russia. "From a layperson's point of view, it looks like we've reduced our troop presence in Europe at a time that
Russia is actually becoming more of a threat,"
Byrne said
. "It looks like we're pulling back, and I think that bothers a lot of us." Such arguments have been surprisingly common since the
administration announced its plans in late spring. Allegations that Trump is "doing Putin's bidding" continue to flow, even though
some of the troops withdrawn from Germany are going to be redeployed farther east
in Poland -- a step the Kremlin will hardly regard as friendly.
George Beebe, vice president and director of programs at the Center for the National Interest, aptly
describes the potential
negative consequences of fomenting public fear of and hatred toward Russia. He points out that
the safe space in our public discourse for dissenting from American orthodoxy on Russia has grown microscopically thin. When
the U.S. government will open a counterintelligence investigation on the presidential nominee of a major American political party
because he advocates a rethink of our approach to Russia, only to be cheered on by American media powerhouses that once valued
civil liberties, who among us is safe from such a fate? What are the chances that ambitious early-or mid-career professionals
inside or outside the U.S. government will critically examine the premises of our Russia policies, knowing that it might invite
investigations and professional excommunication? The answer is obvious.
Indeed it is. America went through such stifling of debate during the original McCarthy era. The impact lasted a generation and
was especially pernicious with respect to policy toward East Asia. Washington locked itself into a set of rigid positions, including
trying to orchestrate an international effort to shun and isolate China's communist government and see every adverse development
in the region as the result of machinations by Beijing and Moscow. The result was an increasingly futile, counterproductive China
policy until Richard Nixon had the wisdom to chart a new course in the early 1970s. This ossified thinking and lack of debate also
produced the disastrous military crusade in Vietnam.
America cannot afford such folly again. Smearing those who favor a less confrontational policy toward Moscow as puppets, traitors,
and (in the case of accusations against Tulsi Gabbard) "
Russian assets " will not lead to prudent policies. Persisting in such an approach will exacerbate dangerous tensions abroad
and undermine needed political debate at home.
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The American
Conservative , is the author of 12 books and more than 850 articles on international affairs.
966 pages and not one single proof. They go from telling how some businessmen from America and Russia do business together
(which is indication of what exactly? Hunter Biden was doing business with the same oligarch) to saying that if Trump (and other
opposition to hillary) went to see the Podesta' emails from wikileaks that was proof that Trump AND Russia together made the leaks
(what? If some dirt comes out over your opponent it is just normal to go and see what's about); and the only proof they provide
for this assertion (in a 966 page report) is one sentence: "The DNC said Russia had hacked their servers" - not one single proof
offered for that. After all, the DNC would never lie, would they?
And again, please name one policy Trump enacted which does benefit Russia in any way. If they truly helped Trump to get elected
(and they are still doing it) then they must be getting something out of it. So what it is, that Russia is getting from Trump?
"From a layperson's point of view, it looks like we've reduced our troop presence in Europe at a time that Russia is actually
becoming more of a threat,"
Troops weren't really reduced though. Troops were moved to Belgium and Italy (Italy, who's been occupied during WWII and who
still is precluded access to certain areas of their sovereign territory because of American occupation, and Belgium, the Capital
of the European Union, a subservient vassal to American policies, who would rather damage herself and her SMEs rather than growing
some b*lls and promote policies for her people's benefits). The move to Poland was to be expected, but what is really worrying
is that if the US moves nukes to Poland (as German politicians, from both the left and the right are starting to complain about
these nukes sitting under their bottoms) then the 1997 NATO-Russia treaty will crumble, and if that crumbles, Europe will be in
danger. What the author suggests (that America gets out of conspiratorial idiocy and gets back to cooperation) is actually the
best way to maintain peace and stability. Of course the other way (and this is not an either/or, this is complementary action)
is to get Europe to take independent decisions, take the reins of her defence, and tell the US to stop stuffing the East with
weapons and take their nukes back on the other side of the Ocean (after all we've got France who's got nukes as well, and there
is little chance Russia would actually nuke Europe, as they are part of geographical Europe and they'd suffer the consequences
as well to some degree).
EDIT: plus, there is literally zero proof that Russia wants to invade Europe and have a war in Europe (as part of Russia is
European as well). Yes last time they did win the war, but at what cost? This "protecting Europe" rhetoric is just a way to keep
control over Europe. Europa Faber Fortunae Suae , it is really time for it, isn't it Europe?
Actually, "protecting Europe" is about providing bodyguard services to Germany. For which Germany pays less than nothing. Except
in Germans paying for the liberal left think tanks and loss-generating MSM. And them then talking about Russian interference in
US elections, roflol.
NATO is like all other government bureaucracies - once you create one it is nearly impossible to disband. Whole industries
have grown up around it, and think tanks keep moving people in and out of government to ensure continuation of this mission (which
is to keep lots and lots of money flowing into industries that have no purpose.)
Germans and Italians benefit if troops on their soil keep buying their tchotchkes and baubles.Their governments are also staffed
by the same think tank people.
The troop reduction is leverage to try to get Germany to pay their way. The President is not happy with us paying their way,
perpetually, as the Washington establishment (including Biden) would have it.
It would be a tragic irony if the West blindly stumbled into a conflict with Russia after having avoided it during the dangerous
Cold War years. But history shows wars can start in that way.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...
Sure, absolutely. I have said for years (and still say) that we should have better relations with Russia. There was a real
opportunity to improve the relationship due to shared interests against Islamic extremism.
Too bad Trump blew the opportunity. First, he asked for illegal Russian election help on live TV. Then, Trump and his people
lied about their contacts with Russia, lied some more about the purpose of the Trump Tower meeting, and just kept on lying about
their contacts with Russia. Then his cowtowing to Putin in Helsinki without an official US interpreter or offical record just
put gas on what just a smoldering pile of suspicion that could have been much more easily discredited. So Trump brought a lot
of this on himself.
How different might it have been if Flynn, Don, Jr. and everyone else had said, "Hell, yes, we're talking to Russia because
it is in the national interest of the United States to have better relations with Russia, and we're proud to be working in that
direction." Might have taken the wind out of the Dems sails, or at least make them look stupid. Instead, Trump and his lies just
fed into the whole investigation -- why lie if you did nothing wrong?
Since Flynn, Trump has had no apparent advisors worth the title. If he were operating completely in the dark and making policy
decisions based on feel alone it would look much the way it does. Nor do I believe that most of this is his fault, other than
his jettisoning Flynn at the first sign of DNC hatred. That to them (and to future talent) was a clear sign his house was made
of straw and vulnerable to being taken down.
There's probably some truth to the claim that potential advisors were cautious after Flynn was canned. Of course, there is
no reason to assume that Trump would follow anyone's advice.
Flynn was working for Turkey on our dime, and pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI under oath. He had to go. He was a worthless
"advisor" who was in it for himself, and his son too.
Russia interfered extensively in our election to help Trump. Trump encouraged that help. Trump doesn't want to hear any reports
of continued Russian interference in our election. Trump refuses to do everything he can to prevent Russian interference.
Change Trump to Obama and RWers would be currently storming the gates they'd be freaking out so much. Their partisanship easily
overwhelms their patriotism.
America's anti russian paranoia stems from american failures the past 20 years. That paranoia originates from America's ruling
class not its people. America had 4 periods of anti-Russian/soviet paranoia, always coming at a time america felt weak
Before Germany's reunification in 1990, the Russians and the Americans reached an understanding that NATO would not expand
eastward, in return for Russia's not opposing the reunification. Unfortunately, the US/NATO violated this understanding starting
in 1999 when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO. More former East Block countries were admitted in later
years. The expansion of NATO coupled with US interference in Ukraine and its support of the Maidan Revolution in 2014 have resulted
in a deterioration in US - Russia relations. It would be a real stretch to blame this deterioration on Trump.
Trump has been the most Russia-friendly president. His initial instinct or policy view about Russia is rational! He knows the
US cannot be in war with both China and Russia at the same time. His goal was/is to divide these two countries that are very close
recently, so the US would pivot to China without fearing fighting with Russia too.
Having said that, his ineptitude, corrupt mind, and everything is transactional attitude messed that up by mixing his private
business and diplomacy contaminating the whole affair. The US is going to pay big time for Trump's mistakes.
There is plenty to criticize about America's policy towards Russia going back to the expansion of NATO, which was entirely
counter-productive, but this is just fighting one conspiracy with another. The leaders of the Trump campaign wanted to obtain
information on Clinton from Russian intelligence and were disappointed when the Russians didn't deliver. Trump lied repeatedly
about his involvement with Russia and took "anti-Russian" actions only when forced to by the entire Congress, which until 2019
was entirely under Republican control. The tone of this article is thoroughly dishonest and shows contempt for TAC's readers.
Our elite, drunk from imagined Cold War win, made up plans to control universe. It always felt artificial -- globalization
being good for us, while saturating China with our industry. While from the beginning refusing all Russia's overtures to normalize
relations. Clearly, Russia as a more formidable military and scientific entity had to be subjugated first, while China, overwhelmed
by rapid development would have acquiesced to being our manufacturing colony. China turned out not timid, while Russia being pushed
and demonized -- struck independent course. Chinese and Russian objectives were converging for along time. .But we stuck to the
script. Trump abandoned the script,hoping to charm Russia into our fold. The establishment disagrees, so without a clue in how
to proceed in global domination -- - confusion reigns.
While China was under Western thumb we'd become used to thinking of them as mere "coolies", but they proved to be more intelligent
than us, by our own methodology. The government works for the benefit of the people, not just a fraction of it, and it seems is
far more popular than our own. They deserve their hard earned wealth.
Russia is a different story, and will take decades to overcome the damage done by Yeltsin. Your views on Trump-Russia I agree
with but he was hampered by the fake conspiracy cooked up by Hillary C. and the Spy agencies.
Why is Democratic and a good chunk of Republican establishment still fixated on Russia? Even if economically, technologically,
geographically and demographically -- China is a threat to our own technological dominance, what is left of it.
I think the answer is a potent blend of fear and hatred. Fear is easy to explain. Russia has always been militarily and
scientifically advanced, and after Cold War displayed somewhat deceptive image of its weakness. Thus, no rush to finish them off.
Hatred part goes deeper then classical British empire Russophobia. It goes back to hundreds of years of slavery conducted out
of Crimea by successive empires, Khazars, Tatars, Ottomans. The wealth was accumulated from the millions of Slavs sold into Slavery
-- and the wealth went into Byzantine empire, and following the Venetian sack of Constantinople, the wealth went into Venice and
many German and French feudal cities, including Vatican. Nearly exclusive slave trade rights was in the hands of Jewish traders.
Twice Russians broke down slave trade -- first by Russian ruler in 10 century, where in Crimea Russians took Christianity. And
following centuries of occupation -- again, in 18th century by Catherine the Great -- this time for good.
But the banking set up in Venice was the foundation of modern banking in Europe, dictating wars ever since. The move of
European banking in early 18th century was cemented by the entry of Rothshield international banking into UK. Not only that
UK had by 1815 the debt twice its GDP, from which it did not recover until WWI, but continued as limping empire -- but it became
a loudest purveyor of Russophobia since. Russophobia and money lords walk hand in hand. This is the irrational part of the
equation. And the outcome is the fury that Russia "escaped" so many times. The mere notion that these inferior people -- whose
ethnicity is the very meaning if the word slave in German , French and English -- would aspire to equality, is unthinkable.
The rational part of the fear -- Russia is technologically advancing. Thus -- no effort is to be spared in degrading their
capabilities. Following their own line if thinking -- they fear revenge.
It is for that reason that Trump's notion of accepting Russian partnership -- is unacceptable. Even if for the purposes of
global domination. They would prefer taking their chances with China. Too late.
Russia has been damaged, but has reestablished political macro stability through constitutional change, by reviving State Council
function, and by creating massive reserves. Asia is a massive market independent of controlled straits, canals or islands. This
is at present fairly obvious. And challenges to status quo are well under way, while we still dream if the empire.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday dropped a little October surprise said his
department has Hillary Clinton's 'deleted' emails and will release them before the
election.
"We're getting them out," Pompeo told Fox News Dana Perino.
TheGhostOfJamesOtisJr 17 minutes ago (Edited)
Shandong Carter Heavy Industry received all email, including classified material, sent to
Hillary Clinton's private server based on an Intelligence Community Investigator General (ICIG)
report. The ICIG determined all Hillary Clinton email was being forwarded to " [email protected] ",
an address possibly connected to the Chinese equipment manufacturer Shandong Carter Heavy
Industry The ICIG alerted FBI agent Peter Strzok who strangely did not seem alarmed by the
connection despite the fact all but four of the emails sent to Hillary Clinton's private email
server were forwarded to that address, roughly 600,000 in total.(
pdf , p14/105)
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2019-08-14%20Staff%20memo%20to%20CEG%20RHJ%20-%20ICIG%20Interview%20Summary%20RE%20Clinton%20Server.pdf
The following is an excerpt from testimony by Frank Rucker of the ICIG, "Mr. Strzok seemed
to be 'aloof and dismissive.' [Rucker] said it was as if Mr. Strzok felt dismissive of the
relationship between the FBI and ICIG and he was not very warm." - (
pdf p15/105)
The FBI later determined the email address was set up by a Clinton IT staffer named Paul
Combetta. The FBI dismissed the possible China connection because they found no evidence to
contradict Combetta's claim he "had no connection to, and had never heard of, ' Shandong Carter
Heavy Industry Machinery CO., Ltd.'''(
pdf p104/105) That's an odd statement because IT staffers wouldn't normally be expected to
have relationships with Chinese heavy industry. IT workers usually set up email addresses for
others.
Paul Combetta is the IT staffer who used BleachBit to erase emails on Clinton's private
email server.( pdf
p38 ) . Perhaps this is why the FBI didn't consider it necessary to question Combetta in
front of a Grand Jury .( pdf , p127 ) That this didn't demonstrated
criminal intent to the FBI is beyond comprehension. Obviously this goes beyond mere bias and
borders on obstruction of justice. The numerous attempts to debunk this story are almost
comical when combined with other evidence, namely Peter Strzok's leaking to the press:
December 15, 2016 Peter Strzok: " Think our sisters have begun leaking like mad. Scorned
and worried, and political, they're kicking into overdrive. "
April 10, 2017 Peter Strzok: " I had literally just gone to find this phone to tell you I
want to talk to you about media leak strategy with DOJ before you go. "
April 22, 2017 Peter Strzok: " Article is out! Well done, Page. "
There is only one important matter at this time. And that is confirming ACB to the SC prior
to the so-called election. All this other stuff can wait. Lose and it's all pointless
anyway.
As we disregarded Russian fears and ignored the chance for a true partnership, Steve worried
about the resumption of hostile relations between our two countries and possibly a new Cold
War.
Jim Comey Ignored State Department Whistleblower on HIllary's Crimes With Classified
Material by Larry C Johnson
One year before Jim Comey was immersed in his plot to overthrow Donald Trump, the duly
elected President of the United States, a brave Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department
of State came forward with firsthand information of Hillary Clinton's rampant abuse of
Classified material. The man, a senior State Department diplomat who had served as the acting
Ambassador (Chargé d'Affaires) in the Asia Pacific
region under President Clinton, also was a veteran of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam
War.
The letter from this whistleblower is stunning and I am going to present it in total. It is
dated 10 January 2016. You can read it for yourself here
starting at page 121 . I became aware of this letter thanks to the assiduous research and
writings of Charles Ortel (he wrote about this recently
at the American Thinker ).
The letter explains in great detail how Hillary and her cabal of sychophants used an
unclassified system to disseminate Top Secret and Secret intelligence. But the Senior Diplomat
did not stop there. He explained carefully and specifically who the FBI needed to interview and
the questions they needed to ask. You do not need to take my word for it. You can read the
letter for yourself.
And what did the sanctimonious, smug buffoon heading up the FBI do? Nothing. But this senior
Foreign Service Officer was dogged in making sure the FBI had the information. He called FBI
Headquarters and could not get any confirmation that his letter was accepted. Not satisfied, he
walked into the FBI's Washington Field Office. The results of this meeting were reported to
three FBI Agents working on the Hillary Clinton investigation. Named in the report are Peter
Strzok and Jonathan Moffa (the third name is blacked out).
Here is the report in its entirety. Please note that the State Department official delivered
the information on the 27th of January 2016, but the report was not written up until four weeks
later–22 February 2016. (You can see the original on the
FBI website here starting at page 11.)
I do not know if John Durham has seen these documents. I am posting to make sure that he
does. There is no evidence that Inspector General Horowitz examined these documents or
interviewed the Foreign Service Officer. With Secretary of State Pompeo's promise that Hillary
emails will be forthcoming, I think it is worthwhile to revisit what this brave whistleblower
tried to bring to the attention of the FBI, who clearly was hellbent on protecting Hillary
rather than pursing justice and upholding the law. Shameful.
Unfortunately the formatting on this website cuts off the sides of the letter and makes it
unreadable for me - anyone else having this problem? (MacAirBook- Safari)
Great find and wish I could read it. Thanks, LJ. Share your appreciation of the American
Thinker website.
Sad but I suspect that the shear number of those in Government that have a vested interest
in this will ensure that nothing continues to be the outcome.
Deap: I had the same formatting problem. But you can find the letter by clicking on the
link in the post which states "here starting at p. 121."
When you get to the FBI Vault, click on the PDF on the left side of the page, near the
top, entitled "Hillary Rodham Clinton part 23 of 23.pdf."
When the PDF opens, scroll down to page 121. The letter will be found at pp. 121 to 131.
Page 132 (HRC 10114) may be the postage receipt for the letter when it was originally sent,
but it is illegible.
I haven't tried to find the American Thinker article which is referenced in this post, but
it may provide context.
I found the Ortel article at American Thinker. Google "Charles Ortel American Thinker" and
you can find a page with Ortel's articles and blogs. The article is entitled "James Comey and
Robert Mueller have Massive Clinton Foundation Problems." It appears that Mr. Ortel has a
significant interest in the Clinton Foundation.
Carter Page is interviewed by Sharyl Atkinsson on C-Span 2/ Book TV this weekend.
Chilling, interesting perspective. Page's book is out: Abuse and Power.
Apparently Atkinson, of Sinclair Broadcasting, has had her own troubles with illegal
surveillance.
Often Book tv replays programs, sometimes late, when it can be recorded.
Thanks all for the tips to access this link. Got it. All I can remember is Barry Soetoro
stating ...but Hilary didn't mean any harm running her separate insecure server.
The beginning pages of this link re-capping the strings of false and highly hedged
statements about Benghazi were bone chilling to read too. I guess we should be grateful Biden
did not pick Susan Rice for VP, but then he did much worse, he picked Kamala Harris.
And oh yeah, lock her up!
PS: is there some comfort seeing my spell check still does not recognize the word
"Kamala"? The gods of small favors strikes again.
am so very happy that you have been able to get the documents to prove what became so very
obvious to so many who did not have access to documents but who just had working brains. They
help us to understand what was going on with HRC's computer situation and with Jim Comey's
FBI.
You mention Hillary's "cabal of sychophants." There was no one more eager to become a
card-carrying member of that cabal than Comey himself. I do remember an interview on
television--don't have the date nor can I remember the media outlet that broadcast it--in
which Comey gushed about how wonderful it would be for Hillary to win since his wife and
daughters and even he himself were excited about possibly having the first female POTUS.
It seemed to me at the time that it was not an appropriate statement for the head of the
FBI to make on national television--especially with all the questions about Hillary's emails
and her obliterated computer--not to mention also the tarmac meeting in AZ between Bill and
Loretta Lynch (supposedly to discuss grandchildren). I thought then and still think that the
old Peter Principal was really being played out in the FBI at the time.
I don't remember the timeline of all this. But all I remember is how rotten things seemed
were the District of Columbia.
The myth that Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin's puppet just won't die, even though ample
evidence demonstrates that the president's policy toward Russia has actually been
surprisingly hardline and confrontational. Such pervasive paranoia has led to a rebirth of
McCarthyism in the United States and is preventing a badly needed reassessment of U.S. foreign
policy. In short, threat inflation with respect to Russia and an obsession with the phantom
danger of presidential treason continues to poison our discourse.
The end of the exhaustive FBI and Mueller commission investigations into "Russia collusion"
was never going to put the treason innuendoes to rest. Subsequent developments, such as
unsupported charges that Moscow paid financial bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops
in Afghanistan, served to keep the narrative alive. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi epitomized the
ongoing efforts to make imputations of disloyalty stick. "With [Trump], all roads lead to
Putin,"
Pelosi said in late June 2020. "I don't know what the Russians have on the president,
politically, personally, or financially."
In a September 21 Washington Postop-ed
, former New York Times correspondent Tim Weiner echoed Pelosi's perspective. He
asserted that
despite the investigation by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, despite the
work of congressional intelligence committees and inspectors general -- and despite
impeachment -- we still don't know why the president kowtows to Vladimir Putin, broadcasts
Russian disinformation, bends foreign policy to suit the Kremlin and brushes off reports of
Russians bounty-hunting American soldiers. We still don't know whether Putin has something on
him. And we need to know the answers -- urgently. Knowing could be devastating. Not knowing
is far worse. Not knowing is a threat to a functioning democracy.
Only visceral hatred of Donald Trump combined with equally unreasoning suspicions about
Russia, much of it inherited from the days of the Cold War, could account for the persistence
of such an implausible argument. Yet an impressive array of media and political heavyweights
have adopted that perspective.
As during the McCarthy era in the 1950s, challenging the dominant narrative entails the risk
of severe damage to reputation and career. In September 2020, TheIntercept 's Glenn
Greenwald disclosed in an interview with Megyn Kelly that
he had been blacklisted at MSNBC, primarily because he'd disputed the network's unbridled
credulity about Russia's alleged menace and President Trump's collusion with it. When Kelly
asked him how he knew he was banned, Greenwald responded: "I have tons of friends there. I used
to go on all the time. I have producers who tried to book me and they get told, 'No. He's on
the no-book list.'"
Although an MSNBC spokesperson denied that there was any official ban, the last time
Greenwald had appeared on a network program regarding any issue was in December 2016, just as
the Russia collusion scandal was gaining traction. The timing was a striking coincidence.
Greenwald insisted that he was told about being on the no-book list by two different producers,
and he charged that his situation was not unique: "[I]t's not just me but several liberal-left
journalists -- including Matt Taibbi and Jeremy Scahill -- who used to regularly appear there
and stopped once they expressed criticism of MSNBC's Russiagate coverage and skepticism
generally about the narrative."
It would be bad enough if blows to careers were the extent of the damage that paranoia about
Russia and Trump had caused. But that mentality is inhibiting any effort to improve relations
with a significant international geostrategic player that possesses several thousand nuclear
weapons.
The opposition to any conciliatory moves toward Russia has reached absurd and toxic levels.
Critics even condemned the Trump administration's April 2020 decision to issue a joint
declaration with the Kremlin to mark the date when Soviet and U.S. forces linked up at the Elbe
River during World War II, thereby cutting Nazi Germany into two segments. The larger purpose
of the declaration was to highlight "nations overcoming their differences in pursuit of a
greater cause." The U.S. and Russian governments stressed that a similar standard should apply
to efforts to combat the coronavirus. It should have been noncontroversial, but some
condemned it as "playing into Putin's hands."
That theme has been even more prominent since Trump's decision to move some U.S. troops out
of Germany. Even some members of the president's own party seem susceptible to the argument.
During recent House Armed Services Committee hearings, Congressman Bradley Byrne invoked
Russia. "From a layperson's point of view, it looks like we've reduced our troop presence in
Europe at a time that Russia is actually becoming more of a threat," Byrne
said . "It looks like we're pulling back, and I think that bothers a lot of us." Such
arguments have been surprisingly common since the administration announced its plans in late
spring. Allegations that Trump is "doing Putin's bidding" continue to flow, even though some of
the troops withdrawn from Germany are going to be redeployed farther east
in Poland -- a step the Kremlin will hardly regard as friendly.
George Beebe, vice president and director of programs at the Center for the National
Interest, aptly describes
the potential negative consequences of fomenting public fear of and hatred toward Russia.
He points out that
the safe space in our public discourse for dissenting from American orthodoxy on Russia
has grown microscopically thin. When the U.S. government will open a counterintelligence
investigation on the presidential nominee of a major American political party because he
advocates a rethink of our approach to Russia, only to be cheered on by American media
powerhouses that once valued civil liberties, who among us is safe from such a fate? What are
the chances that ambitious early-or mid-career professionals inside or outside the U.S.
government will critically examine the premises of our Russia policies, knowing that it might
invite investigations and professional excommunication? The answer is obvious.
Indeed it is. America went through such stifling of debate during the original McCarthy era.
The impact lasted a generation and was especially pernicious with respect to policy toward East
Asia. Washington locked itself into a set of rigid positions, including trying to orchestrate
an international effort to shun and isolate China's communist government and see every adverse
development in the region as the result of machinations by Beijing and Moscow. The result was
an increasingly futile, counterproductive China policy until Richard Nixon had the wisdom to
chart a new course in the early 1970s. This ossified thinking and lack of debate also produced
the disastrous military crusade in Vietnam.
America cannot afford such folly again. Smearing those who favor a less confrontational
policy toward Moscow as puppets, traitors, and (in the case of accusations against Tulsi
Gabbard) "
Russian assets " will not lead to prudent policies. Persisting in such an approach will
exacerbate dangerous tensions abroad and undermine needed political debate at home.
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a
contributing editor at The American Conservative , is the author of 12 books and more
than 850 articles on international affairs.
966 pages and not one single proof. They go from telling how some businessmen from
America and Russia do business together (which is indication of what exactly? Hunter Biden
was doing business with the same oligarch) to saying that if Trump (and other opposition to
hillary) went to see the Podesta' emails from wikileaks that was proof that Trump AND
Russia together made the leaks (what? If some dirt comes out over your opponent it is just
normal to go and see what's about); and the only proof they provide for this assertion (in
a 966 page report) is one sentence: "The DNC said Russia had hacked their servers" - not
one single proof offered for that. After all, the DNC would never lie, would they?
And again, please name one policy Trump enacted which does benefit Russia in any way. If
they truly helped Trump to get elected (and they are still doing it) then they must be
getting something out of it. So what it is, that Russia is getting from Trump?
"From a layperson's point of view, it looks like we've reduced our troop presence in
Europe at a time that Russia is actually becoming more of a threat,"
Troops weren't really reduced though. Troops were moved to Belgium and Italy (Italy,
who's been occupied during WWII and who still is precluded access to certain areas of their
sovereign territory because of American occupation, and Belgium, the Capital of the
European Union, a subservient vassal to American policies, who would rather damage herself
and her SMEs rather than growing some b*lls and promote policies for her people's
benefits). The move to Poland was to be expected, but what is really worrying is that if
the US moves nukes to Poland (as German politicians, from both the left and the right are
starting to complain about these nukes sitting under their bottoms) then the 1997
NATO-Russia treaty will crumble, and if that crumbles, Europe will be in danger. What the
author suggests (that America gets out of conspiratorial idiocy and gets back to
cooperation) is actually the best way to maintain peace and stability. Of course the other
way (and this is not an either/or, this is complementary action) is to get Europe to take
independent decisions, take the reins of her defence, and tell the US to stop stuffing the
East with weapons and take their nukes back on the other side of the Ocean (after all we've
got France who's got nukes as well, and there is little chance Russia would actually nuke
Europe, as they are part of geographical Europe and they'd suffer the consequences as well
to some degree).
EDIT: plus, there is literally zero proof that Russia wants to invade Europe and have a
war in Europe (as part of Russia is European as well). Yes last time they did win the war,
but at what cost? This "protecting Europe" rhetoric is just a way to keep control over
Europe. Europa Faber Fortunae Suae , it is really time for it, isn't it Europe?
Actually, "protecting Europe" is about providing bodyguard services to Germany. For
which Germany pays less than nothing. Except in Germans paying for the liberal left think
tanks and loss-generating MSM. And them then talking about Russian interference in US
elections, roflol.
NATO is like all other government bureaucracies - once you create one it is nearly
impossible to disband. Whole industries have grown up around it, and think tanks keep
moving people in and out of government to ensure continuation of this mission (which is to
keep lots and lots of money flowing into industries that have no purpose.)
Germans and Italians benefit if troops on their soil keep buying their tchotchkes and
baubles.Their governments are also staffed by the same think tank people.
The troop reduction is leverage to try to get Germany to pay their way. The President is
not happy with us paying their way, perpetually, as the Washington establishment (including
Biden) would have it.
It would be a tragic irony if the West blindly stumbled into a conflict with Russia
after having avoided it during the dangerous Cold War years. But history shows wars can
start in that way.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...
Sure, absolutely. I have said for years (and still say) that we should have better
relations with Russia. There was a real opportunity to improve the relationship due to
shared interests against Islamic extremism.
Too bad Trump blew the opportunity. First, he asked for illegal Russian election help on
live TV. Then, Trump and his people lied about their contacts with Russia, lied some more
about the purpose of the Trump Tower meeting, and just kept on lying about their contacts
with Russia. Then his cowtowing to Putin in Helsinki without an official US interpreter or
offical record just put gas on what just a smoldering pile of suspicion that could have
been much more easily discredited. So Trump brought a lot of this on himself.
How different might it have been if Flynn, Don, Jr. and everyone else had said, "Hell,
yes, we're talking to Russia because it is in the national interest of the United States to
have better relations with Russia, and we're proud to be working in that direction." Might
have taken the wind out of the Dems sails, or at least make them look stupid. Instead,
Trump and his lies just fed into the whole investigation -- why lie if you did nothing
wrong?
Since Flynn, Trump has had no apparent advisors worth the title. If he were operating
completely in the dark and making policy decisions based on feel alone it would look much
the way it does. Nor do I believe that most of this is his fault, other than his
jettisoning Flynn at the first sign of DNC hatred. That to them (and to future talent) was
a clear sign his house was made of straw and vulnerable to being taken down.
There's probably some truth to the claim that potential advisors were cautious after
Flynn was canned. Of course, there is no reason to assume that Trump would follow anyone's
advice.
Flynn was working for Turkey on our dime, and pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI under
oath. He had to go. He was a worthless "advisor" who was in it for himself, and his son
too.
Russia interfered extensively in our election to help Trump. Trump encouraged that help.
Trump doesn't want to hear any reports of continued Russian interference in our election.
Trump refuses to do everything he can to prevent Russian interference.
Change Trump to Obama and RWers would be currently storming the gates they'd be freaking
out so much. Their partisanship easily overwhelms their patriotism.
America's anti russian paranoia stems from american failures the past 20 years. That
paranoia originates from America's ruling class not its people. America had 4 periods of
anti-Russian/soviet paranoia, always coming at a time america felt weak
Before Germany's reunification in 1990, the Russians and the Americans reached an
understanding that NATO would not expand eastward, in return for Russia's not opposing the
reunification. Unfortunately, the US/NATO violated this understanding starting in 1999 when
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO. More former East Block
countries were admitted in later years. The expansion of NATO coupled with US interference
in Ukraine and its support of the Maidan Revolution in 2014 have resulted in a
deterioration in US - Russia relations. It would be a real stretch to blame this
deterioration on Trump.
Trump has been the most Russia-friendly president. His initial instinct or policy view
about Russia is rational! He knows the US cannot be in war with both China and Russia at
the same time. His goal was/is to divide these two countries that are very close recently,
so the US would pivot to China without fearing fighting with Russia too.
Having said that, his ineptitude, corrupt mind, and everything is transactional attitude
messed that up by mixing his private business and diplomacy contaminating the whole affair.
The US is going to pay big time for Trump's mistakes.
There is plenty to criticize about America's policy towards Russia going back to the
expansion of NATO, which was entirely counter-productive, but this is just fighting one
conspiracy with another. The leaders of the Trump campaign wanted to obtain information on
Clinton from Russian intelligence and were disappointed when the Russians didn't deliver.
Trump lied repeatedly about his involvement with Russia and took "anti-Russian" actions
only when forced to by the entire Congress, which until 2019 was entirely under Republican
control. The tone of this article is thoroughly dishonest and shows contempt for TAC's
readers.
Our elite, drunk from imagined Cold War win, made up plans to control universe. It
always felt artificial -- globalization being good for us, while saturating China with our
industry. While from the beginning refusing all Russia's overtures to normalize relations.
Clearly, Russia as a more formidable military and scientific entity had to be subjugated
first, while China, overwhelmed by rapid development would have acquiesced to being our
manufacturing colony. China turned out not timid, while Russia being pushed and demonized
-- struck independent course. Chinese and Russian objectives were converging for along
time. .But we stuck to the script. Trump abandoned the script,hoping to charm Russia into
our fold. The establishment disagrees, so without a clue in how to proceed in global
domination -- - confusion reigns.
While China was under Western thumb we'd become used to thinking of them as mere
"coolies", but they proved to be more intelligent than us, by our own methodology. The
government works for the benefit of the people, not just a fraction of it, and it seems is
far more popular than our own. They deserve their hard earned wealth.
Russia is a different story, and will take decades to overcome the damage done by Yeltsin.
Your views on Trump-Russia I agree with but he was hampered by the fake conspiracy cooked
up by Hillary C. and the Spy agencies.
Why is Democratic and a good chunk of Republican establishment still fixated on Russia?
Even if economically, technologically, geographically and demographically -- China is a
threat to our own technological dominance, what is left of it.
I think the answer is a potent blend of fear and hatred. Fear is easy to explain.
Russia has always been militarily and scientifically advanced, and after Cold War displayed
somewhat deceptive image of its weakness. Thus, no rush to finish them off.
Hatred part goes deeper then classical British empire Russophobia. It goes back to
hundreds of years of slavery conducted out of Crimea by successive empires, Khazars,
Tatars, Ottomans. The wealth was accumulated from the millions of Slavs sold into Slavery
-- and the wealth went into Byzantine empire, and following the Venetian sack of
Constantinople, the wealth went into Venice and many German and French feudal cities,
including Vatican. Nearly exclusive slave trade rights was in the hands of Jewish traders.
Twice Russians broke down slave trade -- first by Russian ruler in 10 century, where in
Crimea Russians took Christianity. And following centuries of occupation -- again, in 18th
century by Catherine the Great -- this time for good.
But the banking set up in Venice was the foundation of modern banking in Europe,
dictating wars ever since. The move of European banking in early 18th century was cemented
by the entry of Rothshield international banking into UK. Not only that UK had by 1815
the debt twice its GDP, from which it did not recover until WWI, but continued as limping
empire -- but it became a loudest purveyor of Russophobia since. Russophobia and money
lords walk hand in hand. This is the irrational part of the equation. And the outcome is
the fury that Russia "escaped" so many times. The mere notion that these inferior people --
whose ethnicity is the very meaning if the word slave in German , French and English --
would aspire to equality, is unthinkable.
The rational part of the fear -- Russia is technologically advancing. Thus -- no
effort is to be spared in degrading their capabilities. Following their own line if
thinking -- they fear revenge.
It is for that reason that Trump's notion of accepting Russian partnership -- is
unacceptable. Even if for the purposes of global domination. They would prefer taking their
chances with China. Too late.
Russia has been damaged, but has reestablished political macro stability through
constitutional change, by reviving State Council function, and by creating massive
reserves. Asia is a massive market independent of controlled straits, canals or islands.
This is at present fairly obvious. And challenges to status quo are well under way, while
we still dream if the empire.
Gina Haspel is the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Haspel is the first
career clandestine service officer to become director, and the first woman. She was the CIA
Chief of Station in London -- twice, and that repeat assignment is very unusual. What is most
interesting is the timing of Haspel's last tour as London Station Chief -- from 2014 to early
2017. That is the same timeframe (specifically, the late summer of 2016) when the FBI
approached foreign policy academic and "utility government operative" Stefan Halper to begin the operation targeting
Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in an FBI-designed foreign counterintelligence operation,
against Team Trump, to be launched in Cambridge, England.
Nothing speculative here -- the Justice Department Inspector General pegged the exact date
of the FBI/Halper meeting as August 10, 2016. Halper had been on contract (again) with the U.S.
government since the Iowa Caucuses began in October 2015. For the sake of brevity, I am not
discussing Halper's role in targeting former Defense Intelligence Agency Director, Lieutenant
General Mike Flynn. That is another column for another day -- and certainly Haspel knows a
great deal about that, as well.
The timeframe (2014-2017) matters, because Haspel, as London Station Chief would have been
briefed on the FBI's counterintelligence plan before any actions were approved to go forward.
The CIA Station Chief is the top intelligence official in any given country. The FBI must
inform the Station Chief of what they planned to do and get Station Chief approval. The FBI
hates that, but those are the rules.
Because the various intelligence agencies are sensitive, they do not use the word
"approved." Instead, they use the word "coordinated."
Jargon aside, nothing would have happened without Haspel's okay.
Think about this for a while : The current CIA director was an active, knowledgeable party
to the efforts to target candidate Trump with a contrived foreign counterintelligence
investigation. That carried forward to a more sophisticated and aggressive plan to carry out a
soft coup against President Trump. People around President Trump were prosecuted and/or had
their lives destroyed based on a scheme of U.S. government lies. Who appears to have been "in
on it" from day one? Gina Haspel.
So, when we read in an
article by Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist , that Haspel is personally resisting
the declassification and release of records on "Russiagate," we are not surprised. In fact, we
are relieved, because a few of us have been shouting from the mountaintops about Haspel for
years, to no avail. The smarmy James Comey is easier to identify and loathe than the elusive
Haspel.
For those seeking
more information on Haspel , Shane Harris of the Washington Post wrote a nauseating
hagiography of Haspel in July 2019. Consistent with WaPo 's standards there are several factual
errors and loads of opinion masquerading as "tough reporting." Harris (and one assumes Haspel)
makes sure readers know that Haspel and company "boils down" presidential intelligence
briefings to "a few key points that they think Trump absolutely needs to know." We are supposed
to also believe that "Trump favors pictures and graphics over text." Of course, the CIA
director's office did not cooperate with Harris. No, not at all.
The FBI is not allowed to penetrate and subvert a presidential campaign. Executive
Order 12333, Section 2.9 , "Undisclosed Participation in Organizations in the United
States," prohibits it in plain language. Historically, the prohibition is a consequence of U.S.
Army Counterintelligence penetrating Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at the behest of
the FBI during the 1960s -- among other abuses of power and authority. That legal prohibition
is the reason the FBI felt the need to manufacture a "foreign counterintelligence threat" in
the UK and then "import" the investigation back into the United States.
The FBI plotters needed to establish a foreign counterintelligence "event" to run their
operation. The UK was the easiest and operationally safest/friendliest place to pull it off,
especially with Stefan Halper's connections to Cambridge. Haspel was clearly fully informed and
had "coordinated" the operation. She also enjoyed cordial relationships with MI6 and GCHQ. Now
we (largely, but imperfectly) know what transpired. Halper under oath, in public, would fill in
a lot of blanks. Gina Haspel, under the same circumstances and conditions, might just complete
the puzzle.
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Should President Trump be reelected, it might just happen. A President Biden guarantees we
will never hear another syllable of the rest of the story.
Former FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress last Wednesday that he did not
remember much about what was going on when the FBI deceived the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) Court into approving four warrants for surveillance of Trump campaign
aide Carter Page.
Few outsiders are aware that those warrants covered not only Page but also anyone Page was
in contact with as well as anyone Page's contacts were in contact with – under the
so-called two-hop surveillance procedure. In other words, the warrants extend coverage two
hops from the target – that is, anyone Page talks to and anyone they, in turn, talk
to.
At the hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsay Graham reviewed the facts (most
of them confirmed by the Department of Justice inspector general) showing that none of the
four FISA warrants were warranted.
Graham gave a chronological rundown of the evidence that Comey and his "folks" either
knew, or should have known, that by signing fraudulent FISA warrant applications they were
perpetrating a fraud on the court.
The "evidence" used by Comey and his "folks" to "justify" warrants included Page's
contacts with Russian officials (CIA had already told the FBI those contacts had been
approved) and the phony as a three-dollar bill "Steele dossier" paid for by the
Democrats.
Two Hops to the World
But let's not hop over the implications of two-hop surveillance , which apparently remains
in effect today. Few understand the significance of what is known in the trade as "two-hop"
coverage. According to a former NSA technical director, Bill Binney, when President Barack
Obama approved the current version of "two hops," the NSA was ecstatic – and it is easy
to see why.
Let's say Page was in touch with Donald Trump (as candidate or president); Trump's
communications could then be surveilled, as well. Or, let's say Page was in touch with
Google. That would enable NSA to cover pretty much the entire world. A thorough read of the
transcript of Wednesday's hearing, particularly the Q-and-A, shows that this crucial two-hop
dimension never came up – or that those aware of it, were too afraid to mention it. It
was as if Page were the only one being surveilled.
Here is a sample of The New York Times 's typical coverage
of such a hearing:
"Senate Republicans sought on Wednesday to promote their efforts to rewrite the
narrative of the Trump-Russia investigation before Election Day, using a hearing with the
former F.B.I. director James B. Comey to cast doubt on the entire inquiry by highlighting
problems with a narrower aspect of it.
"Led by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary
Committee spent hours burrowing into mistakes and omissions made by the FBI when it applied
for court permission to wiretap the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2016 and
2017. Republicans drew on that flawed process to renew their claims that Mr. Comey and his
agents had acted with political bias, ignoring an independent review that debunked
the notion of a plot against President Trump."
Flawed process? Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz pinpointed no few
than 17 "serious performance failures" related to the four FISA warrant applications on Page.
Left unsaid is the fact that Horowitz's investigation was tightly circumscribed. Basically,
he asked the major players "Were you biased?" And they said "No."
Chutzpah-full Disingenuousness
Does the NYT believe we were all born yesterday? When the Horowitz report was
released in early December 2019, Fox News' Chris Wallace found those serious performance
failures "pretty shocking." He quoted an
earlier remark by Rep. Will Hurd (R,TX) a CIA alumnus:
"Why is it when you have 17 mistakes -- 17 things that are misrepresented or lapses --
and every one of them goes against the president and for investigating him, you have to say,
'Is that a coincidence'? it is either gross incompetence or intentionality."
Throughout the four-hour hearing on Wednesday, Comey was politely smug – a hair
short of condescending.
There was not the slightest sign he thought he would ever be held accountable for what
happened under his watch. You see, four years ago, Comey "knew" Hillary Clinton was a
shoo-in; that explains how he, together with CIA Director John Brennan and National
Intelligence Director James Clapper, felt free to take vast liberties with the Constitution
and the law before the election, and then launched a determined effort to hide their tracks
post election.
Trump had been forewarned. On Jan. 3, 2017, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY),
with an assist from Rachel Maddow, warned Trump not to get crosswise with the "intelligence
community," noting the IC has six ways to Sunday to get back at you.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/fotKK5kcMOg
Three days later, Comey told President-elect Trump, in a one-on-one conversation, what the
FBI had on him – namely, the "Steele Dossier." The media already had the dossier, but
were reluctant (for a host of obvious reasons) to publish it. When it leaked that Comey had
briefed Trump on it, they finally had the needed peg.
New Parvenu in Washington
After the tête-à-tête with Comey on Jan. 6, 2017, newcomer Trump didn't
know what hit him. Perhaps no one told him of Schumer's warning; or maybe he dismissed it out
of hand. Is that what Comey was up to on Jan. 6, 2017?
Was the former FBI director protesting too much in his June 2017 testimony to the Senate
Intelligence Committee when he insisted he'd tried to make it clear to Trump that briefing
him on the unverified but scurrilous information in the dossier wasn't intended to be
threatening?
It took Trump several months to figure out what
was being done to him.
Trump to NYT: 'Leverage' (aka Blackmail)
In a long Oval Office interview
with the Times on July 19, 2017, Trump said he thought Comey was trying to hold the
dossier over his head.
" Look what they did to me with Russia, and it was totally phony stuff. the dossier Now,
that was totally made-up stuff," Trump said. "I went there [to Moscow] for one day for the
Miss Universe contest, I turned around, I went back. It was so disgraceful. It was so
disgraceful.
"When he [Comey] brought it [the dossier] to me, I said this is really made-up junk. I
didn't think about anything. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal. I said,
this is – honestly, it was so wrong, and they didn't know I was just there for a very
short period of time. It was so wrong, and I was with groups of people. It was so wrong that
I really didn't, I didn't think about motive. I didn't know what to think other than, this is
really phony stuff."
The Steele dossier, paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign
and compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, includes a tale of Trump cavorting
with prostitutes, who supposedly urinated on each other before the same bed the Obamas had
slept in at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel.
Trump told the Times : "I think [Comey] shared it so that I would think he had it
out there. As leverage."
Still Anemic
Even with that lesson in hand, Trump still proved virtually powerless in dealing with the
National Security State/intelligence community. The president has evidenced neither the skill
nor the guts to even attempt to keep the National Security State in check.
Comey, no doubt doesn't want to be seen as a "dirty cop," With Trump in power and Attorney
General William Barr his enforcer, there was always the latent threat that they would use the
tools at their disposal to expose and even prosecute Comey and his National Security State
colleagues for what the president now knows was done during his candidacy and presidency.
Despite their braggadocio about taking on the Deep State, and the continuing
investigations, it seems doubtful that anything serious is likely to happen before Election
Day, Nov. 3.
On Wednesday, Comey had the air of one who is equally sure, this time around, who will be
the next president. No worries. Comey could afford to be politely vapid for five more weeks,
and then be off the hook for any and all "serious performance failures" – some of them
felonies.
Thus, a significant downside to a Biden victory is that the National Security State will
escape accountability for unconscionable misbehavior, running from misdemeanors to
insurrection. No small thing.
Sen. Graham concluded the hearing with a pious plea: "Somebody needs to be held
accountable." Yet, surely, he has been around long enough to know the odds.
Given his disastrous presidency, either way the prospects are bleak: no accountability for
the National Security State, which is to be expected, or four more years of Trump.
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). This
originally appeared at Consortium
News .
DNI Declassifies Brennan Notes; Briefed Obama On Intelligence That Hillary Clinton
Concocted Trump-Russia Allegations by Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2020 - 16:19
Twitter Facebook Reddit EmailPrint
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified several documents,
including handwritten notes from former CIA John Brennan after he briefed former President
Obama on an alleged plot by Hillary Clinton to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as "a
means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server" ahead of the 2016 US
election, according to Fox News .
Ratcliffe declassified Brennan's handwritten notes – which were taken after he
briefed Obama on the intelligence the CIA received – and a CIA memo, which revealed
that officials referred the matter to the FBI for potential investigative action.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence transmitted the declassified documents
to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on Tuesday afternoon.
"Today, at the direction of President Trump, I declassified additional documents relevant
to ongoing Congressional oversight and investigative activities ," Ratcliffe said in a
statement to Fox News Tuesday. - Fox News
" We're getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED], " read Brennan's
notes. "CITE [summarizing] alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her
foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference
by the Russian security service."
On September 7, 2016, US intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to
former FBI officials James Comey and Peter Strzok concerning allegations that Hillary Clinton
approved a plan to smear then-candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Russian President Vladimir
Putin and Russian hackers , according to information given to Sen. Lindsey Graham by the
Director of National Intelligence.
According to Fox News' Chad Pergram, "In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained
insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate
Donald Trump," after one of Clinton's foreign policy advisers proposed vilifying Trump "by
stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services."
U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe recently declassified information
indicating the CIA obtained intelligence in 2016 that the Russians believed the Clinton
campaign was trying to falsely associate Russia with the so-called hack of DNC computers. CIA
Director John Brennan shared the intelligence with President Obama. They knew, in other words,
that the DNC was conducting false Russian flag operation against the Trump campaign . The
following is an exclusive excerpt from The Russia Lie that tells the amazing story in
detail:
On March 19, 2016, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, surrendered his emails
to an unknown entity in a "spear phishing" scam. This has been called a "hack," but it was not.
Instead, it was the sort of flim-flam hustle that happens to gullible dupes on the
internet.
The content of the emails was beyond embarrassing. They
showed election fraud and coordination with the media against the candidacy of Bernie
Sanders. The DNC and the Clinton campaign needed a cover story.
Blaming Russia would be a handy way to deal with the Podesta emails. There was already an
existing Russia operation that could easily be retrofitted to this purpose. The problem was
that it was nearly impossible to identify the perpetrator in a phishing scheme using computer
forensic tools.
The only way to associate Putin with the emails was circumstantially.
The DNC retained a company that called itself "CrowdStrike" to provide assistance.
CrowdStrike's chief technology officer and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is an anti-Putin,
Russian expat and a senior fellow at the Atlantic
Council .
With the Atlantic Council in 2016, all roads led to Ukraine. The Atlantic Council's list of
significant contributors includes
Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk.
The Ukrainian energy company that was paying millions to an entity that was funneling large
amounts to Hunter Biden months after he was discharged from the US Navy for drug use, Burisma,
also appears prominently on the Atlantic Council's donor list.
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Western puppet installed in Ukraine,
visited the Atlantic Council's Washington offices to make a speech weeks after the
coup.
Pinchuk was also a
big donor (between $10 million and $20 million) to the Clinton Foundation. Back in '15, the
Wall Street Journal published an investigative
piece , " Clinton Charity Tapped Foreign Friends ." The piece was about how Ukraine was
attempting to influence Clinton by making huge donations through Pinchuk. Foreign interference,
anyone?
On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
announced : "We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton . . . We have emails
pending publication."
Two days later, CrowdStrike fed the Washington Post a
story , headlined, "Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on
Trump." The improbable tale was that the Russians had hacked the DNC computer servers and got
away with some opposition research on Trump. The article quoted Alperovitch of CrowdStrike and
the Atlantic Council.
The next day, a new blog – Guccifer 2.0 – appeared on the
internet and announced:
Worldwide known cyber security company CrowdStrike announced that the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by "sophisticated" hacker groups.
I'm very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) But in fact, it was easy,
very easy.
Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton's and other Democrats'
mail servers. But he certainly wasn't the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get
access to the DNC's servers.
Shame on CrowdStrike: Do you think I've been in the DNC's networks for almost a year and
saved only 2 documents? Do you really believe it?
Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC's
network.
Guccifer 2.0 posted hundreds of pages of Trump opposition research allegedly hacked from the
DNC and emailed copies to Gawker and The Smoking Gun . In raw form, the opposition research was
one of the documents obtained in the Podesta emails, with a notable difference: It was widely
reported the document now contained "
Russian fingerprints ."
The three-parenthesis formulation from the original post ")))" is the Russian version of a
smiley face used
commonly on social media. In addition, the blog's author deliberately used a Russian
VPN service visible in its emails even though there would have been many options to hide
any national affiliation.
Under the circumstances, the FBI should have analyzed the DNC computers to confirm the
Guccifer hack. Incredibly, though, the inspection was done by CrowdStrike, the same Atlantic
Council-connected private contractor paid by the DNC that had already concluded in The
Washington Post that there was a hack and Putin was behind it.
CrowdStrike would declare the "hack" to be the work of sophisticated Russian spies.
Alperovitch described it as, " skilled
operational tradecraft ."
There is nothing skilled, though, in ham-handedly disclosing a Russian identity when trying
to hide it. The more reasonable inference is that this was a set-up. It certainly looks like
Guccifer 2.0 suddenly appeared in coordination with the Washington Post 's article that
appeared the previous day.
FBI Director James Comey
confirmed in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017 that the FBI's
failure to inspect the computers was unusual to say the least. "We'd always prefer to have
access hands-on ourselves if that's possible," he said.
But the DNC rebuffed the FBI's request to inspect the hardware. Comey added that the DNC's
hand-picked investigator, CrowdStrike, is "a highly respected private company."
What he did not reveal was that CrowdStrike never corroborated a hack by forensic analysis.
In testimony released in 2020, it was revealed that CrowdStrike
admitted to Congressional investigators as early as 2017 that it had no direct evidence of
Russian hacking.
CrowdStrike's president Shawn Henry testified, "There's not evidence that [documents and
emails] were actually exfiltrated [from the DNC servers]. There's circumstantial evidence but
no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated."
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The circumstantial evidence was Guccifer 2.0.
This was a crucial revelation because the thousand ships of Russiagate launched upon the
positive assertion that CrowdStrike had definitely proven a Russian hack. Yet this fact was
kept from the American public for more than three years.
The reasonable inference is that the DNC was trying to frame Russia and the FBI and
intelligence agencies were going along with the scheme because of political pressure.
Those who assert that it is a "conspiracy theory" to say that CrowdStrike would fabricate
the results of computer forensic testing to create a false Russian flag should know that it was
caught doing exactly that around the time it was inspecting the DNC computers.
On Dec. 22, 2016, CrowdStrike caused an international stir when it claimed to have uncovered
evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery computer app to help pro-Russian
separatists. Voice of America later determined the claim
was false , and CrowdStrike retracted its finding.
Ukraine's Ministry of Defense was forced to eat crow and admit that the hacking never
happened.
If you wanted a computer testing firm to fabricate a Russian hack for political reasons in
2016, CrowdStrike was who you went out and hired.
Nobody can even imagine of inflicting on the USA the same damage as CIA/FBI sponsored
Russiagate did.
And who authorized this CIA honcho to classify other countries as "enemy states"? He revealed
himself as yet another "national security parasite" and probably should be fired on the
spot.
US intelligence, the Pentagon, and national security officials are closely monitoring how
America's rivals and enemies "react" to Thursday night's shock news of President Trump's
coronavirus diagnosis, for which he's since said to be exhibiting mild symptoms.
"The U.S. military stands ready to defend our country and its citizens," Joint Staff
spokesperson Col. Dave Butler said Friday, according to
Politico . "There's no change to the readiness or capability of our armed forces."
"What we are anticipating is that the Russian actors and probably the Iranians will play
this up," one anonymous defense official also added. Further the countries of China and North
Korea are also being monitored, according to the report.
Specifically US intelligence will scrutinizing any "subtle increase in activity against us,
knowing we are preoccupied, and the opportunity to test us, perhaps," Marc Polymeropoulos, a
former CIA Senior Intelligence Service officer,
described to Politico.
The former CIA officer emphasized that "Our enemies will see us in a vulnerable state."
Ex-Oligarch , 6 hours ago
It's not the foreign adversaries we need to worry about.
Peter Royce Clayon da Turd , 5 hours ago
Herbert Walker Bush almost did in Reagan and got away with it. To be honest, I think he
ran EVERYTHING after that assassination attempt anyway, so the powers that be got what they
wanted. Would also explain why Ronnie could not recall Iran Contra.
Philo Beddoe , 6 hours ago
Pro tip.
Ahem, try monitoring domestic adversaries.
reTARD , 6 hours ago
By US Intelligence agencies, you mean the same 17 US Intelligence agencies that were
complicit in Russiagate, 9/11, etc.? LMAO.
KekistanisUnite , 6 hours ago
It's not the Russians or Iranians I'm concerned about.
goldenspiral9 , 6 hours ago
Lol. PuuhleeZe. This scripted tv show is getting ridiculous.
WTFUD , 6 hours ago
WTF - US Intelligence - The same NWO filth who dun 9/11.
That's a relief. sarc
LetThemEatRand , 6 hours ago
I wonder if our elected officials really believe their own ******** that they are the one
thing standing between an invasion and the nation's security. Most of them probably don't,
but they are glad that we allow them to spend trillions in tax dollars for bunkers and other
measures of keep them safe in the event of a war that they may start.
Captain Scarlet , 6 hours ago
Speaking from Britain I can honesty say that the BBC is one of Trump's premier foreign
adversaries.
Dzerzhhinsky , 6 hours ago
The BBC was the first official Government propaganda outlet in the world. They have a long
history of lying.
yerfej , 6 hours ago
When I listen to the BBC (or CBC) I am reminded that there are many people on this planet
with glossy degrees in some garbage but yet they can't actually think or relate to anyone but
their college cliques.
44magnum , 6 hours ago
The only adversaries we have are the ones the government tells us we have. Who to like who
to hate.
ay_arrow
Pied - Piped - Piper , 5 hours ago
Rubio desperately attempting to remain viable after he's already dead
politically......
Hulk , 5 hours ago
"US intelligence, the Pentagon, and national security officials are closely monitoring how
America's enemies "react" to Thursday night's shock news of President Trump's coronavirus
diagnosis, for which he's since said to be exhibiting mild symptoms"
and so far, Schumer, Piglosi, Feinstein, Biden, Nadler Obama, Brennan, Comey, Mueller and
his team of winners, havent tried a thing !!!
Is-Be , 5 hours ago
Putin calls all other countries "partners" and the MIC call everyone "adversaries".
One of these is not the same as the other.
Hint: You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
ZENDOG , 6 hours ago
Are they looking at the FBI ??
Lots of traitors there.
Thraxite , 4 hours ago
Dude forgot his paranoia medication. What a loony.
Aussiestirrer , 2 hours ago
Never pass up an opportunity to run a false flag operation.
President Trump has gotten rid just about everyone in this article I found 3 years ago
> The ATLANTIC COUNCIL is funded by BURISMA, GEORGE SOROS OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION &
others. It was a CENTRIST, MILITARISTIC think tanks,now turned leftist group
> JOE BIDEN extorted Ukraine to FIRE the prosecutor investigating BURISMA, HUNTER's
employer.
> LTC VINDMAN & FIONA HILL met MANY TIMES with DANIEL FRIED of the ATLANTIC
COUNCIL. FIONA HILL is a former CoWorker of CHRISTOPHER STEELE !
> AMBASSADOR YOVANOVITCH is connected to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, is PRAISED in their
documents, gave Ukraine a "do not prosecute" list, was involved in PRESSURING Ukraine to not
prosecute GEORGE SOROS Group.
> BILL TAYLOR has a financial relationship with the ATLANTIC COUNCIL and the US UKRAINE
BUSINESS COUNCIL (USUBC) which is also funded by BURISMA.
> TAYLOR met with THOMAS EAGER (works for ADAM SCHIFF) in Ukraine on trip PAID FOR by
the ATLANTIC COUNCIL. This just days before TAYLOR first texts about the "FAKE" Quid Pro Quo
!
> TAYLOR participated in USUBC Events with DAVID J. KRAMER (JOHN MCCAIN advisor) who
spread the STEELE DOSSIER to the media and OBAMA officials.
> JOE BIDEN is connected to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, he rolled out his foreign policy
vision while VP there, He has given speeches there, his adviser on Ukraine, MICHAEL CARPENTER
(heads the Penn Biden Center) is a FELLOW at the ATLANTIC COUNCIL.
> KURT VOLKER is now Senior Advisor to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, he met with burisma
"... For societies to evolve and flourish, we all need to accept other people's viewpoints and continue open-minded, civil and respectful dialogue. In science, scientists always question everything; why shouldn't we question everything in life without personalizing and demonizing those you disagree with? It's become impossible to have rational fact-based discussions with these inflexible ideological zealots. ..."
"... The intelligentsia has created a toxic environment of indoctrination where freedom of thought and speech is outlawed. The student "mob" will enforce the process of re-education, utilizing lies, propaganda, peer-pressure and fear of cancellation. No student or adult should be intimidated, bullied or harassed to the point of unwavering compliance. There is something systematically rotten in our educational system, and it needs to be purged of these radical ideologues. These are fascist tactics - USA-style. ..."
The bitter divisions in
America are turning neighbour against neighbour and tearing families apart, amid an atmosphere
of indoctrination where freedom of thought and speech is outlawed. I fear we're on the road to
civil war.
2020 has been one hell of a year. It included getting Brexit done, Covid-19, big-tech
tyranny featuring extreme censorship by Twitter, Google, Facebook and Amazon as well as the
stealth implementation of a social credit framework by Silicon Valley oligarchs as they plunder
the economy under the diversionary power grab by pay-to-play politicians implementing
quasi-permanent unlawful lockdowns. I'm sorry to say that the USA will become a banana
republic.
In addition, the global economy is in the worst economic depression in history - one that
will only deepen as unemployment rates skyrocket as we enter the last few months of
2020.
I bet most folks wish they could put a bullet in the head of 2020 and move straight on into
2021, but there are three months left - 2020 is only 75% done. What else could go wrong?
Well in the USA, we still have to deal with a presidential election and the appointment of
Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States - two things that the left
are fighting tooth and nail to stop.
Since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016, US politics have not
only become highly toxic, they have also become radioactive. The swamp's resist-everything
Democratic Party, enabled by FBI bias and animus that was spun like a spider's web by the
feckless fake news media and echoed by Hollywood's hypocritical perverts, made
numerous attempts to stage a coup d'etat (carefully read the declassified letter below) of
the democratically elected president. The CIA referred an investigation to the FBI that the
Hillary Clinton campaign was colluding with Russia to impact the 2016 presidential election.
The FBI lied to the FISA judges to spy on the Trump campaign, and no one was ever
prosecuted.
Why have
FISA judges Collyer, Mosman, Conway and Dearie, who signed off on those warrants, and were
lied to by the FBI to illegally obtain those same warrants to spy on a political opposition
party during a presidential election, done nothing? Why have these Judges remained silent? Is
the entire system a stitch-up?
Now, the narrative has shifted at warp speed. It's no longer about Russian collusion. The
new narratives that matter are virtue signalling, identity politics, critical race theory,
record hypocrisy and a
dual justice system where
murder, looting and arson are justified because those on the right are all Nazis and the
radicalized left's enforcers,
ANTIFA and BLM thugs, are only " peaceful protestors
."
And nothing will interfere with this narrative. For example, the BLM mob influenced the
prosecutors by getting them to charge BLM supporter Larynzo Johnson with "
wanton endangerment " when he ran up to two police officers and shot them while rioting.
Why was this blatant assassination rampage not prosecuted as attempted murder? Is the BLM mob
now dictating charging decisions? Johnson's attempted murder of police officers has quickly
disappeared as it interferes with the media mob's narrative.
The media have drummed these themes into the heads of the public and driven a wedge between
family members, close friends and co-workers that has polarized America to the brink of civil
war. Life has become so bad in the USA that many of my several decades-old friendships recently
ended when they became unable to respect any individual opinion that differed from their own.
That has happened to me. Friends for decades have been consumed by Trump Derangement Syndrome
and are cancelling me.
For societies to evolve and flourish, we all need to accept other people's viewpoints and
continue open-minded, civil and respectful dialogue. In science, scientists always question
everything; why shouldn't we question everything in life without personalizing and demonizing
those you disagree with? It's become impossible to have rational fact-based discussions with
these inflexible ideological zealots.
I just had a long conversation with Hudson, my friend's son. He is 18 years old and is a
popular American football playing, honour-list senior attending a private school in California.
Hudson graduates this spring, and he hopes to be accepted and attend a college where he will
play football. There are around 2,000 students in his private high school. From our
conversation, I gleaned that most of Hudson's teachers and the student population are very
liberal and intolerant of anyone who has differing views.
What I found most shocking was how Hudson's teachers "teach". Today's students are not
educated; they are indoctrinated. By that, I mean "teachers" are only telling half-truths or
half of the story, so any "conclusions" the students are allowed to reach on their own are
based on inaccurate data. These teachers incorporate their bias into an indoctrination cocktail
with a dash of critical race theory in order to get the students to conform to the teacher's
world view. Hudson explained how "the loudest students at school are liberal -- I guess it's
over 98%."
Regarding the comments Hudson reads on social media channels from his school friends, he
says all are supportive of Joe Biden becoming the 46th president of the United States; none are
supporting Trump. When I asked why, he responded, "Your life would be ruined, and you would
not get into college."
On 3 November, Hudson will be voting in his first presidential election. He will be voting
for Donald Trump. But he is too fearful to discuss politics at school with his peers.
He is too
afraid to discuss politics with anyone but his parents. Terrorizing students is repugnant
and must be stopped.
The intelligentsia has created a toxic environment of indoctrination where freedom of
thought and speech is outlawed. The student "mob" will enforce the process of re-education,
utilizing lies, propaganda, peer-pressure and fear of cancellation. No student or adult should
be intimidated, bullied or harassed to the point of unwavering compliance. There is something
systematically rotten in our educational system, and it needs to be purged of these radical
ideologues. These are fascist tactics - USA-style.
Was this racism censored by Twitter? No, Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, gave Kendi $10
million
That said, don't expect things to improve anytime soon; in fact, COVID-19 will be used as an
excuse to reset the economy. What does that mean? The oligarchs in Wall Street and in Silicon
Valley will manipulate this election result, so Kamala Harris will be the de facto 46th
president of the United States.
... ... ...
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Mitchell Feierstein is the CEO of Glacier Environmental Fund and author of 'Planet Ponzi: How the World Got into This
Mess, What Happens Next, and How to Protect Yourself.' He spends his time between London and Manhattan.
"... AP is hardly the Ministry of Truth, dictating Newspeak under the penalty of torture. As it turns out, it doesn't have to be. A bit of updated style – and thought – guidance announced on Twitter from time to time will do. ..."
Used as the journalism Bible by most English-language media, the AP Stylebook has updated its guidance for employing the word 'riot,'
citing the need to avoid "stigmatizing" groups protesting "for racial justice."
While acknowledging the dictionary definition of riot as a "wild or violent disturbance of the peace," AP said the word
somehow "suggests uncontrolled chaos and pandemonium."
Worse yet, "Focusing on rioting and property destruction rather than underlying grievance has been used in the past to stigmatize
broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality or for racial justice " the Stylebook account tweeted on
Wednesday.
The claim that something has been used in the past in a racist way has already led to banishing many English terms to the Orwellian
"memory hole." It certainly appears the AP is trying to do the same with "riot" now.
Instead of promoting precision, the Stylebook is urging reporters to use euphemisms such as "protest" or "demonstration."
It advises "revolt" and "uprising" if the violence is directed "against powerful groups or governing systems,"
in an alarming shift in focus from what is being done towards who is doing it to whom .
There is even a helpful suggestion to use "unrest" because it's "a vaguer, milder and less emotional term for a condition
of angry discontent and protest verging on revolt."
Translated to plain English, this means a lot more mentions of "unrest" and almost no references to "riot," in media
coverage going forward, regardless of how much actual rioting is happening.
Mainstream media across the US have already gone out of their way to avoid labeling what has unfolded since the death of George
Floyd in May as "riots." Though protests in Minneapolis, Minnesota turned violent within 48 hours, before spreading to other
cities across the US – and even internationally – the media continued calling them "peaceful" and "protests for racial
justice."
Yet in just the first two weeks of the riots, 20 people have been killed and the property damage has
exceeded $2 billion , according
to insurance estimates – the highest in US history.
AP is no stranger to changing the language to better comport to 'proper' political sensitivities. At the height of the riots in
June, the Stylebook decided to capitalize"Black" and "Indigenous" in a "racial, ethnic or cultural sense."
A month later, the expected decision
to leave "white" in lowercase was justified by saying that "White people in general have much less shared history and culture,
and don't have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color."
Moreover, "Capitalizing the term 'white,' as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs,"
wrote AP's vice-president for standards John Daniszewski.
The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, as its full name goes, has effectively dictated the tone of English-language
outlets around the world since it first appeared in 1953. It is also required reference material in journalism schools.
So when it embraces vagueness over precision and worrying about "suggestions" and "subtly conveying" things over
plain meaning, that rings especially Orwellian – in both the '1984' sense of censoring speech and thought and regarding the corruption
of language the author lamented in his famous 1946
essay 'Politics and the English language.'
AP is hardly the Ministry of Truth, dictating Newspeak under the penalty of torture. As it turns out, it doesn't have to be.
A bit of updated style – and thought – guidance announced on Twitter from time to time will do.
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.
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
I draw your attention to the irrefutable fact that Mr. Cohen said that the Buk missile, which
brought down Malaysian Flight 370 over the skies of Donbas, was the Ukraine government "playing
with its new toys and made a big mistake." -- and I draw your attention to the irrefutable fact
that Mr. Cohen said that the Buk missile, which brought down Malaysian Flight 370 over the skies
of Donbas, was the Ukraine government "playing with its new toys and made a big mistake."
He was a real giant in comparison with intellectual scum like Fiona Hill, Michael McFaul and other neocons.
Notable quotes:
"... I tried to explain to American friends what was happening, but quickly realized that ultimately, even friends believe what they read in the newspapers, and the newspapers were pushing the Washington line. Except for Steve Cohen. Steve was the only major figure in America who insisted on remembering the Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, like my family members, distrusted and hated the new Kiev government. He spoke of neo-Nazi paramilitiaries who fought for the US-backed government committing war crimes against civilians in eastern Ukraine. He spoke the truth, regardless of how unwieldy it was. ..."
"... There's a lot to say about Steve. He was extraordinarily kind, never forgetting that in geopolitics, the ones who have the most to lose aren't strategists but everyday individuals impacted by policy. He was a consummate teacher, insisting on giving mentees the skills to navigate the world, a real proponent of the Teach a man to fish philosophy. He had facets and stories and memories; he lived life with empathy and gusto. ..."
"... Steve's insistence on speaking the truth about Ukraine and US-Russia relations drew all sorts of attention. America was hurtling toward a new cold war with Russia, and Steve well, from the perspective of Washington's foreign policy establishment, Steve was fucking up the narrative. Steve talked about inconvenient things, things like US-backed war criminals and America's own meddling in Russian affairs; in the process, he himself had become inconvenient. ..."
"... After all, this wasn't some random blogger. This was one of America's foremost Russia experts, a tenured professor at Princeton and New York University, someone who didn't just write about history but had dinner with it, had briefed US presidents, and was friends with legends like Mikhail Gorbachev. Steve had clout earned from decades of brilliant work; by 2014, he was using that clout to throw a wrench in the think tank world. ..."
"... It was something far colder, more sustained, something that ironically the Soviets did to dissidents: a relentless crusade to render the target untouchable, a leper without a platform. The barrage of articles and diatribes hurled at Steve in the national press painted him as not just a dissenter but a supporter of dictators and murderers. It was a vicious, prolonged assault carried out by think tank toadies, the kind of people who win races by kneecapping the competition. ..."
"... I'd often talk with Steve after a new hatchet job or smear on national television. Of course, the attacks were hurtful -- the only way to not be affected was to not care, and Steve cared. But I also noticed he was remarkably free of bitterness. Every time I thought he'd snap, he'd return the next day to write, discuss, keep fighting. ..."
"... It took me a couple of years to understand that what kept Steve going was faith in his beloved institutions. He believed in academia, in scholarship, in discourse, debate, and civility. He believed in the capacity of everyday people to explore and engage with their world, he believed in Russia, and he always believed in America. He believed in these things far more than he believed in the power of today's warmongers. ..."
"... In 1967 Noam Chomsky wrote an article in the NY Review entitled "the Responsibility of Intellectuals" the first sentence ran like this: "IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.". Stephen Cohen did precisely that when all the parrots and pundits were lined up against him. ..."
"... Always I was skeptical of prevailing scholarly interpretive trends on the Soviet experience that were echoed by colleagues claiming expertise on the subject. Cohen provided the foundation for my skepticism and invigorated my lectures on American foreign policy. ..."
"... Once Cohen plied his knowledge against the hysterical narrative that culminated in 4 years of frothing neo-McCarthyism (by the freakin' "left," no less), we were no longer gonna see him on the PBS newshour any more likely than we would and will see chris hedges, chomsky, or margaret kimberly. ..."
"... His book War With Russia? was an oasis of counter-narrative when I picked it up. Losing voices like his is immeasurable as we hurtle toward total war with Russia and/or China, both of whom are finally, naturally, and perfectly predictably beginning to draw a line in the sand. ..."
I first reached out to Stephen Cohen because I was losing my mind.
In the spring of 2014, a war broke out in my homeland of Ukraine. It was a horrific war in a
bitterly divided nation, which turned eastern Ukraine into a bombed-out wasteland. But that's
not how it was portrayed in America. Because millions of eastern Ukrainians were against the
US-backed government, their opinions were inconvenient for the West. Washington needed a clean
story about Ukraine fighting the Kremlin; as a result, US media avoided reporting about the
"wrong" half of the country. Twenty-plus million people were written out of the narrative, as
if they never existed.
I tried to explain to American friends what was happening, but quickly realized that
ultimately, even friends believe what they read in the newspapers, and the newspapers were
pushing the Washington line. Except for Steve Cohen. Steve was the only major figure in America
who insisted on remembering the Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, like my family members,
distrusted and hated the new Kiev government. He spoke of neo-Nazi paramilitiaries who fought
for the US-backed government committing war crimes against civilians in eastern Ukraine. He
spoke the truth, regardless of how unwieldy it was.
And so I e-mailed him, asking for guidance as I began my own writing career. Of course,
there were many who clamored for Steve's time, but I had an advantage over others. Steve and I
were both night owls, real night owls, the kind who have afternoon tea at three am. It
was then, when the east coast was sleeping, that he became my mentor and friend.
There's a lot to say about Steve. He was extraordinarily kind, never forgetting that in
geopolitics, the ones who have the most to lose aren't strategists but everyday individuals
impacted by policy. He was a consummate teacher, insisting on giving mentees the skills to
navigate the world, a real proponent of the Teach a man to fish philosophy. He had
facets and stories and memories; he lived life with empathy and gusto.
But one thing Steve taught me is to stick to my strengths, and truth be told, there are
others who can describe his life better than I. I'll stick to what I learned during our
conversations at three in the morning, which is that, above all else, Stephen F. Cohen was a
man of faith.
Steve's insistence on speaking the truth about Ukraine and US-Russia relations drew all
sorts of attention. America was hurtling toward a new cold war with Russia, and Steve well,
from the perspective of Washington's foreign policy establishment, Steve was fucking up the
narrative. Steve talked about inconvenient things, things like US-backed war criminals and
America's own meddling in Russian affairs; in the process, he himself had become
inconvenient.
After all, this wasn't some random blogger. This was one of America's foremost Russia
experts, a tenured professor at Princeton and New York University, someone who didn't just
write about history but had dinner with it, had briefed US presidents, and was friends with
legends like Mikhail Gorbachev. Steve had clout earned from decades of brilliant work; by 2014,
he was using that clout to throw a wrench in the think tank world.
The DC apparatchiks couldn't discredit Steve's credentials or track record -- he'd predicted
events in Ukraine and elsewhere years before they occurred. They couldn't intimidate him --
he'd faced far worse threats, like the KGB. Instead, they set out to turn him into an
America-hating, Putin-loving pariah.
This went beyond an ad hominem campaign. It was something far colder, more sustained,
something that ironically the Soviets did to dissidents: a relentless crusade to render the
target untouchable, a leper without a platform. The barrage of articles and diatribes hurled at
Steve in the national press painted him as not just a dissenter but a supporter of dictators
and murderers. It was a vicious, prolonged assault carried out by think tank toadies, the kind
of people who win races by kneecapping the competition.
I'd often talk with Steve after a new hatchet job or smear on national television. Of
course, the attacks were hurtful -- the only way to not be affected was to not care, and Steve
cared. But I also noticed he was remarkably free of bitterness. Every time I thought he'd snap,
he'd return the next day to write, discuss, keep fighting.
It took me a couple of years to understand that what kept Steve going was faith in his
beloved institutions. He believed in academia, in scholarship, in discourse, debate, and
civility. He believed in the capacity of everyday people to explore and engage with their
world, he believed in Russia, and he always believed in America. He believed in these things
far more than he believed in the power of today's warmongers.
Steve liked movies and would often end a lecture with a movie reference to drive home the
thesis. When I think of him, I think of the ending of The Shawshank Redemption , the
line about Andy Dufresne crawling through filth and coming out clean on the other side. Steve
didn't live in a movie; I can't claim he emerged unscathed. What he did was come through
without bitterness or cynicism. He refused to turn away from the ugliness, but he didn't allow
it to blind him to beauty. He walked with grace. And he lost neither his convictions nor his
faith.
Lev
Golinkin Lev Golinkin is the author of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka,
Amazon's Debut of the Month, a Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program
selection, and winner of the Premio Salerno Libro d'Europa. Golinkin, a graduate of Boston
College, came to the US as a child refugee from the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov (now
called Kharkiv) in 1990. His writing on the Ukraine crisis, Russia, the far right, and
immigrant and refugee identity has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, CNN, The Boston Globe, Politico Europe, and Time (online), among other venues;
he has been interviewed by MSNBC, NPR, ABC Radio, WSJ Live and HuffPost Live.
Pierre Guerlain says: October 1, 2020 at 12:42 pm
In 1967 Noam Chomsky wrote an article in the NY Review entitled "the Responsibility of
Intellectuals" the first sentence ran like this: "IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals
to speak the truth and to expose lies.". Stephen Cohen did precisely that when all the
parrots and pundits were lined up against him. He was a Mensch. History will bear him
the historian out.
Valera Bochkarev says to Lance Haley: October 1, 2020 at 11:09 am
Hmm, who's the apologist here ?
If the Ukraine is SO sovereign how is it I did not see any outrage in your diatribe
against 'Toria, Pyatt and the rest orchestrating the Maidan putsch or the $5Billion US spent
on softening up the ukraine for the regime change ?
I believe in numbers, as in the number of military bases any given country has surrounding
the ones it wants to subvert, in the amount of money allocated to vilify and eventually bring
down the "unwanted" regimes and the quantity and 'quality' of sanctions imposed against those
regimes; and the sum of all of the above perpetrated against humanity in the past 75 or so
years.
Your vapid drivel, Mr Haley, evaporates almost without a trace once seen with those
parameters in mind.
Numbers don't lie.
Michael Batinski says: September 30, 2020 at 5:48 pm
Let me add from the perspective of an American historian who taught for forty years in a
midwestern university. From the start I depended on William Appleman Williams to keep
perspective and to counter prevailing interpretive trends.
Always I was skeptical of
prevailing scholarly interpretive trends on the Soviet experience that were echoed by
colleagues claiming expertise on the subject. Cohen provided the foundation for my skepticism
and invigorated my lectures on American foreign policy.
I will always be thankful.
Michael Batinski
Tim Ashby says: September 30, 2020 at 2:37 pm
The smothering agitprop in America trumps even Goebbels and co. with its beautifully
dressed overton window and first-amendment-free-press bullshit.
Once Cohen plied his knowledge against the hysterical narrative that culminated in 4 years
of frothing neo-McCarthyism (by the freakin' "left," no less), we were no longer gonna see
him on the PBS newshour any more likely than we would and will see chris hedges, chomsky, or
margaret kimberly.
Let's face it, we were lucky to win the editorial fight to even give him
space in the Nation.
His book War With Russia? was an oasis of counter-narrative when I picked it up. Losing
voices like his is immeasurable as we hurtle toward total war with Russia and/or China, both
of whom are finally, naturally, and perfectly predictably beginning to draw a line in the
sand.
"... The REASON they won't release them: The TRUMP Collusion wasn't with the Russians , but with APARTHEID Isra-h-e-l-l. But NO ONE will investigate that. M.A.G.A. is out. M.I.G.A is in. ..."
"... 'Bloody Gina' is Trump's loyalist appointee, following through on what loyalist Pompeo started to protect Trump Crime Family Corruption, Chabad Mafia, and ZOG. ..."
"... please allow me to still congratulate Gina on reducing the almighty Third Option into the Toiletpaper Option. ..."
"... 2018, BREAKING: Trump appoints Haspel as first female CIA director ..."
"... 2017: Breaking: CIA Director Mike Pompeo appoints Haspel as the first female CIA officer to be named deputy director. ..."
"... Fathead and Esper were best buds at West Point.. ..."
"... Evidence destruction was one the main purposes of the Mueller "investigation". ..."
"... Please. If you can see what Trump has done, basically bending the US and its taxpayers over for Israel, you'd realize he's just another in a long line of AIPAC Presidents. Ain't nobody opposing him. CIA knows what Russia knows about him, and they're just using him as bait. ..."
"... proof is in the pudding, Hillary still walks free, none of the corrupt ones are in jail and won't ever go to jail. Face it, Biff has many fooled. ..."
"... U.S. Navy Reserve Doctor on Gina Haspel Torture Victim: "One of the Most Severely Traumatized Individuals I Have Ever Seen" ..."
"... What bothers me more is how deep the Deep State goes in Washington. They totally control the government and without mass firings it is impossible to even make a dent in it. This country is gone and just doesn't know it yet. Once Kamala is crowned as queen reality will come slamming home pdq. By the time the country realizes what has happened to them it will be way too late, no matter how many guns they have at home. Once they cut off access to your money, very few people will be independent enough to survive on their own. ..."
"... Trump has opened the eyes of more Americans to the simple fact that an unelected bureaucracy is running the country ..."
"... DJT hired this c8nt, sure, but the pool of candidates equipped to take over the CIA is very small, and all are career swamp things. If DJT put in a true outsider, the ranks would close and the "Director" would know nothing, could do nothing, and nothing would change. The ranks would just wait for another President. Trump is powerless over the CIA. After all, they could easily have him 'accidentally' killed; they've done it before. ..."
"... The CIA just needs to be dissolved in acid. The political, psychological and historical deep-rooted corruption isn't fixable by anyone. ..."
"... McConnell would never confirm a "true outsider". Mitch is the real problem here, he tells Trump who he will and will not confirm, so Trump has to accept one of Mitch's choices. ..."
"... He could put in Mike Flynn. And any vested employee who "closed ranks" would go on immediate and permanent furlough. ..."
"... Here's something we Americans can learn from the Russians. In August 1991 after Gorbachev left to the Black Sea for a short vacation, the heads of the USSR "power ministries" (KGB chairman, armed forces chief of staff, Minister of Interior, etc. etc.) formed the "State Committee for Extrordinary Situation" ( G.K.Ch .P.) and tried to overthrow the government. ..."
"... That's what happened in Washington in 2016-2018 - "GKChP Lite." ..."
"... After the putsch attempt failed, the leaders were arrested and the power ministries reorganized - the KGB was split into several departments including the FSB and SVR for internal and external intelligence. ..."
"... Trump can declassify these personally if he wants, at any time. He could even go live on air and read portions of it to the public. He has the power, but he refuses to use it. ..."
"... Trumps entire cabinet is full of Goldman Sachs, Skull and Bones, CFR, Pentagon, CIA, Career politicians... at what point do you realize he was never going to drain the swamp? Both candidates are a joke and so is this website for becoming a Big R Republican website. ..."
"... This is all kabuki theater because Trump could have signed an Executive Order releasing everything back to JFK 3 years ago instead of flapping his yap. Comey has a Hollywood movie coming out this fall, As Biden said, "Shut up, man". ..."
"... No one is going to prison that deserves to over this. They'll crucify some desk monkey or intern, pat each other on the back and brag about a job well done. We've seen it the last four years, some low level schmuck changes the footer on some emails and the DOJ is all over it like white on rice. Totally ignoring the fact there is a seditionist movement, maybe even treasonous, happening at a systemic level throughout government. Four years is enough time to build a case, lord knows any one with half a mind can find all the evidence needed in four damned days. ..."
"... The a-holes running the DOJ won't prosecute Comey, or Clinton, or Brennan or any other name we know. Because they're doing dirty deeds themselves and don't want to set the precedent in fear those who come after them might in turn prosecute them ..."
"Federalist" co-founder Sean Davis reports that CIA Director Gina Haspel is personally
blocking the release of documents that will show "what actually happened" with Russiagate.
" This isn't just a scandal about Democrat projection, this is a scandal about what was a
coup planned against the incoming administration at the highest levels and I can report here
tonight that these declassifications that have come out," Davis told FOX News host Tucker
Carlson on Wednesday. "Those weren't easy to get out and there are far more waiting to get
out."
"Unfortunately those releases and declassifications according to multiple sources I've
talked to are being blocked by CIA director Gina Haspel who herself was the main link between
Washington and London ," Davis said.
"As the London station chief from John Brennan's CIA during the 2016 election. Recall, it
was London where Christopher Steele was doing all this work. And I'm told that it was Gina
Haspel personally who is blocking a continued declassification of these documents that will
show the American people the truth of what actually happened."
Watch:
pier , 1 hour ago
The REASON they won't release them: The TRUMP Collusion wasn't with the Russians , but with APARTHEID Isra-h-e-l-l. But NO ONE will investigate that. M.A.G.A. is out.
M.I.G.A is in.
Joseph Sullivan , 1 hour ago
No. This is all the UK. And Brit east India/pharma complex I'm serious. Israel is a UK proxy.
tion , 1 hour ago
True. 'Bloody Gina' is Trump's loyalist appointee, following through on what loyalist
Pompeo started to protect Trump Crime Family Corruption, Chabad Mafia, and ZOG.
My last
comment including my sentiments towards Gina got eaten by censorship for reasons obvious to
me, but please allow me to still congratulate Gina on reducing the almighty Third Option into
the Toiletpaper Option.
acetrumchura , 1 hour ago
2018, BREAKING: Trump appoints Haspel as first female CIA director
acetrumchura , 1 hour ago
2017: Breaking: CIA Director Mike Pompeo appoints Haspel as the first female CIA officer
to be named deputy director.
BGen. Jack Ripper , 49 minutes ago
Fathead and Esper were best buds at West Point..
NoWorries77 , 1 hour ago
Evidence destruction was one the main purposes of the Mueller "investigation".
realitybiter , 2 hours ago
Trump Has played like Tom Brady. Without either guard or tackle. Take the CIA and the FBI. They are both still ran by rats. Tree of liberty is VERY thirsty.
eatapeach , 1 hour ago
Please. If you can see what Trump has done, basically bending the US and its taxpayers
over for Israel, you'd realize he's just another in a long line of AIPAC Presidents. Ain't
nobody opposing him. CIA knows what Russia knows about him, and they're just using him as
bait.
GreatUncle , 57 minutes ago
Either they are accountable or they are treasonous. CIA is the globalist intelligence agency now.
MAGAMAN , 2 hours ago
It will happen, the fuse just keeps getting shorter. Nobody even refutes that Obama is a
traitor that spied on Trump's campaign and tried to overthrow the President. The evidence is
overwhelming and continues to snow ball.
ChiangMaiXPat , 1 hour ago
It will never happen as Trump appointed these Clowns. Imagine appointing people working
DIRECTLY against your self interest. Does this sound logical or even remotely plausible? I
don't recall it EVER happening in any other administration.
spqrusa , 2 minutes ago
He cannot do anything without Consent from the Privy Council and the circle of demons.
ThaBigPerm , 2 hours ago
Aaaand Trump can just order declassification over "her" head. Do it.
Lather Rinse Repeat , 1 hour ago
Surfaces the cabal's foot soldiers. CIA Director Haspel was a great leader when appointed. But when process drives Haspel to
block an action, the message is that Haspel is rot and so is Haspel's network. These networks run deep and wide and prosecuting 1 or 10 does nothing - you need them all,
or the problem comes back in 5 years.
Lokiban , 2 hours ago
He won't
proof is in the pudding, Hillary still walks free, none of the corrupt ones are in jail
and won't ever go to jail. Face it, Biff has many fooled.
spam filter , 2 hours ago
The way he's constantly saying, "someone should do something about this" ...Tells my
spidey sense that he has little power in the swamp.
Propaganda Phil , 2 hours ago
Isn't she the same chick who destroyed all the torture tapes? Good luck.
Mr. Bones , 1 hour ago
All power of classification is derived from the office of the executive.
He could do exactly this, unilaterally.
Farmer Tink , 1 hour ago
First, normal people who consume news from the networks, particularly those that get their
news from MSNBC and social media, would never hear this. Second, if they did find out about
this, they'd never believe it. It would cause too much cognitive dissonance for them to
believe.
They wouldn't believe it unless the four legacy broadcast media told them so. They
just live in a land of Orange Man Bad as far as news go. A plot to overthrow the US
government by Obama and the Brits would be unfathomable to them.
Someone Else , 2 hours ago
Trump had an abrasive demeanor during the debate and in general.
How could he not, when truly everybody for four years HAS fought him tooth and nail? Few
would have had the ability to stand up to what he has stood up to.
Quia Possum , 1 hour ago
He had that demeanor before he was president too, so I don't accept that excuse.
desertboy , 27 minutes ago
U.S. Navy Reserve Doctor on Gina Haspel Torture Victim: "One of the Most Severely
Traumatized Individuals I Have Ever Seen"
justyouwait , 2 hours ago
All this crap needs to come out. Any date for the release before the election will have
the Dems and their media lap dogs crying foul. It just doesn't matter. They will NEVER
support the release of any documents that are damming to them. He should release it all right
up to the day of the election. This country needs to know all the criminality that went down.
That goes for the so called Durham report too, of which there have been so many rumors. That
one is likely to be a huge zero though by the time Barr gets done with it and then tells us
there were "improprieties" but nothing really bad. What a joke.
What bothers me more is how deep the Deep State goes in Washington. They totally control
the government and without mass firings it is impossible to even make a dent in it. This
country is gone and just doesn't know it yet. Once Kamala is crowned as queen reality will
come slamming home pdq. By the time the country realizes what has happened to them it will be
way too late, no matter how many guns they have at home. Once they cut off access to your
money, very few people will be independent enough to survive on their own.
John Couger , 2 hours ago
Trump has opened the eyes of more Americans to the simple fact that an unelected
bureaucracy is running the country
Sigh. , 2 hours ago
DJT hired this c8nt, sure, but the pool of candidates equipped to take over the CIA is
very small, and all are career swamp things. If DJT put in a true outsider, the ranks would
close and the "Director" would know nothing, could do nothing, and nothing would change. The
ranks would just wait for another President. Trump is powerless over the CIA. After all, they
could easily have him 'accidentally' killed; they've done it before.
The CIA just needs to be dissolved in acid. The political, psychological and historical
deep-rooted corruption isn't fixable by anyone.
Mclovin , 1 hour ago
McConnell would never confirm a "true outsider". Mitch is the real problem here, he tells
Trump who he will and will not confirm, so Trump has to accept one of Mitch's choices.
gcjohns1971 , 1 hour ago
He could put in Mike Flynn. And any vested employee who "closed ranks" would go on immediate and permanent
furlough.
There are only a couple or three thousand CIA agents and analysts. The rest are
contractors.
To bypass the swamp things you sideline them and put your own people in charge of the
contracts.
otschelnik , 1 hour ago
Here's something we Americans can learn from the Russians. In August 1991 after Gorbachev
left to the Black Sea for a short vacation, the heads of the USSR "power ministries" (KGB
chairman, armed forces chief of staff, Minister of Interior, etc. etc.) formed the "State
Committee for Extrordinary Situation" ( G.K.Ch
.P.) and tried to overthrow the government.
That's what happened in Washington in 2016-2018 - "GKChP Lite."
After the putsch attempt failed, the leaders were arrested and the power ministries
reorganized - the KGB was split into several departments including the FSB and SVR for
internal and external intelligence.
Trump has to do the same thing - break them up.
Occams_Razor_Trader , 1 hour ago
Kennedy wasn't a big fan................. look where it got him......................
Back and to the left.................................
LostinRMH , 2 hours ago
Trump can declassify these personally if he wants, at any time. He could even go live on
air and read portions of it to the public. He has the power, but he refuses to use it.
LostinRMH , 2 hours ago
The only timing Trump is interested in is running out the clock. If he get's a second term, a lot of these current issues will magically vanish, and new
ones will appear. This is just a scripted political show for the sheeple. It's all fake.
Oldwood , 2 hours ago
The swamp owns the government's employment agency. All hires come from within the swamp.
LooseLee , 1 hour ago
Sorry Old Man. Trump could have handled this sooooo much better and differently. I call
BS.
knightowl77 , 50 minutes ago
Here is the "B.S."
80 to 90% of the Federal Government are swamp creatures or friendly to the swamp...90 out
of 100 U.S. Senators are either swamp members or at least friendly to the swamp....Trump can
only get people confirmed to certain agencies who are Not hostile to the swamp...McConnell
and company are blocking the draining....The Dems would be even worse or just impeach
Trump....
No One else has even tried...I doubt anyone else could've survived the swamp as long as
Trump has....So you tell us HOW he could have done it better and differently?????????
AlexTheCat3741 , 1 hour ago
Not one person who has had a prior association with John Brennan should be doing anything
in the Trump Administration. And if that person cannot be fired, then reassign them to
cleaning toilets or picking up trash.
WHERE IS PRESIDENT TRUMP GETTING HIS PERSONNEL CHOICES FROM? We know Chris Cristie was one
who recommended director of the "Fibbers Bureau of Insurrection", Chris Wray and he is an
absolute disaster AND NEARLY AS BAD AS JAMES COMEY WHO MUST BE SUFFERING FROM DEMENTIA TOO AS
HE CANNOT SEEM TO REMEMBER ANYTHING WHILE UNDER OATH BEFORE A SENATE COMMITTEE.
And now we have this Gina Haspel running the CIA? ARE YOU F CKING KIDDING??
The first person to next get the ax in the Trump Administration is whoever it is that is
giving him these personnel choices, e.g., Rex Tillerson, James Matis, John Kelly, Kirsten
Nielson, Mark Esper, Mark Miley..........WHO IS PICKING THIS TRASH WHEN THE PRESIDENT NEEDS
REAL HELP PERFORMING A COLON FLUSH ON THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO GET THE GARBAGE OUT AND TO
UNDO THE DAMAGE DONE BY 8 YEARS OF BARACK O'DINGLEBARRY AND SLOW JOE BIDEN??
Citi The Real , 1 hour ago
Trumps entire cabinet is full of Goldman Sachs, Skull and Bones, CFR, Pentagon, CIA,
Career politicians... at what point do you realize he was never going to drain the swamp?
Both candidates are a joke and so is this website for becoming a Big R Republican
website.
DeeDeeTwo , 1 hour ago
This is all kabuki theater because Trump could have signed an Executive Order releasing
everything back to JFK 3 years ago instead of flapping his yap. Comey has a Hollywood movie
coming out this fall, As Biden said, "Shut up, man".
Alfred , 2 hours ago
The Director of the CIA is a cabinet position. If she doesn't want to take direction from POTUS, she should be fired.
Wild Bill Steamcock , 53 minutes ago
Yeah, there's a reason she's blocking it. If those papers are released, it'll lead to
someone high up the food chain facing a courtroom out of necessity because people will lose
their goddamed ****.
Once that happens, you'll by necessity have to go after six more. Then six more. Then
everyone in D.C., their families, friends, and pet dogs are gonna be locked up.
They protect themselves. "Obeyance of the law is for thee, not for me."
Wild Bill Steamcock , 41 minutes ago
No one is going to prison that deserves to over this. They'll crucify some desk monkey or
intern, pat each other on the back and brag about a job well done. We've seen it the last
four years, some low level schmuck changes the footer on some emails and the DOJ is all over
it like white on rice. Totally ignoring the fact there is a seditionist movement, maybe even
treasonous, happening at a systemic level throughout government. Four years is enough time to
build a case, lord knows any one with half a mind can find all the evidence needed in four
damned days.
The a-holes running the DOJ won't prosecute Comey, or Clinton, or Brennan or any other
name we know. Because they're doing dirty deeds themselves and don't want to set the
precedent in fear those who come after them might in turn prosecute them
radical-extremist , 1 hour ago
Be aware CIA people stick together like glue. They're more loyal to each other than they
are the US or any president. Once you're in the CLUB, you're in the CLUB for life. Trump was
absolutely right about not trusting "our intelligence agencies".
12Doberman , 1 hour ago
I hate the CIA...and it's been a power unto itself for a very long time. The idea that it
is under civilian oversight is a joke.
Max21c , 1 hour ago
the CIA...and it's been a power unto itself for a very long time. The idea that it is
under civilian oversight is a joke.
Quite true there is no oversight and the secret police community and intelligence
community are presently and have been for a long time above the law, above the Constitution,
above the very framework of government per above Congress & above the President and above
the Courts... and everybody just goes along with the pack of criminals in the security state
and accepts that they have the right to commit crimes, run criminal activities, and abuse
secret police powers... and nobody ever stands up to the Nazis and NeoNazis and these
radicals in the military secret police, military intelligence, Pentagon Gestapo, National
Security Council, FBI & CIA and the rest of the criminal underworld network inside and
around the organized criminal enterprises and organized criminal networks of the security
state...
12Doberman , 1 hour ago
That's right and the civilian government is largely just a facade.
ken , 1 hour ago
CIA wasn't W-A-S for preventing 9/11...or were they involved in it? Did the missing
trillions go to Israel, and that other country, as payment for services???
_arrow
protrumpusa , 2 hours ago
Someone asked in previous post - why do democrats hate Trump? Good question.
It can't be his policies - who except illegals don't want secure borders, who doesn't want a
strong private buisiness economy, who doesn't want manufacturing jobs to be brought back from
China.
Our democrat leaders, plus Romney all have a connection to Ukraine's stolen treasury money
and Soros's money too, and Trump doesn't . This I believe is the reason democrats hate
President Trump
protrumpusa , 2 hours ago
The Obama administration and the FBI knew that it was they who were meddling in a
presidential campaign - using executive intelligence powers to monitor the president's
political opposition. This, they also knew, would rightly be regarded as a scandalous abuse
of power if it ever became public. There was no rational or good-faith evidentiary basis to
believe that Trump was in a criminal conspiracy with the Kremlin or that he'd had any role in
Russian intelligence's suspected hacking of Democratic Party email accounts.
[snip]
In the stretch run of the 2016 campaign, President Obama authorized his administration's
investigative agencies to monitor his party's opponent in the presidential election, on the
pretext that Donald Trump was a clandestine agent of Russia. Realizing this was a gravely
serious allegation for which there was laughably insufficient predication, administration
officials kept Trump's name off the investigative files. That way, they could deny that they
were doing what they did. Then they did it . . . and denied it.
LEEPERMAX , 30 minutes ago
Gina Haspel worked directly for the instigator of the Crossfire Hurricane operation
– John Brennan. It would have been impossible for Haspel not to have known about the
British spying from London since it was reported in UK newspaper on a weekly basis.
She certainly was controlling Stefan
Halper , Josef
Mifsud ,
Stephan Roh , Alexander Downer, Andrew Wood, John McCain, Mark Warner, Adam Schiff and
the other conspirators.
Kan , 2 hours ago
The FBI and CIA are the enemy of the people. There is little doubt at this point that they
serve nobody but the bankers that formed the organization and themselves.
Gunston_Nutbush_Hall , 2 hours ago
How convenient.
CIA operative Trump nominates Haspel to be the CIA director, after CIA Operative Trump
picked CIA chief Mike Pompeo to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, thereafter
Epstein is Trumpincided on CIA Operatives Barr Pompeo Trump's watch, while running smoke
cover for the CIA's Obama's False Flag National Government.
Shortly after taking office in 1999, Jesse Ventura writes he was asked to attend a meeting
at the state Capitol. He says 23 CIA agents were waiting for him in a basement conference
room.
The greatest False Flag ever? Brainwashing Americans to think Constitutional Federal
Government exists.
Kefeer , 17 minutes ago
The people who want to know and care to know the truth already know the truth. It is
suspect that Trump appoints people like Christopher Wray and Gina Haspel and I really do not
know what to make of it - is he part of the swamp or making bad decisions? I honestly do not
know, but my biblical lens filter tells me we are in trouble regardless of the outcomes
because so many of the institutions in government and industry are so corrupt.
Maltheus , 29 minutes ago
Trump is absolutely incompetent, when it comes to selecting people. He always has been.
Flynn was one of the few, who was halfway decent, and he got thrown to the wolves. Pretty
much everyone else, he's ever chosen, has knifed him in the back, and most of us saw it
coming a mile away.
Tuffmug , 13 minutes ago
The Swamp is deep and has had twenty + years to grow . Trump had to chose the ones who
stunk least from a slimy pool of corrupted officials and fight against every agency, each
filled with deep state snakes. I'm just surprised he is still breathing.
Kinskian , 29 seconds ago
So his incompetence begins and ends with "selecting people" and that gets no downvotes
from the 'tards. I understand why. You're still blaming other people for Trump's failures in
office instead of placing the blame squarely with HIM. He is incompetent in his role as
President, and that is his responsibility.
LEEPERMAX , 36 minutes ago
Gina Haspel would have known about the coup. If she has not reported all of this to the
President Trump, she is complicit in the overthrow attempt and is guilty of HIGH TREASON.
Wild Bill Steamcock , 49 minutes ago
Spooks run this world. And they certainly like power, and money. But do you want to know
what they like most of all?
Information.
Control of information drives everything else. And anyone who has even sniffed that world
knows to get quality information you can't buy it. Instead you have to trade information of
equal value.
We're not important enough to have the opportunity to know what they know. I don't know
about you, but I'm a little angry about that.
StealthBomber , 30 minutes ago
That is because they are un-accountable.
Wild Bill Steamcock , 30 minutes ago
and untouchable.
Take one out and the whole thing collapses.
insanelysane , 51 minutes ago
Don't think we need declassifications to know what happened. We know what
happened.
as I've stated many times, governments would be completely unstable if the government
legally proved that organizations within the government were involved is sedition. With the
IRS scandal the deflection was that a few rogue employees did some things even though the
entire IRS was involved in harassing far right and far left organizations.
The problem with Russiagate is that none of the rogue employees are willing to to go down
without taking everyone involved down. The IRS rogues got nice payouts and no prison
time.
radical-extremist , 1 hour ago
She doesn't want them released because obviously it implicates her in Strzok's Crossfire
Hurricane scheme. It also puts mud on the face of MI6, which is why Trump might be
hesitant.
October is young.
12Doberman , 1 hour ago
Haspel is also likely a figurehead in many respects. From what I've read about CIA over
the years those at the top have competing agendas and don't trust and share information with
each other. The idea that a president is sworn in ever 4-8 years and is brought up to speed
on everything they are doing is laughable...and likely impossible. No president fully
controls the CIA and it has it's own agenda that runs across and through
administrations...may as well call it the head of the deep state snake.
Felix da Kat , 2 hours ago
Haspel is a Brennan redux.
The deep state is much deeper than anyone dare thought.
If Trump cannot do unwind the DS,then all is lost.
If Biden gets in, he will only serve to further entrench DS operatives.
Looking bleak out there, folks.
1nd1v1s1ble1 , 3 hours ago
*sigh* As if anything is going to come of this...when has any high ranking politician EVER
been taken to task or incarcerated for their crimes? It's the same political theater brought
to you by the MSM/Jesuit/Jooish/Freemason cult who ritually perform their televised 'skits'
to the masses to make it appear as if justice exists or better yet, we have a Republic-
newsflash: it died a long, long time ago. The frightened mask-wearing, compliant sheeple lap
it up every f'n time-when do you awake and realize there is no bi-partisan political machine,
there is no blue versus red, just like their cronies in Hollyweird, these politicians are
simply actors who were too ugly to make it there, orange man aint gonna save ya, bumbling joe
aint gonna save ya, understand Stockholm Syndrome-survivors of 'merica....they DO NOT GIVE A
F#*K ABOUT YOU OR YOUR FAMILY and would prefer you were dead.
Even the POTUS cannot do anything in DC alone, no matter what he wants to do. He needs
people to cooperate or follow orders. It seems many or most of the people around him are deep
state spies. I think they are scared ****less of what Trump might try to declassify. I think
the CIA would destroy evidence before providing proof of a seditious coup. If you've
committed murder or treason, destroying evidence seems like jaywalking.
Now we know Haspel is personally involved and we probably know exactly why she is blocking
the release of this information.
Jack_Ewing , 17 minutes ago
Trump was supposed to drain the swamp but surrounded himself with the scariest of swamp
creatures, this Medusa-like entity being one of the most terrifying. Pompeo, Mnuchin, Wray,
Miller, Haspel, Kushner, and the chief of the all, the official cover-upper for the Deep
State for the last 40 years, William Barr.
donkey_shot , 45 minutes ago
surprise, surprise: one-time iraqi detainee torturer and current CIA chief gina haspel is
a nasty piece of work: geez, whodathunk?
The only reason I can think of for holding these documents is that the conspiracy is so
vast and intricate, it might destroy 80 plus percent of the government! If that's what it
comes down to, so be it! Blow the whole PHUCKING thing to kingdom come!
Philthy_Stacker , 45 minutes ago
An accurite assumption.
LOL123 , 1 hour ago
Gina Haspel doesn't have a legal leg to stand on.
"The most explosive revelation was that the dossier was
bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee , a
fact that the Clinton campaign took pains to hide, that Clinton officials lied about, and
that Fusion GPS refused to reveal on its own. It wasn't an intelligence report at all. It was
a political hit job paid for by Trump's opponent."
Political issues " incorporated" into public stock holding corporations.
"Individual shareholders cannot generally sue over the deprivation of a corporation's
rights; only the board of directors has the standing to assert a corporation's constitutional
rights in court. [7]
-USA
Ever since Citizens United, the Supreme Court's 2010 decision allowing unlimited
corporate and union spending on political issues, Americans have been debating whether, as
Mitt Romney said, "Corporations are people, my friend."
The question came to the Supreme Court in a challenge to regulations implementing
President Obama's landmark health care law. Those regulations require employers with 50 or
more employees to provide those employees with comprehensive health insurance, which must
include certain forms of contraception. The contraception requirement was designed to protect
the rights of women. Studies show that access to
contraception has positive benefits for women's education, income, mental health, and family
stability.
since a political entity ( DNC and Hillary Campaign funded a public corporation which
is a " corporate personhood" and can be sued it is open to discovery in a court of
law.
the chickens have come home to roost....as Mitt Romney says....corporations are the
citizens "best friend".
R.G. , 1 hour ago
Citizens ARE corporaions.
4Y_LURKER , 1 hour ago
Finkel is Einhorn!
Einhorn is Finkel!
Totally_Disillusioned , 1 hour ago
If Sean Davis was able to unearth this, President Trump, Pompeo have known this for some
time and Ratcliffe certainly knows this. the question is "why is she allowed to block
disclosure?". None of the players are currently in service and would not be at risk if their
involvement was disclosed. What possibly is the excuse? Are they using the old excuse of not
revealing sources and methods?
All these people need a stern reminder the govt is owned by the people...they work for us.
So far we are the only people kept in the dark. Breakup the intel 17 agencies and re-engineer
down to two - one domestic and one international.
SirBarksAlot , 1 hour ago
It's always a national security issue when it's your responsibility to release the
documents that would incriminate you.
Gunston_Nutbush_Hall , 3 hours ago
Exactly why CIA Trump hand selected her. Exactly for the same reason CIA Trump hand
selected BARR.
TO PROVIDE CLEAN SMOKE N COVER FOR THEIR CIA NATIONAL GOVERNMENT.
Barr: CIA operative
It is a sobering fact that American presidents (many of whom have been corrupt) have gone
out of their way to hire fixers to be their attorney generals.
Consider recent history: Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), Eric Holder (2009-2015), Michael
Mukasey (2007-2009), Alberto Gonzales (2005-2007), John Ashcroft (2001-2005),Janet Reno
(1993-2001), **** Thornburgh (1988-1991), Ed Meese (1985-1988), etc.
Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting
in 1971. Barr's youth career goal was to head the CIA.
CIA operative assigned to the China directorate, where he became close to powerful CIA
operative George H.W. Bush, whose accomplishments already included the CIA/Cuba Bay of
Pigs, Asia CIA operations (Vietnam War, Golden Triangle narcotics), Nixon foreign policy
(Henry Kissinger), and the Watergate operation.
When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA's "legal office"
and Bush's inner circle, and worked alongside Bush's longtime CIA enforcers Theodore "Ted"
Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines, and others, several of whom were likely involved
with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy assassination, and numerous southeast Asian
operations, from the Phoenix Program to Golden Triangle narco-trafficking.
Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Church Committee investigations into CIA
abuses.
Barr stonewalled and stopped inquiries in the CIA bombing assassination of Chilean
opposition leader Orlando Letelier.
Barr joined George H.W. Bush's legal/intelligence team during Bush's vice presidency
(under President Ronald Reagan) Rose from assistant attorney general to Chief Legal Counsel
to attorney general (1991) during the Bush 41 presidency.
Barr was a key player in the Iran-Contra operation, if not the most important member of
the apparatus, simultaneously managing the operation while also "fixing" the legal end,
ensuring that all of the operatives could do their jobs without fear of exposure or
arrest.
In his attorney general confirmation, Barr vowed to "attack criminal organizations",
drug smugglers and money launderers. It was all hot air: as AG, Barr would preserve,
protect, cover up, and nurture the apparatus that he helped create, and use Justice
Department power to escape punishment.
Barr stonewalled and stopped investigations into all Bush/Clinton and CIA crimes,
including BCCI and BNL CIA drug banking, the theft of Inslaw/PROMIS software, and all
crimes of state committed by Bush
Barr provided legal cover for Bush's illegal foreign policy and war crimes
Barr left Washington, and went through the "rotating door" to the corporate world,
where he took on numerous directorships and counsel positions for major companies. In 2007
and again from 2017, Barr was counsel for politically-connected international law firm
Kirkland &
Ellis . Among its other notable attorneys and alumni are Kenneth Starr, John Bolton,
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and numerous Trump administration attorneys.
K&E's clients include sex trafficker/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and Mitt Romney's Bain
Capital.
A strong case can be made that William Barr was as powerful and important a figure in the
Bush apparatus as any other, besides Poppy Bush himself.
...Shortly after taking office in 1999, Jesse Ventura writes he was asked to attend a
meeting at the state Capitol. He says 23 CIA agents were waiting for him in a basement
conference room.
Bobby Farrell Can Dance , 3 hours ago
The Navalny "incident" is the latest pathetic CIA and British MI6 operation and the
Belarus incitement. Sloppy, unoriginal and going to backfire in their stupid faces.
Everybody knows the evil empire wants Nordstream II dead, Navalny is the latest lever and
that woman they recognized as leader of Belarus is as laughable as that Guaido goon they
recognized in Venezuela, but he's actually outside of Venezuela - yeah that's how popular he
is. Western intelligence agenices are hacks, they are past their peak.
John Hansen , 3 hours ago
The real stupid thing is the West will succeed.
Spinifex , 20 minutes ago
Christopher Steele is THE GUY who 'doctored all this up'. Why has he not been bought
before congress and asked questions?
Sergi Scripal worked for Christopher Steele. Sergi Scripal earned tens of thousands of
pounds 'providing information' to Christopher Steele. Why is he 'not being asked questions?
He's not 'dead'. Sergi Scripal is 'alive and well' and 'being hidden' by the U.K. Government
'for his own safty.' The U.K. can provide 'access to Sergi Scripal.
Pablo Miller worked for Christopher Steele. Pablo Miller was Sergi Scripals 'handler' with
MI6. Pablo Miller was also the 'last person to talk to Sergi Scripal' before Sergi Scripal
'surccumed to Novichok poison.' Why is Pablo Miller (aka: Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo -
https://gosint.wordpress.com/2019/02/02/who-is-mi6-officer-pablo-miller/
All three worked for Orbis Business Intelligence the company that wrote the 'Steele
Dossier' that Gina Haspel had access to and 'approved' sending onto the FBI and CIA. All
three, Christopher Steele, Sergi Scripal and Pablo Miller are 'alive and well' and all three
are able to provide information about the Steele Dossier, what was in the Steele Dossier, and
WHERE the information in the Steele Dossier came from. Ask the questions dammit, and you'll
get the answers.
headless blogger , 58 minutes ago
Not a fan of Trump, although I voted for him the first time, but he will be in serious
trouble if Biden gets into office as there are too many vengeful people on that side of the
isle. They attempted a coup d'etat which is the worse treason, where most of these people
would be executed in "normal" times.
So, they HAVE TO win at all costs, in their thinking. They will then turn the tables on
Trump as well as the entire Conservative camp. It looks like an ugly future if they win. If
Trump wins, it will be ugly too.
Sure signs to get the hell out now if you can.
The Technocracy crowd is behind all of this, btw. They are waiting for the full collapse
at which time we will be inundated with Tech Billionaires coming forward to "save us".
BEWARE!!
4 play_arrow 1
1nd1v1s1ble1 , 1 hour ago
*sigh* As if anything is going to come of this...when has any high ranking politician EVER
been taken to task or incarcerated for their crimes? It's the same political theater brought
to you by the MSM/Jesuit/Jooish/Freemason Satanic cult who ritually perform their televised
'skits' to the masses to make it appear as if justice exists or better yet, we have a
Republic- newsflash: it died a long, long time ago. The frightened mask-wearing, compliant
sheeple lap it up every f'n time-when do you awake and realize there is no bi-partisan
political machine? There is no blue versus red, just like their cronies in Hollyweird, these
colluding politicians are simply actors who were too ugly to make it there, orange man aint
gonna save ya, bumbling joe aint gonna save ya, understand Stockholm Syndrome-survivors of
'merica....they DO NOT GIVE A F#*K ABOUT YOU OR YOUR FAMILY and would actually prefer you
were dead.
Better/cheaper than sending US military to fight in another useless war.
headless blogger , 1 hour ago
Gina Haspel was selected by Trump!! When you take into consideration Trump's selections of
Haspel, Bolton, and many others, it becomes obvious there is someone in his admin that is
directing him to bring these people on. He brings them on and then they betray him.
5onIt , 1 hour ago
Pence is the dude you are looking for.
Haspel was the CIA Station Chief in London, when this was all going down.
Be sure, she has chit to hide.
LEEPERMAX , 1 hour ago
John Brennan led the coup this side of the Atlantic, while Gina Haspel , who was in the
CIA London office at the time, worked the coup from London as the CIA chief in cooperation
with GCHQ and Robert Hannigan. Both are creepy, corrupt traitors of America.
The current head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel, oversaw one such site
where torture was carried out. ... Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Professor Mark P. Denbeaux, Seton
Hall University ...
y_arrow
Mister Delicious , 2 hours ago
She was Brennan's London pet.
She should be fired and escorted from the building, and then DOJ NSD should open an
investigation into her contacts with Brennan.
Think there might be a Demstate coup attempt?
Well, don't you imagine any friend of John Brennan's is not a friend of Trump.
I don't care how much you love Orange Jesus - he has picked absolutely terrible people
over and over and over.
Good DNI now but he needs to take charge.
richsob , 3 hours ago
Orange Fat Boy is getting played like a violin. You and I both know it. Does he? Probably
because you can see it on his face but he's just not willing to do what it would take to get
everything out into the open. And if he tries to expose everything after he's lost the
election nobody will listen to him......even you and I. It will be too late then.
We would think that the New York Slimes would know something about losses. After all, they
paid $1.1 Billion in 1993 for The Boston Globe and in 2013, sold it for $70 Million to
businessman John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, and a massive 93%
loss.
But it's worse than that because included in that sale is BostonGlobe.com ; Boston.com ; the direct-mail marketing company Globe Direct; the
company's 49 percent interest in Metro Boston, a free daily paper; Telegram.com and The Worcester Telegram & Gazette. The Times
bought the Telegram & Gazette for $295 million in 1999.
We should be convinced to pay any attention to Fake News Tabloid, The New York Slimes,
given that kind of Business Acumen? I don't think so.
rwe2late , 3 hours ago
Hope & Change, Drain the swamp, End the wars
Angelic Obama allegedly prevented from saving us by "deep state" Republicans.
Angelic Trump allegedly prevented from saving us by "deep state" Democrats.
Poor us, our chosen leaders and parties are always so blameless in failing us.
protrumpusa , 4 hours ago
President Trump has gotten rid just about everyone in this article I found 3 years ago
> The ATLANTIC COUNCIL is funded by BURISMA, GEORGE SOROS OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION &
others. It was a CENTRIST, MILITARISTIC think tanks,now turned leftist group
> JOE BIDEN extorted Ukraine to FIRE the prosecutor investigating BURISMA, HUNTER's
employer.
> LTC VINDMAN & FIONA HILL met MANY TIMES with DANIEL FRIED of the ATLANTIC
COUNCIL. FIONA HILL is a former CoWorker of CHRISTOPHER STEELE !
> AMBASSADOR YOVANOVITCH is connected to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, is PRAISED in their
documents, gave Ukraine a "do not prosecute" list, was involved in PRESSURING Ukraine to not
prosecute GEORGE SOROS Group.
> BILL TAYLOR has a financial relationship with the ATLANTIC COUNCIL and the US UKRAINE
BUSINESS COUNCIL (USUBC) which is also funded by BURISMA.
> TAYLOR met with THOMAS EAGER (works for ADAM SCHIFF) in Ukraine on trip PAID FOR by
the ATLANTIC COUNCIL. This just days before TAYLOR first texts about the "FAKE" Quid Pro Quo
!
> TAYLOR participated in USUBC Events with DAVID J. KRAMER (JOHN MCCAIN advisor) who
spread the STEELE DOSSIER to the media and OBAMA officials.
> JOE BIDEN is connected to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, he rolled out his foreign policy
vision while VP there, He has given speeches there, his adviser on Ukraine, MICHAEL CARPENTER
(heads the Penn Biden Center) is a FELLOW at the ATLANTIC COUNCIL.
> KURT VOLKER is now Senior Advisor to the ATLANTIC COUNCIL, he met with burisma
By Jonny Tickle Angela Merkel's visit to Alexey Navalny was an attempt to politicize
the situation, according to Russia's Foreign Ministry. The German Chancellor dropped in to see
the Russian opposition figure when he was hospitalized in Berlin.
Speaking to Komsomolskaya Pravda Radio, the Ministry's spokesperson Maria Zakharova said
that the chancellor's visit had "nothing to do with the desire to find the truth" about
what happened to an opposition figure who was allegedly poisoned, and was simply a political
decision.
"Many people ask why," Zakharova said, when questioned about Merkel's motives. "I
think these questions should be addressed to the German side we regard it as an attempt to
politicize the issue."
The current communication between Moscow and Berlin is an "endless game of tag," with
Germany refusing to use official channels, Zakharova claimed.
On Monday, Navalny confirmed that the chancellor had met with him in Berlin's Charite
hospital. The opposition figure denied that the meeting was "secret," calling it a
"private conversation with (his) family." The visit was also confirmed by German
government spokesperson Steffen Seibert, who clarified that Berlin does not announce Merkel's
private meetings. According to German magazine Der Spiegel, which first broke the news of the
encounter, it "should be regarded as a clue for the Russian government that Berlin will not
give in and will find out the truth [behind the incident]."
On August 20, Navalny was hospitalized in the Siberian city of Omsk after he became ill on a
flight from Tomsk to Moscow. Two days later, after a request from his family and associates,
the activist was flown to Berlin for treatment at the city's Charite clinic. Over a week later,
German authorities announced that the anti-corruption activist was poisoned with a substance
from the Novichok group of nerve agents. The medical team in Omsk denies that any poison was
found in Navalny's body. On September 23, he was discharged from hospital and is expected to
make a full recovery.
If you like this story, share it with a friend! Embla Bill Johnson 7 hours ago What
is certain is that EUC Ursula Von der Legen was activated. At least they are two about it. So
therefore the geopolitical region is covering EU member countries, not only Germany. Tor
Gjesdal 5 hours ago When the Banksters, Rothschild s are your Masters you just have to obey
Merkel. Besides US$ HAS much dirt on You also by their Spying on us All... Cyber criminals
Supreme. Which simply put: No Real Democracy at all, Faked this also. ((( Not to mention their
lies, cheating and stealing in their Medias and schools. etc.. What complete Hypocrits and how
Truely Un-Godly! It is so sad to see these Leaders of the Nazto-sphere showing how sold out
their Souls and Minds are. (( Galaxy31 5 hours ago The West is so desperate to make crooked
Navalny look like an important fierce opposition. In reality he is far far from being important
or a fierce opposition. He is simply a traitor politely said, nothing else. ariadnatheo 3 hours
ago What do they and what does Angela herself mean by "a private visit"? She is the head of the
German state for Zweibelkuchen sake! Private as in ... intimate? I cannot see her as a cougar.
In fact I can't even imagine her in bed. No way! Please say it ain't so, Angela! armyexpat 1
hour ago I wonder what "they" have on Merkel or her gov. The German gov is spinning a fairy
tail as fact.
"... In the infamous Steele dossier , prepared for the Clinton campaign by a 'former' British spy, the first entry that is tying the Trump campaign to the 'Russian DNC hack' was allegedly written on July 28 2016. ..."
"... The president of Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company which investigated the DNC leak, later said that his company never found any proof that Russia had hacked the DNC. ..."
"... The claims made in the Ratcliffe letter fit the timeline of the scandal as it developed. They supports the assertion that the Clinton campaign made up 'Russiagate' from whole cloth. It was supported in that by a myriad of media and by dozens of high level anti-Trump activists in the FBI and CIA. ..."
"... "There was no transition because they came after me trying to do a coup. They came after me spying on my campaign. They started from the day I won and even before I won. From the day I came down the escalator with our First Lady. They were a disaster. They were a disgrace to our country. And we've caught 'em. We've caught 'em all. We've got it all on tape. We've caught 'em all." ..."
"... The need to then cover for murder added to the urgency to propagate the whole "Russiagate" fiction. The US' misnamed "intelligence community" and mass media both were complicit in the murder of Rich, so they had additional motivation to lead the public off the scent with an entirely fabricated false narrative. ..."
"... I doubt that it was solely a Clinton operation. After all, CIA director Mike Morrell kicked it off with his piece in the NY Times, which signaled some significant level of support at least parts of the intelligence community. ..."
"... The whole Russiagate affaire was very reminiscent of the Ken Starr inquisition, which yielded nothing until Bubba cavalierly incriminated himself with Monica. Trump has yet to prove himself that stupid. ..."
"... Remember when Tulsi Gabbard called out Hillary Clinton about getting the media to support her Russiagating of her? ..."
"... "Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly." ..."
"... Seriously, Mr. President? You have been given a personal intelligence briefing from your CIA Director that one of the candidates to succeed you in the Presidency is an actual, bought and paid-for agent of Russia? And you don't go public because Ole Meanie Mitch won't let you ? ..."
"... This said to me that Obama knew it was all BS from the beginning. Of course, there have been gobs of disclosures and evidence since that it was fake and BS, and none whatsoever that it was real. ..."
"... Thanks to Wikileaks, we have a copy of an email exchange between Hillary's Campaign Manager, John Podesta and longtime Democratic operative Brent Budowsky talking about how Hillary should take on The Donald. Budowski tells Podesta: "Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria."" ..."
"... The Russiagate fabrication was a political convenience for the Dems, but it allowed Trump and his NATO/EU agents to sanction, pressurise, interfere with Russia in every dimension, because Trump 'had to' to show they he was not Russia's sock puppets! ..."
"... The video I just watched and linked to on the Week in Review thread makes this observation: The Ds burned the US-Russia relationship while the Rs made no real protest; now we have the Rs burning the US-China relationship while the Ds make no real protest. ..."
"... Assange announced on June 12, 2016 that a new tranche of DNC emails had been leaked to Wikileaks and was being prepared for publication. The effort to manufacture the false narrative about Russian hacking began immediately after that, likely within minutes of the announcement. ..."
"... A "populist outsider" will NEVER be allowed to win the Presidency. It was claimed that Obama was also a "populist outsider" yet he served the Deep State/Empire and the US establishment very well. ..."
"... Russiagate was primarily a means of initiating a new McCarthyism as part of a plan to counter Russia and China. ..."
Where the allegations that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential elections made up by
the Clinton campaign?
A letter sent by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe seems
to suggest so :
On Tuesday, Ratcliffe, a loyalist whom Trump placed atop U.S. intelligence in the spring,
sent Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) a letter claiming that in late July 2016, U.S. intelligence
acquired "insight" into a Russian intelligence analysis. That analysis, Ratcliffe summarized
in his letter, claimed that Clinton had a plan to attack Trump by tying him to the 2016 hack
of the Democratic National Committee.
...
Ratcliffe stated that the intelligence community "does not know the accuracy of this
allegation or to the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect
exaggeration or fabrication."
The letter says that then CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on the
intelligence. He reported that the Russians believed that Clinton approved the campaign plan on
July 26 2016.
So U.S. intelligence spying on Russian intelligence analysts found that the Russians
believed that Clinton started a 'Trump is supported by the Russian hacking of the DNC'
campaign. The Russian's surely had reason to think that.
Emails from the Democratic National Committee were published by Wikileaks on July 22
2016, shortly before the Democratic National Convention. They proved that during the primaries
the DNC had actively worked against candidate Bernie Sanders.
On July 24 Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook went on CNN and made, to my knowledge,
the very first
allegations (video) that Russia had 'hacked' the DNC in support of Donald Trump.
It is likely that the Russian analysts had seen that.
Mook's TV appearance was probably a test balloon raised to see if such claims would
stick.
Two days later Clinton allegedly approved campaign plans to emphasize such claims.
In the infamous Steele
dossier , prepared for the Clinton campaign by a 'former' British spy, the first entry that
is tying the Trump campaign to the 'Russian DNC hack' was allegedly written on July 28
2016.
The president of Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company which investigated the DNC leak,
later said that his company
never found any proof that Russia had hacked the DNC.
There are suspicions that Seth Rich, an IT administrator for the DNC and Bernie Sanders
supporter, has leaked the DNC emails to Wikileaks . Rich was murdered on July 10 2016 in
Washington DC in an alleged 'robbery' during which nothing was stolen.
The claims made in the Ratcliffe letter fit the timeline of the scandal as it developed.
They supports the assertion that the Clinton campaign made up 'Russiagate' from whole cloth. It
was supported in that by a myriad of media and by dozens of high level anti-Trump activists in
the FBI and CIA.
Posted by b on September 30, 2020 at 16:04 UTC |
Permalink
Are you trying to tell me b that "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton is suspected of
wrongdoing?/snark
I am all for bringing down the whole house of corrupt cards that fronts for the private
finance cult. The Clintons are just examples of semi-recent to recent corruption. Obama is in
that boat as is Biden and others.
But just remember that Trump was already entirely corrupt before (s)elected into power.
Trump is just another front for global private finance evil that humanity must face.
Another "conspiracy theory" turned into conspiracy fact.
With regards to Killary being "supported in that by a myriad of media and by dozens of
anti-Trump activists...", well, it's a pay-to-play world and CGI was the
piggybank at that particular time...
thanks b... the timeline certainly fits and is consistent here.... larry johnson at sst has
an article up on the same topic... how much of this is coming out now due the election and
how much of it is coming out now, just because it happens to be coming out now??
It's hard to tell when Trump is ever being truthful, but in last night's debate he clearly
stated:
"There was no transition because they came after me trying to do a coup. They came after
me spying on my campaign. They started from the day I won and even before I won. From the day
I came down the escalator with our First Lady. They were a disaster. They were a disgrace to
our country. And we've caught 'em. We've caught 'em all. We've got it all on tape. We've
caught 'em all."
Whether that is indicative of an imminent substantial October surprise i guess we will all
have to wait and see.
The murder/robbery of Seth Rich has frequently been described as "botched" , which I
have always felt was a strange way to describe a murder. It is as if the mass media were
trying to exculpate the murderer even though we are supposed to not know who the murderer
actually is.
So nothing was taken from Rich, but perhaps that is because the murderer couldn't find
what he was looking for? The USB thumb drive with the purloined emails, maybe? Of course, by
the time Rich was murdered the emails had already been passed along to Wikileaks, but I
suppose the murderer might not have known that at the time. That would make an effort to
retrieve the emails "botched" , wouldn't it? This suggested to me from the moment that
I heard it that those in the mass media who seeded the story of a robbery being
"botched" in fact were knowingly covering for the effort to control the leak which was
what was "botched" .
The need to then cover for murder added to the urgency to propagate the whole
"Russiagate" fiction. The US' misnamed "intelligence community" and mass media
both were complicit in the murder of Rich, so they had additional motivation to lead the
public off the scent with an entirely fabricated false narrative.
With no evidence at all my suspicion is that Rich was killed as a crime of passion committed
by a hotheaded member of his own family, which would explain both the family's reticence and
the somewhat muted investigation.
There are suspicions that Seth Rich, an IT administrator for the DNC and Bernie Sanders
supporter, has leaked the DNC emails to Wikileaks. Rich was murdered on July 10 2016 in
Washington DC in an alleged 'robbery' during which nothing was stolen.
That explains why Bernie Sanders suddenly became the "sheep dog". He flat out doesn't want
to be assassinated and doesn't want his family to be also assassinated.
While it would be a boon for the nation, I rather doubt Trump will have Barr indict the
Clintons for their crimes or go after the daily fraud committed at the Fed or on Wall Street.
I doubt Trump has any inkling that in order to truly make America Great Again he must first
destroy the Financial Parasites who caused America's downfall in the first place. Thirty-four
days to go.
Assange repeatedly stated russia didn't leak the emails. i saw no compelling reason to think
he would lie about it. then when the steel dossier came out it was so over the top and reeked
of fabrication. the whole thing was so far fetched and then ratcheted up 1000 fold after she
lost the election as an excuse. she never took any responsibility for her loss.
i think what amazes me most is how the media, and everyone following along, believed this
story that drove the narrative for years. this ridiculous obsession with russia was all part
of a coverup to distract the public from how rotten to the core the dnc is.
The mention of Seth Rich in connection with Russiagate prompted a hazy recollection of an
article over at SST by Larry C Johnson (LCJ), who has been exposing flaws in the Russiagate
fiasco for several years. LCJ deduced from the publicly-available Wikileaks/DNC files that
they couldn't have been hacked over the WWW because the timestamp for each file indicated
that those files came from a portable device, a thumb drive. From that info, and Assange
being very upset about the murder of Seth Rich, LCJ concluded that Rich sent the DNC files to
Wikileaks.
I looked up SST's "Russiagate" files and found the relevant article dated August 28, 2019
from which the following brief extract is the section mentioning file-types which LCJ found
so compelling...
... An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23 and 25 May and 26
August respectively. The fact that they appear in a FAT system format indicates the data was
transfered to a storage device, such as a thumb drive.
How can you prove this? The truth lies in the "last modified" time stamps on the
Wikileaks files. Every single one of these time stamps end in even numbers. If you are not
familiar with the FAT file system, you need to understand that when a date is stored under
this system the data rounds the time to the nearest even numbered second.
Bill examined 500 DNC email files stored on Wikileaks and found that all 500 files
ended in an even number -- 2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If a system other than FAT had been used, there
would have been an equal probability of the time stamp ending with an odd number. But that is
not the case with the data stored on the Wikileaks site. All end with an even number.
...
I doubt that it was solely a Clinton operation. After all, CIA director Mike Morrell kicked
it off with his piece in the NY Times, which signaled some significant level of support at
least parts of the intelligence community.
The whole Russiagate affaire was very reminiscent of the Ken Starr inquisition, which
yielded nothing until Bubba cavalierly incriminated himself with Monica. Trump has yet to
prove himself that stupid.
I suspect that Hillary was delighted at the prospect of revenge for all she and Bubba had
gone through in the 1990s...except that she totally blew it...
Remember when Tulsi Gabbard called out Hillary Clinton about getting the media to support her
Russiagating of her? Here it is, you can see she blames Hillary as the source of the story:
"Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption,
and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have
finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has
been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why.
Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate
media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It's now clear that this primary is
between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly."
The Ballad of Tulsi and Hillary shows us how much the US and the world lost by the media
supporting Hillary in her plan to Russiagate the world.
The letter says that then CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on the
intelligence. He reported that the Russians believed that Clinton approved the campaign plan
on July 26 2016.
I was one of those who thought that the whole Russia conspiracy was dubious from day one,
although I might have been kind of, "Well, maybe " for a day or so.
But that line from your post I quoted above points to one of the earliest and most
convincing pieces of evidence to me that the whole thing was fake. It was reported early on
that Obama had been briefed on the Russian interference and he wanted to go public to the
American people about what was going on, but Senator Mitch McConnell wouldn't agree to
it!
Seriously, Mr. President? You have been given a personal intelligence briefing from your
CIA Director that one of the candidates to succeed you in the Presidency is an actual, bought
and paid-for agent of Russia? And you don't go public because Ole Meanie Mitch won't let
you ?
This said to me that Obama knew it was all BS from the beginning. Of course, there have
been gobs of disclosures and evidence since that it was fake and BS, and none whatsoever that
it was real.
Even with all the revelations debunking the whole Russiagate narrative, the Deep State has
been successful in instilling in the news media, Hollywood, political elites of both parties,
and the overwhelming base of the democratic party that Russia somehow "installed" Trump, that
he is a Putin "puppet/puppy" (your choice), and any resistance to establishment democratic
party power is due to Russian manipulation of social media, and in general Russia (etc.) is
fundamental to causing social and political problems. It took America about seven years to
get over McCarthyism. Russiagate will stay in American discourse for a long time.
The dangerous part of Russiagate is that it has reached the level of hysteria that it can
be used by American Deep State to justify direct and dangerous confrontations with Russia up
to and including war. Russiagate pales the propaganda about Saddam and WNDs. Let us remember
that two days into the US invasion of Iraq, the invasion had a 72% approval rating according
to Gallup. Any conflict with Russia will probably have even higher approval levels.
Between Trump and Biden, it is Biden who will be the most likely to start the final
conflagration.
@hoarsewhisperer I trust that the time stamps indicates that a FAT format was used at a
certain stage. What I don't recall is that how this would exclude workflows which involve an
USB stick at any later stage after a hack. I think this technical proof is not as decisive as
it seems and calculating huge statistical odds does not change that. The fact that the NSA
has not come up with proof, now that does mean something. Something Baskervillish.
Found it interesting that in the very mainstream 'Friends' sitcom it was already a joke in
the 90s that "gi joe looks after american foreign oil interests".
Except for a few conflict sitreps there really hasn't been much of note posted here this
year.
Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney has also argued that the data could not have been
hacked because internet speeds at the time were not sufficient for the transfer of the data
when it was extracted. He claims that the speed was consistent with saving to a thumb drive.
The word "botched" could have been invented to explain why nothing was stolen, in order to
put off those who questioned the motive.
No witness came forward but it could be that someone saw the shooting from a distance and
yelled at the perp.
"Ratcliffe's letter, which is based on information obtained by the CIA, states that Hillary
decided on 26 July 2016 to launch the Russia/Trump strategem. But the CIA was mistaken. The
Clinton effort started in 2015--December 2015 to be precise.
Thanks to Wikileaks, we have a copy of an email exchange between Hillary's Campaign
Manager, John Podesta and longtime Democratic operative Brent Budowsky talking about how
Hillary should take on The Donald. Budowski tells Podesta:
"Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting
on Putin re Syria.""
Larry Johnson wrote today in his article "I Told You Long Ago, Hillary's Team Helped
Fabricate the Trump Russia Collusion Lie by Larry C Johnson"
If I remember correctly Obummer signed legislation making it ok for the press to openly lie
to everyone in the us! HR4310, legalized propaganda for US consumption. He gave us fake news!
The constant stream of US, UK, NATO, EU fabrications framing Russia, from MH17, Skripal,
'interfering in elections' garbage, the Navalry poisoning, coupled with endless provocations
like interfering in the Syrian settlement, twisting the OPCW work, attempting to destroy the
Iran nuclear agreement and so much more appear to -finally - running out Russia's strategic
patience with the Trump administration.
1. 24 September Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov:
"...the incumbent US administration has lost its diplomatic skills almost for good."
"we have come to realise that in terms of Germany and its EU and NATO allies' conduct, ...it
is impossible to deal with the West until it stops using provocations and fraud and starts
behaving honestly and responsibly."
The Russiagate fabrication was a political convenience for the Dems, but it allowed Trump
and his NATO/EU agents to sanction, pressurise, interfere with Russia in every dimension,
because Trump 'had to' to show they he was not Russia's sock puppets!
Looks like Russia might be shifting strategy from strictly going through the defined and
agreed processes in relation to problems with the West to perhaps not engaging so
meticulously.
After all, what's the point when the agreed processes are ignored by the other party?
So, does "impossible to deal with" mean "will not deal with"?
The video I just watched and linked to on the Week in Review thread makes this observation:
The Ds burned the US-Russia relationship while the Rs made no real protest; now we have the
Rs burning the US-China relationship while the Ds make no real protest.
Many other nations
are watching, some already having joined the China-Russia bloc while others get ready as they
watch what little remains of US soft power go down the tubes thanks to Imperial tactics being
deployed onto US streets. Meanwhile, lurking not too far away is the coming escalation of the
financial crisis which Trump's Trade War has exacerbated. Those running this show are myopic
to the max--in order to post an economic recovery, the markets existing in those nations now
being alienated will be essential since the domestic market will be far too weak to fuel a
recovery by itself, even with enlightened leadership.
"On July 24 Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook went on CNN and made, to my knowledge, the
very first allegations (video) that Russia had 'hacked' the DNC in support of Donald
Trump."
It is not the case that it was the first such allegation. To my knowledge, the first such
allegation that was published was published on 14 June 2016 in the Washington Post,
headlining "Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump"
and I provide here an archived link to it instead of that newspaper's link, so that no
paywall will block a reader from seeing that article: https://archive.is/T4C2G
powerandpeople @28: "So, does "impossible to deal with" mean "will not deal with"?"
Highly unlikely. The Russians will continue to pursue reason even after the war on Russia
goes hot. If the Russians give up on diplomacy then that means Lavrov is out of a job. The
Russians are capable of walking and chewing gum, or shooting and talking as the case may be,
at the same time.
By the way, I think the same is true for the Chinese, even if they have not done much
shooting lately. When America's war against them goes hot they will keep the door to
diplomacy open throughout the conflict. Neither of these countries wants a war and it is the
US that is pushing for one. They will be happy to stop the killing as soon as the US does.
Personally I think that may be a mistake because when the war goes hot and the US suffers
some military defeats and sues for peace, if America still has the capability to wage war
then the peace will just be temporary. The US will use any cessation of hostilities to rearm
and try to catch its imagined enemies off guard.
Whether or not the US will be able to rearm after significant military defeats in its
current de-industrialized condition is another matter.
How can the US possibly contemplate a war with China? The US cannot function without China's
production. To cite just one example; eighty percent of US pharmaceuticals are produced in
China. The US needs China far more than China needs the US. A war with China is a war the US
cannot win.
Assange announced on June 12, 2016 that a new tranche of DNC emails had been leaked to
Wikileaks and was being prepared for publication. The effort to manufacture the false
narrative about Russian hacking began immediately after that, likely within minutes of
the announcement.
We already knew that Hillary had engaged Steele in Spring 2016 as what was termed an
"insurance policy". This "insurance" angle makes no sense: 1) Hillary was the overwhelming
favorite when she engaged Steele and had virtually unlimited resources that she could call
upon. And, 2) the bogus findings in Steele's dossier could easily be debunked by any
competent intelligence agency so it wasn't any sort of "insurance" at all.
<> <> <> <> <>
That Hillary started Russiagate is not surprising. This limited hangout, which is
so titillating to some, is meant to cover for a far greater conspiracy than Hillary's
vindictiveness.
We should first recognize a few things:
the Empire is a bi-partisan affair;
the Presidency is the lynch-pin of the Empire;
it became apparent in 2013-14 that the Empire (aka "World Order") was at grave risk as
Russia's newfound militancy showed that her alliance with China had teeth.
the 2016 race was KNOWN to be rigged via Hillary's collusion with DNC and Sanders'
sheepdogging (Note: After the collusion became know, Hillary gave disgraced Debra
Wasserman-Shultz a high-level position within Hillary's campaign - further angering
progressives). Why does it surprise anyone that the General Election was also rigged?
These facts lead to the following conclusions:
A "populist outsider" will NEVER be allowed to win the Presidency. It was claimed that
Obama was also a "populist outsider" yet he served the Deep State/Empire and the US
establishment very well.
Hillary's 2016 "campaign mistakes" were likely deliberate/calculated to allow Trump to
win. MAGA Nationalist Trump was the Deep State's favorite. This explains why Trump
announced that he would not investigate the Clintons within days of his being elected and
why Trump picked close associates of all his 'Never Trump' Deep State enemies to fill key
posts in his Administration such as: John Brennan's gal Gina Haspel for CIA Director; John
McCain's guy Mike Pence as VP; the Bush's guy William Barr for Attorney General; and the
neocon's John Bolton for NSA.
Russiagate was primarily a means of initiating a new McCarthyism as part of a plan to
counter Russia and China.
David @32: "How can the US possibly contemplate a war with China?"
Sadly, the United States is suffering from delusions of exceptionality. Mass psychosis.
The importance of industrial capacity is radically underestimated by the top economic
theorists (and thus advisors) in the West, and except for some of the deplorable working
people in America and perhaps about five or six Marxists in the country, the rest of the
American population is equally delusional. "Well, if we can't get it from China then we
will just order it from Amazon!
I hope you are sitting down and prepared to go into shock. Breaking news--""In late July
2016, US intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging
that US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a
scandal against US Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians'
hacking of the DNC." If you are not a regular reader of SST, yes, you will be shocked. But for
you old timers, you already knew this.
Yes. I am taking another well earned victory lap. I was the first to write about this. You
can find my piece here (
published on 6 May 2019 ). Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe gave Senator
Lindsey Graham a letter today detailing recently declassified intelligence outlining the
Clinton Campaign's effort to manufacture a collusion narrative featuring Donald Trump and
Vladimir Putin. Here's the letter:
Ratcliffe's letter, which is based on information obtained by the CIA, states that Hillary
decided on 26 July 2016 to launch the Russia/Trump strategem. But the CIA was mistaken. The
Clinton effort started in 2015--December 2015 to be precise. Thanks to Wikileaks, we have a
copy of an email exchange between Hillary's Campaign Manager, John Podesta and longtime
Democratic operative Brent Budowsky talking about how Hillary should take on The Donald.
Budowski tells Podesta:
" Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far
betting on Putin re Syria ."
This was more then opposition research by Hillary's campaign. It entailed an extensive
weaponization of U.S. and foreign law enforcement and intelligence assets that set out to
identify and target members of Trump's campaign who could be used to feed the Russian collusion
meme. Hillary, for example, had a powerful and dangerous ally in a London firm comprised of
former MI6 assets–
Hakluyt:
there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence
firm lurking about with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against Donald Trump.
Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co. ,
founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of
otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations pay
huge sums. . . .
Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's
Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations
world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but
it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking "
It is no mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, who was credited by
the FBI as serving up the predicate to launch the investigation into
George Papadopolous, also was closely tied to the Clinton Foundation and funneling
Austailian money to the Clinton's. Back in 2006, Downer was Australia's Foreign Minister when
he and Bill Clinton signed a $25 million Memorandum of Understanding, marking the first round
of Australian taxpayer donations to the Clinton Foundation.
The timing of Alexander Downer's "sudden concern" about Papadopolous is very suspect. Downer
waited two months before informing US authorities about Papadopoulus's alleged drunken bragging
about the Trump team working with the Russians to get Hillary. But why wait two months? Should
we take it as nothing more than this being a coincidence with the fact that Hillary at the same
time approved an effort by her campaign to tie Trump to Russia in order to divert attention
from her email scandal. The alleged Russian hacking of DNC emails was front-page news around
the world by June 15. Why did it take Downer four more weeks to comprehend the dire
implications of Papadopoulus's intoxicated ramblings? Papadopoulos disputes Downer's account.
Yet, per Mueller, this was one more event justifying the Russian interference meme.
It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving
factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to
disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times
reported.
Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory
board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal
connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network
reported in a January 2016 exclusive:
But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings
of the group, including a client cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a
few months ago.
His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a
two-day country retreat at the invitation of the group, which has been involved in a number of
corporate spy scandals in recent times.
The Clinton Plot, aided and abetted by the CIA and the FBI, to destroy Donald Trump
continues to chug along. But it is no longer avoiding scrutiny. The truth is coming out, albeit
slowly. But this latest revelation should be considered in the context of news that John Durham
also is taking a fresh look at the criminal conduct of the Clinton Foundation. I do not think
these matters are unrelated.
"..Russian intelligence analysis alleging that US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against US Presidential candidate Donald
Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians' hacking of the DNC."
Larry,
So what analysis did the US IC have not just in the Obama administration but also in the
Trump administration? Why didn't they get the intel on Hillary's plan?
All Trump appointees were in place by early 2017 - AG, DAG, FBI & CIA Director, DNI.
Is the story now that the Russian IC knew about Hillary's plan but the Trump IC did not?
A well earned victory lap. It looks like Trump finally got some people who were willing to
go there.
In saying that, in the past, or at least immediately after he assumed office, he was
reluctant to go after Hillary. And I think she has too much dirt on other people, too much
leverage to be put down.
I like this direction and I hope to see something happen.
Blue Peacock
The fact that this was hidden is further evidence that the Deep State was hiding this info
and trying to suppress it. The Russian meme is bullshit. What I mean by that is the narrative
that Trump was colluding with the Russians. He wasn't. It was a fabricated narrative and the
evidence was being withheld. If Trump interfered in trying to release that info they were
going to use it as evidence of "obstruction of justice."
Good News, Mr. Johnson. Politico reports that Ratcliffe duped by Russian Disinformation.
Source: SSCI. Warner and his succubus Richard Burr investigated the matter. Nothing to see.
Russian disinformation. Nothing to see here.
James,
Appreciate your humor. Politico is a disgrace. Ignore reality and whistle past the graveyard.
We'll see if the Little Old Lady from South Carolina finds his testicles tomorrow and presses
the issue with Jimmy Comey. But facts are facts. There is zero evidence that the Russians
hacked the DNC.
I recall Comey reporting he took a disturbing "letter" he had received to Loretta Lynch,
when he was agonizing over either (1) disclosing the Carlos Danger Weiner emails or (2) the
fake "exoneration" over the original Clinton email debacle.
Can't remember which event. . I believe Comey explained to Lunch, see what i am up
against?
Lynch apparently only gave Comey a very jaundiced eye, and made no comment. So Comey went
ahead and did what he did on his own -either (1) re-open the Weiner emails; or (2) go forward
with the pre-judged "exoneration". (Memory fritz here)
Does this ring a bell? Was this Clinton instigated Trump Russia hoax claim in the "letter"
to Comey? Did this have anything to do with Bill Clinton's "random" tarmac meeting with Lynch
in this same time frame?
The tarmac Lynch meeting would have coincided with the "exoneration" move by Comey.
PS, thanks for keeping us on top of this still very evolving and breaking story - 3.5
years later. Way too many loose ends that have not yet come together, but odd events when put
into relationship with other later disclosures help clear the fog.
......."
" To be clear, this is not Russian disinformation and has not been assessed as such by
the Intelligence Community. I'll be briefing Congress on the sensitive sources and methods by
which it was obtained in the coming days," he (Radcliffe) wrote.........
It gets better, Facebook labels the DNI's letter as false information, and it only took
them an hour to do so. Of course they turned it over to CNN's former reporter Alan Duke,
Editor-in-Chief & co-founder of "Lead Stories".
Congratulations on your early discernment of the centrality of the Clinton Group in this
conspiracy. What was the date of your first piece on this? I would like to re-publish it.
It's seems that every time that investigation/prosecution of those involved in the Seth
Rich murder is brought up, D.C. looks and runs the other way as fast as possible. What do you
think is going on? Was Rich one more of the Clinton Group's body count?
Yes, you DO deserve a victory lap. It's too bad that your right to a victory lap is now
confirmed so much later than it should have been. We could have had saved lots and lots of
time and newsprint if others had listened earlier. D.C. really is full of swamp gas that the
truth is often clouded over and ignored for a long time.
So much time wasted and so much in the way of tax payors' money spent over the years only
to have this finally confirmed years later. My greatest wish would be that we never have to
hear a word from HRC ever again.
Thanks for taking "no quarter" on the perpetrators of this attempt to subvert our
government.
"[A]betted by the CIA and the FBI" and legions of MSM types tripping over each other to
get their daggers bloody. If indictments go out (a big "if") the people coordinating the MSM
should be served, too.
"It gets better, Facebook labels the DNI's letter as false information, and it only took
them an hour to do so. Of course they turned it over to CNN's former reporter Alan Duke,
Editor-in-Chief & co-founder of "Lead Stories". "
The burden of proof is on your side. A letter is not proof. Anyone can write one.
Clinton approved an advisor's proposal to "vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal
claiming interference by Russian security services" in July 2016, according to information
declassified on Tuesday by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. The bombshell
revelation was made public in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.
Carolina), in response to a request for information related to the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane
(i.e. Russiagate) probe.
By the end of July 2016, US intelligence agencies had picked up chatter that their Russian
counterparts not only knew of the scheme, but that Clinton was behind it – though the
declassified material stresses that the American intelligence community "does not know the
accuracy" of the claim that Clinton had green-lighted such a plan, or whether the Russians
were exaggerating. However, then-CIA director John Brennan apparently followed up that
assessment by briefing then-President Barack Obama on Clinton's Russian smear scheme, according
to his handwritten notes – suggesting the spy agencies were very much aware what was
going on.
The news made a splash among the president's supporters and other Russiagate skeptics, one
of whom observed the timing of the events described in the declassified material dovetailed
seamlessly with the timetable in which Russiagate was unveiled to the public. Clinton staffer
Robby Mook appeared on CNN on July 24, 2016 to claim that "Russian state
actors broke into the [Democratic National Committee]" and "stole" the campaign's
emails "for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump."
Former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele filed his report around the same date,
accusing the Trump campaign of colluding with Russian security services to hack the DNC and
dump the emails via Wikileaks. The false information that made up the infamous "peepee
dossier" – collected under contract from opposition research firm Fusion GPS –
was used to justify securing a FISA warrant for Trump campaign aide Carter Page. That warrant,
and others that followed, have since been declared invalid, as it was discovered the Obama
administration had "violated its duty of candor" on its application for every
warrant.
Just a month before the 2016 election, Obama's intelligence agencies announced that they
believed Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC – allegations it has since emerged
were made without even examining the server on which the emails were stored.
More than a year after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's report shocked
Russiagate true believers with the absence of the promised proof of collusion, the colossal
conspiracy theory has all but unraveled.
Today, the Arctic has increasingly become identified as a domain of great prosperity
and cooperation amongst world civilizations on the one side and a domain of confrontation and
war on the other.
In 2007, the Russian government first voiced its support for the construction of the
Bering Strait rail tunnel connecting the Americas with the Eurasian continent- a policy which
has taken on new life in 2020 as Putin's Great Arctic Development strategy has wedded itself
to the northern extension of the Belt and Road Initiative (dubbed the Polar Silk Road). In
2011, the Russian government re-stated its pledge to build the $64 billion project .
####
On September 26, President Trump announced that a long-overdue project would receive
Federal support which involves connecting Alaska for the first time with Canada and the lower
48 states via a 2570 km railway.
In his Tweet announcing the project, Trump said:
####
I'd never read about the sale of Alaska to America by Russia in any detail before but just
by looking at the map it was clear that it made sense. Indefensible against a rapidly growing
country, so sell early for a good price or lose it and get nothing.
As for Ehret's hypothesis, we know that t-Rump sees things in a deal oriented way and not
simply 'You must be destroyed (TM)' way, though his methods of reaching such deals 'Maximum
Pressure (TM)' are none too bright and result in less than a normally negotiated deal. But,
if we look at the ends rather than the means, improving trade links is surely to America's
(and others) advantage.
One thing that does strike me from the maps of the proposed increased US-Asia links is
that having those function normally is not compatible with the current strategic goal of
trying to contain China. So, what is the point of the US Pacific Fleet? Just Free-Dumb of
Navigation (FONOPS) cruises for pensioners?
Update (1712ET): Online sleuths such as The Last Refuge are already connecting dots between
when the Trump-Russia allegations surfaced and the newly released briefing timeline
.
TheLastRefuge
@TheLastRefuge2 ·
Sep 29, 2020 This is additionally important for a specific reference point. Clinton ally,
and former acting CIA Director Mike Morell first published the Clinton created Russia narrative
(in the New York Times) less than a week after this July 26, 2016, briefing by Brennan.
The Reckoning @sethjlevy This conversation between
@jaketapper and
@RobbyMook happened on July 25th. The Reckoning @sethjlevy On day 1 of the Democrat
Convention as Wikileaks began their DNC releases Mook's interview uses the release to begin
spinning the Trump Russia tale. This was planned, prepared, purposeful and the beginning of one
of the most damaging psy op disinformation campaigns in US history.
https://twitter.com/sethjlevy/status/963977316547399680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1311019881039618049%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fus-intelligence-investigated-hillary-clinton-over-alleged-plan-smear-trump-russia
Sean Davis @seanmdav ·
Sep 29, 2020 Replying to @seanmdav Today's declassification confirms that from the
beginning, the FBI knew its anti-Trump investigation was based entirely on Russian
disinformation. Brennan and Comey were personally warned. They responded by fabricating
evidence and defrauding the courts. https:// judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/
09-29-20_Letter%20to%20Sen.%20Graham_Declassification%20of%20FBI's%20Crossfire%20Hurricane%20Investigations_20-00912_U_SIGNED-FINAL.pdf
BenTallmadge @BenKTallmadge https:// twitter.com/benktallmadge/
status/1310676483501768705?s=21 BenTallmadge @BenKTallmadge Replying to @BenKTallmadge
Alexander Vindman was working at thé US embassy in Moscow when the wife of former mayor
wired $3.5M to Hunter Biden, right before Russia took Crimea H/t @grabaroot https://
twitter.com/playstrumpcard /status/1310648949393502214?s=21 https:// twitter.com/playstrumpcard
/status/1310648949393502214
Meanwhile, this is being downplayed by intelligence officials as Russian disinformation,
which DNI Ratcliffe has refuted.
Chuck Ross @ChuckRossDC · 3h Intel officials came out
within minutes to claim Russian disinfo in the Ratcliffe letter. We didn't find out for nearly
three years that Russian disinfo might have been in the dossier.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-4&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1311056956023595009&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fus-intelligence-investigated-hillary-clinton-over-alleged-plan-smear-trump-russia&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px
Jeremy Herb @jeremyherb New statement from Ratcliffe on unverified Russian intel: "To be
clear, this is not Russian disinformation and has not been assessed as such by the Intelligence
Community. I'll be briefing Congress on the sensitive sources and methods by which it was
obtained in the coming days."
5:35 PM · Sep 29, 2020
* * *
On September 7, 2016, US intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to
former FBI officials James Comey and Peter Strzok concerning allegations that Hillary Clinton
approved a plan to smear then-candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Russian President Vladimir
Putin and Russian hackers , according to information given to Sen. Lindsey Graham by the
Director of National Intelligence.
According to Fox News' Chad Pergram, "In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained
insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate
Donald Trump," after one of Clinton's foreign policy advisers proposed vilifying Trump "by
stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services."
Chad Pergram @ChadPergram ·
Sep 29, 2020 Replying to @ChadPergram 5) DNI info to Grahm: On 07 September 2016, U.S.
intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and
Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding 'U.S. Presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton's approval of a plan..
Chad Pergram @ChadPergram 6) DNI info to Graham:...concerning U.S. Presidential candidate
Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the
public from her use of a private mail server.'"
2:51 PM · Sep 29, 2020
In response to your request for Intelligence Community (IC) information related to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, I have declassified
the following:
In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence
analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan
to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and
the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The IC docs not know the accuracy
of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect
exaggeration or fabrication.
According to his handwritten notes, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Brennan
subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the
intelligence, including the "alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26. 2016 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."
On 07 September 2016. U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI
Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok
regarding "U.S. Presidential candidate I lillary Clinton's approval of a plan concerning U.S.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of
distracting the public from her use of a private mail server."
As referenced in his 24 September 2020 letter to your Committee, Attorney General Ban has
advised that the disclosure of this information will not interfere with ongoing Department of
Justice investigations. Additional declassification and public disclosure of related
intelligence remains under consideration; however, the IC welcomes the opportunity to provide a
classified briefing with further detail at your convenience.
Respectfully,
i RatcliiTc
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Wikileaks
In 2017, it was claimed that the "blame Russia" plan was hatched "within twenty-four hours"
of Clinton losing the election - while the US intelligence investigation predates that by
several months.
New book by 'Shattered' by Clinton insiders reveals that "blame Russia" plan was hatched
"within twenty-four hours" of election loss.
The authors detail how Clinton went out of her way to pass blame for her stunning loss on
"Comey and Russia."
"She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way," a longtime Clinton
confidant is quoted as saying.
The book further highlights how Clinton's Russia-blame-game was a plan hatched by senior
campaign staffers John Podesta and Robbv Mook. less than "within twenty-fourhours" after she
conceded:
That strategy had been set within twenty -four hours of her concession speech. Mook and
Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case
that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple ofhours, with Shake Shack
containers littering the room, they went over the script theywould pitch to the press and
the public. Already. Russian hacking was the centerpieceof the argument.
The Clinton camp settled on a two-pronged plan -- pushing the press to cover how"Russian
hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign, overshadowed by thecontents of stolen
e-mails and Hillary*s own private-server imbroglio.'' while"hammering the media for focusing
so intently on the investigation into her e-mail, whichhad created a cloud over her candidacy
." the authors wrote.
US intelligence believed Clinton plot to 'stir up a scandal' was a 'means of distracting
the public from her use of a private mail server.'
"In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian
intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved
a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by
tying him to Putin and the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee," Ratcliffe
wrote Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham. "The IC does not know the accuracy
of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect
exaggeration or fabrication
####
The chronology of events supports something like this. It seems to me t that when it was
evident that t-Rump might win the election, the Dems prepared the ground for a 'poison pill'
to leave behind. Ultimately this is what O-Bomber signed off when t-Rump won. What this does
tell us is that the Dems have become as well verse in the black arts of political sabotage at
least as well as what the Reps have done since the 1990s and onwards.
This is the basis of the current undeclared civil war in America. It was driven from the
top down by corrupt elites who never imagined that it would gain traction below ground as
globalization would cement the West's Fukuyamiyan superioritiy in to the foreseeable future.
Then there was 9/11, 2008 and a further self-made quagmire in more sensless Do
Something interventions around the world.
The funny thing here is now the Repubs are trying to spin it that Putin was actually
trying to hurt t-Rump! What's thre phrase, a day late and a dollar short ?
"... The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades. Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all. ..."
"... Screw the war mongers and the MIC. ..."
"... If you read the article, it's obvious that [neo]liberals/whores are the apogee of hypocrisy. ..."
"... Perpetual war is about $$$. It knows no party. Never has and never will. ..."
Feral, yes; rabid, absolutely; smart... not so much. Why is anyone surprised?
The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated
to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves
that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades.
Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all.
Yup. It's always about the money. As Fitts would say, that screeching you hear is the cash flow drying up for the rentiers.
The murdering of women and children be damned. Hillary's demonic cackle is but the grotesque cherry on top:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
Yes, those are all good and sound arguments. The point I was trying to make, though, is
that American toxicologists and field experts are astounded that anyone might survive
exposure to VX; it is unaccountable not only that they could be alive, but that there is not
a trail of death following the assassins as well until it kills them, too. But nobody seems
surprised for Navalny to make a complete recovery and be sitting up in bed making demands and
strolling around the stairwells, after exposure to a much more toxic agent that should have
killed him, while nobody noticed anyone sneaking into his room dressed in a full hazmat suit
with breathing apparatus and apparently others could come and go from the scene of the
alleged exposure with no protection.
Perhaps the Skripals 'disappeared' because the British government was unsure how to
present them after a supposedly-deadly poisoning attempt which they plainly are said to have
survived. Perhaps also it is the judgment of similar authorities that the public will accept
the dichotomy without demur; hence, the agent can still be nefarious beyond belief because it
is so insidious and deadly, but Navalny can be alive and making noise after exposure to
it.
I'd like to look at the Navalny 'poisoning" from a slightly different angle, one which I
think bears scrutiny. I've said several times that nobody – to the best of my knowledge
– has ever survived poisoning by VX. But that's not quite accurate – the two
women who thrust what was always believed to be VX in some form into the face of Kim Jong Nam
(Kim Jong-Un's half-brother) at an airport in Kuala Lumpur killed him stone dead. But they
themselves apparently survived with no ill effects except that one of them allegedly may have
vomited.
The major difference in the way the stories are treated, then, is the incredulity with
which the apparent survival of the alleged poisoners is regarded by the western press.
Consider;
An amount of VX, we are told, that weighs as much as two pennies would kill 500 people. I
assume that's what he meant, as he is strikingly un-eloquent for a scientist and the 'penny'
is not a weight of measure. Is that a British penny, or an American one? Big difference in
weight.
''The other chemical agents like sarin, tabun, those kinds of things, they're way below
this. They're toxic, yes, but this is the king,'' said John Trestrail, a U.S. forensic
toxicologist who has examined more than 1,000 poisoning crimes.
He said an amount of VX weighing two pennies could kill 500 people through skin
exposure. It's also hard to acquire and would likely have come from a chemical weapons
laboratory, making it more likely that the attack was executed by a government."
Yes, you read that right – VX is the King of vicious toxicological agents. Except
for Novichok, which is ten times as deadly, and the would-be killers dusted Navalny's bottle
with enough of it that the bottle was liberally covered with the dust, and his clothes
apparently were as well, or so Team Navalny suspects. Say – that's a handy little
timeline right there, innit? When did Navalny put those clothes on? Presumably he had a
shower before going to bed; did he dress in fresh clothes before leaving for the airport, or
wear the same stuff from the day before? Either way, the poisoner must have accessed
Navalny's room between the time he got up and the time the plane took off – if he still
had Novichok on his clothes from the day before, he'd be dead, plus would have contaminated
God knows how many surfaces.
Anyway, remember – Novichok is ten times as deadly as the King of nerve agents, VX.
But it has killed – according to western yarns – only one of six people exposed
to it; Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Detective Nick Bailey, Navalny and Charles Rowley all
survived and have apparently achieved full recovery, Navalny in only a week after emerging
from an alleged coma.
Western incredulity? None. Nothing to see here, old chap.
Listen to the awful consequences of poisoning with VX, and remember the assassins only
pushed some quantity of VX into Kim Jong-Nam's face; a second's contact, them they ran away,
not wearing gloves or any protective gear at all.
"VX is an amber-colored, tasteless, odorless chemical weapon first produced in the
1950s. When inhaled or absorbed through the skin, it disrupts the nervous system and causes
constriction and increased secretions in the throat, leading to difficulty breathing. Fluids
pour from the body, including sweat, spontaneous urination and defecation, often followed by
convulsions, paralysis and death. Kim Jong Nam sought help at the airport clinic and died en
route to a hospital within two hours of being attacked, police said."
I don't think anyone has reported what Navalny was roaring and screaming, but perhaps it
was"Get back!!! I'm shitting myself!! Jesus, I can't stop pissing!!! Help me!!" although you
would think if his symptoms included spontaneous defecation and urination, someone would have
said – it could be important. Different agent, I know, but the symptoms of nerve-agent
poisoning are quite similar across the type. Navalny's symptoms were nothing like nerve-agent
poisoning, no matter how energetically the defector Mirzayanov and his fan club try to
backstop Navalny's story. The intense sweating and the obvious gross irritation of the mucous
membranes would have been unmistakable to the doctors in Omsk, considering Navalny had
already passed the onset of whatever symptoms he did have and was unconscious.
Kim Jong-Nam died within two hours of being attacked with a nerve agent ten times less
toxic than Novichok. Navalny was definitely poisoned with a substance ten times more toxic
than VX, according to the Germans and the French and whoever else swears to that ludicrous
story, but was to all appearances normal at least an hour after having been poisoned, since
he showed no symptoms until at least 40 minutes after the plane took off with no obvious GRU
agents on board, and hung around the airport before the flight was called at least long
enough to drink a cup of tea, plus however long it took for him to get from the hotel to the
airport.
"The two women -- one Vietnamese, one Indonesian -- recorded on surveillance cameras
thrusting a substance into Kim Jong Nam's face as he was about to check in for a flight home
to Macau, apparently did not suffer serious health problems. Malaysian police have said they
were not wearing gloves or protective gear and that they washed their hands afterward as they
were trained to do. However, authorities said Friday that one of them vomited
afterward.
Both have been arrested along with another man. Authorities are also seeking several
others, including an employee of North Korea's state-owned airline, Air Koryo.
''If they used their bare hands, there's just no possible way that they would have
exposed him to VX unless they took some sort of precaution,'' Goldberger said. ''The only
precaution I know of would be administration of the antidote before this went down.''
Perhaps that's it; perhaps immediately after swigging from his water-bottle – which
he left in the hotel room, obviously – Navalny rang room service for some Novichok
antidote. Just in case. Can't be too careful, when you are the main opposition leader.
"No areas were cordoned off and protective measures were not taken. When asked about it
a day after the attack, airport spokesman Shah Rahim said there was no risk to travelers and
the airport was regularly and properly cleaned. But officials announced Friday that the
facility would be decontaminated.
''It's as persistent as motor oil. It's going to stay there for a long time. A long
time, which means anyone coming in contact with this could be intoxicated from it,''
Trestrail said. ''If this truly is VX, they ought to be calling in a hazmat team and looking
at any place these women or the victim traveled after the exposure.''
A hazmat team, and looking at any place the assassin or anyone potentially exposed might
have traveled. For an agent ten times less toxic than Novichok.
Putin proposed, "exchanging guarantees of non-interference in each other's internal
affairs, including electoral processes, including using information and communication
technologies and high-tech methods."..
####
That is some excellently timed next level trolling from Pootie-McPoot-Face.
Of course the USA will never agree to such a proposal, because (a) it does not regard its
meddling as 'interference' but as the bringing of the gift of freedom, (b) it stands on its
absolute right of judgment as to what is a situation that requires more democracy and what is
not, and (c) it probably knows at some level that Russia did not meddle in the US elections,
and that it would therefore in that case be constraining its own behavior in exchange for
nothing.
But then, when refused – I imagine the US will try to extract something from the
offer, such as "A-HA!! So you ADMIT to meddling in our elections!! – Russia can
obviously claim, "Well, we tried."
The detail was previously redacted from a footnote in Justice Department inspector
general Michael Horowitz's 2019 report on four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
court warrant applications
the investigation was opened "based on information by the FBI indicating that the
Primary Sub-source may be a threat to national security." The investigation was closed in
2011 and not reopened.
####
I had assumed that anyone of Russian origin who is in contact with certain American
officials/agencies is automatically probed. Not much of a surprise.
"... Maybe Navalny had allegedly been assisted by his apparent drug of choice, cocaine? ..."
"... On the Navalny poisoning. Interesting to see that Vladimir Ashurkov is in the inner core of the Integrity Initiative. Suggesting another media-led provocation. ..."
"... Apparently, Pevchikh was given a bogus interview on the BBC and was presented as an uninteresting, nothing special sort of person, about whom rumours and innuendo were amassing for no reason whatsoever. ..."
"... The interviewer never pressed her on how long she had lived in the UK, what her business interests there were (claims have been made that she runs a book store), why she visits Russia so frequently, what indeed isher present citizenship, how she became involved with Navalny's "fund" -- she says she answered an ad., but where? In the UK? Hardly! And on and on . ..."
"... On Thursday (24 September), Christian Gramm, the president of Germany's Military Intelligence Service (MAD), was forced to resign. To many, the shake-up doesn't come as a surprise given the recent criticism over how the agency handled investigations into right-wing extremism in the German Special Forces (KSK). Gramm's term as MAD president will come to an end next month ..."
"... Verzilov is supposedly – according to one source I read – the force behind having Navalny evacuated to Germany. It will be funny now if he cannot return to Russia. ..."
"... That guy is a self-important prick with delusions of grandeur. If he is representative of the non-systemic opposition in Russia then, assuming that Putin is even aware of this guy, it would only provide a good laugh after a hard day at the office ..."
"... Verzilov is an attention junkie. He set himself up as the 'spokesman' of Pussy Riot because they were getting a lot of attention and he wanted to be part of it. He has no visible talent of his own – except perhaps a facility for languages, his English is pretty good ..."
"... His English is good because he went to school in Toronto until his somehow landing a place at MGU Philosophy Faculty, which is one of the greatest riddles of the Cosmos, in my opinion. ..."
"... I'd like to look at the Navalny 'poisoning" from a slightly different angle, one which I think bears scrutiny. I've said several times that nobody – to the best of my knowledge – has ever survived poisoning by VX. But that's not quite accurate – the two women who thrust what was always believed to be VX in some form into the face of Kim Jong Nam (Kim Jong-Un's half-brother) at an airport in Kuala Lumpur killed him stone dead. But they themselves apparently survived with no ill effects except that one of them allegedly may have vomited. ..."
"... The major difference in the way the stories are treated, then, is the incredulity with which the apparent survival of the alleged poisoners is regarded by the western press. Consider; ..."
"... It's hard to imagine the Germans poisoned his samples, although I suppose it is possible. But if Pevchik had poisoned him with something intended to incapacitate but not kill him, you'd think the doctors in Omsk would have detected it. ..."
"... It might be interesting to see what kind of deal would result from a process in which Russia has given up trying to be liked by the west, and consequently examines each negotiation on its merits alone. ..."
, "When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to
be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the
bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false." Uncle
Volodya
"Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent."
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
who haven't got it."
– George Bernard Shaw
I'm lazy. But vanity constrains me from admitting that, so I call it 'busy'. However I choose to label it, I haven't written
anything new in a long time. It's not writer's block, because I had a couple of topics in mind; if I had to blame it on
anything, I'd blame it on the comments section. We don't really have any rules here, or not many (there are a couple of people
who can't comment, but that's because they cannot be trusted to not instantly return to old habits as soon as they are
allowed), and things routinely drift off-topic to whatever is going on at the time. Current events; yes, that's the term I was
looking for. So when new things are happening, we tend to discuss them in the comments section, instead of my writing a new
post dedicated specifically to that issue. It's the primary cause, I'm afraid, of important comments you would like to be able
to locate because they contain hard-to-find sources or just the information you need to settle an argument, because they are
not linked by subject. Obviously I prefer the unregulated format, or I wouldn't use it, but it does have its disadvantages.
Anyway, the silver lining that comes with being late to discuss a particular current event is that you get to talk about the
filtered version, after the ferment has settled down and often new facts have presented. So it is with the teapot tempest of
Alexei Navalny, vaulted to international fame virtually overnight by becoming the latest victim poisoned by nefarious
Soviet-era deadly nerve agents that, in their known application, have a success rate of 16.67%. A funny statistic has emerged
from the absurd times we are living in – a viral infection, the 'novel coronavirus', more commonly called COVID-19, has the
world shivering with terror like frogs in a glass cage with a big snake, even though its Infection Fatality Rate (IFR)
compares with the annual influenza bouts we have lived with all our years. Yet an engineered nerve agent reputed to be ten
times as deadly as the most toxic poison the west could come up with – one which, I might add, has a known survivor list among
the exposed of zero point zero – has never killed the individual it was intended to kill, and managed to incidentally slay one
innocent bystander who was also
an
alcoholic and drug abuser
. As John Lennon remarked in "Nobody Told Me"; strange days indeed. Most peculiar, Mama.
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I looked it up so as to have an electronic link, so readers could get the full effect. But I initially saw it in the
newspaper, the Canadian Globe & Mail (British Columbia edition), in which it was headlined a little differently –
"Why
nobody has power to make Kremlin come clean on poisoning"
. So far as I can make out on initial examination, the body of
the article is unchanged. Both pieces – well, the same piece with two different headlines – are by Mark MacKinnon, who is
The
Globe & Mail
's senior international correspondent, based in London, UK. He's
quite
highly-regarded by his employers
, is a seven-time winner of the National Newspaper Awards (for creativity, perhaps,
although they don't say), and the author of "
The New Cold War:
Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics
". Gee, that sounds like it might be about a particular country; let's
have a dekko at
the
writeup
.
"When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two
years later, liberal democracy was supposed to fill the void left by Soviet Communism. Poland and Czechoslovakia made the best
of reforms, but the citizens of the "Evil Empire" itself saw little of the promised freedom, and more of the same old despots
and corruption. Recently, a second wave of reforms -- Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, and Ukraine in 2004, as well as
Kyrgyzstan's regime change in 2005 -- have proven almost as monumental as those in Berlin and Moscow. The people of the Eastern
bloc, aided in no small part by Western money and advice, are again rising up and demanding an end to autocracy. And once
more, the Kremlin is battling the White House every step of the way. Mark MacKinnon spent these years working in Moscow, and
his view of the story and access to those involved remains unparalleled. With The New Cold War, he reveals the links between
these democratic revolutions -- and George Soros, the idealistic American billionaire behind them -- in a major investigation
into the forces that are quietly reshaping the post-Soviet world."
Because western-imposed liberal democracy has been such a star-speckled success in so many places – Libya. Iraq,
Venezuela anyway, the above author information is offered to sort of set the tone for the type of worldview you might expect.
And to introduce a premonition, before you even read his material, that Mark MacKinnon just might be exactly the sort of guy
who would smirk with revulsion at the mention of Putin's name, and have a big ol' man-crush on Alexei Navalny. I'm not
implying anything untoward, here; Mr. MacKinnon is a realist. An ideologue, yes, but a realist.
And as with others of his ideological type, I marvel that he apparently sees some sort of inspirational leader in Navalny. I'm
cautiously optimistic, of course, because until international busybodies have a vote in Russian elections – as they have in
other places, except it's called 'regime change' – there is about as much chance of Alexei Navalny being elected to a position
of influence by a broad Russian vote as there is of you dying from coronavirus. Which you have about a 99.6% chance of
surviving, if you should get it. Anyway, I'm optimistic, as I have suggested many times before, because for so long as western
liberal meddlers choose to put all their eggs in the Navalny basket, for that long leaders elected by Russian votes will rule
more or less unmolested. You could probably persuade Russians to dress up as Obama on Hallowe'en (well, first you would have
to persuade them to celebrate it, which
The Moscow Times
almost
reduced itself to tears trying to bring about) as you could to persuade them to vote for Navalny. And this latest escapade,
which – perversely – has put him in the western hall of political fame has probably actually cost him votes in Russia, which
is remarkable considering he already was about as popular as vomit air-freshener.
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Mr. MacKinnon starts off his excoriation of the Kremlin, and his apparent poignant appeal for someone to rid us of this
troublesome autocratic dictator, with some lighthearted snark about how predictable it is that the Kremlin would deny
poisoning Alexei Navalny. Uh huh; of course they would. Real men would immediately own up – yeah, I poisoned that
motherfucker. Teach him to talk smack about me. What are you gonna do about it? You might be repulsed by the implicit evil
there, but at least you could respect Putin for telling the truth.
Let's look at it a little differently. Suppose I said "Mark MacKinnon is a wife-beater". For the record, I don't even know if
he is married. Or straight. But that's beside the point, which is that to the best of my knowledge, it is not true. Doesn't
matter. Predictably, he would deny it. Now suppose I repeated that allegation regularly for twenty years. Might I be able to
say, wearily, "the only predictable thing about MacKinnon's latest wife-beating incident is his denial of having had anything
to do with it"? I think I could. But denying it is exactly the predictable occurrence if he had not done it.
How about we take a quick recap of some of the things Russia has been accused of just in the last few years. A state-sponsored
doping program for its Olympic athletes, in which they were fed performance-enhancing cocktails that powered them all the way
to the podium. The special investigatory body put together to look into it, headed by Canadian Richard McLaren, claimed there
was so much proof that it was embarrassing. When we got down to where the rubber meets the road, said investigatory body could
not prove fuck-all, their star witness
fell
apart in testimony
, and 28 Russian athletes
had
their Olympic bans reversed
while 7 medals were reinstated. The Nation
recapped
it thus
;
"How the Times could provide such minimal coverage of these important
April 2018 reasoned CAS decisions on matters on which the Times had extensively reported is inexplicable. By allowing the
Russian athletes, for the very first time, to confront their accusers with cross-examination, the CAS was in a position to
make startling revelations about Rodchenkov and McLaren. Rodchenkov, for example, admitted that he never personally witnessed
any accused Russian athlete committing doping violations themselves, including taking the illegal drug cocktail, giving a
clean urine sample out of competition, tampering with a urine sample, or transmitting information to co-conspirators about the
coding on the drug sample after it had been given.
Furthermore, several of Rodchenkov's explanations of events were simply
not believable. For example, Rodchenkov had stated that the swapping of urine samples occurred after 1 am, but his own diary
entries confirmed his bedtime by midnight each night, with two or three exceptions. When confronted with this contradiction,
he made the incredible claim that he had lied to his diary."
Were the Russians guilty? Apparently not. What is the appropriate response when you are accused of something but did not do
it? Denial? Damn straight. But there's another key takeaway in there – the testimonial hearing in which the athletes and their
representatives dismantled Rodchenkov's self-important blathering was
the
very first time they had been able to confront their accuser
. Uncorroborated denials are easy to brush off, which would
seem to summarize Mr, MacKinnon's style.
One more. Russia was accused by the United States – whose allies quickly picked it up as one more example of the reprehensible
Russian conduct that just makes you shake your head in helpless wonder – of paying the Taliban in Afghanistan a bounty to kill
American soldiers.
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For starters, it would not be difficult to imagine the US Army as being so loathed in Afghanistan – considering American
military operations have devastated the country for 19 years now – that jihadis in Afghanistan would be happy to kill them for
free; might even pay for the opportunity, if they had any money. Some might say well, if not for the democracy-promotion
efforts of America, the Taliban might still be in charge! Yeah, ha, ha; funny story about that. President Trump announced this
past Spring that it was
time
to turn over law and order in Afghanistan
to the Taliban.
He said US troops had been killing terrorists in Afghanistan "by the
thousands" and now it was "time for someone else to do that work and it will be the Taliban and it could be surrounding
countries".
Personally, I think it's a hell of a cheek of the Taliban to accept money from the Russians to kill Americans who just cut
them such an exceptional deal – you would think they would be so happy that they would dance into the streets with their arms
full of flowers and candy. Oh, wait – different democracy-promotion operation.
And I'd just like to point out to anyone who is forming the opinion that I am a sarcastic prick that the main piece of
'evidence' on which the Americans based the assessment that a mysterious Russian GRU (military intelligence) unit was paying
bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers was the discovery of 'a large amount of American cash from a raid on a
Taliban outpost'.
Jesus, God of our fathers – please tell me they had more than that. Quite apart from the patent rudeness of carrying out a
raid on the 'outposts' of your new Afghanistan caretakers, the US dollar is the most common and widely-circulated currency in
the world. Instead of leaping to the conclusion that it had to have come from the Russians – whose currency was still the
ruble the last time I looked – why was the King Arthur Flour Company not immediately a suspect? After all, sourdough baking
has
lunged
to a quivering peak
during 'COVID times' (as I heard one imbecile describe the peyote cartoon we are all living); King
Arthur offers a
very
popular sourdough starter
, and the Afghans are great bakers. Maybe they were saving up to buy a couple of truckloads, give
the people something to raise their morale! Get it? 'Raise' their morale? It's not funny if I have to explain it. But it makes
as much sense as assuming the Russians want to accelerate the killing of American forces just as they are arranging terms for
a pullout, which would surely make them stay longer.
Well, let's get back to Mr. MacKinnon's story, before we wander too far off the path. But I hope that addresses the issue of
the Kremlin denying western accusations. Deny is what you do when you really had nothing to do with whatever it was you are
being accused of, instead of 'manning up' and saying "Yeah; it was me". Gaddafi did that, in the hope of making peace with the
Americans, and look where it got him. And America is not put off by lack of evidence – obviously.
So we're back where Russia might be believed today, if the past 20 years had never happened. At that, I would suggest he's
casting too wide a net; the USA and Russia were getting along fairly well between the time the Harvard Boys were invited in to
remake Russia in 1991, and the presidential candidacy of American Idiot and Venture Capitalist Mitt Romney, during which
candidacy he identified Russia – for no apparent reason than that it sometimes caused headaches for the United States at the
UN – as the USA's Number One Geopolitical Enemy. That was in 2012, which was only 8 years ago, and in fact the great majority
of western accusations against Russia have taken place since 2014 and the US State Department's successful second run at
taking over Ukraine to Make It Safe For Democracy. It's pretty hard to restore your 'credibility' when the international press
whose language is foreign to your own continues to insist it has mountains of evidence that you are lying, but cannot reveal
any of it because of national security. On the occasions it does publish some of its substantiation, the alternate-narrative
element of the public is so scathing in its scorn – as happened when the British tried going public with their Skripals Case –
that
the
storytellers are sent back to the drawing-board
to make up something different. Otherwise they might have to explain why a
poison so virulent that Sergei Skripal's house had to have its roof removed because Novichok was daubed on the front doorknob,
but the same poison failed to kill not only the Skripals times two, Detective Nick Bailey, Charles Rowley and now Navalny. The
Skripals came into direct contact with it while the family's roof did not, unless they had a sixteen-foot diameter doorknob,
and Navalny actually
drank
it. So the story goes. I don't think
'absurd' is too strong a word.
Russia, we hear, denied that its soldiers were in Crimea before Russia 'annexed' the territory in 2014. Where? Russia was
permitted by international agreement to base sufficient forces at Sevastopol to easily take the region away from a Ukrainian
Army so useless that initial attempts to stop the unraveling were made by civilian militias. Oh, and my favourite; Russia
denied shooting down MH-17 "even after the anti-aircraft system involved in the attack was detected leaving Russia then
returning short one missile." Is that a fact? Well, no; it's not. That accusation was made by Bellingcat, the brain trust of
former underwear-company accountant Eliot Higgins, and there was
never
any 'detection'
of any such anti-air system "leaving Russia and returning short one missile". Bellingcat offered a
potential route such a system might have taken to and from a launch site, in an animation, which was itself never
substantiated by evidence – a route which took the system many vulnerable kilometers out of its way on the alleged return –
and the photograph that made the cover of Paris Match is
so
obviously a Photoshop mosaic
. And the inclusion of Ukraine, who was automatically a suspect considering the incident
occurred in Ukrainian airspace, in the investigation to establish Russian guilt, together with its unsupervised access to the
collected evidence, renders the whole issue farcical.
"And on it went. The official RIA Novosti newswire quoted chemical-weapon
experts who said that had Novichok been used, Mr. Navalny would already be dead. It's a line Russian state media have used
before, after Mr. Skripal and his daughter survived the 2018 attack, but one they dropped after 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess died
after coming into contact with an unused vial of Novichok in a Salisbury park three months later."
Is that what happened, Mr. seven-times-recipient-of-the-National-Newspapers-Award? Dawn Sturgess was given the perfume bottle
as a gift from her boyfriend, Charles Rowley, at his home in Amesbury, 8 miles from Salisbury. She allegedly 'immediately
sprayed some on her wrists and rubbed them together'
according
to Rowley
.
"Charlie Rowley claimed his partner, mother-of-three Dawn Sturgess, fell
ill within 15 minutes of spraying the bottle, which he said he had found, on to her wrists at his home in Amesbury,
Wiltshire."
Couldn't ask for much more of an eyewitness than Rowley – he's kind of at the center of the story, albeit he is a heroin
addict himself, according to a previously-cited reference. He claims that within 15 minutes she was stricken, claimed to have
a headache, and disappeared to the bathroom, where he found her fully clothed and lying in the bath, 'in a very ill state'.
That's
funny; according to Sky News, she was not so ill that she could not admit herself to hospital, which she is alleged to have
done at 11 AM on Saturday, after being poisoned with a nerve agent ten times as deadly as VX, exposure to which nobody has
survived.
"During their trip to Salisbury on Friday, the pair visited a number of
shops during the afternoon and evening with their friend Sam Hobson.
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The following day, Ms Sturgess admitted herself to hospital at 11am. Mr
Hobson, 29, and Mr Rowley went on to visit a number of places in the town centre."
Mr. Rowley, the poor man who 'lost so much', was so affected by his beloved's condition that he and his friend Sam Hobson went
on – after she admitted herself to hospital – to see the sights of downtown Amesbury. We know they were in Amesbury because
one of the locations they visited, Boots the Chemist in Amesbury, was soon thereafter closed by police as part of the
investigation.
Perhaps they were looking around for the hospital. Because
there
isn't one in Amesbury
. The closest is in Salisbury, 8 miles away, and the next-closest is in Andover, even further. So the
poor woman, having passed out in a very ill state after spraying a deadly nerve agent directly on her skin, somehow roused
herself for the 8-mile drive to Salisbury and then proceeded with the admittance process, while the cretins in Emergency let
the two who had dropped her off head back to Amesbury for some window-shopping. The alternative is that they were not even
with her, and she drove herself. Say, do you know what one of the symptoms of nerve-agent poisoning is? Blurred vision due to
excessive watering of the eyes.
The 'only predictable part of the drama', to borrow from Mr. MacKinnon's introduction, is that Ms. Sturgess did not "die after
coming into contact with an unused vial of Novichok in a Salisbury park", or anything close to it. Sloppy, or loyal? Which is
it?
Anyway, back to Navalny; for some reason I seem to be incapable of staying on his dramatic story. So, 'predictably', there are
some pretty big holes in his story. For one, he was supposedly – initially – exposed to a near-unimaginably-toxic nerve agent
which he drank in tea at the airport, prior to departure. Then the same Novichok which laid out Dawn Sturgess within 15
minutes did not affect Lyosha until 40 minutes after the plane took off. Team Navalny and its backers have attempted to
explain that away by suggesting this was a specially-engineered 'slow-acting' Novichok.
What use would a slow-acting military-grade nerve agent be? Want to give the enemy a fair chance before killing him stone
dead? And while we're on the subject: note to the GRU, or the FSB or whoever – stop engineering Novichok to be slow-acting
just to attack Navalny, and impervious to rain (like no other nerve agent ever, the immediate countermeasure is to flush the
area with water and take atropine) to attack Sergei Skripal, and WORK ON MAKING IT KILL PEOPLE!!! Jesus Christ, do I have to
think of everything myself?
So, obviously, the tea narrative was not going to work. Enter The Water Bottle Of Death. Allegedly, the GRU or FSB, or maybe
Putin himself poisoned a water bottle and left it in Navalny's hotel room in Tomsk, where there were always people in and out
and they had no clue whether it would kill Navalny or someone else. Maybe that's why they engineered it to be slow-acting and
non-fatal. Then, after Navalny checked out and headed to the airport, where he hung around for at least long enough to drink a
cup of tea before his flight was called, and then after takeoff and 40 minutes into the flight, suddenly, Lyosha is poisoned!!
He begins to roar and scream with pain, and members of his entourage immediately go to get a lawyer to accompany them, and go
to Navalny's hotel, and – wonder of wonders – not only has it not been cleaned, it is still completely undisturbed!! Fucking
hotel service in Tomsk, unbelievable, I hope they don't pay them much.
So, what do we deduce from that? Not only did Navalny show no ill effects after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve
agent for approximately an hour – rolling back the moment of his poisoning to his drinking tea in the airport before his
flight was called – he survived it for significantly longer than that, because in the end the tea was just tea. He did not
take the Water Bottle Of Death with him, instead leaving it in his hotel room, so he must have drunk from it before he left
the room. How long was that? How far was his hotel from the airport? Well, let's see – he
stayed
at the Xander
(four stars, not too shabby), which is
24
km from the Bogashevo Airport
. I feel safe in suggesting Navalny survived direct contact with a military-grade nerve agent
for at least two hours before he even showed any symptoms, and perhaps for considerably longer than that. Which sounds quite a
bit like the Skripal saga, in which they were poisoned by their front doorknob – the approximately sixteen-foot-diameter one
which reaches to the roof, it's a two-level home – but still managed to drive to the town center, feed the duckies in the park
and then go on to a restaurant and finish dinner, before throwing a poison wobbler on a nearby bench outside. Where they
happened to be discovered by the senior medical officer in the British Army. Quite by chance, she was just passing by.
So contact with the American VX agent means near-instantaneous death, but contact with a substance ten times more toxic means
nothing at all for at least an hour and perhaps twice that, then an unpleasant bout of coma, then presto! 90% recovery of
mental faculties – admittedly, not a high threshold for Navalny – and maybe 50% recovery of physical capability, with a
cautiously-optimistic prognosis of a full recovery. Lawdy Jeebus; a miracle!
Back to MacKinnon's story for a moment. "His transfer to Berlin's specialist Charité hospital was delayed for 24 crucial hours
while Russian officials floated wildly different versions of what might have happened to him." Actually, they did no such
thing; the doctors in Omsk are acknowledged to have probably saved his life, there actually was something wrong with him. They
stabilized him for transport rather than immediately saying "Here you go, Krauts, it's your show", so his transfer was delayed
for a not-at-all-excessive 24 hours, and it was the Germans who 'floated wildly different versions of what might have happened
to him', initially claiming he had been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor, and only changing the story to Novichok
after the Water Bottle Of Death was delivered to Berlin by Navalny's wife. And unless Lyosha had a water bottle secretly
hidden on his person, they did not establish nerve-agent poisoning from his samples, either, unless the German doctors are
incredibly incompetent. It would be pretty hard for a skilled medical technician to confuse a cholinesterase inhibitor with a
nerve agent, and the doctors in Berlin initially had no clue what was wrong with him. They became confident after the water
bottle was delivered.
Navalny's aide is shown delivering his tea to him at the airport. No gloves, no Personal Protective Equipment whatsoever. But
Lyosha was already crawling with Novicok – he must have been poisoned in his room. Was the hotel closed? The airport? Was the
plane impounded and destroyed? Why is Navalny's aide still alive, and not just waking up from a coma?
And now I am afraid I have some questions about Chain of Custody of important evidence in a criminal investigation. Because
according to the timeline of the 'Navalny poisoning', Team Navalny back on the ground in Tomsk did not announce the discovery
of a poisoned water bottle from his hotel room until September 17th – two days after the fact. Right up until then, Navalny's
'press agent' stuck with the story that he was poisoned with tea at the airport. What kind of four-star hotel does not clean
the room of a guest who has checked out for two days afterward? Alternatively, what kind of political team allows a narrative
to persist that their leader was poisoned with tea at the airport for two whole days before they clue the world in that they
have discovered important evidence to the contrary? So far as we know, nobody had analyzed the alleged traces on the bottle
while it was still in Russia – the Germans allegedly established it was Novichok. Or else Team Navalny already knew, but
didn't bother to tell anyone, just assuming everyone who handled it would take deadly-nerve-agent precautions. Who else might
have been inside that hotel room in two days?
According
to the NewsTimes
, an Instagram post by Navalny claimed members of his 'team' tossed his hotel room looking for evidence
only an hour after he collapsed, which is pretty impressive considering they had no real reason at that point to suspect a
crime had been committed; he probably had just reached the hospital in Omsk by that point, if even that, and there had been no
announcement as to his condition, But they waited until September 17th to announce they had discovered a bottle contaminated
with Novichok? nearly a month later? Excuse me – some state-sponsored nerve agent – the bottle had not been tested yet.
According to the certifiable inbreeders in the European Parliament, Novichok and its family of poisons can only be made in
state-owned military laboratories, and there is no way civilians could have gotten hold of it.
"MEPs have called for
sanctions against Russia, saying on September 17, "The poison used, belonging to the 'Novichok group', can only be developed
in state-owned military laboratories and cannot be acquired by private individuals, which strongly implies that Russian
authorities were behind the attack."
Huh. That's odd. Because Alistair Hay – a toxicologist at the University of Leeds, a leading expert in the toxic properties of
chemical warfare agents and a member of the British government's advisory group on chemical warfare –
assessed
that it could be made by "any competent chemist"
. I'm pretty sure they're not all in the military, and obviously they do
not need to be Russian. The principal developmental engineer of Novichok, Vil Marzayanov, published a book which contained the
formula, and which sells on Amazon for less than 30 bucks. But what does Hay know, right?
"The Kremlin's latest denials should and will fall flat with Western
governments. It was already clear that Mr. Putin's inner circle had ample reasons to wish Mr. Navalny harm. (The Kremlin's
feelings about the anti-corruption campaigner have long been obvious. Mr. Putin has repeatedly refused to use Mr. Navalny's
name, even when asked direct questions about him. On Thursday, Mr. Peskov continued that practice, referring only to "the
Berlin patient.")
Ha, ha!! Oh, my God. It is clear that the Kremlin has ample reasons to wish Mr. Navalny harm, because they don't talk about
him. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it. That's some award-winning journalism right there.
I think we're done here; what is supposed to be a straightforward tale of the unrepentant state poisoning of a political
opponent is in fact so confusing and contradictory that I cannot make any sense of it. I suspect even closer examination of it
is only going to reveal further inconsistencies.
"The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner
strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations
that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as
inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the
nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among
the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen
who – with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological
testing, and so forth – dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right."
Harry G. Frankfurt, from "
On Bullshit
".
How many of you would describe the western media as "
exquisitely
sophisticated craftsmen who dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right"
?
Count me out. They're not even good at it. Fortunately for them, critical thinking is at an all-time low.
In the
aftermath of 9/11, I never could have imagined that the US government would ever openly side with the perpetrators, much
less that the public at large would be OK with it. And yet that is precisely what happened in Libya and Syria. When
Trump showed signs of disengaging from Syria, some of the people protesting were themselves survivors of 9/11 or
families of the victims. If they can get away with that, what can't they do? It seems like the media can claim whatever
they want, no matter how ridiculous, and the public will believe them without question. Some of the things I've seen in
the media look to me like experiments being undertaken to probe the gullibility of the public.
This is
what weakens the sincerity of people like Tulsi Gabbard and retired Colonel, Senator Richard Black despite all the
good that they have said and done.
Exactly –
WHY would the US aid and abet in Iraq, Libya and Syria the group that 'allegedly' perpetrated the worst act of
diabolical terrorism against American citizens in its history it wouldn't – unless of course the official narrative
was just not true.
You only
have to listen to very clumsy performance by Ehud Barak in the BBC studios on the very day, or Jane Standley
declaring the collapse of WT7 23 minutes before it happened (an honest mistake according to official BBC response) or
the very fact that WT7 collapsed at all to know that the 'official narrative' is Bullshit.
**"Tyranny
requires that the truth be silenced, that real history be erased and rewritten, that speech be restricted, and that
individual thought be silenced."**
*Erasing
History and Erasing Truth: Censorship and Destroying Records Is the Cornerstone of Tyrants* by Gary D. Barnett
We have
always been at war with Eastasia. It is hard to believe that Orwell almost predated television (he died in 1950), and
'1984' certainly did.
American –
and, in fact, western in general – manipulation of public perception almost invariably relies on values and the
public's impression of what is 'the right thing to do'. Consequently, the choice is always a Manichean one; this guy
is trampling on democratic values. He's killing his own people. Peaceful protests are being forcibly dispersed with
machine-gun fire. An entire people cries out for freedom. Are we gonna let him get away with it? Who's with me???
Slightly more subtle is the implication of, "If you're not with us, you're against us". There is no possibility of
detachment. Thus it is with the coronavirus crisis now – you and everyone else have a responsibility to public
safety. If you don't do as the government says is necessary for public safety, then you are an enemy of public
safety, and deserve the scorn of your fellow man. Come on; who's with me??
You simply
have to make it clear that everyone must make a choice; there is no such thing as 'sitting this one out'. Then you
frame the choice in such a way that choosing for the majority is easy – do you want to make the world a better place?
If you say 'No', then obviously you want to make it a worse place.
Like taking
candy from a baby. In Trump's case, though, he's on the wrong side of the equation, and rather than he and his
administration steering the narrative, others both for him and against him are framing the choice and he is having to
react to it. Those who are against him want to destroy and cast him out, and those for him want to use him as a
global influence.
Thank you
Mark; I'm glad to have found your blog site.
I find the
format just fine- I learn a heck of a lot from the diversion onto 'off topic' topical events.
I wandered
into one of my favourite bookstores a couple of times over the last week (I am in Australia). Really, the only reason
for doing so is to check out the classics section (which remains authentic) or to follow up on a special order – there
is nothing on the shelves these days, especially the 'latest/best sellers', that is worth burning the paper it is
printed on. I get most of my books directly from the author's site or as free pdf downloads from such places as
archive-dot-org. I have never, and never would utilise Amazon.
You will see
books glorifying Greta, Jacinda, Hillary, Michael (sic), the Walrus, the latest ['Rage'] by Woodward or the latest
obligatory 'testimony' from a 100-year-old 'survivor'.
They then have
the array of trash talk vilifying, demonising and assassinating anyone with integrity who has something worthwhile to
say and who cares about humanity:
"The Doctor
Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield's War on Vaccines"
– "Award-winning investigative journalist Brian Deer reveals the shocking truth blah "
But the
centrepiece at the moment is
"The
Rodchenkov Affair: How I Brought Down Putin's/Russia's Secret Doping Empire" by Grigory Rodchenkov. [Oh dear!!]
Great lines:
"exquisitely
sophisticated craftsmen who dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly wrong
[sic]"
"When an
honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that
he considers his statements to be false."
This is what
so impresses me – that they can produce so much bullshit that some (?many/most) people actually find credible – but when
what is left of the world and humanity is based entirely on exquisitely crafted lies – then what?
PS. I see that
Russia and/or China meddled in the RBG's respiratory system overnight. One commenter wrote "Weekend at Bernie's" is
FINALLY over.
PPS. Russia
has also denied bombing schools and hospital in Syria. Boris Johnson would know – here he is admitting that the UK
openly funds terrorists – he forgot that people would actually realise who and what the 'White Helmets' are as he
proudly boasts of another £65 million going the way of these "fantastically brave people".
not to
mention the despicable practice of 'double tapping' by Russia and the [Assad] 'regime' – rotten bastards!
Ha, ha!
Thanks, Julius; I thought the post just went on and on as it was, and each avenue seemed to lead into another, so
that I despaired of ever finishing it. If I had brought Browder into it, I'd still be writing. But if you are a
devotee of Browder and his mendacious machinations, here's a post from my old blog on 'that individual'. Get it? I'm
showing how much he disturbs me by refusing to mention him by name.
Navalny is simulating – we go through this point by point
Navalny came to his senses and immediately started having photos
published on Instagram. Indeed, what else is there to to do in hospital? But it would have been better, of course, if he
had not do this, because the public has raised many questions.
Journalist Alexander Sosnovsky has analyzed Navalny's photos and
posts on social networks, coming to a rather simple and logical conclusion -- Alexey is simulating. This is hardly
surprising, given Navalny and his associate's love for exaggeration, lies and fraudulent schemes.
Sosnovsky
highlighted several points by which it is quite easy to realize that the blogger is lying about his "terrible" state.
There is no tracheostomy mark on Navalny's neck, which means that he did not have such a serious violation of the
respiratory system. And it means that there is no talk of any kind of poisoning with combat poison.
In the photo, he is walking down stairs -- after a few weeks in a
coma, muscles can hardly recover so quickly. The knee joints literally "freeze", and it is simply impossible to use
stairs so easily.
The same applies to sitting in the lotus position, and this is how
the blogger is sitting in the earlier photo. Again, this is absolutely impossible after such a severe poisoning, as all
Navalny's hamsters and his family talk about.
By the way, In the message, Navalny thanks the doctor, but he did not
write about his family under any of the photos. But when a person is on the verge of death, relatives are the first ones
he thinks of when he comes to his senses. And his daughter had flown from the USA, but not a word about Yulia, Dasha and
Zakhara, although usually Navalny now and then shows photos and videos of his family, posing as a loving family man.
Next, we pay attention to Navalny's trainers, and they are rather
heavy, not of cloth. Such footwear is not worn in an intensive care unit. It is used by patients undergoing normal
treatment and who can walk about on the street, but the blogger has not been outside, otherwise his photos would have
already appeared on the Web, because there are a lot of paparazzi around. By the way, the fact that he is in the
"Charité" has not been in any way confirmed.
In general, there are a lot of questions about Navalny. It remains
only to wait for answers from him, although he probably will not bother to devote time to this, because the blogger
usually does not comment on any of his type of fraud.
s
t
imulating?
Maybe Navalny had allegedly
been assisted by his apparent
drug of choice, cocaine? Or, he was actually out of a coma a few days earlier (to plan how to spin things) and had
access to a rowing machine
My
point is that we are given a
narrative
but there really
is absolutely nothing but his/team/Charite's word about any of this. It's annoying that we have to question
everything but even then we often accept much of what is said and look at the most obvious inconsistencies
rather than the much more subtle
sleights of hand
or
sideways misdirections. It is non-stop.
What
we can do is if we know the conclusion sic 'Navalny poisoned', then the narrative has to (mostly) fit in to
that box/framework. So work backwards and see if the public claims fit that narrative, short of deliberate
traps to to mop up the conspiracy crowd.
Yes,
I had to laugh when MacKinnon ridiculed the notion that Navalny might have been poisoned by samagon by invoking
the image of Navalny – as painted by his 'press agent' and his 'team' – as a "near teetolaler". What are they
going to say? That he is a lush who drowns kittens? Mark MacKinnon, Stenographer to the Stars, all gossip
repeated.
What is far
more likely is that he will consult with his handlers, and together they will come up with a reply stinging in its
scorn, revolving around the theme, "Can you believe they are saying this??", inviting all readers to have a hearty
laugh at the squalling of the conspiracy theorists. It's worked before – no reason to change the formula until it
stops working.
In that
photo, Navalny looks as if he is walking through a fire escape area. Would hospitals really allow patients to walk
unassisted and unprotected through the fire escape area? Once the door into the fire escape closes, if you're in
the fire escape, you cannot open it again. You'd have to walk all the way down to the exit and out into the open
air – fire escapes are designed to get you out of a burning building. Once out, Navalny would be exposed to all
kinds of aerosols including air pollutants, let alone the odd coronavirus spike-ball, that could sicken him in his
recently recovered state.
This
makes you wonder whether Navalny even set foot into any hospital in Berlin at all, and not just a medical clinic
or some place where discharged patients go to recuperate after a hospital stay. (I forget the term used for such
places where people receive care after being discharged from hospital.)
Which
I would say support my suposition that Berlin's Charite hospital has been rather conservative with it is press
release (patient confidentialty) that has afforded FC Nav
alny's PR team
sufficient time to create a nice visual story fit for western consumption, nyam nyam nyam copy copy copy,
snore.
Perhaps the
category and grade of Novichok used to poison Navalny are the same as for the Novichok used on Julia Skripal. Recall
that during her May 2018 interview with the Reuters reporter at USAF Fairford base in Gloucestershire or wherever,
Julis Skripal looked slim and radiant and her skin was in good condition. She was able to walk unassisted to the
interview as well. It seems clear to me that that Novichok stuff must actually be some Fountain of Youth elixir, that
it puts its victims into temporary Snow White repose and then, without warning, not only awakens them but restores
them to a better state of health and physical condition better than what they had before they were poisoned. Next
thing you know, Navalny will be training for the marathon in next year's Olympic Games.
Oh, man. New
reader here. The "peyote cartoon" line made me laugh so damn hard. Thanks you for that. Nothing beats this cult-like
world like a good long laugh at the cult's expense.
While the
western world(read fascist) was going ape over novichok-you know the Russian bio-weapon that is the most dangerous
chemical known to man except it fails to kill anyone-Putin had developed and infected the entire political and mass
media leaders of the west with a new bio-weapon that he created himself. It's called Notajoke and it makes those
infected become babbling idiots and anyone can see that it has worked. Trump got his dose from some Las Vegas hookers
who the FSB infected and they in turn pissed on him. Even worse, it eventually gives every infected person a Hitler
mustache that cannot be gotten rid of. These babbling idiots are aware something is wrong but they are not sure of whats
happening and they have developed a strategum. They are going to emulate certain successful comics from the past and
make their adversaries die laughing. Trump becomes Moe, Boris becomes Larry and Angela becomes Curly-wise guy eh? They
plan to resort to slapstick, where upon they slap you with sanctions and then stick it to you, bomb your country and
everyone is in stitches(in the hospital) "Yeah that' what we'll do eh Moe?". As part of the plan the G7 mental 7 dwarfs
are on board with Moe(Trump-coc) as their leader followed by Larry(Boris-sleezy) and Curly(Angela-frumpy) with those
idiots True-dough(dopey) Canada, Cunte(bashful) Italy, Macaroon(creepy) France and the Jap chap Ape Abe(jappy). What a
team folks- I may die of laughter before I'm finished this tirade. Their latest brilliant stroke is to put an end to
Nordstream 2 so that their citizens can pay double thereby aiding Moe and getting rid of their excess money. The Baltic
states are on board as well. They are afraid that Russia will steal their technology- ooops they don't have any, their
natural resources- ooops ditto, their dirt-ya that's it, their dirt. Poland is worried about the theft of their
telecommunications technology developed by Alexander Graham Kowalski better known as "The Telephone Pole". Ukraine got
on board and has now elevated itself to the poorest country in Europe. Moe thought Putin may be behind all this so he
offered a challenge. Putin responded with chess?, judo?, hockey?, Moe had in mind a pie throwing contest. "wise guy eh?"
