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Welcome David Schenker

Another Zionist in charge of American foreign policy

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • June 11, 2019

Those who think that the foreign policy of the United States should be the product of serious discussion embracing a variety of viewpoints to come to a conclusion that benefits the American people should perhaps take note of what has been going on in the President Donald Trump administration. The use of unrelenting pressure to include threats of military intervention rather than negotiation has been noted by many, but the media predictably has failed to discuss the implications of having a team in place making decisions relating to the volatile Middle East and beyond that consists overwhelmingly of Orthodox Jews and Christian Zionists.

To recap, Trump’s A-team in the Middle East is headed by his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner who is being personally advised by a group of Orthodox Jews. David Friedman, the U.S. (sic) Ambassador to Israel is also an Orthodox Jew and a former bankruptcy lawyer with no diplomatic or foreign policy credentials. He is a passionate supporter and even a funder of the illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank and on the Golan Heights. Friedman endlessly and ignorantly repeats Israeli government talking points and eventually succeeded in changing the language used in State Department communications, eliminating the word “occupied” when describing Israel’s control of the West Bank. His humanity does not extend beyond his Jewishness, defending the Israeli shooting of thousands of unarmed Gazan protesters and the bombing of schools, hospitals and cultural centers. How he represents the United States and its citizens who are not dual nationals must be considered a mystery.

Friedman’s top adviser is Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, who is described by the Embassy as an expert in “Jewish education and pro-Israel advocacy.” Once upon a time Lightstone described Donald Trump as posing “an existential danger both to the Republican Party and to the U.S.” and even accused him of pandering to Jewish audiences. Apparently when opportunity knocked, he changed his mind about his new boss. Pre-government in 2014, Lightstone founded and headed Silent City, a Jewish advocacy group supported by extreme right-wing money that opposed the Iran nuclear agreement and also worked to combat the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Trump’s chief “international negotiator” for the Middle East is yet another Orthodox Jew Jason Greenblatt, the former Trump Organization lawyer. If you have read a recent New York Times op-ed by Greenblatt entitled “Care about Gaza? Blame Hamas” you would understand that the misery being experienced by Palestinians in Gaza has nothing to do with Israeli snipers, artillery rounds and phosphorous bombs. It is all the Arabs’ own fault. Greenblatt uniquely claims that Israel’s illegal settlements are “not an obstacle to peace” and he is very upset because some naysayers are actually putting part of the blame for the human catastrophe in Gaza on Israel.

Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman are perfect examples of the type of “dual” loyalist who cannot appreciate that their overriding religious and ethnic allegiances are incompatible with genuine loyalty to the United States. The other key pro-Israel players in the foreign policy establishment are nominally Christian, including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, both of whom are Christian Zionists who believe (and hope) that the re-creation of Israel is part of biblical prophecy that will lead to a great war, the end of the world as we know it and the second coming of Christ. The final component of the Zionist line-up is National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has been a recipient of the “Defender of Israel Award” as well as an outspoken advocate of war with Iran.

Not exactly a model of diversity, is it? Well, there was one piece missing and that was the State Department’s Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, which has been vacant for the past fourteen months due to failure of the Senate to approve the candidate proposed by Trump, one David Schenker. Schenker was not on hold because of what might be regarded as legitimate concerns about his background or his presumed biases, but rather because Senator Tim Kaine had been demanding from the White House documents relating to military action in Syria, a more-or-less unrelated issue. Last Wednesday Schenker was finally approved by the Senate in an 83 to 11 vote.

Schenker has spent most of his time in Washington at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think-tank that supports the Israeli government. He began as an analyst after graduate school and his career exhibits the familiar neocon pattern of jumping between pro-Israel foundations and government jobs to build a resume and credibility. He served in the George W. Bush Pentagon, which was a hot bed of neocon subversion featuring Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith. And WINEP is no ordinary think-tank. It was founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington. To describe WINEP as “supporting the Israeli government” is an understatement.

When news of the Senate’s confirmation vote came through, WINEP Executive Director Robert Satloff enthused that “David Schenker’s career has been dedicated to enhancing the quality of U.S. Middle East policy, and it is only fitting he should now be the one enacting such policies at such a critical time for U.S. interests in the region.” Satloff is right to gloat, as The Lobby that he is part of now has its nice Jewish boy in a senior position at the State Department where he will be “enhancing the quality” of U.S. foreign policy for the Middle and Near East to favor Israel.

In a press release WINEP Institute President Shelly Kassen and Chairman Martin J. Gross also joined in, describing how “We are proud of the fact that David Schenker will be the latest in a long line of Institute experts to join the government in senior positions — in both Republican and Democratic administrations — to provide expertise on the Middle East.”

Yes, Schenker is clearly full of expertise, though it is odd how the government appears to think that expert opinion on the Middle East is an attribute belonging only to Jewish pseudo-scholars and think-tank parasites. It is expected that Schenker will not hesitate to get tough with the Arabs. In a September 2017 interview he emphasized the threat posed by “Hezbollah’s tunnels under the Israel-Lebanon border.” And he believes that a future war between Israel and Hezbollah is “not a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when.’” There is little doubt which side Schenker will be on, even if Benjamin Netanyahu starts the war.

There is an unfortunate history of American Jews closely attached to Israel being promoted by powerful and cash rich domestic lobbies to act on behalf of the Jewish state, enabling them to move between think-tanks and government almost effortlessly. To be sure, by virtue of their relentless networking and gaming of the system, Jews who are Zionists are vastly overrepresented in all government agencies that have anything at all to do with the Middle East. Meanwhile, one can also reasonably argue that the Republican and Democratic Parties are de facto in the pockets of Jewish/Israeli billionaires named Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban, both of whom regard the advancement of Israeli rather than American interests as their top priorities.

What is to be done? Well, it would be nice, almost unbearably nice, to see the media and Congress just for once doing their jobs by challenging the bona fides of poseurs like Kushner, Friedman, Greenblatt and Schenker not to mention the demented trio of Pence, Pompeo and Bolton. It is not in the United States’ interest to have as its representatives and spokesmen in an important and highly volatile part of the world individuals who are demonstrated partisans on issues that that will surely require some compromise if they are ever to be resolved. Israeli leaders have described with a grin how easy it is to “move” the United States in their favor by virtue of the power of their diaspora associates both in and out of government. Perhaps it is time to wake up to that fact, to get rid of the Quislings and set the pendulum swinging in the other direction.

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 councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

June 10, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , | 5 Comments

Extreme Politics: The Roger Pielke Jr. Story

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | June 10, 2019

Last week, an article by economist Ross McKitrick appeared in Canada’s National Post. Titled This scientist proved climate change isn’t causing extreme weather – so politicians attacked, it tells the story of Roger Pielke Jr., a professor in Boulder, Colorado who has been mercilessly persecuted for the unpardonable sin of telling the truth.

With Canada’s Prime Minister childishly insisting a national carbon tax will prevent wildfires, floods, and tornadoes, McKitrick sets us straight:

Globally there’s no clear evidence of trends and patterns in extreme events such as droughts, hurricanes and floods. Some regions experience more, some less…There’s no trend in U.S. hurricane landfall frequency or intensity. If anything, the past 50 years has been relatively quiet…Since 1965, more parts of the U.S. have seen a decrease in flooding than have seen an increase…There’s no trend in U.S. tornado damage (in fact, 2012 to 2017 was below average)…Cold snaps in the U.S. are down but, unexpectedly, so are heatwaves.

The bottom line is there’s no solid connection between climate change and the major indicators of extreme weather… [bold added]

Pielke once specialized in natural disasters and the damage they inflict. In 2006, Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, appeared. It incorrectly claimed global warming was responsible for Hurricane Katrina, which had devastated New Orleans. This became the party line amongst US Democrats.

Having since switched his research focus to other matters, Pielke spoke publicly last year about being relentlessly smeared and slimed by ridiculously senior Democrats despite the fact that he himself has never once voted Republican.