Pompeo and
Abrahms not to be outdone have become Ollie and Stan as Ollie admonishes Stan-"this is another fine mess you've gotten
me into" over Venezuela and proceed to bump into one another. To add a little "stiff" competition in comes Joe "the
stiff" Biden to out stupid them all.
MacKinnon is
a
follower.
No relation to autistic hacker Gary MacKinnon.* This
MacKinnon is a member of the Ford Estate, not the Fourth Estate. It's the
appearance
of
journalism. Just because some thing is long (lots of words) doesn't make it fact. Never mistake quantity for
quality, but that is the strategic propaganda goal against Russia. Bombard the public with endless long, big, stronger,
higher, faster, deeper/whatever reports/investigations/studies etc. which when you actually look for the source is
either
anonymous/highly likely/judged to be
/whatever, but you
never get to read the actual source material. NEVER.
Vis the poison
in the hot tea. What got me was that no-one commented that using a poison in 70c+ tea would dramatically reduce its
effect (chemically break down very quickly) which is directly contrary to the claimed goal of killing Navalny). It would
also have to be specifically designed to be heat resistant which is a whole other level of chemical weapons development
more suitable for a sci-fi future of scorching global temperatures where the human race dwell below ground like
Morlocks.
Top stories in
the Russian press on Thursday, September 17
Vedomosti:
Rostec
to shell out $1.7 bln on creating new Sukhoi Superjet aircraft
By 2023, the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) plans to create the
Sukhoi SuperJet New, an import-substituted version of the short-haul Sukhoi SuperJet 100, the only civilian jet built by
the Russian aviation industry. The development of the new Sukhoi Superjet New aircraft, which UAC plans to create by
2023, will cost 120 bln-130 bln rubles ($1.6-1.7 bln), Vedomosti writes, citing sources close to the corporate
leadership of Rostec and UAC.
According to the newspaper, the United Engine Corporation (UEC) is
developing a domestic PD-8 engine, which the aircraft will use. ..UAC will allocate at least 50 bln rubles ($664 mln)
for the development of SSJ New.
####
Plenty of
stuff, but as usual, put up or shut up. Russia puts up.
Vis the
u-Ropean 'Magnitsky Act' no unanimity required. Russia would do well to say in advance that it would counter-act against
certain senior EU officials/member states for complicity in genocide in Libya, Yemen etc.
The problem
with u-Rope is that is that Brussels is a balm for the crimes of its member states. On the one hand the EU is the
collective consciousness of its member states but is not responsible for their individual actions. It is yet again 'cake
and eat it.' Brussels needs to be rudely disabused that it can continue to play this game without consequence (f/y
European Parliament second hand, seat warming pols who are only waiting until their party wins elections back home
again). Take away this option. I don't see Russia taking this new act lying down though and are deliberately playing
their cards close to their chest.
Now on
reflection, this act has taken a remarkably long time to come to this point. This in itself tells us that there are
clearly significant misgivings behind closed doors. The fact that it has now reached his stage also tells us that
Brussels/Paris/Berlin think they have come up with a
cunning plan
aka
'squared the circle', but it is also a significant sign of weakness. Maybe the timing is related to the almost completed
NordStream 2 but that is irrelevant. This is about
consequence.
u-Rope
is currently at its weakest (politically and economically) for a long time but for some reason it thinks now is the time
for a EU Magnitsky It's really poor thinking.
So, I declare
2020 as the year of Hail Marys. The last throw of the dice. Desparation of maybe a final win, however fleeting to go out
in a blaze of heavenly glory before the EU turns inward to deal with its US sponsored saboage attempts, sic the PiS run
lo-land of Po-land that runs out of substantial cash on 31 December 2020 and the wheels of the bus start coming off.
The only other
tidbit I've seen is about Byelorussia. In particular only Latvia has STFU about and avoided the ire of Lucky-shenko. The
Brits would say that Riga is 'Boxing Clever.' Still, is it setting itself up as an EU interlocutor. Yet again, this is a
story of omisson. Lucky shouldn't trust any of them. And speaking of f/kers who won't let go, Borissov in Bulgaria is
still refusing to resign (who cares, they're in the EU) and Djukanovic in pro-EU Montengro remains presient despite
losing parliament. But, if you are in Da Klub, however korrupt or faked (hello Romania too!), it's just not
news.
So it must be
true! "Novichok" was used to murder the "Leader of the opposition"! Soviet developer of "Novichok" makes an apology to
Navalny:
Отравление
Навального , 20 сен, 00:23 179 058
Разработчик "Новичка" извинился перед Навальным
Он назвал разработку боевого яда "преступным бизнесом" и пояснил, что посвятил всю свою последующую жизнь борьбе против
применения отравляющих веществ
Vil Sultanovich Mirzayanov, a Tatar now living happily in the USA,
where he likes to dish the dirt on Russia as regards chemical weapons
Novichok developer has apologized to Navalny
He called the
development of combat poison "a criminal business" and explained that he had devoted his entire subsequent life to the
fight against the use of toxic substances
A chemist and one of the developers of the Novichok chemical warfare
agent Vil Mirzayanov has apologized to opposition leader Alexei Navalny on the Dozhd TV channel.
"I sincerely
apologize to Navalny for being involved in this criminal business -- the development of this substance, which he was
poisoned with", said the chemist who has lived in the United States since 1995.
He noted that
he had devoted himself all his subsequent life to the fight against the use of combat poisons.
In an
interview with Dozhd, Mirzayanov explained that in 1993 he met a man who had survived poisoning by "Novichok". He stated
that the symptoms he described were similar to those mentioned by Navalny on Instagram on September 19.
"All the
symptoms are similar. He overcame, survived. Apparently, Navalny will have to be patient. But, ultimately, he must be
healthy, "said the scientist. The restoration of full health to the Russian politician, Mirzayan said, could take up to
a year.
In his opinion, the situation as regards the impossibility of writing
words on a blackboard, which Navalny described, is associated with problems of signal transmission from the brain to
functional organs -- "Novichok" molecules prevent the breakdown of the protein responsible for the transmission of such
signals.
RBK calls
Navalny a "politician".
"Dozhd" gave
the interview.
Both are
libturd organs.
Mirzayanov was
not a developer of "Novichok". At one time he worked at the State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology
in the department for counteracting foreign technical intelligence, where he rose to the rank of head of department.
That is, he was familiar with what they do in laboratories, but he himself did not "invent" Novichok.
He started
blowing the whistle as regards the Soviet Union allegedly working around compliancy with the proposed 1990 Chemical
Weapons Accord and In 1992 published an article about the USSR and Russian development of extremely potent
fourth-generation chemical weapons from the 1970s until the early 1990s. The publication appeared just on the eve of
Russia signing the 1990 Chemical Weapons Convention.
Mirzayanov was
arrested on treason charges but the trial collapsed. He was released, but kept under house arrest and observation. In
1995 he relocated to the United States where he presently resides, taking a position at Rutgers University in New
Jersey.
Mirzayanov is
a professional Tatar: On October 26, 2008, was elected to the Presidium of the Milli Mejlis of the Tartar People in
exile. On January 17, 2009, in an article on CNN, he published the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE OF TATARSTAN, adopted at
a Special Meeting of the Milli Mejlis of the Tatar People on December 20, 2008] At a conference on the separation of
Tatarstan from Russia, held in Ankara in the same year, Mirzayanov was elected "Prime Minister" of the "government in
exile". In March 2010, Mirzayanov signed the "Putin Must Go" campaign.
In March 2018,
after the alleged poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal by "Novichok", Mirzayanov spoke about how Russia had maintained
tight control over its "Novichok" stockpile and that the agent is too complicated for a non-state actor to have
weaponized.
"It's torture.
It's absolutely incurable."
"I never
imagined even in my bad dreams that this chemical weapon, developed with my participation, would be used as terrorist
weapons."
Mirzayanov
said only the Russians could be behind the use of the weapon and said he was convinced Russia carried it out as a way of
intimidating opponents of President Vladimir Putin.
All part of
Washington's momentum campaign – keep it rolling, a new atrocity by Russia every day. Mirzayanov is an American now,
well established and apparently happy, and doubtless he will be well-rewarded for his storytelling. But I doubt the
'apology' to Navalny was his idea. Washington just wants to keep Navalny in the news, in the hope that the more
people learn who he is and what he is all about, the greater will be his influence in Russia.
Who is Mirzayanov and why did he apologize to Navalny?
The mass media, which in general few people trust, continue to
increase false publications about the poisoning of blogger Navalny. So, absurd information has appeared on the Web
about the fact that one of the creators of "Novichok", Vil Mirzayanov, who lives in the States, has apologized to
Alexei Navalny.
But the
fact is that Mirzayanov is not a developer of Novichok, he has nothing to do with this poisonous substance. He was
involved in some kind of indirect way with the creation of the poison, as were many others, but to call him a
developer is like calling a woodworker who made a stretcher for a canvas the artist who created the oil painting that
is on it.
So in
general, complete nonsense. One of the direct participants in the process of creating the toxin, Leonid Rink, stated
that Mirzayanov was only one of the workers on "Novichok", but did not participate in the direct creation of the
poison.
He also
commented on Navalny's symptoms, saying that they are in no way similar to those that should have been in the case of
Novchik poisoning. Rink stressed that his "colleague" also cannot know what the real symptoms are when this toxin
enters the human body. So Mirzayanov's statement is completely unfounded, and may apparently be explained as having
been made because he was ordered by someone to make it.
Finally, Rink said that if Navalny had been poisoned with this
particular poison, he would not have been saved.
Russia has
so many internal traitors (Navalny, Rodchenko and this Mirzayanov for example) that it makes too easy for Russia's
enemies to use them against Russia.
And is
it working? Is the west achieving the goals it set for itself by co-opting these traitors? Maybe in the short
term; the west was successful – using Rodchenkov – of keeping Russia largely out of a couple of Olympics series.
But the overall effect, it seems to me, is that the west is increasingly revealed as a partisan liar, and
consequently untrustworthy.
Why do
you say, "So many"? Does Russia have more 'internal traitors' than other countries? From the point of view that
they are willing to help other countries overthrow their own government, perhaps. But otherwise they are simply
people who disagree with the way their country is run, by the people who run it. The rest is support offered by
the west for them to air their views. Do you think Russia could make good use of Edward Snowden to bring down the
United States government by starting a movement in the USA of discontented people? I do; it wouldn't even be
difficult – it is a fragmented and angry country already, with several anti-government movements the government
can barely keep in check. Are there any signs Russia plans to use that approach? I mean, for real, not the
hysterical cries that Russia is behind Black Lives Matter and other obviously-American groups that are fed up with
their lives as they are.
It is
working because 95% of the people in Finland or the United States or Germany believe that Russian state
poisoned Navalny. The facts don't matter as much as what people believe in.
And
those who want more sanctions against Russia and isolate Russia also benefit, because they can point to Navalny
"poisoning" and say that Russia must be punished.
In
the US, virtually everyone has an opinion regardless of the level of familiarity with the topic. But, the
willingness to suffer for those opinions is ZERO, nada, ništa.
I
would appreciate a link to the information indicating 95% of the US population "believe[s] that Russian
state poisoned Navalny".
Like I said before, so much US propaganda is being dispensed that its value, like an overprinted currency,
is diminishing. When the US economic system collapses, as it surely will, all those opinions will be
forgotten as quickly as last year's "America's Got Talent" runner-up.
And so they apply more sanctions. Has that had any measurable negative effect on Russia? What will they do,
ban it from the Council of Europe again?
Look at it this way – the sanctions and the regime-change operations in neighbouring countries and the
serial-lying campaigns have all been part of a plan, a plan to drive Putin from power and put a western
bobblehead in his place. How many years have they been trying this, now – since 2014? Is it working? Is
Russia in worse shape now than it was then, or better? Is it more independent, or less? More assertive, or
less? Does it have a more diversified economy, or less?
If
I had put this plan together, and poured it on as hard as I could for six straight years now and had as
little to show for it as the west has, I'd be expecting to be called into the office any day now to get
fired.
Russia has so many internal traitors (Navalny, Rodchenko and
this Mirzayanov for example) that it makes too easy for Russia's enemies to use them against Russia.
The US
government/deep state leadership is traitorous to its own population. The steadily decreasing standard of living
over the past 3-4 decades combined with a rapidly growing wealth inequity tell us that,
Having
traitors fighting the national leadership is to be much preferred to a national leadership in the hands of
traitors. More simply, the US does not have many traitors because the traitors are running the show.
Got it?
When all
is said and done, the countries with the most fit population will generally prevail if left alone. The West knows
that hence the continuous pressure on Russia. Still got it?
The last photo of
Alexei Navalny before boarding the Moscow bound aeroplane plane in Tomsk / Twitter
Taken after
Navalny had allegedly drunk poisoned tea, they all at first howled in unison, but now they say he drank from a Novichok
contaminated bottle in his hotel room, which the Navalnyites later so fortuitously recovered from Navalny's long vacated
hotel room and sent to Berlin.
95% of people
in the West believe this story, namely that Navalny was poisoned by Novichok?
And not only
do 95% of Westerners believe that Navalny had ingested Novichok, but also, that it was a specially developed delayed
action Novichok that would only take effect some 40 minutes after that photo above had been taken.
Furthermore,
95% of Westerners believe that Navalny recovered from his poisoning by specially developed, delayed-action Novichok.
Now if the
story were subsequently changed and it were claimed that Navalny had been poisoned by, say, special, delayed action
strychnine,
AND
had
recovered from its effects, would 95% of Westerners believe that as well?
Well, maybe,
if it were alleged that such special, delayed action Strychnine could only have been developed by evil Russian
scientists, and one of those who partook in its development now showed remorse for his nefarious activities ands made a
public apology to Navalny for all the bother said strychnine had caused him.
Greetings from
Berlin! The happy couple enjoying
deutsche Gemütlichkeit
. It's a
miracle, I tell ya!
The above
Instagram text reads:
Julia and I had our
anniversary on August 26 -- 20 years of being wed, but I'm even glad that I missed it and I can write this today, when I
know a little more about love than I did a month ago.
You, of
course, have seen this a hundred times in films and read about it in books: one loving person lies in a coma, and the
other brings him back to life with her love and incessant care. Of course, we also acted in this way. According to the
canons of classic films about love and coma. I slept and slept and slept. Julia came, talked to me, sang songs to me,
turned on music. I won't lie – I don't remember anything.
But I'll tell
you what I remember exactly. Rather, it can hardly be called a "memory", rather, a bundle of my very first sensations
and emotions. However, it was so important to me that it has been forever imprinted in my mind. I'm lying there. I have
already been brought out of the coma, but I don't recognize anyone, I don't understand what is happening. I don't speak
and I don't know what to say. And the whole of the time that I was there was spent waiting for her arrival. Who she is
is unclear. I don't know what she looks like either. Even if I manage to see something with a defocused gaze, then I
simply cannot remember the picture. But She is different, I understand that, so I lie and wait for her all the time. She
comes and becomes the head of the ward. She adjusts my pillow very comfortably. She doesn't have a quiet, sympathetic
tone. She talks cheerfully and laughs. She tells me something. When she is around, idiotic hallucinations recede. It's
very good with her. Then she leaves, I feel sad, and I start waiting for her again.
I don't doubt for a
second that there is a scientific explanation for this. Well, like, I caught the timbre of my wife's voice, my brain
secreted dopamines, it became easier for me. Each visit literally became healing, and the expectation effect increased
the dopamine reward. But no matter how cool scientific and medical explanation sounds, now I know for sure just from my
own experience: love heals and brings you back to life. Julia, you saved me, and let it be written in the textbooks on
neuroscience😍
[Wipes tear
from eye .]
The body of
the Kommersant article text:
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny has published a blog post in which
he is outraged by the lack of a criminal investigation into his poisoning. He has also demanded the return of his
clothes, which may be important evidence. Mr. Navalny noted that two independent laboratories in France and Sweden, as
well as a German special laboratory in the Bundeswehr, had confirmed the presence of Novichok in his body. "However, in
Russian political and legal reality, none of this exists In Russia there is no criminal case, but there is a
"pre-investigation check on the fact of hospitalization ". It seems that I didn't fall into a coma on the aeroplane, but
slipped in a supermarket and broke my leg", wrote Mr. Navalny. He also demanded that the clothes he wore on August 20 be
returned to him -- the day he felt sick. According to the politician, he was "sent absolutely naked" to Germany.
"Considering that a Novichok was found on my body and a contact method of infection is very likely, my clothes are a
very important piece of evidence. 30 days allotted by law for pre-investigation
Listen,
arsehole: you threw a wobbler on the aircraft, howled and screamed and rolled around on the deck and then, allegedly,
went into a coma. On admission to hospital, you were put into a coma and remained in an induced comatose state until
your miraculous recovery in the Charité, Berlin
The reason why
no criminal case has been made in the country where you were allegedly dosed with Novichock, is that there is no
evidence of this being the case. Furthermore, there was no evidence of poisoning in the analyses of your body fluids and
tissue done in Omsk.
German doctors
say that they have such evidence, but they wont show it; likewise the Bundeswehr laboratories.
And there will
be no traces of Novichok on your clothing in the Omsk hospital either. If there had been, there would have been a lot of
dead people at that hospital last month.
September
21, 2020
The results of investigations of Navalny's clothing have become
known
Russian experts did not find traces of poison or hazardous
substances on the belongings of Alexei Navalny, in which he was on the day of hospitalization. The results of the
research have been made known to the TASS agency.
"In his
personal belongings, no dangerous, prohibited, poisonous, other substances or their traces were found", said a source
in law enforcement agencies.
Earlier,
the Ministry of Health of the Omsk region told Interfax that Navalny's clothes were seized from doctors by the
investigating authorities during an inspection.
On Monday, September 21, the blogger demanded that the things that
were removed from him in the Omsk hospital be returned to him. According to him, these clothes could become important
evidence, since there were traces of a poisonous substance on his body. "30 days of a 'pre-investigation check' were
used to hide this vital piece of evidence. I demand that my clothes be carefully packed in a plastic bag and returned
to me", the oppositionist said.
Yeah, deny,
deny, deny! That's all that Russians do. However, 95% of Finnish people think he was Novichocked and there were
traces of the most deadly nerve agent known to man on his clothes.
RUSSIA HAS NO
FUTURE: NAVALNY'S PARTY LIQUIDATED
09/21/2020
Today, September 21, the RF Supreme Court liquidated Navalny's party
"Russia of the Future".
In mid-May
2019, Alexey Navalny's assistants submitted documents to the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation for
registration of the "Russia of the Future" party. True, the ministry re-registered the "Party of Free Citizens" under a
new name, but refused to register Navalny's associates, owing to the fact that a party with this name had already been
registered.
Alexei Navalny
filed a lawsuit trying to challenge the registration refusal. Ultimately, both the Zamoskvoretsky Court and the Moscow
City Court were on the side of the Ministry of Justice.
Navalny's
aide, Ivan Zhdanov, said they currently do not plan to reapply for party registration.
"Our case has
been communicated to the ECHR and we are not planning new filings in the near future", Zhdanov said.
Since 2012, politician Navalny has been trying to register his party
under the names "People's Alliance", "Party of Progress" or "Russia of the Future". However, all attempts to do so have
been in vain.
In other
words, as I have said before: "Fuck off, arsehole!"
The
"politician" without a party and with statistically zilch public support in Russia.
No mass
protests or civil unrest anywhere in Russia since Navalny's alleged poisoning: nothing like the massive popular protests
held week in week out in support for Furgal in Khabarovsk. Sweet FA in support of the "leader of the Russian opposition"
whom Putin tried to murder with Novichok!
However, I
hear that 95% of people in the West believe there was indeed an assassination attempt made against the US agent using
the most deadly nerve agent (weapons grade, modified) known to man and undertaken on Putin's direct order.
Here's a
possible solution – call it "The Party of Crooks and Thieves". Subtle, innit? Then The Kremlin will think Navalny is
calling himself and his fellow party members crooks and thieves, when all along he is simply planning – cunningly, as
he and the US Department of State do everything – to give his signature phrase the publicity boost it deserves!
Fookin' ELEGANT!
Over a dozen members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's
Russiagate-investigating team "accidentally" wiped their phones before they could be inspected and "lost" the phone of
disgraced FBI lawyer Lisa Page with anti-Trump texts.
Musing
during an evening work break – the reason why mass rape of children by our vaunted leaders draw so little attention
from the MSM has nothing to do with "protecting" those in power either due to fear or reward. Rather, Bill and Hilary
do what comes natural to sociopaths. As such, their behavior is accepted, if not condoned, as normal for those in
power. Us deplorables just don't get it.
Journalist who has visited Charité has pointed out signs of Navalny's
absence there
14:55 22 September 2020, Berlin, Germany
Alexei Navalny is not at the Charité clinic in Berlin. This is the
conclusion reached by journalist Alexander Sosnovsky, who has visited the place.
A journalist from
Berlin has shown why Navalny cannot be at the "Charité" / Collage: FBA "Economics Today"
According to the journalist, the photo of Navalny with his wife on a
balcony makes one think about his whereabouts. Sosnovsky, who is familiar with the architecture of Berlin, drew
attention to the strange urban landscape in the corner of the picture. He pointed out that the Charité building does not
have balconies with a similar view, as it is located in the central part of Berlin with a completely different
architecture.
To confirm his
words in practical way, Sosnovsky personally went to the Charité and walked around the building with a camera. He drew
attention to the construction work near the clinic (this would probably have got into the blogger's photo), as well as
the complete absence of journalists and security. All this confirmed Sosnovsky's suspicions about Navalny's absence from
Charité.
In addition to
the cityscape, the journalist had questions about the can with cigarette butts on Navalny's balcony. Sosnovsky called
such an object impossible in an élite medical institution in Germany with patients of this level. If Navalny himself
smoked all the cigarettes in the frame, this raises even more questions about his "diagnosis" and the conclusions of
German doctors.
The journalist
notes that all the shots of Navalny taken after he had emerged from the coma are static and "inanimate." Sosnovsky, a
person with a medical education and a practicing doctor, calls this understandable, pointing to the possibility of
identifying the signs of specific diseases and influences based on movements, speech and other dynamic manifestations.
For example, after a tracheostomy (artificial windpipe), a person often has voice problems.
"Any video and
audio makes it possible with a high degree of probability to calculate where and how it was made. It is much more
difficult from a photo. And if they hide from us the opportunity to determine the location and diagnosis, this is very
significant", Sosnovsky said on the air of Soloviev Live.
Earlier, Navalny demanded that Russia return the clothes in which the
blogger was hospitalized in Omsk. However, Navalny's own associates previously wrote that all his belongings were
transferred to his wife, and some of the items that the blogger touched and used could have been taken out by Maria
Pevchikh, a suspect in his poisoning.
" This makes you wonder whether Navalny even set foot into any
hospital in Berlin at all, and not just a medical clinic or some place where discharged patients go to recuperate
after a hospital stay "
– even
before that photo of the Navalnys being lovey-dovey on a balcony appeared. Do hospital floor plans normally include
balconies attached to patient wards? I am sure hospitals are not designed like hotels or even like educational
institutions, to include balconies for individual patients or groups of patients, for possible security and liability
reasons among others. (You don't want patients sneaking out at night and possibly getting run over in traffic when
they are supposed to be under hospital supervision; and you also don't want to make entry easy for people looking for
drugs and entering hospitals through patient wards to get drugs.)
And since
when do hospitals allow patients or even their visitors to smoke on their premises? Not only are they a health hazard
(to smokers and non-smokers alike in sealed air-conditioned environments such as hospitals provide) but they are also
a fire hazard.
I can't
remember where I read it (Euractiv?), but apparently the current NordStream II plan is to complete it
and
then
apply restrictive measures such as capacity caps etc. This I can believe. A) it get's Brussels off the hook for
wildly violating its own Energy Charter (private investor protections), something which you may all recall Brussels has
been trying to use against Russia even though the latter did not ratify it but is technically supposed to be bound by
the rules or a period; b) it looks like it has taken action; c) it can reverse at any point not to mention all the
exemptions Brussels allowed for 'Field Pipes', TAP etc. and retro-actively trying to redefine its rule to be
ex-territoria – i.e. apply to out pipline that are not end-to-end EU pipelines but cross outside of the EU. And finally
to threaten and blackmail Gazprom in public to agree Privately mutually beneficial terms that do not contravene the
Energy Charter, i.e. if Gazprom
voluntarliy
goes along with the
new rules. Very Brussels 'squaring the circle'/presenting weakness/compromise as VICTORY!
We know from
the past that Brussels imposed a 50% capacity cap on Russian gas though NS I until demand picked up and the restriction
would have driven up prices for EU industry and private customers and thus magically lifted the cap, subject to 'market
conditions' of course!
In other news,
a PiS (Polish government) spokesman said that they didn't need coalition partners which turned out to mean that
'The
PiS-led coalition would lose its parliamentary majority without United Poland, which has 17 seats. The coalition crisis
came after simmering tensions spilled into open conflict when the junior members refused to support an animal rights
bill.
.' 'Hanging by a thread' anal-cyst looks more like projection to me.
Oh, what a
stupid fucking plan. They're not serious, or don't realize they are not, but ENI and Uniper and Wintershall are not
going to put up with that shit for a minute. They invested to make money, not lose it, and they are not remotely
interested in making room for American LNG. I sometimes wonder what passes for political nous in Europe these days –
it doesn't look like you have to have too many synapses firing.
Therefore it is very much a political figleaf. Something they can tell themselves and others knowing full well
that they won't do it. More importantly they think it buys them time for example if t-Rump is not re-elected even
though the Dems are onboard with the 'f/k NSII' plans.
I think
this actually shows that they looked down the barrel of the gun (i.e. spoke to their own Legal Service) and didn't
like what they saw, that Brussels would be unequivocaly on the hook for NSII not being completed. This is just
like earlier when the EU Legal Services told them that they couldn't apply the Third Energy Package retroactively
(as previously posted on this blog – or was it the old one?). The article below has a pdf upload of the actual EU
Legal Services opinion & the German.* Bundesnetzagentur.
Oh, look at
that – Mr. Less-than-5% has been 'discharged' from the hospital he probably was never in, so you journalists can stop
hanging about picking the western storyline apart; he ain't here no more.
Poisoned with the deadliest nerve agent
known to man, and in less than a week he's ready to hit the road (less than a week after coming out of a coma where
he had to have a ventilator breathe for him, I mean). Day one, he wakes up. Day two, he's recovered 90% of his brain
function and nearly all his mobility. And only a couple of days after that, he's demanding his clothes back from
Russia and making plans for his glorious return, perhaps riding an Abrams main battle tank. Wasn't Detective Bailey
in the hospital for weeks, with death hovering over his pillow the whole time? And HE had gloves on! Navalny is
Superman. Remarkable.
Fully
recovered, the Fritz miracle worker doctors say.
A golden
Guinea to the swab who first spies a balcony on yon white monster! Aaaaarrr!!!
As it
happens, I lived in Berlin for a while in 1988 -- in both the capitalist showcase of "West Berlin" and in "East
Berlin", the capital of the former German Democratic Republic or "sowjetische Besatzungszone" as "West German"
politicians liked to label the place without going into details about why exactly a large chunk of the so=called
"Thousand Year Reich" was indeed occupied by the Soviet Union, and I agree with other critics: no way was that
balcony shot of Bullshitter and his wife taken at the Charité, which is situated right slap bang in the middle of
Berlin.
Berlin's
Charité Hospital -- "Bettenhochhaus" -- was completed in 1982 and was cleaned and renovated in 2016-2017. It is
around 87m tall and is Germany's largest hospital. It dominates the skyline at the Mitte Campus, nestled right in
the middle of the city near the Parliament and Central Station.
Not because he
is in trouble with the law here. Although a trial awaits him in order to establish the truth as regards another criminal
case. Not because he can be poisoned (but who needs him), although no one poisoned him. He is either a pawn in someone's
dirty game that was used on the quiet, or the initiator of this whole bad story.
If he had
really been poisoned with a chemical warfare agent, then everyone who had contact with him would be in the hospital bed.
And the aeroplane in which they brought the bottle on which the traces of "Novichok" were allegedly found, would have
been burnt long ago. As in the case with the Skripals, the British demolished the house where they had found traces of
the poison. Somehow everything turns out awkwardly.
What is it all
for? By and large, Navalny does not play any role in Russian politics. An ordinary blogger who positions himself as an
opposition politician, fighter against corruption. True, it is worth recalling that this fighter against corruption has
himself been a defendant in a criminal case of embezzlement in Kirovles. And he received a five-year suspended sentence
for embezzlement and yet more embezzlement.
Scandals are
his bread and butter. The forgotten blogger decided to remind everyone about himself in this way, let's say for the sake
of hype. True, it all went too far. And if the truth is revealed, and someday it will definitely come out, then Navalny
will really have to worry about his health . . .
Most likely, the fugitive blogger will disappear like Skripal. It
will be better for everyone. So stay there in Germany or go to the states.
And the above
opinion, in my opinion, is what the vast majority of Russians think.
I live with
Russians -- real Russians: I don't sit in flash cafés or bars, chinwagging with the Russian bourgeois "élite", who are
ever willing to spill forth to me their tales of woe and suffering in the "regime" and their yearning for the
establishment of a "liberal" Western "democracy" here, as do the likes of Independent Moscow correspondent Carroll, and
Shaun "don't-give-me-no-dill" Walker, the BBC correspondent Rainsford, so full of negative spin on all things Russian,
and her slimy git of a BBC colleague Rosenberg.
And now the
ever truthful Frog rag "Le Monde" reports that in conversation with Macron, Putin suggested that the Bullshitter may
have poisoned himself. Signal
immediate heart-rending response from team Navalny -- read "Washington":
"I cooked 'Novichok' in the kitchen. I took a soft sip from a flask on
the plane "
Navalny has responded to Putin's suggestion that the oppositionist himself drank poison
Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has responded to the
words of Russian President Vladimir Putin, published in the French newspaper "Le Monde", that he poisoned himself with a
substance from the "Novichok" group. "Good version. I believe that it deserves the closest study. Cooked "Novichok" in
the kitchen. Took a soft sip from a flask on the plane. I fell into a coma. Prior to that, I agreed with my wife,
friends and colleagues that if the Ministry of Health insists that they take me to Germany for treatment, they would not
allow it to be done. To die in the Omsk hospital and end up in the Omsk morgue, where the cause of death would be
established: "had lived enough" – this is the ultimate goal of my cunning plan. But Putin outplayed me. You just can't
fool him. As a result, I, like a fool, lay in a coma for 18 days, but did not achieve my goal. The provocation failed! "
– ironically Navalny on his page on the social network Instagram.
23
September 2020, 08:39
Macron's statement on Navalny and the resonating publication of "Le
Monde"
The French
President said that what happened to the Russian oppositionist was an "assassination attempt." Le Monde wrote about
the conversation between Macron and Putin, and the Russian ambassador to Germany has said that Berlin does not want
to cooperate with Moscow over the Navalny situation.
Updated at
10:07
French President Emmanuel Macron called on Russia to shed light on
the situation with Navalny. Speaking at a session of the UN General Assembly, the French President called the
incident an "assassination attempt": "We will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons in Europe, Russia or Syria. We
need to clarify quickly and flawlessly as we will make sure that the red lines are respected. "
His video
message to the UN coincided with a high-profile publication of the French newspaper "Le Monde" about a telephone
conversation between Macron and Putin. Sources of the publication retell their conversation about the situation with
Navalny.
According to Le Monde, it was "a conversation not intended to be
heard". According to sources, Macron said that since it would be impossible for a private organization to use
"Novichok"
[Why? Peddling another "Novichok" myth yet again! -- ME]
,
an official Russian explanation is needed
[Why? Presumption of Russian guilt? -- ME]
.
In response, Putin allegedly called Alexei Navalny "a simple internet brawler who committed illegal actions in the
past and used the Anti-Corruption Fund to blackmail deputies and officials". According to the newspaper, the Russian
president noted that Navalny had previously simulated various diseases and could have swallowed the poison himself.
Why the politician did this, Putin did not explain, writes "Le Monde".
According
to the newspaper, Vladimir Putin also noted that "Novichok" is a much less complex substance than it is believed. The
lack of an official investigation was explained by the fact that the results of the French and German tests were not
transferred to Russia. In addition, the Russian president, according to "Le Monde's" sources, suggested investigating
other versions, leading, in particular, to Latvia, where the inventor of "Novichk" lives. As the newspaper noted, in
fact, several Soviet scientists took part in the creation of "Novichk" at once, and the fact that one of them lives
abroad says nothing, especially in the absence of any plausible motive. According to the newspaper, Macron rejected
the Latvian trace and the version of an attempt to poison himself.
How should
one feel about the publication of "Le Monde" and will it have any impact in Europe? Commentary by political scientist
Georgy Bovt:
– First of
all, Le Monde has just thrown shit at the Russian president, because, first of all, we do not know in what context
this was said. It could have been said in such a sarcastic tone, for example, and in the context of other spoken
phrases, it would have sounded different from what it sounds like now, when such a position seems rather too strange
to many. This happens quite often when retelling rather frank conversations of politicians, which are then presented
without understanding the tone and context. So, of course, this post will make a difference. And secondly, the fact
that the Elysée Palace itself considered it possible to leak this information to the press makes it problematic in
the future to communicate with Macron at the level at which it happened before.
– During his speech at the session, he also called on Russia to shed
light on, as he put it, the attempt to assassinate Navalny.
– It
doesn't matter much now, since it is obvious that the conversation with Putin, which took place in confidence, was
leaked to the press. Usually this is not done after all. And if it is done, then the relationship that was before is
cancelled out. This probably means that Macron also decided to cross out his relationship with Putin, which had
developed before.
– Couldn't Putin have thus, on the contrary, been try to improve
relations by recounting all Navalny's "ideas" and attempts to blackmail people close to the authorities during his
investigations?
– The Kremlin's attitude towards Navalny can hardly be called
exalted, and to say that the Kremlin loves Navalny would be a strong exaggeration. Therefore, the attitude to this
politician there is supercritical, dismissive. Nevertheless, to seriously talk about the fact that he poisoned
himself -- well, the general public will not understand this: this requires at least some additional clarification
about the basis on which such statements are made, if they are made seriously, and not in such a manner as a cynical
joke.
[You must
be kidding, Bovt! Navalny critics -- and most Russians are! -- think he's lower than a snake's belly, that he's a
TRAITOR, a FOREIGN AGENT!!!!! If the Pindosi tell him to give one for the Gipper, he'll fucking well do it! That's
his nature. He's in it for the moolah!!!! Nothing else! -- ME]
Late at
night, Navalny himself reacted to the publication. On social media, he wrote: "Good version. I cooked "Novichok" in
the kitchen. I took a soft sip from a flask on the aeroplane. To die in an Omsk hospital and end up in an Omsk
morgue, where the cause of death would be established "had lived enough" -- that was the ultimate goal of my cunning
plan. But Putin outplayed me. You just can't fool him. As a result, I, like a fool, lay in a coma for 18 days, but
did not achieve my goal. The provocation failed! "
Russian
Ambassador to Germany Sergei Nechaev said that Berlin does not want to cooperate with Moscow on the situation with
Navalny. According to him, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office sent requests for legal assistance to France,
Sweden and twice to Germany, but did not receive a single answer.
According
to the diplomat, without these samples from foreign laboratories, law enforcement agencies cannot start a criminal
investigation into the incident. He said that a preliminary investigation of the situation had already begun on the
part of Russia: many objects were examined, the staff of the hotel, hospital and airport were interviewed.
According
to the latest data, Navalny's condition improved and he was discharged from the hospital. This was told in the Berlin
clinic Charite. Doctors consider it possible that he will recover completely.
Which all
begs the question that he was poisoned with "Novichok", which he clearly wasn't!
Why?
Because he
is not dead!
It matters
not who administered the poison or whether the bullshitting bastard took it himself: the dose wasn't lethal.
The bastard
took some salts in the aircraft toilet, then put on a show for the passengers, none of whom suffered any ill effects
from their having been in close proximity with a person covered with the most deadly poison known to man.
Russian
doctors at Omsk know that the lying traitorous bastard wasn't poisoned.
So do
German doctors in Berlin, but they have political agenda to follow.
On the Navalny
poisoning. Interesting to see that Vladimir Ashurkov is in the inner core of the Integrity Initiative. Suggesting
another media-led provocation.
More fool
you BBC for believing the story of such a cnut!
Ashurkov is
Executive Director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. A former banker, Ashurkov was rolling the lolly in as the
Director of Group Portfolio Management and Control at Alfa Group Consortium from 2006 to 2012, when he was asked to
step down because of his political involvement with Alexei Navalny. So he has an axe trto grind.
As usual,
the rich and privileged Ashurkov is so typical of the millions of Russians who love and adore Bullshitter Navalny.
From the
Russian
Wiki
entry on Ashurkov, which is far more revealing than the sparse
English
Wiki
on the thieving twat:
In April 2014, Ashurkov left Russia. On July 30, 2014, he was put
on the federal wanted list in the case of fraud with the financing of Navalny's election campaign as mayor of Moscow.
In July
2014, he applied for political asylum in the UK in connection with persecution in the Russian Federation. In February
2015, he received asylum, at the same time his common-law wife Alexandrina Markvo was arrested in absentia by the
Basmanny Court, whose firm Bureau 17 of the RF IC was accused of stealing several million budget funds during
literary events.
In the UK,
he was engaged in investment projects in the field of venture and angel investments dedicated to e-commerce. At the
same time, he continued to work with Alexei Navalny. In December 2015, he launched the
Sanation
Law
project, which analyzes the adopted scandalous bills and the process of their further cancellation, "which
will become relevant when the political system is liberalized and the new government takes a course to dismantle the
authoritarian regime". According to his own statements, he changed his libertarian beliefs to more leftist ones.
He gave,
along with several others, testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons of the British
Parliament in connection with the preparation of the latter's report "Russian corruption and the UK inquiry", which
was presented in May 2018 year.
In November 2018, hackers of the Anonymous group published
documents of the British project Integrity Initiative; amongst others, Ashurkov's surname appeared in the lists of
participants. Ashurkov suggested that the hackers stole the Institute of Statecraft (one of the founders of the
Integrity Initiative) mailing address database, which actually contains his email address. According to him, he had
not heard of the Integrity Initiative.
Western politicians are still undecided over their response to
the
poisoning
, says the BBC's Jenny Hill in Berlin.
However, Mr
Navalny's discharge from hospital will intensify pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel who has demanded – so far
in vain – a full explanation from the Kremlin, she adds.
A nerve agent from the Novichok group was also used to poison Russian
ex-spy Sergei Skripal
and his daughter in Salisbury, England in 2018. They both survived, but a local woman, Dawn
Sturgess, died after coming into contact with the poison.
Britain
accused
Russia's military intelligence of carrying out that attack
. Twenty countries expelled more than 100 Russian
diplomats and spies. Moscow denied any involvement.
And no
evidence presented whatsoever for the above highlighted accusations.
But Russia, as
ever, is presented as denying a fully proven fact -- a "slam dunk" accusation, as I believe Pindosi are sometimes wont to
say.
What with all the noise of the dogs and camels, a swan song can be
easily missed. But not Maria Pevchikh's (lead image, right) broadcast by the BBC's Russian Service.
For the first
time, the British state propaganda organ has said too much too loudly in defence of one of its Russian assets, and
confirmed the combination of celebrity, political ambition, and money which has made the poisoning of Alexei Navalny a
faulty fabrication; and Navalny's attempt to make political capital out of it, a modest success for the British secret
services; an immodest failure for the German Foreign Ministry, Defence Ministry, German Army, and the Berlin medical
clinic which goes by the name of Charity
German sources close to the thinking of the Chancellery in Berlin
and of Chancellor Angela Merkel believe that whatever she has been told by her subordinates and experts, her intention
is to let the Navalny poisoning narrative fade away for lack of evidence of a crime the Germans are willing to publish
####
More at the
link.
I concur with
the conclusion. I think at some point Merkel realized she was being bumped in to action and rather than just saying 'No'
against a mass of pressure and liability for her, she moved sideways and insisted on the full processes to be followed.
That way she could not be accused of blocking, and secondly it affects the time frame for actions which is the whole
critical point of the whole affair. Outside a certain window, proposed actions lose much of their force, are obsolete or
ultimately become pointless.
As for les
grenouilles, le coq is all about puffing up its chest and looking much bigger than ite really is. Maybe they've given up
on their 'special relationship' with Russia. It's certainly backwards from when Putin allowed Sarkozy to dig the EU/NATO
and the west out of its self-made hole of backing Saakashiti's 2008 'war of liberation.' Exactly what 'other tools' does
Clément Beaune think the EU can bring to bear on Russia that would have any more effect than the current sanction etc.?*
Unless he is talking about sorcery
But we were so bad at dealing with power that we just delegated it,
if I may put it like that, to NATO, to the U.S., to national states, armies and so on," Beaune said.
"The EU was not about this. So the EU is learning that, hello, there
are some powers on the doorstep -- Russia, Turkey, just to mention two of them, the main ones -- and they are not so nice.
So we have to unite and we have to develop tools, and we don't have them at this stage," he said
Apparently,
Pevchikh was given a bogus interview on the BBC and was presented as an uninteresting, nothing special sort of
person, about whom rumours and innuendo were amassing for no reason whatsoever.
The
interviewer never pressed her on how long she had lived in the UK, what her business interests there were (claims
have been made that she runs a book store), why she visits Russia so frequently, what indeed isher present
citizenship, how she became involved with Navalny's "fund" -- she says she answered an ad., but where? In the UK?
Hardly! And on and on .
It was a
"nothing to see here, now move along!" interview undertaken by the free of state control BBC under the auspices of
the State Intelligence Service, for whom, I am sure, Pevchikh is a most willing helper, if not in its employ.
"In response
to the actions of the European Union, Russia has decided to expand the list of representatives of EU member states and
institutions that are prohibited from entering the Russian Federation".
She stressed that the number of people in the list is equal to a
similar list compiled by the European Union, adding that the bloc has taken multiple unfriendly steps towards Russian
citizens, using sanctions as an "absurd" excuse
With his
receding hairline and rapidly thinning mop Navalny has exceeded his shelf life for attracting naïve youngsters. He looks
like the Russian equivalent of Rigsby, the seedy rackrent landlord in Rising Damp.
Rigsby
was a great snidey, lecherous, creep of a landlord
Poor old
Leonard Rossiter was a good actor as well. I was rather saddened when he died unexpectedly.
One of
my old workmates could take Rigsby off to a "T". He used to chat up girls using Rigsby-style creepy flattery and
strangely enough, he used to hit it off with them when performing his chatting-up of them in this fashion.
Oh, I doubt
it – Pevchikh is the exact opposite of a media personality, apparently doing her best to remain in a blurry
background and not get noticed. And owing to the suspicion now surrounding her, she would never have Navalny's
freedom of movement in Russia, where he is watched only by the newbies who need the training and the guys who showed
up to work hung-over and are being punished.
Did Russia
really poison opposition politician Navalny? And NATO wants a color revolution in Belarus
708 views•23 Sep 2020
Moderate
Rebels
20.9K subscribers
Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton start off with an exclusive, bombshell intercepted recording we were leaked of Russian
President Vladimir Putin's phone calls.
Then we speak
with journalist Bryan MacDonald, who lives in Russia, about the very suspicious alleged poisoning of opposition
candidate Alexei Navalny, and what his real, xenophobic politics are.
We also
discuss the NATO/EU attempt to orchestrate a so-called color revolution in Belarus and install a pro-Western neoliberal
regime.
SECTIONS
0:00 Exclusive, bombshell intercepted recording
8:33 Poisoning of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny
45:00 Belarus color revolution attempt
1:21:30 Outro
Over at
OffGuardian, a frequent contributor argues compellingly that information which supports questions as to whether face
masks have any beneficial effect against an airborne viral infection is being systematically purged from the internet.
Furthermore,
the comments carry on the discussion of the extent to which not only well-known corporate-friendly browsers and search
engines like Google censor searches and limit access to critical information through down-ranking algorithms, but even
'independent' browsers like DuckDuckGo.
Often people
who narrate tech talks seem chosen for their preoccupied monotone delivery, so that reading the phone book seems a
viable alternative to listening, and this one is no exception – nonetheless, a very interesting demo of a fairly-new
website known as 'Censored Search'.
I think most
people realize the internet is slowly but surely being taken over by corporate and one-world interests that want to
shape your thinking by controlling what you read – apparently monitoring was not enough. But I would wager few grasp
just how blatant and invasive it is. The internet is lost, and it is past time for an alternative that gets back to its
maverick early days while maintaining its present versatility. The secret to the success of advertising – which after
all, is mostly propaganda – is to prevent your ability to turn it off and not be exposed to it.
Which is
the modern version that stands today, then? The one with balconies, or without?
According
to Wiki, the Charite has four campuses, all in Berlin – the main building in Mitte (which appears to be the one in
which the honoured guest was allegedly quartered and allowed to smoke and wander about the stairwells at will). the
Benjamin Franklin in Lichterfelde , the Virchow Klinikum in Wedding and the Berlin Buch, in Buch. Of those pictured,
only the main building appears to have balconies like a hotel. The Buch is not pictured, but was apparently acquired
in 2001 by the Helios clinics Group; the Charite now uses it only for research facilities.
It's hard
to know which side you're looking at, but one side appears flat right across while the sections that are balconied
protrude slightly at each side. It would obviously be much easier to build them on than to blast them off, so it
appears the version with the balconies is current.
On Thursday
(24 September), Christian Gramm, the president of Germany's Military Intelligence Service (MAD), was forced to resign.
To many, the shake-up doesn't come as a surprise given the recent criticism over how the agency handled investigations
into right-wing extremism in the German Special Forces (KSK). Gramm's term as MAD president will come to an end next
month
####
Curious timing
no? Surely completely unrelated to the recent likely faked Navalny 'poisoning.'
I'll be
damned. That IS an astonishing coincidence, and they apparently felt it was enough of a glaring coincidence that a
red-herring excuse was supplied. If your guess is accurate, it likely suggests there will be no flinching from
Germany on supplying Navalny's samples to Russia, and no apology; the issue will just be allowed to fade away, while
a few selective firings is supposed to send its own message. We'll see. Good catch!
Well
keep an eye on the follow up or far more likely the almost total absence of it.
When it
is embarassing to oneself, suddenly it becomes like classic 'straight facts' reporting. When it can cause trouble
for your enemies, speculation runs wild, pure
Rosenford
(Rosenberg/Rainsford),
They can peddle all kinds of ropey speculative s/t and opinon as proper journalism
because
it is Russia
where we all know that everything is possible.
RUSSIA AND COVID. As far as I can see it's pretty much under control
in Russia. CNN has a (surprisingly) intelligent discussion; counting is everything (vide: with or from?) and the
Russians are stricter on their counting. They also treat early with an effective drug. Meanwhile in the USA and UK,
supposedly the best prepared I recommend Stephen Walt's essay again: The Death of American Competence. And I reiterate:
2020 will go down as the year the West lost its mojo .
####
Navalny's apartment in Moscow has been seized following a lawsuit by
Prigozhin
Bailiffs have
seized the apartment of opposition politician Alexei Navalny in Moscow, FBK press secretary Kira Yarmysh said on
Twitter.
According to
her, Federal Bailiff Service officers announced a ban on registration actions at the end of August, a week after Navalny
had been poisoned on board a Tomsk-Moscow flight.
"This means
that the apartment cannot be sold, donated or mortgaged. At the same time, Alexey's accounts have been seized", Yarmysh
explained.
She also added
that the seizure was connected with a lawsuit filed by the St. Petersburg businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who bought out
the FBK debt of 88 million rubles from "Moskovskiy Shkolnik". 30 million rubles have already been collected from the
fund's accounts.
In October, the Moscow Arbitration Court took the side of "Moskovskiy
Shkolnik" in a dispute with FBK. The company demanded compensation for damages received as a result of the fund's
investigation of poor quality food in the capital's schools.
Data from an extract of the Unified State Register of Real Estate,
which is at the disposal of RIA Novosti, confirms that the bailiffs imposed encumbrances on Navalny's apartment, in
which he owns one third of the living space.
In addition,
as follows from the database of enforcement proceedings on the Federal Bailiff Service website, Navalny must pay almost
29 million rubles under a writ of execution on "other foreclosures of a property nature" in favour of individuals and
legal entities, as well as pay off an enforcement fee of more than two million rubles.
Commenting on
the situation with Navalny's apartment, Yevgeny Prigozhin, director of "Concord Management and Consulting", said that he
would be able to give shelter the blogger for a small fee.
"As for Navalny's apartment, if he does not find shelter with his comrades-in-arms, like Lenin, then I will make him an
inexpensive in the hallway", the Concord press service quotes him.
In 2019, a
court in Moscow found 17 statements in a video clip and a publication on catering in Moscow schools and kindergartens as
untrue and defamatory to the business reputation of "Moskovskiy Shkolnik" and ordered that there be recovered from FBK,
as well as Navalny and Lyubov Sobol, in total 88 million rubles. They were also ordered to remove the subject and
articles containing inaccurate information from their websites and social media accounts, as well as publish a
refutation in the form of the operative part of the court decision.
In July this year, Navalny announced the closure of the
Anti-Corruption Fund. In August, Prigozhine bought out the debt of Navalny, Lyubov Sobol and FBK to the Moscow Schoolboy
company. After that, the right to claim passed to the businessman.
What you gonna
do now, Yogi?
You should
know: both you and Sobol are lawyers -- aren't you?
It sounds
as if 'the Kremlin' is finally going to get serious about punishing that toad. He's so used to piling up suspended
sentences hat he perhaps expected another. But I suspect the purpose of the legal actions against him this time
around is to prevent his return to Russia. Moscow is likely quite comfortable with the idea of him becoming another
'president in exile' like Khodorkovsky.
And Navalny has access to the finest legal minds in the west – surely they
will take his case pro bono, and show up where 'the Kremlin' is acting illegally. If they cannot do that, well then
what must be our conclusion?
I suspect
the days of money-for-nothing for Lyosha may be over.
It
sounds like a lien or inhibition on dealing with the property – standard practice in seeking to recover monies
owed in the western legal systems so admired by the blogger. A bog-standard remedy in private law disputes – i.e.
NOT involving the state other than through its position to adjudicate between non-state parties in duly conducted
court proceedings.
The
purchase of the assignation of rights in the school services defamation case was pure genius.
Commenting
on the situation with Navalny's apartment, Yevgeny Prigozhin, director of "Concord Management and Consulting", said
that he would be able to give shelter to the blogger for a small fee.
"As for Navalny's apartment, if he does not find shelter with his comrades-in-arms, like Lenin, then I will fashion
him an inexpensive bed in the hallway", the Concord press service quotes him.
Dasha studied English language in-depth at Moscow Gymnasium No. 45,
one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the Russian capital,
However, after
graduating from high school, the girl did not want to stay in her native Moscow. Dasha has frankly admitted in her blog:
she is going to study at Stanford University, one of the top universities in America, located in sunny California.
According to Daria, she will study at Stanford free of charge, since
her parents' income is below one hundred thousand dollars. However, this has caused more surprise among Russians – the
fact is that only US citizens on a low income have the opportunity of studying at this university without paying fees,
and In any case, her parents must pay considerable expenses for her living and studying in America
I daresay
Moscow is starting a dossier on Darya, with relevant information such as this, against the day she will want to
return to Russia as a celebrated dissident like Daddy.
*Pussy Riot
Activist May Have Been Poisoned, German Doctors Say*
Sept. 18, 2018
BERLIN --
German doctors treating a Pussy Riot activist who lost his sight, speech and mobility after spending time in a court in
Moscow said on Tuesday that it was "highly plausible" that he had been poisoned, as their tests had found no evidence
that he was suffering from a long-term illness.
The activist,
Pyotr Verzilov, 30, was treated for several days in the toxicology wards of two hospitals in Moscow after falling ill.
On Saturday, he was flown to Berlin and admitted to the Charité hospital. His doctors in the German capital told
reporters at a news conference that he was in an intensive care unit but was not in life-threatening condition.
"We are
working on the assumption of a poisoning that has lasted about a week," Dr. Kai-Uwe Eckardt, director of the hospital's
medical center, said. "Test results indicate certain active ingredients, but the exact substance has not yet been
determined."
Verzilov is
supposedly – according to one source I read – the force behind having Navalny evacuated to Germany. It will be funny
now if he cannot return to Russia.
That
guy is a self-important prick with delusions of grandeur. If he is representative of the non-systemic
opposition in Russia then, assuming that Putin is even aware of this guy, it would only provide a good laugh
after a hard day at the office
Verzilov is an attention junkie. He set himself up as the 'spokesman' of Pussy Riot because they were
getting a lot of attention and he wanted to be part of it. He has no visible talent of his own – except
perhaps a facility for languages, his English is pretty good – and so he must attach himself to those who
either are talented, or who fancy they are and who are supported in that belief by the English-speaking
media.
His English is good because he went to school in Toronto until his somehow landing a place at MGU
Philosophy Faculty, which is one of the greatest riddles of the Cosmos, in my opinion.
I think he was at least 12 when he began to live in Canada. He lived there with his "philosopher" first
wife as well. What exactly their status in Canada is, I can never clearly find out.
She dropped out of the MGU Philosophy Faculty after he had humped her when she was 18. A couple of weeks
before she had the baby, he was shagging her in public -- or simulating the act -- in a Moscow zoological
museum. He and his ex-wife had other fornicating accomplices during the "event".
Time to pay up! More than three million rubles have been blocked on
Alburov's bank account
Today, 18:17
Georgy Alburov, who
had previously called himself the head of the FBK investigation department, suddenly revealed his real boss to the
world, when the activities of Maria Pevchikh were exposed
Photo:
http://www.instagram.com/alburov
It is time to
pay the bills. The hand of justice has also reached out to the liberalist Georgy Alburov from the so-called
Anti-Corruption Fund, recognized as a foreign agent. More than three million rubles have been blocked on his bank
account. The money will go towards losses incurred by government services during last year's rallies in Moscow.
Navalnyist Alburov was one of the main agitators of the disorder there.
Unlike
adequate people, Navalnyists do not recognize the obvious illegality of their actions, as well as the right of
representatives of the authorities to impose completely justified punishment against them. They start screaming on all
their Twitter, Facebook, Telegram etc. accounts about alleged blatant injustice and, as it happens, every time, they ask
for donations. Thus, they manage, of course, by manipulating the hamsters a little, to avoid financial responsibility by
dumping it on their lop-eared biomass.
This method is
used not only by Alburov, it is a common feature of FBK foreign agent members. First, they fuck everything up and then
cry onto ther subscribers' shoulders
Sabine
Hossenfelder is one intelligent and charismatic physicist. She takes on established science for its tendency to pursue
projects simply to create job openings for scientists as well as presenting lucid explanations of various scientific
phenomenon. Here, she rants about science being used to justify political decisions.
Navalny is 'a
ray of light emerging from the darkness'. Remarkable. Like Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show in "Cover of the Rolling
Stone", Navalny will want to buy five copies for his mother.
Well, well;
look at that. Shale oil and gas production in the USA continues to fall, and according to BP's 2020 Energy Outlook
Report, oil demand 'may never return to pre-pandemic levels'. Which would suggest we saw the peak in global consumption
last year.
And which, I
am bound to suggest, is not the desirable state of affairs if you fancy yourself the World's Biggest Energy Exporter.
International
Banker agrees, adding the gloomy forecast – depending on your point of view – that according to IATA, airline companies
will require 25% fewer planes in the sky over the next 5 years. That's hardly good news for Boeing, and might mean the
end of production for the 737 MAX. But it's quite a few gallons less of avgas, as well.
"Can US shale bounce back quickly from this crisis? It seems
unlikely. According to Ramanan Krishnamoorti, professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston's Cullen
College of Engineering, the industry is in serious trouble. "You're going to see a lot of bankruptcies, a lot of
furloughs, more than furloughs. You're going to see layoffs. You're going to see people leave this entire industry
because there aren't going to be jobs," he told Houston's ABC13 news outlet."
The US
fracking industry has been basically a Ponzi scheme since the first well was drilled. It seems to have become the
darling of the investment class who never quite seemed to realize that they were really not making much as a return
on investment.
Combine
that with what seems to be very short life spans for wells, and I think we probably have seen a decimation or
destruction of the industry. I'm not sure but I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see that the US will not have oil "
self-sufficiency" how much longer. (We will not mention the Russian and Canadian oil that is being imported.)
After
putting up with Doug Ford for the last while, I have rather given up on expecting modern-day Conservatives to
actually have a grasp on reality that Kenny is really a worry. It really sounds like he thinks did Alberta is going
to go back to the boom days of 1970s or at least of the 1990s. He is nuts.
I was just
reading about city of Shenzhan, the new 12 million inhabitant city just over the border from Hong Kong. As of this
year there's 16,000+ city buses and God knows how many taxis that have all gone electric. This is just a hint of
what's going to be happening around the world from the look of it. Heck, my small city has 3 electric buses on order.
The oil
market is not going to disappear anytime soon but even BP is reported as saying they don't expect oil demand to come
back to what it was before the pandemic
Our
lease ran out a couple of weeks ago on the RX-350, and we traded it in for a hybrid, the
UX-250H
.
Below 40 kph it's all-electric, like if you are cruising around a neighbourhood looking for a particular house
number. Above that the gas engine kicks in, but it is supported by the electric motor and gets more than 700 km on
a tank of gas. Teslas used to be a bit of an oddity around here as recently as 5 years ago, but now they're
everywhere. The Nissan Leaf is very popular as well, and the buyer base for electrics has expanded rapidly as soon
as drivers realized electric vehicles do not have to be nerdy, and at the high end (Tesla) they can leave
conventionally-powered cars in the dust. The Tesla is very fast and the acceleration is instant, with no throttle
lag.
Losing
the economic clout of the energy industry would be a blow – potentially a fatal one – to the USA. A few years ago,
not many, oil and gas companies would have made up nearly half of the top ten US companies for both revenue and
profit. Only one makes both listings now – Exxon-Mobil – but the industry remains tremendously influential in
politics and, more importantly, is into the government for so much money in loans and investments that its
collapse would imperil the government itself.
Some
would be quite happy to see America with its shoulders pinned to the mat, after enduring decades of its arrogance
and swaggering; I wouldn't be too sorry to see it myself. But it maintains -somehow – the world's biggest and
best-outfitted military by a long shot, and when it sees itself on an irreversible downward trend, it is going to
want to take its enemies with it.
It may
seem like a small matter but China seems to have electrified its entire scooter fleet. Scooters often pump out
more pollution than a car. Multiply that by tens of millions and you have a major pollution source. The battery
powered scooters are quiet and likely maintenance-free. Compare and contrast with India and its tens of millions
of two-cycle oil smoke/unburnt gasoline pollution generators a.k.a. scooters.
I
have not heard if it is 100% but it should be close. IIRC, I have read that Shanghai is full of them and there
seems to be pretty decent recharge facilities.
Given
the combination of global warming and the often atrocious air quality in major cities, the Communist Gov't
seems to be really pushing to get away from fossil fuels.
India
might be a good market for Chinese scooters and might spur some Indian companies to get going -- well after this
latest border war calms down.
And you
won't find the u-Ropean Parliament harping much or even loudly about the authoritarian regime in Azerbaidjan because
its produces good gas and it is run by
our kind of
dictator.
That's their 'Human Rights' bulls/t in a can for you. Myanmar has also got of remarkably lightly from the west too.
Leaving
Europe behind, I have always been amazed that President Duterte of the Philippines is`not not a pariah. Declaring
open season on one's citizens and
letting
encouraging the police to
shoot anyone they want strikes me as a bit dubious for a head of state.
Putin proposed, "exchanging guarantees of non-interference in each
other's internal affairs, including electoral processes, including using information and communication technologies and
high-tech methods."..
####
That is some
excellently timed next level trolling from Pootie-McPoot-Face.
I'd like to
look at the Navalny 'poisoning" from a slightly different angle, one which I think bears scrutiny. I've said several
times that nobody – to the best of my knowledge – has ever survived poisoning by VX. But that's not quite accurate – the
two women who thrust what was always believed to be VX in some form into the face of Kim Jong Nam (Kim Jong-Un's
half-brother) at an airport in Kuala Lumpur killed him stone dead. But they themselves apparently survived with no ill
effects except that one of them allegedly may have vomited.
The major
difference in the way the stories are treated, then, is the incredulity with which the apparent survival of the alleged
poisoners is regarded by the western press. Consider;
An amount of
VX, we are told, that weighs as much as two pennies would kill 500 people. I assume that's what he meant, as he is
strikingly un-eloquent for a scientist and the 'penny' is not a weight of measure. Is that a British penny, or an
American one? Big difference in weight.
''The other chemical agents like sarin, tabun, those kinds of things,
they're way below this. They're toxic, yes, but this is the king,'' said John Trestrail, a U.S. forensic toxicologist
who has examined more than 1,000 poisoning crimes.
He said an amount of VX weighing two pennies could kill 500 people
through skin exposure. It's also hard to acquire and would likely have come from a chemical weapons laboratory, making
it more likely that the attack was executed by a government."
Yes, you read
that right – VX is the King of vicious toxicological agents. Except for Novichok, which is ten times as deadly, and the
would-be killers dusted Navalny's bottle with enough of it that the bottle was liberally covered with the dust, and his
clothes apparently were as well, or so Team Navalny suspects. Say – that's a handy little timeline right there, innit?
When did Navalny put those clothes on? Presumably he had a shower before going to bed; did he dress in fresh clothes
before leaving for the airport, or wear the same stuff from the day before? Either way, the poisoner must have accessed
Navalny's room between the time he got up and the time the plane took off – if he still had Novichok on his clothes from
the day before, he'd be dead, plus would have contaminated God knows how many surfaces.
Anyway,
remember – Novichok is ten times as deadly as the King of nerve agents, VX. But it has killed – according to western
yarns – only one of six people exposed to it; Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Detective Nick Bailey, Navalny and
Charles Rowley all survived and have apparently achieved full recovery, Navalny in only a week after emerging from an
alleged coma.
Western
incredulity? None. Nothing to see here, old chap.
Listen to the
awful consequences of poisoning with VX, and remember the assassins only pushed some quantity of VX into Kim Jong-Nam's
face; a second's contact, them they ran away, not wearing gloves or any protective gear at all.
"VX is an amber-colored, tasteless, odorless chemical weapon first
produced in the 1950s. When inhaled or absorbed through the skin, it disrupts the nervous system and causes constriction
and increased secretions in the throat, leading to difficulty breathing. Fluids pour from the body, including sweat,
spontaneous urination and defecation, often followed by convulsions, paralysis and death. Kim Jong Nam sought help at
the airport clinic and died en route to a hospital within two hours of being attacked, police said."
I don't think
anyone has reported what Navalny was roaring and screaming, but perhaps it was"Get back!!! I'm shitting myself!! Jesus,
I can't stop pissing!!! Help me!!" although you would think if his symptoms included spontaneous defecation and
urination, someone would have said – it could be important. Different agent, I know, but the symptoms of nerve-agent
poisoning are quite similar across the type. Navalny's symptoms were nothing like nerve-agent poisoning, no matter how
energetically the defector Mirzayanov and his fan club try to backstop Navalny's story. The intense sweating and the
obvious gross irritation of the mucous membranes would have been unmistakable to the doctors in Omsk, considering
Navalny had already passed the onset of whatever symptoms he did have and was unconscious.
Kim Jong-Nam
died within two hours of being attacked with a nerve agent ten times less toxic than Novichok. Navalny was definitely
poisoned with a substance ten times more toxic than VX, according to the Germans and the French and whoever else swears
to that ludicrous story, but was to all appearances normal at least an hour after having been poisoned, since he showed
no symptoms until at least 40 minutes after the plane took off with no obvious GRU agents on board, and hung around the
airport before the flight was called at least long enough to drink a cup of tea, plus however long it took for him to
get from the hotel to the airport.
"The two women -- one Vietnamese, one Indonesian -- recorded on
surveillance cameras thrusting a substance into Kim Jong Nam's face as he was about to check in for a flight home to
Macau, apparently did not suffer serious health problems. Malaysian police have said they were not wearing gloves or
protective gear and that they washed their hands afterward as they were trained to do. However, authorities said Friday
that one of them vomited afterward.
Both have been
arrested along with another man. Authorities are also seeking several others, including an employee of North Korea's
state-owned airline, Air Koryo.
''If they used their bare hands, there's just no possible way that
they would have exposed him to VX unless they took some sort of precaution,'' Goldberger said. ''The only precaution I
know of would be administration of the antidote before this went down.''
Perhaps that's
it; perhaps immediately after swigging from his water-bottle – which he left in the hotel room, obviously – Navalny rang
room service for some Novichok antidote. Just in case. Can't be too careful, when you are the main opposition leader.
"No areas were cordoned off and protective measures were not taken.
When asked about it a day after the attack, airport spokesman Shah Rahim said there was no risk to travelers and the
airport was regularly and properly cleaned. But officials announced Friday that the facility would be decontaminated.
''It's as persistent as motor oil. It's going to stay there for a
long time. A long time, which means anyone coming in contact with this could be intoxicated from it,'' Trestrail said.
''If this truly is VX, they ought to be calling in a hazmat team and looking at any place these women or the victim
traveled after the exposure.''
A hazmat team,
and looking at any place the assassin or anyone potentially exposed might have traveled. For an agent ten times less
toxic than Novichok.
Reading
this
Wikipedia account
of how Kim Jong-nam was targeted and attacked by the two women, I think there are other
possibilities to consider:
(a) that the substance or substances sprayed into his face was / were dangerous only if (in the case of two or more
substances) combined in a particular way and then inhaled;
(b) Kim was known to be allergic to particular substances and the people who plotted his assassination knew what
those substances were and used them to induce an anaphylactic shock that killed him;
(c) Kim had other health issues (he was a very tubby fellow) that should have been considered factors in his death;
(d) one of the women who attacked Kim supposedly crept up behind him, took out a cloth with chemical on it and
reached around his head to smack the cloth onto his face – sounds a bit like those movie / TV show stunts where
someone creeps up from behind his victim and puts a chloroform-soaked cloth onto the victim's face – and
chloroform
can be toxic in high doses
;
(e) Kim's treatment at the Menara clinic at the airport included atropine and adrenaline and these could have
contributed to his death if the plotters had foreknowledge of what would be used to treat him were he to be poisoned
and planned his assassination accordingly.
Kim's
assassins need not have been North Koreans or connected to the North Korean government in any way. He also might not
have been expected to die but just be given a scare, but the shock he got along with his obesity and other underlying
health issues might have done him in.
Yes,
those are all good and sound arguments. The point I was trying to make, though, is that American toxicologists and
field experts are astounded that anyone might survive exposure to VX; it is unaccountable not only that they could
be alive, but that there is not a trail of death following the assassins as well until it kills them, too. But
nobody seems surprised for Navalny to make a complete recovery and be sitting up in bed making demands and
strolling around the stairwells, after exposure to a much more toxic agent that should have killed him, while
nobody noticed anyone sneaking into his room dressed in a full hazmat suit with breathing apparatus and apparently
others could come and go from the scene of the alleged exposure with no protection.
Perhaps
the Skripals 'disappeared' because the British government was unsure how to present them after a supposedly-deadly
poisoning attempt which they plainly are said to have survived. Perhaps also it is the judgment of similar
authorities that the public will accept the dichotomy without demur; hence, the agent can still be nefarious
beyond belief because it is so insidious and deadly, but Navalny can be alive and making noise after exposure to
it.
MOSCOW,
September 28 – RIA Novosti.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel secretly
visited Alexei Navalny while he was being treated at the Charité clinic in Berlin, "Spiegel" weekly reported, citing its
own informant.
Other details
are not provided.
On August 20,
the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation* was hospitalized in Omsk after he had fallen ill on an aeroplane. Doctors
diagnosed a metabolic disorder that had caused a sharp drop in blood sugar levels. It is not yet clear what caused this,
but no poisons were found in Navalny's blood and urine.
Later he was
transported to Germany. In early September, the German government announced that the Russian had been poisoned with a
substance from the "Novichok" group of biological warfare agents. Moscow sent a request for more detailed information on
the results of analyses from the Berlin laboratory, but there was no response.
At the same
time, it is known that the German intelligence service BND has had access to "Novichok" since the 1990s. In addition, it
has been studied by about 20 Western countries, including Great Britain, the USA, Sweden, the Czech Republic. Russia, in
accordance with a presidential decree of 1992, stopped developing in the field of chemical weapons, and in 2017
destroyed the entire available stock of such substances, which has been confirmed by the OPCW.
On September
7, Navalny was discharged from the hospital, his condition is satisfactory.
*The Anti-Corruption Foundation is included by the Russian Ministry
of Justice in the register of NGOs performing the functions of a foreign agent.
Note: the
bastion of freedom and democracy has still not, as per agreement, destroyed its chemical weapons stocks -- always delays
and so on, see
On Wednesday the Director-General of the Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Ambassador Ahmet Üzümcü of Turkey, congratulated Russia on completing the
destruction of its chemical weapons stockpile which originally totalled 39 967 agent tonnes (i.e. excluding munition
weight). This represents a major milestone towards realizing a world without chemical weapons as envisaged by the
negotiators of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)
The USA, the other major possessor of a chemical weapons stockpile
(which originally totalled approximately 30 000 agent tonnes), has completed the destruction of approximately 90 per
cent of its stockpile and is scheduled to finish its operations by 2023 .
Technologically backward Russia completes its task as agreed: the far more technologically advanced USA is still
dawdling along
It's hard
to imagine the Germans poisoned his samples, although I suppose it is possible. But if Pevchik had poisoned him with
something intended to incapacitate but not kill him, you'd think the doctors in Omsk would have detected it.
Navalny confirms meeting with Merkel at Berlin clinic
28 September 2020, 11:22
Blogger Alexei Navalny has confirmed that German Chancellor Angela
Merkel visited him at the Berlin Charité clinic, where he was being treated. Earlier, the secret visit of the politician
was reported by the journal "Der Spiegel", citing sources.
"There was a
meeting, but you shouldn't call it "secret " -- rather, a private meeting and conversation with the family. I am very
grateful to Chancellor Merkel for visiting me at the hospital", Navalny wrote on his Twitter microblog on September 28.
At the same
time, the interlocutors of "Der Spiegel" called the visit top secret, without giving details of the meeting. The
publication considered this fact a sign of Merkel's loyalty to Navalny.
Earlier, the
German Chancellor called Navalny a victim of an attack carried out with a substance from the "Novichok" group.
The Russian
Foreign Ministry considered such statements by Berlin to be yet another information campaign against Russia, noting that
the accusations were not supported by facts.
Alexei Navalny
felt unwell during the Tomsk-Moscow flight on 20 August. The plane urgently landed in Omsk, the blogger was taken to the
emergency hospital No. 1, and later transported to the Charite clinic in Berlin,
Gazeta.ru
recalls.
There, the Russian "found" signs of intoxication with a substance
from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors. However, Omsk doctors during the examination of the patient did not reveal
intoxication with this substance. On September 23, Navalny was discharged from the hospital.
So Merkel too
is part and parcel of the Navalny bullshit performance dreamt up by the US Dept. of State.
I wonder if
she "secretly" visited Yuschenko and Timoshenko and Verzilov when they were patients at the Charité
I should
hardly imagine so -- they are of no importance whatsoever when compared with the "leader of the Russian opposition",
albeit the Russians themselves consider the Bullshitter with the derision he deserves, but don't tell anyone in the
"free world" that!
Germany
seems to be collecting Eastern Europe's politicians. Timoshenko miraculously woke from her coronavirus coma, but I
cannot find information that says she was also at Charite.
EU green light
for merger suggests Franco-German pressure for 'champion' companies is paying off.
blah blah blah blah
The clearance
could become a precedent for other political mergers -- such as the Franco-Italian tie-up between cruise ship-builders
Fincantieri and Chantiers de l'Atlantique -- and the Commission will have to "limit the contagion," the first senior
official said.
And the Dane has to ensure the Polish champion keeps its promises .
####
Interesting if
you follow how the Brussels/EU is still struggling to adapt to the real world (i.e. outside the EU) rather than its own
bubble and dreams of a western led globalization, particularly it's failure to balance consumer protection with building
modern, EU based companies/organizations that can hold their own against other globocorps. It's where principles hit
reality.
But, I was
sure that there was something in the past about a possible Russian share in the Gdansk Lotos Refinery (I was wrong) but
I did come across this in looking for further information:
One of the
arguments for the thesis that Russians could enter the Polish market as a shareholder of one of the two biggest
refineries, is supposedly the fact that they are already present in Germany. However, it is worth reminding that they
slipped into Germany thanks to Venezuela's fondness towards Russian politics. Venezuela's late president Hugo Chavez
agreed for PDVSA, a state-owned oil company, to sell its shares in five German refineries to Russia's Rosneft. Since
then, Igor Sechin's concern has been trying to acquire the missing link – the retail market and gas stations. Despite
interventions, negotiations and investments, Russians have not achieved this goal yet. They have been trying to purchase
gas stations in Germany for a few years. This is the next natural step for any oil company that took over shares in a
refinery on a new market. After the success on the wholesale market, it wants to earn on the retail market by selling
its own oil products. However, nobody wants to sell Russians, in this case Rosneft, any gas stations despite the fact
they have been present on the market in Germany for years.
In January
2019, Rosneft Deutschland GmbH, Rosneft's daughter company, launched a trade and marketing business in Germany. Today it
purchases products from three German refineries in which it has shares
Why would Russians want to enter the Polish market? Poland is one of
the biggest importers of Russian oil. In 2019 PKN Orlen imported 8.3 m tons of oil from Russia, which makes it one of
the biggest importers of this fuel. By entering the Polish market, Russians could achieve synergy by acquiring 30
percent of shares in the refinery. However,
####
Plenty more at
the link.
So, it looks
like this merger is to bolster the lo-land of Po-lands energy position and protect the key refinery being picked up by
one means or another by Russia.
French
president heads to Lithuania and Latvia, where discussion will focus on Russia and Belarus.
"The so-called new architecture of security that France wants to
develop with Russia is sensitive for us, because it's a bilateral conversation discussing a multilateral issue," said a
Lithuanian government official ahead of Macron's visit
So far
Macron's team has played it coy, avoiding confirming that he will meet with Tikhanovskaya but not ruling it out either.
She has expressed her desire to meet with him
Western officials have stressed that they are not in competition
with Moscow over Belarus and Macron believes Russia has a role to play.
####
The €µ
'Failing at Home so preening abroad' PR campaign continues apace after his successful trip to Lebanon where he saved the
country from disaster. Except he didn't!
Le Coq soit
bloqué! (trans. 'cock block' ! 😉 )
What the f/k
does he think he can offer? Are the Balts and Russia going to be overawed with his garlic charm before he sleeps with
their wives (and husbands) before they all form a circle and hold hands merrily? No.
Yes, the only
thing that makes sense is a a grand strategic treaty between the EU and Russia, but when some of its own members are
actively undermining such a thing and playing with the Americans at the same time, you have to wonder what all the point
of this is? Simply 'Don't you forget about me'? Russia is not going to patiently wait for the EU to climb out of its own
hypocritical a**hole after years of sanctions and 'Do as we say, not as we do.'
The CFE Treaty
is not fit for purpose and the permanent rotation of NATO forces on Russia's borders drives a tank through it, however
clever they think this loophole is. By the time the EU is ready to talk properly and get off its high horse, the only
things it will have attached to its shoulders will be its own stubby little fingers, or should that be 'cut off its nose
to spite its face'? Just ridiculous!
Ha, ha,
haaaa!! 'Garlic charm' – I don't know if that was deliberate or accidental, but it's brilliant.
The Baltic
position on Russia is well-known, and you would not have to be much of a political wunderkind to figure out that the
Balts hope for a chance to shit all over any plans France might have that smack too much of rapprochement to suit
them. But there is no real danger Micron would proceed with any such plans even if he made them; he is a political
lightweight aching to duplicate the derring-do of Sarkozy. No political softening between Russia and Europe is
possible with the current crop of European leaders, as all are committed Atlanticists to some degree and in thrall to
Washington. They might pretend Washington is bullying them, but it hurts so good, daddy.
Lavrov has
already announced that Russia has given up on trying to get the west to like it, and acknowledges it is not possible.
Just like admitting you are an alcoholic – metaphorically speaking, I wasn't pointing at you personally -is the day
your recovery begins, resolving to dedicate no more Russian effort to wooing the western delinquents is the day the
west loses a shiny toy it loved to play with. Few moments were so satisfying as those dedicated to typing "Moscow
denies it!" after some new fabricated atrocity was thrown in Russia's face. I recommend a macro be built into all
Russian diplomatic computers' word-processor programs which reads, "Believe what you like. It is of no interest to
us. Oh, and your zipper is open. Made you look!!". The last two sentences are optional, but I think they lend a
certain
joie de vivre
.
Why the
German Chancellor visited the blogger at the hospital is not quite clear. After all, if German doctors are right
about "Novichok", then the head of the German Cabinet of Ministers, Bundeskanzlerin Merkel, seriously risked her
life.
Armen
Gasparyan* has suggested that the matter is due to the status of the patient from Russia -- after all, he is in
Germany as an official guest of the Chancellor. And what kind of guest is this, with whom the hospitable hostess does
not even meet?
So they
decided to support this fantasy about his status in Germany by following due protocol, but with a supposedly secret
visit, which secret the whole world immediately learnt about.
* Armen
Gasparyan works for a Russian media outlet Sputnik and, at the same time, is a member of Russia Today board. In
parallel, he is a member of Russian State Duma Youth Council and a holder of a prize from the Ministry of
Communications of the Russian Federation for his contribution towards developing radio communication.
In December
2018, the "Russian opposition" (that's the non-systemic opposition, mind you -- the ones that no one votes for) -- has
included Gasparyan in the list of "Putin's propagandists".
It might be
interesting to see what kind of deal would result from a process in which Russia has given up trying to be liked by
the west, and consequently examines each negotiation on its merits alone.
I think it might result in quite a few
initial offers being rebuffed with "Uh huh. Go fuck yourself." And that would be kind of refreshing. It might usher
in an international process between the two countries in which no 'deal' was possible until each side was satisfied
it had gotten the better of the other. I need hardly point out these would be few and far between, and none would be
arms-control agreements.
22 September 2020 13:18 What is known about Maria Pevchikh: Navalny's mysterious companion – connected with
his foreign customers?
The trail of Maria Pevchikh begins in London and seems to lead to the shadow curators of the
Anti-Corruption Foundation
If you believe that journalists have so far been able to unearth Navalny's mysterious
companion on his "last tour" in Siberia, Maria Pevchikh lives in a prestigious area of London
overlooking the Thames. But her old grandmother Valentina Vasilievna – in a modest
two-room apartment on the far outskirts of Moscow – in Zelenograd. Only now her
granddaughter does not visit her at all, although in recent years she has flown to Moscow 64
times.
"Komsomolskaya Pravda" went to all the addresses of Maria Pevchikh in Russia –
Zelenograd, Moscow State University, school, neighbours, relatives and colleagues at
FBK
and discovered that Pevchikh was not only Navalny's employee, but the conspiratorial
head of his investigation department, and, possibly, its curator from Western
customers.
LIKE A DETECTIVE Maria Pevchikh. A couple of weeks ago, this name was not known to anyone except to a
narrow circle of people. But now it has thundered all over the world. Now Pevchikh claims to
be an old and trusted employee of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (Navalny's main brainchild)
with almost 10 years of experience, who has had a hand in almost all of his landmark
investigations. But her name never flashed in the credits for the FBK video exposures . And
the opposition blogger's associates have never spoken about her anywhere.
So after the mysterious "poisoning" of Navalny on August 20, no one let slip the fact
that on the trip he was accompanied by a mysterious companion – 33-year-old Maria
Pevchikh. Perhaps Maria would have remained unnoticed if the transport police of the Siberian
Federal District had not found her name among those who were on that trip with the
oppositionist. And it turned out – what a coincidence – she was the only one of
the 6 members of Navalny's entourage in Siberia who was not interviewed: " Marina [sic}
Pevchikh, who permanently resides in Great Britain, on August 20, avoided giving
explanations. On August 22 the said citizen flew to Germany, and therefore it was not
possible to get an explanation from her", the police reported on September 11. That is, 3
weeks after the incident! Until that moment, there was complete silence about the existence
of Pevchikh.
But as soon as this name was sounded, something strange began to happen. More like a
detective story.
LOOKING FOR POLICE, LOOKING FOR JOURNALISTS
The name of the Pevchikh immediately became surrounded with rumours and speculation. Who is
she? Where from? FBK employees were stubbornly silent. There were only two mentions of
Pevchikh in open sources. First, how about a 9th grade student from Zelenograd gymnasium No.
1528 who took part in the international (!) "Gifted children" competition. The second (from
2010) on the website of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Moscow State University:
"Congratulations to Maria Pevchikh! The 5th year student has been selected as the head of the
Russian delegation at the G8 Youth Forum in Canada based on the results of the All-Russian
competition". And a photo of a smiling red-haired girl. And journalists also found the name
of the Pevchikh in the list of students at the prestigious London School of Economics and
Political Science.
A couple more blurry images from the Internet, where it is generally difficult to see
someone (supposedly in 2013, from a Moscow hotel, where Navalny had a secret meeting with the
ex-Prime Minister of Belgium). Well, Western journalists also recognized Maria as the woman
caught in the lenses of cameras in Berlin next to Navalny's wife Julia. True, everywhere the
"Pevchikhs" are in dark glasses and wearing a mask. From coronavirus or prying eyes? That, in
fact, is all.
We congratulate Maria Pevchikh!
Such mystery only spurred interest – who is this lady?
"Investigations" began – who Pevchikh was, overshadowing even the "poisoning" of
Navalny. And bit by bit the image of a certain secret agent was formed – a sort of
James Bond in a skirt. With reference to a source close to FBK, a Sherlock Holmes managed to
dig up from the Internet that Maria lives in a prestigious area of London overlooking Tower
Bridge. Owns a chain of bookstores in Britain. And she participates in competitions under the
US Special Forces program – "Navy Seals"!
And she is also a friend of Navalny's rivals and associates in the fight against the
"Russian regime" who have settled in London – Khodorkovsky, Chichvarkin, Ashurkov. But
bad luck – none of these figures in social networks have found a friend by the name of
Pevchikh. And in the photos that appear in their social networks, none of Maria is to be
seen.
Maria's story with social networks is generally amazing – they simply do not
exist! In the 21st century that is simply unthinkable for a young woman. Have you at least
one young woman acquaintance who has no Facebook or Instagram page, or who is in at least in
Odnoklassniki or VKontakte? Quite!
Experts believe that such secrecy is one of the sure signs that a person is related to
the special services. They – both in Russia and abroad – do not welcome the
publicity of their employees on social networks.
However, Major General of the FSB in reserve Alexander Mikhailov admits that she might
be playing a two-sided gamey:
"Apparently, this person leads a double life and, on the one hand, creates turbulence
around her activities in the same social networks, but on the other hand, she does not want
to attract personal attention to herself. I think this woman may have accounts, but under
assumed names. Because it is impossible to imagine that she works in such a field and does
not use modern technologies at all."
HER FATHER IS A SCIENTIST AND WORKS WITH VIRUSES
But a page on the social network has turned out to belong to Pevchikh's father
Konstantin. No one has any doubts that he is Maria's father – both are registered in
the same apartment in Zelenograd. And Konstantinovna is Maria's patronymic. At the same time,
there is no Maria Pevchikh even in his photo or in subscribers! But there is information that
he is the general director of the Zelenograd NIOBIS LLC, which is engaged in research in the
field of virology. At the same time, he is developing the SkinPort system of painless (say,
invisible) drug delivery through the skin. Which is also a very suspicious circumstance, when
his daughter accompanies an oppositionist, who was either injected or not with some kind of
poison. So much so that he only knew he had been poisoned when he began to feel bad.
There is not much information about NIOBIS either. In the magazine "Zelenograd
Entrepreneur" of October 2011, there is an interview with the leaders of the company Grishin
and Morozov (Pevchikh even then did not communicate with journalists for some reason). In it,
they declare that the NIOBIS biological laboratory is a joint project of the Probe Microscopy
and Nanotechnology Research and Education Centre and the Zelenograd Nanotechnology Centre.
However, in these centres, no matter how many times we called, they did not tell us anything
about NIOBIS, switching from one employee to another. At the legal address in Moscow on
Viktorenko Street, we did not find any information.
Interestingly, the British tabloids could not find Pevchikh either. In search of at
least some information, British journalists began to call Russia, former and current FBK
employees.
"British journalists contacted me and found out at least some information about Maria
Pevchikh", Vitaly Serukanov, the former deputy head of Navalny's Moscow headquarters and
lawyer of his foundation, told KP. "This suggests that not only we in Russia do not
understand what kind of person she is, but, apparently, the British themselves are not clear
about what kind of activities she is involved with. Even they have nothing concrete to go
on.
Of course, rumours immediately spread that Maria Pevchikh was a spy. Some even stated
it openly:
"She is an undercover British intelligence agent with MI6", political scientist
Vladislav Rogimov believes. "My source, a former high-ranking official of the Stasi [GDR
Ministry of State Security] , immediately stated this. And Pevchikh supplied Navalny with
information about the targets of his investigations, such that an ordinary person cannot
get."
A couple more blurry shots from the Internet, where it is generally difficult to see
anyone
MSU AND COLLEGE
Strange, but none of the graduates of those years could remember the outstanding student who
glorified the faculty during her studies by becoming the leader of a youth
delegation.
"Well, I seem to remember Maria – such a bright girl. We crossed paths with her
in the hostel. She loved rock music and knew English well", Svetlana Cherezova, a graduate of
the social faculty in 2009, told KP. [American rock music, the chief weapon of US soft
power! Rock music is the bane of modern society! -- ME 😦 ]
"And how did you realise that she knows a foreign language?"
"In the summer, foreign students were settled in the hostel. And she communicated well
with them. But after that I somehow didn't see her "
Another graduate of the social faculty recalled the Pevchikh, but also only vaguely.
"Yes, she studied with us. Smart, open like that. But that's all I remember about
her."
And in the Zelenograd gymnasium №1528 Maria Pevchikh was not remembered at all. Even
by the old-timers who have been working at the school for over 30 years.
"No, we didn't have a student with that last name."
HEAD, ABOUT WHOM NO ONE KNEW ANYTHING Even after journalists had found out that Pevchikh has been an FBK employee since 2011,
Navalny's fund employees remained silent about her. No statements! None at all.
And only on September 15, when Navalny came to his senses, and journalists and
political analysts said in unison that Pevchikh herself could have organized his "poisoning",
the FBK employees, as if on command "from above", began to urgently divert suspicions from
her, turning everything into a joke and publishing pictures of themselves with her. Georgy
Alburov, who had previously called himself the head of the FBK investigation department,
suddenly revealed his real boss to the world yes, Pevchikh:
"I have been working with Maria in the Investigation Department for 8 years and for
about 7 of them we constantly joked about some kind of martial art that she went to a couple
of times. They teach how to fight off drunken men with the help of a hundred different
techniques of hitting in the groin (we laugh at this). Our office wiretap also failed to
remember the name, and now Maria is featured in the media as 'a martial arts master trained
under the US Army SEAL program'. It's funny. And it's not funny that now all her relatives
are hunted by the Prigozhin gangster 'media' (and the British ones are also "Prigozhin
gangsters", yes, George? – author) . Not for the poisoners of Alexei, but for
Maria's 85-year-old grandmother. We shall remember this and shall not forget. And I wish my
fighting friend (and boss) fortitude and courage."
Georgy Alburov, who had previously called himself the head of the FBK investigation
department, suddenly revealed his real boss to the world. Photo: http://www.instagram.com/alburov
On the same day, FBK lawyer Lyubov Sobol also published a photo of herself with Maria:
"I know Masha as an honest and decent person. To suggest that she may have been involved in
the poisoning of Navalny complete bullshit and a smokescreen to distract attention".
And not a word about why for so long all as one "fighters against corruption" were
silent about the existence of Pevchikh and the fact that she was on a trip with Navalny in
Siberia.
BUT WHAT ABOUT GRANDMA?
And Maria Pevchikh's grandmother really lives in Zelenograd. Not far from the local forest
park. Here, apparently, the "Prigozhin gangster media" had been hunting for her.
In general, it is strange that an employee of the investigation department, who herself
"hunts" for the targets of Navalny's revelations and for these targets' relatives as well,
was outraged that journalists began to visit all possible addresses associated with Maria.
What would have happened if the "Navalnyites" themselves had not hidden her existence hardly
anyone could have "crossed her grandma's threshold", because nobody had seen her there for a
long time: she dwelt elsewhere.
"Yes, I know Valentina Vasilievna. Our children studied together, in the same school.
My son and her Kostya", a neighbour told the KP correspondent on the street at the entrance.
"She lived here just like me since the construction of the house, since 1982. But I haven't
seen her for a long time, although I had met her all the time before. She seems to be still
working".
"At 85 years of age?"
"Why 85? She is 84".
"And what does she do? "
"Earlier, I believe, she was at Mikron [manufacturer of integrated circuits –
author] . Where now, I do not know".
"Her son often turns up here? "
"No, I haven't seen him for a long time.
And her granddaughter Maria?
"Oh, I did not know that she has a granddaughter! I have never seen her."
No other neighbours remembered Masha Pevchikh, even from the photo. Although she, as
the media has already dug up, in recent years flew to Moscow at least 64 times, but here,
with her grandmother, she has not appeared. At least, neighbours have never came across
her.
"I AM SO FUCKING AWESOME" .
And only ABOUT a month after the "poisoning" of Navalny, when suspicions about Maria Pevchikh
had reached their peak, she herself gave an interview for some reason to the BBC, and not to
the Russian media. "I am the head of the investigation department at FBK. I was recruited by
an ad (in 2011), as they say. If you've seen our investigations on Navalny's channel, then I
have this or that relationship." Maria explained her incognito state in one phrase: "It was
my personal choice and desire to avoid publicity". But at the same time: "Absolutely everyone
in the office knew me. A huge number of people from the journalistic environment knew me.
Therefore, the fact that I am somehow connected with FBK is a secret only for a very wide
audience."
Investigations about herself were ridiculed by Pevchikh (a professional technique when
it is impossible to refute, but it is necessary to object): "This is absolutely ridiculous. I
read about myself and thought: Damn, how fucking awesome I am".
About the her scientist father: "Some creepy, crazy story has been made up about my
father, with whom I have not communicated for 15 years – my parents are divorced. And
he is portrayed as almost a key figure in all that has happened".
But Maria gave a lot and of details about what happened in Tomsk, about how boldly she,
together with others, rushed into Navalny's room in order to collect "evidence" –
bottles of water. She confirmed that she flew to Germany on the same aircraft as did Navalny
and took those bottles out of the hotel to the West and on which German experts found traces
of "poison". True, she did not explain why she had not y taken sheets and towels, because
poison can be both solid and gaseous. The discerning Pevchikh's' suspicions fell only on
liquid.
Maria tossed a few of her pictures to the BBC and a portion, apparently to dilute the
avaricious photos that the media was chewed on.
Talking about everything and yet . . . again about nothing. Also a professional
reception?
SECRET BRITISH FBK CURATOR
"When they began asking me about Maria Pevchikh, I also could not immediately understand who
it was", Vitaly Serukanov, an FBK employee in 2013-2017, told KP. "But then I remembered that
I first noticed her (although I had probably seen her many times, but had not paid any
attention to her) in 2016. It was surprising to me that Navalny, who always kept his distance
from his employees, behaved in a special way with her. With respectful reverence. As if they
were of the same rank, as if they were of the the same position. This is generally strange
and did not fit into the paradigm of his behaviour. That is to say, Maria is a person who
appeared sometimes, but who had to be respected. My personal opinion is that she is a liaison
agent between Navalny and foreign customers. The person who brought the invoice and, at the
right time, audited the investigation department, supervised its work. Such as , you know, a
British auditor who is always lurking in the shadows.
"Pevchikh told the BBC that she actually ran Navalny's investigation
department.
"I have been saying for a long time that the FBK investigation department "headed by
the talented Alburov" was a screen that does not represent anything. Alburov is just a drone
driver who provides a naive Russian man in the street with a picture: "You see, we are not
foreign agents. Our investigation department is here". In fact, there is no talented Alburov.
And there are people like Maria Pevchikh who flock to Russia to promote the interests of
their Russian and Western masters. That's all, no matter how tough it sounds.
"That is, all this hidden lifestyle, lack of social networks and photos are part of
this opera?
"Absolutely!"
But you had some corporate parties, meetings at FBK. How did it happen that for
almost 10 years Pevchikh never got into the frame?
"She very professionally avoided attracting attention to herself. Never hit the lens.
And I'm sure the rest of the people made sure that this did not happen. At the same time, FBK
is a special society where everyone wants to become a media and popular person. There are
even internal competitions to see who is more popular on social media. The same was always
demanded by Navalny. His main postulate in politics was: "I am absolutely open. I have no
secrets. " But it turns out there are! Suddenly, a certain Pevchikh is presented to the
world, who has never even been registered in the fund and who lives on an unbelievable
income. All the stories about her business are just a way to legalize her financial situation
– like 'I'm such an ordinary simpleton from Britain'. Who's going to believe
that?
And they would hide Pevchikh further. But she was so very much lit up in this story
with the "poisoning" that they had no other choice. I was really amused how all these clowns,
such as Alburov and Sobol, on command, simultaneously began to upload their prepared photos
of Pevchikh. It's funny. Why did they hide her before? Refused to answer questions about her?
And then they burst through at once. Received instructions to bring Pevchikh out into the
light so as to ward off the threat from her? All this suggests that Pevchikh knows more than
we can ever imagine. The story is a real detective one. Even a spy one. It's very interesting
what will happen next.
She is almost too perfect; a daddy who is both a virologist and a developer of a means of
delivering a drug through the skin without a needle or any sensation likely to be noticed,
leader of the effort to collect 'evidence' in the hotel room – an effort surprising in
its thoroughness in that they thought to take a lawyer with them and yet still made it before
the hotel had begun to clean the room, and a young woman with no social media presence when
they normally cannot powder their noses without Facebooking it. Add to that the full-court
press by the Navalnyites to ridicule any possibility she might be involved; especially Sobol,
who as a lawyer herself would be able to more accurately appraise the weight of mounting
coincidences.
But you went too far when you spat on American rock music. I will grant that at least half
of it is crap, but America is the cradle of rock, more so than the UK. Your punishment is to
listen to Joan Jett and the Blackhearts do "I Hate Myself for Loving You" on a volume at
least 8 and preferably all the way over. This is a fine example of the genre, one I used to
play for the little 'un when she actually was a little 'un, to show her that women can do
anything.
Truth be told: political operatives own and run our MSM. This is why the press is called
the 'Fourth Estate'.
They are more correctly described as a Fifth Column , one far more open and sworn to
destroy our country and its foundational citizens – and taxpayers – as any that
ever operated during World War II. You would think this would be of vital interest to people
who loudly declare themselves to be "Nazi-punchers", but who time and again show themselves to
be merely low-level street terrorists informed and inspired by Mao's Red Guard and the
irredeemable thugs of the African National Congress.
One wonders what's preventing them from
mimicking the Red Terror waged by the leftists of Spain, when the battle for "freedom" involved
the disinterment of the graves of Catholic clergy to better pose the corpses in blasphemous
positions. Imagine how depraved those Mostly Peaceful protesters had to have been for even a
leftist-supporting site such as Wikipedia to baldly state
The violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people (including 6,832
Roman Catholic priests, the vast majority in the summer of 1936 in the wake of the military
coup), attacks on the Spanish nobility, industrialists, and conservative politicians, as well
as the desecration and burning of monasteries and churches.
Directly in the crosshairs this time are small and medium-sized owner-operated businesses
– the true backbone of American freedom and prosperity – who have largely been
sacrificed in exchange for the knock-kneed offerings of Danegeld from our giant conglomerates,
all of whom have prospered immensely from the suffering and privation brought on by the
Democratic lockdown of society – and the total shutdown of our economy.
Think! – have you read a single article charting how the government war on small
business directly enriched Amazon.com and
world's richest autocrat, Jeff Bezos? . who then funnels his windfall into a newspaper that
blatantly pimps for the Democratic Party, which translates into a vast payday for the DNC, not
least from its newly-approved partnership with the shadowy and many-tentacled Soros-surrogate
group, BLM?
The result is what you'd expect when a fringe group operates with the full cooperation and
partnership of major industry and both political parties (don't confuse Trump with a
standard-issue Republican, please – he may have terrible flaws, but that isn't one of
them) – 10% of the population holding the other 90% in a chokehold with only one set of
rules: no arrest and prosecution for Bolshevik violence and terror ..but the zero-tolerance
heavy hand of corrupt Leviathan coming down hard against any and all citizens who fight back
or, eventually – inevitably – who even struggle against their restraints.
Short of the sudden arrival of celestial horsemen to punish the guilty and reward the
set-upon, it has become clear that the only answer is the one that the Powers That Be claim to
be dead set against: racial separatism. (Particularly when we consider that all that will be
necessary to turn America into Hell on earth will be the adoption of Ibram Kendi's First Law,
sometimes known as equality of outcome :
To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the
U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is
evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.
Could any "amendment" be more terrifyingly totalitarian than this?)
White and black separation would, instead, accomplish two goals, both more important than
Kendi's quick fix: we would learn soon enough about actual equality of outcomes (which
is why no Communist, black or white, wants anything to do with the creation of one more failed
basket-case black state), and much more importantly, white families can sleep secure in their
beds at night, without worrying about Apache raids at midnight, egged on and recorded for
"posterity" by that Fourth Estate/Fifth Column referred to up top. Because the fact of the
matter is that, even should some combination of government and law-enforcement halt the burning
and looting of America – as things stand now, none of the worst malefactors will ever see
the inside of a prison cell .which means any ceasefire will only be temporary, to be violently
ripped asunder the moment they sense white Americans have at last lowered their guard once
more. And living in perpetual paranoid readiness for violent uprisings and mindless destruction
is no way to live at all.
Trump has it half right, a border wall is the answer: only it needs to run
lengthwise , between the Southern and Northern borders. If we don't use the next four
years to plan out such a separation, fretting over our children's children will be a fruitless
exercise – those who aren't murdered will be captured and 'go native' .and in case you
haven't looked at a globe lately, there's no place left to run.
As a recovering journalist, I can point out that even on a rinkydink rag in a small city,
where I got fired for being a real journalist back in the early '70's; he who owns the
presses and distribution networks calls the tune. It's a matter of working-class (no matter
how middle-class your income or social-status) versus the ownership class. The latter wins
every time.
"Then there are the Chinese. OK, they really are communists, but who is it that has
bought into the nonsense about them oppressing poor, innocent, religious head choppers? Who
cares even if those lies were true? Yep, that's millennial morons."
Actually it was the USG through funding of various think tanks and NGOs that started the
whole fiasco with the MSM pushing the narrative. You know people with power in established
organizations, who tend to be much older. I wouldn't blame the people at the bottom so much for
the decisions made at the top.
Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt
influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift
U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's
confidence in our democratic process."
What America is yet again conniving to do is to discredit any domestic political dissent
against the fraud of "American Democracy" by connecting this dissent to those nations that
are the latest targets of America's Two Minutes of Hate campaign.
This is a standard American tactic that the USA always resorts to when it fears its own
citizens are starting to question the fairy tale of American "Democracy and Freedom." Thus,
during the Cold War, the USA even to discredit some elements of the Civil Rights movement as
being assets of the Soviet Union.
The great Orwellian hypocrisy of America's pants-wetting complaints that other countries
are meddling in America's (fake) democracy is that the United States itself is guilty of
regime changing, balkanizing, and colonizing scores of foreign nations dating back over a
century to the USA's regime change and eventual colonization of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Bottom Line: America needs to drink a big up of Shut the F*ck Up with its pathetic Pity
Party whining about foreigners trying to influence its bogus democracy.
The Washington Post , whose sole owner
is a CIA contractor , has published yet another anonymously sourced CIA press release
disguised as a news report which just so happens to facilitate longstanding CIA foreign
policy.
True to form ,
at no point does WaPo follow standard journalistic protocol and disclose its blatant financial
conflict of interest with the CIA when promoting an unproven CIA narrative which happens to
serve the consent-manufacturing agendas of the CIA for its new cold war with Russia.
And somehow in our crazy, propaganda-addled society, this is accepted as "news".
The CIA has had a hard-on for the collapse of the Russian Federation
for many years , and preventing the rise of another multipolar world at all cost has been
an open agenda of US imperialism since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed it is clear
that the escalations
we've been watching unfold against Russia were in fact
planned well in advance of 2016, and it is only by propaganda narratives like this one that
consent has been manufactured for a new cold war which imperils the life of every organism on
this planet.
There is no excuse for a prominent news outlet publishing a CIA press release disguised as
news in facilitation of these CIA agendas. It is still more inexcusable to merely publish
anonymous assertions about the contents of that CIA press release. It is especially inexcusable
to publish anonymous assertions about a CIA press release which merely says that something is
"probably" happening, meaning those making the claim don't even know.
None of this stopped The Washington Post from publishing this propaganda piece on behalf of
the CIA. None of it stopped this story from being widely shared by prominent voices on social
media and repeated by major news outlets like
CNN , The New
York Times , and
NBC . And none of it stopped all the usual liberal influencers from taking the claims and
exaggerating the certainty:
The CIA-to-pundit pipeline, wherein intelligence agencies "leak" information that is picked
up by news agencies and then wildly exaggerated by popular influencers, has always been an
important part of manufacturing establishment Russia hysteria. We saw it recently when the
now completely debunked claim that Russia paid bounties on US troops to Taliban-linked
fighters in Afghanistan first surfaced;
unverified anonymous intelligence claims were published by mass media news outlets, then by
the time it got to spinmeisters like Rachel
Maddow it was being treated not as an unconfirmed analysis but as an established fact:
If you've ever wondered how rank-and-file members of the public can be so certain of
completely unproven intelligence claims, the CIA-to-pundit pipeline is a big part of it. The
most influential voices who political partisans actually hear things from are often a few
clicks removed from the news report they're talking about, and by the time it gets to them it's
being waved around like a rock-solid truth when at the beginning it was just presented as a
tenuous speculation (the original aforementioned WaPo report appeared on the opinion page).
The CIA has a well-documented history of
infiltrating and manipulating the mass media for propaganda purposes, and to this day the
largest supplier of leaked information from the Central Intelligence Agency to the news media
is the CIA itself. They have a whole process for
leaking information to reporters they like (with an internal form that asks whether
the information is Accurate, Partially Accurate, or Inaccurate), as was
highlighted in a recent court case which found that the CIA can even leak documents to
select journalists while refusing to release them to others via Freedom of Information Act
requests.
The way mainstream media has become split along increasingly hostile ideological
lines means that all the manipulators need to do to advance a given narrative is set it up
to make one side look bad and then share it with a news outlet from the other side. The way
media is set up to masturbate people's confirmation bias instead of report objective facts will
then cause the narrative to go viral throughout that partisan faction, regardless of how true
or false it might be.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-4&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1291936114698153984&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fmsm-promotes-yet-another-cia-press-release-news&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px
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The coming US election and its aftermath is looking like it will be even more insane and
hysterical than the last one, and the enmity and outrage it creates will give manipulators
every opportunity to slide favorable narratives into the slipstream of people's hot-headed
abandonment of their own critical faculties.
And indeed they are clearly prepared to do exactly that. An
ODNI press release last month which was uncritically passed along by the most prominent US
media outlets reported that China and Iran are trying to help Biden win the November election
while Russia is trying to help Trump. So no matter which way these things go the US
intelligence cartel will be able to surf its own consent-manufacturing foreign policy agendas
upon the tide of outrage which ensues.
The propaganda machine is only getting louder and more aggressive. We're being prepped for
something.
* * *
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'It's Easier to Fool People Than to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled'
- Mark Twain
palmereldritch , 49 seconds ago
And prior to Bezos/CIA ownership the paper was managed by heirs whose ownership stake
was originally acquired through a bankruptcy sale by a board member/trustee of The Federal
Reserve.
So maybe it was just a share transfer...
Freeman of the City , 1 minute ago
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free"
We can both be right. Russia cockblocking Israel's ability to just roll over Assad's
Syria, their relationship with Iran, etc. are big factors. It's been pretty funny to watch
American Progressives rant and rave about Russia like warmonger rednecks in the 80's who just
watched Rocky IV.
The US is ruthlessly waging an intense Hybrid War on Russian energy interests in Europe by
targeting the Eurasian Great Power's relevant projects in Germany, Belarus, and Bulgaria,
banking on the fact that even the partial success of this strategy would greatly advance the
scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's transatlantic
allies.
The Newest Front In The New Cold War
The New
Cold War is heating up in Europe after the US intensified its Hybrid
War on Russian interests there over the past two months. This proxy conflict is being
simultaneously waged in Germany, Belarus, and Bulgaria, all three of which are key transit
states for Russian energy exports to the continent, which enable it to maintain at least some
influence there even during the worst of times. The US, however, wants to greatly advance the
scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's transatlantic
allies which would allow America to reassert its unipolar hegemony there even if this campaign
is only partially successful. This article aims to explore the broad contours of the US'
contemporary Hybrid War strategy on Russian energy in Europe, pointing out how recent events in
those three previously mentioned transit states are all part of this larger
plan.
Germany
From north to south, the first and largest of these targets is Germany, which is nowadays
treating Russian anti-corruption blogger Navalny. The author accurately predicted
in late August that "intense pressure might be put upon the authorities by domestic politicians
and their American patrons to politicize the final leg of Nord Stream II's construction by
potentially delaying it as 'punishment to Putin'", which is exactly what's happening after
Berlin signaled that it might rethink its commitment to this energy project. America isn't all
to blame, however, since Germany ultimately takes responsibility for its provocative statements
to this effect. Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, published a
thought-provoking piece titled " Russian-German Relations: Back To The Future " about
how bilateral relations will drastically change in the aftermath of this incident. It's concise
and well worth the read for those who are interested in this topic.
Belarus
The next Hybrid War target is Belarus , which the
author has been tracking for half a decade already. After failing to convince Lukashenko to
break off ties with Russia after this summer's Wagner incident, a Color Revolution was then
hatched to overthrow him so that his replacements can turn the country into another Ukraine
insofar as it relates to holding Russian energy exports to Europe hostage. The end goal is to
increase the costs of Russian resources so that the US' own become more competitive by
comparison. Ultimately, it's planned that Russian pipelines will be phased out in the
worst-case scenario, though this would happen gradually since Europe can't immediately replace
such imports with American and other ones. "Losing" Belarus, whether on its own or together
with Nord Stream II, would deal a heavy blow to Russia's geopolitical interests. Countries like
Germany wouldn't have a need to maintain cordial relations with it, thus facilitating a
possible "decoupling".
That's where Bulgaria could become the proverbial "icing on the cake". Turkish Stream is
expected to transit through this Balkan country en route to Europe, but the latest
anti-government protests there threaten to topple the government, leading to worries that
its replacement might either politicize or suspend this project. Azerbaijan's TANAP and the
Eastern Mediterranean's GRISCY pipelines
might help Southeastern Europe compensate for the loss of Russian resources, though the latter
has yet to be constructed and is only in the planning stages right now. Nevertheless,
eliminating Turkish Stream from the energy equation (or at the very least hamstringing the
project prior to replacing/scrapping it) would deal a death blow to Russia's already very
limited Balkan influence. Russia would then be practically pushed out of the region, becoming
nothing more than a distant cultural-historical memory with close to no remaining political
influence to speak of.
Economic Warfare
The overarching goal connecting these three Hybrid War fronts isn't just to weaken Russia's
energy interests, but to replace its current role with American and other industry competitors.
The US-backed and Polish-led " Three Seas Initiative
" is vying to become a serious player in the strategic Central & Eastern European space,
and it can achieve a lot of its ambitions through the construction of new LNG and oil terminals
for facilitating America's plans. In addition, artificially increasing the costs of Russian
energy imports through political means related to these Hybrid Wars could also reduce Russia's
revenue from these sources, which presently account for 40%
of its budget . Considering that Russia's in the midst of a systemic economic transition
away from its disproportionate budgetary dependence on energy, this could hit Moscow where it
hurts at a sensitive time.
The Ball's In Berlin's Court
The linchpin of Russia's defensive strategy is Germany, without whose support all of
Moscow's energy plans stand zero chance of succeeding. If Germany submits to the US on one,
some, or all three of these Hybrid War fronts in contravention of its natural economic
interests, then it'll be much easier for America to provoke a comprehensive "decoupling"
between Russia and Europe. It's only energy geopolitics that allows for both sides to maintain
some sense of cooperation despite the US-encouraged sanctions regime against Russia after its
reunification with Crimea and thus provides an opportunity for improving their relations
sometime in the future. Sabotaging Russia's energy interests there would thus doom any
realistic prospects for a rapprochement between them, but the ball's in Berlin's court since it
has the chance to say no to the US and ensure that the German-Russian Strategic Partnership
upholds Europe's strategic autonomy across the present century.
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Concluding Thoughts
For as much as cautiously optimistic as many in the Alt-Media Community might
be that the US' Hybrid War on Russian energy in Europe will fail, the facts paint a much more
sobering picture which suggests that at least one of these plots will succeed. Should that
happen, then the era of energy geopolitics laying the foundation for Russian-European relations
will soon draw to a close, thereby facilitating the US' hoped-for "decoupling" between them,
causing budgetary difficulties for Moscow at the moment when it can least afford to experience
such, and pushing the Eurasian Great Power's strategic attention even further towards Asia. The
last-mentioned consequence will put more pressure on Russia to perfect its "balancing"
act between China and India , which could potentially be a double-edged sword that makes it
more relevant in Asian geopolitical affairs but also means that one wrong move might seriously
complicate its
21st-century grand strategy .
If you look at the three countries mentioned Belarus will likely be absorbed by Russia
sooner rather than later. The push for this is underway looking at meetings taking place. For
Bulgaria the US is far away and has no power to stop the Turks. It is the Turks the
Bulgarians fear, with a lot of reasons, their surest way of keeping out of the Turks clutches
is to look to Russia for support. Unfortunately the USA has an appalling track record of
betraying countries, ask Libya.
The Germans have no choice but take the Russian gas, economically, socially and for
strategic reasons. The truly big fear for the US is a German/Russian bloc. German and Russian
technology with unrivaled resources. That is the future super power if they are pushed
together, something that is very likely if we see a major economic contraction in the next
few years.
Mustahattu , 4 hours ago
The US fear of an Eurasian alliance. The US fear Europe will create a Silicon Valley of
the future. The US fear the Euro will replace the dollar as a reserve currency. The US fear
Russia will become a superpower. The US fear China. There's a lot to fear yankee dear...cos
it's all gonna happen.
Hope Copy , 1 hour ago
RUSSIA is content with 45 and 25nm as it can be hardened.. 14 and especially 7nm is so
that the **** will wear out..
Ace006 , 2 hours ago
Instead of fretting about how this or that country or bloc will become a/an _________
superpower the US could focus on regaining its former pre-eminence.
It's a crazy thought, I know, but
moving a massive amount of industrial capacity to China and fueling the rise of a
communist country just might have been a bad idea and
thrashing about in the international arena like a rutting rhinoceros at huge expense
makes us look foolish and, in the case of Syria, petty and vindictive.
Repairing the damage from the former and stopping the hemorrhage of money and reputation
respectively would be a far better objective than playing Frankenstein in Libya, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Iran, Poland, N. Korea, and Venezuela, inter alia .
Mexico is a failed state right on our border that contributes mightily to our immigration,
cultural, and political problems. But, no, the puffed up, prancing morons who make US policy
can summon the imagination to figure out how to help our very own neighbors deal with their
hideous problems. No. Let's engage in regime change and "nation building" in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Belarus.
The words of the great Marcus Aurelius are on point: "Within ten days thou wilt seem a god
to those to whom thou art now a beast and an ape, if thou wilt return to thy principles and
the worship of reason."
Herodotus , 1 hour ago
Bulgaria must return to the protection of the Ottoman Empire.
yerfej , 4 hours ago
Easy solution, end NATO. Just have all US forces told to leave the EU and let them
determine their own destiny. Then do the same with US forces in the ME, Japan, Korea, etc.
EVERYONE would be better off, including US taxpayers which get nothing out of the useless
overseas deployment of resources which could be better spent at home.
yojimbo , 3 hours ago
5% budget deficit, 5% military spending. Leave the world, drop 4.5% of the spending and
either save money, or build infrastructure. It's so simple, I am disappointed Trump doesn't
at least state it. I get he is limited by the system, and can't be a Cincinnatus, even if he
wanted to, but he has his First Amendment.. though I grant him a personal fear of being
Kennedied!
Bac Si , 2 hours ago
Howdy Yerfej. It sounds like you are all for Isolationism.
But Isolationism means different things to different people. Pre WW2, Isolationism in the
US meant selling our products to hostile countries. In the case of Japan, oil to help them
kill Chinese people. In the case of Germany and Italy, food and vehicles to help them conquer
all of Europe.
Considering the ridiculous education that the US gives its children, it's no wonder that
most Americans don't know much about history (I say that in general terms, not to you
specifically). Henry Ford senior not only received the 'Grand Cross of the German Eagle' from
Adolf Hitler in 1938, he also received a 'Congressional Medal' from the US Congress shortly
after WW2 – and for the same reason. Selling trucks to help the war effort.
Even after Pearl Harbor, there were politically powerful Isolationists that did not want
the US to get involved in WW2. Why? Because a lot of money was at stake. It still is. These
same people will continue to argue for Isolationism even after we are attacked.
Two months AFTER Pearl Harbor, FDR made a speech that included this:
"Those Americans who believed that we could live under the illusion of isolationism wanted
the American eagle to imitate the tactics of the ostrich. Now, many of those same people,
afraid that we may be sticking our necks out, want our national bird to be turned into a
turtle. But we prefer to retain the eagle as it is – flying high and striking hard. I
know that I speak for the mass of the American people when I say that we reject the turtle
policy and will continue increasingly the policy of carrying the war to the enemy in distant
lands and distant waters – as far away as possible from our own home grounds." –
FDR
This radical change in our foreign policy has never been explained or even referred to in
US history books. Powerful economic forces will always love the idea of "Open Trade
Isolationism". But if Isolationism is ever suddenly defined by not doing business with any
hostile government – those powerful forces will go ballistic. They will strongly lobby
against 'Economic Warfare'. In other words, they will always want to make lots of money by
selling their products to hostile governments, no matter how many people die.
Want a great example?
Right after Loral Corporation CEO Bernard L. Schwartz donated a million dollars to the
DNC, President Clinton authorized the release of ballistic missile technology to China so
Loral could get their satellites into space fast and at low cost. Those same missiles, and
their nuclear warheads, are now pointed at the US.
The argument has always been that if we trade with hostile governments, they will grow to
like us. Does anyone out there believe that if the UK and France gave pre WW2 Germany an
extra $20 billion in trade, Germany wouldn't have started WW2? Anyone with a brain would tell
you that Germany would have put those resources into their military (like China has been
doing) and WW2 would have started earlier.
Yerfej, if we brought back the Cold War organization called the Coordinating Committee for
Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM), I would be all for Isolationism. President Clinton got
rid of it in his first year, and Western weapons technology has been threatening us ever
since.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 5 hours ago
You have to love the dynamic duo of "lie, cheat and steal" Pompeo and his "mob boss"
Trump. There is absolutely no subtlety in their obvious shakedown tactics.
PrivetHedge , 4 hours ago
The mob had far more honor, and better morals.
PrivetHedge , 4 hours ago
Washington's transatlantic allies...
Hahahah, occupied vassals.
Washington has cost Germany a massive slice of GDP.
you_do , 4 hours ago
Yankee has plenty of problems at home.
Rest of the world can decide their own energy policy.
They do not suffer from the 'Russia' propaganda.
geno-econ , 5 hours ago
Let Russia, the lowest cost energy producer win energy competition in Europe as China, the
lowest cost manufacturing producer is winning in America. Only difference is retailers,
shippers, assembly part importers such as auto, electronics and appliance makers are making a
profit and consumer gets lower prices. We should let others decide for themselves and stop
meddling----only result will be a bloody nose
you_do , 4 hours ago
Yankee has plenty of problems at home.
Rest of the world can decide their own energy policy.
They do not suffer from the 'Russia' propaganda.
geno-econ , 5 hours ago
Let Russia, the lowest cost energy producer win energy competition in Europe as China, the
lowest cost manufacturing producer is winning in America. Only difference is retailers,
shippers, assembly part importers such as auto, electronics and appliance makers are making a
profit and consumer gets lower prices. We should let others decide for themselves and stop
meddling----only result will be a bloody nose
free-energy , 4 hours ago
Notice how everything the US does around the world is a WAR. War on Energy, War on Drugs,
War on Birth Control, War War War... America will fall after 2020 if nothing changes for the
better. Every year the world grows more and more tired of the US bs and moves further away
from it. Its so bad that they choose to deal with a communist country over us.
You reap what you've sowed.
Bobby Farrell Can Dance , 3 hours ago
The Anglo American parasite pirate gangsters keep barking on about Russia bad, China bad,
but I look around and I see nothing but these trouble makers waging war on anything they
cannot control. The US and UK are devil nations. They will deserve all the rot they have
coming their way.
Unknown User , 5 hours ago
Trump wants a trade balance with all major economies like Germany and China. If they don't
buy from us, he will have to raise tariffs. In case of Germany, they need nothing from us so
he wants them to buy US LNG. Merkel's position is that "there is a cheap Russian gas", while
Trump is telling her "no there isn't one".
Pumpinfe , 4 hours ago
So trump loves to deep throat Russia but give Germany a hard time to Nordstream 2? Wake up
fanboys, your hero is a ******. I got so much money invested in gazprom. LNG is junk and
gazprom (Russian owned) is gona crush LNG and trump and his idiot following can't do a damn
thing. You trump idiots will believe anything. Let me enlighten you...gazprom is the lowest
cost producer of natural gas in the world...go look at the difference between gazprom and LNG
and then you will realize that orange dump is an idiot along with his army of empty heads. Oh
and if you think China and Russia are not friendly, go look up the Power of Siberia pipeline.
That will give you a good sense of the relationship between Russia and China. America is
rotting from the inside and Russia and China are eating their popcorn watching it happen.
Dabooda , 3 hours ago
I don't see Trump deep-throating anyone but Netanyahu. Sans gratuitous insults, your
comment about Gazprom is spot on
Lokiban , 5 hours ago
I doubt Merkel will give in. She would commit political suicide if she did that. She knows
Navalny is a US effort to stop Nordstream 2.
What is the alternative? Buying gas from the US or US-controlled oilfields in Iraq and Syria?
Putin might have a say in that.
Lokiban , 5 hours ago
I doubt Merkel will give in. She would commit political suicide if she did that. She knows
Navalny is a US effort to stop Nordstream 2.
What is the alternative? Buying gas from the US or US-controlled oilfields in Iraq and Syria?
Putin might have a say in that.
thurstjo63 , 3 hours ago
The main fault in Mr Korybko's thinking is that he believes that European countries will
not just shoot themselves in the foot but in the head to appease the US. At a european and
local level, those who wanted Nord Stream 2 to be suspended or killed have failed. The costs
are way too high. For that we can thank, perversely, the agreements associated with
protecting investments from political decisions pushed by the US itself!!! Given that there
is no proof of Navalny being poisoned, Germany knows that there is no way that they could
hope to win their case for stopping Nord Stream 2 in a tribunal with persons capable of
rational thought. That is why they made the deal to buy some US liquified gas for a couple of
billion dollars. Because that is the cheapest way of extricating themselves from this
situation. Otherwise, they are looking at orders of magnitude more compensation to russian
and european firms for stopping the pipeline.
As for Belarus, barring Lukashenko doing something profoundly stupid like reacting
violently to protests, that ship has already sailed. Protests are smaller every week and
mainly on the weekend as now the "opposition" has been publishing people's profiles accusing
them of collaborating with the government without any proof, leading to innocent people and
their families to be threatened. There will be a transition from Lukashenko over the next
couple of years but you can be sure that the present "opposition" given their desire to break
away from Russia will not be part of the group that comes to power in the future since their
base of support diminishes every week.
Finally Bulgaria already shot themselves in the foot when they backed out of South Stream
and had major problems securing energy resources to meet its needs during the intervening
period. Radev as any politician wanting to stay in office knows, if he doesn't go through
with connecting Turk Stream to the rest of Europe that he might as well resign. So unless the
US has compromising information on him that can force him from office or the Radev's
administration doesn't control the US attempts to create the conditions for a colour
revolution in Bulgaria, it is definitely not going to happen.
I'm sorry but Mr. Korybko is wrong on all counts!
Savvy , 4 hours ago
When the US backed Georgia's violent incursion into S Ossetia it took Russia one day to
send them back.
Russians are slow to saddle but ride fast.
Joiningupthedots , 2 hours ago
That was with the remnants of the old Soviet Army too.
The new Russian Army is an entirely different beast in both organisation, training,
experience and equipment.
Decoupling Russia from EU, is re-enforcing the Eurasia bloc...where is the future of the
world.
Russia belongs to Europa...not the USA.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 4 hours ago
Geographically Europe and Asia are one continent. It was "European exceptionalism" (the
precursor to American Exceptionalism) that divided it as an ethno-cultural construct.
researchfix , 5 hours ago
Cancelling NS2 will chase the German industry into Russia. Cheap energy, moderate wages,
Eurasian market at the front steps.
The sheep and their ex working places and Mutti will stay in Germany.
Bobby Farrell Can Dance , 3 hours ago
Do Germans want to be slaves of these abject Brits and Americans? Pffffft....gas from
Russia is a NO BRAINER.
Only British and Americans rats do not like that idea. How un-selfish then, it is for
these jealous, insecure morons to dictate to Germany how she should trade. That's called
outright meddling. These imperialists are like entitled Karens, they think the world owes
them favours at the snap of a finger.
Sandmann , 4 hours ago
Nordstream 2 has an add-on leg to UK. Germany is largest gas importer on earth and cannot
run its industry without gas imports from Russia. LNG is simply too expensive unless US
taxpayers subsidise it.
If US wants to destabilise Europe it will reap the consequences. Southern Europe depends
on gas from North Africa - Portugal generates electricity from Maghreb Pipeline to Spain from
Algeria via Morocco. Erdogan hopes to put Turkey in position of supplying gas to Europe.
Germany will not abandon Nordstream 2 but might abandon USA first.
Max21c , 3 hours ago
The US is ruthlessly waging an intense Hybrid War on Russian energy interests in Europe
by targeting the Eurasian Great Power's relevant projects in Germany, Belarus, and
Bulgaria, banking on the fact that even the partial success of this strategy would greatly
advance the scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's
transatlantic allies.
It's a petty game and when it fails then the Washingtonians credibility and legitimacy
just further erodes. The EU needs the energy supplies and the Russian Federation has the
supplies. It's all just short term & small gain silliness by a pack of freaks in
Washington DC and their freaks in the CIA, Thunk Tank freaks and freaks in the foreign policy
establishment. It's just more of the Carnival sideshow/freakshow put on by Washingtonians. As
usual if it's a Washingtonian (post Cold War) policy then there's little or no substance
behind it and you can be sure it hasn't be thought through thoroughly and it'll eventually
turn and boomerang back on the circus people in Washington, Ivy League circus people, and
JudeoWASP elite circus people, CIA circus clowns and circus clowns in the Thunk Tonks and
elites Fareign Poolicy ***-tablishment.
John Hansen , 3 hours ago
If all it takes is a Navaly hoax to cause this Europe isn't really worth dealing with.
propaganda_reaper , 3 hours ago
Once upon a time, a revolution occurred in a country through which passed a gas pipeline.
The bad guys were vanquished. And the very good foreign guys who helped the local good guys
defeat the tyrant said: "We got the same stuff, but liquid."
Any similarity with fictitious events or characters was purely coincidental.
Remember the Gas to Europe still flows through the Ukraine. Russia just needs to reduce
the gas Pressure and blame the Ukraine and Europe goes cold and Dark.
German People will beg for Nordstream 2 to be switched on.
lucitanian , 31 minutes ago
That's not the way Russia works. But it's the kind of blackmail that the US uses. And
that's why Russia is a more dependable partner for Europe for energy.
Hope Copy , 1 hour ago
This **** goes right back to the 'DeepState' pseudo-revolution that got the Nicky-the-weak
killed ,because he financed his railroads and wanted to be rich as hell as he perceived the
ENGLISH monarchy to be, with a parliamentary DUMA that he could over rule if need be. I have
looked 'DeepState' right in the eyes when I was young and dumb and was told that I would
never go to their masion.. Nicky had family enemies. and the Czech fighting force was never
going to save him.. Stalin was also double-crossed, but was well informed.. it was in his
sector if one reads and believes. Cunning fox Stalin was, always playing those under him to
do his bidding.. and that lesson has been well learned by a couple of the world's leaders in
this day-in-age...
Herodotus , 1 hour ago
German manufacturing costs must be driven higher to take the heat off of the UK as they
emerge from the EU and attempt to become competitive.
novictim , 1 hour ago
When "War" is actually not war but trade policy and financial incentives then you know you
are engaged in dangerous bloviations and hyperbole.
When the shooting starts, then you can talk of War.
SuperareDolo , 2 hours ago
Russia might not want to fight these attempts to isolate it from the western economy. The
collateral damage will be that much less, once Babylon the great finally falls.
LoveTruth , 2 hours ago
And US claims to be a "Fair Player," caring for freedom and democracy, while twisting arms
and supporting corrupted officials.
IronForge , 3 hours ago
PetroUSD, MIC, Colonial Control of Vassals. World Domination Play by the Hegemony.
Just like the Policies of NATO: Russians Out, Germans Down, Anglo-American-ZioMasons and
Vatican_Vassals In.
Policies were like this - Sponsored by Anglo-ZioMasons from Pre-WWI, continued through
WWII and the First Cold War, and onwards after the Collapse of the SUN and the ensuing NeoCon
Wolfowitz Doctrine and PNAC7/Bush-Cheney PetroUSD Plans.
The Hegemony Control MENA Energy Producers. The IRQ-KWT War were mishandled; and KSA
demanded for the USA to Smite IRQ. The Initial War and Occupation prompted Hussein to opt the
EUR for Petroleum, which Brought about the End of Hussein through the 9-11/PNAC7 Long
War.
LBY opted for the Au-Dinar for Petroleum; and were Fail-Stated. IRN and RUS remain the
only Major Energy Producers not Controlled by the Hegemony.
IRN were Sanctioned since removing the Shackles of Hegemonic Occupancy via Shah Par Levi;
and attempts for Energy Diversification via Nuclear means raised suspicions of Nuclear
Weapons Development - prompting for heavier Sanctions and 5thColumn Regime Change Operations
by the Hegemony. IRN circumvented Sanctions in part by selling their Petroleum via Major
Currencies and Barter. Though many Countries have reduced or maintained their purchase of IRN
Petroleum via Sanctions Protocols, CHN are involved in Purchasing IRN's Output.
RUS, another Target of Ruin, Plunder, and Occupational Exploitation by the Hegemony, were
Too Large a Country with Standing Armed Forces for Direct Military Invasion by the Hegemony.
After the Collapse of the SUN, The Harvard/Chicago led Economic Reforms ended in Plunder -
which prompted the Selection and Rise of Putin, who drove out the Plunderers. The Hegemony
continue their Geopolitical War of Influence Peddling around RUS while attempting Soft War
NATO Membership Recruitment and Regime Change Coups within RUS, Ex-SUN Nation-States, and
Trading Partners.
RUS have endured, became Militarily mightier, have become the Major Energy Producer for
North/Western Europe and CHN. In addition to the Production, RUS now have begun Trading
Petroleum+NatGas outside of the PetroUSD Exchange Mechanism, opting for Customer Currencies
or RUB.
RUS and IRN are expected to be Key Providers of the PetroCNY-Au Exchange Mechanism.
The Hegemony and MENA Vassals can't Compete in Combined Petroleum+NatGas Volume and Price;
and DEU - by Directly Importing from RUS - will most likely become more Independent from the
Hegemon.
CHN, RUS, and DEU - Major Energy, Industrial, Natural Resource, and Military Powers
Decoupling from the Influences of the Hegemony, with IND Slowly coming to their Own (IND are
simply Too Large to remain Vassals to the Hegemon; and Vassal GBR did so much to Oppress them
in the past).
Funny that the Anglo-American-ZioMasons and VAT have brought each of these 3 Powers to
Ruin and Occupation in the Past 2 Centuries.
The Ironies being Played Out are that:
1) GBR Lost their Prime Colonies - America/USA, IND, and now Trade City Colony HKG - by
their Oppressive and Exploitative Occupancy; and
2) USA, after Fighting Wars for Independence from such Occupations by GBR - Once Becoming
a Major Military Power, Followed in the Anglo-ZioMason Tradition of Geopolitical Conquest and
Control to the Scale of pursing not only in World Domination - but in Absolute Global
Rule.
Maghreb2 , 2 hours ago
Problem is demographic
shift . The previous modern system dominated by Zio-Masonry was GNP and GDP where
currencies were measured against global output and floated against gold and each other. Now
with high inflation and demographic decline knocking out the economy is easier leading to
fights between zones of influence. Petro Ruble, Euro or dollar. Dangerous commodities like
kilos of heroin, trafficked humans or weapons. Zio-Masonic system has fallen to gangsterism.
Hybrid Warfare is the kind of thing we saw in Afghanistan or 80s Columbia .
Militarized Russian mafia vs NATO backed militarized police forces.
Once the population reaches a certain age and consumption drops there isn't much to fight
over besides social control systems of the young minority. Color revolutions in Central
Europe are really only effecting the long term economy of the young . Hope would be Left wing Radicals
stood up to the system and aligned with right wing groups to eliminate masonic and Zionist
factions and take back the command and control systems before the continet is shut down
permanently.
Precision strikes and hunting down their
descendents . Easy to find because Hitler and Stalin had their ancestors massacred for
loyalty to Rothschild. They won't bite the hands that feed.The Vatican vassal systems was
built on knowing that a Zionist is Zionist and Masons is a Mason. They are cults simply
teaching them the correct way to behave can avert these political problems.
In terms of Belarus and Russia they should consider the fact the birth rate rate rose
after the Soviet collapse and exodus west means many of them shouldn't have even been born in
Rothschilds plan. In their " system
" economic planning starts at birth because color revolutions effect
long term bond issuances they control.
Stalin and Hitler both knew this and used money linked to raw marterials and goods to beat
the British gold standard system. If you knew what the Western Central banks were worth you
would kill people for using their money.
"Life is hard, it's harder if your stupid" - John Wayne
Freeman of the City , 18 seconds ago
'It's Easier to Fool People Than to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled'
- Mark Twain
palmereldritch , 49 seconds ago
And prior to Bezos/CIA ownership the paper was managed by heirs whose ownership stake was
originally acquired through a bankruptcy sale by a board member/trustee of The Federal
Reserve.
So maybe it was just a share transfer...
Freeman of the City , 1 minute ago
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free"
Once I'd seen this mention of The Russian Playbook (aka KGB, Kremlin or Putin's Playbook), I saw the expression all over the place.
Here's an early – perhaps the earliest – use of the term. In October 2016, the Center for Strategic and International studies ("
Ranked #1 ") informed us of the "
Kremlin Playbook " with this ominous beginning
There was a deeply held assumption that, when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO and the European Union
in 2004, these countries would continue their positive democratic and economic transformation. Yet more than a decade later, the
region has experienced a steady decline in democratic standards and governance practices at the same time that Russia's economic
engagement with the region expanded significantly.
And asks
Are these developments coincidental, or has the Kremlin sought deliberately to erode the region's democratic institutions
through its influence to 'break the internal coherence of the enemy system'?
Well, to these people, to ask the question is to answer it: can't possibly be disappointment at the gap between 2004's expectations
and 2020's reality, can't be that they don't like the total Western values package that they have to accept, it must be those crafty
Russians deceiving them. This was the earliest reference to The Playbook that I found, but it certainly wasn't the last.
Of course, all these people are convinced Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Somehow. To some effect. Never
really specified but the latest outburst of insanity is this
video from the Lincoln Project . As Anatoly Karlin observes:
"I think it's really cool how
we Russians took over America just by shitposting online. How does it feel to be subhuman?" He has a point: the Lincoln Project,
and the others shrieking about Russian interference, take it for granted that American democracy is so flimsy and Americans so gullible
that a few Facebook ads can bring the whole facade down. A curious mental state indeed.
What can we know about The Playbook? For a start it must be written in Russian, a language that those crafty Russians insist on
speaking among themselves. Secondly such an important document would be protected the way that highly classified material is protected.
There would be a very restricted need to know; underlings participating in one of the many plays would not know how their part fitted
into The Playbook; few would ever see The Playbook itself. The Playbook would be brought to the desk of the few authorised to see
it by a courier, signed for, the courier would watch the reader and take away the copy afterwards. The very few copies in existence
would be securely locked away; each numbered and differing subtly from the others so that, should a leak occur, the authorities would
know which copy read by whom had been leaked. Printed on paper that could not be photographed or duplicated. As much protection as
human cunning could devise; right up there with
the nuclear
codes .
And so on. It's all quite ridiculous: we're supposed to believe that Moscow easily controls far-away countries but can't keep
its neighbours under control.
There is no Russian Playbook, that's just projection. But there is a "playbook" and it's written in English, it's freely available
and it's inexpensive enough that every pundit can have a personal copy: it's named "
From Dictatorship To Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation " and it's written by
Gene Sharp (1928-2018) . Whatever Sharp may have thought he
was doing, whatever good cause he thought he was assisting, his book has been used as a guide to create regime changes around the
world. Billed as "democracy" and "freedom", their results are not so benign. Witness Ukraine today. Or Libya. Or Kosovo whose long-time
leader has just been indicted for numerous crimes
. Curiously enough, these efforts always take place in countries that resist Washington's line but never in countries that don't.
Here we do see training, financing, propaganda, discord being sown, divisions exploited to effect regime change – all the things
in the imaginary "Russian Playbook". So, whatever he may have thought he was helping, Sharp's advice has been used to produce what
only the propagandists could call "
model interventions "; to the "liberated" themselves, the reality is
poverty ,
destruction ,
war and
refugees
.
Reading Sharp's book, however, makes one wonder if he was just fooling himself. Has there ever been a "dictatorship" overthrown
by "non-violent" resistance along the lines of what he is suggesting? He mentions Norwegians who resisted Hitler; but Norway was
liberated, along with the rest of Occupied Europe, by extremely violent warfare. While some Jews escaped, most didn't and it was
the conquest of Berlin that saved the rest: the nazi state was killed . The USSR went away, together with its satellite governments
in Europe but that was a top-down event. He likes Gandhi but Gandhi wouldn't have lasted a minute under Stalin.
Otpor was greatly aided by NATO's war on Serbia. And, they're only
"non-violent" because the Western media doesn't talk much about
the violence ; "non-violent" is not the first word that
comes to mind in this video of Kiev 2014 . "Colour revolutions"
are manufactured from existing grievances, to be sure, but with a great deal of outside assistance, direction and funding; upon inspection,
there's much design behind their "spontaneity". And, not infrequently, with mysterious sniping at a expedient moment – see
Katchanovski's research
on the "Heavenly Hundred" of the Maidan showing pretty convincingly that the shootings were " a false flag operation" involving
"an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland".
There is little in Sharp's book to suggest that non-violent resistance would have had much effect on a really brutal and determined
government. He also has the naïve habit of using "democrat" and "dictator" as if these words were as precisely defined as coconuts
and codfish. But any "dictatorship" – for example Stalin's is a very complex affair with many shades of opinion in it. So, in terms
of what he was apparently trying to do, one can see it only succeeding against rather mild "dictators" presiding over extremely unpopular
polities. With a great deal of outside effort and resources.
Patrick Armstrong was an analyst in the Canadian Department of National Defence specialising in the USSR/Russia from 1984
and a Counsellor in the Canadian Embassy in Moscow in 1993-1996. He retired in 2008 and has been writing on Russia and related subjects
on the Net ever since.
One of the most vibrantly alive people I met, André Vltchek, just died . Though he barely
made it past his mid-fifties he got in a lot more living than a hundred average Americans who
live to collect their pensions. Allah yarhamhu.
In honor of this great Truth Jihadi we're replaying this 2018 interview:
The West claims to be the "free world" -- the global leader in human rights,
humanitarianism, and free expression. Globetrotting independent journalist André Vltchek , who joins us from Borneo,
isn't buying it. His latest
essay begins:
Western culture is clearly obsessed with rules, guilt, submissiveness and punishment.
By now it is clear that the West is the least free society on Earth. In North America and
Europe, almost everyone is under constant scrutiny: people are spied on, observed, their
personal information is being continually extracted, and the surveillance cameras are used
indiscriminately.
Life is synchronized and managed. There are hardly any surprises.
One can sleep with whomever he or she wishes (as long as it is done within the 'allowed
protocol'). Homosexuality and bisexuality are allowed. But that is about all; that is how far
'freedom' usually stretches.
Rebellion is not only discouraged, it is fought against, brutally. For the tiniest
misdemeanors or errors, people end up behind bars. As a result, the U.S. has more prisoners per
capita than any other country on Earth, except the Seychelles.
Andre taunted rightwing elites and illness – with a passion. I guess one of them
caught up.
Living hard seems like a death-wish, maybe it was. Staring at darkness messes people up
and he traveled again and again into the hearts of darkness across the planet because he
wanted to be a modern Wilfred Burchett. He was one of the greats. My condolences to his
family and friends.
Peace to Stephen Cohen too. You both will be missed.
André Vltchek was not an intellectual heavyweight. What is fascinating about his
life-story is how and who financed. That should be easy for insiders to fish out, and
insiders there be.
As to my humble opinion, Chomsky was neither. From all angles, his pre-fabricated
prestige, his in-group attitudes, his encrusted prestance, pettiness, pedantry, always within
convention, his factoid approach, the channels of communication, the lack of any systemic
approach, his "good guys bad guys" copper´ approach, did not warrant the few hours
listening in on his tune and omni-presence. His numb personality, contrary to the combative
Vltchek is noted as a minor.
Some "intellectuals" have half a page of original content in them over the course of a
life-time (not the same as career (n´est ce pas Pinker?)), most have none. "History
repeat itself", through the bull-horns of public intellectuals. They both practiced a sort of
journalism that is superficial (accent on the superficial) agenda driven.
Ex-CIA John Kiriakou stated that the CIA was attempting to recruit just about anyone that
they were able to starting in the sixties ranging from Hollywood actors/actresses, musicians,
writers, journalists, artists, business people, just about anyone. Operation Mockingbird is
still widely used even if it is no longer regerred to it as Operation Mockingbird.
André Vltchek (1962-2020) was the son of a Czech nuclear physicist father, and a
Russian-Chinese artist-architect mother, born in Soviet-era St Petersburg (then Leningrad).
He spent part of his childhood as well in the famous Czech beer city of Pilsen.
Western culture is clearly obsessed with rules, guilt, submissiveness and
punishment.
What culture is not? Every single population on Earth wants to survive, Westerners want
non-Aryans to survive, but the mechanism is always the same. The Stasi, the Gestapo, the CIA,
the KGB – they all breathed air, and they all tortured dissenters. Turkey was almost
overthrown in 2016. The Shah of Iran was, as were Hosni Mubarak and Gaddafi in Egypt and
Libya. Bashar is facing quite a lot of criticism for being free – that critique comes
in the form of bombs and jihadi freedom fighters. The Saudi Prince is wise for strangling and
beheading Khashoggi. The USSR disintegrated after they had shut down the GULAG.
As a result, the U.S. has more prisoners per capita than any other country on Earth,
except the Seychelles.
In 2012, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in [the DPR of Korea] estimated 150,000 to
200,000 are incarcerated, based on testimonies of defectors from the state police bureau,
which roughly equals 600–800 people incarcerated per 100,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
The World Prison Brief puts the United States' incarceration rate at 655 per 100,000.
Okay. If the West is the least free society on the planet, why the heck do all these
third-world people keep trying to move there? It is plain that Vltchek's thinking flunks the
real-world reality test.
The reality is, the rest of the world is worse off than the West, or people wouldn't keep
trying to leave the third world for the West.
@Anon ey want to have freedom of their stupid religious beliefs, not freedom from
religion. They still don't know that freedom of religion is not worth anything if it also
doesn't guarantee freedom from religion.
Thomas Jefferson tried very hard to explain this to them, but Yankee morons have never
learned what Jefferson tried to teach them. (With some notable exceptions, though, who,
however, have absolutely no political power.)
Vltchek is/was right: American/Western civilization [sic] (siphilization, rather) is
bankrupt and inhuman. It can only offer an abundance of material goods and military weapons
as if the only goals of human life were material things and warfare.
We all know that we are living in crazy, and dangerous, times, yet I can't help being awed
at what the imperial propaganda machine (aka the legacy ziomedia) is trying to make us all
swallow. The list of truly batshit crazy stuff we are being told to believe is now very long,
and today I just want to pick on a few of my "favorites" (so to speak).
First, of course, comes the " Novichok Reloaded " scandal around the alleged poisoning of
the so-called "dissident" Alexei Navalnyi. I already mentioned this absolutely ridiculous story
once
, so I won't repeat it all here. I just want to mention a few very basic facts:
in my
past article , if what the German authorities are claiming is true, then the Russians are
truly the dumbest imbeciles on the planet. Not content to use this now famous "Novichok" gas
against Skripal in the UK and after failing to kill Skripal, these stupid Russians decided to
try the very same gas, only "improved", and they failed again: Navalnyi is quite alive and
well, thank you! Then there is this: according to the imperial propaganda machine, Novichok
was so horribly dangerous, that the Brits had to use full biosuits to investigate the alleged
poisoning of Skripal. They also said that they would completely destroy the dangerous Skripal
home (though they never did that). The self same propaganda machine says that the Novichok
used on Navalnyi was a more powerful, improved version. Okay. Then try to answer this one:
why did the Russians NOT put on biosuits, why did not a single passenger suffer from any side
effects (inside a closed aircraft cabin!)? How is it that this super-dooper Novichok not only
failed to kill Navalnyi (who, allegedly, ingested it!) but also failed to even moderately
inconvenience anybody from the many people Navalnyi was surrounded by on that day?
I could continue to deconstruct all this nonsense, but that would take pages. I will mention
two thing though:
First, the Russians have requested any and all evidence available to the Germans and to the
Organization for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – but they got
absolutely nothing in return. Yet the EU is demanding an investigation (which is already under
way in Russia anyway!) as if the Russians did not want the exact same!
After being exposed
to an improved Novichok and after weeks in coma in intensive care, here is Navalnyi trotting
down stairs feeling great
Second, Navalnyi apparently has an immunity to otherwise deadly Russian biological agents,
just take a look at him on this post-Novichok photo:
[By the way, the first time around the Brits also never gave the Russians any information,
nevermind any kind of evidence. Apparently, to hide some super-secret secrets. Yeah,
right!]
If you have ever wondered why Syrian jihadists, or so-called 'moderate opposition', got
support from the woke liberal West, a recent leak by Anonymous reveals it's because Western
governments funded this propaganda.
In the end, it is the sheer childishness of the propaganda which amazes me most, not that
our rulers lie about other countries – I have always known that. But somehow there was a
kernel of truth around which the web of lies was spun, for example about life in the old Soviet
Union.
I began to realise the scope of Western ability to literally invent the most baseless lies
only in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, and only because I knew more about Iraq than any
politician in Britain or America and ten times more than the average made-up telly-dolly
chuntering through their auto-cued war propaganda. The women presenters weren't any better.
This all came flooding back to me when I received an email from Anonymous earlier this week
and then read Ben Norton's excellent analysis of it all in The GrayZone.
If anyone ever wondered how the hordes of head-chopping throat-cutting heart-eating
gay-murdering women-hating 'Jihadists' of the Syrian War ever managed to get a fair press in a
'woke' liberal West that gets hot under the lace collar about JK Rowling novels, the answers
are all in
the Anonymous leak . The principle answer is that you, the taxpayer, paid for it.
That's right. The blizzard of 'White Helmets' (who made it right up to the Oscars to thank
everyone who'd helped them except those that had helped them the most), "chemical-weapons
attacks" and all the paraphernalia of a newly "moderate opposition" in Syria – was all
paid for by YOU. Millions of pounds of British taxpayers' money was revealed to have been spent
secretly on UK support for the throat-cutting coalition of chaos, which for a decade massacred
its way across Syria wearing a snow-white Western beard of respectability.
It would appear that while the US (or rather its milk-cows in the Gulf) was paying for the
lethal-weapons, perfidious Albion was doing what it does best – lying through its teeth
whilst making those being lied to, pay for the privilege. Now that – thanks to the leaks
– we know this, it should put us on guard for the next one. Yet somehow it doesn't, at
least not for the purveyors of the news.
The Lazarus-like resurrection (and photo-shoot) of Russia's opposition figure and Western
darling Alexey Navalny after yet another alleged Novichok (believed to be 5-8 times more toxic
than VX nerve agent) attack without so much as a tracheostomy to show for it is swallowed whole
in yet another anti-Russian public relations offensive.
Grown sane men call my television show to talk about 'concentration camps' in China in
which, we are told, "a million Uighur Muslims" are being held and forcibly sterilised. This is
despite the allegations being largely based on studies backed by the American government and
statements by Western media favourite, German researcher Adrian Zenz. Zenz, who is part of the
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a US-backed advocacy group,
believes that he is "led by God" on his "mission" against China. Meanwhile, according to China's
official statistics the Uighur population in Xinjiang province increased by over 25 percent
between 2010 and 2018, while the Han Chinese rose by only two percent.
The lying industry may be the only sector of the Western economies still in full production.
No need for furlough or bounce-back loans. The lie-machines never still. No smoke is usually
detected from their chimneys, but inside, their pants are well and truly on fire.
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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.
That the Steele dossier was potentially based on the words of a Russian spy should have been
a red flag against its use. It seems that the FBI had not informed the FISA court about the
dubious sourcing of the dossier allegations.
Igor Danchenko, the premier sub-source for the Steele dossier, had
earlier worked for the Democrat affiliate Brookings Institute:
New information strikes the strongest blow yet at the foundations of the Russian collusion
narrative. April 4, 2019: A protestor outside the White House demanding the release of the full
Mueller Report. (By
bakdc/Shutterstock)
In a September 24th letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC),
Attorney General Bill Barr
revealed that the "primary sub-source" for the Steele dossier was the subject of an FBI
counterintelligence investigation in 2009. The source's Russian ties had been called into
question, and the individual was considered a possible national security threat, according to
Attorney General Barr's letter. This sub-source has elsewhere been identified as
Russian national Igor Danchenko.
This latest revelation in the Russiagate saga lands just over a month before the election,
chipping away further at one of the main lines of criticism that many on the left have leveled
against President Trump -- and bolstering suggestions from the president's own camp that the
FBI and other executive agencies engaged in substantial misconduct during the transition period
in 2016. Allegations contained in the Steele dossier justified FISA warrants against Trump
campaign advisor Carter Page and inspired many of the collusion claims that have been floated
in the four years since Trump's election victory.
The attorney general's letter attributes the finding to a now-declassified footnote in the
inspector general's report on the dubious FISA warrants. The footnote reports that the
individual later identified as Christopher Steele's primary source was under FBI investigation
from 2009 to 2011; the investigation was terminated because the subject "had apparently left
the United States."
The FBI found that Danchenko had been in contact with two known Russian intelligence
officers in 2005 and 2006. In his exchanges with one of these contacts, the Steele sub-source
openly expressed his desire to join the Russian diplomatic service. All of this was known to
the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane team as early as December 2016 -- five months before Robert
Mueller was even appointed to investigate collusion charges originating from Danchenko.
A few other interesting details:
Specifically, the FBI received reporting indicating a research fellow for an influential
foreign policy advisor in the Obama Administration was at a work-related event in late 2008
when they were approached by another employee of the think tank ("the employee"). The
employee reportedly indicated that if the two individuals at the table "did get a job in the
government and had access to classified information" and wanted "to make a little extra
money," the employee knew some people to whom they could speak. According to the research
fellow, there was no pretext to the conversation; the employee had not been invited to the
table
And if that weren't enough, "one interviewee did note that the Primary Sub-source
persistently asked about the interviewee's knowledge of a particular military vessel." Real
subtle there, Igor.
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It now seems likely that the panic about foreign influence which swept over our politics for
four years rested on the word of not just a Russian spy, but the worst Russian spy of all time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Declan Leary is the Collegiate Network Fellow at The American Conservative and a
graduate of John Carroll University. His work has been published at National Review ,
Crisis, and elsewhere.
Thank you for the links, very interesting. I've seen several of the pics of Navalny, the
heads look edited in, a bit too big, not quite aligned. This all seems very amateruish, like
the Belorussian coup attempt. I'll bet they are connected more than we know.
I don't believe a bit of it. I haven't seem any evidence of life for Navalny except some not
very convincing pictures.
The video of Ms Pevchickh is interesting too, she is very animated, works hard to get her
point across.
If you allow she was part of a plot to get him "poisoned", lots of new questions pop up:
did Navalny know, was he in on it? Was this supposed to tie in with the Belarus unrest, a
distraction, something else? Who talked Merkel into going along and how? Is Heiko Maas really
that dumb he thought this was going to work?
"... On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. ..."
On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate
Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its
red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. It would be satisfying to see
the collective wisdom of the Parliament to exceed that of the BND. But then that is a low
bar.
If all the energy wasted on peddling Russiagate had instead been used to push real
political alternatives to Trump's programs the Democrats and their voters would likely be in
a better position.
The Ds defeated that possibility when they conspired to derail Sanders and promote
Clinton. As a result, Obama's legacy is Trump. But there was a Deep State faction pulling
Obama's strings that's likely supporting the attempt to foment a domestic Color Revolution,
yet for the life of me I can't see why as all the grifters are getting billions--unless--it's
perceived that Trump's stalled their imperialist projects or stopped what they hoped to
accomplish via JCPOA. In other words, we need a better motive for Russiagate than the mere
disruption of Trump's administration.
The Nexus is Ukraine, where the DNC, Obama and others were heavily involved with corruption,
money into their pockets and money laundered for campaign uses, illegally brought back into
the US.
It was never Russia or Russians. It was always the Podesta-Clinton-Obama operatives and
their true believers in FBI and DOJ, working with the Russophobes in NGOs and the State
Dept.
The desperation as Trump became a real possible President and then an actual elected
President was to cover their crimes in Ukraine and the illegal actions to spy on Trump and
set up Trump campaign associates.
The difficult call now is how high up do the present investigators have cover to save the
institutions of the FBI and DOJ? A real take down would go to Obama, Biden, Clapper, Comey,
Brennan, Podesta, Clinton and all their lieutenants. It would collapse the CIA, State, FBI,
DOJ, and all the lying experts on Russia who perjured to Congress.
Red Ryder gets it -- Ukraine is the specific catalyst, linked to the New Cold War against
Russia and the corruption of the Democrats involved in that conflict.
There is also Flynn and his dirt on Obama's Syria/ISIS policy -- remember his Al Jazeera
interview about Obama's "wilful decision" to ignore DIA reports on ISIS. Flynn knows the US
and its allies had some kind of links to ISIS and Nusra Front (Al Qaeda) in Syria.
And there is also the more general concern, raised by Karlof1, about the Presidency and
the empire.
I found this barb delivered by Lavrov during his presser with Zarif I linked to on the open
thread to be very curious when thought about in the context of Russiagate:
"The fact that the United States has threatened to impose sanctions on those who defy the
American interpretation of the current situation serves as further proof of Washington's
desire to move like a bull in a china shop, putting ultimatums to everyone and punishing
everyone indiscriminately because, in my view, the incumbent US administration has lost
its diplomatic skills almost for good ." [My Emphasis]
Red Ryder @8 & profk @10 connect Ukraine and the outing of the Empire's role in the
creation of Daesh. Yes, it seems much is related to Russia's Phoenix-like rise and outwitting
the Empire's buffoons beginning in 2013 that's generated the above behavior noted by Lavrov.
If TrumpCo does get a second term, unless the entire foreign policy team is dumped and
replaced, its agenda will go nowhere other than further into the hole they've dug for
themselves over the past 20 years--almost every nation is now against Bush's USA as many now
know who the terrorists really are and where they live.
What if the goal of 2016 election was to set up the 2020 American color revolution? If so
Trump needed to win. Obama and the FBI did the groundwork here at home. There is some debate
if the first Trump dossier was actually the second one to cover for the Cody Shearer one that
was given to Strobe Talbot to give to Christopher Steele. Still it had the same goal as to
foster doubt about the legitimacy of 2016 that is currently culminating with the gun toting,
fire bombing hissy fit of the children of liberal privilege. Now if those blasted supreme
righties would just show up, and the whole thing can go really hot like it did in Ukraine,
Libya, Egypt, almost Syria, and any country I might be forgetting. Notice the Trump
administration is parroting the left's white supremacist conspiracy. Its all really bad
theater, but does anyone really care the crumbing infrastructure and the looming economic
collapse when you can instead root for your team. Yes, I am guilty of the later too. Added
bonus we already have a twofer of enemies (Russian and China) for yet another elitist war.
I very doubt that it was "Russiagate" who make it difficult for Trump to pursue the policies
he had been advocating during his election campaign...In fact, "Russiagate" has long ago been
debunked and we have not seen Trump worrying a bit about the average American Joe, most
flagrant during this pandemic...I doubt he would had behaved different were the "Russiagate"
to have never existed..
Simply, electoral "promises" almost never are fullfilled in the already dating decades
neoliberal order, both from the right or the "alleged" liberal left...
On the same grounds, we could affirm then that conspiracy theories about Obama´s
birth place made it difficult for Obama to pursue the policies he had been advocating during
his election campaign....
That Trump has ties to Russian oligarchs is, to my view, out of doubt for anyone following
a bit some writers who use to deeply research their analyses out there like John Helmer....
That these oligarchas had anything to do, in this respect, with the Kremlin, it is doubtful,
but highly likely related to business shenanigans amongst them and Trump & Co...related
to illegal bribes and money laundering...
What have been largely proved is that Trump and his administration have been using big
data management corporations and social networks engineering to manipulate elections and give
coups eveywhere ( as the thorough research I posted at the Week in Review leaves in evidence
it happened in several countries in Latin America , which leads us to suspect that they would
not resist the desire to use the same methods in the US...before...and after the 2016
elections...having Bannon ad chief of campaign and then as chief of staff in 2016 so as that
does not add for tranquility, with what legal methods is respected for achieving whatever
goal..as the last events have clearly showed...
It was during Trump´s mandate that the war on Yemen continued towards total
erradication of Yemenis, especially of Shia belief, by indiscriminate bombing and blockade of
essential goods...that Qasem Soleimani was murdered without any justified reason...that NATO
started a cheeky build up in Russian borders who remained still free of it...that the US
withdrew from most international agreements leaving US/Russia, US/Iran, US/LatinAmerican
relations at its lowest levels, by underminig any remaining trust...Trump reinstated and made
even harsher sanctions against everybody who was not already a "puppet regime", including
Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, Russia, Iran, China, and, even looping the loop, against puppet
governments in the EU...
I very doubt it was Russiagate which kept him from releasing his tax records as requested
by governance transparecny, returning the ammounts of money defrauded in the "University
Loans" affair, clarifying his ties to Epstein network, stopping sowing hatred and divide
amongst US population, build the most world wide network of far-right extremists since post
WWII around the world but especially in Europe to undermine what of "democracy" remains left,
labeled and declared as "terrorists" any political party abroad who does not go along and
oppose his puppet government´s corrupt policies anywhere, lit the Middle East on fire
by continuously provoking Iran, Lebanon, Syria, sent his regime envoys to the EU to twist arm
so that the European countries dedicate more budget to buy provedly ineffective arms from the
US when the money is most needed for socio-economic and health issues in the middle of a
pandemic, not to mention the requisition of health supplies´ cargos in the very Chinese
tarmac which had been previously ordered and bought by European countries which needed them
urgently, criminalized, and tried to label them as second cathegory citizens, a great part of
US population of non-white foreign descent through whose hard work and shameful labor
conditions US thrived along all these decades, well, you name it, the list would be almost
for a book...or two...
To blame all this mess on "Russiagate" is, well, in the best case, underestimating the
readership here...
Oh please, b: "legal jeopardy", don't make me laugh. It's been four years . The whole
political part of Trump's career he's been under the tutelage of mafia consigliere Roy Cohn.
Even better known, he's flown on the Lolita Express, and the FBI has a trove of videos etc
from Epstein's safe (hmm, what else does the latter have in common with Roy Cohn besides the
Trump connection). Bottom line, he's a deeply compromised individual who's concluded long
ago, and correctly, that he's in over his head and better off just playing along. He's had no
reservations appointing professional Russophobes like Fiona Hill; in fact, which of his
appointees has not been a Cold Warrior besides perhaps T-Rex, who was a mere Venezuela
hawk because of some old Exxon bad blood, and who was quickly ditched anyway. Even now, his
own FBI director spouts RussiaGate red meat, and the Donald is doing squat about it.
What does it all matter to Trump? He doesn't have a good name to clear. He didn't run for
president expecting to win, let alone to carry out this or that specific program. This
Vale Tudo carnival atmosphere clearly suits him: if his opponents can make baseless
accusations, so can he. If they can expect to skate beyond some meaningless fall guys, so can
he. To actually uphold the law--it's just not how he rolls.
Had he mostly contented himself with playing president on TV and enjoying the perks of the
office, and understood you can't just let a pandemic kill off your own voters, all would've
been dandy. But, predictably, his ego got the better of him, and he just had to be the
statesman who was finally going to bring China to heel. Again, merely tweeting about it
could've been ignored, but by appointing an array of rabid ideologues who went to work on
"decoupling", he's sided with a Deep State which will hate him regardless, against
Corporate America which went into China to, you know, make money. In this way, he's made
himself enemies a Republican can ill afford; combine this with his personal style (or lack of
it), and just about nobody has his back any more. So the machine goes about purging this
alien body from its system.
when do the American people get to investigate Truman, Ike, John McCain, JFK, Johnson, Bush,
Obama, FBI, Trump, 9/11, CIA, invasion of Iraq, wall street, the US Treasury, the military,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and the like..?
,==He did it==> he did not do it, <=someone else did it, ==>avoids the basic
problem:
America has a government that
a.) conducts wars to protect the economic interest of its favored few.
b.) uses law , to grant feudal lords wealth creating by extracting bits of wealth from
Americans.
c.) conducts nearly all its affairs in classified secret..
d.) is un accountable for the money it spends.
e.) is un accountable for the genocides it conducts in foreign lands.
f.) has two crime families which divide and conquer the citizens to control all election
outcomes
g.) has given to private bankers, its power to print money, control the economy, and tax the
people.
h.) has not adhered to the Bill of Rights or the un amended constitution.
i.) refuses to require private media to speak only the truth.
j.) Refuses to comply with and orto enforce the 1st and 4th amendment<=papers and effects
t/b secure
expand this list as you like
and
Americans have
a.) no access to the USA. <= 3 votes, insolation of state or voting district,
out 527 positions don't get it & none for the President
b.) must pay to the USA taxes and have no input as to how such taxes are collected or
used,
c.) must register their presence to the USA with id numbers
d.) must obey USA laws which Americans had no say in writing, or passing.
e.) must endure foreign wars and domestic programs that serve no legitimate domestic
interest.
expand this list as you like.
You are onto something there...I do not recall whose US think tank analyse I read about US
youth tending ideologically to the left...the same could be said of any youth around the
world after they have been left without future prospect and past opportunities to rise
through the social ladder by rampant savage neoliberal capitalism...
I said at the time that the Ukrainian experiment of 2014 was a general dressed rehearsal
for a future planned authoritarian fascist rule in most of the world, especially the West,
once the prospects, already known by the elites, of collapsing capitalism are obvious for the
general public and cause the consequent uprising..It is in this context that the pandemic and
its sudden impoverishing outcome fits, along with the "orchestrated" violent riots at various
locations, to justify martial law...
Notice that "rewritting of history of WWII" in favor of fascism is a feature of any US
administration since the fall of the USSR...
Past days I read that Roger Stone, former Trump advisor, if i am not wrong also implied in
a corruption case, advised Trump to declare martial law after winning in Novemeber...It is in
that context that all the noise we have been hearing all these past months about the riots,
militias, coups, and so on fit...What we have not heard about is about hundreds of thousands
of evictions, inacabable line ups for food banks, and the total socio-economic disaster more
than anything willingly built by TPTB...
Recal that they "built their own reality, and when you are catching up with that reality,
they build another one"...
It is difficult to teach old chickenhawk a new tricks. Looks like she is a real "national
security parasite" and will stay is this role till the bitter end.
"America's world management, NATO, the European Union and the construction of establishments and
alliances the US constructed after World War II have taken a hit." took hit because of the crisis of neoliberalism
not so much because of Russia resistance to the USA neoliberal domination and unwillingness to became a vassal state a la EU
states, Japan and GB.
Her hostile remark confirms grave mistake of allowing immigrants to occupy high position in the US foreign policy hierarchy.
They bring with themselves "ancient hatred"
Only a blind (or a highly indoctrinated/brainwashed) person is unable to see where all these neocon policies are leading...
Notable quotes:
"... America's world management, NATO, the European Union and the construction of establishments and alliances the US constructed after World War II have taken a hit ..."
"... "They lost the entire US political class ..."
Fiona Hill, the National Security Council's senior director for European and Russian affairs
till 2019, says divisions are rising inside the Kremlin over the knowledge of persevering with
a "dirty tricks" marketing campaign that's had combined outcomes and will now face diminishing
returns.
On the one hand, Russia's 2016 affect operations succeeded past the Kremlin's wildest goals.
The US-dominated, unipolar world that Putin has lengthy railed in opposition to is now not.
America's world management, NATO, the European Union and the construction of establishments and
alliances the US constructed after World War II have taken a hit. "On that ledger, wow, yes,
basically over-fulfilled the plan," mentioned Hill.
At the identical time, getting caught in the act of making an attempt to sabotage US
democracy has proved pricey. "They lost the entire US political class and politicized ties so that the whole future of
US-Russia relations now depends on who wins in November," she mentioned.
Following a long line of very arrogant american imperial "negotiators", mr oblivion
billingslea used standard "negotiating" techniques like
(a) accusing the other side of crimes Americans have committed first and forever, eg,
extreme lying, bad faith argumentation, military aggression, foreign government security
breaching, assassination and poisoning [as in american presidents and independent thinkers],
and of course, electoral cheating;
(b) putting the opponent in the "negotiation process" on the defensive or back foot by
stating false news allegations amplified by the media controlled by the american empire;
(c) offering nothing useful or commitable to be done by the empire, and yet
"magnanimously" demanding the moon as opponents' concessions, eg, russian, iranian and
chinese nuclear weapons limits, but not for nato's development and deployment, and; (d) after
making impossible demands, the imperials accuse the opponents of hostility and unwillingness
to "negotiate".
The russians can skillfully agree by stating that they only require the americans to
reduce their nukes to 320 pieces like china, and in less than five years.
This is why it is very important for sovereign nations to read the guidebook, called the
"idiot's guide on running the american empire", and developing deep and lasting
solutions.
As for the other american imperial military "advantages", eg, constellation of
"aggression" satellites, andrei forgot to mention that these can be shot or burned down in
minutes easily by russia, china and even iran, as these stations cannot hide or run away in
earth orbits.
Replenishment of weapons and military supplies after 3 months is rather doomed as the
cheap, mass production and manufacturing facilities do not exist. Which must be re-created
somehow but now
American lands are the targets. Much, Much Different Than WW2 !!
And of course, russia can always nuke down the USA and its vassal countries, and thus
permanently ruin their economies for a decade or more, they don't know how to run defense --
this was always the fatal weakness of all bullies - if they'll have enough time to "learn
it"... let's see... I doubt this.
Let's see americans try to start and conduct a nuclear war after too many spy, internet
and gps satellites are shot down. Russia can even do this today using conventional
explosives, and the world will be shocked how helpless the american military and economy can
be made even without using russian nukes.
There are countries still immune to the numerous american imperial diseases that are
already documented daily in zerohedge postings. The better countries still have lots of
parents telling their kids to study and work hard so they can have better lives than their
ancestors.
In oregon and california, they teach unemployable kids to burn something or somebody
sometime before dinner.
CdVision • 11 hours ago
I was about to say that what now comes out of the US & Trump's mouth in particular, is
Orwellian. But that credits it with too much gravitas. The true comparison is Alice in
Wonderland:
"Words mean whatever I want them to mean".
Reminiscence of the Future.. ( http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2020/09/russia-steals-everything.html)
Russia "Steals Everything" !! (Not just China, oops... ???!!!!)
And Jesus Christ was an American and was born in Kalamazoo, MI. It is a well-known fact. So
Donald Trump, evidently briefed by his "utterly competent and crushingly precise aids", knows
now that too! !!! LOL
> US President Donald Trump claims that Russia developed hypersonic weapons after
allegedly stealing information from the United States.
> According to him, "Russia received this information from the Obama administration,"
Moscow "stole this information." Trump said that "Russia received this information and then
created" the rocket, reports TASS.
> "We have such advanced weapons that President Xi, Putin and everyone else will envy
us. They do not know what we have, but they know that it is something that no one has ever
heard of. "
->We are the foremost and always number one. Everything is invented only by us, the
rest can only either steal, or be gifted with our developments for good behavior. This
situation is eternal, unchanging, everyone lags behind American Tikhalogii at least 50 years
(the time frame was chosen so that even a 20-year-old would lose heart, "what's the point of
trying to catch up, it won't work anyway, in my lifetime"). It was, is, and will be, this is
the natural course of events.
All this is delivered in the format of the classic Sunday sermon of the American
provincial Protestant church, coding the parishioners for further deeds and actions. And it
worked effectively, creating in some basalt confidence "we are better because we are better",
in others - "I don't mind anything for joining this radiant success, I'm ready for anything,
I'll go for any hardships and crimes, if only There".
Only now it worked. In a situation where the frequency of pronouncing such mantras is more
and more, emotions are invested in them too, but in fact everyone understands that this is
what autohypnosis does not work.
The poor have stolen from the United States, if you look at it, literally everything. And
5G and the superweapon of the gods. Moreover, a pearl with a characteristic handwriting is
not copy / paste, but move / paste, you bastards. Therefore, the United States does not even
have any traces of developments left - the guys just sit in an empty room, shrug their hands,
"here we have a farm of mechanical killer dolls, with the faces of Mickey Mouse overexposed,
and now look - traces of bast shoes and candy wrappers from "Korkunov" only, ah-ah-ah, well,
something like that, ah. "
At the same time, there are no cases of sabotage, espionage - whole projects were simply
developed, developed, brought to a working product, and then the hob - and that's it, and
disappeared. And this became noticeable only after years. And all the persons involved are
like "wow, wow."
Psychiatric crazy fool of the head, no less.
But due to the fact that all of the above theses are driven very tightly into the template
for the perception of the world, both those who voiced these theses and the listeners are
satisfied.
Because the post-American post-hegemonic world is not terrible because in some ratings
another country will be higher there, and Detroit will never be rebuilt "as it was". It is
scary because it is not clear how to live for people who had no support in the form of global
goals, faith, philosophy of life, and all this was replaced by narcissism on the basis of
"successful success is my second self".
This means that the moment when this issue has to be resolved must be delayed to the last.
Leaving the whole topic on the plane "we were offended, we are offended, we were dishonest,
which means we have the right to any action" is not a bad move.
It's a pity that it doesn't really affect the essence of what is happening.
Somewhat a side note, but has some relevance. The West has used against Russia the same
memes and tropes the German Nazis used against Jews, the Soviet Union, and Slavic
peoples. The great Jewish conspiracy to destroy German is being regurgitated as Putin
wants to destroy American democracy. But the second half the Nazi attack was the Jews wanted
to destroy European civilization, and not just Germany. This is where the crap about "rules
based order" comes in. Some also used the term "liberal democracies". Same theme: Russian
wants to destroy the entirety of the Western order--not just making sure Hillary lost the
election (and now Biden).
But here is the thing. The West with American leadership looks at this struggle over a
rules based order as a life and death struggle. It is not just about economic competition and
dominance. The underlying propaganda base is rather deadly.
"... 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 ..."
"... 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." ..."
"... Bhadrakumar describes how the 'west', through its own behavior, created a mighty block that now opposes its dictates. He concludes ..."
"... Quintessentially, Russia and China contest a set of neoliberal practices that have evolved in the post-World War 2 international order validating selective use of human rights as a universal value to legitimise western intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. On the other hand, they also accept and continuously affirm their commitment to a number of fundamental precepts of the international order -- in particular, the primacy of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, the importance of international law, and the centrality of the United Nations and the key role of the Security Council. ..."
"... The rules are follow the dictates of our western neo-colonial institutions like the World Bank, the IMF et all. ..."
"... Its a pretty simple concept backed by the attack dog of the US military. ..."
"... 'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. The term was invented to avoid having to say 'rule of law', which invited criticism because even the most minimal amount of law (such as Geneva conventions, ICC etc) was rejected in practice and in policy by the leading members of the actually existing world order. ..."
"... Rumor says the "Wolfowitz Doctrine" also envisioned the balkanization of Russia (the document is still classified, but it leaked to a NYT journalist at the time, who published a report on it). ..."
"... It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world. But as the "exceptionalist" western countries decline, they will go even crazier and crazier and there will be full blown hysteria. ..."
"... In this sense, the rule based order will be over as there will be only disorder and animalistic, crazed western rage and bullying. The West is like a trapped animal. It will start pouncing, raging and snarling like a wild animal. This is the real nature of the West. A hungry wild animal that needs to feed. ..."
"... But behind the liberal mask, there are hateful eyes and gnashing teeth, and hunger and greed for other people's resources. ..."
"... Expressed in words, the West's face says "I'm the best and you are nothing! Give me your stuff! And this is how it will forever be!" ..."
"... As Putin has said, the US is no longer agreement capable. ..."
"... Instead of bringing Russia into the Western liberal democracies (with the threat of major nuclear war now drastically reduced) the now Anglo-Zionist Empire just looted it. ..."
"... Actually the Trump Administration has done far more against Russia than all US administrations from the last 30 years. Do not listen what they say, look at what they do. Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks ..."
"... Rules based international order .... the U.S. functions as the the Supreme Court for the U.N. , 'we have invoked snapback sanctions and extended the arms embargo on Iran indefinitely and are enforcing it'. UN, 'but your vote failed'. ..."
"... Rules based International Order is the dog whistle for global private finance controlled economies. It is sad that we are in a civilization war with China/Russia about who runs international finance going forward and yet there is no discussion of the subject but instead all sorts of proxy conflicts. ..."
"... The US is not just facing relative decline -- the fact that others are catching up in key ways. The US is also facing absolute decline -- the fact that it is suffering a degradation of capacities and is losing competitive battles in key areas. Examples of absolute decline include the Russian and Chinese military-technological revolutions based on anti-ship and hypersonic missiles and air defense systems; Chinese 5G; China's demonstrative success in suppressing COVID and its overall manufacturing power; the declining quality of life for most Americans; and the collapse of American institutional competence. ..."
"... Related to this, we can't separate these dynamics from the political economy of the states in question. China, in particular, is showing that an interventionist state, with high levels of public ownership, is essential to qualitative power, human security, and economic and social development. ..."
"... Psssst, learning Russian is easier than Chinese and we already know a few Russian words, such as novichok. ..."
"... Russia after the Cold War was a shambles and today it remains a weak economy with a limited role on the world stage, concerned mainly with retaining some of its traditional areas of influence. China is a vastly more formidable competitor. If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world. [my emphasis] ..."
"... It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world. ..."
"... The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot. What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them despite threats and intimidation from the Empire. ..."
"... The Empire's power-elite KNOW that Russia, China, and allies of Russia-China don't want to be subject to their "rules-based order". The Empire is actively working to undermine, subvert, and divide the countries that oppose it. While also securing their own territories/population via intimidation and propaganda. ..."
"... On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. ..."
"... My late father as an army officer prosecuted Japanese war criminals for their atrocities now the Anglo-Zionists are the pre-eminent war criminals and their leaders loudly proclaim "our values" as a pathological and propagandistic form of projection. Is it possible they are unaware of their blatant hypocrisy ? ..."
"... There is no "international law" and no "international order." There is only relative power. And when those powers clash, as seems inevitable, the world is in for a major nuclear war, and probably preceded by several more regional wars. Meanwhile, the US internally is collapsing into economic disaster, social unrest, political and social oppression, infrastructure failure, and medical disasters. We'll probably be in martial law sometime between November 3 and January 21 if not beyond that period, just for starters. ..."
"... America's "Rules-Based International Order" is a Goebbelsian euphemism for a Lies-Based Imperial Order, led by the USA and its war criminal allies (aka the self-styled Free World). ..."
"... The true nature of this America-led order is exposed by the USA's war of aggression against Iraq (which violated international law and had no United Nations sanction) and its decades-long War on Terrorism, which have murdered hundreds of thousands of people and maimed, immiserated, or refugeed millions of more people. ..."
"... The Empire is very much alive and dangerous. Ask Iran, ask Syria, as the Palestinians, ask the Russians, ask the Chinese. Ask numerous African nations. Even Pangloss was not so stupidly naive. ..."
"... quite right. 'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. ie US and its "allies" is basically asking the rest of the world to finance their (the US et al) version of a welfare state. ..."
"... China and rest of the worlds foreign central banks stopped growing their foreign exchange reserves (on net) in 2014 leaving the US in a sort of limbo. ..."
"... "Major powers maintaining cooperation, at least not engaging in Cold War-style antagonism, is the important foundation of world peace. China is committed to maintaining cooperation among major powers, as well as being flexible in the balance of interests acceptable to all parties. The problem is the Trump administration is hysterically shaping decoupling and confrontation between Beijing and Washington, and has been mobilizing more forces to its side at home and abroad. Those US policymakers are deliberately splitting the world like during the Cold War. ..."
"... The first 'Cold War' was entirely contrived. The US knew the Soviet Union was weak and had no agenda beyond maintaining security and its own reconstruction after WW2. There was no threat of a Western European invasion, or of the USSR spreading revolution globally. All that Cold War ideology is a lie. And the same lying is taking place about China today. No difference. ..."
"... It's good to see discussion here of the nefarious role of the American far-right neocon warmongers in the State Department, intelligence services and military leadership just before the turn of the new century. What I have never seen clearly explained, however, is the connection between these very dangerous forces and the equally cynical and reactionary Israeli politicians and the Mossad, as well as Saudi Arabian officials. ..."
The 'western' countries, i.e. the United States and its 'allies', love to speak of a 'rules based international order'
which they say everyone should follow. That 'rules based order' is a way more vague concept
than the actual rule of law:
The G7 is united by its shared values and commitment to a rules based international order.
That order is being challenged by authoritarianism, serious violations of human rights,
exclusion and discrimination, humanitarian and security crises, and the defiance of
international law and standards.
As members of the G7, we are convinced that our societies and the world have reaped
remarkable benefits from a global order based on rules and underscore that this system must
have at its heart the notions of inclusion, democracy and respect for human rights,
fundamental freedoms, diversity, and the rule of law.
That the 'rules based international order' is supposed to include vague concepts of
'democracy', 'human rights', 'fundamental freedoms', 'diversity' and more makes it easy to
claim that this or that violation of the 'rules based international order' has occurred. Such
violations can then be used to impose punishment in the form of sanctions or war.
That the above definition was given by a minority of a few rich nations makes it already
clear that it can not be a global concept for a multilateral world. That would require a set of
rules that everyone has agreed to. We already had and have such a system. It is called
international law. But at the end of the cold war the 'west' began to ignore the actual
international law and to replace it with its own rules which others were then supposed to
follow. That hubris has come back to bite the 'west'.
Anatol Lieven's recent piece, How
the west lost , describes this moral defeat of the 'west' after its dubious 'victory' in
the cold war:
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:
...
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 recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of
America."
But that power has since failed in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, during the 2008
financial crisis and now again in the pandemic. It also created new competition to its role due
to its own behavior:
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. ...
On the other hand, the benign and neglectful way in which Washington regarded
the rise of China in the generation after the Cold War (for example, the blithe decision to
allow China to join the World Trade Organisation) was also rooted in ideological arrogance.
Western triumphalism meant that most of the US elites were convinced that as a result of
economic growth, the Chinese Communist state would either democratise or be overthrown; and
that China would eventually have to adopt the western version of economics or fail
economically. This was coupled with the belief that good relations with China could be
predicated on China accepting a so-called "rules-based" international order in which the US
set the rules while also being free to break them whenever it wished; something that nobody
with the slightest knowledge of Chinese history should have believed.
The retired Indian ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar touches on the same points in an excellent
series about the new Chinese-Russian alliance:
Bhadrakumar describes how the 'west', through its own behavior, created a mighty block that
now opposes its dictates. He concludes:
Quintessentially, Russia and China contest a set of neoliberal practices that have evolved in
the post-World War 2 international order validating selective use of human rights as a
universal value to legitimise western intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign
states. On the other hand, they also accept and continuously affirm their commitment to a
number of fundamental precepts of the international order -- in particular, the primacy of
state sovereignty and territorial integrity, the importance of international law, and the
centrality of the United Nations and the key role of the Security Council.
While the U.S. wants a vague 'rules based international order' China and Russia emphasize an
international order that is based on the rule of law. Two recent comments by leaders from China
and Russia underline this.
China firmly supports the United Nations' central role in global affairs and opposes any
country acting like boss of the world, President Xi Jinping said on Monday.
...
"No country has the right to dominate global affairs, control the destiny of others or keep
advantages in development all to itself," Xi said.
Noting that the UN must stand firm for justice, Xi said that mutual respect and equality
among all countries, big or small, is the foremost principle of the UN Charter.
No country should be allowed to do whatever it likes and be the hegemon or bully, Xi said.
"Unilateralism is a dead end," he said.
...
International laws should not be distorted or used as a pretext to undermine other countries'
legitimate rights and interests or world peace and stability, he added.
The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went even further by outright rejecting the 'western rules' that the 'rules
based international order' implies:
Ideas that Russia and China will play by sets of Western rules under any circumstances are
deeply flawed , Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with New
York-based international Russian-language RTVI channel.
"I was reading our political scientists who are well known in the West. The following idea
is becoming louder and more pronounced: it is time to stop applying Western metrics to our
actions and stop trying to be liked by the West at any cost . These are very reputable people
and a rather serious statement. It is clear to me that the West is wittingly or unwittingly
pushing us towards this analysis. It is likely to be done unwittingly," Lavrov noted.
"However, it is a big mistake to think that Russia will play by Western rules in any case,
just like thinking this in terms of China."
As an alliance China and Russia have all the raw materials, energy, engineering and
industrial capabilities, agriculture and populations needed to be completely independent from
the 'west'. They have no need nor any desire to follow dubious rules dictated by other powers.
There is no way to make them do so. As M.K. Bhadrakumar concludes
:
The US cannot overwhelm that alliance unless it defeats both China and Russia together,
simultaneously. The alliance, meanwhile, also happens to be on the right side of history.
Time works in its favour, as the decline of the US in relative comprehensive national power
and global influence keeps advancing and the world gets used to the "post-American century."
---
P.S.
On a lighter note: RT , Russia's state sponsored international TV station, has recently
hired Donald Trump
(vid). He will soon host his own reality show on RT . The working title is reportedly:
"Putin's Apprentice". The apprenticeship might give him a chance to learn how a nation that has
failed can be resurrected to its former glory.
Posted by b on September 22, 2020 at 17:59 UTC | Permalink
The Liberal International Order or Pax Americana are synonyms for The
Rules Based Order. The plan that was followed for years was the outline given by Zbigniew
Brzezinski and the Trilateral Commission in The Grand Chessboard to "contain" the ambition of
Russia, China, and Iran over their interest to expand into Central Asia and the Middle East.
Brzezinski changed
in 2016, so did Kissinger, Brzezinski wrote that it was time to make peace and to integrate
with Russia, China and Iran. But the elites had changed by then, newer people had taken
over and no longer followed Brzezinski.
The rules are follow the dictates of our western neo-colonial institutions like the World
Bank, the IMF et all. We will own you and you will do what we say and those are the rules.
Any challenge to our authority will lead to war, economic ruin or both.
Its a pretty simple concept backed by the attack dog of the US military.
'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another.
The term was invented to avoid having to say 'rule of law', which invited criticism
because even the most minimal amount of law (such as Geneva conventions, ICC etc) was
rejected in practice and in policy by the leading members of the actually existing world
order.
Rumor says the "Wolfowitz Doctrine" also envisioned the balkanization of Russia (the document
is still classified, but it leaked to a NYT journalist at the time, who published a report on
it).
It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the
world. But as the "exceptionalist" western countries decline, they will go even crazier and
crazier and there will be full blown hysteria.
In this sense, the rule based order will be over as there will be only disorder and
animalistic, crazed western rage and bullying. The West is like a trapped animal. It will start pouncing, raging and snarling like a wild
animal. This is the real nature of the West. A hungry wild animal that needs to feed.
All the liberalism is just self-congratulation about how exceptionalist it is. It is born
out of narcisism and self-obsession during the "good times" of the West.
But behind the liberal mask, there are hateful eyes and gnashing teeth, and hunger and
greed for other people's resources.
The real face of it is hateful and snarling. And it will be fully exposed during the next
10 years, as the West goes crazy and it becomes a hungry wild animal that desperately needs
to feed.
Expressed in words, the West's face says "I'm the best and you are nothing! Give me your
stuff! And this is how it will forever be!"
Countries need to stay out from the wild animal and carry a big stick just in case, until
it succumbs from its internal hatreds and contradictions.
As Putin has said, the US is no longer agreement capable. As b. outlines. the US elites no
longer follow the rule of law. This is even true within the US. The US inherited the role
formerly played by the British Empire after WW2.
The national security apparatus of both the
US and the Soviet Union kept the Cold War going. Notice how soon after JFK was assassinated
Khrushchev was deposed. Gorbachev rightly stopped the Soviets superpower regime. As Dmitri Orlov points out - Empire hollowed out the Soviet Union and he sees it doing the same to the
US.
Instead of bringing Russia into the Western liberal democracies (with the threat of major
nuclear war now drastically reduced) the now Anglo-Zionist Empire just looted it. The life
expectancy of Russians fell 7 years in a decade until rescued by Putin.
It can now be seen
that the Nixon-Kissinger opening up to China was not to gain access to its large market
potential but to gain access to hundreds of millions of cheap, disciplined, and educated
workers. The elites starting in the 70s became greedier. Jet travel,electronic communication,
and computers allowed the outsourcing of manufacture.
The spread of air conditioning allowed
even the too hot south to be a location. First in the US as the factories began their march
through the non union southern states onto Mexico. Management from the north could now live
in air conditioned houses, drive air conditioned cars and work in air conditioned offices.
The 70s oil inflation led to stagnation as the unionized labor were powerful enough to get
cost of living raises. With the globalization of labor union power in the US has been
destroyed. As Eric X Li points out China's one party rule actually changes policies easier
than the Western democracies.
So China's government hasn't joined in with the West in just
creating wealth for the top 1% and debt for the real economy.
As b. pointed out, the Anglo
Zionist policies created the mutual benefit partnership of Russia and China. The Chinese belt
and road initiative appears to be intent on creating a large trading zone that could benefit
those involved. The US is just using sanctions and the military to turn sovereign functioning
countries that don't go along with it into failed states and their infrastructure turned to
rubble
Now, the US is forced into puppeteering the UN in order to maintain the illusion of the
'rules based order,' even as it slides further and further away from any meaningful
international cooperation:
Fortunately for the world, the United States took responsible action to stop this from
happening. In accordance with our rights under UNSCR 2231, we initiated the snapback process
to restore virtually all previously terminated UN sanctions, including the arms embargo. The
world will be safer as a result.
The United States expects all UN Member States to fully comply with their obligations
to implement these measures. In addition to the arms embargo, this includes restrictions
such as the ban on Iran engaging in enrichment and reprocessing-related activities, the
prohibition on ballistic missile testing and development by Iran, and sanctions on the
transfer of nuclear- and missile-related technologies to Iran, among others. If UN Member
States fail to fulfill their obligations to implement these sanctions, the United States is
prepared to use our domestic authorities to impose consequences for those failures and ensure
that Iran does not reap the benefits of UN-prohibited activity.
Actually the Trump Administration has done far more against Russia than all US
administrations from the last 30 years. Do not listen what they say, look at what they
do. Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks.
Pompeo talks more or less continually about "China's bullying behaviour". To me it is
wonderful that he can say this with a straight face. (Perhaps it is a result of his lessons
in the CIA on "how to lie better".)All the countries that have engaged with China have
benefitted from it, whether as salesmen or as recipients of aid or loans at advantageous
rates. The countries that have engaged with America have mostly (All?) lost. (The fifty+
countries invaded and wrecked since WW2 or the NATO "allies" or the countries attacked with
sanctions.) Either their economies were destroyed or billions upon billions of dollars were
paid to the US MIC. The NATO member countries have got what from their membership? Formerly,
they had "Protection" from an imaginary Soviet threat, more recently "Protection" from an
equally imaginary Russian threat! Some bargain, that!
Rules based international order .... the U.S. functions as the the Supreme Court for the
U.N. , 'we have invoked snapback sanctions and extended the arms embargo on Iran
indefinitely and are enforcing it'. UN, 'but your vote failed'.
U.S, 'we have the right to seize cargo between any two countries transported in
international waters based on U.S. federal appeals court decision even though the transaction
in no way involves the U.S. We call this Freedom of Navigation and why we need to have
aircraft carriers in the South China Sea and Arabian Gulf'
Rules based International Order is the dog whistle for global private finance controlled
economies.
It is sad that we are in a civilization war with China/Russia about who runs international
finance going forward and yet there is no discussion of the subject but instead all sorts of
proxy conflicts.
Thanks for the posting b as it gets to the core myths around the global private finance
jackboot on the neck of countries in the West.
The US is not just facing relative decline -- the fact that others are catching up in key
ways. The US is also facing absolute decline -- the fact that it is suffering a degradation
of capacities and is losing competitive battles in key areas. Examples of absolute decline
include the Russian and Chinese military-technological revolutions based on anti-ship and
hypersonic missiles and air defense systems; Chinese 5G; China's demonstrative success in
suppressing COVID and its overall manufacturing power; the declining quality of life for most
Americans; and the collapse of American institutional competence.
Related to this, we can't separate these dynamics from the political economy of the states
in question. China, in particular, is showing that an interventionist state, with high levels
of public ownership, is essential to qualitative power, human security, and economic and
social development.
Capitalism might enrich a few, but it is the primary cause of America's relative and
absolute decline.
US and allied military analysts have been talking over the last year or so of the need to
enter a single focus and total "wartime" posture throughout our societies, with all financial
and industrial output directed to the "war". This has influenced the information/ propaganda
efforts, but also the uptick in military manoeuvres around Taiwan and renewed NATO pressure
directed at Russia (including the recent provocative B52 flights). Don't think Russia/China
can be tricked into over-reacting, but some kind of loss-of-life military confrontation may
be what the rules-based side is looking for as the population at large will probably not
accept a "wartime sacrifice" regimen without such.
Whilst Russia and China are creating a truly new, unique and creative alliance and a
market of everything, in Australia the "authorities" are sicking their police dogs on poor
grannies sitting on park benches. This image of five brainless armed state goons in a show of
force over two quiet little grannies really puts things into perspective. It must be that New
World Order that Soros and puppets always talked about.
Psssst, learning Russian is easier than Chinese and we already know a few Russian words,
such as novichok.
The post scriptum stopped the clock for me. Has our host slipped into our drink there a
profound prophecy, disguised as jesting?
Many agree something big will happen (break?) soon, possibly with the elections. The other
thing is the Americans' ability to change course, drop all baggage, and run off in a new,
even the opposite direction with unfettered enthusiasm (and ferocity). No people has a
greater capacity for almost instant renewal, once it chooses to.
I also notice that the spoof takes good aim at The Donald's peculiarities, though in a
fair and human way. The proverbial Russian warmth, or a humorous invitation?
Meanwhile, I enjoy my newfound optimism in these dark times. Thanks b!
Thanks b and on Anatol Lieven in the Prospect story (fairy story?)...
Russia after the Cold War was a shambles and today it remains a weak economy with a limited
role on the world stage, concerned mainly with retaining some of its traditional areas of
influence. China is a vastly more formidable competitor. If the US (and the UK, if as usual
we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of
arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which
western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the
competition and endangering the world. [my emphasis]
Lieven simply does not see it. Has it ever occurred to Lieven that colonialism just might
be rejected by both Russia and China and that there might be no competition? Does Lieven
watch too much football?
What is it that endangers the world in Lieven's petite cortex? This verbose Lieven
tosh is littered with fancy sentences trawled from here and there but always presented to us
from a narrow dimensional mind with limited analysis and seemingly zero interrogation.
again:- "then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world"...
So Lieven thinks the current behaviour of the US hegemon and its collaborator the UK is
innocuous? These were the two nations that blithely squandered the "peace dividend" from the
end of cold war as he describes and have led us to this time of perpetual war. A perpetual
war that he does not mention, does not allude to, does not treat as an important driver
behind the current global mistrust and disengagement from the USUK drive for global
dominance.
Lieven is putting lipstick on his pig and screaming about losing the competition to the
imagined wolf outside his prison.
It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over
the world.
I agree. The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot. What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually
prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them
despite threats and intimidation from the Empire.
_________________________________
Passer by @Sep22 20:15 #14
Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks.
Yes. We still see the narratives like of Trump as Putin-lover despite the debunking of
Russiagate and the clear evidence of Cold War tensions. The incessant propaganda reeks of
desperation.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
Some seem to think that the Empire is cornered.
Aha! We've got you now, you scoundrels!
LOL.
The Empire's power-elite KNOW that Russia, China, and allies of Russia-China don't want to
be subject to their "rules-based order". The Empire is actively working to undermine,
subvert, and divide the countries that oppose it. While also securing their own
territories/population via intimidation and propaganda.
On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate
Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its
red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. It would be satisfying to see the
collective wisdom of the Parliament to exceed that of the BND. But then that is a low bar.
"For our part, we more than once described a balanced and mutually acceptable framework
for future agreements in this sphere during our contacts with the American negotiators. Aware
of the difficulties on the path forward in light of how widely different our approaches are,
we proposed extending the New START as it was originally signed.
"We do not want any unilateral advantages, but we will not make any unilateral concessions
either. A deal may be possible if the United States is ready to coordinate a new document on
the basis of the balance of interests, parity and without expecting Russia to make unilateral
concessions. But this will take time. We can have time to do this if the treaty is
extended."
As predicted, the Outlaw US Empire makes an offer it knows will be refused so it can then
blame Russia for being an unreliable negotiating partner--a trick we've all seen before.
I agree. The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot.
What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually
prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them
despite threats and intimidation from the Empire.
Yes, the big question remaining is to predict what will happen and when. This is what the
real deal is. And I'm sure they are working on that in the Intel agencies. It can certainly be predicted that the US and the EU will be significantly weaker in 2030
that today. Will this be enough is the question.
We now have some new information about US long term health as published by CBO. Very
interesting numbers.
They predict lower population growth and lower GDP growth for the US than previously
estimated, as well as higher debt rates. US federal debt is to reach 195 % of GDP by 2050 under best case scenario.
Analysts also seem to agree that the Covid 19 crisis further weakened the US vis a vis
China, as the Chinese economy significantly outperformed almost everyone else this year, more
than expected before the crisis.
I will also mention two important recent numbers. This year:
1. China, for the first time, became the biggest trading partner for the EU, beating the
US.
2. China's retail market overtook the one of the US.
Posted by: vk | Sep 22 2020 19:05 utc | 4 -- "....Eurasia is where most of human civilization
lives, it's the "World Island" - the world island not in the military sense, but in the
economic sense. Every path to human prosperity passes through Eurasia - that's why the USA
can't "let it alone" in the first place, while the reverse is not true, that is, Eurasia can
give to the luxury of letting the Americas alone."
Excellent observation, VK.
Even if the World Island (thanks for your formulation) trades with itself, within itself,
there is sufficient mass to last a century, during which the arrogantly exceptional West
might just wake up from their Century of Humiliation.
Meanwhile, inertia alone will ensure that the West forgets that their vaunted
"civilisation" was fed, watered, enriched by the Silk Route that came from the East -- from
the Middle Kingdom (China) and from the Middle East (which is "middle", as you pointed out
above, because all wealth passes through that region).
Yes there are rules which are observed more by their breach than their observance: The Geneva
Conventions. Just ask Julian Assange.
I find it incredible that the Anglo-Zionist captive nations can sign, ratify, incorporate
into domestic law and then sign the additional protocol, making themselves high contracting
parties, which requires them to report all and any breaches to Geneva, then ignore all the
above commitments. One of these commitments includes educating their citizens on the basic
provisions of the conventions. Again they haven't bothered, that could expose their hypocrisy
to the public.
Even the bandit statelet signed but I am yet to see just one example of its application in
the seventy plus years of its barbaric and bloodthirsty occupation of Palestine.
Interestingly, the conventions prohibit the occupied from signing away one iota of their
territory to the occupier. So much for what Claude Pictet's Commentary to the Fourth Geneva
Convention calls "alleged annexations." This book is available from the ICRC.
My late father as an army officer prosecuted Japanese war criminals for their atrocities
now the Anglo-Zionists are the pre-eminent war criminals and their leaders loudly proclaim
"our values" as a pathological and propagandistic form of projection. Is it possible they are
unaware of their blatant hypocrisy ?
It seems the New World Order has some familiar and unsurprising antecedents:
Anatol Lieven comes from an educated and cultured family in Britain's upper middle class
layer. His older siblings - he is the youngest of five children - include a High Court judge
(Dame Natalie Lieven), a Cambridge University professor / historian (Dominic Lieven) and a
psychologist / linguistics researcher (Elena Lieven). They haven't done badly for a family from the old Baltic German
aristocratic elite that used to serve the Russian empire as administrators for the
Livonia governorate.
The British Lievens might see themselves as gatekeepers and interpreters of what the
ruling classes desire (or appear to desire) and communicate that down to us. Hence their
positions in intellectual and academic occupations - no engineers, technicians or academics
in the physical or biological sciences among their number.
Anatol Lieven is right though about "competition", in the sense I believe he is using it:
it is "competition" for supposed global leadership and influence as only the British and
Americans understand it. Life as British and American elites understand it is the annual
football competition writ large; there can only be one winner and the worst position to be in
is second place and every other place below it. Never mind that what Russia and China have in
mind is a vision of the world with multiple and overlapping leadership roles dispersed among
nations according to various criteria: this ideal is simply too much for the Anglosphere
elites to understand, let alone digest and accept.
Still, I wonder why Anatol Lieven is teaching in a university in Qatar of all places.
Family influence and reputation must only go so far.
if you aren't at least a little prepared for a
disruption in critical supplies, and choose instead to waste time commenting on online
forums, it won't matter how up to date you are on "rules based international order" vs.
"international law". at that point the reality will be something like this: if you aren't
holding it, you don't have it, and if you can't defend it, you won't be keeping it for long.
Got that absolutely right.
There is no "international law" and no "international order." There is only relative
power. And when those powers clash, as seems inevitable, the world is in for a major nuclear
war, and probably preceded by several more regional wars. Meanwhile, the US internally is
collapsing into economic disaster, social unrest, political and social oppression,
infrastructure failure, and medical disasters. We'll probably be in martial law sometime
between November 3 and January 21 if not beyond that period, just for starters.
This month is National Preparedness Month. I recommend watching the following videos from
well-known "preppers" who have been warning about this stuff for years.
And this one from The Urban Prepper, an IT guy who is exceptionally well organized and
logical in his videos. I recommend subscribing to his channel. He avoids most of the
excessive "doom and gloom" hype that afflicts a lot of prepper channels and is oriented more
about urban survival than "backwoods bushcraft" since most people live in cities. Prepping 101: Prepping
Architecture Diagram for Gear Organization
And if you don't watch anything else, watch this one from Canadian Prepper - he's
absolutely right in this one and it specifically applies to the barflies here: What is Really Going
On? Its WORSE Than You Think
Meanwhile, inertia alone will ensure that the West forgets that their vaunted "civilisation"
was fed, watered, enriched by the Silk Route that came from the East -- from the Middle
Kingdom (China) and from the Middle East (which is "middle", as you pointed out above,
because all wealth passes through that region).
Posted by: kiwiklown | Sep 22 2020 23:41 utc | 39
Oh, and this one from Canadian Prepper in which he muses about whether and why we actually
*want* the SHTF situation to occur. This one would resonate with a lot of the commentary here
about the social malaise and the psychological reasons for it. Maybe nothing really new for
some, but definitely relevant.
Still, I wonder why Anatol Lieven is teaching in a university in Qatar of all places.
Family influence and reputation must only go so far.
Thank you that backgrounder explains a lot. Perhaps like Englanders before him he finds
Qatar, safe and rewarding PLUS mounds of finest hashish and titillating company. From my
understanding it is a grotesque abuser of human rights and everyone has a price.
America's "Rules-Based International Order" is a Goebbelsian euphemism for a Lies-Based
Imperial Order, led by the USA and its war criminal allies (aka the self-styled Free World).
The true nature of this America-led order is exposed by the USA's war of aggression
against Iraq (which violated international law and had no United Nations sanction) and its
decades-long War on Terrorism, which have murdered hundreds of thousands of people and
maimed, immiserated, or refugeed millions of more people. These crimes against humanity have
been justified by Orwellian American lies about "Weapons of Mass Destruction," "fighting
terrorism," or the curious events of Sept. 11th.
This America "Rules-Based" order is one drenched in the blood of millions of people--even
as it sanctimoniously disguises itself behind endless propaganda about defending liberal
democracy or the rule of law.
Truly, America and its allies can take their malignant Rules-Based Disorder back to Hell,
where they all belong.
"Thus your "side note" has no "relevance" whatsoever."
You sound like some podunk UN official from a podunk country trying to impress a waitress
in a NYC bar. The Empire is very much alive and dangerous. Ask Iran, ask Syria, as the
Palestinians, ask the Russians, ask the Chinese. Ask numerous African nations. Even Pangloss
was not so stupidly naive.
Thank you - YES that is the answer and always has been PLUS there will be no pipeline from
Iran through Afghanistan to Pakistan and on to China. There will be NO overland pipeline or
rail route to sound the death knell to the maritime mafia.
Please vote for trump 2020. no president destroy America from inside like what trump did. The goal is to accelerate American empire destruction and grip in this world.
What better way to put such clown along his circus in white house. he will make a mess of everything and will definitely bring
America down
i hope he win 2020 and America explode into civil war and chaos. With America destroyed internally , they wont have time to invade
Venezuela or Iran
Remember , if Biden win 2020 , American foreign policy will revert into normalcy that means
seeking alliance with EU and 5 eyes in a more meaningful way , aka giving them preferential
treatment on trade..
all that to box in china and russia , reenable TPP , initiate the delayed venezuela overt
invasion other than covert
this is dangerous for the whole world , not that it will save US in the long run but it
will increase real shooting conflict with china and russia.. So focus on trump victory in 2020 , the more controversial the win the better , lets push america into chaos
I appreciate the time and thought that goes into a post like this; all without a popup ad
trying to sell me ANOTHER item I just bought via Amazon, in spite of the fact that I am among
the least likely to want another right now. Voice of reason crying in the wilderness and all
that.
The rule The Capitalist Ogres promote as the heart of Civilization is simply the age-old
Golden Rule. Those with the gold, make the rules.
@ptb quite right.
'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. ie US and its "allies" is basically asking the rest of the world to finance their (the US
et al)
version of a welfare state.
as US et al can no longer fund their own unaffordable welfare promises made to their own
electorates, they have to call on the rest of the world to do so (China has been effectively
funding the US budget deficit since they entered the WTO.
and the EU (mainly Germany) was doing the same before China's entry into WTO)
China and rest of the worlds foreign central banks stopped growing their foreign exchange
reserves (on net) in 2014
leaving the US in a sort of limbo.
Well, you're sorta correct; it was all those nations including China that bought Outlaw US
Empire debt. China certainly knows better now and for almost a decade now it's purchases--and
those of the rest of the world -- of said debt have declined to the point where a huge crisis
related to the debt pyramid threatens all those aside from the 1% living within the Outlaw US
Empire. The Judo involved was very instructive.
"Trump's UN
address censured" headlines Global Times article that reviews yesterday's UNGA.
Domestic BigLie Media didn't like what it heard from Trump:
"Commenting on the US' performance, many Western media tended to view US as being
'isolated,' and its unilateral efforts 'widely derided....'
"Some US media outlets cannot stand Trump's accusations. A WSJ report said many Democrats
blamed Trump for "isolating the US and diluting American influence in the WHO or other
bodies."
It went on to say Trump's threat of withdrawal is often used as leverage to "influence
partner countries, or get allies to pay more for shared defense."
"Some US media linked Trump's address to his widely blamed effort to re-impose sanctions
on Iran, saying his address came as 'UN members push back against Washington,' AP
reported.
"Wednesday's Washington Post article reported that the Trump administration walked on a
'lonely path' at the UN where the US attacked WHO, and embarked on the 'widely derided'
effort to snap back Iran sanctions.
"A week before the UN General Assembly, US media NPR predicted that the US 'appeared to be
isolated' at this year's General Assembly, saying that Trump's 'America First' agenda left
him out of sync with America's traditional allies as it has a long record of pulling out of
international agreements, including one meant to tackle the world's climate crisis."
So, Trump's attack on China's environmental record was beyond hypocritical and ought to be
termed psychopathic prevarication. The best comment from the article well describes the
Trumptroll @53:
"'Trump's smears and attacks against China were apparently aimed at campaigning for his
reelection. Only his die-hard fans - those who do not care about truth but support him -
will buy his words ,' Ding Yifan, a researcher at the Institute of World Development of
the Development Research Center of the State Council, told the Global Times." [My
Emphasis]
And isn't that really the basic issue--the truth? 75 years of lies by the Outlaw US Empire
to cover it's continuous illegalities and subversion of its own fundamental law while killing
and displacing tens of millions of people. Guardian of the Free World my ass! More like
Guardian of the Gates of Hell.