A case in point is John Podesta. This man was President Bill Clinton’s last chief of staff. He was an advisor to President Barack Obama. More recently, he served as Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign manager. Podesta’s other project is the Center for American Progress (CAP), described as “the Democrat’s favorite think tank.”

Podesta is as partisan as they come, and CAP is a Democratic Party political machine. In Pielke’s words, between 2007 and 2015, “CAP wrote more than 161 articles critical of me, many spreading false and incorrect representations of my views. They averaged an article a week in 2008 and 2009.”

Overall, seven different CAP writers chose to ignore Pielke’s airtight scholarship. He needed to be muzzled for political reasons – for “questioning the link between climate change and extreme weather” and for allegedly providing “cover for climate deniers.”

In an internal 2014 e-mail (made public by WikiLeaks in 2016), CAP employee Judd Legum boasts that his part of that organization got Pielke fired as a contributor to FiveThirtyEight.com, a website affiliated with ABC News.

Pielke’s first and only article there was titled Disasters Cost More Than Ever – But Not Because of Climate Change. Studded with numerous links to source material, it points out that even the UN’s highly politicized Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits there’s scant evidence of a spike in the frequency or intensity of floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes.

In other words, there’s nothing remotely radical or non-mainstream about Pielke’s position. But the blowback orchestrated by CAP and others was so vociferous, he was never published at FiveThirtyEight.com again. In this interview Pielke says he suggested leaving three months later, after the website had demonstrated “some reluctance in continuing to publish my work.”

Slide #38 in the presentation Pielke gave last year includes a third party advertisement that characterizes his departure as a “Victory for climate truth!” Rather than being an honest scholar, you see, he’s actually a “climate confusionist” who deserves to be destroyed.

Today, someone searching on Pielke’s name at FireThirtyEight.com is presented with a very short list. It includes an editorial by its founder and editor-in-chief about Pielke’s article. It also includes a response to Pielke’s article by Kerry Emanuel. But there’s no actual link to Pielke’s calm, sane piece itself.

Having kowtowed to bullies, FireThirtyEight.com now sticks to conventional fare – articles that discuss “climate change denialists” and “climate change deniers.”

The simple truth is so threatening to certain political operatives that Pielke’s persecution didn’t end there. In 2015, he was falsely accused of secretly taking money from an oil company and investigated by Congress. In that context, the president of the university that employs him was advised in writing that Obama’s White House science advisor believed Pielke to be guilty of “serious misstatements.”

Also in 2015, Paige St. John, a Pulitzer Prize-winning US journalist, discovered that mentioning Pielke in an article was sufficient to ignite a campaign against her. Slide #22 contains a comment St. John sent to Pielke by e-mail:

You should come with a warning label: Quoting Roger Pielke will bring a hail storm down on your work from the London Guardian, Mother Jones and Media Matters.

Let that sink in. No one is off limits. Even journalists at the top of the heap are targeted and bullied. The climate mafia exists. Its enforcers are real. Their mantra is: thou shalt not set a toe out of line.

As Ross McKitrick ended his National Post article last week, so shall I: “Something has gotten scary and extreme, but it isn’t the weather.”

June 10, 2019 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 1 Comment

Pompeo’s promise to intervene against Corbyn should surprise no one

By Catte Black | OffGuardian | June 10, 2019

The alt media-verse is currently on fire with the news that the US State Dept’s answer to Al Capone, Mike Pompeo, has been caught promising “Jewish leaders” to send the boys round to Jeremy Corbyn if he should get elected and subsequently prove to be uppity and out of line. According to the WaPo, who broke the story:

The remarks, which are contained in audio of a private meeting leaked to The Washington Post, make Pompeo the second senior U.S. official to comment on Britain’s turbulent leadership succession in the past week.

During his meeting with Jewish leaders in New York, Pompeo was asked if Corbyn “is elected, would you be willing to work with us to take on actions if life becomes very difficult for Jews in the U.K.?”

In response, Pompeo said, “It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gantlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best,” he said to fervent applause from attendees.