Yes, I'm biased, but anyone seeking truth and invoking the Rule of Law would find themselves
at odds with the Outlaw US Empire. Today's Global Times Editorial makes
the following key observations:
"Major powers maintaining cooperation, at least not engaging in Cold War-style antagonism,
is the important foundation of world peace. China is committed to maintaining cooperation
among major powers, as well as being flexible in the balance of interests acceptable to all
parties. The problem is the Trump administration is hysterically shaping decoupling and
confrontation between Beijing and Washington, and has been mobilizing more forces to its side
at home and abroad. Those US policymakers are deliberately splitting the world like during
the Cold War.
"The impulse to promote a cold war is the ultimate version of unilateralism, and shows
dangerous and mistaken arrogance that the US is almighty. Everyone knows that the US is
declining in its competitiveness under the rules-based international system the US itself
initiated and created. It wants to build a new system more beneficial to itself, and allow
the US to maintain its advantage without making any effort. This is simply impossible."
My research is pointing me to conclude the First Cold War was contrived so the Outlaw US
Empire could impose privately owned finance and corporations and the political-economies
connected to them upon the world lest the collective forces that were the ones to actually
defeat Fascism gain control of their national governments and shape their political-economies
into the public/collectively owned realm where the benefits would flow to all people instead
of just the already powerful. That's also the intent of imposing a Second Cold War. Some seem
to think there's no ideological divide at play, but as I've ceaselessly explained there most
certainly is, thus the intense demonization of both Russia and China--the Strategic
Competition also is occurring in the realm of Ideas. And the only tools available for the
Outlaw US Empire to use are lies, since the truths involved would encourage any neutral
nation to join the Win-Win vision of China and Russia, not the Zero-sum bankruptcy pushed by
the Parasites controlling the Empire.
@ karlof1 | Sep 23 2020 15:56 utc | 84 and forward with the links and quotes...thanks
I do like the confirmation Pepe quote, thanks
It is sad to understand that much of the US population does not have the mental clarity to
see that Trump is no different than Biden when it comes to fealty to the God of Mammon. Way
too many Americans think that replacing Trump with Biden will make things all better.
The end of the rules based international order/global private finance cannot end soon
enough, IMO
Thanks for your reply! As I discussed with the Missus last night, IMO only the people
regaining control over the federal government can rescue themselves from the multiple
dilemmas they face--the most pressing being the Debt Bomb and control of the monetary and
fiscal systems by private entities as exemplified by the Federal Reserve and Wall Street,
both of which employ the Financial Parasites preying on the nation's body-politic. Undoing
all the past wrongs requires both Congress and the Executive be captured by The People who
can then write the laws to end the wrongs while arresting and prosecuting those responsible
for the last 20+ years of massive fraud. The biggest components would be ending the Federal
Reserve, Nationalizing all the fraudster banks, writing down the vast majority of debt, and
disbanding NATO thus ending the overseas empire. Those are the most fundamental steps
required for the USA to avoid the coming calamity brought about by the Neoliberals. I also
have finally developed my thesis on where, why and how that philosophy was developed and put
into motion.
The first 'Cold War' was entirely contrived. The US knew the Soviet Union was weak and had
no agenda beyond maintaining security and its own reconstruction after WW2. There was no
threat of a Western European invasion, or of the USSR spreading revolution globally. All that
Cold War ideology is a lie. And the same lying is taking place about China today. No
difference.
The key issues for the US were:
1. it needed western european capitalist states to buy US manufactured exports. Those
states had to remain capitalist and subordinate to the US, i.e. to avoid what Acheson called
'neutralism' in world politics.
2. the US wanted gradual decolonization of the British and French empires so that US firms
could access markets and resources in those same territories. but the US feared revolutionary
nationalism in the colonies and the potential loss of market access by the former colonial
powers, which would need resources from the post-colonial world to rebuild after WW2.
The key event which cemented the 'Cold War' in Europe was the division of Germany, which
Carolyn Eisenberg shows was entirely an American decision, in her important book, Drawing the
Line.
The driving force of all this, though, was the economic imperatives of US capitalism. The
US needed to restore and save capitalism in Western Europe and Japan, and the Cold War was
the ideological framework for doing so. The Cold War ideology also allowed the US to frame
its meddling in Korea, Guatemala, Iran, etc.
The late historian Gabriel Kolko wrote the best analyses of these issues. His work is much
better than the New Left 'revisionist' US historians.
I agree with your recap and second your appraisal of Gabriel Kolko. Eisenberg's work
somehow escaped my view but will no longer thanks to your suggestion.
But I see more to it all as the First Cold War had to occur to promote the
financialization of the USA's industrial Capitalism which began within the USA in 1913 and
was abruptly interrupted by the various market crashes, the failure of the international
payments system and subsequent massive deflation and Great Depression. A similar plan to
outsource manufactures to its colonies and commonwealth and financialize its economy was
began in the UK sometime after the end of the US Civil War. At the time in England, the
school of Classical Political-Economists and their political allies (CPE) were attempting to
rid the UK and the rest of Europe of the last vestiges of Feudalism that resided in the
Rentier and Banking Classes, the former being mostly populated by Royalty and its
retainers. Land Rent was the primary source of their income while it was the stated intent of
the CPE to change the tax burden from individuals and businesses to that of Land Rent and
other forms of Unearned Income. That movement came swiftly on the heels of the abolition of
the Slave Trade which was a vast source of Royal income. Recognizing this threat to the basis
of their wellbeing, the Royals needed to turn the tables but in such a manner where their
manipulation was secret because of the vast popularity of the CPE's agenda. Thus began the
movement to discredit the CPE and remove their ideas from discourse and later completely from
the history of political-economy. And there was another problem--German Banks and their
philosophy inspired by Bismarck to be totally supportive of German industry, which provided
the impetus for its own colonial pursuits primarily in Africa.
Within that paragraph is my thesis for the rise of Neoliberalism, much of which Dr. Hudson
documents but hasn't yet gotten to/revealed the root cause of the counter revolution against
the CPE. IMO, that reactionary movement underlies far more, particularly the growing
animosity between the UK and Germany from 1875 to 1914. As Eisenberg's research proves,
there's much more past to be revealed that helps to resolve how we arrived at the times we
now face.
Indeed, as Hudson and Max Keiser ask: Why pay taxes at all since the Fed can create all
the credit required. I've written about the pros and cons of Secession here before which are
quite similar to those existing in 1861. In Washington for example, how to deal with all the
Federal property located there. Just as Ft. Sumter didn't belong to South Carolina, the many
military bases there don't belong to Washington. Trying to seize it as the South Carolinians
attempted in 1861 merely creates the casus belli sought by Trump. Now if you could get the
vast majority of the military stationed in Washington to support your cause, your odds of
resisting would greatly improve.
IMO, trying to regain public control over the Federal government would be much easier.
Thank you brother karlof1, YES, the minotaur indeed but where is Theseus and Ariadne when
we need them? Please don't tell me that Biden and Harris are the 'chosen ones' - that would mock the
legend and prove that the gods are truly crazy :))
It seems to me that a review is required, that we need to turn back the clock to an earlier
analysis whose veracity has only been boosted by subsequent events. So here from
2011: "On November 3, 2011, Alan Minsky interviewed me on KPFK's program, 'Building a
Powerful Movement in the United States' in preparation for an Occupy L.A. teach-in." Here's a
brief excerpt to remind people what this is all about:
"Once people realize that they're being screwed, that's a pre-revolutionary situation.
It's a situation where they can get a lot of sympathy and support, precisely by not doing
what The New York Times and the other papers say they should do: come up with some neat
solutions. They don't have to propose a solution because right now there isn't one –
without changing the system with many, many changes. So many that it's like a new
Constitution. Politics as well as the economy need to be restructured. What's developing now
is how to think about the economic and political problems that are bothering people. It is
not radical to realize that the economy isn't working. That is the first stage to realizing
that a real alternative is needed. We've been under a radical right-wing attack – and
need to respond in kind. The next half-year probably will be spent trying to spell out what
the best structure would be."
It's good to see discussion here of the nefarious role of the American far-right neocon
warmongers in the State Department, intelligence services and military leadership just before
the turn of the new century. What I have never seen clearly explained, however, is the
connection between these very dangerous forces and the equally cynical and reactionary
Israeli politicians and the Mossad, as well as Saudi Arabian officials.
Like many others, I
have been slowly won over to the position that the attacks of 9-11, and especially the
totally unprecedented collapses of the three WTC towers, could only have been caused by the
precisely timed explosion of previously installed demolition materials containing nanothermite. But if one accepts that position the immediately subsequent question is "Who
planned and carried out the attacks?" Many people have claimed it was the Mossad, others that
it was the Mossad in concert with the US neocons etc., -- many of whom were Israeli/US dual
citizens -- but even now, so many years after the horrific events, I can find no coherent
account of how such conspirators, or any others for that matter, might actually have carried
out WTC building demotions. Do any of you know of sources on the matter that have made good
progress on connecting the dots and explaining what precisely happened -- the easier part --
and how exactly it was carried out, by whom, and how they have managed to get away with it
for all this time?
Lieven: If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with
Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality,
bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the
Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world.[my emphasis]
Uncle Tungsten: Lieven simply does not see it. Has it ever occurred to Lieven that
colonialism just might be rejected by both Russia and China and that there might be no
competition? Does Lieven watch too much football?
What is it that endangers the world in Lieven's petite cortex?
-------
It is clear to me that Tungsten does not understand Lieven because Lieven does not cross all
t's and dot all i's. There can be two reasons for Lieven style: (1) a British style, leaving
some conclusions to the reader, it is not elegant to belabor the obvious (2) Lieven works in
a pro-Western feudal state and that particular piece appeared in a neo-liberal outfit where
it is already a clear outlier toward (what I see as) common sense. Neo-liberals view
themselves as liberals, "tolerating a wide spectrum of opinion", but with clear limits about
the frequency and content for the outliers of their tolerance.
Back to "endangering the world", how "loosing competition to China" can result in huge
mayhem? I guess that Tungsten is a little dense here. The sunset of Anglo-Saxon domination
can seem like the end of the world for the "members" of that domination. But a longer
historical perspective can offer a much darker vision of the future. First, there is a clash
of two blocks, one with superior industrial production, domination of markets of assorted
goods -- both as importer and exporter, etc, the other with still superior military
technology and combative spirit.
Recall (or check) the situation in east Asia ca. 1240 AD. One of the major power was Song
China, after a calamitous defeat roughly 300 years later, diminished Song China succeeded in
developing all kinds of practical and beautiful goods and vibrant commerce while having quite
inept military. The second major power was the Mongols. You can look up the rest.
USA stresses the military types of pressures, and seeing its position slipping too far,
they may resort to a series of gigantic "provocations" -- from confiscation of property by
fiat, like they did to Venezuela, to piracy on open seas, no cargoes can move without their
approval and tribute, from there things can escalate toward nuclear war.
More generally, western decline leads to decrease of wealth affecting the lower classes
first but gradually reaching higher, enmity toward competitors, then hatred, such processes
can have dire consequences.
Importantly, these are speculations, so stopping short of spelling them out is reasonable.
However, give some credit to Lieven for "the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed,
criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period
after the Cold War".
On the rule-based world order. Scattered thoughts.
The article by Lieven was good in one aspect: it at least mentioned the crazy economic
template aka imho 'religion' that lead to a part of this mess. For the rest, hmm. The 'rules based international order' was always pretty much a phoney scaffold, used for
presentation to hide, cover up, legitimised many goings on (after WW2 I mean.)
Like a power-point extolling xyz product, with invented or 'massaged' charts and all.,
with tick boxes for what it positive or followed. (Fairness, Democracy, etc. etc. as
'Natural' 'Organic' etc. Total BS.)
In these kinds of discussions I am always reminded of the 'rights of the child' which in
CH are taught in grade 3-5, with a boiled down text, logo type pix, etc. It is very tough on
teachers, and they often only pretend to push the content. There are many immigrant children
in CH and the natives know that the 'rights' are not respected and not just in 'jungles'
(anarchist / animalistic hot spots) as they say. The kids go nuts - as they still more or
less believe that they 'have a voice' as it called -- the parents follow the kids, lotsa
troubles. OK, these are aspirations - but 'democracy' (purposely used as a calling card
following advice from a well-know ad agency..) is so as well. And presenting aspirations that
can't possibly be achieved in any way, when not a smiley joke about meeting God or flying to
Mars, and is socially important, is not well received.
Anyway, since the invasion of Iraq (totally illegal according to any standards) leading to
the biggest demos in the world ever, a loud indignant cry, which invasion the UN condoned,
ppl (in my experience, in CH, F, It) no longer have a shred of belief in 'international
rules'. Which of course makes them more 'nationalist' in the sense of acting in the
community, close at hand, as the Intl order is a shit-scene.
"... In pretending to be the statesman to bring China to heel, this gangster of a statesman manifested the loss of diplomatic skill almost for good. ..."
"... The scheme smells of rotten fish and there's an attempt to deflect attention from the real problem which centers on a corrupt 'secret society' of jurists. The right waves its hands in our faces while the left plunges the knives in our backs. Who are Donald Trump's handlers? ..."
A number of recent document releases shine new lights on 'Russiagate'. That conspiracy
theory, peddled by the Obama administration, the Democratic Party aligned media and 'deep
state' actors opposed to President Trump, alleged that Trump was in cahoots with Russia. The
disinformation campaign had the purpose of sabotaging his presidency.
To some extend it has worked as intended. But due to the legal investigation of the whole
affair much more is now known about those who conspired against Trump. Some of them are likely
to end up in legal jeopardy.
Some of those are the agents under FBI director Comey who used the easily debunked Steele
dossier, paid for by the Democratic party, to gain a FISA court warrants that allowed them to
spy on the Trump campaign. It now turns out that the main source for the dossier they used was
a shady actor who the FBI
had earlier investigated for an alleged connection to Russian intelligence:
The primary sub-source for the Steele dossier was the subject of an earlier
counterintelligence investigation by the FBI, and those facts were known to the Crossfire
Hurricane team as early as December 2016, according to newly released records from the
Justice Department that were first reported by CBS News.
The timing matters because the dossier was first used two months earlier, in October 2016,
to help secure a surveillance warrant for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, and then
used in three subsequent surveillance renewals.
"Between May 2009 and March 2011, the FBI maintained an investigation into the individual
who later would be identified as Christopher Steele's Primary Sub-source," the two page FBI
memo states. "The FBI commenced this investigation based on information by the FBI indicating
that the Primary Sub-source may be a threat to national security."
That the Steele dossier was potentially based on the words of a Russian spy should have been
a red flag against its use. It seems that the FBI had not informed the FISA court about the
dubious sourcing of the dossier allegations.
Igor Danchenko, the premier sub-source for the Steele dossier, had
earlier worked for the Democrat affiliate Brookings Institute:
Danchenko worked at the time as a Russia analyst for the Brookings Institution, a prominent
liberal foreign policy think tank.
An employee of the think tank said that another employee, seemingly Danchenko, told others
that if they got jobs in the government and obtained classified security clearances, they
might be put them in touch with people so they could "make a little extra money."
"The coworker did express suspicion of the employee and had questioned the possibility
that the employee might actually be a Russian spy," the FBI memo says.
Danchenko may or may not have been a Russian spy. But the fact the FBI had once opened a
full counter-intelligence investigation of him which was never concluded shines a very bad
light on the dossier peddlers.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated the Obama administration released an 'Intelligence
Community Assessment', concocted by hand-selected agents under CIA director John Brennan, that
claimed that Russia hade preferred Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. That had never made
sense. Clinton was a well known factor to the Kremlin while Trump was a wild card that
potentially would cause chaos - which is what he ended up doing. It only now turns out that
several CIA analysts had come to that conclusion but that there thinking was excluded from the published analysis :
Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence
report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and assigned a political ally to take a
lead role in writing it after career analysts disputed Brennan's take that Russian leader
Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White House ,
according to two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials
detailing Brennan's role in drafting the document.
The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify
continuing the Trump-Russia "collusion" investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in
2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end
found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow.
The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report -- known
as the "Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent
Elections (ICA)" -- just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion
over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia
influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect
Trump.
The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham's ongoing investigation into the
origins of the "collusion" probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced
for political purposes.
Around the same time the ICA was written FBI agents involved in the anti-Trump investigation
were messaging each other about Russiagate issues. A
new release of parts of their conversations is
quite damaging :
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents tasked by fired former Director James Comey to
take down Donald Trump during and after the 2016 election were so concerned about the
agency's potentially illegal behavior that they purchased liability insurance to protect
themselves less than two weeks before Trump was inaugurated president, previously hidden FBI
text messages show. The explosive new communications and internal FBI notes were disclosed in
federal court filings today from Sidney Powell, the attorney who heads Michael Flynn's legal
defense team.
...
The new disclosures made by DOJ also show that the FBI used so-called national security
letters (NSLs) to spy on Flynn's finances. Unlike traditional subpoenas, which require
judicial review and approval before authorities can seize an innocent person's property and
information, NSLs are never independently reviewed by courts. One of the agents noted in a
text message that the NSLs were just being used as a pretext by FBI leadership to buy time to
find dirt on Flynn after the first investigation of him yielded no derogatory
information.
...
In one series of texts sent the same day as the infamous Jan. 5 Oval Office meeting between
Obama, Biden, Comey, Sally Yates, and Susan Rice , one agent admits that "Trump was right"
when he tweeted that the FBI was delaying his briefings as incoming president so they could
cook up evidence against him. As The Federalist first reported last May, that Jan. 5 meeting
was the key to understanding the entire anti-Trump operation run out of Obama's FBI.
"The 'Intelligence' briefing on so-called 'Russian hacking' was delayed until Friday,
perhaps more time needed to build a case," Trump tweeted on January 3. "Very strange!"
Brennan's 'Intelligence Community Assessment' was published on January 5. The White House
round also led to a renewal of the investigation of Trump's incoming National Security Advisor
General Michael Flynn. That investigation, codenamed 'razor', had had no results and was
supposed to be closed. The FBI agents did not like the White House plans at all:
"So razor is going to stay open???" an agent wrote on Jan. 5.
"[Y]ep," another FBI agent responded. "[C]rimes report being drafted."
"F," the first agent wrote back.
"[W]hat's the word on how [Obama's] briefing went?" one agent asked, referring to the Jan.
5 meeting.
"Dont know but people here are scrambling for info to support certain things and its a mad
house," an FBI agent responded.
"[J]esus," an agent wrote back. "[T]rump was right. [S]till not put together . why do we
do this to ourselves. [W]hat is wrong with these people[?]
Last but not least the Durham investigation into the FBI's operation against Trump released
a
protocol of an interview with an FBI agent who was
involved in the investigation against General Flynn and in the later Mueller investigation
against Trump:
A 13-page summary of an interview with Flynn case agent William Barnett, made public in a
court filing by prosecutors just before midnight Thursday, [..] revealed that the veteran
agent harbored deep doubts and skepticism about the merits of the investigation into Flynn's
potential ties with Russia -- at least in its early stages -- and questioned the Mueller
team's tactics in the broader probe of the Trump campaign's contacts with Russians, known as
Crossfire Hurricane.
Though Barnett said he repeatedly expressed those doubts to colleagues and superiors --
and says he feared groupthink and a "get Trump" attitude was driving the investigation
forward -- he continued to be included in the work of Mueller's attorneys during sensitive
interviews.
All together those releases by the Justice Department and the new reports again demonstrate
that there was no legit Russiagate and no reason to investigate the Trump campaign. It was all
a conspiracy theory concocted to make it more difficult for Trump to pursue the policies he had
advocated during his election campaign.
It was even more than that. Mike Whitney is right in calling it an illicit coup
attempt. Obama, his éminence grise John Brennan, and all those willing minions who were
part of it should be in jail.
If all the energy wasted on peddling Russiagate had instead been used to push real political
alternatives to Trump's programs the Democrats and their voters would likely be in a better
position.
Posted by b on September 25, 2020 at 16:52 UTC |
Permalink
The significance of the FBI opening a counterintelligence file on Danchenko based on one item
of gossip depends entirely upon how many such files it opens on such evidence. The
significance of the file staying open depends on how quickly the FBI closes such files. My
knowledge, such as it is, is that the FBI is quick to open "investigations" on any evidence,
including simple gossip and habitually leaves them open to provide an opening for later
pursuit (i.e., a serious investigation) if it wishes. That is, the claim the source is
tainted is very weak. The added conclusion that a tainted source cannot provide correct
information means essentially no informant subject to a possible criminal charge should serve
as motive for an investigation. This is an absurdity, indulged as special pleading for Trump.
The argument reduces to, "Danchenko" is a Russian, thus may be a Russian spy. This kind of
nonsense is what many Democrats rely on, ironically.
The claim that of course it would make no sense for Putin et al. to favor Trump because
Clinton was a "known quantity" is shameless nonsense. If the quantity known is a relentless
hostility, even the unknown Trump would promise the chance of a more favorable US foreign
policy. There are two further points here. First, the tacit admission that Putin didn't get a
favorable outcome from Trump concedes all claims about Trump's less warlike, more pacific
foreign policy are more shameless nonsense. Second, the phony logic offered to defend Trump
proves Trump has always had significant support in the so-called Deep State. Brennan may have
had other motives in editing this BS out, but no one will ever prove it wasn't dropped
because it was blatantly stupid pro-Trump twaddle.
Similarly, the breathless report of January 5 meeting ignores how James Comey, a man
notorious for intervening in the election by announcing yet another nothingburger
investigation into email servers, was part of the meeting. It simply was not a meeting of
Obama conspirators. The indignant comments by disloyal FBI agents merely concedes again that
the supposed Deep State conspiracy was also in favor of Trump. I have no idea why Deep State
conspirators favoring Trump would buy liability insurance against being charged with
conspiring *against* Trump. Pretending their actions were justified by the pro-Democratic
Party faction of the Deep State could easily impel them to make things look better. I would
really like to see the actual terms of the policy, though. I suspect it was meant to cover
their asses if they were called out by their boss Comey for violating confidentiality,
playing partisan politics on the job, all manner of illegal and immoral acts.
The inclusion of a vocal Trump defender in the Mueller investigation of Flynn ("at least
in the early stages...") is not, *not,* *NOT,* an indication of hanky panky. It is evidence
of an honest investigation. Though hardly conclusive evidence, trying to pretend it is proof
of the opposite is a shameless perversion of reason.
Trumpery, Trumpery, Trumpery.
Even the seemingly high-minded conclusion about pushing real political alternatives to
Trump's programs fails to merit respect. There is only a limited amount of disagreement on
policy issues between Trump (and his Republic Party---not a democracy!---tail) and the
Democratic Party. Trumpery about how there is a real difference of principle driving the Deep
State conspiracy is unbelievable even when spouting more Trumpery.
PS Real evidence for Obama's anti-Trump campaign would be about how he encouraged Clinton to
contest Trump's loss of the vote. She had vastly more ground for refusing to concede than
Trump does. And unlike this BS, this anti-Trump campaign doesn't violate any laws or even
regulations. It would even be a principled stand for majority rule. Every single person who
upheld the legitimacy of minority rule because, Electoral College, is dedicated to Trump's
legitimacy. Rube Goldberg conspiracy theories purporting to show Trump is a victim of the
Deep State determined to fight his salvation of humanity are refuted by this alone.
True enough. Luckily for us, that was just the beginning of their increasingly bizzare
behavior. It's been quite a show so far, and they haven't even finished figuring out how to
hang this election yet...
More to come, surely.
Good article B.
Thanks again.
So we are to believe that Russia can't kill their targets and that the US Deep State can't
prevent an unwanted "populist" from being President despite the ease of manipulating the USA
money-driven selection of a President?
Really?
Well, it was NOT an "anti-Trump campaign". It was an anti-Russia campaign flavored with
"Trump is a populist!" sweetener.
Because the US Deep State WANTED to initiate a new McCarthyism AND to elect MAGA
Nationalist Trump.
Obama himself was a Deep-State approved faux populist Presidential stooge that
conducted secret wars and betrayed his 'base' to advance the interests of the establishment.
Trump is merely the Republican Obama.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
The US Presidency is the lynchpin of the Empire. No true "populist outsider" will EVER be
allowed to occupy that office.
It's difficult to fathom why smart people can't see this.
If all the energy wasted on peddling Russiagate had instead been used to push real
political alternatives to Trump's programs the Democrats and their voters would likely be in
a better position.
The Ds defeated that possibility when they conspired to derail Sanders and promote
Clinton. As a result, Obama's legacy is Trump. But there was a Deep State faction pulling
Obama's strings that's likely supporting the attempt to foment a domestic Color Revolution,
yet for the life of me I can't see why as all the grifters are getting billions--unless--it's
perceived that Trump's stalled their imperialist projects or stopped what they hoped to
accomplish via JCPOA. In other words, we need a better motive for Russiagate than the mere
disruption of Trump's administration.
The Nexus is Ukraine, where the DNC, Obama and others were heavily involved with corruption,
money into their pockets and money laundered for campaign uses, illegally brought back into
the US.
It was never Russia or Russians. It was always the Podesta-Clinton-Obama operatives and
their true believers in FBI and DOJ, working with the Russophobes in NGOs and the State
Dept.
The desperation as Trump became a real possible President and then an actual elected
President was to cover their crimes in Ukraine and the illegal actions to spy on Trump and
set up Trump campaign associates.
The difficult call now is how high up do the present investigators have cover to save the
institutions of the FBI and DOJ? A real take down would go to Obama, Biden, Clapper, Comey,
Brennan, Podesta, Clinton and all their lieutenants. It would collapse the CIA, State, FBI,
DOJ, and all the lying experts on Russia who perjured to Congress.
Red Ryder gets it -- Ukraine is the specific catalyst, linked to the New Cold War against
Russia and the corruption of the Democrats involved in that conflict.
There is also Flynn and his dirt on Obama's Syria/ISIS policy -- remember his Al Jazeera
interview about Obama's "wilful decision" to ignore DIA reports on ISIS. Flynn knows the US
and its allies had some kind of links to ISIS and Nusra Front (Al Qaeda) in Syria.
And there is also the more general concern, raised by Karlof1, about the Presidency and
the empire.
I have been reading and nodding in agreement with Mike Whitney since his work started showing
up on counterpunch. Does counterpunch still feature his work? My guess is not. Mike Whitney
is a full-blown unapologetic Trump-defender and has consistently and very clearly shown that
the recent BLM and urban riots are entirely funded and sewn by Democratic-party alligned
elite.
I'm glad b can agree with some things the above writer has put-forth. I wonder if b knows
about the den of vipers brooding here at the bar, spouting off about white-supremacists and
other fictions designed to obfuscate the clear and present danger to our duly-elected POTUS
and to render his supporters as racist fascists.
I wish b would just come out and say it. There is a real difference btw the two options on
Nov. 3. Yes, both parties are elites and not in any way to be given cart blanche with our
trust, but only one party has proven that it has attempted to usurp our democracy, infiltrate
and hijack and make partisan the checks and balances of our government and FBI, and call 50%
of the population "deplorables."
My only question to the idiots still holding onto their noble quest of dethroning POTUS
because he is immoral: what do you think will happen after? At some point it becomes
imperative for you to think about that and wonder if DJT really is the only one standing btw
the people and utter tyranny.
I found this barb delivered by Lavrov during his presser with Zarif I linked to on the open
thread to be very curious when thought about in the context of Russiagate:
"The fact that the United States has threatened to impose sanctions on those who defy the
American interpretation of the current situation serves as further proof of Washington's
desire to move like a bull in a china shop, putting ultimatums to everyone and punishing
everyone indiscriminately because, in my view, the incumbent US administration has lost
its diplomatic skills almost for good ." [My Emphasis]
Red Ryder @8 & profk @10 connect Ukraine and the outing of the Empire's role in the
creation of Daesh. Yes, it seems much is related to Russia's Phoenix-like rise and outwitting
the Empire's buffoons beginning in 2013 that's generated the above behavior noted by Lavrov.
If TrumpCo does get a second term, unless the entire foreign policy team is dumped and
replaced, its agenda will go nowhere other than further into the hole they've dug for
themselves over the past 20 years--almost every nation is now against Bush's USA as many now
know who the terrorists really are and where they live.
What if the goal of 2016 election was to set up the 2020 American color revolution? If so
Trump needed to win. Obama and the FBI did the groundwork here at home. There is some debate
if the first Trump dossier was actually the second one to cover for the Cody Shearer one that
was given to Strobe Talbot to give to Christopher Steele. Still it had the same goal as to
foster doubt about the legitimacy of 2016 that is currently culminating with the gun toting,
fire bombing hissy fit of the children of liberal privilege. Now if those blasted supreme
righties would just show up, and the whole thing can go really hot like it did in Ukraine,
Libya, Egypt, almost Syria, and any country I might be forgetting. Notice the Trump
administration is parroting the left's white supremacist conspiracy. Its all really bad
theater, but does anyone really care the crumbing infrastructure and the looming economic
collapse when you can instead root for your team. Yes, I am guilty of the later too. Added
bonus we already have a twofer of enemies (Russian and China) for yet another elitist war.
I very doubt that it was "Russiagate" who make it difficult for Trump to pursue the policies
he had been advocating during his election campaign...In fact, "Russiagate" has long ago been
debunked and we have not seen Trump worrying a bit about the average American Joe, most
flagrant during this pandemic...I doubt he would had behaved different were the "Russiagate"
to have never existed..
Simply, electoral "promises" almost never are fullfilled in the already dating decades
neoliberal order, both from the right or the "alleged" liberal left...
On the same grounds, we could affirm then that conspiracy theories about Obama´s
birth place made it difficult for Obama to pursue the policies he had been advocating during
his election campaign....
That Trump has ties to Russian oligarchs is, to my view, out of doubt for anyone following
a bit some writers who use to deeply research their analyses out there like John Helmer....
That these oligarchas had anything to do, in this respect, with the Kremlin, it is doubtful,
but highly likely related to business shenanigans amongst them and Trump & Co...related
to illegal bribes and money laundering...
What have been largely proved is that Trump and his administration have been using big
data management corporations and social networks engineering to manipulate elections and give
coups eveywhere ( as the thorough research I posted at the Week in Review leaves in evidence
it happened in several countries in Latin America , which leads us to suspect that they would
not resist the desire to use the same methods in the US...before...and after the 2016
elections...having Bannon ad chief of campaign and then as chief of staff in 2016 so as that
does not add for tranquility, with what legal methods is respected for achieving whatever
goal..as the last events have clearly showed...
It was during Trump´s mandate that the war on Yemen continued towards total
erradication of Yemenis, especially of Shia belief, by indiscriminate bombing and blockade of
essential goods...that Qasem Soleimani was murdered without any justified reason...that NATO
started a cheeky build up in Russian borders who remained still free of it...that the US
withdrew from most international agreements leaving US/Russia, US/Iran, US/LatinAmerican
relations at its lowest levels, by underminig any remaining trust...Trump reinstated and made
even harsher sanctions against everybody who was not already a "puppet regime", including
Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, Russia, Iran, China, and, even looping the loop, against puppet
governments in the EU...
I very doubt it was Russiagate which kept him from releasing his tax records as requested
by governance transparecny, returning the ammounts of money defrauded in the "University
Loans" affair, clarifying his ties to Epstein network, stopping sowing hatred and divide
amongst US population, build the most world wide network of far-right extremists since post
WWII around the world but especially in Europe to undermine what of "democracy" remains left,
labeled and declared as "terrorists" any political party abroad who does not go along and
oppose his puppet government´s corrupt policies anywhere, lit the Middle East on fire
by continuously provoking Iran, Lebanon, Syria, sent his regime envoys to the EU to twist arm
so that the European countries dedicate more budget to buy provedly ineffective arms from the
US when the money is most needed for socio-economic and health issues in the middle of a
pandemic, not to mention the requisition of health supplies´ cargos in the very Chinese
tarmac which had been previously ordered and bought by European countries which needed them
urgently, criminalized, and tried to label them as second cathegory citizens, a great part of
US population of non-white foreign descent through whose hard work and shameful labor
conditions US thrived along all these decades, well, you name it, the list would be almost
for a book...or two...
To blame all this mess on "Russiagate" is, well, in the best case, underestimating the
readership here...
Oh please, b: "legal jeopardy", don't make me laugh. It's been four years . The whole
political part of Trump's career he's been under the tutelage of mafia consigliere Roy Cohn.
Even better known, he's flown on the Lolita Express, and the FBI has a trove of videos etc
from Epstein's safe (hmm, what else does the latter have in common with Roy Cohn besides the
Trump connection). Bottom line, he's a deeply compromised individual who's concluded long
ago, and correctly, that he's in over his head and better off just playing along. He's had no
reservations appointing professional Russophobes like Fiona Hill; in fact, which of his
appointees has not been a Cold Warrior besides perhaps T-Rex, who was a mere Venezuela
hawk because of some old Exxon bad blood, and who was quickly ditched anyway. Even now, his
own FBI director spouts RussiaGate red meat, and the Donald is doing squat about it.
What does it all matter to Trump? He doesn't have a good name to clear. He didn't run for
president expecting to win, let alone to carry out this or that specific program. This
Vale Tudo carnival atmosphere clearly suits him: if his opponents can make baseless
accusations, so can he. If they can expect to skate beyond some meaningless fall guys, so can
he. To actually uphold the law--it's just not how he rolls.
Had he mostly contented himself with playing president on TV and enjoying the perks of the
office, and understood you can't just let a pandemic kill off your own voters, all would've
been dandy. But, predictably, his ego got the better of him, and he just had to be the
statesman who was finally going to bring China to heel. Again, merely tweeting about it
could've been ignored, but by appointing an array of rabid ideologues who went to work on
"decoupling", he's sided with a Deep State which will hate him regardless, against
Corporate America which went into China to, you know, make money. In this way, he's made
himself enemies a Republican can ill afford; combine this with his personal style (or lack of
it), and just about nobody has his back any more. So the machine goes about purging this
alien body from its system.
when do the American people get to investigate Truman, Ike, John McCain, JFK, Johnson, Bush,
Obama, FBI, Trump, 9/11, CIA, invasion of Iraq, wall street, the US Treasury, the military,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and the like..?
,==He did it==> he did not do it, <=someone else did it, ==>avoids the basic
problem:
America has a government that
a.) conducts wars to protect the economic interest of its favored few.
b.) uses law , to grant feudal lords wealth creating by extracting bits of wealth from
Americans.
c.) conducts nearly all its affairs in classified secret..
d.) is un accountable for the money it spends.
e.) is un accountable for the genocides it conducts in foreign lands.
f.) has two crime families which divide and conquer the citizens to control all election
outcomes
g.) has given to private bankers, its power to print money, control the economy, and tax the
people.
h.) has not adhered to the Bill of Rights or the un amended constitution.
i.) refuses to require private media to speak only the truth.
j.) Refuses to comply with and orto enforce the 1st and 4th amendment<=papers and effects
t/b secure
expand this list as you like
and
Americans have
a.) no access to the USA. <= 3 votes, insolation of state or voting district,
out 527 positions don't get it & none for the President
b.) must pay to the USA taxes and have no input as to how such taxes are collected or
used,
c.) must register their presence to the USA with id numbers
d.) must obey USA laws which Americans had no say in writing, or passing.
e.) must endure foreign wars and domestic programs that serve no legitimate domestic
interest.
expand this list as you like.
You are onto something there...I do not recall whose US think tank analyse I read about US
youth tending ideologically to the left...the same could be said of any youth around the
world after they have been left without future prospect and past opportunities to rise
through the social ladder by rampant savage neoliberal capitalism...
I said at the time that the Ukrainian experiment of 2014 was a general dressed rehearsal
for a future planned authoritarian fascist rule in most of the world, especially the West,
once the prospects, already known by the elites, of collapsing capitalism are obvious for the
general public and cause the consequent uprising..It is in this context that the pandemic and
its sudden impoverishing outcome fits, along with the "orchestrated" violent riots at various
locations, to justify martial law...
Notice that "rewritting of history of WWII" in favor of fascism is a feature of any US
administration since the fall of the USSR...
Past days I read that Roger Stone, former Trump advisor, if i am not wrong also implied in
a corruption case, advised Trump to declare martial law after winning in Novemeber...It is in
that context that all the noise we have been hearing all these past months about the riots,
militias, coups, and so on fit...What we have not heard about is about hundreds of thousands
of evictions, inacabable line ups for food banks, and the total socio-economic disaster more
than anything willingly built by TPTB...
Recal that they "built their own reality, and when you are catching up with that reality,
they build another one"...
Right on money, man! I can't help but chuckle and recall a quote from Agatha Christie's
A Mirror Crack'd : "Yes, you can see her. You seem to-understand her very well." Here,
change 'her' to 'him' and you pretty much summed up how Trump stumbling into that house on
Penn Ave. and his antics in office since. In pretending to be the statesman to bring China to
heel, this gangster of a statesman manifested the loss of diplomatic skill almost for
good.
Chances are he stands a good chance of stumbling into the same office again in Nov. Heaven
help the US of A in diplomacy for the next four years.
Old and Grumpy @14: "What if the goal of 2016 election was to set up the 2020 American
color revolution?"
But to what end? If you can control the outcome of the election sufficiently to pick the
winner, then what point does a color revolution serve? You put a candidate in office just so
that you can then remove him with a coup? This just injects tremendous expense and
uncertainty into the management of the empire.
I realize that there are some who are deeply invested in the notion that the establishment
wanted a Trump win, despite all of the opposition from them that Trump ended up facing, but
it makes no sense. PNAC , the former
roadmap for the empire, is now all but dead and the establishment is grudgingly falling in
line behind the hail-mary play of a "Great Reset" . Most of the empire's proxies in
Syria have been wiped out, the US influence in Libya is likewise mostly gone, and Myanmar is
slipping away. Venezuela is still holding their own against the empire. The "Pivot to
Asia" is spinning in place and going nowhere fast, and Russia and China are
diplomatically outmaneuvering the US before the eyes of the rest of the world. This is
definitely not where the elites wanted things to end up four years after 2016.
The efforts to foster a color revolution in the US are just signs of panicked desperation.
It is not what they were aiming for in 2016.
Assuming your question is rhetorical, no it isn't. My question is whether or not the FISA
court is culpable in this event. While we repeat the mantra that the FBI didn't inform the
court about the dubious source, it is apparent to me the court failed in proper diligence.
The scheme smells of rotten fish and there's an attempt to deflect attention from the real
problem which centers on a corrupt 'secret society' of jurists. The right waves its hands in
our faces while the left plunges the knives in our backs. Who are Donald Trump's
handlers?
"recent BLM and urban riots are entirely funded and sewn by Democratic-party alligned
elite."
Prove it. Perhaps you're confusing the DNC BLM national organization withe the autonomous
BLM actions in the streets. Two very different animals.
Your problem is that you still think the two parties are separate entities. There is only
one party in this country, the Property Party, and it has two right wings, the Democrats and
the Republicans.
"At some point it becomes imperative for you to think about that and wonder if DJT really
is the only one standing btw the people and utter tyranny."
Only morons wonder about such things. No one here wants to read your delusional Qanon/MAGA
bullshit.
The fact that large part of population consider Democratic leadership criminal and anther
part Trump administration criminal is a new factor in 2020 elections. Look like neoliberal Dems
made another blunder in unleashing American Maidan in those circumstances.
Thanks to Judge Emmet Sullivan refusing the DOJ's request to drop the Michael Flynn case, a
cache of explosive documents has now been released to the public revealing that at least one
FBI agent on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team thought the case was a politically motivated
"dead end," and others bought professional liability insurance as their bosses were continuing
the investigation based on " conspiracy theories. "
In one case, FBI agent William J. Barnett said
during a Sept. 17 interview that he believed Mueller's prosecution of Flynn was part of an
attitude to "get Trump," and that he didn't want to pursue the Trump-Russia collusion
investigation because it was "not there" and a "dead end," according to
Fox News .
Barnett, during his interview, detailed his work at the FBI, and his assignment to the
bureau's original cases against Flynn and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Barnett said the Flynn investigation was assigned the code name "Crossfire Razor," which was
part of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation -- the bureau's code name for the original
Trump-Russia probe.
Barnett told investigators that he thought the FBI's Trump-Russia probe was "opaque" and
"with little detail concerning specific evidence of criminal events."
" Barnett thought the case theory was 'supposition on supposition,'" the 302 stated, and
added that the "predication" of the Flynn investigation was "not great, " and that it "was
not clear" what the "persons opening the case wanted to 'look for or at.'"
After six weeks of investigating, Barnett said he was "still unsure of the basis of the
investigation concerning Russia and the Trump campaign working together , without a specific
criminal allegation." -
Fox News
When Barnett approached agents about what they thought the 'end game' was with Flynn -
suggesting they interview the former National Security Adviser "and the case be closed unless
derogatory information was obtained," he was cautioned not to conduct an interview, as it may
tip Flynn off that he was under investigation.
"Barnett still did not see any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the
Russian government," the 302 states. "Barnett was willing to follow any instructions being
given by the deputy director as long as it was not a violation of the law."
Insurance over "conspiracy theories"?
Another revelation from documents in the Flynn case comes in the form of text messages
released on Thursday in which agents bought liability insurance, fearing they would be sued
over an investigation into Flynn based on "conspiracy theories."
"We all went and purchased professional liability insurance," one analyst texted on Jan. 10,
2017 - 10 days before Trump was inaugurated, according to
Just The News .
"Holy crap," responded a colleague. "All of the analysts too?"
"Yep," replied the first analyst. "All the folks at the Agency as well."
"Can I ask who are the most likely litigators?" responded a colleague. "As far as
potentially suing y'all."
"Haha, who knows .I think the concern when we got it was that there was a big leak at DOJ
and the NYT among others was going to do a piece," the first analyst texted back.
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The explosive messages were attached to a new filing by Flynn's attorney Sidney Powell,
who argued to the court that is considering dismissing her client's guilty plea that the
emails show "stunning government misconduct" and "wrongful prosecution."
A hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday.
" There was no case against General Flynn ," Powell wrote in the new motion. " There was
no crime. The FBI and the prosecutors knew that. This American hero and his entire family
have suffered for four years from public abuse, slander, libel, and all means of defamation
at the hands of the very government he pledged his life to defend." -
Just The News
Thanks to Judge Sullivan's hatred of Flynn, the world now knows how much more corrupt the
Mueller investigation was.
ay_arrow
novictim , 1 minute ago
"We all went and purchased professional liability insurance," one analyst texted on
Jan. 10, 2017 - 10 days before Trump was inaugurated, according to
Just The News .
Ok.
BUT NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THESE PROTECTORS OF THE CONSTITUTION BLEW THE WHISTLE.
None of these FBI agents seeing egregious abuse of power by the FBI leveled at a
decorated Lt. Gen. had the moral fortitude to stand up and say "NO!". They all hated Trump
so much that they simply bought protection insurance for themselves.
FIRE ALL OF THEM.
play_arrow
J J Pettigrew , 2 minutes ago
A soft coup attempt...
does this qualify as "swaying an election"? Like the 2018 election that gave the House
to the Dems and Pelosi her power?
Or is this an attempt to flip an election from 2016?
They always accuse others of that which they themselves are guilty...ALWAYS. At least
they let us know what they are up to. Like who is in bed with Russian oligarchs.....Hunter
gets the 3.5 million
play_arrow
Everybodys All American , 6 minutes ago
Judge Sullivan has no choice. If he does not drop this case now then he is in serious
violation of the law in a big time way. Anything is possible from this idiot but he will be
impeached and removed if he does not dismiss this case for sure now.
lay_arrow
whackedinflorida , 8 minutes ago
It has been fairly obvious that if Sullivan refused to dismiss the case and insists on
having a hearing, a large amount of government misconduct would ultimately be disclosed.
Leftists are willing to believe anything if it fits their narrative, and ignore second
order effects of what they do. By the end of this, the charges against Flynn will be
dismissed (or he will be pardoned), and the prosecutors will be the ones facing the justice
system. Its almost as if Sullivan is doing Trump's bidding.
Show More Replies
otschelnik , 10 minutes ago
To start going up the food chain as to how this ****show got started we need to know a
couple of pieces of information which the deep state is jealously hiding from us:
1) WHO WERE THE CONTRACTORS ACCESSING THE NSA DATABASE? This will draw a straight line
back to the Democrat party.
2) WHO WERE THE FBI AGENTS TAKING LIABILITY INSURANCE? These are the same as USSR NKVD
henchmen shooting kulaks and political prisoners in the back of the head.
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Fabelhaft , 8 minutes ago
Flynn's courage reduces Mueller's battlefield manner to the shell-shocked infirmaries of
WW1.
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Aubiekong , 16 minutes ago
If we lived in a country of law and order. The democratic leadership would all be in
prison along with all those involved in the "investigation".
gaaasp , 32 minutes ago
When can Flynn speak freely?
turbojarhead , 26 minutes ago
I think you nailed it-Flynn cannot interview due to his legal case-the man who knows
where ALL the bodies are buried, SPECIFICALLY in the Iran deal. It ALMOST seems like
Sullivan-maybe at the behest of others-has been desperate to keep Flynn from being able to
speak up for 4 years...
Maxter , 1 minute ago
It doesn't make much sense that Flynn knows where all the bodies are buried but never
told the Trump team before all this mess.
So they say he has been discharged now, but not where he is. He said in the beginning he
wanted to go home. I'm guessing he won't do that yet. In the picture he looks spooked, as
one can easily understand. I think this whole thing with Navalny since he left the Russian
hospital is fake, theater, sort of like Boris Johnson's bout with COVID19, which I think
was also fake.
Thank you and I bet he IS spooked. It is possible that he was expatriated without his
consent and that he knew what the consequences would be if he ever tried to leave apart from
this fiasco. The scenes back at the hotel and the loose lipped egotistical rants from his
English minder, Pevchikh and also the BBC are just one enormous debacle.
Read John Helmer's multiple
posts on this entire story and it smells like a rats nest of intrigues to set him up
or (a more remote possibility) to extricate him.
One thing is certain, if he tries to return to Russia the British bulldog will kill
him. Time will tell.
... According to [Sosnovsky], the photo of Navalny with his wife on the balcony makes one
think about his whereabouts. Sosnovsky, who is well acquainted with the architecture of
Berlin, drew attention to the strange urban landscape in the corner of the picture. He
pointed out that the Charite building does not have balconies with such a view, as it is
located in the central part of Berlin with a completely different architecture.
To confirm his words in practice, Sosnovsky personally went to the Charite and walked
around the building with a camera. He drew attention to the construction work near the
clinic (it would probably have gotten into the blogger's photo), as well as the complete
absence of journalists and security. All of this confirmed Sosnovsky's suspicions about
Navalny's absence from the Charité.
In addition to the cityscape, the journalist had questions about the can with
cigarette butts on Navalny's balcony. Sosnovsky called such an object impossible in an
elite medical institution in Germany with patients of this level. If all the cigarettes in
the frame were smoked by Navalny himself, this raises even more questions about his
"diagnosis" and the conclusions of German doctors.
The journalist notes that all the shots with Navalny after he emerged from the coma are
static and "inanimate." Sosnovsky, a person with a medical education and a practicing
doctor, calls this understandable, pointing to the possibility of identifying the signs of
specific diseases and influences by movements, speech and other dynamic manifestations. For
example, after a tracheostomy (artificial windpipe), a person often has voice problems.
"Any video and audio makes it possible with a high degree of probability to calculate
where and how it was done. It is much more difficult from a photo. And if they hide from us
the opportunity to determine the location and diagnosis, this is very indicative,"
Sosnovsky said on the air of Soloviev Live.
Earlier, Navalny demanded that Russia return his clothes , in which the blogger was
hospitalized in Omsk. However, Navalny's associates had previously written that all of his
belongings were transferred to his wife, and some of the items that the blogger touched and
used could be taken out by Maria Pevchikh, a suspect in his poisoning."
I have seen the photo of Navalny walking down a staircase with no help and a second photo
of Navalny and his wife Julia out on a balcony at the hospital where he is (supposedly?)
staying with the can of cigarette butts placed near the bottom of the sliding door. I had my
doubts about Navalny being in hospital even before I saw the Sosnovsky article - would a
hospital allow a patient just out of a coma to walk around by himself, especially down the
stairs, or allow him to smoke cigarettes? Would a hospital even have balconies attached to
patients' wards?
Colm O'Toole @ 26, Uncle Tungsten @ 32, David G @ 33:
I am also sad to hear of Andre Vltchek's passing. He used to be an occasional contributor
to Off-Guardian.org.
His death is being treated as suspicious by Turkish police authorities. I myself am rather
puzzled by the decision to travel overnight by car from Samsun to Istanbul, given his state
of health (according to the report that Colm O'Toole linked to) and the length of the car
journey (about nine hours) when he could have travelled by plane.
When intelligence honchos became politicians the shadow of Lavrentiy Beria emerge behind
them. while politization of FBI create political police like Gestapo, politization of CIA is much
more serious and dangerous. It creates really tight control over the country by shadow
intelligence agency. In a sense CIA and the cornerstone of the "deep state"
Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence
report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and assigned a political ally to take a
lead role in writing it after career analysts disputed Brennan's take that Russian leader
Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White House,
according to two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials
detailing Brennan's role in drafting the document.
John Brennan, left, with Robert Mueller in 2013: The CIA director's explosive conclusion in
the ICA helped justify continuing Trump-Russia "collusion" investigations, notably Mueller's
probe as special counsel. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify
continuing the Trump-Russia "collusion" investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in
2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end
found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow.
The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report -- known as
the "Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections
(ICA)" -- just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion over his
presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia influenced the
2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect Trump.
The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham's ongoing investigation into the origins
of the "collusion" probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for
political purposes.
RealClearInvestigations has learned that one of the CIA operatives who helped Brennan draft
the ICA, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, financially supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign and
is a close colleague of Eric Ciaramella,
identified last year by RCI as the Democratic national security "whistleblower" whose
complaint led to Trump's impeachment, ending in Senate acquittal in January.
John Durham: He is said to be using the long-hidden report on the drafting of the ICA as a
road map in his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence.
Department of Justice via AP
The two officials said Brennan, who openly supported Clinton during the campaign, excluded
conflicting evidence about Putin's motives from the report , despite objections from some
intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump
as a "wild card."
The dissenting analysts found that Moscow preferred Clinton because it judged she would work
with its leaders, whereas it worried Trump would be too unpredictable. As secretary of state,
Clinton tried to "reset" relations with Moscow to move them to a more positive and cooperative
stage, while Trump campaigned on expanding the U.S. military, which Moscow perceived as a
threat.
These same analysts argued the Kremlin was generally trying to sow discord and disrupt the
American democratic process during the 2016 election cycle. They also noted that Russia tried
to interfere in the 2008 and 2012 races, many years before Trump threw his hat in the ring.
"They complained Brennan took a thesis [that Putin supported Trump] and decided he was
going to ignore dissenting data and exaggerate the importance of that conclusion, even though
they said it didn't have any real substance behind it," said a senior U.S intelligence
official who participated in a 2018 review of the spycraft behind the assessment, which
President Obama ordered after the 2016 election.
He elaborated that the analysts said they also came under political pressure to back
Brennan's judgment that Putin personally ordered "active measures" against the Clinton campaign
to throw the election to Trump, even though the underlying intelligence was "weak."
Adam Schiff: Soon after the Democrat took control of the House Intelligence Committee, its
review of the drafting of the intelligence community assessment was classified and locked in a
Capitol basement safe. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The review, conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, culminated in a lengthy report
that was classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe soon after Democratic Rep. Adam
Schiff took control of the committee in January 2019.
The official said the committee spent more than 1,200 hours reviewing the ICA and
interviewing analysts involved in crafting it, including the chief of Brennan's so-called
"fusion cell," which was the interagency analytical group Obama's top spook stood up to look
into Russian influence operations during the 2016 election.
Durham is said to be using the long-hidden report, which runs 50-plus pages, as a road map
in his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence while
targeting the Trump campaign and presidential transition in an unprecedented investigation
involving wiretapping and other secret surveillance.
The special prosecutor recently interviewed Brennan for several hours at CIA headquarters
after obtaining his emails, call logs and other documents from the agency. Durham has also
quizzed analysts and supervisors who worked on the ICA.
A spokesman for Brennan said that, according to Durham, he is not the target of a criminal
investigation and "only a witness to events that are under review." Durham's office did not
respond to requests for comment.
The senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss
intelligence matters, said former senior CIA political analyst Kendall-Taylor was a key member
of the team that worked on the ICA. A Brennan protégé, she donated hundreds of
dollars to Clinton's 2016 campaign, federal records show. In June, she gave $250 to the Biden
Victory Fund.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor: A Brennan protégé, she donated hundreds of dollars to
Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, and recently defended the ICA in a
"60 Minutes" interview . "60 Minutes"/YouTube
Kendall-Taylor and Ciaramella entered the CIA as junior analysts around the same time and
worked the Russia beat together at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. From 2015 to 2018,
Kendall-Taylor was detailed to the National Intelligence Council, where she was deputy national
intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. Ciaramella succeeded her in that position at NIC,
a unit of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that oversees the CIA and the
other intelligence agencies.
It's not clear if Ciaramella also played a role in the drafting of the January 2017
assessment. He was working in the White House as a CIA detailee at the time. The CIA declined
comment.
Kendall-Taylor did not respond to requests for comment, but she recently defended the ICA as
a national security expert in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview on Russia's election activities,
arguing it was a slam-dunk case "based on a large body of evidence that demonstrated not only
what Russia was doing, but also its intent. And it's based on a number of different sources,
collected human intelligence, technical intelligence."
But the secret congressional review details how the ICA, which was hastily put together over
30 days at the direction of Obama intelligence czar James Clapper, did not follow longstanding
rules for crafting such assessments. It was not farmed out to other key intelligence agencies
for their input, and did not include an annex for dissent, among other extraordinary departures
from past tradecraft.
Eric Ciaramella: The Democratic national security "whistleblower," whose complaint led to
President Trump's impeachment, was a close colleague of Kendall-Taylor. It's not clear if
Ciaramella also played a role in the drafting of the January 2017 assessment.
whitehouse.gov
It did, however, include a two-page annex summarizing allegations from a dossier compiled by
former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. His claim that Putin had personally
ordered cyberattacks on the Clinton campaign to help Trump win happened to echo the key finding
of the ICA that Brennan supported. Brennan had
briefed Democratic senators about allegations from the dossier on Capitol Hill.
"Some of the FBI source's [Steele's] reporting is consistent with the judgment in the
assessment," stated the appended summary, which the two intelligence sources say was written
by Brennan loyalists.
"The FBI source claimed, for example, that Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim
of defeating Secretary Clinton, whom Putin 'feared and hated.' "
Steele's reporting has since been discredited by the Justice Department's inspector general
as rumor-based opposition research on Trump paid for by the Clinton campaign. Several
allegations have been debunked, even by Steele's own primary source, who confessed to the FBI
that he ginned the rumors up with some of his Russian drinking buddies to earn money from
Steele.
Former FBI Director James Comey told the Justice Department's watchdog that the Steele
material, which he referred to as the "Crown material," was incorporated with the ICA because
it was "corroborative of the central thesis of the assessment "The IC analysts found it
credible on its face," Comey said.
Christopher Steele: His dossier allegations were summarized in a two-page annex to the
ICA, but dissenting views about the Kremlin's favoring Hillary Clinton over Trump were
excluded. Victoria Jones/PA via AP
The officials who have read the secret congressional report on the ICA dispute that. They
say a number of analysts objected to including the dossier, arguing it was political innuendo
and not sound intelligence.
"The staff report makes it fairly clear the assessment was politicized and skewed to
discredit Trump's election," said the second U.S. intelligence source, who also requested
anonymity.
Kendall-Taylor denied any political bias factored into the intelligence.
"To suggest that there was political interference in that process is ridiculous," she
recently told NBC News.
Her boss during the ICA's drafting was CIA officer Julia Gurganus. Clapper tasked Gurganus,
then detailed to NIC as its national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, with
coordinating the production of the ICA with Kendall-Taylor.
They, in turn, worked closely with NIC's cybersecurity expert Vinh Nguyen, who had been
consulting with Democratic National Committee cybersecurity contractor CrowdStrike to gather
intelligence on the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer
system. (CrowdStrike's president has
testified he couldn't say for sure Russian intelligence stole DNC emails, according to
recently declassified transcripts.)
Durham's investigators have focused on people who worked at NIC during the drafting of the
ICA, according to recent published reports.
No Input From CIA's 'Russia House'
The senior official who identified Kendall-Taylor said Brennan did not seek input from
experts from CIA's so-called Russia House, a department within Langley officially called the
Center for Europe and Eurasia, before arriving at the conclusion that Putin meddled in the
election to benefit Trump.
"It was not an intelligence assessment. It was not coordinated in the [intelligence]
community or even with experts in Russia House," the official said. "It was just a small
group of people selected and driven by Brennan himself and Brennan did the editing."
The official noted that National Security Agency analysts also dissented from the conclusion
that Putin personally sought to tilt the scale for Trump. One of only three agencies from the
17-agency intelligence community invited to participate in the ICA, the NSA had a lower level
of confidence than the CIA and FBI, specifically on that bombshell conclusion.
The official said the NSA's departure was significant because the agency monitors the
communications of Russian officials overseas. Yet it could not corroborate Brennan's preferred
conclusion through its signals intelligence. Former NSA Director Michael Rogers, who has
testified that the conclusion about Putin and Trump "didn't have the same level of sourcing and
the same level of multiple sources," reportedly has been cooperating with Durham's probe.
The second senior intelligence official, who has read a draft of the still-classified House
Intelligence Committee review, confirmed that career intelligence analysts complained that the
ICA was tightly controlled and manipulated by Brennan, who previously worked in the Obama White
House.
N
Brennan's tight control over the process of drafting the ICA belies public claims the
assessment reflected the "consensus of the entire intelligence community." His unilateral role
also raises doubts about the objectivity of the intelligence.
In his defense, Brennan has pointed to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report that
found "no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community's conclusions."
"The ICA correctly found the Russians interfered in our 2016 election to hurt Secretary
Clinton and help the candidacy of Donald Trump," argued committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner,
D-Va.
"Our review of the highly classified ICA and underlying intelligence found that this and
other conclusions were well-supported," Warner added.
"There is certainly no reason to doubt that the Russians' success in 2016 is leading them
to try again in 2020, and we must not be caught unprepared."
Brennan, ex-Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco and ex-national intelligence
director James Clapper, interviewed by Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC, right, at a 2018 Aspen
Instutute event. Aspen
Institute
However, the report
completely blacks out a review of the underlying evidence to support the Brennan-inserted
conclusion, including an entire section labeled "Putin Ordered Campaign to Influence U.S.
Election." Still, it suggests elsewhere that conclusions are supported by intelligence with
"varying substantiation" and with "differing confidence levels." It also notes "concerns about
the use of specific sources."
Adding to doubts, the committee relied heavily on the closed-door testimony of former Obama
homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, a close Brennan ally who met with Brennan and his
"fusion team" at the White House before and after the election. The extent of Monaco's role in
the ICA is unclear.
Brennan last week pledged he would cooperate with two other Senate committees investigating
the origins of the Russia "collusion" investigation. The Senate judiciary and governmental
affairs panels recently gained authority to subpoena Brennan and other witnesses to
testify.
Several Republican lawmakers and former Trump officials are clamoring for the
declassification and release of the secret House staff report on the ICA.
"It's dynamite," said former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who reviewed the staff report while
serving as chief of staff to then-National Security Adviser John Bolton.
"There are things in there that people don't know," he told RCI.
"It will change the dynamic of our understanding of Russian meddling in the election."
However, according to the intelligence official who worked on the ICA review, Brennan
ensured that it would be next to impossible to declassify his sourcing for the key judgment on
Putin. He said Brennan hid all sources and references to the underlying intelligence behind a
highly sensitive and compartmented wall of classification.
He explained that he and Clapper created two classified versions of the ICA – a highly
restricted Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information version that reveals the sourcing,
and a more accessible Top Secret version that omits details about the sourcing.
Unless the classification of compartmented findings can be downgraded, access to Brennan's
questionable sourcing will remain highly restricted, leaving the underlying evidence
conveniently opaque, the official said.
The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham's ongoing investigation into the
origins of the "collusion" probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were
juiced for political purposes.
No, you think? We fought all of WWII in less time than it takes to make the first
indictments of these ******* traitors. And that assumes they will happen EVENTUALLY,
which they won't.
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NoDebt , 1 hour ago
Used to be it would take somewhere from a couple months to a couple years for
conspiracy theory to be proven conspiracy fact around here.
Now it's four years and counting. Pretty soon it will be a decade or more. Then....
who really cares? Once you've successfully stretched something out that long who really
gives a **** anyway?
If the government finally admitted that Oswald didn't really shoot JFK and that it was
some CIA ***** from the grassy knoll, would you really care at this point? If the
government admitted that there really were aliens in Area 51, would your world really be
rocked by that revelation at this point? Something a little more contemporary, you say?
Fine. What about WTC 7? If conspiracy theories were all confirmed on that one would you
really have a hard time sleeping tonight?
On a long enough timeline everyone stops giving a **** about the truth.
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Md4 , 2 hours ago
" The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify
continuing the Trump-Russia "collusion" investigation, which had been launched by the FBI
in 2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in
the end found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow."
While wasting thirty million dollars...and two focking years of our
lives...
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NoDebt , 1 hour ago
It's not even done yet, man. Clock is still running. Four years and counting, end to
end. If Trump gets a second term, eight years, minimum. And as he leaves office they will
still be threatening indictments "any day now". And nobody will even remember why any of
this started, nor care.
I already don't care.
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Politinaut , 46 minutes ago
Brennan and all of those involved, must pay.
z530 , 57 minutes ago
Unless the classification of compartmented findings can be downgraded, access to
Brennan's questionable sourcing will remain highly restricted, leaving the underlying
evidence conveniently opaque, the official said.
Complete 100% ********. Trump can declassify anything he wants, at anytime, for any
reason. If I were him, I would order everything related to Crossfire declassified
tomorrow, sit back and watch the fireworks.
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wee-weed up , 1 hour ago
Brennan is TRUE deep-state scum.
My most fervent desire is to see that holier-than-thou...
lyin' Obozo-Hitlery protector, frog marched...
straight to prison on national TV...
And then forced to sing like a Canary.
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Md4 , 1 hour ago
"He explained that he and Clapper created two classified versions of the ICA – a
highly restricted Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information version that reveals the
sourcing, and a more accessible Top Secret version that omits details about the
sourcing.
Unless the classification of compartmented findings can be downgraded, access to
Brennan's questionable sourcing will remain highly restricted, leaving the underlying
evidence conveniently opaque, the official said."
One of the most important objectives going forward from all this... has to be the
dismantling of the whole apparatus of security classification.
All of it must be overhauled and restructured.
We simply cannot have a regime of intelligence security so rigorous, as to be clearly
used as a means of tyrannizing the very nation it's supposed to serve.
No enemy on earth is worth that...
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bkwaz4 , 1 hour ago
Rational people have always understood that any Russian or Chinese meddling in the
2016 election was done to get Hillary elected so that influence could be purchased
through the Clinton Foundation.
The criminals involved need to be executed.
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Max21c , 1 hour ago
So its the usual situ of all lies and distortions and more lies on top of still more
lies... all more lies made up by the secret police and Washington Gestapo...
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St. TwinkleToes , 1 hour ago
It's a small circle of friends at CIA with Brennan protégé, Andrea
Kendall-Taylor and NSA with Eric Ciaramella, the Democratic national security
"whistleblower," who are sleeping with their bosses for advancement and or given head
service to closet LGBTiQNPWXYZ government heads.
Their job literally "sucks" in order to exist.
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mikka , 2 hours ago
When this sort of thing happens in Russia, China etc., there is a purge, because the
country is more important than its actors. Not in USSA: because of the so called
"democracy", the usurpers get away with it, allowing them not only to survive but also to
try again when conditions improve.
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Max21c , 31 minutes ago
It is interesting to see some of the criminal activities of the rats, vermin, and scum
in the CIA Gestapo & FBI Gestapo and Pentagon Gestapo possibly coming to light... One
or two rays of light and all the cockroaches in the criminal gangs of "national security"
and the state security apparatus of the banana republic and police state start scurrying
about in a frenzy for awhile...
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Max21c , 47 minutes ago
Notice how all these Nazis and NeoNazis such as Brennan, Steele, Clapper, Schiff,
Warner, Lisa Monaco, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Eric Ciaramella, James Comey, Julia Gurganus,
Vinh Nguyen, Obama, Biden, Clinton are all elite gangsters, crooks, criminals and
hoodlums with ties to the Ivy League, CNN, MSNBC, CBS 60 Minutes, the Aspen Institute,
the secret police community, the Gestapo community, the intelligence community, the CFR,
Elite Think Tanks, the puppet press and official media and numerous other parts of the
criminal underworld of Washingtonian and their secret police & NeoNazi Gestapo...
They're all just gangsters like in any third world banana republic and police state...
just like all the rest of the goons and thugs and criminals in Washington DC..
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GoldHermit , 58 minutes ago
If Brennan is not public enemy number one, he's certainly in the top 5.
Max21c , 45 minutes ago
Washington DC runs thick with animals and gangsters just like Brennan... he's common
to the criminal culture of the US government and the criminal culture and criminal nature
of US government officials and Washingtonians... They're all the same and they're all
Nazis and NeoNazis... US elites and Washingtonians are no different than the Soviet KGB,
East German Stasi, Nazi Gestapo or Nazi Waffen SS... just a pack of criminals the rob,
terrorize and persecute people... US government is just one big criminal network and
crime syndicate... all they do is rob people, cheat people, persecute people and
terrorize people... It's a Washingtonian thing and a US government thing...
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rtb61 , 1 hour ago
Of course the Russian government favoured the Clintons, they had a ton of evidence of
corruption on them, they released that tape to prove it to them. They know every single
little thing the Klinton Krime Klan did in the Ukraine, everything, they had them cold,
anything they wanted the Clintons would have complied, they still would of course have
demanded to be paid.
Right now both China and Russia prefer the Clinton Corporation Party, they are much
easier to pay off. Too many heads in the Republican Party, too many pay offs, much easier
with the Clinton Foundation Party, the party the Klinton Krime Klan sold to the
corporations, calling it the Democrats is a lie, it is the Clinton Foundation Party,
selling governments to the highest bidder not just yours but with regime change any
country you choose.
It all keeps coming out for political theatre but yet, no even a hint of an arrest let
alone an actual prosecution. Good for votes from the stupids I suppose.
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williambanzai7 , 1 hour ago
Brennan is a moron. A moron who takes orders from a gaggle of Marxists and a Former
Nazi.
TahoeBilly2012 , 1 hour ago
His little fake aristocratic tone is hilarious. As if a muslim Irish American was some
sort of delicate flower.
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Patmos , 14 minutes ago
Tragically ironic how the CIA has in large part become the thing it was at least in
theory supposed to help protect against: Tyranny.
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Soloamber , 34 minutes ago
Isn't it ironic that a report covering a political coup on a presidential campaign and
subsequent attack on an
elected President can't be divulged because it is considered "political ".
Durham reports to Barr and they know the truth will never come to light if Biden wins
.
What they choose to ignore is they work for and are obligated to protect the public
interest .
Not the Democrats , not the Republicans .
It's either that or they are just protecting their old boy netwirk .
Take your pick .
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Md4 , 2 hours ago
"The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report --
known as the "Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in
Recent Elections (ICA)" -- just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of
suspicion over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to
suggest Russia influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again
to reelect Trump.
The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham's ongoing investigation into the
origins of the "collusion" probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were
juiced for political purposes."
Or... outright lies known by Blo to be lies?
Sounds like conjured red meat deliberately fed to the leftist House machine...
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ComradePuff , 10 minutes ago
When I was getting my masters in 2017 at MGIMO, my instructors were as often diplomats
and politicians as they were professors. One, a member of Duma, told us that it was funny
they way the Americans were spinning the collusion angle, because the general consensus
at the Kremlin was that Clinton was preferable to Trump as she was known and they
understood how to deal with her, while Trump seemed like a loose cannon. I was the only
American in the class (in the whole school at that point) and he was not even talking to
me, so clearly this was just general knowledge here.
edit: The CIA must suck at their jobs if there was disagreement, because I learned
that in the first week without using a single bribe, rent boy, honey trap or fake
mustache. That or the CIA just lies, as they do with everything else. Most likely a mix
of both.
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amanfromMars , 40 minutes ago
Have you ever thought on what kind of vital explosive intelligence, on the extremely
precarious state of the certainly not United States of America, the likes of a Russia or
a China receives whenever they can freely read, listen and see any/all of the fabricated
tales and phantom trails fed to media main streams ...... for, of course, they would know
immediately whenever such is reported and widely shared, it be wilfully untrue and
decidedly designedly false ..... and they be confronted by weak pathological liars in
international executive offices of a failed state, or a rapidly failing state in well
self-publicised terminal decline ..... for a fast approaching resulting death by suicide
‽ .
And what does it also tell one and all about the equally perverse and parlous state of
the national intelligence quotient of Five Eyes allies, whenever they be by virtue of
either their unquestioning support or deafening silence on such matters, no more than
co-conspirators on a similar sinister path.
Are they themselves incapable of better thinking for greater tinkering? Do they need
it to be freely provided by ..... well, what would they be? Private Contractors/Pirate
Operations/Alien Facilities/Out of this World Utilities?
You can surely be in no doubt that they certainly need something radically different,
considering the plain enough, destructive path that they be currently on, using what they
presently have.
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Soloamber , 48 minutes ago
Clintons . They already had a business relationship .
Clintons pay to play was well known .
Strange how "donations " have dropped 90% after she blew the election .
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Mini-Me , 2 hours ago
When does Durham get off his arse and do his damn job?
US President Donald Trump said the FBI targeted him for a "coup" after newly released
documents showed that federal agents bought liability insurance over fears their handling of
the Trump-Russia probe could lead to legal trouble.
The new documents were disclosed in a
federal court filing on Thursday by Sidney Powell, defense attorney for former Trump
adviser Michael Flynn. Seizing on the new release, the president ran a victory lap at a
campaign rally in Florida, telling the crowd the FBI had been "caught" attempting a
"coup."
"Today a trove of text messages was released from FBI agents involved in the Russian
witch hunt. You gotta see this," Trump said, reading out a headline from the
Federalist .
These people are scum. They were trying to do a coup. And we've caught them before that, we
caught them spying on our nation Never forget: they are coming after me because I'm fighting
for you.
The documents, which largely consist of text messages between unnamed federal agents, reveal
that both FBI and CIA personnel purchased professional liability insurance days before Trump
took office, fearing that illicit media leaks at the Department of Justice could result in
lawsuits against many involved in the first leg of the Trump-Russia investigation – then
known by its FBI codename, "Crossfire Hurricane."
"We all went and purchased professional liability insurance," one agent said in a
text on January 10, 2017, some 10 days before Trump's inauguration.
"Holy crap. All the analysts too?" another agent said, prompting the first to reply
"Yep. All the folks at the Agency as well" – an apparent reference to the
CIA.
When the first agent was asked who might be filing lawsuits, he responded: "Haha, who
knows I think [the] concern when we got it was that there was a big leak at DOJ and the [New
York Times] among others was going to do a piece."
The thought was if that piece comes out, and Jan 20th comes around the new [attorney
general] might have some questions then yada yada yada we all get screwed.
The messages also indicate that the FBI's separate investigation into Michael Flynn, then
Trump's national security advisor, was kept alive long after senior figures in the bureau
ordered the probe closed, finding no "derogatory information" on Flynn. While one agent
expressed relief in early November 2016 that the Flynn probe – named "Crossfire
Razor" – was ordered shut, that order had been overturned by January 2017, bureau
personnel said in the messages.
Other texts show agents discussing the use of National Security Letters (NSLs) as a pretext
to 'buy time' and drag out the investigation, allowing the FBI to continue digging into Flynn's
finances with little judicial oversight, despite prior "traces" turning up
"nothing."
Flynn was forced to resign as national security advisor in 2017 and later charged for
misleading the FBI about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, with whom he was
accused of discussing US sanctions on Russia prior to Trump's swearing-in as president. The DOJ
has since ordered Flynn's case closed after prior document dumps revealed misconduct at the
bureau, Flynn's judge has refused to comply with
the order.
Among other revelations, the new messages also show that some agents believed FBI officials
running the Trump-Russia investigation were biased in favor of then-Democratic candidate
Hillary Clinton, even hoping she would win the 2016 race.
"Doing all this election research – I think some of these guys want a Clinton
presidency," the agent said, prompting another to respond that "they seem to respect
that they know what they are gonna get."
"Haha, really. Instead of a wild card like Trump," the first agent said.
The FBI documents were not the only blockbuster publication on Thursday. A new DOJ memo made
public by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) suggests the FBI was aware that a primary
source for Christopher Steele – a former British intelligence operative hired by the
Clinton team to compile dirt on Trump in an infamous "dossier" – was the subject
of a counter-intelligence investigation in 2009. Despite deeming the source a potential Russian
spy, the bureau relied on Steele's dossier to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign,
disregarding the questionable origins of his so-called intelligence.
The dossier compiled by British spy Christopher Steele, paid through the firm Fusion GPS by
Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, was used by the FBI to obtain a warrant to spy on
Trump campaign aide Carter Page in October 2016, prior to the presidential election. The
warrant was renewed after Donald Trump got elected president and finally expired sometime in
late 2017.
In a redacted,
two-page memo made public on Thursday by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), the US
Department of Justice reveals that Steele's "primary sub-source" (PSS) had been under
FBI investigation in 2009 as a possible Russian agent. The FBI team going after Trump
("Crossfire Hurricane") became aware of this in December 2016 and interviewed the PSS in
January 2017 – then renewed the Page FISA warrant three more times anyway.
"In December 2016, the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE team identified the Primary Sub-source used by
Christopher Steele and, at that time, became familiar with the 2009 investigation. The
CROSSFIRE HURRICANE team interviewed the Primary Sub-source over the course of three sequential
days in January 2017. At that time, the 2009 investigation remained closed. The 2009
investigation remains closed to this day," says the DOJ memo.
The reason the FBI had closed the investigation, as the memo reveals, was that the PSS had
left the US in September 2010. The FBI said "consideration would be given to re-opening the
investigation in the event" the person returned to the US. For whatever reason, though the
PSS did return at some point, the investigation was never reopened.
While the DOJ memo does not name the PSS, some enterprising internet sleuths fingered him in
July as one Igor Danchenko. His attorney Mark E. Schamel confirmed the identification to the
New York
Times a day after RT reported on it. Danchenko had worked as a researcher for the Brookings
Institution until 2010. This lines up with the memo saying he was working at a think tank in
Washington, DC when some coworkers suspected him of being a "Russian spy."
The FBI's investigation came up with nothing much beyond a September 2006 "contact with a
known Russian intelligence officer," and him being "very familiar" with a
"Washington, DC–based Russian officer."
Flimsy as that seems now, it was a lot more than they ever had on Carter Page. It didn't
help that FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith had altered evidence to make Page look like a foreign
agent, when he in fact was not. In August, Clinesmith pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of
making a false statement.
When he sent over the memo to Graham, Attorney General Bill Barr wrote that additional
classified information that "bears upon the FBI's knowledge concerning the reliability" of the
Steele dossier may be declassified by the Director of National Intelligence soon, as it won't
interfere with the criminal investigation conducted by US Attorney John Durham.
The Steele Dossier has been the keystone of 'Russiagate' – the manufactured scandal
accusing Trump of having ties or "colluding" with Russia during the 2016 election – from
the very beginning. It had already emerged that the "Crossfire Hurricane" team had interviewed
Danchenko in January 2017 and established that the Dossier was fabricated, but proceeded to use
it to spy on Trump, framing Carter Page as a Russian agent anyway. At the time, they
already knew that Danchenko had been under FBI investigation as a suspected Russian agent
– but it didn't seem to bother them in the least.
Simply put, this means Crossfire Hurricane team members – such as former agent
Peter Strzok and his paramour Lisa Page, as well as FBI director James Comey and his deputy
deputy Andrew McCabe, ought to have some explaining to do.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Thos intelligence nets are becoming more and more sophisticated. They essentially represent a
hidden political force that influences the elections.
From comments: "This is so convoluted and Byzantine and no one is offering documentation,
just allegations."
Notable quotes:
"... Rarely in the news, however, is the role played by Israeli cybersecurity startups in the creation of the Russiagate narrative itself. Incubated within the Israeli military apparatus and benefiting from an uninterrupted stream of billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars, these "private Mossads" have been present behind the scenes throughout the numerous Russia-related scandals fomented by the mainstream press to sow partisan discord among the American electorate and line the pockets of network executives. ..."
"... The Senate's inquiries uncovered a consistent thread of IDF-linked cybersecurity firms and intelligence assets coordinating and facilitating meetings between the coterie of Russian characters that make up the Russiagate universe and the Trump campaign, including protagonists like Guccifer 2.0, the hacker who released Hilary Clinton's infamous emails to Wikileaks via a cell phone registered in Israel. ..."
"... "These guys came out of the military intelligence army unit, and it's like coming out with a triple Ph.D. from MIT. The amount of knowledge these guys have in terms of cybersecurity, cyber-intelligence [is] just so beyond what you could get [with] a normal education that it's just unique there are hundreds and hundreds of Israeli start-up companies that the founders are guys who came out of this unit." ..."
"... Michael Flynn, who was himself also working in an advisory capacity with the "consortium of cyber-spy companies run by former Israeli intelligence officers" known as the NSO Group, that is comprised of several of the Israeli startups summoned before the committee for voluntary, closed-door testimony. ..."
"... One of the NSO companies questioned by the Senate committee in relation to Russian interference, Psy-Group, is currently under investigation in California, where it was caught red-handed actually trying to rig a local election for a paying customer. ..."
"... Butina's former lover, Paul Erickson joked about being a CIA asset and had built a phony reputation as a man of staunch moral Christian values. Erickson worked for several Republican campaigns dating back to the late '80s, including a stint as national policy director for Pat Buchanan's '92 White House run. He first achieved international notoriety as Mobutu Sese Seko's lawyer, reportedly accepting a $30,000 lobbying contract to obtain a U.S. visa for the African despot, which was ultimately denied. ..."
"... It was Erickson's long-standing ties to the NRA and the organization's former president David Keene, which set the stage for the Maria Butina story as a Russian infiltrator looking for " access to U.S. political organizations ." Erickson had worked with Keene as a registered foreign agent since the 1990s and formed part of the NRA's efforts to forge closer ties to Israel since at least 2011. ..."
"... A con-artist by most accounts, Erickson is described by a Republican legislator as "the single biggest phony I've ever met in South Dakota politics." South Dakota was where Yale-educated Erickson came up in the political arena and where he's left a long trail of burned business associates and friends. In 2019, Erickson pled guilty to wire fraud and money laundering , admitting he had bilked 78 people of $2.3 Million over 22 years and was sentenced this past July to seven years in federal prison. ..."
A Senate investigation reveals that a consortium of Israeli hacking and surveillance firms
coordinated and facilitated meetings between Trump campaign operatives and Russia during the
2016 campaign, but they don't really want to talk about it.
Alleged Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election is headline news, once again,
as a Ukrainian lawmaker is charged by the Trump administration "in a sweeping plot to sow
distrust in the American political process," reports the Associated Press.
Microsoft also made claims that it detected "hacking attempts targeting U.S. political
campaigns, parties and consultants" by agents from Russia, China, and Iran. In a September 10
blog
post , Microsoft's Tom Burt, Corporate Vice President of Customer Security & Trust,
listed three groups from each region that Microsoft "observed" carrying out their cyber
operations.
Rarely in the news, however, is the role played by Israeli cybersecurity startups in the
creation of the Russiagate narrative itself. Incubated within the Israeli military apparatus
and benefiting from an uninterrupted stream of billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars, these
"private Mossads" have been present behind the scenes throughout the numerous Russia-related
scandals fomented by the mainstream press to sow partisan discord among the American electorate
and line the pockets of network executives.
Evidence of their activities has been exposed -- though not pursued -- in the latest volume
of a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee investigation on Russian interference in the 2016
presidential election, which shows how then-candidate Donald Trump personally embarked on a
parallel campaign on behalf of Israel to block a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements
in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Originally
submitted by Egypt, UNSCR 2334 strips Israeli settlements
beyond the 1967 borders of any "
legal validity " in the eyes of the international community and brands them a "flagrant
violation under international law." Russia, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, had
refused all of the advances made by Trump's operatives to use its veto power against the
measure, and Trump himself would
prevail upon Egyptian President al-Sisi -- whom Trump calls his "
favorite dictator " -- to
withdraw the declaration . Together with Israeli pressure, UNSCR 2334 seemed destined to
languish in obscurity as Egypt
acquiesced and delayed the vote to "permit them to conduct an additional meeting of the
Arab League's foreign ministers to work on the resolution's wording."
The Senate's inquiries uncovered a consistent thread of IDF-linked cybersecurity firms
and intelligence assets coordinating and facilitating meetings between the coterie of Russian
characters that make up the Russiagate universe and the Trump campaign, including protagonists
like Guccifer 2.0, the hacker who
released Hilary Clinton's infamous emails to Wikileaks via a cell phone registered in
Israel.
George Birnbaum, a former chief of staff to Benjamin Netanyahu and GOP operative, told the
committee how Trump aide Rick Gates had inquired about using "Israeli technology" to collect
dirt on opponent Hillary Clinton at a March 2016 meeting, explaining to the senators what would
be so attractive about Israeli companies, specifically:
"These guys came out of the military intelligence army unit, and it's like coming out
with a triple Ph.D. from MIT. The amount of knowledge these guys have in terms of
cybersecurity, cyber-intelligence [is] just so beyond what you could get [with] a normal
education that it's just unique there are hundreds and hundreds of Israeli start-up companies
that the founders are guys who came out of this unit."
The unit Birnbaum is referring to is the IDF's Unit 8200, where these "hundreds and
hundreds" of tech startups are born right in the bowels of the Israeli national security state
and propagate throughout the world and the United States, in particular.
Described as " private Mossads "
for hire, many of the Israeli hacking and surveillance firms that moved behind the scenes,
brokering meetings between Trump's people and Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska during the
height of the so-called Russian "collusion," were working through a "key middle man" with close
ties to then-Trump National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, who was himself also working
in an advisory capacity with the "consortium of cyber-spy companies run by former Israeli
intelligence officers" known as the NSO Group, that is comprised of several of the Israeli
startups summoned before the committee for voluntary, closed-door testimony.
While the American public was fed one Russophobic scandal after another, and Robert Mueller
held court in the press for two years straight, no one -- especially Mueller -- was paying
attention to this perverse network of Israeli surveillance companies who operated the virtual
scaffold upon which the Russiagate narrative was being constructed and whose fellow Unit 8200
graduates in other subsectors of the cybersecurity industry are deeply ensconced in highly
questionable activities surrounding the coming 2020 election.
THE NSO GROUP
The NSO
Group gained notoriety when it was identified as the developer of Pegasus, the iPhone
spyware that
was found installed on slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi's phone in the days leading
up to his gruesome death. NSO's cell phone tracking technology has been associated with other
ghastly events, such as the scandal involving Pegasus in Mexico, where a team of international
investigators looking into the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa was targeted by the
spyware, as well as Mexican
journalists and their families.
One of the NSO companies questioned by the Senate committee in relation to Russian
interference, Psy-Group, is currently under investigation in California, where it was
caught red-handed
actually trying to rig a local election for a paying customer. Another, Circles, was
founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer and is "known for covertly intercepting phone
calls, text messages, and tracking locations of unaware citizens," according to a report by
Forensic News .
In 2018, Haaretz published
an expose on the company disclosing the extent to which Circles and the Israeli espionage
industry is helping "world dictators hunt dissidents and gays," among other nefarious
opportunities available in the "global commerce" of surveillance technologies.
An NSO rep peddles software services at annual European Police Congress in Berlin, April 28,
2020. Hannibal Hanschke | Reuters
The middle man the Senate investigation identified is Walter Soriano; singled out for his
association with several Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska and Dmitry Rybolovlev, who
bought
Trump's West Palm Beach mansion in 2008. The Senate report accuses Soriano and Israeli
cybersecurity companies of coordinating "between the Trump Campaign and Russia," but fails to
pursue the matter beyond that.
The UN resolution denouncing Israeli settlements would pass on December 23, 2016, after four
temporary Security Council members, Malaysia, New Zealand, Senegal, and Venezuela reportedly
took matters into their own hands and moved the vote forward. UNSCR 2334 became official as
a result of a historic breach of established pro-Israel policy by the United States, which
abstained from the vote. Widely reported as Obama's "
parting shot " to Netanyahu and the incoming administration, the passing of the resolution
went against Obama's own record of using U.S.' veto power to banish similar
proposals .
President-elect Donald Trump would take office in a matter of weeks and the Mueller
investigation kicked off the barrage of Russophobic content peddled over the digital airwaves
night after night. Stories like
Maria Butina's were plastered all over the media to buttress the Russiagate
narrative.
THE LEGEND OF MARIA BUTINA
Butina's former lover, Paul Erickson joked
about being a CIA asset and had built a phony reputation as a man of staunch moral
Christian values. Erickson worked for several Republican campaigns dating back to the late
'80s, including a stint as
national policy director for Pat Buchanan's '92 White House run. He first achieved
international notoriety as Mobutu Sese Seko's lawyer, reportedly accepting a $30,000 lobbying
contract to obtain a U.S. visa for the African despot, which was ultimately denied.
It was Erickson's long-standing ties to the NRA and the organization's former president
David Keene, which set the stage for the Maria Butina story as a Russian infiltrator looking
for "
access to U.S. political organizations ." Erickson had
worked with Keene as a registered foreign agent since the 1990s and formed part of the
NRA's efforts to forge
closer ties to Israel since at least 2011.
Prosecutors would paint Butina as a seductress, ensnaring Erickson in a "duplicitous
relationship," but it was the cunning GOP operative who first spotted Butina during a 2013
trip to Moscow with Keene. Butina and Erickson would meet again in Israel one year later
where they would begin their 'love affair' during which he would become "integral to Butina's
activities," assisting the Russian gun enthusiast "in developing relationships with individuals
and organizations involved in U.S. politics," according to the Senate Intelligence
Committee.
Maria Butina poses for a photo at a shooting range in Moscow, April 22, 2012. Pavel Ptitsin
| AP
A con-artist
by most accounts, Erickson is
described by a Republican legislator as "the single biggest phony I've ever met in South
Dakota politics." South Dakota was where Yale-educated Erickson came up in the political arena
and where he's left a long trail of burned business associates and friends. In 2019, Erickson
pled guilty to
wire fraud and money laundering , admitting he had bilked 78 people of $2.3 Million over 22
years and was sentenced this past July to
seven years in federal prison.
The NRA has been forging ties to the Israeli security state for years now. In 2013, Trump's
former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, joined a delegation of 30 in Jerusalem for a
10-day tour of Israel's police institutions. The honorary NRA member stated on that
occasion, that Israel could "serve as a model for American security." The legend of Maria
Butina, itself, was seeded in Israel that same year when an "obscure" Israeli gun-rights group
posted on
Facebook that she had announced to have signed a cooperation agreement with the NRA
and "neighboring countries" to promote gun rights at a meeting with its members.
Butina would meet with Erickson and Keene two weeks later in Moscow, along with Alexander
Torshin, former deputy governor of Russia's central bank and lifetime NRA member. Torshin, who
has been targeted by U.S. sanctions, traveled with Butina to the United States to "discuss
U.S.-Russian economic relations" in April 2015. The pair met with several senior American
officials, like Federal Reserve vice chairman and former Israel central bank chief, Stanley
Fischer; the Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, Nathan Sheets and others in a
meeting "
moderated " by AIG CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. The details of the high-level meeting, two
months before Donald Trump made his announcement to run for president, have never been made
public.
Feature photo | Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee
business meeting to consider authorization for subpoenas relating to the Crossfire Hurricane
investigation, the code name for the counterintelligence investigation undertaken by the FBI in
2016 and 2017 into links between Trump and Russian officials, June 11, 2020. Carolyn Kaster |
AP
Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher,
writer and documentary filmmaker.
I always said it was Israeli influence not Russian. How obvious can it get. But we have
Trump constantly kissing the Israeli ass while being kicked in the teeth and Congress bending
over backwards pedaling lies about Russia for Israeli benefit.
Is there anyone on our side in DC?
Ok, so we have the israelis, synonymous with deep state, responsible for wtc '93, wtc
9/11, the arab spring, the afghan conflict, the iraq conflict, problems with Iran, training
antifa/blm, equipping and training the messican cartels, the farc, and tupac amaru. Being the
worlds controlling supplier of MDMA. As well as giving U.S. technology to the chinese, and
direct involvement with the release of covid 19. And hiring osama bin laden to build a
highway in the sudan, then embezzling $800 million from bin ladens project, and blaming it on
the U.S. It's time for the world to put their collective heads back into where the sun does
shine.
A satirical video using "deepfake" technology to show US President Donald Trump as coming to
work for RT after the November election was taken very seriously by 'Russiagate' peddlers at
the Daily Beast and the Lincoln Project.
"... Cohen had the courage to take on the entire ruling elites of this country and their messianic supremacist ideology by himself, almost completely alone. ..."
"... He opposed the warmongering nutcases during the Cold War, and he opposed them again when they replaced their rabid hatred of the Soviet Union with an even more rabid hatred of everything Russian. ..."
First, he was a man of immense kindness and humility . Second, he was a man of total
intellectual honesty . I can't say that Cohen and I had the same ideas or the same reading of
history, though in many cases we did, but here is what I found so beautiful in this man: unlike
most of his contemporaries, Cohen was not an ideologue , he did not expect everybody to agree
with him, and he himself did not vet people for ideological purity before offering them his
friendship.
Even though it is impossible to squeeze a man of such immense intellect and honesty into any
one single ideological category, I would say that Stephen Cohen was a REAL liberal , in the
original, and noble, meaning of this word.
I also have to mention Stephen Cohen's immense courage . Yes, I know, Cohen was not deported
to GITMO for his ideas, he was not tortured in a CIA secret prison, and he was not rendered to
some Third Word country to be tortured there on behalf of the USA. Stephen Cohen had a
different kind of courage: the courage to remain true to himself and his ideals even when the
world literally covered him in slanderous accusations, the courage to NOT follow his fellow
liberals when they turned PSEUDO-liberals and betrayed everything true liberalism stands for.
Professor Cohen also completely rejected any forms of tribalism or nationalism, which often
made him the target of vicious hatred and slander, especially from his fellow US Jews (he was
accused of being, what else, a Putin agent).
Cohen had the courage to take on the entire ruling elites of this country and their
messianic supremacist ideology by himself, almost completely alone.
Last, but most certainly not least, Stephen Cohen was a true peacemaker , in the sense of
the words of the Holy Gospel I quoted above. He opposed the warmongering nutcases during the
Cold War, and he opposed them again when they replaced their rabid hatred of the Soviet Union
with an even more rabid hatred of everything Russian.
I won't claim here that I always agreed with Cohen's ideas or his reading of history, and I
am quite sure that he would not agree with much of what I wrote. But one thing Cohen and I
definitely did agree on: the absolute, number one, priority of not allowing a war to happen
between the USA and Russia. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Stephen Cohen dedicated
his entire life towards this goal.
first "met" Steve through
his
1977 essay
"Bolshevism and Stalinism." His cogent, persuasive, revisionist argument that there are always alternatives in
history and politics deeply influenced me. And his seminal biography,
Bukharin
and the Bolshevik Revolution
, challenging prevailing interpretations of Soviet history, was to me, and many, a model of
how biography should be written: engaged and sympathetically critical.
At the time, I was too accepting of conventional wisdom. Steve's work -- and soon, Steve himself -- challenged me to be
critical-minded, to seek alternatives to the status quo, to stay true to my beliefs (even if they weren't popular), and to ask
unpopular questions of even the most powerful. These are values I carry with me to this day as editorial director of
The
Nation
, which Steve introduced me to (and its editor, Victor Navasky) and for which he wrote a column ("Sovieticus") from
1982 to 1987, and many articles and essays beginning in 1979. His last book,
War
with Russia?
was a collection of dispatches (almost all posted at
thenation.com
)
distilled from Steve's weekly radio broadcasts -- beginning in 2014–on
The
John Batchelor Show
.
T
he experiences we shared in Moscow beginning in 1980 are in many ways my life's most meaningful. Steve introduced me
to realms of politics, history, and life I might never have experienced: to Bukharin's widow, the extraordinary Anna
Mikhailovna Larina, matriarch of his second family, and to his eclectic and fascinating circle of friends -- survivors of the
Gulag, (whom he later wrote about in
The
Victims Return
) dissidents, and freethinkers -- both outside and inside officialdom.
From 1985 to 1991, when we lived frequently in Moscow, we shared the intellectual and political excitement, the hopes and the
great achievements of those
perestroika
years.
We later developed a close friendship with Mikhail Gorbachev, a man we both deeply admired as an individual and as a political
leader who used his power so courageously to change his country and the world. Gorbachev also changed our lives in several
ways.
Our marriage coincided with
perestroika
.
In fact, Steve spent the very first day after our wedding, our so-called honeymoon, at the United Nations with Gorbachev and
the news anchor Dan Rather (Steve was consulting for CBS News at the time). Then, on our first anniversary, in 1989, we were
with President Bush (the first) and Gorbachev on Malta when they declared the end of the Cold War. And we think of our
daughter, Nika, now 29 years old, as a
perestroika
baby
because she was conceived in Russia during the Gorbachev years, made her first visit to Moscow in July 1991 and since then has
been back some 40 times. In a moving moment, a year after Raisa Maksimovna died, Gorbachev remarked to Steve that our marriage
and partnership reminded him of his with Raisa because we too seemed inseparable.
Steve has often regretted that many of the Russian friends he made after 1985 did not know about his earlier Moscow life. He
first visited the Soviet Union in 1959. But it was those pre-
perestroika
years,
1975 to 1982, that gave Steve what he once told me was his "real education. Not only in Russian society but in Russian
politics, because I began to understand the connection between trends in society, trends in the dissident movement, and trends
in the nomenklatura." They were "utterly formative years for me."
They also informed his writings, especially his pathbreaking book
Rethinking
the Soviet Experience
, which was published at the very time Gorbachev came to power. "There was a lot of tragedy," Steve
used to say, "but also a lot of humor and warmth when people had little more that personal friendships and ideas to keep them
company." From 1980, when I first traveled to Moscow with Steve, to 1982 when neither of us could get a visa (until 1985 when
Gorbachev became leader), we lived in that Russia, spending many nights in friends' apartments and kitchens drinking into the
night, and listening to uncensored, often pessimistic, thinking about the present and future of Russia.
I later became Steve's collaborator in smuggling
samizdat
manuscripts
out of Russia to the West, and bringing
samizdat
books
back to Russia and distributing them. By the time I joined him, Steve had managed to send dozens of such books to Moscow, and
satisfying friends with a selection ranging from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, George Orwell, and Robert Conquest
to the
Kama
Sutra
and, of course, the
samizdat
version
of Steve's own book on Bukharin. I learned from Steve that one had to keep forbidden documents and manuscripts on one's person
at all times, knowing that the KGB frequently searched apartments and hotel rooms. At a certain point, Steve's shoulder bag
became so heavy that he developed a hernia on his right side. After surgery, he started carrying his bag on his left side, but
developed a second hernia there, as well. He liked to say that the worst the KGB ever did to him was to cause him two hernias!
In fact, it was
samizdat
manuscripts
that first brought us together. In 1978, Steve heard that I had a diplomatic passport, which would have exempted me from a
customs search, and was about to travel to Moscow. (At the time my father was the United States representative to the United
Nations in Geneva.) Through a mutual friend, Steve asked if I would bring out
samizdat
documents
being held for him in Moscow. I would have been happy to do so, but Steve had been misinformed. I didn't have a diplomatic
passport.
S
teve could sometimes seem like a tough guy, but those who won his trust knew he was a person of great generosity,
loyalty, and kindness. He was known in our New York City neighborhood on the Upper West Side as an impresario/organizer and
longtime supporter of basketball tournaments for local, often poor, kids. In the United States and Russia, Steve mentored and
supported young scholars. In the last decade, he set up fellowships for young scholars of Russian history at the several
universities where he'd he studied and taught: Indiana University, Princeton, New York University, and Columbia. He lent his
support to the establishment of Moscow's State Museum of the History of the Gulag -- and to its young director and team.
Life with Steve was never boring. He was supremely independent, the true radical in our family, unfailingly going to the root
of the problem. He spoke his mind. He had a CD with a dozen variations of "My Way" -- from Billy Bragg to Frank Sinatra. And as
The
Chronicle of Higher Education
subtitled its 2017 profile of Steve, he "was the most controversial Russia expert in
America."
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Nation
's work.
Through all our years together, Steve was my backbone, fortifying me for the battles
Nation
editors
must wage (often with their own writers, sometimes including Steve!), and giving me the personal and political courage to do
the right thing. But never more so than when we entered what might be called the "Russiagate era."
While Steve liked to say it's healthy to rethink, to have more questions than answers, there was a wise consistency to his
political analysis. For example, as is clear from his many articles in
The
Nation
in these last decades, he unwaveringly opposed American Cold War thinking both during the Cold War and since the
end of the Soviet Union. He was consistent in his refusal to sermonize, lecture, or moralize about what Russia should do. He
preferred to listen rather than preach, to analyze rather than demonize.
This stance was no recipe for popularity, which Steve professed to care little about. He was courageous and fearless in
continuing to question the increasingly rigid orthodoxies about the Soviet Union and Russia. But in the last months, such
criticism did take its toll on him. Along with others who sought to avert a new and more dangerous Cold War, Steve despaired
that the public debate so desperately needed had become increasingly impossible in mainstream politics or media. Until his
death he'd been working on a short article about what he saw as the "criminalization of détente." The organization he
established, the American Committee on East-West Accord, tried mightily to argue for a more sane US policy toward Russia.
He fared better than I often did confronting the controversies surrounding him since 2014, in reaction to his views on
Ukraine, Putin, election interference, and more. Positions he took often elicited slurs and scurrilous attacks. How many times
could he be labeled "Putin's puppet"? "Putin's No.1 American apologist"? Endlessly, it seemed. But Steve chose not to respond
directly to the attacks, believing -- as he told me many times when I urged him to respond -- that they offered no truly substantive
criticism of his arguments, but were merely ad hominem attacks. What he did write about -- he was increasingly concerned about
the fate of a younger generation of scholars -- was the danger of smearing those who thought differently about US policy toward
Russia, thereby silencing skeptics and contributing to the absence of a needed debate in our politics, media, and academy.
M
ikhail Gorbachev often told Steve how deeply influenced he was by his writings, especially his biography of Bukharin.
Steve first met Gorbachev in 1987 at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. It was a reception for America's "progressive
intelligentsia" -- which Steve found funny, because he considered himself a maverick and didn't like labels. But he was there
that day, and within a few minutes a Kremlin aide told Steve that the general secretary wanted to talk to him. Minutes later,
Mikhail Sergeevich approached and asked Steve, assuming the author of Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution must be eminent
and of a "serious" age: "
Deistvitelno
[really] -- you
wrote the book, or was it your father?"
Steve finally achieved that "serious" age Gorbachev spoke of! But his heart, spirit and mind remained youthful till the very
end. Maybe it's because of his love of Jerry Lee Lewis's rock and roll, or New Orleans blues or Kentucky bluegrass, or his
passion for basketball (shared with our daughter Nika and his 16-year-old grandson, Lucas), or his quest for a good anecdote
(his annual anecdote lectures at Princeton and later NYU drew large crowds). Maybe it's because we continued our walks in
nearby Riverside Park for as long as was possible -- walks full of loving and spirited argument and talk. Perhaps it's because,
while Steve was a very serious person, he didn't take himself seriously.
O
n Saturday, Mikhail Gorbachev sent these words about Steve:
Dear Katrina,
Please accept my sincere condolences on Steve's
passing. He was one of the closest people to me in his views and
understanding of the enormous events that occurred in the late 1980s in Russia and changed the world.
Steve was a brilliant historian and a man of
democratic convictions. He loved Russia, the Russian intelligentsia, and
believed in our country's future.
I always considered Steve and you my true
friends. During perestroika and all the subsequent years, I felt your
understanding and unwavering support. I thank you both.
Dear Katrina, I feel deep sympathy for your
grief and I mourn together with you and Nika.
Blessed memory for Steve.
I embrace you,
Mikhail Gorbachev
19.09.20
F
or 40 years, Steve was my partner, companion, co-conspirator, best friend, fellow traveler, mentor, husband (for 32
years), co-author. I will be forever grateful to him for introducing me to
The
Nation
, to Russia, for a life that has been full of shared adventure, friendship and passion, and for our beloved
daughter, Nika.
MOST POPULAR
1
Katrina vanden Heuvel
TWITTER
Katrina
vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of
The
Nation
, America's leading source of progressive politics and culture. She served as editor of the magazine from 1995 to
2019.
Herbert Weiner
says:
September 22, 2020 at 11:53 pm
My condolences for the passing of Stephen who fought the post Cold War policies against Russia with a balanced analysis--so
contradictory to the intellectuals who gloat in our victory and are unrealistic to the "threat" posed by Russia which desperately
needs peace and friendship with the West and, especially, us.
He has shown that you can criticism and condemn Stalinism
while also condemning our anti-Soviet policies. He walked that tightrope which I applaud. May his memory be a blessing.
Erwin Borda
says:
September 22, 2020 at 10:44 pm
Dear Katrina, at this time of America's political confusion, pain and intellectual despair, the lost of Steve is really big.
He has been a source of inspiration to many, and the true defender of Russia in the middle of political adversity. Steve being an
intellectual giant always exposed his ideas in a humble and honest way. What a lost for America and for the world!
Rest in Peace Steve! And for you Katrina and Nika my most sincere condolences!
God Bless you all!
Valera Bochkarev
says:
September 22, 2020 at 8:56 am
Boots, Applebaums, Kristols and Joffes of this world will come and go as specks of dirt clogging up our civilization while never
measuring up to courageous moral and intellectual giants like Professor Cohen. His intellect, insight and humility will always be
a shining beacon for those that have high hopes for humanity. Rest in peace, Steve Cohen. You've led a righteous and honorable
life, Sir.
Pierre Guerlain
says:
September 22, 2020 at 2:43 am
I started reading Steve's articles in connection with the conspiracy theory that Russiagate is and then I watched many videos of
him in interviews. I came to admire such a courageous man who was slandered by people who knew nothing, nothing about Russia, the
country Steve knew so well but also nothing about geopolitics, international relations and the tricks of intel services. Always
competent and with a gift for clear exposition, Steve warned about what is one of the gravest dangers: war with Russia. I too
admired Gorbachev and saw how he was hoodwinked by people who unknowingly prepared Putin's rise. A great courageous thinker is
gone and we miss him.
Ann Wright
says:
September 21, 2020 at 7:53 pm
I admired Steve's perspective from 1992 when I was in the second group that wasIn the US Embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and two
years later with the Us Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan for two years from 1994-1996. I've been back to Russia twice in the past
three years and
I agree totally with His view of the stupidity of another Cold War!!!
John Stewart
says:
September 21, 2020 at 5:12 pm
Katrina, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. I took two courses with Professor Cohen at Princeton in 1973 and 1974, and
he was without question the best lecturer I had in seven years of higher education. He became my intellectual mentor, although I
was too shy to ever really talk with him. I graduated in Politics and Russian Studies in 1977, and he was an inspiration. I am
especially saddened by his death because I have been thinking of picking up Russian studies soon when I retire and I wanted his
advice on where I should do a Masters degree, with whom, and what topics needed someone to pick up. He was a great man, and a
voice of sense about Russia. He will be greatly missed.
John Connolly
says:
September 21, 2020 at 3:10 pm
Dear Katrina: Thank You for this personal sharing of Your life with Stephen Cohen; and sincere condolences to You, Nika and
Lucas.
I really appreciate Your clarity and candor about the unique position Steve occupied in the academic, intellectual and political
firmament ... never completely clear to me until Your explication. Steve regularly engaged and sometimes enraged me with some of
his positions -- some of them seeming to me ill-considered defenses of cloddish Stalinist bureaucrats or malevolent Russian
authoritarians ... but I read everything he wrote in 'The Nation' and anywhere else I came across him. As a longtime Trotskyist/
Socialist I could find plenty to argue about with Brother Cohen, but also found great appreciation for the fact that
almost
no one else was currently thinking and writing about Russia or the Soviet experience with the rigor, insight, depth of experience
and skill that Stephen owned and shared with us all.
It goes without saying he will be missed by You his dearest and closest
ones; but he will be sorely missed too by those of us in Your extended 'Nation' Family, and the Progressive millions he so widely
taught and influenced to 'think different'.
When Vladimir Putin got charge of Russia, there was no sign that he would do better than the
drunk he had replaced. An ex KGB officer seemed like a choice more driven by nostalgia rather
than ideology, but Putin had many more assets going for him than first met the eyes:
patriotism, humanism, a sense of justice, cunning ruse, a genius economist friend named Sergey
Glazyev whom openly despised the New World Order, but above all, he embodied the reincarnation
of the long lost Russian ideology of total political and economical independence. After a few
years spent at draining the Russian swamp from the oligarchs and mafiosis that his stumbling
predecessor had left in his trail of empty bottles, Vlad rolled his sleeves and got to
work.
Because his opponents had been looting the planet for 250 years through colonization insured
by a military dominance, Vlad knew that he had to start by building an invincible military
machine. And he did. He came up with different types of hypersonic missiles that can't be
stopped, the best defensive systems on the planet, the best electronic jamming systems, and the
best planes. Then to make sure that a nuclear war wouldn't be an option, he came up with stuff
which nightmares are made of, such as the Sarmat, the Poseidon and the Avangard, all
unstoppable and able to destroy any country in a matter of a few hours.
Putin said that Russia is the only country in the world that has hypersonic weapons even
though its military spending is a fraction of the U.S. military budget. Russian Defense
Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, and Chief of General Staff of Russia Valery Gerasimov, right,
attend the meeting.
With a new and unmatched arsenal, he could proceed to defeat any NATO force or any of its
proxies, as he did starting in September 2015 in Syria. He proved to every country that
independence from the NWO banking system was now a matter of choice. Putin not only won the
Syrian war, but he won the support of many New World Order countries that suddenly switched
sides upon realizing how invincible Russia had become. On a diplomatic level, it also got
mighty China by its side, and then managed to protect independent oil producers such as
Venezuela and Iran, while leaders like Erdogan of Turkey and Muhammad Ben Salman of Saudi
Arabia decided to side with Russia, who isn't holding the best poker hand, but the whole deck
of cards.
Ending in the conclusion that Putin now controls the all-mighty oil market, the unavoidable
energy resource that lubricates economies and armies, while the banksters' NATO can only watch,
without any means to get it back. With the unbelievable results that Putin has been getting in
the last five years, the New World Order suddenly looks like a house of cards about to crumble.
The Empire of Banks has been terminally ill for five years, but it's now on morphine, barely
realizing what's going on.
Tragedy and hope
Since there is no hope in starting WW3 which is lost in advance, the last banzai came out of
the bushes in the shape of a virus and the ensuing media creation of a fake pandemic. The main
focus was to avoid a catastrophic hyperinflation of the humongous mass of US dollar that no one
wants anymore, to have time to implement their virtual world crypto-currency, as if the
chronically failing bankers still have any legitimacy to keep controlling our money supplies.
It seemed at first that the plan could work. That's when Vlad took out his revolver to start
the Russian roulette game and bankers blew their brains out upon the pressure on the
trigger.
He called a meeting with OPEC and killed the price of oil by refusing to lower Russia's
production, taking the barrel to under 30 dollars. Without any afterthought and certainly even
less remorse, Vlad killed the costly Western oil production. All the dollars that had been
taken out of the market had to be re-injected by the Fed and other central banks to avoid a
downslide and the final disaster. By now, our dear bankers are out of solutions.
... ... ..
The New World Order is facing the two most powerful countries on the planet, and this fake
pandemic changed everything. It showed how desperate the banksters are, and if we don't want to
end up with nuclear warheads flying in both directions, Putin and Trump have to stop them
now.
Terminate the BIS, the World Bank, the IMF, the European Central bank, the EU, NATO, now.
Our world won't be perfect, but it might get much better soon.
Easter resurrection is coming. This might get biblical.
"... The blogger Caitlin Johnstone accurately states that these most of these mainstream corporate journalists are really *narrative managers* in that their primary role is to peddle the official narrative of the US corporate/political establishment for any given topic. ..."
"... I would add that the managing editors of these "journalists"/narrative managers would be more honestly described as "handlers," to use the parlance of spooks. ..."
"... Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality". ..."
"... In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try ..."
snake , Sep 22 2020 0:59 utc | 22 can we not invent a method that can counter this tactic of using propaganda to control
the narrative?
1) Hack them. Release their planning documents, emails, phone calls, etc. showing how the scam was set up.
2) Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality"
- that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated
narrative, you can't set "reality".
3) In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to
cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say*
they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief
systems. So again, waste of time to try.
Well....as always, and especially if it involves anything even remotely relating to 'Russia', or Iran, or whatever adversarial
operational target of the day might be -- one can reliably count on our very own "Izvestia on the Hudson" to faithfully execute
their officially sanctioned nation security state propaganda mission by dutifully steno-graphing as much dis/mis-information as
their NSA/CIA/Pentagon handlers request (require) from them.
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper's movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic
was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called
"the narrative." We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with
editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the
mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting
National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: "My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?"
The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper's daily Page One meeting:
"We set the agenda for the country in that room.
The blogger Caitlin Johnstone accurately states that these most of these mainstream corporate journalists are really *narrative
managers* in that their primary role is to peddle the official narrative of the US corporate/political establishment for any given
topic.
I would add that the managing editors of these "journalists"/narrative managers would be more honestly described as "handlers,"
to use the parlance of spooks.
In fact, it would be apt to described venerable institution of journalism itself as an intelligence operation.
@snake | Sep 22 2020 0:59 utc | 22 can we not invent a method that can counter this tactic of using propaganda to control the
narrative?
1) Hack them. Release their planning documents, emails, phone calls, etc. showing how the scam was set up.
2) Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus
reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one
coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality".
3) In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power,
due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate
may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own
internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try.
Those sneaky Russians are well aware Biden is doing a good enough job of subverting his
own campaign.
They know he, like his opponent, offers no relief from the constant militarism and forever
wars that the American public is fed up with.
They know he, like his opponent, is corrupt and represents corporate interests and that
the American public sees him as out of touch and incapable of offering anything in terms of
substantive change.
They know that so long as Biden doesn't offer any kind of viable alternative to the status
quo his candidacy is going to be weak and ineffectual and that there isn't much of anything
they could do that could possibly enhance that effect.
So, they're content to sit back and let nature take its course. In other words, they
realize the best way to interfere in the American elections... is by NOT interfering with
them.
And how could the Americans possibly counter such a strategy? The deviousness is off the charts. Damn those Russians!
The rapid onset of a mysterious illness that almost killed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny last week and ultimately led to his
emergency airlifting to Germany for treatment while in a medically induced coma immediately prompted widespread speculation
from the Western media that the authorities had tried to poison him, but it's unrealistic to imagine such a scenario since
there are several compelling reasons why the government wouldn't ever want to harm him as well as some relevant arguments for
why the West wants their targeted audience across the world to think otherwise.
The Mysterious Illness
The
Western media has been captivated by the curious case of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny after the rapid onset of a mysterious
illness almost killed him while he was mid-flight from Siberia to Moscow to
face
charges of slander
after calling a World War II veteran a "traitor" earlier this summer for supporting amendments to the
constitution. Navalny was ultimately airlifted to Germany for treatment while in a medically induced coma at his
wife's
request
. Private individuals
footed
the bill
, and the authorities
didn't
object
to his departure. Prior to that, the Russian doctors shared their
preliminary
diagnosis
that his illness was caused by a "metabolic disorder" which might have been triggered by a "sharp drop in blood
sugar". They also
confirmed
that
"no poisons or traces of poison have been found in his system", which is why a law enforcement source told
TASS
that
"There are no grounds for opening a criminal case, no crime elements have been identified." An
industrial
chemical
was found on his hands and clothes during testing, but the Omsk Regional Office of the Interior Ministry is of
the belief that "it may have appeared after contact with plastic glass".
Assassination Speculations
Those are the facts as they objectively exist at the moment of this article's publication on 24 August, but the political
context of the case has fueled speculation about foul play. The
most
popular theory
is that he was poisoned after drinking a cup of tea that was
handed
to him by his aide
while waiting for his flight at the airport. Staff at the cafe in question that were interviewed by
police said that they
didn't
know anything
about the incident, and the business has since
closed
.
Despite the Russian doctors
concluding
that
there were "no toxicological substances that could have been described as a poison" in his system, the Western media has
speculated that he was poisoned as part of a Kremlin plot. This narrative builds upon the unproven stories of the past two
decades, especially the recent Skripal case from two years ago, alleging that President Putin personally orders his critics
across the world to be poisoned as punishment for bruising his ego. Despite being ridiculous to countenance for any objective
observer, it nevertheless advances the information warfare narrative that the Russian leader is a "dangerous dictator" who
must be stopped by all means possible.
Navalny's Real Role In Russian Society
This politically self-serving depiction of events relies on its targeted audience's ignorance of Russian domestic politics
since those who are aware of everyday realities there know better than to imagine such a scenario. Navalny isn't the
"opposition leader" that he's portrayed as abroad, but is more like an investigative blogger and protest organizer than
anything else. His ethno-nationalist views only appeal to the extreme right-wing fringe of society, though Westerners are
generally unaware of them since their media mostly only focuses on his occasional liberal rhetoric and regular criticism of
the authorities. While his racial beliefs are politically dangerous in terms of threatening to unravel the cosmopolitan
country's unity, they're not an electoral threat considering how unpopular they are, hence why the ruling United Russia party
isn't too concerned about him. Navalny wouldn't even be that well-known at home had he not repeatedly broken the law by
organizing unauthorized rallies, provocations which always receive disproportionate attention from his Western media allies.
Exaggerating his political importance is therefore nothing more than a Western infowar tactic.
The "Pressure Valve"
This presumably irks the government, but it in no way threatens it. If anything, the authorities have come to accept the role
that Navalny plays in society as a "pressure valve" for people's frustration with corruption and other related issues. They're
used to his antics by now, and he's regarded as the "devil that they know". His departure from the scene would actually be
counterproductive since it might open up the opportunity for an even more radical individual to replace him, one who's much
less "manageable" and might dangerously stir up ethno-nationalist tensions in society under the cover "anti-corruption"
rhetoric. Since he's so highly regarded in the West as a result of their long-running infowar, they know that they'd
immediately be suspected if anything happened to him. This in turn, as is presently on display as a result of his mysterious
medical crisis, could then be twisted into even more devious infowar narratives against their country such as the current one
speculating that the authorities tried to assassinate him. They'd never do anything of the sort, but all that matters is that
the West's targeted audience believes this false claim after being preconditioned for years to accept it.
Different Infowar Targets, Different Intended Outcomes
The
non-Russian audience is having their negative views about the country reinforced by the "
media
circus
" surrounding Navalny's mysterious illness, and their governments might potentially use the incident as a pretext
for tightening the sanctions regime against Russia, and especially against specific individuals who they might eventually
claim were linked to what's being wrongly portrayed as an "assassination attempt". As for the targeted Russian audience, the
West might hope that this incident could spark another wave of protests in Moscow along the lines of the ongoing ones in the
Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk and the Belarusian capital of Minsk. That wouldn't be for the purpose of overthrowing the
government which is completely unrealistic, but simply to cause some more trouble for it. The German doctors'
forthcoming
prognosis
will be crucial in determining the scenario trajectory since they'll either reaffirm the findings of their
Russian counterparts and predictably lead to this manufactured scandal blowing over or possibly challenge them under pressure
from Western intelligence agencies and thus exacerbate the situation.
The
ambulance that transported Alexei Navalny to Charite Mitte Hospital Complex in Berlin, Germany August 22, 2020
Scenario Forecasting
There are no credible reasons to doubt the Russian doctors' preliminary prognosis that Navalny's medical emergency was caused
by a sharp drop in his blood-sugar levels, but their German counterparts might publicly allege a different version of events.
Should that happen, then it's almost certain that Western governments will claim that he was poisoned at the behest of
President Putin, threaten to impose more sanctions against Russia (most likely targeted ones), and naturally grant Navalny
political asylum. Russia would predictably object to that series of events considering the fact that its doctors concluded
that there were no poisons found in his system, which would lead to yet another layer of tension in Russia-West relations. Not
only that, but since Navalny is currently being treated in Germany, intense pressure might be put upon the authorities by
domestic politicians and their American patrons to politicize the final leg of Nord Stream II's construction by potentially
delaying it as "punishment to Putin". That would be an unfortunate twist to the situation, but one that definitely can't be
ruled out after taking into account just how badly the US wants to sabotage that project.
Concluding Thoughts
As
it stands, it looks like Navalny really did experience a genuine medical emergency, one which was naturally occurring and not
the result of any foul play. Neither the Russian authorities nor foreign intelligence agencies attempted to assassinate him,
but the German doctors might be pressured by Western intelligence agencies to contradict their counterpart's findings in order
to provoke a fake crisis in Russia-West relations, one which could then potentially be leveraged to put interfere with the
final stage of Nord Stream II's construction. Regardless of how this incident ends, one thing's for certain, and it's that
Navalny's mysterious illness was politicized before there were any grounds to do so. The Western media has an interest in
making it seem like President Putin ordered his assassination because of his bruised ego, but this is ridiculous to
countenance since Navalny fulfills a useful role in Russian society by functioning as a "pressure valve" for people's
frustration with corruption and other related issues. The last thing that the Kremlin would ever do is harm him since all
Russian authorities already know that their government would immediately be suspected if something happened to him.
Unfortunately in his brilliant analysis of USA-Russia relations Stephen Cohen never pointed out that the USA policy toward
Russia is dictated by the interests of maintaining global neoliberal empire and the concept of "Full Spectrum Dominance" which was
adopted by the USA neoliberal elite after the collapse of the USSR.
Like British empire the USA neoliberal empire is now overextended, metropolia is in secular stagnation with deterioration
standard of living of the bottom 80% of population, so the USA under Trump became more aggressive and dangerous on the international
arena. Trump administration behaves behaves like a cornered rat on international arena.
Notable quotes:
"... On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York City and we, the "dissident" community of Americans standing for peace with Russia – and for peace with the world at large – lost a towering intellectual and skillful defender of our cause who enjoyed an audience of millions by his weekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC Radio. ..."
"... from the start of the Information Wars against Russia during the George W. Bush administration following Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, no voice questioning the official propaganda line in America was tolerated. Steve Cohen, who in the 1990s had been a welcome guest on U.S. national television and a widely cited expert in print media suddenly found himself blacklisted and subjected to the worst of McCarthyite style, ad hominem attacks. ..."
"... the opposition to Steve was led by experts in the Ukrainian and other minority peoples sub-categories of the profession who were militantly opposed not just to him personally but to any purely objective, not to mention sympathetic treatment of Russian leadership in the territorial expanse of Eurasia. ..."
"... Almost no one outside our 'dissident' community is concerned about the possibility of Armageddon in say two years' time due to miscalculations and bad luck in our pursuing economic, informational and military confrontation with Russia and China. ..."
"... My point in this discussion is that in the last decade of his life Stephen Cohen became one of the nation's most fearless and persistent defenders of the right to Free Speech. ..."
"... It was forced upon him by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media who pilloried him or blacklisted him over his unorthodox, unsanctioned, nonconformist views on the "Putin regime." It was forced upon him by university colleagues who sought to deny his right to establish graduate school fellowships in Russian affairs bearing his name and that of his mentor at Indiana University, Professor Tucker. ..."
"... In the face of vicious personal attacks from these McCarthyite forces, in the face of hate mail and even threats to his life, Steve decided to set up The American Committee and to recruit to its governing board famous, patriotic Americans and the descendants of the most revered families in the country. In this he succeeded, and it is to his credit that a moral counter force to the stampeding bulls of repression was erected and has survived to this day. ..."
On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York City and we, the
"dissident" community of Americans standing for peace with Russia – and for peace with
the world at large – lost a towering intellectual and skillful defender of our cause who
enjoyed an audience of millions by his weekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC
Radio.
A year ago, I reviewed his latest book, War With Russia? which drew upon the
material of those programs and took this scholar turned journalist into a new and highly
accessible genre of oral readings in print. The narrative style may have been more relaxed,
with simplified syntax, but the reasoning remained razor sharp. I urge those who are today
paying tribute to Steve, to buy and read the book, which is his best legacy.
From start to finish, Stephen F. Cohen was among America's best historians of his
generation, putting aside the specific subject matter that he treated: Nikolai Bukharin, his
dissertation topic and the material of his first and best known book; or, to put it more
broadly, the history of Russia (USSR) in the 20 th century. He was one of the very
rare cases of an historian deeply attentive to historiography, to causality and to logic. I
understood this when I read a book of his from the mid-1980s in which he explained why Russian
(Soviet) history was no longer attracting young students of quality: because there were no
unanswered questions, because we smugly assumed that we knew about that country all that there
was to know. That was when our expert community told us with one voice that the USSR was
entrapped in totalitarianism without any prospect for the overthrow of its oppressive
regime.
But my recollections of Steve also have a personal dimension going back six years or so when
a casual email correspondence between us flowered into a joint project that became the launch
of the American Committee for East West Accord (ACEWA). This was a revival of a
pro-détente association of academics and business people that existed from the mid-1970s
to the early 1990s, when, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the removal of the
Communist Party from power, the future of Russia in the family of nations we call the
'international community' seemed assured and there appeared to be no further need for such an
association as ACEWA.
I hasten to add that in the original ACEWA Steve and I were two ships that passed in the
night. With his base in Princeton, he was a protégé of the dean of diplomats then
in residence there, George Kennan, who was the leading light on the academic side of the ACEWA.
I was on the business side of the association, which was led by Don Kendall, chairman of
Pepsico and also for much of the 1970s chairman of the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council of
which I was also a member. I published pro-détente articles in their newsletter and
published a lengthy piece on cooperation with the Soviet Union in agricultural and food
processing domains, my specialty at that time, in their collection of essays by leaders in the
U.S. business community entitled Common Sense in U.S.-Soviet Trade .
The academic contingent had, as one might assume, a 'progressive' coloration, while the
business contingent had a Nixon Republican coloration. Indeed, in the mid-1980s these two sides
split in their approach to the growing peace movement in the U.S. that was fed by opposition in
the 'thinking community' on university campuses to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars agenda. Kendall
shut the door at ACEWA to rabble rousing and the association did not rise to the occasion, so
that its disbanding in the early '90s went unnoticed.
In the re-incorporated American Committee, I helped out by assuming the formal obligations
of Treasurer and Secretary, and also became the group's European Coordinator from my base in
Brussels. At this point my communications with Steve were almost daily and emotionally quite
intense. This was a time when America's expert community on Russian affairs once again felt
certain that it knew everything there was to know about the country, and most particularly
about the nefarious "Putin regime." But whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, polite debate about the
USSR/Russia was entirely possible both behind closed doors and in public space, from the
start of the Information Wars against Russia during the George W. Bush administration following
Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, no voice questioning the
official propaganda line in America was tolerated. Steve Cohen, who in the 1990s had been a
welcome guest on U.S. national television and a widely cited expert in print media suddenly
found himself blacklisted and subjected to the worst of McCarthyite style, ad hominem
attacks.
From my correspondence and several meetings with Steve at this time both in his New York
apartment and here in Brussels, when he and Katrina van der Heuvel came to participate in a
Round Table dedicated to relations with Russia at the Brussels Press Club that I arranged, I
knew that Steve was deeply hurt by these vitriolic attacks. He was at the time waging a
difficult campaign to establish a fellowship in support of graduate studies in Russian affairs.
It was touch and go, because of vicious opposition from some stalwarts of the profession to any
fellowship that bore Steve's name. Allow me to put the 'i' on this dispute: the opposition
to Steve was led by experts in the Ukrainian and other minority peoples sub-categories of the
profession who were militantly opposed not just to him personally but to any purely objective,
not to mention sympathetic treatment of Russian leadership in the territorial expanse of
Eurasia. In the end, Steve and Katrina prevailed. The fellowships exist and, hopefully,
will provide sustenance to future studies when American attitudes towards Russia become less
politicized.
At all times and on all occasions, Steve Cohen was a voice of reason above all. The problem
of our age is that we are now not only living in a post-factual world, but in a post-logic
world. The public reads day after day the most outrageous and illogical assertions about
alleged Russian misdeeds posted by our most respected mainstream media including The New
York Times and The Washington Post . Almost no one dares to raise a hand and
suggest that this reporting is propaganda and that the public is being brainwashed. Steve did
exactly that in War With Russia? in a brilliant and restrained text.
Regrettably today we have no peace movement to speak of. Youth and our 'progressive' elites
are totally concerned over the fate of humanity in 30 or 40 years' time as a consequence of
Global Warming and rising seas. That is the essence of the Green Movement. Almost no one
outside our 'dissident' community is concerned about the possibility of Armageddon in say two
years' time due to miscalculations and bad luck in our pursuing economic, informational and
military confrontation with Russia and China.
I fear it will take only some force majeure development such as we had in 1962 during the
Cuban Missile Crisis to awaken the broad public to the risks to our very survival that we are
incurring by ignoring the issues that Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Princeton and New
York University was bringing to the airwaves week after week on his radio program.
Postscript
In terms of action, the new ACEWA was even less effective than its predecessor, which had
avoided linking up with the peace movement of the 1980s and sought to exert influence on policy
through armchair talks with Senators and other statesmen in Washington behind closed doors of
(essentially) men's clubs.
However, the importance of the new ACEWA, and the national importance of Stephen Cohen lay
elsewhere.
This question of appraising Stephen Cohen's national importance is all the more timely given
that on the day of his death, 18 September, the nation also lost Supreme Justice Ruth Ginsburg,
about whose national importance no Americans, whether her fans or her opponents, had any
doubt.
My point in this discussion is that in the last decade of his life Stephen Cohen became
one of the nation's most fearless and persistent defenders of the right to Free Speech. It
was not a role that he sought. It was thrust upon him by the expert community of international
affairs, including the Council on Foreign Relations, from which he reluctantly resigned over
this matter.
It was forced upon him by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media
who pilloried him or blacklisted him over his unorthodox, unsanctioned, nonconformist views on
the "Putin regime." It was forced upon him by university colleagues who sought to deny his
right to establish graduate school fellowships in Russian affairs bearing his name and that of
his mentor at Indiana University, Professor Tucker.
In the face of vicious personal attacks from these McCarthyite forces, in the face of
hate mail and even threats to his life, Steve decided to set up The American Committee and to
recruit to its governing board famous, patriotic Americans and the descendants of the most
revered families in the country. In this he succeeded, and it is to his credit that a moral
counter force to the stampeding bulls of repression was erected and has survived to this
day.
[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection
of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in
November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes
& noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the "View Inside" tab
on the book's webpages to browse.]
It was all about Full Spectrum Domination. McFaul is not intellectual, he is a propagandist. Actually mediocre, obnoxious
propagandist. In like Professor Cohen, intellectually he is nothing with academic credentials.
The level and primitivism lies about Ukraine would name any serious academic flash. It was about encircling
Russia.
McFaul was behind Magnitsky which in best conspiracy tradition raises questions whether he works for MI6? We now know who
Browder was and suspicious that he was Magnitsky killer or facilitator/financer (by hiring the jail doctor who traded Magnitsky)
are very strong in view of "cui bono" question.
Notable quotes:
"... He is definitely not at the same level as Stephen F.Cohen. This is very alarming for the US, that people like him could have any power decision on Foreign Policy, and could explain the slow decline of the USA. ..."
"... McFaul is intellectually incoherent and disingenuous. Cohen wasted him ..."
"... We all know the truth... US economy heavily dependent on producing weapons and ammunition ..."
"... Mc Faul is clearly not supposed to have been in the positions of power, where he was. Something is fundamentally wrong with America. I think there is a crisis of personnel. Where are all these incredibly smart, high IQ people Harvard, Princeton, and the Ivy Leagues are supposedly pumping out? ..."
McFaul is definitely not an academic, but much more a mediocre high civil servant. He is
also very post modern in his approach. He is here to sell his book, not to argue ideas. He is
incapable of building a rhetorical argument, and of having any political vision or strong
analytical intelligence.
He is definitely not at the same level as Stephen F.Cohen. This is
very alarming for the US, that people like him could have any power decision on Foreign
Policy, and could explain the slow decline of the USA.
Confronted to people like Putin who is
obviously an Old fashion politician like de Gaulles or Churchill, the Cold War can only lead
us to catastrophe.
Great facts from Prof. Cohen. Faulty logic from McFaul ("you cannot use those
variables..."). McFaul will not get far in understanding Russia with this twisted approach,
ie pretending like nothing (NATO, missile treaty, regime changes) happens.
Very informative debate! I think McFaul has only contributed to the new cold war with the
treaties he helped write and the ill-informed advice he provided to the neoconservative Obama
administration. Mr. Stephen Cohen is brilliant and I only wish he was more influential in
shaping today's foreign policy. Though thankfully, McFaul is also no longer influential in
shaping U.S. foreign policy.
Very low from McFaul. Bringing personal attacks on him from social media as "facts" and
"arguments" ("McFaul is a pedophile") . This not a level of academic argument from McFaul. He
is no match to Cohen.
It's so easy to understand! Russia is doing same thing usa will do when china starts to
open military bases in latin America. Its not hard to imagine and in decade or to you will
not have to imagine you will have that reality. Many Latin America countries will be interconnected with china with economic and military
agreements than one day they will try to
brig Mexico in China's sphere of influence if they refuse china can let's say "help" opposition
to come in power and sign everything China wants.
I would like to see what American "experts"
will say. How many of them will think that Mexico as a sovereign natio have right to sign any
agreement it wants maybe even Russia can open military base and bring nuclear weapons to
border of USA. So what it's their democratic right, isn't it?
1:13:33 - 1:13:58 I swear by the
all-powerful Albert Einistine that you are lying AND YOU KNOW IT. Russians said A BILLION
times that U.S.A slowly but SURELY preparing for what they called "a calamitous war" by
moving its lethal weapons nearer and nearer to the Russian territories.
We all know the
truth... US economy heavily dependent on producing weapons and ammunition but the very very
very main reason [for harassing Russia and the rest of world] is because the Rothschild
family wants GLOBAL DOMINATION. SOLD FACT (ask ANY Russian intelligence officer about it and
you will see what i mean).
I have read Professor Cohen's last two works ("Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives" and
"War with Russia?") and found them very informative and persuasive, but seeing him here
expanding upon his key arguments is even more rewarding.
He shouldn't have to be brave to
hold to his position, given his reputation as a scholar, but regrettably he is made to appear
out of step with the critical mass of opinion makers who see more value promoting conflict
with Russia than working towards a sensible accommodation.
I'm not an "expert" from Stanford, but as I recall the USSR imploded and the US [CIA etc]
was totally surprised -so called pundits and experts in the US did not see it coming, then
the next thing we get is US mainstream media claimed victory in the cold war, just blanket
assertions that US won the cold war because the US is virtuous and clean and good, and we did
it by the clear superiority of US way of life or some such crap.
Charles Krauthammer, for
example. Now so called media and historians try to convince us that Reagan lead disarmament,
but as I recall he blocked it at most points, for example, it was Gorbachev not Reagan who
was out front and did all the leading at Reykjavik, and Reagan threw away Gorbachev's
historic offer to totally disarm on the grounds that Star Wars was a more important priority,
on Richard Perle's advice.
Now we are seeing something similar under Trump in which the US is
again uninterested in peace and far more interested in wars by proxies and drones and global
hegemony and control running the 7 seas and space to boot.
Michael Foley is a liar of course US was involved I was me in US Army force and my friends
used to travel to Georgia way before 2008 and of course everybody knows 2008 Russia and
Georgia went to war with each other but our soldiers US government soldiers were teaching
Georgians fighting with the NATO forces and all orange resolutions and Geo like him involved
in Overturning government was famous Victoria Nuland
Interesting debate and I hope Cohen is right, and is not the first of its kind. But still
the FIRST EVER free debate about the New Cold War in the United States is (so far) still on
Youtube. While listening to the two professors I found myself noting the difference in the
presentation of facts from a career oriented politician/academic who is influenced by a
forced narrative (McFaul) and one (Cohen) who is an academic historian who is in dissent and
can speak freely (he is retired).
Keep in mind that Prof. McFaul has a career to worry about.
It shows a LOT! Here we can see how political pressure can influence a debate. McFaul is
still quite deserving of accolades for his courage to even say what he did in this debate.
And note how much free speech is missing in American society in the fact that this sort of
thing is very difficult to achieve in a collapsed democracy. Note also that McFaul also stuck
to "the Narrative" big lies like the so-called Crimea "annexation" when he would have known
the truth of it....There are other examples. Americans are denied the fact that the public
vote taken in Crimea was over 90% IN FAVOUR of joining Russia (again). This fact is simply
too large for McFaul to be unaware of and yet most Americans are wallowing in this fake news.
Or censored omissions. FWIW, Galearis
Prof. McFaul is a partisan. He bases his opinion of detailed facts, so detailed that he
misses the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that he claims to be a sovereigns, but
only when it comes to the US sovereignty. How about Russia's sovereignty?
Or Ukraine's whose
government has been toppled by a (among others) US sponsored coup? How about Syria
sovereignty? He furthers the view that the US had a fair posture towards Russia, which is
not. This is also demonstrated by his personal deep dislike of Putin, which is something that
both a real statesman or a real scholar should not influence opinions and actions.
McFaul's
perspective is also flawed by the conflation of his (and Obama's) wishes and reality: that is
that they don't like Putin and think to deal with Russia as if Putin was not there,
but he is. You deal with the reality, not with your wishes. Putin is legitimate and strong
Russia's president, whether McFaul likes him or not. A real respect for sovereignty demands
respect for the head of the state you deal with. You don't question his legitimacy, as well
as they don't questioned Clinton's, Bush's, Obama or Trump legitimacy. His point of view is
that everything goes on in the world should have the US sanction, otherwise is not good.
This
is imperial hubris, this is arrogance. This flaws his opinion in so far everything is
measured upon american likes and dislikes. THis is not statesmanship, this is not
scholarship, this is partisanship. He is also intellectually dishonest because he confuses a
debate on right and wrong, which should be based on certain assumptions, with a debate on
party interests, which has nothing to do with right and wrong, and is based on different
assumptions. Indeed he is the less fit person in a debate on responsibility for the New Cold
War because he was involved in its development and acquisition.
Partisanship is admitted, but
shouldn't be disguised as neutrality or given any relevance just because of knowledge of
technical details he knows - much of them are, frankly, irrelevant. His points are weak and
inconsistent with geopolitical and a realist view of the international relations, they are
biased by universal-liberal ideology, they are US-centric, he forgets too many essential
points about the whole story. For instance he talks about the missed chance for Russian
democracy (here a debate about what democracy is: his assumption is that the US democracy is
.... please, don't make me laugh), but he doesn't mention that Soviet people voted in
referenda and overwhelmingly wanted the USSR to keep on existing, but he forgets this
"detail".
He forgets how the so much beloved Elcin sent the tanks against the parliament,
many people were killed, how he allowed the pillaging of Russian people and resources by
criminal oligarchs (many of them happily hosted by the UK and presented as political
dissidents), and how the Russian 1996 were HEAVILY rigged and meddled by the US in order to
reconfirm Elcin as a president. He complains about Putin being appointed by Elcin out of
nothing. Well I can't recall any American complaints at that time, maybe because they thought
he could be an alcoholic puppet like Elcin and that was clearly something the US liked and
supported. So what about Obama (fake) words about wishing a strong Russia?
Obama spoke
derogatory words about Russia. The only American interests about Russia is that is a militarily and strategically weak provider of cheap natural resources and that is not in tne
position of competing for anything. I will stop here, although I could write pages and pages
about McFlaws .... ooops! McFaul's inconsistency both as a scholar and even more as a
statesman's advisor, but the debate was among a great intellectual with a clear vision of the
world, and a small professor taken with insignificant details and too much love for Obama and
blind believe in liberal universal ideology.
Mc Faul is clearly not supposed to have been in the positions of power, where he was.
Something is fundamentally wrong with America. I think there is a crisis of personnel. Where
are all these incredibly smart, high IQ people Harvard, Princeton, and the Ivy Leagues are
supposedly pumping out?
Prof. Cohen astonishing realpolitik ingenuity when asked "what the security interests of
Ukraine and Georgia are" ( 1:16:21 ) unveils to me his
understanding of politics as kind of imperialistic chess game where the US stands against the
USSR (or RF for that matter). I have experienced the same feelings from his other debates (I
remember one memorable at Munk Debates in 2015) - as if the historic fears, desires and
dreams (of NATO or EU membership as the only effective shield against Russian military power)
of so many ex-soviet countries means absolutely nothing - as if they were mere puppets of US
"regime". As though the legitimate wishes of these sovereign countries means nothing at all.
He is so surprised by that question he suddenly can't retrieve even the definition of what
security interests of a country actually means - a rather strange quality in a historian.
Ultimately he comes up with "they should make peace with their neighbors" - say this to
countries that were along their history subjects of Soviet violent repression, military
invasions, ethnic genocides and such. "I don't think Russian is a threat to them". Absolutely
ridiculous.
This Michael McFaul individual is such severe laughing-stock completely out of touch with
reality. Stephen Cohen's version of the "new cold war" is much closer to reality and we
should not forget the nefarious entities that pull the strings in D.C. U.S. covert
involvement throughout eastern Europe and especially the Ukraine is more than evident. Putin
and Russia in general is not stupid and see right through U.S. covert meddling on Russia's
border. And those "peaceful demonstrators" in Syria that MacFaul dearly praises are mere
agents of the CIA/Mossad complex. Where are they now?
Monroe doctrine doesn't care about the democratic rights of countries in the western
hemisphere to enter into any alliance or partnership with USA's rival. Also, there's still no
evidence of Russian hacking which is basis of their religion of RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA !
Sure, since in Ukraine you guys didn't push money in mysterious organisations that would
support the "democratic" narrative. I don't like NATO in my country and I see nato presence
as an existential threat for Russia! Look back at the Cuba crisis it's exactly the SAME! You
no good morally and ethically corrupt poor excuses of mouth pieces
Either that Faul person is delusional or he is outright lying - Did Turkey not get
threatened with sanctions when they decided to trade with Russia on anti missile weapons.
You know Obama is a straight faced liar . Furthermore , we genocided innocent Christians
and Muslims in three countries and created a diaspora of migrants to Europe. So , we are
supposed to believe that all those PhDs did not foresee that , most people think that it was
your intentional outcome all along . So it goes now in Venezuela. Mcfaul is one of many who
just carry the water and carry out orders . It's almost as if , the powers that be want the
USA to fall . Because they can not be this stupid .
Call Cohen tells the truth the other guy just lying a United States started that whole
thing in Syria they backed up Isis they backed up all the terrorists and because they want to
split the country up and give Israel that major part of it cuz they want the natural
resources the oil out of there and everything else because that's what they do everywhere
they go they want a natural Resorts and they don't care how many people they kill
You know Obama is a straight faced liar . Furthermore , we genocided innocent Christians
and Muslims in three countries and created a diaspora of migrants to Europe. So , we are
supposed to believe that all those PhDs did not foresee that , most people think that it was
your intentional outcome all along . So it goes now in Venezuela. Mcfaul is one of many who
just carry the water and carry out orders . It's almost as if , the powers that be want the
USA to fall . Because they can not be this stupid .
Prof. McFaul is a partisan. He bases his opinion of detailed facts, so detailed that he
misses the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that he claims to be a sovereignist, but
only when it comes to the US sovereignty. How about Russia's sovereignity? Or Ukraine's whose
government has been toppled by a (among others) US sponsored coup? How about Syria
sovereignty? He furthers the view that the US had a fair posture towards Russia, which is
not. This is also demonstrated by his personal deep dislike of Putin, which is something that
both a real statesman or a real scholar should not influence opinions and actions. McFaul's
perspective is also flawed by the conflation of his (and Obama's) wishes and reality: that is
that they donì't like Putin and think to deal with Russia as if Putin was not there,
but he is. You deal with the reality, not with your wishes. Putin is legitimate and strong
Russia's president, whether McFaul likes him or not. A real respect for sovereignty demands
respect for the head of the state you deal with. You don't question his legitimacy, as well
as they don't questioned Clinton's, Bush's, Obama or Trump legitimacy. His point of view is
that everything goes on in the world should have the US sanction, otherwise is not good. This
is imperial hubris, this is arrogance. This flaws his opinion in so far everything is
measured upon american likes and dislikes. THis is not statesmanship, this is not
scholarship, this is partisanship. He is also intellectually dishonest because he confuses a
debate on right and wrong, which should be based on certain assumptions, with a debate on
party interests, which has nothing to do with right and wrong, and is based on different
assumptions. Indeed he is the less fit person in a debate on responsibility for the New Cold
War because he was involved in its development and acutisation. Partisanship is admitted, but
shouldn't be disguised as neutrality or given any relevance just because of knowledge of
technical details he knows - much of them are, frankly, irrelevant. His points are weak and
inconsistent with geopolitical and a realist view of the international relations, they are
biased by universal-liberal ideology, they are US-centric, he forgets too many essential
points about the whole story. For instance he talks about the missed chance for Russian
democracy (here a debate about what democracy is: his assumption is that the US democracy is
.... please, don't make me laugh), but he doesn't mention that Soviet people voted in
referenda and overwhelmingly wanted the USSR to keep on existing, but he forgets this
"detail". He forgets how the so much beloved Elcin sent the tanks against the parliament,
many people were killed, how he allowed the pillaging of Russian people and resources by
criminal oligarchs (many of them happily hosted by the UK and presented as political
dissidents), and how the Russian 1996 were HEAVILY rigged and meddled by the US in order to
reconfirm Elcin as a president. He complains about Putin being appointed by Elcin out of
nothing. Well I can't recall any American complaints at that time, maybe because they thought
he could be an alcoholic puppet like Elcin and that was clearly something the US liked and
supported. So what about Obama (fake) words about wishing a strong Russia? Obama spoke
derogatory words about Russia. The only American interests about Russia is that is a
militarly and strategically weak provider of cheap natural resources and that is not in tne
position of competing for anything. I will stop here, although I could write pages and pages
about McFlaws .... ooops! McFaul's inconsistency both as a scholar and even more as a
statesman's advisor, but the debate was among a great intellectual with a clear vision of the
world, and a small professor taken with insignificant details and too much love for Obama and
blind believe in liberal universal ideology.
Mc Faul is clearly not supposed to have been in the positions of power, where he was.
Something is fundamentally wrong with America. I think there is a crisis of personnel. Where
are all these incredibly smart, high IQ people Harvard, Princeton, and the Ivy Leagues are
supposedly pumping out?
I won't, for a second, try to justify the expansion of N.A.T.O. up to the borders of
Russia. But I simply cannot get past the belief that the N.A.T.O. expansion was fueled by a
(not implausible) fear that a non-Soviet Russia would eventually try to surround its borders
with Moscow-friendly governments, just as Stalin did before, during, and after WWII. Russia
has been invaded from the west so many times that the lingering fear of it is almost in the
Russian people's genetic code. What the rest of the world sees as Soviet & post-Soviet
Russian paranoia and expansionism could plausibly be seen by the Russians as a prudent
precaution against further western aggression. I don't AGREE with this, but I can imagine how
the Russian psyche might be so inclined. I don't agree with the N.A.T.O. expansion, but I can
also see how western paranoia about Russian expansionism would fuel the resulting western
"encroachment". Ask people in Latvia, Lithuania & Estonia (and, for that matter, Finland)
who were alive in WWII if their fear of Russian expansion is based in reality, or is merely
paranoia. Be prepared for "VERY STRONG" answers.
Why does 'our' US/Euro left leave me a pronounced impression that they have some special
axe grinding on Russia? Is my take on this wrong? And try as I may to ignore it, my gut
reaction to our younger author is highly unfavorable. I shall re-watch tomorrow hoping to
listen more obectively.
Prof. Cohen astonishing realpolitik ingenuity when asked "what the security interests of
Ukraine and Georgia are" ( 1:16:21 ) unveils to me his
understanding of politics as kind of imperialistic chess game where the US stands against the
USSR (or RF for that matter). I have experienced the same feelings from his other debates (I
remember one memorable at Munk Debates in 2015) - as if the historic fears, desires and
dreams (of NATO or EU membership as the only effective shield against Russian military power)
of so many ex-soviet countries means absolutely nothing - as if they were mere puppets of US
"regime". As though the legitimate wishes of these sovereign countries means nothing at all.
He is so surprised by that question he suddenly can't retrieve even the definition of what
security interests of a country actually means - a rather strange quality in a historian.
Ultimately he comes up with "they should make peace with their neighbors" - say this to
countries that were along their history subjects of Soviet violent repression, military
invasions, ethnic genocides and such. "I don't think Russian is a threat to them". Absolutely
ridiculous.
This Michael McFaul individual is such severe laughing-stock completely out of touch with
reality. Stephen Cohen's version of the "new cold war" is much closer to reality and we
should not forget the nefarious entities that pull the strings in D.C. U.S. covert
involvement throughout eastern Europe and especially the Ukraine is more than evident. Putin
and Russia in general is not stupid and see right through U.S. covert meddling on Russia's
border. And those "peaceful demonstrators" in Syria that MacFaul dearly praises are mere
agents of the CIA/Mossad complex. Where are they now?
I think it's fair to say that the US won the cold war, the eastern block was broke, there
soviet union was a nightmare for humanity, the west was seen as a bright light and it was. So
let's put aside propaganda, ask anyone from the eastern block and they will tell you that
what Russia created was a genocide. Just look how fast all of those counties jumped to enter
NATO. Soviet union collapsed. It's a very nice discussion and I learn a lot from this, there
are a lot of things that US and Russia could have done to prevent another cold war, I think
what we are with is with a belief in human wisdom, if there is any left.
"... There is no chance of mending relations and even less of achieving some security partnership between US and Russia. The rift will only keep on widening as US political and financial elites are growing increasingly desperate (and thus even more aggressive) while Russia abandons its attempts to please the haters and moves its focus on to its future prospective partners who have genuine interest in cooperating with Russia and achieving common goals.... including opposing the common enemy if you like! Well at least I hope so: the only reason why US wish to get closer to Russia would be to stab it in the back... one more time! ..."
Speaking as an Independent, I say that our country, the USA, has engineered past confilcts and wars in order to feed the military
industrial complex. Not so much that it results in a nuke-shooting war, but in a regular non-nuke shooting war. The solution?
Send the sons and daughters of the politicians into direct combat, every time they approve another war. That should keep things
a bit more peaceful.
Professor Cohen is this nation's most objective and therefore most valuable thinker on Russia! The charge that his views are
"not patriotic" is a compliment rather than the insult they intended. A scholar's views are only valuable to the public and, more
importantly, policy makers, if they are OBJECTIVE!!! Which is to say that he follows the FACTS wherever they lead!
Any "discussion" with no mention of the supranational central bank cartel is intentional deceptive omission. The "brass ring"
is forced use of petro-dollars. The central bank stock holders and bankers loaning all dollars into existence as national debt,
do not care who owns land. They care who pays off national debts and interest on debt. Civil war is their racket. There are no
sovereign nations. No genuine nations that create their medium of exchange publicly. No national people. Just participants in
an extortion or its victims. The "Elite" collect on money they created as loans in their central banking accounts. All others
are only human numbers assigned billing addresses.
Welcome to the New World Order ....where Multinational corporations rule & their profits are what are most important..... NOT
nation states it's the 99.9% against the .01% and they use MSM propaganda & fear to control the DUMB masses thinking
I just discovered John Batchelor Show on which Cohen has a guest spot- I just was drawn to this man's thinking, probably because
I had made up my mind about Russia during the Ukraine crises. Seeing the US has ruin every country we have gone into- I'm on Russia's
side, especially where Russia and Ukraine has a history, on that side of the world.
38:49 - Apologies for the somewhat Utopian
question here. I agree with everything Cohen has said, but regarding cause of jihadist terrorism ( ie implosion of the economies
in the region), does it make sense to discuss primarily this game of terrorist whack a mole (bombing, invading and crushing Jihadist
insurgencies)? Is there any point in talking about a pro active policy of recreating sustainable, stable economies in the region?
What would that even look like?
Not very many average Americans would be able to easily access and watch this. Average Americans still consume mainly mainstream
media. Too bad, because this lecture would have opened their eyes and have blown up their brain-contaminated minds by the CNN,
the New York Times and alike.
I agree wholeheartedly Loane. Have always been extremely impressed with and appreciative of Cohen's carefully & thoughtfully
considered contribution. We in the US have gone a bit off the deep end when it comes to this deeply embedded belief in exceptionalism
and superiority, and have been extremely rude to much of the rest of the world in the process. It amazes me how patient Russia
has been with us, waiting for us to come around to a more sober understanding of the world we live in today. I have to conclude
that what we are experiencing here in the US is a perennial phenomenon that comes with the end of all empires throughout history,
the mission creep of over-extending resources and the big one, seemingly blind hubris.
There is no chance of mending relations and even less of achieving some security partnership between US and Russia. The rift
will only keep on widening as US political and financial elites are growing increasingly desperate (and thus even more aggressive)
while Russia abandons its attempts to please the haters and moves its focus on to its future prospective partners who have genuine
interest in cooperating with Russia and achieving common goals.... including opposing the common enemy if you like! Well at least
I hope so: the only reason why US wish to get closer to Russia would be to stab it in the back... one more time!
NATO'S reason to exist ended when the Warsaw Pact was demolished. It was created to confront the socialist Warsaw Pact but
today ALL of the members of the pact are part of NATO, except Russia. So why is it still operating? Who are they confronting?
They are a bunch of bureaucrats looking for a reason to stay employed in an organization that lost its excuse to be. However,
their behavior has gone from increasing security to actually becoming a menace to trigger a nuclear war to destroy life on earth.
It will take a Republican President to turn our relationships with hostile nations around. For some irrational reasoning, the
current administration refuses negotiation with it's enemies. Somehow this is going to create understanding. and a less dangerous
world. I don't see a continuation of this Administrations policy anything but reckless . I am assuming this policy has been one
determined through Clinton, and will remain so. Clinton has said on a number of occasions, it is the Obama Administration's policies
that will be hers as well. As an ex cold warrior, who has spent a lot of time chasing Soviet boomers in the North Atlantic, I
am not willing to gamble my children and grand children's lives . It is a dangerous and ego driven pissing match. Let us start
talking , This administration and families can climb into their luxury nuclear bomb proof bunkers...... My family and most Americans
don't have that luxury.
Dr. Cohen, so Putin gave the Northern Alliance to the USA after 911 to bludgeon Afghanistan for hiding Bin Laden? Paul Craig
Robert, David Ray Griffin and a growing list of Americans believe 911 was a total bamboozle. If that is true which it looks increasingly
like it was, does that mean Putin was playing along with the our Reichstag fire? What does that make Putin? NATO should have been
totally remade after 1986, but it wasn't and we simply missed a huge opportunity not for worldwide U.S. hegemony, but for a new
umbrella of security by super powers in alliance. Obviously, the proliferation of ethno-religious groups was in Putin's mind when
he welcomed us into Afghanistan, but damn it man, tell people EXACTLY why we and the Russians want to be in the Golden Crescent
besides the extraction of minerals.
Julia Ioffe is a joke -- she is essentially a typical "national security parasite" and of the level that surprisingly, is
lower that Max Boor, although previously I thought this is impossible. Julia Ioffe is very typical of the anti-Russian thinking
in the West.
This incessant Russophobia constantly being trumpeted by the Washington militarist imperialists must stop. It's putting the
world on the brink of nuclear war.
Stephen Cohen's a godsend along with a handful of the other intellectuals out there speaking and writing the truth that penetrates
the miasma of disinformation, half-truths and exaggerations emanating from the state-corporate nexus in the American mass media.
Cohen, along with John Pilger, James Petras, Robert Parry, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, Eva Bartlett, Diana Johnstone and
Paul Craig Roberts must be read widely in order for folks to get a grasp of where the Washington imperialist ruling class is driving
the world.
at 25:40 he just destroys her totally. what
a point he made, amazing!! "thank you professor" the guy on the left wants to end Cohen's carnage of the so called experts. Cohen
made minced meat out of em. Fact after fact...stonewalled em both. Listen to her, ISIS doesn't have nuke's, she obviously doesn't
have a clue.
Cohen is always cogent and convincing. One area I wish some historian would look into is how "Russia-gate" is not echoing Cold
War themes, but echoing themes from the German Nazis in particular their belief about a great Jewish conspiracy against Europe.
Even Putin recently remarked on all these accusations: "It reminds me of anti-Semitism, A dumb man who can't do anything would
blame the Jews for everything." Look at how Putin is drawn and pictured on major outlets. The NYTimes blamed resistance to TPP
on Putin.
The Russians like the Jews are behind every social problem. Popular culture shows and speaks of Russia in the same way Nazi
propagandists wrote about Russia.
Undermining Western liberal democracies, Jews were compared to spiders catching people in the webs. Same with Putin. Pick up
Hitler's speech after the invasion of the Soviet Union justifying it., Echos? Accidental rhetoric of conspiracies ?
"to look past a long list of transgressions and abuses..." this is what I absolutely hate about America, they are all so stupid
and ignorant to their own countries misdeeds it is unbelievable, infuriating beyond belief. The US is currently fighting 7 wars
simultaneously, which it all started itself under false pretences and hid the real reason beneath a thick layer of BS propaganda
and misinformation.
The secession of Crimea is the least egregious event of the entire conflicts history. The EU and US have pumped billions of
dollars into the coup which took place weeks before the Crimean referendum, on the 20th of February 2014, 2 weeks prior to that,
an intercepted phone conversation between Victoria Nuland (Assistant Secretary of State of the United States to Europe) and Geoffrey
Pyatt (US Ambassador to the Ukraine) was leaked on February 4th, 2014. In this phone conversation, they describe key positions
within the Ukrainian government being filled by Klitshko and Yatz... fast forward a few weeks, who do we see? Klitsh and Yatz!
It was the most obvious sponsored coup in history.
Putin snatched the Crimean peninsula from NATO, who wanted to seize Russias military harbour in Sevastopol (which the Russians
have used to supply Syria, this was one and a half years before they entered the conflict directly, apart from being a very important
strategic harbour in general), by suggesting a referendum to the local government and they accepted.
Why? Because they were ethnic Russians and knew who gained power in Kiev, the neo-Nazi, Bandera-worshipping OUN, which the
US has nourished, supported and developed for the last 100 years within the Ukrainian territory. These Nazis hate Russians, they
have a deep seeded hatred of all things Russian which has been indoctrinated and drilled into them by the CIA for decades, the
first thing they did after seizing power was to demote the Russian language from the official list of languages of the Ukraine.
They have since honoured Ukrainian Nazi-collaborators from WWII by erecting statues, renaming streets, creating new holidays
etc. This is just one example of US misinformation and propaganda, nothing they say accurately describes the truth, nothing, not
one thing has it's bases in reality. Be it about Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and what have you, it's all lies and propaganda
to mask their intentions.
North Korea is another example. North Korea is a hornets nest they kick once in a while to scare the Japanese and South Koreans
into tolerating US occupation longer. Everything North Korea does is a direct response to threats and intimidations by the US.
They staged a drill off the coast of North Korea which they called "Decapitation" for F's sake.
They have ratcheted up the tension again these past few months to sneak in their THAAD weapons stations, before the new President
was chosen. And these THAAD systems have absolutely nothing to do with North Korea, it's against China and Russia, North Korea
is a pretext.
The still active war, which has merely been under a seize fire for decades, against North Korea, could have been ended before
there was colour television, but the US needs North Korea to exist in order to justify their occupation of S.Korea and Japan.
And by the way, the CrowdStrike guy testified in 2017 that there was ZERO PROOF that the Russians hacked the DNC, but Schiff
hid that for 2 years until John Ratcliff threatened to declassify it, then Schiff's sorry ass released the interviews. So, this
man was 100 percent right, there is ZERO PROOF the Russians or anyone hacked the DNC. Its a damned lie, and it was always a lie.
As usual, the journalists and leftist have nothing to offer- no facts, no forensic evidence, no truth. Only speculation hyperbole
and hysteria. I don't believe Russia are the good guys but give me a break in all this crap!
why did cohen tell everyone even potential 'terrorists' that there is too much of exactly what 'terrorists' wish to get their
hands on in the former soviet states?!!? if he is 'so afraid' of 'terrorism...' WHY did he say THAT?!!? not very bright... or
perhaps he is FOS. idk?! wth?! SMH. maybe e is trying to inform people who r not 'terrorists,' so that people know n can figure
out how to address the issues...?
Yet, for any terrorists who wanted to know how to get materials he spoke of, now they may know a region where they could potentially
go to attain the materials... maybe in 'terrorists' circles they all know this already? it just seems concerning, is all...
Beth Lemmon, 2 years ago (edited)
Love Stephen Cohen, he is spot on and right about most if not all points, he's fair, wicked smart and sober minded. However
he isn't right about POTUS Trump. If anyone has been watching this type of discourse about world geopolitics it looks like the
NWO wants wars to depopulate the earth, set up a OWG and a utopia. It's so blatantly obvious to those who are honest and not ideologically
possessed.
They recruit their stupid Antifa army and zombie possessed minions to do their dirty work in the streets. They want send our
amazing military to do the fighting wars that are just to feed the MIC, and does nothing for America's good.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God
"... In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a
blow to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding. ..."
Stephen F Cohen, the renowned American scholar on Russia and leading authority on US-Russian
relations, has died of lung cancer at the
age of 81.
As one of the precious few western voices of sanity on the subject
of Russia while everyone else has been frantically flushing their brains down the toilet,
this is a real loss. I myself have cited Cohen's expert analysis many times in my own work, and
his perspective has played a formative role in my understanding of what's really going on with
the monolithic cross-partisan manufacturing of consent for increased western aggressions
against Moscow.
In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a blow
to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding.
I don't know how long Cohen had cancer. I don't know how long he was aware that he might not
have much time left on this earth. What I do know is he spent much of his energy in his final
years urgently trying to warn the world about the rapidly escalating danger of nuclear war,
which in our strange new reality he saw as in many ways completely unprecedented.
The last of the many books Cohen authored was 2019's
War
with Russia? , detailing his ideas on how the complex multi-front nature of the post-2016
cold
war escalations against Moscow combines with Russiagate and other factors to make it in
some ways more dangerous even than the most dangerous point of the previous cold war.
"You know it's easy to joke about this, except that we're at maybe the most dangerous moment
in US-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever," Cohen told The Young Turks in 2017. "And the reason is that we're
in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the
possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented
military buildup on Russia's border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between
Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are
flying in the same territory. Anything could happen."
Cohen repeatedly points to the most likely cause of a future nuclear war: not one that is
planned but one which erupts in tense, complex situations where "anything could happen" in the
chaos and confusion as a result of misfire, miscommunication or technical malfunction, as
nearly
happened many times during the last cold war.
"I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the
Cuban missile crisis," Cohen told Democracy
Now in 2017. "And arguably, it's more dangerous, because it's more complex. Therefore, we
-- and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these -- and, in my judgment, factless
accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in
American-Russian relations, we have an American president who's being politically crippled by
the worst imaginable -- it's unprecedented. Let's stop and think. No American president has
ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we're talking about here, or that his
associates have committed treason."
"Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis," Cohen added. "Imagine
if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been
crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn't was to have launched a war against
the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war."
"A recurring theme of my recently published book War with Russia? is that the new Cold War
is more dangerous, more fraught with hot war, than the one we survived," Cohen wrote
last year . "Histories of the 40-year US-Soviet Cold War tell us that both sides came to
understand their mutual responsibility for the conflict, a recognition that created political
space for the constant peace-keeping negotiations, including nuclear arms control agreements,
often known as détente. But as I also chronicle in the book, today's American Cold
Warriors blame only Russia, specifically 'Putin's Russia,' leaving no room or incentive for
rethinking any US policy toward post-Soviet Russia since 1991."
"Finally, there continues to be no effective, organized American opposition to the new Cold
War," Cohen added. "This too is a major theme of my book and another reason why this Cold War
is more dangerous than was its predecessor. In the 1970s and 1980s, advocates of détente
were well-organized, well-funded, and well-represented, from grassroots politics and
universities to think tanks, mainstream media, Congress, the State Department, and even the
White House. Today there is no such opposition anywhere."
"A major factor is, of course, 'Russiagate'," Cohen continued. "As evidenced in the sources
I cite above, much of the extreme American Cold War advocacy we witness today is a mindless
response to President Trump's pledge to find ways to 'cooperate with Russia' and to the
still-unproven allegations generated by it. Certainly, the Democratic Party is not an
opposition party in regard to the new Cold War."
"Détente with Russia has always been a fiercely opposed, crisis-ridden policy
pursuit, but one manifestly in the interests of the United States and the world," Cohen
wrote in another
essay last year. "No American president can achieve it without substantial bipartisan
support at home, which Trump manifestly lacks. What kind of catastrophe will it take -- in
Ukraine, the Baltic region, Syria, or somewhere on Russia's electric grid -- to shock US
Democrats and others out of what has been called, not unreasonably, their Trump Derangement
Syndrome, particularly in the realm of American national security? Meanwhile, the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists has recently reset its Doomsday Clock to two minutes before
midnight."
And now Stephen Cohen is dead, and that clock is inching ever closer to midnight. The
Russiagate psyop that he predicted would pressure Trump to advance dangerous cold war
escalations with no opposition from the supposed opposition party
has indeed done exactly that with nary a peep of criticism from either partisan faction of
the political/media class. Cohen has for years been correctly
predicting this chilling scenario which now threatens the life of every organism on earth,
even while his own life was nearing its end.
And now the complex cold war escalations he kept urgently warning us about have become even
more complex with the
addition of nuclear-armed China to the multiple fronts the US-centralized empire has been
plate-spinning its brinkmanship upon, and it is clear from the ramping
up of anti-China propaganda since last year that we are being prepped for those aggressions
to continue to increase.
We should heed the dire warnings that Cohen spent his last breaths issuing. We should demand
a walk-back of these insane imperialist aggressions which benefit nobody and call for
détente with Russia and China. We should begin creating an opposition to this
world-threatening flirtation with armageddon before it is too late. Every life on this planet
may well depend on our doing so.
Stephen Cohen is dead, and we are marching toward the death of everything. God help us
all.
People are just now starting to realize that possible alternate path. But the Demoncrats
in the USA must first be put down, politically euthanized, along with their neocon
never-Trump Republican partners. And that cleaning up is on the way. Trump's second term will
be the advancement of the USA-Russia initiative that is so long overdue.
PerilouseTimes , 48 minutes ago
Putin won't let western billionaires rape Russia's enormous natural resources and on top
of that Putin is against child molesters, that is what this Russia bashing is all about.
awesomepic4u , 1 hour ago
Sad to hear this.
What a good man. It is a real shame that we dont have others to stand up to this crazy pr
that is going on right now. Making peace with the world at this point is important. We dont need or
want another war and i am sure that both Europe and Russia dont want it on their turf but it
seems we keep sticking our finger in their eye. If there is another war it will be the last
war. As Einstein said, after the 3rd World War we will be using sticks and stones to fight
it.
Clint Liquor , 44 minutes ago
Cohen truly was an island of reason in a sea of insanity. Ironic that those panicked over
climate change are unconcerned about the increasing threat of Nuclear War.
thunderchief , 41 minutes ago
One of the very few level headed people on Russia.
All thats left are anti Russia-phobic nut jobs.
Send in the clowns.
Stephen Cohen isn't around to call them what they are anymore.
Eastern Whale , 55 minutes ago
cooperate with Russia
Has the US ever cooperated with anyone?
fucking truth , 3 minutes ago
That is the crux. All or nothing.
Mustafa Kemal , 49 minutes ago
Ive read several of his books. They are essential, imo, if you want to understand modern
russian history.
Normal , 1 hour ago
The bankers created the new CCP cold war.
evoila , 19 minutes ago
Max Boot is an effing idiot. Tucker wiped him clean too. It was an insult to Stephen to
even put them on the same panel.
RIP Stephen.
Gary Sick is the equivalent to Stephen, except for Iran. He too is of an era of competence
which is and will be missed as their voices are drowned out by neocon warmongers
thebigunit , 17 minutes ago
I heard Stephen Cohen a number of time in John Bachelor's podcasts.
He seemed very lucid and made a lot of sense.
He made it very clear that he thought the Democrat's "Trump - Russia collusion schtick"
was a bunch of crap.
He didn't sound like a leftie, but I'm sure he never told me the stuff he discussed with
his wife who was editor of the left wing "The Nation" magazine.
Boogity , 9 minutes ago
Cohen was a traditional old school anti-war Liberal. They're essentially extinct now with
the exception of a few such as Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich who have both been
ostracized from the Democrat Party and the political system.
"... these "contested election" scenarios we are hearing so much about play perfectly into the Color Revolution framework sketched out Revolver News' first installment in the Color Revolution series. ..."
"... the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint for suing the President into paralysis and his allies into bankruptcy, who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted 10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever called the Ukraine President in 2018, who personally served as special counsel litigating the Ukraine impeachment, who created a template for Internet censorship of world leaders and a handbook for mass mobilizing racial justice protesters to overturn democratic election results, there is perhaps no man alive with a more decorated resume for plots against President Trump. ..."
"... Indeed, the story of Norm Eisen – a key architect of nearly every attempt to delegitimize, impeach, censor, sue and remove the democratically elected 45th President of the United States ..."
"... In Norm Eisen's case, the "same people same playbook" refrain takes an arrestingly literal turn when one realizes that Norm Eisen wrote a classic Color Revolution regime change manual, and conveniently titled it "The Playbook." ..."
In our report on Never Trump State Department official George Kent, Revolver News first
drew attention to the ominous similarities between the strategies and tactics the United
States government employs in so-called "Color Revolutions" and the coordinated efforts of
government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.
Our recent follow-up to this initial report focused specifically on a shadowy, George
Soros linked group called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), which convened "war games"
exercises suggesting the likelihood of a "contested election scenario," and of ensuing chaos
should President Trump refuse to leave office. We further showed how these "contested election" scenarios we are hearing
so much about play perfectly into the Color Revolution framework sketched out Revolver News' first installment in the Color
Revolution series.
This third installment of Revolver News' series exposing the Color Revolution against
Trump will focus on one quiet and indeed mostly overlooked participant in the Transition
Integrity Project's biased election "war games" exercise -- a man by the name of Norm
Eisen.
As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint for suing the President into
paralysis and his allies into bankruptcy, who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax,
who drafted 10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump
ever called the Ukraine President in 2018, who personally served as special counsel
litigating the Ukraine impeachment, who created a template for Internet censorship of world
leaders and a handbook for mass mobilizing racial justice protesters to overturn democratic
election results, there is perhaps no man alive with a more decorated resume for plots
against President Trump.
Indeed, the story of Norm Eisen – a key architect of nearly every attempt to
delegitimize, impeach, censor, sue and remove the democratically elected 45th President of
the United States – is a tale that winds through nearly every facet of the color
revolution playbook. There is no purer embodiment of Revolver's thesis that the very same
regime change professionals who run Color Revolutions on behalf of the US Government in order
to undermine or overthrow alleged "authoritarian" governments overseas, are running the very
same playbook to overturn Trump's 2016 victory and to pre-empt a repeat in 2020. To put
it simply, what you see is not just the same Color Revolution playbook run against Trump, but
the same people using it against Trump who have employed it in a professional capacity
against targets overseas -- same people same playbook.
In Norm Eisen's case, the "same people same playbook" refrain takes an arrestingly
literal turn when one realizes that Norm Eisen wrote a classic Color Revolution regime change
manual, and conveniently titled it "The Playbook."
Just what exactly is President Obama's former White House Ethics Czar (yes, Norm Eisen was
Obama's ethics Czar), his longtime friend since Harvard Law School, who recently partook in
war games to simulate overturning a Trump electoral victory, doing writing a detailed
playbook on how to use a Color Revolution to overthrow governments? The story of Norm Eisen
only gets more fascinating, outrageous, and indispensable to understanding the planned chaos
unfolding before our eyes, leading up to what will perhaps be the most chaotic election in
our nation's recent history.
... ... ...
A deep dive into Eisen's book would exceed the scope of this relatively brief exposé.
It is nonetheless important for us to draw attention to key passages of Eisen's book to
underscore how closely the "Playbook" corresponds to events unfolding right here at home. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that regime change professionals such as
Eisen simply decided to run the same playbook against Trump that they have done countless
times when foreign leaders are elected overseas that they don't like and want to remove via
extra-democratic means -- "peaceful protests," "democratic breakthroughs" and such. ... ... ...
So, it appears the War on Populism is building
toward an exciting climax. All the proper pieces are in place for a Class-A GloboCap color
revolution , and maybe even civil war. You got your unauthorized Putin-Nazi president, your
imaginary apocalyptic pandemic, your violent identitarian civil unrest, your heavily-armed
politically-polarized populace, your ominous rumblings from military quarters you couldn't
really ask for much more.
OK, the plot is pretty obvious by now (as it is in all big-budget action spectacles, which
is essentially what color revolutions are), but that won't spoil our viewing experience. The
fun isn't in guessing what is going to happen. Everybody knows what's going to happen. The fun
is in watching Bruce, or Sigourney, or "the moderate rebels," or the GloboCap "Resistance,"
take down the monster, or the terrorists, or Hitler, and save the world, or democracy, or
whatever.
Trump represent new "national neoliberalism" platform and the large part of the US neoliberal elite (Clinton gang and large part
of republicans) support the return to "classic neoliberalism" at all costs.
Highly recommended!
The essence of color revolution is the combination of engineered contested election and mass organized protest and civil disobedience
via creation in neoliberal fifth column out of "professionals", especially students as well as mobilizing and put on payroll some useful
disgruntled groups which can be used as a foot soldiers, such as football hooligans. Large and systematic injection of dollars into
protest movement. All with the air cover via domination in a part or all nation's MSM.
He served as US ambassador in Chich Republic from 2011 to 2014. Based on his experience wrote that book
Democracy's Defenders published by The Brookings Institution, a neoliberal think tank, about the role of US embassy in neoliberal
revolution in Czechoslovakia (aka Velvet Revolution of 1989) which led to the dissolution of the country into two. BTW demonstrations
against police brutality were an essential part of the Velvet Revolution
Notable quotes:
"... Same tactics - color revolutions they (Soros, Nuland/Kagan, Eisen, McCain when alive) used to overthrow Orthodox countries in Eastern Europe. Belarus the latest. Ukraine (Orange, Maidan) 2014. Georgia (Rose rev). Serbia, Montenegro. Use young people who have bad sense of history and are more sympathetic to the "West." ..."
This is, without ANY question, one of Tucker's most important segments that he has ever done. IT IS EXTREMELY-RARE THAT
"""they""" ARE EXPOSED, BY-NAME, SO OPENLY AND DIRECTLY, BUT, IT HAPPENED, TONIGHT.
Please bring back Dr. Darren Beattie back. More info. on the color revolutions, Mr. Eisen, crew, and their relationship
to mail in voting fraud and their impact on the 2020 election is needed. If Mr. Eisens methods are to be used in the 2020 election
mass awareness is needed.
This is not about Trump. The endgame of the deep state is to enslave people through social division. The election is a wrestling
match for entertainment.
Sheesh, he looks scared. I hope he's being well protected now. Darren is a very brave man who is trying to tell the citizens
of the US that there is malice aforethought towards the President and this election. It is now not a choice between Republicans
or Democrats, it is a fight between good and evil. I'm sure Trump and his team are aware of the playbook and will do everything
they can to sort this, with God's help. It may get hairy, but trust the plan.
I have a feeling dems will "rig for red" to frame republicans for voter fraud, overlooking the overwhelming amount of voter
fraud in favor of Biden Harris. Causing outrage and calls to remove the President from office and saying Biden actually won.
When he really did not. Be prepared. Stay strong.
Same tactics - color revolutions they (Soros, Nuland/Kagan, Eisen, McCain when alive) used to overthrow Orthodox countries
in Eastern Europe. Belarus the latest. Ukraine (Orange, Maidan) 2014. Georgia (Rose rev). Serbia, Montenegro. Use young people
who have bad sense of history and are more sympathetic to the "West."
american people still don't know and can't understand what's happening and what their government is doing, even right now
it's happening in Belarus, it happened in Ukraine, Venezuela, Hong Kong and etc. and now it's happening in your own country,
wake up people and don't forget who's behind all this - a NGO founded by CIA called NED (National endowment for democracy),
Soros and his NGOs and the deep state.
"... Russian military leaders view the "colour revolutions" as a "new US and European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other states as a means of serving their security interests at low cost and with minimal casualties. ..."
"... the activities of radical public associations and groups using nationalist and religious extremist ideology, foreign and international nongovernmental organizations, and financial and economic structures, and also individuals, focused on destroying the unity and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation, destabilizing the domestic political and social situation -- including through inciting "color revolutions" -- and destroying traditional Russian religious and moral values ..."
Worldwide media use the term Colour Revolution (sometimes Coloured Revolution
) to describe various
related movements that developed in several countries of the former Soviet Union , in the People's Republic of
China and in the Balkans during the early-21st century. The term has
also been applied to a number of revolutions elsewhere, including in the Middle East and in the
Asia-Pacific region,
dating from the 1980s to the 2010s. Some observers (such as Justin Raimondo and Michael Lind ) have called the events a
revolutionary
wave , the origins of which can be traced back to the 1986 People Power Revolution (also known
as the "Yellow Revolution") in the Philippines .
Participants in colour revolutions have mostly used nonviolent resistance , also called
civil resistance .
Such methods as demonstrations, strikes and interventions have aimed to
protest against governments seen as corrupt and/or authoritarian and to advocate democracy , and they have built up
strong pressure for change.
Colour-revolution movements generally became associated with a specific colour or flower as
their symbol. The colour revolutions are notable for the important role of non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) and particularly student activists in organising creative
non-violent resistance .
Such movements have had a measure of success as for example in the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia 's Bulldozer
Revolution (2000), in Georgia 's Rose Revolution (2003) and in Ukraine 's Orange Revolution (2004). In most but not
all cases, massive street-protests followed disputed elections or requests for fair elections
and led to the resignation or overthrow of leaders regarded by their opponents as authoritarian . Some events have been called "colour revolutions", but differ from the
above cases in certain basic characteristics. Examples include Lebanon's Cedar Revolution (2005) and
Kuwait 's Blue Revolution
(2005).
Russia and China share nearly identical views that colour revolutions are the product of
machinations by the United States and other Western powers and pose a vital threat to their
public and national security.
The 1986 People Power Revolution (also
called the " EDSA " or the "Yellow"
Revolution) in the Philippines was the first successful non-violent uprising in the
contemporary period. It was the culmination of peaceful demonstrations against the
rule of
then-President Ferdinand Marcos – all of which
increased after the 1983 assassination of
opposition Senator Benigno S. Aquino,
Jr. A contested snap election on 7 February 1986 and a
call by the powerful Filipino Catholic
Church sparked mass protests across Metro Manila from 22–25 February.
The Revolution's iconic L-shaped Laban sign comes from the Filipino term for
People Power, " Lakás ng Bayan ", whose acronym is " LABAN " ("fight").
The yellow-clad protesters, later joined by the Armed Forces , ousted
Marcos and installed Aquino's widow Corazón as the country's eleventh
President, ushering in the present Fifth
Republic .
Long-standing secessionist sentiment in Bougainville eventually led to conflict with
Papua New Guinea. The inhabitants of Bougainville Island formed the Bougainville
Revolutionary Army and fought against government troops. On 20 April 1998, Papua New
Guinea ended the civil war. In 2005, Papua New Guinea gave autonomy to Bougainville.
in 1989, a peaceful demonstration by students (mostly from Charles University ) was attacked by
the police – and in time contributed to the collapse of the communist government in
Czechoslovakia.
The 'Bulldozer Revolution' in 2000, which led to the overthrow of
Slobodan Milošević . These demonstrations are usually considered to be the
first example of the peaceful revolutions which followed. However, the Serbians adopted an
approach that had already been used in parliamentary elections in Bulgaria (1997) ,
Slovakia (1998) and
Croatia (2000) ,
characterised by civic mobilisation through get-out-the-vote campaigns and unification of
the political opposition. The nationwide protesters did not adopt a colour or a specific
symbol; however, the slogan " Gotov je " (Serbian Cyrillic:
Готов је , English: He is finished
) did become an aftermath symbol celebrating the completion of the task. Despite the
commonalities, many others refer to Georgia as the most definite beginning of the series of
"colour revolutions". The demonstrations were supported by the youth movement Otpor! , some of whose members
were involved in the later revolutions in other countries.
Following the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the
Adjara
crisis (sometimes called "Second Rose Revolution" or Mini-Rose
Revolution ) led to the
exit of Chairman of the Government Aslan Abashidze from office.
Purple
Revolution was a name first used by some hopeful commentators and later picked up by
United States President George W. Bush to describe the coming of
democracy to Iraq following the 2005 Iraqi
legislative election and was intentionally used to draw the parallel with the Orange
and Rose revolutions. However, the name "purple revolution" has not achieved widespread use
in Iraq, the United States or elsewhere. The name comes from the colour that voters' index
fingers were stained to prevent fraudulent multiple voting. The term first appeared shortly
after the January 2005 election in various weblogs and editorials of individuals supportive
of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The term
received its widest usage during a visit by U.S. President George W. Bush on 24 February 2005 to
Bratislava , Slovak
Republic, for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin . Bush stated: "In recent
times, we have witnessed landmark events in the history of liberty: A Rose Revolution in
Georgia, an Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and now, a Purple Revolution in Iraq."
The Tulip
Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (also sometimes called the "Pink Revolution") was more violent
than its predecessors and followed the disputed 2005 Kyrgyz
parliamentary election . At the same time, it was more fragmented than previous
"colour" revolutions. The protesters in different areas adopted the colours pink and yellow
for their protests. This revolution was supported by youth resistance movement KelKel .
The Cedar
Revolution in Lebanon between February and April 2005 followed not a disputed election,
but rather the assassination of opposition leader Rafik Hariri in 2005. Also, instead of the
annulment of an election, the people demanded an end to the Syrian occupation of
Lebanon . Nonetheless, some of its elements and some of the methods used in the
protests have been similar enough that it is often considered and treated by the press and
commentators as one of the series of "colour revolutions". The Cedar of Lebanon is the symbol of the
country, and the revolution was named after it. The peaceful demonstrators used the colours
white and red, which are found in the Lebanese flag. The protests led to the pullout of
Syrian troops
in April 2005, ending their nearly 30-year presence there, although Syria retains some
influence in Lebanon.
Blue Revolution was a term used by some Kuwaitis to refer to
demonstrations in Kuwait in support of women's suffrage
beginning in March 2005; it was named after the colour of the signs the protesters used. In
May of that year the Kuwaiti government acceded to their demands, granting women the right
to vote beginning in the 2007 parliamentary elections. Since there was
no call for regime change, the so-called "blue revolution" cannot be categorised as a true
colour revolution.
In Belarus, there have been a number of protests against President Alexander Lukashenko , with
participation from student group Zubr . One round of
protests culminated on 25 March 2005; it was a self-declared attempt to emulate the
Kyrgyzstan revolution, and involved over a thousand citizens. However, police severely
suppressed it, arresting over 30 people and imprisoning opposition leader Mikhail Marinich .
A second, much larger, round of protests began almost a year later, on 19 March 2006,
soon after the presidential
election . Official results had Lukashenko winning with 83% of the vote; protesters
claimed the results were achieved through fraud and voter intimidation, a charge echoed
by many foreign governments.
Protesters camped out in October Square in Minsk over the next week, calling variously for
the resignation of Lukashenko, the installation of rival candidate Alaksandar
Milinkievič , and new, fair elections.
The opposition originally used as a symbol the white-red-white former flag of Belarus ; the
movement has had significant connections with that in neighbouring Ukraine, and during
the Orange Revolution some white-red-white flags were seen being waved in Kiev. During
the 2006 protests some called it the " Jeans Revolution " or "Denim
Revolution",
blue jeans being considered a symbol for freedom. Some protesters cut up jeans into
ribbons and hung them in public places. It is
claimed that Zubr was responsible for coining the phrase.
Lukashenko has said in the past: "In our country, there will be no pink or orange, or
even banana revolution." More recently he's said "They [the West] think that Belarus is
ready for some 'orange' or, what is a rather frightening option, 'blue' or ' cornflower blue '
revolution. Such 'blue' revolutions are the last thing we need". On
19 April 2005, he further commented: "All these coloured revolutions are pure and simple
banditry."
In Myanmar (unofficially called Burma), a series of anti-government protests were
referred to in the press as the Saffron Revolution
after Buddhist monks ( Theravada Buddhist monks normally
wear the colour saffron) took the vanguard of the protests. A previous, student-led
revolution, the 8888
Uprising on 8 August 1988, had similarities to the colour revolutions, but was
violently repressed.
The opposition is reported to have hoped for and urged some kind of Orange revolution,
similar to that in Ukraine, in the follow-up of the 2005 Moldovan
parliamentary elections , while the Christian
Democratic People's Party adopted orange for its colour in a clear reference to the
events of Ukraine.
A name hypothesised for such an event was "Grape Revolution" because of the abundance
of vineyards in the country; however, such a revolution failed to materialise after the
governmental victory in the elections. Many reasons have been given for this, including a
fractured opposition and the fact that the government had already co-opted many of the
political positions that might have united the opposition (such as a perceived
pro-European and anti-Russian stance). Also the elections themselves were declared fairer
in the OSCE election monitoring reports than had been the case in other countries where
similar revolutions occurred, even though the CIS monitoring mission strongly condemned
them.
Green Movement is a term widely used to describe the 2009–2010
Iranian election protests . The protests began in 2009, several years after the main
wave of colour revolutions, although like them it began due to a disputed election, the
2009 Iranian
presidential election . Protesters adopted the colour green as their symbol because it
had been the campaign colour of presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi , whom many
protesters thought had won the elections .
However Mousavi and his wife went under house arrest without any trial issued by a
court.
The Kyrgyz Revolution of 2010 in
Kyrgyzstan (also sometimes called the "Melon Revolution") led to the
exit of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev from office. The
total number of deaths should be 2,000.
Jasmine Revolution was a widely used term for the
Tunisian
Revolution . The Jasmine Revolution led to the exit of President Ben Ali from office and
the beginning of the Arab Spring .
Lotus Revolution was a term used by various western news sources to describe the
Egyptian Revolution of 2011
that forced President Mubarak to step down in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring , which followed the Jasmine
Revolution of Tunisia. Lotus is known as the flower representing resurrection, life and the
sun of ancient Egypt. It is uncertain who gave the name, while columnist of Arabic press,
Asharq Alawsat, and prominent Egyptian opposition leader Saad Eddin Ibrahim claimed to name
it the Lotus Revolution. Lotus Revolution later became common on western news source such
as CNN. Other names,
such as White Revolution and Nile Revolution, are used but are minor terms compare to Lotus
Revolution. The term Lotus Revolution is rarely, if ever, used in the Arab world.
In February 2011, Bahrain was also affected by protests in Tunisia and Egypt. Bahrain
has long been famous for its pearls and Bahrain's speciality. And there was the Pearl
Square in Manama, where the demonstrations began. The people of Bahrain were also
protesting around the square. At first, the government of Bahrain promised to reform the
people. But when their promises were not followed, the people resisted again. And in the
process, bloodshed took place (18 March 2011). After that, a small demonstration is taking
place in Bahrain.
An anti-government protest started in Yemen in 2011. The Yemeni people sought to resign
Ali Abdullah Saleh as the ruler. On 24 November, Ali Abdullah Saleh decided to transfer the
regime. In 2012, Ali Abdullah Saleh finally fled to the United States(27 February).
A call which first appeared on 17 February 2011 on the Chinese language site Boxun.com in the United States
for a "Jasmine revolution" in the People's Republic of China and repeated on social
networking sites in China resulted in blocking of internet searches for "jasmine" and a
heavy police presence at designated sites for protest such as the McDonald's in central
Beijing, one of the 13 designated protest sites, on 20 February 2011. A crowd did gather
there, but their motivations were ambiguous as a crowd tends to draw a crowd in that area.
Boxun experienced a denial of service attack
during this period and was inaccessible.
Protests started on 4 December 2011 in the capital, Moscow against the results of the parliamentary
elections, which led to the arrests of over 500 people. On 10 December, protests erupted in
tens of cities across the country; a few months later, they spread to hundreds both inside
the country and abroad. The name of the Snow Revolution derives from December - the month
when the revolution had started - and from the white ribbons the protesters wore.
Many analysts and participants of the protests against President of Macedonia Gjorge
Ivanov and the Macedonian
government refer to them as a "colourful Revolution", due to the demonstrators throwing
paint balls of different colours at government buildings in Skopje , the capital.
In 2018, a peaceful revolution was led by
member of parliament Nikol Pashinyan in opposition to the
nomination of Serzh
Sargsyan as Prime Minister of Armenia ,
who had previously served as both President of Armenia and prime
minister, eliminating term limits which would have otherwise
prevented his 2018 nomination. Concerned that Sargsyan's third consecutive term as the most
powerful politician in the government of Armenia gave him too much political influence,
protests occurred throughout the country, particularly in Yerevan , but demonstrations in solidarity with
the protesters also occurred in other countries where Armenian diaspora live.
During the
protests, Pashinyan was arrested and detained on 22 April, but he was released the
following day. Sargsyan stepped down from the position of Prime Minister, and his
Republican Party decided to
not put forward a candidate. An interim
Prime Minister was selected from Sargsyan's party until elections were held, and protests
continued for over one month. Crowd sizes in Yerevan consisted of 115,000 to 250,000 people
at a time throughout the revolution, and hundreds of protesters were arrested. Pashinyan
referred to the event as a Velvet Revolution. A vote was
held in parliament, and Pashinyan became the Prime Minister of Armenia.
Many have cited the influence of the series of revolutions which
occurred in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly the
Velvet Revolution
in Czechoslovakia in 1989. A
peaceful demonstration by students (mostly from Charles University ) was attacked by the
police – and in time contributed to the collapse of the communist government in
Czechoslovakia. Yet the roots of the pacifist floral imagery may go even further back to the
non-violent Carnation Revolution of Portugal in
April 1974, which is associated with the colour carnation because carnations were worn, and the 1986 Yellow Revolution in
the Philippines where demonstrators offered peace flowers to military personnel manning
armoured tanks.
Student movements
The first of these was Otpor! ("Resistance!") in the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, which was founded at Belgrade University in October 1998 and
began protesting against Miloševic' during the Kosovo War . Most of them were already veterans
of anti-Milošević demonstrations such as the 1996–97 protests
and the 9 March
1991 protest . Many of its members were arrested or beaten by the police. Despite this,
during the presidential campaign in September 2000, Otpor launched its " Gotov je " (He's finished) campaign that
galvanised Serbian discontent with Miloševic' and resulted in his defeat.
Members of Otpor have inspired and trained members of related student movements including
Kmara in Georgia, Pora in
Ukraine, Zubr in Belarus and
MJAFT! in Albania. These
groups have been explicit and scrupulous in their practice of non-violent resistance as advocated
and explained in Gene
Sharp 's writings. The massive
protests that they have organised, which were essential to the successes in the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, Georgia and Ukraine, have been notable for their colourfulness and use
of ridiculing humor in opposing authoritarian leaders.
Critical analysis
The analysis of international geopolitics scholars Paul J. Bolt and Sharyl N. Cross is that
"Moscow and Beijing share almost indistinguishable views on the potential domestic and
international security threats posed by colored revolutions, and both nations view these
revolutionary movements as being orchestrated by the United States and its Western democratic
partners to advance geopolitical ambitions."
Russian
assessment
According to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies , Russian military leaders view the "colour revolutions" as a "new US and
European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other states
as a means of serving their security interests at low cost and with minimal casualties."
Government figures in Russia , such as Defence Minister
Sergei Shoigu (in
office from 2012) and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (in office from 2004), have
characterised colour revolutions as externally-fuelled acts with a clear goal to influence the
internal affairs that destabilise the economy, conflict with the law and represent a new form of warfare. Russian President
Vladimir Putin has
stated that Russia must prevent colour revolutions: "We see what tragic consequences the wave
of so-called colour revolutions led to. For us this is a lesson and a warning. We should do
everything necessary so that nothing similar ever happens in Russia".
The 2015 presidential decree The Russian Federation's National Security Strategy (
О Стратегии
Национальной
Безопасности
Российской
Федерации ) cites "foreign sponsored
regime change" among "main threats to public and national security," including
the activities of radical public associations and groups using nationalist and religious
extremist ideology, foreign and international nongovernmental organizations, and financial
and economic structures, and also individuals, focused on destroying the unity and
territorial integrity of the Russian Federation, destabilizing the domestic political and
social situation -- including through inciting "color revolutions" -- and destroying
traditional Russian religious and moral values
Chinese view
Articles published by the Global Times , a state-run nationalist tabloid, indicate that Chinese
leaders also anticipate the Western powers, such as the United States, using "color revolutions" as a means to undermine the one-party state. An article published on 8 May 2016 claims: "A
variation of containment seeks to press China on human rights and democracy with the hope of
creating a 'color revolution.'" A 13 August 2019
article declared that the 2019 Hong Kong extradition
bill protests were a colour revolution that "aim[ed] to ruin HK 's future."
The 2015 policy white paper "China's Military Strategy" by the State Council
Information Office said that "anti-China forces have never given up their attempt to
instigate a 'color revolution' in this country."
Azerbaijan
A number of movements were created in Azerbaijan in mid-2005, inspired by the examples
of both Georgia and Ukraine. A youth group, calling itself Yox! (which means No!), declared its opposition to
governmental corruption. The leader of Yox! said that unlike Pora or Kmara , he wants to change not just the leadership,
but the entire system of governance in Azerbaijan. The Yox movement chose green as its colour.
The spearhead of Azerbaijan's attempted colour revolution was Yeni Fikir ("New Idea"), a
youth group closely aligned with the Azadlig (Freedom) Bloc of opposition political parties.
Along with groups such as Magam ("It's Time") and Dalga ("Wave"), Yeni Fikir deliberately
adopted many of the tactics of the Georgian and Ukrainian colour revolution groups, even
borrowing the colour orange from the Ukrainian revolution.
In November 2005 protesters took to the streets, waving orange flags and banners, to protest
what they considered government fraud in recent parliamentary elections. The Azerbaijani colour revolution finally fizzled out with the police riot on 26
November, during which dozens of protesters were injured and perhaps hundreds teargassed and
sprayed with water cannons.
On 5 February 2013, protests began in Shahbag and later spread to other parts of
Bangladesh following
demands for capital punishment for Abdul Quader Mollah , who had been
sentenced to life imprisonment, and for others convicted of war crimes by the International
Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh . On that
day, the International Crimes
Tribunal had sentenced Mollah to life in prison after he was convicted on five of six
counts of war crimes . Later
demands included banning the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party
from politics including election and a boycott of institutions supporting (or affiliated with)
the party.
Protesters considered Mollah's sentence too lenient, given his crimes. Bloggers and online activists called for additional protests at Shahbag.
Tens of thousands of people joined the demonstration, which gave rise to protests across the
country.
The movement demanding trial of war criminals is a protest movement in Bangladesh, from 1972
to present.
Belarus
In Belarus , there have
been a number of protests against President Alexander Lukashenko , with
participation from student group Zubr . One round of protests
culminated on 25 March 2005; it was a self-declared attempt to emulate the Kyrgyzstan
revolution, and involved over a thousand citizens. However, police severely suppressed it,
arresting over 30 people and imprisoning opposition leader Mikhail Marinich .
A second, much larger, round of protests began almost a year later, on 19 March 2006, soon
after the presidential election
. Official results had Lukashenko winning with 83% of the vote; protesters claimed the results
were achieved through fraud and voter intimidation, a charge echoed by many foreign
governments.
Protesters camped out in October Square in Minsk over the next week, calling variously for the
resignation of Lukashenko, the installation of rival candidate Alaksandar Milinkievič ,
and new, fair elections.
The opposition originally used as a symbol the white-red-white former flag of Belarus ; the movement has had
significant connections with that in neighbouring Ukraine, and during the Orange Revolution
some white-red-white flags were seen being waved in Kiev. During the 2006 protests some called
it the " Jeans
Revolution " or "Denim Revolution", blue
jeans being considered a symbol for freedom. Some protesters cut up jeans into ribbons and hung
them in public places. It is
claimed that Zubr was responsible for coining the phrase.
Lukashenko has said in the past: "In our country, there will be no pink or orange, or even
banana revolution." More recently he's said "They [the West] think that Belarus is ready for
some 'orange' or, what is a rather frightening option, 'blue' or ' cornflower blue ' revolution. Such 'blue'
revolutions are the last thing we need". On 19
April 2005, he further commented: "All these colored revolutions are pure and simple
banditry."
In Burma (officially called Myanmar), a series of anti-government protests were referred to
in the press as the Saffron Revolution after
Buddhist monks ( Theravada Buddhist monks normally wear
the colour saffron) took the vanguard of the protests. A previous, student-led revolution, the
8888 Uprising on 8
August 1988, had similarities to the colour revolutions, but was violently
repressed.
A call which first appeared on 17 February 2011 on the Chinese language site Boxun.com in the United States for
a "Jasmine revolution" in the People's Republic of China and repeated on social networking
sites in China resulted in blocking of internet searches for "jasmine" and a heavy police
presence at designated sites for protest such as the McDonald's in central Beijing, one of the 13
designated protest sites, on 20 February 2011. A crowd did gather there, but their motivations
were ambiguous as a crowd tends to draw a crowd in that area.
Boxun experienced a denial of service attack during
this period and was inaccessible.
In the 2000s, Fiji suffered numerous coups. But at the same time, many Fiji citizens
resisted the military. In Fiji, there have been many human rights abuses by the military.
Anti-government protesters in Fiji have fled to Australia and New Zealand. In 2011, Fijians
conducted anti Fijian government protests in Australia. On 17 September
2014, the first democratic general election was held in Fiji.
In 2015, Otto
Pérez Molina , President of Guatemala, was suspected of corruption. In Guatemala City,
a large number of protests rallied. Demonstrations took place from April to September 2015.
Otto Pérez
Molina was eventually arrested on 3 September. The people of Guatemala called this event
"Guatemalan Spring".
Moldova
The opposition is reported to have hoped for and urged some kind of Orange revolution,
similar to that in Ukraine, in the follow-up of the 2005 Moldovan
parliamentary elections , while the Christian
Democratic People's Party adopted orange for its colour in a clear reference to the events
of Ukraine.
A name hypothesised for such an event was "Grape Revolution" because of the abundance of
vineyards in the country; however, such a revolution failed to materialise after the
governmental victory in the elections. Many reasons have been given for this, including a
fractured opposition and the fact that the government had already co-opted many of the
political positions that might have united the opposition (such as a perceived pro-European and
anti-Russian stance). Also the elections themselves were declared fairer in the OSCE election
monitoring reports than had been the case in other countries where similar revolutions
occurred, even though the CIS monitoring mission strongly condemned them.
On 25 March 2005, activists wearing yellow scarves held protests in the capital city of
Ulaanbaatar , disputing
the results of the 2004 Mongolian
parliamentary elections and calling for fresh elections. One of the chants heard in that
protest was "Let's congratulate our Kyrgyz brothers for their revolutionary spirit. Let's free
Mongolia of corruption."
An uprising commenced in Ulaanbaatar on 1 July 2008, with a peaceful meeting in protest of
the election of 29 June. The results of these elections were (it was claimed by opposition
political parties) corrupted by the Mongolian People's Party (MPRP).
Approximately 30,000 people took part in the meeting. Afterwards, some of the protesters left
the central square and moved to the HQ of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party –
which they attacked and then burned down. A police station was also attacked. By the night
rioters vandalised and then set fire to the Cultural Palace (which contained a theatre, museum
and National art gallery). Cars torching, bank
robberies and looting were reported. The
organisations in the burning buildings were vandalised and looted. Police used tear gas, rubber
bullets and water cannon against stone-throwing protesters. A 4-day
state of emergency was installed, the capital has been placed under a 2200 to 0800 curfew, and
alcohol sales banned, rioting not
resumed. 5 people
were shot dead by the police ,
dozens of teenagers were wounded from the police firearms and disabled and
800 people, including the leaders of the civil movements J. Batzandan, O. Magnai and B.
Jargalsakhan, were arrested. International
observers said 1 July general election was free and fair.
In 2007, the Lawyers' Movement started in Pakistan with the aim of restoration
of deposed judges. However, within a month the movement took a turn and started working towards
the goal of removing Pervez Musharraf from power.
The liberal opposition in Russia is represented by several parties and
movements.
An active part of the opposition is the Oborona youth movement. Oborona
claims that its aim is to provide free and honest elections and to establish in Russia a system
with democratic political competition. This movement under the leadership of Oleg
Kozlovsky was one of the most active and radical ones and is represented in a number of
Russian cities. During the elections of 8 September 2013, the movement contributed to the
success of Navalny in Moscow and other opposition candidates in various regions and towns
throughout Russia. The "oboronkis" also took part with other oppositional groups in protests
against fraud in the Moscow mayoral elections.
Since the 2012 protests, Aleksei Navalny mobilised with support of
the various and fractured opposition parties and masses of young people against the alleged
repression and fraud of the Kremlin apparatus. After a strong
campaign for the 8 September elections in Moscow and the regions, the opposition won remarkable
successes. Navalny reached a second place in Moscow with surprising 27% behind Kremlin-backed
Sergei Sobyanin
finishing with 51% of the votes. In other regions, opposition candidates received remarkable
successes. In the big industrial town of Yekaterinburg, opposition candidate Yevgeny Roizman received the majority
of votes and became the mayor of that town. The slow but gradual sequence of opposition
successes reached by mass protests, election campaigns and other peaceful strategies has been
recently called by observers and analysts as of Radio Free Europe "Tortoise Revolution"
in contrast to the radical "rose" or "orange" ones the Kremlin tried to prevent.
The opposition in the Republic of Bashkortostan has held protests demanding
that the federal authorities intervene to dismiss Murtaza Rakhimov from his position as
president of the republic, accusing him of leading an "arbitrary, corrupt, and violent" regime.
Airat
Dilmukhametov , one of the opposition leaders, and leader of the
Bashkir National Front , has said that the opposition movement has been inspired from the
mass protests of Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Another
opposition leader, Marat
Khaiyirulin , has said that if an Orange Revolution were to happen in Russia, it would
begin in Bashkortostan.
From 2016 to 2017, the candlelight protest was going on in South Korea with the aim to force the ousting
of President Park
Geun-hye . Park was impeached and removed from office, and new presidential
elections were held.
In Uzbekistan , there
has been longstanding opposition to President Islam Karimov , from liberals and Islamists.
Following protests in 2005, security forces in Uzbekistan carried out the Andijan massacre that successfully
halted country-wide demonstrations. These protests otherwise could have turned into colour
revolution, according to many analysts.
The revolution in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan began in the largely ethnic Uzbek south, and
received early support in the city of Osh . Nigora
Hidoyatova , leader of the Free
Peasants opposition party, has referred to the idea of a peasant revolt or 'Cotton
Revolution'. She also said that her party is collaborating with the youth organisation
Shiddat , and that she
hopes it can evolve to an organisation similar to Kmara or Pora. Other nascent
youth organisations in and for Uzbekistan include Bolga
and the freeuzbek
group.
When groups of young people protested the closure of Venezuela's RCTV television station in June 2007, president
Hugo Chávez
said that he believed the protests were organised by the West in an attempt to promote a "soft
coup" like the revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. Similarly,
Chinese authorities claimed repeatedly in the state-run media that both the 2014 Hong Kong protests
– known as the Umbrella Revolution – as well as
the 2019–20 Hong Kong
protests , were organised and controlled by the United States.
In July 2007, Iranian state television released footage of two Iranian-American prisoners,
both of whom work for western NGOs, as part of a documentary called "In the Name of Democracy."
The documentary purportedly discusses the colour revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and accuses
the United States of attempting to foment a similar ouster in Iran.
Other
examples and political movements around the world
The imagery of a colour revolution has been adopted by various non-revolutionary electoral
campaigns. The 'Purple Revolution' social media campaign of Naheed Nenshi catapulted his platform from 8%
to become Calgary's 36th Mayor. The platform advocated city sustainability and to inspire the
high voter turn out of 56%, particularly among young voters.
In 2015, the NDP of Alberta earned a majority
mandate and ended the 44-year-old dynasty of the Progressive
Conservatives . During the campaign Rachel Notley 's popularity gained momentum,
and the news and NDP supporters referred to this phenomenon as the "Orange Crush" per the
party's colour. NDP parodies of Orange flavoured Crush soda logo became a popular meme on
social media.
"... One NGO called the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group (TDWG) was bold or reckless enough to draw the parallels between the Color Revolution in Belarus and the events playing out against Trump explicitly ..."
"... Now, would the reader care to take a guess as to who runs the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group? If you guessed Norm Eisen, you would be correct. ..."
In our report on Never
Trump State Department official George Kent , Revolver News first drew attention
to the ominous similarities between the strategies and tactics the United States government
employs in so-called "Color Revolutions" and the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats,
NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.
Our recent follow-up to this initial report focused specifically on a shadowy, George Soros
linked group called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), which convened "war games"
exercises suggesting the likelihood of a "contested election scenario," and of ensuing chaos
should President Trump refuse to leave office. We further showed how these "contested election"
scenarios we are hearing so much about play perfectly into the Color Revolution framework
sketched out Revolver News' first installment in the Color Revolution series.
This third installment of Revolver News ' series exposing the Color Revolution
against Trump will focus on one quiet and indeed mostly overlooked participant in the
Transition Integrity Project's biased election "war games" exercise -- a man by the name of
Norm Eisen.
As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint for
suing the President into paralysis and his
allies into bankruptcy , who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted
10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever
called the Ukraine President in 2018 , who personally served as special counsel
litigating the Ukraine impeachment, who created a template for Internet censorship of world
leaders and a handbook for mass mobilizing racial justice protesters to overturn democratic
election results, there is perhaps no man alive with a more decorated resume for plots against
President Trump.
Indeed, the story of Norm Eisen – a key architect of nearly every attempt to
delegitimize, impeach, censor, sue and remove the democratically elected 45th President of the
United States – is a tale that winds through nearly every facet of the color revolution
playbook. There is no purer embodiment of Revolver's thesis that the very same regime
change professionals who run Color Revolutions on behalf of the US Government in order to
undermine or overthrow alleged "authoritarian" governments overseas, are running the very same
playbook to overturn Trump's 2016 victory and to pre-empt a repeat in 2020. To put it simply,
what you see is not just the same Color Revolution playbook run against Trump, but the same
people using it against Trump who have employed it in a professional capacity against targets
overseas -- same people same playbook.
In Norm Eisen's case, the "same people same playbook" refrain takes an arrestingly literal
turn when one realizes that Norm Eisen wrote a classic Color Revolution regime change manual,
and conveniently titled it "The Playbook."
Just what exactly is President Obama's former White House Ethics Czar ( yes, Norm Eisen
was Obama's ethics Czar ), his longtime friend since Harvard Law School, who recently
partook in war games to simulate overturning a Trump electoral victory, doing writing a
detailed playbook on how to use a Color Revolution to overthrow governments? The story of Norm
Eisen only gets more fascinating, outrageous, and indispensable to understanding the planned
chaos unfolding before our eyes, leading up to what will perhaps be the most chaotic election
in our nation's recent history.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -
"I'd Rather Have This Book Than The Atomic Bomb"
Before we can fully appreciate the significance of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution manual "The
Playbook," we must contextualize this important book in relation to its place in Color
Revolution literature.
As a bit of a refresher to the reader, it is important to emphasize that when we use the
term "Color Revolution" we do not mean any general type of revolution -- indeed, one of the
chief advantages of the Color Revolution framework we advance is that it offers a specific and
concrete heuristic by which to understand the operations against Trump beyond the accurate but
more vague term "coup." Unlike the overt, blunt, method of full scale military invasion as was
the case in Iraq War, a Color Revolution employs the following strategies and tactics:
A "Color Revolution" in this context refers to a specific type of coordinated attack that
the United States government has been known to deploy against foreign regimes, particularly
in Eastern Europe deemed to be "authoritarian" and hostile to American interests. Rather than
using a direct military intervention to effect regime change as in Iraq, Color Revolutions
attack a foreign regime by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass protests and
acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to
their agenda in the Western press.
[Revolver]
This combination of tactics used in so-called Color Revolutions did not come from nowhere.
Before Norm Eisen came Gene Sharp -- originator and Godfather of the Color Revolution model
that has been a staple of US Government operations externally (and now internally) for decades.
Before Norm Eisen's "Playbook" there was Gene Sharp's classic "From Dictatorship to Democracy,"
which might be justly described as the Bible of the Color Revolution. Such is the power of the
strategies laid out by Sharp that a Lithuanian defense minister once said of Sharp's preceding
book (upon which Dictatorship to Democracy builds) that "I would
rather have this book than the nuclear bomb."
Gene Sharp
It would be impossible to do full justice to Gene Sharp within the scope of this specific
article. Here are some choice excerpts about Sharp and his biography to give readers a taste of
his significance and relevance to this discussion.
Gene Sharp, the "Machiavelli of nonviolence," has been fairly described as "the most
influential American political figure you've never heard of."
1 Sharp, who passed away in January 2018, was a beloved yet "mysterious" intellectual
giant of nonviolent protest movements , the "father of the whole field of the study of
strategic nonviolent action."
2 Over his career, he wrote more than twenty books about nonviolent action and social
movements. His how-to pamphlet on nonviolent revolution, From Dictatorship to
Democracy , has been translated into over thirty languages and is cited by protest
movements around the world . In the U.S., his ideas are widely promoted through activist
training programs and by scholars of nonviolence, and have been used by nearly every major
protest movement in the last forty years .
3 For these contributions, Sharp has been praised by progressive heavyweights like Howard
Zinn and Noam Chomsky, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times, compared to Gandhi,
and cast as a lonely prophet of peace, champion of the downtrodden, and friend of the left .
4
Gene Sharp's influence on the U.S. activist left and social movements abroad has been
significant. But he is better understood as one of the most important U.S. defense
intellectuals of the Cold War, an early neoliberal theorist concerned with the supposedly
inherent violence of the "centralized State," and a quiet but vital counselor to
anti-communist forces in the socialist world from the 1980s onward.
In the mid-1960s, Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear theorist, recruited
29-year-old Sharp to join the Center for International Affairs at Harvard , bastion of the
high Cold War defense, intelligence, and security establishment. Leading the so-called "CIA
at Harvard" were Henry Kissinger, future National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and future
CIA chief Robert Bowie. Sharp held this appointment for thirty years. There, with Department
of Defense funds, he developed his core theory of nonviolent action: a method of warfare
capable of collapsing states through theatrical social movements designed to dissolve the
common will that buttresses governments, all without firing any shots. From his post at the
CIA at Harvard, Sharp would urge U.S. and NATO defense leadership to use his methods against
the Soviet Union. [Nonsite]
We invite the reader to reflect on the passages in bold, particularly their potential
relevance to the current domestic situation in the United States. Sharp's book and strategy for
"non violent revolution" AKA "peaceful protests" has been used to undermine or overthrow target
governments all over the world, particularly in Eastern Europe.
Gene's color revolution playbook was of course especially effective in Eastern Bloc
countries in Eastern Europe:
Finally, there is no shortage of analysis as to the applicability of Sharp's methods
domestically within the USA in order to advance various left wing causes. This passage
specifically mentions the applicability of Sharp's methods to counter act Trump.
Ominous stuff indeed. For readers who wish to read further, please consult
the full Politico piece from which we have excerpted the above highlighted passages. There
is also a fascinating documentary on Sharp instructively titled "
How to Start a Revolution ."
This is all interesting and disturbing, to say the least. In its own right it would suggest
a compelling nexus point between the operations run against Trump and the Color Revolution
playbook. But what does this have to do with our subject Norm Eisen? It just so happens that
Eisen explicitly places himself in the tradition of Gene Sharp, acknowledging his book "The
Playbook" as a kind of update to Sharp's seminal "Dictatorship to Democracy."
And there we have it, folks -- Norm Eisen, former Obama Ethics Czar, Ambassador to
Czechoslovakia during the "Velvet Revolution," key counsel in impeachment effort against Trump,
and participant in the ostensibly bi-partisan election war games predicting a contested
election scenario unfavorable to Trump -- just happens to be a Color Revolution expert who
literally wrote the modern "Playbook" in the explicitly acknowledged tradition of Color
Revolution Godfather Gene Sharp's "From Dictatorship to Democracy."
Before we turn to the contents of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution manual, full title "The
Democracy Playbook: Preventing and Reversing Democratic Backsliding," it will be useful to make
a brief point regarding the term "democracy" itself, which happens to appear in the title of
Gene Sharp's book "From Dictatorship to Democracy" as well.
Just like the term "peaceful protestor," which, as we pointed out in our George Kent essay
is used as a term of craft in the Color Revolution context, so is the term "democracy" itself.
The US Government launches Color Revolutions against foreign targets irrespective of whether
they actually enjoy the support of the people or were elected democratically. In the case of
Trump, whatever one says about him, he is perhaps the most "democratically" elected President
in America's history. Indeed, in 2016 Trump ran against the coordinated opposition of the
establishments of both parties, the military industrial complex, the corporate media,
Hollywood, and really every single powerful institution in the country. He won, however,
because he was able to garner sufficient support of the people -- his true and decisive power
base as a "populist." Precisely because of the ultra democratic "populist" character of Trump's
victory, the operatives attempting to undermine him have focused specifically on attacking the
democratic legitimacy of his victory.
In this vein we ought to note that the term "democratic backsliding," as seen in the
subtitle of Norm Eisen's book, and its opposite "democratic breakthrough" are also terms of art
in the Color Revolution lexicon. We leave the full exploration of how the term "democratic" is
used deceptively in the Color Revolution context (and in names of decidedly
anti-democratic/populist institutions) as an exercise to the interested reader. Michael McFaul,
another Color Revolution expert and key anti-Trump operative somewhat gives the game away in
the following tweet in which the term "democratic breakthrough" makes an appearance as a better
sounding alternative to "Color Revolution:"
Most likely as a response to Revolver News' first Color Revolution article on State
Department official George Kent, former Ambassador McFaul issued the following tweet as a
matter of damage control:
Being a rather simple man from a simple background, McFaul perhaps gave too much of this
answer away in the following explanation (now deleted).
Trump has lost the Intelligence Community. He has lost the State Department. He has lost the military. How can he continue to
serve as our Commander in Chief ?
With this now-deleted tweet we get a clearer picture of the power bases that must be
satisfied for a "democratic breakthrough" to occur -- and conveniently enough, not one of them
is subject to direct democratic control. McFaul, Like Eisen, George Kent, and so many others,
perfectly embodies Revolver's thesis regarding the Color Revolution being the same
people running the same playbook. Indeed, like most of the star never-Trump impeachment
witnesses, McFaul has been an ambassador to an Eastern European country. He has supported
operations against Trump, including impeachment. And, like Norm Eisen, he has actually
written
a book on Color Revolutions (more on that later).
Norm Eisen's The Democracy Playbook: A Brief Overview:
A deep dive into Eisen's book would exceed the scope of this relatively brief exposé.
It is nonetheless important for us to draw attention to key passages of Eisen's book to
underscore how closely the "Playbook" corresponds to events unfolding right here at home.
Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that regime change professionals such as Eisen
simply decided to run the same playbook against Trump that they have done countless times when
foreign leaders are elected overseas that they don't like and want to remove via
extra-democratic means -- "peaceful protests," "democratic breakthroughs" and such.
First, consider the following passage from Eisen's Playbook:
If you study this passage closely, you will find direct confirmation of our earlier point
that "democracy" in the Color Revolution context is a term of art -- it refers to anything they
like that keeps the national security bureaucrats in power. Anything they don't like, even if
elected democratically, is considered "anti-democratic," or, put another way, "democratic
backsliding." Eisen even acknowledges that this scourge of populism he's so worried about
actually was ushered in with "popular support," under "relatively democratic and electoral
processes." The problem is precisely that the people have had enough of the corrupt ruling
class ignoring their needs. Accordingly, the people voted first for Brexit and then for Donald
Trump -- terrifying expressions of populism which the broader Western power structure did
everything in its capacity to prevent. Once they failed, they viewed these twin populist
victories as a kind of political 9/11 to be prevented by any means necessary from recurring.
Make no mistake, the Color Revolution has nothing to do with democracy in any meaningful sense
and everything to do with the ruling class ensuring that the people will never have the power
to meddle in their own elections again.
The passage above can be insightfully compared to the passage in Gene Sharp's book noting
ripe applications to the domestic situation.
It is instructive to compare the passage in Eisen's Color Revolution book to the passage in
Michael McFaul's Color Revolution book
First off, it is absolutely imperative to look at every single one of the conditions for a
Color Revolution that McFaul identifies. It is simply impossible not to be overcome with the
ominous parallels to our current situation. Specifically, however, note condition 1 which
refers to having a target leader who is not fully authoritarian, but semi-autocratic. This
coincides perfectly well with Eisen's concession that the populist leaders he's so concerned
about might be "illiberal" but enjoy "popular support" and have come to power via "relatively
democratic electoral processes."
Consulting the above passage from McFaul's book, we note that McFaul has been perhaps the
most explicit about the conditions which facilitate a Color Revolution. We invite the reader to
supply the contemporary analogue to each point as a kind of exercise.
A semi-autocratic regime rather than fully autocratic
An unpopular incumbent (note blanket negative coverage of Trump, fake polls)
A united and organized opposition (media, intel community, Hollywood, community groups,
etc)
Enough independent media to inform citizens of falsified vote (see full court press in
media pushing contested election narrative, social media censorship)
A political opposition capable of mobilizing tens of thousands or more demonstrators to
protest electoral fraud ( SEE BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ANTIFA )
On point number four, which is especially relevant to our present situation, Eisen has an
interesting thing to say about the role of a contested election scenario in the Orange
Revolution, arguably the most important Color Revolution of them all.
Finally, let's look at one last passage from Norm Eisen's Color Revolution "Democracy
Playbook" and cross-reference it with McFaul's conditions for a Color Revolution as well as the
situation playing out right now before our very eyes:
A few things immediately jump out at us. First, the ominous instruction: "prepare to use
electoral abuse evidence as the basis for reform advocacy." Secondly, we note the passage
suggesting that opposition to a target leader might avail itself of "extreme institutional
measures" including impeachment processes, votes of no confidence, and, of course, the good
old-fashioned "protests, strikes, and boycotts" (all more or less peaceful no doubt).
By now the Color Revolution agenda against Trump should be as plain as day. Regime change
professionals like McFaul, Eisen, George Kent, and others, who have refined their craft
conducting color revolutions overseas, have taken it upon themselves to use the same tools, the
same tactics -- quite literally, the same playbook -- to overthrow President Trump. Yet again,
same people, same playbook.
We conclude this study of key Color Revolution figure Norm Eisen by exploring his
particularly proactive -- indeed central role -- in effecting one of the Color Revolution's
components mentioned in the Eisen Playbook -- impeachment.
-- -- -- –
The Ghost of Democracy's Future
We mentioned at the outset of this piece that Norm Eisen is many things -- a former Obama
Ethics Czar (but of course), Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, participant in the now notorious
Transition Integrity Project, et cetera. But he earned his title as "legal hatchet man" of the
Color Revolution for his tireless efforts in promoting the impeachment of President Trump.
The litany of Norm Eisen's legal activity cited at the beginning of this piece bears
repeating.
As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint
for suing the President into paralysis and his
allies into bankruptcy , who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted
10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever
called the Ukraine President in 2018 , who personally served as DNC co-counsel for
litigating the Ukraine impeachment
If that resume doesn't warrant the title "legal hatchet man" we wonder what does? We
encourage interested readers or journalists to explore those links for themselves. By way of
conclusion, it simply suffices to note that much of Eisen's impeachment activity he conducted
before there was any discussion or knowledge of President Trump's call to the Ukrainian
President in 2018 -- indeed before the call even happened. Impeachment was very clearly a
foregone conclusion -- a quite literal part of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution playbook -- and it
was up to people like Eisen to find the pretext, any pretext.
Despite their constant invocation of "democracy" we ought to note that transferring the
question of electoral outcomes to adversarial legal processes is in fact anti-Democratic -- in
keeping with our observation that the Color Revolution playbook uses "democracy" as a term of
art, often meaning the precise opposite of the usual meaning suggesting popular support.
Perhaps the most important entry in Eisen's entry is the first, that is, Eisen's
participation in the infamous David Brock blueprint on how to undermine and overthrow the Trump
presidency.
The Washington Free Beacon attended the retreat and obtained David Brock's
private and confidential memorandum from the meeting. The memo, "
Democracy Matters: Strategic Plan for Action ," outlines Brock's four-year agenda to
attack Trump and Republicans using Media Matters, American Bridge, Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) , and Shareblue.
This leaked memo was written before President Trump took office, further suggesting that all
of the efforts to undermine Trump have not been good faith responses to his behavior, but a
pre-ordained attack strategy designed to overturn the 2016 election by any means necessary. The
Color Revolution expert who suggests impeachment as a tactic in his Color Revolution "playbook"
was already in charge of impeachment before Trump even took office -- -Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is run by none other than Norm Eisen.
But the attempt to overturn the 2016 election using Color Revolution tactics failed. And so
now the plan is to overthrow Trump in 2020, hence Norm Eisen's noted participation in the
Transition Integrity Project. Looking around us, one is forced to ask the deeply uncomfortable
question, "transition into what?"
To conclude, we would like to call back to a point we raised in the first piece in our color
revolution series. In this piece, we noted that star Never Trump impeachment witness George
Kent just happens to be running the Belarus desk at the State Department. Belarus, we argued,
with its mass demonstrations egged on by US Government backed NGOS, its supposed "peaceful
protests" and of course its contested election results all fit the Color Revolution mold
curiously enough.
One NGO called the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group (TDWG) was bold or reckless enough
to draw the parallels between the Color Revolution in Belarus and the events playing out
against Trump explicitly. In response to a remark by a twitter user that the TDWG's remarks
about Belarus suggested parallels to the United States, the TDWG ominously replied:
Now, would the reader care to take a guess as to who runs the Transatlantic Democracy
Working Group? If you guessed Norm Eisen, you would be correct.
Stay tuned for more in Revolver.news' groundbreaking coverage of the Color
Revolution against Trump. Be sure to check out the previous installments in this series.
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.
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.
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 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:
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.
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:
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.
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
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":
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
@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.
@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.
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.
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.
@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.
Counter disinformation network can't revive the dead chicken of neoliberal ideology.
Neoliberal elite lost legitimacy and as such has difficulties controlling the narrative.
That's why all this frantic efforts were launched to rectify the situation.
Anti-Russian angle of Atlantic council revealed here quite clearly
The paper's biggest single recommendation was that the United States and EU establish a
Counter-Disinformation Coalition, a public/private group bringing together, on a regular basis,
government and non-government stakeholders, including social media companies, traditional
media, Internet service providers (ISPs), and civil society groups. The Counter-Disinformation
Coalition would develop best practices for confronting disinformation from nondemocratic
countries, consistent with democratic norms. It also recommended that this coalition start with
a voluntary code of conduct outlining principles and agreed procedures for dealing with
disinformation, drawing from the recommendations as summarized above.
In drawing up these recommendations, we were aware that disinformation most often comes from
domestic, not foreign, sources. 8 While Russian and other disinformation players are
known to work in coordination with domestic purveyors of disinformation, both overtly and
covertly, the recommendations are limited to foreign disinformation, which falls within the
scope of "political warfare." Nevertheless, it may be that these policy recommendations,
particularly those focused on transparency and social resilience, may be applicable to
combatting other forms of disinformation.
That's naive take. Wary knows quite a bit about Antifa. Most probably the key people are
iether FBI agents or informants. The problem is that he find Antifa activities politically
useful. That's why he does not want to shut it down. This again put FBI in the role of kingmaker,
like under Comey.
Also don't forget that Brennan faction of CIA is still in power and that means the "deep
state" still is in control like was the case during Mueller investigation.
In May of 2017, President Trump did the right thing and fired FBI Director James Comey, the
individual at the center of the attempt to overturn the 2016 election results. Comey
orchestrated the spying efforts on President Trump and his campaign, which included the FBI
improperly applying for four separate Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to
eavesdrop on campaign aide Carter Page. He also authorized a politically motivated
investigation into Lt. General Michael Flynn and encouraged the entrapment of Flynn by his FBI
agents in an infamous White House interview.
Clearly, Comey was a disastrous FBI Director; however, the President made a terrible choice
when he replaced him with Christopher Wray, a bureaucrat who has not reformed the agency in any
meaningful way. He also seems to be incapable of identifying the real threats that are facing
the country.
In testimony on Thursday before the House Homeland Security Committee, Wray made a series of
remarkable claims. He stated that Antifa is not a group but is more of "an ideology or maybe a
movement." He also refused to identify Chinese efforts to interrupt the 2020 election and again
focused attention on activities from Russia.
With these remarks, Wray is doing the bidding of the Democrats and following their talking
points. Regarding Antifa violence, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY),
claimed it was a "myth."
Nadler has been in his congressional cocoon for too long. Antifa has been active for several
years, but since the death of George Floyd on May 25, it has intensified its activities around
the country. Millions of Americans have seen the frequent and disturbing video footage of
rioting and looting throughout the country. According to U.S. Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX),
"there have been more than 550 declared riots, many stoked by extremists, Antifa and the BLM
(Black Lives Matter) organization."
In his comments to Wray at the committee meeting, Crenshaw also noted the rioters have done
an extensive amount of damage. He stated that "between one and two billion dollars of insurance
claims will be paid out. That doesn't come close to measuring the actual and true damage to
people's lives, not even close."
Crenshaw is right as many of our urban areas, such as New York, Washington D.C.,
Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland among others have been devastated by a series of violent
protests. In the past few months, scores of monuments have been destroyed, and significant
damage has been done to businesses and public buildings. The group has also attacked innocent
civilians and targeted police officers. As Crenshaw asserted in this rebuttal to Wray, Antifa
matches the definition of a domestic terrorist organization.
The issue surely must be why media like The New York Times (Russia paying Taliban to target
US forces in Afghanistan) and Politico (Iran planning to assassinate US ambassador to South
Africa) continue to repeat the lie over and over even when they have been found out and
everyone around the world is dying of laughter at the continued stupidity. Are the NYT and
Politico stenographers so dense and wrapped up in their own tiny worlds that they are
tone-deaf?
Are the NYT and Politico stenographers so dense and wrapped up in their own tiny worlds
that they are tone-deaf?"
Denial is a BIG river. And we've been living in a make believe world for a long time here.
And finally, it's all they've got left. It's like Vietnam all over again, same bunch of
morons, same mistakes, same wall-to-wall lying. Even a lot of the same players.
The MSM, especially the prestigious outlets, such as the NYT and the WaPo, serve as the main
conduits for U.S. government propaganda. Their prestige makes them especially suited to
receive leaks, which they obediently publish regardless of their veracity. Other outlets
repeat the stories until almost every person who follows the news has been exposed to them.
Reporters working for these outlets know that their careers depend upon maintaining
relationships with sources who will provide them with leaks. Careers taking precedence over
journalistic integrity, they play ball rather than leave the field. It's a brilliant system
that controls the flow of information without formal controls.
What I find amazing is how the American people will believe almost any government statement
without evidence given on news broadcast. Other countries may display the same
characteristic, but not at the same level as Americans. Personally, I find most
unsubstantiated reports as nothing more than Gossip and hearsay until verified by three other
international independent sources; what used to be a basic journalistic standard.
Posted by: Jen | Sep 19 2020 10:59 utc | 3 why media like The New York Times...and
Politico...continue to repeat the lie over and over even when they have been found out and
everyone around the world is dying of laughter
That's their job. And it's the US electorate who are *not* "dying of laughter" - because
they have been brainwashed by that same MSM.
A few years back I read a poll in which something like 77% of the US electorate believe
that Iran has actual nuclear weapons - not just a weapon program, actual nuclear weapons
deployed. This is the results you get from MSM reporting - and that's why they do it. They
are hand in glove with the US government. They are owned by corporations that have defense
contracts - not to mention that wars sell papers and boost broadcast ratings. You remember
that
moron talking about "beautiful US weapons"? You think that is an accident?
Why wouldn't they? After all, deep down, they know they have to invade countries to
survive. Better to do that while sleeping with a clean consciousness.
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T
he US media's three-year obsession with the mostly fictitious allegations of "Russiagate" has all but obscured, even
deleted, important, potentially historic, developments inside that nation itself, still the world's largest territorial
country. One of the most important is the Putin government's decision to invest $300-to-$400 billion of "rainy day" funds in
the nation's infrastructure, especially in its vast, underdeveloped provinces, and on "national projects" ranging from
education to health care and family services to transportation and other technology. If successfully implemented, Russia would
be substantially transformed and the lives of its people significantly improved.
Not surprisingly, however, the plan has aroused considerable controversy and public debate in Russia's policy elite, primarily
for two reasons. The funds were accumulated largely due to high world prices for Russia's energy exports and the state's
budgetary austerity during the decade after Putin came to power in 2000, and they have been hoarded as a safeguard against
Western economic sanctions and/or a global economic depression. (Russia's economic collapse in the Yeltsin 1990s, perhaps the
worst modern-day depression in peacetime, remains a vivid memory for policy-makers and ordinary citizens alike.)
There is also the nation's long, sometimes traumatic, history of "modernization from above," as it is termed. In the late 19th
century, the czarist regime's program to industrialize the country, "to catch up" with other world powers, had unintended
consequences that led, in the accounts of many historians, to the end of czarism in the 1917 revolution. And Stalin's
"revolution from above" of the 1930s, based on the forced collectivization of the peasantry, which at the time accounted for
more than 80 percent of the population, along with very rapid industrialization, resulted in millions of deaths and economic
distortions that burdened Soviet and post-Soviet Russia for decades.
Nor are Russia's alternative experiences of modernization from below inspiring or at least instructive. In the 1920s, during
the years known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP, the victorious Bolsheviks pursued evolutionary economic development
through a semi-regulated market economy. It had mixed -- and still disputed -- results, and it was brutally abolished by Stalin in
1929. Decades later, Yeltsin's "free-market reforms" were widely blamed for the ruination and widespread misery of the 1990s,
which featured many aspects of actual de-modernization.
With all this "living history" in mind, Putin's plan for such large-scale (and rapid) investment has generated the controversy
in Moscow and resulted in three positions within the policy class. One fully supports the decision on the essentially
Keynesian grounds that it will spur Russia's annual economic growth, which has lagged below the global average for several
years. Another opposes such massive expenditures, arguing that the funds must remain in state hands as a safeguard against the
US-led "sanctions war" (and perhaps worse) against Russia. And, as usual in politics, there is a compromise position that less
should be invested in civilian infrastructure and less quickly.
Running through the discussion is also Russia's long history of thwarted implementation of good intentions. To paraphrase a
prime minister during the 1990s,
Viktor
Chernomyrdin
, "We wanted things to turn out for the best, but they turned out as usual." In particular, it is often asked,
what will be the consequences of putting so much money into the hands of regional and other local officials in provinces where
corruption is endemic? How much will be stolen or otherwise misdirected?
Nonetheless, Putin seems to be resolute. He is also insistent that his ambitious plan to transform Russia requires a long
period of international peace and stability. Here again is plain evidence that those in Washington who insist Putin's primary
goal is "to sow discord, divisions, and instability" in the world, especially in the West, where he hopes to find "modernizing
partnerships," do not care about or understand what is actually unfolding inside Russia -- or Putin's vision of his own
historical role and legacy.
Stephen F. Cohen
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and
Princeton University. A
Nation
contributing
editor, his most recent book,
War
With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate
, is available in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly
conversations with the host of
The
John Batchelor Show
, now in their seventh year,
are
available at www.thenation.com
.
Published Sept. 18, 2020
Updated Sept.
19, 2020,
9:37
a.m. ET
Stephen F. Cohen, an eminent historian whose books and commentaries on Russia examined the rise and fall of Communism,
Kremlin dictatorships and the emergence of a post-Soviet nation still struggling for identity in the 21st century, died on
Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.
His wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher and part owner of The Nation, said the cause was lung cancer.
From the sprawling conflicts of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the tyrannies of Stalin to the collapse of the Soviet
Union and Vladimir V. Putin's intrigues to retain power, Professor Cohen chronicled a Russia of sweeping social upheavals
and the passions and poetry of peoples that endured a century of wars, political repression and economic hardships.
A professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, he was fluent in Russian, visited
Russia frequently and developed contacts among intellectual dissidents and government and Communist Party officials. He
wrote or edited 10 books and many articles for The Nation, The New York Times and other publications, was a CBS-TV
commentator and counted President George Bush and many American and Soviet officials among his sources.
In Moscow he was befriended by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who invited him to the May Day celebration at
Red Square in 1989. There, at the Lenin Mausoleum, Professor Cohen stood with his wife and son one tier below Mr. Gorbachev
and the Soviet leadership to view a three-hour military parade. He later spoke briefly on Russian television to a vast
audience about alternative paths that Russian history could have taken.
Loosely identified with a revisionist historical view of the Soviet Union, Professor Cohen held views that made him a
controversial public intellectual. He believed that early Bolshevism had held great promise, that it had been democratic
and genuinely socialist, and that it had been corrupted only later by civil war, foreign hostility, Stalin's malignancy and
a fatalism in Russian history.
A traditionalist school of thought, by contrast, held that the Soviet experiment had been flawed from the outset, that
Lenin's political vision was totalitarian, and that any attempt to create a society based on his coercive utopianism had
always been likely to lead, logically, to Stalin's state terrorism and to the Soviet Union's eventual collapse.
Professor Cohen was an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Gorbachev, who after coming to power in 1985 undertook ambitious
changes to liberate the nation's 15 republics from state controls that had originally been imposed by Stalin. Mr. Gorbachev
gave up power as the Soviet state imploded at the end of 1991 and moved toward beliefs in democracy and a market economy.
Image
Mr. Cohen first came to international attention in 1973 with his biography of Lenin's protégé Nikolai Bukharin.
"Stephen Cohen's full-scale study of Bukharin is the first major study of this remarkable associate of Lenin,"
Harrison
Salisbury's wrote in a review
in The Times. "As such it constitutes a milestone in Soviet studies, the byproduct both
of increased academic sophistication in the use of Soviet materials and also of the very substantial increase in basic
information which has become available in the 20 years since Stalin's death."
After Lenin's death, Mr. Bukharin became a victim of Stalin's Moscow show trials in 1938; he was accused of plotting
against Stalin and executed. His widow, Anna Mikhailovna Larina, spent 20 years in exile and in prison camps and campaigned
for Mr. Bukharin's rehabilitation, which was endorsed by Mr. Gorbachev in 1988.
Ms. Larina and Professor Cohen became friends. Given access to Bukharin archives, he found and returned to her the last
love letter that Mr. Bukharin wrote her from prison.
In "Rethinking the Soviet Experience" (1985), Professor Cohen offered a new interpretation of the nation's traumatic
history and modern political realities. In his view, Stalin's despotism and Mr. Bukharin's fate were not necessarily
inevitable outgrowths of the party dictatorship founded by Lenin.
Richard Lowenthal, in a review for The Times, called Professor Cohen's interpretation implausible. "While I do not believe
that all the horrors of Stalinism were 'logically inevitable' consequences of the seizure of power by Lenin and his
Bolshevik Party," Mr. Lowenthal wrote, "I do believe that Stalin's victory over Bukharin was inherent in the structure of
the party's system."
As Professor Cohen and other scholars pondered Russia's past, Mr. Gorbachev's rise to power and his efforts toward glasnost
(openness) and perestroika (restructuring) cast the future of the Soviet Union in a new light, potentially reversing 70
years of Cold War dogma.
Cohen succumbed to lung cancer at his home in Manhattan, on Friday, according to his wife
Katrina vanden Heuvel, who is also the part-owner and publisher of The Nation magazine, where
he worked as a contributing editor.
A native of Kentucky, he was a prolific and prominent scholar in his field, serving as a
professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University. As a
frequent visitor to Russia, Cohen became well-connected among leading Soviet dissidents,
politicians and thinkers in the 1980s, even befriending Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.
Cohen also advised former US President George Bush, senior, in the late 1980s, and assisted
Anna Larina, the widow of Nikolai Bukharin, to rehabilitate her husband's name during the
Soviet era. He had earlier written a biography of the journalist and politician, which argued
that had Bukharin succeeded Vladimir Lenin as Bolshevik leader, rather than Joseph Stalin, the
Soviet Union would have enjoyed greater openness, and perhaps even democracy.
Breaking with many American academics and political commentators, Cohen was highly critical
of Washington's approach to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He warned of the
dangers of NATO expansion and argued that much of the economic devastation seen in Russia
during the 1990s could be traced to bad-faith policies and advice from the United States.
His principled, and patriotic stand, led to smears from members of the think tank racket and
both liberal and neoconservative interventionists, keen to stoke tensions with Moscow. Cohen
was labelled a Putin apologist. He responded by saying that he saw him as being "in the Russian
tradition of leadership, getting Russia back on its feet."
After the election of Donald Trump, Cohen found himself in the crosshairs of the mainstream
media for challenging the now-debunked Russiagate narrative, which he said was being used to
sabotage bilateral relations and trigger a "new Cold War" with Moscow.
The unsubstantiated claim that Trump's presidential campaign "colluded" with the
Kremlin would likely make a US-Russia detente "impossible" and could even help fuel an
actual war between the two nations, Cohen argued. He lamented that Special Counsel Robert
Mueller's probe into the conspiracy theory, which found no evidence of collusion, would do
little to tone down the fiery rhetoric and anonymously sourced media hysteria concerning Russia
and its alleged influence over the US political system.
The author of numerous books and countless articles, Cohen was a frequent guest on RT, where
he often used his air time to sound the alarm over the dangerous state of US-Russia relations,
lamenting that the hostility was both unnecessary and potentially calamitous.
Alice's "curiouser and curiouser" remark in Lewis Carroll's Adventures in Wonderland applies
to dubious twists in the Navalny novichok poisoning hoax.
No evidence or motive links Russia to what happened to him.
Was the August 20 Tomsk, Russia incident made-in-the-USA?
Was Germany pressured, bullied or bribed to go along -- at the expense of its own
self-interest?
Clearly Angela Merkel, other German officials, their Western counterparts, and establishment
media know the claim about Navalny's novichok poisoning is a colossal hoax.
They know that anyone exposed to the toxin, the world's deadliest, would be dead in
minutes.
The same goes for others in close proximity to the exposed individual.
Navalny is very much alive and recovering nearly a month after falling ill.
No one he came in contact with developed novichok poisoning symptoms.
Russian doctors treating him with state-of-the-art equipment and tests found no toxins of
any kind in his system.
They saved his life and stabilized his condition, enabling him to travel to Berlin for
further treatment.
If the Kremlin wanted him dead, he'd have been left untreated in Russia to die.
He's recovering because of heroic treatment by Russian doctors.
On Thursday, elements close to Navalny shifted the fake news novichok poisoning narrative
from tea he drank in the Tomsk, Russia airline terminal to the deadly nerve agent in his hotel
room water bottle.
Are other versions of what happened to him coming ahead?
Claiming novichok traces were found in a hotel water bottle he drank from doesn't pass the
smell test.
The deadly substance in an opened hotel room bottle would likely contaminate and kill anyone
near it.
If, in fact, Navalny was poisoned by novichok in his hotel room overnight, he'd have died in
minutes, clearly not what happened.
The novichok in a hotel room bottle scenario is implausible on its face.
Claiming members of his team entered his hotel room after learning of his illness, found it
uncleaned, and examined everything potentially useful for an investigation -- "recording,
describing, and packing" everything would have exposed them to novichok if it existed by
touching the alleged bottle with the toxin.
Whatever happened to Navalny wasn't from novichok poisoning in a bottle or from any other
source.
On Thursday, Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow's
representative to the OPCW Alexander Shulgin requested copies of files the organization
received from Germany on Navalny's condition, but got no response, adding:
"According to our data Germany and a whole number of (other Western) countries (are)
cultivating the OPCW" with regard to the Navalny incident.
Since he arrived in Berlin for treatment over three weeks ago, Merkel's government
stonewalled Russia by refusing to provide evidence it claims to have about novichok poisoning
because there is none.
On Thursday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said "(t)here is too much absurdity about this
whole situation to take anyone's word on trust, so we are not going to take anyone's word,"
adding:
"(T)he situation is as follows: the OPCW Technical Secretariat says 'we know nothing. Talk
to the Germans,' and the Germans say 'we know nothing. Talk to the OPCW."
Russian lower house State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin suggested foreign intelligence
responsibility for what happened to Navalny.
On Thursday, majority Russophobic European Parliament (EP) MPs adopted a resolution that
calls for an "immediate launch of an impartial international investigation (sic)" on the
Navalny incident by the EU, its allies, the UN, Council of Europe, and OPCW -- to frame Russia
for what happened to Navalny.
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The resolution also calls for (unjustifiably and unlawfully) sanctioning Russia and
suspending Nord Stream 2 construction.
EP resolutions are non-binding. The EP, Council of the European Union, European Council, and
European Commission operate separately from individual member states.
Time and again earlier, they irresponsibly bashed Russia in cahoots with the US, adopting
non-binding resolutions.
According to Zakharova earlier, anti-Russia propaganda is based on "paranoia phobias,
fictitious messages (and) myths."
Interviewed by Radio Sputnik in Moscow, Sergey Lavrov said Western governments want Russia
"punished both for what is happening in Belarus and for the incident with Navalny," adding:
They refuse to fulfill mandated obligations under the European Convention on Legal Aid by
not responding to official requests by the Russian Prosecutor General's Office for documented
information on Navalny's condition.
"Germany says that it cannot tell us anything. They say, go to the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)."
"We went there several times. They say go to Berlin."
"They loudly declare that the fact of poisoning has been established. Except for Russia
nobody could have done it. Admit it."
"All this has already happened with the" fake news Skripals novichok poisoning
incident.
Russia is a valued ally of all world community countries.
Instead of fostering cooperative relations with Moscow, actions by Germany and other EU
countries risk rupturing them.
Were Khodorkovsky or Browder among people involved? To what extent Trump administration and
MI6 were involved? Looks more and more line a bad replay of Skripals poisoning
Notable quotes:
"... Germans and "the whole world", to quote Pompeo, know the truth: Russians simply deny the truth, and the more they deny, the more truthful the accusations appear. And the elephant in the room: Why isn't the poisoned by "Novichok" bullshitting bastard of a US agent dead? And the answer given by the Germans, that is ironic in the extreme: because Russian doctors saved his life in Omsk. ..."
"... There are undeniable advantages to accusations for which no substantiation is offered – as we saw with the Skripals, you can await public comment, identify where you went wrong from scornful rejections of the narrative, and then modify it so that it makes more sense. ..."
"... I hope Germany offers residency to the Navalnys, and that they accept. Russia can't really refuse to let him back in, he's a citizen. But as long as he is there he will cause trouble, and he'll be recharged with all the PR he has received from this latest caper. ..."
"... But it is suggested that Russia is bargaining for his return; the story also expands on Lavrov's recent statements, and introduces a villain in the woodpile I would not have personally suspected: Poland. ..."
"... I recall Lavrov querying the other day Pevchikh's presence in Germany, her refusal to be interviewed by investigators in Omsk and how come she managed to fly to Germany with Navalny? He also said that other supporters of Navalny had also turned up in Germany. ..."
"... I lay a pound to a pinch of shit that Pevchikh is a British agent. ..."
"... Looking good for almost a corpse. COVID-19, a flu virus, is a deadly killer, and Novichok, a deadly nerve agent, is not a killer. ..."
"... Dances with Bears: THE PEVCHIKH PLOT – NAVALNY BOTTLE, LONDON WITNESS FLEE THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, BERLIN TOO http://johnhelmer.net/the-pevchikh-plot-navalny-bottle-london-witness-flee-the-scene-of-the-crime-berlin-too/ ..."
"... I reckon Khordokovsky has a hand in this. He has the same moral compass as dead Berezovsky. None. And he has refused to stick to agreements (keep out of politics). If the British or someone else get fingered for this cunning plan , would they serve him up on a silver platter? Almost certainly so. ..."
"... We certainly did well to focus on Maria Pevchikh as soon as we discovered that in addition to being the one who evaded questioning by Russian authorities by flying out to Germany, she also had British residency. She certainly has become a "person of interest" and could well be the major individual in the plot to incapacitate Navalny and use him to pressure Germany over NSII and Russia over the Belarus unrest. ..."
"... It is still unknown whether Pevchikh is a British citizen. I think she is and probably must be, in fact, for if she is only a visa holder or an applicant for UK citizenship, she could be told by the Home Office to go take a hike if it is proven that she was instrumental in the poisoning plot. ..."
"... Ask Pevchikh! Only she is now probably undergoing debriefing in London at UK Secret Intelligence Services HQ, 85 Albert Embankment. ..."
"... There was considerable risk involved in the deception. I doubt that Navalny went into the deception willingly. There was a very real risk that he could have suffered some brain damage going into the first coma and that's sure to compromise his health in the long term in other ways. ..."
"... More likely it seems a lot of the deception was planned behind Navalny's back and people were waiting for an opportunity to carry it out. It may have been planned years ago for someone else and then switched to Navalny once he was in the Omsk hospital. Julia Navalnaya may have been pushed into demanding that Navalny be transferred to Berlin and while the Omsk hospital doctors were stabilising him for the transfer, the deception then started going into action in Germany. ..."
"... Lavrov smelt a rat several days ago -- last week, I'm sure -- when he stated that suspicions had been aroused by one of Navalny's gang refusing to answer investigators' questions in Omsk and then scarpering off to Germany. ..."
"... I'm quite sure the FSB already knew of Pevchikh's comings and goings between London and Moscow (over 60 flights there and back I read somewhere) and her activities with the Navalny organization. ..."
"... if Washington thinks it can actually halt Nord Stream II – with the understanding that the Russians would probably give up after such a stinging second rebuke – then the sky is the limit, and they will scornfully reject any other solution. The one who stands to get hurt the most is Europe. But I don't think they realize it. ..."
NYT сообщила о
планах
Навального
вернуться в
Россию
15 сентября 2020
NYT has announced Navalney's to return to Russia
15 September 2020
Founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Alexei Navalny, who is undergoing treatment
in Germany, has discussed his poisoning with the German prosecutor and announced that he
plans to return to Russia, The New York Times has reported, citing a source in the German
security forces.
According to the source, Navalny is fully aware of his condition, of what happened and
where he is. In a conversation with the prosecutor, he refused that his case be jointly
investigated by Germany and Russia. Navalny said he planned to return to Russia immediately
after his recovery and continue his mission, the newspaper notes.
I notice that the Navalny fake story has gone off the radar in the Western MSM.
Now there just remain the lies and innuendos fixed in the minds of the sheeple.
Only an investigation by the Germans.
No investigation by the Russians.
Germans and "the whole world", to quote Pompeo, know the truth: Russians simply deny
the truth, and the more they deny, the more truthful the accusations appear. And the elephant
in the room: Why isn't the poisoned by "Novichok" bullshitting bastard of a US agent dead?
And the answer given by the Germans, that is ironic in the extreme: because Russian doctors
saved his life in Omsk.
Other elephants lurking in the shadows:
Why hadn't everyone who had been in contact with the piece of shit, including fellow
passengers on the Tomsk-Moscow flight died?
Where were the hazmat-suit-wearing specialists that should have detoxified the aeroplane
on board of which the Bullshitter threw a wobbler?
So many elephants, all ignored.
Total fabrication.
When the liar returns here, how about arresting him for breach of his bail conditions?
Not technically but absolutely legally he was not allowed to leave the country.
How about arresting him for perverting the course of justice? You can get life for doing
that in the UK!
He refuses to allow the Russian state to investigate his case but he and his controllers
and supporters maintain that the Russian state attempted to murder him with the most deadly
nerve agent known to man -- but it didn't work.
And on the plus side he can sell expensive 'blessed' trinkets to his hamsters help
subsidize his interesting lifestyle. Think holy relics, think Medjigorje, Lourdes
etc.
Навальный,
"Новичок" и
"белая коробка"
13 сентября 2020
Navalny, "Novichok" and the "White Box"
13 September 2020
Why is not a single Berlin doctor ready to personally confirm the announced poisoning
of Navalny?
A Russian patient is recovering in the "White Box" of the Charité hospital.
During the three weeks of Navalny's stay within these walls, no one shouted at the doctors
that they were murderers, no one demanded from them hourly reports on the patient's state of
health. At the beginning of the week, the hospital's press service informs the press that the
personal guest of the Federal Chancellor has been withdrawn from an artificial coma and is
reacting to other people. A couple of days later, "Spiegel" magazine publishes encouraging
information: "More progress has been made. If his health continues to improve, Navalny will
begin to receive more visitors". According to "Bellingcat" and "Der Spiegel", Navalny can
already speak and can probably recall the events that happened before he lost consciousness
on an aeroplane flying from Tomsk to Moscow.
In general, the latest Charité press releases are in clear contradiction to the
horror that the German press had been gathering all week. The already poisoned underpants
have been forgotten, the newspaper "Die Zeit" returns the reader to a famous photograph:
morning in a café at the Tomsk airport, a passenger for the flight to Moscow flight
peers into a cup that he has raised in order to drink out of it. In it,, according to a "Die
" source, is not just a chemical warfare agent from the "Novichok" group: in there is a
"Novichok" on steroids.
"Before this assassination attempt, the world did not know about this poison, which is
said to be even more deadly and dangerous than all known substances from the Novichok group.
Scientists found corresponding traces on the Navalny's hands and on the neck of a bottle from
which he had drunk. This "modified Novichok" allegedly acts more slowly than previous
versions. The Germans assume that one of the FSB agents monitoring Navalny, or an undercover
agent, added drops of poison to his tea or applied a substance to the surface of a cup.
Navalny was supposed to die on board the aircraft", writes "Die Zeit".
Everything is just fine and dandy here: for example, about agents who had to perform
the necessary manipulations with a super-poison in a crowded place. A remarkable and suddenly
appeared bottle -- no bottle was seen in Omsk at all. The story goes on about the fact that,
apart from tea, Navalny did not drink anything. It turns out that those accompanying the
blogger took the bottle out of the plane, hid it, and then transported it to Germany and
handed it to Bundeswehr chemists Concealing evidence is pure criminality. But the most
interesting thing is the super-"Novichok".
After the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury (let us recount the usual version of
events that happened there), about 50 more people sought medical help. Houses were taken
apart, pets were destroyed. But here no one except Navalny was hurt: neither the people at
Tomsk airport, nor the fellow travellers with whom he, having the terrible poison in his
hands, took a selfie on a bus, nor the passengers on board the aircraft, and he also touched
things there. Symptoms of poisoning should have appeared amongst the passengers, but they did
not. This should raise questions from the authors of the serious newspaper "Die Zeit", but it
does not. A weapon of mass destruction by any reasoning, but the longer the German press
examines the Navalny case, the more mediaeval and grotesque it becomes. And it works -- you
can see it even from the reaction of quite moderate politicians.
Already a week and a half ago, Merkel announced the results of a toxicological
examination, allegedly carried out in a secret laboratory of the Bundeswehr (yes, Navalny was
poisoned), opponents of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline have intensified their onslaught
against the federal government in order to stop the construction, they say, this is the only
way to punish Russia. At the head of the column are the party leaders of the Greens and those
associates of Merkel who are friendly with Washington and have plans for higher party or
administrative posts after the Chancellor leaves.
These voices were at least heard. In an evening talk show on ZDF, German Foreign
Minister Heiko Maas made it clear that the shutdown of Nord Stream 2 could be one
response.
"We cannot say that since the sanctions do not work, then there is no need to introduce
any. Sometimes we have to put up with the risk of the consequences, thereby saying that we do
not want to live in a world without rules", Maas said.
Now Herr Maas, along with many members of the government and administration and the
Chancellor, lives in a world of very strange rules. Merkel's press secretary Seibert
reiterated that Germany will interact with Russia exclusively at the site of the Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), where all the documents allegedly have
already been sent.
The OPCW Technical Secretariat informed our permanent representative, Alexander
Shulgin, that Berlin had only sent a notification about Navalny's poisoning, a sheet of A4
paper, but there is still nothing that the experts could work on. But the Germans had to
formulate a response to the proposal of the Russian Prosecutor General's Office on exchange
of information: any information about the state of Navalny can be transferred to Russia only
with his permission.
This was the case in 2004. The Charité clinic then diagnosed the presidential
candidate of the Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin poisoning -- no one ever saw
documentary evidence. Yushchenko then for 4 years, while he was of interest he was to the
public, promised to show everything, but he never did.
This trick can be repeated again, the main thing is to find the answer to an urgent
task: to inflate the level of confrontation between Russia and Germany, and therefore the
entire West, in order to force the Russian authorities to be as cautious as possible in their
domestic and foreign policy, for example, in the Belarusian direction.
However, the fact that Nord Stream 2, for which the German federal government was ready
to support unto death, suddenly became an instrument of blackmail -- admit the poisoning,
otherwise we can close it down -- openly outraged German business and regional
elites.
"It seems that the verdict has already been given -- there are demands that
construction of the pipeline be stopped. I strongly oppose such measures", said Michael
Kretschmer, Prime Minister of Saxony.
"We have had absolutely trusting cooperation with Russia in the energy sector for 50
years. And even in the most difficult political times, which were probably even more
difficult during the Cold War, we managed to maintain this trust", emphasized Michael Harms,
executive director of Eastern Committee of the German economy.
Even a true transatlantist, the president of the Munich Security Conference Wolfgang
Ischinger, stood up for Nord Stream 2 (and Denmark had joined the renewed US incitement
against it the day before).
Political games will not pass themselves of as force majeure. Investors will go to the
German government for their money. Here you need to think ten times, because along with the
demands of multibillion-dollar compensation, there will definitely be asked unpleasant
questions about the reasons that made the German authorities abandon a project that was
profitable to all sides. So you can go to Navalny's analyses. In a normal court, bureaucratic
excuses will not work. And, by the way, in Germany there are politician-lawyers who can
professionally draw up a claim and conduct a case.
"I want to investigate this. One of the developers of Novichok is in the US. It is
known that many special services have this poison. Of course, the Russian have it as well,
but if Putin did it, then why give Navalny to Germany? So that we can establish all this
here? A crime must have some logic", says Bundestag deputy Gregor Gizi.
The logic that we now see is somehow not German. One gets the impression that the
compassion and humanism of the German politician, brought up on the lessons of the past, are
now being tried out by smart and cynical people who know how to competently fabricate,
substitute and cover their tracks. And not too far away, we already had Britain.
At the end of May 2003, the BBC released material that Prime Minister Blair and his
cabinet had made a decision to enter the war in Iraq based on falsified intelligence. The
person who passed on this information to reporters was David Kelly, a leading chemical
weapons specialist at the British Department of Defence. His speech at the parliamentary
hearings threatened the prime minister, the military and the secret services with big
problems, Hiwever, on July 18, 2003, Kelly was found dead in the woods near his home.
Suicide, the investigation stated, but in 2007, a group of parliamentarians conducted an
unofficial investigation -- there were no legal consequences, but now all British people know
that Kelly was murdered in cold blood.
In 2015, Blair was forced to admit that he lied to citizens about Iraq, and escaped
trial only because no one wanted to get involved with it. Nevertheless, Blair has gone down
in history with this lie. And history is important to remember in order to do it right.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov calls on the Germans to leave emotions and turn on
their brains.
"I hope that these absurd actions will be stopped and Germany, at least for the sake of
the reputation of German punctuality, will fulfill its obligations under the agreement with
the Russian Federation. Moreover, they are demanding an investigation from us, but it turns
out that all those who accompanied Navalny are slowly moving to Germany too. this is very
unpleasant and leads to serious thoughts. Therefore, it is in the interests of our German
colleagues to protect their reputation and provide all the necessary information that would
somehow shed light on their so far absolutely unfounded accusations", Lavrov said.
Another proposal has gone from Moscow to Berlin: to send a Russian investigation team
to Germany in order to jointly study the circumstances of the case, the victim of which is a
Russian citizen. So far, there is no reason to believe that Berlin will respond with
consent.
Some German politicians and almost all the SMS likes to moralize against Russia,
periodically recalling the Stalinist repressions and the GULAG. But now Germany itself
behaves like an investigator during interrogation in the dungeons of the NKVD. Confession is
the queen of proof.*
There are undeniable advantages to accusations for which no substantiation is offered
– as we saw with the Skripals, you can await public comment, identify where you went
wrong from scornful rejections of the narrative, and then modify it so that it makes more
sense.
In this case, people wonder why such a potent nerve agent did not fell Navalny instantly
like a poleaxed ox, before he ever left the terminal, instead of 40 minutes or so into the
flight. Ahhh but this, we later learn, was a specially-modified Novichok, engineered to be
slow-acting. Just what you want in a nerve agent. Hint – no, it isn't. Just like you
don't want it specially engineered to be 'persistent', like that chemical-warfare expert tit
for Bellingcat claimed was the reason the poison daubed on Skripal's doorknob did not wash
away in the rain and was still deadly weeks afterward. You want a nerve agent to quickly and
efficiently kill enemy troops caught in the open and unprotected, and then as quickly degrade
and disperse so your own forces can move in and occupy the objective. The last thing you want
is it hanging about for weeks, or being 'slow-acting' so those troops can come in and wax
your ass and then later fall down dead. One of the first casualties of these silly stories
must be that the agent is 'military grade'. The military would say, if you want to use that
useless shite, spread it yourself – we want nothing to do with it.
navalny Hi, this is Navalny. I miss you all 😍. I still can hardly do
anything, but yesterday I was able to breathe on my own all day. Generally myself. I did not
use any outside help, not even the simplest valve in my throat. I liked it very much. An
amazing, underestimated by many thing. Would totally recommend.
What, no tracheotomy scar?
Why aren't you dead, you wanker?
Thinking about thanking the Omsk doctors who "saved your life" after you had taken a dose
of salts in the aircraft shithouse?
I take it that the kiddie Navalnyites in the above Instagram are all Russian citizens and
part of the Bullshitter's entourage that turned up in Berlin, hot on the heels of their
comatose hero.
So how did they get the documentation that enabled them to leave the Mafia State and enter
Germany, the coronavirus shamdemic notwithstanding?
Yes, they are his children. Navalnaya clearly got permission for their son to travel to
Germany. His daughter has flown in from the USA.
However, the question still remains as regards those Navalnyites who rolled up in Germany
following their leader's private flight there: how did they get the appropriate documentation
to do so at such short notice, not to mention Pevchikh, who flew with the comatose Navalny to
Berlin -- and then vanished?.
Seibert was asked about this and said he knew nothing about her.
Ah, yes; that's a good point. I just assumed the hamsters were blathering from a distance,
as in Russia. I did not realize some of them had turned up in Germany, except for the
mysterious Masha.
I hope Germany offers residency to the Navalnys, and that they accept. Russia can't
really refuse to let him back in, he's a citizen. But as long as he is there he will cause
trouble, and he'll be recharged with all the PR he has received from this latest
caper.
But it is suggested that Russia is bargaining for his return; the story also expands
on Lavrov's recent statements, and introduces a villain in the woodpile I would not have
personally suspected: Poland.
I recall Lavrov querying the other day Pevchikh's presence in Germany, her refusal to
be interviewed by investigators in Omsk and how come she managed to fly to Germany with
Navalny? He also said that other supporters of Navalny had also turned up in
Germany.
I lay a pound to a pinch of shit that Pevchikh is a British agent.
British and other international toxicological experts say that without technical
reporting by the laboratory of the spectrometric composition of the chemical, and without
identifying the compound by the international naming protocol there is no evidence at
all;..
the US Army had recently manufactured its own Novichok types: "A230, A232 and A234 A232
has a CAS number of 2308498-31-7. A230 and A234 have no known CAS numbers."
####
I reckon Khordokovsky has a hand in this. He has the same moral compass as dead
Berezovsky. None. And he has refused to stick to agreements (keep out of politics). If the
British or someone else get fingered for this cunning plan , would they serve him up
on a silver platter? Almost certainly so.
We certainly did well to focus on Maria Pevchikh as soon as we discovered that in
addition to being the one who evaded questioning by Russian authorities by flying out to
Germany, she also had British residency. She certainly has become a "person of interest" and
could well be the major individual in the plot to incapacitate Navalny and use him to
pressure Germany over NSII and Russia over the Belarus unrest.
It is still unknown whether Pevchikh is a British citizen. I think she is and probably
must be, in fact, for if she is only a visa holder or an applicant for UK citizenship, she
could be told by the Home Office to go take a hike if it is proven that she was instrumental
in the poisoning plot.
When Berezovsky got cocky in the UK after a judge there had prevented his being forced to
leave Misty Albion because Berzovsky had persuaded him that were he to return to Mordor, he
would face an unfair trial and his life would be in danger -- the erstwhile "Godfather of the
Kremlin" had arrived in the with a 6-month visitor's visa -- he started bragging to the
"Guardian" that he was organizing with his chums still in the Evil Empire the overthrow of
the tyrant Putin.
The Home Secretary at the time was none other than "Jack" Straw -- another odious pile of
ordure -- who promptly summonsed Berezovsky to the Home Office for an official bollocking. He
was told that if, while resident in the UK, he continued to engage himself with the overthrow
of a foreign head of state, he was out.
Be that as it may, I am quite sure he was working with British state security, as was his
once favoured acolyte Litvinenko.
Litvinenko was poisoned. Berezovsky committed suicide -- they say.
Россия задала
ЕС девять
вопросов об
обвинениях в
ситуации с
Навальным
Постоянное
представительство
России при
Евросоюзе
указало на
ключевые
нестыковки в
версии об
отравлении
Алексея
Навального
15 сентября 2020
Russia has asked the EU nine questions about accusations in the situation with
Navalny
The Permanent Representative of Russia to the European Union has pointed out the key
inconsistencies in the version about the poisoning of Alexei Navalny
15 September 2020
In the eighth question, Russian diplomats drew attention to a bottle of water, on
which, according to Germany, traces of poison had been found: "Not a single surveillance
camera recorded how Navalny drank from a similar bottle at the Tomsk airport [before
departure]. from this bottle earlier or on board the plane, how did this bottle get to
Berlin? "
Ask Pevchikh! Only she is now probably undergoing debriefing in London at UK Secret
Intelligence Services HQ, 85 Albert Embankment.
Navalny, if indeed he was close to death, must now realize he was set up by one of his own
benefactors. What would be his next move? Going back to Russia would make the most sense as
the Russians may actually protect him from another show-assassination and he would have
freedom to prance around to his heart's content.
I don't believe he was ever 'close to death', rather that he was an active part of the
deception. He is a grifting idiot who puffs up like a toad upon being flattered. He could
never win power in Russia legitimately, as he is mostly a figure of contempt in Russia save
for the perennially-discontented children of the liberal elite and the few Americaphiles who
don't know enough to keep their heads down. I believe he played his role by taking something
that would nauseate him but not seriously hurt him, rolling about and screaming, and that the
introduction of the phony 'poison bottle' was with his full knowledge. I wish Russia would
just disown him and tell the Germans they can have him.
However, I could be wrong. We will know from the tone of his remarks when he feels he is
strong enough to once again assume his president-in-waiting role, and starts spouting off
about what happened to him. He is the most likely candidate to be selected to get the
water-bottle narrative back on track, so if he comes out with an explanation for how he drank
from the bottle somewhere there were no surveillance cameras, and noticed a sketchy-looking
guy in a leather jacket and a "Vote For Putin!" T-shirt standing nearby just before he drank,
it will be a pretty good indication that he is as full of shit as ever.
There was considerable risk involved in the deception. I doubt that Navalny went into
the deception willingly. There was a very real risk that he could have suffered some brain
damage going into the first coma and that's sure to compromise his health in the long term in
other ways.
More likely it seems a lot of the deception was planned behind Navalny's back and
people were waiting for an opportunity to carry it out. It may have been planned years ago
for someone else and then switched to Navalny once he was in the Omsk hospital. Julia
Navalnaya may have been pushed into demanding that Navalny be transferred to Berlin and while
the Omsk hospital doctors were stabilising him for the transfer, the deception then started
going into action in Germany.
Lavrov smelt a rat several days ago -- last week, I'm sure -- when he stated that
suspicions had been aroused by one of Navalny's gang refusing to answer investigators'
questions in Omsk and then scarpering off to Germany.
I'm quite sure the FSB already knew of Pevchikh's comings and goings between London
and Moscow (over 60 flights there and back I read somewhere) and her activities with the
Navalny organization.
Perhaps they allowed Navalny to leave for Germany -- with Pevchikh flying out with him, I
may add -- because they knew what was afoot and would later expose the Germans for liars, or
if not that, then for their falling to a sucker punch off the British secret service.
They certainly allowed Pevchikh to leave Russia: she didn't sneak on board Navalny's
private flight.
Just Pevchikh, note, not Navalnaya, who is not a British agent, I'm sure.
Certainly possible – as I say, we will know more from his blabber once he starts
giving interviews, which he lives to do. His tone will have changed considerably if he
believes his erstwhile chums in politics intended to martyr him. Otherwise I read his
expressed desire to return at once to Russia as simply remaining in character – the
selfless hero risking all for freedom and democracy.
I wonder how he will thank the doctors in Omsk for saving his life, as it is generally
acknowledged they did. He cannot go into transports of admiration for their professional
skills, because they claimed to have found no trace of poisoning in his samples. He faces the
choice, then, of simply passing over it without mention, or accusing the people who saved his
life of 'being part of the machine'. Doing either will certainly not increase his popularity
in Russia. And it makes no difference at all how popular he is in the west – something
the west seemingly cannot be taught.
Die Zeit сообщила о
предложении
США от ФРГ по
"Северному
потоку -- 2"
RT на русском, 16
сентября 2020
Die Zeit announced the proposal of the USA from Germany for the "Nord Stream –
2
RT in Russian, September 16, 2020
The German government has offered the United States a deal in exchange for Washington's
waiver of sanctions against Nord Stream 2.
This is reported by the newspaper Die Zeit, citing sources
It is noted that Berlin has expressed its readiness to invest up to € 1 billion in
the construction of two terminals in Germany for receiving liquefied natural gas from the
United States.
"In response, the United States will allow the unhindered completion and operation of
Nord Stream 2", TASS quotes the text of a letter from German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz,
which was sent on August 7 to the head of the US Treasury, Stephen Mnuchin.
In early August, US senators sent a letter to the operator of the German port of
Sassnitz calling for an end to work to support the construction of Nord Stream 2.
Very true about the term "loser" being a harsh insult for Americans. The "loser" tag
starts to be applied to kids in early grade school and only intensifies from that point. The
glorification of success (defined by the level of conspicuous consumption) further sharpens
the divide between losers and winners. Our "feel-good" stories are often about individuals
who were able to transform themselves from "losers" to "winners". American culture is
one-dimensional in that way.
Building an LNG terminal is one thing, buying US LNG is another thing. In addition, I
believe that Russia could provide LNG to Germany as well and likely at a substantially lower
price.
The US may settle for this gesture as it does hold the door open, however slightly, for
future developments to be leveraged by the US to force Germany to reduce or stop gas
purchases from Russia. Having the terminal in place could make a future change in suppliers
more feasible and faster but nevertheless representing an economic disaster for Germany. Lets
call it step 1 in Plan B.
On the other hand any diplomatic/economic success plays well in this presidential erection
year. So a) is it worth it?; b) can they reverse the decision the day after? I assume they
can have their cake and eat it as Brussels is mostly spineless. Borrell can squeal about
Russia, but that's because he can do f/k all about the USA's behavior, being spokeshole and
all
That's what people seem not to get – the decision would not ever be 'reversible'
once Nord Stream II is complete. That pipeline quad alone can carry all of Europe's gas
supply that it receives from Russia. None through Ukraine, not a whiff, if that is Moscow's
will, although the Russians have agreed to transit token amounts, which the Ukrainians say
are not enough to make the system's continued operation viable – without the large
volumes they are accustomed to handling, they will have to progressively begin shutting down,
bypassing and dismantling sections they can no longer afford to maintain.
So long as the pipeline's future remains in doubt, Uncle Sam can sell the philosophical
possibility of supplying Europe with large volumes of cheap LNG via tankers, made desirable
– although it will cost a little more, no getting around that – for political
reasons. Once Nord Stream II is complete, the reality of a reliable supply of cheap pipeline
gas would have to be countered with a concrete offer from the USA; this many cubic meters
times this many Euros. Any housewife can do a cost-benefit analysis at that level. Do you
want to pay more for American gas just because it comes from America? Well, let me think
about it – what are the benefits? Well, it comes from America! What, you mean, that's
it? There would be no possibility the Americans would use their status as a major energy
supplier as leverage to bring about economic or political changes in Europe that they
desired, would there? Well I can't guarantee that.
You know what? I'm okay with Russian gas, thanks just the same. Maybe I'll use the money I
save to buy a Ford – how's that?
Pathetic. After declaring forcefully that American extraterritorial sanctions are illegal
– which, technically, they are, only America has a right to threaten to limit European
trade in America if it wishes; although that, too is illegal under WTO rules – Germany
is now cowering and trying to 'make a deal'. With Trump, in case anyone missed that, whose
'Art of the Deal' consists of destroying the opponent until he is happy to have escaped with
his life, and will never publicly complain about a 'deal' which came out very much to his
disadvantage. Put another way, offering America a 'deal' only highlights that you believe you
are in a weak position, are looking for mercy, and are ripe for the plucking. Germany was
already planning to build the heaviest concentration of LNG terminals in Europe; a far better
strategy would have been to threaten to cancel them all if Uncle Sam did not back off. The
Americans are certainly smart enough to figure out – in about 2.5 seconds – that
more LNG terminals means diddly when Russia can also supply LNG far cheaper than the USA
because it has teensy transport costs by comparison, being much closer. Two more LNG
terminals buys America precisely zero advantage, but the willingness to 'deal' reveals
vulnerability. The only American response to rolling on your back to expose your belly is to
step on your head.
I swear, it is hard to recognize Germany as the country which once frightened the
world.
A Trump counter-offer might be a commitment from Germany to buy X amount of American LNG
at a locked-in price, said amount to be sufficient that extra Nord Stream capacity would not
be utilized. It depends on whether the Americans really think they can actually stop Nord
Stream II, because even that would ultimately be a loser strategy. Unless a term far into the
future were specified, the Americans know that once the pipeline is finished, their product
is no longer competitive and cannot ever be unless it is unprofitable to themselves. They
could satisfy themselves with gutting the Germans for a year or two (if they accepted), but
it would be short-term satisfaction at best. Might be enough to win Trump the election,
though.
But if Washington thinks it can actually halt Nord Stream II – with the
understanding that the Russians would probably give up after such a stinging second rebuke
– then the sky is the limit, and they will scornfully reject any other solution. The
one who stands to get hurt the most is Europe. But I don't think they realize
it.
The Borgias are history. Well, obviously, they ARE history. But now they have been
relegated to the Second Division/Championship (football joke) of Poisoners by Sergei Lavrov
and his chef de cuisine:
Oh look! The Navalnyites have shown a video, shot in Tomsk, of Navalny drinking from the
allegedly poisoned water bottle that earlier nobody had seen or made mention of before it
turned up in Berlin and was sent to the Bundeswehr lab.
Recall that his loud-mouth spokeswoman had from the very start insisted that Navalny had
been poisoned by laced-with-poison tea that he had drunk at Tomsk airport.
Change of story line -- as persistently happened in the Skripal fake.
Video Showing Water Bottle That 'Poisoned' Alexei Navalny Shared by His Team
17 September, 2020: 10:17
That Sputnik headline should read, I think, "shared with his team".
And if that is the case, why didn't his team also start howling and screaming and rolling
around on the deck some time later on board the Tomsk-Moscow flight?
Navalny's companions have reported that they took bottles from a hotel room in
Tomsk
Alexei Navalny's companions have said that a bottle of mineral water, on which German
experts had allegedly found traces of poison from the Novichok group, had been brought from a
hotel room in Tomsk.
On an Instagram, they have posted a video in which, according to them, an hour after
news of Navalny's deteriorating condition, they examine the room and seize all the items
which he had been able to touch.
On August 20, the aeroplane in which Navalny was flying urgently landed in Omsk, from
where the blogger was taken to hospital. On August 21, doctors announced that the main
diagnosis was metabolic disorders.
At the moment, Navalny is in Germany, where he has been taken out of an artificial
coma. German doctors announced that he had been poisoned with substances from the Novichok
group, but did not provide any relevant evidence.
So why didn't the Navalny hamsters, who dutifully sought out the poison bottle and most
certainly handled it, throw wobblers as did Navalny when performing what he thought were the
effects of nerve agent poisoning?
And whom did the hamsters hand the bottle to -- Navalnaya or Pevchikh? And who handled the
bottle after its arrival in Berlin and before the obliging Bundeswehr said it had been dosed
with the most lethal nerve agent (weapons grade) known to man?
Why isn't there a trail of stiffs from Tomsk to Berlin and beyond?
Who's going to believe this shite?
"Why, the whole world knows it's true!" will Imperial Plenipotentiary Pompeus Fattus Arsus
surely say.
One of the developers of Novichok, Leonid Rink, commented on reports that a bottle in
the Tomsk hotel where Alexei Navalny had stayed could [have been] Novichok
[contaminated] .
"This is a situation where no one would have been allowed to touch the bottle -- you
would have died if you had done so. If this had really been the case, then there would have
basically been a deceased person, and everyone who had carried this bottle without gloves and
protection would also have died", he told RIA Novosti.
Ah, but . . . Rink is forgetting that it was a special, delayed action Novichok made to
take effect on "Putin's Fiercest Critic" when he was on board the Tomsk-Moscow flight.
Rink's an old Soviet has-been and knows nothing about the latest developments in
diabolical weaponry that issues forth from secret Orc laboratories.
Maybe the cunning developers have produced a Novichok variant safe to those who have
sinned but fatal (or liable, at least, to provoke a severe tummy upset, occasionally) to the
purest of heart?
I like this idea of the special edition of Novichok with the delayed kick. Maybe we could
call it Brawndo and speculate that the poison only goes into action when it does because the
added electrolytes take time to work to release the poison.
Alexei Navalny's team immediately after his departure from Tomsk airport, went to the
hotel room in that city where he had spent the night, and packed all the items (including
water bottles) so as to deliver them for analysis (of course, not in Russia). A video about
this was posted on the oppositionist's Instagram.
Everything in this story is beautiful. Navalny's supporters were collecting "evidence"
on a case that had not yet happened -- but it was already supposed to have happened? Together
with them, there went a lawyer to the hotel -- he was also at the ready. But why were none of
the "trackers" hurt if on the "evidence", as is said, they found traces of the "Novichok"
military poison? And how did the "people of Navalny" end up in a room where cleaning up
should have been done after the guest's departure? There are other questions as well. Some of
them "KP" asked FSB reserve general Alexander Mikhailov .
And the person shown handling the bottle is wearing gloves – they made sure to show
that. But as others have pointed out, this was well before anyone knew 'an attempt had been
made on the Opposition Leader's life'. What, all Lyosha's shit was still in his hotel room,
towels on the floor, the next day, after he checked out? Pretty crappy service in those
Russian hotels. He didn't even leave Russia for several days, and the first suggestions he
had been poisoned came from his 'press agent', who claimed he had been poisoned with tea at
the airport.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sergei Yerofeyev, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, has spoken about
this.
According to Yerofeyev, Navalny has been nominated for the prize by "a number of
professors from recognized universities who deal with Russia". He did not give specific
names, but noted that there are "great people" amongst the scientists who have nominated
Navalny.
A professor of any university in the world can nominate a candidate for the Nobel Peace
Prize: there are no specific requirements for a candidate. In addition, members of national
governments and parliaments, heads of state and some other categories of persons can nominate
candidates.
The oppositionist will have to fight for the main prize of the planet with venerable
rivals.
This is, first of all, US President Donald Trump, who was nominated by Christian
Tubring-Jedde, a member of the Norwegian parliament from the far-right Libertarian Progress
Party. As the MP said in an interview with Fox News, Donald Trump should be awarded for his
role in concluding an agreement on the full normalization of relations between Israel and the
UAE.
And why not? O'Bummer was awarded the peace prize, wasn't he?
I wonder how the Kiev Post evaluates Navalny's position on the Crimea?
The status of the Crimea is a problem that a new democratic Russia will inherit from
its former government. The Russian position on this problem will be determined by the
recognition of the right of the citizens of the Crimea to determine their own destiny
-- Navalny
20!8
I say give it to him. Let him join the prestigious ranks of Obama, the OPCW, the EU.
I also propose starting a Nobel War Prize, to be awarded to whatever individual or
organization is responsible for the highest body count in a given year. Although that may be
redundant, considering that it would probably be given to the same people as the Peace
Prize.
Ha, ha!! And it all descends into farce, again. Navalny has arrived – he has gone
global, beyond his wildest dreams. The nothing from Wherever He Is From who could not even
break 5% in presidential election polling is now a major star, glittering in the western
firmament. As Saint Lily Tomlin once remarked, no matter how cynical you get, you can never
keep up.
All the west is going to be able to get out of this is the satisfaction of showing its ass
to the neo-Soviets, the way it does when it re-names the street the Russian Embassy is
– or was – located on after some prominent Russian dissident. Beavis and Butthead
level, at best.
That's it! This is a farewell article. A real goodbye to the topic. More precisely,
parting with Navalny as a topic. His political role has been played to the end. And even
lethal doses of Novichok have not caused a mass movement. Furgal's arrest caused an explosion
of civil consciousness in Khabarovsk. The poisoning of Navalny, sending him abroad, the
discovery of Novichok, official accusations from Germany did not cause any rally, no
procession, no movement. No excitement in civic consciousness has occurred and will never
happen.
New Documents Reveal Secret British Efforts To Arm, Assist And Propagandize 'Moderate
Rebels' In Syria
In November 2018 some anonymous people published a number of documents that had been
liberated from a clandestine British propaganda organization, the Integrity Initiative
.
The same group or person who revealed the Integrity Initiative papers has now
released several dozens of documents about another 'Strategic Communication' campaign run by
the British Foreign Office. The current release reveals a number of train and assist missions
for 'Syrian rebels' as well as propaganda operations run in Syria and globally on behalf of the
British government.
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 portrait 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.
The documents are not about the 'White Helmets' which were a separate British run Strategic
Communication campaign financed by various governments. While the operations described in the
new documents were coordinated with U.S. efforts they do not reference the CIA run campaigns in
Syria which included similar efforts at a cost of $1 billion per year.
The various projects and the detailed commercial offers to implement them from various
notorious companies are roughly described in the above two links. I will therefore refrain from
repeating that here. Some of the documents' content will surely be used in future Moon of
Alabama posts. But for now I will let you rummage through the stash.
Please let us know in the comments of the surprising bits that you might find.
Posted by b on September 18, 2020 at 15:51 UTC |
Permalink
Documents the "war crimes industry" of the UK, and others, as expressed in Libya and Syria.
Assad has indicated he will pursue reparations from the nations that have killed 400,000
citizens, destroyed or stolen his industrial infrastructure (whole factories broken down and
trucked into Turkey).
One reason why the US and UK and France want Assad dead is the tens of billions of dollars
they will have to pay the Syrian people for the genocidal war waged for a decade in order to
kill Assad and break Syria into pieces.
This confirms the UK has essentially kept the same military doctrine it adopted by necessity
in 1945, which is: attach itself to the USA, focus on intelligence, punch above your weight.
Ideologically, they rationalize that by attributing themselves the role of the cultured
province of the USA; "Greece to the USA's Rome".
The British were always fascinated with intelligence/paramilitary forces. In their vision,
it gives you (a nation) an air of sophistication, a civilizing aspect to the nation that
wages this kind of warfare.
After the Suez fiasco of 1956, the UK gave up direct interventions in the Middle East. It
now only intervenes there under the skirt of the USA. Of course, whenever they can, they do
that with their weapon of choice, which is intelligence. So, yeah, these documents don't
surprise me.
Question: I'll start with the hottest topic, Belarus. President of the Republic of Belarus
Alexander Lukashenko visited Bocharov Ruchei. Both sides have officially recognised that change
within the Union State is underway. This begs the question: What is this about? A common
currency, common army and common market? What will it be like?
Sergey Lavrov: It will be the way our countries decide. Work is underway. It relies on the
1999 Union Treaty. We understand that over 20 years have passed since then. That is why, a
couple of years ago, upon the decision of the two presidents, the governments of the Russian
Federation and the Republic of Belarus began to work on identifying the agreed-upon steps that
would make our integration fit current circumstances. Recently, at a meeting with Russian
journalists, President Lukashenko said that the situation had, of course, changed and we must
agree on ways to deepen integration from today's perspective.
The presidential election has taken place in Belarus. The situation there is tense, because
the opposition, backed by some of our Western colleagues, is trying to challenge the election
outcome, but I'm convinced that the situation will soon get back to normal, and the work to
promote integration processes will resume.
Everything that is written in the Union Treaty is now being analysed. Both sides have to
come to a common opinion about whether a particular provision of the Union Treaty is still
relevant, or needs to be revised. There are 31 roadmaps, and each one focuses on a specific
section of the Union Treaty. So, there's clearly a commitment to continue the reform, a fact
that was confirmed by the presidents during a recent telephone conversation. This is further
corroborated by the presidents' meeting in Sochi.
I would not want that country's neighbours, and our neighbours for that matter, including
Lithuania, for example, to try to impose their will on the Belarusian people and, in fact, to
manage the processes in which the opposition is unwittingly doing what's expected of it. I have
talked several times about Svetlana Tikhanovskaya's situation. Clearly, someone is putting
words in her mouth. She is now in the capital of Lithuania, which, like our Polish colleagues,
is strongly demanding a change of power in Belarus. You are aware that Lithuania declared Ms
Tikhanovskaya the leader of the Republic of Belarus, and Alexander Lukashenko was declared an
illegitimate president.
Ms Tikhanovskaya has made statements that give rise to many questions. She said she was
concerned that Russia and Belarus have close relations. The other day, she called on the
security and law-enforcement forces to side with the law. In her mind, this is a direct
invitation to breach the oath of office and, by and large, to commit high treason. This is
probably a criminal offense. So, those who provide her with a framework for her activities and
tell her what to say and what issues to raise should, of course, realise that they may be held
accountable for that.
Question: Commenting on the upcoming meeting of the presidents of Russia and Belarus in
Sochi, Tikhanovskaya said: "Whatever they agree on, these agreements will be illegitimate,
because the new state and the new leader will revise them." How can one work under such
circumstances?
Sergey Lavrov: She was also saying something like that when Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin
went to Belarus to meet with President Lukashenko and Prime Minister Golovchenko. She was
saying it then. Back then, the opposition was concerned about any more or less close ties
between our countries. This is despite the fact that early on during the crisis they claimed
that they in no way engaged in anti-Russia activities and wanted to be friends with the Russian
people. However, everyone could have seen the policy paper posted on Tikhanovskaya's website
during the few hours it was there. The opposition leaders removed it after realising they had
made a mistake sharing their goals and objectives with the public. These goals and objectives
included withdrawal from the CSTO, the EAEU and other integration associations that include
Russia, and drifting towards the EU and NATO, as well as the consistent banning of the Russian
language and the Belarusianisation of all aspects of life.
We are not against the Belarusian language, but when they take a cue from Ukraine, and when
the state language is used to ban a language spoken by the overwhelming majority of the
population, this already constitutes a hostile act and, in the case of Ukraine, an act that
violates its constitution. If a similar proposal is introduced into the Belarusian legal field,
it will violate the Constitution of Belarus, not to mention numerous conventions on the rights
of ethnic and language minorities, and much more.
I would like those who are rabidly turning the Belarusian opposition against Russia to
realise their share of responsibility, and the opposition themselves, including Svetlana
Tikhanovskaya and others – to find the courage to resist such rude and blatant
manipulation.
Question: If we are talking about manipulation, we certainly understand that it has many
faces and reflects on the international attitude towards Russia. Internationally, what are the
risks for us of supporting Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko? Don't you think 26 years
is enough? Maybe he has really served for too long?
Sergey Lavrov: The President of the Republic of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, did say it
might have been "too long." I believe he has proposed a very productive idea –
constitutional reform. He talked about this even before the election, and has reiterated the
proposal more than once since then. President of Russia Vladimir Putin supports this attitude.
As the Belarusian leader said, after constitutional reform, he will be ready to announce early
parliamentary and presidential elections. This proposal provides a framework where a national
dialogue will be entirely possible. But it is important that representatives of all groups of
Belarusian society to be involved in a constitutional reform process. This would ensure that
any reform is completely legitimate and understandable for all citizens. Now a few specific
proposals are needed concerning when, where and in what form this process can begin. I hope
that this will be done, because President Alexander Lukashenko has repeatedly reaffirmed
carrying out this initiative.
Question: Since we started talking about the international attitude towards Russia, let's go
over to our other partner – the United States. The elections in the US will take place
very soon. We are actively discussing this in Russia. When asked whether Russia was getting
ready for the elections in the US at the Paris forum last year, you replied: "Don't worry,
we'll resolve this problem." Now that the US elections are around the corner, I would like to
ask you whether you've resolved it.
Sergey Lavrov: Speaking seriously, of course we, like any other normal country that is
concerned about its interests and international security, are closely following the progress of
the election campaign in the US. There are many surprising things in it. Naturally, we see how
important the Russian issue is in this electoral process. The Democrats are doing all they can
to prove that Russia will exploit its hacker potential and play up to Donald Trump. We are
already being accused of promoting the idea that the Democrats will abuse the mail-in voting
option thereby prejudicing the unbiased nature of voting. I would like to note at this point
that mail-in voting has become a target of consistent attacks on behalf of President Trump
himself. Russia has nothing to do with this at all.
A week-long mail-in voting is an interesting subject in comparing election systems in
different countries. We have introduced three-day voting for governors and legislative assembly
deputies in some regions. You can see the strong criticism it is subjected to, inside Russia as
well. When the early voting in the US lasts for weeks, if not months, it is considered a model
of democracy. I don't see any criticism in this respect. In principle, we have long proposed
analysing election systems in the OSCE with a view to comparing best practices and reviewing
obviously obsolete arrangements. There have been instances in the US when, due to its
cumbersome and discriminatory election system, a nominee who received the majority of votes
could lose because in a national presidential election the voting is done through the Electoral
College process rather than directly by the people. There have been quite a few cases like
that. I once told former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in reply to her grievances
about our electoral system: "But look at your problem. Maybe you should try to correct this
discriminatory voting system?" She replied that it is discriminatory but they are used to it
and this is their problem, so I shouldn't bother.
When the United States accuses us of interference in some area of its public, political or
government life, we suggest discussing it to establish who is actually doing what. Since they
don't present any facts, we simply recite their Congressional acts. In 2014, they adopted an
act on supporting Ukraine, which directly instructed the Department of State to spend $20
million a year on support for Russian NGOs. We asked whether this didn't amount to
interference. We were told by the US National Security Council that in reality they support
democracy because we are wreaking chaos and pursuing authoritative and dictatorial trends
abroad when we interfere in domestic affairs whereas they bring democracy and prosperity. This
idea is deeply rooted in American mentality. The American elite has always considered its
country and nation exceptional and has not been shy to admit it.
I won't comment on the US election. This is US law and the US election system. Any comments
I make will be again interpreted as an attempt to interfere in their domestic affairs. I will
only say one thing that President Vladimir Putin has expressed many times, notably, that we
will respect any outcome of these elections and the will of the American people.
We realise that there will be no major changes in our relations either with the Democrats or
with the Republicans, as representatives of both parties loudly declare. However, there is hope
that common sense will prevail and no matter who becomes President, the new US Government and
administration will realise the need to cooperate with us in resolving very serious global
problems on which the international situation depends.
Question: You mentioned an example where voters can choose one president and the Electoral
College process, another. I even have that cover of Time magazine with Hillary Clinton and
congratulations, released during the election. It is a fairly well-known story, when they ran
this edition and then had to cancel it.
Sergey Lavrov: Even the President of France sent a telegramme, but then they immediately
recalled it.
And these people are now claiming that Alexander Lukashenko is an illegitimate
president.
Question: You mentioned NGOs. These people believe that NGOs in the Russian Federation
support democratic institutions, although it is no secret to anyone who has at least a basic
understanding of foreign and domestic policy that those NGOs act exclusively as institutions
that destabilise the situation in the country.
Sergey Lavrov: Not all of them.
Question: Can you tell us more about this?
Sergey Lavrov: We have adopted a series of laws – on public associations, on
non-profit organisations, on measures to protect people from human rights violations. There is
a set of laws that regulate the activities of non-government organisations on our territory,
both Russian and foreign ones.
Concepts have been introduced like "foreign agent," a practice we borrowed from "the world's
most successful democracy" – the United States. They argue that we borrowed a practice
from 1938 when the United States introduced the foreign agent concept to prevent Nazi ideology
from infiltrating from Germany. But whatever the reason they had to create the concept –
"foreign agent" – the Americans are still effectively using it, including in relation to
our organisations and citizens, to Chinese citizens, to the media.
In our law, foreign agent status, whatever they say about it, does not prevent an
organisation from operating on the territory of the Russian Federation. It just needs to
disclose its funding sources and be transparent about the resources it receives. And even that,
only if it is engaged in political activities. Initially, we introduced a requirement for these
organisations that receive funding from abroad and are involved in political projects to
initiate the disclosure process. But most of them didn't want to comply with the law, so it was
modified. Now this is done by the Russian Ministry of Justice.
Question: Do you think that NGOs are still soft power?
Sergey Lavrov: Of course. In Russia we have about 220,000 NGOs, out of which 180 have the
status of a foreign agent. It's a drop in the ocean. These are probably the organisations,
funded from abroad, that are more active than others in promoting in our public space ideas
that far from always correspond to Russian legislation.
There is also the notion of undesirable organisations. They are banned from working in the
Russian Federation. But there are only about 30 of them, no more.
Question: Speaking about our soft power, what is our concept? What do we offer the world?
What do you think the world should love us for? What is Russia's soft power policy all
about?
Sergey Lavrov: We want everything that has been created by nations and civilisations to be
respected. We believe nobody should impose any orders on anyone, so that nothing like what has
now happened in Hollywood takes place on a global scale. We think nobody should encroach on the
right of each nation to have its historical traditions and moral roots. And we see attempts to
encroach upon them.
If soft power is supposed to promote one's own culture, language and traditions, in exchange
for knowledge about the life of other nations and civilisations, then this is the approach that
the Russian Federation supports in every way.
The Americans define the term "soft power" as an attempt to influence the hearts and minds
of others politically. Their goal is not to promote their culture and language, but to change
the mood of the political class with a view to subsequent regime change. They are doing this on
a daily basis and don't even conceal it. They say everywhere that their mission is to bring
peace and democracy to all other countries.
Question: Almost any TV series out there shows the US president sitting in the Oval Office
saying he's the leader of the free world.
Sergey Lavrov: Not just TV series. Barack Obama has repeatedly stated that America is an
exceptional nation and should be seen as an example by the rest of the world. My colleague Mike
Pompeo recently said in the Czech Republic that they shouldn't let the Russians into the
nuclear power industry and should take the Russians off the list of companies that bid for
these projects. It was about the same in Hungary. He then went to Africa and was quite vocal
when he told the African countries not to do business with the Russians or the Chinese, because
they are trading with the African countries for selfish reasons, whereas the US is establishing
economic cooperation with them so they can prosper. This is a quote. It is articulated in a
very straightforward manner, much the same way they run their propaganda on television in an
unsophisticated broken language that the man in the street can relate to. So, brainwashing is
what America's soft power is known for.
Question: Not a single former Soviet republic has so far benefited from American soft
power.
Sergey Lavrov: Not only former Soviet republics. Take a look at any other region where the
Americans have effected a regime change.
Question: Libya, Syria. We stood for Syria.
Sergey Lavrov: Iraq, Libya. They tried in Syria, but failed. I hope things will be different
there. There's not a single country where the Americans changed the regime and declared victory
for democracy, like George W. Bush did on the deck of an aircraft carrier in Iraq in May 2003,
which is prosperous now. He said democracy had won in Iraq. It would be interesting to know
what the former US President thinks about the situation in Iraq today. But no one will,
probably, go back to this, because the days when presidents honestly admitted their mistakes
are gone.
Question: Here I am listening to you and wondering how many people care about this? Why is
it that no one understands this? Is this politics that is too far away from ordinary people who
are nevertheless behind it? Take Georgia or Ukraine. People are worse off now than before, and
despite this, this policy continues.
Will the Minsk agreements ever be implemented? Will the situation in southeastern Ukraine
ever be settled?
Returning to what we talked about. How independent is Ukraine in its foreign policy?
Sergey Lavrov: I don't think that under the current Ukrainian government, just like under
the previous president, we will see any progress in the implementation of the Minsk agreements,
if only because President Zelensky himself is saying so publicly, as does Deputy Prime Minister
Reznikov who is in charge of the Ukrainian settlement in the Contact Group. Foreign Minister of
Ukraine Kuleba is also saying this. They say there's a need for the Minsk agreements and they
cannot be broken, because these agreements (and accusing Russia of non-compliance) are the
foundation of the EU and the US policy in seeking to maintain the sanctions on Russia.
Nevertheless, such a distorted interpretation of the essence of the Minsk agreements, or rather
an attempt to blame everything on Russia, although Russia is never mentioned there, has stuck
in the minds of our European colleagues, including France and Germany, who, being co-sponsors
of the Minsk agreements along with us, the Ukrainians and Donbass, cannot but realise that the
Ukrainians are simply distorting their responsibilities, trying to distance themselves from
them and impose a different interpretation of the Minsk agreements. But even in this scenario,
the above individuals and former Ukrainian President Kravchuk, who now heads the Ukrainian
delegation to the Contact Group as part of the Minsk process, claim that the Minsk agreements
in their present form are impracticable and must be revised, turned upside down. Also, Donbass
must submit to the Ukrainian government and army before even thinking about conducting reforms
in this part of Ukraine.
This fully contradicts the sequence of events outlined in the Minsk agreements whereby
restoring Ukrainian armed forces' control on the border with Russia is possible only after an
amnesty, agreeing on the special status of these territories, making this status part of the
Ukrainian Constitution and holding elections there. Now they propose giving back the part of
Donbass that "rebelled" against the anti-constitutional coup to those who declared these people
terrorists and launched an "anti-terrorist operation" against them, which they later renamed a
Joint Forces Operation (but this does not change the idea behind it), and whom they still
consider terrorists. Although everyone remembers perfectly well that in 2014 no one from
Donbass or other parts of Ukraine that rejected the anti-constitutional coup attacked the
putschists and the areas that immediately fell under the control of the politicians behind the
coup. On the contrary, Alexander Turchinov, Arseniy Yatsenyuk and others like them attacked
these areas. The guilt of the people living there was solely in them saying, "You committed a
crime against the state, we do not want to follow your rules, let us figure out our own future
and see what you will do next." There's not a single example that would corroborate the fact
that they engaged in terrorism. It was the Ukrainian state that engaged in terrorism on their
territory, in particular, when they killed [Head of the Donetsk People's Republic] Alexander
Zakharchenko and a number of field commanders in Donbass. So, I am not optimistic about
this.
Question: So, we are looking at a dead end?
Sergey Lavrov: You know, we still have an undeniable argument which is the text of the Minsk
Agreements approved by the UN Security Council.
Question: But they tried to revise it?
Sergey Lavrov: No, they are just making statements to that effect. When they gather for a
Contact Group meeting in Minsk, they do their best to look constructive. The most recent
meeting ran into the Ukrainian delegation's attempts to pretend that nothing had happened. They
recently passed a law on local elections which will be held in a couple of months. It says that
elections in what are now called the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics will be held only
after the Ukrainian army takes control of the entire border and those who "committed criminal
offenses" are arrested and brought to justice even though the Minsk agreements provide for
amnesty without exemptions.
Question: When I'm asked about Crimea I recall the referendum. I was there at a closed
meeting in Davos that was attended by fairly well respected analysts from the US. They claimed
with absolute confidence that Crimea was being occupied. I reminded them about the referendum.
I was under the impression that these people either didn't want to see or didn't know how
people lived there, that they have made their choice. Returning to the previous question, I
think that nobody is interested in the opinion of the people.
Sergey Lavrov: No, honest politicians still exist. Many politicians, including European
ones, were in Crimea during the referendum. They were there not under the umbrella of some
international organisation but on their own because the OSCE and other international agencies
were controlled by our Western colleagues. Even if we had addressed them, the procedure for
coordinating the monitoring would have never ended.
Question: Just as in Belarus. As I see it, they were also invited but nobody came.
Sergey Lavrov: The OSCE refused to send representatives there. Now that the OSCE is offering
its services as a mediator, I completely understand Mr Lukashenko who says the OSCE lost its
chance. It could have sent observers and gained a first-hand impression of what was happening
there, and how the election was held. They arrogantly disregarded the invitation. We know that
the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) is practically wholly
controlled by NATO. We have repeatedly proposed that our nominees work there but they have not
been approved. This contradicts the principles of the OSCE. We will continue to seek a fairer
approach to the admission of members to the organisation, but I don't have much hope for this.
Former OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger made an effort with this for the past three
years but not everything depended on him – there is a large bloc of EU and NATO countries
that enjoy a mathematical majority and try to dictate their own rules. But this is a separate
issue.
Returning to Crimea, I have read a lot about this; let me give you two examples. One
concerns my relations with former US Secretary of State John Kerry. In April 2014, we met in
Geneva: me, John Kerry, EU High Representative Catherine Ashton and then Acting Foreign
Minister of Ukraine Andrey Deshchitsa. We compiled a one page document that was approved
unanimously. It read that we, the representatives of Russia, the US and the EU welcomed the
commitments of the Ukrainian authorities to carry out decentralisation of the country with the
participation of all the regions of Ukraine. This took place after the Crimean referendum.
Later, the Americans, the EU and of course Ukraine "forgot" about this document. John Kerry
told me at this meeting that everyone understood that Crimea was Russian, that the people
wanted to return, but that we held the referendum so quickly that it didn't fit into the
accepted standards of such events. He asked me to talk to President Vladimir Putin, organise
one more referendum, announce it in advance and invite international observers. He said he
would support their visit there, that the result would be the same but that we would be keeping
up appearances. I asked him why put on such shows if they understand that this was the
expression of the will of the people.
The second example concerns the recent statements by the EU and the European Parliament to
the effect that "the occupation" of Crimea is a crude violation of the world arrangement
established after the victory in World War II. But if this criterion is used to determine where
Crimea belongs, when the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic joined the UN after WWII in 1945,
Crimea did not belong to it. Crimea was part of the USSR. Later, Nikita Khrushchev took an
illegal action, which contradicted Soviet law, and this led to them having it. But we all
understood that this was a domestic political game as regards a Soviet republic that was the
home to Khrushchev and many of his associates.
Question: You have been Foreign Minister for 16 years now. This century's major foreign
policy challenges fell on your term in office. We faced sanctions, and we adapted to them and
coped with them. Germany said it obtained Alexey Navalny's test results. France and Sweden have
confirmed the presence of Novichok in them. Reportedly, we are now in for more sanctions. Do
you think the Navalny case can trigger new sanctions against Russia?
Sergey Lavrov: I agree with our political analysts who are convinced that if it were not for
Navalny, they would have come up with something else in order to impose more sanctions.
With regard to this situation, I think our Western partners have simply gone beyond decency
and reason. In essence, they are now demanding that we "confess." They are asking us: Don't you
believe what the German specialists from the Bundeswehr are saying? How is that possible? Their
findings have been confirmed by the French and the Swedes. You don't believe them, either?
It's a puzzling situation given that our Prosecutor General's Office filed an inquiry about
legal assistance on August 27 and hasn't received an answer yet. Nobody knows where the inquiry
has been for more than a week now. We were told it was at the German Foreign Ministry. The
German Foreign Ministry did not forward the request to the Ministry of Justice, which was our
Prosecutor General Office's ultimate addressee. Then, they said that it had been transferred to
the Berlin Prosecutor's Office, but they would not tell us anything without the consent of the
family. They are urging us to launch a criminal investigation.
We have our own laws, and we cannot take someone's word for it to open a criminal case.
Certain procedures must be followed. A pre-investigation probe initiated immediately after this
incident to consider the circumstances of the case is part of this procedure.
Some of our Western colleagues wrote that, as the German doctors discovered, it was "a sheer
miracle" that Mr Navalny survived. Allegedly, it was the notorious Novichok, but he survived
thanks to "lucky circumstances." What kind of lucky circumstances are we talking about? First,
the pilot immediately landed the plane; second, an ambulance was already waiting on the
airfield; and third, the doctors immediately started to provide help. This absolutely
impeccable behaviour of the pilots, doctors and ambulance crew is presented as "lucky
circumstances." That is, they even deny the possibility that we are acting as we should. This
sits deep in the minds of those who make up such stories.
Returning to the pre-investigation probe, everyone is fixated on a criminal case. If we had
opened a criminal case right away (we do not have legal grounds to do so yet, and that is why
the Prosecutor General's Office requested legal assistance from Germany on August 27), what
would have been done when it happened? They would have interviewed the pilot, the passengers
and the doctors. They would have found out what the doctors discovered when Navalny was taken
to the Omsk hospital, and what medications were used. They would have interviewed the people
who communicated with him. All of that was done. They interviewed the five individuals who
accompanied him and participated in the events preceding Navalny boarding the plane; they
interviewed the passengers who were waiting for a flight to Moscow in Tomsk and sat at the same
bar; they found out what they ordered and what he drank. The sixth person, a woman who
accompanied him, has fled, as you know. They say she was the one who gave the bottle to the
German lab. All this has been done. Even if all of that was referred to as a "criminal case,"
we couldn't have done more.
Our Western partners are looking down on us as if we have no right to question what they are
saying or their professionalism. If this is the case, it means that they dare to question the
professionalism of our doctors and investigators. Unfortunately, this position is reminiscent
of other times. Arrogance and a sense of infallibility have already been observed in Europe,
and that led to very regrettable consequences.
Question: How would you describe this policy of confrontation? When did it start (I mean
during your term of office)? It's simply so stable at the moment that there seems no chance
that something might change in the future.
Sergey Lavrov: President of Russia Vladimir Putin has repeatedly spoken on this topic. I
think that the onset of this policy, this era of constant pressure on Russia began with the end
of a period that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time when the West believed it
had Russia there in its pocket – it ended, full stop. Unfortunately, the West does not
seem to be able to wrap its head around this, to accept that there is no alternative to
Russia's independent actions, both domestically and on the international arena. This is why,
unfortunately, this agony continues by inertia.
Having bad ties with any country have never given us any pleasure. We do not like making
such statements in which we sharply criticise the position of the West. We always try to find
compromises, but there are situations where it is hard not to come face to face with one
another directly or to avoid frank assessments of what our Western friends are up to.
I have read what our respected political scientists write who are well known in the West.
And I can say this idea is starting to surface ever stronger and more often – it is time
we stop measuring our actions with the yardsticks that the West offers us and to stop trying to
please the West at all costs. These are very serious people and they are making a serious
point. The fact that the West is prodding us to this way of thinking, willingly or unwillingly,
is obvious to me. Most likely, this is being done involuntarily. But it is a big mistake to
think that Russia will play by Western rules in any case – as big a mistake as like
approaching China with the same yardstick.
Question: Then I really have to ask you. We are going through digitalisation. I think when
you started your diplomatic career, you could not even have imagined that some post on Twitter
could affect the political situation in a country. Yet – I can see your smile – we
are living in a completely different world. Film stars can become presidents; Twitter,
Instagram, or Facebook can become drivers of political campaigns – that happened more
than once – and those campaigns can be successful. We are going through digitalisation,
and because of this, many unexpected people appear in international politics – unexpected
for you, at least. How do you think Russia's foreign policy will change in this context? Are we
ready for social media to be impacting our internal affairs? Is the Chinese scenario possible
in Russia, with most Western social media blocked to avoid their influence on the internal
affairs in that country?
Sergey Lavrov: Social media are already exerting great influence on our affairs. This is the
reality in the entire post-Soviet space and developing countries. The West, primarily the
United States, is vigorously using social media to promote their preferred agenda in just about
any state. This necessitates a new approach to ensuring the national security. We have been
doing this for a long time already.
As for regulating social media, everyone does it. You know that the digital giants in the
United States have been repeatedly caught introducing censorship, primarily against us, China
or other countries they dislike, shutting off information that comes from these places.
The internet is regulated by companies based in the United States, everyone knows that. In
fact, this situation has long made the overwhelming majority of countries want to do something
about it, considering the global nature of the internet and social media, to make sure that the
management processes are approved at a global level, become transparent and understandable. The
International Telecommunication Union, a specialised UN agency, has been out there for years.
Russia and a group of other co-sponsoring countries are promoting the need to regulate the
internet in such a way that everyone understands how it works and what principles govern it, in
this International Union. Now we can see how Mark Zuckerberg and other heads of large IT
companies are invited to the Congress and lectured there and asked to explain what they are
going to do. We can see this. But a situation where it will be understandable for everyone else
and, most importantly, where everyone is happy with it, still seems far away.
For many years, we have been promoting at the UN General Assembly an initiative to agree on
the rules of responsible behaviour of states in the sphere of international information
security. This initiative has already led to set up several working groups, which have
completed their mandate with reports. The last such report was reviewed last year and another
resolution was adopted. This time, it was not a narrow group of government experts, but a group
that includes all UN member states. It was planning to meet, but things slowed down due to the
coronavirus. The rules for responsible conduct in cyberspace are pending review by this group.
These rules were approved by the SCO, meaning they already reflect a fairly large part of the
world's population.
Our other initiative is not about the use of cyberspace for undermining someone's security;
it is about fighting crimes (pedophilia, pornography, theft) in cyberspace. This topic is being
considered by another UNGA committee. We are preparing a draft convention that will oblige all
states to suppress criminal activities in cyberspace.
Question: Do you think that the Foreign Ministry is active on this front? Would you like to
be more proactive in the digital dialogue? After all, we are still bound by ethics, and have
yet to understand whether we can cross the line or not. Elon Musk feels free to make any
statements no matter how ironic and makes headlines around the world, even though anything he
says has a direct bearing on his market cap. This is a shift in the ethics of behaviour. Do you
think that this is normal? Is this how it should be? Or maybe people still need to behave
professionally?
Sergey Lavrov: A diplomat can always use irony and a healthy dose of cynicism. In this
sense, there is no contradiction here. However, this does not mean that while making ironic
remarks on the surrounding developments or comments every once in a while (witty or not so
witty), you do not have to work on resolving legal matters related to internet governance. This
is what we are doing.
The Foreign Ministry has been at the source of these processes. We have been closely
coordinating our efforts on this front with the Security Council Office, and the Ministry of
Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media and other organisations. Russian delegations
taking part in talks include representatives from various agencies. Apart from multilateral
platforms such as the International Telecommunication Union, the UN General Assembly and the
OSCE, we are working on this subject in bilateral relations with our key partners.
We are most interested in working with our Western partners, since we have an understanding
on these issues with countries that share similar views. The Americans and Europeans evade
these talks under various pretexts. There seemed to be an opening in 2012 and 2013, but after
the government coup in Ukraine, they used it as a pretext to freeze this process. Today, there
are some signs that the United States and France are beginning to revive these contacts, but
our partners have been insufficiently active. What we want is professional dialogue so that
they can raise all their concerns and accusations and back them with specific facts. We stand
ready to answer all the concerns our partners may have, and will not fail to voice the concerns
we have. We have many of them.
During the recent visit by German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas to Russia, I handed him a list
containing dozens of incidents we have identified: attacks against our resources, with 70
percent of them targeting state resources of the Russian Federation, and originating on German
territory. He promised to provide an answer, but more than a month after our meeting we have
not seen it so far.
Question: Let me ask you about another important initiative by the Foreign Ministry. You
decided to amend regulations enabling people to be repatriated from abroad for free, and you
proposed subjecting the repatriation guarantee to the reimbursement of its cost to the budget.
Could you tell us, please, is this so expensive for the state to foot this bill?
Sergey Lavrov: Of course, these a substantial expenses. The resolution that provided for
offering free assistance was adopted back in 2010, and was intended for citizens who find
themselves in situations when their life is at risk. Imagine a Russian ambassador. Most of the
people ask for help because they have lost money, their passport and so on. There are very few
cases when an ambassador can actually say that a person is in a life-threatening situation and
his or her life is in danger. How can an ambassador take a decision of this kind? As long as I
remember, these cases can be counted on the fingers of my two hands since 2010, when an
ambassador had to take responsibility and there were grounds for offering this assistance. We
wanted to ensure that people can get help not only when facing an imminent danger (a dozen
cases in ten years do not cost all that much). There were many more cases when our nationals
found themselves in a difficult situation after losing money or passports. We decided to follow
the practices used abroad. Specifically, this means that we provide fee-based assistance. In
most cases, people travelling abroad can afford to reimburse the cost of a return ticket.
This practice is designed to prevent fraud, which remains an issue. We had cases when people
bought one-way tickets knowing that they will have to be repatriated.
Question: And with no return ticket, they go to the embassy?
Sergey Lavrov: Yes, after that they come to the embassy. For this reason, I believe that the
system we developed is much more convenient and comprehensive for dealing with the situations
Russians get into when travelling abroad, and when we have to step in to help them through our
foreign missions.
Question: Mr Lavrov, thank you for your time. As a Georgian, I really have to ask this.
Isn't it time to simplify the visa regime with Georgia? A second generation of Georgians has
now grown up that has never seen Russia. What do you think?
Sergey Lavrov: Georgians can travel to Russia – they just need to apply for a visa.
The list of grounds for obtaining a visa has been expanded. There are practically no
restrictions on visiting Russia, after obtaining a visa in the Interests Section for the
Russian Federation in Tbilisi or another Russian overseas agency.
As for visa-free travel, as you know, we were ready for this a year ago. We were actually a
few steps away from being ready to announce it when that incident happened with the Russian
Federal Assembly delegation to the International Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy,
where they were invited in the first place, seated in their chairs, and then violence was
almost used against them.
I am confident that our relations with Georgia will recover and improve. We can see new
Georgian politicians who are interested in this. For now, there are just small parties in the
ruling elites. But I believe our traditional historical closeness, and the mutual affinity
between our peoples will ultimately triumph. Provocateurs who are trying to prevent Georgia
from resuming normal relations with Russia will be put to shame.
They are trying to use Georgia the same way as Ukraine. In Ukraine, the IMF plays a huge
role. And the IMF recently decided that each tranche allocated to Ukraine would be
short-term.
Question: Microcredits.
Sergey Lavrov: Microcredits and a short leash that can always be pulled a little.
They are trying to use Georgia the same way. We have no interest in seeing this situation
continue. We did not start it and have never acted against the Georgian people. Everyone
remembers the 2008 events, how American instructors arrived there and trained the Georgian
army. The Americans were well aware of Mikheil Saakashvili's lack of restraint. He trampled on
all agreements and issued a criminal order.
We are talking about taking their word for it. There were many cases when we took their word
for it, but then it all boiled down to zilch. In 2003, Colin Powell, a test tube – that
was an academic version. An attack on Iraq followed. Many years later, Tony Blair admitted that
there had been no nuclear weapons in Iraq. There were many such stories. In 1999, the
aggression against Yugoslavia was triggered by the OSCE representative in the Balkans, US
diplomat William Walker, who visited the village of Racak, where they found thirty corpses, and
declared it genocide of the Albanian population. A special investigation by the International
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found they were military dressed in civilian clothes. But Mr
Walker loudly declared it was genocide. Washington immediately seized on the idea, and so did
London and other capitals. NATO launched an aggression against Yugoslavia.
After the end of the five-day military operation to enforce peace, the European Union
ordered a special report from a group of invited experts, including Swiss diplomat Heidi
Tagliavini. She was later involved in the Minsk process, and then she was asked to lead a group
of experts who investigated the outbreak of the military conflict in August 2008. The
conclusion was unambiguous. All this happened on the orders of Mikheil Saakashvili, and as for
his excuses that someone had provoked him, or someone had been waiting for him on the other
side of the tunnel, this was just raving.
Georgians are a wise nation. They love life, perhaps the same way and the same facets that
the peoples in the Russian Federation do. We will overcome the current abnormal situation and
restore normal relations between our states and people.
In addition, if you follow the Minister, follow up on this interview with Sputnik
Exclusive: Sergei Lavrov Talks About West's Historical Revisionism, US Election and Navalny
Case
Maria Pevchikh was among the group of six people who accompanied opposition figure and
anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny on the trip to Siberia that ended with his poisoning .
Now, the Transit Police Department for Russia's Siberian Federal District is claiming that Maria
Pevchikh -- or as they've mistakenly called her, "Marina" Pevchikh -- is refusing to testify.
The department is carrying out a preliminary inquiry into Navalny's hospitalization in Omsk
(Russian police officials have yet to open an actual case over the attack on Navalny).
"Pevchikh, one of [the people] who were with Navalny, [who] resides permanently in Great
Britain, avoided making a statement on August 20. According to the investigation, on August 22,
the citizen in question flew to Germany, as a result it wasn't possible to get a statement from
her. Her whereabouts are currently being established," transit police officials said in a
statement.
The other five people who accompanied Navalny have been questioned. This includes Vladlen
Los, Georgy Alburnov, and Ilya Pakhomov -- employees of Navalny's non-profit, the
Anti-Corruption Foundation, -- as well as his press secretary Kira Yarmysh and cameraman Pavel
Zelensky. The transit police are also looking to establish the whereabouts of other passengers
who were on the same flight from Tomsk to Moscow as Navalny.
Pro-Kremlin media accuse
Pevchikh of 'involvement in Navalny's poisoning'
On September 7, the pro-Kremlin outlet Pravda.ru reported, citing an anonymous
source, that Pevchikh accompanied Navalny on his trip to Siberia "on the instructions of FBK
director Vladimir Ashurkov ," who allegedly came in conflict with Navalny shortly beforehand,
over his decision to
dissolve the FBK . Pravda.ru said Pevchikh was "likely Navalny's poisoner," claiming
that she stayed in the same hotel room as him, but wasn't with him on the plane from Tomsk to
Moscow; instead, she drove to Novosibirsk and then flew from there to Omsk. In addition,
Pravda.ru called Pevchikh "a woman with an opaque life story and very interesting facts
in her biography."
Kremlin-linked catering magnate Evgeny Prigozhin also made
allegations about Pevchikh's possible involvement in Navalny's poisoning via statements from
the press service of his company, Concord (however, the company also claims that Navalny's
press secretary Kira Yarmysh was involved in poisoning him). The pro-government websites
Tsarygrad TV and Putin News made similar claims .
In fact, police officials made no
attempt to contact Maria Pevchikh
According to Meduza's research, Maria Pevchikh studied sociology at Moscow State
University and political science at the London School of Economics, concurrently. She has
worked for the FBK since 2011, and now leads the foundation's research department. Pevchikh
lives in London, but she travels to Russia often. Her job includes gathering materials and
writing scripts for the FBK's investigations.
Prior to Navalny's poisoning, Pevchikh was with him in Tomsk, where his team was filming new
video investigations. According to Meduza's research, all of the group members stayed in
separate rooms at the Xander Hotel. The investigation, Meduza found out, went relatively
smoothly.
When Navalny left Tomsk, a few of the group members stayed behind, including Maria Pevchikh.
After the news broke that Navalny had been poisoned, they all went to Omsk. Meduza found out
that Maria Pevchikh was allowed to leave Russia without any difficulties. Russia's law
enforcement agencies have made no attempt to contact her over the past two weeks, even though
her Russian phone is always on. She was never called in for questioning or interrogation, and
hasn't received a summons. Pevchikh told Meduza that she will be prepared to give detailed
comments at a later date.
Transit police officials plan to seek help from Germany
The Transit Police Department for Russia's Siberian Federal District reports that in
addition to questioning Navalny's companions, the preliminary investigation has established the
route he travelled, as well as the places he visited and stayed in Tomsk and the Tomsk Region.
This includes the Xander Hotel, the restaurant Velvet, a rental apartment, where Navalny's
supporters held a working meeting, and the Vienna Cafe in the Tomsk Airport. According to
police officials, these are the places where Navalny ate and drank, "including wine and
alcoholic cocktails."
Given
medical reports that Navalny has been brought out of his coma, the investigative unit of
the transit police is preparing a request for legal assistance from Germany. The request
includes an application to involve Russia's state investigators in the German investigation of
Navalny's case -- seeking in particular "the opportunity to ask clarifying and additional
questions while retrieving statements."
Russian police say they are searching for a woman who was with Alexey Navalny in Tomsk
before his alleged poisoning, last month. They claim 'Marina Pevchikh,' who left Russia after
refusing to answer police questions.
Investigators said on Friday morning that the woman left for Germany on August 22, when
Navalny was taken to Berlin for treatment at the request of his associates.
However, later the same day, Pevchikh herself apparently spoke and insisted that Russian law
enforcement officials had not tried to contact her, even though her Russian phone is always on.
She added that she was never summoned for interrogations and questioning, nor she did not
receive any summons.
The woman also clarified that her name is Maria, not Marina. She was speaking to Meduza, a
Western state-funded Russian language news site, based in Latvia.
Russian investigators are now looking into the events surrounding Navalny's illness, which
quickly left him incapacitated. The police have researched what he did in Tomsk, including who
he met, where he stayed, and where he ate. The investigation led authorities to Pevchikh, who
they claim previously refused to answer police questions.
"To date, five out of the six citizens who accompanied Navalny during the trip have been
interviewed: Vladlen Los, Georgy Alburov, Ilya Pakhomov, Kira Yarmysh, and Pavel Zelensky,"
said the police department's statement. "Marina Pevchikh, who was with Navalny and
permanently resides in Britain, refused to give her side of the story on August 20. According
to the investigation, on August 22, she flew to Germany, and therefore it was not possible to
question her."
The police note that the investigation is ongoing, and they are also establishing the
whereabouts of passengers who flew on the plane with Navalny.
In response to the incident, officials from NATO and the European Union have demanded that
Russia conducts a "full and transparent" investigation. Despite no conclusion yet being
reached, some have called for Moscow to be sanctioned over the alleged poisoning, which the
Kremlin has called "absurd."
On Wednesday, Russia's Foreign Ministry lodged a formal protest with Germany's ambassador,
calling suggestions of state involvement "unfounded."
Speaking at a press conference in Moscow on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
noted that Navalny's associates are now "slowly beginning to move to Germany," which, in
the context of the country's accusations against the Kremlin, is "very unpleasant."
"It is still in the interests of our German colleagues to protect their reputation and
provide all the necessary information that would somehow shed light on the so-far unfounded
accusations," Lavrov said.
On August 20, Navalny was taken ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. Following an emergency
landing in Omsk, a Siberian city 2,000km east of the capital, he was taken to a local hospital.
The opposition figure was flown to Berlin's Charite clinic two days later, where he is
currently being treated. According to German doctors, Navalny was poisoned with a variant of
the nerve agent family 'Novichok'.
"... Furthermore, Navalny had been in the Charité clinic for a week before it was announced that he had been poisoned by so-called Novichok, and only then after his test samples had been sent from Berlin to the Bundeswehr laboratory in Munich, which declared that "Novichok" had. been found. ..."
"... All this is being done with the objective of driving a wedge between Russia and Germany. And it is succeeding, from the tone set by Lavrov. ..."
"... I do not doubt the French and Swedish found Novichok or whatever the stuff is in Navalny's blood sample; they were meant to find it. That's quite a different thing from finding Navalny was poisoned with it. They have probably tested the bottle, and a blood sample given to them. But if Navalny was actually poisoned with a deadly nerve agent, he should be dead instead of up and about and feeling peckish. ..."
"... I would not be surprised if the Spiez laboratory that tested samples of the Skripals' blood in 2018 had not been asked to test Navalny's blood samples 'cos as any fule knows , that place's computers are chock full of Russian hackers nosing around all their databases, and Russian spies are everywhere in the building, hiding in the ceilings and cupboards and beneath the floorboards they might even be hiding in the kitchen rubbish bins or the incinerator ..."
"... Navalny drank something shitty in the Tomsk-Moscow aircraft toilet, then he performed his dramatics outside the toilet for all to behold, and the "Novichok" contaminated bottle was given to Navalnaya by Pevchikh en route to Berlin. ..."
"... The fundamental thing about this false flag is that the Doctors in Omsk saved Navalnys life. They treated him and ensured that he lived, So the samples the Russian doctors took and their analysis to find a cure for Navlany are the most important factor in all this. They found no evidence of poisoning. German doctors who came to Omsk acknowledged this at the time and discussions were held. ..."
"... Pevchikh attracted attention by the fact that she had flown to Russia from Great Britain for Navalny's "tour", and as soon as the blogger was poisoned, she immediately left the country on the same flight that took Alexey to Germany. By the way, even the blogger's wife was not allowed on board that flight, yet Pevchikh was allowed to do so. She was with him all the way. ..."
French, Swedish labs confirm Navalny poisoned with Novichok
Specialist laboratories in France and Sweden have independently confirmed findings that
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a chemical agent from the Novichok group,
the German government has said.
Now how about testing the samples of Navalny's blood and tissue that were used in
Omsk?
Chain of possession of samples?
Something added to samples between Omsk and Berlin?
No samples from Russia have been tested in Europe, samples that were tested in Omsk by US
manufactured, state of the art spectroscopy apparatus.
Furthermore, Navalny had been in the Charité clinic for a week before it was
announced that he had been poisoned by so-called Novichok, and only then after his test
samples had been sent from Berlin to the Bundeswehr laboratory in Munich, which declared that
"Novichok" had. been found.
And during that long wait for the German findings, total silence from the Navalnyites,
who, when Navalny was in the Omsk hospital, were howling and screaming for an immediate
statement from doctors there about what had "poisoned" their heroic leader.
All this is being done with the objective of driving a wedge between Russia and
Germany. And it is succeeding, from the tone set by Lavrov.
I do not doubt the French and Swedish found Novichok or whatever the stuff is in
Navalny's blood sample; they were meant to find it. That's quite a different thing from
finding Navalny was poisoned with it. They have probably tested the bottle, and a blood
sample given to them. But if Navalny was actually poisoned with a deadly nerve agent, he
should be dead instead of up and about and feeling peckish.
I suppose we'll never know what these specialist labs in France and Sweden are, we'll just
have to take the German government's word that it sent samples of Navalny's blood to these
and possibly other labs to test.
I would not be surprised if the Spiez laboratory that tested samples of the Skripals'
blood in 2018 had not been asked to test Navalny's blood samples
'cos as any fule knows , that place's computers are chock full of Russian hackers nosing
around all their databases, and Russian spies are everywhere in the building, hiding in the
ceilings and cupboards and beneath the floorboards they might even be hiding in the kitchen
rubbish bins or the incinerator
Navalny drank something shitty in the Tomsk-Moscow aircraft toilet, then he performed
his dramatics outside the toilet for all to behold, and the "Novichok" contaminated bottle
was given to Navalnaya by Pevchikh en route to Berlin.
It will be interesting to learn full details of the chain of transmission of the
"deadly-ish" bottle from its last handling by an agent of the Russian state onwards. If the
bottle is to play the central role demanded by the "martyr"'s present narrative, then the
transfer of custody thereof has to be evident and indisputable. Moreover, the transmission of
the bottle to German hands needs to have a rational explanation including such minor issues
as why the Russian authorities didn't seize it as evidence or confiscate it at the security
checkpoints?
The fundamental thing about this false flag is that the Doctors in Omsk saved Navalnys
life. They treated him and ensured that he lived, So the samples the Russian doctors took and
their analysis to find a cure for Navlany are the most important factor in all this. They
found no evidence of poisoning. German doctors who came to Omsk acknowledged this at the time
and discussions were held.
Germany did not play any part in saving his life they just brought him out of the induced
coma. Whatever happened in that Clinic and after wards is all unclear and lacks transparency.
PS. France and Sweden can only say the samples they were given had "poison".
Very many people die every day of poisoning. On death certificates one often sees the term
"septicaemia" as cause of death. That's what it said on my father's death certificate.
Septicaemia is commonly called "blood poisoning".
My unfortunate father was not poisoned by anyone: his body poisoned him. He had
cancer.
And this what the the Germans etc. at first said: they found poison in body.
This has been taken as his having been poisoned by one someone using a poison and this
poison is "Novichok".
Macron has said today that somebody had attempted to murder Navalny.
Because he was a "threat" to the "Kremlin Party" and Putin in particular?
Macron and the BBC, CNN, Fox News etc. should take a look at the Russian election results
now being announced.
I think it's actually called "Chain of Custody", and refers to the traceability of every
time a piece of evidence was handled by a different person, how it was sealed against
tampering, and so forth.
"Custody" is a loaded, legal term which the supporters of the "martyr" should be wary of
using, Mark.
If the bottle was suspected by one or more of Navalny's companions when still in Russian
territory of having contained a toxic substance then it ought to have been transmitted to the
custody of the appropriate Russian authorities. Reasonable safeguards such as video recording
the handover could be taken. Thereafter a "chain of custody" of potential evidence can follow
to provide a Court – those pesky places that the shit-smearers would run a mile from
– to assess (test, prove if you prefer) the quality of the evidence and the reliability
of the chain of custody thereof.
The allegations of poisoning have been enabled by the deliberate withholding of "evidence"
from the Russian investigators. Those who did not cooperate with the Russian authorities have
been given so many free passes on the basis of their being plucky Scooby Doo style kids that
I half-expect VVP to mumble about "getting away with it except for those pesky kids". The
cartoonish level of the entire affair and the contempt this narrative displays towards media
consumers in "The West" is dangerous. When all are held to the same standards progress will
be made.
To revert to the "chain of custody" briefly: let's hold the feet of the plucky kids to the
fire of legal process and find out the truth about the "magic bottle" and its amazing journey
to the West. I read recently that in the aftermath of the fall of the Shah in 1979 many very
prosperous Iranians relocated to California. Among those were Zoroastrians who had time
enough and plenty to find digs for themselves and then to finalise the new home for the Holy
Fire which arrived by sea months later. Perhaps the Navalnyites have a similar story to
account for the miraculous appearance of The Bottle in Germany.
From the Orc Blogosphere, so it will be fake, unlike squeaky clean Western MSM and its
open sources:
Pevchikh attracted attention by the fact that she had flown to Russia from Great
Britain for Navalny's "tour", and as soon as the blogger was poisoned, she immediately left
the country on the same flight that took Alexey to Germany. By the way, even the blogger's
wife was not allowed on board that flight, yet Pevchikh was allowed to do so. She was with
him all the way.
According to statements made by German doctors, the poison was found on Navalny's
underwear and on the neck of a bottle. Maybe you are still just thinking about this bottle,
but only a few had access to Alexey's underwear, apart from people who were staying with him:
Pevchikh, for example.
She organized Navalny's meetings with politicians from other countries to discuss the
assistance that the West is ready to provide the blogger with, provided him with exclusive
information and could even play the role of Alexey's "curator" from the West.
As soon as Navalny began to lose popularity, the West could well have decided to take
extreme measures and make a "holy sacrifice" out of Alexey.
He was taken out of a coma. It seems as though he remembers something and can speak,
without suffering any consequences. But will he return to Russia? Or will we never see him
again? Good question.
But one thing is clear for sure, if he returns to the country -- it will already be a
completely different story and a completely different game.
Source:
Кажется,в "деле
Навального"
появился
подозреваемый |
Политические
заметки |
Яндекс Дзен
It seems that a suspect has appeared in the "Navalny case" | Political Notes | Yandex
Zen
In short, Lavrov has demanded that the Germans present evidence for their accusations.
There is none so far.
They have evidence they insist -- "undeniable results from the Bundeswehr -- but they
won't show the data that the Bundeswehr states has given "undeniable" confirmation that
Navalny was poisoned with something that the Western MSM and governments call "Novichok".
I mean, there is a difference between data and the interpretation thereof.
The Germans persistently refuse to present the data that they allege to have, but present
an interpretation of said data as given by the Bundeswehr laboratory.
The ancients interpreted the data of the heavens that they had in the belief that the
earth was the centre of all things and later, this interpretation was based on the belief in
what is written in "Holy Scripture", which they believed was the word of something they
called "god", which had created the All.
The Western interpretation of the data that they say they have concerning analyses of
Navalny's medical tests taken in Germany is based on the belief that the Russians are wont to
use something that the West calls "Novichok" in order to eliminate "dissidents" in the
Russian "regime" and journalists and "leaders of the opposition" there in "Putin's Mafia
State" who dare to criticize the Russian "tyrant".
'In the early stage, you're a young crusader and you write an exposé story about
the powers that be, and you bring it to your editor and the editor says: "No, kill it. We
can't touch that. Too hot."
'Stage two: You get an idea for the story, but you don't write it and you check with
the editor first and he says: "No, won't fly. No, I think the old man won't like it. Don't do
that, he has a lot of friends in there and that might get messy."
'Stage three: You get an idea for the story and you yourself dismiss it as
silly.
'Stage four: You no longer get the idea for that kind of an exposé
story.
'And I would add a stage five: You then appear on panels, with media critics like me,
and you get very angry and indignant when we say that there are biases in the media and
you're not as free and independent as you think.'
Perhaps when the BBC's John Simpson finally retires, or Channel 4's Jon Snow, or ITV's
Mark Austin, or any of the other big beasts in the media jungle, they'll be brave and honest
enough to make similar cogent observations about journalism .
####
A lot more at the link.
I just came across this even though it is from May 2013. Very succinct points especially
as I regularly mention the west's five stages of grief and guesstimate where it is currently
at. As The Canary piece notes: As Chomsky noted, he didn't think journalists like Marr
"self-censor". But that:
if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're
sitting
####
Though to be honest I know a few journalists and they do privately rail against the
reporting of their own employers, ergo self-censorship = self-preservation and future
channels of advancement. They generally believe that they cannot change anything in a
meaningful way. This explains why quite a few quit the business to do something completely
different but often keep a toe in with a blog or infrequent item on current
affairs/whatever.
Continuing the Pevchikh saga, I saw on Russian TV yesterday a presser in Berlin, during
which a journalist asked spokesman for Merkel's government Seibert about that woman of
mystery.
Seibert just repeated that he knew nothing about such a woman. He was pressed further,
told that she had left Russia on board the same aircraft as Navalny had, arrived with him in
Berlin, and vanished.
Seibert was asked how come a Russian national was allowed entry into Germany without
appropriate documentation, especially during this CORONA-19 crisis. Seibert repeatedly acted
stumm .
Huh. Where's that famous 'pressure from the streets' from Navalny's hamsters to find out?
Or is nobody interested in hearing any possibility but 'Putin dunnit'? Not a peep from the
Navalny entourage, none of whom appear to be curious about the mysterious Masha.
Apparently you are just supposed to take Germany's word that There Is Nothing To See Here.
Just like they suddenly gained an immovable certainty that Navalny was poisoned with a new
version of Novichok which acts totally differently from that which poisoned the Skripals, yet
still bears the state seal of the Russian Federation and could not have been employed without
the Head Of State's approval. After three days or so of testing and suggesting he was
poisoned with something, but it might have been a cholinesterase inhibitor of some kind.
By Bryan MacDonald We are now expected to believe that Kremlin assassins used a new,
even more powerful, Novichok poison on Alexey Navalny, and his aides brought a water bottle
laced with it to Germany, but nobody suffered any side effects.
At this point, Western reporters covering the story are either completely high on the
Kool-Aid or they are going to intense lengths to suppress their skepticism, because so much of
the narrative simply doesn't add up.
The opposition figure's condition when he was first hospitalized, in Siberia, was clearly
very grave. He was placed into an induced coma and attached to a ventilator. The situation was
so serious that his wife and associates demanded he be moved abroad, to Germany, for treatment.
A request Russian authorities acquiesced to the following evening, after a tense day when the
doctors treating him in Omsk stated that they felt he was too unwell to travel, and his
associates alleged they were stalling.
Since Navalny's arrival in Berlin, things have become politicized, and there has been talk
of sanctions and other diplomatic and economic penalties being directed at Russia. Germany
insists that its experts
found traces of the extremely lethal Novichok poison in the activist's system. Angela Merkel
herself has more-or-less accused the Russian government of being behind what she has described
as an "attempted murder."
Moscow claims that Russian doctors didn't find any substance of that nature in their tests.
But Berlin has shot back by saying laboratories in France and Sweden have backed up its
assertions.
When it comes to Russia, the mainstream Western media operates in a self-contained pit of
rumor, fear, braggadocio, bulls**t, and propaganda. Thus its correspondents have treated the
Navalny case in a predictable fashion: Any pronouncements from the opposition figure's
associates, and the German government – even when contradictory or scarcely believable
– are treated like gospel truth, but anything Russian officials say is immediately
disparaged.
Before Thursday, the most blatant example of this came on September 9, when, to quote Max
Seddon, a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, "Germany apparently concluded (that)
Navalny was poisoned with a substance 'that the world did not know until this attack, but which
is more malicious and deadly than all known offshoots of the Novichok family,' and that Russian
security must have done it."
Now, given that the previous incarnation of Novichok was said to be eight times more potent
than VX (a deadly nerve agent famously used in the assassination of North Korean leader Kim
Jong-un's half brother Kim Jong-nam), if the new variant is even deadlier, how could Navalny
not only be alive, but, at that point, already out of his coma.
Less than a week later, he was able to get out of bed, and pose for photographs. Yet,
Western media has just accepted the German statement at face value and has failed to ask how
can a pronouncement like this be credible?
Now, we have an even stranger illustration. On Thursday Navalny's team posted a video to his
official Instagram, which alleges that traces of Novichok were found on a water bottle in his
Tomsk hotel room, where he stayed the night before the ill-fated flight to Moscow.
They described how, after learning that his plane had been forced to make an emergency
landing, his aides went to the room, which had not yet been cleaned. The video shows Navalny's
supporters "recording, describing, and packing" everything they found there. According
to the text, they took what they found to scientists in Germany.
While Western media has faithfully amplified the allegations, the reality is it's all pretty
hard to swallow. For the narrative to be true, we have to suspend disbelief, and imagine that
the Kremlin's crack assassins tried to kill Navalny by dousing the most deadly nerve agent
known to man on bottles in his hotel room. Then, they didn't even bother trying to cover up
their dastardly act by at least telling the hotel to have housekeeping clean up the place and
remove the receptacles?
Instead, they just left the evidence there, not at all worried that the Novichok might kill
the hotel staff or the next guest in the room, leading to the exposure of the secret agents
involved, and a local scandal. Also, how did the poisoners know which room Navalny would stay
in? It's common knowledge that his team never books under his name, so they could just as
easily have killed one of his aides.
Also, how did they time the Novichok to conveniently work while the activist was on his
flight, given they could not have known what time he'd take a swig of the water? Plus, what if
he never drank it at all, and instead gave it to a thirsty comrade? Perhaps the Kremlin
assassins stuck a label on it? 'For Alexei Anatolievich only! Please drink at precisely
(whatever) o'clock'.
What's more, you then have to imagine Navalny's team came back, with no protective gear,
beyond rubber gloves, and touched bottles laced with this killer substance, but suffered no
side effects? Not only this, but they managed to subsequently fly them out of the country,
presumably on commercial flights, during a pandemic when direct routes from Russia to Berlin
are closed? Without any care for the dangers of taking a potentially lethal substance on a
plane full of innocent passengers?
The story pushes beyond the normal bounds of believability, and stretches all credibility.
It's also another example of how bad and distorted Western reporting out of Moscow has become.
Much of it being little more than PR boosterism for those opposition figures who are viewed as
favourable to Western interests in Russia.
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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.
A 33-year-old young woman who recently flew in from London. On August 15 she celebrated
her birthday and then went with Navalny on the working trip. When the plane urgently landed
in Omsk for Navalny's hospitalization, the woman also remained on the ground in the 'Ibis
Siberia Omsk' hotel, waiting for Alexei to recover. She left from Russia to Britain on August
22.
Maria Konstantinovna Pevchikh (Мария
Константиновна
Певчих) born in 1987, Russian. In 2010 she graduated from
the sociological faculty of Moscow Lomonosov State University.
Lives in London. Fond of sports, trains under the program of "Navy Seals", an elite US
military unit, owns bookstores in the UK and Australia.
Have close ties with Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yevgeny Chichvarkin. Joined Navalny's
activity in 2009. At that time, she was 22-year-old and worked as an assistant to one of the
British parliamentarians.
It is alleged that the family and relatives do not know this woman.
They discovered that in Tomsk the blogger's company has booked seven rooms for four
people, Navalny himself spent the night in a different room that was recorded in his
name.
I always assumed that Trump was the candidate of MIC in 2016 elections, while Hillary was the
candidate of "Intelligence community." But it looks like US military is infected with desperados
like Mattis and Trump was unable fully please them despite all his efforts.
But it looks like US military is infected with desperados like Mattis and Trump was unable
fully please them despite all his efforts. Military desperados are not interested in how many
American they deprived of decent standard of living due to outside military expenses. All they
want is to dominate the word and maintain the "Full Spectrum Dominance" whatever it costs.
It is Trump's tortured relationship with the military that stands out the most, especially
as told through the eyes of former Secretary of Defense Jim 'Mad Dog' Mattis, a retired marine
general. It is clear that Bob Woodward spent hours speaking with Mattis -- the insights,
emotions and internal voice captured in the book show a level of intimacy that could only be
reached through in-depth interviews, and Woodward has a well-earned reputation for getting
people to speak to him.
The book makes it clear that Mattis viewed Trump as a threat to the US' standing as the
defender of a rules-based order -- built on the back of decades-old alliances -- that had been
in place since the end of the Second World War.
It also makes it clear that Mattis and the military officers he oversaw placed defending
this order above implementing the will of the American people, as expressed through the free
and fair election that elevated Donald Trump to the position of commander-in-chief. In short,
Mattis and his coterie of generals knew best, and when the president dared issue an order or
instruction that conflicted with their vision of how the world should work, they would do their
best to undermine this order, all the while confirming to the president that it was being
followed.
This trend was on display in Woodward's telling of Trump's efforts to forge better relations
with North Korea. At every turn, Mattis and his military commanders sought to isolate the
president from the reality on the ground, briefing him only on what they thought he needed to
know, and keeping him in the dark about what was really going on.
In a telling passage, Woodward takes us into the mind of Jim Mattis as he contemplates the
horrors of a nuclear war with North Korea, and the responsibility he believed he shouldered
when it came to making the hard decision as to whether nuclear weapons should be used or not.
Constitutionally, the decision was the president's alone to make, something Mattis begrudgingly
acknowledges. But in Mattis' world, he, as secretary of defense, would be the one who
influenced that decision.
Mattis, along with the other general officers described by Woodward, is clearly gripped with
what can only be described as the 'Military Messiah Syndrome'.
What defines this 'syndrome' is perhaps best captured in the words of Emma Sky, the female
peace activist-turned adviser to General Ray Odierno, the one-time commander of US forces in
Iraq. In a frank give-and-take captured by Ms. Sky in her book 'The Unravelling', Odierno spoke
of the value he placed on the military's willingness to defend "freedom" anywhere in the world.
" There is, " he said, " no one who understands more the importance of liberty and
freedom in all its forms than those who travel the world to defend it ."
Ms. Sky responded in typically direct fashion: " One day, I will have you admit that the
[Iraq] war was a bad idea, that the administration was led by a radical neocon program, that
the US's standing in the world has gone down greatly, and that we are far less safe than we
were before 9/11. "
Odierno would have nothing of it. " It will never happen while I'm the commander of
soldiers in Iraq ."
" To lead soldiers in battle ," Ms. Sky noted, " a commander had to believe in the
cause. " Left unsaid was the obvious: even if the cause was morally and intellectually
unsound.
his, more than anything, is the most dangerous thing about the 'Military Messiah Syndrome'
as captured by Bob Woodward -- the fact that the military is trapped in an inherited reality
divorced from the present, driven by precepts which have nothing to with what is, but rather by
what the military commanders believe should be. The unyielding notion that the US military is a
force for good becomes little more than meaningless drivel when juxtaposed with the reality
that the mission being executed is inherently wrong.
The 'Military Messiah Syndrome' lends itself to dishonesty and, worse, to self-delusion. It
is one thing to lie; it is another altogether to believe the lie as truth.
No single
general had the courage to tell Trump allegations against Syria were a hoax
The cruise missile attack on Syria in early April 2017 stands out as a case in point. The
attack was ordered in response to allegations that Syria had dropped a bomb containing the
sarin nerve agent on a town -- Khan Shaykhun -- that was controlled by Al-Qaeda-affiliated
Islamic militants.
Trump was led to believe that the 59 cruise missiles launched against Shayrat Airbase --
where the Su-22 aircraft alleged to have dropped the bombs were based -- destroyed Syria's
capability to carry out a similar attack in the future. When shown post-strike imagery in which
the runways were clearly untouched, Trump was outraged, lashing out at Secretary of Defense
Mattis in a conference call. " I can't believe you didn't destroy the runway !",
Woodward reports the president shouting.
" Mr. President ," Mattis responds in the text, " they would rebuild the runway in
24 hours, and it would have little effect on their ability to deploy weapons. We destroyed the
capability to deploy weapons " for months, Mattis said.
" That was the mission the president had approved, " Woodward writes, clearly
channeling Mattis, " and they had succeeded ."
The problem with this passage is that it is a lie. There is no doubt that Bob Woodward has
the audio tape of Jim Mattis saying these things. But none of it is true. Mattis knew it when
he spoke to Woodward, and Woodward knew it when he wrote the book.
There was no confirmed use of chemical weapons by Syria at Khan Shaykhun. Indeed, the
forensic evidence available about the attack points to the incident being a false flag effort
-- a successful one, it turns out -- on the part of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamists to
provoke a US military strike against Syria. No targets related to either the production,
storage or handling of chemical weapons were hit by the US cruise missiles, if for no other
reason than no such targets could exist if Syria did not possess and/or use a chemical weapon
against Khan Shaykhun.
Moreover, the US failed to produce a narrative of causality which provided some underlying
logic to the targets that were struck at Khan Shaykhun -- "Here is where the chemical weapons
were stored, here is where the chemical weapons were filled, here is where the chemical weapons
were loaded onto the aircraft." Instead, 59 cruise missiles struck empty aircraft hangars,
destroying derelict aircraft, and killing at least four Syrian soldiers and up to nine
civilians.
The next morning, the same Su-22 aircraft that were alleged to have bombed Khan Shaykhun
were once again taking off from Shayrat Air Base -- less than 24 hours after the US cruise
missiles struck that facility. President Trump had every reason to be outraged by the
results.
But the President should have been outraged by the processes behind the attack, where
military commanders, fully afflicted by 'Military Messiah Syndrome', offered up solutions that
solved nothing for problems that did not exist. Not a single general (or admiral) had the
courage to tell the president that the allegations against Syria were a hoax, and that a
military response was not only not needed, but would be singularly counterproductive.
But that's not how generals and admirals -- or colonels and lieutenant colonels -- are
wired. That kind of introspective honesty cannot happen while they are in command.
Bob Woodward knows this truth, but he chose not to give it a voice in his book, because to
do so would disrupt the pre-scripted narrative that he had constructed, around which he bent
and twisted the words of those he interviewed -- including the president and Jim Mattis. As
such, 'Rage' is, in effect, a lie built on a lie. It is one thing for politicians and those in
power to manipulate the truth to their advantage. It's something altogether different for
journalists to report something as true that they know to be a lie.
On the back cover of 'Rage', the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Robert Caro is quoted from
a speech he gave about Bob Woodward. " Bob Woodward ," Caro notes, " a great
reporter. What is a great reporter? Someone who never stops trying to get as close to the truth
as possible ."
After reading 'Rage', one cannot help but conclude the opposite -- that Bob Woodward has
written a volume which pointedly ignores the truth. Instead, he gives voice to a lie of his own
construct, predicated on the flawed accounts of sources inflicted with 'Military Messiah
Syndrome', whose words embrace a fantasy world populated by military members fulfilling
missions far removed from the common good of their fellow citizens -- and often at conflict
with the stated intent and instruction of the civilian leadership they ostensibly serve. In
doing so, Woodward is as complicit as the generals and former generals he quotes in misleading
the American public about issues of fundamental importance.
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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
Whichever construct you want to believe, the fact remains that US has continued to sow
instability around the world in the name of defending the liberty and freedom. Which brings
to the question how the world can continue to allow a superpower to dictate what's good or
bad for a sovereign country.
Johan le Roux Jewel Gyn 18 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 03:42 AM
The answer you seek is not in the US's proclaimed vision of 'democracy' ot 'rescuing
populations from the clutches of vile dictators.' They just say that to validate their
actions which in reality is using their military as a mercenary force to secure and steal the
resources of countries.
Joaquin Montano 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 04:57 PM
Bob Woodward was enshrined as a great, heroic like journalist by the Hollywood propaganda
machine, but reality is he is a US Security agent pretending to be a well informed/connected
journalist. And indeed, he is well informed/connected, since he was a Naval intelligence man,
part responsible of the demise of the Nixon administration when it fell out of grace with the
powerful elites, and the Washington Post being well connected with the CIA, the rest is
history. And as they say, once a CIA man, always a CIA man.
That is correct. Woodward is a Naval intelligence man. The elite in the US was not happy
about Nixon's foreign policy and his detante with the Soviet Union. Watergate was invented,
and Nixon had nothing to do with it. However, it brought him down, thank's to Woodward.
NoJustice Joaquin Montano 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:48 PM
But he also exposed Trump's lies about Covid-19.
lectrodectus 17 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:45 AM
Another first class article by ....Scott .. The book makes it clear that Mattis viewed Trump
as a threat to the Us' standing as the defender of a " rules -based order -built on the back
of decades -old alliances-that had been in place since the end of the second World War". It
also makes it clear that " Mattis and the Military officials he oversaw placed defending this
order above the implementing the will of the American People " These old Military Dinosaurs
simply can't let go of the past, unfortunately for the American people / the World I can't
see anything ever changing, it will be business as usual ie, war after War after War.
Jonny247364 lectrodectus 5 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:53 PM
Just because donny signs a dictact it does not equate to the will of the americian people.
The americian people did not ask donny to murder Assad.
neeon9 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:56 PM
"a threat to the US’ standing as the defender of a rules-based order –" Who made
that a thing? who voted for the US to be the policeman of the planet? and who said their
"rules" are right? I sure didn't, nor did anyone I know, even my american friends don't know
whose idea it was!
fezzie035fezzm 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:29 PM
It's interesting to note that every president since J.F.K. has got America into a military
conflict, or has turned a minor conflict into a major one. Trump is the exception. Trump
inherited conflicts (Afghanistan, Syria etc) but has not started a new one, and he has spent
his three years ending or winding down the conflicts he had inherited.
NoJustice fezzie035fezzm 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:34 PM
Trump increased military deployment to the Middle East. He increased military spending. He
had a foreign general assassinated. He had missiles fired into Syria. He vetoed a bill that
would limit his authority to wage war. Trump is not an exception.
T. Agee Kaye 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 05:59 PM
Good op ed. 'Rage is built on a lie' applies to many things.
E_Kaos T. Agee Kaye 7 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:46 PM
True, the beginning of a new narrative and the continuation of an old narrative.
PYCb988 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 07:25 PM
Something's amiss here. Mattis was openly telling the press that there was no evidence
against Assad. Just Google: Mattis Newsweek Assad.
erniedouglas 12 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:14 AM
What was Watergate? Even bet says there were tapes of a private relationship between Nixon
and BB Rebozo.
allan Kaplan 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:03 PM
Continuation of a highly organized and tightly controlled disinformation campaign to do one
singularly the most significant and historically one of the most illegal act of American
betrayal... overthrow American elections at any and all costs to install one of the most
deranged, demoralized sold out brain dead Biden and his equally brown nosing Harris only to
unseat a legally and democratically elected US president according to our Constitution! Will
their evil acts against America work? I doubt it! But at a price that America has never
before seen. Let's sit back and watch this Rose Bowl parade of America's dirtiest of the
dirty politics!
E_Kaos allan Kaplan 7 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:49 PM
"brown nosing harris", how apropos with the play on words.
Bill Spence allan Kaplan 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:29 PM
Both parties and their politicians are totally corrupt. Why would anyone support one side
over the other? Is that because you believe the promises and lies?
custos125 17 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:35 AM
Is there any evidence that both Mattis and Woodward knew that the allegations of a Syrian use
of chemical weapons by plane were not true, a false flag? On the assumption of this use, the
capacity to fly such attack and deploy such weapons was destroyed for some time. I recommend
reading of Rage, it is quite interesting, even if some people will not like it and try to
keep people away from the book.
E_Kaos custos125 7 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:58 PM
My observations were: 1 - where were the bomb fragments 2 - why use rusted gas cylinders 3 -
how do you attach a rusted gas cylinder to a plane 4 - were the rusted gas cylinders tossed
out of a plane 5 - how did the rusted gas cylinders land so close to each other My conclusion
- False Flag Incident
neeon9 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:58 PM
The is only one threat to peace in the world, and it's the US/Israeli M.I.C.. War mongering
children, who actually believe, against all reason, that they are the most worthy and
entitled race on earth! they are not. The US has been responsible for more misery in the
world than any other state, which isn't surprising given how many Nazi's were resettled there
by the Jews. They are also the only Ppl on the planet who think a nuclear war is winnable!
How strange is that!
NoJustice 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:22 PM
So everything is a lie because Woodward didn't mention that there was no evidence found that
linked the Syrian government to the chemical attack?
Strongbo50 6 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:58 PM
The left is firing up the Russian Interference narrative again, how Russia is trying to take
the election. The real truth is in plain sight, The main stream media is trying to deliver
Biden a win, along with google yahoo msn facebook and twitter. I say, come on Russia, if you
can help stem that tide of lies please Mr Putin help. That's a joke but the media is real.
And Woodward in his old age wants one more trophy on his mantle.
CuttySark 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 05:41 PM
Trump has become the great white whale. Seems like there are Ahab's everywhere willing to
shoot their hearts upon the beast to bring it down whatever the cost. I think it was this
kind of rage and attitude that got Adolf off to a good start.
NoJustice CuttySark 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 05:44 PM
He's an easy target because he keeps screwing up.
Gryphon_ 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:59 PM
The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. Never in my life have I seen a
newspaper that lies as much as the post. Bob Woodward works for the post.
The USA political establishment is seeking confirmation of its insanity using lies, more lies
then more lies. Democracy is dead in the USA and is replaced with perjury, violence,
nationwide corruption and full blown insanity. All politicians need the rope.
WakeUpGoyim 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 05:03 PM
During Obamas 2nd run for president (see YouTube) he openly said Russia was not hostile &
Mitt Romney said Russia was an enemy - Romney got hammed for saying this. Today if Trump says
Russia is Americas friend, the media then say he is an agent. People have short memories, or
so the media thinks so, actually most people do, most cant even remember why countries went
on lock-down.
NoJustice WakeUpGoyim 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 05:17 PM
No. He said Russia wasn't the number one threat.
apothqowejh 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:31 PM
The CIA was founded by the same fascists who tried to enlist Smedley Butler to overthrow FDR.
During the post-war period, they smuggled their ideological brethren out of Germany with
operation Paperclip. Their founding fathers included Prescott Bush, a Nazi, whose son and
grandson went on to become US Presidents. They have never stopped hating Russia, nor have
they ever stopped lying to the American Public.
FFII 2 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 06:45 PM
OMG.... Biden is a perfect candidate for Russia. Old, dumb and predictable. With a cart load
of corruption evidence from Ukraine sources, regarding his dealing with Poroshenko personaly
and his son with Ukrainian gas company, earning millions
___RICHLAND__ 2 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 07:00 PM
As an Australian i've seen Biden's handywork in Ukraine, trust me, the guy's an Expert in
Over-throwing an Elected Government"
frankfalseflag 49 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 08:52 PM
Did you know that the FBI takes its orders from the CIA?
mumbojumbo272 2 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 07:41 PM
Oh, Wray forced out of comfort zone following is ''gang'' being sub-poena by senate to divert
attention on Russia. Interesting !
Those clever and evil Russians are at the top of their game
again. For less then 20 millions dollars they dispose Hillary in 2016
and now intend to dispose Creepy Joe. Wait, is that this a valuable service to the
nation?
The collapse of neoliberalism forces the US neoliberal elite to deploy desperate measures to preserve the unity of the nation
and the US-controlled world neoliberal empire. Neo-McCarthyism in one of those dirty tricks. The pioneer in this dirty game was
Hillary, but now it is shared by both parties.
According to FBI director Christopher Wray you need to be Russian to
understand that Biden as a Presidential Candidate is DOA. And that decision of DNC to prop him
instead of Sanders or Warren was pretty idiotic, and was based on the power the neoliberal wing
(aka Clinton mafia) still holds within the Party. You have to be pretty delusional to believe
Biden has all his marbles.
And by "interference" he means reporting in the news and expressing
own opinion. Like in 2016 looks like FBI again crossed the line and had become the third
political party, which intends to be the kingmaker of the Presidential elections. So here's a
suggestion: call in UN observers to the elections.
Russian media influence is actually very easy to prove -- just ask yourself, do you trust
RT more than CNN? But if a person laugh every time Joe Biden talks and it has nothing to do
with Russia.
And if this nonsense again comes from the FBI Director, the legitimate question is "What
next?" The claim that Putin ordered the assassination of Abraham Lincoln?
Look at all those hapless intelligence agencies, helplessly watching Russian hackers
stealing election. But, wait a minute, we are talking about arguably the largest, best
equipped, best financed and most devious intelligence agencies on the Earth. So it is natural
to assume that people who want to steal the election are those who cry most loudly about the
Russian influence.
Actually If Russia really wanted to "sink" Biden all that it would need to do is noisily
support him openly. The rabid Russophobia would do the rest: Unfortunately most of of Americans
are spoon fed neoliberal propaganda and don't care much about if it's real or not. That reminds
me the USSR where the life of people was difficult enough not to pay attention to Communist
Party slogans and propaganda.
Notable quotes:
"... According to the FBI director, the Russians' primary goal seems to be not only to " sow divisiveness and discord ," but to trash Democratic nominee Joe Biden – along with " what the Russians see as a kind of anti-Russian establishment " – through social media, " use of proxies ," state-run media, and " online journals ." ..."
"... Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats even suggested Congress create another election integrity body to supervise the vote in November, apparently concerned the existing authorities – all 54 of them, one for each state plus four federal entities tasked with keeping meddlers, foreign and domestic, shut out – weren't enough. ..."
"... "Crowd pleasing claims" is spot on the money. Sounds like the FBI has been tasked to lay some groundwork for the "after party". He knows what he is doing. ..."
"... Nothing new from the man who was Comey's assistant AG when Comey was Deputy Attorney General. ..."
Russia is reprising its still-unproven 2016 election meddling efforts, this time targeting
Democratic challenger Joe Biden, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, who gave no
evidence to support his crowd-pleasing claims.
Wray told the House of Representatives that Russia is taking a " very active " role
in the 2020 US election, claiming Moscow " continues to try to influence our elections,
primarily through what we call malign foreign influence " during a Thursday hearing on
national security threats.
According to the FBI director, the Russians' primary goal seems to be not only to " sow
divisiveness and discord ," but to trash Democratic nominee Joe Biden – along with
" what the Russians see as a kind of anti-Russian establishment " – through
social media, " use of proxies ," state-run media, and " online journals ."
Wray contrasted 2020's alleged meddling with that of 2016, which he claimed involved "
an effort to target election infrastructure ," presenting no evidence to back up
either current or past claims – other than that the FBI or other intelligence agencies
had made the same claims in the past. There is no actual evidence that Russia interfered with
election infrastructure in 2016.
While four years of similarly flavored conspiracy theories blaming Russia for Donald
Trump's 2016 win have come up empty-handed, the paucity of real-world evidence for 'Russian
meddling' has not stopped Wray and other US intel officials from hyping it up as a major
threat to the integrity of the democratic process.
The National Counterintelligence and Security Center suggested last month that, while
Russia would interfere in the election in favor of Trump, China and Iran would meddle on
behalf of Biden – implying Americans couldn't vote at all without doing the bidding of
a foreign nation.
Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats even suggested Congress create another
election integrity body to supervise the vote in November, apparently concerned the existing
authorities – all 54 of them, one for each state plus four federal entities tasked with
keeping meddlers, foreign and domestic, shut out – weren't enough.
TWOhand 5 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 03:49 PM
"Crowd pleasing claims" is spot on the money. Sounds like the FBI has been tasked to lay
some groundwork for the "after party". He knows what he is doing.
danko79 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:22 PM
Can't feel anything but sympathy for those that are so easily influenced. If/when Biden
loses, perhaps blaming his lack of ability to string a few words together might be more
relevant than any kind of imaginary foreign interference.
Terry Ross 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:43 PM
Nothing new from the man who was Comey's assistant AG when Comey was Deputy Attorney General. Wray made it clear
when sworn in for position of FBI head that he believed Russia had interfered to help Trump win 2016 election. The only
question that remains is why Trump picked him for the job.
"... The CIA was founded by the same fascists who tried to enlist Smedley Butler to overthrow FDR. During the post-war period, they smuggled their ideological brethren out of Germany with operation Paperclip. Their founding fathers included Prescott Bush, a Nazi, whose son and grandson went on to become US Presidents. ..."
The CIA was founded by the same fascists who tried to enlist Smedley Butler to overthrow FDR.
During the post-war period, they smuggled their ideological brethren out of Germany with
operation Paperclip. Their founding fathers included Prescott Bush, a Nazi, whose son and
grandson went on to become US Presidents.
They have never stopped hating Russia, nor have
they ever stopped lying to the American Public.
Is this a preparation for immigration with important political side effect? After all Navalny
is former stock speculator, so he can concoct some scheme of "escape" from Russia in such a
dramatic way. And German intelligence service were only too glad to play their role, as they did
in Yushchenko case.
The idea of Novichok poisoning is pretty crude and highly quetionable -- being military agent
it supposedly it acts instantly killing the victim. Here Navalny manage to get into plain and
remain countious for at least 30 min. More probably is the same scheme as in Skripal case. Some
agent after which you lose conciouness, but that does not cause any serious side effects.
A video posted by Navalny's team on his Instagram page showed them searching Navalny's room
at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk on Aug. 20, an hour after they were informed about his
illness.
Apparently, this is how Germany got the materials, which a military lab allegedly tested to
confirm the presence of Novichok. Initially, Navalny's team claimed he had been poisoned after
drinking a cup of tea at the airport. But now it's a water bottle from his hotel room. The
story just keeps changing,
"It was decided to gather up everything that could even hypothetically be useful and hand
it to the doctors in Germany. The fact that the case would not be investigated in Russia was
quite obvious," the post said.
It showed his team bagging several empty bottles of "Holy Spring" mineral water, among
other items, while wearing protective gloves.
"Two weeks later, a German laboratory found traces of Novichok precisely on the bottle of
water from the Tomsk hotel room," the post said.
"And then more laboratories that took analyses from Alexei confirmed that that was what
poisoned Navalny. Now we understand: it was done before he left his hotel room to go to the
airport."
One of Navalny's team members bragged to Al Jazeera that the evidence was taken "right under
the KGB's nose".
Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister and an ally of Navalny, said his team had
outplayed the FSB security police with their quick thinking: "They took the evidence from
under their noses and shipped it out of the country."
Navalny's flight took off at 08:01am, so he must have left the room by 5am, to go to the
airport to catch the flight. The bedside clock in the video says 11:45 (presumably am)... and
the room had not been cleaned? Really??
Why did Navalny's team think he would be going to Germany... it was 2 more days until the
family made that request. Odd...
Were Navalny's team checked for nerve agent? They were in a room with "the world's most
deadly" nerve agent... but they all seem fine.
Has the room been used by anyone else since? Are they all OK?
This story is complete garbage.
SiFiUK , 7 hours ago
So sick of this BS, is anything real any more? Surely, in the near future, the public
won't believe anything the MSM says, whether it really is true or not.
EDIT: I still remember well how, during the BBC's Skripal coverage, one of the 'actors',
dramatically dressed in a hazmat suit and searching for 'clues', took his helmet off thinking
he'd gone off camera. Epic fail, yet the story still stuck enough to have confidence in
launching a sequel!
d0gpants , 6 hours ago
Just like that ***** said...something like 'we know were successful when everything the
public believes is a lie'
BigJim , 6 hours ago
William Casey, I do believe.
Meanwhile, the FSB poison Navalny, but don't bother removing the evidence, or worry about
his woman touching the bottle (the fiends!) and his "team" have no problems getting into his
room... after he#s already checked out.
BetaGap , 5 hours ago
Did they need the bottle or could they find the substance on the photo already?
Was the name putin written on each molecule?
HowdyDoody , 6 hours ago
A clear water bottle with a blue top was spotted peeking out of his wife's handbag as she
tavelled to Germany. The water bottle sold for use on the flights are blue with a pink
top.
And there is no verifiable chain of custody for this bottle. In other words it is not
evidence.
thurstjo63 , 5 hours ago
@EuroPox,
Thank you for pointing out exactly what I was thinking! Difficult to believe that the room
was not already cleaned especially since the hotel already knew that he checked out.
But consider the fact that Navalny's team is supposedly going into his hotel room to
recover novichuk, a deadly nerve agent!?!
Maybe Navalny thinks that this is going to revive his career!
EuroPox , 4 hours ago
I do not understand how Germany got suckered into this, especially as Nordstream is such a
hot topic... how could the Germans have been so stupid? Merkel really was caught with her
pants down (which is not an image I wish to dwell on...)
A_Huxley , 3 hours ago
Its that special agent. That does not work.
That people can be around.
But its super secret.
Then it gets found.
Then the media talks a lot on when, how and where and when again.
All very secret, but we can read along in real time.
Space-Time Continuum , 8 hours ago
You're being presented:
Skripal 2
Like all remakes, this one is worse.
BorisTheBlade , 8 hours ago
Naturally, as Marx used to say: history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a
farce. Modern day marxists usually skip the tragedy, go straight to farce and outright
nonsense. Moron is a new normal.
BuboTB48 , 7 hours ago
BOLLOCKS !!!
If a lethal dose of Potassium Cyanide is about the size of a pea, then imagine that a
lethal dose of Sarin is about the size of a full stop (period).
Now we have to change scales and assume that the lethal dose of Sarin is the size of a
baseball, then the lethal dose of VX is now smaller than the aforementioned full stop
(period).
Unfortunately we have to change scales again to consider Novichok. So the Potassium
Cyanide lethal dose becomes the size of a seriously over-inflated basketball, while the sarin
lethal dose is struggling to look like a poorly endowed baseball. The VX lethal dose is a lot
smaller than a marble. The Novichok lethal dose is still smaller than the full stop
(period).
Seriously lethal, and pretty quick acting it has the same symptoms as most nerve agents
which are designed to destroy the bodies ability to transmit nerve signals via acetyocholine
and cholinesterase. You get pinpoint pupils, convulsions, asphyxiation, etc and of course,
most importantly death. If you survive, typically by injecting Atropine, then the damage to
the nervous system may well still be permanent and you will never really recover.
Military NBCD training gives you 9 seconds to get your gas mask on and a further minute to
get into the full activated carbon NBCD suit, after this you then have to decontaminate all
over with a neutraliser like Fuller's Earth.
How the fcuk have three people now survived being poisoned by this monstrous chemical,
while all showing different symptoms and two of them disappeared of the face of the
earth.
As I said at the start, complete and utter bollocks
AlphaSnail , 7 hours ago
+ 1000 ups
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 5 hours ago
I could do a thousand ups with your avatar.
serotonindumptruck , 8 hours ago
Navalny is clearly a see-eye-ay spy.
Water bottles?
I thought it was tea consumed at the Moscow airport?
One doesn't survive Novichok nerve agent poisoning, which is reputed to be 10 times more
deadly than VX nerve gas.
Can the Western intelligence agencies manage to get their narrative straight?
This was a massive false flag operation designed to shut down the Nord Stream II
pipeline.
greenskeeper carl , 8 hours ago
They really do think we are stupid. I could make a long list of people who benefit from
his being 'poisoned' but Putin is not on there.
Vivekwhu , 8 hours ago
The NATO gangsters are banking on the Plebs being too hooked on football and the
Kardassians.
gatorengineer , 8 hours ago
Yes they really do think we are that stoopid, covid is proving to them how stoopid we
are.
SiFiUK , 7 hours ago
I truly believe that there were several members of the elite questioning whether this
covid hoax was a stretch too far, and if the public really were that dumb. After seeing the
success of 'Phase 1' (to quote Gates), it is clear that even the skeptics among them agree
that the public deserves everything they get.
How can any of us deny that anyone falling for this BS doesn't deserve to get poisoned by
the vaccine?
4Y_LURKER , 8 hours ago
I like how all these people are supposedly being poisoned by a deadly nerve agent but are
all living, this is better than worldcup soccer drama queens. Russia!
gatorengineer , 8 hours ago
6 billion died from covid so far, just as amazing...
4Y_LURKER , 2 hours ago
Plot twist: we all died during COVID it was the salmon
BlindMonkey , 8 hours ago
Deadly nerve agent is on the water bottles and they are just sitting around on a hospital
table and nobody around them dies?
How is this supposed to be remotely believable?
BigJim , 6 hours ago
Hotel room... but yeah, the story sucks
BlindMonkey , 2 hours ago
Pic looks like a hospital bed. YMMV
John Hansen , 8 hours ago
Pretty easy to slip stuff past the KGB considering they haven't existed for over 20
years.
bill_bly , 6 hours ago
They still do (under that name) in Belarus, but your point is valid.
AriusArmenian , 6 hours ago
Sure, Russia attempted to kill him with Novichok which didn't work then let's him go to
Germany so that they can blame Russia. This is over the top stupid.
And in the West most people believe it. It must be a kind of IQ Test to show just how
gullible most people are.
Yamaoka Tesshu , 6 hours ago
After the Skripal circus in the UK, I doubt anybody buys it.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 5 hours ago
Not so, anyone who only gets their news from the MSM will believe it.
josie0802 , 6 hours ago
Sounds like a ten year old attempting to write a detective novel.
abee , 7 hours ago
Navalny is an idiot
lucitanian , 6 hours ago
True, but the German government is showing itself to be more than an idiot.
BetaGap , 5 hours ago
Seems like in Germany you can present everything to the people there.
Putin poisened Navalny.
The sky is green.
Invaders are refugees.
etc. etc. etc.
44magnum , 5 hours ago
German zio occupational government
Volkodav , 6 hours ago
Addict
Yamaoka Tesshu , 6 hours ago
That would depend on how much they pay him.
hzp , 8 hours ago
How can you tell if Putin ordered the poisoning or not? he still alive!!!
Joe A , 7 hours ago
How fast does this poison work because he got the symptoms on the plane. Some sources says
if works after 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
It must have been a couple of hours since he left his hotel room before he developed the
symptoms on the plane. How many hours are there between him leaving the hotel room or
drinking the water and the development of symptoms? Did he check out? Did he keep the hotel
room? If the poison was in the water bottle in the hotel room and he drank it there then he
should have developed the symptoms there.
Yamaoka Tesshu , 4 hours ago
From what I've read the stuff shuts you down right away. Read, mind you. But they did want
to kill him. The note from Putin had vodka spilled on it, and the operatives saw "n" and "k"
and assumed it was like last time. VVP actually wrote "nunchuck", figuring they should keep
it simple this time.
ooobie , 8 hours ago
simply not credible, not a word of it. It was a set up with some other non-deadly
substance, making him sick but not killing him. Doubt he was aware, but somebody involved in
his group did this for the p.r. value as NATO drivels over the thought of adding Belarus to
the Hate Russia coalition, a NATO umbrella group.
humbug , 5 hours ago
So let's assume they poisoned him with the old "Novichok" calling card - which they also
would know would backfire on Nordstream 2 and give the USA (Russia's main geopolitical enemy)
an opportunity to sell its more expensive gas exports to the EU instead, long term, pushing
them out the market for good.
Bollocks!!
JackBurton , 5 hours ago
Exactly..zero benefit for Russia to do this. Just another wrench to throw in the
spokes..
CriticalUser , 4 hours ago
The benefit is a frightening warning to Putins' political opponents. Putin has seen what
is happening in Belarus.
Argon1 , 3 hours ago
By all accounts he wishes it would collapse already, its come around with a begging bowl
after decades of oligarch rule.
bluez , 7 hours ago
This is simply a dirt cheap way for the Germans to placate the USSA. Everybody with a
brain larger than a walnut knows that this absurd narrative is unenforceable. It won't change
anything, and the pipeline will be completed.
If the Russians were going to poison somebody one might suppose that they would try
something else. It would be plain stupid to just keep using 'Novichok®' over and
over.
44magnum , 5 hours ago
Especially if it doesn't kill anyone
lucitanian , 6 hours ago
The fact that German government officials at ministerial level are trying to hold up this
farce of a story that Navalny was poisoned by Novichok and that the Russian government is to
blame is simply incredible.
As someone else bellow pointed out. At 11:45 (according to the bedside clock) at the hotel
when Navalny must have left 4 or 5 hours earlier, how did they know that he would lnd up sick
in Germany since that was only clear 2 days later? Also the chain of evidence is soooo
unreliable. A total joke to even call it evidence.
The German government has been made to look totally stupid. Who's idea was it to go down
this rabbit hole?
jmNZ , 6 hours ago
Like the UK government, they're vassals of the US.
VZ58 , 7 hours ago
Man oh man...you'd think that MI6/CIA would get their act together and use some actually
deadly "Russian Novichok" from their lab in Porton Down the next time they want a do another
Skripal! Oh wait, I see...they don't want their assets like Navalny or the Skripals to
actually die...
Vivekwhu , 8 hours ago
Stage-managed or what? The US Evil Empire is really desperate to stop Nordstream II. Now I
know what to do the next time I go to the hotel in the UK. I could make a killing out of the
UK government and become a star in the Russia, China, Iran etc.
I could scream "Boris poisoned me with "Etonian mineral spring water, laced with VX".
And all because I criticised him for having too many babies.
To the NATO nutjobs who planned this farce: only those drunk and drugged (half of the
US/EU population) are stupid enough to believe these anti_Russian RACIST propaganda
farts.
Egao , 7 hours ago
This is evidence tampering :) now Russian state can rightfully deny any potential
liability as the bottles were extracted illegally by Navalny's subordinates without due
custody chain and could be replaced at any point of time. Not to mention that his stuff is
one of the most interested parties and had real motive to poison Navalny.
Jgault , 7 hours ago
Except that the russian state is the only known manufacturer of novochok in the
world...where did that come from?
bluez , 7 hours ago
I had a chemist girlfriend who made Novichok® every Saturday night. A tiny touch of
that with a heroic helping of fine hash gives incredible sexual results.
bluez , 7 hours ago
Holy smokes! Man you have no clue what you missed out on!
Volkodav , 7 hours ago
Wrong
simpson seers , 5 hours ago
are you really and truly that stupid?.....
AlphaSnail , 7 hours ago
you dont need proof when you can issue a press release.
Banjo , 6 hours ago
An anonymous sourced one even better.
DEDA CVETKO , 8 hours ago
In related news, a squadron of flying piglets defects from Belarus to Saudi Arabia.
tranium , 8 hours ago
That's it. NO Nord Stream 2 for you!
researchfix , 8 hours ago
That´s quite o.k.
Citizens will pay 3 times in energy cost, because industry will be excluded from raising
cost.
The cost of being dumb...
xrxs , 8 hours ago
Molecules of freedom ain't free.
QABubba , 6 hours ago
And the winner of the Academy Award for best Documentary is: "The White Helmets," err,
"Alexia Navalny and Co."
blitzen69 , 7 hours ago
navalny, the russian version of macron...just another rothschild punk assed b*tch
xxyyzzsmith , 5 hours ago
Being a Yale World Fellow and having a daughter at Stanford. No chance of his being a
stooge for other interests hoping for color revolution in Russia?
CriticalUser , 5 hours ago
You think Putin's daughter lives in Russia? Think again!
CatInTheHat , 2 hours ago
Why YES so glad you asked!
The US tiny hats are all freaking out as it looks as?if no maidan in Belarus is going to
take place.
A little bit of pressure on Russia to let Lukashenko go and maybe then they will get to
keep their pipeline.
Russia is no fool. They will continue to support Belarus and Lukashenko so that the US
cannot plunder it and put nukes on it's border with Russia.
Putin played his hand beautifully.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 5 hours ago
Riddle me this. If the KGB (really the FSB now, but why quibble) conducted the attempted
poison via a water bottle, would they also not clean up the crime scene after.
Are we to believe they are that incompetent on both counts?
No, whatever traces of Novi-whatever were found on the bottle was applied in Germany.
I trust whoever did it got extra hazard pay ;-)
ComeOnThink , 3 hours ago
Not to mention the same problem with the Skripal narrative - how can you get a nerve agent
into your system and not show symptoms until several hours later?
How does that work, exactly?
If you hit a fly with an insecticide does he happily fly around for hours afterwards and
then - hello! I'm not feeling well - drop dead?
Or does it start to show symptoms of distress almost instantly?
CatInTheHat , 2 hours ago
Did you know that when first responders were called about the Skripals the first thing
they said as they were getting Skripals to hospital was that they suspected FENTANYL
overdose.
ComeOnThink , 1 hour ago
Sure. But regardless of whether it is Fentanyl or Novichok, how is anyone expected to
believe that you can get the stuff into your system and NOT show effects for several hours
after exposure/ingesting/whatever.
It simply doesn't happen.
You get something nasty like that in your system then you get sick very, very quickly.
I have no doubt - none whatsoever - that whatever it was that made the Skripals sick was
administered to them in that park. And it acted so quickly that neither of them had any time
to react or cry for help.
Fentanyl? Novichok? Take your pick, but whatever it was that incapacitated them was
administered minutes before they were found slumped on that bench.
Same with Navalny: if he was poisoned (which is not a given) then it was done on that
plane, it was not done hours beforehand in his hotel room.
Did you know this: six members of his entourage hopped on that plane with him, and all six
of them stayed with him until he got to Germany. Five are still by his side, and one of them
has skipped town.
This one: Maria Pevchikh.
The first opportunity that presented itself she fled back to where she came from.
Which is not Moscow, but London.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
jmNZ , 6 hours ago
Navalny = Skripal 2
I wonder which patsy will be Skripal 3?
Yamaoka Tesshu , 6 hours ago
Does he have a cat? They can always recycle the Skripals' "crisis actor" cat. It has
experience "dying".
I don't get it, how are we supposed to be afraid of the Russians if they can't pull off a
simple poisoning? I was told now, they didn't even whack the kitty.
fnsnook , 7 hours ago
.....and a pristine russian passport and kgb identification was found on the bathroom
counter in the room.
Volkodav , 5 hours ago
KGB ID find would top this to ridiculous greatness.
gatorengineer , 8 hours ago
So MI-6 did it?
Indiana Militia , 8 hours ago
Our pathetic government has been murdering people non stop for decades, and they have the
nerve to act offended at something Putin does? You have got to be kidding me.
They have no problem with Saudi Arabia blowing up school buses full of children, or
chopping people up into pieces with a bone saw in foreign embassies. But God forbid the
Russians killing some pathetic CIA stooge trying to destroy their nation from within. Though
we all know it isn't true anyway.
They lock Kyle Rittenhouse up for daring to defend fellow Americans that they abandoned
from communist terrorists, while giving a pass to Israel who has been murdering people non
stop for 80 years. Oh how I truly hate them.
SMC , 5 hours ago
LOL... propaganda for idiots.
Sokhmate , 6 hours ago
Damn. I can spot the Novichonga particles in that picture. Damn Pesky Rooshians.
cashback , 6 hours ago
And the evidence point to CIA/MI6
CrazzeTimes4all , 7 hours ago
Aaah the classic False Flag.
It's pretty pathetic for the US to use an unsuccessful poisoning as leverage to sidetrack
Nordstream 2.
The empire's collapsing, so it's time to threaten the whole planet...either you deal
exclusively with us OR ELSE!!
PS Is killing someone really this difficult!?
JUICE E SMALL IT EMPIRE , 8 hours ago
It could go both ways. The only way I think that is because of the wine and chocolate.
However, I think if Russia wanted him dead. He would be dead. Putin is not in the business of
fighting with the USA.
ComeOnThink , 3 hours ago
Laughable.
Note this: "A video posted by Navalny's team on his Instagram page showed them searching
Navalny's room at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk on Aug. 20, an hour after they were informed
about his illness."
Navalny was in a Russian hospital on August 20. It wasn't agreed that he would be released
to the Germans until the day after.
Now note this: "It was decided to gather up everything that could even hypothetically be
useful and hand it to the doctors in Germany. The fact that the case would not be
investigated in Russia was quite obvious."
Dudes, he wasn't *in* Germany at the time that you were claiming to be rummaging around in
his hotel room collecting stuff for the Germans.
He was in a Russian hospital, and as far as you could have known at that time that's where
he was going to stay.
Honestly, this is amateur-hour stuff.
Moribundus , 3 hours ago
Immodestly, I still consider myself an expert in organic chemistry.
Of course, organophosphates were also a part of my studies, not only military grade
poisons, but also pesticides and toxicology.
When using nerve-paralytic combat poisons, such as Sarin, Soman, Tabun, VX, IVA, Novichok and
many others, it is not a problem to kill someone. The problem is the opposite rather than
poisoning someone so that he does not die.
Let's go to toxicity. Kim Jong-nam died after being hit with one drop of the American
neuroparalytic substance VX. The literature states that Novichok is 5-8 times more toxic than
American VX, the Germans even report that he is up to 10 times more toxic than VX. So what
tiny dose would Skripals and Navalny have to receive to survive?
After exposure to neuro-paralytic agents, death usually occurs within minutes of this point.
Death occurs rapidly, regardless of whether the substance has been ingested, inhaled, or
passed through the skin, which is no problem for these substances.
Even the evaporation of a single drop in an enclosed space or the inhalation of a single
grain (in the case of a solid, non-liquid version of Novichok) will cause death within a few
minutes. By blocking cholinesterase, these substances cause incredibly severe cramps, so
severe that the victim can break a own bone in the cramp; they also block the respiratory and
smooth muscles, in short, everything that is normally caused by nervous excitement.
After being poisoned by Novichok, the Skripals calmly walkec and sit on park bench and
Navalny calmly boarded the plane. Does anyone want to claim such crap to me, an organic
chemist? What is this dirty game of politicians?
The only person, the Russian chemist Andrei Zeleznakov, who was demonstrably hit by Novichok
(a small dose) and immediately received an antidote, still died within 5 years of a total
disruption of the nervous system. And Skripal's take took relax and grin into the lenses of
journalists.
How long do you want to feed common people with this myths about Novichok and the evil
Russians who are removing by them their opponents?
As a chemist, I say: if Navalny had been poisoned by Novichok, the only article you would
write about him, journalists, would be about his funeral.
And finally: how did the Germans identify that this was poisoning by Novichok? They claim
that they never made it. How they identified, when spectra were needed to identify it, at
least from infrared, mass and UV-VIS spectroscopy. However, reference spectra can only be
measured from a pure, real sample. So, as neither the Germans nor the British ever produced
Novichok, where did they have the reference spectra with which they made comparisons of the
samples of the Navalny and Skripals?
Without this (without comparing the spectra) it is not possible to reliably identify the
substance. So you can choose:
1) Neither the Germans nor the British found any Novichok in the bodies of the Navalny and
Skripals, they just launched a dirty media campaign against Russia, or
2) The Germans and the British know Novichok, they produce it by themselves, and therefore
they have spectra from it. Then they are dirty liars again, when they claim that they do not
have it, did not have, or never produced Novichok. So they are either lying in the first or
second point, but the result is still the same, they are liars. And stupid, sensational
greedy journalists help them spread these lies among the common people.
Berkleyboy , 3 hours ago
Thank you for this informative response
Itinerant , 1 hour ago
They are claiming to have found Novichok in Navalny's urine, skin, blood, and water
bottle.
Any such poison is quickly metabolized (otherwise it doesn't work), and you will never find
anything but trace metabolites (especially after days of delay), which can never establish
what the exact precursor poison was. That is why they need an environmental sample, such as
the water bottle. The story of finding traces in urine are technically impossible.
What I find confusing is that this story is coming out now when the shift to the water
bottle was reported quite a few days ago...
skippy dinner , 5 hours ago
Well, I guess they did a slightly better job of it than "Jucy" Smollett. But the idea was
much the same.
No. Hold the pictures next to each other. Significant differences...
vincenze , 4 hours ago
Try to make the image smaller and rotate it a little bit.
Also, his wife has a smaller head compared to his in other photos, unlike in the
photo.
Yamaoka Tesshu , 4 hours ago
Good catch. They're too lazy even for a quick photop.
CatInTheHat , 2 hours ago
My GOD her head does look photo shopped.
Notice also no equipment behind them looks as if it has been used. And his bed looks
fresh. As if never slept in.
UndercoverBrother , 6 hours ago
Putin is laughing his *** off
/any time you can use that remark is a good time
MAD_EYE_STARE , 7 hours ago
Jeez...he looks great....like he's been at a spa or something.
What a pissy weak nerve agent that was....
St. TwinkleToes , 7 hours ago
Fake poisoning just like the fake plandemic.
What's with all the fakery?
Is their a master plan for all this bs?
Its getting phucing old, and I'm not buying into this bs anymore.
File under: Propaganda, Disinformation, Fake News.
JPHR , 8 hours ago
Actually using the Skripal hoax as "proof" for this Skripa 2.0 Navanlny hoax can only be
facilitated by a completely moronic MSM press lacking any measure of common sense.
Sorry, run that by me again: Navalny swigged some nerve agent in his hotel room in Tromsk,
THEN travelled to the airport, THEN had a cup of tea, THEN boarded his flight, and only THEN
became sick?
How does that work again?
I can - maybe - understand a slow-acting poison that is in pill-form. Maybe.
But not a nerve agent that you ingest by drinking. The results are instant.
Honestly, you have to be a moron to buy this story.
BTW, who waves goodbye to their boss and then hangs around the hotel room for hours
afterwards?
Kaiama , 4 hours ago
So even before they knew he had been poisoned they already bagged the "evidence"
themselves and "smuggled it" past the KGB? Are we all born yesterday? This is an admission
that this was a planned provocation.
Woodenman , 4 hours ago
I think Russia should really kill a few people with Novichok and throw the U.S. and Europe
for a loop when Russia does what they are always accused of.
Berkleyboy , 3 hours ago
I could offer up a few names if it would help
VZ58 , 1 hour ago
Could start with an old Hungarian )ew...
WTFUD , 5 hours ago
Do not let this Guaidoesque like puppet back into Russia.
cowdogg , 6 hours ago
Did they look for evidence in Navalny's office in the US embassy in Moscow?
JeanTrejean , 6 hours ago
Questions ? ;
1) Doesn't they clean the rooms after the client check out the Hotel ?
2) Didn't the eventually killers, clean and supress all traces, as soon Navaltny left
?
3) Are they allowed to fly with bottles...?
4) Doesn't this extremely dangerous poison infected others person, at the hotel, at the
fly,...?
CriticalUser , 5 hours ago
1) Room cleaning doesn't happen immediately after departure of the client
2) Not necessarly
3) Bottles can be carried without problem in check-in luggage
4) Not if there is no physical contact. It's a nerve agent not a gas.
"... German Chancellor Angela Merkel personally announced at a press conference last week that a chemical weapons laboratory of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) had proved "beyond doubt" that Navalny was the victim of an attack using the Novichok nerve agent. She called on the Russian government to answer "very serious questions." ..."
"... At a special session of the Parliamentary Control Committee, which meets in secret, representatives of the German government and the secret services left no doubt, according to media reports, that the poisoning of Navalny had been carried out by Russian state authorities, with the approval of the Russian leadership. The poison was said to be a variant of the warfare agent -- one even more dangerous than that used in the Skripal case in Britain. It purportedly could enter the body simply through inhalation, and its production and use required skills possessed only by a state actor. ..."
"... Excerpt of an article by Peter Schwarz published by wsws.org ..."
The relationship between Germany and Russia has reached its lowest point since Berlin
supported the pro-Western coup in Ukraine six years ago and Russia subsequently annexed the
Crimean Peninsula.
The German government is openly accusing the Russian state of poisoning opposition
politician Alexei Navalny, who is currently in Berlin's Charité Clinic. He reportedly
awoke from a coma on Monday.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel personally announced at a press conference last week
that a chemical weapons laboratory of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) had proved "beyond doubt"
that Navalny was the victim of an attack using the Novichok nerve agent. She called on the
Russian government to answer "very serious questions."
At a special session of the Parliamentary Control Committee, which meets in secret,
representatives of the German government and the secret services left no doubt, according to
media reports, that the poisoning of Navalny had been carried out by Russian state authorities,
with the approval of the Russian leadership. The poison was said to be a variant of the warfare
agent -- one even more dangerous than that used in the Skripal case in Britain. It purportedly
could enter the body simply through inhalation, and its production and use required skills
possessed only by a state actor.
Germany and the European Union are threatening Russia with sanctions. The German government
has even questioned the completion of the almost finished Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline,
which it had categorically defended against pressure from the US and several Eastern European
states.
The German media has gone into propaganda mode, repeating the accusations against Russian
President Vladimir Putin with a thousand variations. Seventy-nine years after Hitler's invasion
of the Soviet Union, which claimed more than 25 million lives, German journalists and
politicians, in editorials, commentaries and on talk shows, speak with the arrogance of people
who are already planning the next military campaign against Moscow.
Anyone who expresses doubts or contradicts the official narrative is branded a "conspiracy
theorist." This is what happened to Left Party parliamentarian Sevim Dagdelen, among others, on
Sunday evening's "Anne Will" talk show. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) foreign policy
expert Norbert Röttgen, the head of the Munich Security Conference Wolfang Ischinger and
former Green Party Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin sought to outstrip one another in
their accusations against the Russian government. When Dagdelen gently pointed out that, so
far, no evidence whatsoever has been presented identifying the perpetrators, she was accused of
"playing games of confusion" and "encouraging unspeakable conspiracy theories."
The Russian government denies any responsibility in the Navalny case. It questions whether
Navalny was poisoned at all and has called on the German government to "show its cards" and
present evidence. Berlin, according to Moscow, is bluffing for dirty political
reasons.
Contradictory and implausible
Evidence of the involvement of the Russian state is as contradictory as it is
implausible.
For example, the German authorities have so far published no information or handed evidence
to Russian investigators identifying the chemical with which Navalny was poisoned. Novichok is
merely a generic term for several families of warfare agents.
No explanation has been given as to why no one else showed signs of poisoning from a nerve
agent that is fatal even in the tiniest amounts, if touched or inhaled. Navalny had had contact
with numerous people between the time he boarded the airplane on which he fainted, his entering
the clinic in Omsk where he was first treated, and his transfer to the Charité hospital
in Berlin.
This is only one of many unexplained anomalies in the German government's official story.
Career diplomat Frank Elbe, who headed the office of German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher for five years and negotiated the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as
head of the German delegation in Geneva from 1983 to 1986, wrote on Facebook on Friday: "I am
surprised that the Federal Ministry of Defence concludes that the nerve agent Novichok was used
against Navalny."
Novichok, he wrote, belongs "to the group of super-toxic lethal substances that cause
immediate death." It made no sense, he argued, to modify a nerve poison that was supposed to
kill instantly in such a way that it did not kill, but left traces behind allowing its
identification as a nerve agent.
There was something strange about this case, Elbe said. "Either the perpetrators -- whoever
they might be -- had a political interest in pointing to the use of nerve gas, or foreign
laboratories were jumping to conclusions that are in line with the current general negative
attitude towards Russia."
The assertion that only state actors can handle Novichok is also demonstrably false. The
poison was sold in the 1990s for small sums of money to Western secret services and economic
criminals, and the latter made use of it. For example, in 1995, the Russian banker Ivan
Kiwelidi and his secretary were poisoned with it. The chemist Leonid Rink confessed at the time
in court that he had sold quantities to criminals sufficient to kill hundreds of people. Since
the binary poisons are very stable, they can last for decades.
The Navalny case is not the reason, but the pretext for a new stage in the escalation of
German great power politics and militarism. The media hysteria over Navalny is reminiscent of
the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, when the German press glorified a coup d'état carried out
by armed fascist militias as a "democratic revolution."
Social Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then foreign minister and now German president,
personally travelled to Kiev to persuade the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to
resign.
He also met with the fascist politician Oleh Tyahnybok, whose Swoboda Party glorifies Nazi
collaborators from World War II. Yanukovych's successor, Petro Poroshenko, one of the country's
richest oligarchs, was even more corrupt than his predecessor. He terrorised his opponents with
fascist militias, such as the infamous Azov regiment. But he brought Ukraine into NATO's sphere
of influence, which was the real purpose of the coup.
In the weeks before the Ukrainian coup, leading German politicians (including then-President
Joachim Gauck and Steinmeier) had announced a far-reaching reorientation of German foreign
policy. The country was too big "to comment on world politics from the sidelines," they
declared. Germany had to defend its global interests, including by military means.
NATO marched steadily eastward into Eastern Europe, breaking the agreements made at the time
of German reunification in 1990. For the first time since 1945, German soldiers today patrol
the border with Russia. With Ukraine's shift into the Western camp, Belarus is the only
remaining buffer country between Russia and NATO.
Berlin now sees the protests against the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko as an
opportunity to remove this hurdle as well. Unlike in Ukraine, where anti-Russian nationalists
exerted considerable influence, especially in the west of the country, such forces are weaker
in Belarus, where the majority speaks Russian. The working class is playing a greater role in
the resistance to the Lukashenko regime than it did in Ukraine. But Berlin is making targeted
efforts to steer the movement in a pro-Western direction. Forces that appeal for Western
support, such as the presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, are being
promoted.
The dispute over the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, whose discontinuation is
being demanded by more and more German politicians, must also be seen in this context. It was a
strategic project from the very beginning.
The natural gas pipeline, which will double the capacity of Nord Stream 1, which began
operations in 2011, will make Germany independent of the pipelines that run through Ukraine,
Poland and Belarus. These countries not only earn transit fees from the pipelines but have also
used then as a political lever.
With a total capacity of 110 billion cubic metres per year, Nord Stream 1 and 2 together
would carry almost all of Germany's annual gas imports. However, the gas is also to be
transported from the German Baltic Sea coast to other countries.
In addition to Russia's Gazprom, German, Austrian, French and Dutch energy companies are
participating in the financing of the project, which will cost almost €10 billion. The
chairman of the board of directors is former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social
Democratic Party), who is a friend of President Putin.
Nord Stream 2 is meeting with fierce opposition in Eastern Europe and the US. These
countries fear a strategic alliance between Berlin and Moscow. In December of last year, the US
Congress passed a law imposing severe sanctions on companies involved in the construction of
the pipeline -- an unprecedented move against nominal allies. The nearly completed construction
came to a standstill because the company operating the special ship for laying the pipes
withdrew. Berlin and Moscow protested vehemently against the US sanctions and agreed to
continue construction with Russian ships, which, however, will not be available until next year
at the earliest.
Excerpt of an article by Peter Schwarz published by wsws.org
That's according to Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament from the
Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The "obscure" case involving the alleged poisoning
of Navalny has been used by the EU establishment to launch another round of Moscow-bashing, he
says.
The lawmaker explained that his fellow MEPs had not, in fact, seen a single piece of
evidence suggesting the Russian government might have had a hand in what happened to
Navalny.
We don't have the evidence... none of the members of parliament who today voted in
favor of sanctions has seen any evidence.
Krah said it was "unrealistic" to expect that Navalny's case would not be
politicized, arguing that it was "absolutely clear" it was being used to push an
anti-Moscow agenda.
On Thursday morning, the EU Parliament passed a resolution calling on member states to
"isolate Russia in international forums," to "halt the Nord Stream 2 project" and
to prioritize the approval of another round of sanctions against Moscow.
The MEP also expressed skepticism about the prospects of the broader public ever getting to
see any evidence linking the opposition figure's sudden illness to Russian foul play.
"Evidence will only get published and provided to Russia if there is public
pressure," he said, adding that he does not see any such pressure building anywhere in the
EU. Until that changes, Berlin is likely to continue demanding "answers" from Moscow
while holding off on requests by Russian for cooperation, Krah believes.
The German MEP also weighed in on the fate of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, suggesting that
the alleged poisoning could work to Washington's benefit, given that the White House has been
seeking to undermine the project, liking Russian gas to Germany, for months. Krah said it was
"clear from the beginning" that the US would try to use the situation to scupper the
project, which he says would make Germany "more independent from American
influence."
The EU resolution, which is not legally binding but acts as an advisory for the bloc's
leaders, was supported by 532 MEPs and opposed by 84, while 72 abstained. Fresh sanctions
against Russia have been mulled by both the EU and US since news about Navalny's alleged
poisoning was made public.
Moscow has repeatedly expressed its readiness to cooperate with Germany in the probe into
the incident, while stressing that the Russian medics who first treated Navalny when he fell
ill found no traces of any poison in his body. The Kremlin has also repeatedly approached
Berlin for data possessed by the German side, but has so far received none.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Dachaguy 8 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:02 PM
Of course, the investigation is incomplete, but that doesn't stop the EU from levying
"justice." We've seen this before in the Downing Street Memos, where the facts were, "being
fixed around the policy. " Millions of innocent people died as a result. When will people
learn?
Jeff_P 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 06:01 PM
There should be an international commission to look into this false flag. It should be
comprised of Russia and Germany, of course, but no other NATO or European countries and no US
vassal states other than Germany. Other members could be Cuba, China, Venezuela, and maybe
India. And, of course, the US playbook of assignment of guilt without the benefit of evidence
and the exacting of penalties without proving guilt won't fly. Russia might just tell Europe
to go FO and leave PACE and the other organizations that it supports but which insist on
abusing it.
perikleous 6 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:09 PM
If Russia was determined they would say you cannot delay NSII or we cut the Ukraine pipeline
as well, its all or none! Tick Tock Tick Tok, winter is coming soon! Hopefully the Covid 19
won't delay the fuel ships your relying on or the workers who procure the fuel, you know a
2nd wave... is "Highly Likely" and its taking over in the rural areas where the fuel comes
from! Present evidence to a poisoning directed by either the fuel company or the gov't and we
will continue, or just tell your "handlers" go ***, because I do not recall the US severing
weapons sales to Saudi Arabia after Admission to them Severing the head off of (J. Koshoggei)
because the US profits/jobs are bigger than one WaPo Journalists life! Hypocracy in action!
Shelbouy 6 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 03:46 PM
Germany has offered to help pay for the construction of two LNG terminals in Germany to the
tune of 1 billion plus to the US. to receive US LNG. The US in turn has said then they would
not interfere with the completion of Nord Stream 2 if this were to take place. I am
suggesting that Germany then would have 30% cheaper Russian gas than US LNG, blend these two
prices, hi cost US LNG and low cost Russian gas of Nord Stream 2, and sell to the EU
consumers at a price which would likely be higher than the current rate today, and who would
be the wiser, and who would consumers blame when the price of gas goes up instead of down.
This may, at least temporarily, appease the US while at the same time ensure the completion
of the cheaper Russian supply line, and prevent the diversion of Russian gas to other
customer nations like China, and Germany laughs all the way to the bank. This is only
speculation on my part because I do not know if it would work that way or not. If it did then
Germany would have their cake and eat it. The offer of Germany to the US is however, a fact.
The reasons behind this offer are speculative. After all, it's really all about money anyway.
perikleous Shelbouy 5 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:16 PM
The US would demand a contract/commitment for the fuel based on your yearly usage currently,
if you re neg, they still bill you for it! Then its handled in court while your bank accounts
are frozen and none of the US debt to you is paid until this is resolved. You may win the
hearing/court but the losses from not having access to that money will cost way more!
HimandI 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 05:47 PM
Just more proof that the EU rulers are bought and paid prostitutes.
Jayeshkumar 6 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 10:03 PM
May be EU is indirectly suggesting to use the 2nd Pipeline to be used Exclusively for
Transporting the Hydrogen, in the Future!
Congozebilu 2 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 08:06 PM
From the first minute this Navalny story broke I knew it was aimed at Nordstream. Everyone
who understands geopolitics and also US desperation to sell "freedom gas" knows that
Nordstream was the intended target this Navalny clown show.
ivoivo 1 hour ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:00 PM
apparently there are evidence found in a trash can in his hotel room in omsk, they poisoned
him with novichock in a water they gave it to him and discard a paper cup in a trash can,
standard kremlins procedure, isn't it, what is happening to world intelligence, russians
can't kill some dude that is actually not even important and americans can't stop russian
hackers in meddling in us election
"... But CNN has and will continue to repeat the allegations as fact, so it's mission accomplished for the deep state. As another poster said on this board about manufacturing consent: "It is important to discuss the story, not its credibility, the more the discussion, the more the reaction and the more it reinforces the narrative." ..."
"... In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper coined the concept of systematic manipulation of "public opinion". This would become a hallmark of Western Civilization in the post-war. The public opinion theory states that the masses don't have an opinion for themselves or, if they have, it is sculpting/flexible. The dominant classes can, therefore, guide the masses like a shepherd, to its will. ..."
"... It is an insult to the noble profession, to call what the mainstream media in the west, especially in the USA do, journalism. In my opinion what they do is propaganda and stenography on behalf of those who are in power. I am not sure who coined the term but "presstitution" is not a bad attempt at describing their profession. ..."
"... While the western corporate media lie on a continuous basis - and that has the predictable effect - what is more insidious is not these acts of commissions ( meaning lies), but their acts of omission (meaning excluding or deemphasizing important contextual information) leading people to make the wrong conclusions. NPR in the US is an excellent example of such presstitution. ..."
"... Why are the US promoting conflict with China, with Russia? Why are they beating Europe, maybe with the intention to destroy it? Why is a new civil war in the US promoted? ..."
"... Normal (geopolitically interested) people would think: against China it is better to come together and unite, at least US & Europe, but eventually Russia included. For instance take the population of these three together: far less than China's. ..."
"... Journalism in the US is so superficial, it is a drop above the uppermost wavy comb. Not worth to pay attention to it. ..."
"... Other than few independent blog site such as this, every media outlet is in the service of its home government or foreign sponsors. Only born-suckers take the corporate media at face value. Modern journalism is nothing but an aggressive propaganda racket. ..."
"... Using lies (bearing false witness) to cause murder and theft are not exactly a new phenomenon. These 'groups of individuals', which are employing these fabricated deceptions, are doing nothing less than trying to commit murder and theft. ..."
"... Everything that was accomplished (albeit incompletely or moderately) through the New Deal and then the abortive Great Society absolutely spooked the oligarchy. Lifting much of the working class out of absolute wage slavery to the point where the next rung on Maslow's ladder was at least visible. And when it all culminated in the late 60's and early 70's with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Surface Mining act, and various labor protection measures, the wealthy owner class decided the proles had gained too much power to influence "their" captive government. ..."
"... What differs, however, is the presentation. Trump is criticized (not praised) for being allegedly soft on Russia and Biden criticized for being allegedly soft on China. This clever trick ensures that just about everybody is onboard the bash-China-and-Russia train. ..."
"... In a violently polarized society, with red-blue antagonism reaching ridiculous heights, people tend to act exclusively in contradiction to the cult figure they hate so much. ..."
"... I've been saying for years here to watch the documentary - Century of the Self. If you want to learn about and understand America, its all here. Government, Corporations, Consumerism, Militarism, Deep State, Psychology, Individual selfishness and mental illness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s ..."
Every few days U.S. 'intelligence' and 'officials' produce fake claims about this or that
'hostile' country. U.S. media continue to reproduce those claims even if they bare any logic
and do not make any sense.
On June 27 the New York Times and the Washington Post published fake news
about
alleged Russian payments to the Taliban for killing U.S. troops.
[T]hat the story was obviously bullshit did not prevent Democrats in Congress, including
'Russiagate' swindler Adam Schiff, to bluster about it and to call for immediate briefings
and new
sanctions on Russia .
Just a day after it was published the main accusation, that Trump was briefed on the
'intelligence' died. The Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Advisor and
the CIA publicly rejected the claim. Then the rest of the story started to crumble. On June
2, just one week after it was launched, the story was
declared dead .
...
The NYT buried the above quoted dead corpse of the original story page A-19.
Despite that the Democrats
continued to use the fake story for attacks on Donald Trump.
Yesterday the commander of the U.S. forces in the Middle East
drove a stake though the heart of the dead corpse of the original story:
Two months after top Pentagon officials vowed to get to the bottom of whether the Russian
government
bribed the Taliban to kill American service members , the commander of troops in the
region says a detailed review of all available intelligence has not been able to corroborate
the existence of such a program.
"It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me," Gen. Frank
McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops
in Afghanistan.
But as one fake news zombie finally dies others get resurrected. Politico's
'intelligence' stenographer Natasha Bertrand produced
this nonsensical claim :
The Iranian government is weighing an assassination attempt against the American ambassador
to South Africa, U.S. intelligence reports say, according to a U.S. government official
familiar with the issue and another official who has seen the intelligence.
News of the plot comes as Iran continues to seek ways to retaliate for President Donald
Trump's decision to kill a powerful Iranian general earlier this year, the officials said. If
carried out, it could dramatically ratchet up already serious tensions between the U.S. and
Iran and create enormous pressure on Trump to strike back -- possibly in the middle of a
tense election season.
U.S. officials have been aware of a general threat against the ambassador, Lana Marks,
since the spring, the officials said. But the intelligence about the threat to the ambassador
has become more specific in recent weeks. The Iranian Embassy in Pretoria is involved in the
plot, the U.S. government official said.
Ambassador Lana Marks is known for selling overpriced handbags and for her donations to Trump's campaign.
To Iran she has zero political or symbolic value. There is no way Iran would ever think about
an attack on such a target. Accordingly the South African intelligence services
do not believe that there is such a threat:
South African Minister of State Security Ayanda Dlodlo said the matter was "receiving the
necessary attention" and that the State Security Agency (SSA) was "interacting with all
relevant partners both in the country and abroad, to ensure that no harm will be suffered by
the US Ambassador, including any other Diplomatic Officials inside the borders of our
country."
However, an informed intelligence source told Daily Maverick that although the
"matter has been taken seriously as we approach all such threats, specifically, there appears
to be, from our perspective, no discernible threat. Least of all from the source that it
purports to emanate from.
There was "no evidence or indicator", the source said, so the plot was "not likely to be
real". The "associations made are not sustainable on any level but all precautions will be
put in place".
The source suggested this was an instance of the "tail wagging the dog", of the Trump
administration wielding a "weapon of mass distraction" to divert attention from its failures
in the election campaign running up to President Donald Trump's re-election bid on November
3.
The spokesperson for the Iranian ministry of foreign affairs, Saeed Khatibzadeh, strongly
denied the allegation in the Politico report which he called "hackneyed and worn-out
anti-Iran propaganda".
In January the U.S. assassinated the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Soleimani
led the external campaigns of the Iranian Quds Forces. He was the one who orchestrated the
campaign that defeated the Islamic State. His mythic-symbolic position for Iran and the
resistance in the Middle East is beyond that of any U.S. figure.
There is simply no one in the U.S. military or political hierarchy who could be seen as his
equal. Iran has therefore announced that it will take other ways to revenge the assassination
of Soleimani.
As an immediate response to the assassination of Soleimani Iran
had launched a precise missile attack against two U.S. bases in Iraq. It has also announced
that it will make sure that the U.S. military will have to leave the Middle East. That program
is in full swing now as U.S. bases in Iraq are again coming under
daily missile attacks :
More than eight months after a barrage of rockets killed an American contractor and wounded
four American service members in Kirkuk, Iraq, militia groups continue to target U.S.
military bases in that country, and the frequency of those attacks has increased.
"We have had more indirect fire attacks around and against our bases the first half of
this year than we did the first half of last year," Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of the
U.S. Central Command, said. "Those attacks have been higher."
...
McKenzie's comments came just hours after he announced the United States would be cutting its
footprint in Iraq by almost half by the end of September, with about
2,200 troops leaving the country .
Just hours agon two Katyusha rockets were fired against the U.S.
embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone. Two British/U.S.convoys also came under attack . U.S. air
defense took the missiles down but its anti-missile fire is only further disgruntling the Iraqi
population.
These attacks are still limited and designed to not cause any significant casualties. But
they will continue to increase over time until the last U.S. soldier is withdrawn from
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other Middle East countries. That, and only that, is the
punishment Iran promised as revenge for Soleimani's death.
The alleged Iranian thread against the U.S. ambassador to South Africa is just another fake
news propaganda story. It is useful only for lame blustering:
According to press reports, Iran may be planning an assassination, or other attack,
against the United States in retaliation for the killing of terrorist leader Soleimani, which
was carried out for his planning a future attack, murdering U.S. Troops, and the death &
suffering...
...caused over so many years. Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will
be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!
The danger of such fake stories about Russia or Iran is that they might be used to justify a
response in the case of a false flag attack on the alleged targets.
Should something inconvenient happen to Ambassador Lana Marks the Trump administration could
use the fake story as an excuse to respond with a limited attack on Iran.
It is well known by now that U.S. President Donald Trump is lying about every time he opens
his mouth. Why do U.S. journalists presume that the agencies and anonymous officials who work
under him are more truthful in their utterings than the man himself is hard to understand. Why
do they swallow their bullshit?
Posted by b on September 15, 2020 at 11:50 UTC |
Permalink
US and European journalists are also lying constantly, that's why. Even when they make
embarrassing attempts at "being unbiased" or "factual". Do they understand it? Many might
not, but some do, perhaps fewer than anyone would think reasonable.
Btw a lot of these "journalists" in Europe in particular openly self-identify to "the
left" or even as socialists and communists or "greens". So much for ideology as some kind of
solution: entirely worthless and superficial.
But CNN has and will continue to repeat the allegations as fact, so it's mission
accomplished for the deep state. As another poster said on this board about manufacturing
consent:
"It is important to discuss the story, not its credibility, the more the discussion, the
more the reaction and the more it reinforces the narrative."
Just for laughs, I looked at the reviews of Gordon Chang's book, 'The Coming Economic
Collapse of China' to see if I could figure out the reasoning and one of the reviewers said
that China weakens because they lack a free press to hold their govt accountable. I had a
good laugh at that one.
In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper coined the concept of systematic manipulation of "public opinion".
This would become a hallmark of Western Civilization in the post-war. The public opinion theory states that the masses don't have an opinion for themselves or,
if they have, it is sculpting/flexible. The dominant classes can, therefore, guide the masses
like a shepherd, to its will.
Friedrich von Hayek - a colleague of Popper and father of British neoliberalism (the man
behind Thatcher) - then developed on the issue, by proposing the institutionalization of
public opinion. He proposed a system of three or four tiers of intellectuals which a
capitalist society should have. The first tier is the capitalist class itself, who would
govern the entire world anonymously, through secret meetings. These meetings would produce
secret reports, whose ideas would be spread to the second tier. The second tier is the
academia and the more prominent politicians and other political leaderships. The third tier
is the basic education teachers, who would indoctrinate the children. The fourth tier is the
MSM, whose job is to transform the ideas and opinions of the first tier into "common sense"
("public opinion").
Therefore, it's not a case where the Western journalists are being fooled. Their job was
never to inform the public. When they publish a lie about, say, Iran trying to kill an
American ambassador in South Africa, they are not telling a lie in their eyes: they are
telling an underlying truth through one thousand lies. The objective here is to convince
("teach") the American masses it is good for the USA if Iran was invaded and destroyed (which
is a truth). They are like the modern Christian God, who teach its subjects the Truth through
"mysterious ways".
It is an insult to the noble profession, to call what the mainstream media in the west,
especially in the USA do, journalism. In my opinion what they do is propaganda and
stenography on behalf of those who are in power. I am not sure who coined the term but
"presstitution" is not a bad attempt at describing their profession.
Unfortunately they have been amazingly successful in brainwashing people. One current
example, from numerous ones that could be cited, is the public's opinion on Julian Assange.
.
While the western corporate media lie on a continuous basis - and that has the predictable
effect - what is more insidious is not these acts of commissions ( meaning lies), but their
acts of omission (meaning excluding or deemphasizing important contextual information)
leading people to make the wrong conclusions. NPR in the US is an excellent example of such
presstitution.
What I am saying is nothing new to the bar flies here. But I am extremely distressed when
I see how poorly informed (propagandized, brainwashed) the vast majority of the people I know
are. Let's say a decade ago, ideological polarization was the main reason why it was so
difficult to have an open discussion on important issues the US. Today it has become even
more difficult because, thanks to the success of the presstitutes, people also have different
sets of "facts". And most alarmingly, after successfully creating a readership who believe in
alternative "facts", the mainstream presstitutes are moving on to creating a logic-free
narrative. Examples include Assad supposedly gassing his people when he was winning (even
though that was guaranteed to produce western intervention against him). A more recent
example is the Navalny affair. Sadly, very sadly, way too many people are affected.
Hi, thanks, and sorry, but: why does nobody look behind the curtain?
Why are the US promoting conflict with China, with Russia?
Why are they beating Europe, maybe with the intention to destroy it?
Why is a new civil war in the US promoted?
Are these random developments of history? Are laws of history behind that?
NO!! Surely not!
Normal (geopolitically interested) people would think: against China it is better to come
together and unite,
at least US & Europe, but eventually Russia included.
For instance take the population of these three together: far less than China's.
If something is going against the common sense, then there should be a reason behind.
This reason I recommend You, with due respect, to find - and to uncover the plan.
Journalism in the US is so superficial, it is a drop above the uppermost wavy comb.
Not worth to pay attention to it.
The actual demand is to understand and to show the forces playing deep underwater.
And to preview where these forces are determined to strike against.
A new report showing that US state-level voter databases were publicly available calls into
question the narrative that Russian intelligence "targeted" US state election-related
websites in 2016.
The problem with these sorts of accusations about "state-sponsored" hacking is they assume
that because a target has some connection to a state or some political activity that it means
the hackers are "nation-state". In reality, personal identification information (PII) is a
commodity on the black market, along with intellectual property - and *any* hacker will
target *any* such source of PII. So the mere fact that it is an election year, and that
voting organizations are loaded with PII, makes them an obvious target for any and every
hacker.
"Oregon's chief information security officer, Lisa Vasa, told the Washington Post in
September 2017 that her team blocks 'upwards of 14 million attempts to access our network
every day."'
This is the usual ridiculous claim from almost every organization. They treat every
Internet packet that hits their firewall as being an "attempt to access" the network (or
worse, a "breach" - which it is not.) Which is technically true, but would only be relevant
if they had *no* firewall - a setup which no organization runs these days. By definition,
99.99999% of those attempts are random mass scans of a block of IP addresses by either a
hacker or some malware on someone else's machine - or even a computer security researcher
attempting to find out how many sites are vulnerable.
"It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me," Gen. Frank
McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops
in Afghanistan.
Barflies should write Gen Frank McKenzie inside the back cover of their diaries, and count
the days until we hear of/from him again. I've a feeling he's crossed a line and knows
precisely what he's doing and why. Imo, the Swamp has just been put on notice.
Posted by: vk | Sep 15 2020 12:54 utc | 4
In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper coined the concept of "public opinion".
vk, I can't find anything regarding this coinage. Could you please provide a link.
Wiki is specially devoid of it and it goes back to 16 century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion
The term public opinion was derived from the French opinion publique which was first used in
1588 by Michel de Montaigne in the second edition of his Essays
Thank you, b. In this world of illusion that mainstream press provides it is forgivable that
we cannot even convince members of our own families that are dear to us of the underlying
truths behind what these masters of deception continue to print. Surely they only do so
because livelihoods are threatened, and the public perceptions are reaching a critical point
where belief in what they write, read by the diminishing numbers of faithful few, reaches a
pinnacle of perception and spills chaotically down into a watershed of realization.
I remember when we were told what happens on the top floor of the New York Times. It
opened my eyes. And perhaps here also, b is providing a chink through which we may glimpse
what is happening in military circles in fields of operation where facts collide with
fiction:
"We have had more indirect fire attacks around and against our bases the first half of
this year than we did the first half of last year," Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander
of the U.S. Central Command, said. "Those attacks have been higher."
...
McKenzie's comments came just hours after he announced the United States would be
cutting its footprint in Iraq by almost half by the end of September, with about 2,200
troops leaving the country.
On Hayek's "tiering", google "IHS model" ("pyramid of social change") and his book "The
Intellectuals and Socialism".
On Popper's conception of "public opinion", see "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945).
Yes, the term itself is not Popper's invention - he never claimed to have done so. But he
gave it a "twist", and we can say nowadays every Western journalist's conception of "public
opinion" is essentially Popper's.
because on matters related to Iran, China and Russia, they are not independent, there is
no real difference between the two camps in US, Biden' foreign policy which is endorsed and
supported by NYT and WP is not that different than Trump's, if not more radical. There is no
free press in US, as matter of fact, as long as this United Oligarchy of America exist there
will be no free press.
As well, this fake news propaganda barrage continues in the context of determined censorship
of alternative media and social media - a campaign which has been largely promoted by the
liberal intelligentsia in the US, in the name of reducing "fake news."
Having to live within an ever-widening swamp of utter BS is wearying and mind-numbing - also
to the point, one may assume.
Yes, I agree, IMO/observation, the US Government, the political parties and their supportive
media are rapidly ideologically polarizing their constituencies to two hard entrenched
ideological camps (which as you say has become hard shelled impenetrable). Except on one
common ideological point, which almost all the population has been and is being brain washed
as young as first grade, this common used term, which shield you from needing to investigate
or form any other opinion is: US has always been, is and will be a "force for good" by its
constitution, no matter what she has done or will do. This sentence when fully believed and
carved in one' mind from childhood is very difficult to erase and crack. These two
ideologically opposing camps about 70% of the population will not want to hear any fact or
not, other than what they are told and believed all their life.
"Unlike utopian engineering, piecemeal social engineering must be "small scale," Popper
said, meaning that social reform should focus on changing one institution at a time. Also,
whereas utopian engineering aims for lofty and abstract goals (for example, perfect justice,
true equality, a higher kind of happiness), piecemeal social engineering seeks to address
concrete social problems (for example, poverty, violence, unemployment, environmental
degradation, income inequality). It does so through the creation of new social institutions
or the redesign of existing ones. These new or reconfigured institutions are then tested
through implementation and altered accordingly and continually in light of their effects.
Institutions thus may undergo gradual improvement overtime and social ills gradually reduced.
Popper compared piecemeal social engineering to physical engineering. Just as physical
engineers refine machines through a series of small adjustments to existing models, social
engineers gradually improve social institutions through "piecemeal tinkering." In this way,
"[t]he piecemeal method permits repeated experiments and continuous readjustments" (Open
Society Vol 1., 163).
Only such social experiments, Popper said, can yield reliable feedback for social
planners. In contrast, as discussed above, social reform that is wide ranging, highly complex
and involves multiple institutions will produce social experiments in which it is too
difficult to untangle causes..."
So Top-Down with a vengeance, but softly, softly, hunting for 'good results', for what and
how these are defined is left out entirely, and who exactly runs the process...? (Btw China
sorta follows this approach with 'social experiments' gathering data that is analysed etc. to
improve governance.)
Don't forget that the only time the Amerikastani Empire's warmongering imperialist media
called Trump "presidential" was when he launched missiles at Syria on false pretences in
support of al Qaeda.
The statement by praetor McKenzie probably won't do much to remove the "Russian bounties"
tale from the received Beltway belief structure, where it lodged immediately upon
publication, any more than earlier refutations, or its inherent implausibility, did. I see
the bounties regularly referred to by Dems and Dem-adjacent media as established fact.
In the same light, it's worthwhile to read the Politico article on the alleged Iranian
designs on the purse princess and try to spot other fictions included as supposedly factual
background, some qualified as being American assertions, but others presented as undisputed
fact, such as:
Trump's version of the almost-happened retaliation after Iran downed a U.S. drone
that the attack that killed a U.S. "contractor" in Iraq that started last winter's
U.S./Iran tit-for-tat was "by an Iranian-allied militia"
Soleimani was responsible for the death of numerous U.S. troops
Soleimani plotted to hire a Mexican drug cartel to kill the Saudi ambassador in
Washington (remember that one? a blast from the past)
This new one about the plot to get the ambassador in Pretoria may be too trivial to get
sustained attention, but it will show up as background in some future Politico article or the
like, joining the rest in the Beltway's version of reality, which at this point is made
almost entirely of these falsehoods encrusting on each other, decade after decade, creating
the phony geopolitical mindscape these people live in.
Mere factual refutation – even from otherwise establishment-approved sources –
won't remove these barnacles. For instance, in February the NY Times itself published a
debunking of the initial account that it was an Iran-backed Shia militia, as opposed to
Salafist I.S.-affiliated forces, that killed that U.S. contractor last December. But the good
(if delayed) reporting is forgotten; the lie persists. The same fate awaits McKenzie's
dismissal of the Russian bounties nonsense.
The thoughtful reader would at this point stop and ponder. "Fake News About Iran, Russia,
China Is U.S. Journalism's Daily Bread". I agree with this statement. But not just U.S. Journalism. Minimally U.K. Journalism is
on-board, if not tutoring the Yanks in the art of Journalism. And then there is Europe
herself, she too has armies of Journalists and many Journals. They too mostly fake around in
general.
Now then, that leave Journalism in "Iran, Russia, China". It is fine trait to root for
underdogs but Journalism in these states is also subject to a highly controlled and managed
environment. It is disingenuous to ignore these facts.
Given this congregation of "fakers", worldwide, it is very reasonable to question the very
"fight" that these "fakers" keep telling us is on between the "adversaries".
Good to see so many being able to name the operation of the official narrative. It serves
also another purpose, witnessed by one of the most consequential actions of all, the wanton
abandonment of international law and accountability - the GWOT and the launching of same in
Afghanistan and Iraq. That other purpose is to create cover for those, elected in our name,
to avoid responsibility.
"Who knew?" asked the soulless Rumsfeld. And the refrain returned from the hollowed out
halls of the Greatest Democracy On Earth (tm) - "We were misled!", "Look it says so right
there in the official narrative, REMEMBER?" But the misleaders are never rounded up and never
face any consequences, cause truth be told all that voted for the AUMF belong in the pokey.
And the congressional class of '02-'03 would do the same thing all over again, 'cause the
narrative's got their back.
Despite the future grimness predicted by 1984 , the ability and effectiveness of Media
Structures to openly lie and thus herd the public to embrace the preferred Narrative hasn't
turned out quite the way Orwell thought it might. Former authoritarian blocs learned the hard
way that it's better to tell their citizens the truth and actively engage them in governance,
while the Anglo-Imperial powers have gone in the opposite direction, thus the question why?
IMO, the longstanding Narrative related to the mythical Dream has greatly eroded in the face
of Reality, while at the same time the Rentier Class and the Duopoly it controls needs
to try and obfuscate what it's doing. And thus we've seen the rise of BigLie Media to be used
for the purpose of Divide and Rule. There're numerous works detailing how and why; two of the
more important are Manufacturing of Consent and J is for Junk Economics . Part
of the overall process of dumbing-down populations is the deliberate destruction of the
educational process, particularly in the areas of philosophy and political-economy/history,
which are essentially connected as one when considering the History of Ideas or a sub-area
like the Philosophy of Science.
Such a dumbing-down of a nation's populous can be measured, the USSR and its Warsaw Bloc
being the most evident, but also The Inquisition and its affect on the advancement of science
within the regions it ruled, and the inward turning of China during the Ming Dynasty which
allowed for its subjugation by Western forces beginning in the 16th Century. Most recently,
this is evident in China's passing the Outlaw US Empire in terms of geoeconomics and thus
overall geopolitical power. An explanation for India's inability to match China's development
can be found in its refusal to do away with its semi-feudal caste system and not educate its
masses so they can become a similar collective dynamo as in China. At the beginning of his
brief tenure, JFK noted the Knowledge Gap that existed between a USSR that was nearing its
intellectual heights (although that wasn't known then) and the USA whose educational system
effectively excluded @60% of students from having the opportunity to advance. There would
never have been a Dot.Com economy without JFK's initiative to improve educational outcomes.
There seems to be a notion within the Outlaw US Empire's elite that an well educated populace
presents a danger to their rule and they can get by using AI and Robotics to further their
future plans. Here I'd refer such thinkers to the lessons provided by the failure of Asimov's
Galactic Empire in his Foundation series of books--particular their reliance on AI, robotics,
dumbing-down the populace to the point where no one recalls how atomics functioned. The sort
of balance sheet being constructed by the Fed cannot repair or replace crumbling
infrastructure or train the engineers needed to perform the work.
So, what continual BigLie Media lies tell us is the continued downward spiral of the
West's intellectual abilities will continue while an East that values the Truth and Discovery
moves on to eclipse it, mainly because the West has stopped trying, thinking it's found a
better way based on the continual amassing of Debt, which is seen as wealth on their balance
sheets. Ultimately, the West thinks the one person holding all the assets as the winner of
its Zero-sum Monopoly Game is a better outcome than having millions of people sharing the
winnings of a Win-Win system that promotes the wellbeing of all. I can tell you now which
philosophy will triumph, but you all ought to be capable of reasoning that outcome.
After a sound and an in-depth analysis, b sometimes confounds me with his credulity. Take
this sentence for example: "Why do U.S. journalist presume that the agencies and anonymous
officials who work under him are more truthful in their uttering than the man himself is hard
to understand. Why do swallow their bullshit?" Of course there is no daylight between the US,
and indeed the whole Western governments, and its Press. Other than few independent blog site
such as this, every media outlet is in the service of its home government or foreign
sponsors. Only born-suckers take the corporate media at face value. Modern journalism is
nothing but an aggressive propaganda racket.
You only have to look at who owns the media and who their close friends are,
to understand why the media says what it says or lies what it lies !
It's an industry promoting the elites self-interest, creating fictioous enemy countries to
feed the arms industry and create US domestic mass paranoia.
The Israeli lobby groups are at the wheel of the whole dam clown car.
Using lies (bearing false witness) to cause murder and theft are not exactly a new
phenomenon.
These 'groups of individuals', which are employing these fabricated deceptions, are doing
nothing less than trying to commit murder and theft.
No doubt the two propaganda streams will merge until we will be told that the CIA now
believes that Iran will attempt plausible deniability by funnelling the money through Putin,
who will offer it to the Taliban by way of a bounty on the Ambassador's head.
The CIA's wet dream: the Taliban does it, Putin arranged it, but it was all Iran's fault,
leading to:
A) infinite occupation of the poppy fie.... sorry, Afghanistan
B) even more sanctions on Russia
C) war with Iran
'"Public opinion", according to Bernays, is an amorphous group of judgments which are not
well elaborated even in the head of a single average individual. He extracts a quotation from
Wilfred Trotter, which states that this average man has many strong convictions whose origin
he can't explain (Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, p. 36). People's minds have
"logic-proof compartments" which must be approached by means beyond the rational. (pp.
61–68).'
Yes, I forgot to mention this very important book. If I'm not mistaken (and I may be),
Popper got the term from Bernays.
Popper, von Hayek... these guys are the fathers of neoliberalism. I'm not mentioning
backyard intellectuals here. They shaped the West as we know it today and, if you're a
Westerner and wants to understand the civilization you live in, you have to know what they
formulated.
Just to clear that off: I don't agree with Popper's (or Bernays, for that matter)
conception on "public opinion". The Marxist conception of ideology is much more complete and
precise scientifically.
Speaking of education (although of science/tach, rather than critical thinking)...
Add in the migration of top-level educated individuals. In the US, an underdeveloped
primary/secondary school system creates room at the university/grad level to absorb talent
from the rest of the world. For many years, this was a source of competitive advantage --
imported human capital is better than home grown, because if you import, you take it away
from someone else. Clever!
It was not that big a deal for the US if social mobility of native born lower and middle
classes was stifled somewhat. (and I would say it still would not be a big deal if the
resources of the country were not so grossly mismanaged/wasted/stolen).
But in the current century, or certainly the decade now ending, China alone can fill every
US grad school science/tech program and still have people to spare for itself. Other parts of
the world are right up there as well.
And then you have computers. Sometime between 2000 and 2010, computers became pretty much
cheap enough that you could give one to a every kid, even in families of limited means.
Provided the primary/secondary education system is there to support it, a country could
develop as much tech talent as they had population. The first generation of kids whose
childhood took place under this condition is now coming out of university - I would think
vastly greater in numbers than any amount the US (or Euro) higher educational system can
absorb. Should be a pretty serious shifting of gears in how human capital is distributed
worldwide.
But none of this is about critical thinking. Few systems of organizing society actually
promote that ... it tends to happen in spite of the organizing principles, rather than
because of them. Nor are the most educated (regardless of country of origin) any less
susceptible to the propaganda - if anything they are more so, due to the design of the
message, because it is more important that they receive it. You want a book recommendation
that talks about that, check out 'Disciplined Minds' by Jeff Schmidt (though perhaps with an
overly pessimistic outlook -- people can recognize the reality he describes and deal with
it... it is only the more naive/idealistic types who fall extra hard for the mythology and
then find themselves in a conflict they can't handle). There are lots of other avenues to
take too... about the psychology of self-discovery, discovery of self-vs-social-organism
etc....
Exactly that and yet we are constantly fed a diet from the bottom of the barrel. NYT?
WAPO? They are rags. Gutter press peddling drivel. Surely there are more erudite and critical
publications in this world than these USA drivel sheets. I am aware of good journalism in
Switzerland and elsewhere but currently separted from a device adequate to translate and
quote.
Thank you Conspiracy-theorist it I way past time we escaped the neverending story of BS +
HATE.
A propos fake news, John Helmer reports on the Navalny saga and was lately on the
Gorilla radio podcast with Chris Cook to discuss the newest events. It's a one-hour-talk
but very enjoyable listening to Helmer. You can also follow his reports on his blog
Dances With Bears .
Try this on for size. This is a conclusion I arrived at several decades ago, wrote about
several times, but not recently.
Everything that was accomplished (albeit incompletely or moderately) through the New Deal
and then the abortive Great Society absolutely spooked the oligarchy. Lifting much of the
working class out of absolute wage slavery to the point where the next rung on Maslow's
ladder was at least visible. And when it all culminated in the late 60's and early 70's with
the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Surface Mining act, and various labor protection
measures, the wealthy owner class decided the proles had gained too much power to influence
"their" captive government.
The princes and barons of industry and finance were very open about their complaints. The
advance of regulation on their ability to pollute and to exploit must stop or they would take
their bundles of riches and go elsewhere. It is what Saint Ronny was ALL about. And so all
that got fat and filthy rich during the real American Century took their wealth where
regulation and labor fairness and justice didn't exist to continue their exorbitant profit
taking.
And then they imported those cheap products here to wreak what was left of our industrial
base and to impress on all of us that they remain the boss, the real power. Drive down wages,
destroy pensions and safety nets and put US proles back into wage slavery. Remember the 80's
and 90's when Wal-Mart basically told established and storied US manufacturers "either you
produce the goods we want for what our Asian suppliers can make them for, or you're
finished." And that is exactly what happened. Wal-Mart was just the vanguard, it is now
ubiquitous. Another aspect of this assault was forcing us proles into the stock market
through our pensions and retirement funds so as to make us all sympathetic to de-regulation -
so as not to hurt OUR bottom line. Many labor unions became just a sick symbiosis with the
industries they "served."
Incomplete and observational, I am not erudite or lettered, but I think it is an accurate
narrative.
There is a curious schizophrenia where the U.S. press will treat presidential claims about
foreign affairs as a sacred truth but treat claims denying adultery, such as in the Lewinski
affair, as dismissible.
Living in the USA (Steve Miller classic) has always seemed to me about dealing with falsehood
and deception. US highschool seemed like he time for me when the formidable pressure to
conform became completely nonsensical, perhaps because it was so utterly cruel, but also
because it seemed untruthful. You basically were required to accept modes if behavior and
thought that seemed alien to human behavior, but were presented as the sine quo non of how to
be. How to succeed, how to live. It seems to me that if you were attempting to retain
truthfulness, this conformity was rife with logical fallacies of every sort which if you
tried to deal with them, or confront them, you were ostracized or at worst outcast.
In the many years since, it seems like everything else, once a person adopts untruthful
behavior, it is next to impossible to change course, so you deal with all kinds of people who
have doubled down on their personal deceptions. Marriages based on financial success come to
mind, and are like any deception, the cause of incredible dis ease and misey.
There is a philosophical concept I came upon called parrhesia that Foucault gives a
fantastic series of lectures on which can be found by searching the web, that investigates
the perils implicit in telling truth to falsehood, and the many disasters and tragedies that
have befallen human kind in the attempts to do so.
I've come to think that humans by nature are basically incapable of avoiding whatever it
is that is "truth." Because over and over life seems to present situations that are the
unswervingly the same to everyone. Youth and aging, for example, and the end result never
varies, like illness, death, and dying. And everyone has their own similar story navigating
the human predicaments and facing an inalterable "truth," which might be in this example,
death.
My wonder as I observe life as I age, is what is the damage done to those not only who try
their honest best to remain truthful, but what is the damage done to those who cannot escape
an adopted untruth and refuse to let go of it. I suppose in this moment of history, you need
only look at pandemic, wildfires, and conflicts to see how far human beings have digressed
from an Eden. But there must be a purpose to it all? Like, trying to cling to any kind of
integrity.
You think international fake news is just a Trump thing? Just off the top of my head we have
thins like Tonkin Bay, Kuwait babies being massacred by Iraqi troops, my personal favorite
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and a multiple of mean Assads killing their people with
poison. That is just a bipartisan few. We have one political party, who serves the deep
state. The deep state serves the interests of Wall Street and more importantly the Rothschild
world banking system. Give the spooks a lot of credit they let us have two "choices" while
controlling both. Think of it as a neo fascism kinda thing that ironically finances the anti
fascists. The press is just a means to an end. Assume everything is an agenda, and read the
independents for some actual thought. I may not agree with you all the time, but I do love
you MoA. Thank you for all your work.
'spooked oligarchy...reforms..culminated in ..70s'
Yep. When committed Dem's go off on Trump, it's deeply felt but kindof a ritual rant.
Bring Ralph Nader into the conversation, just mention him in passing, and the response
becomes live! Betrayal, danger of being shown up again!
Old and Grumpy @67 has a good point. Anyone suggesting that fake news is in any way related
to Trump being President are big parts of the problem for why fake news persists in the first
place. Suggesting that it is because of Trump, and thus implying that the fake news will go
away when Trump does, is either profoundly ignorant, or profoundly deceitful, though probably
both. Trump ranting about fake news exposed the problem and forced it into the public
discourse. Those rants did not create the problem.
"You basically were required to accept modes if behavior and thought that seemed alien to
human behavior ... ... forced to double down"
I had short but deeply influential conversation right out of college with a recruiter/HR
manager from Raytheon, of all places. He talked about exactly what you said. He spoke, in a
hypothetical third person, about a mid-career guy with a mortgage and family who finds
themselves questioning the defense industry. How that isn't the best place to be in,
mentally. I changed my career plans that day, forever thankful for the encounter.
However, regarding people being able to avoid unpleasant realities, he was of the opinion
that for most people, it is possible to do so. Even beneficial. (Except of course for the
recipients of his company's products. I didn't say that but I think he figured out that I was
thinking it). The issue, from the point of view of running an effective organization, is what
happens if the doubters and believers start to mix? Part of his assigned task was to simply
keep out people curious enough to ask too many questions. That's one of the "benefits" of
really polarizing politics too.
"My wonder as I observe life as I age, is what is the damage done to those not
only who try their honest best to remain truthful, but what is the damage done to those who
cannot escape an adopted untruth and refuse to let go of it."
That's what modern pharmaceuticals are for, and why one in six Americans (officially) are
prescribed them. If we include the numbers of Americans who self-medicate with alcohol and/or
grey/black market pharmaceuticals, then the proportion would be a bit (quite a bit) larger.
People who succeed at being truthful (mostly to themselves) are not confronted with cognitive
dissonance mind-quakes; however, such individuals are confronted with experiencing the retch
reflex when consuming mass media.
Is being truthful vs embracing the lies then half-dozen of one and six of the other? I
find satisfactory peace of mind from being truthful and simply avoiding the primary vector of
deception; the mass media. Noble individuals like our host and some of the posters here will
slog through that vile cesspool of lies and fish out the little nuggets of truth that leak
out. It is selfish of me to leave such dirty work to others, but at least I am not
hermetically isolated on a mountain somewhere.
An interesting thought. I have long had the feeling that a large part of the obviously
orchestrated drive to almost define both of the two US parties with really incredibly
unimportant issues like bathroom preferences were designed to split the voters as equally as
possible, so that to swing elections one had only to control the votes of a very small number
of tie breakers. I still think this is likely true, but I do think you make an important
point that a lot can be learned about what is truly important to the PTB by reflecting on the
topics that aren't being argued over.
Compare the "two" US political parties, and you will note that while they seem to be getting
ever more extreme and irreconcilable and quasi-religious in their differences, these
differences are always on the periphery. Both parties are being indoctrinated with certain
common beliefs they will take for granted because they are never talked about -- because
these points are not allowed to be in contention. So while even something like climate change
can be a big divider (no worries, there's money to be made on both sides of that issue, and
means of control); but you will never hear debate about
1. America is the greatest ever!
2.
America is always and unquestionably a force for good, and even it's proven bad things
(kidnapping, rendition, and torture programs) are done "for the greater good."
3. Unbridled
capitalism is the only way, and the privatization and unwinding of any vestiges of social
programs, like education, social security, and even utilities and infrastructure, is always a
good thing deserving of priority.
4. Individualism is the best, if not only, way. To be a
hero you must strike alone against the bad guys/the system/the government; someone who
rallies others, causes forces to be gathered and united, unionized, whatever are discouraged
or ignored.
5. "Leadership" in the affairs of others around the world is American right,
responsibility, and destiny. Having the largest, almost entirely offensively oriented
military on earth is essential; and having it, we must use it to get our money's worth.
6.
Omnipresent "intelligence" services equal safety and are absolutely required for life to be
normal. I'm sure there are other examples of "universally agreed" doctrines in the US, but
these are some that leap out.
These crazy MSM lies Anecdote. Last Sat (Geneva, Switz.) I spoke to 20 ppl whom I know
somewhat, all know I like to discuss news etc. I said, weird news this week, making no
mention of Navalny. 18/20 believed Putin poisoned Navalny and brought it up spontaneously!
There is something so appealing and narratively 'seductive' about spies and 'opponents'
(Skripal ) and mysterious poisons used by evil doers etc. that fiction just flows smoothly
into fact or whatever is 'real.'
I had to mention Assange myself to most, but there the reaction was very mixed, most
thought Assange was being persecuted, or it was 'not right', and took this story seriously in
one way or another - 4 ppl claimed not to know the latest news. Here, NGOs, Leftists and
Others have made demands for him to be offered asylum in Switz, so he has been front
page.
Besides that (I'm always interested in from-the-ground view-points, experiences, so post
some myself) what is going on is monopoly consolidation:
Mega MSM in cahoots with the MIC, Big Pharma, Big Agri, Finance, and so on. Corporations
joining up their positions bit by bit while also competing in some ways, bribing and owning
the Pols. who are front-men and women tasked with providing a lot of drama, manufactured
agitation, etc., which in turn is fodder for the MSM, etc.
Overall, the most important sector to watch is the GAFAM, 1, the reign of the middle men
is close at hand (control information, both the channels and the content, and commerce up to
a point.) All this leaves out energy considerations, another vital topic left aside.
Thanks for your reply! I've touched on the topic of human capital and its development
occasionally here, positing it's the #1 asset of all nations. Those nations who neglect to
develop their own human capital are bound to become deficient when it comes to basic
comparative advantages with other nations, particularly as political-economy shifts from
being materialistic to knowledge-based; thus Pepe Escobar agreeing wholeheartedly with my
comment about India. (He added this article to his FB timeline and I posted my comment
there.)
From 1999-2003, I was involved in developing distance learning platforms for the rapidly
advancing ability to learn outside of a school's four walls. The other educators I worked
with and myself had great hopes for the virtual classroom and what it might do to aide both
teachers and students. At the time we thought this development would provide a great
opportunity for the third member of the educational team--parents--to play a greater role in
the process since active parental involvement was proven to generate better student outcomes.
But for that to be properly implemented, equitable funding for all school districts became an
even greater issue than it was already. This issue highlighted the huge problems related to
financing education at a moment when BushCo Privatizers began to seriously threaten what was
already in place. And that problem has only worsened, the vast disparities being very evident
thanks to COVID-forced distance learning. The primary reason good teachers can't be retained
is the entire system's a massive Clusterfuck. And computers aren't substitutes for even poor
teachers. And parents are even more aloof from becoming involved in the process than ever
before.
The dumbing-down I mention is now entering its third generation. The educational structure
needs to be completely refitted nationally, but I wouldn't give that task to any of the
fuckwits employed by the past three administrations--Yes, I'm arguing education needs to be a
completely federal program instead of the 53 different school systems in states and
territories; and yes, I'm aware of the pitfalls and potential corruption that poses, which is
a microcosm of all the problems at the federal level of government. This problem is yet
another very basic reason why the Duopoly and its backers need to be ousted from government
and kept as far away as possible as the structure is torn down and rebuilt--The USA will
never be great again until that is done.
I suggest that the reason that the media focus on the ridiculous is to convince the public
that there is nothing important happening - except where the MSM wants the participation of
the public as in with anti-Russia, anti_China, anti-Socialism, etc. Good to get the public
participation directed at harmless targets.
They've got to fill the papers with something. The public must be kept warm, comfortable,
semi-comatose, watching cat videos...
Last thing anybody wants is the involvement of the public, they will only screw
everything-up or try anyway.
Thanks for your reply! Your explanation sadly is correct, but it was put into motion prior
to Reagan becoming POTUS. The tools used to undo the New Deal were put into place before FDR
became POTUS. And FDR's unwillingness to prosecute those who attempted to overthrow his
government provided that faction to infiltrate government and eventually attempt to undo the
good that was done prior to WW2. When looked at closely, American society was generally quite
Liberal in the positive aspects of that term and during the Depression was becoming ever more
Collectivist with the war advancing that even further. At the war's end, it was paramount for
the forces taking control of the nation to push the public to the right and away from its
collectivist proclivities. Where we find ourselves today thus is not an accident of history
but an engineered outcome. You may recall voices on the Right accusing Liberals and their
organizations of engaging in Social Engineering. Those accusations were projections since it
was actually forces on the Right that were maneuvering society to the Right while assiduously
applying the principle of Divide and Rule to create a condition where they would be immune
from political challenge, which is where we are now.
A few understand this ugly truth and how we arrived here. What's missing is scholarship
that links the changes that began in the 1870s with today's situation. Yes, there're good
examinations of various pieces of the overall puzzle. But it appears that only Hudson and
those in his small circle have figured it out; yet, they haven't produced a complete history
that encapsulates it all. And for us to have a realistic chance to undo what's been done, we
need to know how it all transpired.
Antonym @ 60
"There are big differences between Trump and Biden regarding their foreign policies:
Trump is hard on Xi-China and soft on Putin Russia, while Biden is the reverse."
I don't share your view. The current administration's foreign policy is very much aligned
with that of past administrations and the diplomatic circus surrounding the Skripal affair
alone is evidence that nobody is soft on Russia.
What differs, however, is the presentation. Trump is criticized (not praised) for being
allegedly soft on Russia and Biden criticized for being allegedly soft on China. This clever
trick ensures that just about everybody is onboard the bash-China-and-Russia train.
In a violently polarized society, with red-blue antagonism reaching ridiculous heights,
people tend to act exclusively in contradiction to the cult figure they hate so much.
If a Trump hater hears the criticism that the president is too soft on Russia, he will
readily grab the bash-Russia stick hoping to score a few hits on Trump. The same person's
reaction to a criticism on Biden will be either indifference or angry denial. In either case,
he will not be opposed to the bash-Russia nor the bash-China movement.
The dem hater's reaction is similar. Indifference to the soft-on-Russia claim (ie. no
opposition to the bash-Russia movement) and active support for the China-bashing.
The article and subsequent discussion brings to mind Dawkins discussion of Memes and
Memetics. Not those pesky internet memes. The propaganda war is fierce, and almost without
exception the people here are poking and prodding perhaps without being able to put the
finger on the "EZ button". This is war, baby, so one thinks the following link may be useful:
Wherein: " Ideally the virus of the mind being targeted will be overwritten with a higher
fidelity, fecundity, and longevity memeplex in order to assure long term sustainability. When
this is not practical, it is still possible to displace a dangerous memeplex, by creating a
more contagious benign meme utilizing certain packaging, replication, and propagation
tricks."
The lie is irrelevant, whether true or false, it must be believable, and it must
successfully replicate.
You are right, the early FDR days were, in hindsight, one of the most important in setting
the course of the US for the next century, and unfortunately Big Business won, taking us on a
long, ugly road to the right. I agree this would be a most fascinating history book if some
of those respected, genuinely knowledgeable people you often cite could collaborate on an
opus.
Yes, most people do not know that the wide ranging labor laws implemented at that time
were actually not meant to empower organized labor, but to limit it. Perhaps FDR thought it
was the best he could do for the working class, but I tend to think it was more a case of him
thinking that by outlawing general strikes, wildcat strikes, strikes in support of other
unions, and setting up an NLRB with a lot of political control by business, the powers who
had so recently let it be known they were ready to actively try to overthrow the government
might be mollified. I think he feared the US was at the cusp of a revolution, and perhaps it
was. Whether or not if would have been better had that been allowed to proceed is the big
question.
Anti-China activists funded by NED & Co make up all sorts of horrid stories online, which
are then picked up by MSM and political NGOs to spoon feed world audiences/viewers. Viola,
you have "fact-based" anti-China news!
This is literally what these overseas Uyghur activists do all day. Putting a random
caption on a video they ripped down from a medical worker's tiktok in China. And people
believe it. They'd even believe if the follow up rebuttal is that this is a forced labour
doctor.
Glad to see his name mentioned here. I've been saying for years here to watch the
documentary - Century of the Self. If you want to learn about and understand America, its all here. Government, Corporations,
Consumerism, Militarism, Deep State, Psychology, Individual selfishness and mental
illness.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Thanks for your reply! JK Galbraith in his American Capitalism: The Concept of
Countervailing Power lamented what you recap in your 2nd paragraph and that there was
thus no power capable of offsetting Big Business although one was sorely needed. As I wrote,
some very sharp minds have written about small segments of the overall movement toward
totalitarianism since the 1870s, Galbraith's 1952 book being one that's still worth
reading.
Karlof 1 @ 32 attacks vk @4-- Your attempt to credit Karl Popper with the concept of public
opinion is just as false as the stories b wrote about. Click here for a history of that
concept. by: karlof1 | Sep 15 2020 17:04 utc | 32
What I like about what vk@ 4 said is that he has given this list a beginning to not only
understand our plight as members of the governed classes, but also to analyze our experience
with this stuff and to develop a set of rules that can allow us to defend our minds against
being controlled by invisible hands of mind control.
can we on this list develop a defensive strategy and use it to teach the governed
masses?
Around the globe and throughout history it can be observed that the oligarchs invent a
collection of values and stuff them into structures they call nation states, culture,
institutions and journalist are all designed to, and rewarded for supporting the values,
while media is charged to keep the propaganda circulating.
The H&C propaganda model pulls together from across the political communications
literature the variety of factors which essentially constrain journalist and means that they
don't actually play the independent autonomous and watchdog role that we expect them to in a
democracy ae Herman Chromsky talk about the importance oe size concentration ownership oe
mainstream media the way in w/e ownership of most oe media outlets w/people go to for their
information is essentially associated w/very large conglomerates w/h overlapping interests
and overlapping interests with government and this produces a large structural constraint oe
way the media operates.
The Interface between Propaganda and War: Prof.
The Propaganda Model: The filters (Herman & Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, the political
economy of the mass media).
@5, Nathan Mulcahy, going by this Google Books Ngram Viewer
graph use of the word "presstitute" appeared around 1882. Its use really took off in
2009, peaking in 2016-2017, but definitely still up there. It didn't give an equivalent graph
for "presstitution".
I think that might be just for printed books, and not for online usage. Since at least
2014, if not earlier, Paul Craig Roberts has definitely contributed to popularizing the term,
imo. It's definitely fitting for our mainstream new media.
Speaking of fake news, Wikipedia asserts that it was coined by a "trend
forecaster" author Gerald Celente (but if you look at Wikipedia's source article, it's some
Indian news site article that clearly makes the attribution "according to
urban dictionary " which is not only a crowd-sourced site but also makes zero mention of
this Celente.
Karl Marx said that " Philosophers have hitherto only
interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it ." I doubt very much that
you will know which changes you need to make if you don't have a very good idea about your
starting point. In his book Factfulness and in his many excellent online presentations, the
late Swedish Professor of International Health Hans Rosling identifies a lot of the ways things
have gotten better , especially for the world's poorest.
Suppose, for example, that you encounter the name " Milton Friedman ,"
perhaps in connection with lamented "neoliberalism" and maybe in connection with human rights
abuses perpetrated by the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Friedman has been denounced
as the "father of global misery," and his reputation has taken another beating in the wake of
the fiftieth anniversary of his 1970 New York Times Magazine essay " The Social Responsibility of Business is to
Increase its Profits ," which I suspect most people haven't read past its title. But what
happened during "The Age of Milton Friedman," as the economist Andrei Shleifer asked in
a 2009
article ? Shleifer points out that "Between 1980 and 2005, as the world embraced free
market policies, living standards rose sharply, while life expectancy, educational attainment,
and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined."
Things have never been so good, and they are getting better , especially for the world's
poor.
In 2008, there was a bit of controversy over the establishment of the Milton Friedman
Institute at the University of Chicago, which operates today as the Becker Friedman Institute (it is also named for Friedman's
fellow Chicago economist Gary Becker ). In a
blistering
reply to a protest letter signed by a
group of faculty members at the University of Chicago, the economist John Cochrane wrote, "If
you start with the premise that the last 40 or so years, including the fall of communism, and
the opening of China and India are 'negative for much of the world's population,' you just
don't have any business being a social scientist. You don't stand a chance of contributing
something serious to the problems that we actually do face." Nor, might I add, do you stand
much of a chance of concocting a revolutionary program that will actually help the people
you're trying to lead.
2. What makes me so sure I won't replace the existing regime with
something far worse?
I might hesitate to push the aforementioned button because while the world we actually
inhabit is far from perfect, it's not at all clear that deleting the state overnight wouldn't
mean civilization's wholesale and maybe even perpetual collapse. At the very least, I would
want to think long and hard about it. The explicit mention of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara in
the course description suggest that students will be approaching revolutionary ideas from the
left. They should look at the results of populist revolutions in 20th century Latin America,
Africa, and Asia. The blood of many millions starved and slaughtered in efforts to "forge a
better society" cries out against socialism and communism, and
macroeconomic populism in Latin America has been disastrous . As people have pointed out
when told that "democratic socialists" aren't trying to turn their countries into Venezuela,
Venezuelans weren't trying to turn their country into Venezuela when they embraced Hugo Chavez.
I wonder why we should expect WLU's aspiring revolutionaries to succeed where so many others
have failed.
3. Is my revolutionary program just a bunch of platitudes with which no
decent person would disagree?
In 2019, Kristian Niemietz of London's Institute of Economic Affairs published a useful
volume titled Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies , which you can
download for $0 from IEA . He notes a tendency for socialists and neo-socialists to pitch
their programs almost exclusively in terms of their hoped-for results rather than in terms of
the operation of concrete social processes they hope to set in motion (on this I paraphrase
my intellectual hero Thomas Sowell ).
Apply a test proposed a long time ago by the economist William Easterly: can you imagine
anyone seriously objecting to what you're saying? If not, then you probably aren't saying
anything substantive. Can you imagine someone saying "I hate the idea of the world's poor
having better food, clothing, shelter, and medical care" or "It would be a very bad thing if
more people were literate?" If not, then it's likely that your revolutionary program is a
tissue of platitudes and empty promises. That's not to say it won't work politically–God
knows, nothing sells better on election day than platitudes and empty promises–but you
shouldn't think you're saying anything profound if all you're saying is something obvious like
"It would be nice if more people had access to clean, drinkable water."
... ... ...
7. How has it worked the other times it has been tried?
Years before the Russian Revolution, Eugene Richter predicted with eerie prescience what
would happen in a socialist society in his short book Pictures of the Socialistic Future (
which you can
download for $0 here ). Bryan Caplan, who wrote the foreword for that edition of Pictures
and who put together the online " Museum of Communism ," points out
the distressing regularity with which communists go from "bleeding heart" to "mailed fist." It
doesn't take long for communist regimes to go from establishing a workers' paradise to shooting
people who try to leave. Consider whether or not the brutality and mass murder of communist
regimes is a feature of the system rather than a bug. Hugo Chavez and Che
Guevara both expressed bleeding hearts with their words but used a mailed fist in practice
(I've written before that "irony" is denouncing Milton Friedman for the crimes of Augusto
Pinochet while wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. Pinochet was a murderous thug. Guevara was, too).
Caplan points to
pages 105 and 106 of Four Men: Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba
. On page 105, Lazaro Benedi Rodriguez's heart is bleeding for the illiterate. On page 106,
he's "advis(ing) Fidel to have an incinerator dug about 40 or 50 meters deep, and every time
one of these obstinate cases came up, to drop the culprit in the incinerator, douse him with
gasoline, and set him on fire."
... ... ...
9. What will I do with people who aren't willing to go along with my
revolution?
Walter Williams once said that he doesn't mind if communists want to be communists. He minds
that they want him to be a communist, too. Would you allow people to try capitalist experiments
in your socialist paradise? Or socialist experiments in your capitalist paradise (Families,
incidentally, are socialist enterprises that run by the principle "from each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs.")? Am I willing to allow dissenters to advocate my
overthrow, or do I need to crush dissent and control the minds of the masses in order for my
revolution to work? Am I willing to allow people to leave, or will I need to build a wall to
keep people in?
10. Am I letting myself off the hook for questions 1-9 and giving myself
too much credit for passion and sincerity?
The philosopher David Schmidtz has said that if your best argument is that your heart is in
the right place, then your heart is most definitely not in the right place. Consider this quote
from Edmund Burke and ask whether or not it leads you to revise your revolutionary plans:
"A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood. He would feel some
apprehension at being called to a tremendous account for engaging in so deep a play, without
any sort of knowledge of the game. It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance, that it is
directed by insolent passion. The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save
itself from injustice and oppression is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man. But
I cannot conceive any existence under heaven (which, in the depths of its wisdom, tolerates
all sorts of things) that is more truly odious and disgusting, than an impotent helpless
creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any other
qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling
for battles which he is not to fight, contending for a violent dominion which he can never
exercise, and satisfied to be himself mean and miserable, in order to render others
contemptible and wretched." (Emphasis added).
The day after the elections , Russians
got together to rally against election fraud. Even though the United Russia party, according to
preliminary results, is to lose some 77 seats compared to the previous Duma, most of the
protesters considered the election to be neither fair, nor free (see our previous reports on
the web crackdown
and massive
violation reports).
After the polls closed on Dec. 4, Solidarnost movement invited protesters to
Chistye Prudy metro station in Moscow, while the Communists, also unhappy with the election
results, organized their rally at Pushkinskaya square. Solidarnost movement represenatives,
most of whom have no political arena except street actions and the blogosphere, managed to
bring thousands of people together (while crowd estimates vary significantly, the most balanced
assessment seems to be from 8,000 to 10,000 people).
Chistye Prudy
People began gathering for the Solidarnost event at around 19:00 MSK. Georgiy Alburov
posted a picture of the
line to the site of the rally:
Line to the Chistye Prudy rally. Photo by Georgiy Alburov
Thousands out in cold/rain baying for free elections, Putin to be sent to prison. Never
seen anything on this scale. Definite change of mood
The overall coverage was chaotic as the mobile Internet stopped working in the area and
people couldn't upload videos and pictures. LiveJournal kept the chronology of the events
here [ru].
Only later in the evening people were able to upload videos [ru] from the rally and particularly
the speech [ru] by
Alexey Navalny, who was among the most popular politicians of the event. His speech probably
best describes the essence of the current events:
And then: "They can call us microbloggers or net hamsters. I am a net hamster! And I'll bite
[these bastards' heads off.] We'll all do it together! Because we do exist! [ ] We will not
forget, we will not forgive"
The reference to 'net hamsters' (a pejorative term for politically-engaged Internet
commenters) and their political will to change the country has destroyed the myth of the
slacktivist nature of political engagement online. Navalny has specifically emphasized
'forgetting/forgiving' to show that netizens do not necessarily have a short attention span
often ascribed to them.
On to Lubyanka
After several speeches made by the opposition politicians, the crowd moved on towards
Lubyanka Square, where the head office of the Federal Security Service is located. The
video [ru] uploaded by
user bigvane depicts Muscovites moving to Lubyanka and chanting "Free elections":
Most of the activists, however, were soon stopped on their way. Ilya Barabanov tweeted a
picture of the blocked road:
Blocked road. Photo by Ilya Barabanov
Twenty minutes after the aforementioned photo was made, Alexey Navalny was detained by the
police. Ilya Barabanov was detained three minutes after Navalny. (See this great photo report
made by ridus.ru correspondents here [ru].)
But even the detention didn't break the rebellious and quite positive spirit of the
protesters. Navalny, while sitting in a police bus together with other activists, shared an
instagram photo of the cheerful detained protesters:
'I'm sitting in a police bus with all the guys. They all say hi.' Photo by Alexey
Navalny
Another video , also shot
inside a police bus, showed protesters discussing the salaries of police officers, laughing a
lot.
The Hamster Revolution
The most interesting part of the post-election rebellion is not its peaceful manner (also an
important feature compared to violent nationalist riots), but its new demographics. Tvrain.ru
field reporter said that the crowd consisted mainly of the "intelligentsia, hipsters, and young
people." "It is a fashionable rally," said the reporter. Later, these observations were added:
the age of the protesters was between 16 and 33 and for many of those who were detained this
was the first street action experience. As Vera Kichanova tweeted :
Lyosha Nikitin writes that he is the only one of the 16 people in the police bus who had been
detained before. Others were taking part in a rally for the first time!
***
Meanwhile, levada.ru, the site of Levada Center polling and sociological
research organization, has been DDoSed [ru] and the contents
of epic-hero.ru were removed [ru] by the hosting provider.
Obama was saved by the MSM from the reputation of traitor, a man professing peace and
harmony among all races for which good people elected him, to that of a rabid sycophant of
the oligarchs, to that of a pliant instrument of despotism, intent upon the ruin of America
in general - an enemy to the cause of liberty, sowing violence and division.. Obama was a
wolf presented in sheep's clothing, a betrayer of the American Dream, the perpetrator of
criminal acts for which the nation is now suffering. For this he and that woman he married
were paid to gallop about in fancy dress and mansions flagrantly blowing the $40,000,000
handed them by the Globalists. The force from which he and his have been saved is
condemnation and ostracism.
From his past as a communist Alinsky community "organizer," we should have known his aim
was overthrow of the country.
jeff montanye , 2 hours ago
agree with everything but "that woman he married."
close enough for an upvote.
NAV , 1 hour ago
Sorry, Jeff, I understand, but it is hard for me to forgive the selfishness of a woman who
has had opportunity and wealth all her life in America and then had the gall to say that she
was not proud of America until she was 44 years old, when she said of her husband's 2008
Democrat presidential nomination, "For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of
my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."
She had/has no concept of what is/was the American Dream, ie, opportunity and property
rights. Does she not know that a billion people in this world subsist on a dollar or less a
day and have NO hope of anything better? How proud and how thankful THEY would be for the
opportunities of a better life in America, which she and her husband have helped to erase in
support of communism, IMHO.
createnewaccount , 11 hours ago
Obama was President because they could.
Same with any outrage.
P Dunne , 13 hours ago
No doubt Clinton was a war monger she got loads of cash from special interests seeking
destabilization in the region.
fxrxexexdxoxmx2 , 13 hours ago
This so untrue.
The Clinton's have only ever thought about children. Wanting to save them, shelter them,
keep them close.
Every effort taken by the Clinton's was about safe secure and frequent access to
children.
Trying to make that a bad thing is like saying the Netflix movie ' Cuties' was not an
artistic expression worthy of an Oscar.
Vivekwhu , 6 hours ago
Trump is in office not in power. Now he leaves a few hundred US troops in Syria to openly
steal the oil. Obiden would have farted nice flowery democratic language to hide the robbery
at gunpoint, but Trump is so honest and brazen.
Let it Go , 4 hours ago
How quickly people forget! Our memory has a way of removing rough edges from events we
should not try to whitewash the past and rewrite history to present a different picture of
what really happened. Because of the stark contrast in the demeanor and style of Trump and
Obama, the media has "photoshopped" reality.
For years former President Obama remained more or less off the grid. Now that he has
reemerged we should take a moment to review the Obama era. The article below reminds us of
many of the scandals that took place during this time in history.
The Plot Against Libya: An Obama-Biden-Clinton Criminal Conspiracy
This is clearly another Washingtonian Triumph and Success story. Other people's lives are
destroyed but Washingtonians and elites get the tsetse fly headlines for a spell. Libya is
just another great achievement by the Washington Regime and its state security apparatus and
puppet journalists. It's the claimed thoughtful good intentions of Ivy Leaguers &
JudeoWASP elites that counts and the headlines that matter not the bodies, bloodshed,
butchery, and slaughter.
Keep in mind it's for the people! The reason the Washingtonians destroy countries abroad
is because "it's for the people." The reason Washingtonians sick the secret police on people
and persecute people at home is because "it's for the people."
Let it Go , 4 hours ago
One thing we have come to expect on any issue confronting our nation is grandstanding from
those in both parties. The government in Washington like those in other countries specialize
in putting lipstick "On A Pig." It is very possible Washington is a swamp that cannot be
drained.
Strangely, as time has passed it seems the polarizing divide that grips the nation might
be planned or contrived merely to create a pathway to greater power by the forces that hold
us hostage. The article below explores how those in power with the aid of the media have
created an environment of gridlock where they can run free and continue exploiting those they
pretend to serve. http://Washington Specializes On Putting
Lipstick On A Pig.html
Obamaroid Ointment , 4 hours ago
The Obama Regime tried to pull a coup here too, in fact they still haven't given up on
it.
Manthong , 10 hours ago
At least Goldman is not involved.
Mentaliusanything , 7 hours ago
Hahahahahahaha! They are always "involved" Just not directly only covertly
In the days, weeks, and months immediately following the 9/11 attacks, Arab-Americans,
South Asian-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and Sikh-Americans were the targets of widespread
hate violence. Many of the perpetrators of these acts of hate violence claimed they were
acting patriotically by retaliating against those responsible for 9/11.
...
Just after September 11, numerous Arabs, Muslims, and individuals perceived to be Arab or
Muslim were assaulted, and some killed, by individuals who believed they were responsible
for or connected to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The first backlash
killing occurred four days after September 11.
Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot to death on September 15 as he was planting flowers outside
his Chevron gas station. The man who shot Sodhi, Frank Roque, had told an employee of an
Applebee's restaurant that he was "going to go out and shoot some towel heads." Roque
mistakenly thought Sodhi was Arab because Sodhi, an immigrant from India, had a beard and
wore a turban as part of his Sikh faith. After shooting Sodhi, Roque drove to a Mobil gas
station a few miles away and shot at a Lebanese-American clerk. He then drove to a home he
once owned and shot and almost hit an Afghani man who was coming out the front door. When
he was arrested two hours later, Roque shouted, "I stand for America all the way."
The next two killings were committed by a man named Mark Stroman. On September 15, 2001,
Stroman shot and killed Waquar Hassan, an immigrant from Pakistan, at Hassan's grocery
store in Dallas, Texas. On October 4, 2001, Stroman shot and killed Vasudev Patel, an
immigrant from India and a naturalized U.S. citizen, while Patel was working at his Shell
station convenience store. A store video camera recorded the killing, helping police to
identify Stroman as the killer. Stroman later told a Dallas television station that he shot
Hassan and Patel because, "We're at war. I did what I had to do. I did it to retaliate
against those who retaliated against us."
Beyond these killings, there were more than a thousand other anti-Muslim or anti-Arab
acts of hate which took the form of physical assaults, verbal harassment and intimidation,
arson, attacks on mosques, vandalism, and other property damage.
Instead of "calming prejudice" the GB Bush administration institutionalized hate
crimes:
First, in the weeks immediately following the September 11 attacks, the government began
secretly arresting and detaining Arab, Muslim, and South Asian men. Within the first two
months after the attacks, the government had detained at least 1,200 men.
...
Second, in November 2001, the Department of Justice began efforts to "interview"
approximately 5,000 men between the ages of 18 and 33 from Middle Eastern or Muslim nations
who had arrived in the United States within the previous two years on a temporary student,
tourist, or business visa and were lawful residents of the United States. Four months
later, the government announced it would seek to interview an additional 3,000 men from
countries with an Al Qaeda presence.
...
Third, in September 2002, the government implemented a "Special Registration" program also
known as NSEERS (National Security Entry-Exit Registration System), requiring immigrant men
from 26 mostly Muslim countries to register their name, address, telephone number, place of
birth, date of arrival in the United States, height, weight, hair and eye color, financial
information and the addresses, birth dates and phone numbers of parents and any foreign
friends with the government.
Besides all that a rather useless security theater was installed at U.S. airports which
has costs many billions in lost time and productivity ever since. The Patriot Act was
introduced which allowed for unlimited spying on private citizens. Wars were launched that
were claimed to be justified by 9/11. These were "mass outbreaks of anti-Muslim sentiment and
violence. Many were killed and maimed in them. People were tortured and vanished. All of this
happened largely to applause of a majority of the U.S. people which were glued to 24 and dreamed of being "terrorist
hunters".
Anyone with a functional memory knows that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was anything but
"pretty calm". It is ridiculous that Krugman is claiming that.
I find it a bit humorous b that you are critical of Krugman for his 911 dementia when for
years many of us finance types have railed about how morally corrupt the logic and thinking
of Paul Krugman is.
Paul Krugman is to economics what Bernie Sanders has become for the purported "left" side
of the "right wing" uni-party....a sheep dog for the easily led.
Paul Krugman is an acolyte for the God of Mammon/global private finance elite.
While spreading anger and hate toward Arab people, The Bush Administration rescued the
many members of the Kingdom's family from all around the US and escorted their flights out of
the US to safety in Saudi Arabia.
Distracting the public big time was Dick Cheney, VP, who insisted from the very next day
that the plot to hit the Twin Towers was Saddam's plot.
So, the historical record and US response was skewed from the getgo. AQ and Bin Laden
didn't concern the neocons. They wanted the US to go to Iraq again, and this time start a
wide war that would spread to Syria and Lebanon and Iran.
It was easy times to spread fear and hate, and Cheney and the war mongers of CENTCOM were
riding high. Americans were scared of all Arabs, all Sunnis, all Shiites, from anywhere. They
were all the same in the public's mind. Enemies.
It was perfect and has led to 19 years of endless wars. Add ISIS and al Nusra and the
Taliban and you have an endless soup of enemies.
krugman is a terrible shill for the neo-cons and liberal-interventionists of the 21st
century
at my age, I shouldn't really be surprised any more by what american "intellectuals" and
"nobel prize winners" say about anything..... but I am.
He's neo-liberal interventionist moron of the first rank, and saying what he did actually
normalizes the war mania and war-mongering which has become so staple in mainstream thought
and the "think tanks" and is now practically part of the american DNA and "culture".
shame on krugman
...
It appears the Deep State has attacked the USA's people twice in two decades--on 911 and with
the decision to let as many die as possible by deliberately not doing anything to mitigate
the impact of COVID-19 and allowing the real economy to atrophy so even more will die in the
long run.
Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 11 2020 19:40 utc | 34
Talking about tilting at windmills - I'll never forget Robert Fisk angrily pointing out
that the Yankees knew where to find Al CIA-duh because they extended the cave complex at Tora
Bora to help Al CIA-duh, equipped with 10,000 US Stinger Missiles, kick the Russians out of
Afghanistan in the 1980s!!!
(The Yankees had to wait for 10+ years to invade Afghanistan because it takes that long
for Stingers to pass their Use By date)
@michaelj72. "krugman is a terrible shill for the neo-cons and liberal-interventionists of
the 21st century"
Actually, Paul Krugman was a strong and outspoken opponent of the Iraq War since early
2003 and possibly earlier. He was amongst the few mainstream liberal commentators to take
that stand.
If MoA readers and commenters were to read the entire series of Krugman's tweets, six in
all, they will see mention of how the Bush govt began exploiting the events of 11 September
2001 almost immediately. Though the example Krugman actually uses would make most people
cringe at what it suggests about the bubble he lives in and how far removed it is from most
people's lives and experiences, and his reference to a "horrible war" does not mention either
Afghanistan or Iraq.
It has to be said that Twitter is not designed very well for the kind of informal
conversational commentary that people often use it for. But then you would think Krugman
would use something other than Twitter to discuss and compare 9/11 with the impact of
COVID-19.
The real issue I have with Krugman's Tweet is that he is revising history and bending over
backwards to apologise for Dubya in a way to criticise Donald Trump's performance as
President.
b " Anyone with a functional memory knows that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was anything but
"pretty calm". It is ridiculous that Krugman is claiming that. "
Careful with that axe b, you are talking about Biden's chief economic adviser and likely
appointee as Chair of the Fed. How does this look?
Volker
Greenspan
Bernanke
Yellen
Powell
Krugman
Reading Krugman's columns in 2016, I had a strong to overwhelming sense that this was a
person revving up for a spot in Hillary's White House or cabinet. For some reason it isn't
hitting me as strongly this time around – he may not have as close connections in
Biden's circle – but it certainly would not be a surprise to see him take a turn
through the media/government revolving door if Trump loses (though, fwiw, I don't think it
will be a job at the Fed).
Yep. Pretty staggering how a few disgruntled ex-CIA contractors managed to, deliberately
or not, help the US Gov't launch the biggest world war operation right under the noses of the
brainwashed masses.
99% of Westerners still are clueless as to explaining the last 20 years in a broader
geopolitical context.
#28: "The antiwar protests in the US were small and insignificant."
No they were not. Millions of people demonstrated against the planned war, in the US,
in the UK, and around the world...
We mustn't forget how the vast majority of those who allegedly were anti-war suddenly went
totally pro-war silent upon Obama coming in.
But that pales compared to the vile spectacle of all the self-alleged
"anti-authoritarians", "anti-propagandists" "dissidents", who suddenly regard the government
media as the literal voice of God, where their alleged God speaks of Covid.
His book, End this Depression Now, is pretty weak. He has no theory of why the crash
occurred. He critiques the austerity agenda but doesn't understand that government spending
CAN create tax liabilities for capital down the road and eat into profits, thus blocking
expanded investments and growth. Moronic libertarians hate Krugman just because they are
right wing assholes who think, like fairies, that a free market without the state will work
fine and self correct. Marx debunked this fairy tale thoroughly in Capital Volume 1, showing
that, even if we start with the mythical free market of libertarian morons, capitalism will
still operate according to the general law by which concentration and centralization lead to
class polarization. In any case, in volume 3 of Capital, Marx develops his laws of crisis,
showing that the cycles of expansion and depression under capitalism follow the movements of
the rate of profit, which itself is determined by the ratio of the value of sunk capital in
production technologies to the rate of exploitation (profits/wages). If the former rises more
than the latter, the rate of profit sinks, along with investment, output and employment.
Financial crises then set in.
The empirical evidence in the data bears out Marx's theory, not Krugman's dumb notion of
aggregate demand, or the stupid libertarian focus on interest rates.
We could discuss here all day about the sociological subject of the American people's true
positioning in the aftermath of 9/11. It would be, sincerely, a waste of time.
The important thing to grasp over this episode - from the point of view of History - is
this: it was a strategic victory for al-Qaeda . The USA took the bait (all scripted?)
and went into a quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a few years, the surplus the USA had
accumulated with the sacking and absorption of the Soviet space during Bill Clinton
evaporated and became a huge deficit in the Empire's accounts. Not long after, the 2008
financial meltdown happened, burying Bushism in a spectacular way.
There's a debate about the size of the hole the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan cost the
American Empire. Some put it into the dozens of billions of USDs; others put it into the
trillions of USDs range. We will never know. What we know is that the hole was big enough to
both erase the American surplus and to not avoid the financial meltdown of 2008.
Either the expansion through the Middle East wasn't fast and provided riches enough to
keep up with the Empire's voracious appetite or the invasion itself already represented a
last, desperate attempt by the Empire to avoid its imminent collapse. We know, however, that
POTUS Bush had a list of countries he wanted to invade beyond Iraq (the "Axis of Evil") which
contained a secret country (Venezuela). He was conscious Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn't be
enough. Whatever the case, he didn't have the time, and the financial meltdown happened in
his last year in the White House.
They knew who the perps of 9/11 were: their "own" Saudi irregulars in the CIA's US main
land training camps, who started practicing on the "wrong"- domestic American- targets. These
guys were officially entered without any background checks.
The Bush and Bin Laden families go way back in money making. That is why George had to ponder
so long in that Florida kindergarten after hearing about the attacks: he had a suspicion. The
Saudi only fly out after 9/11 confirms that.
Paul Krugman Is a pro. Completely owned by Deep State. His purpose is to deflect
discussion and prevent questioning the official version of 9/11 , and get people chasing
something completely irrelevant. Well done Paul, most have taken the bait.
Dannehy's email contained no information about the investigation, her work for Durham, or
political pressure, according to the Courant.
Durham, the US attorney for the district of Connecticut since 2017, was tasked in May 2019
to investigate the way the FBI and the DOJ handled the so-called Russiagate probe of Trump's
campaign and administration, from mid-2016 to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special
counsel in May 2017.
Though copious evidence that the investigation wasn't on the level has since emerged –
from the text messages between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to memos about
"entrapment" of General Michael Flynn and a damning inspector-general report, Durham's
probe has resulted in only one prosecution so far.
Last month, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to making a false statement,
admitting that he altered evidence in the case of Carter Page. By claiming Page was a 'Russian
agent,' the FBI was able to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, both before and
after the 2016 presidential election.
Evidence has emerged that the principal basis of the FISA warrants was the discredited
'Trump-Russia dossier,' compiled by British spy Christopher Steele and funded by Hillary
Clinton's campaign through the Democratic Party.
bjd050 11 Sep, 2020 07:14 PM
"Improper political influence". That's rich, coming from a coup plotters' apologist.
At the time of writing, he is still in a coma in the intensive care unit, in the same
German clinic. What happened to him, no one can say for sure yet (or does not want
to).
Written before it was not unsurprisingly "revealed" by the Germans that Navalny was
poisoned with "Novichok".
I recall how in 2012, having spouted his usual bullshit to the mob at Bolotnaya, Navalny
left the stage but did not join the sheeple, some of whom wished to storm the police lines
containing them in order that they not cross a nearby bridge over the Moscow River and head
for the Kremlin, but went the opposite way, where a line of OMON personnel prevented persons
from venturing any further.
A gap then appeared in the OMON cordon, through which the Bullshitter nonchalantly
proceeded, whither no one knows.
I used to teach a bloke at KPMG who believed that Navalny was employed by the FSB. He was
a regular sort of bloke: mid-30s, married, young family, well educated, widely travelled, a
tax specialist.
Politically, he was right of centre, but not much: certainly not a Libtard and no rampant
nationalist either.
He had a younger brother, he told me, who was still at college and whom he considered to
be a dickhead because he was a Navalny hamster who attended the Bullshitter's unsanctioned
assemblies.
There have been a few Orcs who have expressed their opinion to me over the years that
Navalny is a latter-day "Father Gapon".
Western regime-change tuners would do well to take notice that Navalny is popular with
disaffected children of the elite and the intelligentsia for the same reason The Rolling
Stones and Deep Purple were beloved by the youth of my generation – because adults
despised them. I still believe Ritchie Blackmore is the greatest rock guitarist who ever
lived, but if he announced he was moving to Canada to run for Prime Minister, I would just
laugh. There is no crossover in those skills. Well, I couldn't actually give less of a fuck
who is the next Prime Minister of Canada, so perhaps it's not a good example, and Blackmore
would doubtless do as well as anyone else. But you see my point, I'm sure. Being a
Navalny-follower is cool because it is an act of rebellion. Lyosha was a real-estate lawyer,
and his understanding of massive organizations like the Ministry of Finance or the
labyrinthine workings of the tax code is strictly at the newspaper-commenter level. To be
fair, that's true of many Prime Ministers and Presidents as well, but they rely on Heads of
Departments and Ministers to know that stuff. Navalny seems to think those people would serve
him loyally and make his imaginings come to life if he could just win. It's surprising he has
not looked to America there, too, for his inspiration. Was that Obama's experience? I don't
think so. Nor is it Trump's.
I suppose Lyosha reasons that if he could just get elected, Harvard would send a team of
experts to help him remodel Russia, and doubtless it would. But that was tried once already,
and I think the reaction to a repeat attempt would be a little less welcoming this time
around.
Omsk doctor says there were no toxicants in Navalny's body
"Любой
токсикант,
проходя через
наши органы
детоксикации (а
это печень,
почки и лёгкие),
оставит след. В
данном случае в
течение всего
времени
пребывания ни
почки, ни
лёгкие, ни
печень не были
(поражены. -- RT)", --
уточнил
Александр
Сабаев в
разговоре с RT.
"Any toxicant passing through our detoxification organs (which are the liver,
kidneys and lungs) will leave a trace. In this case, during his entire stay, neither his
kidneys, nor his lungs, nor his liver were (affected. – RT) ", Alexander Sabaev
clarified in a conversation with RT.
And I am willing to bet that at the Omsk hospital they have records of their analyses on
hand to prove this. They used a USA manufactured machine to do these analyses, by the
way.
This is called "presenting evidence".
Over to you, "Free World" doctors at the Berlin Charité clinic -- better said
"Porton Down" and Bundeswehr laboratories!
I guess their hope was that Russia would just deny and then subside into sullen acceptance
when it could not be heard. It does not look like that is going to happen. If Germany has to
admit to fabricating its case, or even to confess it was mistaken, it will do 'great
propaganda damage' – to use Karl's phrase – to the west in general and Germany in
particular. Russia should not let up, and not accept non-answers like 'results classified for
reasons of national security'.
Hello again, folks. This is going to be interesting. Dilyana Gaytandzhieva has been
working away on researching that lab in Georgia. There has now been a data leak of hundreds
of documents from the lab. She had discovered something fishy going on there earlier in the
year, a biological warfare program run on Georgian soil by the US. Interesting, everyone
involved in fighting disinformation then turned on her and said it was Russian propaganda.
More recently, there have been claims in the media further obscuring the actual work there by
saying that the lab has been working on COVID research. Right. Anyway, Dilyana's twitter feed
is worth checking.
Now here's something for those who think that Putin was "a moron" for allowing Navalny to
go to Germany for treatment:
Knowing full well that Navalny had not been poisoned by anything, let alone "Novichok",
and having irrefutable evidence that this was the case, the powers-that-be here allowed the
Bullshitter to go to Germany, where the Evil Russians rightly assumed that the Germans, on
CIA advice, would attempt to use the Novichok gambit, a scam that they felt was an astounding
success in the UK.
Now it looks as though the wicked Orcs might now be able to kill 2 birds with one stone:
to reveal what lying bastards those who hold the levers of power in the USA snd its vassal
states are and to "debunk" (favourite term used by our erstwhile Venezualian troll) the
Skripal story.
I don't think that was a clever plan by the Russians – I actually think it was an
unpleasant surprise when Germany revealed that it, too, cannot be trusted because it is an
agent of Washington, or at least that there are powerful American influences in Berlin. I am
beginning to get a little respect back for Merkel, as she always has to be putting off some
special-interest group or other which is trying to back her into a corner; and, as we're all
aware, she is not a well woman.
Russia was right, I believe, to permit Navalny's transportation as it was at the wish of
the family, as you stated, and the western media is always ready to scream that Russians are
not free to make their own decisions. A note of caution should have been introduced, though,
by Germany's picking up the tab; Russia should have known then that something opportunistic
was afoot. But now Germany is in a very awkward position, and Russia is actually on pretty
solid ground – all it has to do is keep putting the screws to Germany and demanding an
explanation for why there was no 'nerve agent' in Navalny's samples before he left Russia,
but it magically showed up in Germany. Not to mention that the Germans tried to go with
poisoning using a cholinesterase-inhibitor until there was a rational explanation for that,
and only then switched to Novichok. The Germans are on the back foot now.
"Der Spiegel" has now said that traces of poison have been found on Navalny's clothing,
skin etc..
They just wont give up!
But are they still saying he was Novichocked? If they are, then why aren't his fellow
passengers on the Tomsk – Moscow flight not dropping dead like flies? For that matter,
why isnt Navalny dead? In fact, why didn't he die immediately after drinking his Novichocked
tea?
Ummm .how did Lyosha get such a heavy dose of poison that it was all over him, and he has
no clue where it came from? Or is that why he's been kept in a coma – so he doesn't
have to provide any answers?
"In all fairness, we should probably draw everyone's attention to the fact that the
Omsk hospital provided more information about the patient's health than, for example, the
Berlin hospital is doing right now. Our doctors behaved much more transparently with regard
to informing both journalists and all those interested than their German colleagues
do."
What a frightful image that conjures up: the snap of tight fitting surgical gloves as she
puts them on her hands before sticking her right index finger into a big jar of that goo!
No KY jelly in the the gas-station with missile, see: just good ol' Vaseline.
Such interesting Novichok. It only worked on Navalny 40 minutes after takeoff.
According to a young woman, the blogger [Navalny -- ME] suddenly felt
unwell about 40 minutes after take-off.
A passenger on the Tomsk-Moscow flight, in an interview with 5 -tv.ru , spoke about the
incident with Alexey Navalny on board the plane. The girl noted that she initially saw the
blogger at the airport in the cafeteria, where she was drinking coffee. According to her, the
man was sitting at a table and enjoying tea.
When boarding, the passenger noticed that Alexei Navalny was behind her and she asked
him for a photo to be taken of him and her together. The celebrity reacted positively to his
fellow traveller's request, after which the girl went to her seat.
"It seemed to me that he was feeling fine, absolutely. I had a photo taken of me and
him: you can't tell from it that he was somehow in bad way. We took photos; I went to my
place. I sat at the tail-end, where it all happened. We took off. Some flight time had
already passed, maybe 40 minutes, and he went to the toilet. I didn't see him come out, I
tried to sleep. I woke up because of a stewardess screaming that medical assistance was
needed", said the passenger.
The call of the cabin crew was answered by a woman who tried to bring Alexei Navalny to
life. While this was happening, his companions – a girl and a lad -- were shouting:
"Lyosha [Navalny -- ME] , don't close your eyes! Lyosha, breathe!"
The passenger said that at some point, Alexei Navalny began to shout in an inhuman
voice. This greatly frightened some of the passengers.
"In the end he began to shout 'beluga' [expensive brand of black caviar -- ME] ,
unlike a human being. It scared everyone very much. I burst into tears there then and I
started to panic. His cheeks were slapped. The pilot announced an emergency landing in Omsk",
the girl said.
After the landing, a medical team came on board. After having been examined, the
blogger was immediately put on a saline drip and was soon carried out of the aeroplane on a
stretcher. By that time, according to the incident witness, Alexei Navalny was already
unconscious.
The blogger's fellow passenger emphasized that when the aircraft was being refueled,
people in the cabin were vigorously discussing the incident. One of the passengers suggested
that Alexei Navalny had had an overdose of illegal drugs.
"When all this was happening, we were already at the refueling station and there was a
discussion going on between people. The woman who had tried to provide him with medical
assistance said: "Everything will be fine with him. He will now be cleaned up there and he
will be released". There were shouts from passengers: "Addict! Serves him right! ", "This is
an overdose!" said the blogger's fellow passenger.
The girl added that many began to intercede for Alexei Navalny and reject assumptions
about his taking drugs.
The blogger is currently in a serious condition, doctors say that he is stable. He was
put into a drug-induced coma ad connected to a ventilator. A final diagnosis has not been
established. A full investigation is underway.
Earlier, 5 -tv.ru reported that the police did not believe in the intentional poisoning
of Navalny.
Ate something that was a little off, Lyosha? And washed down with moonshine vodka?
Opinion: Will Vladimir Putin ride out the Navalny storm?
The consequences of what German Chancellor Angela Merkel all but called an
assassination attempt on Alexei Navalny could be serious and substantial for Vladimir Putin,
says DW's Konstantin Eggert.
Russian society should have been the first to react to Alexei Navalny's predicament.
But do not expect tens of thousands of people at the gates of the Kremlin, chanting "We won't
forget, we won't forgive," as they usually do during anti-Putin protests.
Do they really do that "at the gates of the Kremlin"?
Many are also afraid. What happened to the opposition leader was most probably designed
to warn the politically active: "This is what happens when you cross the authorities'
path."
The public will most probably remain as indifferent to the fate of Navalny as to the
struggle of the "brotherly" Belarusian people for civil rights. Russians are preoccupied with
the coronavirus pandemic, anxious about their jobs and the future of their families. Many are
also afraid. What happened to the opposition leader was most probably designed to warn the
politically active: "This is what happens when you cross the authorities' path."
That a fact, Eggert?
Navalny is not just a "blogger," as the Kremlin's propagandists like to call him. He is
a politician who has actively formulated an alternative political and economic agenda for
Russia. Even his temporary departure from the political scene is a blow to all critics of the
Kremlin. It is difficult to replace him.
An economic agenda you say? Are you serious?
The question is how cohesive and organised his supporters are. The inability to garner
broad popular support has plagued all Russian anti-authoritarian movements for centuries,
starting with the "Decembrist" uprising in 1825.
Broad and popular support? Now I know you are pulling my pisser!
No one really expects an objective and transparent investigation from Moscow into the
poisoning. The key question now is how seriously Germany and its EU and NATO allies
respond.
Talking about transparency, where's the fucking evidence that your pals say they have,
proving that "Novichok"was used to assassinate the charlatan who you like to label as a
politician and not a foreign agent?
Having taken responsibility for Navalny's fate, the German government has also taken on
a moral burden so serious that it is now almost impossible to shed it without incurring
lasting damage.
Responsibility for the Bullshitter's fate?
Moral burden?
Oh fuck off will ya!
No, on second thoughts don't! Let's analyse the heap of shite you wrote for DW in, say6
months' time, and see how it compares with the reality of Russian politics.
And I tell you what: Navalny will be alive and well before that time, he will not be
president of Russia, but he will still be a blogger hired by the US State Dept.
However, he but won't be blogging from his present home address: he'll be blogging from
Berlin or even further afield, perhaps from the USA.
Stop flogging yourself ME and let it go. I almost posted a piece by Lithuanian gobshite
and FM
Linas Linkevičius. I will not give those likes the oxygen of publicity unless there is
actually something new. It seems that Merkel is 'coming under pressure' because she refuses
to be bounced in to immediate action of do something and NATO of course have
commented. This is the same NATO that wants 'discussions with Turkey' but that Greece
completely rejects. Who's falling apart here again?
Well, just a small quibble – Von Eggert did not say Navalny had broad popular
support – he said the opposite, citing an INABILITY to garner broad political
support.
If Lyosha has a complete plan for Russia under his leadership, he's keeping it under wraps
except for loving peeks offered to western reporters; I have never seen a complete and
coherent election platform from Navalny. If anyone has, please post it here. That means a
serious plan in which objectives like – for example – 'reduce taxes' are costed
and the explanation provided for where the money will come from makes sense. Of course every
political candidate cites the need for reforms, and doubtless reforms are always needed,
nobody has a perfect plan. But it is one thing to say 'reduce taxes' and other
vote-compelling inducements, and quite another to do it and still have enough money for the
state to carry out needed improvements to public infrastructure.
But do not expect tens of thousands of people at the gates of the Kremlin, chanting "We
won't forget, we won't forgive," as they usually do during anti-Putin protests
."
My stress.
And they don't do that during anti-Putin protests -- ever..
For one thing, Navalny and his mostly juvenile mob are not allowed anywhere near the
Kremlin..
That's why the charlatan always surfaces at Pushkin Square metro station and, like a Pied
Piper, tries to lead his hamsters downhill along Tverskaya Street towards Manezh Square and
the Kremlin. When doing this, he usually gets lifted about 100 metres away from the metro
station by Putin's brutal, thuggish police.
An open and shut case! Clearly Novichok poisoning, a deadly poison made only in Russia,
and the Russians have already used it at least once. The most deadly nerve agent known to man
and part of the brutal armament that Putin's thugs use on their murderous missions.
Germany has denied allegation of falsification of the Navalny case
3 September 2020
MOSCOW, September 3 – RIA Novosti. The statement made by the President of
Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, about the falsification of data on the "poisoning" of Navalny
is not true, the press service of the German Cabinet told RIA Novosti.
Earlier, at a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Lukashenko said that
Minsk had intercepted a conversation between Warsaw and Berlin, which denied allegations of
the blogger's poisoning. He promised that he would give the Russian side a transcript of this
"interesting dialogue, which clearly indicates that this is falsification".
"Of course, Mr. Lukashenko's statement does not correspond to reality. Yesterday the
Federal Chancellor, the Foreign Minister and the Defence Minister expressed their views on
the new circumstances in the Navalny poisoning case There is nothing to add", the cabinet
told the agency.
In Moscow, they noted that they had not yet received this evidence.
"Lukashenko hast just announced this. He said that the material would be transferred to
the FSB. There is no other information yet", Peskov told RIA Novosti.
What a duplicitous creep Lukashenko is!
Always jumping to one side of the fence to the other and thinking he is so smart in doing
so.
Then again, perhaps he has such damning evidence, but even if he had, nobody would believe
it, because Germany, being a vassal state of the USA, is on the side of freedom and
democracy.
"Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit für das deutsche Vaterland" as one sings there to a
well known tune.
" Once Navalny was in Berlin it was only a matter of time before it was declared that he
was poisoned with Novichok. The Russophobes are delighted. This of course eliminates all
vestiges of doubt about what happened to the Skripals, and proves that Russia must be
isolated and sanctioned to death and we must spend untold billions on weapons and security
services. We must also increase domestic surveillance, crack down on dissenting online
opinion. It also proves that Donald Trump is a Russian puppet and Brexit is a Russian
plot.
I am going to prove beyond all doubt that I am a Russian troll by asking the question Cui
Bono?, brilliantly identified by the Integrity Initiative's Ben Nimmo as a sure sign of
Russian influence.
I should state that I have no difficulty at all with the notion that a powerful oligarch
or an organ of the Russian state may have tried to assassinate Navalny. He is a minor
irritant, rather more famous here than in Russia, but not being a major threat does not
protect you against political assassination in Russia.
What I do have difficulty with is the notion that if Putin, or other very powerful Russian
actors, wanted Navalny dead, and had attacked him while he was in Siberia, he would not be
alive in Germany today. If Putin wanted him dead, he would be dead.
Let us first take the weapon of attack. One thing we know about a "Novichok" for sure is
that it appears not to be very good at assassination. Poor Dawn Sturgess is the only person
ever to have allegedly died from "Novichok", accidentally according to the official
narrative. "Novichok" did not kill the Skripals, the actual target. If Putin wanted Navalny
dead, he would try something that works. Like a bullet to the head, or an actually deadly
poison.
"Novichok" is not a specific chemical. It is a class of chemical weapon designed to be
improvised in the field from common domestic or industrial precursors. It makes some sense to
use on foreign soil as you are not carrying around the actual nerve agent, and may be able to
buy the ingredients locally. But it makes no sense at all in your own country, where the FSB
or GRU can swan around with any deadly weapon they wish, to be making homemade nerve agents
in the sink. Why would you do that?
Further we are expected to believe that, the Russian state having poisoned Navalny, the
Russian state then allowed the airplane he was traveling in, on a domestic flight, to divert
to another airport, and make an emergency landing, so he could be rushed to hospital. If the
Russian secret services had poisoned Navalny at the airport before takeoff as alleged, why
would they not insist the plane stick to its original flight plan and let him die on the
plane? They would have foreseen what would happen to the plane he was on.
Next, we are supposed to believe that the Russian state, having poisoned Navalny, was not
able to contrive his death in the intensive care unit of a Russian state hospital. We are
supposed to believe that the evil Russian state was able to falsify all his toxicology tests
and prevent doctors telling the truth about his poisoning, but the evil Russian state lacked
the power to switch off the ventilator for a few minutes or slip something into his drip. In
a Russian state hospital.
Next we are supposed to believe that Putin, having poisoned Navalny with novichok, allowed
him to be flown to Germany to be saved, making it certain the novichok would be discovered.
And that Putin did this because he was worried Merkel was angry, not realising she might be
still more angry when she discovered Putin had poisoned him with novichok
There are a whole stream of utterly unbelievable points there, every single one of which
you have to believe to go along with the western narrative. Personally I do not buy a single
one of them, but then I am a notorious Russophile traitor.
The United States is very keen indeed to stop Germany completing the Nord Stream 2
pipeline, which will supply Russian gas to Germany on a massive scale, sufficient for about
40% of its electricity generation. Personally I am opposed to Nord Stream 2 myself, on both
environmental and strategic grounds. I would much rather Germany put its formidable
industrial might into renewables and self-sufficiency. But my reasons are very different from
those of the USA, which is concerned about the market for liquefied gas to Europe for US
produces and for the Gulf allies of the US. Key decisions on the completion of Nord Stream 2
are now in train in Germany.
The US and Saudi Arabia have every reason to instigate a split between Germany and Russia
at this time. Navalny is certainly a victim of international politics. That he is a victim of
Putin I tend to doubt.
I do hope that Murray was writing cynically when he penned the following words above about
Navalny:
He is a minor irritant, rather more famous here than in Russia
His popularity here is minimal and his political base statistically zilch, the incessant
swamping of the Russian blogosphere with his praise by his hamsters notwithstanding.
I saw one of such hamster's nonsense only the other week in which the retard wrote that
Navalny is the most well-known person in Russia and another post of yet another hamster who
presented a list of policies that the bullshitter would follow "when he becomes
president".
The whole crock of Navalny -- Novichok shite neatly summed up by a comment to Murray's
article linked above:
Goose
September 4, 2020 at 00:28 We're being asked to believe by people calling themselves serious journalists, that the
Kremlin's thought process was thus :
Let's poison this guy with Novichok. Nobody will know it was us and there'll be no
diplomatic fallout.
Completely illogical.
Logic has no part in this machination, dear chap: the people to whom these lies are
directed are fucking stupid: uneducated, brain-dead, browser surfing, soap opera and
"Celebrity Come Dancing" and "Reality TV" and porn watching morons.
Oh yes! And in the UK they're daily fed pap about "The Royals": every day without fail the
UK media presents page after page of "stories" concerning "Kate and Wills" and "Harry and
Megan".
And much of the rest of the UK media is full of shite about "football" and its prima
donnas -- that's "Associated Football" or "soccer" as they prefer to say in North America,
and not "Rugby Football" -- better said: not "Rugby League Football".
Nato has called for Russia to disclose its Novichok nerve agent programme to
international monitors, following the poisoning of activist Alexei Navalny.
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said members were united in condemning the
"horrific" attack.
He added there was "proof beyond doubt" that a Novichok nerve agent was used against Mr
Navalny.
Where is the proof????????
You just say so or some "guy" at Porton Down or some Bundeswehr
Scheißkerl laboratories?
Get fucked Stoltenberg!
And Peskov, a word of advice: Shut the fuck up and say nothing.
Don't believe that silence from you will be taken as proof of guilt!
You and the Russian state are guilty of everything as charged by the very nature of the
fact that you are Russian, "the other"!
Sound familiar?
It's what the Nazis said about every Jew: guilty of all accusations because of their
ethnicity -- not their religion, note: Christianized Jews were still "Jews". They were guilty
of all charges from the moment of each and every one's birth as a "Jew".
And the sickening thing is that "woke" arseholes the world over condemn racism, but racism
directed against Russians is fair game.
The US president has received heavy criticism for his reluctance to immediately join
NATO allies in pressing Russia over the Navalny incident, which CNN called "the latest
instance of Trump failing to speak out and call for answers from the Kremlin on issues
ranging from election interference to possible bounties on US troops in Afghanistan."
I presume that the concept of "burden of proof" is now a dead letter in the Free West.
I thought that whole Russia-offered-bounties-for-dead-US-troops thing had been 'debunked'
for good. Several western sources which are sometimes not snapping-turtle crazy said there
was nothing to it. So why are they still citing it?
Alexei Navalny is one of the most important leaders of what passes for political
opposition in President Putin's Russia. Some say he is, in effect, "the" leader of the
opposition in Russia. He has just been the subject of an assassination attempt, and lies in
an induced coma in a German hospital. It's worth repeating: the leader of the opposition to
Vladimir Putin has been poisoned, perhaps fatally, using novichok, a chemical weapon banned
by international treaty. There is little doubt that, in one form or another, formal or
informal agents of the Russian state would have been part of the plot, especially given the
evidence of novichok, and that the highest circles of the Russian establishment would either
have knowledge of the attack, or made it apparent to any shady blah, blah. blah ..
Now don't you folks go and forget, BoJo recently made Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of that
rag and who penned the above shite, a Baronet.
Lebedev has dual Russian/British citizen and has lived in the UK since he arrived there as
an 8-year-old with his KGB papa, who had landed a cushy number at the Soviet Embassy.
Papa Lebedev went back to Russia, where in the immediate post-Soviet years of Russia he
made a mint and became an "oligarch", namely an extremely successful thief who had pillaged
Russia. His son became a UK citizen in 2010.
Evgeny Lebedev is now a life peer and may now plonk his arse (and get paid for doing so!)
in one of the chambers of the British legislature, the one whose members are unelected: they
are there either through their aristocratic "birthright" or are appointees, such as is
Lebedev.
When BoJo appointed Lebedev as a life peer, the moronic Russophobes in the UK accused that
fool of a British PM of being under the Evil One's control.
Just shows you how they know shag all about Russia and Russians.
Recording of conversation between Berlin and Warsaw on Navalny case published
20:40 09/04/2020 (updated: 05:19 09/05/2020)
MOSCOW, September 4 – RIA Novosti.The state Belarusian media has
published a recording of the negotiations between Berlin and Warsaw on the situation with
Alexei Navalny, intercepted by Minsk .
RIA Novosti is publishing a transcript of this dialogue.
– Hello, good afternoon, Nick. How are we getting on?
– Everything seems to be going according to plan. The materials about Navalny are
ready. They'll be transferred to the Chancellor's office. We'll be waiting for her
statement.
– Has the poisoning been definitely confirmed?
– Look, Mike, it's not that important in this case. There is a war going on. And
during a war, all sorts of methods are good.
– I agree. It is necessary to discourage Putin from sticking his nose into the
affairs of Belarus. The most effective way is to drown him with the problems in Russia, and
there are many of them. Moreover, in the near future they will have elections, voting day in
the Russian regions.
– This is what we are doing. How are you doing in Belarus?
– To be honest, not that well, really. President Lukashenko has turned out to be
a tough nut to crack. They are professional and organized. It is clear that Russia supports
them. The officials and the military are loyal to the president. We are working on it. The
rest [of this conversation] we'll have when we meet and not on the 'phone.
I find it hard to believe this is real. Lukashenko is 'a tough nut to crack'? The
Belarusian government is 'professional and organized'? Well, you never know with the Poles.
But it seems so perfectly to confirm western perfidy that it must be made up. Who would be
stupid enough to say things like that on the phone?
And "Yats is our man!" Victory Noodles crowed to Pie-whacked.
Don't forget also that Jens Stoltenberg was dumb enough to think he could drive a taxi
around Oslo and pick up paying passengers without their recognising him and commenting on his
poor driving skills and knowledge of Oslo streets.
And on hearing off a Latvian (?) politician, who had been observing the "Revolution of
Dignity" and was involved in an investigation into the deaths of the "Heavenly Hundred", that
there were good grounds to believe that those martyrs for Ukrainian freedom had been martyred
by being shot in the back by their fellow countrymen who were of a fascist bent, Lady Ashton
said: "Gosh!""
Now that really was a dumb utterance to make on the phone, considering the
circumstances.
It is also worth underlining that the Russian pilot who decided to make an emergency
landing in Omsk, rather than proceed to Moscow, may have saved Navalny's life, as may the
doctors in Omsk who – despite their professed doubts about poison – administered
atropine, the closest treatment there is to a novichok antidote, early on. The claim, made by
some, that this was a brazen attack, with the Kremlin's fingerprints all over it, designed to
be found out and interpreted as a "two fingers up" to the west, does not stack up.
But the German findings that probably the most influential Russian opposition leader
was poisoned and that the substance used was the same as the one identified in the Skripal
case – a military-grade nerve agent, moreover, that is associated with Russia, even
though it was developed in the Soviet-era and can be found outside Russia – means that
the Kremlin has a case to answer. Yes, everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the
Kremlin is all denials, but the onus is now squarely on Putin to make his case in the court
of international opinion.
" the doctors in Omsk who – despite their professed doubts about poison –
administered atropine, the closest treatment there is to a novichok antidote, early on."
That a fact, Doctor Dejevsky?
" everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the Kremlin is all denials, but the onus
is now squarely on Putin to make his case in the court of international opinion"
Burden of proof?
Russia has been accused! Russia is not obliged to prove its innocence, FFS!!!!
Where is the evidence to back up the accusation????
Of course the Omsk hospital doctors had to apply atropine because Navalny's groupies were
squealing that he had been poisoned. They would have squealed again and accused the hospital
of malpractice if the hospital had not used the drug.
Russian doctors have proposed to their German colleagues that they establish a joint
group on the case of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, the president of Russia's
National Medical Chamber, noted paediatrician Leonid Roshal, told reporters on
Saturday.
Will the Germans agree?
I shouldn't imagine so. They and the rest of the West have crossed the Rubicon:
By
Tony
Cox
, a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.
The New York Times and CNN are desperate to paint Donald Trump as an enemy of the military, due to his desire not to get
involved in pointless wars. But this is simply not true, and Trump has the backing of many soldiers.
Someone should tell the
New York Times, CNN and other mainstream media outlets that soldiers don't actually like getting killed or maimed for no good
reason. Nor do they like generals and presidents who spill their blood in vain.
Alas, ignorance of these
obvious truths probably isn't the issue. This is likely just another case of the biggest names in news pretending to not get
the point so they can take the rest of us along for a ride in their confidence game of alternative reality.
The latest example is the
New York Times spinning President Donald Trump's critique this week of Pentagon leadership and the military industrial complex
as disrespect for the military at large.
"Trump has lost the right and authority to be
commander in chief,"
the
Times quoted
retired US Marines General Anthony Zinni as saying. Zinni cited Trump's alleged
"despicable
comments"
about the nation's war dead – reported last week by
The
Atlantic
, citing anonymous sources – as one of the reasons Trump "must go."
Never mind that Trump and all on-the-record administration sources denied The Atlantic's report. The Times couldn't resist
when the pieces seemed to fit so well together for the military's latest propaganda campaign against Trump. First the
president disses the troops, calling them "losers" and "suckers," then he has the
temerity
to say
Pentagon leaders want to fight wars to keep defense contractors happy.
Except the pieces don't
fit. The many people who occupy so-called boots on the ground don't have the same interests as the few people who send them to
war. In fact, combat troops are given reason to hate the generals who send them to die when there's not a legitimate national
security reason for the war they're fighting. And the US has fought a long line of wars that didn't serve the nation's
national security interests. Even when a war is justified, the interests of top brass and front-line soldiers often clash.
Remember that great 1967
war movie, '
The
Dirty Dozen'
? A group of 12 soldiers who were condemned to long prison sentences or execution in military prison for their
crimes were sent on a 1944 suicide mission to kill high-ranking German officers at a heavily defended chateau far behind enemy
lines. After succeeding in the mission and escaping the Germans, the lone surviving convict, played by tough-guy actor Charles
Bronson, told the mission leader,
"Killing generals could get to be a habit with me."
So no, New York Times, speaking out against ill-advised wars does not equal bashing the military. And sorry, General Zinni,
but generals, defense contractors and their media mouthpieces don't get to decide who has the
"right
and authority"
to be commander in chief. The voters decided that already, and they expressed clearly that they don't want
senseless and endless wars and foreign interventions.
The Times cited General
James McConville, the Army's chief of staff, as saying Pentagon leaders would only recommend sending troops to combat
"when
it's required for national security and a last resort."
And no, it wasn't a comedy skit. What's the last US war or combat
intervention that measured up to that standard? Let's just say the late Bronson, who died in 2003 at the age of 81, was a
young man the last time that happened.
CNN tried a similar ploy
on Sunday, while trying to sell the "losers" and "suckers" story in an interview with US Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert
Wilkie. Host Dana Bash said the allegations fit a
"pattern of public statements
" by
the president because Trump called US Senator John McCain a "loser" in 2015 and said McCain shouldn't be considered a hero for
being captured in the Vietnam War. She repeatedly suggested to Wilkie, who didn't take the bait, that Trump's attacks on
McCain, who died in 2018, showed disrespect for the troops.
Apparently, this follows
the same line of propagandist thought which told us that saying there are rapists among the illegal aliens entering the US
from Mexico – which is undeniably true –
equals
saying
all Mexicans are rapists. In CNN land, a bad word about McCain is a bad word about all soldiers.
McCain was
a
warmonger
who didn't mind getting US troops killed or backing terrorist groups in Syria. If
he
had his way
, many more GIs would be dead or disabled, because the intervention in Syria would have been escalated and the
US might be at war with Iran. Soldiers wouldn't want their lives wasted in such conflicts.
All wars are hard on the
people who have to fight them, but senseless wars are spirit-crushing. An average of about 17 veterans commit suicide each day
in the US, according to Veterans Administration
data
.
Veterans account for 11 percent of the US adult population but more than 18 percent of suicides.
The media's deceiving
technique of trying to pretend that ruling-class chieftains and front-line grunts are in the same boat reflects a broader
campaign of top-down revolution against populism. The
military
is
just one of several pro-Trump segments of the population that must be turned against the president. Other pro-Trump segments,
such as
police
,
are demonized and attacked.
Trump has managed to keep
the US out of new wars and has drawn down deployments to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan – despite Pentagon opposition. His rival,
Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, can be expected to rev up the war machine if he takes charge. His foreign policy
adviser, Antony Blinken, lamented in a May
interview
with CBS News
that Trump had given up US "leverage" in Syria.
Trump also has turned
around the VA hospital system, ending
decades
of neglect
that left many veterans to die on waiting lists.
Like past campaigns to
oust Trump, the notion that he's not sufficiently devoted to the troops might be a tough sell. No matter how good their words
may sound, the people who promote endless wars without clear objectives aren't true supporters of the rank and file.
By Dr. Karin Kneissl , who works as an energy analyst and book author. She served as the Austrian minister of foreign affairs
from 2017-2019. In June, she published her book on diplomacy 'Diplomatie Macht Geschichte' in Germany through Olms, and in early
September her book 'Die Mobilitätswende', or 'Mobility in Transition', was released in Vienna by Braumüller. The cacophony of
noise generated in the wake of the attack on the Russian opposition figure is drowning out the reality. As Angela Merkel has always
maintained, the German-Russian gas deal is purely a commercial project.
Nord Stream has always had the ingredients to drive sober-minded Germans emotional. I remember energy conferences in Germany back
in 2006 when already the idea of such a gas pipeline as a direct connection from Russia to Germany provoked deep political rows,
not just in Berlin but across the EU.
Conservatives disliked it for the simple reason that it was a "Schröder thing," the legacy of social democrat Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder, who lost the election of September 2005 to Angela Merkel. Schröder had negotiated the project with his good friend, President
Vladimir Putin, and then chaired the company in charge of implementing it.
Around that time, I was invited to an energy conference in Munich by the conservative think tank, the Hanns Seidel Foundation,
managed by the Bavarian party CSU, the traditional junior partner of the ruling CDU in the government. The bottom-line of the debate
on Nord Stream was negative, with the consensus being that the German-Russian pipeline would lead to the implosion of a European
common foreign policy and damage the EU's energy ambitions.
I attended many other such events across Germany, from parliament to universities, and listened carefully to all the arguments.
The feelings towards Nord Stream were much more benign at meetings held under the auspices of the SPD.
But over the years, the rift between different political parties evaporated, and a consensus emerged which supported enhanced
energy cooperation between Berlin and Moscow. Politicians of all shades defended the first pipeline, Nord Stream 1, after it went
operational in 2011, bringing Russian gas directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
They also enthusiastically supported the creation of the second, Nord Stream 2, better known by its acronym NS2. This $11bn (£8.4bn)
1,200km pipeline is almost finished and was due to go online next year.
But now, in the very final stage of construction, everything has been thrown in limbo thanks to the alleged poisoning of Russian
opposition figure Alexey Navalny.
NS2 has always been controversial. Critics, such as the US and Poland, have argued that it makes Germany too reliant on energy
from a politically unreliable partner. President Trump last year signed a law imposing sanctions on any firm that helps Russia's
state-owned gas company, Gazprom, finish it. The White House fears NS2 will tighten Russia's grip over Europe's energy supply and
reduce its own share of the lucrative European market for American liquefied natural gas.
These sanctions have caused delays to the project. A special ship owned by a Swiss company menaced with sanctions had to be replaced.
And prior to that, various legal provisions were brought up by the European Commission that had to be fulfilled by the companies
in retrospect.
Now the case of Navalny, currently being treated at a Berlin clinic after being awoken from a medically induced coma, has thrown
everything up in the air again. It has triggered a political cacophony that threatens relations between Germany, the EU, Russia,
and Washington. And at the center is the pipeline.
Various German sources, among them laboratories of the armed forces, have alleged that Navalny had been poisoned with the nerve
agent Novichok. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD)
stated in an interview published on Sunday by Bild: " I hope the Russians don't force us to change our stance on Nord Stream
2 – we have high expectations of the Russian government that it will solve this serious crime ." He claimed to have seen "
a lot of evidence " that the Russian state was behind the attack. " The deadly chemical weapon with which Navalny was poisoned
was in the past in the possession of Russian authorities ," he insisted.
He conceded that stopping the almost-completed pipeline would harm German and broader European business interests, pointing out
that the gas pipeline's construction involves "over 100 companies from 12 European countries, and about half of them come from Germany."
Maas also threatened the Kremlin with broader EU sanctions if it did not help clarify what happened "in the coming days." Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded by labeling the accusations "groundless" and Moscow has staunchly denied any involvement
in the affair.
The whole matter is complicated by domestic political considerations in Germany. CDU politician Norbert Röttgen, who heads up
foreign affairs within the ruling party and has demanded that the pipeline should be stopped, is among those conservatives vying
to lead the CDU in the run-up to Chancellor Angela Merkel's retirement next year. Meanwhile, Merkel is still trying to strike a balance
between the country's legal commitments, her well-known mantra that NS2 is a " purely commercial project, " and what is now
a major foreign policy crisis.
The chancellor had always focused on the business dimension. But most large energy projects also have a geopolitical dimension,
and that certainly holds true with Nord Stream.
When I was Austria's foreign minister, I saw first-hand the recurring and very harsh criticism of the project by US politicians
and officials. I remember the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, in a speech at the margins of the UN General Assembly in September
2018 that focused solely on NS2. I replied by pointing out to him that pipelines are not built to annoy others, but because there
is demand. One thing was certain – the US opposition to Nord Stream would not wane and now the Navalny case has given it new impetus.
What we are witnessing is a tremendous politicization of the pipeline with a wide range of people all shouting very loudly.
So here we are, in a very poisoned atmosphere where it might be difficult to revise positions without losing face. The social
democrat Maas, just like the conservative Röttgen and many others, have taken to the media for different reasons. In my observation,
it might have to do with their respective desires to take a strong position in order to also mark their upcoming emancipation from
the political giant Merkel (she is due to step down next year).
Due to her professional and empathetic handling of the pandemic, she is today much more popular than before the crisis. That makes
it difficult for a junior partner, represented by Foreign Minister Maas, and for all those who wish to challenge her inside the party.
What is needed is to get the topic out of the media and out of the to-and-fro of daily petty politics. Noisy statements might
serve some, but not the overall interests involved. And there are many at stake. It is not only about energy security in times of
transition, namely moving away from nuclear, but much wider matters.
As a legal scholar, I deem the loss of trust in contracts. Vertragstreue, as we call it in German – loyalty to the contract –
will be the biggest collateral damage if the pipeline is abandoned for political reasons. This fundamental principle of every civilization
was coined as pacta sunt servanda by the Romans – agreements must be kept. Our legal system is based on this. Who would still conclude
contracts of such volumes with German companies if politics can change the terms of trade overnight?
In June 2014, construction sites on the coasts of the Black sea, both in Russia and Bulgaria, were ready for starting the gas
pipeline South Stream. After pressure from the European Commission, the work never started. The political reason was the dispute
on Ukraine – in particular, the annexation of the Crimea. However, the legal argument was that the tenders for the contracts were
in contradiction with EU regulations on competition. Tens of thousands of work permits, which had been issued from Bulgaria to Serbia
etc., were withdrawn. The economic consequence was the rise of China's influence in the region. South Stream was redirected to Turkey.
So here we are in the midst of a diplomatic standoff. It is a genuine dilemma, but it could also turn into a watershed. Will contracts
be respected or will we move into a further cycle of uncertainty on all levels? Germany is built on contracts, norms (probably much
too many) and not on arbitrariness.
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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.
silvermoon 5 hours ago
All these weeks have passed and Germany has still not shown shared actual evidence of their Navalny tests
with Russia though. That is the same as saying we found the gun with your finger prints on it but never showing it.
Count_Cash
silvermoon 3 hours ago
Correct, Germany has only since 10th September (if confirmed) shared any 'evidence'. That is sufficient intervening
time to concoct any test result and associated materials that they want - another Diesel scandal. Indeed people will ask why when
you had the patient on 22nd of august, it took you so long to send samples to the OPCW, despite almost immediately yelling Poison!
gainwmn silvermoon 5 hours ago
U stupid sheep: Germany did show it to the OPCW, i.e. the organization RF is the member of,
and therefore the latter gets the full access to all the data provided by Germany, as well as any other of 192 members. Kremlin lies
and demands in this regard is more than ridiculous, they completely destroy any shred of trust left to all RF governmental structures
and regime itself.
Teodor Nitu gainwmn 3 hours ago
Riiight!...Those Russians...not only their chemical
weapons are no longer working, but they are no longer capable to choose the proper time to use them, or so the story goes. Think
about it; they 'used' novichok to kill the Skripals and they are still alive and well (supposedly), now they (Russians) 'used' novichok
again to kill Navalny and he is alive and getting better.
Besides, they chose the absolutely wrong time to do it. With Skripals it
was just before the opening of the World Cup in Russia and now, just before the finishing of the North Stream 2 pipeline.
It sounds
that they are sabotaging their own interests, aren't they? Are they (Russians) that stup!d? Some 'smart' posters here seem to believe
it. But lets get real, one has to be able to see beyond the length of his nose, in order to understand what is really going on.
silvermoon Teodor Nitu 2 hours ago
Russia had all their chemical weapons legally destroyed. Along with hundreds of countries. The
US, UK and Israel never did. Navalny the innocent anti Putin. Can't win one way try another.
Pro_RussiaPole gainwmn 2 hours ago
So why is Russia still asking for it? Clearly, something is being withheld. As for
the OPCW, their credibility has been shot for years with all their fake Syrian chem weapon attack reports.
seawolf 6 hours ago
Even if there was not Navalny's story, they could invent another to stop the project.
Abraxas79 seawolf 4 hours ago
Exactly.
I hope Russia is the one that abandons it. Let Germany be the one that decides to cancel it and go along with it. Concentrate on
supplying China and other Asian nations and internal consumption. Forget about Europe. You don't have to turn off the current supply,
just charge more for it when the market allows. Looks like the next German leader according to this article is quite the Russophobe,
which means relations will only get worse.
Pro_RussiaPole Abraxas79 2 hours ago
If this navalny farce does end up cancelling the NS2 project, Russia should stop all gas transit to western Europe through
Poland and Ukraine by spring of next year. Tell those countries that will be cut off that Russia can either sell them LNG, or
that they will have to connect to other sources of gas. Because if certain countries are so against Russian gas, then why are
they not doing anything against Russian gas going through Poland and Ukraine, and why isn't Trump threatening sanctions on
these countries for doing so?
Blue8ball713 RTjackanory 3 hours ago
Its a far longer list
and it have the fingerprints of GB secret services all over it.
Reply Gabriel Delpino seawolf 46 seconds ago It is not in the interest
of Germany to stop de project. Reply
magicmirror 6 hours ago
Europe should have nothing to do with the USA ....... proved time and
time again they cannot be trusted. All they want is markets, resources and consumers. They lie, they cheat, they steal...... (quoting mr Pompeo, I think). A big opportunity to win Europe's independence.
SmellLaRata
5 hours ago
All due respect for Mr. Navalny but since when does an individual fate of one person dictates the fate for millions ?
And c' mon Germany. Your hypocrisy is so utterly laughable. You ignore the Assange and Snowden cases, the slaughter of Kashoggi,
the brutal beating of yellow vests, the brutal actions against the Catalans ... but Navalni. Not even a hint of a proof of government
involvemen. But it fits the agenda, does it? The agenda which is dictated by the deep state agitators who so much flourished under
Obama.
gainwmn SmellLaRata
4 hours ago
Even being not a fan (to say the least) of the US foreign and some of the domestic policy, I have to point out that tried
by U analogy is largely out of balance: first, the issue in Navalny (as well as in Scripals' and others cases acted on with poisons)
case is not so much the assassination attempt on a person's life, as the banned use of chemical weapons, the ban RF's signature has
been under since 1993. And that conclusion (Russia's guilt) has not been made by the UK or Germany or any other country alone, but
the OPCW - the organization not only RF is the member of, but also 191(!) other countries, out of which not a single country (except
RF) rejected that conclusion!; second, the US did not made attempt on either Snowden's or Assange's life, with any kind of weapon,
not already mentioning the weapons banned by the international agreements American government(s) signed. This is a large - I would
say - decisive difference! As far as Kashoggi's case or other cases sited by U, RF did not react with sanctions against the respective
perpetrators either, thus demonstrating the same disregard for the law and order as the US did... therefore making all lies about
innocent RF and evil US, foolish, at the least.
Pro_RussiaPole gainwmn 2 hours ago
The US and its lackeys are killing Assange. They are doing it slowly. And many voices going along with a lie does not make
the lie true. Because these poisoning allegations are lies. The accused were never allowed to see the evidence or challenge
it. And there is the whole issue of politicized reports coming out of the OPCW that contradicted evidence and reality.
Nathi Sibbs 4 hours ago
After completing the pipe and
it start running Russia must turn off all Ukraine pipes. No more gas for free from Russia, Ukraine must start importing LNG from thier reliable partner USA. I think imports from USA will be good for Ukrainian Nazi people
Abraxas79 Nathi Sibbs 4 hours
ago
How are they going to pay for it? Ukraine's only exports these days are its women to various brothels across Europe and North
America.
Hilarous 5 hours ago
The German leaders know very well that the case of Navalny will never be resolved and exists
for no other reason than to seize a pretext to demonize Russia and to end Nord Stream 2 in exchange for US freedom gas
magicmirror
Hilarous 4 hours ago
freedom gas and handsome presents .....
SandythePole 3 hours ago
This is an excellent account by Dr Karin Kneissl. It is a genuine dilemma for 'occupied'
Europe. Its occupying master does NOT want NS2 and will do anything to stop it. Russia suffers sanctions upon sanctions, but still
gallantly tries to maintain friendly and honourable business relations with its implacable neighbours. For how much longer is this
to continue? Surely there must be some limit to the endless provocations of occupied Europe and its Western master. Perhaps it is
time to shut off the oil and gas and leave Germany to sail under its own wind.
dunkie56 3 hours ago
Perhaps Russia should disengage
with Germany/EU totally and forge ahead in partnership with China and India and whoever wants to do business. let the EU tie it's
ship to the sinking US ship and drown along with it's protection racket partner! Then Russia should build a new iron curtain between
itself and all countries who want to align with the EU..in the long run Russia has tried to forge a partnership with the West but
it just has not born any fruit and even as pragmatic as Russia is they must be coming to the conclusion they are flogging a dead
horse!
Blue8ball713 dunkie56 2 hours ago With 146 million citizen Russia is too small to be a real partner to anyone like
China or India. Best fit is the EU, but the EU is controlled or better said occupied by the USA. Its part of their hegemonial system.
So Russia is left out in the rain..
micktaketo 5 hours ago
I am not sure if it is the right thing to do but I think Russia
should sue the German authorities if this deal is withdrawn and if it is have nothing to do with Germany again along with other corrupt
countries that cannot prove or at the least bring forth their evidence to be seen, to be transparent to all even Russia the first,
because Russia is the one being accused. These countries must think we the people are all completely stupid and Russia more so. This
corruption stinks to high heaven and is obvious to all sane people who love fairness. You cannot trust an entity that believes in
getting what they want by hook or by crook. Russia learn your lesson ! So you countries that love whats good for you and your people
do not cheat them for they voted for you to help them. Germany do not kick yourself, it will hurt your people. Saying, There is more
than one way to skin a cat, they say.
Mutlu Ozer 3 hours ago
There is a simple concept to investigate a crime to find the criminals: Just look at whose benefit the crime is? EU
politicians are certainly smart people to know this basic concept of criminal investigation. However, now they are playing a
new strategy about how to domesticate(!) not only Russia China as well... Germans are the main actors in the stage of the WW-I
and WW-II. I surely claim that Germans would be the main architect of the last war, WW-III.
For anyone old enough to have been alive and aware of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and
of so-called COVID-19 in 2020, memory may serve to remind one of an eerie parallel between the
two operations.
However, if memory has been expunged by the work of one's forgettery or deleted by the
corporate media's flushing it down the memory hole, or if knowledge is lacking, or maybe fear
or cognitive dissonance is blocking awareness , I would like to point out some similarities
that might perk one up to consider some parallels and connections between these two
operations.
The fundamental tie that binds them is that both events aroused the human fear of death.
Underlying all fears is the fear of death. A fear that has both biological and cultural
roots. On the biological level, we all react to death threats in a fight or flight manner.
Culturally, there are multiple ways that fear can be allayed or exacerbated, purposely or not.
Usually, culture serves to ease the fear of death, which can traumatize people, through its
symbols and myths. Religion has for a long time served that purpose, but when religion loses
its hold on people's imaginations, especially in regard to the belief in immortality, as Orwell
pointed out in the mid-1940s, a huge void is left. Without that consolation, fear is usually
tranquilized by trivial pursuits.
In the cases of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the current corona virus operation,
the fear of death has been used by the power elites in order to control populations and
institute long-planned agendas. There is a red thread that connects the two events.
Both events were clearly anticipated and planned.
In the case of September 11, 2001, as I have argued before
, linguistic mind-control was carefully crafted in advance to conjure fear at the deepest
levels with the use of such repeated terms as Pearl Harbor, Homeland, Ground Zero, the
Unthinkable, and 9/11. Each in its turns served to raise the fear level dramatically. Each drew
on past meetings, documents, events, speeches, and deep associations of dread. This language
was conjured from the chief sorcerer's playbook, not from that of an apprentice out of
control.
And as David Ray Griffin, the seminal 9/11 researcher (and others), has pointed out in a
dozen meticulously argued and documented
books , the events of that day had to be carefully planned in advance, and the post hoc
official explanations can only be described as scientific miracles, not scientific
explanations. These miracles include: massive steel-framed high-rise buildings for the first
time in history coming down without explosives or incendiaries in free fall speed; one of them
being WTC-7 that was not even hit by a plane; an alleged hijacker pilot, Hani Hanjour, who
could barely fly a Piper Cub, flying a massive Boeing 757 in a most difficult maneuver into the
Pentagon; airport security at four airports failing at the same moment on the same day; all
sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies failing; air traffic control failing, etc. The list goes on
and on. And all this controlled by Osama bin Laden. It's a fairy tale.
Then we had the crucially important anthrax attacks that are linked to 9/11. Graeme
MacQueen, in
The 2001 Anthrax Deception , brilliantly shows that these too were a domestic
conspiracy.
These planned events led to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the U.S.
withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, the invasion of Iraq , the ongoing war on terror, etc.
Let us not forget years of those fraudulent color-coded warnings of the terrorist levels and
the government admonition to use duct tape around your windows to protect against a massive
chemical and biological attack.
Jump to 2020 .
Let me start in reverse while color-coded designs are fresh in our minds. As the COVID-19
lockdowns were under way, a funny thing happened as people were wishing that life could return
to normal and they could be let out of their cages. Similar color-coded designs popped up
everywhere at the same time. They showed the step-by-step schedule of possible loosening of
government controls if things went according to plan. Red to yellow to green. Eye catching. Red
orange yellow blue green. As with the terrorist warnings following September 11, 2001. In
Massachusetts, a so-called blue state where I live, it's color chart ends in blue, not green,
with Phase 4 blue termed "the new normal: Development of vaccines and/or treatments enable the
resumption of 'the new normal.'" Interesting wording. A resumption that takes us back to the
future.
As with the duct tape admonitions after 9/11, now everyone is advised to wear a mask. It's
interesting to note that the 3 M Company, a major seller of duct tape, is also one of the
world's major sellers of face masks. The company was expected to be producing 50
million N95 respirator masks per month by June 2020 and 2 billion globally within the coming
year. Then there is 3 M's masking tape but this is a sticky topic.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, we were told repeatedly that the world was changed
forever. Now we are told that after COVID 19, life will never be the same. This is the "new
normal," while the post-9/11-pre-Covid-19 world must have been the old new normal. So
everything is different but normal also. So as the Massachusetts government website puts it, in
the days to come we may be enabled to enact "the resumption of 'the new normal.'" This new old
normal will no doubt be a form of techno-fascist transhumanism enacted for our own good.
As with 9/11, there is ample evidence that the corona virus outbreak was expected and
planned; that people have been the victims of a propaganda campaign to use an invisible virus
to scare us into submission and shut down the world's economy for the global elites. It is a
clear case, as Peter Koenig tells Michel Chossudovsky in this must-see interview
, that is not a conspiracy theory but a blatant factual plan spelled out in the 2010
Rockefeller Report , the October 18, 2019 Event 201 , and Agenda
21 , among other places.
Like amorphous terrorists and a war against "terrorism," which is a tactic and therefore not
something you can fight, a virus is invisible except when the media presents it as a pale,
orange-spiked bunch of floating weird balls that are everywhere and nowhere. Watch your back,
watch your face, mask up, wash your hands, keep your distance – you never know when those
orange spiked balls may get you.
As with 9/11, whenever anyone questions the official narrative of Covid-19, the official
statistics, the validity of the tests,
the effectiveness of masks , the powers behind the heralded vaccine to come, and the
horrible consequences of the lockdowns that are destroying economies, killing people, forcing
people to despair and to commit suicide, creating traumatized children, bankrupting small and
middle-sized businesses for the sake of enriching the richest, etc., the corporate media mock
the dissidents as conspiracy nuts, aiding the viral enemy.
This is so even when the dissenters are highly respected doctors, scientists, intellectuals,
et al., who are regularly disappeared from the internet. With September 11, there were
initially far fewer dissenters than now, and so the censorship of opposing viewpoints didn't
need the blatant censorship that is now growing daily.
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This censorship happens all across the internet now, quickly and stealthily, the same
internet that is being forced on everyone as the new normal as presented in the Great
Global Reset , the digital lie, where, as Anthony Fauci put it, no one should ever shake
hands again.
A world of abstract images and beings in which, as Arthur Jensen tells Howard Beal in the
film, Network , "All necessities [will be] provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom
amused." A digital dystopia that is fast approaching as perhaps the end of that red thread that
runs from 9/11 to today.
Heidi Evens and Thomas Hackett write in the New York Daily News :
With the nation's illusion of safety and security in ruins, Americans begin the slow and
fitful process of healing from a trauma that feels deeply, cruelly personal leaving citizens
throughout the country with the frightening knowledge of their vulnerability.
Over two dozen phones belonging to members of Robert Mueller's special counsel team were
wiped clean before they were handed over to the Inspector General, according to information
contained in
87 pages of DOJ records released on Thursday.
Some of the phones were wiped using the Apple operating system's 'wrong-password' failsafe,
where the wrong password must be entered ten times - after which the system wipes the
drive.
Those who couldn't seem to remember their password 10 times in a row include 'attack dog'
lawyer Andrew Weissman , who urged DOJ attorneys to go rogue and 'not' help US Attorney John
Durham investigate FBI and DOJ conduct during the Trump investigation.
A phone belong to assistant special counsel James Quarles "wiped itself without
intervention from him," the DOJ's records state.
Andrew Weismann, a top prosecutor on Mueller's team, "accidentally wiped" his cell phone,
causing the data to be lost. Other members of the team also accidentally wiped their phones,
the DOJ said.
Phones issued to at least three other Mueller prosecutors, Kyle Freeny, Rush Atkinson, and
senior prosecutor Greg Andres were also wiped of data.
Additionally, t he cell phone of FBI lawyer Lisa Page was misplaced by the special
counsel's office . While it was eventually obtained by the DOJ inspector general, by that
point the phone had been restored to its factory settings, wiping it of all dat a. The phone
of FBI agent Peter Strzok was also obtained by the inspector general's office, which found
"no substantive texts, notes or reminders" on it.
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"... The idea, therefore, that Paul Manafort was an agent of influence for the Russian government flies against everything we know about what he actually did. As for Kilimnik, maybe he is a Russian intelligence agent – I'm not in a position to say. But if he is, he's a very weird one, who spent years actively pushing the Ukrainian government to pursue a policy which directly contradicted Russian interests. ..."
"... None of this, needless to say, appears in the US Senate report. Instead, the report chooses to focus on the apparently shocking revelation that Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with Kilimnik, as if this sharing of private information was in some ways a massive threat to national security and proof that Manafort was working for the Russians. The fact that both Manafort and Kilimnik spent years doing their damnedest to undermine Russia is simply ignored. Go figure! ..."
Despite the secondary roles played some bit part actors in the Russiagate drama, the central
figure in allegations that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to be elected as
president of the United States has always been Trumps' onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort.
The recent US Senate report on Russian 'interference' in the 2016 presidential election thus
started off its analysis with a long exposé of Manafort's comings and goings.
Simply put, the thesis is as follows: while working in Ukraine as an advisor to
'pro-Russian' Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich, Manafort was in effect working on behalf
of the Russian state via 'pro-Russian' Ukrainian oligarchs as well as Russian billionaire Oleg
Deripaska (a man with 'close ties' to the Kremlin). Also suspicious was Manafort's close
relationship with one Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the US Senate claims is a Russia intelligence
agent. All these connections meant that while in Ukraine, Manafort was helping the Russian
Federation spread its malign influence. On returning to the USA and joining the Trump campaign,
he then continued to fulfill the same role.
The fundamental flaw in this thesis has always been the well-known fact that while advising
Yanukovich, Manafort took anything but a 'pro-Russian' position, but instead pressed him to
sign an association agreement with the European Union (EU). Since gaining independence, Ukraine
had avoided being sucked either into the Western or the Russian camp. But the rise of two
competing geopolitical projects – the EU and the Russia-backed Eurasian Union – was
making this stance increasingly impossible, and Ukraine was being put in a position where it
would be forced to choose. This was because the two Unions are incompatible – one can't
be in two customs unions simultaneously, when they levy different tariffs and have different
rules. Association with the EU meant an end to the prospect of Ukraine joining the Eurasian
Union. It was therefore a goal which was entirely incompatible with Russian interests, which
required that Ukraine turn instead towards Eurasia.
Manafort's position on this matter therefore worked against Russia. Even The
Guardian journalist Luke Harding had to concede this in his book Collusion ,
citing a former Ukrainian official Oleg Voloshin that, 'Manafort was an advocate for US
interests. So much so that the joke inside [Yanunkovich's] Party of Regions was that he
actually worked for the USA.'
If anyone had any doubts about this, they can now put them aside. On Monday, the news agency
BNE Intellinews
announced that it had received a leak of hundreds of Kilimnik's emails detailing his
relationship with Manafort and Yanukovich. The story they tell is not at all what the US Senate
and other proponents of the Trump-Russia collusion fantasy would have you believe. As
BNE reports:
Today the Yanukovych narrative is that he was a stool pigeon for Russian President
Vladimir Putin from the start, but after winning the presidency he actually worked very hard
to take Ukraine into the European family. As bne IntelliNews has already reported,
Manafort's flight records also show how he crisscrossed Europe in an effort to build support
in Brussels for Yanukovych in the run up to the EU Vilnius summit.
On March 1, his first foreign trip as newly minted president was to the EU capital of
Brussels. The leaked emails show that Manafort influenced Yanukovych's decision to visit
Brussels as first stop, working in concert with his assistant Konstantin Kilimnik In a
memorandum entitled 'Purpose of President Yanukovych Trip to Brussels,' Manafort argued that
the decision to visit Brussels first would underscore Yanukovych's mission to "bring European
values to Ukraine," and kick start negotiations on the Association Agreement.
The memorandum on the Brussels visit was the first of many from Manafort and Kilimnik to
Yanukovych, in which they pushed Yanukovych to signal a clear pro-EU line and to carry out
reforms to back this up.
To handle Yanukovych's off-message antics, Manafort and Kilimnik created a back channel to
Yanukovych for Western politicians – in particular those known to appreciate Ukraine's
geopolitical significance vis-à-vis Russia. In Europe, these were Sweden's then
foreign minister Carl Bildt, Poland's then foreign minister Radosław Sikorski and
European Commissioner for Enlargement Stefan Fule, and in the US, Vice President Joe
Biden.
"We need to launch a 'Friends of Ukraine' programme to help us use informal channels in
talks on the free trade zone and modernisation of the gas transport system," Manafort and
Kilimnik wrote to Yanukovych in September 2010. "Carl Bildt is the foundation of this
informal group and has sufficient weight with his colleagues in questions connected to
Ukraine and the Eastern Partnership. ( ) but he needs to be able to say that he has a direct
channel to the President, and he knows that President Yanukovych remains committed to
European integration."
Beyond this, the emails show that Manafort and Kilimnik also tried hard to arrange a meeting
between Yanukovich and US President Barack Obama, and urged Yanukovich to show leniency to
former Prime Minister Yuliia Timoshenko (who was imprisoned for fraud).
It is noticeable that the members of the 'back channel' Manafort and Kilimnik created to
lobby on behalf of Ukraine in the EU included some of the most notably Russophobic European
politicians of the time, such as Carl Bildt and Radek Sikorski. Moreover, nowhere in any of
what they did can you find anything that could remotely be described as 'pro-Russian'. Indeed,
the opposite is true. As previously noted, Ukraine's bid for an EU agreement directly
challenged a key Russian interest – the expansion of the Eurasian Union to include
Ukraine. Manafort and Kilimnik were therefore very much working against Russia, not
for it.
The idea, therefore, that Paul Manafort was an agent of influence for the Russian
government flies against everything we know about what he actually did. As for Kilimnik, maybe
he is a Russian intelligence agent – I'm not in a position to say. But if he is, he's a
very weird one, who spent years actively pushing the Ukrainian government to pursue a policy
which directly contradicted Russian interests.
None of this, needless to say, appears in the US Senate report. Instead, the report
chooses to focus on the apparently shocking revelation that Manafort shared Trump campaign
polling data with Kilimnik, as if this sharing of private information was in some ways a
massive threat to national security and proof that Manafort was working for the Russians. The
fact that both Manafort and Kilimnik spent years doing their damnedest to undermine Russia is
simply ignored. Go figure!
Oh, look, no masks! And you thought that got covered up by the investigation done by the
Mueller team? Let's go over this one more time:
The document declassified by DNI Grenell shows that there were 14 unique days when the NSA
received requests to "unmask"--the first was on 30 November 2016 by UN Ambassador Samantha
Power and the last came on 12 January from Joe Biden. There were two separate requests on the
14th of December by Samantha Power, which indicates two separate NSA reports. Samantha Power
would not have to submit two requests for the same document.
"so basically, any legitimate grievance or concern of citizens is a Russian plot ."
Other commenters tweeted that they didn't need any help from Moscow to clearly see that Biden's
mind
is failing .
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper went on CNN to accuse Russia of
interfering in US affairs including the Covid-19 pandemic, Portland and Kenosha protests, and
election meddling while giving no real evidence.
Clapper, who has previously said Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to
co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever," was more than happy to push more xenophobic Russia
conspiracy theories during a Monday CNN interview when prompted by anchor Alisyn
Camerota.
The US Department of Homeland Security reportedly blocked the distribution of a July intelligence bulletin warning of a
Russian plot to promote "misinformation" that the Democratic presidential candidate is in poor mental health.
The
report
by
ABC News on Wednesday cited internal emails, and the media outlet said a DHS spokesperson confirmed that distribution of the
bulletin to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies had been delayed. The spokesperson said the bulletin didn't meet
quality standards, including having sufficient evidence and context, for dissemination, ABC said.
Democrats will likely pounce on the report to allege that the DHS blocked the warning to help President Donald Trump win the
November election and that the Trump campaign's criticism of Biden's mental state is part of the Russian misinformation
effort. Twitter users are already promoting the new collusion theory, asking
"
which
'homeland'
does DHS serve?"
and saying,
"
Trump
and Putin
are one."
The ABC report downplayed
portions of the intelligence bulletin unrelated to Russia, including warnings that Iranian and Chinese state media outlets are
promoting suggestions that Trump
"suffers from psychosis"
and may be in poor
physical health. It also sets up the argument that any future criticism of the Democrat's mental soundness is Russian
misinformation.
One Twitter user said the
report is
"laying the groundwork for 'anyone commenting on Joe's decline is in league
with Russia' takes,"
while another inferred,
"so basically, any legitimate
grievance or concern of citizens is a
Russian
plot
."
Other commenters tweeted that they didn't need any help from Moscow to clearly see that Biden's
mind
is failing
.
Online speculation has
grown over Biden's expanding series of infamous gaffes, such as welcoming his audience to the
wrong
place
and then trying to pass it off as a joke when he gave a July speech in his home state of Delaware.
The Democrat has also
stumbled in unscripted moments to know
where
he is
, such as praising the beauty of Vermont when he was actually campaigning last year in New Hampshire, and whom he's
with, such as mistaking his
wife
for his sister
in a primary victory speech in March. He bragged in February that he negotiated the 2016 Paris Climate
Agreement with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Deng died in 1997.
Democrats have tried to
revive the Trump-Russia collusion narrative despite the failure of special prosecutor Robert Mueller to prove that the Trump
campaign worked with Moscow to win the 2016 presidential election.
When the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence informed congressional committees last week that intelligence briefings on election security
issues would no longer be done in person, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff
issued a statement saying,
"The American people have both the right and the need to know
that another nation, Russia, is trying to help decide who their next president should be."
The statement ignored the
fact that Russia isn't the only country that has been accused of using disinformation and other means to influence the 2020 US
elections. A US intelligence report last month warned that Russia, China and Iran, among others, have sought to influence
voters and that mass use of voting by mail will make it easier for foreign countries to interfere.
China
and Iran
also allegedly sought to discredit Trump, according to the intelligence warnings.
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interested? Share this story!
Doug Valentine's new book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal
Operations Corrupt America and the World , is a compilation of newly updated articles
and recent interviews. The book, which discusses a part of history that is rarely mentioned
nowadays but is vital to understand as we enter the Trump era, is divided into four sections.
The first covers the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam; the second looks at how the agency
manages the War on Drugs; the third reviews how the Phoenix program became the model for
Homeland Security and the War on Terror; and the fourth takes a look at the the CIA's influence
on the media.
The CIA created the Phoenix program in South Vietnam in 1967 as a means of identifying,
capturing, detaining, interrogating and assassinating the civilian leaders of the insurgency.
As detailed in the book, the program has become the template for Homeland Security, as well as
for waging the War on Terror and the War on Drugs.
The following edited excerpt, which focuses on the CIA's illegal domestic spying program,
Chaos, was omitted from the book. It is taken from an interview Valentine did with Guillermo
Jimenez in November 2014, originally titled "The CIA Has Become the Phoenix."
Cloaked in secrecy, the CIA is rarely written about and poorly understood. But while
researching the infamous Phoenix program, Valentine managed to penetrate the agency and
interview dozens of agency officers. His
Phoenix research materials are available to the public at the National Security Archive.
His interviews with several CIA officers are available online here and here
.
GUILLERMO JIMENEZ: The Phoenix Program has recently been republished by Open Road
Media as part of their Forbidden Bookshelves series. Would you mind sharing with us how your
book was chosen for the series? What do you make of this new-found interest in Phoenix; what
the CIA was up to in Vietnam; and what the CIA is up to generally?
VALENTINE: When the book came out in 1990, it got a terrible review in The New York
Times . Morley Safer, who'd been a reporter in Vietnam, wrote the review. Safer and the
Times killed the book because in it I said Phoenix never would have succeeded if the
reporters in Vietnam hadn't covered for the CIA.
Several senior CIA officers said the same thing, that "So and so was always in my office.
He'd bring a bottle of scotch and I'd tell him what was going on." The celebrity reporters knew
what was going on, but they didn't report about it in exchange for having access. I said that
in the book specifically about The New York Times . So I not only got the CIA angry at
me, I also got the Vietnam press corps angry at me too.
Between those two things, the book did not get off to an auspicious start. The Times
gave Safer half a page to write his review, which was bizarre. The usual response is just to
ignore a book like The Phoenix Program . But The New York Times Book Review
serves a larger function; it teaches the media elite and "intelligentsia" what to think and how
to say it. So Safer said my book was incoherent, because it unraveled the bureaucratic networks
that conceal the contradictions between policy and operational reality. It exposed Bill Colby
[who ran Phoenix for the agency and later became CIA director] as a liar. Safer was upset that
I didn't portray his friend and patron as a symbol of the elite, as a modern day Odysseus.
Luckily, with the Internet revolution, people aren't bound by the Times and network
news anymore. They can listen to Russia Today and get another side of the story. So Mark
Crispin Miller and Philip Rappaport at Open Road chose The Phoenix Program to be the
first book they published. And it's been reborn. Thanks to the advent of the e-book, we've
reached an audience of concerned and knowledgeable people in a way that wasn't possible 25
years ago.
It's also because of these Internet developments that John Brennan, the director of CIA,
thought of reorganizing the the agency. All these things are connected. It's a vastly different
world than it was in 1947 when the CIA was created. The nature of the American empire has
changed, and what the empire needs from the CIA has changed. The CIA is allocated about $30
billion a year, so the organizational changes are massive undertakings. If you want to
understand the CIA, you have to understand how it's organized.
JIMENEZ: I want to talk to you about that but first I'd like to touch upon the CIA's
infiltration of the US media. I find it curious, because the way that you describe it, it's not
so much a deliberate attempt to censor the media. There's a lot of self-censorship as a result
of that already existing relationship. Is that how you see this?
VALENTINE: Yes. The media organizes itself the way the CIA does. The CIA has case
officers running around the world, engaged in murder and mayhem, and the media has reporters
covering them. The reporter and the case officer both have bosses, and the higher you get in
each organization, the closer the bosses become.
The ideological guidelines get more restrictive the higher up you go. To join the CIA,
you have to pass a psychological assessment test. They're not going to hire anybody who is
sympathetic towards poor people. These are ruthless people who serve capitalist bosses .
They're very rightwing, and t he media's job is to protect them. Editors only hire reporters
who are ideologically pure, just like you can't get into the CIA if you're a Communist or think
the CIA should obey the law.
It's the same thing in the media. You can't get a job at CNN if you sympathize with the
Palestinians or report how Israel has been stealing their land for 67 years. The minute you say
something that is anathema or upsets the Israelis, you're out. The people who enforce these
ideological restraints are the editors and the publishers. For example, while covering the
merciless Israeli bombardment of civilians in Gaza in 2014, Diana Magnay was harassed and
threatened by a group of bloodthirsty Israelis who were cheering the slaughter. Disgusted,
Magnay later referred to them as "scum" in a tweet. She was forced to apologize, transferred to
Moscow, and banished forever from Israel.
In a similar case, NBC correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin was playing soccer with four young boys
in Gaza when Israel shelled the playing field. Mohyeldin witnessed their murders, which he
reported in a series of tweets. Without ever providing a reason, NBC pulled Mohyeldin from Gaza
and prevented him from ever returning. NBC replaced Mohyeldin with Israeli sympathizer Richard
Engel.
Any dictator would be happy with the way American media is organized. The minute you step
out of the box, they fire you or send you off to Siberia . It's a homogenous system. Not
just the media and CIA, but politicians too. As the 2016 primaries proved, you can't be a
candidate for either party unless you pass the ideological test. You must be a freewheeling
capitalist. You must support Israel with billions of tax payer dollars. You must give the
military whatever weapons it wants. That's the nature of the American state. These things
naturally work together because that is the way it has been structured for 240 years.
JIMENEZ: We've seen pseudo alternatives emerge in the Internet posing as adversarial or
anti-establishment when they're anything but. We've seen this growing trend, and it's something
to be mindful of as we look for these sources on the Internet.
VALENTINE: The Internet is a free for all, so you have to approach it the way any
enlightened person approaches every part of America, which is buyer beware. Capitalism is not
designed to protect poor people or make sure people lead healthy, fulfilling lives. It's
designed to make sure the super-rich can steal from the poor. There's only so much wealth and
the rich want it.
The rich want to monopolize information too. Is a particular piece of information on the
Internet coming from a reliable source? Who knows? Just because some of it is true doesn't mean
that all of it is true. To be able to discern whether the information is accurate or complete,
you must be grounded in the reality that the capitalist system are organized to oppress you,
keep you in the dark and off balance as much as possible. It's a game of wits and you've got to
be smart about it. Buyer beware.
JIMENEZ: Now I'd like to talk about the recent organizational changes in the CIA. It stems
from an article in The Washington Post by Greg Miller. The headline is "CIA Director
John Brennan Considering Sweeping Organizational Changes." What the article is saying is that
Brennan wants to restructure the CIA using the model of their Counterterrorism Center; merging
different units and divisions, combining analysts with operatives into hybrid teams that will
focus on specific regions of the world. This sounds to me like the organizational changes that
were born out of Phoenix and that were exported to other parts of the world over the years. The
CIA appears to be applying the same structure to all of its operations. Is that how you read
this?
VALENTINE: Yes, and it's something that, from my perspective, was predictable, which is why
The Phoenix Program was re-released now, because what I predicted 25 years ago has
happened. And you can only predict accurately if you know the history.
The CIA initially, and for decades, had four directorates under an executive management
staff: Administration, Intelligence, Operations, and Science and Technology. Executive
management had staff for congressional liaison, legal issues, security, public relations,
inspections, etc. Administration is just that: staff for finance, personnel, and support
services like interrogators, translators and construction companies. Science and Technology is
self-explanatory too, but with a typical CIA twist – science for the CIA means better
ways to kill and control people, like the MKULTRA program. And now there's a fifth directorate,
Digital, that keystrokes and hacks foreign governments and corporations.
The Operations people overthrew foreign governments the old fashioned way, through sabotage
and subversion. The Operations Directorate is now the National Clandestine Service. The
Intelligence Directorate, which is now called Analysis, studied political, economic and social
trends around the world so that executive management could mount better operations to control
them.
The Operations Directorate was divided into several branches. The Counterintelligence (CI)
branch detected foreign spies. Foreign Intelligence (FI) staff "liaison" officers worked with
secret policemen and other officials in foreign nations. They collected "positive intelligence"
by eavesdropping or by recruiting agents. The Covert Action branch engaged in deniable
political action. The Special Operations Division (now the Special Activities Division)
supplied paramilitary officers. There was also a Political and Psychological branch that
specialized in all forms of propaganda.
These branches and directorates were career paths for operations officers (operators)
assigned to geographical divisions. An FI staff officer might spend his or her entire career in
the Far East Asia Division. The managers could move people around, but those things, generally
speaking, were in place when the CIA began. The events that led to the formation of the
current Counterterrorism Center began in 1967, when US security services began to suspect that
the Cubans and the Soviets were infiltrating the anti-war movement. Lyndon Johnson wanted to
know the details, so his attorney general, Ramsay Clark, formed the Interdepartmental
Intelligence Unit (IDIU) within the Department of Justice. The IDIU's job was to coordinate the
elements of the CIA, FBI and military that were investigating dissenters. The White House
wanted to control and provide political direction to these investigations.
The Phoenix program was created simultaneously in 1967 and did the same thing in Vietnam.
It brought together 25 agencies and aimed them at civilians in the insurgency. It's political
warfare. It's secret. It's against the rules of war. It violated the Geneva Conventions. It's
what Homeland Security does in the US: bringing agencies together and focusing them on
civilians who they think look like terrorists.
The goal of this kind of bureaucratic centralization is to improve intelligence collection
and analysis so reaction forces can leap into the breach more quickly and effectively. In 1967,
the CIA already had computer experts who were traveling around by jet. The world was getting
smaller and the CIA, which had all the cutting edge technology, was way out in front. It hired
Ivy Leaguers like Nelson Brickham to make the machine run smoothly.
Brickham, as I've explained elsewhere, was the Foreign Intelligence staff officer who
organized the Phoenix program based on principles Rensis Likert articulated in his book New
Patterns of Management . Brickham believed he could use reporting formats as a tool to
shape the behavior of CIA officers in the field. In particular, he hoped to correct "the grave
problem of distortion and cover-up which a reporting system must address."
Likert organized industries to be adaptable, and the CIA organized itself the same way. It
was always reorganizing itself to adapt to new threats. And in 1967, while Brickham was forming
Phoenix to neutralize the leaders of the insurgency in South Vietnam, James Angleton and the
CIA's Counterintelligence staff were creating the MHCHAOS program in Langley, Virginia, to spy
on members of the anti-war movement, and turn as many of them as possible into double
agents.
Chaos was the codename for the Special Operations Group within Angleton's
Counterintelligence staff. The CIA's current Counterterrorism Center, which was established in
1986, is a direct descendent of Chaos.
The CIA's CT Center evolved from the Chaos domestic spying mechanism into the nerve center
of the CIA's clandestine staff. Same thing happened with the CIA's Counter-Narcotics Center at
the same time. Both are modeled on Phoenix, and both are wonderful tools for White House cadres
to exercise political control over the bureaucracies they coordinate. These "centers" are the
perfect means for policing and expanding the empire; they make it easier than ever for the CIA
to track people and events in every corner of the world. The need for the old-fashioned
directorates is fading away. You don't need an entire directorate to understand the political,
social and economic movements around the world anymore, because the United States is
controlling them all.
The US has color revolutions going everywhere. It's got the World Bank and the IMF
strangling countries with debt, like the banks are strangling college students and home owners
here. The War on Terror is the best thing that ever happened to US capitalists and their secret
police force, the CIA. Terrorism is the pretext that allows the CIA to coordinate and transcend
every government agency and civic institution, including the media, to the extent that we don't
even see its wars anymore. Its control is so pervasive, so ubiquitous; the CIA has actually
become the Phoenix.
JIMENEZ: Right.
VALENTINE: It's the eye of god in the sky; it's able to determine what's going to happen
next because it's controlling all of these political, social and economic movements. It pits
the Sunnis against the Shiites. It doesn't need slow and outdated directorates. These Phoenix
centers enable it to determine events instantaneously anywhere. There are now Counterterror
Intelligence Centers all over the world. In Phoenix they were called Intelligence Operations
Coordinating Centers. So it's basically exactly the same thing. It's been evolving that way and
everybody on the inside was gearing themselves for this glorious moment for 30 years. They even
have a new staff position called Targeting Officers. You can Google this.
JIMENEZ: Right, right, exactly.
VALENTINE: The centers represent the unification of military, intelligence and media
operations under political control. White House political appointees oversee them, but the
determinant force is the CIA careerists who slither into private industry when their careers
are over. They form the consulting firms that direct the corporations that drive the empire.
Through their informal "old boy" network, the CIA guys and gals keep America at war so they can
make a million dollars when their civil service career is over.
JIMENEZ: The Washington Post and subsequent articles frame it as if these changes are
drastic. But to hear you, it's a natural progression. So what does this announcement mean? Is
the CIA putting out its own press release through the Washington Post just to give
everyone the heads up?
VALENTINE: Well, everybody in the CIA was worried that if the directorates were reorganized,
it would negatively affect their careers. But executive management usually does what its
political bosses tell them to do, and Brennan reorganized in 2015. He created a fifth
directorate, the Directorate for Digital Innovation (DDI) ostensibly as the CIA's
"mantelpiece". But, as the Washington Times reported, "it is the formation of the new
'mission' centers – including ones for counterintelligence, weapons and
counter-proliferation, and counterterrorism – that is most likely to shake up the
agency's personnel around the world."
The CIA's "ten new Mission Centers" are designed to "serve as locations to integrate
capabilities and bring the full range of CIA's operational, analytic, support, technical and
digital skill sets to bear against the nation's most pressing national security problems."
This modernization means the CIA is better able to control people politically, starting with
its own officers, then everyone else. That's the ultimate goal. Politicians, speaking in a
unified voice, create the illusion of a crime-fighting CIA and an America with a responsibility
to protect benighted foreigners from themselves. But they can't tell you what the CIA does,
because it's all illegal. It's all a lie. In order for the politicians to hold office, they
have to cover for the CIA. Their concern is how to explain the reorganization and exploit it.
They squabble among themselves and cut the best deals possible.
The foreign policy elite dislikes Russia, always has, and will do anything to keep
this "adversary" front and center because their prospects for prestige, power and position
depend upon the presence of an enemy. As an example see Strobe Talbot and Michael
McFaul.
Notable quotes:
"... Ben Cardin agreed to be the cosponsor of a Magnitsky Act in the Senate. He sought a Republican cosponsor, John McCain, a Russophobic senator who never met a war he didn't like. ..."
"... It wasn't the first time McCain helped a fraudster. McCain was one of the corrupt "Keating Five" senators who improperly intervened in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., corrupt chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed in 1989 at a cost of $3.4 billion to the federal government (and thus taxpayers). Many investors lost their life savings. ..."
"... To get to McCain and others, Browder hired lobbyist Juleanna Glover, who had been Vice President Dick Cheney's press secretary and then Attorney General John Ashcroft's senior policy adviser. She went with Ashcroft when he left government to run the Washington office of his law firm, the Ashcroft Group. ..."
"... She got Browder a meeting with McCain who agreed to sponsor the Magnitsky Act. It fit with his Russophobia and friendship with fraudsters. ..."
"... On September 29, 2010, Senators Ben Cardin, John McCain, Roger Wicker (Republican of Mississippi) and Joe Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut) introduced the bill in the Senate. Anyone involved in the false arrest, torture or death of Sergei Magnitsky, or the crimes he uncovered, would be publicly named, banned from entering the United States, and have their U.S. assets frozen. ..."
"... Remember again that a few months later Browder would tell the San Diego law school he didn't know how Magnitsky died. ..."
"... How the Browder-Magnitsky hoax law got passed in a trade deal ..."
"... Browder got Senator Joe Lieberman, conservative Democrat from Connecticut, to agree to block Jackson-Vanik repeal unless the administration stopped blocking his Magnitsky Act. ..."
"... Lieberman and the other cosponsors of the Magnitsky Act sent a letter to Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The letter said, "In the absence of the passage of the Magnitsky legislation, we will strongly oppose the lifting of Jackson-Vanik." ..."
"... The final count December 6, 2012 was 92-4. Levin and three other Democrats – Bernie Sanders as well as Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, both of Rhode Island – were the only Senators to vote against it. Elizabeth Warren was not yet in the Senate. ..."
"... It was signed by Obama a week later. Read Title IV of the law to see how it is based on the fake claims the chief sponsors would not, could not prove. Including "he was beaten by 8 guards with rubber batons on the last day of his life" based on zero evidence, just Browder's lies. (I also wrote to Cardin's office and got no reply.) ..."
As the Democratic Convention is in progress, it is fitting to look at how Democrats in Congress and the White House, with Republican
collaboration, were responsible for the
Magnitsky Act , the law that protects tax fraudster William Browder and his henchman Mikhail Khodorkovsky by erecting a wall
against their having to face justice for their financial crimes. And ramps up hostility against Russia.
The fraudster William Browder .
This is a half-hour interview about this I did today on this subject
for Fault Lines . And a 15-minute
interview for The Critical
Hour . Here is an expanded version of what I said.
William Browder in the mid-1990s became manager of the Hermitage Fund, set up with $25 million from Lebanese-Brazilian banker
Edmond Safra and Israeli mining investor Beny Steinmez to buy shares in Russian companies.
He says he started the fund, but that is a lie. He was brought in to manage other people's money. But after some years, when the
two investors either died or confronted major financial problems, Browder gained control.
Browder doesn't like paying taxes.
Browder was an American who traded his citizenship for a UK passport in 1998 so he could avoid paying U.S. taxes on his stock
profits. ( CBS called
him a tax expatriate.)
He didn't like paying Russian taxes either. In an early rip-off, he and his partners billionaire Kenneth Dart of Dart cups and
New York investor Francis Baker bought a majority of Avisma, a titanium company, that produces material used in airplanes.
They cheated
minority investors and the Russian tax collector of profits by using transfer pricing.
You sell your production to a fake company at a low price, then your fake company sells it at the world price. You book lower
dividends to cheat minority shareholders, report lower taxes to cheat the Russian people.
Browder and partners bought Avisma from infamous oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky on the basis of continuing his transfer
pricing scam. It was revealed by documents in a lawsuit when Browder and partners sued another infamous guy, Peter Bond, the Isle
of man crook handling the rake-offs for not passing on the full amount of the skim. (No honor among thieves!) The legal documents
where Browder admits to the scam are linked in this
story
.
Browder cheats bigtime on Russia taxes
Browder's next corruption was to
cheat the Russians of taxes from his stock buys in Russia, to the tune of about $100million. That included claiming as deductions
disabled workers who didn't work for him, local investments he never made, profits from stock buys of Gazprom the Russian energy
conglomerate that non-Russians were not allowed to buy in Russia.
Investigations started in the early 2000s for $40 mil in evaded takes and led to legal judgments in 2004. When he refused to pay,
in November 2005 he was denied a Russian visa and in 2006 he moved all his assets out of Russia. But the Russian tax evasion investigations
continued.
Browder's accountant Sergei Magnitsky was arrested for investigation of the tax evasion in 2008, and the European Commission on
Human Rights
ruled last year that was correct because of the evidence and because he was a flight risk. Browder's fake narrative was that
Magnitsky, who he lied was his lawyer , had been arrested because he blew the whistle on a scheme by Russian officials to
embezzle money from the Russian Treasury. In his own U.S. federal
court deposition
, Browder admits Magnitsky didn't go to law school or have a law license. See his brief
video on
that.
Browder gives speeches that he didn't know how Magnitsky died
Then Magnitsky died of heart failure exacerbated by stomach disease which forensic reports say was not properly treated. Browder
first said (in talks at the British foreign policy association
Chatham House , London, a month after he died, and San Diego Law School
-- video at minute 6:20 -- a year later) he didn't know how Magnitsky died, but after a few years he invented a story that he
had been beaten to death.
Jonathan Winer, who helped Browder with his scam.
That story was developed by Jonathan Winer, a former assistant to Senator John Kerry and then a State Department official. Winer
was working for APCO, an international public relations company one of whose major clients was the same Mikhail Khodorkovsky. They
correctly assumed the western media would do no research. Or at least would not be allowed to report it. And the mainstream media
never did, except much later
Der Spiegel in Germany, which the rest of the western press ignored.
The plan was to get a U.S. law that would in effect block the Russians from going after certain Americans who had cheated on taxes.
They would be Browder and Khodorkovsky, who is actually named in the law.
Khodorkovsky would spend several hundred thousand dollars to buy Congressional support for the Magnitsky Act, clearly money
well spent. He duly reported it as lobbying expenses.
Here is how the Democrats and Republicans colluded in the Browder Magnitsky hoax. Much of this comes from Browder's own writings
in his mostly fake book "Red Notice." Note the corruption of both parties.
Magnitsky died in November 2009. Only four months later in March 2010, Browder was plotting his Magnitsky hoax, attacking Russians
he would claim were responsible for Magnitsky's death. But the bizarre part of the story is that he continued throughout 2010 to
say he didn't know how Magnitsky died, including in a videoed Dec 2010
San Diego law school talk. He obviously assumed U.S. media and politicians would not notice or care about the contradictions.
Ben Cardin, senator who signed on to Browder hoax.
Browder got Maryland Democratic Senator Ben Cardin to send a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March 2010 urging
her to ban visas for 60 people Browder had listed (without evidence) as complicit in Magnitsky's death. (Remember 9 months later
in a videoed talk at San Diego Law School Browder says he didn't know how Magnitsky died.)
The letter to Hillary Clinton, written (Browder says in his book) by Browder acolyte Kyle Parker, a staffer at the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, said, I "urge you to immediately cancel and permanently withdraw the U.S. visa privileges of all those involved
in this crime, along with their dependents and family members." Immediately? No due process, not even for children and grandparents?
Cousins?
Attached to the letter was the list of the sixty officials Browder accused, without evidence, of involvement in Magnitsky's death
and a tax fraud against the Treasury.
Browder's fake tax refund fraud
The tax refund fraud was a scheme in which shell companies were set up to sue Browder's Hermitage companies claiming contract
violations and damages of $1billion. The Hermitage companies immediately agreed to pay (no evidence of actual bank transfers), then
demanded the Treasury pay a tax refund of $230million because they now had zero profits.
Viktor Markelov, tried and jailed for the scam,
said he worked with a Sergei Leonidovich, which is Magnitsky's name and patronymic. Other evidence, including an inexplicable
delay of months between Browder learning about the his companies being re-registered in other names and him reporting that as
"theft," indicates he was part of the scam too.
Note this: Hermitage trustee HSBC filed a financial document in July 2007 saying it was putting aside $7 million for legal
costs that might be required to get back the companies. This was five months before the tax refund fraud occurred. Albert
Dabbah, chief financial controller for HSBC, confirmed the
document's authenticity in U.S.
federal court. But Browder and Magnitsky (in his
testimony
) said they didn't learn about the "theft" till October 2007.
Theft of his companies? The best defense is a good offense. Accuse others of the crime you committed.
Senator Cardin was requesting that all sixty of Browder's accused have their U.S. travel privileges permanently revoked.
But Hillary didn't buy it. Then House staffer Parker arranged for Browder to
testify about the Magnitsky case May 6 th at the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, not an official House body but
a pressure group set up in the name of a Russophobic former congressman from Hungary.
Congressman Jim McGovern would not send the evidence he promised, because he couldn't. There wasn't any.
The commission chairman was Massachusetts Democratic congressman Jim McGovern, who runs liberal but is a Russophobe who pretends
to be a human rights advocate.
Now what is really interesting is that seven months after this May 6 testimony, on December 6, 2010, Browder was telling the
San Diego law school (video 6:20 in) that "they put him in a straight
jacket, put him in an isolation room and waited outside the door until he died." Nothing about torture or killing. Had Browder forgotten
his dramatic beating story?
McGovern at the Lantos Commission hearing asked for no evidence. He said he would introduce legislation, put the 60 names Browder
cited in it, move it to the committee and make a formal recommendation from Congress, then pass it on the floor.
McGovern lies about sending evidence
Kimberly Stanton, who runs a propaganda operation and refused to provide evidence.
In July 2019, almost a decade later, I saw McGovern when he spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations. I asked if he would send
me evidence backing the claim that Magnitsky was tortured and killed. He agreed and introduced me to an aide. The aide referred me
to Kimberly Stanton, director of the Lantos Commission, who refused in an
email
to provide any information. And said evidence against targeted people is not required!
I also wrote McGovern's press secretary Matt Bonaccorsi and legislative director Cindy Buhl. They ignored repeated requests, never
sent me anything. I conclude that Jim McGovern, who pretends to be a liberal civil rights promoter, is a fake and a fraud.
McGovern introduces a Magnitsky bill in the House.
John McCain, he loved fraudsters and wars.
Ben Cardin agreed to be the cosponsor of a Magnitsky Act in the Senate. He sought a Republican cosponsor, John McCain, a Russophobic
senator who never met a war he didn't like.
It wasn't the first time McCain helped a fraudster. McCain was one of the corrupt "Keating Five" senators who improperly intervened
in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., corrupt chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed in 1989
at a cost of $3.4 billion to the federal government (and thus taxpayers). Many investors lost their life savings.
Keating was the target of a regulatory investigation. With powerful senators like McCain advocating his cause, the regulator
backed off taking action against Lincoln. Though Keating went to jail. McCain was cited only for exercising "poor judgment." Helping
a crook doesn't get you thrown out of the Senate.
To get to McCain and others, Browder hired lobbyist Juleanna Glover, who had been Vice President Dick Cheney's press secretary
and then Attorney General John Ashcroft's senior policy adviser. She went with Ashcroft when he left government to run the Washington
office of his law firm, the Ashcroft Group.
Juleanna Glover, former aide to Dick Cheney. She can buy you a bill .
She got Browder a meeting with McCain who agreed to sponsor the Magnitsky Act. It fit with his Russophobia and friendship
with fraudsters.
On September 29, 2010, Senators Ben Cardin, John McCain, Roger Wicker (Republican of Mississippi) and Joe Lieberman (Democrat
of Connecticut) introduced the bill in the Senate. Anyone involved in the false arrest, torture or death of Sergei Magnitsky, or
the crimes he uncovered, would be publicly named, banned from entering the United States, and have their U.S. assets frozen.
Remember again that a few months later Browder would tell the San Diego
law school he didn't know how Magnitsky died.
Now here is how the law got passed. The Jackson-Vanick amendment put in place in the mid-1970s imposed trade sanctions on the
Soviet Union to punish it for not allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate. Well, nobody could emigrate. Eventually 1.5 million Jews were
allowed to leave the country.
How the Browder-Magnitsky hoax law got passed in a trade deal
Thirty-seven years later the Soviet Union no longer existed, and everybody could emigrate, but Jackson-Vanik was still on the
books. It blocked American corporations from enjoying the same trade benefits with Russia as the world's other WTO members.
So, the U.S. business community said Jackson-Vanik had to go, and the Obama administration agreed. So did John Kerry, chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They needed an act of Congress.
Meanwhile, Kerry opposed the Magnitsky Act which he considered untoward interference in Russia (is that like saying meddling?)
and had been delaying bringing it to vote in committee.
Browder got Senator Joe Lieberman, conservative Democrat from Connecticut, to agree to block Jackson-Vanik repeal unless the
administration stopped blocking his Magnitsky Act.
Lieberman and the other cosponsors of the Magnitsky Act sent a letter to Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chairman of
the Senate Finance Committee. The letter said, "In the absence of the passage of the Magnitsky legislation, we will strongly oppose
the lifting of Jackson-Vanik."
John Kerry had good instincts, forced to make bad compromise.
So, Kerry stopped his opposition to the Magnitsky Act.
The two bills were combined. First the bill would be brought up at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to pass Magnitsky, then
it would go before the Finance Committee to repeal Jackson-Vanik, and then, it would go before the full Senate for a vote.
Kerry called for a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 2012, with the purpose of approving the Magnitsky
Act.
At the hearing, Kerry said that America was not a perfect country, and that the people in that room should be "very mindful of
the need for the United States not to always be pointing fingers and lecturing and to be somewhat introspective as we think about
these things." (Such nuance would obviously not be allowed today.)
He was "worried about the unintended consequences of requiring that kind of detailed reporting that implicates a broader range
of intelligence." He didn't have to worry. Reporting? Intelligence? Actual evidence would never be required! The U.S. was
setting up a kangaroo court and calling it a human rights tribunal!
The bill passed the House 365 to 43 on November 16, 2012. Voting "No" were 37 Democrats and 6 Republicans. Among them Maxine
Waters and Ron Paul. And surprisingly New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler who since then became a Russophobe. Tulsi Gabbard had not
yet been elected.
Kyle Parker told Browder, "There are a number of senators who are insisting on keeping Magnitsky global instead of Russia-only."
One was Cardin, but also Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan – a political giant who spent many years fighting, holding hearings, about
offshore tax evasion and must have known very well how Browder was a poster child for offshore tax-evading crooks. Also Jon Kyl,
Republican from Arizona. Of course, Browder wanted "Russia only," because the purpose of the law was to attack Russia, not to promote
global human rights. Cardin withdrew his objection, and the bill was "Russia only."
The Senate vote
The final count December 6, 2012 was 92-4. Levin and three other Democrats – Bernie Sanders as well as Jack Reed and Sheldon
Whitehouse, both of Rhode Island – were the only Senators to vote against it. Elizabeth Warren was not yet in the Senate.
It was signed by Obama a week later. Read Title IV of
the law to see how it is based on the
fake claims the chief sponsors would not, could not prove. Including "he was beaten by 8 guards with rubber batons on the last
day of his life" based on zero evidence, just Browder's lies. (I also wrote to Cardin's office and got no reply.)
It was the first pillar of Russiagate, where Cold Warrior Democrats joined forces with Cold Warrior Republicans. The result would
be to build a wall against Russia bringing Browder to justice, including getting Interpol to refuse to issue a red notice that would
require other countries to arrest him. He would name his book Red Notice as a jab at the Russians.
And the crooks Browder and Khodorkovsky, protected from the rule of law, laughed all the way to their offshore banks. Here's the
link to Browder's Mossack Fonseca (on Panama Papers fame) bank.
(Speaking of the rule of law, it doesn't apply to offshore banks, with secret owners of companies and accounts. They are largely
run by western banks that make big profits from laundering the money of the world's crooks. Note on any SEC filing where banks have
their subsidiaries: Caymans, Isle of Man, Guernsey, BVI, etc. No local clients, just financial fakery: letterbox companies, tax evasion.
It's okay. When there's corruption, only the little people go to jail. In the offshore system, the corrupt financial oligarchy rules.)
A full-bench US federal appeals court has reversed an earlier decision to dismiss the
'Russiagate' case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, returning it to the
judge who refused to let the charges be dropped.
In a 8-2 ruling on Monday, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Judge Emmet Sullivan,
and sent the case back to him for review. Sullivan had been ordered by a three-judge panel in
June to drop the case against Flynn immediately, but hired an attorney and asked for an en
banc hearing instead.
Flynn's attorney Sidney Powell said the split was "as expected" based on the tone of
the oral arguments, pointing to a partisan divide on the bench, and added it was a
"disturbing blow to the rule of law."
The former top lawyer for the Barack Obama administration, Neal Katyal, hailed the decision as
"an important step in defending the rule of law" and argued the case should not be
dismissed because Flynn had pleaded guilty.
Flynn had indeed pleaded guilty to one charge of lying to the FBI, but Powell moved to
dismiss the charges due to the failure of his previous attorneys – a law firm with ties
to the Democrats – and the government to disclose evidence that could set him free. After
producing documents revealing that the FBI set out to entrap Flynn, had no valid cause to
interview him in the first place, and the prosecutors improperly extorted him into a plea by
threatening to charge his son, the Justice Department moved to drop all charges.
Sullivan had other ideas, however. In a highly unusual move, he appointed a retired judge
– who had just written a diatribe about the case in the Washington Post – to be
amicus curiae and argue the case should not be dropped. It was at this point that Powell took
the case to the appeals court, citing Fokker, a recent Supreme Court precedent that Sullivan
was violating.
Ignoring the fact that Sullivan had appointed the amicus and sought to prolong the case
after the DOJ and the appeals court both told him to drop it, the en banc panel argued the
proper procedure means he needs to make the decision before it can be appealed.
One of the judges, Thomas Griffith, actually argued in a concurring opinion that it would be
"highly unusual" for Sullivan not to dismiss the charges, given the executive branch's
constitutional prerogatives and his "limited discretion" when it came to the relevant
federal procedure, but said that an order to drop the case is not "appropriate in this case
at this time" because it's up to Sullivan to make the call first.
The court likewise rejected Powell's motion to reassign a case to a different judge.
Conservatives frustrated by the neverending legal saga have blasted the appeals court's
decision as disgraceful. "The Mike Flynn case is an embarrassing stain on this country and
its 'judges',"tweeted TV commentator Dan
Bongino. "We don't have judges anymore, only corrupted politicians in black robes."
While Flynn was not the first Trump adviser to be charged by special counsel Robert
Mueller's 'Russiagate' probe, he was the first White House official pressured to resign over
it, less than two weeks into the job.
With Mueller failing to find any evidence of "collusion" between President Donald
Trump's campaign and Russia, Democrats have latched onto Flynn's case as proof of their
'Russiagate' conspiracy theory. The latest argument is that the effort to drop the charges
against Flynn is politically motivated and proof of Attorney General Bill Barr's
"corruption."
Barr is currently overseeing a probe by US attorney John Durham into the FBI's handling of
the investigation against Trump during and after the 2016 election, with the evidence disclosed
during the Flynn proceedings strongly implicating not just the senior FBI leadership but senior
Obama administration figures as well.
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Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the latest Western leader to wildly jump on the
bandwagon claiming that Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was poisoned, and by
implication insinuating the Kremlin had a sinister hand in it.
"The poisoning of Alexei Navalny shocked the world,"
asserted Johnson on Twitter, who went on to call for a "transparent investigation" to find
the perpetrators . The British premier didn't explicitly finger the Russian authorities, but
that was what he implied.
It's amazing how Boris Johnson, wracked by the political disaster of his sheer incompetent
mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic in Britain, somehow has the time and "authority" to
poke into Russian affairs.
Johnson's rush to judgement replicates other Western leaders who have
concluded without any evidence that Navalny was poisoned in a malicious way. U.S. Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo has said he backs the European Union's call for a comprehensive
investigation. Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel not only referred to Navalny's condition as
"poisoning" but also a "crime".
Boris Johnson's intervention is reminiscent of how he accused the Kremlin of poisoning
former MI6 spy Sergei Skripal in March 2018 within days of that incident. Johnson was then the
UK's foreign minister. What actually happened to Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English
city of Salisbury remains a mystery since the pair have not been seen or heard of since.
Presumably, they are in the custody of the British authorities, who have denied all
international norms by not allowing Russia consular access to at least one of its citizens.
As with the Skripal case, the reflexive response among Western governments and media is to
accuse Russian authorities of malign involvement in the case of Navalny. Demanding an
investigation by the Russian government indicates a high-handed presumption to interfere in
Russian internal affairs. It also indicates a Western prejudice to criminalize Moscow over any
incident.
As soon as Navalny was hospitalized after apparently being taken ill during a flight last
week from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, Western media headlines immediately inferred it
was the result of sinister play. "Putin critic" was ubiquitous in headlines, as were unfounded
claims of "poisoning" from drinking tea. (Russian trope alert.)
The Russian doctors who treated Navalny said there was no evidence of poisonous substance
found in his body. They said his seizure may have been caused by a fatal drop in blood sugar
levels. He is reportedly diabetic. So, from what we can tell, the Russian doctors appear to
have saved Navalny's life by their rapid response, but they were unable to make a precise
diagnosis. What then merits Western demands for an investigation by the Russian
authorities?
Two days after being treated in Russia, Navalny is airlifted on Saturday, August 22, by a
private jet to a hospital in Germany, where he continues to reside, reportedly in a coma, which
is not life-threatening. The doctors in the Charité hospital in Berlin release a vague
statement
claiming that it is "likely" he has been "poisoned" . They cite the presence of "cholinesterase
inhibitors" in his body as evidence of "poisoning".
The Russian medics were also aware of "cholinesterase inhibitors" being present and were
treating Navalny with atropine, a known antidote. But as the Russians point out, cholinesterase
inhibitors are widely found in a variety of clinical pharmaceuticals as well as more sinister
substances, such as nerve agents. By merely detecting the presence of cholinesterase inhibitors
and while not detecting any specific chemical that then does not permit a conclusion of
"poisoning", which the Russian doctors refrained from.
Therefore, what we have is a hasty assessment by the German doctors who make a dramatic
conclusion, which the Russian counterparts do not, even though both teams were working on the
same clinical sample information. Surely, that is unprofessional and unethical on the part of
the German medics.
It would appear that the doctors at the Berlin hospital share the same mental condition as
Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel and Mike Pompeo. That is, a condition of condemning Russia before
any evidence is in. Then let the media pile on the propaganda tropes and "history" of
"assassinations" by "Kremlin poisoning"
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The curious question is: why did the Russia authorities permit the private transport of a
Russian citizen out of the country at a time when he was in a serious medical condition? Was
the Russian government unnerved by the media accusations of foul play against a dissident
figure who has been lionized by the West as some kind of political hero? Did they feel the need
to be excessively "open"?
Alexei Navalny, despite his high-profile among Western media, is a minor figure in Russian
politics. His so-called anti-corruption campaigns have negligible interest for most ordinary
Russian citizens, and minimal political impact for the Russian government. In short, Navalny is
a professional gadfly whose importance is blown out of all proportion to its reality by Western
media. There is nothing to gain for the Russian authorities in causing injury to this person,
assuming that such a malicious event might even be considered.
That may well explain why Russian officials assented to Navalny being airlifted to Berlin,
knowing full well that his medical condition was not caused by anything pertaining to
deliberate, sinister action. Still, that decision by the Russians seems an odd concession over
a matter of sovereignty. It's doubtful that the Americans, British, Germans or others would
have followed a similar course for one of their citizens being take abroad, especially one who
could be exploited for propaganda value.
Surely, Moscow did not underestimate the mentality of Russophobia which Western politicians
suffer from? The cardinal rule is never give hostages to fortune when dealing with buffoons
like Britain's Boris Johnson. It looks like Navalny is now one such hostage to anti-Russian
fortune.
2 play_arrow smacker , 58 minutes ago
"The curious question is: why did the Russia authorities permit the private transport of
a
Russian citizen out of the country at a time when he was in a serious medical
condition?"
Because the Russians knew from their own examination of Navalny that the Germans
wouldn't
find anything in him they didn't already know about? And this seems to be the case.
What's left is spin and Boris' blustering bullsh1t.
Vivekwhu , 2 hours ago
Boris statement: my name is Boris and I am addicted to Russian Collusion Delusion Virus
poisoning.
This idiot actually bongs for Britain and makes more baby Borises!
InTheLandOfTheBlind , 2 hours ago
Mi5/6 are still in control
JPHR , 2 hours ago
By know Steele's reputation is totally destroyed by exposing his supposedly relevant
"Russian" sources for the Russiagate dossier as a Brookings Institute employee's bar
talk.
Given Steele's involvement with the Litvinenko affair one really ought to revisit any so
called British proof especially because the UK refused to follow Chemical Weapons Convention
dispute settlement procedure just like it refused to follow that procedure with respect to
the Skripal hoax.
Again Britain is alleging Russian guilt with a previous hoax as proof.
That is the UK Standard Operating procedure.
interrupt , 3 hours ago
This is classic Russian modus operandi - poison your enemies then deny everything. Works
every time.
JPHR , 2 hours ago
Classic is alleging a chemical attack and don't wait for the nonexistent proof and start
either attacking like in Syria or expelling diplomats.
The OPCW has been weaponized. MSM has ignored the extensive multiple whistle blowers
reports about falsifying reports by the OPCW.
So if the OPCW gets involved with this Navalny incident too that will confirm that this is
another western intelligence hoax probably to be used against for example Nordstream 2.
Why-Am-I-Banned , 3 hours ago
Yes a country with a GDP of $1.4 Trillion is the enemy of the world... I'm so sick of this
Russian $hit, we need to be partners with them, we have more in common with Russians than you
can even imagine
Herodotus , 4 hours ago
Russia has always been ruled by a dictator or quasi-dictator.
Winston Churchill , 4 hours ago
A chronic diabetic slips into a coma on an airline flight ,surely poisoned ?
Yamaoka Tesshu , 3 hours ago
A chronic alcoholic has medical problems? Outlandish! The Russian State furnished the
poison alright. It has a monopoly on vodka.
"... I approve of Russia continuing to refer to 'our western colleagues' or 'partners', because it suggests mockery to me so long as nobody in Russia believes it. ..."
That was the first that I'd heard of 'Russia hacking the SK Olympics' so I looked it up and
unfortunately I ran across this which may be the article that Hornsby may have read:
How digital detectives unraveled the mystery of Olympic Destroyer -- and why the next big
attack will be even harder to crack.
####
This is what passes for 'journalism.'
It is full of the usual false and long debunked claims, suppositions and 'detective work',
namely Guccifer 2.0 (CIA/whatever creation to cover up the DNC leaks which were not hacked but
given by USB stick by Seth Rich as 1st person source former ambassador Craig Murray has told
us), but the author knows better. Quite the feather in his cap for writing something that could
have come straight out of Langley.
He quotes from FireEye which we know has also been rather loose with the facts (Russian
interference in US election machines) and worst of all discovers 'metadata' that proves it was
'Da Kremlin', even though we all know about the NSA's hacking tools and obfuscation programs
like MARBLE via Snowden. And plenty more. Yes, Russians are still really clever but they cannot
help but use the same IP addresses as previous attacks and 'Hello Mama' in cyrillic like
teenage scriptkiddies. Greenberg's real pro.
It just goes to show that they never give up and there is always a journalist at an
established publication more than willing to run with it when the story is a bit exciting and
involves 'anonymous' security agencies and sources who tell them what they want to hear. Who
needs censorship when you live in your own weird reality?
As I have probably suggested before, Russia has to get used to the idea that the western
alliance is its implacable enemy, and its core – the United States – will accept
no other solution than Russia's demise in violence or its complete submission to American
disposal.
I approve of Russia continuing to refer to 'our western colleagues' or 'partners',
because it suggests mockery to me so long as nobody in Russia believes it.
But the American and American-dominated media has escalated the campaign against Russia to
the point that it is the root of everything which is wrong with the world. When you would
think any reasonable country would lie quiet for awhile, having aroused the ire of its
enemies to a fever pitch, Russia goes right on provoking and poking and daring the west to do
something. Or so the story goes. It is disappointing to see official Germany so easily pushed
off its previous halfway-defiant platform, but not really surprising. It remains to be seen
if it will actually use the completion of Nord Stream II as leverage to get what will mollify
the Americans. I frankly doubt it, and suspect Mutti Merkel and Heiko are just making
indignant noises while they scramble for a new position, but you never know. As I have often
said also, if Europe was left dependent on American LNG shipped in by tankers, it would serve
it right. Just as long as Russia is not coerced into shipping gas through Ukraine forever and
a day. That's the absolute no-go point.
Just letting all you contributors know how much I appreciate the links and key points to
the various hot topics in, particularly involving Belarus/President Lukashenko (and
what's-er-name) and the antics of Navalny et al. I have followed the Skripal case and it is
an absolute face palmer that the 'victims' remain in solitary confinement unable to tell
their 'story' while the 'perpetrators' (allegedly Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov) still
have not run out of toothpaste, cereal and toilet paper and continue to elude Britain's
finest
Since I had a hand in triggering this thread I Just wanted to get back to the intrepid Eva
K Bartlett for a moment.
At 40:16 of her talk in the video below Eva says (first part tongue in cheek)
**"Being a Russian propagandist, a Kremlin agent, a DPRK stooge doesn't actually pay but
speaking truth in the face of mountains of lies is a moral thing to do – human lives
are at stake."**
I shared this elsewhere in the context of the events in Victoria, Australia and posed:
"You might ask "What has Eva K Bartlett got to do with Andrews, Morrison, Hurley et al?"
Elsewhere I saw a meme featuring Andrews with a Kim Jong Un haircut. I commented that such
a meme should more appropriately feature Lenin or Trotsky – or in (Daniel) Andrews'
case, lower ranked henchmen such as Kaganovich or Beria.
Consider for example the narrative they [Andrews, Morrison, Hurley] have been spewing in
recent years with regard to Syria and the DPRK (etc)
It comes as no surprise to me then that these supporters of terrorism, advocators of
genocide and protectors of child trafficking and paedophilia would inevitably turn on 'their
own people'.
• Eva Bartlett speaks on North Korea & Syria (FULL)
3 Awan brothers are named by Webb : Imran, Jamal and Abid. (A 4th brother and wife of one
of the Awan's are also believed to be involved).
Originally installed in congressional positions by Greg Meeks who is widely regarded as
the most corrupt member of congress.
I will preface this discussion by stating you will find some variation in the numbers cited.
I believe that is because I quoted from stories as the case was developing. The Daily Caller
was the primary source for most of the news on the net. I tried to be as accurate as possible
with the facts quoting the sources I found. I am posting this because I want answers, it is not
a definitive work. I do, however, believe the breach is every bit as consequential as the
hillary email server and the CIA Wikileak.
I know a bunch of shills will tear me up screaming, "ya got no proof," but indulge me in a
conspiracy theory. I think the greatest disservice the MSM had managed to perpetuate is the
fallacy that other than the obvious connection of all these people there is otherwise no
connection between these events.
Let's assume for the moment that the items described here are patterns of political belief
and criminal activity. They aren't individual acts, but on going criminal conspiracies. Let's
not look at this as an isolated event. While I'm detailing the actions of the Awan brothers. I
believe, but can not prove, those action may have been perpetuated in concert with other
individuals at work in the under belly of the government. It's almost as if disparate groups
come in contact occasionally when their objectives overlap. As I stated, I have no proof of
this, but it stands to reason the flood of cyber attacks and leaks may have overlapped through
the individuals linked in the different events. For example, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was an
integral player in the DNC Hacks and also introduced the Awan brothers to Congress. Is there a
connection? Maybe, maybe not. It is not that far fetched, this has happened before, see the
Silverman
group . Silverman associated with the CPUSA and knew
Jarrett's father, Dr. James Bowman and through
three degrees of separation used by the NSA is directly connected to Valerie
Jerrett . If it is good enough for the IC to open an inquiry why can't we indulge in some
similar speculation.
• The First anomalous fact is the Media. Why have they largely ignored the issue.
Before you cyber trolls jump on me, I would like you to consider two facts. Congress deals with
very sensitive and classified material all the time. The Awan brothers could never have had a
secret clearance for any other group than Congress. There is no news story there?
• The Second error is the "smoking gun." The evidence is always covered up with a
coincidence, a cover story if you will. While I believe the politicos in D.C. are pampered
rubes, they do have a good support staff, and some have been trained to support clandestine
operations. The rest have been hammered with political optics for the entirety of their career
in D.C.. They are all trained to control optics and the dissemination of the truth.
• The Third fallacy is the "bad guy." Why does everyone think an on going criminal
conspiracy can be distilled down to a single criminal committing a crime rather than a pattern
of criminal behavior with one or more groups profiting off the criminal activities. It is best
to think of their actions like organized crime and should be prosecuted like a RICO case. An
on going criminal enterprise by an organized group or groups of conspirators.
The Media
Why hasn't the media made this the top news story to at least go along with the Russian
hack. Let's face it, the media doesn't care about the damage to the country, they only care
about their partisan agenda. If they didn't they would cover stories damaging to the DNC.
With a
$600,000,000 CIA contract you would think the Washington Post could afford an
investigative journalist or two. Perhaps CNN will take up an interest as this rabbit hole
runs deep and wide. Don't hold your breath.
Snowflakes and "journalists" can call Trump a fascist, but there is nothing connecting an
enormous breach of the United States Security Apparatus by as many as 80 Democrat members of
Congress (past and present). We rail on about the Russians and Trump without specific
allegations backed up with evidence, but the media avoids providing nightly updates about these
5 spies that have compromised congress. The answer is simple, the Awan Brothers are Muslim and
the "victims"/dupes are Dems. Dupes who in fact abused their position of responsibility to end
up being compromised by their own "trusted" staff. Several of the Congressmen involved in the
breach have gone so far as to blame the allegations on
Islamophobia .
Meeks said he was hesitant to believe the accusations against Alvi, Imran Awan and the
three other staffers, saying their background as Muslim Americans, some with ties to
Pakistan, could make them easy targets for false charges.
This story damages the narrative that Muslims are benevolent members of the government and
Dems care about the country. It really shows the depth of the progressive aims to " fundamentally transforming
the United States of America .
This is where the conspiracy theory comes in. Give me a little latitude to connect the dots,
and let's see where this trail goes...
The mainstream media seemed far more interested in obfuscating the details regarding the
Tillerson terminations than they were in covering what could be one of the most dangerous
intelligence leaks in years, of which there has been but a peep out of any major news outlet.
Captain Joseph R. John (Navy-Ret.) has stated that he believes the Muslim Brotherhood "
fifth column" has "infiltrated U.S. Government ," and if he is correct, the Awan brothers
could very well be a part of this infiltration.
The media is
90% Democrat and I would argue that in recent years the mainline Dems have gone hard left,
almost Marxist. They have an almost suicidal pact with Islamists. Where does this scandal
connect with Middle Eastern Islamists?
One might well look at the set of circumstances laid out above and see in it a scandal
that would make Watergate look like a petty break-in. One might then scratch his or her head
and wonder -- why on earth would the New York Times or the Washington Post, which
incidentally just hired John Podesta (speaking of horrendous cybersecurity!) as a columnist,
have virtually no interest in the Awans at all?
Do Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos, one might ask, really believe they can't sell papers with
such a story to tell?
Fox News is told the employees made "unauthorized access" to the House computer
system.
Further, there were instances where House information was discovered in an external
"cloud" server. The contractors in question reportedly were sending and storing House-related
information in that off-site server.
"That violates House rules and it puts the House at risk," a source familiar with the
investigation said.
It is unclear whether the access issues exposed the House's networks to potential hackers
or spying efforts by unfriendly nations or terrorist groups, at a time when Washington is on
high alert for such cyber-activity.
Actually the last statement has been refuted. It has been alleged that Imran Awan had
achieved a privilege escalation through
Social Engineering . Essentially Imran through the political clout of the Congressional
leaders he worked for managed to convinced the Capitol Hill IT staff to escalate the Awans to
super user privileges to work on the "Congressional Machines" in violation of accepted
practices on the network. One device in particular was the Wasserman iPad compromised in the
DNC Leak. It has been also alleged they may have had Podesta's password. Since the Dems
approved the privilege escalation it is now forensically difficult to determine if the Russians
leaked the emails or the "enormously trustworthy and drunken" Awan brothers sold access to the
DNC servers.
Imran Awan bullied central IT to bend the rules for him so there wouldn't be a paper trail
about the unusually high permissions he was requesting. And their actions were not logged, so
members have no way of knowing what information they may have taken, the central IT employee
said.
After obtaining access to the Capitol server system, the Awan brothers could control all
aspects of a congressman system. They sold and configured the hardware setting permissions and
remote access to maintain the devices remotely. Essentially the keys to the kingdom. Through
congressional requests they managed to completely compromise the network. They could read
email, transfer files, install applications (i.e. key loggers). The latter reports that the
systems and network were completely compromised. Beyond that, Imran had bypassed IT key loggers
and reporting systems by gaining remote access directly to congressional computers.
The central IT staffer said any suggestion that the brothers' access didn't span the full
gamut of congressional intrigue was silly because they were the ones giving out
permissions.
The problem is that once they bypassed internal security there was no
logging of their actions . House authorities set their sights on the possibility that a
remote server had been used to transfer files off of Congressional members computers. The
investigation revealed that Imran had been
stealing money, equipment, and over charging for services . In total for almost 10 years
and almost 80 Democrat members of Congress were compromised.
This is where things go hinkey. Rather than turning the case over to the FBI the case is
turned over to U.S.C. Police. They are investigating the theft, not the data breach.
Let's state that again...
The USCP are investigation the theft of Equipment not the Loss
Of Congressional Data.
"At the request of Members of Congress, the United States Capitol Police are investigating
the actions of House IT support staff," Malecki said in a statement. "No Members are being
investigated. No arrests have been made. It should be noted that, administratively, House
staff were asked to update their security settings as a best practice. We have no further
comment on the ongoing investigation at this time."
The Bad Guy Two of the brothers, Imran and Jamal, have been linked to an emerging
security breach
The Awan brothers managed to get access to the Dems committee computers by just asking for
the passwords. In addition the Awan brothers sold the congress outrageously priced equipment
and broke into members of Congress' offices to steal equipment and or data.
Five House employees are under criminal investigation amid allegations that they stole
equipment from more than 20 member offices and accessed House IT systems without lawmakers'
knowledge.
More than 20 members were victimized by the alleged procurement scam and chiefs of staff
for the lawmakers were briefed on the matter Thursday.
The former staffer said "Jamal was always there," but Imran would only work "odd
hours."
And who is investigating this fiasco?
Where is the FBI and why have they left it to the DC police? Is it a "limited hangout"
they hope to bury by the promoting the administration's ties to Boris and Natasha?
D.C. Metro police have been brought into the investigation rather than the F.B.I at the
request of the Congressional
members involved with the Awan Brothers.
A source in the briefing said the Sergeant-at-Arms confirmed the U.S. Capitol Police is
conducting an active criminal investigation but said no arrests have been made. The source
said the FBI is not involved in the investigation.
"At the request of members of Congress, the United States Capitol Police are investigating
the actions of House IT support staff. No members are being investigated. No arrests have
been made.
Why aren't the FBI involved? I can only speculate, but it would mean that a FBI forensic
team would have to comb through all of those congressional computers to determine the extent of
the security compromise and data lost. The Dems just didn't seem up for the inconvenience of
allowing the FBI investigation to go forward.
The Awan Brothers had the keys to the kingdom. Physical security is paramount to cyber
security. If a hacker has Physical access to a machine they own it. It is the simplest hack to
conduct. The Anwar Bros had Debbie Wasserman Schultz's machine, along with Schultz, at least 80
other Dems also hired the
Awan Brothers to provide IT support at significantly higher rates than normal IT
support.
Jamal, who public records suggest is only 22 years old and first began working in the
House when he was 20, was paid nearly $160,000 a year, or three times the average House IT
staff salary, according to InsideGov, which tracks congressional salaries. Abid was paid
$161,000 and Imran $165,000.
Despite the fact that these individuals, reportedly heavily in debt, would have failed
security clearances they were able to receive top salary from Dems including members of the
intelligence panel and members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs were among the dozens
of members who employed the suspects on a shared basis. The two committees deal with many of
the nation's most sensitive issues, information and documents, including those related to the
war on terrorism.
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who was shamed for the Democratic National Committee conspiracy
against Bernie Sanders, recommended the Awan Brothers for their positions and Representative
Jackie Speier asked for their TOP SECRET CLEARANCE .
frontpagemag | Last year, eight members of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence issued a demand that their staffers be granted access to top secret classified
information.
The signatories to the letter were Andre
Carson, Luis Guiterez, Jim Himes, Terri Sewell, Jackie Speier, Mike Quigley, Eric Swalwell
and Patrick Murphy. All the signatories were Democrats. Some had a history of attempting to
undermine national security.
Beyond the debt, the brothers seemed to have, they had convictions for felony traffic
offenses including
DUI . Any one of these issues are enough to prevent or revoke a security clearance for
normal folks. I guess things just work differently on Capitol Hill. The American military or
college grads are denied clearances due similar issues in their record, but not these Pakistani
brothers. Any one of these offenses would have caused me to fail my FBI background check at
work, but congress can admit anybody. Do you see a problem here? Valerie Jarrett and
Huma Abedin are
perfect examples of the double standard in the government / Congress. Staffers of any
background history can get clearances, but Dems seem to be able to prevent Trump's staff from
getting clearance. What is going on here?
Multiple small businesses and individuals went unpaid as a result of the 2012 bankruptcy.
Abid also had an unpaid line of credit of $10,000 with the congressional credit union at the
time of bankruptcy.
Abid's record includes numerous driving- and alcohol-related legal problems, including
driving with a suspended or revoked license, court records show. He was found guilty of drunk
driving a month before he started at the House, and was arrested for public intoxication a
month after his first day.
with possibly opposing goals. A felon normally commits the felony tens of times, maybe
hundreds of times before they get caught. How many times does a Coke head commit a felony
buying coke before they get caught? If they ever get caught, how many years do they get away
with the crimes before they draw the attention of the authorities. The FBI, Congress, whatever
never find the full scope of criminal activity. They may just get enough evidence to convict of
a crime, but they never convict for all the crimes committed.
What is really becoming obvious is the Democrats have irresponsibly opened our congressional
security oversight to Middle Eastern Factions. These 5 are just one group that were exposed.
Hillary had Huma, Obama had Vallery. A sharia practicing terrorist that believes in female
circumcision leading a woman's March to equality in the 21st century. There are so many
examples that one has to be purposefully obtuse to ignore the contradictions.
While the nay sayers claim you can not connect the dots it is obvious that the dots were
there for all to see and could have been connected. I would say that the deviation from
standard security practices was intentional, but Podesta's password was password123 or some
such nonsense. Who knows, our leaders may really be that incompetent. They haven't even made it
to the minimum expectations to be employed in corporate America.
I really don't know what to make of two very different groups with nothing but vaguely
similar beliefs in Marxist ideals working together. Many of the thoughts I have on the subject
are almost too extreme to believe, but the evidence is almost unavoidable. None of it makes
sense unless someone is lying about their objectives.
Two House Democrats this week fired technology staffers linked to an ongoing
criminal investigation , more than a month after the couple in question was barred from
House computer networks.
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) confirmed to Politico that Hina Alvi's last day as an IT
support staffer in his office was Tuesday. Her husband, Imran Awan, was working for Rep.
Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) as of Tuesday evening, but a spokeswoman for Fudge said midday
Wednesday that Awan was no longer an employee.
This post has been updated and corrected with new information from US Capitol Police, which
said no arrests have been made but there is an active investigation ongoing into IT staff who
were involved in an alleged procurement scam. A lawmaker briefed on the situation had told
BuzzFeed News that arrests were made.
I believe Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was getting "schtupped" by at least one of the Awan
brothers.
Consider that even under heavy scrutiny, Debbie Wasserman Schultz fought like a mama grizzly
to keep these men on the job within the government. Why would she do this for a regular IT guy
on the payroll.
As The Daily Caller continues,
Awan was banned Feb. 2, 2017, from the congressional computer network because he is a
suspect in a cybersecurity investigation, but he still had access to House facilities because
Wasserman Schultz continued to employ him.
Outside of a couple of Congressional Black Caucus holdouts, every other Congressman fired
Awan when they found out he was under investigation. The CBC fired the later. Then the day
after the crap really hit the fan, Wasserman Schultz finally fired Awan.
... Why was the laptop found in the Rayburn building, when Wasserman Schultz's office and
every other Congressman for whom Awan worked office in the Longworth building?
Remember when Wasserman Schultz used a televised May 18, 2017 congressional hearing on the
Capitol Police budget to threaten "consequences" if Chief Matthew Verderosa did not give her
the laptop.
"If a member loses equipment," it should be given back, she said.
...
She tried the "executive immunity" argument that "If I'm not under investigation,
then you can't take away my SIDE PIECE!".
A couple month's later, Wasserman Schultz tried a different approach. Now she claimed to
protect the rights of Awan and the taxpayers.
If these political criminals were in the real world, this case would be over. But they work
in the world of politics where things are murky. Who knows what Wasserman Schultz has on
somebody else, who knows something about two other people. Thus, America gets the
run-around.
Politicians fight to protect each other. Because they know if America knew how dirty most of
the were, we'd disband government entirely.
As for Wasserman Schultz, hopefully the return of the mack, Awan sheds light on her dealings
with him. Moreover, let's hope this investigation uncovers what most Americans suspect of the
Democrats. We know in our hearts they are corrupt beyond belief. So let's prove it. Again.
Judicial Watch announced today that a federal court yesterday ordered a snap
hearing after the Justice Department submitted information under seal on Friday following the
court's demand for an explanation of why no records have been produced in the ongoing legal
battle for documents about the Congressional Democrat IT (information technology) scandal
involving the Awan brothers. The hearing is set for tomorrow, January 15, at 10 am.
In November 2018, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuit against the FBI over two FOIA requests for records related to the Awan brothers (
Judicial Watch
v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-02563)).
In August 2019, the Justice Department told the court that it would begin producing records
by November 5, 2019. After producing no records, on November 13, 2019, the agency told Judicial
Watch that it was having "technical difficulties," and in a recent email claimed that
"difficulties with the production remain."
In a joint status report
filed on December 5, 2019, Judicial Watch reported to the court that the DOJ claimed in a phone
call that it was now unable to produce any records to either of the FOIA requests "because the
agency was waiting for some unspecified action by Judge [Tanya S.] Chutkan in some other matter
so as to avoid having to produce records in this case." In that same report the DOJ told the
court that Judge Chutkan is "presiding over a related sealed criminal matter" that prohibits
the government from releasing the requested FOIA information.
In a hearing last month, U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta expressed frustration and
ordered the Justice Department to explain its failure to produce records by January 10 and to
provide Judicial Watch some details about the delay. Instead, the Justice Department made its
filing under seal and has yet to provide Judicial Watch with any details about its failure to
produce records as promised to the court.
"The cover-up of the Awan Brothers Democratic IT scandal shows the FBI and DOJ's penchant
for dishonesty isn't just limited to FISA abuse," stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
"The DOJ's handling of the Awan Brothers case has long been an issue of concern and now we are
expected believe some secret investigation prevents the public from knowing the full truth
about this scandal. We are skeptical."
Imran Awan and his family were banned from the House computer network in February 2017 after
the House's top law enforcement officer wrote that Imran was "an ongoing and serious risk to
the House of Representatives, possibly threatening the integrity of our information systems,"
and that a server containing evidence had gone "missing." The inspector general said server
logs showed "unauthorized access" and procurement records were falsified.
Imran Awan was Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's (D-FL) top information technology aide. Most
lawmakers fired Awan in February, but Wasserman Schultz kept him on until he was
arrested in July 2017 , trying to board a flight for Pakistan.
In July 2018, Imran Awan was given a plea deal,
and pled guilty to federal bank fraud but prosecutors found no evidence that Awan "violated
federal law with respect to the House computer systems."
The Awan brothers reportedly "were not given
background checks before being given access to highly sensitive government information and no
explanations have been given as to why." Additionally, "If they would have run this background
check it would have found out not only multiple criminal convictions, but $1 million
bankruptcy, a dozen lawsuits it would have found a whole host of major red flags and the
Democrats didn't do any of those checks."
The Awan Brothers aided former DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz in making threatening voice modulated phone calls to
attorneys suing the DNC for election fraud.
Lt. Colonel Tony Schaffer told
Fox
News
that Schultz ordered the Awan Brothers to scare off the lawyers due to the threat they pose in exposing widespread
election fraud committed by the Democratic Party in 2016.
Disobedientmedia.com
reports: If substantiated, the claims may have significance for the DNC fraud lawsuit proceedings,
and add to the growing controversy surrounding the recent arrest of Imran Awan on bank fraud charges.
Jared Beck, and attorney litigating the DNC Fraud Lawsuit noted
on Twitter
:
"We take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and
domestic. And sadly, the domestic enemies to our voting system and our honoring of the
Constitution are right at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with their allies in the Congress of the
United States".
Amazing that Pelosi is suddenly aware of her duty.
Thank you karlof1 - LMFAO - coffee all over the keyboard.
Perhaps Pelosi should take her own advice and discuss this belief of hers with Debbie
Wasserman Schultz. After all Schultz promoted the Awan family spy and blackmail ring to other
members of the Democrat caucus in Congress.
Another swamp pond yet to drain, take note Barr, there is still a lot of work ahead ha ha
ha.
The way Merkel and other politicians immediately jumped on the poisoning thesis is
reminiscent of May's reaction in the Skripal case. It is difficult not to become suspicious.
Looks like they like to reuse the same propaganda memes over and over. Russian bounties to the
Taliban become Iranian bounties to the Taliban, Novichok becomes cholinesterase inhibitor, rinse
and repeat.
Russia did it. Evil Putin ordered it. Horrible China sponsored it. Iran backed it.
Hezbollah played a hand as well.
Thank Glorious God for the Indispensable Nation of American Exceptionalism. Rescuing the
world from evil dictators and conspiring theorists plots. Evil doers who hate OUR way of
life stand no chance against the Glorious Christians and their Honorable Zionist
gatekeepers.
Thanks and Glory to American Gods that Juan Guaido is now the President of Venezuela.
Soon the Zionist will offer their Chosen Ones to replace Evil Dictators.
Thanks and praise to MOA for shining Gods Light and dancing on Western narratives giving
them validity against the Evil doers of Poison and injustice.
Trump and Pence are "Men of the Bible" seeking out injustice and filling the world with
Christian values of Bro Love and world Peace. May all you Christians take a knee and pray
for these Mens souls and the Soul of America for leading the way to righteousness. Oh yeah-
and pray for whatever the fuck his name is Nirvany Nalvinny poisoned guy.
If the Russians are really trying to assassinate, why do it in so theatrical a manner?
Just shoot him twice in the back of the head and call it suicide like the Americans do.
I don't understand why people commenting here still insist on playing CSI Miami. The
Russian doctors have already publicly stated their own lab results showed absolutely no signs
of Cholinesterase Inhibitors. As in evidence of zero CI - not zero evidence of CI:
"Upon his admission to the [Omsk] hospital, Alexey Navalny was tested on a wide range of
narcotics, synthetic substances, psychodiletics and medicinal substances, including
cholinesterase inhibitors -- all tests came back negative ," Sabayev said in a
press statement, as quoted by the Omsk Ministry of Health.
No cholinesterase inhibitors were used, according to the Russian lab results. It's not
that they didn't test Navalny for the substances - they did and they came out negative.
Sabayev even called the Germans' bluff:
"Additionally, Navalny lacked symptoms specific of the poisoning with cholinesterase
inhibitors substances . As we said earlier, we are ready to share Alexey Navalny's
samples with our German colleagues for examination ," the health official [Sabayev]
added.
MoA's own German source state the lab tests in Germany were carried out by "independent
laboratories". They most likely are in BND's control, in one way or the other. Many Western
European nations have constitutional clauses that allow their respective governments
(usually, at the discretion of the executive) to intervene directly on the private sector in
specific occasions, normally under "national security" reasons. The executive of the British
government, for example, has a legal device that allows it to outright censor (without the
need for legislative approval) any specific information from all the British media outlets.
I'm sure modern Germany also has many constitutional clauses that allow its government and
intelligence agencies to intervene anywhere, anytime in the German economy instantly and
covertly, under the umbrella of national security.
As I predicted, the Russians aren't that stupid. They stored some blood samples from
Navalny, and they know, for sure, that he wasn't poisoned with CIs. That's why Peskov was so
direct, so sudden and so confident when he declared the Kremlin was in no hurry - because they
saw no reason - to initiate an investigation on Navalny's sudden health problems. And he also
called the German bluff ("If the substance is established and if it is established that this
is poisoning, then, of course, this will be a cause for investigation", i.e. there won't be
an investigation because there's no poison).
From southfront:
The air travel between Russia and Germany is mostly suspended due to coronavirus limitations.
The flight to Germany was organized by the Berlin-based Cinema for Peace Foundation. The
flight was paid by businessman Boris Zimin. Boris Zimin is the son of Dmitry Zimin –
the founder of VimpelCom (Beeline telecommunications brand).
PJSC VimpelCom is the third-largest wireless and second-largest telecom operator in
Russia. It is wholly owned by VEON Ltd. through which it is linked to Mikhail Fridman,
Russian Western-linked business magnate. Fridman's Alfa Group Consortium is among the main
shareholders of VEON Ltd.
These persons and entities represent the Russian influence group linked to the global
finance. The very same group has links and support work of think tanks affiliated with the
Higher School of Economics, the center of the Alma Mater of the liberal economic block of the
Russian government. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobanin and Chairwoman of the Bank of Russia Elvira
Nabiullina also could be considered a part of the global finance in Russia.
In Russian media, this network of Western-linked persons, organizations, influence groups
and top officials is often described as the 'liberal tower' of the Kremlin. Thus, despite the
image of the opposition figure, Navalny receives support from the highest levels of the
Russian governance and business systems.
Whenever Navalny does end up dying the Russian government will be blamed anyway, so if
they wanted him dead then why not just blow him up with some missiles like the US did with
General Soleimani? Why not just arrest him, claim he resisted arrest, then shoot him like
happens with so many people in the US?
This talk about him being targeted by the Russian government using obscure toxins that
don't work is beyond silly.
Due to Navalny's dealings in Tomsk, this smells more of a bid to leave the country.
Orchestrations set in place by Germany suggests an asset that has run his course, but they
can't leave him in country to deal with any complications of him being taken by someone else.
This doesn't feel like state acting....or at least not the Russian state. Gruff is right,
this isn't targeting by the Russians. Navalny hasn't been relevant in Russian circles since
at least 2012-13 if he was even then.
This talk about him being targeted by the Russian government using obscure toxins that
don't work is beyond silly.
But that's the West's MO when it comes to trying to frame the USSR/Warsaw Pact
Member/Russia over the decades--an old Big Lie Narrative that will be used until the Outlaw
US Empire finally drowns.
From yesterday :
"'The Russians were there and they are there now 24/7 trying to interfere in our election,
but they're not the only ones', Pelosi said."
But then Pelosi added:
"We take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and
domestic. And sadly, the domestic enemies to our voting system and our honoring of the
Constitution are right at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with their allies in the Congress of the
United States".
Amazing that Pelosi is suddenly aware of her duty.
"... Navalny fell ill on August 20 during a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk where he was transferred to a hospital. Navalny fell into a coma. The doctors diagnosed a sharp drop in his blood sugar. Navalny has diabetes and his symptoms as described were consistent with a diabetic shock. We therefore (somewhat prematurely) concluded that Navalny was not poisoned . ..."
"... The wording of the Charité statement seems to imply that the laboratory results point to the potential effects of a cholinesterase inhibitors, not to a specific substance itself. This is consistent with a statement by the clinic in Omsk which insists that no cholinesterase inhibitors, i.e a 'poison', were found: ..."
"... We can be quite sure that a trained toxicologist would recognize a Cholinergic crisis . There is however a documented case from India in which an organophosphate poisoning was falsely interpreted as diabetic ketoacidosis (hat tip Bernd Neuner ): ..."
"... If Navalny was poisoned - which is not established - the next question must be how Navalny came into contact with a cholinesterase inhibitor. Was the contact caused by himself or by someone else? Was it intentionally or unintentionally? ..."
"... Navalny's spokeswomen has insisted that the only substance Navalny ingested that morning was a tea from an airport bar. A CCTV video from the airport shows that the tea was brought from the bar by a person that then sits down with Navalny. They presumably traveled together. How would the airport barkeeper, if he supposedly poisoned Navalny, knew for whom the tea was? ..."
"... next page " the poison theory constructors are creating a colorful james bond style movie script. It captures the imagination. If the exciting, easily visualised, movie script is solidly imprinted in the imagination, then dull, tedious, evidence based reality doesn't get a look-in. ..."
"... Besides, this doesn't explain the almost immediate poisoning accusation by Merkel and then, the next day (today), by top EU ideologue Josep Borrell. The German State (at least the BND) must be involved - the fact that the Charité is owned by the State itself only strengthens this hypothesis. ..."
"... Someone on the web (might even be here) mentioned that cholinesterase inhibitors can be used against Cocaine dependence. Is this true or not? I do not have any other information and I am not a Medecin/doctor or user. But these days I am naturally cynical about any "official" statements, whoever makes them. ..."
"... The way Merkel and other politicians immediately jumped on the poisoning thesis is reminiscent of May's reaction in the Skripal case. It is difficult not to become suspicious. ..."
"... Due to Navalny's dealings in Tomsk, this smells more of a bid to leave the country. Orchestrations set in place by Germany suggests an asset that has run his course, but they can't leave him in country to deal with any complications of him being taken by someone else. ..."
The case of the alleged 'poisoning' of the Russian rabble rouser Alexey Navalny is becoming
more curious.
Navalny fell ill on August 20 during a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow. The plane
made an emergency landing in Omsk where he was transferred to a hospital. Navalny fell into a
coma. The doctors diagnosed a sharp drop in his blood sugar. Navalny has diabetes and his
symptoms as described were consistent with a diabetic shock. We therefore (somewhat
prematurely) concluded that
Navalny was not poisoned .
After a day and a half in the Omsk hospital the patient stabilized. On request of his family
he was flown to Berlin and admitted to the Charité hospital. The Charité is a
very large (14,000 employees) state run university clinic that is leading in many medical
fields. Its laboratories
found effects consistent with the ingestion of, or contact with, a cholinesterase
inhibitor:
Following his admission, Mr. Navalny underwent extensive examination by a team of
Charité physicians. Clinical findings indicate poisoning with a substance from the
group of cholinesterase inhibitors. The specific substance involved remains unknown, and a
further series of comprehensive testing has been initiated. The effect of the poison –
namely, the inhibition of cholinesterase in the body – was confirmed by multiple tests
in independent laboratories.
As a result of this diagnosis, the patient is now being treated with the antidote
atropine.
Cholinesterase is needed in the human nerve system to break down acetylcholine which is a
signaling substance between synapses. Inhibitors of cholinesterase are used in the
therapy of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, anxiety disorder and other illnesses.
Cholinesterase inhibitors can be found in certain plant extracts or synthesized. There
are two types of cholinesterase inhibitors, carbamates and organophosphates. Both types are
also widely used as pesticides. During World War II organophosphates were developed as chemical
weapons (tabun, sarin, soman) but not widely used.
The wording of the Charité statement seems to imply that the laboratory results point
to the potential effects of a cholinesterase inhibitors, not to a specific substance itself.
This is consistent with a statement by the clinic in Omsk which insists that no
cholinesterase inhibitors, i.e a 'poison', were found:
"When Alexey Navalny was admitted to the in-patient clinic, he was examined for a wide range
of narcotics, synthetic substances, psychedelic drugs and medical substances, including
cholinesterase inhibitors. The result was negative," said Sabayev, chief of the acute
poisoning unit at the Omsk emergency care hospital where Navalny was treated before being
airlifted to Germany.
"Besides, he did not have a clinical picture, specific for poisoning with substances from
the group of cholinesterase inhibitors," Sabayev, who is also the top toxicologist in the
Omsk Region and the Siberian Federal District, added.
We can be quite sure that a trained toxicologist would recognize a Cholinergic crisis . There is however
a documented case from India in which an organophosphate poisoning was falsely interpreted as diabetic
ketoacidosis (hat tip Bernd Neuner ):
We present a 15-year-old girl who was initially treated for "diabetic ketoacidosis" with
further worsening of her general condition. This delayed recovery, coupled with focused
investigations, finally led us to a diagnosis and the appropriate management of an
intentional overdose with organophosphorous (OP) pesticide, presenting as diabetic
ketoacidosis.
The statement by German doctors on the diagnosis of FBK founder Alexei Navalny is nothing new
for Russian specialists, Dmitry Peskov, press secretary of the Russian President, told
reporters.
"We have not yet learned anything new from this statement. We specifically contacted our
doctors and asked how, from a professional point of view, we can relate to what was written.
The fact is that the fact of this lowered cholinesterase was established in the first hours
by our doctors in a hospital in Omsk. And the atropine, which the Germans are talking about
and which is now being given to the patient, began to be administered during the first hour
of the patient's stay in intensive care, " said Peskov.
The presidential spokesman stressed that the level of cholinesterase may decrease for a
variety of reasons, including from taking a number of medications. At the same time, German
doctors did not identify a toxic substance in Navalny's analyzes.
"Therefore, it is very important here to find out what caused the decrease in
cholinesterase levels. And neither our doctors, nor the Germans have yet been able to
establish the cause . At least, this follows from the statement of our German doctors'
colleagues. There is no substance, unfortunately, it cannot be established, analyzes do not
show it," Peskov explained.
He stressed that the analytical data of Russian and German doctors are the same, but the
conclusions are different.
"We do not understand why our German colleagues are in such a hurry, using the word
"poisoning". You know, this version was among the first that our doctors considered, but I
repeat once again: the substance has not yet been established. Maybe the Germans have some
data," said Peskov, noting that Russian doctors are ready to provide samples of the first
tests.
If Navalny was poisoned - which is not established - the next question must be how Navalny
came into contact with a cholinesterase inhibitor. Was the contact caused by himself or by
someone else? Was it intentionally or unintentionally?
Navalny's spokeswomen has insisted that the only substance Navalny ingested that morning was
a tea from an airport bar. A CCTV video from the airport shows that the tea was
brought from the bar by a person that then sits down with Navalny. They presumably traveled
together. How would the airport barkeeper, if he supposedly poisoned Navalny, knew for whom the
tea was?
As 'western' media continue with their "Putin poisoned Navalny" nonsense it is important to
again point out that
other people have more reason to harm Navalny than the Kremlin does:
During the last years Navalny has made some enemies by uncovering corruption cases. His
latest one was about the local governor of Tomsk. It was also the reason why he had flown
there. Should Navaly become the victim of a crime the suspects should be sought there.
Posted by b on August 25, 2020 at 11:57 UTC | Permalink
next page " the poison theory constructors are creating a colorful james bond style
movie script.
It captures the imagination. If the exciting, easily visualised, movie script is solidly
imprinted in the imagination, then dull, tedious, evidence based reality doesn't get a
look-in.
The India girl case is an interesting case if you're a doctor, but it is too over the top to
claim they are common. The important thing to consider here is that the Russian doctor who
treated him (and saved his life) discarded that possibility.
It is only the doctor that can diagnose his/her patient. Hunting for exotic cases around
the world is not diagnosis.
Besides, this doesn't explain the almost immediate poisoning accusation by Merkel and
then, the next day (today), by top EU ideologue Josep Borrell. The German State (at least the
BND) must be involved - the fact that the Charité is owned by the State itself only
strengthens this hypothesis.
The numbers consolidate last month's preview. It's bad, and Germany is officially in an
economic depression (2009-2020).
Uniting this data with my previous speculation on the "Prussian" and the "double-header"
hypotheses, I'm inclined to think the Belarus-Navalny operations are a gambit by the EU to
expand further to the East (Russia) and, ultimately, to dispute with China over the control
of Eurasia in the 21st/22nd Centuries.
I am a great fan of MOA, a refugee from ZH which is now an almost unreadable and tainted by
its anti-China drumbeat.
However, with all due respect I find that our host tends to come to conclusions a bit too
quickly... Navalny could well have been poisoned, but by whom? Guaido and her female clone
Tikhanovskaya better watch out - their handlers in the CIA may see them more useful as
martyrs than as "legitimate opposition".
As for other topics, I also find b to have way, way too quickly dismissed the Beirut blast
as anything other than AM.
As in, too quickly because the ramifications were too terrible to contemplate, as in the
ascendence of unspeakable evil on the part of the shitty little state. As to whether the
blast was nuclear or conventional, that is a minor point.
"If the substance is established and if it is established that this is poisoning, then, of
course, this will be a cause for investigation," he [Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov] said.
Someone on the web (might even be here) mentioned that cholinesterase inhibitors can be used
against Cocaine dependence. Is this true or not? I do not have any other information and I am
not a Medecin/doctor or user. But these days I am naturally cynical about any "official"
statements, whoever makes them.
This (anti-cocaine use) might equally be "disinformation", but with its' widespread use in
"elite" circles, it is not inconcievable. Navalny being in the toilets rather than having an
immediate reaction to the tea at the airport, could be an indication that something happened
in there.
The Russians caused the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico in a plot to meddle with the U.S.
elections by causing disruptions in Texas which may vote Democrat in November. Considering
this it is plausible to think Putin poisoned Nav' in an attempt to take over the world.
3/3 Though a doctor from another region of Russia, who did not treat Navalny, wrote that
in his practice, cholinesterase inhibitors Proserin &Ubretid are allegedly widely used to
prevent disorders developing in patients placed on mechanical ventilation.
Josep Borrell as the top ideologue of the EU is overestimating a gray functionary
belonging to the Felipe González group, a group that somehow preceded the false center
left of Blair in the UK or Clinton in the USA.
From that same group of politicians that first
campaigned against Spain joining NATO back in the '80s with the slogan "De entrada no",
something like to start with NO, well one of those socialists later became NATO's secretary
general and lead the organization during its sinister days of the Yugoslavia bombings,
handsomely rewarded monetarily later became Mister Pesc, a strange definition for the sort of
foreign minister of the EU, the place than Borrell has been rewarded with nowadays, which
means he has rendered the required services to the empire. Those guys true ideology is
personal advancement and nothing else, so it kind of sounds funny to think he is the top
ideologue of the EU, but then again, he could be, which is a true mesure of what the EU is
worth politically, a pitiful colony.
Note that this is an off-label use of cholinesterase inhibitors, so an American doctor
would not likely prescribe it. Someone who has a supply of cocaine sufficient enough to
become an addict, on the other hand, probably would not have difficulty obtaining a
cholinesterase inhibitor like Galantamine, though. Navalny's CIA/State Department handlers
who keep him on coke could probably get him anything he asked for, though if I were in his
shoes I wouldn't put anything from them up my nose.
Unlikely. Europe hardly survived WW2. Russia plus China are a lot of people to make
angry.
It's more likely some projects continuing because someone has forgotten to stop them or
because they still have got money left. You would have to carry Europe to fight and even then
they would not fight.
As is, Europe's south has been bought up by Chinese investment. They invest strategically
not for short term returns.
Noone will climb a tree before knowing the results of US elections.
There is however a documented case from India in which an organophosphate poisoning was
falsely interpreted as diabetic ketoacidosis
So what? Doctors make false diagnoses all the time. It is called medical error. A
significant proportion of deaths in hospitals worldwide are due to medical error. India? Now,
if somebody is going to suggest that medical error never happens in India I am going to say
either they are a liar or an idiot. Medical errors also happen in German hospitals, by the
way, including Charité - plenty of them! Including both with and without intent.
This whole Navalny "poisoning" fantasy stinks to high heaven. It differs very little in
essential essence from the Skripal fantasy so far, and I am quite sure it is headed on the
same path.
But have we missed a point here? Is this not just trying to round the anti-Russia circle
started by the Skripal poisoning? Will not everyone now assume that Navalny was poisoned with
Novichok and that this proves beyond doubt that this is the preferred way for getting rid of
Kremlin enemies? You don't really have to prove anything more, it is now all out there, like
Russia gate, the dog whistle has been blown.
Re: "This whole Navalny "poisoning" fantasy stinks to high heaven. It differs very little
in essential essence from the Skripal fantasy so far, and I am quite sure it is headed on the
same path."
I agree completely. The whole script is so old and tired one would have to have spent the
last few decades living under a rock not to see through it, throw enough shit and hope some
of it sticks. It is probably just another ploy to put pressure on the German government to
cancel Nordstream 2.
This is the source a few other articles on the net also quote from, but where did it come
from. I spent some time searching for other earlier references to Navalny having diabetes but
could not find any.
@vk #3
Why do you believe that the EU and/or Germany wish to expand eastward when their economy is
in deep recession and they already have 45 million Ukrainians for cheap labor?
I would note that even East Germany is lagging West Germany in terms of economic progress
since reunification, which itself was incredibly expensive.
Ukraine isn't a great example either of neither economic progress nor contributing
integration into the EU.
From southfront:
The air travel between Russia and Germany is mostly suspended due to coronavirus limitations.
The flight to Germany was organized by the Berlin-based Cinema for Peace Foundation. The
flight was paid by businessman Boris Zimin. Boris Zimin is the son of Dmitry Zimin –
the founder of VimpelCom (Beeline telecommunications brand).
PJSC VimpelCom is the third-largest wireless and second-largest telecom operator in
Russia. It is wholly owned by VEON Ltd. through which it is linked to Mikhail Fridman,
Russian Western-linked business magnate. Fridman's Alfa Group Consortium is among the main
shareholders of VEON Ltd.
These persons and entities represent the Russian influence group linked to the global
finance. The very same group has links and support work of think tanks affiliated with the
Higher School of Economics, the center of the Alma Mater of the liberal economic block of the
Russian government. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobanin and Chairwoman of the Bank of Russia Elvira
Nabiullina also could be considered a part of the global finance in Russia.
In Russian media, this network of Western-linked persons, organizations, influence groups
and top officials is often described as the 'liberal tower' of the Kremlin. Thus, despite the
image of the opposition figure, Navalny receives support from the highest levels of the
Russian governance and business systems.
1) the plan was never to make the DDR prosperous. On the contrary: too much people living
prosperously is damaging to capitalist expansion;
2) that's the pattern of recent EU expansion, with the latest great batch of new members
coming from ex-Yugoslavia and the Iron Curtain (why not, for example, insisting on the
accession of Norway and Switzerland, which are much richer and culturally alike
countries?);
3) besides the huge pool of cheap and relatively well-educated labor power (which can be
imported to Germany proper, thus rising unemployment rates, thus eroding the power of the
mighty German unions), there's the pot of gold of the old communist infrastructure (water,
electricity, communications, education, healthcare), which is already centralized and thus
would result in monopolistic rent for the German capitalists who will inevitably buy them in
a privatization process (as happened with Slovakia);
4) Belarus is the natural springboard to invade Russia, thus increasing Germany's leverage
within NATO.
Thanks for the reply. - Even if Navalny was suffering from a "manque" of his favourite
substance, the Germans and others would not mention it. He would not have had (much ?) trace
in his blood either.
Esteemed B, I am still waiting for a source reference for Navalnys diabetes. It is still
important to get the information confirmed. His environment says that he did not consume
anything except the tea. That would be a very risky behavior for a diabetic in itself.
Whether a diabetic shock can be ruled out due to the cholinesterase problem, which can
probably be considered certain after it has been confirmed by two hospitals, I cannot judge.
You seem to assume that.
The way Merkel and other politicians immediately jumped on the poisoning thesis is
reminiscent of May's reaction in the Skripal case. It is difficult not to become suspicious.
I dwell on the words Navalny spoke in Tomsk to his crew, about him becoming a martyr and it
not helping Putin, then his trauma on the following day. Yes, the observation about the tea
at the airport is of great importance. The time between its ingestion and boarding the plane
is similarly important IF he was administered a toxic agent via that tea. And if he's
diabetic or even pre-diabetic, there's a suite of meds he'd need to take daily if not
requiring insulin, and those meds must be ingested with food--I know.
I imagine all security camera footage of his time at Tomsk airport has been scrutinized,
the result being the Kremlin's ruling no investigation's warranted. That decision's good
enough for me.
navalny's words the day before about being a hero if Putin killed him is I think key.
Russia seems to produce a few Rasputin types - like the clown that nailed his balls to the
pavement.
Seen some photos of Navalny when he was younger and his eyes looked normal. Those wide open
staring eyes in selfies and so forth in recent years give more than a hint of madness.
I agree with Karlof1. If Navalny is diabetic, he seems a bit careless to me to just drink a
tea all morning. He should eat something according to his diet and probably take some meds as
well (if the disease isn't at a very early stage).
To compare Pavlensky to Rasputin is not proportional. The monk was the victim of the
British services and has been thoroughly discredited and demonized, by the same guys that
killed him. Check out the movie about Rasputin's life with no other than Gerard Depardieu.
Rasputin had the Tsarina's ear and he was against Russia going to war, the first world war,
and that was the main motive to eliminate him.
Pavlensky on the other hand is a freak useful to the empire propaganda on a condom basis, use
and throw away, just like the Pussy Riots, always referred to as the punk group, a group that
never issued a first album, save for a couple of clips on youtube after leaving Russia.
Freaks of that caliber are a dime a dozen everywhere, but since they are useful to discredit
Russia, well then they are endowed with media attention, and even Hillary receiving one of
the Riots member, Tolokonnikova, the one that being pregnant engaged in a public orgy,
another one of the group hits was introducing a frozen chicken into a members vagina.
Pavlensky was hailed as a hero for burning the FSB building entrance door, the feared
Lyubianka. He tried the same trick with the gates of the Bank of France, and he was sent to a
psychiatric ward, with no media noise at all. If that would have occurred back in Moscow we
would be still hearing and reading about psychiatric torture back to the good old days of the
Soviet Union.
Russia did it. Evil Putin ordered it. Horrible China sponsored it. Iran backed it. Hezbollah
played a hand as well.
Thank Glorious God for the Indispensable Nation of American Exceptionalism. Rescuing the
world from evil dictators and conspiring theorists plots. Evil doers who hate OUR way of life
stand no chance against the Glorious Christians and their Honorable Zionist gatekeepers.
Thanks and Glory to American Gods that Juan Guaido is now the President of Venezuela. Soon
the Zionist will offer their Chosen Ones to replace Evil Dictators.
Thanks and praise to MOA for shining Gods Light and dancing on Western narratives giving
them validity against the Evil doers of Poison and injustice.
Trump and Pence are "Men of the Bible" seeking out injustice and filling the world with
Christian values of Bro Love and world Peace. May all you Christians take a knee and pray for
these Mens souls and the Soul of America for leading the way to righteousness. Oh yeah- and
pray for whatever the fuck his name is Nirvany Nalvinny poisoned guy.
they like to reuse the same propaganda memes over and over. Russian bounties to the Taliban
become Iranian bounties to the Taliban, Novichok becomes cholinesterase inhibitor, rinse and
repeat.
As the collective west, including Germany, proceed to fabricate another "highly likely" Putin
play, may I ask what they have been doing while the collective west has buried Julian Assange
alive? Hypocricy is a much too weak word for it.
@ Posted by: Clueless Joe | Aug 25 2020 17:37 utc | 42
There's an extreme treatment for diabetics type 2, where you live in a near state of
starvation for months. In some mild cases, it is stated to cure diabetes.
Navalny could be going through this treatment, hence just a cup of tea (there are many
teas famous for cutting the appetite) in the morning.
If the Russians are really trying to assassinate, why do it in so theatrical a manner?
Just shoot him twice in the back of the head and call it suicide like the Americans do.
I've seen this site before - they post statements from various medical people on matters
of public medical interest, such as the pandemic. Useful for people who want some background
on the chemicals involved.
Posted by: Circe | Aug 25 2020 16:14 utc | 29
Yup. Just ran across that piece while searching for anything on Navalny having diabetes.
Found nothing so far beyond that. b's source appears to be the only one mentioning any
diabetes in Navalny's medical history. Apparently his personal doctor has denied this, saying
that the "diabetes" issue appears to have more a "description" of his medical condition
rather than an actual diagnosis.
Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 25 2020 17:26 utc | 40 And if he's diabetic or even pre-diabetic,
there's a suite of meds he'd need to take daily if not requiring insulin, and those meds must
be ingested with food--I know.
Yes, Metformin is the preferred drug. I started on twice a day, then once I lost 45
pounds, the doctor dropped me to one a day. In fact, now I could stop taking it, but I
continue to do so because it has alleged anti-aging properties. The only real negative is
that it leeches vitamin B-12 from the body - but I take tons of B-12 anyway, so doesn't
concern me. Metformin usually needs to be taken with food because otherwise it tends to give
you "the runs".
Russian news agency Interfax later quoted officials in Omsk as saying tests had identified
the presence of an industrial chemical in his body.
Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs told the agency that since the substance they
claim was present is commonly used to increase plasticity in products, "it is possible that
it could appear in surface washings through the contact of Alexei Navalny with similar
objects, for example, through a plastic cup".
Studies have previously shown that the chemical officials were referring to -
2-ethylhexyl diphenyl phosphate - does not have a strong toxic effect on humans.
So it appears from the articles so far that initially the police detected that specific
chemical, but medical experts ruled it out as a cause, merely a by-product of having drunk
from a plastic cup.
This article discusses the term "metabolic disease", clarifying that it doesn't
necessarily mean diabetes.
Bottom line: There is no evidence Navalny had diabetes, although he might well have had
either Type 2 or Type 1 diabetes but never diagnosed. However, if he was in a diabetic coma,
that should have been detected almost immediately, even by first responders in the ambulance.
Beyond that, it appears that whatever chemical was the cause of his condition, it's likely
undetectable now.
So another "nothing-burger" which will be seized on to drum up hysteria against Russia.
And I've spent *way* too much time on this irrelevant crap.
At your age, you should take an interest in dissecting and studying insects.
Re coma from undiagnosed diabetes. From what I can find, that would be due to high blood
sugar, whereas a diagnosed patient taking meds can be hit with low blood sugar if
carbohydrates and insulin are not matched.
We need a timeline showing when tea drunk; when airplane boarded; when Navalny went to loo on
plane. Video showing his demeanor as he boarded would be great. It's been said his stomach
was empty except for the tea, so anything in that tea presumably would have acted quickly,
prior to his boarding. Or there was nothing in the tea and Navalny injured himself -- or was
injured by someone during the walk in the jet-way from the terminal to the plane. Security
Video?
"Mr Navalny drank a cup of tea at a cafe inside Tomsk airport, which his supporters
suspect had been poisoned because it was all he ate or drank that morning."
"The saleswoman, who did not want to be identified, said one of Mr Navalny's entourage
bought the tea at the counter and took it to him at the table."
The long delay between administration of the poison and the onset of effects AND the apparent
nonlethatity are clear evidence of novichok. Case closed.
Precisely four hours between contact with novichok and onset of symptoms, regardless of
victim age, weight, health, and quantity of novichok contacted. It is a truly amazing
chemical weapon, though not very practical for battlefield use.
testing for circulating cholinesterase activity is very simple-- a chromogenic assay with
acetyl thiocholine and DTNB. So its the first thing you would do in a case like this. In the
case of a nerve agent there should be no circulating activity. The Russians must have known
this.
So the question is now -- is there anything stuck to the active site serine of the enzyme--
an adduct. This one for Porton Down -- they will find it probably by immunoprecipitation and
mass spectrometry and they ought to get the mass and some structural data on the toxin.
Clinically, he should have had a bradycardia and excess secretions and pupils constricted.
Doesn't sound like that. The question is can we trust the West to be truthful here. After
various OPCW fiascos I doubt it.
CJ
Whenever Navalny does end up dying the Russian government will be blamed anyway, so if
they wanted him dead then why not just blow him up with some missiles like the US did with
General Soleimani? Why not just arrest him, claim he resisted arrest, then shoot him like
happens with so many people in the US?
This talk about him being targeted by the Russian government using obscure toxins that
don't work is beyond silly.
Due to Navalny's dealings in Tomsk, this smells more of a bid to leave the country.
Orchestrations set in place by Germany suggests an asset that has run his course, but they
can't leave him in country to deal with any complications of him being taken by someone else.
This doesn't feel like state acting....or at least not the Russian state. Gruff is right,
this isn't targeting by the Russians. Navalny hasn't been relevant in Russian circles since
at least 2012-13 if he was even then.
I don't understand why people commenting here still insist on playing CSI Miami. The Russian
doctors have already publicly stated their own lab results showed absolutely no signs of
Cholinesterase Inhibitors. As in evidence of zero CI - not zero evidence of CI:
"Upon his admission to the [Omsk] hospital, Alexey Navalny was tested on a wide range of
narcotics, synthetic substances, psychodiletics and medicinal substances, including
cholinesterase inhibitors -- all tests came back negative ," Sabayev said in a
press statement, as quoted by the Omsk Ministry of Health.
No cholinesterase inhibitors were used, according to the Russian lab results. It's not
that they didn't test Navalny for the substances - they did and they came out negative.
Sabayev even called the Germans' bluff:
"Additionally, Navalny lacked symptoms specific of the poisoning with cholinesterase
inhibitors substances . As we said earlier, we are ready to share Alexey Navalny's
samples with our German colleagues for examination ," the health official [Sabayev]
added.
MoA's own German source state the lab tests in Germany were carried out by "independent
laboratories". They most likely are in BND's control, in one way or the other. Many Western
European nations have constitutional clauses that allow their respective governments
(usually, at the discretion of the executive) to intervene directly on the private sector in
specific occasions, normally under "national security" reasons. The executive of the British
government, for example, has a legal device that allows it to outright censor (without the
need for legislative approval) any specific information from all the British media outlets.
I'm sure modern Germany also has many constitutional clauses that allow its government and
intelligence agencies to intervene anywhere, anytime in the German economy instantly and
covertly, under the umbrella of national security.
As I predicted, the Russians aren't that stupid. They stored some blood samples from
Navalny, and they know, for sure, that he wasn't poisoned with CIs. That's why Peskov was so
direct, so sudden and so confident when he declared the Kremlin was in no hurry - because they
saw no reason - to initiate an investigation on Navalny's sudden health problems. And he also
called the German bluff ("If the substance is established and if it is established that this
is poisoning, then, of course, this will be a cause for investigation", i.e. there won't be
an investigation because there's no poison).
It is known that activation of acetylcholine receptors (specifically M3 muscarinic receptors)
in the pancreas promotes insulin release into the bloodstream, which consequently would tend
to decrease blood glucose.
It's therefore possible that hypoglycemia could be triggered by increased acetylcholine
levels (drug-induced or otherwise). This would be less likely to occur in diabetics, as such
individuals would be deficient in either the ability to produce (type 1 diabetes) or respond
(type 2 diabetes) to insulin.
Dmitri Petrovsky, a doctor of medical sciences, a surgeon and deputy of the
municipality of Yaroslavl, questioned the competence of German doctors who said that blogger
Alexei Navalny had been poisoned.
Doctors [treating] Navalny [at] the German clinic "Charité" reported on Monday,
August 24, about the presence in the body of the blogger substance, part of the group of
inhibitors cholinesterase. According to them, this indicates the poisoning of the head of the
Anti-Corruption Foundation (recognized as a foreign agent).
Dmitri Petrovsky, M.D., surgeon and deputy of the municipality of Yaroslavl, commented
on the statement of German medics.
"What they found in Navalny cholinesterase inhibitors after being in intensive care is
normal. They should be in the man who was in intensive care and was on ventilator. And if
the doctor finds them in the analysis of the person after a stay in the operating room and
concludes that he was poisoned, then the conclusion is: either it is a political order,
or an illiterate doctor," the expert said.
According to public figure Ernest Makarenko, the hospitalization of Navalny in
["Charité"] is nothing but a political matter. Omsk doctors coped perfectly with the
blogger's treatment, but to make Navalny a "victim", he had to be defiantly taken to the
West, the expert added.
Readers will need to use Google Translate.
In other words, if Navalny had not been found to have cholinesterase inhibitors in his
body after being treated in an ICU with intubation, then the doctors at the Omsk hospital who
initially treated him hadn't been doing their job properly.
Aha - found MPN's comment @ 12, clicked on the link to Elena Evdokimova's tweets and then
clicked on a link she provides and here is another article (from Zhurnalistskaya Pravda)
on Dmitri Petrovsky's comments about Navalny's treatment in Germany.
What they found in Navalny cholinesterase inhibitors after being in intensive care
is normal. They should be in the man who was in intensive care and was on ventilator. If they
weren't there, it would be strange, I'd be surprised.
Tonight, doctors of the German clinic "Charite" found in the blood of blogger Alexei
Navalny substance, which, in their opinion, could provoke his illness, and hastened to
announce the poisoning. However, in Russian practice, this substance is widely used to
prevent disorders that developing in patients on ventilator.
German doctors found in Navalny substance - cholinesterase inhibitor.
"The effect of the toxin, i.e. the inhibition of cholinesterase in the body, has been
proven several times in independent laboratories. According to the diagnosis, the patient is
treated with an antidote to atropine. The outcome of the disease remains unsafe and the
subsequent effects, especially in the nervous system, cannot be ruled out at this time," the
statement obtained by Izvestia reads.
Deputy of the municipality of Yaroslavl, M.D., surgeon Dmitry Petrovsky commented on
this "find" of German colleagues.
"Cholinesterase inhibitors are widely used medicines in medicine. Basically, they are
used in the postoperative management of patients, when transferring to independent
breathing. That's what Navalny had. He was first on ventilator and when trying to translate
it, could use the drug Proserin. It is a cholinesterase inhibitor that is officially
administered to all patients when transferred to independent breathing. It must be used. I
think it was used. But I also understand that, most likely, he had to shine as Proserin's
German colleagues. Perhaps used not Proserin in its pure form, but another drug, more rare
- Ubretide, which is also an absolutely official drug, which is used in intensive care, in
postoperative practice to prevent bladder atony, to prevent bowel atony and, accordingly,
widely used. But, I admit, it can be used little in Germany, and it was not in the
toxicology kit, so they could be surprised, and because of this all the cheese-bor.
What they found in Navalny cholinesterase inhibitors after being in intensive care is
normal. They should be in the man who was in intensive care and was on ventilator. If they
weren't there, it would be strange, I'd be surprised.
When a person breathes with the help of the ventilator, various disorders develop,
including respiratory, cardiovascular, with the intestines, with the bladder. Various drugs
are used to prevent these disorders, including cholinesterase inhibitors. And if the doctor
finds them in the analysis of the person after a stay in the operating room and concludes
that he was poisoned, then the conclusion is: either it is a political order, or an
illiterate doctor."
Perhaps next time Navalny is in Russia and has a seizure or a collapse requiring IC
treatment and intubation, hospital staff should just arrange to send him to the closest
international airport and phone Charité to collect him as he is.
Thanks for providing those! IMO, sometime after the Skripal kidnapping a memo was sent to
all Russian medical personnel about the handling of known dissidents -- to use kid gloves and a
fine tooth comb whilst saving all fluids taken for testing and using an impeccable evidence
chain, for that's what's related by the doctor. I'd like to think such attention to detail is
usual practice in Russia.
i recommend a new ''military grade chemical agent" Novichok in honour of Alexey Navalny...
maybe alexeychok is better... it has a nice malevolent russian ring to it!
Opinion: Germany unlikely to pressure Russia on reported poisoning
Doctors in Berlin have revealed that Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny may have
been poisoned. Even if this were proven beyond doubt, the German government has no way to
retaliate against Moscow, says Jens Thurau.
A change from the recently trumpeted MSM headlines that the Germans had found poison in
Navalny's system.
But then:
Siberian doctors said Navalny, who has become known as one of President Vladimir
Putin's fiercest critics, had suffered from a metabolic disorder. Soon thereafter, the
gravely ill man was flown to Berlin for medical treatment, even though Russian authorities
had argued he was too unwell to travel. Was his relocation deliberately delayed so that
traces of his suspected poisoning would be harder to detect in his body? If so, the plan did
not work. Shortly after Navalny's arrival in the German capital, Berlin doctors announced
there was a high likelihood he had been poisoned.
Jesus H Christ!!!
Hopefully, the medical professionals in Berlin will help Navalny make it through
this. [Because those Russian retards certainly couldn't have done this? -- ME] But it
is highly unlikely Germany will adopt a tougher stance on Russia or impose meaningful
sanctions -- just as it highly improbable Russia will help shine any light on the Navalny
case. This is a cynical assessment, granted. But these are the times we are living
in.
Highly improbable, you wanker?
Shine a light on the Navalny case?
You mean, find out who poisoned the so full of shit lying imposter?
If he was poisoned, that is.
Sequence of events in the "Navalny Case":
Navalny goes to the toilet.
Comes out.
Starts screaming and howling.
Loses consciousness.
Entourage starts shouting "Poisoned!"
Aeroplane emergency landing, Navalny rushed to hospital.
Coma induced by medics.
No poison in body found.
Navalny still under INDUCED coma flown to Berlin.
May possibly/ likely/ highly likely be that he was poisoned say German medics.
Still under INDUCED coma.
And some poor bastard in the Berlin "Charité" clinic sill continues to wipe that
bastard's arse and empty his piss bottle.
Still shaping the narrative – now when Germany does not take any concrete action, it
will not be because Navalny was not poisoned and the whole thing an engineered crisis, but
because Germany is hesitant to do anything. Like the previous situation discussed, in which
Europe orders Russia to do something it knows Russia is going to do anyway, so that it
appears Russia is responding to European orders. Shaping the narrative. And either way, in
this instance, it results in bad feeling between Germany and Russia, which was the objective.
It does highlight, though, that there remains a significant liberal presence in Germany which
is sympathetic to America and its 'values', and it would be foolish to discount this in
further planning. And the media outlets are mostly dominated by those liberals.
The timing is terrible though. It'll be September in less than a week and all the other
domestic problems automatically become amplified (kids back to school/masks etc.). That'll
knock Saint Navalny off the front pages and his team will have to compete for space while
running on fumes.
Even the National post, which is rabidly conservative and borderline Republican, has
backed away a little from the "He was POISONED!!" shocker, today featuring 'The Kremlin's'
story, although the tone was still catty and it made a point of mentioning this and that
speaker was a 'Putin ally'.
"Шарите"
заподозрили в
непрофессионализме
из-за выводов
по Навальному
Анастасия
Броцкая, 24
августа 2020
"Charité" suspected of unprofessionalism because of conclusions about
Navalny
Anastasia Brotskaya, 24 August 2020
Doctor of Medical Sciences, surgeon and deputy of the municipality of the city of
Yaroslavl Dmitry Petrovsky, in an interview with Journalistic Pravda, commented on the
statement of German doctors.
"The fact that they found cholinesterase inhibitors in Navalny after his being in
intensive care is normal. They should be in a person who has been in intensive care and on
mechanical ventilation. The conclusion was that he had been poisoned -- then the conclusion
is this: either it is a political order, or an illiterate doctor," the expert noted.
"Cholinesterase inhibitors are widely used medicines in medicine. Basically, they are
used in the postoperative management of patients, when transferring to independent
breathing. That's what Navalny had. He was first on ventilator and when trying to translate
it, could use the drug Proserin. It is a cholinesterase inhibitor that is officially
administered to all patients when transferred to independent breathing. It must be used. I
think it was used. But I also understand that, most likely, he had to shine as Proserin's
German colleagues. Perhaps used not Proserin in its pure form, but another drug, more rare
– Ubretide, which is also an absolutely official drug, which is used in intensive
care, in postoperative practice to prevent bladder atony, to prevent bowel atony and,
accordingly, widely used. But, I admit, it can be used little in Germany, and it was not in
the toxicology kit, so they could be surprised, and because of this all the cheese-bor.
What they found in Navalny cholinesterase inhibitors after being in intensive care is
normal. They should be in the man who was in intensive care and was on ventilator. If they
weren't there, it would be strange, I'd be surprised.
When a person breathes with the help of the ventilator, various disorders develop,
including respiratory, cardiovascular, with the intestines, with the bladder. Various drugs
are used to prevent these disorders, including cholinesterase inhibitors. And if the doctor
finds them in the analysis of the person after a stay in the operating room and concludes
that he was poisoned, then the conclusion is: either it is a political order, or an
illiterate doctor."
I had to look up "atony" and Google tells me it's a condition in which a muscle loses its
strength or goes slack.
I guess next time when Navalny is back in Russia (if he ever does go back) and suffers a
seizure or falls into a diabetic coma and needs intensive care and intubation, the attending
medical staff should instead send him to the closest international airport and call
Charité to collect him as he is. He can have the minimum care to keep him his heart
beating and his brain oxygenated but no more.
Bravo! Jen for Prime Minister of the Russian Federation – get that weak sister
Medvedev out of there! I am all in favour of aggressive and hard-nosed Russian responses to
western idiocy, and having made fools of German doctors, Russia might even now make an
advance notice that in the event of Navalny's return to Russia – and considering the
west plainly considers Russian medical care to be a potential death sentence for Navalny
– he will be refused medical care and maybe it might be a good idea to establish a
German air-ambulance 'hot line' now for the future. Stress that this policy is brought about
wholly because of the accusatory nature of the German media.
What's the betting that the cheat and swindler and foreign agent Navalny claims asylum in
Germany after he has been brought out of the state of induced coma that he is at present
in?
After all, his life is always under threat in Russia., isn't it?
Good. Russia's loss is the Germans' hard bargain, what? They're welcome to the useless
tit. He will gravitate to wherever he can earn a comfortable living on who he is and not what
he does, as he has always done, living it up while he has no regular source of income and is
always free to go on vacation. But he can't run for office in Russia while living in Germany.
So we will be spared his endless presidential campaigns.
As I've commented several times already, Navalny is well past his sell-by date and his
protégée Sobol now seems more and more to be moving into position as front
person for the "Fund for the Struggle against Corruption".
Navalny's other sidekick, Volkov, has already for a good while now had a home address in
Luxembourg; Lyosha might soon have a Berlin one.
In Berlin, having been at death's door, he will most certainly be feted by all the German
liberals and well rewarded with lucrative media contracts, as is Nemtsov's daughter, who
slags off on Deutsche Welle to her heart's content and with monotonous regularity all things
Russian.
Nemtsova's life would certainly not be under threat if she were to live in Russia, but she
has clearly seized the main chance, making money in Germany whilst ensuring that her dear
dead papa not be forgotten.
Better than standing in shifts on a bridge in Moscow.
As I have probably suggested before, Russia has to get used to the idea that the western
alliance is its implacable enemy, and its core – the United States – will accept
no other solution than Russia's demise in violence or its complete submission to American
disposal.
I approve of Russia continuing to refer to 'our western colleagues' or 'partners', because
it suggests mockery to me so long as nobody in Russia believes it. But the American and
American-dominated media has escalated the campaign against Russia to the point that it is
the root of everything which is wrong with the world.
When you would think any reasonable country would lie quiet for awhile, having aroused the
ire of its enemies to a fever pitch, Russia goes right on provoking and poking and daring the
west to do something.
Or so the story goes. It is disappointing to see official Germany so easily pushed off its
previous halfway-defiant platform, but not really surprising. It remains to be seen if it
will actually use the completion of Nord Stream II as leverage to get what will mollify the
Americans.
I frankly doubt it, and suspect Mutti Merkel and Heiko are just making indignant noises
while they scramble for a new position, but you never know.
As I have often said also, if Europe was left dependent on American LNG shipped in by
tankers, it would serve it right. Just as long as Russia is not coerced into shipping gas
through Ukraine forever and a day. That's the absolute no-go point.
As I have probably suggested before, Russia has to get used to the idea that the western
alliance is its implacable enemy, and its core – the United States – will
accept no other solution than Russia's demise in violence or its complete submission to
American disposal.
This is first of all about preservation and expansion of the US-centered global neoliberal
empire, not so much about Russia. They react identically to any threat to the "neoliberal
world order" and "full spectrum dominance" from any country. False poisonings, creating and
organizing internal opposition out of neoliberal fifth column (which is influential in any
xUSSR country and consists first of all os some stratas of professionals (IT professionals,
part of academic community getting foreign grants and trips, journalists fifth column, etc )
as well as of compradors working in foreign firms, NGO, or getting foreign grants (aka
"grantoeds") ) attempts to stage color revolutions, all the arsenal of subversion is
used.
I think this might turn into a play of German intelligence (with some support and even
encouragement of political leadership) , which was a formidable opponent for Soviets during
WWII. So the same story repeats now on a new level. The idea is probably to convert this into
Scripals II scandal to keep Russophobia hysteria going strong. .
BTW Merkel government was instrumental in pushing Yushchenko poisoning story, which is
some ways was a dressed rehearsal of Scripal's poisoning story (in neither case victims died
and in both cases circumstances of poisoning were really mysterious ). And The Mirror
reminded us about this link in 2018:
Moreover, Merkel was instrumental in organizing color revolution of 2014 in Ukraine (aka
Euromaidan). Klitschko and his party were her puppets. With direct and indirect financial and
organizational support. He was called "Merkel's Boxer Boy In Ukraine." It was against her
attempt to hijack this color revolution Nuland's famous remarks "F*ck the EU" were
directed.
After that Klitschko political star faded and he never got into the Provisional
Government. Yatsenyuk was put in charge.
She is a staunch neoliberal and thus a lapdog of the USA with, nevertheless, her own
dreams of economic "Drang nach Osten". Ambitions which actually fully materialized in Ukraine
and Bulgaria.
So I would expect more pushing of yet another "false flag poisoning" story by all NATO
countries MSM.
Российские
врачи отвергли
немецкую
версию
отравления
Навального в
первый же день
Russian doctors have rejected the German version of Navalny's poisoning on the first
day
24 August 2020
Head of the department of anaesthesiology and resuscitation number 1 of the N.I.
Pirogov Centre, Boris Teplykh, has said that he had not heard "anything new" from the
statement of German doctors. According to him, on the very first day, Russian doctors were
working on the version about the intoxication of opposition leader Alexei Navalny with
cholinesterase inhibitors. But the substance was not found.
"They are talking about clinical data, and not about the substance itself, which
neither we nor, apparently, they have found at the moment. On the very first day of the
patient's admission, we worked on this version, but did not find confirmation", Mr. Teplykh
told RIA Novosti.
According to him, the atropine assigned to Alexei Navalny was given to him from the
first minutes after his hospitalization in Omsk.
"Subsequently, the need for its re-introduction was discussed In addition, the presence
of such a chemical reaction in the body is possible both as a result of the use of other
medications, and in the natural course of the sickness", said Mr. Teplykh.
The chief toxicologist of the Omsk region and the Siberian Federal District, Alexander
Sabaev, also said that cholinesterase inhibitors were not detected during the examination of
Mr. Navalny in Omsk.
"Upon his admission to the hospital, Alexei Navalny underwent investigations on a wide
range of narcotic, synthetic substances, psychodeletics and medicinal substances, including
cholinesterase inhibitors: the result was negative", said Mr. Sabaev. "In addition, he did
not have a clinical picture specific to poisoning by substances of the group of
cholinesterase inhibitors".
Recall that after the hospitalization of Alexei Navalny in the Omsk hospital, a
consultation was held, in which there took part specialists from the N. I. Pirogov National
Medical and Chemical Centre and the N. N. Burdenko Centre for Neurosurgery.
Clinical studies in the Berlin clinic "Charité" showed intoxication of Alexei
Navalny's body with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors. The exact
substance has not yet been identified. It is also not clear how exactly it got into the body.
Mr. Navalny's condition is assessed as "serious", but there is no acute threat to his
life.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas have called on the
Russian authorities to investigate the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. They
have also demanded that those responsible be punished.
At least "Kommersant" says they Russian doctors "have rejected"the "Charité"
doctors' statement and not "denied" that the charlatan had been poisoned
The whole thing is a set-up done by Team-Navalny, that foreign agent hamming it up for all
it was worth with his screaming and howling on board the aircraft. I somehow don't think that
a man poisoned with a "nerve agent" some while before take off would suddenly start howling
in agony after having visited the aircraft toilet.
Germany is a United States satrap and acts as behoves an occupied by the USA state.
Yes, that's just what Putin would do – wait until Navalny was all but used-up as an
opposition figure, and then poison him with something that would not offer any threat to his
life. Just sort of a cryptic, "Next time, Lyosha " warning. Right? If he didn't die of old
age first.
What a ridiculous farce. But, once again Navalny is talked about and talked about from
sunup to sundown, cosseted as if he were a national treasure. He'll probably have to go on a
very long and expensive vacation after this, with his statuesque wife and his lovely children
(except perhaps for the one busy with her American studies) to recover.
"We cannot treat the accusations you mentioned seriously. These accusations have
absolutely nothing to do with truth and are more like empty noise", Peskov told
reporters.
"We do not understand why our German colleagues are in such a hurry to use the word
'poisoning' and so on. This version was among the first to be considered by our doctors, but,
I repeat, the exact substance has not been determined", Peskov said.
Euractiv avec AFP: EU calls for 'independent, transparent' probe into Navalny
case
Cholinesterase is an enzyme needed for the central nervous system to function properly.
Its inhibitors are used to make medicines and insecticides, but also nerve agents such as
sarin
####
Or an escape route if necessary?
A 'full investigation' is required for Russia to prove that it is not guilty of 'possibly'
having done 'something' and the final arbiters of such a truth will be western politicans and
institutions. Have cake, will eat. You would expect u-Rope to be more careful considering the
US is trying by hook or by crook to kill NSII and destroy EU relations with Russia, but there
are plenty of broad-spectrum russophobes in the EU who don't care. Consequences are for
others.
What will be really funny will be if they are successful. I can imagine the looks on their
faces upon being told Nord Stream II is canceled and the Ukrainian transit contract will not
be renewed. It's not as if Russia could not sell the gas elsewhere. But gas prices in Europe
would transcend the fantastic. And America would get the opportunity to prove it just wants
to be Europe's commercial good friend, and would NEVER use energy imports to meddle in
national affairs like elections.
Why not? That's what the formerly-handsome Viktor Yushchenko did, coming out of it looking
like a pine-cone, but a martyr forever to a Russian attempt to kill him. I tell you what
– the Russians are going to have to give up poison as a weapon of assassination,
because they suck at it – they can't kill anyone! Put a little investment into a
commercially-available long gun in a common caliber, and shoot enemies of the state from a
nearby rooftop. That won't work repeatedly, because after the first time the cops will
blanket every rooftop and high point for miles around, but you'll have a dead dissident to
show for it.
In case anyone is in doubt, that is sarcasm and not an actual assassination plan. But I
cannot refrain from pointing out it has been used with great success in the United States by
individuals who most people, to put it kindly, would not consider extra-smart. This whole
poison thing seems too complicated and relies too much on chance, and the results are plainly
unsatisfactory. Time to get back to fundamentals, what?
Of course, if it is all just a big scam, it will be kind of hard for Washington to
actually shoot Navalny and kill him and pin it on Russia. Although the British did a
reasonable job of it by simply picking two Russians visiting the UK and painting them as
professional FSB 'wet men'.
I disagree. He is a spokesman. His comments were short and to the point. Now that they
have been made there is no need to respond to anything else unless something actually new
turns up and certainly not including the next range of unsubstantiated rumors. In short,
Peskov said 'Put up or shut up.' Diplomatically.
Whatever, a former Kremlin top doc held no punches as regards this latest Navalny
performance:
. . . the former chief physician of the Kremlin Hospital of the Russian President's
Property Management Department, Alexander Myasnikov, did not remain silent. When he heard the
diagnosis from German doctors that Navalny had been poisoned, he said:
" I shall speak cynically: if they had wanted to kill him, they would have killed
him! "
Maybe, but he should know that an invitation to comment is an invitation to engage, and
that past history indicates every official Russian statement will be dismissed as lies. Same
for the Chinese, now, really. Their denials of having started the coronavirus 'pandemic' are
regarded humorously as pathetic dissembling, and actually tacit admissions of guilt. Only the
west always tells the truth – all others always lie. A landscape which would not be at
all unfamiliar to Winston Smith.
Navalny's spokeswoman's response to Peskov statement:
In response, Mr Navalny's spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, tweeted: "It was obvious that the
crime would not be properly investigated and the culprit found. However, we all know
perfectly well who he is."
I absolutely agree. Just let those looking for a comment get a busy signal. The Russian
state has no comment, or cannot be reached. The latter is preferable.
US Senator demonizes Russia 'as supporting thugs' and 'undermining democracy' in bid to
lure India closer to US and its Quad alliance
The Nikkei Asian Review, well known for its anti-China reportage, featured an article
0n the weekend titled "India should ignore Putin's offer to broker accord with
China."
The author is none other than Marco Rubio, the high-flying Republican senator from
Florida and the acting chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, co-chairman of the
Congressional-Executive Commission on China and a ranking member of the Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations. ..
####
Rubio, Rubio, you're the big boob-io!
Is Modhi too polite to tell the US to f/o and the US takes this as encouragement to keep
making 'suggestions'? I wonder at which point the penny will drop and Washington will stop
this stupid behavior?
Rubio is high, I'll give him that; I don't know about high-flying. It has become political
gold in America to say something insulting about Russia or its leader, or both, and much of
the drooling electorate responds positively. America being the nation of the shortsighted and
the instant-gratification fans, it is hard to see down the road to here such behavior might
cost it, and for right now it sure is fun.
Washington obviously thinks it is irreplaceable as a trade partner, because it keeps
dangling the "If you want to do business with us, you'll do as we say" ultimatum, which it
evidently believes is persuasive. It remains to be seen if other countries are going to abase
themselves for money. They might; it is a powerful incentive. But the USA is defining
'loyalty' in a whole new context, suspiciously like the collecting of 'vassals' as described
by Putin. Saying you will do as you are told by Washington now implies that you will stay
bought, no matter how wiggy American policies become.
I think most traditional US allies will stay on the fence for as long as they can, hoping
for some idea of the direction the USA intends to take. But its debt is dragging it down and
down, and its squalling that it must do every deal so that it is to America's advantage makes
it less and less a desirable commercial partner.
Russian government-supported organisations are playing a small but increasing role
amplifying conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon, raising concerns of interference in the
November US election.
####
Yes, yet again new data/analytics shitpad Graphika (where Ben 'Russia is Evil' Nimmo an
expert at the Atlantic Council* shakes his butt) is being used as a source.
I haven't bothered to look at the timing of the cycles when the western propaganda efforts
decide to bring on stream a new bs site to peddle their rubbish, but I suppose that now
Bell-End Cat is more widely known to be NATO affiliated/whatever, an opening for another
'honest' data/fact driven organization that the PPNN can quote laundered fake intel is
required. One thing in common is that they are all new but have some old hands on deck.
counts among its ranks such luminaries as Ben Nimmo, perhaps best known for baselessly
accusing British and Finnish citizens of being Russian bots. Nimmo, who remains a senior
non-resident fellow at pro-war NATO-backed think tank Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic
Research Lab and has also worked with the UK government's secretive Integrity Initiative, was
hired by Graphika last year as its Head of Investigations, suggesting the company values a
vivid imagination over factual accuracy
Commenting on the spotlight that U.S. intelligence officials have placed on both countries'
interference efforts (along with Iran's), Pelosi and Schiff declared that the analysis
"provided a false sense of equivalence to the actions of foreign adversaries by listing three
countries of unequal operational intent, actions, and capabilities together."
In particular, they charged, the actions of Kremlin-linked actors seeking to undermine Vice
President Biden, and seeking to help President Trump" were glossed over.
Pelosi stated subsequently, "The Chinese, they said, prefer (presumptive Democratic nominee
Joe) Biden -- we don't know that, but that's what they're saying, but they're not really
getting involved in the presidential election."
... ... ...
Also alleging that Chinese agents are increasingly active on major social media platforms --
a study from research institute Freedom House,
which reported that :
"[C]hinese state-affiliated trolls are apparently operating on [Twitter] in large numbers.
In the hours and days after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of
Hong Kong protesters in October 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported, nearly 170,000
tweets were directed at Morey by users who seemed to be based in China as part of a
coordinated intimidation campaign. Meanwhile, there have been multiple suspected efforts by
pro-Beijing trolls to manipulate the ranking of content on popular sources of information
outside China, including Google's search engine Reddit,and YouTube."
Last year, a major
Hoover Institution report issued especially disturbing findings about Beijing's efforts to
influence the views (and therefore the votes) of Chinese Americans, including exploiting the
potential hostage status of their relatives in China. According to the Hoover researchers:
"Among the Chinese American community, China has long sought to influence -- even silence
-- voices critical of the PRC or supportive of Taiwan by dispatching personnel to the United
States to pressure these individuals and while also pressuring their relatives in China.
Beijing also views Chinese Americans as members of a worldwide Chinese diaspora that presumes
them to retain not only an interest in the welfare of China but also a loosely defined
cultural, and even political, allegiance to the so-called Motherland."
In addition: "In the American media, China has all but eliminated the plethora of
independent Chinese-language media outlets that once served Chinese American communities. It
has co-opted existing Chinese language outlets and established its own new outlets."
Operations aimed at Chinese Americans are anything but trivial politically. As of 2018, they
represented nearly 2.6 million eligible U.S. voters, and they belonged to an Asian-American
super-category that reflects the fastest growing racial and ethnic population of eligible
voters in the country.
Most live in heavily Democratic states, like California, New York, and Massachusetts, but
significant concentrations are also found in the battleground states where many of the 2016
presidential election margins were razor thin, and many of which look up for grabs this year,
like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
More broadly, according to the Hoover study:
"In American federal and state politics, China seeks to identify and cultivate rising
politicians. Like many other countries, Chinese entities employ prominent lobbying and public
relations firms and cooperate with influential civil society groups. These activities
complement China's long-standing support of visits to China by members of Congress and their
staffs. In some rare instances Beijing has used private citizens and companies to exploit
loopholes in US regulations that prohibit direct foreign contributions to elections."
But even more thoroughly overlooked than these narrower forms of Chinese political
interference is a broader, much more dangerous type of Chinese meddling that leaves Moscow's
efforts in the dust. For example, U.S.-owned multinational companies, which have long profited
at the expense of the domestic economy by offshoring production and jobs to China, have just as
long carried Beijing's water in American politics through their massive contributions to U.S.
political campaigns. The same goes for Wall Street, which hasn't sent many U.S. operations
overseas, but which has long hungered for permission to do more business in the Chinese
market.
These same big businesses continually and surreptitiously inject their views into American
political debates by heavily financing leading think tanks -- which garb their special interest
agendas in the raiment of objective scholarship.
Hollywood and the rest of the U.S. entertainment industry has become so determined to brown
nose China in search of profits that it's made nearly routine rewriting and censoring material
deemed offensive to China.
... ... ...
Alan Tonelson is the founder of RealityChek, a public policy blog focusing on
economics and national security, and the author of The Race to the Bottom.
Obama State Department considered Konstantin Kilimnik a 'sensitive source,' Senate report
now identifies him as Russian intel officer.
"Thank you very much for looking into this and very sorry to ask," U.S. embassy
official Alexander "Sasha" Kasanof wrote businessman Konstantin Kilimnik in a Dec. 6, 2015
email obtained by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigators and reviewed by Just the
News. "Ambassador very unhappy about the article, though agree it stinks to me to (sic) of
people we know very well."
A few lines later, Kasanof's email offered Kilimnik some valuable inside skinny about
the Obama administration's assessment of a sensitive meeting between indicted fugitive
Ukrainian oligarch Dmitri Firtash's associate Yuriy Boyko and Assistant Secretary of State
Victoria Nuland.
####
Plenty more at the link including original (cable) source material.
Kilimnik was good enough for Nuland
This story is worth repeating again and again. The recent Senate Intelligence Committee
report fingering Kilimnik is FoS media fodder and of course the media refuses to look at the
actual material, rather 'trust' what the pols say. i-Racki WMDs anyone? Yet more proof that
those who profess their journalistic creed is 'to hold the powerful to account' have long
since stopped doing so and are more than willing to switch their interpretations 180 degrees
depending on which politics they support.
RussiaGate is about MIC, Intelligence agencies and Dem leadership need to have an enemy to
milt taxpayers and retain power and military budget. Nothing personal, strictly business.
I met Strobe Talbott in 1968 when he and I were graduate students at Magdalen College,
Oxford. I liked him and respected him, and after we lost touch as friends, I followed his
career at Time , the State Department, and the Brookings Institution with admiration.
In recent years, however, I've become disillusioned with the foreign policy he advocated with
regard to Russia and was disturbed to learn of his involvement in the genesis of the
Russiagate narrative.
August 3, 2020
Dear Strobe,
It has been a long time – a very long time – since we've been in touch, but I
assume you remember me from 1968, when we met at Magdalen College, Oxford. Having just
graduated from Yale, you were there on a Rhodes Scholarship; I was on a Reynold Scholarship
granted by my alma mater, Dartmouth. Despite your three-barreled WASP name (Nelson Strobridge
Talbott) and your distinguished pedigree (son of a Yale football captain, Hotchkiss alum,
etc.) you were unpretentious, and we made friends quickly.
Despite assurances from my draft board that I would not be drafted that year, I got an
induction notice on Nixon's inauguration day. You were the first person I consulted. Safe
from the draft, like most Rhodes Scholars, you listened sympathetically. We were together in
our opposition to the War if not in our vulnerability to the draft.
You and I played the occasional game of squash. And when my Dartmouth fraternity brother
and Rhodes Scholar John Isaacson injured your eye with his racket, I visited you in the
Radcliffe Infirmary during your convalescence. I was reading Tristram Shandy as part
of my program, and one day I read some bits to you. You seemed to share my amusement; I can
still see you smiling in your hospital bed with a big patch on one eye. When your father came
from Ohio to visit you, he invited me, along with your Yale classmate Rob Johnson out to
dinner at the Bear.
You had majored in Russian at Yale and were writing a thesis on some topic in Russian
literature, Mayakovsky, perhaps? At any rate, you seemed committed to Russian studies.
(Little did I know.) When I chose to take a student tour behind the Iron Curtain during the
spring vac, you gave me some reading suggestions and advised me to dress warmly. Having
packed for England's relatively mild climate, I lacked a warm enough coat; you generously
loaned me your insulated car coat, which served me well in Russia's raw spring cold.
You likely debriefed me after my travels; I must have passed on to you my sense of the
Soviet Union as a very drab place with a demoralized, often drunk, population, and a general
sense of repression. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy my trip – just that I was
struck by the stark differences at the time between the West and the East. How lucky I was to
have been born in the "free world."
The tour returned from Moscow and St. Petersburg via Ukraine and Czechoslovakia. In
Prague, just after the brutal suppression of Prague Spring, we were acutely aware of how
hated the Russians were. This just reinforced my distaste for what Ronald Reagan later termed
the Evil empire – perhaps the only thing he said I ever agreed with. So, like you, I
was staunchly anti-Communist at the time.
The next year, you got a gig polishing the text of Nikita Krushchev's memoirs, which had
been smuggled out of Russia. The publisher put you up in an "undisclosed location," which you
let on was the Commodore Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts; we met for coffee in Harvard
Square with friends of yours, possibly including Brooke Shearer whom you later married, and
one of her brothers, Cody or Derek. It may have been then that I drove you to the school
where I was teaching on a deferment, Kimball Union Academy in central New Hampshire; you
stayed overnight before returning to civilization.
Your second year, you moved into a house with Bill Clinton and two other Rhodes
Scholars.
During the next few years – the early 70s – you and I exchanged occasional
letters. After that, the rest is history: your illustrious career – as a journalist at
Time , then as a Russia hand and Deputy Secretary of State Department in the Clinton
administration, and then as president of the Brookings Institution – was easy to follow
in the media.
Eventually our paths diverged, I lost touch with you, with one exception.
In the mid-1990s, while you were serving at State, a close friend asked me to ask you to
do her a favor. I hate asking for favors, even for myself, and resent those who use
connections to advance themselves. But all my friend needed was for a senior State official
to sign off on a job application of some sort. I phoned your office from mine. I got a frosty
reception from your administrative assistant, who was justifiably protective of your time,
but she put me through. You recognized my voice, sounded glad to be in touch, and granted the
favor. It never came to anything, but I remember how pleased I was even to have such a brief
task-oriented phone encounter with you after a lapse of two decades.
In any case, over the next several decades I followed your career with interest and was
pleased with your success.
As I was by that of another member of the Oxford cohort, Bob Reich, another fraternity
brother of mine. We were not close, and I saw him less often in Oxford than I saw you. But
you and he both wound up in the Clinton administration – the Oxford troika, I like to
call you. You and Bob were doing what Rhodes Scholars were supposed to do: go into
professions, network, and perform public service. The Rhodes to success. Never a whiff of
scandal about either of you. You, Strobe, were very much what we Dartmouth men referred to as
a straight arrow.
So why am I writing you now, after all these years? And why a public letter?
In part, because I have become progressively more critical of the foreign policy that you
have advocated. Early on you were advocating disarmament. Good. And closer relations with the
Soviet Union. Also good. Indeed, you were regarded as something of a Russophile (never a
compliment). But while you initially resisted the expansion of NATO, you eventually went
along with it. Like George Kennan, I consider that decision to be a serious mistake (and a
breach of a promise not to expand NATO "one inch" to the east after Germany was
reunited).
When the Cold War ended, the Warsaw Pact dissolved. NATO did not; instead, it expanded
eastward to include former Warsaw Pact members and SSRs until today it borders Russia. Russia
resistance to this is inevitably denounced in the West as "Russian aggression." Hence the
tension in Ukraine today. You're not personally responsible for all of this of course. But
you are deeply implicated in what seems to me a gratuitously provocative, indeed
imperialistic, foreign policy.
Two old friends could amicably agree disagree on that, as I disagree with virtually all my
liberal friends.
But your loyalty to the Clintons has apparently extended to involvement in generating the
Russiagate narrative, which has exacerbated tensions between Russia and the USA and spread
paranoia in the Democratic establishment and mainstream media. I am always disturbed by the
hypocrisy of Americans who complain about foreign meddling in our elections, when the USA is
the undisputed champ in that event. Indeed, we go beyond meddling (Yeltsin's reelection in
1996) to actual coups, not to mention regime-change wars.
My concern about this has come to a head with the
recent revelation of your complicity in the dissemination of the Steele dossier, whose
subsource, Igor Danchenko, was a Russian national employed by Brookings.
I don't know which is worse: that you and your colleagues at Brookings believed the
dossier's unfounded claims, or that you didn't but found it politically useful in the attempt
to subvert the Trump campaign and delegitimize his election. I suspect the latter. But
doesn't this implicate you in the creation of a powerful Russophobic narrative in
contemporary American politics that has demonized Putin and needlessly ramped up tension
between two nuclear powers?
A lifelong Democrat who voted for Bill twice and Hillary once, I am no fan of Trump or of
Putin. But Russiagate has served as a distraction from Hillary's responsibility for her
catastrophic defeat and from the real weaknesses of the neoliberal Democratic Party, with its
welfare "reform," crime bill, and abandonment of its traditional working-class base.
Moreover, in and of itself, the Russiagate story represents what Matt Taibbi has called
this generation's WMD media scandal. The narrative, challenged from the beginning by a few
intrepid independent journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Aaron Maté,
and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, is now being further undermined by the
declassification of documents by the Senate. If, as I have recently read, you were active in
disseminating the Steele dossier, you have contributed to
the mainstream media's gas-lighting of the American public – liberals, at least
(like most of my friends). Ironically, then, you have given credence to Trump's often, but
not always, false charge: "Fake News." Once described as a Russophile, you now seem complicit
in the creation of a nation-wide paranoid and hysterical Russophobia and neo-McCarthyism.
"... It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. ..."
For forty years I carefully read the New York Times in hard copy each and every
morning, eager to discover what had transpired since the previous day. But just in the last few
months, my commitment has begun to flag, and my eyes often only lightly glance at half or more
of the articles and their columnar headlines.
I'd never thought much of Donald Trump, but can't seem to work up the enthusiasm to read yet
another article headlining the "lies" of our Great Satan or his coterie of lesser Satans. The
endless villainies of his Luciferian ally Vladimir Putin have grown dull to my mental tongue.
The diabolical wickedness of China, whom Trump had supposedly so recently courted, elicits
little interest. Closer to home, my eyes skip over another "social distancing" advice column
about Covid-19, or further explanations of how "peaceful protesters" had recently set a
government building on fire in Portland, Oregon, or destroyed Chicago's wealthiest downtown
shopping district.
The Business Section reports that the worst disease outbreak in a century, the worst
unemployment since the Great Depression, and the worst national rioting in two generations has
produced unprecedented gains in share prices on Wall Street, but the staff writers have
apparently forgotten the word "bubble." Many days the Arts Section seems to have become almost
monochromatically black. So my daily regular morning ritual now takes much less time than it
did in the past.
I can't exactly plot the trajectory of this sharp drop in my recent interest. But I
certainly noticed the change not longer after
a Twitter-mob forced the Times to summarily purge for insufficient "wokeness" its
highly-regarded Editorial Page Editor, widely considered a leading contender to run the paper,
perhaps suggesting that the journalists changed their coverage and writing style to avoid a
similar fate. I had always read my morning newspapers at a local coffee-shop, but the
Coronavirus outbreak ended that possibility, thereby disrupting my routine. And my years of
denouncing the dishonesty of "Our American Pravda" in my own articles
may have finally begun to register in my own mind.
There are occasional exceptions to this pattern. Earlier this month the Times
carefully tabulated our national mortality figures and determined that our "excess deaths"
from early March to the end of July had already exceeded 200,000 , indicating that the
American body-count from our Covid-19 epidemic was considerably larger than generally assumed,
and might even reach the half million mark by the end of the year. But examples of such solid
reporting seem few and far between these days.
The obvious decline of the Times is especially apparent to me each morning when I
compare it with the rival Wall Street Journal , which I read immediately afterward.
After Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal in 2007, most observers predicted a sad fate
at the hands of the proprietor whose early Fleet Street media empire had been built upon on the
frontal nudity of the Page Three Girls of his tabloid Sun . But Murdoch totally
confounded those skeptics, providing his new flagship broadsheet with huge financial backing
and a hands-off editorial policy, thereby elevating it from a business-focused publication to a
near-peer rival to the Gray Lady at a time when so many other papers were about to begin
shriveling from massive loss of advertising. Within a couple of years, even such inveterate
Murdoch-haters as The Nationacknowledged this
surprising reality .
Superb journalist resources unshackled by extreme "political correctness" allow an
outstanding product, and this has certainly been demonstrated by the Journal 's
regular front-page investigative reports. A few days ago, our continuing Covid-19 disaster
prompted yet another of these, which I think lacked only a few crucial elements to be worthy of
a Pulitzer Prize.
Numerous publications have documented America's severe mistakes in combating the disease,
but
this 4,500 word WSJ report focused upon the serious mishandling of the original
outbreak by Chinese authorities.
The article revealed that top public health officials at China's Center for Disease Control
only became aware of the situation on December 30th, when they learned that at least 25
suspected cases of a mysterious illness had already occurred in Wuhan during that month. But as
the writers noted, the outbreak had certainly begun somewhat earlier:
Even a fully empowered China CDC would likely have missed the very first cases of the
coronavirus, which probably began spreading around Wuhan in October or November, most likely
in people who never showed symptoms, or did but never saw a doctor, researchers say.
All of this new information seems quite consistent with what had previously been discovered
by America's leading media outlets. But the Journal writers seem to have missed one
additional fact that could have elevated this important story from a mundane investigation to a
sensational expose. Although they documented that the Chinese government only learned of the
Wuhan outbreak at the end of December, they seemed unaware that more than a month earlier
American intelligence officials had distributed a secret report to our military allies
describing the "cataclysmic" disease outbreak then underway in Wuhan.
A few months ago, I
had noted the clear implications of this bizarre discrepancy in timing:
For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early
missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has
presumably encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.
As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather
detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese
documents. Provocatively entitled "China Didn't Warn Public of Likely
Pandemic for 6 Key Days" , the piece was widely distributed, running
in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the
Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan.
14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the
number of infections greatly multiplied.
Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough
4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful
timeline of those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of
emphasis or minor disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese
officials first became aware of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January,
with the first known death occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public
health measures later that same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious,
elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the
ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month,
an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far
back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence
Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in
the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our
government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the
story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report,
while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a
few days later,
Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared
such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to
independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several
government sources.
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of
the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese
government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of
precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the
earliest knowledge of future fires.
An entirely new disease that spreads in silent, asymptomatic fashion can easily escape
initial detection, and we should not be surprised that no one in China noticed the Wuhan
outbreak when it first began in October or November. But America's intelligence operatives were
entirely aware of what was happening from the very beginning, and began informing all our
allies. This seems about as close to a "smoking gun" as we can ever likely to encounter in the
annals of the murky world of intelligence operations.
Moreover, I
have also noted the very unusual international pattern the deadly disease immediately began
to follow:
As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China's own borders, another
development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had
occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But
by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more
surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with
a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least
a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were
quite
senior . Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred
Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.
Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only
political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran,
and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost
anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran's top
military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian
ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon
dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere
coincidence?
So if the journalists at the WSJ had merely taken note of what had previously been
reported by ABC News and confirmed by Israeli television, they would surely have
earned themselves a Pulitzer Prize. But earning and receiving are two separate matters, and
they might easily have instead been purged for treading upon such touchy national security
matters. After all, our own webzine was banned by both
Facebook and Google just days after we raised these same matters.
Such retaliation helps explain why our American mainstream media has long since concluded
that discretion is the better part of valor.
You
get as much justice as you can afford..,.. poor people in America know this. Justice is Swift for the poor man. Good example
jussie Smollett...... America has no justice yet to this day. The great Awakening started for me by, Nancy pelosi. She said we
are above you. Referring to the elite.... Two-tier justice system, that's why so many people are watching. Trump 20 🇺🇸 20
Landslide Victory 🤔
The
federal government bureaucrats and politicians are running the government like the Five Mafia Families of NY ran NYC and
beyond. ...selective prosecutions is all that can be seen from coast to coast. Everyone knows what's really going on. If
you're associated with President Trump, however distant, or are a Republican instant prosecution. If you're a Democrat member
of a coup d'etat, fo'get about it. Shakespeare was right about the lawyers. At least about the lawyers in the Southern
District of NY. Attorney General Barr should have gutted that cabal of seditious traitors, top to bottom, left to right.
Probably most of the DC contingent of the DOJ as well.
Fantastic interview. I hope many who do not understand the significance of this will take a step back and really understand
that these people are after ALL of us...
I hope that the American citizens will continue to inform themselves about the shenanigans that the Democrats have been up to
and prevent the mob with this 'world view" (which means total control by a view) will not be allowed to take root. The
alternative is this; if the US can be turned into a CCP of America then what chance does the rest of us have? Please
Americans, clean up you education system and make sure it is free and fair and available to everyone without indoctrination
from anyone. And dare to stand up against regimes that violate human rights. At present you are the only government who
publicly states the genocide that is going on in China and dares to take steps to stop the money hungry corporations to find
loopholes....
Very
good interview. It's just so disturbing that the press is so corrupted. The Constitution grants them freedoms to help the
public not to lie and tear our system down. No one trusts the media at this point, nor should they. It's both sad and
dangerous. Who would have ever thought that the media would turn into public enemy #1.
RINOs are a large part of the permanent coup. The heap of human waste includes not just Obama but also Romney, both Bush's,
McCain, Graham, Murkowski and a very long list of bureaucrats.
Diane Feinstein & Slick Willie acted like they cared about China but they (and many others) would sell anyone down the river,
any time day or night, and stick a fork in, if it benefits them.
I have Lee Smith's first book on the corruption... I'm getting tired of reading these books without seeing any indictments...
I will buy the new book after John Durham and AG Barr start making some real indictments of James Brennan, Comey, McCabe,
Strzok, Lisa Page, Hilary for funding the Dossier, ... all these people need to be behind bars...we can't live in a country of
no consequences for Democrats...
"Our
movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you,
the American People. There is nothing the political establishment will not do, and no lie they will not tell, to
hold on to their prestige and power at your expense.
The Washington establishment, and the financial and media corporations that fund it, exists for only one reason:
to protect and enrich itself.
The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. As an example, just one single trade deal
they'd like to pass, involves trillions of dollars controlled by many countries, corporations and lobbyists. For
those who control the levers of power in Washington, and for the global special interests they partner with, our
campaign represents an existential threat.
It's a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class,
stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and
political entities.
The corporate media in our country is no longer involved in journalism. They are a political special interest, no
different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with an agenda.
The establishment and their media enablers wield control over this nation through means that are well known.
Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and morally deformed. They will
attack you, they will slander you, they will seek to destroy your career and reputation. And they will lie, lie
and lie even more.
I didn't need to do this. I built a great company, and I had wonderful life. I could have enjoyed the benefits of
years of successful business for myself and my family, instead of going through this absolute horror show of lies,
deceptions and malicious attacks. I'm doing it because this country has given me so much, and I feel strongly it
was my turn to give back. We will vote to put this corrupt government cartel out of business.
We will remove from our politics the special interests who have betrayed our workers, our borders, our freedoms,
and our sovereign rights as a nation. We will end the politics of profit, we will end the rule of special
interests, we will put a stop to the raiding of our country – and the disenfranchisement of our people."
Trump, Flynn, Stone, Page, Papa D; all have suffered because of this attempted coup. The main victims though are
the American electorate who have had their Democratic mandate stymied for the last 4 years.
Trumps only DOG in the fight is America. The Swamp has anti American interest. Look who backs the Dem party!
Soros, BLM, Netfilx, Amazon, and a ton of others that have $$$ instead of Americans in mind. Look who owns
the Media and tell me why they are so far left. Does it make sense? They know it isn't Russia but even Ivy
league Schools funding from China. WHY? Hmmmm. Who is pumping money into Silicon Valley? Hmmm
DOJ.gov/biography
~ Wm Pelham BARR was CIA from 1973 to 1977 > once a spook, thereafter always just a sheepdipped spook >
Sessions, Whitaker, BARR & WRAY are deep state coverup team
Biggest threat to US democracy is NOT from the OUTSIDE world - it is the Deep State and MSM.Trump isn't divisive;
he's simply reacted to all of abuses that have been going on. Thank God we have a Leader like him. He is a HERO -
not a villain
This is very interesting, but my initial reaction is trust Trump. He understood, even before any of this
occurred, that this would be the result of his presidency. The Obama/Hillary plan was not something
concocted by Obama - he was a 'puppet' to a much larger, 16 year plan to finally weaken the US on the world
stage, in order to usher in a different kind of global condition. But Trump knew all of this - he has been
preparing for this presidency for decades. He will win in 2020, and the darkness that Smith talks about
regarding a 'permanent coup' will not happen. It's all going to be brought down. This is not another 4 year
election, but a crossroads to the future.
If the Dems win there will be a Witch Hunt like one could not dream possible. The Dems will throw the Justice
System as we know it out the window. They will arrest President Trump and every person that stood up for him on
charges of treason. They will resurrect the Russia Hoax and the Ukraine Hoax and the China-Virus Hoax will be
blamed on President Trump decisively. Trump supporters will be outraged and the Democrats will send in the troops
to confiscate all their guns. Americans if you love your life get out in person and vote for President Trump in
November.
"... The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle . The last four reality-impaired years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don't know what's going on. ..."
"... The LSM should be confronted: "At long last have you left no sense of decency?" But who would hear the question -- much less any answer? ..."
"... Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there are no referees to call the fouls. ..."
"... Incidentally, Mueller's report apparently was insufficient, only two years in the making, and just 448 pages. The Senate committee's magnum opus took three years, is almost 1,000 pages -- and fortified. So there. ..."
"... is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of its study -- call it "Mueller (Enhanced)" -- and the propaganda fanfare -- come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning, as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message. ..."
"... The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for example. But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks. ..."
"... The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness -- particularly with regard to Covid-19 -- he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith. The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling to all concerned is to say the obvious. ..."
"... None of that takes us much beyond the Mueller report and other things generally well known -- even in the LSM. Nor does the drivel about people like Paul Manafort "sharing polling data with Russians" who might be intelligence officers. That data was "mostly public" the Times itself reported , and the paper had to correct a story that the data was intended for Russian oligarchs, when it was meant for Ukrainian oligarchs instead. That Manafort was working to turn Ukraine towards the West and not Russia is rarely mentioned. ..."
"... On the Steele Dossier, the committee also missed a ruling by a British judge against Christopher Steele, labeling his dossier an attempt to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Consortium News explained back in October 2017 that both CrowdStrike and Steele were paid for by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to push Russiagate. ..."
"... the description of #WikiLeaks ' publishing activities by this #SenateIntelligenceCommittee 's Report appears a true #EdgarHoover 's disinformation campaign to make a legitimate media org completely radioactive ..."
"... And that's not the half of it. In September 2018, Mazzetti and his NYT colleague Scott Shane wrote a 10,000-word feature, "The Plot to Subvert an Election," trying to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans. ..."
"... That turned out to be a grotesquely deceptive claim. Mazzetti and Shane failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017, meaning about half came after the election), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people's news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts. Not to mention the lack of evidence that the IRA was the Russian government, as Mueller claimed. ..."
"... "Liberals are embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency produced a report last Jan. 6 that blamed Russia for 'hacking' Democratic emails and releasing them to WikiLeaks ." ..."
The New York Times is leading the full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed
effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump...
The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle . The last four reality-impaired
years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don't know what's going
on.
The LSM should be confronted: "At long last have you left no sense of decency?" But who would hear the question -- much less any
answer? The corporate media have a lock on what Americans are permitted or not permitted to hear. Checking the truth, once routine
in journalism, is a thing of the past.
Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards
as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there
are no referees to call the fouls.
The recent release of a 1,000-page, sans bombshells and already out-of-date report by the Senate Intelligence Committee has provided
the occasion to "catapult the propaganda," as President George W. Bush once put it.
As the the Times 's Mark Mazzetti put it in his
article Wednesday:
"Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, Republican-majority senators hoped it would refocus attention
on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated."
Mazzetti is telling his readers, soto voce : regarding that interference four years ago, and the "continued-unabated" part, you
just have to trust us and our intelligence community sources who would never lie to you. And if, nevertheless, you persist in asking
for actual evidence, you are clearly in Putin's pocket.
Incidentally, Mueller's report apparently was insufficient, only two years in the making, and just 448 pages. The Senate committee's
magnum opus took three years, is almost 1,000 pages -- and fortified. So there.
Iron Pills
Recall how disappointed the LSM and the rest of the Establishment were with Mueller's anemic findings in spring 2019. His report
claimed that the Russian government "interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion" via a social
media campaign run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and by "hacking" Democratic emails. But the evidence behind those charges
could not bear close scrutiny.
You would hardly know it from the LSM, but the accusation against the IRA was thrown out of court when the U.S. government admitted
it could not prove that the IRA was working for the Russian government. Mueller's ipse dixit did not suffice, as we
explained a year ago
in "Sic Transit Gloria Mueller."
The Best Defense
is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of its study -- call it "Mueller (Enhanced)" -- and the propaganda
fanfare -- come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning,
as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message.
Durham
One chief worry, of course, derives from the uncertainty as to whether John Durham, the US Attorney investigating those FBI and
other officials who launched the Trump-Russia investigation will let some heavy shoes drop before the election. Barr has said he
expects "developments in Durham's investigation hopefully before the end of the summer."
FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith already has decided to plead guilty to the felony of falsifying evidence used to support a warrant
from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveillance to spy on Trump associate Carter Page. It is abundantly clear that
Clinesmith was just a small cog in the deep-state machine in action against candidate and then President Trump. And those running
the machine are well known. The president has named names, and Barr has made no bones about his disdain for what he calls spying
on the president.
The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former
FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper,
for example. But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be
the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without
taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks.
The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness -- particularly
with regard to Covid-19 -- he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith.
The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling
to all concerned is to say the obvious.
So, the stakes are high -- for the Democrats, as well -- and, not least, the LSM. In these circumstances it would seem imperative
not just to circle the wagons but to mount the best offense/defense possible, despite the fact that virtually all the ammunition
(as in the Senate report) is familiar and stale ("enhanced" or not).
Black eyes might well be in store for the very top former law enforcement and intelligence officials, the Democrats, and the LSM
-- and in the key pre-election period. So, the calculation: launch "Mueller Report (Enhanced)" and catapult the truth now with propaganda,
before it is too late.
No Evidence of Hacking
The "hacking of the DNC" charge suffered a fatal blow three months ago when it became known that Shawn Henry, president of the
DNC-hired cyber-security firm CrowdStrike,
admitted under oath that his firm had no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked -- by Russia or anyone else.
(YouTube)
Henry gave his testimony on Dec. 5, 2017,
but House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff was able to keep it hidden until May 7, 2020.
Here's a brief taste of how Henry's testimony went: Asked by Schiff for "the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data",
Henry replied, "We just don't have the evidence that says it actually left."
You did not know that? You may be forgiven -- up until now -- if your information diet is limited to the LSM and you believe The
New York Times still publishes "all the news that's fit to print." I am taking bets on how much longer the NYT will be able to keep
Henry's testimony hidden; Schiff's record of 29 months will be hard to beat.
Putting Lipstick on the Pig of Russian 'Tampering'
Worse still for the LSM and other Russiagate diehards, Mueller's findings last year enabled Trump to shout "No Collusion" with
Russia. What seems clear at this point is that a key objective of the current catapulting of the truth is to apply lipstick to Mueller's
findings.
After all, he was supposed to find treacherous plotting between the Trump campaign and the Russians and failed miserably. Most
LSM-suffused Americans remain blissfully unaware of this, and the likes of Pulitzer Prize winner Mazzetti have been commissioned
to keep it that way.
In Wednesday's
article , for example, Mazzetti puts it somewhat plaintively:
"Like the special counsel the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with
the Russian government -- a fact that the Republicans seized on to argue that there was 'no collusion'."
How could they!
Mazzetti is playing with words. "Collusion," however one defines it, is not a crime; conspiracy is.
'Breathtaking' Contacts: Mueller (Enhanced)
Mark Mazzetti (YouTube)
Mazzetti emphasizes that the Senate report "showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied
to the Kremlin," and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the intelligence committee's vice chairman,
said the committee report details "a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives
that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections."
None of that takes us much beyond the Mueller report and other things generally well known -- even in the LSM. Nor does the drivel
about people like Paul Manafort "sharing polling data with Russians" who might be intelligence officers. That data was "mostly public"
the Times itself
reported
, and the paper had to correct
a story that the data was intended for Russian oligarchs, when it was meant for Ukrainian oligarchs instead. That Manafort was working
to turn Ukraine towards the West and not Russia is rarely mentioned.
Recent revelations regarding the false data given the FISA court by an FBI lawyer to "justify" eavesdropping on Trump associate
Carter Page show the Senate report to be not up to date and misguided in endorsing the FBI's decision to investigate Page. The committee
may wish to revisit that endorsement -- at least.
On the Steele Dossier, the committee also missed a ruling by a British judge against Christopher Steele,
labeling his dossier an attempt to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Consortium News
explained back in October 2017 that both CrowdStrike and Steele were paid for by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to
push Russiagate.
Also missed by the intelligence committee was a document released by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that
revealed that Steele's "Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed
up as formal intelligence memos."
Smearing WikiLeaks
The Intelligence Committee report also repeats thoroughly
debunked
myths about WikiLeaks and, like Mueller, the committee made no effort to interview Julian Assange before launching its smears.
Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who partnered with WikiLeaks in the publication of the Podesta emails, described the report's
treatment of WikiLeaks in this Twitter thread
:
2. the description of #WikiLeaks ' publishing activities
by this #SenateIntelligenceCommittee
's Report appears a true #EdgarHoover 's disinformation
campaign to make a legitimate media org completely radioactive
3. Clearly, to describe #WikiLeaks and its publishing activities the #SenateIntelligenceCommittee's Report completely rely
on #US intelligence community+ #MikePompeo's characterisation of #WikiLeaks. There is not even any pretense of an independent
approach
4. there are also unsubstantiated claims like:
– "[WikiLeaks'] disclosures have jeopardized the safety of individual Americans and foreign allies" (p.200)
– "WikiLeaks has passed information to U.S. adversaries" (p.201)
5. it's completely false that "#WikiLeaks does not seem to weigh whether its disclosures add any public interest value" (p.200)
and any longtime media partner like me could provide you dozens of examples on how wrong this characterisation [is].
Titillating
Mazzetti did add some spice to the version of his article that dominated the two top right columns of Wednesday's Times with the
blaring headline: "Senate Panel Ties Russian Officials to Trump's Aides: G.O.P.-Led Committee Echoes Mueller's Findings on Election
Tampering."
Those who make it to the end of Mazzetti's piece will learn that the Senate committee report "did not establish" that the Russian
government obtained any compromising material on Mr. Trump or that they tried to use such materials [that they didn't have] as leverage
against him." However, Mazzetti adds,
"According to the report, Mr. Trump met a former Miss Moscow at a party during one trip in 1996. After the party, a Trump associate
told others he had seen Mr. Trump with the woman on multiple occasions and that they 'might have had a brief romantic relationship.'
"The report also raised the possibility that, during that trip, Mr. Trump spent the night with two young women who joined him
the next morning at a business meeting with the mayor of Moscow."
This is journalism?
Another Pulitzer in Store?
The Times appends a note reminding us that Mazzetti was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald
Trump's advisers and their connections to Russia.
And that's not the half of it. In September 2018, Mazzetti and his NYT colleague Scott Shane wrote a 10,000-word
feature, "The Plot to Subvert an Election," trying to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully
swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans.
That turned out to be a grotesquely deceptive claim. Mazzetti and Shane failed to mention the
fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017, meaning about half came after the election), had been engulfed
in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people's news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts. Not to
mention the lack of evidence that the IRA was the Russian government, as Mueller claimed.
In exposing that chicanery, prize-winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter
commented :
"The descent of The New York Times into this unprecedented level of propagandizing for the narrative of Russia's threat to
U.S. democracy is dramatic evidence of a broader problem of abuses by corporate media Greater awareness of the dishonesty at the
heart of the Times' coverage of that issue is a key to leveraging media reform and political change."
Nothingburgers With Russian Dressing: the Backstory
The late Robert Parry.
"It's too much; it's just too much, too much", a sedated, semi-conscious Robert Parry kept telling me from his hospital bed in
late January 2018 a couple of days before he died. Bob was founder of Consortium News .
It was already clear what Bob meant; he had taken care to see to that. On Dec. 31, 2017 the reason for saying that came in what
he titled "An Apology
& Explanation" for "spotty production in recent days." A stroke on Christmas Eve had left Bob with impaired vision, but he was able
to summon enough strength to write an Apologia -- his vision for honest journalism and his dismay at what had happened to his profession
before he died on Jan. 27, 2018. The dichotomy was "just too much".
Parry rued the role that journalism was playing in the "unrelenting ugliness that has become Official Washington. Facts and logic
no longer mattered. It was a case of using whatever you had to diminish and destroy your opponent this loss of objective standards
reached deeply into the most prestigious halls of American media."
What bothered Bob most was the needless, dishonest tweaking of the Russian bear. "The U.S. media's approach to Russia," he wrote,
"is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. Does any sentient human being read The New York Times ' or The Washington Post 's coverage
of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts? Western journalists now apparently see
it as their patriotic duty to hide facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia."
Parry, who was no conservative, continued:
"Liberals are embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency
produced a report last Jan. 6 that blamed Russia for 'hacking' Democratic emails and releasing them to WikiLeaks ."
Bob noted that the 'hand-picked' authors "evinced no evidence and even admitted that they weren't asserting any of this as fact."
It was just too much.
Robert Parry's Last Article
Peter Strzok during congressional hearing in July 2018. (Wikimedia Commons)
Bob posted his last substantive article on Dec. 13, 2017, the day after text exchanges between senior FBI officials Peter Strzok
and Lisa Page were made public. (Typically, readers of The New York Times the following day would altogether
miss the
importance of the text-exchanges.)
Bob Parry rarely felt any need for a "sanity check." Dec. 12, 2017 was an exception. He called me about the Strzok-Page texts;
we agreed they were explosive. FBI Agent Peter Strzok was on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff investigating alleged Russian
interference, until Mueller removed him.
Strzok reportedly was a "hand-picked" FBI agent taking part in the Jan 2017 evidence-impoverished, rump, misnomered "intelligence
community" assessment that blamed Russia for hacking and other election meddling. And he had helped lead the investigation into Hillary
Clinton's misuse of her computer servers. Page was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's right-hand lawyer.
His Dec. 13, 2017 piece
would be his fourth related article in less than two weeks; it turned out to be his last substantive article. All three of the earlier
ones are worth a re-read as examples of fearless, unbiased, perceptive journalism. Here
are the links .
Bob began his article
on the Strzok-Page bombshell:
"The disclosure of fiercely anti-Trump text messages between two romantically involved senior FBI officials who played key
roles in the early Russia-gate inquiry has turned the supposed Russian-election-meddling "scandal" into its own scandal, by providing
evidence that some government investigators saw it as their duty to block or destroy Donald Trump's presidency.?
"As much as the U.S. mainstream media has mocked the idea that an American 'deep state' exists and that it has maneuvered to
remove Trump from office, the text messages between senior FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and senior FBI lawyer
Lisa Page reveal how two high-ranking members of the government's intelligence/legal bureaucracy saw their role as protecting
the United States from an election that might elevate to the presidency someone as unfit as Trump."
Not a fragment of Bob's or other Consortium News analysis made any impact on what Bob used to call the Establishment media. As
a matter of fact, eight months later during a talk in Seattle that I titled "Russia-gate: Can You Handle the Truth?", only three
out of a very progressive audience of some 150 had ever heard of Strzok and Page.
Lest I am accused of being "in Putin's pocket," let me add the explanatory note that we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity included in our
most explosive Memorandum for President Trump, on "Russian hacking."
Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that
agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say
and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former
intelligence colleagues.
We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians
and pundits say is purely coincidental. The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly
politicized times.
somecallmetimmah , 1 hour ago
Only brain-washed losers read the new york times. Garbage propaganda for garbage people.
AtATrESICI , 43 minutes ago
"developments in Durham's investigation hopefully before the end of the summer." What summer? The summer of 2099.
Mouldy , 1 hour ago
So in a nutshell.. They just called half the USA too stupid to make an informed decision for themselves.
ominous , 1 hour ago
the disagreement is over which half is the stupid half
homeskillet , 25 minutes ago
The MIC's bogey man. What a crock of **** this whole country has become. Pravda puts out more truth than our MSM. I trust
Putin more than the Dem leaders at this point.
Demeter55 , 1 hour ago
The Globalist/New World Order/Deep State/Elitists (or whatever other arrogant subsection of the psychopaths among us you
wish to consider) have one great failing which will defeat them utterly in the end:
They do not know when to cut their losses.
As a result of that irrational stubbornness, born of a "Manifest Destiny" assumption of an eternal lock on the situation,
they will go too far.
Having more wealth than anyone is temporary.
Having more power than anyone is temporary.
Life is temporary.
And we outnumber them by several billion.
Even if they systematically try to destroy us, they will not have the ability unless we are complicit in our own destruction.
While there are many who have "taken the knee" to these tyrants in training, there are more who have no intention of doing
so.
Most nations are not so buffaloed as to fall for this propaganda, but the United States especially was created with the
notion that all men are created equal, and this is ingrained in the national character. We don't buy it.
And our numbers are growing daily, as people wake up and realize they have to take a side for themselves, their families,
their communities.
The global covid-panic was a masterful attack, but it will fail. Indeed, it has failed already. The building counter-attack
will take out those who chose to declare war on humanity. There really is no alternative for us, the humans. Live Free or Die,
as they say in New Hampshire.
And despite the full support of the MSM and the DNC, the Would-Be Masters of the Universe will not succeed.
sborovay07 , 1 hour ago
Sad Assange wasn't granted immunity to testify and was silenced just prior to the release of the Mueller report. Little
has been heard since except his health is horrific. Now, all the Deep State figures on both sides are just throwing as much
mud against Trump as possible to hide the truth. If Durnham does not indict the Deep State figures who participated in the
Obama led coup, all is for not. Only the foot soldiers marching in lock step will be charged.
wn , 1 hour ago
To sum it up.
Conclusion of the Democrats.
Americans need Russian brains to decide their leader in order to move forward.
nokilli , 25 minutes ago
Once the MO for "Russian hacking" is published to the international intelligence community, any (((party))) can pose as
a "Russian hacker."
This is the way computers work. Sybil is eponymous.
KuriousKat , 35 minutes ago
Mazzeti looks like the typical Gopher boy for the CIA Station Chiefs around the world..they retire or become contributors
to NewsWeek Wapo or NYT. ..not Any major network w/o one...Doing **** like this is mandatory..not elective.
I hope I live to see the day when the "New York Times" is deemed the same caliber of
"journalism" as the "National Inquirer". Of course, those with two brain cells to rub
together already know that this is the case. However, by "deemed", I mean by the
one-brain-celled masses.
homeskillet , 23 minutes ago
The National Enquirer actually has many more believable articles.
Pernicious Gold Phallusy , 20 minutes ago
The National Enquirer broke the story of Presidential candidate John Edwards cheating on
his wife, who was undergoing breast cancer treatment at the time. Other media organizations,
including the NYT, knew about it and refused to cover it.
Stu Pedassle , 1 hour ago
Glad to see Operation Mockingbird is still going strong after 60 years
"... "Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate." ..."
"... "chose not to" ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
George Orwell's novel
'1984' depicts life within Oceania, a totalitarian society strictly controlled by an omnipresent Party whose three simple yet
contradictory slogans are: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Citizens of Oceania were forced to accept
that two plus two may equal five if the Party deemed it so.
Akin to the Snake
game
found
on old Nokia mobile phones, woke movements become increasingly illogical and harder to control before eventually tying
themselves in knots or crashing into the walls of logic, sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Modern feminist movements
are having the wind taken out of their sails by other woke factions who argue that children should be taught boys can have
periods
,
so as not to distress transgender students, or that
terms
like
mother and father should be replaced with parent 1 and parent 2. Even the main UK doctors' union sent an internal memo
advising its staff to use the term 'pregnant people' rather than 'expectant
mothers'
to
avoid causing offense.
One could argue that
campaigns designed to remove the concept of male and female is a threat to women and their historical struggles. By
eliminating the 'existence' of women, it not only airbrushes out women's vast contribution to history but also removes the
whole notion of feminism – if womanhood does not exist, then the whole idea of misogyny becomes irrelevant. Perhaps one day
someone will decide that race is simply a construct and can be changed at will, thus making all debates about racism and
oppression irrelevant. Thus future woke cultists might argue themselves into a corner in which racism and thus 'white
privilege' does not exist.
In the West you are free
to choose any gender or sexuality, transition between these at whim, or perhaps create your own, but you are not supposed to
question the foundations of capitalism or liberalism. Likewise, the much lauded concept of human rights and democracy – one of
the key pillars on which Western 'cultural superiority' rests and from which it sneers at 'undemocratic' and 'uncivilised'
countries – is used to justify the destruction, occupation and economic enslavement of other peoples.
Whether it is Libya, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen or Palestine we see that non-white lives do not matter when there are no political points to score.
Indeed, condemning the slaughter of Palestinians could be enough to get you labeled an anti-Semite by those who remain
suspiciously silent when real anti-Semitism rears its ugly head.
For example, far right and
neo-nazi militias in Ukraine,
some
of
whom take their symbols and ideology from the 1930-1940s
,
have
operated with relative impunity and perpetuated human rights abuses upon the people of the Donbass region. These groups were
part of the Maidan movement, visited by Western politicians and praised by liberals, that violently overthrew elected
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Some of the leaders of this movement included far right elements who had no qualms
being amidst white power logos and neo-nazi flags, or had in the past claimed that a
"Moscow-Jewish
mafia"
controls
Ukraine.
Neither
Western nor Israeli politicians seemed too interested in such developments, despite Israeli newspaper
Haaretz
reporting
that weapons sent by Israel to Ukraine were ending up in the hands of far right militias, such as the Azov battalion.
Paradoxically, copious effort and resources were allocated to make people believe that the UK Labour Party, led by left wing
leader Jeremy Corbyn, had a serious problem with anti-Semitism.
As soon as a party leader
like Jeremy Corbyn began to offer something outside the narrowly defined political bandwidth and stood up for the rights of
Palestinians, he was demonized by politicians as well as their media allies and big business handlers. A study conducted by
the London School of Economics and Political Science examined UK newspaper coverage of Corbyn in the months following his
election as Labour Party leader and found evidence of media
bias
such
that
"Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became
a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate."
It is welcome that recent
events in the US have highlighted racism faced by African Americans. Yet frequent murders of African Americans by a
militarized police force did not suddenly appear when Trump came to power. Many Democratic Party politicians who nowadays make
sure everyone knows they unquestioningly support the Black Lives Matter movement had few issues with the status quo before the
killing of George Floyd, and will probably regain their apathy if Biden wins the election.
Furthermore, little is
said about the role the Obama administration played only a few years ago in the destruction of Libya, formerly one of Africa's
richest and most stable nations, and its relinquishment to warlords and Al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Some of these groups were
quick to imprison and murder
citizens
from
sub-Saharan Africa who had migrated to Libya in search of a better life.
Slave
markets
selling sub-Saharan Africans now exist in the new post-Gaddafi Libya.
The UK Conservative Party, traditionally not fans of refugees or migrants, were responsible for the
Windrush
scandal
which saw Caribbean immigrants who had arrived in the UK decades earlier being threatened with deportation despite
having lived, worked, and paid taxes in this country for many years. The same party is now thinking of allowing nearly three
million Hong Kong citizens the opportunity to reside in the UK and later apply for
citizenship
.
When it comes to sticking two fingers up to China, we hear no talk about how the NHS and welfare system cannot afford to
absorb refugees and migrants.
These days many people,
especially celebrities, politicians and media figures, are falling over themselves to condemn racism and make sure everyone is
aware of their anti-racist credentials. The only remaining forms of racism deemed acceptable in the West include Russophobia
and Sinophobia. The media devotes endless hours hyping up the threat from Russia and China and in doing so surreptitiously
promotes animosity toward these nations and their peoples. The shadowy hand of the Russian government is deemed to be behind
every calamity or undesired election result. We are frequently reminded that a vague and poorly defined threat from Russia and
China looms large, though hard evidence is often sketchy, open to interpretation or questionable. At the same time NATO troops
encroach upon Russia's borders, yet the latter is deemed the aggressor, whilst the US sails warships through contested seas
near China's
borders
.
Whereas the UK seeks to provoke Russia for no logical reason, the US is determined to pick a fight with China and claims it
"chose
not to"
stop coronavirus from spreading beyond its borders.
The waning US empire and
its allies within the disintegrating EU prefer to attack their rivals Russia and China to deflect their own populations'
attention away from domestic problems with some good old-fashioned xenophobia. The UK, in particular, would do well to try and
improve its relationships with Russia and China as it is on track to have a lonely time post Brexit.
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.
American main stream media is not informing and reporting but is actually Goebbels-like
propaganda for the Democrats. Fox is only retaliating with opposing views. Imagine Walter
Cronkite being advocate for one party – that would be scandalous. However the present
insects on CNN, MSNBC, NYT or WP and other dishonest outlets have no guts to stand up against
their owners disloyalty to this country.
Insightful overview. Giraldi explores the most important topic in American life. And one
of the most neglected: MSM distortions, omissions, sanctimony, propaganda, deception and
gaslighting. Stomach-turning drek –all of it.
Americans are in a half-Zombie state because of what they see on TV, and cannot discuss on
social media.
Hollywood, elite media, and Big Tech are the gatekeepers [ of the neoliberal power].
The shysters at WPO and NYT think that once they have misdirected the voters for their
goal into voting for Joe Biden, it can pick up things where they left off and fix it without
any problems but what they don't realize is that the train has left the station and now it's
barreling down the dark abyss from where there is no return to safety.
It took balls for Carlson to have Anya Parampil on his show last night. He has had her on
before, so he knows what she is like she tells it like it is. He will get shit for that.
I don't think he agrees with everything she said but agrees with some of it.
@Tommy Thompson he military is responsible for or how Israel is treated, how corporations
are handed free billions upon billions, etc, and its largely business as usual. All the noise
about Trump the disruptor is just that, noise. He hasn't disrupted anything of note.
As long as the two political parties exist, voting is for people who want to believe a
lie. Deep down they know, absolutely know, that the system is rigged but they can't let
themselves fully believe that because that would mean there is no hope. They would realize
that they live in a sophisticated soft military dictatorship that has stolen $21 Trillion
dollars and is the actual gov't of the country. That realization is unpalatable and
hence rejected.
However the present insects on CNN, MSNBC, NYT or WP and other dishonest outlets have no
guts to stand up against their owners disloyalty to this country.
It's not a simple as that. All the media people know that it's a rotten system, but if
they step out of line – they lose their jobs – and make themselves unemployable
anywhere else.
IMO it's not a question of standing up – which is pointless – but using
organized subversion. After all, this is what Jewry have been doing for decades in targeting
Anglo run organizations and it works. It's your friend and collaborator who is really your
enemy.
Thanks Phil for pointing out these prime examples of Media being MIA. But the question
remains, is there anything, new to the media's role in reporting, misreporting or
non-reporting the serious news stories of the day.
The MSM (Main Stream Media) and even a good part of the Alternative Media has been AWOL as
a protector of the rights of the public really for decades. The problem lies with our self
created media system. We have Freedom of the Press only for those that can afford to
buy their own press, print or electronic. The MSM has been accurately shown to be controlled
by a few consolidated Zio- owned Media conglomerates. Thus their has never been any serious
reporting on Israel – Palestine conflict, as it is not allowed and most critical
thinkers have to seek real news tidbits from the biased but less censored Israeli press.
Israel has govt censors, but we have Owner self-censorship which now extends to many other of
domestic and international politics.
The American public is now reaping what it has sowed. It's near total apathy and misplaced
faith in a very outdated electoral system which has slowly winded down its usefulness to the
American public in raising real leaders and statesmen who are willing to defend our Bill of
Rights and national independence is the real culprit.
The dumbed down and distracted public mind set in America is leading the country down a
deep chasm where it looks increasingly impossible to climb out of. Surely this is all leading
to a slow societal self-destruction.
As pointed out by Phil, the MSM failure to call a spade a spade on most key issues
from the Bombing of Beirut to the Portland civil insurrection, are just recent examples of a
press whose job has become more psy-ops and naked propaganda than providing any informed and
objective news reporting and defense of the general public from the political malevolent
forces taking over our country and world.
I think you finally hit it on the head. For 4 years the only agenda has been "get Trump".
Or I should say the only day the MSM LOVED Trump in unison was the day he illegally bombed
Syria over the fake chemical weapons attack on April 5th, 2017. That day every editorial page
in the country said silly things like he's "Presidential" and " a real leader". As if they
take their marching orders from the same Soros News Agency, approved copy for the unwashed
masses. See the problem? That's the day I said "Whoa, we really got a problem". The problem
was the MSM finally thought they got some control over Trump, or should I say the CIA finally
thought it got some control over Trump. Because that's what it really is: Our true masters,
not some silly guy who thinks the "President" is actually a president, and not the " General
Asset Manager, US division" for the NWO.
" the American public has largely figured things out "
A poll about a week ago found that the average American thinks 9% of the population has
died from Covid. (= about 30 million people) A few weeks ago a poll found that (by a narrow
margin) Americans think Trump suffers from cognitive impairment to a greater degree than
Biden. These are not exactly arcane issues, and the degree of ignorance is astonishing.
Brainwashing has succeeded. This is why 'la asserts that the "demonstrators" are mothers and
veterans; and that Biden will cure Covid; she believes that, with the assistance of the
media, she can sell these.
An interesting point about 2020 NYC starting to resemble the 70s. I've talked to several
people who actually say they miss it compared to the "cleaner, safer" NYC since then. All I
remember is garbage, crime, and "malaise."
He [Bezos] and people like him are more concerned with maintaining the Dollar as reserve
currency in order to facilitate the continued sell-out of Americans for cheap foreign
manufactured goods, technology sells to China, and their own personal enrichment.
In both cases, the "beef" with Trump is that he's rocking the boat -- both in terms of his
criticism of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama wars for Israel and the Petrodollar, and in terms of
the America First noises he's made. While he's proven to be a fairly reliable Zionist stooge
(although he hasn't started any new wars in the Mideast, and been more of a placeholder), he's
edging a little too close to America First (with his domestic rhetoric and some of his
policies) for comfort.
"... To understand the risk that Julian Assange represented to CIA interests, it is important to understand just how extensive the operations of the CIA were in 2016. It is within this network of foreign and domestic operations where FBI Agent Peter Strzok is clearly working as a bridge between the CIA and FBI operations. ..."
"... By now people are familiar with the construct of CIA operations involving Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor now generally admitted/identified as a western intelligence operative who was tasked by the CIA (John Brennan) to run an operation against Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos in both Italy (Rome) and London. { Go Deep } ..."
"... In a similar fashion the CIA tasked U.S. intelligence asset Stefan Halper to target another Trump campaign official, Carter Page. Under the auspices of being a Cambridge Professor Stefan Halper also targeted General Michael Flynn. Additionally, using assistance from a female FBI agent under the false name Azra Turk, Halper also targeted Papadopoulos . ..."
"... The initial operations to target Flynn, Papadopoulos and Page were all based overseas. This seemingly makes the CIA exploitation of the assets and the targets much easier. ..."
"... In short, Peter Strzok appears to be the very eager, profoundly overzealous James Bond wannabe, who acted as a bridge between the CIA and the FBI. The perfect type of FBI career agent for CIA Director John Brennan to utilize. ..."
"... It was also Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson who was domestically tasked with a Russian lobbyist named Natalia Veselnitskya. A little reported Russian Deputy Attorney General named Saak Albertovich Karapetyan was working double-agents for the CIA and Kremlin. Karapetyan was directing the foreign operations of Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Glenn Simpson was organizing her inside the U.S. ..."
"... All of this context outlines the extent to which the CIA was openly involved in constructing a political operation that settled upon anyone in candidate Donald Trump's orbit. ..."
"... Additionally, Christopher Steele was a British intelligence officer, hired by Fusion-GPS to assemble and launder fraudulent intelligence information within his dossier. And we cannot forget Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, who was recruited by Asst. FBI Director Andrew McCabe to participate in running an operation against the Trump campaign and create the impression of Russian involvement. Deripaska refused to participate . ..."
"... The key point of all that background is to see how committed the CIA and FBI were to the constructed narrative of Russia interfering with the 2016 election. The CIA, FBI, and by extension the DOJ, put a hell of a lot of work into it. Intelligence community work that Durham is now unraveling. ..."
"... Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill. "Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the WikiLeaks exposure of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails during last year's presidential election," Rohrabacher said, "Julian emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails." ..."
"... Knowing how much effort the CIA and FBI put into the Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative, it would make sense for the FBI to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange; and why the FBI would quickly gather specific evidence (related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) for a grand jury by December 2017. ..."
"... The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange on-the-record statements. ..."
"... The predicate for Robert Mueller's investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the intelligence community assessment; and the only factual evidence claimed within the ICA is that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor. ..."
"... The CIA holds a massive conflict of self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim. The FBI holds a massive interest in maintaining that claim. All of those foreign countries whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also have a vested self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference narrative. ..."
"... This Russian "hacking" claim is ultimately so important to the CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K intelligence apparatus ..."
According to reports in November of 2019, U.S Attorney John Durham and U.S. Attorney General
Bill Barr were spending time on a narrowed focus looking carefully at CIA activity in the 2016
presidential election. One recent quote from a
media-voice increasingly sympathetic to a political deep-state notes:
"One British official with knowledge of Barr's wish list presented to London commented
that "it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite
robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services"". (
Link )
It is interesting that quote came from a British intelligence official, as there appears to
be evidence of an extensive CIA operation that likely involved U.K. intelligence services. In
addition, and as a direct outcome, there is an aspect to the CIA operation that overlaps with
both a U.S. and U.K. need to keep Wikileaks founder Julian Assange under tight control. In this
outline we will explain where corrupt U.S. and U.K. interests merge.
To understand the risk that Julian Assange represented to CIA interests, it is important to
understand just how extensive the operations of the CIA were in 2016. It is within this network
of foreign and domestic operations where FBI Agent Peter Strzok is clearly working as a bridge
between the CIA and FBI operations.
By now people are familiar with the construct of
CIA operations involving Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor now generally
admitted/identified as a western intelligence operative who was tasked by the CIA (John
Brennan) to run an operation against Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos in both Italy
(Rome) and London. {
Go Deep }
In a similar fashion the CIA tasked
U.S. intelligence asset Stefan Halper to target another Trump campaign official, Carter
Page. Under the auspices of being a Cambridge Professor Stefan Halper also targeted General
Michael Flynn. Additionally, using assistance from a female FBI agent under the false name Azra
Turk, Halper also targeted Papadopoulos
.
The initial operations to target Flynn, Papadopoulos and Page were all based overseas. This
seemingly makes the CIA exploitation of the assets and the targets much easier.
One of the more interesting aspects to the Durham probe is a possibility of a paper-trail
created as a result of the tasking operations. We should watch closely for more evidence of a
paper trail as some congressional reps have hinted toward documented evidence (transcripts,
recordings, reports) that are exculpatory to the targets (Page & Papadop). HPSCI Ranking
Member Devin Nunes has strongly hinted that
very specific exculpatory evidence was known to the FBI and yet withheld from the FISA
application used against Carter Page that also mentions George Papadopoulos. I digress
However, there is an aspect to the domestic U.S. operation that also bears the fingerprints
of the CIA; only this time due to the restrictive laws on targets inside the U.S. the CIA
aspect is less prominent. This is where FBI Agent Peter Strzok working for both agencies starts
to become important.
Remember, it's clear in the text messages Strzok has a working relationship with what he
called their "sister agency", the CIA. Additionally, Brennan
has admitted Strzok helped write the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)
which outlines the Russia narrative; and it is almost guaranteed the July 31st, 2016,
"Electronic Communication" from the CIA to the FBI that originated FBI operation "Crossfire
Hurricane" was co-authored from the CIA by Strzok . and Strzok immediately used that EC to
travel to London to debrief intelligence officials around Australian Ambassador to the U.K.
Alexander Downer.
In short, Peter Strzok appears to be the very eager, profoundly overzealous James Bond
wannabe, who acted as a bridge between the CIA and the FBI. The perfect type of FBI career
agent for CIA Director John Brennan to utilize.
Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson hired CIA Open Source analyst Nellie Ohr toward the
end of 2015 ; at appropriately the same time as "
FBI Contractors " were identified exploiting the NSA database and extracting information on
a specific set of U.S. persons.
It was also Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson who was domestically tasked with a Russian
lobbyist named Natalia Veselnitskya. A little reported Russian Deputy Attorney General named
Saak Albertovich Karapetyan was working double-agents for the CIA and Kremlin. Karapetyan was
directing the foreign operations of Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Glenn Simpson was organizing
her inside the U.S.
Glenn Simpson managed Veselnitskaya through the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump
Jr. However, once the CIA/Fusion-GPS operation using Veselnitskaya started to unravel with
public reporting back in Russia Deputy AG Karapetyan
fell out of a helicopter to his death (just before it crashed).
Simultaneously timed in late 2015 through mid 2016, there was a domestic FBI operation using
a young Russian named Maria Butina
tasked to run up against republican presidential candidates . According to Patrick Byrne,
Butina's handler, it was FBI agent Peter Strzok who was giving Byrne the instructions on where
to send her. {
Go Deep }
All of this context outlines the extent to which the CIA was openly involved in constructing
a political operation that settled upon anyone in candidate Donald Trump's orbit.
International operations directed by the CIA, and domestic operations seemingly directed by
Peter Strzok operating with a foot in both agencies. [ Strzok gets CIA service
coin ]
Recap :
Mifsud tasked against Papadopoulos (CIA).
Halper tasked against
Flynn (CIA), Page (CIA), and Papadopoulos (CIA).
Azra Turk , pretending to be Halper
asst, tasked against Papadopoulos (FBI).
Veselnitskaya tasked against Donald Trump Jr
(CIA, Fusion-GPS).
Butina tasked against Trump, and Donald Trump Jr (FBI).
Additionally, Christopher Steele was a British intelligence officer, hired by Fusion-GPS to
assemble and launder fraudulent intelligence information within his dossier. And we cannot
forget Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, who was
recruited by Asst. FBI Director Andrew McCabe to participate in running an operation
against the Trump campaign and create the impression of Russian involvement. Deripaska
refused to participate .
All of this engagement directly controlled by U.S. intelligence; and all of this intended to
give a specific Russia impression. This predicate is presumably what John Durham is currently
reviewing.
The key point of all that background is to see how committed the CIA and FBI were to the
constructed narrative of Russia interfering with the 2016 election. The CIA, FBI, and by
extension the DOJ, put a hell of a lot of work into it. Intelligence community work that Durham
is now unraveling.
We also know specifically that John Durham is looking at the construct of the Intelligence
Community Assessment (ICA); and
talking to CIA analysts who participated in the construct of the January 2017 report that
bolstered the false appearance of Russian interference in the 2016 election. This is important
because it ties in to the next part that involves Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
On April 11th, 2019, the Julian Assange
indictment was unsealed in the EDVA. From the indictment we discover it was under seal
since March 6th, 2018 : (Link to pdf)
On Tuesday April 15th more
investigative material was released . Again, note the dates: Grand Jury, * December of 2017
* This means FBI investigation prior to .
The FBI investigation took place prior to December 2017, it was coordinated through the
Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) where Dana Boente was U.S. Attorney at the time. The grand
jury indictment was sealed from March of 2018 until after Mueller completed his investigation,
April 2019 .
Why the delay?
What was the DOJ waiting for?
Here's where it gets interesting .
The FBI submission to the Grand Jury in December of 2017 was four months after congressman
Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in August of 2017: "Assange told a U.S. congressman
he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents did not come from Russia."
(
August 2017, The Hill Via John Solomon ) Julian Assange told a U.S. congressman on
Tuesday he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents he published during last year's
election did not come from Russia and promised additional helpful information about the leaks
in the near future.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is friendly to Russia and chairs an
important House subcommittee on Eurasia policy, became the first American congressman to meet
with Assange during a three-hour private gathering at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where
the WikiLeaks founder has been holed up for years.
Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill. "Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the WikiLeaks exposure
of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails during last year's presidential election,"
Rohrabacher said, "Julian emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the
hacking or disclosure of those emails."
Pressed for more detail on the source of the documents, Rohrabacher said he had
information to share privately with President Trump. (
read more )
Knowing how much effort the CIA and FBI put into the Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative,
it would make sense for the FBI to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between
Rohrabacher and Assange; and why the FBI would quickly gather specific evidence (related to
Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) for a grand jury by December 2017.
Within three months of the grand jury the DOJ generated an indictment and sealed it in March
2018. The EDVA sat on the indictment while the Mueller probe was ongoing.
As soon as the Mueller probe ended, on April 11th, 2019, a planned and coordinated effort
between the U.K. and U.S. was executed; Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from
the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed (
link ).
As a person who has researched this three year fiasco; including the ridiculously false 2016
Russian hacking/interference narrative: "17 intelligence agencies", Joint Analysis Report
(JAR) needed for Obama's anti-Russia narrative in December '16; and then a month later the
ridiculously political Intelligence Community
Assessment (ICA) in January '17; this timing against Assange is too coincidental.
It doesn't take a deep researcher to see the aligned Deep State motive to control Julian
Assange because the Mueller report was dependent on Russia cybercrimes, and that narrative is
contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes.
This is critical. The Weissmann/Mueller
report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the
Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This claim is directly disputed by
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian
Assange on-the-record statements.
The predicate for Robert Mueller's investigation was specifically due to Russian
interference in the 2016 election. The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the
intelligence community assessment; and the only factual evidence claimed within the ICA is that
Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer
analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor.
The CIA holds a massive conflict of self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim.
The FBI holds a massive interest in maintaining that claim. All of those foreign countries
whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also have a vested
self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference narrative.
Julian Assange is the only person with direct knowledge of how Wikileaks gained custody of
the DNC emails; and Assange has claimed he has evidence it was not from a hack.
This Russian "hacking" claim is ultimately so important to the CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K
intelligence apparatus . Well, right there is the obvious motive to shut Assange down as soon
intelligence officials knew the Mueller report was going to be public.
Now, if we know this, and you know this; and everything is cited and factual well, then
certainly AG Bill Barr knows this.
The $64,000 dollar question is: will they say so publicly?
Non-Corporate Entity , 7 minutes ago
Former NSA chief Bill Binney has forensic evidence that it was a download not a hack!!!
Hello?!?!
exige42 , 22 seconds ago
I believe this all holds true. My only hesitation is why Assange hasn't retaliated. He
was holed up in an Embassy for how many years because of these bastards? He had to have
known they were going to make a move on him sooner or later. Where is his dead plan? I hate
how these corrupt evil bastards have gotten their way forever. There has got to be a turn
on these SOBs. Where is the fight from these people who they are destroying
ffs???!!!
play_arrow
Dolar in a vortex , 1 minute ago
Jabba Barr and Bulldog Durham are a complete joke until they prove otherwise with
significant indictments. And no, Steve Bannon doesn't count.
In January 2017, former State Department official Jonathan Winer destroyed several years
worth of reports from former UK spy Christopher Steele , at Steele's request, according to the
Daily Caller , citing a report released Tuesday.
Winer, a former legislative assistant to former Sen. John Kerry who became the State
Department's Special Envoy for Libya when Kerry was Secretary of State - was Steele's contact
at the State Department, and received the now-debunked reports claiming that President Trump
had been compromised by the Russians.
According to the
Senate report , Winer disclosed that he destroyed reports that Steele had sent him over
the years. The Senate report also says that Winer failed to reveal when asked in his first
interview with the committee that he had arranged the meeting for Steele at the State
Department months earlier. -
Daily Caller
"After Steele's memos were published in the press in January 2017, Steele asked Winer to
make note of having them, then either destroy all the earlier reports Steele had sent the
Department of State or return them to Steele , out of concern that someone would be able to
reconstruct his source network," reads the Senate report, which quote sWiner as saying " So I
destroyed them, and I basically destroyed all the correspondence I had with him. "
In total, Winer had received over 100 intelligence reports from Steel between 2014 and
2016.
Emails that The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained
through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show that Winer shared Steele's reports with a
small group of State Department officials. The Senate report says that the State Department
was able to provide the committee with Steele's reports from 2015 and 2016, though most from
2014 are missing. -
Daily Caller
In March, Steele told a UK court that he had "wiped" all of his dossier-linked
correspondence in December, 2016 and January, 2017, and had no records of communications with
his primary dossier source, Igor Danchenko.
In addition to receiving reports from Steele, Winer gave Steele various anti-Trump memos
from Clinton operative Sidney Blumenthal , which originated with Clinton "hatchet man" Cody
Shearer. Winer claims he didn't think Steele would share the Clinton-sourced information with
anyone else in the government.
"But I learned later that Steele did share them -- with the FBI, after the FBI asked him to
provide everything he had on allegations relating to Trump, his campaign and Russian
interference in U.S. elections," Winer wrote in a
2018 Op-Ed .
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Steele was paid $168,000 by opposition research firm Fusion GPS to produce his anti-Trump
dossier, which was funded in part by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, who used law firm Perkins
Coie as an intermediary.
Very telling that ZH editors don't consider this newsworthy: key findings of the
Republican led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding Russia's 2016 election
interference.
Manafort and Kilimnik talked almost daily during the campaign. They communicated through
encrypted technologies set to automatically erase their correspondence; they spoke using code
words and shared access to an email account. It's worth pausing on these facts: The chairman
of the Trump campaign was in daily contact with a Russian agent, constantly sharing
confidential information with him.
It did not find evidence that the Ukrainian government meddled in the 2016 election, as
Trump alleged. "The Committee's efforts focused on investigating Russian interference in
the 2016 election. However, during the course of the investigation, the Committee
identified no reliable evidence that the Ukrainian government interfered in the 2016 U.S.
election."
"Taken as a whole, Manafort's high-level access and willingness to share information with
individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly
[Konstantin] Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave
counterintelligence threat," the report said.
Kilimnik "almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that
Ukraine had interfered in the U.S. election."
Roger Stone was in communications with both WikiLeaks and the Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0
during the election; according to the Mueller report, Guccifer 2.0 was a conduit set up by
Russian military intelligence to anonymously funnel stolen information to WikiLeaks.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation found "significant evidence to suggest
that, in the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks was knowingly collaborating with Russian government
officials," the report said.
The FBI gave "unjustified credence" to the so-called Steele dossier, an explosive
collections of uncorroborated memos alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian
government officials, the report said. The FBI did not take the "necessary steps to validate
assumptions about Steele's credibility" before relying on the dossier to seek renewals of a
surveillance warrant targeting the former Trump campaign aide, the report said.
Demeter55 , 47 minutes ago
It's the latest in 5 years of "Get Trump!", a sitcom featuring the Roadrunner (Trump) and
the Wiley Coyote (Deep State/Never Trumpers / etc, etc.)
This classic scenario never fails to please those who realize that the roadrunner rules,
and the coyote invariably ends up destroyed.
rpi staff
wednesday august 19, 2020
RPI Director Daniel McAdams was interviewed on RT about the release of the fifth and final
volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the "Russiagate" claims that
President Trump colluded with the Russians to get elected or at least had election help from
Russian President Vladimir Putin. As McAdams points out in the interview, this is yet another
"nothingburger" even as the die-hard Russiagaters poke and prod looking for any sign of life.
McAdams makes the point that a Russian influence operation to "undermine America's faith in
democracy" would be ultra high-risk and what would be the rewards? How would Russia benefit?
Watch the interview here:
CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post are now following the same script
with the Trump panics. The pattern is consistent. Day one involves spectacular claims of
corruption. By day two, placard-bearing protesters are hitting the streets ("
You can't fire the truth !" a protester in Times Square proclaimed in the Sessions affair),
celebrities are taping video
appeals , and experts are quoted suggesting Trump is already guilty of crime:
OPEN TREASON in Helsinki, "
bribery " in Ukraine, or in this case, election interference (some are already speculating
that Trump
could get a year for the mail slowdown).
Almost always, by day three or four, key claims are walked back: maybe there was no direct "
promise " to a foreign leader, or the CIA doesn't have "
direct evidence " of Russian bounties, or viral photos of children in cages at the border
were
from 2014 , not 2017. By then it doesn't matter. A panic is a panic, and there are only two
reportable angles in today's America, total guilt and total innocence. Even when the balance of
the information would still look bad or very bad for Trump, news outlets commit to leaving out
important background, so as not to complicate the audience response.
That's the situation with this story, where the postal slowdown is probably more serious
than other Trump scandals, but people pushing it are also not anxious to remind readers of
their own histories on the issue.
Take the New York Times, currently cranking out about a feature an hour about the U.S.P.S.
Paul Krugman is now
telling us "The Postal Service facilitates citizen inclusion. That's why Trump hates it."
Apparently, until recently, all decent Americans had bottomless affection for the communal
spirit of the Postal Service and supported it without hesitation. Yet in April, 2012, in the
middle of the Obama presidency, the Times ran a very different
house editorial .
The paper argued mounting losses necessitated swift action to reduce costs. The Times
worried that "lawmakers in both houses" would "procrastinate as usual," and blasted the Senate
for devising a bill that "timorously aims at part-time 'downsizing,' not closing, lightly used
post offices." The paper added that decreased revenue thanks to email could mean losses of
"more than $20 billion a year by 2016," and hoped that, so long as "courage trumps
procrastination," the U.S.P.S. could be granted the "flexibility of a modern business."
If you look back, you'll find the overwhelming consensus in both the Bush and Obama years
was that a fully-staffed post office was a money pit, and "
flexibility " was needed to allow the service to budget-slash its way back to relevance in
the Internet age.
For a significant period – between the mid-2000s and the Trump years – it was
hard to find a big-name politician who would talk about the post office at all. An exception
was Bernie Sanders, whose office labored to get major news media organizations interested (
I got some of those calls ) in an alternative narrative about the post office.
But when an analysis by the Office of Personnel Management was released in November, 2002,
it turned out the U.S.P.S. had a "more positive picture" than was believed. The U.S.P.S. was
massively over- paying into its retirement fund, headed for a $70 billion surplus. Then in 2003
the
Postal Pension Funding Reform Act was passed, which among other things forced the U.S.P.S.
to pay the pension obligations of employees who had prior military service.
A few years after that, in 2006, the "
Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act " passed with overwhelming support in both
houses, forcing a series of incredible changes, the biggest being a requirement that the
U.S.P.S. fully fund 75 years worth of benefits for its employees. The provision cost $5.5
billion per year and was unique among government agencies. "No one prefunds at more than 30%,"
said Anthony Vegliante, the service's executive vice president, at the time.
The bill also prevented the post office from offering "nonpostal services" as a way to
compete financially. This barred it from establishing a postal banking service, but also nixed
creative ideas like Internet cafes, copy services, notaries, even allowing postal workers to
offer to wrap Christmas presents. Coupled with the pre-funding benefit mandate and other
pension changes, this paralyzed the post office financially, making it look ripe for
reform.
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By 2012, those took the form of calls for the U.S.P.S. to eliminate 3,700 post offices (a
first step toward eventually closing as many as 15,000) and 250 mail processing centers.
Sanders, along with other Senators with large rural constituencies like Jon Tester and Claire
McCaskill, managed to change the bill and save a lot of the mail processing centers. The Senate
that year also cut the amount of required pre-funding for benefits and
began refunding the U.S.P.S. for about $11 billion in overpayment for retirement costs.
A few years after that, in 2015, the Post Office Inspector General issued a
blistering report about CBRE , the company that had served as sole real estate broker to
the U.S.P.S. from 2011 on. The report found that CBRE had been selling and/or leasing post
office properties at below-market prices, often to clients of CBRE – a company
chaired by Richard Blum , the husband of California Senator Dianne Feinstein. This chronic
problem had a financial impact on the Postal Service, and would have become a much bigger
problem had the U.S.P.S. been forced earlier on to sell off a massive quantity of
infrastructure through that broker, as originally hoped.
The thread running through all of these stories was that panic over the financial condition
of the U.S.P.S. was often a significantly artificial narrative, caused by a bipartisan mix of
stupidity, greed, and corruption. This high-functioning civil service organization, which
provided tremendous value to the public through everything from
subsidized news deliveries in the Pony Express years to the well-maintained public meeting
places built in remote rural locations, has not had real backers in either party for most of
the last thirty or forty years.
None of this means the Trump-DeJoy story isn't serious. It just means that Trump is not the
first person to try to gut the U.S. Postal Service. Going back decades, it's been stuck with
impossible funding mandates, used as a piggy bank by both parties in congress (which refused to
let it stop making massive retirement overpayments for fear of the "
adverse" impact on the federal budget), artificially prevented from expanding or innovating
by lobbyists, and ripped off by connected contractors.
Combine that with the maddening sloppiness of these panic stories – one wild report
after another of mailboxes ripped from the streets "
right before our eyes " in a "plan to steal the election" turns out later to be another old
photo or a shot of a
routine maintenance operation – and it becomes increasingly difficult for nonpartisan
news audiences to know what they're dealing with.
Is this unprecedented corruption, something a little worse than normal, or just the usual
undisguised? If press outlets never dial back excesses, we may miss it when we're actually
supposed to panic.
All Comments 76
2banana , 3 hours ago
Conspiracy after Conspiracy...
You would think after a while, it would get old. And, it does.
Here is real life.
America had an in person voting process that worked and got results in a few hours.
Democrats want to change that to an untested fraud ridden system that may get results in
a few weeks.
And that ain't a conspiracy - that is fact.
Hal n back , 2 hours ago
not only did it work, it emphasized the importance of getting out and voting.
As I walk into my voting place, I say hello to neighbors working there , flip out my
drivers license and sign the proper form. If my signature does not look the same (which
happens after a period of time) the folks behind the table ask me to sign again even if
they know me because its protocol and it is important to get it right. And then I get my
ballot and fill it in and I get to place it in the electronic machine inside a card so my
neighbors do not know which way I am voting.
Which they already know since the neighborhood while aging, is vibrant and has constant
debates on politics especially now as we gather on driveways socially distanced shooting
the bull over the whole thing.
we will not know how many ballots will be filled in by somebody other than the right
person.
why not just save money and give proxies to the Democrats.
slightlyskeptical , 2 hours ago
Electronic machines is the first step in bungled elections.
Four chan , 21 minutes ago
we all know the dems plan to fucckup the election using mail in
votes, what are these democrat gollum going to try next covid 20?
Unknown User , 2 hours ago
There is so much to steal and privatize in America, a Neoliberal paradise.
stacking12321 , 54 minutes ago
"America had an in person voting process that worked"
oh, it worked, did it?
is that why there's endless wars, a ballooning out of control deficit, a pay for play
political system, unconstitutional laws passed constantly, a system of wealth extraction
where the little wealth that people have is squeezed out of the, and given to the
elites?
face the facts, the American political system is an abject failure, the very concept of
government is an abject failure. A violent gang of thugs being enabled to take power over
everyone should be recognized as a crime - all government is a crime against the people it
claims to rule over.
Things will continue getting worse, not better, thanks to your "working" system of
government.
government is not here to help, they are servants of your enemy, the elites.
Tenshin Headache , 3 hours ago
Easy rule of thumb: If you learned it from the fake news, it's fake news.
seryanhoj , 1 hour ago
The basic thing about government and media today is, truth and facts have nothing to do
with their job.
Words are there to mould people's minds to their purpose so they don't make a nuisance
of themselves by having diverse opinions Facts are never allowed to get in the way. What
about when Bush 2 and Blair outright fabricated evidence of Baghdad .WMD...the dodgy
dossier? Oh says they, I saw intelligence reports . Yes .intelligence reports they
pressured them to write. Result. A million dead and Iraq in chaos.
And what happened to Bush 2. Re elected! At that point it was over.
The official Twitter
accounts for RT, Xinhua, and other media outlets owned by certain governments the US doesn't like are being pushed into the
shadows, confirming that Twitter is getting serious about its role as one of the chief enforcers of US informational
supremacy. But deploying the memory-hole against Washington's rivals is tacitly admitting that the same informational
supremacy would be doomed without such heavy-handed censorship.
Not only will Twitter refuse to auto-complete searches for the official accounts of RT, Sputnik, Xinhua, Global Times, and a
handful of other outlets owned by Russia and China – typing in their handles with the @ symbol yields no results for users who
don't already follow these accounts. The platform has essentially made it impossible for the average Twitter user to
accidentally stumble across their posts.
Turning off the "
hide
sensitive content
" function in search settings allows state media accounts to surface under "
people
"
– if their handle is searched exactly, with the @ symbol – tagged with the "
state-affiliated
media
" warning Twitter has casually referred to as an "
election label
." But
posts from these outlets remain missing everywhere but in their own feeds. Running the accounts through Shadowban.eu confirms
they're subject to a "
search suggestion ban.
"
While Twitter announced
earlier this month that it would remove state-run media accounts from any 'recommended' screens, including the home screen,
notifications, and search, the new policy's wording left room for interpretation. Even employees at some of these
organizations thought – perhaps naively – that Twitter wouldn't go so far as to block searches for RT from turning up, well,
RT.
"... How fitting therefore that this time around the discord and distrust on display is patently US-style homegrown – without an iota of Russian input. Recent US intelligence claims of Russian interference seem more threadbare than usual. ..."
"... It is what it always has been: a crisis in legitimacy of American democracy owing to a fractured, self-alienated nation encumbered by endemic social problems. ..."
"... US-style internal discord has become even more magnified and glaring to the point where invoking "foreign malign influence" just looks absurd in its irrelevance. ..."
It's the most important election ever, according to Republicans and Democrats alike. With such vital billing it is all the more
ominous that even before ballots are cast the very legitimacy of the presidential result is in doubt.
This week, a sprawling US
Senate intelligence report again casts aspersions on the Trump election in 2016, alleging
"extensive
sabotage"
by the Kremlin to get him elected. The
report
seems
more a redux of previous unsubstantiated claims of Russian meddling, which Moscow has always categorically rejected as false.
Then there are looming doubts
stemming from the mechanics of mail-in or absentee voting which is set to take an outsized role in the election amid social
distancing over coronavirus public health fears. Like the concerns about the disease itself there is sharp partisan divide over
the merits of mail-in voting. For some it is a necessary precaution, for others it is a ruse built upon an exaggerated health
scare.
On top of that division you
have the extreme partisan stakes being piled up.
Republican President Donald
Trump says if
"radical left"
rival Joe Biden and running mate Kamala Harris win in
November then the US will be plunged into Venezuela-like
"socialist"
disaster (as if
Washington's regime-change machinations have had nothing to do with the latter).
For the Democrats, four more
years of Trump will be akin to living under a dictatorship.
One could say it's all
electioneering hyperbole. But still the divisive passions are running like a fever. There is a lot at stake for the participants
in this election from the torrid way they have depicted the choice. The partisan discord could hardly be more acrimonious from
the extremely polarized way each side views the other.
Throw into the political
maelstrom accusations and counter-accusations of
"cheating"
over the election and then
we have a cauldron of contention which ruptures the public trust in voting. The very legitimacy of US democracy is being split
asunder.
Trump has set the pace for
undermining the presidential election by saying it could be the most rigged ever in history. He has repeatedly claimed that
mail-in voting is rife with fraud and has suggested that the Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic and absentee voting as
a cover for stealing the White House.
Several studies have
shown
that
fraud from mail-in voting in the US is negligible. Many other countries seem to manage a system of absentee voting without much
concern for voter misconduct. Nevertheless, Trump has succeeded in planting the notion among his supporters that mail-in voting
is the death knell for democracy. He has already hinted that he may not accept the result in November if it goes against him. For
millions of diehard Trump supporters that is tantamount to a call to arms in an echo of the anti-lockdown rebellion that the
president advocated earlier this year.
For Democrats and
anti-Trumpers, they see this president as deliberately sabotaging the US Postal Service from his
appointment
of
a political donor as postmaster general in May. The subsequent cost-cutting and cutbacks in services under Louis DeJoy has put in
doubt the adequate delivery of voting ballots in time for the election for many states. Trump has even brazenly
admitted
that
he held back emergency funding for the postal service in order to curb mail-in voting.
So if Trump manages to pull off victory despite failing poll numbers, millions of voters will view his re-election as the product
of his rhetorical maneuvers and maligning of mail-in voting. In the 2016 election, nearly a
quarter
of
all ballots were cast by absentee voting. This time around, it is
estimated
that
nearly half of 200 million registered voters in the US will use the mail-in system due to health concerns of going to polling
stations in person at a time of pandemic risk.
There you have it. Whatever
way this election turns out, there will be a gulf of divisiveness and doubt among US citizens about the legitimacy of the next
administration. The bitter partisan wrangling that has gone on – seemingly interminably – for the past four years is set to
continue with even more corrosive consequences for American democracy.
"Sowing discord and distrust"
has been a stock phrase used in US media in regard to
allegations that Russia has somehow been sponsoring malign influence among Americans. Those claims have always been overblown and
unfounded, bordering on paranoia. Ironically, the anti-Russia allegations were a product of deep inherent discord among Americans
over the controversial election of maverick Donald Trump.
How fitting therefore that
this time around the discord and distrust on display is patently US-style homegrown – without an iota of Russian input. Recent US
intelligence claims of Russian interference seem more threadbare than usual.
It is what it always has
been: a crisis in legitimacy of American democracy owing to a fractured, self-alienated nation encumbered by endemic social
problems.
US-style internal discord has
become even more magnified and glaring to the point where invoking
"foreign malign
influence"
just looks absurd in its irrelevance.
If 'liberal' dogs can't bark at Jews and Deep State, they bark at Russia.
The Origins of Mass Manipulation of the Public Mind
Many years ago, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann realised that
political ideology could be completely fabricated, using the media to control both presentation
and conceptualisation, not only to create deeply-ingrained false beliefs in a population, but
also to entirely erase undesirable political ideas from the public mind. This was the beginning
of not only the American hysteria for freedom, democracy and patriotism, but of all
manufactured political opinion, a process that has been operative ever since. Lippmann created
these theories of mass persuasion of the public, using totally fabricated "facts" deeply
insinuated into the minds of a gullible public, but there is much more to this story. An
Austrian Jew named Edward Louis Bernays who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was one of
Lippmann's most precocious students and it was he who put Lippmann's theories into practice.
Bernays is widely known in America as the father of Public Relations, but he would be much more
accurately described as the father of American war marketing as well as the father of mass
manipulation of the public mind.
Bernays claimed "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind" it will be
possible "to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing
about it". He called this scientific technique of opinion-molding the 'engineering of
consent', and to accomplish it he merged theories of crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical
ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud. [10] [11]
Bernays regarded society as irrational and dangerous, with a "herd instinct", and that if the
multi-party electoral system (which evidence indicates was created by a group of European
elites as a population control mechanism) were to survive and continue to serve those elites,
massive manipulation of the public mind was necessary. These elites, "invisible people", would
have, through their influence on government and their control of the media, a monopoly on the
power to shape thoughts, values, and responses of the citizenry. His conviction was that this
group should flood the public with misinformation and emotionally-loaded propaganda to
"engineer" the acquiescence of the masses and thereby rule over them. According to Bernays,
this manufactured consent of the masses, creating conformity of opinion molded by the tool of
false propaganda, would be vital for the survival of "democracy". Bernays wrote:
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized 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. People are governed, their minds molded, their tastes formed, their ideas suggested,
largely by men they have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our
democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner
. In almost every act of our daily lives we are dominated by the relatively small number
of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they
who pull the wires which control the public mind."[12]
In his main work titled 'Propaganda', [13] which he
wrote in 1928, Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of
democracy because individuals were inherently dangerous (to the control and looting of the
elites) but could be harnessed and channeled by these same elites for their economic benefit.
He clearly believed that virtually total control of a population was possible, and perhaps easy
to accomplish. He wrote further that:
"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any
wise idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up
for it by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of
inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by
the leaders. Fortunately, the politician is able, by the instrument of propaganda, to mold
and form the will of the people. So vast are the numbers of minds which can be regimented,
and so tenacious are they when regimented, that [they produce] an irresistible pressure
before which legislators, editors, and teachers are helpless. "
And it wasn't only the public masses that were 'inherently dangerous', but a nation's
leaders fit this description as well, therefore also requiring manipulation and control.
Bernays realised that if you can influence the leaders of a nation, either with or without
their conscious cooperation, you can control the government and the country, and that is
precisely where he set his sights. Bernays again:
"In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are
ruled by dictators exercising great power. There are invisible rulers who control the
destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions
of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the
scenes. Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits
are modified by authorities. The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the
hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which
controls the opinions and habits of the masses."
And in this case, the "few" are the wealthy industrial elites, their even wealthier banker
friends, and their brethren who control the media, publishing and entertainment industries.
Until the First World War, these theories of creating an entirely false public opinion based
on misinformation, then manipulating this for population control, were still only theories, but
the astounding success of propaganda by Bernays and his group during the war laid bare the
possibilities of perpetually controlling the public mind on all matters. The "shrewd" designers
of Bernays' "invisible government" developed a standard technique for what was essentially
propaganda and mind control, or at least opinion control, and infiltrated it throughout the US
government, its departments and agencies, and its leaders and politicians. Coincident with
this, they practiced infecting the leaders of every identifiable group – fraternal,
religious, commercial, patriotic, social – and encouraging these men to likewise infect
their supporters.
Many have noted the black and white mentality that pervades America. Much of the blame must
be laid on Bernays' propaganda methods. Bernays himself asserted that propaganda could produce
rapid and strong emotional responses in the public, but that the range of these responses was
limited because the emotional loading inherent in his propaganda would create a kind of binary
mentality, eventually forcing the population into a programmed black and white world –
which is precisely what we see in the US today. This isn't difficult to understand. When
Bernays flooded the public with fabricated tales of Germans shiskababbing babies, the range of
potential responses was entirely emotional and would be limited to either abhorrence or perhaps
a blocking of the information. In a sense, our emotional switch will be forced into either
an 'on' or 'off' position , with no other reasonable choices.
The elite few, as Bernays called them, realised early on the potential for control of
governments, and in every subsequent US administration the president and his White House staff,
the politicians, the leaders of the military and intelligence agencies, all fell prey to this
same disease of shrewd manipulation. Roosevelt's "intense desire for war" in 1939 [14] [15]
[16] was the result of this same infection process and, once infected, he of course
approved of the infection of the entire American population. Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays
succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
Bernays – Marketing War
In the discovery of propaganda as a tool of public mind control and in its use for war
marketing, it is worthwhile to take a quick look at the historical background of Bernays' war
effort. At the time, the European Zionists had made an agreement with England to bring the US
into the war against Germany, on the side of England, a favor for which England would grant
them the possession of Palestine as a location for a new homeland. [19]
Palestine did not 'belong' to England, it was not England's to give, and England had no legal
or moral right to make such an agreement, but it was made nevertheless.
US President Wilson was desperate to fulfill his obligations to his handlers by putting the
US into the First World War as they wished, but the American population had no interest in the
European war and public sentiment was entirely against participating. To facilitate the desired
result, Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (The Creel Commission), [20] to
propagandise the war by the mass brainwashing of America, but Creel was merely the 'front' of a
group that consisted of specially hand-picked men from the media, advertising, the movie
industry, and academia, as well as specialists in psychology. The two most important members
were Walter Lippman, whom Wilson described as "the most brilliant man of his age", and Bernays
who was the group's top mind-control expert, both Jews and both aware of the stakes in this
game. Bernays planned to combine his uncle Freud's psychiatric insights with mass psychology
blended with modern advertising techniques, and apply them to the task of mass mind control. It
was Bernays' vast propaganda schemes and his influence in promoting the patently false idea
that US entry to the war was primarily aimed at "bringing democracy to all of Europe", that
proved so successful in altering public opinion about the war. Thanks to Edward Bernays,
American war marketing was born and would never die.
Note to Readers: Some portion of the immediately following content which details the
specifics of the propaganda of Lippman and Bernays for World War I is not my own work. It was
extracted some years ago from a longer document for which I cannot now locate the original
source. If a reader is able to identify this source, I would be grateful to receive that
information so I can properly credit the author for his extensive research.
"Wilson's creation of the CPI was a turning point in world history, the first truly
scientific attempt to form, manipulate and control the perceptions and beliefs of an entire
population." With Wilson's authority, these men were given almost unlimited scope to work
their magic, and in order to ensure the success of their program and guarantee the eventual
possession of Palestine, these men and their committee carried out "a program of
psychological warfare against the American people on a scale unprecedented in human history and
with a degree of success that most propagandists could only dream about".
Having received permission and broad authority from the US President and the White House to
"lead the public mind into war"[21] and,
with their success threatened by widespread anti-war sentiment among the public, these men
determined to engineer what Lippman called "the manufacture of consent" . The committee
assumed the task to "examine the different ways that information flowed to the population and
to flood these channels with pro-war material". Their effort was unparalleled in its scale and
sophistication, since the Committee had the power not only to officially censor news and
withhold information from the public, but to manufacture false news and distribute it
nationally through all channels. In a very short time, Lippman and Bernays were well enough
organised to begin flooding the US with anti-German propaganda consisting of hate literature,
movies, songs, media articles and much more.
... ... ...
Everything we have read above about the marketing of war during preparation for the two
World Wars, is from a template created by Lippman and Bernays exclusively to support the
creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and to promote the agenda of Zionism. That template
has been in constant use by the US government (as the Bankers' Private Army) since the Second
World War, 'engineering consent and ignorance' in the American and Western populations to mask
almost seven decades of atrocities, demonising innocent countries and peoples in preparation
for 60 or 70 politically-inspired color revolutions or 'wars of liberation' fought exclusively
for the financial and political benefit of a handful of European bankers using the US military
as a private army for this purpose, resulting in the deaths and miseries of hundreds of
millions of innocent civilians.
... ... ...
We can easily think of George W. Bush's demonisation of Iraq, the sordid tales of mass
slaughters, the gassing of hundreds of thousands and burial in mass graves, the nuclear weapons
ready to launch within 15 minutes, the responsibility for 9-11, the babies tossed out of
incubators, Saddam using wood shredders to eliminate political opponents and dissidents. We can
think of the tales of Libyan Viagra, all proven to have been groundless fabrications –
typical atrocity propaganda. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran and dozens of other wars and
invasions followed this same template to get the public mind onside for an unjustified war
launched only for political and commercial objectives.
Fast Forward to 2020
We are at the same place today, with the same people conducting the same "anger campaign"
against China in preparation for World War III. John Pilger agrees with me , evidenced in
his recent article "Another Hiroshima is coming – unless we stop it now." [43] And so
does Gordon Duff . [44] The
signs now are everywhere, and the campaign is successful. It is necessary to point out the need
for an 'anger campaign' as opposed to a 'hate campaign'. We are not moved to action from hate,
but from anger. I may thoroughly despise you, but that in itself will do nothing. It is only if
I am moved to anger that I want to punch your lights out. And this, as Lippman and Bernays so
clearly noted, requires emotionally-charged atrocity propaganda of the kind used so well
against Germany and being so well used against China today. Since we need atrocity propaganda
to start a war, there seems to be no shortage.
... ... ...
Then, Mr. Pompeo tells us, "The truth is that our policies . . . resurrected China's
failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that were feeding it."[55] Further,
that (due to COVID-19) China "caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life," and the
"Chinese Communist Party will pay a price". [56] Of
course, we all know that "China" stole the COVID-19 virus from a lab in Winnipeg, Canada, then
released it onto the world – and Pompeo has proof [57] , and
even "A Chinese virologist has proof" that "China" engaged in a massive cover-up while
contaminating the world [58] and then
"fleeing Hong Kong" because "I know how they treat whistle-blowers." [59] And of
course, "China needs to be held accountable for Covid-19's destruction"[60] which is
why everyone in the US wants to sue "China". "Australia" demands an international criminal
investigation of China's role in COVID-19. [61] What a
surprise.
And of course we have an almost unlimited number of serious provocations , from Hong
Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, the South China Seas, to Chinese consulates, media reporters,
students, researchers, visa restrictions, spying, Huawei, the trade war, all done in the hope
of making the Chinese leaders panic and over-react, the easiest way to justify a new war.
The list could continue for several hundred pages. Never in my life have I seen such a
continuous, unabating flood of hate propaganda against one nation, surely equivalent to what
was done against Germany as described above to prepare for US entry into the First World War.
And it's working, doing what it is intended to do. Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany, India,
Brazil, are buying into the war-mongering and turning against China. More will follow. The
Global Times reported "Mutual trust between Australia and China at all-time low". [62]
"Boycott China" T-shirts and caps are flooding India, Huawei is being increasingly banned
from Western nations, Chinese social media APPs like Tik-Tok are being banned, and Bryan
Adams recently slammed all Chinese as "Bat-eating, wet-market-animal-selling, virus-making,
greedy bastards".[63] [64] In
a recent poll (taken because we need to measure the success of our handiwork in the same way
Bernays and the Tavistock Institute did as noted earlier), half of all ethnic Chinese in
Canada have been threatened and harassed over COVID-19.
About 45% of Chinese in Canada said they had been " threatened or intimidated in some
way", fully 50% said they had recently been insulted in public, 30% said they had experienced
. . . "some kind of physical altercation", and 60% said the abuse was so bad "they had to
reorganise their daily routine to avoid it". One woman in her 60s said a man told her and her
daughter "Every day I pray that you people die".[65]
... ... ...
Several years ago, CNN was sued by one of their news anchors for being ordered to lie in the
newscasts. CNN won the case. They did not deny ordering the news anchor to lie. Their defense
was based simply on the position that American news media have "no obligation to tell the
truth". And RT recently reported that nearly 9 out of 10 Americans see a "medium or
high" bias in all media coverage,[65] yet, as
we can see, most of those same people, and a very large portion of the population of many
nations still succumb to the same hate propaganda.
Actually, after only a quick review of some of the news reports, it appears that the
Senate Committee placed great importance on the "fact" that Russia was involved in the
"hacking" of emails from the DNC. This suggests that the Committee relied on the same
intelligence sources that fabricated the Russiagate scenario in the first place. I guess that
the Republicans on the Committee have not kept up with revelations that there is no evidence
of any such hacking. Hence, the Committee's conclusions are likely based on the same old
disinformation and can be readily dismissed.
Mass media throughout the western world are uncritically passing along a press release from
the US intelligence community, because that's what passes for journalism in a world where God
is dead and everything is stupid.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has voiced his opposition to a proposed Russian rule that
would require labeling of propaganda content, saying it would burden "independent" information
work by outlets such as Voice of America.
"This decree will impose new burdensome requirements that will further inhibit RFE/RL's
and VOA's ability to operate within Russia," Pompeo said
Monday, commenting on the draft rule published by the media regulator Roskomnadzor.
Pompeo called VOA and its sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty "vital sources
of independent news and information for the people of Russia" for "more than 70
years."
Far from independent, however, they were both established as US propaganda outlets at the
dawn of the Cold War. They are fully funded by the government, and the charter of their parent
organization – now known as US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) – mandates that they
"be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States" and
"provide a surge capacity to support United States foreign policy objectives during crises
abroad."
The 1948 law that established these outlets outright prohibited their content from being
broadcast in the US itself, until the Obama administration amended it in 2013.
The proposed rule would require all content produced by designated "foreign agents"
in the Russian Federation to be clearly labeled. When the draft of it was made public last
month, acting RFE/RL president Daisy Sindelar protested that its purpose was to
"intimidate" her audience and make them "feel like criminals, or believe that they
are in danger when they watch or read our materials."
Yet the Russian regulation is the mirror image of the requirement imposed under the US
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) on RT, Sputnik and China Global Television Network
(CTGN) since 2017, which only a handful of groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists
(CPJ) condemned as
an attack on free speech. The USAGM remained conspicuously silent even as the designated
outlets were denied credentials to access government press conferences.
US-based social media companies have also bowed to political pressure and labeled Russian-
and Chinese-based outlets as "state-affiliated," while refraining from using that
descriptor for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), German outlet Deutsche Welle, the
French AFP, Turkish TRT, or any of the USAGM outlets, once again showcasing the double
standard.
jangosimba 10 August, 2020
He cheats, he lies, he murders, he steals.
Zogg jangosimba 11 August, 2020
That's a small part of CIA job description.
Harbin
William Johnson 1 hour ago
Mike reminds me that character from "Godfather" series, the old , dumb henchman ready to
follow any order...
Is not Q-anon a disinformation operation run by intelligence againces?
From comments: "Being a true believer in "Q" is literally no different than being a true believer in the
Democrat-Republican kosher sandwich." and "After almost four years of Trump's presidency, QAnon is an attempt to explain the
President's failure to "Make America Great Again.""
Notable quotes:
"... This doesn't mean there's a Satanic cabal running the government. It does mean some bureaucrats opposed or even sabotaged President Trump's agenda. They investigated his subordinates or leaked information to the press. If we substitute "the permanent bureaucracy" for the more ominous sounding term "Deep State," this "conspiracy theory" becomes plausible. ..."
"... What is truly implausible about QAnon is the idea that President Trump knows about everything and will destroy this vast conspiracy. ..."
"... If you desperately want to believe something, you'll find evidence for it . This is confirmation bias at best, schizophrenia at worst. If President Trump truly is about to reveal a vast Satanic conspiracy, he's taking his time. ..."
"... What is especially dangerous about QAnon is not that it promotes dangerous extremism, but that it urges complacency. Its core message is that Donald Trump knows all about the secret conspiracy running the world and has the power to crush it; after all, he's President. ..."
"... After almost four years of Trump's presidency, QAnon is an attempt to explain the President's failure to "Make America Great Again." ..."
"... QAnon isn't dangerous. Conspiracy theories are as old as the Anti-Masonic Party , maybe older. Some unstable people may latch on to them, but they are not notably violent. If anything, if they really believe a Satanic cabal runs the world, they are showing remarkable restraint. ..."
"... I suspect the real reason journalists don't like QAnon is because at its core, it tells people the media are lying. It encourages independent investigation and citizen journalism. ..."
"... Journalists promote a conspiracy far more dangerous and deadly than QAnon. That is the "white privilege" conspiracy theory . ..."
"... Liberals are right to think QAnon is dangerous, but not in the way they think. QAnon is dangerous to whites. It tells them that everything is under control, that an evil conspiracy will be exposed, and that we just need to trust President Trump. We can't be under any illusions that President Trump will save us . "The Storm" is not coming, the cavalry won't ride over the hill, and there isn't a secret military force ready to scoop up our foes and liberate America. It's up to us. ..."
"... The Qanon phenomenon exploits the most fundamental psychological need which is hope, that hope dies last. The hope in order not to die will accept and forgive anything including the greatest nonsense. The hopeful ones can be strung along for ever because hope wants to last as it is the last to die. You just have to keep giving them a dose and keep stringing them alone. ..."
"... Sadly, the author is pretty much on-the-money. If Trump is for real, that is, if he believes what he says, he has been completely incompetent at accomplishing anything. ..."
"... I came late to the QAnon crap and saw it was the same soup as Black Lives Matter. Why, in fact, wouldn't the same crooks behind the one not foment the other? One says "blacks gonna make you kneel and take away all your stuff" while the other says, "don't worry, the least effective president in history has got us covered." ..."
"... They're all in show biz and Americans just happen to be an unusually gullible audience. ' ..."
"... I believe Trump is just another minion of the Deep State and is acting in accordance with their wishes. He is helping play out a charade a good cop (Trump) against a bad cop (Deep State). At any rate, he is not fulfilling his promises to those that elected him whether through incompetence or scheme. ..."
"... The logic of Hood's article is hard to beat either way. Trump/QAnon are just there for show, dangling hope in front of people that there's some person or entity that cares about them. It's the same as the infamous Pentagon Papers fifty years ago: Even after Americans knew the fix was in, the Vietnam War didn't stop until the plutocrats were good and ready to end it. ..."
"... The first sign of trouble was back when they adopted that ridiculous slogan, 'Trust the plan.' Sorry: this is politics. And in politics, I trust no one. The Q ought to be putting pressure on Trump (and the Republican Party generally), not sitting around waiting for them to grow a pair and save the country. ..."
"... The school system is promoting liberal indoctrination, and a whole bunch of kids are dropping out. Why? Because they like weed and don't like math. I see QAnon the same way. Sure, the media can't be trusted. But the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. ..."
"... I'm not prepared to defend the Qanon thing but, clearly, it is more than a pysop. It has revealed enormous amounts of sordid detail about what really goes on this country/ world and who many of the crooks are. The vast majority of the readers would not have learned that info any other way. Period. ..."
"... Great article. It covers the good and the bad and the hopelessly implausible very well. In times of a pandemic of lying generated by the USA Media Leviathan, the vulture capitalism of Wall Street, the exponentiating hate-Whitey rhetoric, the economy-killing Covid Scamdemic,the dwindling Euro-demographic numbers, along with a vurulent virus called Cultural Marxism, "extremism is no vice" ..."
"... A very insightful analysis and I think I now understand Q Anon. This seems to be an evolution from the people who early on were claiming that Trump was playing 4 (or 5 or 6) dimensional chess. I never supported him and don't now. He couldn't play one dimensional checkers if he wanted to and he probably doesn't. ..."
"... It has taken on a life of its own, constantly adapting to changes in situation. I kind of follow it as an unintentional experiment in human psychology. It's also interesting that it has absorbed a great deal of Christian mythology without actually being a Christian religion. ..."
What is QAnon? This question is harder to answer than you might think. There are several
books about QAnon, including QAnon and The Great Awakening by Michael Knight, QAnon: An Invitation to The Great Awakening by "WWG1WGA," and Revolution Q by "Neon Revolt." After reading these and other books and websites, I'd
identify three main points.
"Q," an anonymous, highly placed government official, knows that President Trump is planning
a series of dramatic events that will expose crimes and even treason implicating many
Democrats and government bureaucrats. Q communicates what's coming by posting on various
forums, including 4chan and 8kun (formerly 8chan). He says there's a fierce battle over this
at the highest levels of the government.
President Trump himself communicates with followers
of the movement through code phrases, gestures, and imagery. He and his family also
occasionally retweet accounts linked to QAnon.
"The Storm," the righteous day of justice that
President Trump is bringing, is opposed by a cabal of financial and media elites who want to
keep people from learning the truth. Thus, people must do their own research and not trust
what the mainstream media tell them.
The initial post that spawned "Q" could have been made by anyone. Further "drops" by "Q" or
people in the movement could also be made by anyone. There is no way to verify any of their
claims, except through vague references to key phrases that will supposedly be uttered in the
days following the posts. For example, before President's rally in Tulsa, Eric Trump posted an
American-flag QAnon meme with the #WWG1WGA (this is supposed to stand for "Where We Go One, We
Go All") at the bottom to Instagram. Does this mean anything, or was Eric Trump simply passing
along an image he liked?
QAnon is so popular it has spawned its own "watchdog" groups. NPR's Michael Martin
interviewed
Travis View, the co-host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast. Mr. Martin prepped the
audience by calling QAnon "a group of people who adhere to some far-right conspiracies and
believe a number of absurd things." Mr. View obliged by saying that according to QAnon, "The
world is controlled by a Satanic cabal of pedophiles that they believe control everything like
the media, politics and entertainment." He adds that QAnon also thinks President Trump knows
all about this and will "defeat this global cabal once and for all and free all of us." "QAnon
Anonymous" host Travis View added that it is a "domestic extremist movement" and said President
Trump had "tweeted or retweeted QAnon accounts over 160 times." However, he also admitted "no
one in the current administration has ever done anything to endorse QAnon."
Nevertheless, it seems that at least some of President Trump's advisors know about the
movement and are playing to it. President Trump has directly retweeted
memes from accounts linked to QAnon. Republican congressional candidate Angela Stanton-King
tweeted , " THE STORM IS HERE ."
Tess Owen, Vice's reporter on the "far right" beat,
wrote , "Welp, the GOP Now Has 15 QAnon-Linked Candidates on the November Ballot."
"There is no evidence to these claims" about a "cabal of criminals run by
politicians like Hillary Clinton and the Hollywood elite."
However, after Jeffrey Epstein's
alleged "suicide" and news that powerful figures such as former President Bill Clinton and
Prince Andrew were part of Epstein's strange network, it's hardly absurd to claim there could
be sick stuff going on among the political and cultural elite.
Jimmy Saville was a well-known British media personality, knighted, and honored by many
institutions including the Vatican and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. After his death,
it emerged that he had sexually abused children
; some suggested hundreds of them. Most honors were rescinded posthumously.
A jury recently convicted Harvey
Weinstein, once the most powerful producer in Hollywood, of sexual crimes. Several actresses
including Allison Mack were alleged to be part of a bizarre sexual
cult called NXIVM, and she pleaded guilty to racketeering . During the 2016 election, Wikileaks
released email tying John Podesta's
brother to "artist" Marina Abramovic and her bizarre, occult performance piece "Spirit
Cooking."
If a crazy man approached you in the street raving about these plots, you'd run, but these
things happened. Non-whites sexually abused
thousands of young women in Rotherham, England. Police and local government officials did
nothing because they didn't want to be called racists. This is a sick world, and evildoers
often get away with evil. It's not absurd to think powerful men and women are no better than
middling Labour politicians who looked the other way instead of stopping rape and sex
slavery.
Is there a "Deep State" opposing President Trump? In 2019, the New York Times ran an
editorial called " The
'Deep State' Exists to Battle People Like Trump. " In 2018, an anonymous official wrote, "
I Am
Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration ." Recent evidence suggests that the
FBI bullied General Michael Flynn, President Trump's former national security advisor, and made
him confess he had lied to agents after they threatened his son. The Department of Justice
recently
concluded that the interview of General Flynn was not "conducted with a legitimate
investigative basis."
This doesn't mean there's a Satanic cabal running the government. It does mean some
bureaucrats opposed or even sabotaged President Trump's agenda. They investigated his
subordinates or leaked information to the press. If we substitute "the permanent bureaucracy"
for the more ominous sounding term "Deep State," this "conspiracy theory" becomes plausible.
Incidentally, General Flynn recently posted a
video that uses QAnon slogans.
What is truly implausible about QAnon is the idea that President Trump knows about
everything and will destroy this vast conspiracy. The proof for such assertions lies in
gestures, vague statements, or even the background of where he is speaking. For example, in
QAnon and the Great Awakening, the author says that President Trump's phrases "this is
the calm before the storm" and "tippy top," his supposed circular motions with his hands, and
occasional pointing towards supposed Q supporters are proof that he is on to it. "Q offers
hundreds of data points that demonstrate Q is indeed linked to the Trump Administration," the
book says.
If you desperately want to believe something, you'll find evidence for it .
This is confirmation bias at best, schizophrenia at worst. If President Trump truly is about to
reveal a vast Satanic conspiracy, he's taking his time.
What is especially dangerous about QAnon is not that it promotes dangerous extremism, but
that it urges complacency. Its core message is that Donald Trump knows all about the secret
conspiracy running the world and has the power to crush it; after all, he's President. All we
have to do is wait. "Nothing can stop what is coming," says one popular slogan. If this were
true, President Trump and his followers have already won, and there's no reason to do anything
but scour the internet for clues about what's coming next.
After almost four years of Trump's presidency, QAnon is an attempt to explain the
President's failure to "Make America Great Again." It's true that he's hobbled by powerful
elites. However, President Trump's biggest personnel problems, from John Bolton to Anthony Scaramucci, were people he appointed himself. No one forced him to make Reince Priebus his
chief of staff, expel Steve Bannon, or pick a fight with Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Indeed, according to QAnon, Attorney General Sessions was the one who was supposed to
rout the evildoers .
QAnon assures Trump supporters that he has everything well in hand and that justice is
coming. It's far more terrifying to realize that he doesn't. He is politically isolated,
surrounded by foes, and losing the presidential campaign to a confused and
combative man who occasionally forgets what office he's running for or where he is . President Trump's
not mustering his legions. Instead, his own defense secretary publicly
opposed his plans to use soldiers to suppress riots. The brass
overruled his wishes to leave bases named after Confederate heroes alone. Unless President
Trump has a Praetorian Guard we don't know about (perhaps the Space Force?), there's nothing he
can use against domestic opponents.
The real question is why reporters fear QAnon. Some of its supporters have allegedly
committed crimes. One alleged QAnon believer killed
a Gambino mob boss. In February, another
blocked a bridge with an armored vehicle. Two
others had family troubles, which may or may not be related to their QAnon beliefs. If
these people did those things, they are criminals, but this is hardly a wave of violence. All
together, this would be a
peaceful weekend in Chicago .
QAnon isn't dangerous. Conspiracy theories are as old as the Anti-Masonic Party , maybe older. Some
unstable people may latch on to them, but they are not notably violent. If anything, if they
really believe a Satanic cabal runs the world, they are showing remarkable restraint.
I suspect the real reason journalists don't like QAnon is because at its core, it tells
people the media are lying. It encourages independent investigation and citizen journalism.
This occasionally leads to absurdities, such as building a worldview around 4chan posts.
However, it's healthy to distrust elites. Sometimes, journalists lie ,
stretch
the
truth , or hide
it entirely . Sometimes, they
demand citizens be silenced .
Ordinary Americans looking for truth are a threat. I believe mainstream journalists truly
regard themselves as a Fourth Estate, an independent political power . They
think they have the right to determine what Americans should and should not be allowed to hear
or say. Their efforts to censor and suppress QAnon only fuel the movement.
Journalists promote a conspiracy far more dangerous and deadly than QAnon. That is the
"white
privilege" conspiracy theory . Many journalists and academics tell non-whites that racist
whites hold them down. This implicitly justifies protests,
shakedowns, and even anti-white violence. When George Floyd died, Americans
weren't allowed to see the bodycam videos . Instead, many journalists told a fable about a
white policeman murdering an innocent black man. This was the spark, but journalists had soaked
the country in gasoline years before with endless
sensationalist coverage of race and "racism." Now, riots are destroying cities, ruining
businesses, probably spreading disease, and creating a huge crime wave
. I blame journalists for inciting this violence. It's not QAnon spreading a violent conspiracy
theory, but journalists at CNN
, the New York Times , the Washington Post, and others who manufactured
a fake crisis .
Liberals are right to think QAnon is dangerous, but not in the way they think. QAnon
is dangerous to whites. It tells them that everything is under control, that an evil conspiracy
will be exposed, and that we just need to trust President Trump. We can't be under any
illusions that President Trump will save us .
"The Storm" is not coming, the cavalry won't ride over the hill, and there isn't a secret
military force ready to scoop up our foes and liberate America. It's up to us.
Liberals should be thankful for a conspiracy theory that urges complacency. Our message is
more urgent: Our people, country, and civilization are at stake. You don't need to pore through
websites to see what's happening; just walk down any city street. Time is running out.
You have a duty to
resist . Don't look for a savior. Instead, join us, and be worthy of our ancestors .
"What is especially dangerous about QAnon is not that it promotes dangerous extremism,
but that it urges complacency . "
"We can't be under any illusions that President Trump will save us. "The Storm"
is not coming, the cavalry won't ride over the hill, and there isn't a secret military
force ready to scoop up our foes and liberate America."
The Qanon phenomenon exploits the most fundamental psychological need which is hope, that
hope dies last. The hope in order not to die will accept and forgive anything including the
greatest nonsense. The hopeful ones can be strung along for ever because hope wants to last
as it is the last to die. You just have to keep giving them a dose and keep stringing them
alone.
There is is a blogger Benjamin Fulford that precedes Qanon and uses exactly the same
technique and very similar narratives of hidden forces of Good and Evil fighting for the
dominance and the forces of Good always being very close to the final victory to give you
enough hope to keep you interested till the next installment.. There is a mixture of Free
Masons, Rockefellers, Rothschild, Zionists, Trump, Pope Sabbatean mafia, Khazarian mafia and
Asian Secret Societies. The latter are on the side of Good in Fulford's universe. Fulford, I
think, is located somewhere in Asia, most likely Japan. Fulford missed his calling of being a
script writer of the never ending TV series and dramas like TWD and so on. But I suspect he
makes some money from his series about the world in battle between forces of Good and Evil
and the victory being just around the corner.
From August 10, 2020. Benjamin Fulford installment:
"The Khazarian mafia is preparing the public for some form of alien disclosure or invasion
scenario as they struggle to stay in power, Pentagon and other sources claim. The most likely
scenario for this autumn is the cancellation of the U.S. Presidential election followed by a
UFO distraction, the sources say. U.S. President Donald Trump himself is saying the election
needs to be called off even as he continues to promote a "Space force.""
Or from August 3 installment:
"The P3 Freemasons are saying the Covid-19 campaign is only going to intensify until an
agreement is reached to set up a "World Republic." Certainly, the P3 lodge involvement is
easier to spot in Japan and Korea where all positive test results are being traced to either
Christian (P3) sects or Khazarian Mafia hedge funds."
"The other big theme being pushed by the Zionists is an escalating conflict between the
U.S. and China. The U.S. State Department propaganda machine is pushing a doctored document
known as "The Secret Speech of General Chi Haotian," which claims to contain secret Chinese
plans to invade the U.S., kill women and children and use biological warfare."
"Of course, the opposite is true, since everybody who read the Project for a New American
Century knows the Zionist regime has been touting race-specific or ethnic-specific biological
warfare as a "useful political tool." "
Or from July 27:
"The rest of the world, especially the main creditors Japan and China, are willing to
write off the debt but they want a change in management first. In other words, they want the
Americans to free themselves from the Babylonian debt slavery of the Khazarian mafia.
That process has started with arrests and extra-judicial killings of top Khazarian,
Satan-worshipping elites. The Bush family is gone, the Rockefellers lost the presidency when
Hillary Rockefeller was defeated, and many politicians and so-called celebrities have
vanished.
However, the situation is still like a lizard shaking off its tail in order to escape. The
real control of the United States is still in the hands of "
Sadly, the author is pretty much on-the-money. If Trump is for real, that is, if he
believes what he says, he has been completely incompetent at accomplishing anything. As for
the media, I'd disagree that they sometimes lie; they lie pretty much ALL the time.
What is especially dangerous about QAnon is not that it promotes dangerous extremism,
but that it urges complacency.
So does Trump and the GOP in general. The GOP, MAGA and NeverTrump alike, exists only to sap our will, acclimate us to defeat
and put us to sleep with the comforting illusion that some authority or institution is
fighting for us.
Until the American Right realizes this, it will never gain back one inch of ground. And no
one worth marching with or behind will join their ranks or rise from them.
I came late to the QAnon crap and saw it was the same soup as Black Lives Matter. Why, in
fact, wouldn't the same crooks behind the one not foment the other? One says "blacks gonna
make you kneel and take away all your stuff" while the other says, "don't worry, the least
effective president in history has got us covered."
There's no war in heaven. They're all in show biz and Americans just happen to be an
unusually gullible audience.
'
If Trump is for real, that is, if he believes what he says, he has been completely
incompetent at accomplishing anything.
That is the dilemma. I believe Trump is just another minion of the Deep State and is
acting in accordance with their wishes. He is helping play out a charade a good cop (Trump)
against a bad cop (Deep State). At any rate, he is not fulfilling his promises to those that
elected him whether through incompetence or scheme.
Uhhh, Donald Trump as well as Slickster Billy Bob was part of the Epstein network. This
piece jumps the shark and the rails right there at the start and goes further into PR
turd-polishing land after that.
The logic of Hood's article is hard to beat either way. Trump/QAnon are just there for
show, dangling hope in front of people that there's some person or entity that cares about
them. It's the same as the infamous Pentagon Papers fifty years ago: Even after Americans
knew the fix was in, the Vietnam War didn't stop until the plutocrats were good and ready to
end it.
The truth sets nobody free. Power is a vehicle to find truth and do something about it.
Truth without power just equals more frustration. And the world's full to bursting with
frustration already.
What is especially dangerous about QAnon is not that it promotes dangerous extremism,
but that it urges complacency. Its core message is that Donald Trump knows all about the
secret conspiracy running the world and has the power to crush it; after all, he's
President. All we have to do is wait.
Yup. The first sign of trouble was back when they adopted that ridiculous slogan, 'Trust
the plan.' Sorry: this is politics. And in politics, I trust no one. The Q ought to be
putting pressure on Trump (and the Republican Party generally), not sitting around waiting
for them to grow a pair and save the country.
The school system is promoting liberal indoctrination, and a whole bunch of kids are
dropping out. Why? Because they like weed and don't like math. I see QAnon the same way. Sure, the media can't be trusted. But the enemy of my enemy is
not my friend.
These guys are mostly mentally unstable white knights and while I'm not
much concerned that they will actually harm Justin Beiber by baselessly accusing him of rape,
their behavior contributes to the culture of white knighting and social media witch hunts I
mean citizen journalism which only strengthens the feminist movement.
"You have a duty to resist." The QAnon people, intellectual and moral descendants of the
Scofield Reference Bible, don't want to hear this. They just want to eat and watch TV. After
all, Ben Franklin and George Washington will save us just in time!
QAnon is just another Zionist-pro Israeli psyop. Q never talks about the Israel conspiracy
or how AIPAC controls America. Trump is always, about ready, to bring the hammer down on the
deep state, but never does as he appoints Neocon after Neocon, the latest is Elliott Abrams,
as bad or worse than John Bolton.
Remember back when Hillary was in chains, or Obama went to Gitmo and got executed? QAnon
is false hope being served up to Trump's conservative base who want the criminal government
exposed and prosecuted. But that never happens under Trump.
According to many researchers, including me, Beirut got nuked, and that story is already
gone, swept under the Jewmedia rug, written off as a fertilizer accident. Where's Q on that
one? No where to be found because Q is Jew protecting Israel at every turn.
You all listen to Q at your own peril. And oh yeah, have you noticed the world going to
hell? Where's Trump's secret plan you all? It's fake, Q Anon led you all into a blind alley,
it pacified you as your nation was stolen right in front of your eyes. Q is a pied piper for
adults who think like children. Q Anon was the latest hopium injected into the body politic,
Trump is the swamp, he is working for Israel, he is selling you out, he is the snake who
betrays you. But the q followers can't see that or even hear it because they need hope, and
the opposition is worse than Trump.
I'm not prepared to defend the Qanon thing but, clearly, it is more than a pysop. It has revealed enormous amounts of sordid detail about what really goes on this
country/ world and who many of the crooks are. The vast majority of the readers would
not have learned that info any other way. Period.
Now that a fair amount is exposed, it's up to Trump and Barr to indict and convict a slew
of high level people. If they don't then they are worthless and can go fvck themselves for
jerking the public around and not sealing the deal.
The Christians in the Repub Party are so easy to play. They are taught to 'follow the
leader' from Day 1 of their lives and Trump has provided himself as their golden savior to
worship and trust. God sent him to us, you know. (lol)
That segment of the Repub Party doesn't have a pair to grow. So, it won't happen. Marxism
is in our future, it's only a matter of time.
Very good.
A close friend of mine who I didn't consider too interested in these matters mentioned QAnon
to me while I was telling him how Trump is being sabotaged by some of his own people. I was
surprised he knew, probably more than me.
PS. I would wear a Q tee shirt except that I'm old school and 'Q' connotes queer. So maybe
an Anon one might do. (Big grin)
Great article. It covers the good and the bad and the hopelessly implausible very well. In
times of a pandemic of lying generated by the USA Media Leviathan, the vulture capitalism of
Wall Street, the exponentiating hate-Whitey rhetoric, the economy-killing Covid Scamdemic,the
dwindling Euro-demographic numbers, along with a vurulent virus called Cultural Marxism,
"extremism is no vice"
After laughing themselves silly over the gullible idiots who ran with their 911
'no-planes' psychological operation, the CIA bugmen cooked up a new one. They're laughing
themselves silly all over again.
"Journalists promote a conspiracy far more dangerous and deadly than QAnon. That is the
"white privilege" conspiracy theory. Many journalists and academics tell non-whites that
racist whites hold them down."
A very insightful analysis and I think I now understand Q Anon. This seems to be an
evolution from the people who early on were claiming that Trump was playing 4 (or 5 or 6)
dimensional chess. I never supported him and don't now. He couldn't play one dimensional
checkers if he wanted to and he probably doesn't.
...it
has awakened something of a frustration in a lot of people.
It has taken on a life of its
own, constantly adapting to changes in situation. I kind of follow it as an unintentional
experiment in human psychology. It's also interesting that it has absorbed a great deal of
Christian mythology without actually being a Christian religion. In the end though it is
people trying to feel they have some control (and indeed, considering the fear in the media)
that might be true.
[For fun, dig up and read Asimov's "I Spell My Name with an S" from 1958.]
There is no indication that anyone forced Trump into making any of the bad decisions
mentioned. Your first point is asking Hood to weave some fanciful alternative to what is
outright obvious. No serious author does that. If he were to have used "most likely" before
giving his sensible opinion, would that have satisfied you? The Easter Bunny holding a gun to
Trump's head and telling him to disavow Session is also a possibility, you know, but not a
likely one.
Frankly, I think you are the one who's intellectually deficient.
People who
actually have good instincts but just cannot bring themselves to face the harsh reality in
front of them.
The deplatforming of QAnon crap is not due to "Q" itself, but where "Q" supporters might
find themselves next, once this psyop has run its course. They wanna kill it now to keep the
delusion itself alive, lest all these "Q" true believer stumble into some anti-semitism and
other truths that actually challenge the status quo.
Being a true believer in "Q" is literally no different than being a true believer in the
Democrat-Republican kosher sandwich.
Correct. And when we're talking about the "Deep state," organized pedophilia, human
trafficking, etc, many of these "Q" people will inevitably find their way to the Rabbi behind
the curtain. It is the natural destination if one does not self-censor or cling to their
priors. There is no other destination, in fact.
William Binney is the former technical director of the U.S. National Security Agency who
worked at the agency for 30 years. He is a respected independent critic of how American
intelligence services abuse their powers to illegally spy on private communications of U.S.
citizens and around the globe.
Given his expert inside knowledge, it is worth paying attention to what Binney says.
In a media
interview this week, he dismissed the so-called Russiagate scandal as a "fabrication"
orchestrated by the American Central Intelligence Agency. Many other observers have come to
the same conclusion about allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections with
the objective of helping Donald Trump get elected.
But what is particularly valuable about Binney's judgment is that he cites technical
analysis disproving the Russiagate narrative. That narrative remains dominant among U.S.
intelligence officials, politicians and pundits, especially those affiliated with the
Democrat party, as well as large sections of Western media. The premise of the narrative is
the allegation that a Russian state-backed cyber operation hacked into the database and
emails of the Democrat party back in 2016. The information perceived as damaging to
presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was subsequently disseminated to the Wikileaks
whistleblower site and other U.S. media outlets.
A mysterious cyber persona known as "Guccifer 2.0" claimed to be the alleged hacker. U.S.
intelligence and news media have attributed Guccifer as a front for Russian cyber
operations.
Notably, however, the Russian government has always categorically denied any involvement
in alleged hacking or other interference in the 2016 U.S. election, or elections
thereafter.
William Binney and other independent former U.S. intelligence experts say they can prove
the Russiagate narrative is bogus. The proof relies on their forensic analysis of the data
released by Guccifer. The analysis of timestamps demonstrates that the download of voluminous
data could not have been physically possible based on known standard internet speeds. These
independent experts conclude that the data from the Democrat party could not have been
hacked, as Guccifer and Russiagaters claim. It could only have been obtained by a leak from
inside the party, perhaps by a disgruntled staffer who downloaded the information on to a
disc. That is the only feasible way such a huge amount of data could have been released. That
means the "Russian hacker" claims are baseless.
Wikileaks, whose founder Julian Assange is currently imprisoned in Britain pending an
extradition trial to the U.S. to face espionage charges, has consistently maintained
that their source of files was not a hacker, nor did they collude with Russian intelligence.
As a matter of principle, Wikileaks does not disclose the identity of its sources, but the
organization has indicated it was an insider leak which provided the information on senior
Democrat party corruption.
William Binney says forensic analysis of the files released by Guccifer shows that the
mystery hacker deliberately inserted digital "fingerprints" in order to give the impression
that the files came from Russian sources. It is known from information later disclosed by
former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the CIA has a secretive program – Vault 7
– which is dedicated to false incrimination of cyber attacks to other actors. It seems
that the purpose of Guccifer was to create the perception of a connection between Wikileaks
and Russian intelligence in order to beef up the Russiagate narrative.
"So that suggested [to] us all the evidence was pointing back to CIA as the originator
[of] Guccifer 2.0. And that Guccifer 2.0 was inside CIA I'm pointing to that group as the
group that was probably the originator of Guccifer 2.0 and also this fabrication of the
entire story of Russiagate," concludes Binney in his interview with Sputnik news
outlet.
This is not the first time that the Russiagate yarn has been debunked . But it is crucially important to make Binney's expert
views more widely appreciated especially as the U.S. presidential election looms on November
3. As that date approaches, U.S. intelligence and media seem to be intensifying claims about
Russian interference and cyber operations. Such wild and unsubstantiated "reports" always
refer to the alleged 2016 "hack" of the Democrat party by "Guccifer 2.0" as if it were
indisputable evidence of Russian interference and the "original sin" of supposed Kremlin
malign activity. The unsubstantiated 2016 "hack" is continually cited as the "precedent" and
"provenance" of more recent "reports" that purport to claim Russian interference.
Given the torrent of Russiagate derivatives expected in this U.S. election cycle, which is
damaging U.S.-Russia bilateral relations and recklessly winding up geopolitical tensions, it
is thus of paramount importance to listen to the conclusions of honorable experts like
William Binney.
The American public are being played by their own intelligence agencies and corporate
media with covert agendas that are deeply anti-democratic.
Well - who set up them up, converted from the OSS? The banksters.
"Wild Bill" Donovan worked for JP Morgan immediately after WWII.
"our" US intelligence agencies were set up by, and serve, the masters of high finance.
Is this in dispute?
meditate_vigorously , 11 hours ago
They have seeded enough misinformation that apparently it is. But, you are correct. It
is the Banksters.
Isisraelquaeda , 2 hours ago
Israel. The CIA was infiltrated by the Mossad long ago.
SurfingUSA , 15 hours ago
JFK was on to that truth, and would have been wise to mini-nuke Langley before his
ill-fated journey to Dallas.
Andrew G , 11 hours ago
Except when there's something exceptionally evil (like pedo/blackmail rings such as
Epstein), in which case it's Mossad / Aman
vova.2018 , 7 hours ago
Except when there's something exceptionally evil (like pedo/blackmail rings such as
Epstein), in which case it's Mossad / Aman
The CIA & MOSSAD work hand in hand in all their clandestine operations. There is not
doubt the CIA/MOSSAD are behind the creation, evolution, training, supplying weapons,
logistic-planning & financing of the terrorists & the destruction of the Middle
East. Anybody that believes the contrary has brain problems & need to have his head
examined.
CIA/MOSAD has been running illegal activities in Colombia: drug, arms, organs &
human (child-sex) trafficking. CIA/MOSAD is also giving training, logistic & arms to
Colombia paramilitary for clandestine operation against Venezuela. After Bolsonaro became
president, MOSSAD started running similar operation in Brazil. Israel & Brazil also
recognizes Guaido as the legit president of Venezuela.
CIA/MOSSAD have a long time policy of
assassinating & taking out pep who are a problem to the revisionist-zionist agenda, not
just in the M-East but in the world. The CIA/MOSSAD organizations have many connections in
other countries like the M-East, Saudi Arabia, UAE, et al but also to the UK-MI5.
The Israelis infiltrated the US to the highest levels a long time ago - Proof
Israel has & collects information (a database) of US citizens in coordination
with the CIA & the 5 eyes.
Israel works with the NSA in the liaison-loophole operations
Mossad undercover operations in WDC & all over the world
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee – AIPAC
People with 2 citizenships (US/Israel) in WDC/NYC (the real Power)
From Steve Bannon a christian-zionist: Collusion between the Trump administration and
Israel .
Funny how a number of the right wing conspiracy stories according to the MSM from a
couple years back were true from the get go. 1 indictment over 4 years in the greatest
attempted coup in this country's history. So sad that Binney and Assange were never
listened to. They can try to silence us who know of the truth, but as Winston Churchill
once said, 'Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice
may distort it. But there it is.' KDP still censors my book on their advertising platform
as it
promotes conspiratorial theories (about the Obama led coup) and calls out BLM and Antifa
for what they are (marxists) . Yet the same platform still recommends BLM books stating
there is a pandemic of cops killing innocent blacks. F them!!!! #RIPSeth #FreeJulian
#FreeMillie
smacker , 11 hours ago
Yes, and we all know the name of the DNC leaker who downloaded and provided
WikiLeaks
with evidence of CIA and DNC corruption.
He was assassinated to prevent him from naming who Guccifer 2.0 was and where he is
located.
The Russia-gate farce itself provides solid evidence that the CIA and others are in bed
with DNC
and went to extraordinary lengths to prevent Trump being elected. When that failed, they
instigated
a program of x-gates to get him out of office any way they could. This continues to this
day.
This is treason at the highest level.
ACMeCorporations , 12 hours ago
Hacking? What Russian hacking?
In recently released testimony, the CEO of CrowdStrike admitted in congressional
testimony, under oath, that it actually has no direct evidence Russia stole the DNC
emails.
Nelbev , 9 hours ago
"The proof relies on their forensic analysis of the data released by Guccifer. The
analysis of timestamps demonstrates that the download of voluminous data could not have
been physically possible based on known standard internet speeds. ... a disgruntled
staffer who downloaded the information on to a disc. That is the only feasible way such a
huge amount of data could have been released. ... William Binney says forensic analysis
of the files released by Guccifer shows that the mystery hacker deliberately inserted
digital "fingerprints" in order to give the impression that the files came from Russian
sources. ... "
Any computer file is a bunch of 1s and 0s. Anyone can change anything with a hex editor.
E.g. I had wrong dates on some photographs once, downloaded as opposed to when taken, just
edited the time stamp. You cannot claim any time stamp is original. If true time stamps,
then the DNC files were downloaded to a thumb drive at a computer on location and not to
the internet via a phone line. However anyone can change the time stamps. Stating a
"mystery hacker deliberately inserted digital [Russian] 'fingerprints' " is a joke if
denying the file time stamps were not tampered with. The real thing is where the narrative
came from, political spin doctors, Perkins Coie law firm hired by DNC and Hillary campaign
who hired Crowdstrike [and also hired Fusion GPS before for pissgate dossier propaganda and
FISC warrants to spy on political opponents] and Perkins Coie edited Crowdstrike report
with Russian narrative. FBI never looked at DNC servers. This is like your house was broken
into. You deny police the ability to enter and look at evidence like DNC computers. You
hire a private investigator to say your neighbor you do not like did it and publicise
accusations. Take word of political consultants hired, spin doctor propaganda, Crowdstrike
narrative , no police investigation. Atlantic Council?
Vivekwhu , 8 hours ago
The Atlantic Council is another NATO fart. Nuff said!
The_American , 15 hours ago
God Damn traitor Obama!
Yen Cross , 14 hours ago
TOTUS
For the youngsters.
Teleprompter Of The United States.
Leguran , 6 hours ago
The CIA has gotten away with so much criminal behavior and crimes against the American
public that this is totally believable. Congress just lets this stuff happen and does
nothing. Which is worse - Congress or the CIA?
Congress set up the system. It is mandated to perform oversight. And it just sits on its
thumbs and wallows in it privileges.
This time Congress went further than ever before. It was behind and engaged in an
attempted coup d'état.
Know thy enemy , 10 hours ago
Link to ShadowGate (ShadowNet) documentary - which answers the question, what is the
keystone,,,,,
It's time for Assange and Wikileaks to name the person who they rec'd the info from. By
hiding behind the "we don't name names" Mantra they are helping destroy America by
polarizing its citizens. Name the damn person, get it all out there so the left can see
that they've been played by their leaders. Let's cut this crap.
freedommusic , 7 hours ago
...all the evidence was pointing back to CIA as the originator [of] Guccifer 2.0.
Yep, I knew since day one. I remember seeing Hillary Clinton talking about Guccifer . As
soon as uttered the name, I KNEW she with the CIA were the brainchild of this bogus
decoy.
They copy. They mimic. These are NOT creative individuals.
Perhaps hell is too good a place for them.
on target , 4 hours ago
This is old news but worth bringing up again. The CIA never wanted Trump in, and of
course, they want him out. Their fingerprints were all over Russiagate, The Kavanaugh
hearings, Ukrainegate, and on and on. They are just trying to cover their asses for a
string of illegal "irregularities" in their operations for years. Trump should never have
tried to be a get along type of guy. He should have purged the entire leadership of the CIA
on day one and the FBI on day 2. They can not be trusted with an "America First" agenda.
They are all New World Order types who know whats best for everyone.
fersur , 7 hours ago
Boom, Boom, Boom !
Three Reseachable Tweets thru Facebook, I cut all at once, Unedited !
"#SusanRice has as much trouble with her memory as #HillaryClinton. Rice testified in
writing that she 'does not recall' who gave her key #Benghazi talking points she used on
TV, 'does not recall' being in any meetings regarding Benghazi in five days following the
attack, and 'does not recall' communicating with anyone in Clinton's office about
Benghazi," Tom Fitton in Breitbart.
"Adam Schiff secretly subpoenaed, without court authorization, the phone records of Rudy
Giuliani and then published the phone records of innocent Americans, including
@realDonaldTrump 's lawyers, a member of Congress, and a journalist," @TomFitton .
BREAKING: Judicial Watch announced today that former #Obama National Security Advisor
and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, admitted in written responses given
under oath that she emailed with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Clinton's
non-government email account and that she received emails related to government business on
her own personal email account.
STONEHILLADY , 7 hours ago
It's not just the Democrats, the warmongering neocons of the Republican party are also
in on it, the Bush/Romney McCain/McConnell/Cheney and many more. It's called "Kick Backs"
Ever notice these so called retired Generals all end up working for all these spying
companies that span the 5eyes to Israel. It seems our POTUS has got his hands full swimming
up stream to get this stopped and actually get rid of the CIA. It's the number 1 reason he
doesn't trust these people, they all try to tell him stuff that is mis-directed.
Liars, leakers, and thieves are running not only our nation but the world, as George
Carlin said, "It's a Big Club, and we ain't in it." If you fall for this false narrative of
mail in voting and not actually go and vote on election day, you better start learning
Chinese for surely Peelosi and Schumer will have their way and mess up this election so
they can drag Trump out of office and possible do him and his family some serious harm, all
because so many of you listen to the MSM and don't research their phony claims.
Max21c , 7 hours ago
It's called "Kick Backs" Ever notice these so called retired Generals all end up
working for all these spying companies that span the 5eyes to Israel.
American Generals & Admirals are a lot more corrupt today than they were a few
generations back. Many of them are outright evil people in today's times. Many of these
people are just criminals that will steal anything they can get their banana republic
klepto-paws on. They're nothing but common criminals and thieves. No different than the
Waffen SS or any other group of brigands, bandits, and criminal gangsters.
Max21c , 7 hours ago
The CIA, FBI, NSA, Military Intelligence, Pentagon Gestapo, defense contractors are
mixed up in a lot of crimes and criminal activities on American soil against American
citizens and American civilians. They do not recognize borders or laws or rights of liberty
or property rights or ownership or intellectual property. They're all thieves and criminals
in the military secret police and secret police gangsters cabal.
BandGap , 7 hours ago
I have seen Binney's input. He is correct in my view because he
scientifically/mathematically proves his point.
The blinded masses do not care about this approach, just like wearing masks.
The truth is too difficult for many to fit into their understanding of the world.
So they repeat what they have been told, never stopping to consider the facts or how
circumstances have been manipulated.
It is frustrating to watch, difficult to navigate at times for me. Good people who will
not stop and think of what the facts show them.
otschelnik , 8 hours ago
It could have been the CIA or it could have been one of the cut-outs for plausible
deniability, and of all the usual suspects it was probably CrowdStrike.
- CGI / Global Strategy Group / Analysis Corp. - John Brennan (former CEO)
- Dynology, Wikistrat - General James L. Jones (former chairman of Atlantic Council, NSA
under Obama)
- CrowdStrike - Dmitri Alperovich and Shawn Henry (former chief of cyber forensics
FBI)
- Clearforce - Michael Hayden (former dir. NSA under Clinton, CIA under Bush) and Jim
Jones Jr. (son Gnrl James Jones)
- McChrystal Group - Stanley McChrystal (former chief of special operations DOD)
fersur , 8 hours ago
Unedited !
The Brookings Institute – a Deep State Hub Connected to the Fake Russia Collusion
and Ukraine Scandals Is Now Also Connected to China Spying In the US
The Brookings
Institute was heavily involved in the Democrat and Deep State Russia collusion hoax and
Ukraine impeachment fraud. These actions against President Trump were criminal.
This institute is influenced from foreign donations from entities who don't have an
America first agenda. New reports connect the Institute to Chinese spying.
As we reported previously, Julie Kelly at American Greatness
released a report where she addresses the connections between the Brookings Institute,
Democrats and foreign entities. She summarized her report as follows: Accepting millions
from a state sponsor of terrorism, foisting one of the biggest frauds in history on the
American people, and acting as a laundering agent of sorts for Democratic political
contributions disguised as policy grants isn't a good look for such an esteemed
institution. One would be hard-pressed to name a more influential think tank than the
Brookings Institution. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit routinely ranks at the top of
the list
of the best think tanks in the world; Brookings scholars produce a steady flow of reports,
symposiums, and news releases that sway the conversation on any number of issues ranging
from domestic and economic policy to foreign affairs.
Brookings is home to lots of Beltway power players: Ben
Bernanke and Janet Yellen, former chairmen of the Federal Reserve, are Brookings fellows.
Top officials from both Republican and Democrat presidential administrations lend political
heft to the organization. From 2002 until 2017, the organization's president was Strobe
Talbott. He's a longtime BFF of Bill Clinton; they met in the 1970s at Oxford University
and have been tight ever since. Talbott was a top aide to both President Bill Clinton and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Kelly continued:
Brookings-based fellows working at Lawfare were the media's go-to legal "experts" to
legitimize the concocted crime; the outlet manipulated much of the news coverage on
collusion by pumping out primers and guidance on how to report collusion events from
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's appointment to his final report.
Now, testimony related to a defamation lawsuit against Christopher Steele, the author of
the infamous "dossier" on Donald Trump, has exposed his direct ties to Talbott in 2016 when
he was still head of Brookings. Talbott and Steele were in communication before and after
the presidential election; Steele wanted Talbott to circulate the dossier to his pals in
John Kerry's State Department, which reportedly is what Talbott
did . Steele also briefed top state department officials in October 2016 about his
work.
But this isn't the only connection between the Brookings Institute and the Russia
collusion and Ukrainian scandals. We were the first to report that the Primary Sub-Source
(PSS) in the Steele report, the main individual who supplied Steele with bogus information
in his report was Igor Danchenko.
In November 2019, the star witness for the Democrat Representative Adam Schiff's
impeachment show trial was announced. Her name was Fiona Hill.
Today we've uncovered that Hill is a close associate of the Primary Sub-Source (PSS) for
the Steele dossier – Igor Danchenko – the individual behind most all the lies
in the Steele dossier. No wonder Hill saw the Steele dossier before it was released. Her
associate created it.
Both Fiona Hill and Igor Danchenko are connected to the Brookings Institute.
They gave a presentation together as Brookings Institute representatives:
Kelly writes about the foreign funding the Brookings Institute partakes:
So who and what have been funding the anti-Trump political operation at Brookings over
the past few years? The think tank's top benefactors are a predictable mix of family
foundations, Fortune 100 corporations, and Big Tech billionaires. But one of the biggest
contributors to Brookings' $100 million-plus annual budget is the Embassy of Qatar.
According to financial reports, Qatar has donated more than $22 million to the think tank
since 2004. In fact, Brookings operates a satellite center in Doha, the
capital of Qatar. The wealthy Middle Eastern oil producer
spends billions on American institutions such as universities and other think
tanks.
Qatar also is a top state sponsor of terrorism, pouring billions into Hamas, al-Qaeda,
and the Muslim Brotherhood, to name a few. "The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has
historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level," President Trump said in 2017. "We
have to stop the funding of terrorism."
An email from a Qatari official, obtained by WikiLeaks, said the Brookings
Institution was as important to the country as "an aircraft carrier."
The Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington, D.C., think tank, partnered with a
Shanghai policy center that the FBI has described as a front for China's intelligence and
spy recruitment operations, according to public records and federal court documents.
The Brookings Doha Center, the think tank's hub in Qatar, signed a memorandum of
understanding with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in January 2018, the
institution said . The academy is a policy center funded by the Shanghai municipal
government that has raised flags within the FBI.
The partnership raises questions about potential Chinese espionage activities at the
think tank, which employs numerous former government officials and nearly two dozen
current foreign policy advisers to Joe Biden's presidential campaign.
It is really frightening that one of two major political parties in the US is tied so
closely with the Brookings Institute. It is even more frightening that foreign enemies of
the United States are connected to this entity as well.
Let it Go , 8 hours ago
One thing for sure is these guys have far to much of our money to spend promoting their
own good.
fersur , 7 hours ago
Unedited !
Mueller Indictments Tied To "ShadowNet," Former Obama National Security Advisor and
Obama's CIA Director – Not Trump
According to a report in the Daily Beast, which cited the Wall Street Journal's
reporting of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into two companies, Wikistrat
and Psy Group, "The firm's advisory council lists former CIA and National Security Agency
director Michael Hayden, former national security adviser James L. Jones."
According to numerous reporting from major news outlets like the Wall Street Journal and
Daily Beast, both Wikistrat and Psy Group represent themselves as being social media
analysts and black PSYOP organizations. Both Wikistrat and Psy Group have foreign ownership
mixed between Israeli, Saudi (Middle East) and Russian. Here is what the Wall Street
Journal, The Daily Beast and pretty much everyone else out there doesn't know (or won't
tell you).
The fact Obama's former National Security Advisor, General James Jones, and former Obama
CIA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, are both on Wikistrat's advisory board may not seem
suspicious, but both of these general's have another thing in common, and that is the
ShadowNet. The ShadowNet, and its optional companion relational database, iPsy, were both
originally developed by the small, family owned defense contracting company, Dynology. The
family that owns Dynology; Gen. James Jones. I would add Paul Manafort and Rick Davis was
Dynology's partner at the time we were making the ShadowNet and iPsy commercially
available.
After obtaining the contract in Iraq to develop social media psychological warfare
capabilities, known in military nomenclature as Interactive Internet Activities, or IIA,
Gen. Jones kept the taxpayer funded application we developed in Iraq for the 4th
Psychological Operation Group, and made it commercially available under the trademark of
the "ShadowNet" and the optional black PSYOP component, "iPsy." If you think it is
interesting that one of the companies under Mueller's indictment is named, "Psy" Group, I
did as well. In fact, literally everything both publicly described in news reports, and
even their websites, are exactly the same as the ShadowNet and iPsy I helped build, and
literally named.
The only thing different I saw as far as services offered by Wikistrat, and that of
Dynology and the ShadowNet, was described by The Daily Beast as, "It also engaged in
intelligence collection." Although iPsy was a relational database that allowed for the
dissemination of whatever the required narrative was, "intelligence collection" struck
another bell with me, and that's a company named ClearForce.
ClearForce was developed as a solution to stopping classified leaks following the Edward
Snowden debacle in 2013. Changes in NISPOM compliance requirements forced companies and
government agencies that had employees with government clearances to take preventive
measure to mitigate the potential of leaking. Although the NISPOM compliance requirement
almost certainly would have been influenced by either Hayden, Jones or both, they once
again sought to profit from it.
Using components of the ShadowNet and iPsy, the ClearForce application (which the
company, ClearForce, was named after,) was developed to provide compliance to a regulation
I strongly suspect you will find Jones and Hayden had a hand in creating. In fact, I
strongly suspect you will find General Jones had some influence in the original requirement
for our Iraq contract Dynology won to build the ShadowNet – at taxpayer expense!
Dynology worked for several years incorporating other collection sources, such as
financial, law enforcement and foreign travel, and ties them all into your social media
activity. Their relationship with Facebook and other social media giants would have been
nice questions for congress to have asked them when they testified.
Part 1 of 2 !
fersur , 7 hours ago
Part 2 of 2 !
The ClearForce application combines all of these sources together in real-time and uses
artificial intelligence to predictively determine if you are likely to steal or leak based
on the behavioral profile ClearForce creates of you. It can be used to determine if you get
a job, and even if you lose a job because a computer read your social media, credit and
other sources to determine you were likely to commit a crime. It's important for you to
stop for a moment and think about the fact it is privately controlled by the former CIA
director and Obama's National Security Advisor/NATO Supreme Allied Commander, should scare
the heck out of you.
When the ClearForce application was complete, Dynology handed it off to ClearForce, the
new company, and Michael Hayden joined the board of directors along with Gen. Jones and his
son, Jim, as the president of ClearForce. Doesn't that kind of sound like "intelligence
collection" described by the Daily Beast in Wikistrat's services?
To wrap this all up, Paul Manafort, Rick Davis, George Nader, Wikistrat and Psy Group
are all directly connected to Mueller's social media influence and election interreference
in the 2016 presidential election. In fact, I believe all are under indictment, computers
seized, some already sentenced. All of these people under indictment by Mueller have one
key thing in common, General James Jones's and Michael Hayden's social media black PSYOP
tools; the ShadowNet, iPsy and ClearForce.
A recent meeting I had with Congressman Gus Bilirakis' chief of staff, Elizabeth Hittos,
is confirmation that they are reviewing my DoD memorandum stating the work I did on the IIA
information operation in Iraq, the Dynology marketing slicks for the ShadowNet and iPsy,
along with a screenshot of Goggle's Way-Back Machine showing Paul Manafort's partnership
with Dynology in 2007 and later. After presenting to her these facts and making clear I
have much more information that requires the highest classification SCIF to discuss and
requires being read-on to the program, Elizabeth contacted the office of Congressman Devin
Nunez to request that I brief the intelligence committee on this critical information
pertaining directly to the 2010 Ukrainian elections, Michael Brown riots, 2016 election
interference and the "Russia collusion" hoax. All of that is on top of numerous
questionable ethical and potentially illegal profits from DoD contracts while servings as
NATO Commander and Obama's National Security Advisor.
We also need to know if the ShadowNet and iPsy were allowed to fall into foreign hands,
including Russia, Saudi Arabia and Israel. I'm pretty sure South America is going to have a
few questions for Jones and Obama as well? Stay tuned!
Balance-Sheet , 4 hours ago
Intelligence Agencies of all countries endlessly wage war at all times especially
'Information Warfare' (propaganda/disinformation) and the primary target has always and
will always be the domestic population of the Intelligence Agency's country.
Yes, of course the CIA does target ALL other countries but the primary target will
always be the Americans themselves.
Balance-Sheet , 4 hours ago
Intelligence Agencies of all countries endlessly wage war at all times especially
'Information Warfare' (propaganda/disinformation) and the primary target has always and
will always be the domestic population of the Intelligence Agency's country.
Yes, of course the CIA does target ALL other countries but the primary target will
always be the Americans themselves.
The neoliberals own the media, courts, academia, and BUREAUCRACY (including CIA) and
they will do anything to make sure they retain power over everyone. These control freaks
work hard to create all sorts of enemies to justify their existence.
LaugherNYC , 15 hours ago
It is sad that this information has to be repeatedly published, over and over and over,
by SCI and other Russian. outlets.
Because no legit AMERICAN news outlet will give Binney or Assange the time of day or any
credence, this all becomes Kremlin-sponsored disinformation and denials. People roll their
eyes and say "Oh God, not the whole 'Seth Rich was murdered by the CIA' crap again!! You
know, his FAMILY has asked that people stop spreading these conspiracy theories and
lies."
SCI is a garbage bin, nothing more than a dizinformatz machine for Putin, but in this
case, they are likely right. It seems preposterous that the "best hackers in the world"
would forget to use a VPN or leave a signature behind, and it makes far more sense that the
emails were leaked by someone irate at the abuses of the DNC - the squashing of Bernie, the
cheating for Hillary in the debates - behavior we saw repeated in 2020 with Bernie shoved
aside again for the pathetic Biden.
Would that SOMEONE in the US who is not on the Kremlin payroll would pick up this
thread. But all the "investigative journalists" now work indirectly for the DNC, and those
that don't are cancelled by the left.
Stone_d_agehurler , 15 hours ago
I am Guccifer and I approve this message.
Sarc/
But i do share your opinion. They are likely right this time and most of the pundits and
media in the U. S. know it. That's what makes this a sad story about how rotten the U. S.
system has become.
Democrats will sacrifice the Union for getting Trump out of office.
If elections in Nov won't go their way, Civil War II might become a real thing in
2021.
PeterLong , 4 hours ago
If " digital "fingerprints" in order to give the impression that the files came from
Russian sources" were inserted in the leak by "Guccifer", and if the leak to wikileaks came
from Seth Rich, via whatever avenue, then the "Guccifer" release came after the wikileaks
release, or after wikileaks had the files, and was a reaction to same attempting to
diminish their importance/accuracy and cast doubt on Trump. Could CIA and/or DNC have known
the files were obtained by wikileaks before wikileaks actually released them? In any case
collusion of CIA with DNC seems to be a given.
RightlyIndignent , 4 hours ago
Because Seth had already given it to Wikileaks. There is no 'Fancy Bear'. There is no
'Cozy Bear'. Those were made up by CrowdStrike, and they tried the same crap on Ukraine,
and Ukraine told them to pound sand. When push came to shove, and CrowdStrike was forced to
say what they really had under oath, they said: "We have nothing."
novictim , 4 hours ago
You are leaving out Crowd Strike. Seth Rich was tasked by people at the DNC to copy data
off the servers. He made a backup copy and gave a copy to people who then got it to Wiki
leaks. He used highspeed file transfers to local drives to do his task.
Meanwhile, it was the Ukrainian company Crowd Strike that claimed the data was stolen
over the internet and that the thieves were in Russia. That 'proof" was never verified by
US Intelligence but was taken on its word as being true despite crowd strike falsifying
Russian hacks and being caught for it in the past.
Joebloinvestor , 5 hours ago
The "five eyes" are convinced they run the world and try to.
That is what Brennan counted on for these agencies to help get President Trump.
As I said, it is time for the UK and the US to have a serious conversation about their
current and ex-spies being involved in US elections.
Southern_Boy , 5 hours ago
It wasn't the CIA. It was John Brennan and Clapper. The CIA, NSA FBI, DOJ and the
Ukrainian Intelligence Service just went along working together and followed orders from
Brennan who got them from Hillary and Obama.
Oh, and don't forget the GOP Globalist RINOs who also participated in the coup attempt:
McCain, Romney, Kasich, Boehner, Lee and Richard Burr.
With Kasich now performing as a puppy dog for Biden at the Democrat Convention as a
Democrat DNC executive, the re-alignment is almost complete: Globalist Nationalist
Socialist Bolshevism versus American Populism, i.e. Elites versus Deplorables or Academics
versus Smelly Wal-Mart people.
on target , 5 hours ago
No way. CIA up to their eyeballs in this as well as the State Department. Impossible for
Russiagate or Ukrainegate without direct CIA and State involvement.
RightlyIndignent , 4 hours ago
Following Orders? How did that argument go at Nuremberg? (hint: not very well)
LeadPipeDreams , 6 hours ago
LOL - the CIA's main mission - despite their "official" charter, has always been to
destabilize the US and its citizens via psyops, false flags, etc.
Covid-1984 is their latest and it appears most successful project yet.
Iconoclast27 , 5 hours ago
The CIA received a $200 million initial investment from the Rockefeller and Carnegie
foundations when it was first established, that should tell you everything you need to know
how who they truly work for.
A_Huxley , 6 hours ago
CIA, MI6, 5 eye nations.
All wanted to sway the USA their own way.
Let it Go , 8 hours ago
Almost as frightening as the concentrated power held by companies such as Facebook and
Google is the fact Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and the world's richest man, is the person who
owns and controls the Washington Post. It is silly to think Jeff Bezos purchased the
Washington Post in 2013 because he expected newspapers to make a lucrative resurgence.
It is more likely he purchased the long-trusted U.S. newspaper for the power it would
ensure him in Washington when wielded as a propaganda mouthpiece to extend his ability to
both shape and control public opinion. More on this subject in the article below.
How it is the Democrats, the Deep State, and the legacy media are still able to cling to
the remnants of these long discredited narratives is a mystery.
avoiceofliberty , 6 hours ago
At the official level, you have a point.
However, even before Mueller was appointed, a review of the materials in the extant
public record of both the DNC "hack" and the history of Crowdstrike showed the narrative
simply did not make sense. A detailed investigation of materials not made public was not
necessary to shoot down the entire narrative.
Indeed, one of the great scandals of the Mueller probe is the way it did not bring
prudential skepticism to the question of the DNC "hack". When building a case, either for
public debate or for public trial, a dose of skepticism is healthy; it leads to a careful
vetting of facts and reasoning.
Alice-the-dog , 6 hours ago
The CIA has been an agency wholly independent of the US government almost since its
inception. It is not under any significant control by the government, and has its own
agenda which may occasionally coincide with that of the government, but only
coincidentally. It has its own view of how the world should look, and will not balk at any
means necessary to achieve such. Including the murder of dis-favorable members of
government.
snodgrass , 6 hours ago
It's the CIA and the FBI, Obama and people in his administration who cooked up
Russiagate.
Floki_Ragnarsson , 7 hours ago
The CIA whacked JFK because he was going to slow the roll to Vietnam AND disband the CIA
and reform it.
It is broken and needs to be disbanded and reformed along lines that actually WORK! The
CIA missed the fall of the USSR, 9/11, etc. HTF does THAT happen?
DeportThemAll , 6 hours ago
The CIA didn't "miss" 9/11... they participated in it.
Let it Go , 8 hours ago
The CIA is a tool that when improperly used can do great damage.
Anyone who doesn't believe that countries use psychological warfare and propaganda to
sway the opinions of people both in and outside of their country should be considered
naive. Too many people America is more than a little hypocritical when they criticize other
countries for trying to gain influence considering our history of meddling in the affairs
of other countries.
Americans have every reason to be concerned and worried considering revelations of just
how big the government intelligence agencies have grown since 9-11 and how unlimited their
spying and surveillance operations have become. The article below explores this growth and
questions whether we have lost control.
The idea of Binney and Jason Sullivan privately working to 'secure the vote' is
something that I actually consider to be very eyebrow raising and alarming.
Son of Captain Nemo , 8 hours ago
Bill Binney under "B" in the only "yellow pages" that show a conscience and a
soul!...
This is the dumbest article ever. Russiagate is a total fabrication of the FBI as per
Clinesmith, CIA provided information that would have nipped it at the bud. Read the real
news.
bringonthebigone , 9 hours ago
Wrong. this article is one small piece of the puzzle. Clinesmith is one small piece of
the puzzle. The Flynn entrapment is one small piece of the puzzle. The Halper entrapment
was one small piece of the puzzle.
Because Clinesmith at the FBI covered up the information saying Page was a CIA source
does not mean it was a total FBI fabrication and does not mean the CIA was not involved and
does not mean the DNC server hack is irrelevant.
Sundance does a better job pulling it all together.
PKKA , 14 hours ago
Relations have already soured between Russia and the United States, and sanctions have
been announced. Tensions have grown on the NATO-Russia border. The meat has already been
rolled into the minced meat and it will not be possible to roll the minced meat back into
the meat. The CIA got it. But the Russian people now absolutely understand that the United
States will always be the enemy of Russia, no matter whether socialist or capitalist. But I
like it even more than the feigned hypocritical "friendship". Russia has never reached such
heights as during the good old Cold War. All Russians have a huge incentive, long live the
new Cold War!
smacker , 12 hours ago
More and more people have worked out that the fabricated tensions between the US and
Russia
and US and China have little to do with those two countries posing any sort of threat to
world peace.
It is all about the US trying to remain in No.1 position as uni-polar top dog via the
Anglo American Empire.
We see examples of this every day in the M/E, South China Sea, Taiwan, Libya all over
Eastern Europe,
Ukraine, Iran and now Belaruse. HK was added along the way.
Both Russia and China openly want a multi-polar world order. But the US will never
accept that.
Hence the prospect of war. The only unknown today is what and where the trigger will
be.
smacker , 12 hours ago
More and more people have worked out that the fabricated tensions between the US and
Russia
and US and China have little to do with those two countries posing any sort of threat to
world peace.
It is all about the US trying to remain in No.1 position as uni-polar top dog via the
Anglo American Empire.
We see examples of this every day in the M/E, South China Sea, Taiwan, Libya all over
Eastern Europe,
Ukraine, Iran and now Belaruse. HK was added along the way.
Both Russia and China openly want a multi-polar world order. But the US will never
accept that.
Hence the prospect of war. The only unknown today is what and where the trigger will
be.
hang_the_banksters , 31 minutes ago
the best proof thAt Guccifer 2 was CIA hacking themselves to frame Wikileaks is
this:
Guccifer has not yet been identified, indicted and arrested.
you'd think CIAFBINSA would be turning over every stone to the ends of the earth to bust
Guccifer. we just had to endure 4 years of hysterical propaganda that Russia had hacked our
election and that Trump was their secret agent. so Guccifer should be the Most Wanted Man
on the planet. meanwhile, it's crickets from FBI. they arent even looking for him. because
Guccifer is over at Langley. maybe someone outta ask Brennan where G2 is now.
remember when DOJ indicted all those GRU cybersoldiers? the evidence listed in the
indictment was so stunning that i dont believe it. NSA so thoroughly hacked back into GRU
that NSA was watching GRU through their own webcams and recording them doing Google
searches to translate words which were written in Guccifer's blog posts about the DNC email
leaks. NSA and DOJ must think we are all stupid, that we will believe NSA is so powerful to
do that, yet they cant identify Guccifer.
i say i dont believe that for a second because no way Russian GRU are so stupid to even
have webcams on the computers they use to hack, and it is absurd to think GRU soldiers on a
Russian military base would be using Google instead of Yandex to translate words into
English.
lay_arrow
ConanTheContrarian1 , 1 hour ago
As a confirmed conspiracy theorist since I came back from 'Nam, here's mine: The
European nobility recognized with the American and French revolutions that they needed a
better approach. They borrowed from the Tudors (who had to deal with Parliament) and began
to rule by controlling the facade of representative government. This was enhanced by
funding banks to control through currency, as well as blackmail and murder, and morphed
into a complete propaganda machine like no other in history. The CIA, MI6 and Mossad, the
mainstream media, deep plants in bureaucracy and "democratic" bodies all obey their
dictates to create narratives that control our minds. Trump seems to offer hope, but
remember, he could be their latest narrative.
greatdisconformity , 1 hour ago
A Democracy cannot function on a higher level than the general electorate.
The intelligence and education of the general electorate has been sliding for
generations, because both political parties can play this to their advantage.
It is no accident that most of the messages coming from politicians are targeted to
imbeciles.
The Mueller 'gang' as I'll call them has been caught with their pants down. The
official FBI lawyer team-member of the Mueller gang is now under criminal
indictment. A criminal indictment has been filed against former FBI Attorney Kevin Clinsesmith.
H is criminal action occurred while he was a part of the Mueller Investigative Team . This
crime is detailed in the Information Charging Document filed by the United States Department of
Justice with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, wherein it
documents that "on or about June 19, 2017" Kevin Clinesmith "did willfully and knowingly make
and use a false writing and document, knowing the same to contain materially false, fictitious,
and fraudulent statement and entry in a matter before the jurisdiction of the executive branch
and judicial branch of the Government of the United States".
Kevin Clinesmith while he was part of the Mueller Team did this while President Trump was in
office.
-- "Count One" violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 (a) (3), that specifically says Clinesmith
"shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves
international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8
years, or both" -- the critical meaning of which is that Clinesmith is not only facing 5-years
in prison, but could see his sentence having another 8-years added on if the crime he committed
was domestic terrorism as defined by 18 U.S. C. § 2331.Definitions -- a definition
that makes it a domestic terrorism crime "to influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion" -- and is a domestic terrorism crime.
Clinesmith effectively admitted to committing this crime when he sent a text saying "I Have
Initiated the Destruction of the Republic" -- that explains why Clinesmith has agreed to a plea
deal with US Attorney Durham that will see him pleading guilty and giving evidence against
other coup plotters.
Clinesmith is proving to be a linchpin of the Operation Crossfire Hurricane investigation
that the FBI used to illegally target the Trump campaign in which Clinesmith took part in the
decision to send an FBI special agent into a counterintelligence briefing with Donald Trump and
General Michael Flynn. Clinesmith being one of the FBI lawyers who took part in interviews with
George Papadopoulos -- as well as Clinesmith was one of the plotters behind the FISA warrant
having been illegally obtained to spy on President Trump after he was in office. Clinesmith did
with joy as evidenced by his 22 November 2016 text disdaining Trump's election victory saying
Viva le
Resistance , of which caught Clinesmith by his short-hairs and he now fearing dread knowing
he stuck his foot in his mouth so-to-speak.
It is now Trump's turn to take down all of the membership of the attempted Coup d'Etat. Pop
your popcorn, get out your beer and sodas, and settle in. The show is just getting started.
Even though we assume (the case is not clear yet) this is all about Clinsesmith reversing
the meaning of a document submitted to the FISA court, about as bad act a senior FBI lawyer
can get up to, they are nowhere near as confident as yourself about the potential outcome of
this case over at the CTH.
Much more along the lines of this being another James Wolfe situation. Like Wolfe,
Clinsesmith knows too much and if he spills it all hell lets loose. However, to show there is
justice for all he, again like Wolfe, will spend a short amount of time in a white collar
jail and that's it.
By pleading guilty he has saved himself a small fortune in lawyers fees. Nice one.
I agree that he has made a deal with Durham but if Durham presses him he must tell all
about all or loose the deal and become the cutest fellow in the cell block.
Someone asked that I paint a bird's eye, 20,000 mile high view of the why's and
wherefore's for this whole fiasco, and I'd like feedback.
I draw a direct line from Russiagate to the West's NATO/EU expansion it's collusion with
fascist forces to Regime Change(TM) Ukraine in '14
• where Manafort was working to promote Ukraine's EU accession (AGAINST Russia's
interests)
• backed by the Clinton, Obama, McCain, Kerry, Nuland State Department, and the
establishment media
• leading Crimeans to vote 95% for annexation with Russia, to escape the Ukraine
civil war
prompting punishing sanctions to damage the recovery of Russia
• which was looted by the oligarchs under Clinton/Yeltsin/Summers "shock therapy" in
the '90s.
• including by oligarch tax cheat Bill Browder who lied to promote the extra-judicial
and bogus Magnitsky Act (REAL reason for Trump Tower meeting)
• all hiding behind a massive psy-op campaign of McCarthyite anti-Russia, anti-Putin
hysteria
• brought to you by the (corrupt) FBI, CIA, NSA, MI-6, Five Eyes, all led by the nose
by John Brennan, and
• and the disinfo industry and a spy network which laid out the breadcrumbs of
distraction, while trying to entrap bozos George Papadopolous, Carter Page, Roger Stone,
etc.
• ALL because Trump (via Manafort) would know the truth, and not see Russia as THE
ENEMY - which would totally blowing their cover.
So, the incompetent Dems handed Trump his re-election victory and sparked a dangerous new
Cold War (World War?) and nuclear M.A.D.
No one benefits from this other than the military/national security/information industry
complex.
"I draw a direct line from Russiagate to the West's NATO/EU expansion it's collusion with
fascist forces to Regime Change(TM) Ukraine in '14" Do you think the Russians were guilty or
not?
Plead guilty to a crime and you lose your bar license. I guess Clinesmith was not ready to
fall back being only a bar-tender after all, so he is now wiggling out of his "plea
agreement". The gulf between pleading guilty and pleading nolo contendre now appears
insurmountable.
Reality bites, along with the drawn-out difficulty getting justice in any of this Spygate
takedown. Humbles one about the amount of time it takes to actually build a beyond a
reasonable doubt case against any of these now exposed players, when the defendant can
successfully argue - I didn't intend to commit a crime, and/or I can't recall or I don't
remember anything about this incident.
Carry on Barr-Durham You have my very best wishes and even prayers. Just like Benghazi,
something happened, but you just can't prove something happened. Is that justice served or a
miscarriage of justice?
An alternate theory that I find very plausible is that FBI contractors were using the NSA
database for political opposition research. When the NSA found out and closed that avenue
there was a movement to hide that activity. Russia Collusion provided that opportunity as the
Clinton campaign funded Steele Dossier got laundered by Fusion GPS, DOJ official Bruce Ohr
and with the support of Obama White House became the basis to launch a counter-intelligence
investigation. After Trump got elected this operation moved to hide and obfuscate. Getting
Flynn out became priority one and Trump obliged by firing him. Mueller was the additional
option to prevent exposure and Trump once gain acceded by not declassifying.
As documents get declassified now the public, at least those following this story, get to
see how law enforcement and intelligence were used to interfere in a presidential election
and frame an opposition political candidate and duly elected president as a Manchurian
Candidate. Even more importantly we see how the entire justice system got weaponized using
false evidence and secret courts as well as a campaign of disinformation using the media who
were in cahoots to destroy the Trump presidency.
Clinesmith's plea deal is an important cornerstone in uncovering both the malfeasance and
the violation of law. He knowingly submitted false evidence to FISC to obtain a FISA warrant.
The only open question is how far and deep does Bill Barr want to go?
Begging your indulgence for my 'stream-of-consciousness' argument. Just trying to connect
so many points and history into a concise post.
My view of Russia under Putin has been of a country initially leaning West but unwilling
to give up its sovereignty to US diktat, given the history of NATO aggression.
It was the logical course of events which convinced me Putin was not the aggressor in
Ukraine. First, the Sochi Olympics with all of the media potshots at Russia/Putin, concurrent
and immediately followed by the Maidan coupe and ultra-right attacks on eastern Ukrainians,
especially the fiery massacre in the Odessa Trade Union building killing nearly nearly 50,
with 200 injured.
In the public record at the time was NATO's position that Ukraine must cancel a lease
given the Russians to keep its centuries old naval fleet (it's only warm water base) on the
Crimean peninsula. So, the accession of Crimea to the Russian federation by democratic vote
seemed only too logical, considering it had historically been considered part of Russia.
Otherwise, Russia foreign policy appears to be a model for the world, when compared
side-by-side with that of the U.S., IMHO.
The late June 'Russian bounties in Afghanistan' story lasted no longer than a mere week
given that some of the very publications pushing it
were forced to walk it back based on not only key claims not bearing out, but a slew of top
intel officials and Pentagon generals saying it was baseless.
And then like many other 'Russiagate'-inspired narratives (in this case Trump was accused of
essentially 'looking the other way' while Russians supposedly paid the Taliban to kill US
troops), it was memory-holed.
But this apparently hasn't stopped the State Department or the Pentagon from using it as
leverage while talking to the Russians. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned his counterpart,
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, that "there will be an enormous price to pay" if the Kremlin
did indeed pay Afghan fighters to attack Americans or other Westerners .
"That's what I shared with Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov," Pompeo said. "I know our
military has talked to their senior leaders as well. We won't brook that; we won't tolerate
that."
Russia has of course, denied involvement in any such operation, which many analysts have
pointed out would carry major risk of stoking military conflict with the United States but with
little positive gain in the region.
Pompeo also said in the interview
: "We will do everything we need to do to protect and defend every American soldier and, for
that matter, every soldier from the Czech Republic or any other country that's part of the
Resolute Support Mission to make sure that they're safe."
Importantly, it marks the first time any US official has broached the Russian bounties story
with a Kremlin officials .
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But again, it's somewhat strange given the US administration (and multiple
US intelligence agencies ) has repeatedly denied that it has any merit. Trump has gone so
far as to all it a "hoax". Thus Pompeo's message to the Russians appears a pure tactic for
achieving leverage.
Or alternately, it could be that Pompeo is just plain undermining Trump on this one.
Unitended Consequences , 5 minutes ago
Pompeo is a Deep State mole.
David Wooten , just now
There is still a big disconnect between Trump and the 'Trump' administration.
Have to wonder at the re-emergence of Russiagate. Seems a major reason for its emergence
is to shame voters into voting for Biden. If you do not vote for Biden, you are Putin's
useful idiot. In particular aimed at African Americans. Recently a NYT reporter claimed that
it was Russian mean tweets, etc that caused a very dramatic drop in African American turn out
in 2016. See screen shot by Aron Mate as the NYT reporter deleted the tweets.
Looks like the DNC may be very nervous about Black turnout after Biden's many racial
gaffes. Imagine Black turnout if he chooses Susan Rice as his VP. The DNC may have to go to
Putin to ask for his help.
Were you aware that the Steele dossier had a significant other?
"Rep Devin Nunes:
"You may remember that the State Department was involved and there were additional
dossiers that weren't the Steele dossier- except that they mirrored the Steele dossier.
And we think there is a connection between the [former] president of Brookings
and those dossiers that were given to the State Department."
"
...
Also from article:
"
The "additional dossiers that weren't the Steele dossier" addressed by Nunes
is a reference to a lesser known dodgy dossier produced by Brookings-affiliated
journalist Cody Shearer (brother-in-law of Strobe Talbott) which was crafted
explicitly to validate the wildly unsupported claims found in Steele's dossier.
"
I know it sounds wacky to those of you who still put some store in MSM nonsense,
but I still believe that what we know as "Russiagate" was a carefully planned operation
to:
initiate a new anti-Russia McCarthyism -
after Trump's election, MSM repeated Russigate accusations about Russian meddling
every night for months;
elect MAGA Nationalist (Trump, not Hillary!) -
as Kissinger had called for in his Aug 2014 WSJ Op-Ed;
discredit Wikileaks/Assange;
lead to a vindictive settling of scores with Assange, Flynn, Manafort.
Also: It's likely that Skripal was the true "primary sub-source" and that he was drugged
because he planned to flee back to Russia because he realised that he knew too much. He knew
that the "dirty dossier" was meant to be untrue and easily debunked. It would never actually
tarnish Trump - only Russia. Not surprisingly, Trump's MAGA Nationalism has been
strengthened by Russiagate allegations while the anti-Russia sentiment remains.
From the document: "Binney is quoted as being convinced by Campbell's analysis and now
believes the DNC data was hacked."
This person gets it wrong. What Binney concluded was that the data was *manipulated" and
therefore can not be used to establish much of anything. However, the point that the data
could not be transmitted at the speed estimated in 2016 is still basically valid and that the
data was loaded onto removable storage is also still likely. *However*, that fact has always
been mostly irrelevant, since no one knows how many times it was moved and by what means.
Almost certainly it was moved by an external storage device at some point before ending up in
Wikileaks. Craig Murray pretty much said as much.
How I would have done it is sit outside the DNC server location with a decent high-speed
WiFi connection to their wireless network (I presume they have one, everyone does these
days), and after doing whatever was necessary, either as an employee or a spy, to connect to
the network, I would have downloaded the data to my wireless device (laptop, presumably). The
NSA would be oblivious to this transfer, although depending on my anti-forensics skill, it
might still have been detected internally by a computer forensics expert. CrowdStrike never
found the actual leaker or the exfiltration method AFAIK; all they found was some malware -
which means whoever took it was either authorized to do so (or used the credentials of
someone else authorized to do so - standard operating procedure for either external or
internal spies) or was very good at anti-forensics. Or CrowdStrike was simply incompetent. Or
all three.
What the data analysis *does* do is disprove the US allegation that Russians extracted the
data *over the Internet* *directly* to Wikileaks. Nothing in the Mueller report suggests the
data was moved by external storage media. Binney's statement that if it was moved over the
Internet, the NSA would know it and could prove it remains true. That they never have is one
huge red flag about the Mueller claims.
The rest of the conspiracy analysis in the linked document is only minimally interesting.
The 5G stuff just shows the writer to be a non-scientist, as they fully admit, while still
suggesting that 5G is some sort of health threat. I wouldn't be surprised if it is to some
degree. The problem is that no one outside the non-ionizing radiation scientific community
has any real clue to *what* degree. If the international organizations have concluded it is
not, it takes, as they say, "extraordinary evidence" to prove them wrong. None of that has
been forthcoming, in particular nothing by Snake here. So it's a waste of time to take it
seriously. I've asked Snake for *one* single experiment done by *anyone* with real
credentials that uses the actual level of radiation from either a 5G phone or a tower to
cause subjects to get the virus. AFAIK there is no such experiment done anywhere by anyone.
So there is no evidence it happens - or for that matter, no evidence it doesn't except
current recognized science. Which, as I say, has been dismissed by the real experts.
Everything else is speculation - and conspiracy theory.
In general, I like conspiracy theories. They provide a fertile field for investigation -
if someone has the means to do so. Most conspiracy theorists don't have the means. They just
regurgitate the available reports - which, by definition, are unreliable - and engage in
"analysis", which really means speculation. Only on the ground investigation can begin to get
at the truth.
Back in 1968 or 1969, I forget which, I actually went to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, to
talk to people about the legendary "Mothman" that journalist John Keel had written about. I
talked to the cops involved, a stringer reporter who had accompanied Keel in his
investigations, and some of the UFO witnesses in the area. I couldn't establish what actually
happened from this, but it *did* confirm what Keel had written was what he was told.
Keel was an "old-school" journalist who believed in "ground truth". The problem with most
conspiracy theorists is that most of them don't have either the technical expertise or the
resources to get "ground truth". Keel himself told me once that he would go to a location, do
some investigation, deliver a talk of some sort, and write off his expenses as tax
write-offs, which he said the IRS was not happy about. And he was by no means rich, his books
never sold that much. Without a significant income, it's next to impossible to determine the
truth of 99% of the events in any given conspiracy theory.
Or for that matter, the truth in 99% of the main stream news. But it's not 100%. The other
problem conspiracy theorists have - and we see it here daily - is that just because a report
comes from the MSM, it *has* to be false in its *entirety*. Which is ridiculous. Most of the
MSM news is valid reporting. It's just how much is left out and how the spin is applied from
the wording or who the source was that is the problem. A few things might be completely made
up, but most things aren't. But if the reporter hasn't himself done the leg-work to verify
the statements of the sources, then it has to be considered unreliable or at least
incomplete.
"The Sedwill/Younger narrative of what happened on the day, the British prosecution case
against two GRU agents for the novichok attack, and the ongoing inquest into the cause of
Dawn Sturgess's death remain at risk of exposure; to reduce that risk and move on to a new
policy towards Russia and other enemies, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings have now forced
Sedwill and Younger into retirement, concealing the purge and their purpose": John
Helmer."Dances with Bears" website.
Thanks to Mark2 for the YouTube link on the 77th brigade. You may find Helmer's
investigations as fascinating as I do.
And as an adjunct to uncle tungsten's comments re. the round table and Rhodes scholarship
recipients. Susan Rice is a Rhodes scholar. This is portentous.
"The long read [...] does not account for who or what instigated the British spies into
launching their campaign against Trump. My hunch is that then CIA director John Brennan was
the central person behind it."
You're starting from the assumption that our British "cousins" are junior partners in the
American hegemon's globalist designs, but in fact American imperialism is a departure from
its founding principles, in which willing Anglophiles (Aaron Burr, J.P. Morgan, the Dulles
Bros., to name a few -- you get the picture) have always subverted efforts by US leaders to
break from British geopolitics as formulated by Halford Mackinder, etc., for whom the
survival of Atlanticist world power still depends on preventing US-Russia collaboration to
bring about a world anti-colonialist order. This oligarchy, whose species memory far
surpasses that of the clueless masses for whom they rewrite history, can still feel the burn
of Catherine the Great's support for the American Revolution when she refused George III
Russia's help suppressing rebellion in the American colonies, or when Alexander II deployed
two whole fleets of the Russian Navy to prevent the British from bailing out the failing
Confederacy. More recently, Franklin Roosevelt sent Churchill into apoplectic rage when he
categorically rejected that racist pig's demand to return her colonies back to Britain at the
end of the war.
Since at least the assassination of Lincoln (or earlier, when British soldiers came down
from Canada to burn down Washington in 1814) the British Empire and its surviving heirs have
always been at the core of efforts to denature America, replacing win-win Hamiltonian
economics with a phony "free-trade" ideology increasingly adopted as gospel by "western"
economic authorities, and sabotaging every effort by Americans to play a productive,
cooperative role with other nations in world affairs. Just like Hillary Clinton and her
crazed minions refuse to acknowledge the election of Donald Trump, the Brits never accepted
the loss of their former colonies, and have never missed an opportunity to subvert the
uniquely American System by which we became a world power -- no thanks to any kind of
"special relationship" with Britain, which quickly sank its hooks into our finances by
establishing Wall Street as an outpost of the City of London, and infiltrating all of our
political and economic as well as cultural and academic institutions (Harvard, e.g.) with
devotees of that financial empire. True American interests have always been betrayed by
Anglophile fifth-columnists aligned with the Brits -- more broadly defined as a true
oligarchy that goes back to Venice and its alliance with the Ottoman Empire to bring down
Constantinople, the gateway to a Eurasian powerhouse which then and now threatens to weaken
these globalists' hold over world affairs.
So "Rule Britannia" is still the battle cry of the Five Eyes "intelligence community" as
it spins out wild, implausible narratives to demonize every alternative to the necrotic
vulture capitalism behind globalist hegemony, which most mistakenly see as an American
enterprise but in reality is the essence of the "Deep State" that so-called patriots believe
they oppose. Such is these psy-warriors' control of collective awareness, through mainstream
media and well-placed mouthpieces, as well as, increasingly, "independent" social media and
education itself, that red-blooded Americans who instinctively deplore this usurpation of
their sovereignty blame Russia, or China, or whomever, and mindlessly parrot absurd
"intelligence community" slanders against any country standing up to the status quo
Perfidious Albion has been craftily building since... well, since the day after Yorktown. Any
initial skepticism at this historical perspective, protestations that such claims are
preposterous and the British Empire died long ago, will quickly fall away as the origin of
every fake news item used against the Trump administration is examined, whether paid for by
the Democratic Party, the FBI, etc. Consider this a mere primer in a much-needed re-framing
of strategic analyses at this time. As Leviathan lashes out in increasing pain at an
encroaching multi-polar paradigm of development and growth, its DNA will become increasingly
apparent.
My hunch is that the "long read," by omitting this piece of the puzzle, is a bit of
a cover-up... or, as they say, "limited hangout."
a bit of a cover-up... or, as they say, "limited hangout."
I concur with that.
I believe that the operation was approved by bigwigs in both the US and UK
establishment.
Gina Haspel's presence in London is not likely to be an accident. If the operation was
supposed to elect Hillary instead of Trump, I suspect she wouldn't be CIA Director today.
We should not underestimate the angst in 2013 and 2014 at Russia's interventions in Syria
and Ukraine. Russian assertiveness showed that their alliance with China was serious.
The poms have a way of getting away with this kind of stuff - have been doing it for their
entire history. Lots of conspiring, lots of coverupping. But when the Americans are
actively involved I guess things can get complicated.
Thank you for that post. re Skripals - it is also possible that the two 'Russian chaps'
picked up what they were after (left at a drop by Sergei) and returned to London as planned
and then on to Russia that night. When the MI6 imagined rendezvous between the Russian chaps
and Skripals failed to materialise and then things went pear shape at the pub, MI6 decided to
fix the Skripals. Perhaps they left the 'Russian chaps' alone as it was all too late or too
dangerous for MI6 to grab them as well. Perhaps Sergei gave them material that was promptly
uploaded and sent home as the two rode the train to London. They caught the 1300 train afaik
and the Skripals were 'hit' at 1700 more or less.
But something critical seems to have gone down at the pub and MI6 was not in that loop.
Mayhem ensued as the Skripals then walked away to their doom.
Pure speculation on my part as I seek logic in a black ops world.
Thank you for the advice on Susan Rice. Rhodes Scholar data base here for barflies to ponder . See Alumni and
Volunteers for a roadmap etc.
Even before Rep. Tulsi Gabbard threatened to
boycott the October 15th Dem debate as the DNC usurps the role of voters in the Democratic primacy 2020 election and with an
impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump on the table, the Swamp was stirred and its slimy muck may be about to come to
the surface as never before.
If so, those revelations are long overdue.
It is no secret to the observant that since the 2016 election, the Democratic Party has been in a state of near-collapse, the
victim of its own hubris, having lost their moral compass with unsubstantiated Russisgate allegations; those accusations continue
as a futile exercise of domestic regime change.
Today's Dems are less than a bona fide opposition party offering zero policy solutions, unrecognizable from past glories and
not the same political party many of us signed up for many years ago. Instead, the American public is witnessing a frenzied, unscrupulous
strategy.
Desperate in the denial of its demise, confronting its own shadow of corruption as the Dems have morphed into a branch of the
CIA – not unlike origins of the East German Stasi government.
It should not be necessary to say but in today's hyper volatile political climate it is: No American should be labelled as anything
other than a loyal American to be deeply disturbed by the Democrat/CIA collusion that is currently operating an unprecedented
Kangaroo Court in secret, behind closed doors; thus posing an ominous provocation to what remains of our Constitutional Republic.
As any politically savvy, independent thinking American might grasp, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck
Schumer and their entire coterie of sycophants always knew that Russiagate was a crock of lies.
They lied to their willing Democratic rank n file, they lied to American public and they continue to lie about their bogus Impeachment
campaign.
It may be that whistleblower
Ed Snowden's revelations about the NSA surveillance state was the first inkling for many Americans that there is a Big Problem
with an out-of-control intelligence community until Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned that
Trump was being 'really dumb " in daring to question Intel's faulty conclusion that Russia hacked the 2016 election.
"Let me tell you. You take on the intelligence community = they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."
Inescapably, Schumer was suggesting that the Congress has no oversight, that there is no accountability and that the US has lost
its democratic roots when a newly elected President does not have the authority to question or publicly disagree with any of the
Intel agencies.
Since the 2016 election, there has been a steady drumbeat of the US Intel's unabashed efforts to undermine and otherwise prevent
a newly elected President from governing – which sounds like a clear case of insubordination or some might call it treasonous.
The Intel antipathy does not appear to be rooted in cuts to a favorite social services program but rather protecting a power,
financial and influence agenda that
goes
far deeper and more profound than most Americans care to contemplate.
Among a plethora of egregious corporate media reactions, no doubt stirred by their Intel masters, was to a
July, 2018 summit meeting between Russian President Putin and Trump in Helsinki emblematic of illegitimate censures from Intel
veterans and its cronies:
Not one praised Trump for pursuing peace with Russia.
And yet, fellow Americans, it is curious to consider that there was no outrage after the 911 attacks in 2001 from any member of
Congress, President Bush or the Corporate Media that the US intelligence community had utterly failed in its mission to keep the
American public safe.
There was no reckoning, not one person in authority was held accountable, not one person who had the responsibility to 'know'
was fired from any of the Intel agencies. Why is that?
As a result of the corrupt foundation of the Russiagate allegations, Attorney General Bob Barr and Special Investigator John Durham
appear
hot on the trail with law enforcement in Italy as they have apparently scared the bejesus out of what little common sense remains
among the Democratic hierarchy as if Barr/Durham might be headed for Obama's Oval Office.
Barr's earlier comment before the Senate that " spying did occur' and that '
it's a big deal' when
an incumbent administration (ie the Obama Administration) authorizes a counter-Intelligence operation on an opposing candidate (ie
Donald Trump) has the Dems in panic-stricken overdrive – and that is what is driving the current Impeachment Inquiry.
With the stark realization that none of the DNC's favored top tier candidates has the mojo to go the distance, the Democrats have
now focused on a July 25th
phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump allegedly ' pressured ' Zelenskyy to investigate
Joe Biden's relationship with Burisma, the country's largest natural gas provider.
Zelenskyy, who defeated the US-endorsed incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in a landslide victory, speaks Russian, was elected
to clean up corruption and end the conflict in eastern Ukraine. The war in the Donbass began as a result of the US State Department's
role in the
overthrow of democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
Trump's first priority on July 25th was
Crowd Strike , a cybersecurity firm with links to the HRC campaign which was hired by the DNC to investigate Russian hacking
of its server.
The Dems have reason to be concerned since it is worth contemplating why the FBI did not legally mandate that the DNC turn its
server over to them for an official Federal forensic inspection.
One can only speculate those chickens may be coming home to roost.
Days after an anonymous whistleblower (not to be confused with a real whistleblower like Edward Snowden) later identified as a
CIA analyst with a professional history linked to Joe Biden,
publicly released a
Complaint against
Trump.
House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi announced
the initiation of an ambiguous Impeachment Inquiry campaign with little specificity about the process. The Complaint is suspect since
it reads more like a professionally prepared Affidavit and the Dems consider Pelosi's statement as sufficient to initiate a formal
process that fails to follow the time-honored path of a full House vote predicating a legitimate impeachment inquiry on to the Judiciary
Committee.
Of special interest is how the process to date is playing out with the House Intelligence Committee in a key role conducting what
amounts to
clandestine meetings , taking depositions and witness statements behind closed doors with a still secret unidentified whistleblower's
identity and voice obscured from Republican members of the Intel Committee and a witness testifying without being formally sworn
in – all too eerily similar to East Germany.
The pretense of shielding the thinly veiled CIA operative as a whistleblower from public exposure can only be seen as an overly-dramatic
transparent performance as the Dems have never exhibited any concern about protecting real whistleblowers like Snowden, Chelsea Manning,
Bill Binney, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Julian Assange, Jeffrey Sterling and others who were left to fend for themselves as the
Obama Administration prosecuted more true, authentic whistleblowers than any other administration since the
Espionage Act of 1917 .
As the paradigm shift takes its toll on the prevailing framework of reality and our decayed political institutions, (the FBI and
DOJ come to mind as the Inspector General's report is due at week's end), how much longer does the Democratic Party, which no longer
serves a useful public purpose, deserve to exist?
Russia is backing Donald Trump, China is supporting Joe Biden and Iran is seeking to sow
chaos in the US presidential election, a top intelligence official has warned in a sobering
assessment of foreign meddling.
The
statement on Friday by William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and
Security Center, raises fears of a repeat of the 2016 election, when Russia manipulated social
media to help Trump and hurt his opponent Hillary Clinton.
"Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden and
what it sees as an anti-Russia 'establishment'," Evanina said. "This is consistent with
Moscow's public criticism of him when he was Vice President for his role in the Obama
Administration's policies on Ukraine and its support for the anti-Putin opposition inside
Russia."
Evanina identified Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia Ukrainian politician, as "spreading claims
about corruption – including through publicized leaked phone calls" to attack Biden's
campaign.
The Washington Post reported that Derkach has met repeatedly with Trump's personal lawyer,
Rudy Giuliani, who has pushed conspiracy theories about the former
vice-president.
Evanina also warned that some "Kremlin-linked actors" were spreading false claims about
corruption to undermine Biden, while others were trying to "boost President Trump's candidacy
via social media and Russian television".
Evanina, the top intelligence official monitoring threats to the election, is a Trump
appointee. His statement lists China before Russia but presents less specific evidence of
direct interference by Beijing.
"We assess that China prefers that President Trump – whom Beijing sees as
unpredictable – does not win re-election," Evanina said. "China has been expanding its
influence efforts ahead of November 2020 to shape the policy environment in the United States,
pressure political figures it views as opposed to China's interests, and deflect and counter
criticism of China."
He added: "Beijing recognizes that all of these efforts might affect the presidential
race."
Evanina highlighted China's criticism of Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the
closure of China's consulate in Houston and the White House responses to Chinese actions in
Hong Kong and the South China Sea.
On Friday, the US imposed sanctions on Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, and 10
other senior officials. Trump has also ordered crackdowns on the
Chinese owners of the popular apps TikTok and WeChat.
Iran, meanwhile, was seeking to undermine US democratic institutions and Trump, and to
divide the country ahead of the 2020 elections, Evanina's statement said.
"Iran's efforts along these lines probably will focus on on-line influence, such as
spreading disinformation on social media and recirculating anti-US content. Tehran's motivation
to conduct such activities is, in part, driven by a perception that President Trump's
reelection would result in a continuation of US pressure on Iran in an effort to foment regime
change."
Trump pulled the US out of a nuclear deal agreed by Barack Obama and imposed various
sanctions on Tehran.
The anti-Trump pressure group National Security Action denied that China's public actions
rose to the level of Russia's covert election interference. "Jarringly, the statement attempted
to minimize what Russia is doing – again attacking our democracy in a bid to secure
Trump's reelection – by comparing it to China's public criticism of the administration's
recent punitive measures against Beijing," a spokesperson, Ned Price, said. "Any interference
in our democracy is unacceptable, but there is no equivalence between the two efforts."
In a press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Friday evening, Trump
reacted to the assessment by insisting: "I think that the last person Russia wants to see in
office is Donald Trump because nobody's been tougher on Russia than I have, ever.
"China would love us to have an election where Donald Trump lost to 'Sleepy' Joe Biden. They
would own our country. If Joe Biden was president, China would own our country ... Iran would
love to see me not be president."
The president added: "I'll make this statement. If and when we win, we will make deals with
Iran very quickly. We'll make deals with North Korea very quickly. Whatever happened to the war
in North Korea? You haven't seen that, have you?"
A hacking and social media campaign by Russia in 2016 is credited by US intelligence with
helping Trump to victory. It triggered the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation,
which described Russian meddling
but did not conclude that there had been direct collusion by Trump or his campaign.
The November election is already under siege from the coronavirus pandemic, concerns over
whether the system can handle a surge in mail-in voting and constant attacks by Trump on the
integrity of the process.
Evanina warned that foreign adversaries may try to interfere with election systems by trying
to sabotage the voting process, stealing election data or questioning the validity of results:
"Foreign efforts to influence or interfere with our elections are a direct threat to the fabric
of our democracy."
The report raised concern on Capitol Hill. Marco Rubio and Mark Warner, the top Republican
and Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said they "encourage political leaders on
all sides to refrain from weaponizing intelligence matters for political gain".
Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, said: "It is no surprise our
adversaries have preferences in our elections. Foreign nations have tried to influence our
politics throughout American history. As Director Evanina's statement makes clear, Russian
malign influence efforts remain a significant threat. But it would be a serious mistake to
ignore the growing threats posed by China and Iran."
What MoA is focusing on here – that the body of the NY Times article lacks any
specific allegations to back up the scare headline – closely parallels the "Russian
bounties" story from a few weeks ago.
In that case as well, someone who actually read the initial, supposedly blockbuster
piece, found nothing to support the headline or provide details beyond the lead sentence or
two of the piece. And I'm speaking in objective terms: leaving aside whether a reader might
or might not find any specific alleged findings credible, they simply weren't there.
The follow-up "Russian bounties" articles added a very few specific allegations. These
were unconvincing, but more to the point, nobody paid attention to them or seemed to feel
they were needed, and they ceased within a few days. This was because the initial article had
served its purpose simply by putting this one sentence out there: "Russia is paying bounties
to the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers."
That one bare assertion is now established as a meme (in more like the original sense
of the word than the funny pictures everyone sends around) that impersonates as an
established fact, and now regularly appears in establishment narratives, such as remarks by
members of Congress, and other corporate media pieces, e.g. this week's interview of Trump by
Jonathan Swan, which itself got a lot of coverage: ("Trump didn't bring up the bounties in
his phone conversation with Putin!").
The Times article MoA tries to examine today, only to find it doesn't actually exist in
substance beyond the headline, serves the same purpose, but for this sentence: "Russian
meddling in U.S. elections continues in 2020." This is necessary for the narrative managers
so that they aren't limited to referring to "meddling" as a mere historic event from 2016,
and can treat it as a live – and established as true – threat now. (Of course,
the meddling in 2016 was itself a phony story, and this shows how these manufactured memes
can be stacked one on top of the other to create the false edifice that the Beltway consensus
successfully purveys as the real world to most people in the U.S.)
There is little incentive for the Times and their intelligence-community "sources" to spin
more elaborate lies when the media-political-intellectual culture has degraded to the point
that no one thinks beyond the level of the naked meme. They thus avoid two problems
associated with staging more elaborate hoaxes: (1) it's more work; (2) specific falsehoods
can be disproven with facts. The sole major lesson the Beltway establishment took from the
2003 Iraq-WMD fiasco is to try to avoid lies specific enough that they can be disproven.
That's always been the purpose of intelligence agencies - in every nation throughout
history.
Government agencies work for their own benefit, without exception. And the leaders of
government always work the same way, regardless of the actual "national interests" or
"public interest".
The problem is that everyone believes the fantasy that somehow they can "elect" leaders
and government workers who don't do this. But all elections are manipulated by the
political elites themselves to insure that no one gets into power who might the remotest
notion of upsetting the profitable apply cart. And if any movement arose that sought to
prevent the manipulation of elections - say, a "third party" or some movement to de-fund
parties by elites - that movement itself would be deflected or undermined or taken
over.
It's a circus and you all are the circus animals. Get used to it.
I don't know where the idea that China wants Biden to win came from. The consensus I get
from reading actual PRC media in native Chinese is certainly the opposite: They are 100%
sure the Cold War 2.0 is going to escalate either way, so they will rather have Trump's
outward incompetence than another Obama-like knife-behind-the-smile schemer.
It is the rulers themselves and those who rule the rulers, who are fearful of losing
control of the levers of power. I recall the British in Egypt boasting: 'we don't rule
Egypt, we rule the rulers.'
It is not the accumulation of power for its own sake that is the intoxicating elixir of
the ruling elite. It is furthering their objectives, both open and hidden.
To understand their primary objectives one should ask: just what is the single most bi
partisan policy objective of US presidents, since Woodrow Wilson, with a few minor
differences of opinion and emphasis from Eisenhower and Kennedy? Just what was the first
priority item on the agenda at both the 1919 Paris 'Peace' Conference and the first United
Nations meetings at Lake Success?
It was amending the title deeds of Palestine and attempting to confer some kind of quasi
legitimacy on the new title deed holders.
The rulers are very afraid the future of the Zionist project is slipping away from their
control. So in their rabid and delusional minds anything goes from now on in the
furtherance of that self inflicted nightmare and the elimination of anyone or any country
that inhibits that objective. Watch out.
That's always been the purpose of intelligence agencies - in every nation throughout
history.
Government agencies work for their own benefit, without exception. And the leaders of
government always work the same way, regardless of the actual "national interests" or
"public interest".
The problem is that everyone believes the fantasy that somehow they can "elect" leaders
and government workers who don't do this. But all elections are manipulated by the
political elites themselves to insure that no one gets into power who might the remotest
notion of upsetting the profitable apply cart. And if any movement arose that sought to
prevent the manipulation of elections - say, a "third party" or some movement to de-fund
parties by elites - that movement itself would be deflected or undermined or taken
over.
It's a circus and you all are the circus animals. Get used to it.
I don't know where the idea that China wants Biden to win came from. The consensus I get
from reading actual PRC media in native Chinese is certainly the opposite: They are 100%
sure the Cold War 2.0 is going to escalate either way, so they will rather have Trump's
outward incompetence than another Obama-like knife-behind-the-smile schemer.
It is the rulers themselves and those who rule the rulers, who are fearful of losing
control of the levers of power. I recall the British in Egypt boasting: 'we don't rule
Egypt, we rule the rulers.'
It is not the accumulation of power for its own sake that is the intoxicating elixir of
the ruling elite. It is furthering their objectives, both open and hidden.
To understand their primary objectives one should ask: just what is the single most bi
partisan policy objective of US presidents, since Woodrow Wilson, with a few minor
differences of opinion and emphasis from Eisenhower and Kennedy? Just what was the first
priority item on the agenda at both the 1919 Paris 'Peace' Conference and the first United
Nations meetings at Lake Success?
It was amending the title deeds of Palestine and attempting to confer some kind of quasi
legitimacy on the new title deed holders.
The rulers are very afraid the future of the Zionist project is slipping away from their
control. So in their rabid and delusional minds anything goes from now on in the
furtherance of that self inflicted nightmare and the elimination of anyone or any country
that inhibits that objective. Watch out.
The first and the most important fact that there will no elections in November -- both candidates represent the same oligarchy,
just slightly different factions of it.
Look like NYT is controlled by Bolton faction of CIA. They really want to overturn the
results of 2020 elections and using Russia as a bogeyman is a perfect opportunity to achieve this
goal.
Neocons understand very well that it is MIC who better their bread, so amplifying rumors the simplify getting additional budget
money for intelligence agencies (which are a part of MIC) is always the most desirable goal.
Notable quotes:
"... But a new assessment says China would prefer to see the president defeated, though it is not clear Beijing is doing much to meddle in the 2020 campaign to help Joseph R. Biden Jr. ..."
"... The statement then claims: "Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's confidence in our democratic process." ..."
"... But how do the 'intelligence' agencies know that foreign states want to "sway preferences", "increase discord" or "undermine confidence" in elections? ..."
"... But ascribing motive and intent is a tricky business, because perceived impact is often mistaken for true intent. [...] Where is the evidence that Russia actually wants to bring down the liberal world order and watch the United States burn? ..."
"... Well there is none. And that is why the 'intelligence' agencies do not present any evidence. ..."
"... Is there a secret policy paper by the Russian government that says it should "increase discord" in the United States? Is there some Chinese think tank report which says that undermining U.S. people's confidence in their democratic process would be good for China? ..."
"... If the 'intelligence' people have copies of those papers why not publish them? ..."
"... Let me guess. The 'intelligence' agencies have nothing, zero, nada. They are just making wild-ass guesses about 'intentions' of perceived enemies to impress the people who sign off their budget. ..."
"... Nowadays that seems to be their main purpose. ..."
But when one reads the piece itself one finds no fact that would support the 'Russia
Continues Interfering' statement:
Russia is using a range of techniques to denigrate Joseph R. Biden Jr., American intelligence
officials said Friday in their first public assessment that Moscow continues to try to
interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President Trump.
At the same time, the officials said China preferred that Mr. Trump be defeated in
November and was weighing whether to take more aggressive action in the election.
But officials briefed on the intelligence said that Russia was the far graver, and more
immediate, threat. While China seeks to gain influence in American politics, its leaders have
not yet decided to wade directly into the presidential contest, however much they may dislike
Mr. Trump, the officials said.
The assessment, included in a
statement released by William R. Evanina, the director of the National
Counterintelligence and Security Center, suggested the intelligence community was treading
carefully, reflecting the political heat generated by previous findings.
The authors emphasize the scaremongering hearsay from "officials briefed on the
intelligence" - i.e. Democratic congress members - about Russia but have nothing to back it
up.
When one reads the
statement by Evanina one finds nothing in it about Russian attempts to interfere in the
U.S. elections. Here is the only 'evidence' that is noted:
For example, pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach is spreading claims about
corruption – including through publicizing leaked phone calls – to undermine
former Vice President Biden's candidacy and the Democratic Party. Some Kremlin-linked actors
are also seeking to boost President Trump's candidacy on social media and Russian television.
After a request from Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's personal attorney, a Ukrainian
parliamentarian published Ukrainian
evidence of Biden's very real interference in the Ukraine. Also: Some guest of a Russian TV
show had an opinion. How is either of those two items 'evidence' of Russian interference in
U.S. elections?
The statement then claims: "Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt
influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift
U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's
confidence in our democratic process."
But how do the 'intelligence' agencies know that foreign states want to "sway preferences",
"increase discord" or "undermine confidence" in elections?
The mainstream view in the U.S. media and government holds that the Kremlin is waging a
long-haul campaign to undermine and destabilize American democracy. Putin wants to see the
United States burn, and contentious elections offer a ready-made opportunity to fan the
flames.
But ascribing motive and intent is a tricky business, because perceived impact is often
mistaken for true intent. [...] Where is the evidence that Russia actually wants to bring
down the liberal world order and watch the United States burn?
Well there is none. And that is why the 'intelligence' agencies do not present any
evidence.
Even the NYT writers have to
admit that there is nothing there:
The release on Friday was short on specifics, ...
and
Intelligence agencies focus their work on the intentions of foreign governments, and steer
clear of assessing if those efforts have had an effect on American voters.
How do 'intelligence' agencies know Russian, Chinese or Iranian 'intentions'. Is there a
secret policy paper by the Russian government that says it should "increase discord" in the
United States? Is there some Chinese think tank report which says that undermining U.S.
people's confidence in their democratic process would be good for China?
If the 'intelligence' people have copies of those papers why not publish them?
Let me guess. The 'intelligence' agencies have nothing, zero, nada. They are just making
wild-ass guesses about 'intentions' of perceived enemies to impress the people who sign off
their budget.
Nowadays that seems to be their main purpose.
Posted by b on August 8, 2020 at 18:08 UTC |
Permalink
Many people have asked me why I haven't written a book since the start of my reporting on
the FBI's debunked investigation into whether President Donald Trump's campaign conspired with
Russia.
I haven't done so because I don't believe the most important part of the story has been
told: indictments and accountability. I also don't believe we actually know what really
happened on a fundamental level and how dangerous it is to our democratic republic. That will
require a deeper investigation that answers the fundamental questions of the role played by
former senior Obama officials, including the former President and his aides.
We're getting closer but we're still not there.
Still, the extent of what happened during the last presidential election is much clearer now
than it was years ago when trickles of evidence led to years of what Fox News host Sean Hannity and I
would say was peeling back the layers of an onion. We now know that the U.S. intelligence and
federal law enforcement was weaponized against President
Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and administration by a political opponent. We now know how
many officials involved in the false investigation into the president trampled the
Constitution.
I never realized how terrible the deterioration inside the system had become until four
years ago when I stumbled onto what was happening inside the FBI. Those concerns were brought
to my attention by former and current FBI agents, as well as numerous U.S. intelligence
officials aware of the failures inside their own agencies. But it never occurred to me when I
first started looking into fired FBI Director
James Comey and his former side kick Deputy Director A ndrew
McCabe that the cultural corruption of these once trusted American institutions was so
vast.
I've watched as Washington D.C. elites make promises to get to the bottom of it and bring
people to justice. They appear to make promises to the American people they never intended to
keep. Who will be held accountable for one of the most egregious abuses of power by bureaucrats
in modern American political history? Now I fear those who perpetuated this culture of
corruption won't ever really be held accountable.
These elite bureaucrats will, however, throw the American people a bone. It's how they
operate.
One example is the most recent decision by the Justice Department to ask that charges be
dropped on former national security advisor Michael Flynn. It's just a bone because we know now
these charges should have never been brought against the three-star general but will anyone on
former Special Counsel
Robert Mueller's team have to answer for ruining a man's life. No, they won't. In fact,
Flynn is still fighting for his freedom.
Think about what has already happened? From former Attorney General Jeff Session's
appointment of Utah Prosecutor John Huber to the current decision by Attorney General William
Barr to appoint Connecticut prosecutor John Durham to investigate the malfeasance what has been
done? Really, nothing at all. No one has been indicted.
The investigation by the FBI against Trump was never predicated on any real evidence but
instead, it was a set-up to usurp the American voters will. It doesn't matter that the
establishment didn't like Trump, in 2016 the Americans did. Isn't that a big enough reason to
bring charges against those involved?
His election was an anomaly for the Washington elite. They were stunned when Trump won and
went into full gear to save their own asses from discovery and target anyone who supported him.
The truth is they couldn't stand the Trump and American disruptors who elected him to
office.
Now they will work hand in fist to ensure that this November election is not a repeat win of
2016. We're already seeing that play out everyday on the news.
But Barr and Durham are now up against a behemoth political machine that seems to be
operating more like a steam roller the closer we get to the November presidential
elections.
Barr told Fox News in June that he expects Durham's report to come before the end of summer
but like always, it's August and we're still waiting.
Little is known about the progress of Durham's investigation but it's curious as to why
nothing has been done as of yet and the Democrats are sure to raise significant questions or
concerns if action is taken before the election. They will charge that Durham's investigation
is politically motivated. That is, unless the charges are just brought against subordinates and
not senior officials from the former administration.
I sound cynical because I am right now. It doesn't mean I won't trying to get to the truth
or fighting for justice.
But how can you explain the failure of
Durham and Barr to actually interview key players such as Comey, or former Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper, or former CIA Director John Brennan. That is what we're
hearing from them.
If I am going to believe my sources, Durham has interviewed former FBI special agent Peter
Strzok, along with FBI Special agent
Joe Pientka, among some others. Still, nothing has really been done or maybe once again
they will throw us bone.
If there are charges to be brought they will come in the form of taking down the
subordinates, like Strzok, Pientka and the former FBI lawyer
Kevin Clinesmith , who altered the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act application
against short term 2016 campaign advisor Carter Page.
Remember DOJ Inspector General
Michael Horowitz's report in December, 2019: It showed that a critical piece of evidence
used to obtain a warrant to spy on Page in 2016 was falsified by Clinesmith.
But Clinesmith didn't act alone. He would have had to have been ordered to do such a
egregious act and that could only come from the top. Let's see if Durham ever hold those Obama
government officials accountable.
I don't believe he will.
Why? Mainly because of how those senior former Obama officials have behaved since the troves
of information have been discovered. They have written books, like Comey, McCabe, Brennan and
others, who have published Opinion Editorials and have taken lucrative jobs at cable news
channels as experts.
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It's frankly disgusting and should anger every American. We would never get away with what
these former Obama officials have done. More disturbing is that the power they wield through
their contacts in the media and their political connections allows these political 'oligarchs'
unchallenged power like never before.
Here's one of the latest examples.
Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's top prosecutor Andrew Weissmann just went after Barr
in a New York Times editorial on Wednesday. He went so far as to ask the Justice Department
employees to ignore any direction by Barr or Durham in the Russia investigations. From
Weissmann's New York Times Opinion Editorial:
Today, Wednesday, marks 90 days before the presidential election, a date in the calendar
that is supposed to be of special note to the Justice Department. That's because of two
department guidelines, one a written policy
that no action be influenced in any way by politics. Another, unwritten norm urges officials to defer
publicly charging or taking any other overt investigative steps or disclosures that could
affect a coming election.
Attorney General William Barr appears poised to trample on both. At least two developing
investigations could be fodder for pre-election political machinations. The first is an
apparently
sprawling investigation by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, that began as
an examination of the origins of the F.B.I. investigation into Russia's interference in the
2016 election. The other , led
by John Bash, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, is about the so-called
unmasking of Trump associates by Obama administration officials. Mr. Barr personally
unleashed both investigations and handpicked the attorneys to run them.
But Justice Department employees, in meeting their
ethical and legal obligations , should be well advised not to participate in any such
effort.
I think Barr and Durham need to move fast if they are ever going to do anything and if they
are going to prove me wrong. We know now that laws were broken and our Constitution was torched
by these rogue government officials.
We shouldn't give the swamp the time-of-day to accuse the Trump administration of playing
politics or interfering with this election. If the DOJ has evidence and is ready to indict they
need to do it now.
If our Justice Department officials haven't done their job to expose the corruption, clean
out our institutions and hold people accountable then it will be a tragedy for our nation and
the American people. I'm frankly tired of the back and forth. I'm tired of being toyed with and
lied to. I believe they should either put up or shut up.
Oh Please, JFK, MLK,RFK and MX were all just a few.
50 Years after JFK, still cannot release info?
Just who the hell are we kidding?
lay_arrow
Westcoaster , 4 hours ago
You're absolutely right. And don't get me started on 9/11. The country needs an old
fashion PURGE.
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ebworthen , 4 hours ago
This is how empires collapse.
Cognitive Dissonance , 4 hours ago
There are two things a sociopath acquires on the way up the socioeconomic ladder.
1) Power
2) Knowledge of where all the dead bodies are.....especially the ones he or she
personally buried.
lay_arrow 1
NeitherStirredNorShaken , 4 hours ago
Sara must have missed my detailed facts and evidence over the last five years or so
proving the entire government guilty of sedition, treason, complete failure of fiduciary
duty and seemingly endless more crimes. Waiting for the hierarchy to prosecute itself is
a waste of time.
Instead of a book start putting together something like Citizens Arrest teams.
Gold Banit , 4 hours ago
Nobody has been charged and nobody has gone to jail and nobody will be charged or go
to jail cause DemoRats and Republicans are best of friends....Fact
I have a question for all of the American posters here!
How did you all get so dumb naive brainwashed and FN Stupid?
Is Hillary in jail ?V
play_arrow
LEEPERMAX , 3 hours ago
It's called " Running out the Clock " by almost every criminal on the planet.
WE'VE ALL BEEN PLAYED FROM THE GET GO .
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yerfej , 3 hours ago
Its interesting that there are people out there who actually think this progressive
push can be stopped, it is now impossible. Sixty or seventy years ago there might have
been enough people with morals to fight but not anymore, the majority of people in the
media, courts, academia, and bureaucracy are immoral thieves who are only interested in
lining their pockets. They are HAPPY to see as many people as necessary sacrificed so
they can get theirs, everyone else be damned. Not sure what the exact turning point was
but its long ago.
ay_arrow
sborovay07 , 3 hours ago
Love Sarah and John. She's 100% right as unless the top treasonists pay for their
crimes it was nothing more of a shame investigation by Durnham. The victory laps taken by
Hannity and others is nothing more than hot air. Easy to bring down the little guys, but
the Comey's, Brennan's and Clapper's have to pay. Trump's trust in Barr is waning as we
get closer to the election. Most who have followed all of this the past 4 years know the
criminals are still within the bureaucracies that attempted to overthrow a sitting
President. Only if Assange would have been granted immunity to testify. Now we are
dependent on career government officials to bring justice. #RIPSeth.
Farmer Tink , 2 hours ago
Weissmann's oped in the NYT strikes me as a threat against any DOJ attorney who dares
work on any of Durham's cases. The Obama people would not have any compunctions against
trying to ruin the lives of any attorney there who doesn't defy Barr. I wouldn't expect
to be hired by any private firm ever again, I'd look for an attorney to represent me
before the disciplinary committee off my bar association and I would assume that I'd be
harassed and forced out by the next Dem AG if I did stay at DOJ.
Rather than see this as a symptom of strength, I see this as panic. If Durham has
nothing or will do nothing, then why threaten junior lawyers? Weissmann's an unethical
snake, but I think that he's rather nervous.
play_arrow
geo_w , 17 minutes ago
My respect for the FBI is gone.
Soloamber , 20 minutes ago
I would like to see what Weissmann's $haul was from the "Mueller " investigation .
Sessions was a joke and the Mueller financed fraud should never have taken place .
Trump has been blind sided over and over by intel at the FBI and DOJ .
They take care of themselves .
play_arrow
InTheLandOfTheBlind , 4 hours ago
Justice dept doesnt hold people accountable. They have to prove the opposite and let a
jury or judicial, not administrative, employee impose judgements.
It would be interesting to see how many of inhabitants of CHAZ zone, who experinced the "summer of love" will vote for Trump in
Novemebr.
Notable quotes:
"... The land of soy milk and honey was disbanded on July 1 and was duly eulogised by the usual suspects as basically an extended block party. A month on, the NY Times finally got around to sending a reporter to speak to the people who lived and worked in the area before the protestors moved in and produced an admittedly excellent piece of reportage on the situation. ..."
"... The piece, as journalist Michael Tracey observed on Twitter, would have been dismissed as right-wing propaganda just a month ago and shows that this little experiment in anarcho-communism was a million miles away from paradise. ..."
"... The picture painted by the residents is one of gangs of armed thugs running protection rackets and widespread vandalism. The first person mentioned in the piece, a gay man of Middle Eastern extraction named Faizel Khan, reveals that to get to the coffee shop he runs he had to get permission from "gun wielding white men" who at one point barricaded him and all his customers in the store. ..."
"... In his pre-CHOP days, Mr Hearns was a security guard for many years, but after the police vacated the area (their precinct was taken over by protesters and then promptly set on fire) he became part of the "Black Lives Matter Community Patrol". This patrol had locals "pay for their protection." ..."
"... It doesn't sound like they were particularly good at ensuring community cohesion either, considering six people were shot under their jurisdiction and two of them died. ..."
"... Observers also noted that rather than being a multi-racial melting pot of equality, the CHOP turned into a "white occupation" as the numbers of Antifa activists began to outnumber the BLM protesters. They also established "black only segregated areas" within the CHOP, making it frightening similar to the Confederacy, which also, coincidentally, seceded from the union. ..."
"... The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. ..."
Following
an investigative report the paper of record has revealed that business owners who were stuck in the Capitol Hill Organised Protest
'aren't so sure about abolishing the police'. No sh*t Sherlock.
The New York Times has done something distinctly out of character and actually produced some decent journalism. Taking a break
from getting editors sacked for allowing Republican senators to write op-eds and forcing out the few remaining sane people on their
staff for not quaffing the identity politics Cool-Aid enthusiastically enough, they dispatched a reporter to
Seattle to pick through the remnants
of the CHOP , a month after it closed.
The Capital Hill Organised Protest, formally CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), was the area of the city that, for 23 glorious
days, declared independence from the United States. A bunch of Black Lives Matter and Antifa radicals hoofed out the police and decided
to try and run the area as some sort of Marxist utopia. What they actually established was a gang run hellhole that made the Wild
West look like Switzerland.
It wasn't described as such at the time of course. Seattle's mayor said the city was in for a "summer of love"
and most
of the left-wing press would have had you believe that it was pretty much a hippy commune full of free vegan food and urban collective
farms.
The land of soy milk and honey was disbanded on July 1 and was duly eulogised by the usual suspects as basically an extended block
party. A month on, the NY Times finally got around to sending a reporter to speak to the people who lived and worked in the area
before the protestors moved in and produced an admittedly excellent piece of reportage on the situation. It was headlined,
"Abolish
the Police? Those Who Survived the Chaos in Seattle Aren't So Sure." The piece, as journalist Michael Tracey observed on Twitter,
would have been dismissed as right-wing propaganda just a month ago and shows that this little experiment in anarcho-communism was
a million miles away from paradise.
To say they "aren't sure" has to be the understatement of the year. The picture painted by the residents is one of gangs
of armed thugs running protection rackets and widespread vandalism. The first person mentioned in the piece, a gay man of Middle
Eastern extraction named Faizel Khan, reveals that to get to the coffee shop he runs he had to get permission from "gun wielding
white men" who at one point barricaded him and all his customers in the store.
Mr Khan's experiences during these three and a bit weeks of lawlessness were so horrendous that he and a host of other small business
owners, described as "lonely voices in progressive areas," are suing Seattle after the local police force refused to respond
to their calls for the duration of the CHOP. And as the litany of horrors they were subjected to is laid bare in the NY Times article,
it is not hard to see why.
Another character we meet in this saga is Rick Hearns. In his pre-CHOP days, Mr Hearns was a security guard for many years, but
after the police vacated the area (their precinct was taken over by protesters and then promptly set on fire) he became part of the
"Black Lives Matter Community Patrol". This patrol had locals "pay for their protection." Now what other organisation does
that remind you of? If you can't think of it, may I suggest you watch virtually any Martin Scorsese movie and I think you'll get
the picture.
It doesn't sound like they were particularly good at ensuring community cohesion either, considering
six people were shot
under their jurisdiction and two of them died. Interestingly, since they were replacing the "institutionally racist"
police force, (run by a black woman incidentally but why let facts spoil it) one of the victims was a black teenager.
Observers also noted that rather than being a multi-racial melting pot of equality, the CHOP turned into a "white occupation"
as the numbers of Antifa activists began to outnumber the BLM protesters. They also established "black only segregated areas"
within the CHOP, making it frightening similar to the Confederacy, which also, coincidentally, seceded from the union. Oh, and
they had a Warlord, Raz from CHAZ, too, just as an icing on the cake.
Quite why these so-called activists felt the need to see how anarchy turns out in a world where Somaila exists is beyond me, and
frankly any sane person who is even vaguely aware of history. I'm sure if they'd managed to get hold of the port it wouldn't have
been long before they decided to give piracy on the high seas a try, but alas they didn't have the time.
This just makes the tone of the NY Times piece all the more baffling. While it does chart the horrors of the zone well, framing
the notion of "abolishing the police" as anything other than irredeemably stupid is frankly ridiculous. I suppose they do
deserve praise for finally telling the story, but in no way does it make up for the way they have fomented and given succour to the
absurd and dangerous ideas that gave rise to the CHOP for so long.
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.
Guy Birchall, British journalist covering current affairs, politics and free speech issues. Recently published in The Sun and
Spiked Online. Follow him on Twitter @guybirchall 7 Aug, 2020 22:11
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CHAZ/CHOP protesters remove man for bothering them, June 13, 2020
WASHINGTON -- Russia is using a range of techniques to denigrate Joseph R. Biden Jr.,
American intelligence officials said Friday in their first public assessment that Moscow
continues to try to interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President Trump.
At the same time, the officials said China preferred that Mr. Trump be defeated in November
and was weighing whether to take more aggressive action in the election.
But officials briefed on the intelligence said that Russia was the far graver, and more
immediate, threat. While China seeks to gain influence in American politics, its leaders have
not yet decided to wade directly into the presidential contest, however much they may dislike
Mr. Trump, the officials said.
The assessment, included in a
statement released by William R. Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence
and Security Center, suggested the intelligence community was treading carefully, reflecting
the political heat generated by previous findings.
The White House has
objected in the past to conclusions that Moscow is working to help Mr. Trump, and Democrats
on Capitol Hill have expressed growing concern that the intelligence agencies are not being
forthright enough about Russia's preference for him and that the agencies are introducing
China's anti-Trump stance to balance the scales.
The assessment appeared to draw a distinction between what it called the "range of measures"
being deployed by Moscow to influence the election and its conclusion that China prefers that
Mr. Trump be defeated.
It cited efforts coming out of pro-Russia forces in Ukraine to damage Mr. Biden and
Kremlin-linked figures who "are also seeking to boost President Trump's candidacy on social
media and Russian television."
China, it said, has so far signaled its position mostly through increased public criticism
of the administration's tough line on China on a variety of fronts.
An American official briefed on the intelligence said it was wrong to equate the two
countries. Russia, the official said, is a tornado, capable of inflicting damage on American
democracy now. China is more like climate change, the official said: The threat is real and
grave, but more long term.
Democratic lawmakers made the same point about the report, which also found that Iran was
seeking "to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, President Trump, and to divide the country"
ahead of the general election.
"Unfortunately, today's statement still treats three actors of differing intent and
capability as equal threats to our democratic elections," Speaker Nancy Pelosi and
Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a
joint statement.
Asked about the report during a news conference on Friday night at his golf club in New
Jersey, Mr. Trump said, "The last person Russia wants to see in office is Donald Trump because
nobody's been tougher on Russia than I have." He said that if Mr. Biden won the presidency,
"China would own our country."
Aides and allies of Mr. Biden assailed Mr. Trump, saying that he had repeatedly sided with
President Vladimir V. Putin on whether Russia had intervened to help him in 2016 and that he
had been impeached by the House for trying to pressure Ukraine into helping him undercut Mr.
Biden.
"Donald Trump has publicly and repeatedly invited, emboldened and even tried to coerce
foreign interference in American elections," said Tony Blinken, a senior adviser to the former
vice president.
It is not clear how much China is doing to interfere directly in the presidential election.
Intelligence officials have briefed Congress in recent days that much of Beijing's focus is on
state and local races. But Mr. Evanina's statement on Friday suggested China was on weighing an
increased effort.
"Although China will continue to weigh the risks and benefits of aggressive action, its
public rhetoric over the past few months has grown increasingly critical of the current
administration's Covid-19 response, closure of China's Houston Consulate and actions on other
issues," Mr. Evanina said.
Mr. Evanina pointed to growing tensions over territorial claims in the South China Sea, Hong
Kong autonomy, the TikTok app and other issues. China, officials have said, has also tried to
collect information on the presidential campaigns, as it has in previous contests.
The release on Friday was short on specifics, but that was largely because the intelligence
community is intent on trying to protect its sources of information, said Senator Angus King,
the Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
"The director has basically put the American people on notice that Russia in particular,
also China and Iran, are going to be trying to meddle in this election and undermine our
democratic system," said Mr. King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Intelligence officials said there was no way to avoid political criticism when releasing
information about the election. An official with the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence said that the goal was not to rank order threats and that Russia, China and Iran
all pose a danger to the election.
Fighting over the intelligence reports, the official said, only benefits adversaries trying
to sow divisions.
While both Beijing and Moscow have a preference, the Chinese and Russian influence campaigns
are very different, officials said.
Outside of a few scattered examples, it is hard to find much evidence of intensifying
Chinese influence efforts that could have a national effect.
Much of what China is doing currently amounts to using its economic might to influence local
politics, officials said. But that is hardly new. Beijing is also using a variety of means to
push back on various Trump administration policies, including tariffs and bans on Chinese tech
companies, but those efforts are not covert and it is unclear if they would have an effect on
presidential politics.
Russia, but not China, is trying to "actively influence" the outcome of the 2020 election,
said the American official briefed on the underlying intelligence.
"The fact that adversaries like China or Iran don't like an American president's policies is
normal fare," said Jeremy Bash, a former Obama administration official. "What's abnormal,
disturbing and dangerous is that an adversary like Russia is actively trying to get Trump
re-elected."
Russia tried to use influence campaigns during 2018 midterm voting to try to sway public
opinion, but it did not successfully tamper with voting infrastructure.
Mr. Evanina said it would be difficult for adversarial countries to try to manipulate voting
results on a large scale. But nevertheless, the countries could try to interfere in the voting
process or take steps aimed at "calling into question the validity of the election
results."
The new release comes on the heels of congressional briefings that have alarmed lawmakers,
particularly Democrats. Those briefings have described a stepped-up Chinese pressure campaign,
as well as efforts by Moscow to paint Mr. Biden as corrupt.
"Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt
influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift
U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's
confidence in our democratic process," Mr. Evanina said in a statement.
The statement called out Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia member of Ukraine's Parliament who has
been involved in releasing information about Mr. Biden. Intelligence officials said he had ties
to Russian intelligence.
Intelligence officials have briefed Congress in recent weeks on details of the Russian
efforts to tarnish Mr. Biden as corrupt, prompting
senior Democrats to request more information.
A Senate committee led by Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, has been leading an
investigation of Mr. Biden's son Hunter Biden and his work for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy
firm. Some intelligence officials have said that a witness the committee was seeking to call
was a witting or unwitting agent of Russian disinformation.
Democrats had pushed intelligence officials to release more information to the public,
arguing that only a broad declassification of the foreign interference attempts can inoculate
voters against attempts by Russia, China or other countries to try to influence voting.
In
meetings on Capitol Hill , Mr. Evanina and other intelligence officials have expanded their
warnings beyond Russia and have included China and Iran, as well. This year, the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence put Mr. Evanina in charge of election security briefings to
Congress and the campaigns.
Intelligence and other officials in recent days have been stepping up their releases
of information about foreign interference efforts, and the State
Department has sent texts to cellphones around the world advertising a $10 million reward
for information on would-be election hackers.
How effective China's campaign or Russia's efforts to smear Mr. Biden as corrupt have been
is not clear. Intelligence agencies focus their work on the intentions of foreign governments,
and steer clear of assessing if those efforts have had an effect on American voters.
The first reactions from Capitol Hill to the release of the assessment were positive. A
joint statement by the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee
praised it, and asked colleagues to refrain from politicizing Mr. Evanina's statement.
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the acting Republican chairman of the committee, and Senator
Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democratic vice chairman, said they hoped Mr. Evanina continued to
make more information available to the public. But they praised him for responding to calls for
more information.
"Evanina's statement highlights some of the serious and ongoing threats to our election from
China, Russia, and Iran," the two men's joint statement said. "Everyone -- from the voting
public, local officials, and members of Congress -- needs to be aware of these threats."
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.
Behind every narrative
unfriendly to US geopolitical aims is a Russian proxy typing madly away, according to the Global Engagement Center (GEC), the
State Department's "counter-propaganda" vehicle, which released a report to that effect on Wednesday titled
"Pillars
of Russia's Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem."
More than half of the
76-page paper consists of
"proxy site profiles"
– writeups of websites deemed to be
secretly (or not-so-secretly) operated by the Kremlin. While some are openly connected to the Russian government (New Eastern
Outlook, an official publication of the Russian Academy of Sciences), others – like Montreal-based Global Research – are not.
In the eyes of the GEC,
however, all
"serve no other purpose but to push pro-Kremlin content"
(which might
be news to the websites' operators). Most have previously appeared on lists of "Russian propaganda websites" such as the
sprawling blacklist published by PropOrNot – a
shady
outfit
linked to pro-war think tank, the Atlantic Council – in November 2016.
While the report is
supposedly dedicated to
"exposing Russia's tactics so that partner and allied
governments, civil society organizations, academia, the press, and the international public"
can arm themselves against
evil Kremlin propaganda, its focus on specific websites, their social media follower counts, and the amount of traffic they
get seems tailor-made for legitimizing government censorship. Any ideas which resemble the content of these particular
websites are to be squashed, sidelined, and suppressed, as are any other sites who publish writers associated with the "proxy
sites."
The
"ecosystem"
metaphor
is deployed to explain why some alleged Russian proxies occasionally come out with material opposing the Russian government
line – they're just
"muddying the waters of the information environment in order to
confuse those trying to discern the truth."
As for
"truth,"
the
report has an interesting interpretation of the concept. The claims that it deems to constitute
"disinformation"
include
the assertion that
"financial circles and governments are using the coronavirus to
achieve [their] own financial and political goals"
(are there
any
that
aren't?).
They also include claims
that
"EU bureaucrats and affiliated propaganda bodies are blaming Russia for the crisis
over the outbreak of coronavirus"
(who knew the
Financial
Times
was a Kremlin disinfo outlet too?)
Also included are claims
that
"George Soros' tentacles entangle politics and generate chaos around the world"
(if
the shoe
fits
).
The GEC report wouldn't be
a Russia scare-sheet if it didn't include a heavy dose of projection, and this one does not disappoint. The Kremlin's
"weaponization
of social media"
and
"cyber-enabled disinformation"
are deemed
"part
of its approach to using information as a weapon,"
while Moscow is accused of
"invest[ing]
massively in its propaganda channels, its intelligence services and its proxies to conduct malicious cyber activity to support
their disinformation efforts."
But the CIA and US
military intelligence have been engaging in pre-emptive cyber-warfare for two years with the full knowledge and consent of the
executive branch – a legitimization of
covert
activities
that previously ran on a don't-ask-don't-tell basis dating at least back to the development of the Stuxnet
virus that devastated Iran's nuclear sites over a decade ago.
US weaponization of social
media is so pervasive the US Army was recently
booted
off
streaming platform Twitch for relentlessly propagandizing teenage users. The Pentagon has been
spreading
pro-US
propaganda using hordes of "sock puppets" – fake social media accounts purporting to be real people – for upwards of a decade.
Indeed, the report hints at these very operations, praising the "thriving counter-disinformation community" that is "pushing
back" against those naughty Russians.
With social media
platforms jittery over the looming US election in November, the report appears designed to serve as a handy cheat-sheet as to
which opinions to censor to avoid a repeat of President Donald Trump's upset victory in 2016 – even though none of the listed
"proxies" could be considered pro-Trump by any stretch of the imagination. It also provides a portable reference for Americans
worried about committing thought-crime, though the complete lack of fanfare accompanying its publication – Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo mentioned it in passing during a press conference on Wednesday – would seem to suggest it is not meant for the hoi
polloi.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
"... Furthermore, it is pretty obvious to the Russians that while Crimea and MH17 were the pretexts for western sanctions against Russia, they were not the real cause. The real cause of the West's hatred for Russia is as simple as it is old: Russia cannot be conquered, subdued, subverted or destroyed. They've been at it for close to 1,000 years and they still are at it. In fact, each time they fail to crush Russia, their russophobia increases to even higher levels (phobia both in the sense of "fear" and in the sense of "hatred"). ..."
"... I would argue that since at least Russia and the AngloZionist Empire have been at war since at least 2013, when Russia foiled the US plan to attack Syria under the pretext that it was "highly likely" that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against civilians (in reality, a textbook case of a false flag organized by the Brits), This means that Russia and the Empire have been at [Cold] war since at least 2013, for no less than seven years (something which Russian 6th columnists and Neo-Marxists try very hard to ignore). ..."
"... True, at least until now, this was has been 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic, but this is a real existential war of survival for both sides: only one side will walk away from this struggle. The other one will simply disappear (not as a nation or a people, but as a polity; a regime). The Kremlin fully understood that and it embarked on a huge reform and modernization of the Russian armed forces in three distinct ways: ..."
"... While some US politicians understood what was going on (I think of Ron Paul, see here ), most did not. They were so brainwashed by the US propaganda that they were sure that no matter what, "USA! USA! USA!". Alas for them, the reality was quite different. ..."
Truth be told, most Russian politicians (with the notable exception of the official Kremlin
court jester, Zhirinovskii) and analysts never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend. The
Kremlin was especially cautious, which leads me to believe that the Russian intelligence
analysts did a very good job evaluating Trump's psyche and they quickly figured out that he was
no better than any other US politician.
Right now, I know of no Russian analyst who would predict that relations between the US and
Russia will improve in the foreseeable future. If anything, most are clearly saying that "guys,
we better get used to this" (accusations, sanctions, accusations, sanctions, etc. etc.
etc.).
Furthermore, it is pretty obvious to the Russians that while Crimea and MH17 were the
pretexts for western sanctions against Russia, they were not the real cause. The real cause of
the West's hatred for Russia is as simple as it is old: Russia cannot be conquered, subdued,
subverted or destroyed. They've been at it for close to 1,000 years and they still are at it.
In fact, each time they fail to crush Russia, their russophobia increases to even higher levels
(phobia both in the sense of "fear" and in the sense of "hatred").
Simply put -- there is nothing which Russia can expect from the upcoming election. Nothing
at all. Still, that does not mean that things are not better than 4 or 8 years ago. Let's look
at what changed.
I would argue that since at least Russia and the AngloZionist Empire have been at war
since at least 2013, when Russia foiled the US plan to attack Syria under the pretext that it
was "highly likely" that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against civilians (in
reality, a textbook case of a false flag organized by the Brits), This means that Russia and
the Empire have been at [Cold] war since at least 2013, for no less than seven years (something
which Russian 6th columnists and Neo-Marxists try very hard to ignore).
True, at least until now, this was has been 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5%
kinetic, but this is a real existential war of survival for both sides: only one side will walk
away from this struggle. The other one will simply disappear (not as a nation or a people, but
as a polity; a regime). The Kremlin fully understood that and it embarked on a huge reform and
modernization of the Russian armed forces in three distinct ways:
A "general" reform of
the Russian armed forces which had to be modernized by about 80%. This part of the reform is
now practically complete. A specific reform to prepare the western and southern military
districts for a major conventional war against the united West (as always in Russian history)
which would involve the First Guards Tank Army and the Russian Airborne Forces. The development
of bleeding-edge weapons systems with no equivalent in the West and which cannot be countered
or defeated; these weapons have had an especially dramatic impact upon First Strike Stability
and upon naval operations.
While some US politicians understood what was going on (I think of Ron Paul, see
here ), most did
not. They were so brainwashed by the US propaganda that they were sure that no matter what,
"USA! USA! USA!". Alas for them, the reality was quite different.
Russian officials, by the way,
have confirmed that Russia was preparing for war . Heck, the reforms were so profound
and far reaching, that it would have been impossible for the Russians to hide what they were
doing (see here for details; also
please see Andrei Martyanov's excellent primer on the new Russian Navy here ).
While no country is ever truly prepared for war, I would argue that by 2020 the Russians had
reached their goals and that now Russia is fully prepared to handle any conflict the West might
throw at her, ranging from a small border incident somewhere in Central Asia to a full-scaled
war against the US/NATO in Europe .
Folks in the West are now slowly waking up to this new reality (I mentioned some of that
here
), but it is too late. In purely military terms, Russia has now created such a qualitative gap
with the West that the still existing quantitative gap is not sufficient to guarantee a US/NATO
victory. Now some western politicians are starting to seriously freak out (see this lady ,
for example), but most Europeans are coming to terms with two truly horrible
realities:
Russia is much stronger than Europe and, even much worse, Russia will never
attack first (which is a major cause of frustration for western russophobes)
As for the obvious solution to this problem, having friendly relations with Russia is simply
unthinkable for those who made their entire careers peddling the Soviet (and now Russian)
threat to the world.
But Russia is changing, albeit maybe too slowly (at least for my taste). As I mentioned last
week, a number of Polish, Ukrainian and Baltic politicians have declared that the Zapad2020
military maneuvers which are supposed to take place in southern Russia and the Caucasus could
be used to prepare an attack on the West (see here
for a rather typical example of this nonsense). In the past, the Kremlin would only have made a
public statement ridiculing this nonsense, but this time around Putin did something different.
Right after he saw the reaction of these politicians, Putin ordered a major and UNSCHEDULED
military readiness exercise which involved no less than 150,000 troops, 400 aircraft
& 100 ships ! The message here was clear:
Yes, we are much more powerful than
you are and No, we are not apologizing for our strength anymore
And, just to make sure that the message is clear, the Russians also tested the readiness of
the Russian Airborne Forces units near the city of Riazan, see for yourself:
This response is, I think, the correct one. Frankly, nobody in the West is listening to what
the Kremlin has to say, so what is the point of making more statements which in the future will
be ignored equally as they have been in the past.
If anything, the slow realization that Russia is more powerful than NATO would be most
helpful in gently prodding EU politicians to change their tune and return back to reality.
Check out this recent video of Sarah Wagenknecht, a leading politician of the German Left and
see for yourself:
https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x7uu5fk
The example of Sahra Wagenknecht is interesting, because she is from Germany, one of the
countries of northern Europe; traditionally, northern European powers have been much more
anti-Russian than southern Europeans, so it is encouraging to see that the anti-Putin and
anti-Russia hysteria is not always being endorsed by everybody.
But if things are very slowly getting better in the EU, in the bad old US of A things are
only getting worse. Even the Republicans are now fully on board the Russia-hating float (right
behind a "gay pride" one I suppose) and they are now contributing their own insanity to the
cause, as this article entitled "
Congressional Republicans: Russia should be designated state sponsor of terror " shows
(designating Russia as a terrorist state is an old idea of the Dems, by the way).
Russian options for the Fall
In truth, Russia does not have any particularly good options towards the US. Both parties
are now fully united in their rabid hatred of Russia (and China too, of course). Furthermore,
while there are many well-funded and virulently anti-Russian organizations in the US (Neo-cons,
Papists, Poles, Masons, Ukrainians, Balts, Ashkenazi Jews, etc.), Russian organizations in the
US like this one , have
very little influence or even relevance.
Banderites marching in the US
However, as the chaos continues to worsen inside the US and as US politicians continue to
alienate pretty much the entire planet, Russia does have a perfect opportunity to weaken the US
grip on Europe. The beauty in the current dynamic is that Russia does not have to do anything
at all (nevermind anything covert or illegal) to help the anti-EU and anti-US forces in Europe:
All she needs to do is to continuously hammer in the following simple message: "the US is
sinking -- do you really want to go down with it?".
There are many opportunities to deliver that message. The current US/Polish efforts to
prevent the EU from enjoying cheap Russian gas might well be the best example of what we could
call "European suicide politics", but there are many, many more.
Truth be told, neither the US nor the EU are a top priority for Russia, at least not in
economic terms. The moral credibility of the West in general can certainly be described as dead
and long gone. As for the West military might, it is only a concern to the degree that western
politicians might be tempted to believe their own propaganda about their military forces being
the best in the history of the galaxy. This is why Russia regularly engages in large surprise
exercises: to prove to the West that the Russian military is fully ready for anything the West
might try. As for the constant move of more and more US/NATO forces closer to the borders of
Russia, they are offensive in political terms, but in military terms, getting closer to Russia
only means that Russia will have more options to destroy you. "Forward deployment" is really a
thing of the past, at least against Russia.
With time, however, and as the US federal center loses even more of its control of the
country, the Kremlin might be well-advised to try to open some venues for "popular diplomacy",
especially with less hostile US states. The weakening of the Executive Branch has already
resulted in US governors playing an increasingly important international role and while this is
not, strictly speaking, legal (only the federal government has the right to engage in foreign
policy), the fact is that this has been going on for years already. Another possible partner
inside the US for Russian firms would be US corporations (especially now that they are hurting
badly). Finally, I think that the Kremlin ought to try to open channels of communication with
the various small political forces in the US which are clearly not buying into the official
propaganda: libertarians, (true) liberals and progressives, paleo-conservatives.
What we are witnessing before our eyes is the collapse of the US federal center. This is a
dangerous and highly unstable moment in our history. But from this crisis opportunities will
arise. The best thing Russia can do now is to simply remain very careful and vigilant and wait
for new forces to appear on the US political scene.
I really agree with you that the “blame Russia” and “blame China”
thing has gotten out of hand in US politics. Whether it will turn into a shooting war seems
doubtful to me, as the government is still full of people who are looking out for their own
interests and know that a full-sized war with Russia, China, Iran or whoever will not advance
their interests.
But who would have guessed, a few years ago, that “Russian asset” would become
the all-purpose insult for Democrats to use, not just against Republicans, but against other
Democrats?
With Republicans I think that “blame China” is stronger. China makes a good
scapegoat for the economic situation in the United States. But convincing the working class
that China is the source of their problems (and that Mr. MAGA is going to solve those
problems by standing up to China) requires ignorance of the crucial facts about the trade
relationship between those two countries.
Namely, that the trade deficit exists only because the Federal Reserve chooses to
create huge amounts of new dollars each year for export to other countries, and it’s
only possible for US exports to fall behind imports so badly (and thus put so many American
laborers out of work) because the Fed is making up the difference by exporting dollars.
Granted, it isn’t a policy that the US can change without harming the interests of its
own upper classes; at the same time, it isn’t a policy that China could force on the US
without the people in charge of the United States wanting it.
This is a topic I’ve dealt with a few times on my own blog.
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.
(I don't know where a young you-tuber probably not born before the millennium encountered
Shulamith Firestone's old partner in crime, but I am delighted that she did! I know it shows my
age, but I think that young activists today could benefit a lot from reading what my
generation's activists wrote. Also, from getting off my lawn.)
This is a shadow of USSR over the USA. Dead are biting from the grave.
Notable quotes:
"... Over the course of the period from the heyday of McCarthyism to the present, the percentage of the American people not feeling free to express their views has tripled. In 2019, fully four in ten Americans engaged in self-censorship. Our analyses of both over-time and cross-sectional variability provide several insights into why people keep their mouths shut. We find that: ..."
"... those possessing more resources (e.g., higher levels of education) report engaging in more self-censorship ..."
"... fully 40% of the American people today reported being less free to speak their minds than they used to. That so many Americans withhold their political views is remarkable -- and portentous. ..."
"... Self-censorship is defined as intentionally and voluntarily withholding information from others in [the] absence of formal obstacles ..."
Over the course of the period from the heyday of McCarthyism to the present, the
percentage of the American people not feeling free to express their views has tripled. In 2019,
fully four in ten Americans engaged in self-censorship. Our analyses of both over-time and
cross-sectional variability provide several insights into why people keep their mouths shut. We
find that:
(1) Levels of self-censorship are related to affective polarization among the mass public,
but not via an "echo chamber" effect because greater polarization is associated with more
self-censorship.
(2) Levels of mass political intolerance bear no relationship to self-censorship, either at
the macro- or micro-levels.
(3) Those who perceive a more repressive government are only slightly more likely to engage
in self-censorship. And
(4) those possessing more resources (e.g., higher levels of education) report engaging
in more self-censorship .
Together, these findings suggest the conclusion that one's larger macro-environment has
little to do with self-censorship. Instead, micro-environment sentiments -- such as worrying
that expressing unpopular views will isolate and alienate people from their friends, family,
and neighbors -- seem to drive self-censorship.
We conclude with a brief discussion of the significance of our findings for larger democracy
theory and practice. Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3647099
There can be little doubt that Americans today are deeply divided on their values, many
issue preferences, and their ideological and partisan attachments (e.g., Druckman and
Levendusky 2019). Indeed, these divisions even extend to the question of whom -- or what kind
of person -- their children should marry (Iyengar et al. 2019)!
A concomitant of these divisions is that political discourse has become coarse, abrasive,
divisive, and intense. When it comes to politics today, it is increasingly likely that even an
innocent but misspoken opinion will cause a kerfuffle to break out.
It therefore should not be surprising to find that a large segment of the American people
engages in self-censorship when it comes of expressing their views.1 In a nationally
representative survey we conducted in 2019 (see Appendix A), we asked a question about
self-censorship that Samuel Stouffer (1955) first asked in 1954, with startling results:
fully 40% of the American people today reported being less free to speak their minds than
they used to. That so many Americans withhold their political views is remarkable -- and
portentous.
... ... ...
===
1 Sharvit et al. put forth a useful definition of self-censorship (2018, 331): "
Self-censorship is defined as intentionally and voluntarily withholding information from
others in [the] absence of formal obstacles ." Studies of self-censorship have taken many
forms, ranging from philosophical inquiries (e.g., Festenstein 2018) to studies of those
withholding crucial evidence of human rights abuses (e.g., Bar-Tal 2017) to studies of
self-censorship among racial minorities (e.g., Gibson 2012).
Trump DID commit obstruction of justice... he refused to force HIS Dept of Justice to indict Hillary, Comey, Brennan and Clapper
for their obvious major felonies.
The Guardian is running a more sophisticated version of the story. It claims the Russians
hacked the papers and gave them to Jeremy Corbyn so he could win the General Elections of
December 2019:
The stolen documents – a 451-page dossier of emails – ultimately ended up in
the hands of Jeremy Corbyn during last winter's election campaign after Russian actors
tried to disseminate the material online.
They had been posted on the social media platform Reddit and brought to the attention of
the then Labour leader's team. Corbyn said the documents revealed the NHS "was on the
table" in trade talks with the US.
Details of Russia's targeting of Fox's emails were first revealed on Monday by Reuters,
which said his account was accessed several times between 12 July and 21 October last year.
It was unclear if the documents were obtained when the staunch leave supporter was still
trade secretary; he was dropped by Boris Johnson on 24 July.
However, it still is keeping the earliest date as July 12th, thus reproducing the entire
Reuters' version.
My guess is that The Guardian adapted the story to its center-left (i.e. Blairite)
audience, in a way both Corbyn and the Conservative and Unionist Party could be melded
together as a single evil force. If that's the case, then it is circumstantial evidence for a
highly and centrally coordinated propaganda machine in the UK, possibly ran directly from the
MI5/6, which directly involves all the important British newspapers, TV channels and
more.
It's interesting to see how The Guardian sophisticated the clearly fake story. In the
excerpt I quoted above, it is clear the source of the leak could've only been secretary Fox
(or Fox served as the sacrificial lamb, it doesn't matter for the sake of the argument
here).
Then, it connected Fox's leak with Raab's public accusation of Russia (that story where he
accused Russia in the name of the British government, but didn't reveal the evidence).
To end with a high note, the Guardian then revived a story of hacked e-mails from 2012 and
2017.
You can then see how the British are capable of recycling old, failed propaganda
attacks/fake news to transform then into a new "truth". Very curious and sophisticated
methodology of building a long-term, sustained, false narrative. It almost mirrors the
Christian method of typology, where a previous event is brought up from oblivion to serve as
a prelude for the new event (i.e. the newest fake news).
"The attack bore the hallmarks of a state-backed operation."
There is no such thing.
Look at the Twitter hack last week. Everyone said "must be some sophisticated actor,
possibly state-sponsored". Turns out it was a 17-year-old in Florida. That has happened
repeatedly in the last ten years or more: hacks that looked "sophisticated" turned out to be
done by a single individual. People forget that some organized crime hacker groups earn
millions of dollars from their hacks and can afford to put quite an effort into the
development of sophisticated hacking tools that are the equal of anything a state
intelligence agency can produce.
People in infosec know the truth: it's not that hard to compromise any corporation or
individual. And "attribution by target" - that is, the notion that because a particular
person or organization is government or media, therefore it has to be a state-related hacker
- is completely false. *Any* hacker will hit *any* target that provides 1) a challenge,
and/or 2) personal identification information, and/or intellectual property that can be sold
on the Dark Web.
Only situations where specialized knowledge that is not commonly available to individuals
or civilian groups was used in the hack can clearly indicate a state actor. Stuxnet is the
classic example, requiring access to and the ability to test the malware with specific pieces
of hardware that aren't commonly available to persons outside of industrial or nuclear
engineering.
Stealing some papers from a government individual off his phone or home or office desktop
is almost trivial in comparison.
"his account was accessed several times between 12 July and 21 October"
So for three months they did nothing to fix his security? Good work, guys...you're fired.
This is typical - hackers sitting in a corporation's network for months or even years without
being detected. It's likely they didn't even notice the unauthorized access until they
decided to look back. Not to mention that a government worker isn't supposed to be using
"personal email" to host classified information. So the idiot involved should be fired.
Typical infosec clusterfuck. That's assuming it happened at all, of course, which is
doubtful.
Well, lost two post due to the VPN being on...sigh...
OK, to quote the old British comedy radio show, "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again"...
"...the attack bore the hallmarks of a state-backed operation."
There is no such thing. *Any* hacker will hack *any* target provided it provides 1) a
challenge, and/or 2) personal identification information, and/or 3) intellectual property,
the latter two being sold on the Dark Web. Trying to attribute the hacker based on his target
is a fool's game - not that there is any lack of fools in the infosec space who use such
attribution as marketing, such as CrowdStrike.
Then there's the fact that this guy's account was accessed several times over a
three-month period - meaning no one was monitoring his email security, least of all him. Not
to mention that he was passing classified papers over a personal email account - which should
get him fired. Email is *insecure*, period, unless encrypted between the parties involved.
And even then, you just compromise one party's desktop, laptop or phone, and bingo,
encryption bypassed. And compromising an individual's or organization's email system is not
particularly hard, as any penetration tester knows. One phishing email targeted to the right
person usually does it.
This is the purpose of the Russia-is-responsible-for-all-malign-events disinformation
campaigns as stated by a junior deep-stater:
"An analysis of the UK experience offers some indicators as to what deters Russia .Taken
together, this swift, coordinated national response backed by the weight of the international
community and imposition of punitive measures exposed Russian malign influence activities and
incompetence, embarrassing Russia in the eyes of its citizens. Over time, such reputational
damage could cause more serious problems for the Russian government vis-à-vis the
Russian people."
As 5-Eyes nations fall further behind Russia & China, the outright lies and
disinformation will increase as they'll no longer be capable of honest competition--and
that's just the business sphere. In the social sphere, as living standards continue to fall
for 5-Eyes residents relative to Russia and China, the shrillness and mendacity of the lying
will escalate to cover for the vast political failure that's responsible for the decline. As
some have noted, there's been a reversal of positions with the Outlaw US Empire becoming ever
more degraded like the USSR previously. Both UK and USA continually behave as spoilt brats,
taking their ball home when no longer allowed to win. Self-examination is Taboo. Those
watching rightly question how it was that such people rose to dominant positions--completely
accidental is the answer.
By
Caitlin
Johnstone
, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is
here
and
you can follow her on Twitter
@caitoz
In the American corporatist system, where wealthy elites control the elected government through lobbyists, corporate media is
state media, promoting narratives that help maintain the corporate-approved status quo.
The New York Times
published an astonishingly horrible
article
the
other day titled
"Latin America Is Facing a 'Decline of Democracy' Under the Pandemic"
accusing
governments like Venezuela and Nicaragua of exploiting Covid-19 to quash opposition and oppress democracy.
The article sources its jarringly propagandistic claims in multiple US government-funded narrative management operations like
the
Wilson Center
and the National Endowment for
Democracy
-sponsored
Freedom
House
, the
extensively
plutocrat-funded Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, and the United States Naval Academy.
The crown jewel of this piece of State Department stenography reads as follows:
"Adding to these challenges, democracy in Latin America has also lost a champion in the
United States, which had played an important role in promoting democracy after the end of the Cold War by financing good
governance programs and calling out authoritarian abuses."
The fact that America's most widely regarded newspaper feels perfectly comfortable making such a spectacularly in-your-face
lie on behalf of the US government tells you everything you need to know about what the mass media in America really are and
what they do.
The United States has never at any time been a champion of democracy in Latin America, before or since the Cold War. It has
intervened hundreds of
times
in
the continent's affairs throughout history, with everything from murderous corporate
colonialism
to deadly
CIA regime-change
operations
to overt
military
invasions
.
It is currently trying to orchestrate a
coup
in
Venezuela after
failing
to
stage one during the Bush administration, it's pushing regime
change
in
Nicaragua, and
The New York Times
itself
admitted
this
year that it was wrong to promote the false US government
narrative
of
electoral shenanigans in Bolivia's presidential race last year, a narrative which
facilitated
a bloody
fascist
coup
.
This is propaganda. There is no other word for it. And yet the only time Western politicians and news reporters use that word
is to talk about nations like Russia and China.
Why is propaganda used in an ostensibly free democracy with an ostensibly free media? Why are its news media outlets so
consistently in alignment with every foreign policy objective of US government agencies, no matter how destructive and
inexcusable? If the media and the government are two separate institutions, why do they so consistently function as though
they are not separate?
Well, that's easy. It's because they aren't separate. The only thing keeping this from being seen is the fact that America's
real government isn't located where people think it is.
In a corporatist system of government, where no hard lines are drawn between corporate/financial power and state power,
corporate media is state media. Since bribery is legal in the US political
system
in
the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations, America's elected government is controlled by wealthy elites who have
money to burn and who benefit from maintaining a specific status quo arrangement.
The fact that this same plutocratic class
also
owns
America's media, which is now so consolidated that it's almost entirely run by just six
corporations
,
means that the people who run the government also run the media. This allows America's true rulers to set up a system which
promotes
narratives
that
are favorable to their desired status quo.
Which means that the US has state propaganda. They just don't call it that themselves.
Strip away the phony two-handed sock puppet show of US electoral politics and look at how power actually moves in that
country, and you just see one more tyrannical regime which propagandizes its citizens, brutally cracks down on
protesters
, deliberately
keeps its populace
impoverished
so
they don't get powerful enough to change things, and attacks any nation which dares to
disobey
its
dictates.
Beneath the thin layer of narrative overlay about freedom and democracy, the US is just one more despotic, bloodthirsty
empire. It's no better than any of the other despotic, bloodthirsty empires throughout history. It just has good PR.
Plutocrats not only exert control over America's media and politics, they also form alliances with the secretive government
agencies whose operators remain amid the comings and goings of the official elected government. We see examples of this in the
way new-money tech plutocrats like
Jeff
Bezos
,
Peter
Thiel
and
Pierre
Omidyar
have direct relationships with the CIA and its proxies.
We also see it in the sexual blackmail
operation
which
was facilitated by the late Jeffrey Epstein in connection with billionaire Leslie Wexner and Israeli
intelligence
,
along with potentially the
FBI
and/or other
US intelligence
agencies
.
Today the internet is
abuzz
as newly
unsealed court
documents
relating
to Epstein and
his
co-conspirator Ghislaine
Maxwell reveal witness testimony regarding underage sex trafficking, with such high-profile names appearing in the documents
as
Alan
Dershowitz
,
Bill
Clinton
and
Prince
Andrew
.
The Overton window of acceptable political discourse has been
shrunk
into
such a narrow spectrum of debate that talking about even well-known and extensively documented facts involving the real nature
of America's government and media will get you laughingly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, which is itself a symptom of
tight narrative control by a ruling class which much prefers Americans thinking they live in a free democracy whose government
they control with their votes.
In the old days you used to be able to tell who your rulers were because they'd sit on thrones and wear golden crowns and make
you bow before them. Human consciousness eventually evolved beyond the acceptability of such brazen indignities, so it became
necessary for rulers to take on more of a background role while the citizenry clap and cheer for the illusory puppet show of
electoral politics.
But the kings are still among us, just as cruel and tyrannical as ever. They've just figured out how to mask their tyranny
behind the facade of freedom.
But 2020 has been a year of
revelations
,
a trend which seems likely to continue
accelerating
.
Truth cannot stay hidden forever.
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.
I have a comment that was moderated in the vaccine thread that speaks to this. Some yahoo
claimed that those engaged in the vaccine hype are on the up and up and have the same
motivation all of us unwashed have for an effective and affordable vaccine.
These are the people in charge and we're to believe they are on the up and up and have our
best interests at heart -- that they are magnanimous people with the utmost integrity? Yeah,
no, I don't think so.
The irony is, a vaccine gone wrong, because caveat emptor is now the rule of the day, will
be the REAL Novichok writ large on the world at large.
So the story about the "perfume bottle" was as fictitious as it sounded? I wonder about
the rumors that the Skripals were knocked out with fentanyl might be true.
It always seemed to me that Dawn S was just an afterthought. A woman, who was known to use
drugs, died (unclear how) – and wouldn't it just help our case if we linked it to
Skripals' troubles? The story of a sealed perfume bottle – which seemed to have no
effect on her partner – was always something out of an Alice-in- Wonderland
narrative.
And to think that there is a whole department, somewhere in the bowels of MI6 – that is
paid to come up with such nonsense.
Lies, upon lies, upon more lies. My first reaction on seeing Helmer's report last week was
'et tu, FT-us?' There simply is not a single western media outlet that can be trusted not to
lie.
And if anyone is still confused – just think about this: where are the Skripals? We've
not seen or heard of them in about two years. Julia is a Russian citizen – who seems to
have been kidnapped by another govt (UK). Imagine if Russians had done something like
that.
And as usual we will only have to wait for some appropriate amount of time to pass before
we get the next British rendition of the story. It'll be a good one because it's possible the
British could be dragged into the Hague for this, isn't it?
Delay and delay until people say "who are the Skripals?" Already people are saying "what's
the Steele dossier?" (Just googled Steele, comes at 16th place, page two)
"Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government's allegation that
Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military
intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention."
Er, OK, could we perhaps have a link to this official confirmation, or at least a summary of
what the Austrian government is supposed to have said? Otherwise it's just an assertion
without any evidence.
Helmer seems a bit confused. All the article says is that it's been established by the
bar-code that the ultimate source of the copy of the OPCW report used by the FT was the
Austrians , who as a state party would routinely have received a copy of the report. Since
the FT presumably wanted to protect their sources they obscured the origins. And since it's
highly unlikely the whoever leaked a copy of the report would have handed it directly to the
FT (why would they?) it's likely that it came through intermediaries. He doesn't claim to
have seen the report himself, and in the long and complicated story of his to which he links
simply quotes an anonymous "expert" who hasn't seen the report either. Bricks wthout
straw
It was obvious at the time, and still is, that there was something weird about the Skripal
affair, but this doesn't get us any further forward, I'm afraid.
I am confused as well. The oe24 website doesn't say anything about the contents of the
report, and does not say that Austria wrote the report, or that Austria did their own
research.
All it says is that Marsalek had the Austrian copy of the document.
John Helmer seems to spend a lot of words dancing around so that he can selectively quote
the the following two paragraphs:
The OPCW's findings confirm the United Kingdom's analysis of the identity of the toxic
chemical. It supports our finding that a military grade nerve agent of a type known as
Novichok was used in Salisbury. DSTL, our laboratories at Porton Down, established the
highest concentrations of the agent were found on the handle of Mr Skripal's front
door.
But of course, while the identification of the nerve agent used is an essential piece of
technical evidence in our investigation, neither DSTL's analysis, nor the OPCW's report,
identifies the country or laboratory of origin of the agent used in this attack.So let me
also set out the wider picture, which leads the United Kingdom to assess that there is no
plausible alternative explanation for what happened in Salisbury than Russian State
responsibility. We believe that only the Russian Federation had the technical means,
operational experience, and the motive to target the Skripals.
I.e. Everyone involved is confident Novichok was used, but they were unable to track it to
a specific Russian lab. Given all the other evidence, this is hardly exculpatory, nor is it
contradictory, unless there have previously been high-profile claims that the specific source
of the Novichok was identified. Checking Wikipedia and sources back in 2018 finds multiple
statements, including from the UK government, that they had not be able to track down the
exact source of the nerve agent.
That's how I read it as well. The Austrians reported that they found no traces of Novichok
or other nerve agent in the Skripals' blood samples. At that point, you'd think, they would
have run further tests to determine what agent was involved. The smartest poison would have
been one that left no trace. So that lets out the "technical means" of the Russian state
– it clearly was never needed.
But that's the weird thing. Helmer says:
"Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government's allegation that
Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military
intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention."
But his only link is the Oe24 website, and it does not say anything like that. It only
says that the Austrian government had a copy of the OPCW report, and this particular copy was
leaked to Marsalek.
The Oe24 website does not say anything about the content of that report, and it does not
say that the Austria government did any research of their own.
Perhaps Helmer has other sources, but I can't find them. In particular, I would have
expected a link to the official confirmation by the Austrian government, if there is such a
thing
I don't think "the Austrians" have played any role in this at all, in spite of Helmer's
confusing suggestions. As OPCW state parties they would have received a copy of the report.
That's it. The OE24 story is just that their own copy leaked in some way, which is
embarrassing for the Austrian government since these reports are confidential. But there's no
suggestion that the Austrians played any other role, or even that they could have if they
wanted to. (Why would they?).
To answer your question properly, you'd need an organic chemist who was a specialist in nerve
agents. Remember that "Novichok" is not a nerve agent: it just means something like "new
one", and is the generic name for at least five known nerve agents developed by the Soviet
Union before the end of the Cold War. Each presumably has common characteristics but also
differences, and you'd need an expert to tell you what traces they leave, how fast these
traces decay, and so on. It may simply have been that, whilst the symptoms of the Skripals
were consistent with the use of one or more of the agents, it couldn't be shown clearly
exactly what the agent was. Certainly the careful statements of the UK government at the time
would support that interpretation.
Don't forget by the way that the Russians, as OPCW state parties, would have a copy of the
report, and may have decided that it would suit their interests if it became public in some
roundabout manner.
I asked Helmer on his own website for the same. There is one step missing from the
argument – the content of the OPCW memo. Apparently Helmer in another piece quotes a
chemist who appears to have seen the document and says the FT could not have had material
which confirmed the British government story. But we are not in a position to judge for
ourselves.
The way the other piece reads, the memo may be on the Austrian newspapers website. But
when I clicked on the link I could not find it. Quite often, sensitive links like this are
moved to prevent a snowjob falling apart. So its possible Helmer might have linked to it and
the link was moved. But I cannot say.
However I have to disagree regarding whether this adds information. The FT presented their
story to make it appear the document had been leaked by the Russians. They didnt obscure the
source, they misrepresented it. Curiouser still is the involvement of the FT Russian
correspondent.
But I suspect this is just one installment in the story. I await Mr. Helmer's
clarification.
It was obvious at the time, and still is, that there was something weird about the
Skripal affair, but this doesn't get us any further forward, I'm afraid.
Agreed. The level of reporting here fails to even clear the bar of "anonymous people close
to the matter" sourcing that we would be excoriating mainstream media for: he doesn't offer
us the contents of the report, or claim to have seen it, or even provide testimony of someone
who does claim to have seen it. Helmer comes off, at best, as a crank, and at worst
intentionally obfuscatory. Is this typical of his work?
What's the bet that in a coupla years, that there will be a showcase trial of some
Russians like they are doing in the Netherlands at the moment over the MH17 shoot down. You
would think that being in the same country that they could do it through the International
Criminal Court at the Hague. Only problem here is that they cannot stop the accused giving
evidence in defence but they can through these show trials. To think that the OPCW had such a
great reputation just a few years ago but now they have been corrupted.
Meanwhile in Oz, I see advertised on TV a three-part series coming here called "The
Salisbury Poisoning." I can hardly wait-
I have seen these two strange looking persons here in Esher, south west London. I don't
know if they are he's or she's or them's but sure as fek they are evil russkies with their
backpacks full of nasty substances.
Save for somewhat lighter facial and bodily complexion they are same as the beach vendors
i encountered in Jamaica many years ago, who were not only offering ackee and fish but also a
whole array of chemical mind altering substances as well as privileged access to all and any
members of their supposed family, especially those of self declared female persuasion.
But but but Bellingcat, which is a totally independent organization interested only in
exposing the truth said that it was proven that Russia did it it with the super duper evil
novichoks!
And if the official story doesn't quite hang together and the Skripals don't need to be
"kept safe", then that begs the question of where are they?
Aren't there treaties to not develop nerve agents? So not just the question of who
supplied and administered the agent, but being caught at breaking the treaty?
Rules are for little people, not "state actors." "A fig for your treaty." Remember, of
course, the sell substantiated comment that the US (and its imperial minions and lackeys"
is/are not "agreement-capable."
Interesting, the rigorous and gimlet-eyed analysis being applied to Helmer's article. Too
bad people who are doing that did not also apply the same rigor and skepticism to the
"government" fish story
"We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American public
believes is false." Evil CIA Director William Casey, Feb. 1981. https://amallulla.org/casey/
These agents were developed before the entry into force of the CWC, and it appears that
they were deliberately designed to circumvent its likely provisions. According to various
published sources, some of the agents were "binaries", ie they were agents which would be
created in the field from precursors which would not themselves be subject to the Treaty. It
has been suggested that they were developed hidden within a much larger agricultural
pesticide programme. The old Soviet regime always drew a distinction between signing a Treaty
(which was a political act) and implementing it, which was another matter. I doubt if much
has changed in Moscow since then.
just to add to what appears to be the majority of posts on this matter -- I find the
article from Helmer entirely unconvincing, and certainly doesn't supply any evidence, or
reasoning, that would justify the view that the Brits claim of Russian use of a Novichock
type agent on the Skripals "looks to have fallen apart"
Helmer's article was either very badly written, or very cleverly composed to give it the
"look and feel" of a well researched and well footnoted article despite an underlying
disconnect between evidence provided and verdict announced.
It's almost impossible to refute such an article, beyond returning it to the author for a
rewrite.
I wouldn't go to the wall defending the Brits version of events, but at this point it hangs
together WAY better than Mr. Helmer's article does
For those interested in better understanding the agents in question, here's a link to a
discussion at the time on a well known chemistry blog with chemistry commenters, In the
Pipeline:
Like other commenters I'm not exactly sure what is being asserted by whom here. But I
would say generally, given the context of who the Skripals were and the timing with Russian
signaling, not to mention the Russians having excellent chemistry capabilities, nobody I know
in the chemistry community doubted it was the Russians. I'd struggle to believe they were set
up. And if it were traced back conclusively to a Russian fingerprint, that would be a feature
not a bug, to keep the expats in line.
1) The Uk has fairly good chemistry capabilities too. And so conveniently located
2) The timing was terrible for Russia. But excellent for the UK. Cui bono?
3) This article suggests that the chemical in question was not what was reported in the
media. Its interesting that this material is not public domain. The Russians announced the
confidential Lab analysis result was BZ. They were ignored. Naturally
4) The Skripals fed ducks by hand after leaving home. They gave bread to local children to
feed the ducks. Neither the kids nor the ducks suffered any ill effects.
5) UK government timeline makes no sense
6) Dawn Sturgess' partner is adamant that the "perfume" he gave her was still in its
cellophane wrap. There is no explanation for how it was there given the charity bin he took
it from had been emptied several times.
7) A doctor at the local hospital wrote a letter to the Times disputing the notion of any
poisoning in the area.
This list of inconsistencies is not complete. There are many others. Which is not to say i
know what happened. Just that the story the UK told approximates impossible.
1. The UK is certainly capable. However these aren't synthetically difficult, the hard
part is not killing yourself in the process.
2. I think it fits with Putin's messaging, and maybe they expected to pull this off like a
heart attack or drug OD and the agent screwed up. Historically some of their foreign
assassinations were designed to be written off as accidents or suicides.
3. Chemistry reporting is generally terrible so yes. And there are tons of things, not
just chemical warfare but even mundane things like cosmetic formulations, that are not in the
public domain. As a chemist I wouldn't believe what Russia said unless I'd heard it confirmed
through the gravevine. In any case we certainly know it's a nerve agent, and therefore
deliberate.
4. Agree that the delivery method isn't clear, but I don't find it hard to believe they
came into contact with a sophisticated poison and that once that happened, we saw the result.
There are a lot of ways to deliver a poison e.g. remember the ricin umbrella incident. I
don't think the UK correctly figured it out.
5,6. I agree, and it's related to 4.
7. Honestly doctors are so generally underinformed that when chemists manage to poison
themselves at work, someone else from the lab has to go with them to help the hospital
understand how to treat. So I don't put any weight on this.
I think it's possible to agree that the UK story has issues, probably due to not having
proper investigation by actual experts, without that eliminating the possibility of the
Russian angle. The Russians have a long and storied history of poisoning dissidents in pretty
dramatic ways in foreign countries this matches their pattern. Remember the polonium
incident? That was messy and they didn't care. And if the UK was doing it 'in house' there
would be a lot more pressure not to have collateral damage on a setup like this. Given that
history, I think that invoking a setup takes a lot more evidence, when it's already credible
that the Russians did it again given who Skripal was.
"If you put that in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to
interfere with the election," he said. "And just the historical practices of the Russians,
who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever,
which is a typical Russian technique. So, we were concerned." https://observer.com/2017/05/james-clapper-russia-xenophobia/
I'll clarify my statements and say that they are specific to the Russian government. I
have personally had long working relationships with Russian scientists, and they are
excellent scientists and people who are deservedly part of the international scientific
community. Russian chemistry and physics are first rate.
If you don't like these links, a Google search will show you there are a lot more than
just a few people. The Russian government certainly has a track record with this, and I think
it's fair to state this criticism publicly.
"The Russians have a long and storied history of poisoning dissidents in pretty dramatic
ways in foreign countries"
links please and I'll need more than one about Litvinenko or the familiar Russo-phobic
screed from a deranged British anti-communist still living in the '50's.
No one has explained how the Scripals could have pure novichok on their hands for appox.
4hours feeling fine drinking in the Mill pub and then going for a meal in a Zizzi restaurant
and then both very suddenly, a man twice the weight and age of his
daughter, together become. very ill at exactly the same moment
Oh and hey those professional Russian assasins stroll out of Salisbury station undesguised
at about 11.30am knowing full well that CCT will catch them out and walk up to the Scripal
M16 funded house on a Sunday lunchtime with the Scripals in at the time!
How likely is it that the first person to come to the aid of the Skripals just happened to
be
Colonel Alison McCourt, chief nursing officer in the British Army. This fact was kept secret
for months afterwards, and only came to be known through happenstance.
McCourt joined the Army in 1988 and became Chief Nursing Officer for the Army on February 1,
2018, just a month before the Skriprals' poisoning. She received the OBE (Officer of the Most
Excellent Order of the British Empire) honour from the Queen in 2015. The biography, which
includes a posed photo of McCourt outside the prime minister's residence 10 Downing Street,
notes, "Alison has deployed to Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Sierra Leone." Subsequent assignments
include Officer Instructor at the Defence Medical Services Training Centre and a deployment
to Kosovo as the Senior Nursing Officer for 33 Field Hospital in 2001. During that
operational tour she was the in-theatre lead for the establishment of the joint UK/US
hospital facility at Camp Bondsteel."
I read the FT.
It's a neoliberal joke.
I enjoy making comments, giving an alternative explanation of events.
The funniest bit.
The curse of FT.
They always promote neoliberals and are convinced neoliberal leaders will bring success to a
country.
It always turns into a disaster.
Another amusing aspect is when they give the game away accidently.
The FT had graphs of growth over the years.
A quick glance revealed that growth was much higher in the Keynesian era, even in the
1970s.
The FT did a timeline of financial crises with each one marked by a vertical bar.
There were lots before the Keynesian era, and lots after the Keynesian era, but hardly any
during the Keynesian era.
Surprisingly the FT journalist missed the obvious.
If they had realised they wouldn't have put the timeline in.
Anybody coming new to the Skripal story could do worse than read this blog, which covers
all the absurdities and improbabilities and impossibilities of the official British
government story:
Well, we seem to have arrived at a consensus that Helmer has published a story with a
click-bait title and introduction making accusations which he doesn't even try to
substantiate. Either he's completely confused, or he's just publishing propaganda. Whichever,
I won't take him seriously as a journalist any more: a pity, because some of the things he's
written in the past have been quite informative.
"... The U.S. has spent a century or more trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences. ..."
"... The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal, nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. ..."
"... To the point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so? ..."
"... Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business. ..."
"... Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers, including former Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin, Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world. ..."
"... Under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the ' Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to have played a role in the murder of Che Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered. ..."
"... To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,' adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind. ..."
"... Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War. ..."
"... the U.S. had indicated its intention to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be taken in good faith. ..."
"... Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them. In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former Baltic states were brought under NATO's control . ..."
"... The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC) in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here . The economic and military annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2 . The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis on its payroll in 1948. ..."
"... That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges ..."
"... Its near instantaneous adoption by bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?' ..."
"... Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this move. ..."
The political success of Russiagate lies in the vanishing of American history in favor of a
façade of liberal virtue. Posed as a response to the election of Donald Trump, a
straight line can be drawn from efforts to undermine the decommissioning of the American war
economy in 1946 to the CIA's alliance with Ukrainian fascists in 2014. In 1945 the NSC
(National Security Council) issued a series of directives that gave logic and direction to the
CIA's actions during the Cold War. That these persist despite the 'fall of communism' suggests
that it was always just a placeholder in the pursuit of other objectives.
The first Cold War was an imperial business enterprise to keep the Generals, bureaucrats,
and war materiel suppliers in power and their bank accounts flush after WWII. Likewise, the
American side of the nuclear arms race left former
Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA to put their paranoid fantasies forward as
assessments of Russian military capabilities. Why, of all people, would former Nazi officers be
put in charge military intelligence if accurate assessments were the goal? The Nazis hated the
Soviets more than the Americans did.
The ideological binaries of Russiagate -- for or against Donald Trump, for or against
neoliberal, petrostate Russia, define the boundaries of acceptable discourse to the benefit of
deeply nefarious interests. The U.S. has spent a century or more
trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR
in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to
loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed
NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a
negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a
reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences.
The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria
Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal,
nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have
used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists
subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. Furthermore, Steinem's
aggressive ignorance of the actual history of the CIA illustrates the liberal propensity to
conflate bourgeois dress and attitude with an imagined
gentility . To the
point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not
employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so?
On the American left, Russiagate is treated as a case of bad reporting, of official outlets
for government propaganda serially reporting facts and events that were subsequently disproved.
However, some fair portion of the American bourgeois, the PMC that acts in supporting roles for
capital, believes every word of it. Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American
fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time
that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the
Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly
fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business.
Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers,
including former
Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human
beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin,
Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the
Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's
overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear
weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated
into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world.
By the time that (Senator) John F. Kennedy claimed a U.S. 'missile gap' with the Soviets in
1958, the CIA was providing estimates of Soviet ICBMs (Inter-continental Ballistic Missiles),
that were
wildly inflated -- most likely provided to it by the Gehlen Organization. Once satellite
and U2 reconnaissance estimates became available, the CIA lowered its own to 120 Soviet ICBMs
when the actual number
was four . On the one hand, the Soviets really did have a nuclear weapons program. On the
other, it was a tiny fraction of what was being claimed. Bad reporting, unerringly on the side
of larger military budgets, appears to be the constant.
Under the
Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially
disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the '
Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to
labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in
political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to
have played a role in the murder of Che
Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi
concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered.
The historical sequence in the U.S. was WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, to an economy that
was heavily dependent on war production. The threatened decommissioning of the war economy in
1946 was first met with an
honest assessment of Soviet intentions -- the Soviets were moving infrastructure back into
Soviet territory as quickly as was practicable, then to the military budget-friendly claim that
they were putting resources in place to invade Europe. The result of the shift was that the
American Generals kept their power and the war industry kept producing materiel and weapons. By
1948 these weapons had come to include atomic bombs.
To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward
the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly
traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and
are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,'
adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear
arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons
non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind.
What ties the Gehlen Organization to CIA estimates of Soviet nuclear weapons from 1948
– 1958 is 1) the Gehlen Organization was central to the CIA's intelligence operations
vis-à-vis the Soviets, 2) the CIA had limited alternatives to gather information on the
Soviets outside of the Gehlen Organization and 3) the senior leadership of the U.S. military
had
long demonstrated that it approved of exaggerating foreign threats when doing so enhanced
their power and added to their budgets. Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former
Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive
Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War.
Where this gets interesting is that American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was working for the Rand
Corporation in the late 1950s and early 1960s when estimates of Soviet ICBMs were being put
forward. JFK had run (in 1960) on a platform that included closing the Soviet – U.S. '
missile
gap .' The USAF (U.S. Air Force), charged with delivering nuclear missiles to their
targets, was estimating that the Soviets had 1,000 ICBMs. Mr. Ellsberg, who had limited
security clearance through his employment at Rand, was leaked the known number of Soviet ICBMs.
The Air Force was saying 1,000 Soviet ICBMs when the number confirmed by reconnaissance
satellites was four.
By 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA had shifted nominal control of the
Gehlen Organization to the BND, for whom Gehlen continued to work. Based on ongoing satellite
reconnaissance data, the CIA was busy lowering its estimates of Soviet nuclear capabilities.
Benjamin Schwarz, writing
for The Atlantic in 2013, provided an account, apparently informed by the CIA's lowered
estimates, where he placed the whole of the Soviet nuclear weapons program (in 1962) at roughly
one-ninth the size of the U.S. effort. However, given Ellsberg's known count of four Soviet
ICBMs at the time of the missile crisis, even Schwarz's ratio of 1:9 seems to overstate Soviet
capabilities.
Further per Schwarz's reporting, the Jupiter nuclear missiles that the U.S. had placed in
Italy prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis only made sense as first-strike weapons. This
interpretation is corroborated by Daniel Ellsberg , who argues
that the American plan was always to initiate the use of nuclear weapons (first strike). This
made JFK's posture of equally matched contestants in a geopolitical game of nuclear chicken
utterly unhinged. Should this be less than clear, because the U.S. had indicated its intention
to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing
Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be
taken in good faith.
The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 was met with a promised reduction in U.S. military
spending and an end to the Cold War, neither of which ultimately materialized. Following the
election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was
repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them.
In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging
the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then
unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former
Baltic
states were brought under NATO's control .
The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of
fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically
elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing
the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC)
in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here .
The economic and military
annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2
. The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan
to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace
the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated
former Nazis on its payroll in 1948.
That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security
Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks
volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges.
Its near instantaneous adoption by
bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That
liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by
unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of
historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers
employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?'
The Nazi War
Crimes Disclosure Act came about in part because Nazi hunters kept coming across Nazi war
criminals living in the U.S. who told them they had been brought here and given employment by
the CIA, CIC, or some other division of the Federal government. If the people in these agencies
thought that doing so was justified, why the secrecy? And if it wasn't justified, why was it
done? Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical
ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the
upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this
move.Cue the Sex
Pistols .
Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government's allegation that
Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military
intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention.
Investigations in Vienna by four Austrian government ministries, the BVT intelligence
agency, and by Austrian prosecutors have revealed that secret OPCW reports on the blood testing
of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, copies of which were transferred to the Austrian government, did
not reveal a Russian-made nerve agent.
Two reports, published in Vienna this week by the OE media group and reporter Isabelle
Daniel, reveal that the Financial Times publication of the cover-page of one of the OPCW
reports exposed a barcode identifying the source of the leaked documents was the Austrian
government. The Austrian Foreign Ministry and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und
Terrorismusbekämpfung (BVT), the domestic intelligence agency equivalent to MI5 or FBI,
have corroborated the authenticity of the documents.
The Austrian disclosures also reveal that in London the Financial Times editor, Roula
Khalaf, four of the newspaper's reporters, and the management of the Japanese-owned company
have fabricated a false and misleading version of the OPCW evidence and have covered up British
government lying on the Skripal blood testing and the Novichok evidence.
On Wednesday afternoon this week, OE24, a news portal of the OE media group in Vienna, broke
the first story (lead image, right) that the barcode found on the OPCW document photograph
published in London had been traced to several Austrian state
ministries . The next day, OE political editor Isabelle Daniel reported the Austrian
Foreign, Defence and Economics Ministries had received copies of the barcoded OPCW dossier, and
that the Justice Ministry and prosecutors were investigating "potential moles".
Daniel also
quoted a Foreign Ministry source as saying its copy of the documents had been securely
stored in its disarmament department safe, and that there were "no tips" the leak had come from
there. Daniel also quoted a BVT spokesman as confirming the authenticity of the OPCW file had
been verified. "We have checked it recently. Officially it has not come to us."
Left: Isabelle Daniel of OE, Vienna. Right, Roula Khalaf Razzouk, editor of the
Financial Times since her recent appointment by the Nikkei group, the newspaper's owner. Her
full name and concealment of her Lebanese political and business interests can be followed
here . The names of
the four Financial Times reporters who have participated in the misrepresentation and cover-up
are Paul Murphy, investigations editor; Dan McCrum, a reporter; Helen Warrell, NATO
correspondent; and Max Seddon of the Moscow bureau.
The leak had been an "explosive secret betrayal" and a criminal investigation was under way,
OE24 reported. OE is a privately owned Austrian media group, based in Vienna. It
publishes a newspaper, the news portal OE.at, radio and television.
The Financial Times report first exposing the
OPCW documents appeared on July 9. Details of how the newspaper fabricated the interpretation
the OPCW had corroborated Russian involvement in the Novichok attack can be read
here . For the full Skripal story, read the
book .
At an OPCW Executive Council meeting on April 14, 2018, five weeks after the Skripal attack,
the British Government confirmed that a few days earlier "all States parties" had received
copies of the OPCW dossier. This included Austria, as the Viennese sources now acknowledge.
"The OPCW responded promptly to our request to send their experts to the United Kingdom,"
declared Peter Wilson, the British representative to the OPCW on April 14, 2018.
"They conducted a highly professional mission. The OPCW's designated laboratories have
also responded professionally and promptly. What the Director-General said was really
important on this, and the Technical Secretariat's presentation shows how professional that
work was. The report the Technical Secretariat presented to us on 11 April was thorough and
methodical. The Technical Secretariat responded quickly to our request to share that report
with all States Parties. All have had the chance to see the quality of that work."
Wilson went on to say:
"As you know, on 4 March Yulia and Sergei Skripal were poisoned in Salisbury, the United
Kingdom, with a chemical weapon, which United Kingdom experts established to be a Novichok.
OPCW has now clearly verified those findings."
The Austrian copy of the OPCW file now confirms this was a misrepresentation of the chemical
formula and other evidence the OPCW had gathered.
Wilson went on to conclude:
"the identification of the nerve agent used is an essential piece of technical evidence in
our investigation, neither DSTL's [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down]
analysis, nor the OPCW's report, identifies the country or laboratory of origin of the agent
used in this attack. So let me also set out the wider picture, which leads the United Kingdom
to assess that there is no plausible alternative explanation for what happened in Salisbury
than Russian State responsibility. We believe that only the Russian Federation had the
technical means, operational experience, and the motive to target the Skripals."
The first qualifying sentence was the British truth; the conclusion was the British lie. The
Austrian evidence now verifies there was no evidence of a Russian source in the blood and other
test samples; no evidence of Novichok; and no evidence to corroborate the British allegations
of a Russian chemical warfare attack.
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In its report, the Financial Times displayed a partial photograph of the cover-page of one
of the OPCW documents in its possession (lead image, left). A classification stamp appears to
be showing through the title page, but no barcode is visible. The London newspaper appears to
have cropped the published picture so as to hide the barcode . That concealment -- proof of the
Austrian source – allowed the newspaper reporters to claim the source of the document was
unknown, probably Russian, as the headline implied: "Wirecard executive Jan Marsalek touted
Russian nerve gas documents."
A British military source was reported as claiming "the documents were 'unlikely' to have
come from OPCW member states in western Europe or the US." Khalaf and her reporters added: "The
OPCW, which is based in The Hague, said this week that it was investigating the matter, but
declined further comment. The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment."
With the barcode in their possession but hidden, they knew they were publishing a combination
of disinformation and lies.
The disclosure of the barcode to the Austrians appears to have followed after they had
requested it from Khalaf. She checked with her superiors in the newspaper management before
handing it over. They believed they were doing so in secret.
It is not known if Motohiro Matsumoto , the
Nikkei executive responsible for the London publishing company, was alerted and gave his
authorization; he refuses to answer questions. Matsumoto, one of the five directors of
Financial Times Ltd., is the general manager of Nikkei's global business division. He takes his
running orders from Nikkei's chairman and a long-time media executive, Tsuneo Kita. Matsumoto
replaced Hirotomo Nomura at the head of the Financial Times on March 25, 2020. When Nikkei
bought the newspaper from Pearson Plc in 2015, Nikkei became its sole proprietor.
The Austrian press has yet to report how the barcode was obtained from the newspaper.
Because the BVT and state prosecutors in Vienna are involved in their search for the "moles",
it is likely they contacted their counterparts at MI5 and the Home Office, and that the
newspaper agreed to hand over its copy of the OPCW file to the latter. The collaboration of the
journalists with the secret services to falsify evidence against Moscow in the Novichok story
remains a sensitive secret.
Khalaf has refused repeated requests for comment. Max Seddon, the newspaper's Moscow
reporter, was also asked for additional information about the photograph of the cover-page. He
will not answer.
The Dems. are absolute champions of hypocrisy and hysterical obfuscations. They are also
rather primitive and short-sighted, which all added up means they perpetually accuse others
of their own sins, in narcissistic manipulatory fashion. (Like the abusive husband - prove
you wasn't unfaithful - the teen vicious girl bully - you are a slut - etc.)
"Trump won't accept the election results" is a meme that has been going around for ages.
Now he hinted he might not accept, everyone is all agog. All it signals is that the Dems. are
preparing the ground to contest the results and create serious mayhem. (See the prelude
BLM.)
In 2016 they were taken up short, thru lack of attention, stupidity and hubris - typical
of a small cadre or consigliere group imagining they control everything. They haven't exited
that bubble because they can't - reform is impossible. Their choice of Biden as a possible
placeholder (he might be 'retired' and replaced, or a VP slot might be the P pick, etc.)
probably seems like a good strategy to them, canny and all. Well over 70, brain damaged,
senile and with a reputation of sniffing up little girls, the very idea of 'a leader' is dead
at the door.
All it evidences is that the whole 'primary process' and what one might generously dub
'will of the ppl' as the Dems institute it is a total sham (see Sanders), a transparent
masquerade. Plus that the Dems have no viable, interesting candidate - the last stab was
Obama, whom the Clintons loathed, and many in top spots opposed - but then the 'vote' still
counted (even if manipulations were going on - imho only for under 5% of the vote and this
was accepted by all parties) so Obama was a sure win. Then he was forced of course to
nominate Killary this was seen as a temp. aberration to be dealt with.
Ok, the repubs. So is Trump their candidate or what? :) The democratic 'process' in the US
was always an affair of convos in smoke-filled back rooms, and mucho corruption, dirty
dealing. What is happening now is that the system is cracking fast and nobody knows if they
want dikes to shore it up, to pretend this or that, or to profit from a or b, or to ally with
x or y, or to check out, etc. The masks are coming off (oh wait) one thing is for sure is the
US population will not move or do anything.
jack at 56 I agree, Skripals being 3-way spies is nonsense. Skripal senior was a
washed-out guy who did get some 'kudos' grudgingly from the 'spy' community - ex. he came
here (Switz.) and gave some weak talks etc. I reckon he did want to go back to Russia and may
have made some feelers or requests to do so, but he would have been ignored or at best shoved
to the back of the queue. The Brits never informed him of anything much (imho), etc. Plus,
all this going down when his daughter was there makes no sense for a savvy person, etc. No,
the unravelling of that story will turn out to be quite humdrum, with a lot of 'accidents'
and 'mistakes' etc. (if we ever find out..) with the usual Brit. *Russia Russia Russia* crowd
cashing in opportunistically.
Democrat politicians will keep their knee on the throat of small businesses for as long as
they possibly can for the sole purpose of crippling the economy to defeat Trump in November.
They don't care about the damage this causes. Keeping schools closed in the fall will result
in single parents staying home from work to care for their kids. At very least it stifles the
economy.
Send kids back to school, the majority wants this.
Vote in person November 3rd, make your vote count.
kaiserhoffredux , 3 hours ago
Exactly. There is no logic, reason, or precedent for quarantining healthy people.
To stop a virus, of all things? Ridiculous.
Ignatius , 2 hours ago
They've perverted the language as regards "cases."
A person could test positive and it might well be the most healthy situation: his body
encountered the virus, fought it off, and now though asymptomatic, retains antibodies from a
successful body response. The irony is that what I've described is the very response the vaxx
pushers expect from their vaccines.
Shameless political posturing.
coletrickle45 , 2 hours ago
So if you have 99 - 99.8% chance of surviving this faux virus
But a 100% chance of destroying lives through poverty, bankruptcy, small business
collapse, job losses, domestic abuse, depression, anxiety, fear.
What would you choose? Cost benefit analysis seems pretty obvious.
Gold Banit , 2 hours ago
Most people just regurgitate things they hear, they have lost the ability of creative and
free thought.They have been deliberately dumbed down. The entire system has created a mutant
society which is easy to control and manipulate.
"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent
guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of
the masses." ― Malcolm X ay_arrow
sensibility , 2 hours ago
The COVID-19 Hoax has "Nothing" to do with "Real" Science, It's 100% about "Political"
Science.
Therefore, No Matter What, Politicians will Bend and Manipulate this for "Political"
Gain.
Who Stirred and Exposed the Swamp?
The Swamp Inhabitants Desperately Want & Intend to do Whatever it Takes to Return to
the Old Pre Trump Days of Operating Above the Law Without Exposure and Impunity.
Consequently, Those who Support the COVID-19 Hoax are Swamp Members & Supporters.
Know your Adversary!
monty42 , 2 hours ago
Trump didn't drain, stir, or expose the swamp, sorry that dog don't hunt. He has appointed
recycled establishment swamp creatures his entire term. He appointed Fauci to the Covidian
Taskforce. He says wearing masks is patriotic.
The promises he made his followers did not manifest. Another 4 years after being lied to
is just the same old routine, nothing new.
Until you people are honest about the reality of the situation, you'll never stop the
cycle of D/R destruction.
"... Case in point, reporting today on the newly disclosed Ghisline Maxwell documents only mentioned Prince Andrew and not a word about Bill Clinton ..."
"... believe James Murdoch was part of the "we are all gonna die in <11 years" Green New Deal school of thought. ..."
"James Murdoch, the younger son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has resigned from the board
of News Corporation citing "disagreements over editorial content".
In a filing to US regulators, he said he also disagreed with some "strategic decisions" made
by the company.
The exact nature of the disagreements was not detailed.
... ... ..,
I watch a lot of TeeVee news on all the major networks including the two Foxnews
channels.
It has become apparent to me over the last year or so that there is an internal ideology
contest at Fox between the hard core conservatives like Dobbs. Carlson, Mark Levin, Bartiromo,
Degan McDowell, etc. and a much more liberal set of people like Chris Wallace, Cavuto and the
newer reporters at the White House. I expect that the departure of James Murdoch will result in
more uniformly conservative reporting and commentary on Fox. I say that presuming that James
Murdoch was a major force in trying to push Foxnews toward the left.
I am surprised that Murdoch sent his son to Harvard. pl
Been noticing a lot of irresponsible reporting of late in the WSJ - not on the opinion
page, but in some pretty sloppy reporting with a lot of editorial bias in what is included
and what is intentionally left out.
Case in point, reporting today on the newly disclosed Ghisline Maxwell documents only
mentioned Prince Andrew and not a word about Bill Clinton . Doesn't WSJ know its readers
draw from multiple media sources that have provided original content? Everyday there are
several similar, bias by omission, articles.
One can only hope newly constituted management team will finally get rid of Peggy
Noonan.
John Helmer thinks Skripal was going to bring back to Russia info related to Porton Down
and military secrets.
But I suspect that Skripal was actually the true "primary sub-source" for Steele's "dirty
dossier" (I've voiced this suspicion several times now at moa). I think Skripal knew that
that material in the dossier was false and that it was MEANT to be false. Because it was
intended to throw shade on Russia without actually tarnishing Trump.
Why would Hillary and the Democrats want a dossier that wasn't true? Trick question! CIA
wanted to elect Trump as a nationalist President that would counter Russia and China. Hillary
was almost certainly in on it - along with other top US officials (each of whom feel it was
the patriotic thing to do).
IMO Skripal was probably trying to run back to Russia. Not necessary to bring British
secrets but because he didn't feel safe because he knew too much about the operation to elect
Trump.
That's my conspiracy theory -story and I'm stickin' to it! LOL. Until/unless
there's info that disproves it.
The US MSM is a giant propaganda machine used by the elites to control major narratives in
the heads of the public. They have learned the lesson well from the British and US Empires:
divide and conquer – keep the people in fear and hatred fighting with each other so the
elites can continue to acquire more power and money and wars while they drop crumbs to the
people.
The elites have bought off everything in the US – that is the gift of turbo charged
capitalist neoliberal economics which went on a privatization tear after the end of Cold War
v1.
They made millions on the outsourcing of jobs and industry to Asia but now that the
pickings are getting slim and China is going its own way they are running demonization
narratives on China to march the American people into another Cold War while they make more
millions (since they are still the insiders pushing the buttons).
And most Americans are just childlike and ignorant enough to march along blaming China for
their jobs going overseas. This will go on until US elites have turned America into a dried
out husk.
Tucker Carlson described former President Obama as "one of the sleaziest and most dishonest
figures in the history of American politics" after his eulogy at the funeral of civil rights
icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) on Thursday.
Carlson, who also described the former president as "a greasy politician" for calling on
Congress to pass a new Voting Rights Act and to eliminate the filibuster, which Obama described
as a relic of the Jim Crow era that disenfranchised Black Americans, in order to do so.
"Barack Obama, one of the sleaziest and most dishonest figures in the history of American
politics, used George Floyd's death at a funeral to attack the police," Carlson said before
showing a segment of Obama's remarks.
Pelosi upbraids counterintel chief in private briefing over Russian meddling
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top House Democrats admonished the country's top
counterintelligence official during a classified election security briefing Friday, accusing
him of keeping Americans in the dark about the details of Russia's continued interference in
the 2020 campaign. Pelosi hinted at the conflict upon emerging from the briefing Friday
morning, saying she thought the administration was "withholding" evidence of foreign election
meddling.
U.S. Officials Disseminate Disinformation About 'Virus Disinformation'Getald
, Jul 29 2020 17:44 utc |
1
In another round of their anti-Russian disinformation campaign 'U.S. government officials'
claim that some websites loosely connected to Russia are spreading 'virus
disinformation'.
However, no 'virus disinformation' can be found on those sites.
The Associated Press as well as the New York Times were briefed by the
'officials' and provided write ups.
Two Russians who have held senior roles in Moscow's military intelligence service known as
the GRU have been identified as responsible for a disinformation effort meant to reach
American and Western audiences, U.S. government officials said. They spoke to The
Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak
publicly.
The information had previously been classified, but officials said it had been
downgraded so they could more freely discuss it. Officials said they were doing so now to
sound the alarm about the particular websites and to expose what they say is a clear link
between the sites and Russian intelligence.
Between late May and early July, one of the officials said, the websites singled out
Tuesday published about 150 articles about the pandemic response, including coverage aimed
either at propping up Russia or denigrating the U.S.
Among the headlines that caught the attention of U.S. officials were "Russia's Counter
COVID-19 Aid to America Advances Case for Détente," which suggested that Russia had
given urgent and substantial aid to the U.S. to fight the pandemic, and "Beijing Believes
COVID-19 is a Biological Weapon," which amplified statements by the Chinese.
There is zero 'virus disinformation' in the Korybko piece. The aid flight did happen and
was widely reported. In a response to the allegations the proprietors of O neWorldpoint out that
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a recent Q&A also alluded to a new détente with
Russia. Was that also 'virus disinformation'?
The second piece the 'officials' pointed out, Beijing believes COVID-19 is a biological weapon , was
written In March by Lucas Leiroz, a "research fellow in international law at the Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro". It is an exaggerating analysis of the comments and questions a
spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry had made about the possible sources of the
Coronavirus.
The original spokesperson quote is in the piece. Referring to additional sources the
author's interpretation may go a bit beyond the quote's meaning. But it is certainly not
'virus disinformation' to raise the same speculative question about the potential sources of
the virus which at that time many others were also asking.
The piece was published by InfoBRICS.org, a "BRICS information portal" which
publishes in the languages of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South
Africa). It is presumably financed by some or all of those countries.
Another website the 'U.S. officials' have pointed out is InfoRos.ru which publishes in Russian and English. The
AP notes of it:
A headline Tuesday on InfoRos.ru about the unrest roiling American cities read "Chaos in
the Blue Cities," accompanying a story that lamented how New Yorkers who grew up under the
tough-on-crime approach of former Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg "and have zero
street smarts" must now "adapt to life in high-crime urban areas."
Another story carried the headline of "Ukrainian Trap for Biden," and claimed that
"Ukrainegate" -- a reference to stories surrounding Biden's son Hunter's former ties to a
Ukraine gas company -- "keeps unfolding with renewed vigor."
U.S. officials have identified two of the people believed to be behind the sites'
operations. The men, Denis Valeryevich Tyurin and Aleksandr Gennadyevich Starunskiy, have
previously held leadership roles at InfoRos but have also served in a GRU unit specializing
in military psychological intelligence and maintain deep contacts there, the officials
said.
InfoRos calls itself a 'news agency' and has some rather boring general interest
stuff on its site. But how is its writing in FOX News style about unrest in U.S.
cities and about Biden's escapades in the Ukraine 'virus disinformation'? I fail to find any
on that site.
In 2018 some "western intelligence agency"
told the Washington Post , without providing any evidence, that InfoRos
is related to the Russian military intelligence service GU (formerly GRU):
Unit 54777 has several front organizations that are financed through government grants as
public diplomacy organizations but are covertly run by the GRU and aimed at Russian
expatriates, the intelligence officer said. Two of the most significant are InfoRos and the
Institute of the Russian Diaspora.
So InfoRos is getting some public grants and was allegedly previously run by two
people who before that worked for the GU. What does that say about the current state and the
content it provides? Nothing.
The NYTadds
that hardly anyone is reading the websites the 'U.S. officials' pointed out but that their
content is at times copied by more prominent aggregator sites:
"What we have seen from G.R.U. operations is oftentimes the social media component is a
flop, but the narrative content that they write is shared more broadly through the niche
media ecosystem," said Renee DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet
Observatory, who has studied the G.R.U. and InfoRos ties and propaganda work.
There are plenty of sites who copy content from various outlets and reproduce it under
their name. But that does not turn whatever they publish into disinformation.
All the pieces mentioned by AP and NYT and attributed to the 'Russian'
sites are basically factual and carry no 'virus disinformation'. That makes the
'U.S.officials' claims that they do such the real disinformation campaign.
And the AP and NYT are willingly falling for it.
People being
prepared for Russia having the worlds first covid19 vaccine, the US will of course say it was
stolen from them. Infantile politicians create infantile press to feed infantile articles to
adult children. Critical thinking skills do not exist in the US population.
The development of propagation of information/disinformation through the internet eroded
the power of the old newspapers/news agencies. It's not that this or that particular website
is getting more views, but that the web of communications - the the imperialistic blunders +
decline of capitalism post-2008 -, as a whole, weakened what seemed to be an unshakeable
trust on the MSM (the very fact that this term exists already is historical evidence of their
loss of power).
And this process manifests itself not only in loss of power, but also loss of money: this
is particularly evident in the social media, where Facebook (Whatsapp + Facebook proper) and
Google are beginning to siphon advertisement money from both TV and the traditional
newspapers (printed press). When those traditional printed newspapers went digital, they
behaved badly, by using paywalls - this marketing blunder only accelerated their decline in
readership and thus further advertisement money, generating a vicious cycle for them.
The loss of influence of public opinion for the MSM also inaugurated another very
important societal shift: the middle class' loss of monopoly over opinion and formation of
opinion. Historically, it was the role of the middle class to be highly educated, to go to
academia (college) and, most importantly, to daily read the newspapers while eating the
breakfast. The middle class was the class of the intellectuals by definition, thus served as
the clerical class of the capitalist class, the priests of capitalism. With the
popularization of the internet, the smartphone and social media, this sanctity was broken or,
at least, begun to deteriorate. We can attest this class conflict phenomenon by studying the
rise of the term "expert" as a pejorative one. In the West's case, this shift begun through
the far-right side of the political spectrum, but the shift is there.
The popularization of what was once a privilege is nothing new in capitalism. The problem
here is that capitalism depends on infinite growth to merely exist (i.e. it can't survive on
zero growth, it is mathematically impossible), so it has to "monetize" what still isn't
monetize in order to find/create more vital space (Lebensraum - a term coined by the
hyper-capitalist Nazis) for its expansion and thus survival. Hence the popularization of
college education in the USA (then in Europe). Hence the popularization of daily news through
the internet/social media. This process, of course, has its positives and negatives (as is
the case with every dialectical process) - the fall of the MSM is one of the positives.
So, in fact, when the likes of AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, Guardian, Fox, CNN spread
disinformation against "alt-media", they are really just protecting their market share - the
fact that it implies in suppression of freedom of speech and to mass disinformation and,
ultimately, to war and destruction, is merely collateral damage of the business they operate
in. They are, after all, capitalist enterprises above all.
Excellent analysis, as always, by b. And vk's points are very pertinent too. One tiny
quibble: I doubt that the Nazis coined, though they certainly popularised, the term
lebensraum.
There is an air of desperation about these campaigns against "Russian" "disinformation"
massive changes are occurring, and, because they are so vast, they are moving relatively
slowly.
The old media model, now totally outdated, was the first thing to fall. Now capitalism itself
is collapsing as a result of the primary contradiction that, left to itself, the marketplace
will solve all problems.
As Washington, where magical thinking is sovereign, is demonstrating, left to itself the
hidden hand will bring only misery, famine, death and the Apocalypse. This was once very well
understood, as a brief look at the history of the founding of the UN will show, now it is the
subject of frantic denial by capitalism's priesthood who have grown to enjoy the glitter and
sensuality of life in a brothel. It is a sign of their mental decay that they can do no
better than to blame Russians.
One should presume the anonymous officials responsible for this ground-breaking report (sarc)
are close to the various "combatting Russian disinformation" NGOs. They are merely living up
to the mission statements of their benefactors. AP and NYTimes are being unprofessional and
spreading fake news by failing to reveal their sources. It's mind-numbing - the BS one must
wade through.
Good point however with one glaring contradiction in your thinking.
You make valid a very criticism of capitalism yet you tend to applaud Chinese capitalist
growth (although you tend to deny Chinese capitalist growth is capitalist, a feat of
breathtaking magical thinking).
The great Chinese wealth is fully 75% invested in bubblicious real estate valuations of
non-commercial real estate built on a mountain of construction debt. Sound familiar?
The irony is Chinese growth since 2008 has been goosed along entirely by the very same
financialized hyper capitalist traits as US: great gobs of debt creating supply-side
"growth", huge amounts of middle wealth tied to asset inflated bubbles, and of course the
resulting income and wealth inequality that rivals US inequality and continues to increase
over time.
I snorted coffee out my nose when Gruff tried to totally excuse Chinese income inequality
for being only slightly less than US level....how about the truth? Chinese inequality is
heinous, only slightly less than the also heinous US level.
The diseased working class in China only has an an arm and two legs hacked off while the
diseased US working class is fully quadriplegic. Much, much better to be a fucked over by
globalization Chinese citizen! Lmao
@ b who ended his posting with
"
And the AP and NYT are willingly falling for it.
"
Sorry b, but AP and NYT are active participants in the disinformation campaign of failing
empire and are not falling for anything
The folks that are falling for it are the American public that has lost its ability to
discriminate with the fire hose volume of lies told to them on a daily basis.
Empire is in the process of defeating itself which is the only safe way of ending the
tyranny of global private finance. I commend China and Russia for having the patience and
fortitude to hold the safe space for the dysfunctional social contract having private control
of the lifeblood of human commerce to self destruct.
This is SO hilarious! The propagandists are worried about Russian virus dis-information when
most dis-information has come from the US government in the person of Trump and from the CDC,
which spent months discrediting the effectiveness of face masks!!!
Theses propagandists need to get real jobs dealing with real world problems.
This is SO hilarious! The propagandists are worried about Russian virus dis-information when
most dis-information has come from the US government in the person of Trump and from the CDC,
which spent months discrediting the effectiveness of face masks!!!
Theses propagandists need to get real jobs dealing with real world problems.
there has been no national response to coronavirus but there must be a national acceptance
that this national non-response is China's fault. and any sources reporting truthfully about
the US or disseminating statements easily found elsewhere, as long as they are Russian,
Chinese, Venezuelan, Cuban, Iranian, etc., is pure disinformation. How brittle and weak the
US is. Where's the Pericles to say to the Spartans, "enter our city and inspect our
defenses"? The US is a nation of heavily-armed mice and sheep.
btw, the China love on display around here is pretty funny. in that the Chinese government
has mounted a national response to a very serious threat, China is a nation in a way that the
US is not. There is no US or we would not have 50 states doing different things in response
to the corona outbreak. the US is already dead. But China is a thoroughly authoritarian
capitalist state. they are who they are in a dialectic competition with the US and other
capitalist powers, not because of some Maoist-Confucian amalgam that inspires such wisdom in
their brilliant leaders, who are just as quick to destroy their environment for capitalist
gain as anyone on this planet is. The decline of the US will not make China or Russia or any
"emerging" power less authoritarian or violent. au quite the contraire. They are Shylocks who
will try to better instruction.
However, none of this is of concern to people in the US, whose only concern is the Nazi
spawn who've been running "the West" for much longer than the last 75 years. but it's time to
kill the bitch, not let it keep screwing us and breeding.
As others already said, this is a bit rich, considering that virus disinformation comes from
Trump himself, both live and on Twitter, quoting genuine hacks and megalomaniac doctors,
depending on the week.
Reality check: Russians will be able to travel across the world way before Americans, for
obvious healthcare reasons.
Bevin, I agree, I once had a short exchange on Mondoweiss about the term Lebensraum, it
had been used in some type of marketing by my favorite Swizz supermarket. Which then,
apparently caused an uproar. The term Lebensraum on its own is rather innocent. Leben (life)
Raum (space), a noun compound. Context matters. And I am sure I checked it, and Micros
definitively did not use it in any type of world conquering settler context. I haven't
stumbled yet across a Micros supermarket anywhere outside Switzerland, ;)
I'm under the impression that Info Ros is a Russian government-funded, supported, backed,
site, it certainly looks like it and its reportage is decidedly 'neutral'.
This is SO hilarious! The propagandists are worried about Russian virus dis-information
when most dis-information has come from the US government in the person of Trump and from the
CDC, which spent months discrediting ...
Posted by: JohnH | Jul 29 2020 19:21 utc | 8
This is close to my overall take on matters. But I wouldn't put so much emphasis on
face masks but on something along the lines of Covid is notthing but a flu. Face masks were
initially discussed quite controversially everywhere.
Were it gets interesting is here:
A report published last month by a second, nongovernmental organization, Brussels-based EU
DisinfoLab, examined links between InfoRos and One World to Russian military intelligence.
The researchers identified technical clues tying their websites to Russia and identified some
financial connections between InfoRos and the government.
They have a competitor which seems Bruxelles based too, Patrick Armstrong alerted me to
a while ago: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/
EUvsDisinfo is the flagship project of the European External Action Service's East StratCom
Task Force
************
But yes, on first sight InfoRos seems to be neatly aligned with US alt-Right-Media in
basic outlook. More than with the US MSM.
And now I first have to read what has been on Andrew Korybko's mind lately. ;)
Many Americans of all walks of life do not trust their own government, yet most people here
seem to have faith that their media outlets are telling the truth. How do you break through
to the public that has utter faith in whatever newspaper or television channel they prefer
and highlight the lies in a way which gains real traction?
I believe it takes leadership, which, for Americans, mean celebrities have to endorse the
idea or it likely won't be taken seriously. This cult of celebrity is mirrored on social
media platforms, where millions flock to be a part of some beautiful person's beautiful
photograph or some known personalities acceptable opinion du jour.
There is a great bond gripping the minds of American media consumers. They have trained
their entire lives to worship at the cult of celebrity and this is the key to breaking the
entire media landscape down for them.
This also is the key to unlocking the voices of those who know better with regards to
media lies, but keep silent out of fear.
Will a Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson be able to break the spell? I think it will never
happen based on how Hollywood gatekeeps celebrity and based on how hopelessly apathetic most
are to Julian Assange.
Lol I write for One World. I'm an American who has never had a piece edited or been told what
to write. I was allowed to write a piece about Russia where I was critical of their policy of
backing the STC in Yemen (I thought it was bad to divide Yemen). No one makes anybody tow any
specific line. I decided not to publish my piece on Russia and the STC in Yemen because I
didn't find the topic interesting enough, but I was 100% allowed to be critical of Russia.
Lol I write for One World. I'm an American who has never had a piece edited or been told
what to write.
...
Posted by: Ben Barbour | Jul 29 2020 22:36 utc | 23
Is it possible that you're just the in-house joke at OW?
If they don't care that you'd write "tow" instead of "toe" or that you're too
lazy/thoughtless to reproduce the full name of the entity for which STC is an acronym, before
using the acronym, then it suggests that One World's Editorial Standards are as lax as your
own :-)
"... Two Russians who have held senior roles in Moscow's military intelligence service
known as the GRU have been identified as responsible for a disinformation effort meant to
reach American and Western audiences, U.S. government officials said. They spoke to The
Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak
publicly ..."
Of course GRU agents always work in pairs, guided only by the mysterious telepathic powers
of the Russian President and no-one or nothing else, as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov
did in Salisbury in March 2018 when they supposedly tried to assassinate or send a warning to
Sergei Skripal, and as Dmitri Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy did in London in November 2006 when
they apparently put polonium in a pot of tea served to Alexander Litvinenko in full view of
patrons and staff at a hotel restaurant. It's as if each agent carries only half a brain and
each half is connected to its complement by the corpus callosum that is Lord Vlademort
Putin's thoughts beaming oing-yoing-yoing-like through the atmosphere until they find their
targets.
And of course US government officials always speak on condition of anonymity.
As Agence Presse News puts it:
"... The information had previously been classified, but officials said it had been
downgraded so they could more freely discuss it. Officials said they were doing so now to
sound the alarm about the particular websites and to expose what they say is a clear link
between the sites and Russian intelligence ..."
So if US government officials can now freely discuss declassified news, why do they insist
on being anonymous? This would be the sort of news announced at a US national press club
meeting with Matt Lee in the front row asking awkward and discomfiting questions.
The malicious cultivation (including Gain of Function research) and implantation of this
biowarfare agent (and other ones such as Swine Fever) by the U.S. Intelligence services in
various places around the world (especially in China and Iran), the intentional faulty
responses and deceptive statistics administered by the monopoly-controlled medical
establishment, the feigned inability to provide adequate testing, care, and treatment, along
with planned economic destruction as a means of restoring investor losses and control of
populations through stifling of dissent, are at the heart of the deflection and projection of
blame. That broadly-based subject is barely discussed in alternative media and is totally
obfuscated in MSM, because the "denier-debunkers" dispute the possibility of such extreme
malice existing in our institutions, in spite of previous experience with events such as 9/11
and the '08 financial crisis.
...
So if US government officials can now freely discuss declassified news, why do they insist on
being anonymous?
...
Posted by: Jen | Jul 29 2020 23:29 utc | 25
Precisely.
My guess is that they don't know when to quit.
and/or
They embrace the Mythbusters motto...
"If a thing's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."
"Is it possible that you're just the in-house joke at OW?
If they don't care that you'd write "tow" instead of "toe" or that you're too
lazy/thoughtless to reproduce the full name of the entity for which STC is an acronym, before
using the acronym, then it suggests that One World's Editorial Standards are as lax as your
own :-)"
Fair point on tow vs toe. That's why editing exists when writing articles. As for the STC
part, that is common knowledge if you follow basic geopolitics. When making a post in a
comment thread, should I write out "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" before using the acronym
ISIS? If I am posting in a comment thread about Iran, do I need to write out "Mujahedin-e
Khalq" instead of just using MEK?
It just displays a massive level of ignorance on your part. Nice try though.
Global media moguls are blaming the 1,000 American deaths per day from the Wuhan coronavirus
on Donald Trump to finally get him out of the way. But they are silent on their and the
Democrats complicity in the death toll due to the lack of a national public health system or
the funding to pay for it.
The USA is going to hell. A scapegoat is needed. For the media and Democrats, Russia is to
blame. Anybody else rather than themselves, the true culprits. Donald Trump blames China for
the pandemic if he acknowledges it at all but that is where all of Tim Cook's iPhones are
made. Blaming China is globalist heresy.
I think there's a reasonable case to be made that this is what has occurred.
And, if true, it is covered up by sly suggestions that nCov-19 was man-made with hints or
a smug attitude that convey the message that China created the virus. As well as a
virtual black-out in Western media of Chinese suggestions that the virus may have started in
USA or been planted in Wuhan.
But then, I already stand accused of attributing magical powers of self-interested
foresight and boldness to US Deep-State due to my belief that Trump was their choice to lead
USA in 2016. And so I expect you're theory will receive the same derision. Yet Empires have
not been shy about killing millions when it was in their interest to do so.
In any case, I've written many times that USA/West's unwillingness to fight the virus has
been dressed up as innocent mistakes. Even if the West wasn't the source of the virus they
have much to answer for. Yet very few have taken note of the way that USA/West have played
the pandemic to advance their interests - from lining the pockets of Big Pharma to blaming
China for their own "incompetence" (a misnomer: the power-elite are very competent at
advancing their interests!).
It seems disinformation has been redefined to mean information that counters someone else's
(yours) belief. We pretend to be in an Age of Reason but really, we have just replaced
religious beliefs with secular beliefs. Science has been taken over by pseudoscientists that
have replaced priests. The conflict of interest by the science/priests who profit from their
deceptions is beyond criminal.
To know what is the truth you just have to look at whats being censored. Nobody being
censored for supporting mask mandates, claiming vaccines are safe, and not questioning the
blatant data manipulation of COVID cases that anyone with an open mind and IQ of 100 , and
who reads the data, definitions and studies can see through.
It seems people on both sides of the fence have replaced their brains with their chosen
ideology. Its like watching a Christian, Jew and Muslim arguing which is the best or true
religion. No point in it.
so, lets say GRU agents are feeding russian propaganda sites... how does that compare to
all the CIA-FBI agents and has been hacks working for the western msm?? seems a bit rich for
the pot to be calling a kettle black, even if they are lying thru their teeth! i am sure if
someone did a story on how many CIA - m16 people are presently working with the western msm,
they would have a story with some legs... this shite from anonymous usa gov't officials is
just that - shite..
@ Ben, or Benson Barbour .. thanks for your comments!
Lol I write for One World. I'm an American who has never had a piece edited or been told
what to write. I was allowed to write a piece about Russia where I was critical of their
policy of backing the STC in Yemen (I thought it was bad to divide Yemen). No one makes
anybody tow any specific line. I decided not to publish my piece on Russia and the STC in
Yemen because I didn't find the topic interesting enough, but I was 100% allowed to be
critical of Russia.
There's such a thing as self-censorship. Mainstream US news has effectively brought up
folks to be this way: stay in line or become unemployed- doesn't need to be stated. Not aimed
at you, but it needs to be said (und understood).
@35 That's a very good point. I completely agree. Self-censorship and group think are two of
the biggest problems in modern journalism/analysis. One World consistently publishes
pro-Pakistan and pro-China articles. When I was first sending them submissions, I did a piece
on US vs China in Sudan and South Sudan. I considered omitting China's culpability in
escalating the conflicts, and instead focus on laying the blame squarely at the feet of the
US. In the end I told the truth about both countries' imperialist escalations (to the best of
my ability).
There is a lot of incentive to self-censor at just about any outlet. It's more comfortable
to fit in with a site's brand.
In the case of the Russia-STC article, I really just found the subject matter to be thin.
Russia's support of the STC is mostly just diplomatic. Not a lot to write about.
The Americans are increasingly unhinged in their spittle-flecked accusations against not only
Russia, but also China, Iran, Venezuela, etc.
It's so pathetic as to be humorous.
Underlying the USA's Two Minutes of Hate campaigns, however, is a deeper disease that
defines Americans as a nation and as a people.
Namely, Americans have an inbred fundamentalist belief in their own Moral Superiority as
the Beacon of Liberty, Land of the Free, blah, blah, blah--no matter how many nations they
have bombed back to the Stone Age, invaded, colonized, regime changed, sanctioned, or
economically raped in the name of Freedom and Democracy™.
Donald Trump is half correct.
The United States of America is truly a great nation alright--but great only in terms of
its deceit, great in terms of its delusions, and great in terms of the horrors that it has
inflicted on much of the world.
Comparing America to the Nazis would be a high insult ... to Nazi Germany, as the Third
Reich only lasted about 12 years, while the American Reich has unfortunately lasted well over
200 years and gotten away with its crimes against humanity by possessing what are likely the
greatest propaganda machine and political deception in human history: the American Free Press
and the world historic lie called "American Freedom."
Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel Literature Prize speech briefly but powerfully exposes
this heart of American darkness:
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless,
but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has
exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for
universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road.
Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a
salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a
winner."
"Top US immunologist Dr Anthony Fauci is now saying citizens are not "complete" in
protecting themselves from the Covid-19 pandemic unless they go beyond wearing a mask and add
in eye protection like goggles, too."
More provocation from the oligarchy. Now, that masks are becoming less controversial, time
to step up the provocation, division and control.
Fauci is also behind the anti-hydroxychloroquine propaganda, as well, that even b has
swallowed. This, despite it being used effectively in other countries. All of this simply
because Trump supports it (ergo, it must be bad) and Big Pharma (who control Fauci,
CDC abd WHO) can't profit significantly from its use.
"During the course of the debate, Kennedy also talked about the regular vaccines most
people take, from Hepatitis B to the flu shot, emphasizing that no proper testing had ever
been done, which is mandatory for any other medication. Vaccines "are the only medical
product that does not have to be safety-tested against a placebo," he explained."
Kennedy said
"it's not hypothetical that vaccines cause injury, and that injuries are not rare. The
vaccine courts have paid out four billion dollars" over the past three decades, "and the
threshold for getting back into a vaccine court and getting a judgment – [the
Department of Health and Human Services] admits that fewer than one percent of people who are
injured ever even get to court."
So, how well has the Russian vaccine been tested? Does anyone know?
It is interesting how USAians are being played by the oligarchy.
On foreign policy, the dems and reps are in basic agreement and the propaganda is to bring
the masses together to hate Russia, Chaina and anyone else who the Western (US) oligarchy has
targeted.
Domestically, unity is the enemy of the oligarchy. The masses must be controlled through
division and diversion, so the dems and reps play good cop, bad cop (bad and good being
relative to the supporter) to ensure the masses are diverted from important oligarch issues
to issues of irrelevance to the oligarchs, but easily manipulated emotionnally by the
oligarchs for the beast.
"[...]Donald Trump blames China for the pandemic if he acknowledges it at all but that is
where all of Tim Cook's iPhones are made. Blaming China is globalist heresy."
Then why do you phrase it the "Wuhan coronavius" yourself?
For those interested in corona virus truth,
I am interested in the question -- - was it spread by negligence or deliberately?
That question must be relivant to this debate on MOA.
I ask this now becouse -- --
Tonight on bbc 'panorama' there investigating the spread of the virus from Hospital to care
homes !! I'm told there is some pretty shocking information exposed.
Some may wish to catch that prog. Heads up.
I just add an obversation. -- western psychopathic disinformation and projection has led
to a confused public. A public deciding to disengage with politics. To the gain of the
psychopaths.
A new candidate to the demonization and disinfo operations has been added...Germany...which
has been labeled "delinquent" by the POTUS...in a clear exercise of projection...
Of course, to not be insulted or labeled delinquent, you must act as these other countries
enumerated by Southcom commander, to work for the US ( not your country...) and moreover pay
for it....Typical mafia extortion, isn´t it?
That broadly-based subject is barely discussed in alternative media and is totally
obfuscated in MSM, because the "denier-debunkers" dispute the possibility of such extreme
malice existing in our institutions, in spite of previous experience with events such as
9/11 and the '08 financial crisis.
YES to that and thank you for that post. That the institutions of state and private
sectors are the incubators and propagators of extreme malice is axiomatic in the UKUSAI and
its five eyed running dogs is beyond doubt. They attack and scorn any critic or unbeliever.
They assault and pillory truth speakers and those who might question 'their narrative'.
Then if all that fails the hunt them down and make preposterous claims about them being
anti semitic of anti religion or anti their nation.
Mendacity is the currency of the permanent state and its minions and they need to be outed
and shamed and challenged at every opportunity.
Fort Detrick coronavirus would be on the mark and as you most likely know, you cannot
trust the USA lying eyes once you have served them in their killing fields.
Even that right wing ex special forces advocate Steve Pieczenic testifies to the fact of a
deadly virus in USA in November/December plus his beloved bloggers say way earlier than that
around Maryland etc. Then there is the small problem of the 'vaping' illness that generated
lots of pneumonia like fatalities in June/July. And then the instant closure of Fort Detrick
due to its leaking all over the place through a totally inadequate waste water treatment
plant that couldn't scrub a turd let alone a virus.
The problem with presstitutes, possibly including Ben Barbour , (disclaimer: I've
never read any media products that particular individual generated) goes beyond the point
made by Seer @35 . To be sure, there is no chance that a presstitute would bite the
hand that feeds it, but there is more depth to the problem of why they all suck so
badly, at least the ones in the US. While journalism degrees are the university equivalent of
Special Education (nowadays referred to as "Exceptional Student Education" , which is
very fitting for students from such an "exceptional" nation), they still prepare the
future presstitute to understand that their capitalist employers have interests beyond their
immediately apparent ones. That is, more important to a capitalist employer than tomorrow's
sales and profits is the preservation of capitalism itself.
But the problem is deeper still. The presstitute that is successfully employed by a
capitalist enterprise will invariably be one that knows not to criticize the employer's
business, the capitalist system it depends upon, and the empire that improves that employer's
profitability. More importantly, that successful hireling will additionally have been
brainwashed from infancy that all of these things are good and necessary aspects of the
modern world that need to be ideologically defended. The prospective presstitute will be one
that not only voluntarily, but eagerly serves its capitalist masters varied interests. After
all, when there are plenty of whores to choose from, would you hire one that requires
explicit instructions on every last thing you expect from them and just follows those
instructions mechanically or the the one that puts effort into figuring out what would please
you and delivers that with enthusiasm? Keeping this dynamic in mind will allow one to better
understand the capitalist mass media's products.
The contempt at which the American ruling class hold their citizens is galling. The US
corporate media operates as if their targeted audience are all morons.
Mark2 @45: "...was it [ novel coronavirus] spread by negligence or
deliberately?"
Most likely both.
There is evidence to suggest that the virus was circulating in the US prior to it being
discovered in China. While it is possible this could have been the results of testing the
transmissibility of the virus, it seems more probable that it was an accidental release from
Fort Detrick. This would explain the facility being shut down last year. Military facilities
are never shut down simply for breaking a few rules but because those rule violations led to
something unpleasant.
An accidental release, coupled with the fact that the synthetic origin of the virus would
become apparent to scientists worldwide, resulted in a need to quickly establish an alternate
explanation for the virus. Since the US was losing its trade war with China, and use of a
bioweapon to turn the tide was already gamed out and on the table anyway, the virus (or
possibly a very similar strain that had been pre-selected for the attack) was deliberately
sprayed around a market in Wuhan.
The CDC and CIA probably thought that the virus was contained in the West and that since
it was a surprise to the Chinese it would run rampant there and result in their economy
shutting down and their borders being closed, decoupling China from the world. With the
Chinese treating the virus as a bio attack and defeating its spread, followed by the virus
rampaging through the West, the dynamic changed. Now in order for the virus to decouple China
it must become endemic in the West. The Chinese must be made to close their borders in fear
of becoming infected from the rest of the world. To make this backup plan a reality, and to
get the economies moving again as fast as possible, some western leaders have decided to
accelerate the spread in the hopes of quickly developing "herd immunity" . Taking out
some retirees whom the capitalists view as a burden on the economy is just some nice icing on
the cake.
@ 51 & @ 52
I'd say not ! I'm confided Vietnam Vet is doing 'balenced' Reporting ! The subject of this
post. Take another look at both this post and his comment. A lesson in how to be unbiased but
truthfull.
Soooo any one got a definition of fake news.
Mine would be Truth before personal agenda.
William Gruff @ 53
I think yours is just about the most clear and concise summary of this whole virus
catastrophe that I have seen so far. And that's a hell of a statement !
Unrelated I wonder what would have happened if the Chinese whistle blower had not blown the
whistle ? Now that's one to ponder ? As bad as this all is world wide, where would be right
now ? Dose not bare thinking about.
What are you trying to tell me? Anyone that does not acknowledge the virus originated in
China and that China didn't respond as fast as it could have? And more polemically: there is
some kind of African Marxist heading WHO who obfuscated China's late information to the
WHO?
There is a dot of truth in everything. There is also a dot of truth in the fact that Trump
or his relevant admin was informed early enough.
We've been acquainted with this virus about 7 months or so and it is difficult to separate
reliable information from disinformation. We know very little about it, eg, we don't know
whether those who recover can be reinfected. Is it like the common cold, against which there
is no immunity? We just have to assume that the Trump virus has infected every level of the
administration so that there is ignorance and unadulterated stupidity from the lowest level
in the ministry of propaganda to the secretary of state and, of course, the president himself
currently celebrating the wisdom of an animist/Christian hybrid doctor from Africa spewing
the foulest disinformation one can imagine.
Big @ 57 What ?
Posted by: Mark2 | Jul 30 2020 12:27 utc | 58
babbling: look if this is the good old VV from SST, I wouldn't want to nail him on the
usage of Wuhan virus. But on the larger content of his comment, I am wondering.
Full discovery: I entered the US conspiracy universe shortly after 9/11. I'll probably
never forget there was this one commenter that completely out of then current preoccupations
within the diverse theories, you recall?, suggested that the Chinese were approaching via the
Southern borders.
There surely should be a way how the US and Russia
There surely should be a way how the US and Russia
There surely should be a way how the US and Russia repartition their claims. After all
historically the Russian had some type of partly real Yellow threat too ... :)
Except the "whistle blower" was not a whistle blower since local, provincial, and nations
institutions were already advised or in the process of being advised. Dr Wenliang posted his
information in a private chatroom with other medical professionals on December 30th. Timeline
of events:
Dec 27 -- Dr. Zhang Jixian, director of the respiratory and critical care medicine
department of Hubei Provincial Hospital, files a report to the hospital stating that an
unknown pneumonia has developed in three patients and they are not responding to influenza
treatment.
Dec 29 -- Hubei Provincial Hospital convened a panel of 10 experts to discuss the now
seven cases. Their conclusion that the situation was extraordinary, plus information of two
similar cases in other hospitals, prompted the hospital to report directly to the municipal
and provincial health authorities.
Dec 30 -- The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued an urgent notification to medical
institutions under its jurisdiction, ordering efforts to appropriately treat patients with
pneumonia of unknown cause.
Dec 31 -- The National Health Commission (NHC) made arrangements in the wee hours, sending
a working group and an expert team to Wuhan to guide epidemic response and conduct on-site
investigations. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission released a briefing on its website
about the pneumonia outbreak in the city, confirming 27 cases and telling the public not to
go to enclosed public places or gather. It suggested wearing face masks when going out. The
Wuhan Municipal Health Commission released briefings on the pneumonia outbreak in accordance
with the law. WHO's Country Office in the PRC relayed the information to the WHO Western
Pacific Regional Office, then to the international level headquarters.
Jan 1 -- The NHC set up a leading group to determine the emergency response to the
epidemic. The group convened meetings on a daily basis since then.
Jan 2 -- The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) and the Chinese
Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS) received the first batch of samples of four patients from
Hubei Province and began pathogen identification. The NHC came up with a set of guidelines on
early discovery, early diagnosis and early quarantine for the prevention and control of the
viral pneumonia of unknown cause.
Jan 3 -- Dr. Wenliang signs a statement not to post unsubstantiated rumors.
There's no "whistle blowing" as the information of the cases were already going up the
chain of command. These are facts that can be sourced by multiple media outlets. I can't
believe this fallacy keeps floating and doesn't flush.
In retrospective analyses, SARS-COV-2 was found in routinely collected samples of European
sewage water dating back to at least december 2019. A french doctor reviewed archived medical
samples and imagery from patients who had fallen mysteriously ill in the latter half of 2019
and also found that some had been early cases of COVID-19.
The real coronavirus whistle-blower is a doctor in Washington state USA who tested for the
virus in Januari 2020 and was silenced by USA medical and federal authorities.
I am afraid that there will never be a sincere investigation into the real cause of the
"vaping disease" that caused many deaths from sudden respiratory failure in the USA in the
summer of 2019. Tell me again when Ft. Detrick labs was shut down exactly?
What are you trying to tell me? Anyone that does not acknowledge the virus originated in
China and that China didn't respond as fast as it could have? And more polemically: there is
some kind of African Marxist heading WHO who obfuscated China's late information to the WHO?
There is a dot of truth in everything. There is also a dot of truth in the fact that Trump
or his relevant admin was informed early enough.
Posted by: vig | Jul 30 2020 12:21 utc | 57
vig repeats widely spread arguments, basically, the "official propaganda" from offices
related to an orange-American (excessive time spend on golf courses changes skin color,
perhaps in combination with sunscreen, without sunscreen you would get a "redneck look").
1. Origin: somewhat debatable, but any virus has to originate somewhere. Every country was
on receiving end of pathogens from other countries.
2. China did not respond as fast as it could have. Now, how fast and effective was USA?
One has to note that clusters of fatal lung infections happen regularly, but this is because
of mutations that increase impact on health, while separate mutations increase (or decrease)
the transmission. Draconian measures are necessary if you get both, but you do not lock
cities, provinces, introduce massive quarantine programs until you know that they are
necessary. For the same reasons, the response in Western Europe and USA was not as fast as it
could have.
3. "African Marxist heading WHO mislead poor naive Americans". What is the budget of
American intelligence, and American disease control? Do they collect information, do they
have experts? In particular, American authorities knew pretty much what Chinese authorities
knew, and they had benefit of several weeks of extra time to devise wise strategy. Giving
this benefit to people with limited mental capacities has a limited value. Perhaps China is
at fault here too, Pompeo reported about pernicious impact of Chinese Communist Party on PPT
meeting in USA, that could have deleterious impact on education and thus on mental
capacities.
Pompeo himself may be a victim. He excelled as a West Point student, but if the content of
education was crappy, diligence impacted his brain deeper and not for the better. But nobody
attempts to blame CCP for that.
For starters, the "whistleblower" wasn't a whistleblower at all: he thought he had found a
resurgence of SARS, not a new pandemic. Secondly, the head of respiratory diseases at the
region already was investigating some cases of a "mysterious pneumonia" since end of November
or mid-December - so the investigation already was well under way.
Discovering a new disease is not magic: a doctor cannot simply go the market, see a random
person, and claim he/she discovered a new virus. Doctors are not gods: they can only diagnose
the patients under their care.
The point of discord that the Western MSM capitalized upon was the fact that some random
officer from the local police intercepted his private social media and made him sign a letter
of reprimand. No Law is ever perfect, and these episodes of false triggers do happen even in
Western Democracies.
Little known fact (one which the Western MSM censored) is that the so-called
"whistleblower" was a member of the CCP. After knowing the details of the situation
(including that the disease was already being investigated), he quickly realized the
state-of-the-art and went to the frontlines to fight the pandemic - as any member of the CCP
would've done. Revolutionary communist parties have this tradition that comes since the
Bolshevik Party, where the leadership always leads by example. The Bolsheviks themselves lost
the vast majority of their elite in the Civil War, as they always led in the front
(vanguard). Fidel Castro himself led his army in the front when the invasion of the Bay of
Pigs begun. So, it is not surprising this doctor, once having the facts on the field, quickly
shut up and went to the frontline as a vanguard soldier.
After the whole truth came to the forefront, the Western MSM quickly begun to meltdown
over the fake story they fantasized, and the Taiwanese MSM invented a story of some another
whistleblower who had discovered the virus "at the end of November". That one never truly
gained traction, and silently died out.
But all of this is moot point for the West, because Trump and the other European liberal
powers refused to believe either that the virus was real or that it could reach them until
February the next year.
I think it is OK that b nails the US makes yet another display of stupidity.... on the other
hand I presume that b also has other things to care about, I mean exposing the US as a "fake"
nation is a full time job!
Americans have at least the last 50 years been known for fails, even Churchill commented
something like "the Americans will fail numerous times, but eventually they will get it
right" well that was back then! Today it is fail upon fail. I know that there must be bright
people over there, but it is my sincere impression, that they are a very small minority.
Maybe their schooling system has all gone bonkers ?
"3% of all Americans believe the Earth is flat! WTF!!!
America is on a steep slope downward.
I am personally not worried much about Covid 19, although I am 63 and live in Sweden, the
"black Sheep" in Europe because of our rather lax restrictions, the Swedes themselves are
rather good at keeping distance and using common sense.
I am much more worried that the American culture of ignorance, brain farts, stupidity and low
IQ media will infest my country further and maybe completely ruin it.
Especially by the junk that comes out of Hollywood, pure Sh*t served nice and hot!
I am happy I know, I have not got to endure further 30 years of this.
A few months ago, b posted a link to a Canadian vlogger who lives in Nanning, China. The
vlogger took us on a tour of a so called Wet Market. Here, the vlogger takes us to another
Wet Market tour. He does a good job dispelling racist stereotypes and showing real life in
China.
One to many @ 64
Thanks ! So there was a group of whistle blowers then. It's down to definitions again.
Perhaps mine is a little more loose. But it's of no concern.
For the sake of this excellent thread, perhaps we could all be a little less pedantic. VK ?
Also relevant - Crimson Contagion - the pandemic simulation run by the US government from
January to August 2019 and was based on an infectious coronavirus coming from a food market
in China
Everywhere u go in this world you'll find some version or an "murican" in every country.
Even a country like modern first world Switzerland has its "mountain folk".
In my personal experience with Americans I'm most often pleasantly surprised at their levels
of sophistication and introspection over their American experiences. An enjoyable and as
pleasant a people as anywhere. This may be clouded by mostly meeting these people outside of
the US where unless tourists are well educated and travelled and by default more aware of a
negative view of their homeland that exists outside of the US. For some reason most of these
Americans I've met abroad are decidedly non republican in nature and are mostly
from California and North and North Eastern States. Fellow future Canadians I would call
them.
The other side of the coin is when I've travelled to the states. Texas, Florida, Arizona.
Whew! What a difference. I've learned that talking politics is impossible and the natives are
almost entirely ignorant of anything outside their bubble. Outside of talking points there is
no information behind their arguments. Their knowledge of the outside world is incredibly
lacking and the view of the US in it is overwhelmingly positive.
It isn't Americans its America and its leadership, its influences, systems and all the other
shit that make the US the salad it is. The people r redeemable.
Calling the professionals doing their jobs in China "whistleblowers" is inaccurate.
"Whistleblower" implies revealing information that others are trying to hide. In this
case the suggestion is that the Chinese government was trying to hide the outbreak. This is
nonsense as the Chinese government was unaware of an outbreak until after the relevant
professionals had determined that there was an outbreak. There is no way the Chinese
government could have known about an outbreak before the outbreak was identified by the
professionals tasked with identifying outbreaks. The only ones who knew about the outbreak
before the outbreak occurred were the US "intelligence community" .
Roberto is what folks in Latin America would deem is "un gusano sin vergüenza'. A
willing neo-colonial lapdog for the ghoulish intelligence agencies. You can disregard this
sad waste of matter. The governments of Brasil & Ecuador are willingly allowing their
countries to succumb to COVID-19. Bio-genocide, in other words. It's a nightmare.
UK 'Russia report' fear-mongers about meddling yet finds no evidence
10,974 views•25 Jul 2020
The Grayzone
111K subscribers
Pushback with Aaron Maté
A long-awaited UK government report finds no evidence of Russian meddling in British
domestic politics, including the 2016 Brexit vote. But that hasn't stopped the
fear-mongering: the report claims the UK government didn't find evidence because it didn't
look for it, and backs increased powers for intelligence agencies and media censorship as a
result. Afshin Rattansi, a British journalist and host of RT's "Going Underground",
responds.
Guest: Afshin Rattansi, British journalist and host of RT's "Going Underground."
More willful blindness by the media on spying by Obama administration
By Jonathan Turley
July 27, 2020 " Information Clearing House " - The Washington
press corps seems engaged in a collective demonstration of the legal concept of willful
blindness, or deliberately ignoring the facts, following the release of yet another
declassified document which directly refutes prior statements about the investigation into
Russia collusion. The document shows that FBI officials used a national security briefing of
then candidate Donald
Trump and his top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name
for the Russia investigation.
It is astonishing that the media refuses to see what is one of the biggest stories in
decades. The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false
evidence. The media covered Obama administration officials ridiculing the suggestions of spying
on the Trump campaign and of improper conduct with the Russia investigation. When Attorney
General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was
lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation. The
mocking "wow" response of the fired FBI director received extensive coverage.
The new document shows that, in summer 2016, FBI agent Joe Pientka briefed Trump campaign
advisers Michael Flynn and Chris Christie over national security issues, standard practice
ahead of the election. It had a discussion of Russian interference. But this was different. The
document detailing the questions asked by Trump and his aides and their reactions was filed
several days after that meeting under Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, the FBI
investigation of Flynn. The two FBI officials listed who approved the report are Kevin
Clinesmith and Peter Strzok.
No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media
Clinesmith is the former FBI lawyer responsible for the FISA surveillance conducted on
members of the Trump campaign. He opposed Trump and sent an email after the election declaring
"viva the resistance." He is now under review for possible criminal charges for altering a FISA
court filing. The FBI used Trump adviser Carter Page as the basis for the original FISA
application, due to his contacts with Russians. After that surveillance was approved, however,
federal officials discredited the collusion allegations and noted that Page was a CIA asset.
Clinesmith had allegedly changed the information to state that Page was not working for the
CIA.
Strzok is the FBI agent whose violation of FBI rules led Justice Department officials to
refer him for possible criminal charges. Strzok did not hide his intense loathing of Trump and
famously referenced an "insurance policy" if Trump were to win the election. After FBI
officials concluded there was no evidence of any crime by Flynn at the end of 2016, Strzok
prevented the closing of the investigation as FBI officials searched for any crime that might
be used to charge the incoming national security adviser.
Documents show Comey briefed President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on the
investigation shortly before the inauguration of Trump. When Comey admitted the communications
between Flynn and Russian officials appeared legitimate, Biden reportedly suggested using the
Logan Act, a law widely seen as unconstitutional and never been used to successfully convict a
single person, as an alternative charge against Flynn. The memo contradicts eventual claims by
Biden that he did not know about the Flynn investigation. Let us detail some proven but mostly
unseen facts.
First, the Russia collusion allegations were based in large part on the dossier funded by
the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The Clinton campaign repeatedly
denied paying for the dossier until after the election, when it was confronted with irrefutable
evidence that the money had been buried among legal expenditures. As New York Times reporter
Maggie Haberman wrote, "Folks involved in funding this lied about it and with sanctimony for a
year."
Second, FBI agents had warned that dossier author Christopher Steele may have been used by
Russian intelligence to plant false information to disrupt the election. His source for the
most serious allegations claims that Steele misrepresented what he had said and that it was
little more than rumors that were recast by Steele as reliable intelligence.
Third, the Obama administration had been told that the basis for the FISA application was
dubious and likely false. Yet it continued the investigation, and then someone leaked its
existence to the media. Another declassified document shows that, after the New York Times ran
a leaked story on the investigation, even Strzok had balked at the account as misleading and
inaccurate. His early 2017 memo affirmed that there was no evidence of any individuals in
contact with Russians. This information came as the collusion stories were turning into a
frenzy that would last years.
Fourth, the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and inspectors general found no
evidence of collusion or knowing contact between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. What
inspectors general did find were false statements or possible criminal conduct by Comey and
others. While unable to say it was the reason for their decisions, they also found statements
of animus against Trump and his campaign by the FBI officials who were leading the
investigation. Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified he never would have
approved renewal of the FISA surveillance and encouraged further investigation into such
bias.
Finally, Obama and Biden were aware of the investigation, as were the administration
officials who publicly ridiculed Trump when he said there was spying on his campaign. Others,
like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, declared they had evidence of collusion
but never produced it. Countless reporters, columnists, and analysts still continue to deride,
as writer Max Boot said it, the spinning of "absurd conspiracy theories" about how the FBI
"supposedly spied on the Trump campaign."
Willful blindness has its advantages. The media covered the original leak and the collusion
narrative, despite mounting evidence that it was false. They filled hours of cable news shows
and pages of print with a collusion story discredited by the FBI. Virtually none of these
journalists or experts have acknowledged that the collusion leaks were proven false, let alone
pursue the troubling implications of national security powers being used to target the
political opponents of an administration. But in Washington, success often depends not on what
you see but what you can unsee.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington
University. You can find his updates online @JonathanTurley . - "
Source " -
The Deep state coup attempt (sometimes called the soft coup or the
"insurance policy" ) was an effort by high-level Obama administration intelligence
community officials and holdovers to sabotage the agenda of President Donald Trump , remove him
from power, and hide the illegal actions of the Obama administration.
Tashina "Tash" Gauhar, also goes by Tanisha Guahar, is the Deputy Assistant Attorney General
(DAAG) in the Department of Justice National Security
Division (NSD). Gauhar is a FISA
lawyer. Tash was at the DOJ since 2001, and she formerly served as assistant counsel and chief of
operations in what was then called the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. She worked for
DAG Rosenstein as she did for DAG Sally Yates. Tash Gauhar was the DAG's executor and enforcer
for national security. Tashina Gauhar was/is best friends with Lisa Page . Tashina is reported to have attempted
to get access to highly compartmentalized NSA information, and lied about being an appropriately
cleared recipient.
Guahar is said to have been removed from her position in charge of FISA applications
immediately after IG Michael Horowitz submitted his first draft
report to Attorney General Bill
Barr for classification review. Gauhar now reportedly works for Boeing . [1]
She is the DOJ/FBI lawyer at the heart of the Clinton-email investigation; the DOJ/FBI lawyer
hired by Eric Holder at
his firm and later at the DOJ; the DOJ/FBI lawyer who was transferred to the Clinton probe; the
DOJ/FBI lawyer at the epicenter of the Weiner laptop issues, the only one from MYE who spoke to
New York; the DOJ/FBI lawyer who constructs the FISA applications on behalf of Main Justice; .
just happens to be the same DOJ/FBI lawyer recommending to AG Jeff Sessions that he recuse
himself. Tashina Gauhar -
Conservapedia
Keep hearing these things about Tashina "Tash" Gauhar, head of DoJ National Security
Division seems to always be involved with all these things -- Clinton Emails, DNC/Weiner,
Sessions recusal, Mueller liaison at DoJ, FISA warrants.
27 JULY 2020The Curious Silence of the Traitors by Larry C Johnson
Remember when John O. Brennan--Obama's CIA Director--and disgraced FBI agent, Peter Strzok,
were regularly spewing anti-Trump diatribes on Twitter? Well, Strzok went silent on 11 July
2020 and Brennan did the same a week later (18 July 2020). I do not think that is a
coincidence.
I have now heard from three separate sources that John Durham will have plea deals and/or
indictments before 1 September 2020. Two of the first heads to roll likely will be lying lawyer
Kevin Clinesmith , who deliberately withheld exculpatory from a FISA application to spy on
Carter Page, and lover boy, Peter Strzok.
And then there is the retarded fool, John Brennan, who fancies himself as the Mozart of the
Intelligence Community. Sorry John, you do not even qualify to clean Salieri's toliet. Until 9
days ago, John was a regular tweeter hurling foul invectives at Donald Trump.
Here are two examples of their July 11 screeds:
Trump's commutation of Stone apparently pushed them over the edge. Boo hoo. But since then
it has been crickets from these two chowderheads. Has the past caught up with them? At least in
Strzok's case he has retained legal representation. No indicator yet about Brennan. A competent
lawyer would understand that tweets, especially those attacking the Trump Administration, is a
potentially dangerous, self-incriminating activity.
More than two weeks of silence from Strzok and one week from Brennan does not appear to be a
mere instance of having nothing to say. Lack of substance has not prevented these two buffoons
from shooting their mouths off in the past. Is the day of reckoning nigh?
I sure hope so, but I'm not optimistic.
The swamp will not go willingly and Barr, for all his comments about "justice", is still a
member in good standing.
Look at how the FBI is still out of control, hiding and shredding documents and the "career"
lawyers are still operating the DOJ as an arm of the Democrat party.
How long did Martha Stewart end up in the slammer? How much time did the Varsity Blues
parents get in the Big House? People still do go to jail in this country for messing around
with the facts.
Are Brennan and Strozk immune after trying to take down a sitting President, but trying to
get your stupid kid into USC by cheating gets a prolonged close encounter with Bubba?
Surely, we don't have two systems of justice. One for government employees and one for the
rest of us. I gather one does not "plea bargain" unless there is a case. Though Gen Flynn can
still beg to differ with that presumption. Surely we are not intro framing suspects, even
though their possible charge was framing the President.
Does the DOJ have clean hands at last, on Russiagate. And will a possible plea bargain
finally lead to loss of their security clearances? And pensions. Did Clapper flip.
Why was the "essential question" to only investigate the Trump campaign.
Facts in evidence clearly show Clinton was the one getting the Russians to interfere in
the 2016 campaign. How is her Twitter account doing right now. Did she too drop into this
sudden cone of silence?
Keep hearing these things about Tashina "Tash" Gauhar, head of DoJ National Security
Division seems to always be involved with all these things -- Clinton Emails, DNC/Weiner,
Sessions recusal, Mueller liaison at DoJ, FISA warrants.
Thanks for the write up Larry. The sounds of silence are deafening. The silence of riots
apparently being news, until this instant, when Congressman Nadler was forced to see five
minutes of it via video in the hearing room on Congress, to which he chastised the ranking
member for not giving him 48 hours warning that truth would be shown. I wonder what antifa's
masters have in store for us for the rest of the week, given their narrative is losing them
voter support.
Strzok has a book coming out, "Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald
J. Trump". I'd rather see him sweating bullets before the Sep 8 release. Thanks Larry!
Once behind bars, Strzok can't profit from his crime so this must be a frantic
ghost-written doozie. And all Russia, Russia, Russia again. Talk about an issue that
generates zero traction.
I think we can all write the plot upfront (OrangemanBad), upon with he will hang the most
gauzy of facts Too bad he could not get Team Mueller to agree with him when it counted.
I mourn the trees sacrificed to his tawdry cause. Maintaining a wife and mistress at the
same time however, does add up.
Go back and watch the sad spectacle for yourself on C-SPAN's website, if you'd like. I
wouldn't recommend it. As a preview of coming attractions, Chairman Nadler -- who recently
dismissed the
serious, documented violence in Portland as
a "myth" -- concluded his harried Q&A with this: "Shame on you, Mr. Barr."
... Like many of his colleagues, Nadler repeatedly interrupted Barr's attempts to even begin
to respond to the accusations being hurled at him, then concluded his scripted performance with
a dramatic "shame on you!" And so it has gone. Alternating parcels of Five Minutes' Hate,
interspersed with Republicans playing defense and scoring their own points. Occasional actual
questions have slipped through the theater, but the overall episode has been largely
useless.
From Berr opning statement:
Ever since I made it clear that I was going to do everything I could to get to the bottom
of the grave abuses involved in the bogus "Russiagate" scandal , many of the Democrats on
this Committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply
the President's factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions.
Judging from the letter inviting me to this hearing, that appears to be your agenda
today.
So let me turn to that first. As I said in my confirmation hearing, the Attorney General
has a unique obligation. He holds in trust the fair and impartial administration of justice.
He must ensure that there is one standard of justice that applies to everyone equally and
that criminal cases are handled even-handedly, based on the law and the facts, and without
regard to political or personal considerations...
Indeed, it is precisely because I feel complete freedom to do what I think is right that
induced me serve once again as Attorney General. As you know, I served as Attorney General
under President George H. W. Bush.
After that, I spent many years in the corporate world. I was almost 70 years old, slipping
happily into retirement as I enjoyed my grandchildren. I had nothing to prove and had no
desire to return to government. I had no prior relationship with President Trump.
Watch the whole thing here , or read the full transcript
here . I'll leave you with this.
For much of the past year Trump has caused angst among allies by maintaining a consistent
position that Russia should be invited back into the Group of Seven (G7), making it as it was
prior to 2014, the G-8.
Russia had been essentially booted from the summit as relations with the Obama White House
broke down over the Ukraine crisis and the Crimea issue. Trump
said in August 2019 that Obama had been "outsmarted" by Putin.
But as recently as May when Germany followed by other countries rebuffed Trump's plans to
host the G7 at Camp David, Trump blasted the "very outdated group of countries"
and expressed that he planned to invite four additional non-member nations, mostly notably
Russia .
Germany has rejected a proposal by U.S. President Donald Trump to invite Russian President
Vladimir Putin back into the Group of Seven (G7) most advanced economies , German Foreign
Minister Heiko Maas said in a newspaper interview published on Monday.
Interestingly enough the Ukraine and Crimea issues were raised in the interview: "But Maas
told Rheinische Post that he did not see any chance for allowing Russia back into the G7 as
long as there was no meaningful progress in solving the conflict in Crimea as well as in
eastern Ukraine," according to the report.
People's old ways of understanding what's going on in the world just aren't holding together
anymore.
Trust in the mass media is at an all-time low, and it's only getting lower.
People are more aware than ever that anything they see can be propaganda or
disinformation.
Deepfake technology will soon be so advanced and so accessible that nobody will even trust
video anymore.
The leader of the most powerful country on earth speaks in a way that has no real
relationship with facts or reality in any way, and people have just learned to roll with
it.
Ordinary people are hurting financially but Wall Street is booming, a glaring plot hole in
the story of the economy that's only getting more pronounced.
The entire media class will now spend years leading the public on a wild goose chase for
Russian collusion and then act like it's no big deal when the whole thing turned out to be
completely baseless.
... ... ...
New Cold War escalations between the U.S.-centralized empire and the unabsorbed governments
of China and Russia are going to cause the media airwaves around the planet to become saturated
in ever-intensifying propaganda narratives which favor one side or the other and have no
interest in honestly telling people the truth about what's going on.
It's difficult to understand what's going on in the world because powerful people actively
manipulate public understanding of what's going on in the world.
Powerful people actively manipulate public understanding of what's going on in the world
because if the public understood what's going on in the world, they would rise up and use their
strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful.
The public would rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful if they
understood what's going on in their world because then they would understand that the powerful
have been exploiting, oppressing, robbing, cheating and deceiving them while destroying the
ecosystem, stockpiling weapons of Armageddon and waging endless wars, for no other reason than
so that they can maintain and expand their power.
The public do not rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful
because they have been successfully manipulated into not wanting to.
The Russian-born Danchenko, who was living in the U.S. on a work visa, was released from
jail on the condition he undergo drug testing and "participate in a program of substance abuse
therapy and counseling," as well as "mental health counseling," the records show. His lawyer
asked the court to postpone his trial and let him travel to Moscow "as a condition of his
employment." The Russian trips were granted without objection from Rosenstein. Danchenko ended
up several months later entering into a plea agreement and paying fines.
In 2006, Danchenko was arrested in Fairfax, Va., on similar offenses, including "public
swearing and intoxication," criminal records show. The case was disposed after he paid a
fine.
At the time, Danchenko worked as a research analyst for the Brookings Institution, where he
became a protégé of Hill. He collaborated with her on at least two Russian policy
papers during his five-year stint at the think tank and worked with another Brookings scholar
on a project to
uncover alleged plagiarism in Russian President Vladimir Putin's doctoral dissertation --
something Danchenko and his lawyer boasted about during their meeting with FBI agents. (Like
Hill, the other scholar, Clifford Gaddy, was a Russia hawk. He and Hill in 2015 authored "Mr.
Putin: Operative in the Kremlin," a book strongly endorsed by Vice President Joe Biden at the
time.)
"Igor is a highly accomplished analyst and researcher," Hill noted on his LinkedIn page in
2011.
"He is very creative in pursuing the most relevant of information and detail to support
his research."
Strobe Talbott of Brookings with Hillary Clinton: He connected with Christopher Steele and
passed along a copy of his anti-Trump dossier to Fiona Hill. AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Hill also vouched for Steele, an old friend and British intelligence counterpart. The two
reunited in 2016, sitting down for at least one meeting. Her boss at the time, Brookings
President Strobe Talbott, also connected with Steele and
passed along a copy of his anti-Trump dossier to Hill. A tough Trump critic, Talbott
previously worked in the Clinton administration and rallied the think tank behind Hillary.
If an asteroid runs into the earth, any surviving press will blame it on Russia...
The Guardian a few days ago carried a
very strange piece [which has since been removed] under the heading "Stamps celebrating
Ukrainian resistance in pictures." The first image displayed a stamp bearing the name of the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
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The UPA was, without any shadow of a doubt, responsible for the slaughter of at least
200,000 Polish civilians; they liquidated whole Polish communities in Volhynia and Galicia,
including the women and children. The current Polish government, which is as anti-Russian and
pro-NATO as they come, nevertheless has declared
this a genocide.
It certainly was an extremely brutal ethnic cleansing. There is no doubt either that at
times between 1942 and 1944 the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and collaborated in the
destruction of Jews and Gypsies. It is simplistic to describe the UPA as fascist or an
extension of the Nazi regime; at times they fought the Nazis, though they collaborated more
often.
There is a real sense in which they operated at the level of medieval peasants, simply
seizing local opportunities to exterminate rural populations and seize their land and assets,
be they Polish, Jew or Gypsy. But on balance any reasonable person would have to conclude that
the UPA was an utterly deplorable phenomenon. To publish a celebration of it, disguised as a
graphic art piece, without any of this context, is no more defensible than a display of Nazi
art with no context.
In fact, The Guardian's very brief text was still worse than no context.
"Ukrainian photographer Oleksandr Kosmach collects 20th-century stamps issued by Ukrainian
groups in exile during the Soviet era.
Artists and exiles around the world would use stamps to communicate the horrors of Soviet
oppression. "These stamps show us the ideas and values of these people, who they really were
and what they were fighting for," Kosmach says."
That is so misleadingly partial as a description of the art glorifying the UPA movement as
to be deeply reprehensible. It does however fit with the anything- goes stoking of Russophobia,
which is the mainstay of government and media discourse at the moment. Even at the height of
the Cold War, we never saw such a barrage of unprovable accusations leveled at Russia through
the media by "security service sources."
Attack on UK Vaccine Research
A whole slew of these were rehearsed by Andrew Marr on his flagship BBC1 morning show. The
latest is the accusation that Russia is responsible for a cyber attack on Covid-19 vaccination
research. This is another totally evidence-free accusation. But it misses the point anyway.
Andrew Marr, center, in 2014. (Financial Times, Flickr)
The alleged cyber attack, if it happened, was a hack not an attack -- the allegation is that
there was an effort to obtain the results of research, not to disrupt research. It is appalling
that the U.K. is trying to keep its research results secret rather than share them freely with
the world scientific community.
As I have reported
before , the U.K. and the USA have been preventing the WHO from implementing a common
research and common vaccine solution for Covid-19, insisting instead on a profit driven
approach to benefit the big pharmaceutical companies (and disadvantage the global poor).
What makes the accusation that Russia tried to hack the research even more dubious is the
fact that Russia had
just bought the very research specified. You don't steal things you already
own.
Evidence of CIA Hacks
If anybody had indeed hacked the research, we all know it is impossible to trace with
certainty the whereabouts of hackers. My VPNs [virtual private networks] are habitually set to
India, Australia or South Africa depending on where I am trying to watch the cricket, dodging
broadcasting restrictions.
More pertinently, WikiLeaks' Vault 7 release of CIA material showed the specific programs for the CIA in how to leave clues
to make a leak look like it came from Russia. This irrefutable evidence that the CIA do
computer hacks with apparent Russian "fingerprints" deliberately left, like little bits of
Cyrillic script, is an absolutely classic example of a fact that everybody working in the
mainstream media knows to be true, but which they all contrive never to mention.
Thus when last week's "Russian hacking" story was briefed by the security services -- that
former Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn deployed secret documents on U.K./U.S. trade talks
which had been posted on Reddit, after being stolen by an evil Russian who left his name of
Grigor in his Reddit handle -- there was no questioning in the media of this narrative.
Instead, we had another round of McCarthyite witch-hunt aimed at the rather tired looking
Corbyn.
Personally, if the Russians had been responsible for revealing that the Tories are prepared
to open up the NHS "market" to big American companies, including ending or raising caps on
pharmaceutical prices, I should be very grateful to the Russians for telling us. Just as the
world would owe the Russians a favor if it were indeed them who leaked evidence of just how
systematically the DNC rigged the 2016 primaries against Bernie Sanders.
But as it happens, it was not the Russians. The latter case was a leak by a disgusted
insider, and I very much suspect the NHS U.S. trade deal link was also from a disgusted
insider.
When governments do appalling things, very often somebody manages to blow the
whistle.
Crowdstrike's Quiet Admission
If you can delay even the most startling truth for several years, it loses much of its
political bite. If you can announce it during a health crisis, it loses still more. The world
therefore did not shudder to a halt when the CEO of Crowdstrike admitted there had never been
any evidence of a Russian hack of the DNC servers.
Crowdstrike's Shawn Henry presenting at the International Security Forum in Vancouver,
2009.
(Hubert K, Flickr)
You will recall the near incredible fact that, even through the Mueller investigation, the
FBI never inspected the DNC servers themselves but simply relied on a technical report from
Crowdstrike, the Hillary Clinton-related IT security consultant for the DNC.
It is now known for sure that Crowdstrike had been peddling fake news for Hillary. In fact,
Crowdstrike had no record of any internet hack at all. There was no evidence of the email
material being exported over the internet. What they claimed did exist was evidence that the
files had been organized preparatory to export.
Remember the entire "Russian hacking" story was based ONLY on Crowdstrike's say so. There is
literally no other evidence of Russian involvement in the DNC emails, which is unsurprising as
I have been telling you for four years from my own direct sources that Russia was not involved.
Yet finally declassified congressional testimony revealed that Shawn Henry stated on oath that
"we did not have concrete evidence" and "There's circumstantial evidence , but no evidence they
were actually exfiltrated."
This testimony fits with what I was told by Bill Binney, a former technical director of the
National Security Agency (NSA), who told me that it was impossible that any large amount of
data should be moved across the internet from the USA, without the NSA both seeing it happen in
real time and recording it. If there really had been a Russian hack, the NSA would have been
able to give the time of it to a millisecond.
That the NSA did not have that information was proof the transfer had never happened,
according to Binney. What had happened, Binney deduced, was that the files had been downloaded
locally, probably to a thumb drive.
Bill Binney. (Miquel Taverna / CCCB via Flickr)
So arguably the biggest news story of the past four years -- the claim that Putin
effectively interfered to have Donald Trump elected U.S. president -- turns out indeed to be
utterly baseless. Has the mainstream media, acting on security service behest, done anything to
row back from the false impression it created? No it has doubled down.
Anti-Russia
Theme
The "Russian hacking" theme keeps being brought back related to whatever is the big story of
the day.
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Brexit? Russian hacking.
U.K. general election 2019? Russian hacking
Covid-19 vaccine? Russian hacking.
Then we have those continual security service briefings. Two weeks ago we had unnamed
security service sources telling The New York Times that Russia had offered the Taliban
a
bounty for killing American soldiers. This information had allegedly come from
interrogation of captured Taliban in Afghanistan, which would almost certainly mean it was
obtained under torture.
It is a wildly improbable tale. The Afghans have never needed that kind of incentivization
to kill foreign invaders on their soil. It is also a fascinating throwback of an accusation
– the British did indeed offer Afghans money for, quite literally, the heads of Afghan
resistance leaders during the first Afghan War in 1841, as I detail in my book "Sikunder
Burnes."
Taliban in Herat, Afghanistan, 2001. (Wikipedia)
You do not have to look back that far to realize the gross hypocrisy of the accusation. In
the 1980s the West was quite openly paying, arming and training the Taliban -- including Osama
bin Laden – to kill Russian and other Soviet conscripts in their thousands. That is just
one example of the hypocrisy.
The U.S. and U.K. security services both cultivate and bribe senior political and other
figures abroad in order to influence policy all of the time. We work to manipulate the result
of elections -- I have done it personally in my former role as a U.K. diplomat. A great deal of
the behavior over which Western governments and media are creating this new McCarthyite
anti-Russian witch hunt, is standard diplomatic practice.
My own view is that there are malign Russian forces attempting to act on government in the
U.K. and the USA, but they are not nearly as powerful as the malign British and American forces
acting on their own governments.
The truth is that the world is under the increasing control of a global elite of
billionaires, to whom nationality is irrelevant and national governments are tools to be
manipulated. Russia is not attempting to buy corrupt political influence on behalf of the
Russian people, who are decent folk every bit as exploited by the ultra-wealthy as you or I.
Russian billionaires are, just like billionaires everywhere, attempting to game global
political, commercial and social structures in their personal interest.
The other extreme point of hypocrisy lies in human rights. So many Western media
commentators are suddenly interested in China and the Uighurs or in restrictions on the LBGT
community in Russia, yet turn a completely blind eye to the abuse committed by Western "allies"
such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
As somebody who was campaigning about the human rights of both the Uighurs and of gay people
in Russia a good decade before it became fashionable, I am disgusted by how the term "human
rights" has become weaponized for deployment only against those countries designated as enemy
by the Western elite.
Finally, do not forget that there is a massive armaments industry and a massive security
industry all dependent on having an "enemy." Powerful people make money from this Russophobia.
Expect much more of it. There is money in a Cold War. Sign in to comment Viewing Options
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All Comments 45
jmNZ , 2 hours ago
Most of this can be traced to a group of fanatical Dr Strangeloves in the UK, known as the
"The Integrity Initiative" (sic) , now continuing under a new name since its cover was blown
by ukcolumnnews.
This group is handsomely funded from the public purse by the Foreign Office and its
influence is spread by the BBC and a corps of "disinformation officers" known as the 77th
brigade and 13 Signals, all under the control of the British cabinet office.
They are the ones trying to destabilize America via the Democratic (sic) Party.
And their cover is weekly Russia-bashing stories.
bumboo , 6 hours ago
Craig Murray sounds a reasonable voice. He quit or was fired from his Ambassador job in
Uzbekistan on Iraq war issue. Compare him with our Gen. Collin Powell, Mr. Clean, who lied
about Iraqi WMD in UN, covered up My Lia massacre for a lousy promotion. Now writing books,
public speaking for money and appearing on TVs as a wiseman. Wow.
Thutmoses , 7 hours ago
I think it wont be Russia, it will be China.
If an asteroid runs into the earth, any surviving press will blame it on China
Scipio Africanuz , 8 hours ago
Thanks Craig..
Any renewed cold War will freeze the instigators, and should it get hot, then they burn as
well..
Unfortunately, in the hot version, mankind gets roasted as well and not just by bombs, but
by..
As for the cold version however, the script had flipped thus..
As Sólómọ́nì Wise averred wisely, the borrower is slave
to the lender, and it doesn't matter if the duplicitous borrower tries to stiff the
lender..
The debts will be paid one way or another..
As for those bamboozled into unsustainable liabilities, there's always the merciful
jubilee, but first things first, lessons must be learned, thinking rejuvenated, lifestyle
changed, recalibration engaged, and vigilance imbibed..
To ensure serfdom culs de sac are avoided once the deceived by delusions are
salvaged..
And thus Craig, the necessity of experience that's bitter, so folks may learn by
necessity, what they chose not to learn via humility..
Cheers...
Really_Brit , 8 hours ago
The fundamental problem with this kind of revisionist narrative - that the Russian
leadership has been wildly misinterpreted as hostile to the west - is actually the existence,
in full sight, of Russia's most obvious propaganda tool - RT. What was called Russia Today
until someone in Moscow twigged that almost nothing being broadcast was about Russia that was
at all likely to upset Putin and his oligarchy or hint at the countries inferiority complex
viz a viz the West. So not what would be seen as free press and free broadcasting.
Nothing remotely like the programs RT / Russia Today has put together (or bought) that
describe civil unrest in the developed world. Or civil unrest in the developing world but
caused by the machinations of the developed world.
The closure or restrictions on Western NGO's in Russia intentionally stops any attempt to
replicate RT / Russia Today. So we will never see the Russian equivalents of recognisable US
ex-TV anchors or ex-CIA sounding off, within Russia , about corruption and criminality in
their motherland. Even sounding off about Russia outside in the developed world carries a
heavy price - just remind ourselves of poisoned ex-spies and Salisbury door knobs!
Tarjan , 2 hours ago
"Salisbury door knobs!"
You're chitting me, right?
~
jmNZ , 51 minutes ago
Ha! Ha!
You're as unreal a Brit as can be imagined.
No one believes the Skripal pantomime. Nor the MH17 'narrative'. Nor the farce where a
supposedly democratic country like the UK supports one of the richest and most arbitrary
regimes, Sadist Barbaria, in the wanton destruction of one of the poorest, the Yemen. And how
many times have the US/UK been caught out cooperating with fanatical jihadis terrorizing
Syria, the only parliamentary, secular state in the ME?
We wouldn't know any of this from the BBC.
desertboy , 8 hours ago
" It is appalling that the U.K. is trying to keep its research results secret rather than
share them freely with the world scientific community."
Assumes the intent is to make people healthier.
capital101 , 9 hours ago
War is a racket , from Smedley Butler, should be mandatory reading in school.
I think there is a positive side to this western animosity against Russia and China too.
Because Russia and China now have no good reason to respect western imperialism in the rest
of the world.
During the last Cold War, Russia and China helped many countries in Africa and Asia throw
off their yoke of western imperialism and have some alternatives for their trade and
development. And now we are getting a similar situation.
Russia and China are developing financial tools for international trade independent of the
US dollar. Which in the future will limit US power to impose sanctions and interfere with
trade between other countries. And of course, both Russia and China have goods and
technologies that rival those of western countries. They can provide a complete alternative
for countries that the West is trying to isolate and subjugate.
Perhaps western animosity isn't good for world peace or for the people in Russia and
China. But there is some benefit in this for many less developed countries who need an
alternative to the West for their trade and development.
We have some real competition now, where the competitors aren't colluding with each other.
Which is good for developing countries that need some real alternatives for their trade and
development.
PT , 9 hours ago
"...First they were our enemies. Then they were our friends. Then they were our enemies
again. Then they were our friends again..." - Mad Magazine was pointing this out in the 1970s
... or was it the 1960s?
Judging by the wording and the artwork, probably the '60s.
Fun side note: Compare Mad Magazines from each decade. Which ones had the higher quality
writers? Which ones had the higher quality art work? The answer is clearly visible. The
older, the better.
The UK and US have accused Russia of launching a weapon-like projectile from a
satellite in space. In a statement, the head of the UK's space directorate said: "We are concerned by the
manner in which Russia tested one of its satellites by launching a projectile with the
characteristics of a weapon."
The statement said actions like this "threaten the peaceful use of space".
The USA and UK's constant, unremitting "Putin stole my baby's candy" stories that
nobody expects them to prove are merely making the pair of them look ridiculous. If you're
trying to get Code-Red support for war, step up to the mark and take your shot, instead of
constantly sniveling and making it sound like nobody can draw a peaceful breath until the
Russians have been eliminated from the planet. But I promise you if you do, you are
going to be so sorry. Russia is not Grenada. Time again to trot out my favourite maxim
– 'experience keeps a hard school, but fools will learn at no other'.
Or the US's recently stood up Space Force(skin) USSF – spaceforce.mil (.mil = as
in military). Maybe that is why the UK is whining about it, i.e. to put space between the
US? Oh, and the Brits don't have a capability, having given up launchers in the 1960s.
"Space is the world's newest war-fighting domain," President Trump said during the
signing ceremony. "Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in
space is absolutely vital. And we're leading, but we're not leading by enough. But very
shortly we'll be leading by a lot."
"This is not a farce. This is nationally critical," Gen. John Raymond, who will lead
the Space Force, told reporters on Friday. "We are elevating space commensurate with its
importance to our national security and the security of our allies and partners."
About 16,000 Air Force active duty and civilian personnel are being assigned to the
Space Force. There's still a lot to figure out, including the force's uniform, logo, and
even its official song.
The Space Force will fall within the Department of the Air Force, but after one year
it will have its own representation on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
The new service branch essentially repackages and elevates existing military missions
in space from the Air Force, Army and Navy, said Todd Harrison, who directs the Aerospace
Security Project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
"It's about, you know, all the different types of missions our military already does
in space -- just making sure that we're doing them more effectively, more efficiently,"
said Harrison.
"It will create a centralized, unified chain of command that is responsible for
space, because ultimately when responsibility is fragmented, no one's responsible," he
added.
####
The most interesting bit about the article above is the ommission, i.e. it doesn't
mention offensive space capabilities, even though we know about the robotic Boing X57*
winged spaceplane that swans about for up to a year.
No. Everyone should wait for the US to deploy its weapon systems and then follow!
That would be fair and just because the US is a Democracy and it has earned the right and
more importantly, the benefit of the doubt ad infinitum. Or is the X-37 just there
to sprinkle calming holy water on America's adversaries? ODFO!
The good , a 5 minute segment where a guest picked winner / loser countries post
covid19 world.
Winners: Germany, Taiwan, and Russia, Loser: United States.
It was amusing to watch Zakaria's face contort at the mention of Russia being named a winner,
'wha-whaaaaaaat?' The guest had to reassure Zakaria that Russia is a crap country and only
benefits because of Putin's Fortress Russia campaign and low debt making it capable of
weathering storms. Zakaria's face still frozen in a mask of horror.
The bad a rather long segment on Russia, China, and Iran's meddling campaign for
our next election. This was more painful to me then when I had appendicitis and had to wait
several hours before anyone could drive me to the emergency room.
1. Two experts, a China hater and a Russia hater from different 'Institutes'
2. The gratuitous adding of Iran to the list without explanation. Pro-Iranian views are
invisible.
3. Russian hatefest was over the top. It was a classic case of accusing Russia of what we
do. Russia (aka United States) nihilistically creates trouble and by amplifying discord in
other countries in order to deflect from their own domestic problems and foreign adventurism
in places like Syria and Ukraine.
Nihilistic spoilers? We the U.S. lost in Syria but are now trying to create a quagmire for
Russia and are pulling out all of the stops to make Syrians brutally suffer with a full scale
trade embargo and partition of their country.
The Washington Post has settled a $250 million defamation lawsuit filed by Covington
Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann for an undisclosed amount, after the teen claimed
the left-leaning news outlet 'led the hate campaign' against him following a racially charged
January, 2019 incident at the March for Life Rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
Sandmann was viciously attacked by left-leaning news outlets over a deceptively edited video
clip from the incident, in which the teenager, seen wearing a MAGA hat, appeared to be mocking
a Native American man beating a drum (a known political grifter who
lied about the incident , and
stole valor ).
The following day, a longer version of the video revealed that Sandmann did absolutely
nothing wrong - as the Native American, Nathan Phillips, aggressively approached Sandmann and
beat a drum in his face.
In a tweet on his 18th birthday, Sandmann wrote "On 2/19/19, I filed $250M defamation
lawsuit against Washington Post. Today, I turned 18 & WaPo settled my lawsuit."
https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890
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Sandmann is also suing ABC, CBS, The Guardian, The Hill and NBC Universal.
The kid needs to add NPR to his hit list. Their reporting of it made me permanently
stop listening to that channel (in a vain attempt to hear both sides of the narrative,
you know give the MSM a chance to be honest etc). Good on him for suing and winning
because that's the only way we'll be able to get rid of the drivel that calls itself news
these days.
ay_arrow
VideoEng_NC , 9 minutes ago
Every one of these news sources is screwed, it's going to be euphoric knowing each
judgment means their accounting dept has to cut a fat check. Nick, don't forget the
individuals on the list like Sen Warren & Ellen. Redistribute their wealth to your
account young man, tell em' it's for a cause they should be supporting.
y_arrow
Mzhen , 22 minutes ago
A Washington Post reporter was retweeting the viral video clip by 8:00 a.m. the next
morning. The first Washington Post story was being published online that day (Saturday)
at the same time a group of about 60 Indians was descending on the Bascilica of the
National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception with the intention of disrupting the mass
and reading their list of "demands," which included college educations being denied to
Nick and his classmates.
The Post really played up the anti-Catholic angle in ensuing stories. So if there was
email coordination between the Indian march organizers and the Post , they couldn't
afford to have it come out in discovery.
play_arrow
nsurf9 , 30 minutes ago
His lawyers should have required WaPo publish an apology and name those on its staff
that were responsible for their intentional libel - in bold, headline font - right on its
figging FRONT PAGE - FOR A SOLID MONTH !
Steele's "Primary Subsource" Was Alcoholic Russian National Who Worked With Trump
Impeachment Witness At Brookings by Tyler Durden Sat, 07/25/2020 - 16:50
Twitter Facebook Reddit EmailPrint
The mysterious "Primary Subsource" that Christopher Steele has long hidden behind to defend
his discredited Trump-Russia dossier is a former Brookings Institution analyst -- Igor "Iggy"
Danchenko, a Russian national whose past includes criminal convictions and other personal
baggage ignored by the FBI in vetting him and the information he fed to Steele , according to
congressional sources and records obtained by RealClearInvestigations. Agents continued to use
the dossier as grounds to investigate President Trump and put his advisers under
counter-espionage surveillance.
The 42-year-old Danchenko, who was hired by Steele in 2016 to deploy a network of sources to
dig up dirt on Trump and Russia for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was arrested, jailed and
convicted years earlier on multiple public drunkenness and disorderly conduct charges in the
Washington area and ordered to undergo substance-abuse and mental-health counseling, according
to criminal records.
Fiona Hill: She worked at the Brookings Institution with dossier "Primary Subsource" Igor
"Iggy" Danchenko (top photo), and testified against President Trump last year during
impeachment hearings. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
In an odd twist, a 2013 federal case against Danchenko was prosecuted by then-U.S Attorney
Rod Rosenstein, who ended up signing one of the FBI's dossier-based wiretap warrants as deputy
attorney general in 2017.
Danchenko first ran into trouble with the law as he began working for Brookings - the
preeminent Democratic think tank in Washington - where he struck up a friendship with Fiona
Hill, the White House adviser who testified against Trump during last year's impeachment
hearings. Danchenko has described Hill as a mentor, while Hill has sung his praises as a
"creative" researcher.
Hill is also close to his boss Steele, who she'd known since 2006 . She met with the former
British intelligence officer during the 2016 campaign and later received a raw, unpublished
copy of the now-debunked dossier.
It does not appear the FBI asked Danchenko about his criminal past or state of sobriety when
agents interviewed him in January 2017 in a failed attempt to verify the accuracy of the
dossier, which the bureau did only after agents used it to obtain a warrant to surveil Trump
campaign adviser Carter Page. The opposition research was farmed out by Steele, working for
Clinton's campaign, to Danchenko, who was paid for the information he provided.
A newly declassified FBI summary of the FBI-Danchenko meeting reveals agents learned that
key allegations in the dossier, which claimed Trump engaged in a "well-developed conspiracy of
cooperation" with the Kremlin against Clinton, were largely inspired by gossip and bar talk
among Danchenko and his drinking buddies, most of whom were childhood friends from Russia.
The FBI memo is heavily redacted and blacks out the name of Steele's Primary Subsource. But
public records and congressional sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirm the
identity of the source as Danchenko.
In the memo, the FBI notes that Danchenko said that he and one of his dossier sources "drink
heavily together." But there is no apparent indication the FBI followed up by asking Danchenko
if he had an alcohol problem, which would cast further doubt on his reliability as a source for
one of the most important and sensitive investigations in FBI history.
The FBI declined comment. Attempts to reach Danchenko by both email and phone were
unsuccessful.
The Justice Department's watchdog recently debunked the dossier's most outrageous
accusations against Trump, and faulted the FBI for relying on it to obtain secret wiretaps. The
bureau's actions, which originated under the Obama administration, are now the subject of a
sprawling criminal investigation led by special prosecutor John Durham.
Rod Rosenstein: In an odd twist, a 2013 drunkenness case against Danchenko was prosecuted by
then-U.S Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who ended up signing one of the FBI's dossier-based wiretap
warrants as deputy attorney general in 2017. (Greg Nash/Pool via AP)
One of the wiretap warrants was signed in 2017 by Rosenstein, who also that year appointed
Special Counsel Robert Mueller and signed a "scope" memo giving him wide latitude to
investigate Trump and his surrogates. Mueller relied on the dossier too. As it happens,
Rosenstein also signed motions filed in one of Danchenko's public intoxication cases, according
to the documents obtained by RCI.
In March 2013 -- three years before Danchenko began working on the dossier -- federal
authorities in Greenbelt, Md., arrested and charged him with several misdemeanors, including
"drunk in public, disorderly conduct, and failure to have his [2-year-old] child in a safety
seat," according to a court
filing . The U.S. prosecutor for Maryland at the time was Rosenstein, whose name
appears in the docket filings .
The Russian-born Danchenko, who was living in the U.S. on a work visa, was released from
jail on the condition he undergo drug testing and "participate in a program of substance abuse
therapy and counseling," as well as "mental health counseling," the records show. His lawyer
asked the court to postpone his trial and let him travel to Moscow "as a condition of his
employment." The Russian trips were granted without objection from Rosenstein. Danchenko ended
up several months later entering into a plea agreement and paying fines.
In 2006, Danchenko was arrested in Fairfax, Va., on similar offenses, including "public
swearing and intoxication," criminal records show. The case was disposed after he paid a
fine.
At the time, Danchenko worked as a research analyst for the Brookings Institution, where he
became a protégé of Hill. He collaborated with her on at least two Russian policy
papers during his five-year stint at the think tank and worked with another Brookings scholar
on a project to
uncover alleged plagiarism in Russian President Vladimir Putin's doctoral dissertation --
something Danchenko and his lawyer boasted about during their meeting with FBI agents. (Like
Hill, the other scholar, Clifford Gaddy, was a Russia hawk. He and Hill in 2015 authored "Mr.
Putin: Operative in the Kremlin," a book strongly endorsed by Vice President Joe Biden at the
time.)
"Igor is a highly accomplished analyst and researcher," Hill noted on his LinkedIn page in
2011.
"He is very creative in pursuing the most relevant of information and detail to support
his research."
Strobe Talbott of Brookings with Hillary Clinton: He connected with Christopher Steele and
passed along a copy of his anti-Trump dossier to Fiona Hill. AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Hill also vouched for Steele, an old friend and British intelligence counterpart. The two
reunited in 2016, sitting down for at least one meeting. Her boss at the time, Brookings
President Strobe Talbott, also connected with Steele and
passed along a copy of his anti-Trump dossier to Hill. A tough Trump critic, Talbott
previously worked in the Clinton administration and rallied the think tank behind Hillary.
Talbott's brother-in-law is Cody Shearer, another old Clinton hand who disseminated his own
dossier in 2016 that echoed many of the same lurid and unsubstantiated claims against Trump.
Through a mutual friend at the State Department, Steele obtained a copy of Shearer's dossier
and reportedly submitted it to the FBI to help corroborate his own.
In August 2016, Talbott personally called Steele, based in London, to offer his own input on
the dossier he was compiling from Danchenko's feeds. Steele phoned Talbott just before the
November election, during which Talbott asked for the latest dossier memos to distribute to top
officials at the State Department. After Trump's surprise win, the mood at Brookings turned
funereal and Talbott and
Steele strategized about how they "should handle" the dossier going forward.
During the Trump transition, Talbott encouraged Hill to leave Brookings and take
a job in the White House so she could be "one of the adults in the room" when Russia and
Putin came up. She served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European
and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019.
She left the White House just before a National Security Council detailee who'd worked with
her, Eric Ciaramella, secretly huddled with Democrats in Congress and
alleged Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to launch an investigation of Biden and
his son in exchange for military aid. Democrats soon held hearings to impeach Trump, calling
Hill as one of their star witnesses.
Congressional investigators are taking a closer look at tax-exempt Brookings, which has
emerged as a nexus in the dossier scandal. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, the liberal think tank is
prohibited from lobbying or engaging in political campaigns. Gryffindor/Wikimedia
Under questioning by Republican staff, Hill disclosed that Steele reached out to her for
information about a mysterious individual, but she claimed she could not recall his name. She
also said she couldn't remember the month she and Steele met.
"He had contacted me because he wanted to see if I could give him a contact to some other
individual, who actually I don't even recall now, who he could approach about some business
issues," Hill told the House
last year in an Oct. 14 deposition taken behind closed doors.
Congressional investigators are reviewing her testimony, while taking a closer look at
tax-exempt Brookings, which has emerged as a nexus in the dossier scandal.
Registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, the liberal think tank is prohibited from
lobbying or engaging in political campaigns. Specifically, investigators want to know if
Brookings played any role in the development of the dossier.
"Their 501(c)(3) status should be audited, because they are a major player in the dossier
deal," said a congressional staffer who has worked on the investigation into alleged Russian
influence.
Hill, who returned to Brookings as a senior fellow in January, could not be reached for
comment. Brookings did not respond to inquiries.
Ghost Employee
As a former member of Britain's secret intelligence service, Steele hadn't traveled to
Russia in decades and apparently had no useful sources there . So he relied entirely on
Danchenko and his supposed "network of subsources," which to its chagrin, the FBI discovered
was nothing more than a "social circle."
It soon became clear over their three days of debriefing him at the FBI's Washington field
office - held just days after Trump was sworn into office - that any Russian insights he may
have had were strictly academic.
Danchenko confessed he had no inside line to the Kremlin and was "clueless" when Steele
hired him in March 2016 to investigate ties between Russia and Trump and his campaign
manager.
Christopher Steele, former British spy, leaving a London court this week in a libel case
brought against him by a Russian businessman. Dossier source Danchenko's drinking pals fed him
a tissue of false "rumor and speculation" for pay -- which Steele, in turn, further embellished
with spy-crafty details and sold to his client as "intelligence." (Victoria Jones/PA via
AP)
Desperate for leads, he turned to a ragtag group of Russian and American journalists,
drinking buddies (including one who'd been arrested on pornography charges) and even an old
girlfriend to scare up information for his London paymaster, according to the FBI's January
2017 interview memo, which runs 57 pages. Like him, his friends made a living hustling gossip
for cash, and they fed him a tissue of false "rumor and speculation" -- which Steele, in turn,
further embellished with spy-crafty details and sold to his client as "intelligence."
Instead of closing its case against Trump, however, the FBI continued to rely on the
information Danchenko dictated to Steele for the dossier, even swearing to a secret court that
it was credible enough to renew wiretaps for another nine months.
One of Danchenko's sources was nothing more than an anonymous voice on the other end of a
phone call that lasted 10-15 minutes.
Danchenko told the FBI he figured out later that the call-in tipster, who he said did not
identify himself, was Sergei Millian, a Belarusian-born realtor in New York. In the dossier,
Steele labeled this source "an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican U.S. presidential
candidate Donald Trump," and attributed Trump-Russia conspiracy revelations to him that the FBI
relied on to support probable cause in all four FISA applications for warrants to spy on Trump
adviser Carter Page -- including the Mueller-debunked myth that he and the campaign were
involved in "the DNC email hacking operation."
Danchenko explained to agents the call came after he solicited Millian by email in late July
2016 for information for his assignment from Steele. Millian told RCI that though he did
receive an email from Danchenko on July 21, he ignored the message and never called him.
"There was not any verbal communications with him," he insisted. "I'm positive, 100%,
nothing what is claimed in whatever call they invented I could have said."
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Millian provided RCI part of the email, which was written mostly in Russian. Contact
information at the bottom of the email reads:
Igor Danchenko
Business Analyst
Target Labs Inc.
8320 Old Courthouse Rd, Suite 200
Vienna, VA 22182
+1-202-679-5323
At the time, Danchenko listed Target Labs, an IT recruiter run by ethnic-Russians, as an
employer on his resumé. But technically, he was not a paid employee there. Thanks to a
highly unusual deal Steele arranged with the company, Danchenko was able to use Target Labs as
an employment front.
It turns out that in 2014, when Danchenko first started freelancing regularly for Steele
after losing his job at a Washington strategic advisory firm, he set out to get a security
clearance to start his own company. But drawing income from a foreign entity like Steele's
London-based company, Orbis Business Intelligence, would hurt his chances.
So Steele agreed to help him broker a special "arrangement" with Target Labs, where a
Russian friend of Danchenko's worked as an executive, in which the company would bring
Danchenko on board as an employee but not put him officially on the payroll. Danchenko would
continue working for Steele and getting paid by Orbis with payments funneled through Target
Labs. In effect, Target Labs served as the "contract vehicle" through which Danchenko was paid
a monthly salary for his work for Orbis, the FBI memo reveals.
Though Danchenko had a desk available to use at Target Labs, he did most of his work for
Orbis from home and did not take direction from the firm. Steele continued to give him
assignments and direct his travel. Danchenko essentially worked as a ghost employee at Target
Labs.
Asked about it, a Target Labs spokesman would only say that Danchenko "does not work with us
anymore."
Brian Auten: He wrote the memo on the FBI's interview with the Primary Subsource, which is
silent about Danchenko's criminal record. Patrick Henry College
Some veteran FBI officials worry Moscow's foreign intelligence service may have planted
disinformation with Danchenko and his network of sources in Russia. At least one of them,
identified only as "Source 5" in the FBI memo, was described as having a Russian "kurator," or
handler.
"There are legions of 'connected' Russians purveying second- and third-hand -- and often
made-up -- due diligence reports and private intelligence," said former FBI assistant
director Chris Swecker. "Putin's intelligence minions use these people well to plant
information."
Danchenko has scrubbed his social media account. He told the FBI he deleted all his
dossier-related electronic communications, including texts and emails, and threw out his
handwritten notes from conversations with his subsources.
In the end, Steele walked away from the dossier debacle with at least $168,000, and
Danchenko earned a large undisclosed sum.
The FBI interview memo, which is silent about Danchenko's criminal record, was written by
FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten, who was called out in the Justice inspector
general report for ignoring inconsistencies, contradictions, errors and outright falsehoods in
the dossier he was supposed to verify.
It was also Auten's duty to vet Steele and his sources. Auten sat in on the meetings with
Danchenko and also separate ones with Steele. He witnessed firsthand the countless red flags
that popped up from their testimony. Yet Auten continued to tout their reliability as sources,
and give his blessing to agents to use their dossier as probable cause to renew FISA
surveillance warrants to spy on Page.
As RCI first reported, Auten teaches a national security course at a Washington-area college
on the ethics of such spying .
Former Flynn Deputy K.T. McFarland claims the Durham criminal inquiry into the friggin' in
the riggin' of the "Russia Investigation" and who knew what and when at the FBI and elsewhere
is just about ready to wrap up, and teases that we can expect indictments by the end of the
summer. Solid documentary evidence in the form of meeting notes, email exchanges and the like
has emerged, she says.
When schools in Britain
eventually reopen in September, children filling into the classrooms won't just be learning their reading, writing and
arithmetic. On top of these fundamentals, their teachers will spoon-feed them blatant propaganda that would make Herr Goebbels
blush.
The propaganda source in
question is The Day, a news site founded by a team of established journalists and directed at teens. Designed for use in the
classroom, each of The Day's stories is presented alongside a range of thought-provoking questions and exercises to help young
people learn to
"think for themselves and engage with the world."
Though UK-focused, The Day
is used in classrooms around the world as a teaching aid.
A recent article
describes
Russian
President Vladimir Putin as
"the most dangerous man in the world"
and suggests
"nothing
can be done to bring this rogue state [Russia] to heel."
Moscow's entire foreign policy is
"shameless"
and
Putin is described as a man who delights in stoking unrest in the West. The widely-debunked accusations of Russian
interference into the 2016 US election are treated as fact, as are the rumors that Putin meddled in the UK's Brexit referendum
and in last year's general election.
The children are also
offered Bill Browder's opinion that Russia is a
"mafia state running a mafia operation."
Browder,
the site omits, is a magnate and fraudster who made billions of dollars in Russia during the privatization rush of the 1990s
and
reinvented
himself
as an anti-Putin activist once his revenue stream was cut off.
Below the article, kids
are asked to answer a number of questions, such as
"Should Russia be expelled from the
United Nations?"
and even to write a creative story about what it would be like to meet Putin during his KGB days. For
good measure, the New York Times' recent
evidence-free
and
widely criticized story claiming Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan is suggested as further
reading to help kids become an
"expert"
on all things Putin.
The Day does not bill itself as an anti-Russia think tank for kids. Quite the opposite. Ironically, its founder, Richard
Addis, wanted to set up the site to fight deceptive journalism, hoaxes,
"slanted
reporting"
and
"stories where the truth is contentious"
-- fake news in other
words.
He was supported in this
quest by the British government's Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills in Schools, which
partnered with The Day to compile a damning
report
in
2018, revealing that only two percent of British youngsters have the critical thinking skills to spot phony news.
"It is clear that our schools are absolutely vital in encouraging children to burrow
through the rubbish and rootle out the truth,"
Addis said at the time. Stories on the site with titles like 'Putin the
terrible' and 'Toxic Putin on mission to poison the West' are clearly what Addis considers balanced journalism.
Balance, however, is not a common trait among British Russia-watchers. Parliament's long-awaited 'Russia report'
relies
almost
wholesale on
"allegations"
to back up its claim that Moscow
"poses
a significant threat to the UK."
The report even relies on articles by BuzzFeed to substantiate its shaky claims.
As slanted as its coverage
is, The Day's message may fall on deaf ears. According to the same government report, only a quarter of older children
actually trust the news they read online. As such, The Day's propagandizing might all be in vain.
One by one the so-called Russiagate "evidence" have collapsed. The fake Steele Dossier,
"Russian spy" Joseph Mifsud who is actually a self-admitted member of the Clinton Foundation,
Roger Stone's non-existant Wikileaks contacts, Russian Afgan bounties, etc. But the neoliberal
mainstream media still presents these as "facts" with no retractions.
This is not journalism, its disinformation designed to distract the American public from the
failures of capitalism.
There some interesting parts of this analysis. But as soon as a Professor shows that he believes that The Internet
Research Agency (IRA) troll factory influence 2016 elections his credibility falls to zero. The same is true about believing that
Gussifer 2.0 was not a false play operation by some US actors.
The key problem in the USA foreign policy toward Russia is the concept of "Full Spectrum Dominance" cherished by Washington
Neocons and foreign policy establishment (which are of ten the same people). Add to this a crown of greedy and unprincipled
chickenhawks (the Blob) who play the anti-Russian for their own advancement, obtaining lucrative positions and
enrichment (Fiona Hill, Victoria Nuland and company) and you see the problem. \
Destruction of the UN attempted by the USA after the dissolution of the USSR is a really tragic event, which probably will
backfire for the USA sooner of later
Notable quotes:
"... The Putin elite had earlier welcomed Trump's election, but in practice relations deteriorated further. The foreign policy establishment is deeply sceptical that the EU will be able to act with 'strategic autonomy'. Above all, Russo-Western relations have entered into a statecraft 'security dilemma': ..."
"... Currently, we are again faced with a situation in which mutual intentions are assessed by Washington and Moscow as subversive, while each side considers the statecraft employed by the other side as effective enough to achieve its malign goals. At the same time, each side is more sceptical about its own statecraft and appears (or pretends) to be scrambling to catch up (Troitskiy 2019 ). ..."
Russia today is presented as out to subvert the West. The chosen means are meddling in elections and sowing discord
in Western societies. Russia in this imaginary looms over an unsuspecting West, undermining democracy and supporting
disruptive forces. No longer couched in terms of the Cold War struggle between capitalism and communism, this is a
reversion to great power politics of the rawest sort. However, is this analysis correct? Is Vladimir Putin out to
undermine the West to achieve his alleged goal of re-establishing some sort of post-Soviet 'greater Russia' imperial
union in Russia's neighbourhood, to weaken the Atlantic power system and to undermine the liberal international
order? The paper challenges the view that Russia is trying to reconstitute a Soviet-type challenge to the West, and
provides an analytical framework to examine the dynamics of Russian foreign policy and on that basis assesses
Russia's real rather than imaginary aspirations.
It has become orthodoxy that Russia under an embittered and alienated Vladimir Putin is out to subvert the West. The
chosen means are taken to be meddling in elections and sowing discord in Western societies. The various special
operations include propelling Donald J. Trump to the White House and fixing the Brexit vote in 2016 (Snyder
2018
).
Putin's Russia in this imaginary looms over an unsuspecting West, undermining democracy and supporting disruptive forces
(Shekhovtsov
2017
;
Umland
2017
).
From this perspective, post-communist Russia is up to its old tricks, with the image of the Russian bear threatening the
honour of a defenceless Europe dusted off from the Crimean War and the era of the great game in the late nineteenth
century. No longer couched in terms of the Cold War struggle between capitalism and communism, this is a reversion to
great power politics of the imperial sort. It also represents the application of the weapons of the weak, since Russia
by any definition is but a shadow of the former Soviet Union, with less than half the population and an economy at most
one-tenth the size of that of the USA. Is this analysis correct? Is Putin out to undermine the West to achieve his
alleged goal of re-establishing some sort of post-Soviet union in Russia's neighbourhood and to weaken the Atlantic
power system so that the liberal international order is eroded from within? In other words, is Russia today a
revisionist power out to create a greater Russia?
Before attempting an answer we need to define our terms. What does it mean to be a revisionist power today, and how can
a strategy designed to 'subvert' be analysed and measured? Some fundamental methodological problems render study of the
question inherently difficult. How can revisionism and subversion be measured? How can the specific actors involved in
such actions be identified and disaggregated? At what point do normal policy differences between states become an
existential challenge to an existing order? The answer will take four forms, each of which further defines the question.
First, an assessment of the charge of Russian subversion and the various approaches that can be used to examine the
simple but endlessly complex question: is there a new quality to Russia actions that build on Soviet era 'active
measures' to denigrate and ultimately to destroy an opponent. This requires an examination of the logic of Russian
motives and policy-making, including examination of the structure of the international system and the dynamics of
Russian international politics, which will be presented in the second section. Third, an assessment of some of the
Kremlin's subversive behaviour in recent years, examined in the light of the earlier sections. Fourth, analysis of the
character of Russia's challenge assesses whether Russia today really is an insurgent and revisionist power.
Active measures and the subversion of American democracy
Is Russia really out to subvert the West? Much of the American political establishment believe that this is the case.
A comprehensive list of Russian sins is presented by Biden and Carpenter (
2018
),
including tyranny at home, the violation of the sovereignty of neighbours, meddling in the affairs of countries on
the road to NATO membership, 'soft subversion' through electoral interference in the USA and France, the manipulation
of energy markets and the 'weaponisation' of corruption. In his warning not to overreact to the Chinese challenge,
Zakaria (
2020
,
p. 64) notes that its actions, such as stealing military secrets and cyber-warfare, 'are attempts to preserve what
China views as its sovereignty'. However, these actions are 'nothing like Moscow's systematic efforts to disrupt and
delegitimize Western democracy in Canada, the United States and Europe'. Why do Russia's actions in his view fall
into an entirely different category?
One answer is that it is a question of political culture. The study of
Moscow Rules
by
Giles (
2019a
,
p. 23) argues that Russia's 'instinctive rejection of cooperative solutions is reinforced by the belief that all
great nations achieve security through the creation and assertion of raw power', and this in turn means that Russia
believes 'that the insecurity of others makes Russia itself more secure', predicated 'on the dubious principle that
there is only a finite amount of security in the world'. Elsewhere (Giles
2019b
)
sums up the policy implications in ten key points, which together do not leave much room for diplomatic manoeuvre or
even engagement with such a wily adversary who 'takes a very expansive view of what constitutes Russian territory'.
Treating it as an equal by normalising relations, as during Barack Obama's reset, 'delivered entirely the wrong
messages to Moscow' (Giles
2019a
,
p. 25). There can be no common ground with such an existential foe, and any substantive engagement smacks of
appeasement.
A second perspective focuses on Russophobia, which builds on the political culture notion of some inalienable and
ineradicable essence to Russian behaviour. The concept of Russophobia is often used to discount what may well be
legitimate criticism of Kremlin policies, but it nevertheless accurately conveys an approach that denigrates not only
Russia's leaders but the people as a whole (Mettan
2017
;
Tsygankov
2009
).
In an interview in May 2017 former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper argued that Russians 'are almost
genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique' (Koenig
2017
).
The work of Smith (
2019
)
complements that of Foglesong (
2007
)
on long-standing American anxieties about Russia. Smith argues that recurrent bouts of Russophobia are prompted by
what he calls the 'Russia anxiety', a long-term pattern of thinking and sentiments about Russia that alternate
between fear, contempt and disregard for the country. The cycle began in the sixteenth century when Russia joined the
nascent European international society. Anxiety that Russia threatens Western civilisation was accompanied by various
versions of 'fake history', as in the publication in nineteenth-century France of Russia's 14-point plan for world
domination -- the Testament of Peter the Great. This forgery is just one example of what Smith calls the 'black legend'
of Russian history: the idea that aggression, expansionism and authoritarianism are inherent features of Russia's
national character. Smith aims to demonstrate that Russia is far from exceptional, and instead its behaviour is
predictable and in conformity with traditional patterns of a country defending its national interests, or as Zakaria
argues with reference to China, its sovereignty. The major exception was the Soviet period, but this in many ways ran
against Russia's national identity and represented an imposition based on chance and contingency. In his view, Russia
today is doing no more than any other state, and its external actions are no more egregiously malevolent than any
other.
A third approach looks at Soviet legacies and systemic characteristics. From this perspective, Russia has undergone
an 'unfinished revolution' (McFaul
2001
),
allowing the Soviet era anti-Western and anti-democratic forces to regroup after the fall of communism. This
particularly concerns the so-called
siloviki
(the security apparatus and its
acolytes), as well as the transformed Soviet
apparatchiks
who became the core of
Putin's model of statist oligarchic capitalism. This 'crony capitalism' spreads its subversion by abusing Western
legal and financial institutions for their own malign purposes (Belton
2020
;
Dawisha
2014
).
Despite the change of regime and the end of old-style ideological confrontation, the Soviet system in certain
fundamental respects has reproduced itself. This is why the repertoire of tactics is sometimes described as a
continuation of Soviet era 'active measures' (
aktivnye meropriyatiya
) (Rid
2020
).
These are designed to undermine 'support in the United States and overseas for policies viewed as threatening to
Moscow, discrediting US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, weakening US alliances and US relations with
partners, and increasing Soviet power and influence across the globe' (Jones
2019
,
p. 2). The term is now used indiscriminately to encompass disinformation and cyber activities as elements of a
sustained strategy undertaken by the Soviet and now the Russian security services to undermine an enemy by exploiting
divisions and the vulnerabilities of competitive and open democratic societies.
The Communist International (Comintern) was established in March 1919 to spread the revolution globally and prompted
the Palmer raids in November of that year in the USA as part of the first Red Scare. During the Cold War there were
plenty of times when Moscow tried to influence US politics (Haslam
2012
).
In 1948 the Soviet Union backed the Progressive Party's Henry Wallace, who had been Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice
president but split with the Democratic Party over President Harry Truman's hawkish Cold War stance. In 1964 Soviet
and Czechoslovak agencies smeared the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, as a racist and Ku Klux Klan supporter.
In 1968 the Soviet Union offered an unprecedented level of support for the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey,
including financial aid (which naturally was refused). In 1976 the KGB adopted 'active measures' against Democratic
Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson, a virulent anti-Soviet hawk. In 1980 and again in 1984 it appears that Senator Edward
Kennedy sought Soviet support for his presidential campaign (Kengor
2018
).
In 1983 KGB agents were instructed to help defeat Reagan in his bid for re-election. The Soviet goals outlined above
hold to this day in conditions of renewed Cold War, and this is why the term has regained currency (Abrams
2016
).
This is understandable, given the long history of Cold War conflict and renewed confrontation.
What is striking, however, is that most Soviet actions were inept and remarkably ineffective (Robinson
2019
).
We can also add that today such actions are also intensely counterproductive, arousing the hostility of the
authorities against which they are directed and discrediting what may be legitimate policy differences with these
countries. Political opponents are tarred with the brush of 'collusion' with an external enemy, as was the case
during the second Red Scare in the post-war years overseen by Senator Joseph McCarthy. This is also the case, as we
shall discuss below, in the 'Russiagate' collusion allegations, asserting that Trump worked with Moscow in 2016 to
get himself elected (Sakwa
2021
).
The question then becomes: why does Russia do it? Is it part of a single and coordinated strategy of subversion using
covert means, reflecting an overarching doctrine?
This is where the fourth approach, the ideational, comes in. From this perspective, the struggle between communism
and capitalism has given way to the conflict between democracies and autocracies, with the latter developing a
repertoire of techniques to keep democracy at bay (Hall and Ambrosio
2017
).
Each tries to subvert the other using a range of instruments, while advancing soft power agendas (Sherr
2013
).
Since at least 2004 Russia has been concerned with preventing what it calls 'colour revolutions', in which civil
society is mobilised by Western agencies to achieve regime change (Horvath
2011
,
2013
).
This was the issue addressed by Valerii Gerasimov (
2013
),
the Chief of the Russian General Staff, in his landmark article. The lesson of the Arab spring, he argued, was that
the rules of war had changed. Viable states could quickly descend into armed conflict and become victims of foreign
intervention and sink into an abyss of state collapse, civil conflict and humanitarian catastrophe. The article was a
response to what was perceived to be new forms of Western 'hybrid warfare'. He noted that 'Frontal engagements of
large formations of forces at the strategic and operational level are gradually becoming a thing of the past.
Long-distance, contactless actions against the enemy are becoming the main means of achieving combat and operational
goals'. He identified eight features of modern hybrid warfare that were applied to subvert states and to gain control
of territory without resorting to conventional arms. Regime change could be achieved by the use of civil methods such
as propaganda, funding and training of protest groups, and information campaigns aimed at discrediting the opponent.
He stressed that the 'very rules of war have changed', arguing that non-military means such as the 'use of political,
economic and informational, humanitarian, and other non-military measures -- applied in coordination with the protest
potential of the population', can exceed 'the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness, and 'that the open
use of forces -- often under the guise of peace-keeping and crisis regulation -- is resorted to only at a certain stage,
primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict'.
Gerasimov discounted the element of popular protest against corrupt and authoritarian systems in the Middle East,
North Africa and post-Soviet Eurasia and instead framed these events as part of the radicalised West's regime change
strategies. Following the Russian actions in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, the term 'hybrid warfare' was applied to
Russia's use of mixed methods (propaganda, disinformation, information warfare and special forces) to achieve what
came to be known as a 'nonlinear' military operations (Fridman
2018
).
What Gerasimov had identified as the Western strategy against Russia was now interpreted as the blueprint for the
Kremlin's attempts to destabilise its neighbours and Western democracies.
As for motivation, this is where a fifth approach comes in, focusing on questions of identity and Russia's search for
status in a competitive international environment. From this perspective, the idealism of Mikhail Gorbachev's 'new
political thinking' in international relations in the late 1980s 'offered a global mission that would enhance Soviet
international status while preserving a distinctive national identity'. In this way, the Soviet Union could forge a
'shortcut to greatness' by winning great power status not through economic might and military power but through
normative innovation and the transformation of international politics (Larson and Shevchenko
2003
).
This instrumental view of ideational innovation is challenged by English (
2000
),
who stresses the long-term maturation of an intellectual revolution in Soviet thinking, which then carried over into
Russian debates. As we shall see, there are many layers to Russia's foreign policy identity, although there is a
clear evolution away from an initial enthusiasm for all things European and alignment with the West towards the
stronger articulation of a great power version of Russian national interests. These great power aspirations have been
interpreted as a type of aspirational constructivism directed towards the identity needs of domestic audiences rather
than the expression of an aggressive policy towards the historic West (Clunan
2009
).
Status issues are important (Krickovic and Weber
2018
),
but they have to be understood as part of a larger ensemble of motivations within the structure of international
relations.
The final approach focuses on the structural characteristics of international politics, whose specific post-Cold War
manifestation will be examined below. Briefly put, defensive neorealism argues that in an anarchic international
environment states typically seek to preserve the status quo to maintain their security by preserving the balance of
power (Waltz
1979
,
p. 121). Offensive realists focus on the maintenance of hegemony in the international system and the struggle to
prevent usurpation (Mearsheimer
2001
,
p. 21). Revisionism assumes that the balance of power does not adequately guarantee a state's security, hence it
seeks to change the balance of power; or that is assumes that the balance of power has changed enough to mount a
challenge to the status quo. In Russia's case, classical neorealism of either type would accept regional hegemony,
with offshore balancing an adequate mechanism to ensure that it did not mount a global challenge. However, the
liberal internationalism that predominated after 1989 makes no provision for regional hegemony of any sort, hence
Russia was unable to exert the sort of influence to which it felt entitled, and hence its revisionist challenge was
manifested in attacks on Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. This, at least, is the liberal structural perspective,
and even the defensive realist position has guarded against any reassertion of Russia's great power ambitions, hence
the concern to ensure that Ukraine was distanced as far as possible from any putative Russian 'sphere of influence'
(Brzezinski
1994
,
1997
).
How are we to adjudicate between these six different presentations of Russian interests and concerns? What is the
standard against which we can measure the dynamics of Russian identity formation and foreign policy? Is Putin really
trying to create a 'greater Russia' by not only challenging the established powers but also by waging a covert war to
shape electoral outcomes while destroying the foundations of democracy itself? Undoubtedly, certain Cold War
practices of propaganda and covert influence campaigns have been revived, while some (such as deep espionage
operations) never stopped, accompanied now by 'black cash' flows (untraceable and illicit payments) to sympathetic
movements, cyber-enhanced intelligence operations and outright cyber-warfare. Some of this predates the Cold War and
is part of traditional statecraft, some is part of revived Cold War confrontation, while some is new and takes
advantage of developing social media and communication technologies. Together they reflect the logic of conflict
stopping short of kinetic military action.
Post-Cold War reconstruction of the West and the international system
What is the character of the conflict? We argue here that this is a structural feature of post-Cold War international
politics. Two very different and incommensurate models of post-Cold War order were advanced after 1989 (Sakwa
2017a
,
pp. 12–19). The logic of
expansion
made perfect sense from the perspective of what
came to be seen as the 'victors' at the end of the Cold War. The long-term adversary had not only renounced the
ideology in whose name the struggle against capitalist democracy had been waged, but the country itself
disintegrated. This really did look like 'the end of history', with no sustained ideological alternative to
capitalist modernity on offer. From the first, the logic of expansion was opposed by Russia, the continuer state to
the Soviet Union. From Moscow's perspective, the end of the Cold War was a mutual victory -- the triumph of the new
political thinking that had matured in various academic institutes and think tanks (Bisley
2004
;
English
2000
).
This is why the logic of expansion was countered by the logic of
transformation
,
the view that the end of the Cold War offered a unique opportunity to move beyond ideological confrontation between
and within states. The idea of revolutionary socialism and class war would give way to a politics of reconciliation
and all-class development. This is more than a 'shortcut to greatness' or a strategy for status advancement (although
it is both of these), but a proposal for a structural transformation of the conduct of international politics. This
demand lies at the base of normative developments in international law over the last century as well as in various
peace and environmental movements today. There are plenty of credible realist arguments to dismiss such
transformative approaches as hopelessly idealistic, but repeated financial and pathogenic shocks and the enduring
threats of environmental catastrophe and nuclear annihilation provide the continuing impulse for transformative
thinking (Lieven
2020
).
This relates to a key point at the heart of Russian post-communist self-identity -- the ambition to join not the West as
it exists within the accustomed binaries but a transformed West where Cold War antagonisms are structurally
transcended. After 1989 the stated Russian ambition was to join the political West as it existed at the time, defined
as the embodiment of the democratic ideal, the rule of law, defensible property rights, and above all the realm of
freedom and independent associational life. However, because of the way that the political West evolved during the
Cold War, when the larger political civilisation, termed after the Cold War the liberal international order, melded
with the Atlantic power system, for a large part (but not all) of the Russia elite this became impossible. The power
system at the heart of the liberal normative order endows US power with a unique character. The hegemonic aspect
provided a range of international public goods, including the framework for economic globalisation. However, this was
accompanied by the practices of primacy, which we can credibly describe as dominion, an ascendancy that has spawned a
vast literature describing the USA as an empire (indicatively, Bacevich
2003
;
Johnson
2002
;
Mann
2005
).
Russian leaders from Gorbachev to Putin insisted that the Cold War West -- what in Russian parlance became known as the
'historic West' -- would have to change with the end of the Cold War to become a 'greater West'. This was effectively
the condition for Russia to join the expanded community, but in the end it turned out impossible for both sides to
make the necessary adjustments. The greater West would not have to repudiate hegemony -- that was too much even for a
demandeur
state
such as Russia to ask -- but Moscow's leaders did seek a change in the terms of dominion through the creation of what it
insisted should be a mutually inclusive security order. Hegemony was to a degree acceptable as long as it was
constrained by the system of international law grounded in the post-1945 international system, represented above all
by the United Nations. Russian neo-revisionism challenges dominance in its various manifestations (empire, primacy,
exceptionalism or greatness), but can live with constrained hegemony.
In sum, the fundamental post-Cold War process in the Russian view was to be mutual
transformation
,
whereas the Western view envisaged a straightforward process of
enlargement
. In
the context in which the main antagonist had itself repudiated the ideology on which it had based its opposition to
the historical West since 1917, and which in 1991 disintegrated as a state, the Atlanticist pursuit of expansion and
its accompanying logic of dominion was understandable (Wohlforth and Zubok
2017
).
Victory in the Cold War and the disintegration of the historic enemy (the Soviet Union) not only inhibited
transformative processes in the historic West but in the absence of a counter-ideology or an opposing power system,
encouraged the radicalisation of its key features (Sakwa
2018a
).
The original liberal world order after 1945 developed as one of the major pillars (the Soviet Union was the other)
within a bipolar system and was initially a relatively modest affair, based on the UN Charter defending the
territorial integrity of states (although also committed to anti-colonial national self-determination), multilateral
institutions, open markets that was later formulated as the 'four freedoms' of labour, capital, goods and services,
accompanied by a prohibition on the use of force except in self-defence. After 1989 the liberal world order, as the
only surviving system with genuinely universal aspirations, assumed more ambitious characteristics, including a
radical version of globalisation, democracy promotion and regime change.
The framing of the 'historic West' against a putative 'greater West' repeats the recurring Russian cultural trope of
contrasting 'good' and 'bad' Europes or Wests, 'with which Russians can seek to make common cause in domestic power
struggles' (Hahn
2020
;
see also Neumann
2016
).
As the historic West radicalised, it also enlarged. On the global scale its normative system, the liberal
international order, made universalist claims, while its power system (dominion) in Europe brought NATO to Russia's
western borders and drove the European Union deep into what had traditionally been Russia's economic and cultural
sphere. This would be disruptive in the best of circumstances, but when it became part of the expansion of an
Atlantic power system accompanied by the universalising practices of the liberal international order, it provoked a
confrontation over Ukraine and the onset of a renewed period of confrontation that some call a New Cold War (Legvold
2016
;
Mastanduno
2019
;
Monaghan
2015
).
In the absence of ideational or institutional modification, let alone innovation, after 1989, there was 'no place for
Russia' (Hill
2018
,
p. 8 and
passim
) in this new order.
Does this mean that Russia has become a revisionist power, out to destroy the historic West? Russia's ambition has in
fact been rather different, but in the end no less challenging: to change the practices of the power system at the
core of the historic West. Once mutual transformation was no longer an option and the idea of a greater West receded
(although it remains a residual feature of Russian thinking), Russia turned to neo-revisionism, a rather more modest
ambition to change practices rather than systems (Sakwa
2019
).
This was the culmination of an extended thirty-year period of experimentation. Contrary to the view of the Russian
power system as some immutable and unchangeable malign force (Lucas
2008
,
2013
),
the first and second models outlined above, foreign policy and more broadly Russia's engagement with the historic
West since the end of the Cold War has evolved through four distinct periods. Periodisation is an important heuristic
device and in methodological terms repudiates the view that there is some enduring essence to Russian foreign policy
behaviour, with 'active measures' seamlessly transferred from the Soviet Union to post-communist Russia. It is
important to note that the periodisation outlined here is
layered
. In other words,
each phase does not simply give way to the next, but builds on and incorporates the earlier one, while changing the
emphasis and introducing new elements.
The first period in the early 1990s was characterised by an enthusiastic Westernism and embrace of liberal
Atlanticism (Kozyrev
2019
).
In conditions of catastrophic social and economic conditions at home and assertions of US hegemony and dominion
abroad (although exercised rather reluctantly in Bosnia and elsewhere at this time), this gave way to a more
assertive neo-Soviet era of competitive coexistence, masterminded by the foreign minister from January 1996, Yevgeny
Primakov, who between September 1998 and May 1999 was prime minister. His assertion of multipolarity, alignment with
India and China (the beginning of the RIC's grouping) and foreign policy activism received a harsh rebuff in the NATO
bombing of Serbia from March 1999. Putin came to power in 2000 in the belief that the two earlier strategies were
excessive in different directions, and through his policy of 'new realism' tried to find a middle way between
acquiescence and assertion. Gorbachev-era ideas of 'normality' were revived, and Putin insisted that Russia would be
a 'normal' great power, seeking neither favours from the West nor a privileged position for itself (Sakwa
2008
).
This strategy of positive engagement was thrown off course by the expansive dynamic of the Atlantic power system,
including the war in Iraq in 2003, NATO enlargement and the Libyan crisis of 2011. As for Russia, the commodities
boom of the 2000s fuelled an unprecedented period of economic growth, accompanied by remarkably successful reforms
that transformed the Russian armed forces (Renz
2018
).
These fed ideas of Russian resurgence and appeared to provide the material base for a more assertive politics of
resistance.
When Putin returned to the Kremlin in May 2012 the new realism gave way to the fourth phase of post-communist Russian
foreign policy, the strategy of neo-revisionism. Already in his infamous Munich speech in February 2007, Putin (
2007
)
objected to the behaviour of the US-led Atlantic power system, but in substance the fundamentals of the new realist
strategy continued. Now, however, neo-revisionism challenged the universal claims of the US-led liberal international
order and resisted the advance of the Atlantic power system by intensifying alternative integration projects in
Eurasia and accelerating the long-term 'pivot to Asia'. By now Moscow was convinced that the normative hegemonic
claims of the liberal international order were only the velvet manifestation of the iron fist of American dominion at
its core. Russia, and its increasingly close Chinese partner, stressed the autonomy of international governance
institutions, insisting that they were not synonymous with the universal claims of the liberal international order.
This, in essence, is the fundamental principle of neo-revisionism: a defence of sovereign internationalism and the
autonomy of the international system bequeathed by the Yalta and Potsdam conferences of 1945. This is accompanied by
a rejection of the disciplinary practices of the US-led hegemonic constellation, including democracy promotion,
regime change, humanitarian intervention and nation building (what Gerasimov identified as Western hybrid warfare)
(Cunliffe
2020
).
In effect, this means a rejection of the practices of US-led international order, but not of the system in which it
operates.
Putin defends a model of conservative (or sovereign) internationalism that maps on to a ternary understanding of the
international system. On the top floor are the multilateral institutions of global governance, above all the UN (in
which Russia has a privileged position as permanent member (P5) of the Security Council); on the middle floor states
compete and global orders (like the US-led liberal international order) seek to impose their hegemony; while on the
ground floor civil society groups and civil associations try to shape the cultural landscape of politics (such as
groups trying to push responses to the climate catastrophe and nuclear threats up the global agenda). Putin and his
foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, condemn the liberal order for not living up to its own standards. As Lavrov (
2019
)
argued, 'How do you reconcile the imperative of defending human rights with the bombardment of sovereign states, and
the deliberate effort to destroy their statehood, which leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people?'.
This is the neo-revisionist framework, which exposes the gulf between hegemonic principles and practices of dominion.
It is revisionist to the degree that it repudiates the application of US dominion to itself, but is willing to work
with that hegemony on major international issues as long as Russia's status as an autonomous diplomatic interlocutor
is recognised (Lo
2015
).
Neo-revisionism is the natural culmination of a policy stance torn by two contradictory positions. The revisionist
impulse seeks to reassert Russia into an international system in which great power diplomacy after the end of the
Cold War in 1989 had given way to a hegemonic universalism that by definition repudiated the traditional instruments
of great power diplomacy, such as spheres of influence, great power summitry and grand bargains. On the other side,
Russia remains a conservative status quo power intent on maintaining the post-1945 international system, which grants
it the supreme privilege of P5 membership as well as providing a benign framework to advance its model of sovereign
internationalism. This is a model of world order favoured by China, India and many other states, wary not so much of
the hegemonic implications of the liberal international order but of the power hierarchy associated with the
practices of dominion. This is the framework in which Russia (and China) can engage in globalisation but repudiate
the universalist ambitions of the power system with which it is associated.
With the USA under Trump withdrawing from multilateral commitments to focus on bolstering its ascendancy in the world
of states (the second level), Russia (and China) inevitably stood up in defence of multilateralism, in which they
have such a major stake. This is far from a revisionist position, and instead neo-revisionism defends the present
international system but critiques the historical claim of the liberal international order to be identical with the
multilateral order itself (Sakwa
2017a
).
Of course, the US-led liberal order has indelibly marked international society, but this does not entail a
proprietary relationship to that society (Dunne and Reut-Smith (
2017
).
Russia emerges as the defender of the international system as it is presently constituted, but at the same time
advances an alternative (non-hierarchical) idea of how it should operate. On occasion this may entail revisionist
acts, such as the annexation of Crimea, which from Moscow's perspective was a defensive reaction to a
Western-supported putsch against the legitimate authorities in Kiev (Treisman
2016
),
but they are not part of a consistent revisionist strategy. Both at home and abroad Russia is a status quo power.
Putin railed against the West's perceived revisionism in both aspects, but the main point of resistance is the
element of dominion at the heart of the Atlantic power system. In both respects there is no evidence that Russia
seeks to destroy the international system as presently constituted.
This structural interpretation, in which incompatible models of international politics contest, is overwhelmingly
rejected by the partisans of what can be called post-Cold War monism. From this perspective, there is only one viable
order, the one generated by the USA and its allies. There can be pluralism within that order, but not between orders.
This monist perspective is challenged by some recent international relations literature (Acharya
2017
;
Flockhart
2016
)
and of course by states defending a more pluralist understanding of the international system (for example, English
School approaches, Buzan
2014
).
In practical terms the monist imperative, when couched in liberal order terms but rather less so when applied in the
language of Trumpian 'greatness', renders Russia the structural equivalent of the Soviet Union, or even the dreaded
image of Tsarist Russia.
This leads to a fundamental category error. Russia is not a 'revolutionary power' in the sense defined by Henry
Kissinger (
2013
,
p 2), a country that can never be reassured of its security and consequently seeks absolute security at the expense
of others. Napoleonic France or Hitlerite Germany were determined to overthrow the international systems of their
times to create one more suited to their needs.
Russia today is a conservative power, alarmed by the way that the
international system that it had helped create at the end of the Second World War became radicalised after the end of
the Cold War. Critics argue that this radicalised version of liberal hegemony was 'bound to fail', since its
ambitions were so expansive as to classify as delusional, and which in the end provoked domestic and external
resistance (Mearsheimer
2018
,
2019
).
Russia's neo-revisionism after 2012 sought to defend the autonomy of the multilateralism inaugurated by the
victorious powers after 1945 and was ready to embrace the 'hegemonic' goals of the liberal order as presented in the
Cold War years, but came to fear the revisionism implicit in the 'exceptionalist' ideology of the post-Cold War
version of the liberal order, especially when it was accompanied by what was perceived as the aggressive expansion of
the dominion of the unipolar Atlantic power system.
The Kremlin and subversion
In the context of the distinction between the hegemony of the liberal international order and the dominion of the
Atlantic power system, both Russia and China reaffirm their commitment to the normative principles underlying the
international system as it developed after the Second World War. These include the primacy of state sovereignty,
territorial integrity, the significance of international law and the centrality of the United Nations (Wilson
2019
).
However, both are challenger powers in two respects: first, in questioning the assertive universalism that was
radicalised at the end of the Cold War, including various practices of humanitarian intervention and democracy
promotion, accompanied by regime change strategies; and second, dissatisfaction with the existing distribution of
power in the international system, hence challenge American primacy and hegemonic practices. This combination of
commitment to the international system but challenges to the pre-eminence of a particular order in that system is
what renders the two states neo-revisionist rather than outright revisionist powers. To label them as such is a
category error, with grave and dangerous policy consequences.
This error has now become enshrined doctrinally. The US
National Security Strategy
(
2015
)
already warned that Washington 'will continue to impose significant costs on Russia through sanctions' and would
'deter Russian aggression'. Trump's proclaimed intention of improving relations with Russia provoked a storm of
hostility in which Republican neo-conservatives and Democrat liberal internationalists united to stymie moves in that
direction. This is why the US
National Security Strategy
(
2017
,
p. 25), at the end of Trump's first year in power, warned against the 'revisionist powers of China and Russia',
ranked alongside the 'rogue powers of Iran and North Korea' and the 'transnational threat organisations, particularly
jihadist groups'. The National Defense Strategy (
2018
,
p. 2) also identified Russia and China as revisionist states, seeking 'to shape a world consistent with their
authoritarian model -- gaining veto authority over other nation's economic, diplomatic and security decisions'. The
emergence of challengers undoubtedly came as a shock for a power and normative system that had enjoyed largely
unquestioned pre-eminence. Responses to that shock range from intensified neo-conservative militarism, democratic
internationalist intensification of ideological struggle to delegitimise Russia's aspirations, as well as an
increasingly vocal 'realist' call for a return to the diplomatic practices of pre-Cold War sovereign
internationalism.
The first two responses make common cause against Russia's perceived revisionist challenge and have mobilised a
network of think tanks and strategies against Russia's instruments of subversion. The far from exhaustive list
presented here indicates the scope of Moscow's armoury of subversion, as well as the methodological and practical
problems in assessing their scale, motivation and effect. The first is support for insurgent populist movements in
the West. Russia rides the wave of populist and nationalist insurgency, but it does not mean either that Russia is
the main instigator or beneficiary. The Russian leadership has long complained about the 'hermetic' character of the
Atlantic power system and thus welcomes the breach in the impregnable walls of rectitude created from within by the
various national populisms of left and right. In other words, Moscow perceives national populist insurgency as a
struggle for ideational pluralism within the liberal international order, but above all as allies in the struggle for
geostrategic pluralism against the monism of the Atlantic power system. Russia supports some of these movements, but
not to the extent of jeopardising the existing structures of the international system. Once again, the tempered
challenge of neo-revisionism predominates over the insurrectionary behaviour that would characterise a genuinely
revisionist power.
The Alliance for Securing Democracy identified at least 60 instances of Russia funding political campaigns beyond its
borders, although many of the cases are circumstantial (Foer
2020
).
In his notorious interview with the
Financial Times
on the eve of the Osaka G20
summit in June 2019, Putin asserted that 'the liberal idea' has 'outlived its purpose' as publics turned against
immigration, open borders and multiculturalism, but he immediately brought in the structural context: '[Liberals]
cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over recent decades' (Barber and
Foy
2019
,
p. 1). The Kremlin has gone out of its way to identify with right wing (and occasionally left wing) 'populists' who
argue for a revision of the EU's relations with Russia, including a dismantling of the sanctions regime. Thus, in the
2017 French presidential election Putin welcomed the head of National Rally (formerly the Front National) Marine Le
Pen to Moscow, a move that still attracts widespread condemnation in France. Earlier, a Russian bank had made a €9.4
million loan to her party. Even this needs to be seen in context. Putin's favoured candidate in the 2017 French
presidential election was not Le Pen but the more conventional social conservative François Fillon. When the latter's
campaign as the nominee of the traditional Gaullist party imploded, Moscow was left bereft of a mainstream candidate
calling for a revision of the post-Cold War dominion strategy. As for the funding for Le Pen, the loan was called in
prematurely, and the bank was closed down as part of the Central Bank of Russia's attempt to clean up the financial
sector.
As for Italy, the leader of the Lega (formerly Lega Nord) party, Matteo Salvini, was one of the strongest advocates
of resetting relations with Russia as he entered government following the March 2018 elections as part of the
coalition with the Five Star Movement. The relationship was no more than a 'marriage of convenience', with Moscow
only engaged to the extent that it could advance the goal of weakening the EU's sanctions regime (Makarychev and
Terry
2020
).
In a subsequent scandal, one of Salvini's closest associates and the president of Lombardy Russia, Gianluca Savoini,
was taped talking in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow about an illicit scheme to funnel funds through oil sales to
support the League's electoral campaigns (Nardelli
2019
).
On his visit to the Vatican in July 2019 Putin met with the national populists, or otherwise put, the geopolitical
revisionists. This was his third meeting with Pope Francis, and Putin sounded more Catholic than the Pope: 'Sometimes
I get the feeling that these liberal circles are beginning to use certain elements and problems of the Catholic
Church as a tool for destroying the Church itself' (Horowitz
2019
).
The substantive issue remains. National populists in the West repudiate much of the social liberalism that has now
become mainstream, but most also reject the geopolitical orthodoxy that in their view has provoked the Second Cold
War with Russia. On that basis there is clearly common cause between the populist insurgency in Europe and the
Kremlin. For defenders of the liberal order, this commonality turns the populists into a Moscow-inspired fifth
column. The old division between capitalist democracy and communism after the Cold War has given way to a new binary,
between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. The fundamental divide shifts on to new ground, which can variously
be seen as one between patriotism and cosmopolitanism, which is a variant of the tension between revived nationalist
movements opposed to the erosion of state efficacy by neoliberalism within the framework of globalisation. Many share
concerns about the influx of refugees and fear even greater flows of migrants in the future, which in their view will
erode the civic and cultural bonds of Western societies. National populists challenge cosmopolitan liberalism
(Eatwell and Goodwin
2018
)
and thus align with the cultural conservatism that characterises the neo-revisionist period in Russian foreign policy
(Robinson
2017
).
In this new political spectrum, Russia emerges as an ally of the patriots and the anti-globalisers and is condemned
for funding and variously supporting the anti-liberal insurgency in the West. Whole institutes (such as the Political
Capital Institute in Hungary headed by Péter Krekó and the Henry Jackson Society in London) are devoted to exposing
these links and the various alleged illicit cash flows and networks. There are certainly plenty of lurid tales and
examples of European politicians who have been supported by factions in Russia without being transparent about these
links.
However, the common anti-liberal platform with Moscow is only part of the story. The geopolitical factor is no less
important, with both left and right populists rejecting elements of US dominion in the Atlantic security system, and
question the wisdom of the inexorable drive to the East that inevitably alienates Russia. Here they make common cause
with international relations realists as well as pragmatists like George Kennan, who in 1998 warned of the
deleterious effects on European security of Moscow's inevitable response to NATO enlargement (Friedman
1998
).
Today these groups are in the vanguard in calling for an end to the sanctions regime, which in their view misses the
point -- that Russia's actions in Ukraine and elsewhere after 2014 was a response to the provocative actions of the
Atlantic power system in the first place. In other words, anti-liberalism is only one dimension of the putative
alliance between national populism in Europe and Moscow. Geopolitical revisionism is perhaps the most important one,
and thus national populist movements incur the wrath of the national security establishments. In the UK this led to
the creation of the Integrity Initiative and its various European and American affiliates, sponsored by the shadowy
so-called Institute of Statecraft, funded by the British state.
There is a third dimension -- in addition to geopolitical revisionism and anti-cosmopolitanism -- in the putative alignment
of national populism with Moscow, and that is the question of pluralism. Post-Cold War liberalism entered a
paradoxical turn that in the end forswore the fundamental principles on which it is based -- tolerance and pluralism
(Horsfield
2017
).
In a situation where the liberal idea faced no serious domestic or geopolitical opposition, it became radicalised and
thus eroded its own values. The US-led liberal international order, as suggested above, posed as synonymous with
order itself. There could be no legitimate outside to its own expansive ambitions. The counterpart to universalism is
monism, which eroded the coherence of liberalism in domestic and foreign policy (Sakwa
2017b
,
2018b
).
This helps explain why relations with the EU deteriorated so drastically after 2004.
The influx of East European
countries accentuated monism by embracing the security guarantees offered by American dominion. Extreme partisans of
this view have little time for the hegemonic normative agenda and view the EU as just part of the Atlantic alliance
system, and not necessarily the most important one. They radically repudiate Gorbachevian ideas about a common
European home or a greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok and condemn those who suggest rapprochement with Moscow
as 'Trojan horses' (Orenstein and Keleman
2017
),
the name of a series of Atlantic Council reports exposing Russian contacts in the West. For them, security guarantees
from Washington are the priority. Thus, pan-continental ideas gave way to an intensified Atlanticism, and dominion
prevailed over hegemony. One manifestation of this was the Polish-inspired Eastern Partnership, which in the end
became an instrument for the expansion of the EU's geopolitical influence in its neighbourhood, provoking the Ukraine
crisis in 2014 (Mearsheimer
2014
).
The European Neighbourhood Policy thereafter became more differentiated and thus accepted the pluralism that it had
earlier been in danger of repudiating.
In short, geopolitical revisionist forces are at play in Europe and the USA, and Russian neo-revisionism makes common
cause with them to the degree that they offer more pluralist perspectives on international politics and challenge the
monist dominion of the Atlantic power system, but the degree to which Moscow supports let alone sponsors this
challenge to the post-Cold War order is questionable. This links to a second form of Russian subversion, namely
collusion with anti-establishment figures. The most spectacular case of this is the charge that Moscow colluded with
Trump to steal the 2016 presidential election.
After nearly two years of work, in March 2019 the Robert Mueller
Special Counsel Report into Russiagate boldly asserted that 'The Russian government interfered in the 2016 election
in sweeping and systematic fashion' (Mueller
2019
,
Vol. 1, p. 1). However, it then rather lamely conceded that 'the investigation did not establish that members of the
Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities'
(Mueller
2019
,
Vol. 1, pp. 5 and 173). Once again reinforcing the geopolitical concerns underlying charges of Russian subversion,
the instigators of Russiagate became the heart of the 'resistance' to the president. Alongside credible concerns
about his impact on American democratic institutions, they also opposed the rapprochement with Russia that Trump had
proclaimed as one of his campaign goals.
In his major foreign policy speech delivered at the Mayflower Hotel in
Washington on 27 April 2016, Trump argued that 'I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with
Russia -- from a position of strength -- is possible. Common sense says this cycle of hostility must end. Some say the
Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out'. Trump promised that America would get 'out of the
nation-building business and instead [focus] on creating stability in the world' (Transcript
2016
).
This represented a radical rethinking of foreign policy priorities, and although some of the themes had sounded
before, together they challenged the foundations of the post-Cold War international order. They also suited Russia,
since the expansive Atlantic system had increasingly become a matter of concern in the Kremlin. This geopolitical
coincidence of interests intersected with domestic US political conflicts to create Russiagate, which stymied
putative moves towards a new détente.
The third subversive strategy imputed to Russia is cyber-warfare in various forms. There are plenty of cases of
Russian hacking, including the attack on the German parliament in 2015, which the German chancellor Angela Merkel
condemned as 'outrageous', noting that it impeded her attempts 'to have a better relationship with Russia' (Bennhold
2020
).
She had been equally outraged when she discovered that her office had been bugged by the NSA. In France, 2 days
before the second-round presidential vote on 7 May 2017 20,000 campaign emails from the Emmanuel Macron campaign were
uploaded to Pastebin, a file-sharing site, and then posted on 4chan, an anonymous message board. The Macron team
denounced Russia for a 'high level attack', but even the Atlantic Council reported that the relevant French security
agency 'declared that no conclusive evidence pointed to Russian groups', and 'that the simplicity of the attacks
pointed toward an actor with lower capabilities' (Galante and Ee
2018
,
p. 12). The regulation of hostile cyber activity is crucial, especially when accurate attribution is so difficult and
'false flag' attacks so easy.
This applies to the key Russiagate charge that Russian military intelligence (the GRU) 'hacked' into the server of
the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Campaign Congressional Committee (DCCC) and released
embarrassing materials to WikiLeaks, the web-based investigative site founded by Julian Assange in 2006. The
publication of the emails was allegedly coordinated in some way with the Trump team. The material revealed that the
DNC opposed the campaign of the independent left-leaning senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, to ensure Clinton's
nomination. The hackers also gained access to the emails of Clinton's campaign director, John Podesta, following a
successful spearphishing email sent on 19 March 2016. The 50,000 Podesta emails exposed Clinton's ties with Wall
Street bankers, high speaking fees and apparent hypocrisy in condemning privilege while enjoying its benefits. The
Russian hackers undoubtedly sought to mine political intelligence, but whether they intended specifically to help
Trump is more questionable. The Mueller report detailed the specific GRU cyber-warfare units which hacked the Clinton
campaign and the DNC and then released the emails through Russian-sponsored cut-outs, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, as
well as WikiLeaks. These were 'designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election and undermine
the Clinton Campaign' (Mueller
2019
,
Vol. 1, p. 36).
Strikingly, the FBI or Mueller never conducted forensic examinations of their own and instead relied on CrowdStrike,
a private contractor hired by the Democrats to examine their servers. The material was then published, according to
the report, through DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, 'fictitious online personas' created by the GRU, and later through
WikiLeaks. Mueller argues that Guccifer 2.0 was the source of the emails and that he was a persona managed by Russian
operators (Mueller
2019
,
Vol. 1, p. 47). Mueller alleges that Assange worked for or conspired with Russian agencies, but Assange states
unequivocally that the Russian government was not the source of the emails, and (surprisingly), he was never
questioned by Mueller. The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) group argues that the DNC emails were
physically downloaded and then transferred (by unknown persons) to WikiLeaks rather than being extruded via an
electronic download (Binney and McGovern
2017
).
In Congressional testimony in December 2017 CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry (
2017
)
admitted that he could not confirm that material had actually been exfiltrated from the DNC servers.
The fourth major subversive strategy is disinformation as well as media manipulation. The Internet Research Agency
(IRA) based in St Petersburg deployed sock puppet accounts (trolls) and their automated versions (bots) to influence
public debate by sharing accounts and voicing divisive opinions. These allegedly shaped voter preferences and
depressed turnout among some key constituencies, above all people of colour, in the 2016 US election. The US
Intelligence Community Assessment (
2017
,
p. 1) on 6 January 2017 accused Russia of trying to undermine American democracy and charged with 'high confidence'
that Putin personally ordered 'an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent
goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her
electability and potential presidency'. The ICA was issued in the name of 17 intelligence agencies, although later it
became clear that it had been prepared by a 'hand-picked' group selected by Office of the DNI head, James Clapper
(Full Transcript
2017
).
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (
2020
,
Vol. 4, p. 6) in April 2020 issued its fourth report in its Russia investigation arguing that 'the ICA presents a
coherent and well-constructed basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential
election', a view that is at odds with most commentary on what is usually considered a slipshod and poorly sourced
document (for a summary of critiques, see McCarthy
2019
,
2020; Gessen
2017
).
The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 prompted a new wave of criticism of Russia's disinformation efforts. The Strategic
Communications and Analysis division of the European External Action Service, colloquially known as EUvsDisinfo,
identified a 'trilateral convergence of disinformation narratives' being promoted by China, Iran and Russia (Jozwiak
2020
).
The work of EUvsDisinfo work was examined by the Reframing Russia group at the University of Manchester (Hutchings
and Tolz
2020
).
They examined the specific stories that had been identified as disinformation, and took a broader look at reportage
of the pandemic on Russian television, in particular on Channel 1. They found that 'there was little sign here of the
coordinated pro-Kremlin "conspiracy theory propaganda" flagged by EUvsDisinfo'. They went further to note that its
misrepresentation of Russian Covid-19 coverage was 'troubling' in two respects. First, through 'omission', with
sentences taken out of context and 'rephrased in the form of summaries and headlines which make them sound
particularly outrageous'. The second way is through 'blatant distortion'. For example, EUvsDisinfo claimed that
Sputnik Latvia stated that 'Covid-19 had been designed specifically to kill elderly people', whereas in fact the
article had ridiculed such conspiracy theories and highlighted 'their idiocy'. Reframing Russia questioned
EUvsDisinfo's methodology, assuming that 'random websites without any traceable links to Russian state structures'
were analogous to state-funded media agencies, and that all were part of a coordinated Kremlin-run campaign. It even
included 'conspirological, far-right websites which are actually critical of Putin'. They conclude that
'EUvsDisinfo's headlines and summaries border on disinformation'. Examination of the source material 'cited by
EUvsDisinfo demonstrates that the Russian state is, in fact, not targeting Western countries with an organised
campaign around the current public health crisis'. They ask how a situation was created in which 'an EU-funded body
set up to fight disinformation ends up producing it'. Reframing Russia advances two hypotheses to explain how things
could be got so wrong. The first is 'a profound misunderstanding of how the media in neo-authoritarian systems such
as Russia's work', with not everything managed by the Kremlin. Second, 'The outsourcing of services by state
institutions to third parties without a proper assessment of their qualifications to do the required work', In the
case of EUvsDisinfo, research is outsourced to some 400 volunteers, who are 'operating in a post-Soviet space
saturated by anti-Russian attitudes'.
It is in this context that a burgeoning literature examines possible responses. An article in
Foreign
Policy
in July 2019 argued that 'Moscow now acts regularly against US interests with impunity'. The question, in
the view of the author, was how to rebuild deterrence -- 'how to get Putin to start fearing the United States again'.
The problem was defined in broad terms: 'how to convince Putin that he can't afford to keep trying to disrupt the
global order and undermine the United States, the West, and democracy itself'. The charge list was a long one:
Over the
last decade, Putin has provoked Washington again and again: by invading Georgia, annexing Crimea, attacking
Ukraine, assassinating opponents at home and abroad, and interfering in elections throughout the West. In each
case the underwhelming US response helped convince Putin that he could get away with more such behaviour.
To 'get Putin to start respecting the United States again' such measures as toughening sanctions, strengthening
military alliances, and conducting more assertive diplomacy were recommended (Geltser
2019
).
Simpson and Fritsch (
2019
),
former
Wall Street Journal
writers who founded Fusion GPS, the agency that in 2016
hired Christopher Steele to prepare the infamous dossier on Trump's links with Russia, insisted that Britain needed
its own Mueller report to investigate Russia's role in the Brexit vote. They argued that such an enquiry was
'essential to halt Russia's attack on Britain's democracy' (Simpson and Fritsch
2019
).
The Kremlin Watch Program (
2019
)
of the Prague-based European Values Center for Security Policy suggested 20 measures to counter 'hostile Russian
interference'.
A Pentagon assessment in June 2019 argued that the USA was ill-equipped to counter 'the increasingly brazen political
warfare Russia is waging to undermine democracies' (Bender
2019
).
A 150-page study prepared for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff argued that the USA was still underestimating the
scope of Russia's aggression, including the use of propaganda and disinformation to sway public opinion in Europe and
across the globe. The study also warned against the growing alignment of Russia and China, which were opposed to
America's system of international alliances and shared a proclivity for 'authoritarian stability'. The authors argued
that domestic disarray impeded the USA's ability to respond (Department of Defense
2019
).
Natalia Arno, the head of the Free Russia Foundation, agreed with the report's finding and argued that 'Russia is
attacking Western institutions in ways more shrewd and strategically discreet than many realize' (Bender
2019
).
The Pentagon report recommended that the State Department should take the lead in devising more aggressive 'influence
operations', including sowing division between Russia and China. The study analysed what it called 'gray zone'
activities, the attempt by Putin's regime to undermine democratic nations, in particular those on Russia's periphery,
through 'hybrid' measures, falling short of direct military action. However, although warning of Moscow's alignment
with Beijing, the report recommended cooperation with Russia in key areas such as strategic nuclear weapons. One of
the authors, John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School, argued that Ronald Reagan's offer in the 1980s to share
research on ballistic missile defence (BMD) should be revisited. The report suggested that while elites and the
people broadly supported Putin's foreign policy and the striving for great power status, this was liable to weaken
when faced by socio-economic problems.
Inevitably, forces seeking to break the liberal hegemony at home will make common cause with an external power that
is also interested in breaking that expansive hegemony. Russia looks for friends wherever it can find them, and seeks
a way out of the impasse of the post-Cold War security order. However, it is important to stress the limits to that
alignment. If Russia were a genuinely revisionist power, then it would make sense to ally with any force destructive
of the old order; but as argued above, Russia is a neo-revisionist power -- concerned with changing the monist practices
of post-Cold War liberalism, but not with changing the international system in its entirety. This means that Russia
is quite happy to work within existing structures as long as monism can be kept in check. The struggle against 'fake
news' and 'Russian disinformation' threatens the pluralism at the heart of traditional liberalism. That is why the
investigation into the alleged collusion between the Trump camp and Russia in the 2016 presidential election was more
damaging than the putative original offence. When policy differences and divergences in value preferences are
delegitimated and couched in binary Cold War terms, then the Atlantic power system is in danger of becoming
dangerously hermetic. Immunity to new ideas, even if they come from a traditional adversary, weakens resistance to
domestic degradation.
Russia: challenger or insurrectionary?
We are now in a position to assess whether Putin really is out to subvert the West, as suggested by the US
intelligence community, much recent commentary and numerous strategic and doctrinal statements. The 'black legend'
charge underlies the Russiagate allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US and other elections. Such
accusations are based on the view that a fundamental gulf has opened between the worldviews of the Russian leadership
and the Western community. There are some grounds to argue that this is the case, although this needs to be placed
into the broader framework of the evolution of Russian foreign policy since the end of the communist era and into the
theoretical context of how Russia sees the international system, as described earlier. Above all, as the historic
West moved into an era of expansive 'hegemonism', Russia (and China) were inevitably categorised as hostile nations.
They had the motive and heft to fight back. Lavrov (
2019
)
condemned the way that the 'rules-based order' substituted for international law, while the expanded institutions of
dominion encircled both countries. Challengers to the radicalised liberal world order become subversive by
definition.
Russia is a challenger power but it is not insurrectionary. In other words, it is far from the Soviet position of
seeking to advance the ideology of revolutionary socialism, of which 'active measures' were one of the most specific
manifestations. Further, Russia is not a revisionist power out to destroy the foundations of the international system
as it has taken shape since 1945, but it is neo-revisionist, challenging the practices of the US-led Atlantic order
within that system. As a conservative status quo Russia finds itself challenged by the radicalisation of the historic
West that it had hoped to transform at the end of the Cold War. Concurrently, Russia's identity as a great power
means that it resists the dominion element. It could live with the more modest liberal hegemony of the Cold War years
(and in fact, one of the layers of Russia's foreign policy identity still wants to join it), but the combination of
radicalised hegemonic universalism and the expansive logic of the power system rendered dominion unacceptable. Russia
condemns the Atlantic system for its revolutionary radicalism, manifested in what is perceives to be Western
revisionism. Russia thus finds itself divided from the historic West on a range of policy issues, but not ultimately
by commitment to the post-1945 international system. This is why Moscow welcomed Trump's post-Atlanticist
declarations, since he offered an alternative to the neo-conservative militarism and democratic interventionism of
the post-Cold War era. Shackled by Russiagate, Trump was not able to deliver much and in fact the sanctions regime
and other forms of neo-containment were intensified. In this context, six observations can help us examine the
problem of greater Russia and subversion.
First, it is misleading to see direct continuity between the USSR and Russia. Russia no longer embodies an
alternative ideology and is in fact a status quo power in both ideational and territorial terms. Russia is also
comparatively far less powerful. If at its peak in the early 1970s Soviet GDP reached 58 per cent that of the USA,
today Russia's at most is ten per cent of America's. Russia's defence spending in 2019 was the fourth largest in the
world, but at $65 billion this is less than a tenth of the USA at $732 billion (38 per cent of total global military
spending) and less than a quarter of China's $261 billion (SIPRI
2020
).
Cold War patterns have been restored, but the dynamics of this confrontation are very different even though some of
the procedural rituals of mutual excoriation have returned (Monaghan
2015
).
However, Russia does claim to represent an alternative to the historical West in three ways: as the defender of
conservative sovereign internationalism, where states interact on the basis of interests, although norms are far from
repudiated; as a socially conservative civilisation state with societal dynamics of its own (Coker
2019
;
Tsygankov
2016
);
and as a European power with a stake in creating some pan-continental framework, while at the same time advocating
the establishment of some sort of greater Eurasian unity.
All three open up lines of fracture that Russia seeks to exploit as a challenger but not as an insurrectionary power.
In particular, at the civilisational level the identification of the West with the Atlantic system is challenged.
This is a process that is advancing in any case within the Atlantic system, with the EU Global Strategy (
2016
)
talking of 'strategic autonomy'. The election of Trump later that year prompted Merkel (
2018
),
to argue that Europe could no longer rely on the USA to protect it. The French president Emmanuel Macron (
2019
)
argued that the corollary of the growing Atlantic divide was rapprochement with Russia. Critics argue that Russia
exploits this division and seeks to widen it, and in structural terms they are right. Any breach in the monist wall
will be welcomed by any leader in Moscow. It is along this line that charges of Russian subversion lie.
Second, unlike the former Soviet Union where policy was coordinated by the Central Committee and Politburo, today
Russia is far from monolithic. The layered phases mean that elements of at least four types of Russian engagement
with the West coexist and operate at the same time, although with different intensity. As noted, these range from
Atlanticist engagement, competitive coexistence, new realism to neo-revisionism. Commentary on contemporary Russia
assumes that it behaves like a unitary actor, with Putin serving as the unique demi-urge with nothing better to do
than ceaselessly monitor and manipulate global malign activities. This is indeed a manifestation of Western
'narcissism', and as Paul Robinson (
2020
)
asks 'where does all this nonsense about Putin wanting to destroy democracy come from? It certainly doesn't come from
anything he's ever said'. Russia is a vast and complex country with a vigorous public sphere with plenty of
relatively autonomous interests and actors. Institutionalised political pluralism is constrained, but not all roads
lead to the Kremlin (Sakwa
2020
).
For example, the national populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, has
hosted six conferences of far-right politicians since 1992, many attracted by the anti-Western language deployed by
much of the Russian elite. They provide an alternative narrative that often coincides with the Kremlin's positions,
but this does mean that there is an unbreakable alliance between the two (Moldovanov
2019
).
As the Reframing Russia team argue, not every outlandish comment in Russia's public sphere can be attributed to the
Kremlin's propaganda and disinformation department. Equally, we may add, not every oligarch is 'Putin's crony', bent
on advancing the Kremlin's malign agenda. This attribution and alignment fallacy is why, among other reasons,
sanctions against alleged regime-associated individuals will not achieve the desired effect of changing Russian
policy, since they are based on a flawed understanding of how Russia works, as well as the category error noted above
about the structural sources of Russian foreign policy.
Third, Russian behaviour is located in the matrix of the changing dynamics of the Atlantic power system, the liberal
international order and global power shifts (Karaganov (ed.)
2020
).
Russia is certainly alienated from a particular system that claims to be universal, as well as concerned about the
advance of a power system to its borders. The liberal international order may well have been 'doomed to fail' because
the key policies on which it is based are deeply flawed (Mearsheimer
2019
).
Spreading liberal democracy around the globe was benign in intent but disastrous in consequence (Walt
2019
).
The illusions generated by exaggerated claims of exceptionalism meant that the US 'squandered' Cold War victory
(Bacevich
2020
).
Russia's reaction is just one to an order whose response to the end of the Cold War was to exaggerate the dominion
factor and thus undermined its normative hegemony.
Fourth, Russia has returned as a power critical not only of the Atlantic hegemony but also of the values on which it
is based. At the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in June 2019 Putin talked of the failure of the
'Euro-Atlantic' economic model and argued that 'the existing model of economic relations is still in crisis and this
crisis is of a comprehensive nature' (Putin
2019b
).
Here and on other occasions he condemned the Atlantic powers' use of sanctions as a form of economic warfare. On the
eve of SPIEF on 6 June, Putin and China's leader, Xi Jinping, announced the upgrade of their relationship to a
'Comprehensive Partnership of Coordination for a New Era', accompanied by a joint statement on global strategic
stability (Xinhua
2019
).
There is a tension between the expansive liberal hegemony and countries and social movements who question the
identification of liberalism with order itself. Liberalism ultimately generates antinomies, which are not mere
correctible aberrations but systemic flaws of the liberal paradigm itself. These above all concern the question of
taming the power of capital and dealing with inequality and citizen marginalisation. Moscow does not identify itself
with these radical critiques, and its criticisms ultimately have a superficial and reversible character. Russia does
not stand outside the contradictions of contemporary liberalism, having entered its own liberal era at the end of the
Cold War in 1989. That layer in its identity is far from nugatory. Russia's experience of liberalism is distinctive,
characterising the 1990s as a time of liberal excess, yet the Putin system is permeated with neoliberal ideas and
even liberal aspirations. His critics in Russia from the left and right condemn the antinomies of the system, whereas
Putin simply points out the power and cultural contradictions of post-Cold War liberalism.
Fifth, the struggle for geopolitical pluralism after the neo-revisionist turn in 2012 is accompanied by a programme
of cultural conservatism, opening the door to alignment with Europe's national populists. In condemning what he took
to be the rampant social liberalism, accompanied by Merkel's 'welcome culture' in 2015 vis-à-vis the influx of
refugees, Putin (
2019a
)
sought to bolster support among social conservatives in Europe. As political and social liberals united against
Putinite Russia, it appeared that the impasse could only be broken by bolstering conservative (if not outright
reactionary) movements in Europe. A European change of heart would allow a rapprochement without Russia having to
change its domestic or foreign policies: 'It would be 1989 in reverse. This time it would not be Russia but Europe to
go through a traumatic conversion to foreign ideas' (Maçães
2019
).
Russia would be rescued from isolation and policy-makers could once again turn to the creation of a 'greater Europe',
reducing Russia's dependence on China and strengthening its position vis-à-vis the USA. This is the foundational
argument about Russia being out to subvert the West, and there is some truth in it -- but not in the linear way it is
usually interpreted. The alignment is situational and the geopolitics takes precedence over ideological alignment.
Sixth, as the Russiagate affair demonstrates, Russia acts as the scapegoat for problems generated by domestic
contradictions. In that case, Russian 'meddling' helped explain how the most improbable of candidates was able to win
against an experienced politician, Hillary Clinton, with a long record of public service, to pull off 'the greatest
political upset in American history' (Green
2017
,
p. 236). This impeded the Democratic Party from coming to terms with its own shortcomings, and the country from
addressing its ills. This perhaps is the greatest subversive effect achieved by Russia. As far as we know, this was
not achieved deliberately, although there is the view that Russia fed information 'to have the West believe what the
Kremlin wants the West to believe' (McCarthy
2019
,
p. 166). Even more cunningly, perhaps they were feeding misinformation to Steele to provoke a counter-intelligence
investigation that would incapacitate the Trump presidency and set the Democrats off on a wild goose chase that
prevented them from reforming and reconnecting with the real concerns of the American people. If the latter is the
case, then the operation was a brilliant success. The struggle against presumed Russian 'active measures' does more
damage to Western political institutions and the legitimacy of Western normative hegemony than the putative
subversive activity itself. The security services and spy agencies of course continue to battle it out behind the
scenes, but McCarthyism is as destructive today as it was in the 1950s.
Conclusion
Russia has returned as an international conservative power, but it is not a revisionist one, and even less is it out
to subvert the West. Russia certainly looks for allies where it can find them, especially if they advocate the
lifting of sanctions. When Macron (
2019
)
argued that it was time to bring Russia out of the cold, arguing that 'We cannot rebuild Europe without rebuilding a
connection with Russia', his comments were welcomed in Moscow, although tempered by a justifiable scepticism.
The
Putin elite had earlier welcomed Trump's election, but in practice relations deteriorated further. The foreign policy
establishment is deeply sceptical that the EU will be able to act with 'strategic autonomy'. Above all, Russo-Western
relations have entered into a statecraft 'security dilemma':
Currently, we are again faced with a situation in which mutual intentions are assessed by Washington and Moscow
as subversive, while each side considers the statecraft employed by the other side as effective enough to
achieve its malign goals. At the same time, each side is more sceptical about its own statecraft and appears
(or pretends) to be scrambling to catch up (Troitskiy
2019
).
In the nineteenth century, Russia became the 'gendarme' of Europe, and while Putin repudiates the country assuming
such a role again, Russia has undoubtedly returned as an international conservative power. Maintenance of a
specifically historically determined definition of the status quo is the essence of its neo-revisionism: a defence of
traditional ideas of state sovereignty and of an internationalism structured by commitment to the structures of the
international system as it took shape after 1945. Russia resents its perceived exclusion from the institutions of
Atlantic dominion (above all NATO); but is not out to destroy the international system in which this competition is
waged. Thus, Anton Shekhovtsov (
2017
)
is mistaken to argue that Russia's links to right-wing national populist movements are rooted in philosophical
anti-Westernism and an instinct to subvert the liberal democratic consensus in the West. In fact, the alignment is
situational and contingent on the impasse in Russo-Western relations and thus is susceptible to modification if the
situation changes. Moscow's readiness to embrace Trump in 2016 when he repeatedly argued that it made sense to 'get
on' with Russia indicates that Western overtures for improved relations would find the Kremlin ready to reciprocate.
In 2017 the Kremlin sent Washington various ideas on how to move out of the impasse in US-Russian relations, but
given the 'Russiagate' allegations, the White House was in no position to respond. The same applies when in 2019
Russia was invited to resume full voting rights in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which
the Kremlin embraced even though powerful domestic neo-traditionalist and Eurasianist voices counselled against.
Russia is not out to subvert the West but seeks to change it. For the defenders of monist enlargement, this is just
as bad. Resistance at home and abroad to the post-Cold War Western order has exposed unexpected fragilities and
insecurities, hence the turn to the language of 'resilience' (for example, EU Global Strategy
2016
).
Given its strategy of resistance, Russia in turn becomes the object against which resilience is tested, becoming one
of Federica Mogherini's 'five principles' (
2016
),
creating yet another barrier to normal diplomatic relations. In fact, the structural model outlined in this paper
suggests that Russia does not seek to create a greater Russia through subversion let alone physical enlargement,
although all leaders since the end of the Cold have tried to make the country a great power. This raises the
fundamental and still unresolved question: is Russia still interested in joining a transformed West? Or has it
realised that the only way to retain great power status and sovereign decision-making is to remain outside the West?
Joining the transformed West meant the attempt to create a 'greater Europe', what Gorbachev had earlier termed the
common European home. For defenders of the existing West, this is perceived as threatening its existing values, norms
and freedoms, and perhaps more importantly, also the existing hierarchy of international power; but for Russia, it is
a way out of the perceived geopolitical impasse and offers a common developmental strategy.
The West is faced by a choice 'between containment and engagement on mutually agreed terms' (Trenin
2016
,
p. 110). Incompatible understanding of the political character of the historical epoch provokes an intense barrage of
propaganda from all sides, with mutual allegations of political subversion and interference. The interaction of
hegemony and dominion on the one side and multiple layers of identity on the other provides fertile ground for
incomprehension and the attribution of sinister motives, provoking the statecraft 'security dilemma' identified
above. Russia maintains a neo-revisionist critique, but this does not mean repudiating improved relations with a
post-dominion West. The country increasingly pivoted to the East and strengthened its alignment with China, but this
does not mean that Russia seeks an irrevocable break with the West (Monaghan
2019
).
This is why it seeks improved relations with the EU and the USA if a satisfactory formula for restored contact can be
found. Moscow's support for insurgent populist movements in Europe and disruptive forces in America will always be
tempered by larger strategic concerns and are certainly not unequivocal. The greater Russia envisaged by the Kremlin
elite is one whose sovereignty is defended and whose great power status is recognised, but it is not one that seeks
more territory or to subvert the West and sow discord. The West can be trusted to do that without Russia's help. The
West's response to Russia's neo-revisionism has been neo-containment and counter-subversion strategies, but if the
analysis proposed in this article has any validity, then new forms of engagement may be a more productive course.
References
Abrams, S. 2016. Beyond Propaganda: Soviet Active Measures in Putin's Russia.
Connections:
The Quarterly Journal
15(1): 5–31.
Clunan, A.L. 2009.
The Social Construction of Russia's Resurgence: Aspirations,
Identity, and Security Interests
. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Horvath, R. 2011. Putin's "Preventive Counter-Revolution": Post-Soviet Authoritarianism and the Spectre of
Velvet Revolution.
Europe-Asia Studies
63(1): 1–25.
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Assessing
Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections: Intelligence Community Assessment, ICA 2017
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01D
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6 January,
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
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Krickovic, A., and Y. Weber. 2018. What Can Russia Teach Us about Change? Status-Seeking as a Catalyst for
Transformation in International Politics.
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292–300.
Larson, D.W., and A. Shevchenko. 2003. Shortcut to Greatness: The New Thinking and the Revolution in Soviet
Foreign Policy.
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Makarychev, A., and G.S. Terry. 2020. An Estranged "Marriage of Convenience": Salvini, Putin, and the
Intricacies of Italian-Russian Relations.
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Mueller III, R.S. 2019.
Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in
the 2016 Presidential Election
, 2 vols. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice.
Sakwa, R. 2018a. The International System and the Clash of New World Orders. In
Multipolarity:
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Western-Russian Partnership after the Cold War.
International Politics
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School of Politics and International Relations, Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX,
UK
Richard Sakwa
Corresponding author
Correspondence to
Richard
Sakwa
.
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NoisyBaboon dontdenythe 7 minutes ago Both China and Russia can even bulldoze the US
embassies in their countries. But they will not do this because doing so is actually
NONSENSICAL. Let the foools enjoy themselves.
Craig
Murray lambasts a Russophobic media that celebrates a supposed cyber attack on UK vaccine research, ignores collapse
of key evidence of a "hack" and dabbles in dubious memorabilia.
The Guardian's
headquarters
in London.
(Bryantbob,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Andrew Marr, center, in 2014.
(
Financial
Times
, Flickr)
A whole slew of these were rehearsed by Andrew Marr on his flagship BBC1 morning show. The latest is the accusation
that Russia is responsible for a cyber attack on Covid-19 vaccination research. This is another totally evidence-free
accusation. But it misses the point anyway.
The alleged cyber attack, if it happened, was a hack not an attack -- the allegation is that there was an effort to
obtain the results of research, not to disrupt research. It is appalling that the U.K. is trying to keep its research
results secret rather than share them freely with the world scientific community.
As I have
reported
before
, the U.K. and the USA have been preventing the WHO from implementing a common research and common vaccine
solution for Covid-19, insisting instead on a profit driven approach to benefit the big pharmaceutical companies (and
disadvantage the global poor).
What makes the accusation that Russia tried to hack the research even more dubious is the fact that Russia had
just
bought
the very research specified. You don't steal things you already own.
Evidence of CIA Hacks
If anybody had indeed hacked the research, we all know it is impossible to trace with certainty the whereabouts of
hackers. My VPNs [virtual private networks] are habitually set to India, Australia or South Africa depending on where
I am trying to watch the cricket, dodging broadcasting restrictions.
More pertinently,
WikiLeaks'
Vault
7 release of CIA material showed the
specific
programs
for the CIA in how to leave clues to make a leak look like it came from Russia. This irrefutable
evidence that the CIA do computer hacks with apparent Russian "fingerprints" deliberately left, like little bits of
Cyrillic script, is an absolutely classic example of a fact that everybody working in the mainstream media knows to
be true, but which they all contrive never to mention.
Thus when last week's "Russian hacking" story was briefed by the security services -- that former Labour Party Leader
Jeremy Corbyn deployed secret documents on U.K./U.S. trade talks which had been posted on Reddit, after being stolen
by an evil Russian who left his name of Grigor in his Reddit handle -- there was no questioning in the media of this
narrative. Instead, we had another round of McCarthyite witch-hunt aimed at the rather tired looking Corbyn.
Personally, if the Russians had been responsible for revealing that the Tories are prepared to open up the NHS
"market" to big American companies, including ending or raising caps on pharmaceutical prices, I should be very
grateful to the Russians for telling us. Just as the world would owe the Russians a favor if it were indeed them who
leaked evidence of just how systematically the DNC rigged the 2016 primaries against Bernie Sanders.
But as it happens, it was not the Russians. The latter case was a leak by a disgusted insider, and I very much
suspect the NHS U.S. trade deal link was also from a disgusted insider.
When governments do appalling things, very often somebody manages to blow the whistle.
Crowdstrike's Quiet Admission
Crowdstrike's Shawn Henry presenting at the International Security Forum in Vancouver, 2009.
(Hubert K, Flickr)
If you can delay even the most startling truth for several years, it loses much of its political bite. If you can
announce it during a health crisis, it loses still more. The world therefore did not shudder to a halt when the CEO
of Crowdstrike admitted there had never been any evidence of a Russian hack of the DNC servers.
You will recall the near incredible fact that, even through the Mueller investigation, the FBI never inspected the
DNC servers themselves but simply relied on a technical report from Crowdstrike, the Hillary Clinton-related IT
security consultant for the DNC.
It is now known for sure that Crowdstrike had been peddling fake news for Hillary. In fact, Crowdstrike had no record
of any internet hack at all. There was no evidence of the email material being exported over the internet. What they
claimed did exist was evidence that the files had been organized preparatory to export.
Remember the entire "Russian hacking" story was based ONLY on Crowdstrike's say so. There is literally no other
evidence of Russian involvement in the DNC emails, which is unsurprising as I have been telling you for four years
from my own direct sources that Russia was not involved. Yet finally declassified congressional testimony revealed
that Shawn Henry stated on oath that "we did not have concrete evidence" and "There's circumstantial evidence , but
no evidence they were actually exfiltrated."
This testimony fits with what I was told by Bill Binney, a former technical director of the National Security Agency
(NSA), who told me that it was impossible that any large amount of data should be moved across the internet from the
USA, without the NSA both seeing it happen in real time and recording it. If there really had been a Russian hack,
the NSA would have been able to give the time of it to a millisecond.
That the NSA did not have that information was proof the transfer had never happened, according to Binney. What had
happened, Binney deduced, was that the files had been downloaded locally, probably to a thumb drive.
Bill Binney.
(Miquel
Taverna / CCCB via Flickr)
So arguably the biggest news story of the past four years -- the claim that Putin effectively interfered to have
Donald Trump elected U.S. president -- turns out indeed to be utterly baseless. Has the mainstream media, acting on
security service behest, done anything to row back from the false impression it created? No it has doubled down.
Anti-Russia Theme
The "Russian hacking" theme keeps being brought back related to whatever is the big story of the day.
Then we have those continual security service briefings. Two weeks ago we had unnamed security service sources
telling
The New York Times
that
Russia had offered the Taliban
a
bounty
for killing American soldiers. This information had allegedly come from interrogation of captured Taliban
in Afghanistan, which would almost certainly mean it was obtained under torture.
It is a wildly improbable tale. The Afghans have never needed that kind of incentivization to kill foreign invaders
on their soil. It is also a fascinating throwback of an accusation – the British did indeed offer Afghans money for,
quite literally, the heads of Afghan resistance leaders during the first Afghan War in 1841, as I detail in my
book "Sikunder Burnes."
Taliban in Herat, Afghanistan, 2001.
(Wikipedia)
You do not have to look back that far to realize the gross hypocrisy of the accusation. In the 1980s the West was
quite openly paying, arming and training the Taliban -- including Osama bin Laden – to kill Russian and other Soviet
conscripts in their thousands. That is just one example of the hypocrisy.
The U.S. and U.K. security services both cultivate and bribe senior political and other figures abroad in order to
influence policy all of the time. We work to manipulate the result of elections -- I have done it personally in my
former role as a U.K. diplomat. A great deal of the behavior over which Western governments and media are creating
this new McCarthyite anti-Russian witch hunt, is standard diplomatic practice.
My own view is that there are malign Russian forces attempting to act on government in the U.K. and the USA, but they
are not nearly as powerful as the malign British and American forces acting on their own governments.
The truth is that the world is under the increasing control of a global elite of billionaires, to whom nationality is
irrelevant and national governments are tools to be manipulated. Russia is not attempting to buy corrupt political
influence on behalf of the Russian people, who are decent folk every bit as exploited by the ultra-wealthy as you or
I. Russian billionaires are, just like billionaires everywhere, attempting to game global political, commercial and
social structures in their personal interest.
The other extreme point of hypocrisy lies in human rights. So many Western media commentators are suddenly interested
in China and the Uighurs or in restrictions on the LBGT community in Russia, yet turn a completely blind eye to the
abuse committed by Western "allies" such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
As somebody who was campaigning about the human rights of both the Uighurs and of gay people in Russia a good decade
before it became fashionable, I am disgusted by how the term "human rights" has become weaponized for deployment only
against those countries designated as enemy by the Western elite.
Finally, do not forget that there is a massive armaments industry and a massive security industry all dependent on
having an "enemy." Powerful people make money from this Russophobia. Expect much more of it. There is money in a Cold
War.
Craig
Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002
to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
On the core subject
here: By necessity, a pandemic requires a cooperative international response. Only one country has
refused to do so: The US. In their supreme arrogance, our ruling class lost track the fact that the US
needs the rest of the world, not the other way way around.
Zalamander
,
July 22, 2020 at 19:12
One by one the
so-called Russiagate "evidence" have collapsed. The fake Steele Dossier, "Russian spy" Joseph Mifsud who
is actually a self-admitted member of the Clinton Foundation, Roger Stone's non-existant Wikileaks
contacts, Russian Afgan bounties, etc. But the neoliberal mainstream media still presents these as
"facts" with no retractions. This is not journalism, its disinformation designed to distract the American
public from the failures of capitalism.
Peter Janney
July 22, 2020 at 06:55
Craig Murray succinctly (and very beautifully) gives us a REAL glimpse of what great journalism really
looks like.
-- --
Perhaps it is great writing, but is it journalism?
Some people in
National Union of Journalists (a trade union in UK) ponder that question for many months, unable to
decide if Craig should be allowed to join or not. If he is neither a flack nor a hack, who kind of
journalist is he? (More details at Craig Murray's web site).
Journalism is
printing what someone else does not want printed.
Everything else is public relations.
-- George Orwell
rosemerry
,
July 22, 2020 at 16:42
All of the Russophobia
and lies serve the rulers of the USA?UK and their poodles well. The whole year of Skripal mania started
by Theresa May and joined in by Trump, with the media such as the Guardian's scurrilous Luke Harding
providing fantasy "evidence" and the whole story conveniently disappearing, like the Skripals, when other
"news" arrived, has no benefit to seekers of even the minimum of truth.
DH Fabian
,
July 22, 2020 at 19:46
Certainly, and this
is key to understanding the current situation. What we're seeing now is the final stages of the
long-sinking West -- those once-mighty partners of empire, the UK/US. This descent appears to have
begun with the Reagan/Thatcher years, and is now in the final stages. We've seen a rather dramatic
growth of psychosis in the political-media-public discussion over the past 3-4 years, driven by an
irrational obsession with China/Russia. (Russia and China both quietly observe, prepared to respond if
attacked.) There really isn't anything we can do about it, beyond acknowledging it as what it is.
Very good, but needs
to be supplemented by reference to the interview with NIH Director Franaic Collins on last Sunday's Meet
the Press. When host Chuck Todd asked Collins about Russian hacking of US vaccine research Collins smiled
and answered by pointing out that the research wasn't intended to be secret and that it was all to be
published for "transparency." Todd looked disappointed, mumbled, "OK," and changed the subject. No media
have reported this exchange, which is retrievable on the internet.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
,
July 22, 2020 at 10:58
Brilliant, but that's
what one expects of Craig Murray.
Craig Murray
succinctly (and very beautifully) gives us a REAL glimpse of what great journalism really looks like. I
commend his courage for never bending in the face of all the bullshit we have had to tolerate from the
mainstream media. Thank you, thank you dear Craig . . .
geeyp
,
July 22, 2020 at 00:10
Regarding Craig's last
summing up paragraph, all one need do to confirm that is read the previous article of Michael T. Klare.
Roger Thornhill 2 hours ago If I recall correctly, Obama gave the Russians all of 48 hours
to leave their consulate in San Francisco, which had been occupied since the 19th Century. This
was around Christmas time in 2016. So I don't find this particularly surprising. Two days to
have the diplomats, staff, and families completely out of the country.
By a vote of 324-93 ,
the House of Representatives soundly defeated an
amendment to reduce Pentagon authorized spending levels by 10%. The amendment does not
specify what to cut, only that Congress make across-the-board reductions. The amendment to
the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was offered by Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI). No
Republicans voted for the amendment. Libertarian Justin Amash supported the amendment.
Earlier, the House defeated an amendment to stop the Pentagon's submission of an unfunded
priorities list. Each year, after the Pentagon's budget request is submitted to Congress, the
military services send a separate "wish list," termed "unfunded priorities." This list
includes requests for programs that the military would like Congress to fund, in case they
decide to add more money to the Pentagon's proposed budget.
This article was written while observing the voting on CSPAN. The House Clerk has not
yet posted the roll-call vote. Additional information will be added to the article when
available.
O MG you guys Putin hacked our coronavirus vaccine secrets!
Today mainstream media is reporting what is arguably the single dumbest Russiavape story of
all time, against some very stiff competition.
"Russian hackers are targeting health care organizations in the West in an attempt to steal
coronavirus vaccine research, the U.S. and Britain said," reportsThe New York
Times .
"Hackers backed by the Russian state are trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine and treatment
research from academic and pharmaceutical institutions around the world, Britain's National
Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said on Thursday,"
Reuters reports .
"Russian news agency RIA cited spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying the Kremlin rejected
London's allegations, which he said were not backed by proper evidence," adds Reuters.
First of all, how many more completely unsubstantiated government agency allegations about
Russian nefariousness are we the public going to accept from the corporate mass media? Since
2016 it's been wall-to-wall narrative about evil things Russia is doing to the empire-like
cluster of allies loosely centralized around the United States, and they all just happen to be
things for which nobody can actually provide hard verifiable evidence.
Ever since the shady
cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike
admitted that it never actually saw hard proof of Russia hacking the DNC servers, the
already shaky and always unsubstantiated narrative that Russian hackers interfered in the
U.S. presidential election in 2016 has been on thinner ice than ever. Yet because the mass
media converged on this narrative and
repeated it as fact over and over they've been able to get the mainstream headline-skimming
public to accept it as an established truth, priming them for an increasingly idiotic litany of
completely unsubstantiated Russia scandals, culminating most recently in the entirely
debunked claim that Russia paid Taliban-linked fighters to kill coalition forces in
Afghanistan.
Secondly, the news story doesn't even claim that these supposed Russian hackers even
succeeded in doing whatever they were supposed to have been doing in this supposed
cyberattack.
"Officials have not commented on whether the attacks were successful but also have not ruled
out that this is the case," Wired reports
.
Thirdly, this is a "vaccine" which does not even exist at this point in time, and the
research which was supposedly hacked may never lead to one. Meanwhile, Sechenov First Moscow
State Medical University
reports that it has "successfully completed tests on volunteers of the world's first
vaccine against coronavirus," in Russia.
Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, how obnoxious and idiotic is it that coronavirus
vaccine "secrets" are even a thing?? This is a global pandemic which is hurting all of us;
scientists should be free to collaborate with other scientists anywhere in the world to find a
solution to this problem. Nobody has any business keeping "secrets" from the world about this
virus or any possible vaccine or treatment. If they do, anyone in the world is well within
their rights to pry those secrets away from them.
This intensely stupid story comes out at the same time British media are blaring stories about Russian
interference in the 2019 election, which if you actually listen carefully to the claims
being advanced amounts to literally nothing more than the assertion that Russians talked about
already leaked documents pertaining to the U.K.'s healthcare system on the internet.
"Russian actors 'sought to interfere' in last winter's general election by amplifying an
illicitly acquired NHS dossier that was seized upon by Labour during the campaign, the foreign
secretary has said,"
reports The Guardian .
"Amplifying." That's literally all there is to this story. As we learned with the ridiculous U.S. Russiagate narrative , with such
allegations, Russia "amplifying" something can mean anything from RT reporting on a
major news story to a Twitter account from St. Petersburg sharing an article from The
Washington Post . Even the
foreign secretary's claim itself explicitly admits that "there is no evidence of a broad
spectrum Russian campaign against the General Election."
"The statement is so foggy and contradictory that it is almost impossible to understand it,"
responded Russia's foreign
ministry to the allegations. "If it's inappropriate to say something then don't say it. If you
say it, produce the facts."
Instead of producing facts you've got the Murdoch press pestering Jeremy Corbyn, the
Labour Party candidate, on his doorstep over this ridiculous non-story, and popular
right-wing outlets like Guido Fawkes running the blatantly false
headline "Government Confirms Corbyn Used Russian-Hacked Documents in 2019 Election." The
completely bogus allegation that the NHS documents came to Jeremy Corbyn by way of Russian
hackers is not made anywhere in the article itself, but for the headline-skimming majority this
makes no difference. And headline skimmers get as many votes as people who read and think
critically.
All this new Cold War Russia hysteria is turning people's brains into guacamole. We've got
to find a way to snap out of the propaganda trance so we can start creating a world that is
based on truth and a desire for peace.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of
Consortium News.
Putin Apologist , July 19, 2020 at 17:50
"How many more completely unsubstantiated government agency allegations about Russian
nefariousness are we the public going to accept from the corporate mass media?"
The Answer is none. Nobody (well, nobody with a brain) believes anything the "corporate
mass media" says about Russia, or China, Iran or Venezuela or anything else for that
matter.
James Keye , July 19, 2020 at 10:26
Guy , July 18, 2020 at 15:32
But,but, but we never heard the words "highly likely" ,they must be slipping.LOL
DH Fabian , July 18, 2020 at 13:41
The Democrat right wing are robotically persistent, and count on the ignorance of their
base. By late last year, we saw them begin setting the stage to blame-away an expected 2020
defeat on Russia. Once again, proving that today's Democrats are just too dangerous to vote
for. Donald Trump owes a great deal to his "friends across the aisle."
There's no way the trillion in T-bills will be seized/defaulted/whatever. The damage to US
credibility will be unrecoverable.
It is certainly crazy time. AG Barr threatened major US corporations Disney & Apple
with having to register as "foreign agents" due to their Chinese investments. Earlier in the
year, the FBI and Congress decided to destroy the career of one of America's top scientists
over failure to submit relatively inconsequential paperwork. These are the types of things
which should result in a determined pushback against an intrusive national security state,
but the balance of power in USA may have flipped.
Neocon presstitutes like Appelbaum (actually a well paid MIC lobbyist in disguise) and MI6
connected criminals like like Browder are the feature of the US political landscape, not a bug. I
actually did laugh at Browder's piece on the BBC though, were a money launderer and tax evader
who left his book keeper to die in a Russian prison telling us we shouldn't trust the
Russians.
US economic problems are greatly enhanced by the tremendous amount of defense expenditures
(outspending the combined next seven leading countries in arms expenditures) and tax payer's
money being wasted on paranoid obsessions likes what's mentioned here: http://markcrispinmiller.com/2020/07/a-visit-from-the-fbi/
The article mentions Steele as a discredited participant but what about Applebaum, or are we
to forget how her Polish husband was demoted by his own government for concocting a story about
Putin offering to split Ukraine with Poland, at an alleged meeting that he was shown to have
never attended. Poland no doubt sanctioned him for fabricating such an easily disproved event,
certainly not out of any such notion as a search for truth.
That said, not having invited even a token moderate voice to this august 'panel of experts'
speaks volumes about either the ignorance, the incompetence, the perfidy or just plain 'We
don't really care what you think. We've done our duty' arrogance of the report's authors.
About the Steele Dossier. From the beginning I was nagged by the question of whether anyone
had seriously dug into its provenance? I mean, the chain of custody is critical in evaluating
evidence, isn't it? But that didn't seem to matter to most conversations about it for the
longest time. The impression was left hanging that Christopher Steele, crackerjack agent, had
got the inside stuff straight from people in or near the Kremlin.
Now we learn that the FBI did interview Steele's main conduit for all those claims --
"Primary Sub-source" -- intensively, for three days, early in the Trump administration. They
just never bothered to release any of their findings to the public, even as the dossier's main
claim -- Trump is a Kremlin agent of long standing, beholden to Putin due to some pee tape
kompromat -- took hold in the American political mind and became an article of faith for some.
Still is.
The FBI notes of that interview were released just a few days ago. And they reveal the
"dossier" had zero original reporting. It was concocted entirely from rumors picked up
second-or-third hand, inventive guesses, drunken conversations with persons of no particular
expertise, pillow talk between the main sub-source and his dependent Russian lady friend, and
fragments of a garbled phone call with a "source" whose identity could not be even
approximately established.
In other words, it's way worse than even I thought. And regular readers of this page know
pretty well what I thought about the likely veracity of the Steele Dossier. That such a
pathetic tissue of speculation, delirium and outright falsehood could capture the American
political imagination and drive debate -- for years! -- is simply astounding.
"Much of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Donald Trump was built on the premise
that Christopher Steele and his dossier were to be believed. This even though, early on,
Steele's claims failed to bear scrutiny. Just how far off the claims were became clear when the
FBI interviewed Steele's "Primary Subsource" over three days beginning on Feb. 9, 2017. Notes
taken by FBI agents of those interviews were released by the Senate Judiciary Committee Friday
afternoon."
There is something rotten in the state .. of England.
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. He was getting
homesick (perhaps his mother getting older is part of this) for Russia and he thought that to
get back to Russia he needed something big to get back in Putin's good graces. He would have
needed something really big because Putin really has no use for traitors. Skripal put out some
feelers (perhaps through his daughter though that may be dicey). The two couriers were sent to
seal or move the deal forward. The Brits (and perhaps the CIA) found out about this and decided
to make an example of Sergei. Perhaps because they found out about this late, the deep
state/intelligence people had to move very quickly. The deep state story was was extremely
shaky (to put it mildly) as a result. Or they were just incompetent and full of hubris.
Then they were stuck with the story and bullshit coverup was layered on bullshit coverup. 7
Reply FlorianGeyer Reply to
Marcus April 20, 2019
@ Marcus.
To hope to get away with lies, one must have perfect memory and a superior intellect that
can create a lie with some semblance of reality in real life, as opposed to the digital
'reality' in a Video game. And a rather corny video game at that.
MI5/6 failed on all parts of Lie creation 2 Reply Mistaron April 21, 2019
If Trump was so furious about being conned by Haspel, how come he then went on to promote
her to becoming the head of the CIA? It's quite perplexing.
Zucker probably was not independent player. Bewkes approval was needed. In any case both are
kind of Hollywood types and animosity to Trump is given. On behalf of NYC Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg , Bewkes was one of
the chairs of Media.NYC.2020, which reviewed the future of the global media industry, the
implications for NYC, and suggested actionable next steps for the NYC government. [12]
A CNN whistleblower leaked video showcasing CNN President Jeff Zucker's vendetta against
President Trump and obsession with pushing stories of impeachment.
"Jeff Zucker, basically the president of CNN has a personal vendetta against Trump," said
Nick Neville, a media coordinator at CNN. "It's not gonna be positive for Trump. He hates him.
He's going to be negative."
The whistleblower identified himself as Cary Poarch, a satellite uplink technician at CNN's
Washington, D.C. bureau.
"When I came to work at CNN, I mean it was my dream job," Poarch said. "And that dream,
actually turned into a nightmare."
Poarch recorded the 9:00 a.m. morning calls held by Zucker, in which he urged CNN employees
to focus on the impeachment narrative.
"Let's just stay very focused on impeachment," Zucker said. "We're moving towards
impeachment. I mean, don't like, you know we shouldn't pretend this is going one way. And so,
all these moves are moves towards impeachment."
Zucker also encouraged CNN employees to report on Fox News as if it were a conspiracy
outlet.
"I think what's going on in America now is really fundamentally the result of years of fake
news, conspiracy nonsense from Fox News," Zucker said. "The fake conspiracy nonsense that Fox
has spread for years is now deeply embedded in American society, and frankly that is beyond
destructive for America. And I do not think we should be scared to say so."
After the release of this video,
Poarch announced he saw no other option but to wear a hidden camera and expose the bias of
CNN. Chrissy Clark is a former staff writer at The Federalist. She has work featured in The
Daily Signal and received a degree in political science from Michigan State University. Follow
her on social media @chrissyclark_. Photo Project Veritas/Twitter
This is not simply projection on the part of UK MI5/MI6 duet, this is a real war on reality.
UK false flag operation with Skripla poisoning (which probably was designed to hide possible role
of Skripal in creating Steele dossier) now will forever be textbook example of evilness MI5/MI6
honchos.
If we think that GRU is the past was able to fight Abwehr to standstill, they really would now be worried
about the blowback from Skripal mess.
A highly-anticipated report by the U.K. Parliament into Russia n interference in the country was
released on Tuesday, claiming that Russian influence in the U.K. is the "new normal."
The Russia Report, published after months of delay, is the culmination of two years of fact
finding by the U.K. Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ICS), providing insights
on the
Salisbury Novichok poisonings , Russian financial influence and social media
disinformation. The report said the U.K. was a "top target" for Russian interference.
The publication of the report comes a week after security services in the U.S., U.K. and
Canada said that Russian hackers had been attempting to
hack into global coronavirus vaccine research . The Kremlin has denied the accusations.
However, the report will likely disappoint observers who expected the ICS to detail
how far Russia interfered in the bitterly contested Brexit Referendum of 2016 . Prime
Minister Boris Johnson's was accused of withholding the publication of the report until after
the election of December 2019, a claim they denied.
"Getting" Flynn was the key to neutering the danger Trump posed to the deep state, since
General Flynn was the one military advisor to Trump who was knowledgeable and who had
recognized the salient fact that, under Obama, the US was employing the "raghead" element to do
their bidding in Syria and elsewhere.
Without Flynn, Trump, who like many has a tendency to accept the views of credentialled
experts, could be convinced to continue the deep state policy of permanent warfare aided by
jihadist barbarians. Trump's tragedy was that he accepted what appeared to be the inevitable
and allowed Flynn to be taken down.
"... There was a deeply held assumption that, when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, these countries would continue their positive democratic and economic transformation. Yet more than a decade later, the region has experienced a steady decline in democratic standards and governance practices at the same time that Russia's economic engagement with the region expanded significantly. ..."
"... Are these developments coincidental, or has the Kremlin sought deliberately to erode the region's democratic institutions through its influence to 'break the internal coherence of the enemy system'? ..."
"... a false flag operation" involving "an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland". There is little in Sharp's book to suggest that non-violent resistance would have had much effect on a really brutal and determined government. He also has the naïve habit of using "democrat" and "dictator" as if these words were as precisely defined as coconuts and codfish. But any "dictatorship" – for example Stalin's is a very complex affair with many shades of opinion in it. So, in terms of what he was apparently trying to do, one can see it only succeeding against rather mild "dictators" presiding over extremely unpopular polities. With a great deal of outside effort and resources. ..."
"... His "playbook" is useful to outside powers that want to overthrow governments they don't like. Especially those run by "dictators" not brutal enough to shoot the protesters down. ..."
Once I'd seen this mention of The Russian Playbook (aka KGB, Kremlin or Putin's Playbook), I
saw the expression all over the place. Here's an early – perhaps the earliest – use
of the term. In October 2016, the Center for Strategic and International studies (" Ranked #1 ") informed us of the "
Kremlin Playbook "
with this ominous beginning
There was a deeply held assumption that, when the countries of Central and Eastern
Europe joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, these countries would continue their
positive democratic and economic transformation. Yet more than a decade later, the region has
experienced a steady decline in democratic standards and governance practices at the same
time that Russia's economic engagement with the region expanded significantly.
And asks
Are these developments coincidental, or has the Kremlin sought deliberately to erode
the region's democratic institutions through its influence to 'break the internal coherence
of the enemy system'?
Well, to these people, to ask the question is to answer it: can't possibly be disappointment
at the gap between 2004's expectations and 2020's reality, can't be that they don't like the
total Western values package that they have to accept, it must be those crafty Russians
deceiving them. This was the earliest reference to The Playbook that I found, but it certainly
wasn't the last.
Of course, all these people are convinced Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential
election. Somehow. To some effect. Never really specified but the latest outburst of insanity
is this video from the
Lincoln Project . As Anatoly Karlin observes: "I think it's really
cool how we Russians took over America just by shitposting online. How does it feel to be
subhuman?" He has a point: the Lincoln Project, and the others shrieking about Russian
interference, take it for granted that American democracy is so flimsy and Americans so
gullible that a few Facebook ads can bring the whole facade down. A curious mental state
indeed.
What can we know about The Playbook? For a start it must be written in Russian, a language
that those crafty Russians insist on speaking among themselves. Secondly such an important
document would be protected the way that highly classified material is protected. There would
be a very restricted need to know; underlings participating in one of the many plays would not
know how their part fitted into The Playbook; few would ever see The Playbook itself. The
Playbook would be brought to the desk of the few authorised to see it by a courier, signed for,
the courier would watch the reader and take away the copy afterwards. The very few copies in
existence would be securely locked away; each numbered and differing subtly from the others so
that, should a leak occur, the authorities would know which copy read by whom had been leaked.
Printed on paper that could not be photographed or duplicated. As much protection as human
cunning could devise; right up there with
the nuclear codes .
And so on. It's all quite ridiculous: we're supposed to believe that Moscow easily controls
far-away countries but can't keep its neighbours under control.
There is no Russian Playbook, that's just projection. But there is a "playbook" and it's
written in English, it's freely available and it's inexpensive enough that every pundit can
have a personal copy: it's named "
From Dictatorship To Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation " and it's written by
Gene Sharp (1928-2018) .
Whatever Sharp may have thought he was doing, whatever good cause he thought he was assisting,
his book has been used as a guide to create regime changes around the world. Billed as
"democracy" and "freedom", their results are not so benign. Witness Ukraine today. Or Libya. Or
Kosovo whose long-time leader has just been indicted for numerous crimes .
Curiously enough, these efforts always take place in countries that resist Washington's line
but never in countries that don't. Here we do see training, financing, propaganda, discord
being sown, divisions exploited to effect regime change – all the things in the imaginary
"Russian Playbook". So, whatever he may have thought he was helping, Sharp's advice has been
used to produce what only the propagandists could call "
model interventions "; to the "liberated" themselves, the reality is poverty , destruction ,
war and
refugees .
Reading Sharp's book, however, makes one wonder if he was just fooling himself. Has there
ever been a "dictatorship" overthrown by "non-violent" resistance along the lines of what he is
suggesting? He mentions Norwegians who resisted Hitler; but Norway was liberated, along with
the rest of Occupied Europe, by extremely violent warfare. While some Jews escaped, most didn't
and it was the conquest of Berlin that saved the rest: the nazi state was killed . The
USSR went away, together with its satellite governments in Europe but that was a top-down
event. He likes Gandhi but Gandhi wouldn't have lasted a minute under Stalin. Otpor was greatly aided by NATO's war
on Serbia. And, they're only "non-violent" because the Western media doesn't talk much about
the violence ;
"non-violent" is not the first word that comes to mind in this video of Kiev 2014 . "Colour revolutions" are
manufactured from existing grievances, to be sure, but with a great deal of outside assistance,
direction and funding; upon inspection, there's much design behind their "spontaneity". And,
not infrequently, with mysterious sniping at a expedient moment – see Katchanovski's
research on the "Heavenly Hundred" of the Maidan showing pretty convincingly that the
shootings were " a false flag operation" involving "an alliance of the far right
organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as
Fatherland". There is little in Sharp's book to suggest that non-violent resistance would have
had much effect on a really brutal and determined government. He also has the naïve habit
of using "democrat" and "dictator" as if these words were as precisely defined as coconuts and
codfish. But any "dictatorship" – for example Stalin's is a very complex affair with many
shades of opinion in it. So, in terms of what he was apparently trying to do, one can see it
only succeeding against rather mild "dictators" presiding over extremely unpopular polities.
With a great deal of outside effort and resources.
The text of the OPCW document is "enhanced" in FT reports. "Sexed up" was the term used
about the UN Weapons Inspectors' report on Iraq's WMD programme way back when.
A Dr. David Kelly was involved. I wonder what became of him?
That term "sexed up" really made me cringe when it suddenly came in vogue amongst UK
commenters and "journalists" .
I was already in exile when the the shit hit the fan in the UK as regards criminal Blair's
warmongering and was at a loss to understand what "sexed up" meant in the British newspaper
articles that I read at the time -- no Internet then, so once a week I used to buy a copy of
the "Sunday Times" (Woden forgive me!) in the foyer of of the five-star Hotel National,
Moscow. Used to cost me an arm and a leg an' all! Robbing bastards!
Tutisicecream
Jul 17, 2020 8:44 AM Yikes! The Ruskies are hacking again! Let's not forget that the British Superb plan for
Brexit was born out of Vova's cunning mind.
From the people who brought you polonium in a teacup, Basha's bouncing Barrel Bombs,
Salisbury Plain Pizza and the Covid- Horrid. Now want you to know Vova is back!
Last weekend they launched their counter move with Luke Harding interviewing himself
about his new book
The decline of the Guardian is legend and one of their supposed ace gumshoes, Luke
Harding, who has been the chief protagonist of the "Stupid Russia/ Cunning Russia" Guardian
editorial line gets this time to interview himself. Displacement in psychology, as I'm sure
Luke must have learnt from his handlers, is where we see in others that which we can't or
fail to recognise in ourselves.
Those CIFers long in the tooth will recall how he moderated his own BTL comments on
Russia until it all got too much for him. At which point they were cancelled. Now it seems
it's all gone to a new level as Harding apparently interviews himself about his new book! In
the Guardian's new post apocalyptic normal, where self censorship plus self promotion is the
norm for their self congratulatory hacks and hackets Harding never fails to amaze at this
genre.
As expected the reader is taken into the usual spy vs spy world of allusion and
narrative plus fake intrigue and facts, so much the hallmark of Harding's work. None of which
stands up to serious analysis as we recall:
where we have Arron Maté, a real journalist doing a superb job of exposing Harding
as the crude propagandist he truly is.
This interview is about Harding's last book "Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and
How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win the 2016 US election".
Now we have a new cash cow where clearly with Harding's latest shtick the Guardian can't
be arsed having him interviewed for another piece of self promotion by one of their hacks. So
they go for the off the shelf fake interview where they allow Harding to talk to himself.
Clearly as they point out Harding is working for home, with more than one foot in the
grave it must be time to furlough him.
The above link exhaustively details how the fraud was perpetrated and how the White
Helmets were funded. The most disturbing facts were the murder of captive Syrian civilians
including children for use as props for Western media. There is little doubt in my mind that
these murders were viewed as standard business practice with the only concern being related
to complication from being caught. Of course, being "caught" was a minor inconvenience that
the MSM could easily manage into oblivion.
Mr. Le Mesurier may have been killed as the White Helmets no longer had value and dead men
rarely talk:
His wife was not very helpful in the investigation having changed her story several
times.
Winberg said she looked for her husband inside the house and saw his lifeless body when
she looked out of the window. Police are investigating now how she was able to wake up about
half an hour after she took a sleeping pill and why she stacked a large amount of money
inside the house into bags immediately after Le Mesurier's body was found.
Among questions that are needed to be addressed in the case is why Le Mesurier, who intended
to sleep, did not change his clothes, did not even loosen his belt or remove his watch. It is
also not known why he did not choose a definitive suicidal action to kill himself, instead of
jumping from a relatively low height and why he chose to walk along the roof, passing around
the air conditioning devices on the roof, instead of jumping to the street directly from the
section of the roof closer to his window.
Not much different from the British public (media). UKgov was in trouble last week for
failing to have their own man as head of the toothless rubberstamping parliamentary
intelligence and security committee, shortly afterwards UKGov amped up 'Russia wot stole our
vaccine' and the whole UK media ran with it, save a couple of articles qustioning the
'timing'.
The thinking the US & UK have in common is that there is no cost to their
lying. They're only thinking of the short term obviously, but they depend on the other to
turn the cheek ignore it as 'domstic politiking.' Last saturday I saw the al-Beeb s'allah
preview of RusAmb interview to be broadcast on Sunday. The anchor had an 'expert' to help
her. Cue cherry brief picked quotes from the interview to make the Ambassador look weak and
the 'expert' saying 'that's what you would expect them to say.'
Today I see that Scotland is now the target, i.e. that Russia 'interfered' with the
independence referendum. It's not even anything goes August yet. This whole year has
been August reporting.
I just cannot see why the US public -- better said, some of the US public. -- fall for
that torrent of verbal diarrhoea that Maddow regularly gushes forth on TV about all things
Russian.
The shite that she so regularly spews out is patently untrue and clearly propagandistic.
Time and time again, the content of "The Rachel Maddow Show" (Why "show" FFS? Is it because
that is what it is -- a distraction, an entertainment vehicle for the uncritical masses?) has
repeatedly been shown to be untrue, but never an apology from Maddow.
Oh, what a surprise! Her paternal grandfather's family name was Medvedev, a Four-by-Two
who fled the Evil (Romanov) Empire and set up shop in the "Land of the Free".
Something that has often puzzled me is this: If the Russian Empire was such a "Prison of
Nations", all crushed by the autocratic state, how come Western Europe and the USA is
swarming with the descendants of the Tsar's former Jewish subjects?
To be fair to Maddow -- though I see no reason why I should be, for she is a lying cnut --
her family background is not really kosher: her mother hails from Newfoundland and is of
English/Irish descent, and one of her grandmother's forebears were from the Netherlands.
Furthermore, Maddow says that she had a conservative Catholic upbringing. I suppose that's
why she's now a liberal lesbian. And guess what: she's a Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford
PhD.
Did Skripal played any role in this mess. In this case his poisoning looks more logical as an attempt to hide him from
Russians, who might well suspect him in playing a role in creating Steele dossier by some myths that were present in it.
Notable quotes:
"... Even Beria would laugh at this kind of "evidence". ..."
Much of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Donald Trump was built on the premise
that Christopher Steele and his dossier were to be believed. This even though, early on,
Steele's claims failed to bear scrutiny. Just how far off the claims were became clear when the
FBI interviewed Steele's "Primary Subsource" over three days beginning on Feb. 9, 2017.
Notes taken by FBI agents of those interviews were released by the Senate Judiciary
Committee Friday afternoon.
The Primary Subsource was in reality Steele's sole source, a long-time Russian-speaking
contractor for the former British spy's company, Orbis Business Intelligence. In turn, the
Primary Subsource had a group of friends in Russia. All of their names remain redacted. From
the FBI interviews it becomes clear that the Primary Subsource and his friends peddled
warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence
memos.
Paul Manafort: The Steele dossier's "Primary Subsource" admitted to the FBI "that he was
'clueless' about who Manafort was, and that this was a 'strange task' to have been given." AP
Photo/Seth Wenig, File
Steele's operation didn't rely on great expertise, to judge from the Primary Subsource's
account. He described to the FBI the instructions Steele had given him sometime in the spring
of 2016 regarding Paul Manafort: "Do you know [about] Manafort? Find out about Manafort's
dealings with Ukraine, his dealings with other countries, and any corrupt schemes." The Primary
Subsource admitted to the FBI "that he was 'clueless' about who Manafort was, and that this was
a 'strange task' to have been given."
The Primary Subsource said at first that maybe he had asked some of his friends in Russia
– he didn't have a network of sources, according to his lawyer, but instead just a
"social circle." And a boozy one at that: When the Primary Subsource would get together with
his old friend Source 4, the two would drink heavily. But his social circle was no help with
the Manafort question and so the Primary Subsource scrounged up a few old news clippings about
Manafort and fed them back to Steele.
Also in his "social circle" was Primary Subsource's friend "Source 2," a character who was
always on the make. "He often tries to monetize his relationship with [the Primary Subsource],
suggesting that the two of them should try and do projects together for money," the Primary
Subsource told the FBI (a caution that the Primary Subsource would repeat again and again.) It
was Source 2 who "told [the Primary Subsource] that there was compromising material on
Trump."
And then there was Source 3, a very special friend. Over a redacted number of years, the
Primary Subsource has "helped out [Source 3] financially." She stayed with him when visiting
the United States. The Primary Subsource told the FBI that in the midst of their conversations
about Trump, they would also talk about "a private subject." (The FBI agents, for all their
hardnosed reputation, were too delicate to intrude by asking what that "private subject"
was).
Michael Cohen: The bogus story of the Trump fixer's trip to Prague seems to have originated
with "Source 3," a woman friend of the Primary Subsource, who was "not sure if Source 3 was
brainstorming here." AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File
One day Steele told his lead contractor to get dirt on five individuals. By the time he got
around to it, the Primary Subsource had forgotten two of the names, but seemed to recall Carter
Page, Paul Manafort and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. The Primary Subsource said he asked his
special friend Source 3 if she knew any of them. At first she didn't. But within minutes she
seemed to recall having heard of Cohen, according to the FBI notes. Indeed, before long it came
back to her that she had heard Cohen and three henchmen had gone to Prague to meet with
Russians.
Source 3 kept spinning yarns about Michael Cohen in Prague. For example, she claimed Cohen
was delivering "deniable cash payments" to hackers. But come to think of it, the Primary
Subsource was "not sure if Source 3 was brainstorming here," the FBI notes say.
The Steele Dossier would end up having authoritative-sounding reports of hackers who had
been "recruited under duress by the FSB" -- the Russian security service -- and how they "had
been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct
'altering operations' against the the Democratic Party." What exactly, the FBI asked the
subject, were "altering operations?" The Primary Subsource wouldn't be much help there, as he
told the FBI "that his understanding of this topic (i.e. cyber) was 'zero.'" But what about his
girlfriend whom he had known since they were in eighth grade together? The Primary Subsource
admitted to the FBI that Source 3 "is not an IT specialist herself."
And then there was Source 6. Or at least the Primary Subsource thinks it was Source 6.
Ritz-Carlton Moscow: The Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI "he had not been able to
confirm the story" about Trump and prostitutes at the hotel. But he did check with someone who
supposedly asked a hotel manager, who said that with celebrities, "one never knows what they're
doing." Moscowjob.net/Wikimedia
While he was doing his research on Manafort, the Primary Subsource met a U.S. journalist "at
a Thai restaurant." The Primary Subsource didn't want to ask "revealing questions" but managed
to go so far as to ask, "Do you [redacted] know anyone who can talk about all of this
Trump/Manafort stuff, or Trump and Russia?" According to the FBI notes, the journalist told
Primary Subsource "that he was skeptical and nothing substantive had turned up." But the
journalist put the Primary Subsource in touch with a "colleague" who in turn gave him an email
of "this guy" journalist 2 had interviewed and "that he should talk to."
With the email address of "this guy" in hand, the Primary Subsource sent him a message "in
either June or July 2016." Some weeks later the Primary Subsource "received a telephone call
from an unidentified Russia guy." He "thought" but had no evidence that the mystery "Russian
guy" was " that guy." The mystery caller "never identified himself." The Primary Subsource
labeled the anonymous caller "Source 6." The Primary Subsource and Source 6 talked for a total
of "about 10 minutes." During that brief conversation they spoke about the Primary Subsource
traveling to meet the anonymous caller, but the hook-up never happened.
Nonetheless, the Primary Subsource labeled the unknown Russian voice "Source 6" and gave
Christopher Steele the rundown on their brief conversation – how they had "a general
discussion about Trump and the Kremlin" and "that it was an ongoing relationship." For use in
the dossier, Steele named the voice Source E.
When Steele was done putting this utterly unsourced claim into the style of the dossier,
here's how the mystery call from the unknown guy was presented: "Speaking in confidence to a
compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US
presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of
co-operation between them and the Russian leadership." Steele writes "Inter alia," – yes,
he really does deploy the Latin formulation for "among other things" – "Source E
acknowledged that the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail
messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee [DNC], to the WikiLeaks
platform."
All that and more is presented as the testimony of a "close associate" of Trump, when it was
just the disembodied voice of an unknown guy.
Perhaps even more perplexing is that the FBI interviewers, knowing that Source E was just an
anonymous caller, didn't compare that admission to the fantastical Steele bluster and declare
the dossier a fabrication on the spot.
But perhaps it might be argued that Christopher Steele was bringing crack investigative
skills of his own to bear. For something as rich in detail and powerful in effect as the
dossier, Steele must have been researching these questions himself as well, using his
hard-earned spy savvy to pry closely held secrets away from the Russians. Or at the very least
he must have relied on a team of intelligence operatives who could have gone far beyond the
obvious limitations the Primary Subsource and his group of drinking buddies.
But no. As we learned in December from Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Steele "was not
the originating source of any of the factual information in his reporting." Steele, the IG
reported "relied on a primary sub-source (Primary Sub-source) for information, and this Primary
Sub-source used a network of [further] sub-sources to gather the information that was relayed
to Steele." The inspector general's report noted that "neither Steele nor the Primary
Sub-source had direct access to the information being reported."
One might, by now, harbor some skepticism about the dossier. One might even be inclined to
doubt the story that Trump was "into water sports" as the Primary Subsource so delicately
described the tale of Trump and Moscow prostitutes. But, in this account, there was an effort,
however feeble, to nail down the "rumor and speculation" that Trump engaged in "unorthodox
sexual activity at the Ritz."
While the Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI "he had not been able to confirm the story,"
Source 2 (who will be remembered as the hustler always looking for a lucrative score)
supposedly asked a hotel manager about Trump and the manager said that with celebrities, "one
never knows what they're doing." One never knows – not exactly a robust proof of
something that smacks of urban myth. But the Primary Subsource makes the best of it, declaring
that at least "it wasn't a denial."
If there was any denial going on it was the FBI's, an agency in denial that its
extraordinary investigation was crumbling.
bh2, 23 minutes ago
Even Beria would laugh at this kind of "evidence".
So Russia started to suspect him and British staged this fun show with Novichok ?
Heavily drinking individuals are probably common in London Russian emigrant circles.
‘Duckgate’, as it is now being dubbed, was used to trick US President Trump into expelling 60 Russian Diplomats over false
photographic evidence presented to him by Haspel, as it was provided to her by UK authorities. The manipulation of Trump, courtesy
of CIA Director Haspel, the UK government (and accidentally documented on by the NYT), had blown first serious holes into the
entire narrative that Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by Russian agents with the deadly Novichok nerve agent.
"Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the
Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were
inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives "
Notable quotes:
"... The Primary Subsource was in reality Steele’s sole source, a long-time Russian-speaking contractor for the former British spy’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence. In turn, the Primary Subsource had a group of friends in Russia. All of their names remain redacted. From the FBI interviews it becomes clear that the Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos. ..."
The Primary Subsource was in reality Steele’s sole source, a long-time Russian-speaking contractor for the former British
spy’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence. In turn, the Primary Subsource had a group of friends in Russia. All of their names
remain redacted. From the FBI interviews it becomes clear that the Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors
and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos.
...Steele’s operation didn’t rely on great expertise, to judge from the Primary Subsource’s account. He described to
the FBI the instructions Steele had given him sometime in the spring of 2016 regarding Paul Manafort: “Do you know [about]
Manafort? Find out about Manafort’s dealings with Ukraine, his dealings with other countries, and any corrupt schemes.” The
Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI “that he was ‘clueless’ about who Manafort was, and that this was a ‘strange task’ to have
been given.”
The Primary Subsource said at first that maybe he had asked some of his friends in Russia – he didn’t have a network of sources,
according to his lawyer, but instead just a “social circle.” And a boozy one at that: When the Primary Subsource would get
together with his old friend Source 4, the two would drink heavily. But his social circle was no help with the Manafort question
and so the Primary Subsource scrounged up a few old news clippings about Manafort and fed them back to Steele.
bh2 , 23 minutes ago
Even Beria would laugh at this kind of "evidence".
Versengetorix, 1 hour ago remove
The Durham investigation has been covered over with asphalt.
ze_vodka , 1 hour ago
After all that has happened, if anyone actually still thinks the Trump = Putin story has
any shred of truth... well... there are no words left to write about that.
It was a lie.
Everyone involved is pretty much a seditious traitor.
Everyone who has at least 1 lonely marble floating in the Grey Matter Soup knows it's a
lie.
The establishment's massive propaganda campaigns and psyops CANCEL the truth or make it
unrecognizable via coloring and half-truths. Russiagate, White Helmets, Skripals, MH-17,
Integrity Initiative, Assange, Russian Bounties & remaining in Afghanistan, "China
virus", hydroxyChloroquine, etc.
The Trump Administration has CANCELED entire countries via terminating peace treaties,
imposing sanctions, covert war, and conducting a propaganda war.
Where is the outrage from writers, artists, and academics about THAT?
"... While cozying up to Putin on a personal level, Trump has actually taken a harder line against Russia than his predecessors, to the detriment of people in both countries. The President canceled two arms treaties, imposed sanctions on Moscow, and sent Javelin missiles to Ukraine. ..."
"... Defense industries make billions from government contracts. Former military officers and State Department officials rake in six-figure incomes sitting on corporate boards. Aspiring secretaries of state and defense strut their stuff at think tank conferences and, until the pandemic, at alcohol-fueled, black tie events in Washington. ..."
"... "There's an entire infrastructure influencing policy," says Hoh, who had an inside seat during his years with the government. ..."
"... And that's what the current Russia-Taliban scandal is all about: An unreliable Afghan report is blown into a national controversy in hopes of forcing the White House to cancel the Afghan troop withdrawal. Demonizing Russia (along with China and Iran) also justifies revamping the US nuclear arsenal and building advanced fighter jets that can't fly . ..."
On June 26, in a major front page story, The New York Times
wrote that Russia paid a bounty to the Taliban to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan last
year. The story quickly unraveled.
While the military is investigating the allegations, Mark Miley, chair of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff says
there's no proof that Russian payments led to any US deaths. The National Security Agency
says it found
no communications intelligence supporting the bounty claim.
Marine Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., head of the US Central Command, says he's not
convinced that American troops died as a result of Russian bounties.
"I just didn't find that there was a causative link there," he
tellsThe Washington Post .
Sina Toossi, senior research analyst at the National Iranian American Council, tells me
the controversy reveals an internecine battle within the foreign policy establishment. "Many
in the national security establishment in Washington are searching for reasons to keep US
troops in Afghanistan," Toossi says. "This story plays into those broader debates."
Troop withdrawal?
Faced with no end to its unpopular war in Afghanistan, the Trump Administration negotiated an agreement with
the Taliban in February. Washington agreed to gradually pull out troops, and the Taliban
promised not to attack US personnel.
The Taliban and Afghan government are supposed to hold peace talks and release prisoners
of war. The US troop withdrawal won't be completed until May 2021, giving the administration
in power the ability to renege on the deal.
Nevertheless, powerful members of the Afghan intelligence elite and some in the US
national security establishment strongly object to the agreement and want to keep US troops
in the country permanently.
Matthew Hoh, who worked for the State Department in Afghanistan and is now a senior fellow
with the Center for
International Policy , tells me that the reports of Russian bounties likely originated
with the Afghanistan intelligence agency.
"The mention of Russia was a key word," says Hoh. CIA officials fast-tracked the Afghan
reports. They argued that Russia's interference, and Trump's failure to respond, only
emboldens the Russians.
Originally, the Times
claimed $500,000 in Russian bounty money was seized at the home of a Taliban operative
named Rahmatullah Azizi. He turned out to be an Afghan drug smuggler who had previously
worked as a contractor
for Washington.
The Times later admitted that
investigators "could not say for sure that it was bounty money."
Hoh says the alleged bounties make no sense politically or militarily. Last year, he says,
"The Taliban didn't need any incentives to kill Americans." And this year, it has stopped all
attacks on US forces as part of the February agreement.
But leading Democrats ignore the unraveling of the story in a rush to attack the White
House from the right. Joe Biden reached deep into his Cold War tool box to blast Trump.
"Not only has he failed to sanction or impose any kind of consequences on Russia for this
egregious violation of international law, Donald Trump has continued his embarrassing
campaign of deference and debasing himself before Vladimir Putin," Biden
told a town hall meeting.
Demonizing Russia
While cozying up to Putin on a personal level, Trump has actually taken a harder line
against Russia than his predecessors, to the detriment of people in both countries. The
President canceled
two arms treaties,
imposed sanctions on Moscow, and
sent Javelin missiles to Ukraine.
Both high-ranking Republicans and Democrats benefit politically by creating an evil
Russian enemy, according to Vladimir Pozner, Putin critic and host of a popular Russian TV
interview program.
The bounty accusation "keeps the myth alive of Putin and Russia being a vicious,
cold-blooded enemy of the US," Pozner tells me.
Some call it the foreign policy establishment; others say the national security state or
simply the Deep State. A group of officials in the Pentagon, State Department, intelligence
agencies and war industries have played an outsized role in foreign policy for decades. And
it's not out of the goodness of their hearts.
Defense industries make billions from government contracts. Former military officers and
State Department officials rake in six-figure incomes sitting on corporate boards. Aspiring
secretaries of state and defense strut their stuff at think tank conferences and, until the
pandemic, at alcohol-fueled, black tie events in Washington.
"There's an entire infrastructure influencing policy," says Hoh, who had an inside seat
during his years with the government.
The Deep State is not monolithic, he cautions. "You won't find a backroom with guys
smoking cigars. But there is a notion of US primacy and a bent towards military
intervention."
And that's what the current Russia-Taliban scandal is all about: An unreliable Afghan
report is blown into a national controversy in hopes of forcing the White House to cancel the
Afghan troop withdrawal. Demonizing Russia (along with China and Iran) also justifies
revamping the US nuclear arsenal and building advanced fighter jets that
can't fly .
"It's Russia hysteria," says Hoh.
Afghans suffer
While the Washington elite wage internal trench warfare, the people of Afghanistan suffer.
More than 100,000 Afghans have died because of the war, with 10,000
casualties each year, according to the United Nations . The Pentagon
reports 2,219 US soldiers
died and 20,093 were wounded in the Afghan war.
A lesser imperialist power, Russia has its own interests in Afghanistan. It has taken
advantage of the US decline in the region to expand influence in Syria and Libya.
According to Pozner, Russia doesn't favor a Taliban government in Afghanistan. The Kremlin
considers the Taliban a dangerous terrorist organization. But if the Taliban comes to power,
Pozner says, "Russia would like to have stable relations with them. You have to take things
as they are and build as good a relationship as possible."
Neither Russia nor any other outside power has the means or desire to control Afghanistan.
At best, they hope for a stable neighbor, not one trying to spread extremism in the
region.
That's been the stated US goal for years. Ironically, it can't be achieved until US troops
withdraw.
Reese Erlich's nationally distributed column, Foreign Correspondent, appears every two
weeks. Follow him onTwitter, @ReeseErlich; friend him onFacebook; and visit hiswebpage.
Kinda like a digital form of chlamydia combined with binary syphilis , it never seems to wanna go away no matter how many times
you treat it.
alex kalish , 1 hour ago
Oh Yahoo News - why does ZH reprint blatant crap ? Is their source Christopher Steele ? LMAO. A 17 year old pimple face kid
could hack the CIA and they are going on the offensive ? They may blow up Hoover damn or shut down the electric grid by mistake....
Encroaching Darkness , 1 hour ago
********, top to bottom.
(A) Yahoo news - seriously, Yahoo news?
(B) Brennan wanted to overthrow Flynn / Trump - his proteges are still roaming through the agency. Why would Trump trust Brennan's
underlings to hold a cookout at Langley, let alone unsupervised operations?
(C) Why MUST the CIA be responsible for Iran's explosions? Aren't the Israelis (with much higher motivation, closer location
and more contacts) capable of doing this all by themselves?
Article full of unsupported and unsupportable assumptions, from a pseudo-news organization, trying to blame Trump for Iranian
incompetence. Major fail!
DaBard51 , 1 hour ago
The source is... Yahoo News? Yahoo News is the new "Paper of Record"?
The same Yahoo News that "corroborated" the Steele dossier?
A top government watchdog group obtained 136 pages of never before publicized emails between
former FBI lovers
Peter Strzok and
Lisa Page and one in particular appears to refer to a confidential informant inside the
White House in 2017, according to a press release from
Judicial Watch .
Those emails, some of which are heavily redacted, reveal that "Strzok, Page and top bureau
officials in the days prior to and following
President Donald Trump's inauguration discussing a White House counterintelligence briefing
that could "play into" the
FBI's "investigative strategy."
Majority Say They Want to See Trump's Taxes, Many Think Returns Would Hurt Reelection
Chances
White House Reportedly Moves to Make Coronavirus Cases Private by Cutting Out
CDC
Trump White House Reportedly Conducting 'Loyalty' Interviews of Officials,
Appointees
Majority Don't Trust Trump's Public Messages on COVID-19, Disapproval on Pandemic Response
Hits 60%
Trump's Niece Says She's Heard Him Use the N-Word, Anti-Semitic Slurs
Trump Administration is Reportedly Out to Smear Dr. Anthony Fauci for Early Comments on
Coronavirus
Trump Refuses To Unveil Obama's Portrait At The White House
White House Testing Staff For COVID-19, But Are Results Accurate?
Moreover, another email sent by Strzok to Bill
Priestap, the Former Assistant Director for the Counterintelligence Division, refers to
what appears to be a confidential informant in the White House. The email was sent the day
after Trump's inauguration.
"I heard from [redacted] about the WH CI briefing routed from [redacted]," wrote Strzok. "
I am angry that Jen did not at least cc: me, as my branch has pending investigative matters
there, this brief may play into our investigative strategy, and I would like the ability to
have visibility and provide thoughts/counsel to you in advance of the briefing. This is one
of the reasons why I raised the issue of lanes/responsibilities that I did when you asked her
to handle WH detailee interaction."
In April, 2019 this reporter first published information that there was an alleged
confidential informant for the FBI in the White House. In fact, then senior Republican Chairmen
of the Senate Appropriations Committee
Charles Grassley and Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson submitted a
letter to Department of Justice Attorney General William Barr revealing the new texts from
Strzok to Page showing the pair had discussed attempts to recruit sources within the White
House to allegedly spy on the Trump administration.
The Chairmen revealed the information in a three page letter. The texts had been already
been obtained by SaraACarter.com and information regarding the possible attempt to recruit
White House sources had been divulged by several sources to this news site last week.
At the time, texts obtained by this news site and sources stated that Strzok had one
significant contact within the White House – at the time that would have been Vice
President Mike Pence's Chief of Staff Joshua Pitcock,
as reported.
Over the past year, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, along with years
of numerous Congressional investigations, has uncovered a plethora of documentation revealing
the most intimate details of the FBI's now debunked investigation into Trump's campaign and its
alleged conspiracy with Russia.
For example, in a series of emails exchanged by top bureau officials – in the FBI
General Counsel's office, Counterintelligence Division and Washington Field office on Jan. 19,
2017 – reveal that senior leadership, including former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were
coordinating with each other in their ongoing attempt to target the incoming administration.
Priestap was also included in the email exchanges. The recent discovery in April, of Priestap's
handwritten notes taken in January, 2017 before the Strzok and his FBI partner interviewed
Flynn were a bombshell. In Priestap's notes he states, "What's our goal? Truth/Admission or to
get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?"
In one recent email chain obtained by Judicial Watch, FBI assistant general counsel in the
FBI's National Security Law Branch stated in an email to Strzok [which was almost entirely
redacted]
"I'll give Trisha/Baker a heads up too," it stated. Strzok's reply to the assistant
general counsel, however, was redacted by DOJ. The response back to Strzok has also been
redacted.
Then later in the evening at 7:04 p.m., Strzok sends another emails stating, "I briefed
Bill (Priestap) this afternoon and he was trying without success to reach the DD [McCabe]. I
will forward below to him as his [sic] changes the timeline. What's your recommendation?"
The reply, like many of the documents obtained by Judicial Watch from the DOJ, is almost
entirely redacted. The email response to Strzok was from the Counterintelligence
Division.
Here's what was not redacted
"Approved by tomorrow afternoon is the request. [Redacted] – please advise if I am
missing something." An unidentified official replies, "[Redacted], Bill is aware and willing
to jump in when we need him."
Judicial Watch Timeline of Events On Emails Obtained Through FOIA
At 8 p.m., Strzok responds back (copying officials in the Counterintelligence Division,
Washington Field Office and General Counsel's office):
"Just talked with Bill. [Redacted]. Please relay above to WFO and [redacted] tonight, and
keep me updated with plan for meet and results of same. Good luck."
Strzok then forwards the whole email exchange to Lisa Page, saying, "Bill spoke with Andy.
[Redacted.] Here we go again "
The Day After Trump's Inauguration
The day after Trump's inauguration, on Jan. 21, 2017, Strzok forwarded Page and [a redacted
person] an
email he'd sent that day to Priestap. Strzok asked them to "not forward/share."
In the email to Priestap, Strzok said, "I heard from [redacted] about the WH CI briefing
routed from [redacted]. I am angry that Jen did not at least cc: me, as my branch has pending
investigative matters there, this brief may play into our investigative strategy , and I would
like the ability to have visibility and provide thoughts/counsel to you in advance of the
briefing. This is one of the reasons why I raised the issue of lanes/responsibilities that I
did when you asked her to handle WH detailee interaction."
" Also, on January 21, 2017, Strzok wrote largely the same message
he'd sent to Priestap directly to his counterintelligence colleague Jennifer Boone ," states
Judicial Watch.
The records were produced to Judicial Watch in a January 2018 Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA)
lawsuit filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a December 2017 request for all
communications between Strzok and Page ( Judicial
Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00154)).
The FBI has only processed emails at a rate of 500 pages per month and has yet to process
text messages. At this rate, the production of these communications, which still number around
8,000 pages, would not be completed until at least late 2021.
In other emails, Strzok comments on reporting on the anti-Trump dossier authored by Hillary
Clinton's paid operative Christopher Steele.
In a January 2017 email ,
Strzok takes issue with a UK Independent report which claimed Steele had suspected there was a
"cabal" within the FBI which put the Clinton email investigation above the Trump-Russia probe.
Strzok, a veteran counterintelligence agent, was at the heart of both the Clinton email and
Trump-Russia investigations.
In April and June of 2017, the FBI would use the dossier as key evidence in obtaining FISA
warrants to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page. In a declassified
summary of a Department of Justice assessment of the warrants that was released by the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in January of this year, it was determined that
those two applications to secretly monitor Page lacked probable cause.
The newly released records include a January 11, 2017, email
from Strzok to Lisa Page, Priestap, and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Jon
Moffa, a New York Times report
which refers to the dossier as containing "unsubstantiated accounts" and "unproven claims." In
the email, Strzok comments on the article, calling it "Pretty good reporting."
On January 14, 2017, FBI Assistant Director for Public Affairs Michael Kortan forwards
to Strzok, Page and Priestap a link to a UK
Independent article entitled "Former MI6 Agent Christopher Steele's Frustration as FBI Sat
On Donald Trump Russia File for Months".
The article, citing security sources, notes that "Steele became increasingly frustrated that
the FBI was failing to take action on the intelligence from others as well as him. He came to
believe there was a cover-up: that a cabal within the Bureau blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr
Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Clinton's emails."
Strzok responds: "Thanks Mike. Of course not accurate [the cover-up/cabal nonsense]. Is that
question gaining traction anywhere else?"
The records also include a February 10, 2017, email
from Strzok to Page mentioning then-national security adviser Michael Flynn (five days before
Flynn resigned) and includes a photo of Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Strzok
also makes a joke about how McCabe had fat shamed Kislyak.
On February 8, 2017, Strzok, under the subject "RE: EO on Economic Espionage," emailed
Lisa Page, saying, "Please let [redacted] know I talked to [redacted]. Tonight, he approached
Flynn's office and got no information." Strzok was responding to a copy of an email Page had
sent him. The email, from a redacted FBI official to Deputy Director McCabe read: "OPS has not
received a draft EO on economic espionage. Instead, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce advised OPS
that they received a draft, but they did not send us the draft. I'll follow up with our
detailees about this EO." Flynn resigned
on February 13, 2017.
On January 26, 2017, Nancy McNamara of the FBI's Inspection Division emailed
Strzok and Priestap with the subject line "Leak," saying, "Tried calling you but the phones are
forwarded to SIOC. I got the tel call report, however [redacted]. Feel free to give me a call
if I have it wrong." Strzok forwarded the McNamara email to Lisa Page and an unidentified
person in the General Counsel's office, saying, "Need to talk to you about how to respond to
this."
On January 11, 2017, Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff emailed
Kortan, saying he'd learned that Steele had worked for the Bureau's Eurasian organized crime
section and had turned over the dossier on Trump-Russian "collusion" to the bureau in Rome.
Kortan forwards Isikoff's email to aide Richard Quinn, who forwards to Strzok "just for
visibility". Strzok forwards to his boss, Priestap and Moffa, saying, "FYI, [redacted], you or
I should probably inform [redacted]. How's your relationship with him? Bill unless you object,
I'll let Parmaan [presumably senior FBI official Bryan Paarmann] know." Strzok forwards the
whole exchange onto Lisa Page.
On January 18, 2017, reporter Peter Elkind of ProPublica reached
out to Kortan, asking to interview Strzok, Michael Steinbach, Jim Baker, Priestap, former
FBI Director James Comey and DEA administrator Chuck Rosenberg for a story Elkind was working
on. Kortan replied, "Okay, I will start organizing things." Further along in the thread, an FBI
Press Office official reached out to an FBI colleague for assistance with the interviews,
saying Steinbach had agreed to a "background discussion" with Elkind, who was "writing the
'definitive' account of what happened during the Clinton investigation, specifically, Comey's
handling of the investigation, seeking to reconstruct and explain in much greater detail what
he did and why he did it." In May 2017, Elkind wrote an
article titled "The Problems With the FBI's Email Investigation Went Well Beyond Comey,"
which in light of these documents, strongly suggests many FBI officials leaked to the
publication.
Strzok ended up being scheduled
to meet with Elkind at 9:30 a.m. on January 31, 2017, before an Elkind interview of Comey's
chief of staff Jim Rybicki. Elkind's reporting on the Clinton email investigation was discussed
at length in previous
emails obtained by Judicial Watch.
"These documents suggest that President Trump was targeted by the Comey FBI as soon as he
stepped foot in the Oval Office," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "And now we see how
the Comey FBI was desperate to spin, through high-level leaks, its mishandling of the Clinton
email investigation. And, in a continuing outrage, it should be noted that Wray's FBI and
Barr's DOJ continue slow-walk the release of thousands of Page-Strzok emails – which
means the remaining 8,000 pages of records won't be reviewed and released until 2021-2022!"
In February 2020, Judicial Watch
uncovered an August 2016 email in which Strzok says that Clinton, in her interview with the
FBI about her email controversy, apologized for "the work and effort" it caused the bureau and
she said she chose to use it "out of convenience" and that "it proved to be anything but."
Strzok said Clinton's apology and the "convenience" discussion were "not in" the FBI 302 report
that summarized the interview.
Also in February, Judicial Watch made public Strzok-Page emails showing their direct
involvement in the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the bureau's investigation of alleged
collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The records also show additional "confirmed
classified emails" were found on Clinton's unsecure non-state.gov email server "beyond the number presented" in
then-FBI Director James Comey's statements; Strzok and Page questioning the access the DOJ was
granting Clinton's lawyers; and Page revealing that the DOJ was making edits to FBI 302 reports
related to the Clinton Midyear Exam investigation. The emails detail a discussion about
"squashing" an issue related to the Seth Rich controversy.
In January 2020, Judicial Watch
uncovered Strzok-Page emails that detail special accommodations given to the lawyers of
Clinton and her aides during the FBI investigation of the Clinton email controversy.
In November 2019, Judicial Watch
revealed Strzok-Page emails that show the attorney representing three of Clinton's aides
were given meetings with senior FBI officials.
Also in November, Judicial Watch
uncovered emails revealing that after Clinton's statement denying the transmission of
classified information over her unsecure email system, Strzok sent an email to FBI officials
citing "three [Clinton email] chains" containing (C) [classified] portion marks in front of
paragraphs."
In a related case, in May 2020, Judicial Watch received the " electronic
communication " (EC) that officially launched the counterintelligence investigation, termed
"Crossfire Hurricane," of President Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The document was
written by former FBI official Peter Strzok.
Does Cancel Culture intersect with Woke? The former's not mentioned in
this fascinating essay , but the latter is and appears to deserve some unpacking beyond
what Crooke provides.
As for the letter, it's way overdue by 40+ years. I recall reading Bloom's The Closing
of the American Mind and Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism where they say
much the same.
What's most irksome are the lies that now substitute for discourse--Trump or someone from
his admin lies, then the WaPost, NY Times, MSNBC, Fox, and others fire back with their lies.
And to top everything off--There's ZERO accountability: people who merit "canceling" continue
to lie and commit massive fraud.
The Chinese and Russian Foreign Ministers just jointly agreed in a rare published account
of their phone conversation that the Outlaw US Empire " has lost its sense of reason,
morality and credibility .
Yes, they were specifically referring to the government, but I'd include the Empire's
institutions as well. In the face of that reality, the letter is worse than a joke.
"... Not to be outdone, the censors are also taking aim at To Kill a Mockingbird , Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Atticus Finch, a white lawyer in the Jim Crow South who defends a black man falsely accused of rape. Sixty years after its debut, the book remains a powerful testament to moral courage in the face of racial bigotry and systemic injustice , told from the point of view of a child growing up in the South, but that's not enough for the censors. They want to axe the book -- along with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- from school reading curriculums because of the presence of racial slurs that could make students feel "humiliated or marginalized." ..."
"... What started with Joseph McCarthy's headline-grabbing scare tactics in the 1950s about Communist infiltrators of American society snowballed into a devastating witch hunt once corporations and the American people caught the fever. ..."
"... McCarthyism was a contagion, like the plague, spreading like wildfire among people too fearful or weak or gullible or paranoid or greedy or ambitious to denounce it for what it was: an opportunistic scare tactic engineered to make the government more powerful. ..."
"... Battlefield America: The War on the American People ..."
For those old enough to have lived through the McCarthy era, there is a whiff of something
in the air that reeks of the heightened paranoia, finger-pointing, fear-mongering, totalitarian
tactics that were hallmarks of the 1950s.
Back then, it was the government -- spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House
Un-American Activities Committee -- working in tandem with private corporations and individuals
to blacklist Americans suspected of being communist sympathizers.
By the time the witch hunts carried out by federal and state investigative agencies drew to
a close, thousands of individuals (
the vast majority of them innocent any crime whatsoever ) had been accused of communist
ties, investigated, subpoenaed and blacklisted. Regarded as bad risks, the accused were
blacklisted, and struggled to secure employment. The witch hunt ruined careers, resulting in
suicides, and tightened immigration to exclude alleged subversives.
Seventy years later, the vitriol, fear-mongering and knee-jerk intolerance associated with
McCarthy's tactics are once again being deployed in a free-for-all attack by those on both the
political Left and Right against anyone who, in daring to think for themselves, subscribes to
ideas or beliefs that run counter to the government's or mainstream thought
It doesn't even seem to matter what the issue is anymore (racism, Confederate monuments,
Donald Trump, COVID-19, etc.): modern-day activists are busily tearing down monuments,
demonizing historic figures, boycotting corporations for perceived political transgressions,
and using their bully pulpit to terrorize the rest of the country into kowtowing to their
demands
All the while, the American police state continues to march inexorably forward.
This is how fascism, which silences all dissenting views, prevails.
The silence is becoming deafening.
After years of fighting in and out of the courts to keep their 87-year-old name, the NFL's
Washington Redskins have bowed to public pressure and will
change their name and team logo to avoid causing offense . The new name, not yet announced,
aims to honor both the military and Native Americans.
Who needs a government censor when the American people are already doing such a great job at
censoring themselves and each other, right?
Now there's a push underway to
boycott Goya Foods after its CEO, Robert Unanue, praised President Trump during a press
conference to announce Goya's donation of a million cans of Goya chickpeas and a million other
food products to American food banks as part of the president's Hispanic Prosperity
Initiative.
Mind you, Unanue -- whose grandfather emigrated to the U.S. from Spain -- also praised the
Obamas when they were in office, but that kind of equanimity doesn't carry much weight in this
climate of intolerance.
This is also the overlooked part of how oppression becomes systemic: it comes about as a
result of a combined effort between the populace, the corporations and the government.
McCarthyism worked the same way.
What started with Joseph McCarthy's headline-grabbing scare tactics in the 1950s about
Communist infiltrators of American society snowballed into a devastating witch hunt once
corporations and the American people caught the fever.
McCarthyism was a contagion, like the plague, spreading like wildfire among people too
fearful or weak or gullible or paranoid or greedy or ambitious to denounce it for what it was:
an opportunistic scare tactic engineered to make the government more powerful.
The parallels to the present movement cannot be understated.
The contagion of fear that McCarthy helped spread with the help of government agencies,
corporations and the power elite is still poisoning the well, whitewashing our history, turning
citizen against citizen, and stripping us of our rights.
What we desperately need is the kind of resolve embodied by Edward R. Murrow, the
most-respected newsman of his day.
On March 9, 1954, Murrow dared to speak truth to power about the damage McCarthy was
inflicting on the American people. His message remains a timely warning for our age.
We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of
unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine; and remember that we are not
descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to
defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.
America is approaching another reckoning right now, one that will pit our commitment to
freedom principles against a level of fear-mongering that is being used to wreak havoc on
everything in its path.
The outcome rests, as always, with "we the people." As Murrow said to his staff before the
historic March 9 broadcast: "No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his
accomplices."
Feature photo | Nehemiah Nuk Nuk Johnson, left, with JUICE (Justice Unites Individuals and
Communities Everywhere), confronts a counter protester who did not give his name in Martinez,
Calif., July 12, 2020, during a protest calling for an end to racial injustice and
accountability for police. Jeff Chiu | AP
"... Any NYT reporting on Epstein is meant as a distraction -- to cover up the facts. The NYT is the elites' protector, it punches down instead of up. The NYT 'revelations' about guards are a) punching down to protect elites and b) a distraction to protect elites. The NYT is one of the Augean Stables. ..."
Now, people who are doubting the USG are automatically labelled "conspiracy theorists".
Except that, in this case, it is perfectly sensible to doubt about his death. He could've put
down really powerful people. He wasn't your daily mafia-boy struggling against his mafia boss
over US$ 1 billion in cocaine; no: he could put down half the American royalty.
Ah yes, that self-admitted CIA linked, totally-not deep state propaganda puppet outlet
lecturing the rest of us about the virtues of fact-checking and journalistic integrity...
Any NYT reporting on Epstein is meant as a distraction -- to cover up the facts.
The NYT is the elites' protector, it punches down instead of up.
The NYT 'revelations' about guards are a) punching down to protect elites and b) a
distraction to protect elites.
The NYT is one of the Augean Stables.
"... Interestingly, June 2017 is when the FBI and DOJ signed off on the last extension of the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign via adviser Carter Page. The warrant was signed by acting FBI director and Comey's former deputy Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein – who wrote both the memo used to fire Comey and the scope memo for the Mueller investigation. ..."
"... Evidence has shown that the initial FISA warrant against Page – in October 2016, shortly before the election – and the three renewals all relied heavily on the Steele Dossier, without making it clear to the court that it was unverified opposition research compiled at the behest of a rival political party. ..."
"... "miscarriage of justice" ..."
"... "collusion" ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
"... the infamous dossier used as a pretext to spy on President Donald Trump's campaign was unreliable ..."
New documents show the FBI was aware that the infamous dossier
used as a pretext to spy on President Donald Trump's campaign was unreliable, and that the New York Times published false information
about the 'Russiagate' probe.
The two documents were published on Friday by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina),
as part of an ongoing probe of the FBI's investigation of Trump. One is a 59-page, heavily redacted
interview
of the "primary sub-source" for Christopher Steele, the British spy commissioned through a series of cut-outs by the
Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump during the 2016 election campaign.
While the identity of the source is hidden, the document makes it clear it was not a current or former Russian official, but a
non-Russian employee of Steele's British company, Orbis. The source's testimony seriously questioned the claims made in the dossier
– which is best known for the salacious accusation that Trump was being blackmailed by Russia with tapes of an alleged sex romp in
a Moscow hotel.
The second, and more intriguing, document is a five-page
printout
of a February 14, 2017 article from the New York Times, along with 13 notes by Peter Strzok, one of the senior FBI agents handling
the Russiagate probe. The article was published five days after the FBI interview with the sub-source, and Strzok actually shows
awareness of it (in note 11, specifically).
In the very first note, Strzok labeled as "misleading and inaccurate" the claim by the New York Times that the Trump
campaign had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials before the 2016 election, noting there was "no evidence"
of this.
Likewise, Strzok denied the FBI was investigating Roger Stone (note 10) – a political operative eventually indicted by Special
Counsel Robert Mueller over allegedly lying about (nonexistent) ties to WikiLeaks, whose sentence Trump recently commuted to outrage
from 'Russiagate' proponents. Nor was Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort on any calls involving Russian government officials,
contrary to claims by the Times (note 3).
Not only did the FBI know the story was false, in part based on the knowledge they had from Steele's source, but the recently
ousted FBI director Jim Comey had openly disputed it in June 2017. The paper stood by its reporting.
Interestingly, June 2017 is when the FBI and DOJ signed off on the last extension of the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign
via adviser Carter Page. The warrant was signed by acting FBI director and Comey's former deputy Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein – who wrote both the memo used to fire Comey and the scope memo for the Mueller investigation.
Evidence has shown that the initial FISA warrant against Page – in October 2016, shortly before the election – and the three renewals
all relied heavily on the Steele Dossier, without making it clear to the court that it was unverified opposition research compiled
at the behest of a rival political party.
The last two renewals, in April and June 2017, were requested after the sub-source interview. Commenting on the document release,
Sen. Graham called these two renewals a "miscarriage of justice" and argued that the FBI and the Department of Justice should
have stopped and re-evaluated their case.
Mueller eventually found no "collusion" between Trump and Russia as alleged by the Democrats, but not before a dozen
people – from Stone and Manafort to Trump's first national security adviser Michael Flynn and innocent Russian student Maria Butina
– became casualties of the investigation.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! 236 13
Austin Rock 22 hours ago Staggering is the monumental deceitful effort to hitch Trump to Russia. And yet for MSM and their poodles
in the press no barb thrown is too outragious, no smear is too false enough. With Google, Twitter and Facebook on board we Europeans
are being played. But we Europeans are not as stupid as your average US punter. These pathetic fairy tales are an embarressement
to journalism.
Senate panel releases key FBI memo on Christopher Steele; reaction from John Solomon,
co-author of 'Fallout,' and Rep. Devin Nunes, ranking member of the House Intelligence
Committee.
The
Trump-Russia collusion story continues to be eaten away, and these new notes from disgraced ex-FBI Agent Peter Strzok center on
The
New York Times
and their reporting that got the ball rolling on this media manufactured myth. Yes, it's about time we say
that because these documents, which analyzed the piece about Trump aides having contacts with Russian intelligence officials
before the 2016 election, has more utility being used to catch crap from birdcages now that's been exposed as a fraud. In 2017,
this
"bombshell" dropped
. Even at the outset, there was still no evidence of collusion. Just rumor and unsubstantiated gossip.
"The
officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation," that's what the
Times
had
in their piece. It's one of the many bombshells that turned out to be nothing burgers, part of the liberal media's Russia fetish
that turned into one of the biggest, if not
the biggest
, journalism fails ever. It's sad,
really. All one had to do was merely accept that Lady McBeth, aka Hillary Rodham Clinton, lost the 2016 election. Any person with
cognitive function knew that this story was just simply too good to be true. Second, when weeks and months go by and no evidence
arises, it's a dud. When multiple "breaks" in the case, arise and turn out to be garbage -- there's nothing to the story. It's not
real. It's a myth, but the anti-Trump opposition press kept pressing and pressing until we got a clown show the likes of which we
have never seen. Now, part of it is a bit annoying because we all knew the truth before these clowns did, but seeing these guys
fail and have their work just be totally trashed, burned to a crisp, and then pissed on is just pure gold. Two words that can be
applied to the entire Democrat-media complex: Suck. It.
So,
let's get to the notes that deliver a tomahawk to the face of the liberal media. Based on the FBI's notes, pretty much everything
in it was a lie. "Misleading, inaccurate, and no evidence" are the key phrases Strzok used concerning this fake news story. The
story said that Paul Manafort was plugged into the calls. The FBI said, "We are unaware of any calls with any Russian govt
official in which Manafort was a party."
The
publication said Roger Stone was part of the FBI's Russian inquiry. The FBI denied this. Then-FBI Director James Comey, who would
later be fired for cause in May of 2017, also disputed the story but the NYT decided to stand by it because 'orange man bad.'
Well, they do deserve Pulitzers I guess for being the biggest dupes in the business for taking fake information at face value.
Has the media learned that yet too? Probably not because they're all abjectly stupid people, but not all classified information
is true. It can be false. Remember that next time you report on leaks about North Korean Kim Jong-un being brain dead.
The
ripple effect from stories like this was severe. It led scores of reporters down a media-manufactured alternate reality that some
have not climbed out of yet. They took the blue pill and remained in wonderland.
"Ignorance is bliss," or maybe in this case just pure unadulterated idiocy.
You
guys were wrong. How many times do we have to hit you on the head with a baseball bat until you get it? You were wrong. Your
stories were trash, based in lies and false information and weaponized by Democrats to try and usurp a duly elected president
because you don't like him. You're all entitled brats who deserve an ass-kicking. And Barack Obama appears to be calling the
shots on some of the major battles in this fake news fiasco, specifically when it comes to Michael Flynn, who has been vindicated
regarding his role in this whole mess. He was innocent and targeted by former members of the Obama administration, including
former Vice President Joe Biden.
Looks like Guardian is another intelligence agencies controlled entity.
Notable quotes:
"... Nothing shows just how much the Guardian has become the voice of the Deep State more than its coverage of anything Russia-related. And nothing serves as a better exemplar of how modern propaganda works. ..."
"... As it was anti-Russian I expected it to be accompanied with a Luke Harding byline but this is from the Defence and Security Editor, Dan Sabbagh, Harding, as well as being a plagiarist, has written four anti-Russian books including "Collusion" about how Russia helped Donald Trump get into power (using the discredited Steele dossier as his main source). Here Aaron Mate interviews him leaving him totally uncomfortable by the end. ..."
The Guardian, and all the other predictable voices, are currently reporting that Russian
"state sponsored hackers" have been attempting to steal "medical secrets" from British
pharmaceutical researchers.
At this stage they offer no substantiation, but it does serve as good teaching exercise in
the techniques of modern propagandists.
First the lack of evidence. Observe the Guardian article, note the complete absence of
sources or references. There's not a link in sight. There's no content there beyond the
parroted words of UK government officials, whose honesty and/or competence is never
interrogated.
Second, the lies by omission. They don't mention, for example, the
Vault 7 revelations from Wikileaks that the CIA/Pentagon
have developed technology to make one of their own cyber-attacks appear to come from anywhere
in the world , Russia obviously included. This is clearly vital information.
Third, the multitasking. When you splash a huge red lie on your front pages, it's always
best to make it serve several agendas at once. In fact, an unsupported statement which serves
multiple state-backed narratives at the same time is one of the telltale signs of
propaganda.
With this one completely unverified claim, the Guardian – or rather the people who
tell the Guardian what to say – back up three narratives:
The further demonisation of
an "enemy". Russia is portrayed as pursuing "selfish interests with reckless
behaviour" , whilst we (and our allies) are "getting on with the hard work of finding
a vaccine and protecting global health." Promoting the vaccine. The vaccine is coming. It
will likely be mandatory, it will certainly have been insufficiently tested, if tested at all.
They need some pro-vaccine advertising, and nothing sells better than "our vaccine is so good,
people are trying to steal it". Most importantly – Enhancing the idea that Sars-Cov-2 is
a unique global threat which puts us all in danger. The unspoken assumption is that Russia
needs to steal our research because the virus is so dangerous we all need to be afraid of it
despite it being
harmless to the vast majority of people .
Nothing shows just how much the Guardian has become the voice of the Deep State more than
its coverage of anything Russia-related. And nothing serves as a better exemplar of how modern
propaganda works.
As it was anti-Russian I expected it to be accompanied with a Luke Harding byline but this
is from the Defence and Security Editor, Dan Sabbagh, Harding, as well as being a plagiarist,
has written four anti-Russian books including "Collusion" about how Russia helped Donald Trump
get into power (using the discredited Steele dossier as his main source). Here Aaron Mate
interviews him leaving him totally uncomfortable by the end.
It's all so dumb and fraudulent . Not worthy of anyone's attention who may possess a few
brain cells. Those who serve up this shit in the name of journalism should be sent back to
primary school for some basic education . Really, we have had enough of this crap from
American morons ever since the Cold War era and here we have the same corrupt media parroting
exactly the same dross about those evil Russians . This scum need a history lesson for had it
not been for Russia's sacrifice and bravery in WW2 these cretins would not be sitting on
their arses writing this dross. This ongoing malevolent campaign against Russia is extremely
disturbing and has all the hallmarks of a psychopathic mindset and all coming from a nation
whose main "industry" is the production of weaponry and who is responsible for the deaths of
between 20 to 30 million people, directly and indirectly since the end of WW2.
Eyes Open , Jul 16, 2020 10:35 PM
It's so obvious the media are pulling a 'dog in a manger' psyop on us. Ie. 'oh no! I never
wanted the vaccine in the first place, but the Russians want to steal ours, so all of a
sudden I want my vaccine' etc.
Most likely Gate's vaccines will cause harm to some, so take them all I say. (My
condolences to the Russians.)
This video – from the horse's mouth. Notice the duping delight:
"Russian vaccine hack"
So the CORPORATE FASCISTS are saying that the Russian Federation got its vaccine against the
CORPORATE FASCIST MASS HYSTERIA FEAR PANIC FRENZY PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN by hacking? This is not
going to end well for the OLIGARCH MOBSTER PSYCHOPATHS.
John Ervin , Jul 16, 2020 11:35 PM Reply to
S Cooper
"For The Record" (spitfirelist.com) began reporting 4 or 5 years ago that all the
Russiagate baloney, hacks of Hillary et al., was a CIA inside job ~ and related matters like
it, long before that ~ referring listeners to much evidence that CIA cyber-technology had
long been working on black op devices that could hack while leaving "Russian" or "CCP"
digital fingerprints, etc., all the one-trick pony of ceaseless false-flaggery that our Intel
has been using for years, for nearly everything. And that stuff isn't really new.
Oliver Stone interviewed Putin for 4 hrs a couple years ago, carried by cable here, and
asked him point blank, "Did your agencies hack the DP?" Or words to that effect.
And he answered merely, "That was an internal affair of yours."
Of course, VP is a high spymaster himself, it would seem one of the best, ever, and no
stranger to purposeful misdirection certainly, but by the same token of his eminence in that
global realm, he is well supported by the evidence.
Especially, "If past is prologue " and all of its preponderance? Endless .
S Cooper , Jul 17, 2020 12:40 AM Reply to
John Ervin
The aspect which most concerns me is the no holds barred publicly funded sales and
marketing campaign that Psychopath Billy and BIG PHARMA are mounting to find dupes and Guinea
Pigs for their toxic patent medicine snake oil brew. It is going to hurt a lot of people.
"The hack" bull shit fairy tale store is just one of the means employed by those criminal
psychopaths.
John Ervin , Jul 17, 2020 2:16 AM Reply to
S Cooper
Yes indeed, there are many such signs, all of them bad. I don't know why I feel pleased
when I get confirmations of all the worst suspicions, if it only confirms my antennae are
still functioning, whilst being shamed by the brainwashed and the same old headlines . It
should take a lot more or better to please the sensibilities.
I guess it's the sense of vindication, that one can't help but thrill when that terrible
thirst for some reality is slaked.
Or that you have cause to be thankful. Faith tells you this won't last forever, and it's a
real gift that you weren't fooled.
But it can still feel like "cold comfort" when "almost" everyone you see or know, is.
Too many take the bit too nicely. What good does that do?
It shows up a pale country, too dead, as living only in the flesh, really, too numb in the
spirit, not vigilant.
About to be rolled!
voxpox , Jul 16, 2020 9:25 PM
I like this article, it says it all. I have also long harbored a theory that the US
intelligence are behind most of the worlds financial cyber-crime, systematically fleecing the
world to fund their many many operations around the world. They have the tech with Windows
back-doors, the motivation to hide 'off the book' operations and a proven lack of morals as
demonstrated during the Iran–Contra affair, many years ago. but what do I know. As Bill
Maher says, 'I can't prove it but I know it's true'.
John Ervin , Jul 16, 2020 11:59 PM Reply to
voxpox
The USA foreign policy shows a penchant for amoral deceptiveness of ALL other countries,
even best allies, chronically.
So that gives heft to Bill Maher's maxim.
Perennial treaty busters and oath breakers, why would anyone trust?
Fool me once etc.
That's at the core of my take on all USA has said about C-19(84). Been there, done that,
with 100 other false flags, always the same tune.
The boy who cried wolf: Uncle Scam.
Always proven false after all the marbles are stolen. Or at some point down the road. If
not, it shall be, like the JFK fiasco. Like the lone holdout among nations on the Napalm Ban,
or sole rogue to drop an A bomb (75th Anniversary of that cowardly Holocaust coming up in a
few weeks.)
Lone, lone, lone.
A sad little homeboy in the Land of the Lone Gunman. So many, though. Too many, for the
world's good .
~~~~~~~~~£4£&$4$
Don't take it from me, though, I'm a total patriot, really, compared to Mr. Gonzo, Hunter
S. Thompson:
"America just a nation of 200 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy
guns and no qualms at all about using them on anybody else in the world who tries to make us
uncomfortable."
Hunter always said it like it is, at least at yhr time he saw it, he rode with the Hell's
Angels and wrote the 1st book about them, and wasn't much shy about calling a spade a
spade.
And. Like my own old man: another highly assisted apparent suicide.
I like this article, it says it all. I have also long harbored a theory that the US
intelligence are behind most of the worlds financial cyber-crime, systematically fleecing the
world to fund their many many operations around the world. They have the tech with Windows
back-doors, the motivation to hide 'off the book' operations and a proven lack of morals as
demonstrated during the Iran–Contra affair, many years ago. but what do I know. As Bill
Maher says, 'I can't prove it but I know it's true'.
John Ervin , Jul 16, 2020 11:59 PM Reply to
voxpox
The USA foreign policy shows a penchant for amoral deceptiveness of ALL other countries,
even best allies, chronically.
So that gives heft to Bill Maher's maxim. Perennial treaty busters and oath breakers, why would anyone trust? Fool me once etc.
That's at the core of my take on all USA has said about C-19(84). Been there, done that,
with 100 other false flags, always the same tune.
The boy who cried wolf: Uncle Scam. Always proven false after all the marbles are stolen. Or at some point down the road. If
not, it shall be, like the JFK fiasco. Like the lone holdout among nations on the Napalm Ban,
or sole rogue to drop an A bomb (75th Anniversary of that cowardly Holocaust coming up in a
few weeks.)
Lone, lone, lone. A sad little homeboy in the Land of the Lone Gunman. So many, though. Too many, for the
world's good .
~~~~~~~~~
Don't take it from me, though, I'm a total patriot, really, compared to Mr. Gonzo, Hunter
S. Thompson:
"America just a nation of 200 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy
guns and no qualms at all about using them on anybody else in the world who tries to make us
uncomfortable."
Hunter always said it like it is, at least at yhr time he saw it, he rode with the Hell's
Angels and wrote the 1st book about them, and wasn't much shy about calling a spade a
spade.
And. Like my own old man: another highly assisted apparent suicide.
A guard pushed me into a corridor with a small metal staircase and we started
descending. From there, I could hear the dreadful sounds of people pounding on metal,
shouting in anguish – all sorts of inhuman moaning and howling.
"Shut up, all of you!" barked the officer into the semi-darkness of that metal
hell.
We walked down the corridor surrounded by cells beyond count, men and women were
clinging to the metal netting of the doors. They were begging for water, toilet paper –
or at least for someone to tell them what time it was. Male prisoners were raising hell after
they noticed me, which put an amused grin on the face of my guard.
He threw me into a cell next to one with a man. The wall between us had no windows so I
couldn't see my 'neighbor', but he certainly liked to tune in to any sound I made. He got so
stimulated hearing me moving around next door and choking on my tears that he pleasured
himself loudly all night long – and I had to listen.
Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital and hsot of The Portal podcast, has
gone scorched earth on the New York Times following the Tuesday resignation of journalist
Bari Weiss.
Weinstein describes how The Times has morphed into an activist rag - refusing to cover
"news" unpaletable to their narrative, while ignoring key questions such as whether Jeffrey
Epstein's sex-trafficking ring was "intelligence related."
Jump into Weinstein's Twitter thread by clicking on the below tweet, or scroll down for your
convenience.
At that moment Bari Weiss became all that was left of the "Paper of Record." Why? Because the
existence of Black Racists with the power to hunt professors with Baseball Bats and even
redefine the word 'racism' to make their story impossible to cover ran totally
counter-narrative.
At some point after 2011, the NYT gradually stopped covering the News and became the News
instead. And Bari has been fighting internally from the opinion section to re-establish
Journalism inside tbe the NYT. A total reversal of the Chinese Wall that separates news from
opinion.
This is the paper in 2016 that couldnt be interested in the story that millions of Americans
were likely lying to pollsters about Donald Trump.
The paper refusing to ask the CIA/FBI if Epstein was Intelligence related.
The paper that can't report that it seeks race rioting:
I have had the honor of trying to support both @bariweiss at the New York Times and
@BretWeinstein in their battles simply to stand alone against the internal mob mentality. It is
THE story all over the country. Our courageous individuals are being hunted at work for
dissenting.
Before Bari resigned, I did a podcast with her. It was chilling. I'd make an innocuous
statement of simple fact and ask her about it. She'd reply " That is obviously true but I'm
sorry we can't say that here. It will get me strung up ." That's when I stopped telling her to
hang on.
So what just happened? Let me put it bluntly: What was left of the New York Times just
resigned from the New York Times. The Times canceled itself. As a separate Hong Kong exists in
name only, the New New York Times and affiliated "news" is now the chief threat to our
democracy.
This is the moment when the passengers who have been becoming increasingly alarmed, start to
entertain a new idea: what if the people now in the cockpit are not airline pilots? Well the
Twitter Activists at the @nytimes and elsewhere are not journalists.
What if those calling for empathy have a specific deadness of empathy?
Those calling for justice *are* the unjust?
Those calling "Privilege" are the privileged?
Those calling for equality seek to oppress us?
Those anti-racists are open racists?
The progressives seek regress?
The journalists are covering up the news?
Try the following exercise: put a minus sign in front of nearly every banner claim made by
"the progressives".
Q: Doesn't that make more sense?
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Those aren't the pilots you imagine. And we are far closer to revolution than you think.
Bari and I agree on a lot but also disagree fiercely. And so I have learned that she is
tougher than tough. But these university and journalistic workplaces are now unworkable. They
are the antithesis off what they were built to stand for. It is astounding how long she held
out.
Read her letter. I have asked her to do a make-up podcast & she has agreed. Stay tuned
If you don't want to be surprised again by what's coming understand this: just as there has
been no functioning president, there's now no journalism. We're moving towards a 🌎 of
pure activism.
Prepare to lose your ability to call the police & for more autonomous zones where kids
die so that Govenors & Mayors can LARP as Kayfabe revolutionaries . Disagree with Ms Weiss
all you want as she isn't perfect. But Bari is a true patriot who tried to stand alone. Glad
she's out.
We are not finished by a long shot. What the Intellectual Dark Web tried to do MUST now be
given an institutional home.
Podcast with Bari on The Portal to come as soon as she is ready.
Stay tuned. And thanks for reading this. It is of the utmost importance.
Thank you all. 🙏
P.S. Please retweet the lead tweet from this thread if you understand where we are.
Appreciated.
The willingness of the press to circulate any account that puts Russia in a bad light has not diminished with the collapse of
the Russia-Trump collusion narrative.
hroughout the Trump years, various reporters have presented
to great fanfare one dubious, thinly sourced story after another about Moscow's supposedly nefarious plots against the United
States. The unsupported allegations about an illegal collusion between Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and the Russian government
spawned a host of subsidiary charges that
proved
to be bogus
. Yet, prominent news outlets, including the
New York Times
, the
Washington Pos
t, CNN, and
MSNBC ran stories featuring such shaky accusations as if they were gospel.
The willingness of the press to circulate any account that
puts
Russia
in
a bad light has not diminished with the collapse of the Russia-Trump collusion narrative. The latest incident began when the
New
York Times
published a front-page article on June 28, based on an anonymous source within the intelligence community,
that Moscow had
put
a bounty
on the lives of American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. The predictable, furious reaction throughout the
media and the general public followed. When the White House insisted that the intelligence agencies had never informed either
the president or vice president of such reports, most press reactions were scornful.
As with so many other inflammatory news accounts dealing
with
Russia
,
serious doubts about the accuracy of this one developed almost immediately. Just days later, an unnamed intelligence official
told CBS reporter Catherine Herridge that the information about the alleged bounties
was
uncorroborated
. The source also revealed to Herridge that the National Security Agency (NSA) concluded that the
intelligence collection report "does not match well-established and verifiable Taliban and Haqqani practices" and lacked
"sufficient reporting to corroborate any links." The report had reached "low levels" at the National Security Council, but it
did not travel farther up the chain of command. The Pentagon, which apparently had
originated
the bounty allegations
and tried to sell the intelligence agencies on the theory, soon retreated and issued
its
own statement
about the "unconfirmed" nature of the information.
There was a growing sense of déjà vu, as though the episode
was the second coming of the infamous, uncorroborated Steele dossier that caused the Obama administration to launch its 2016
collusion investigation. A number of conservative and antiwar outlets highlighted the multiplying doubts. They had somewhat
contrasting motives for doing so. Most conservative critics believed that it was yet another attempt by a hostile media to
discredit President Trump for partisan reasons. Antiwar types suspected that it was an attempt by both the Pentagon and the
top echelons of some intelligence agencies to use the media to generate more animosity toward
Russia
and
thwart the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, a process that was still in its early stages following Washington's
February 29, 2020, peace accord with the Taliban.
The bounty stories certainly had that effect.
Congressional hawks in both parties immediately
called
for a delay
in further withdrawals while the allegations were investigated. They also made yet more "Trump is Putin's
puppet" assertions. Nancy Pelosi
could
not resist
hurling another smear with that theme. "With him, all roads lead to Putin," Pelosi said. "I don't know what the
Russians have on the president, politically, personally, or financially."
Despite the growing cloud of uncertainty about the source
or accuracy of the bounty allegation, several high-profile journalists treated it as though it was incontrovertible. A
typically blatant, hostile spin was evident in a
New York Times
article
by
Michael Crowley and Eric Schmitt. The principal "evidence" that they cited for the intelligence report was the earlier story
in their own newspaper. An admission that there were divisions within the intelligence agencies about the report, the authors
buried far down in their article.
High-level intelligence personnel giving the president
verbal briefings did not deem the bounty report sufficiently credible, much less alarming, to bring it to his attention.
Former intelligence official Ray McGovern reached a
blunt
conclusion
: "As a preparer and briefer of The President's Daily Brief to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush,
I can attest to the fact that -- based on what has been revealed so far -- the Russian bounty story falls far short of the PDB
threshold."
Barbara Boland, a national security correspondent for the
American
Conservative
and a veteran journalist on intelligence issues, cited some "glaring problems" with the bounty charges. One
was that the Times' anonymous source stated that the assessment was based "on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and
criminals." Boland noted that John Kiriakou, a former analyst and case officer for the CIA who led the team that
captured senior al-Qaeda figure Abu Zubaydah in 2002, termed reliance on coercive interrogations "a red flag." Kiriakou
added, "When you capture a prisoner, and you're interrogating him, the prisoner is going to tell you what he thinks you want
to hear." Boland reminded readers that under interrogation Khalid Sheik Mohammed made at least 31 confessions, "many of which
were completely false."
A second problem Boland saw with the bounty story was
identifying a rational purpose for such
a
Russian initiative
since it was apparent to everyone that Trump was intent on pulling U.S. troops out. Moreover, she
emphasized, only eight U.S. military personnel were killed during the first six months of 2020, and the
New York Times
story
could not verify that even one fatality resulted from a bounty. If the program existed at all, then it was extraordinarily
ineffective.
Nevertheless, most media accounts breathlessly repeated the
charges as if they were proven. In the
New York Times
, David Sanger and Eric Schmitt
asserted
that,
given the latest incident, "it doesn't require a top-secret clearance and access to the government's most classified
information to see that the list of Russian aggressions in recent weeks rivals some of the worst days of the Cold War." Ray
McGovern responded to the Sanger-Schmitt article by impolitely reminding his readers about
Sanger's
dreadful record
during the lead-up to the Iraq War of uncritically repeating unverified leaks from intelligence sources
and hyping the danger of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Another prominent journalist who doubled down on the bounty
allegations was the
Washington Post's
Aaron
Blake
. The headline of his July 1 article read "The only people dismissing the Russia bounties intel: the Taliban, Russia
and Trump." Apparently, the NSA's willingness to go public with its doubts, as well as negative assessments of the allegations
by several veteran former intelligence officials, did not seem to matter to Blake. As evidence of how "serious" the situation
was (despite a perfunctory nod that the intelligence had not yet been confirmed), Blake quoted several of the usual hawks from
the president's own party.
As time passed, outnumbered media skeptics of the bounties
story nevertheless lobbed increasingly vigorous criticisms of the allegations. Their case for skepticism was warranted. It
became clear that even the CIA and other agencies that embraced the charges of bounties ascribed only "medium confidence" to
their conclusions. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)
, there are three levels of
confidence, "high," "moderate," and "low." A "moderate" confidence level means "that the information is credibly sourced and
plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence." The NSA (and
apparently the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and possibly other portions of the intelligence community) gave the reports
the "low" confidence designation,
meaning
that
"the information's credibility and/or plausibility is questionable, or that the information is too fragmented or poorly
corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or that [there are] significant concerns or problems with the sources."
Antiwar journalist Caitlin Johnstone offered an especially
brutal
indictment
of the media's performance regarding the latest installment of the "Russia is America's mortal enemy" saga.
"All parties involved in spreading this malignant psyop are absolutely vile," she wrote, "but a special disdain should be
reserved for the media class who have been entrusted by the public with the essential task of creating an informed populace
and holding power to account. How much of an unprincipled whore do you have to be to call yourself a journalist and
uncritically parrot the completely unsubstantiated assertions of spooks while protecting their anonymity?"
The media should not have ignored or blithely dismissed the
bounty allegation, but far too many members ran enthusiastically with a story based on extremely thin evidence, questionable
sourcing, and equally questionable logic. Once again, they seemed to believe the worst about Russia's behavior and Trump's
reaction to it because they had long ago mentally programmed themselves to believe such horror stories without doubt or
reservation. The
assessment
by
Alan MacLeod of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) is devastatingly accurate. With regard to the bounty story, he
concluded, "evidence-free claims from nameless spies became fact" in most media accounts. Instead of sober, restrained
inquiries from a skeptical, probing press, readers and viewers were treated to yet another installment of over-the-top
anti-Russia diatribes. That treatment had the effect, whether intended or unintended, of promoting even more hawkish policies
toward Moscow and undermining the already much-delayed withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. It was a biased,
unprofessional performance that should do nothing to restore the public's confidence in the media's already tattered
credibility.
Criticisms of "cancel culture" often is hypocrtical, as was the case with Weiss, and are connected with prioritizing speech that
shores up the status quo -- necon dominance in the US MSM.
An open letter published by Harper's magazine,
and signed by 150 prominent writers and public figures, has focused attention on the apparent dangers of what has been termed a new
"cancel culture".
The letter brings together an unlikely alliance of genuine leftists, such as Noam Chomsky and Matt Karp, centrists such as J K
Rowling and Ian Buruma, and neoconservatives such as David Frum and Bari Weiss, all speaking out in defence of free speech.
Although the letter doesn't explicitly use the term "cancel culture", it is clearly what is meant in the complaint about a "stifling"
cultural climate that is imposing "ideological conformity" and weakening "norms of open debate and toleration of differences".
It is easy to agree with the letter's generalized argument for tolerance and free and fair debate. But the reality is that many
of those who signed are utter hypocrites, who have shown precisely zero commitment to free speech, either in their words or in their
deeds.
Further, the intent of many them in signing the letter is the very reverse of their professed goal: they want to stifle free speech,
not protect it.
To understand what is really going on with this letter, we first need to scrutinize the motives , rather than the substance,
of the letter.
A new 'illiberalism'
"Cancel culture" started as the shaming, often on social media, of people who were seen to have said offensive things. But of
late, cancel culture has on occasion become more tangible, as the letter notes, with individuals fired or denied the chance to speak
at a public venue or to publish their work.
The letter denounces this supposedly new type of "illiberalism":
"We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls
for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.
"Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred
from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; The result has been to steadily
narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion
among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient
zeal in agreement."
Tricky identity politics
The array of signatories is actually more troubling than reassuring. If we lived in a more just world, some of those signing –
like Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W Bush, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former US State Department official – would
be facing a reckoning before a Hague war crimes tribunal for their roles in promoting "interventions" in Iraq and Libya respectively,
not being held up as champions of free speech.
That is one clue that these various individuals have signed the letter for very different reasons.
Chomsky signed because he has been a lifelong and consistent defender of the right to free speech, even for those with appalling
opinions such as Holocaust denial.
Frum, who coined the term "axis of evil" that rationalised the invasion of Iraq, and Weiss, a New York Times columnist, signed
because they have found their lives getting tougher. True, it is easy for them to dominate platforms in the corporate media while
advocating for criminal wars abroad, and they have paid no career price when their analyses and predictions have turned out to be
so much dangerous hokum. But they are now feeling the backlash on university campuses and social media.
Meanwhile, centrists like Buruma and Rowling have discovered that it is getting ever harder to navigate the tricky terrain of
identity politics without tripping up. The reputational damage can have serious consequences.
Buruma famously lost his job as editor of the New York Review of Books two years ago after after he published and defended an
article that
violated
the new spirit of the #MeToo movement. And Rowling made the
mistake of thinking her followers would be as
fascinated by her traditional views on transgender issues as they are by her Harry Potter books.
'Fake news, Russian trolls'
But the fact that all of these writers and intellectuals agree that there is a price to be paid in the new, more culturally sensitive
climate does not mean that they are all equally interested in protecting the right to be controversial or outspoken.
Chomsky, importantly, is defending free speech for all , because he correctly understands that the powerful are only too
keen to find justifications to silence those who challenge their power. Elites protect free speech only in so far as it serves their
interests in dominating the public space.
If those on the progressive left do not defend the speech rights of everyone, even their political opponents, then any restrictions
will soon be turned against them. The establishment will always tolerate the hate speech of a Trump or a Bolsonaro over the justice
speech of a Sanders or a Corbyn.
By contrast, most of the rest of those who signed – the rightwingers and the centrists – are interested in free speech for
themselves and those like them . They care about protecting free speech only in so far as it allows them to continue dominating
the public space with their views – something they were only too used to until a few years ago, before social media started to level
the playing field a little.
The center and the right have been fighting back ever since with claims that anyone who seriously challenges the neoliberal status
quo at home and the neoconservative one abroad is promoting "fake news" or is a "Russian troll". This updating of the charge of being
"un-American" embodies cancel culture at its very worst.
Social media accountability
In other words, apart from in the case of a few progressives, the letter is simply special pleading – for a return to the status
quo. And for that reason, as we shall see, Chomsky might have been better advised not to have added his name, however much he agrees
with the letter's vague, ostensibly pro-free speech sentiments.
What is striking about a significant proportion of those who signed is their self-identification as ardent supporters of Israel.
And as Israel's critics know only too well, advocates for Israel have been at the forefront of the cancel culture – from long before
the term was even coined.
For decades, pro-Israel activists have sought to silence anyone seen to be seriously critiquing this small, highly militarized
state, sponsored by the colonial powers, that was implanted in a region rich with a natural resource, oil, needed to lubricate the
global economy, and at a terrible cost to its native, Palestinian population.
Nothing should encourage us to believe that zealous defenders of Israel among those signing the letter have now seen the error
of their ways. Their newfound concern for free speech is simply evidence that they have begun to suffer from the very same cancel
culture they have always promoted in relation to Israel.
They have lost control of the "cancel culture" because of two recent developments: a rapid growth in identity politics among liberal
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![a group of people standing next to a person in a suit and tie: Joseph R. Biden Jr. last week in Wilmington, Del. A new intelligence assessment said Russia continues to interfere in the election on President Trump's behalf, while China prefers Mr. Biden.]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"80","h":"45","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HDgI.img?h=450&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f"},"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HDgI.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HDgI.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f"}})
© Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Joseph R. Biden Jr. last week in Wilmington, Del. A
new intelligence assessment said Russia continues to interfere in the election on President
Trump's behalf, while China prefers Mr. Biden.
![a group of people posing for a picture: Trump supporters in Ohio on Thursday, during the president's visit to a factory in Clyde.]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"80","h":"45","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HOTh.img?h=450&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=710&y=584"},"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HOTh.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=710&y=584"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HOTh.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=710&y=584"}})
© Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times Trump supporters in Ohio on Thursday, during the
president's visit to a factory in Clyde.