“It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened,” he said.

Of course the idea the “Jewish leaders” harbor any real fear that Jeremy Corbyn (Jeremy Corbyn!) is going to make life “difficult” for British Jews if elected is simply risible. They know, just as every moderately informed person knows, that that’s absurd. They know Corbyn has no wish to make life difficult for anybody – except possibly the uber wealthy and the profiteer class.

They know the “antisemitism” fear is just a cover for the very very real fear that a Corbyn government will break the unwritten rules of modern western governance and reject the agenda of austerity, exploitation and perpetual war that has been creating huge profits and ideological thrills for the blessed few over the last twenty years.

They know that what Pompeo is promising is action to prevent this possibility coming about.

People are up in arms about this, and some seem quite shocked. Apparently the idea the neoliberal elites would try regime change or regime-control on a relatively prosperous western country was something they didn’t previously think possible.

Unfortunately it’s more than possible. The state apparatus of the different western nations are a tight bond of mutual regard and interest, just as likely to foment regime change on their own or their allies’ elected representatives as on those of impoverished or “developing” countries, if they believe those representatives threaten the perceived interests of the state. Of course it isn’t too often necessary, since the same western state apparatus also works to ensure that only governments that don’t threaten perceived state interests manage to get elected. But, when the unthinkable happens, MI5 and the CIA are quite happy to step up to the plate and throw their own or their allies’ democratic governments out the window. It’s happened – or nearly happened – at least twice in the last fifty years.

In the 1960s the UK security agencies, senior military and members of the royal family were apparently contemplating a full blown coup against Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.

In 1975 it was Australia’s turn, when democratically elected reforming prime minister Gough Whitlam was overthrown in a bloodless constitutional coup organised jointly by the US and UK.

The old empire and the new have form in this regard, and this means no one should take Pompeo’s words (spoken in private let’s not forget) lightly.

It’s also interesting to look at how the WaPo frames the revelation. There’s no sense of outrage or surprise there. In fact it’s an almost matter-of-fact piece, written with no awareness of its potential impact. Even those in the comments who object in some form are mostly doing it within the permissible current language of dissent – blaming Trump, because in these identity politics-saturated times, your morality resides in who or what you are NOT in what you do.

To the WaPo – and many of its readers – there’s nothing intrinsically either wrong or surprising in the idea a US secretary of state should be overtly promising to interfere in the democratic governance of another country.

It’s just what they do when they need to.

Catte Black is an OffGuardian co-founding editor. Writer. Opinionated polemicist.

June 10, 2019 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | 4 Comments

MSM Mourns Death Of CIA-Backed Syrian Al-Qaeda/ISIS Ally

By Caitlin Johnstone | June 8, 2019

On Wednesday the alternative media outlet Southfront published an article titled “New Video Throws Light On Jaysh Al-Izza High-Tolerance To Al-Qaeda Ideology” about newly discovered footage showing the leader of a “rebel” faction in Syria cozying up with a militant who was wearing a badge of the official flag of ISIS.

“The video shows Jaysh al-Izza General Commander Major Jamil al-Saleh congratulating a group of his fighters on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr in a underground bunker,” Southfront reports. “One of the fighters greeted by Saleh was wearing a batch of the Islamic Black Standard with the Seal of Muhammad. This is a well-known symbol of al-Qaeda and the official flag of ISIS.”

Today, mass media outlets are mourning the death of a well-known Jaysh al-Izza fighter named Abdel-Basset al-Sarout with grief-stricken beatifications not seen since the death of war criminal John McCain. An Associated Press report which has been published by major news outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, PBS and Bloomberg commemorates Sarout as a “Syrian soccer goalkeeper” who “won international titles representing his country”, as “the singer of the revolution”, and as “an icon among Syria’s opposition”.

Remember Major Jamil al-Saleh from two paragraphs ago? AP features his glowing eulogy in its write-up on Sarout’s death:

“He was both a popular figure, guiding the rebellion, and a military commander,” said Maj. Jamil al-Saleh, leader of Jaish al-Izza rebel group, in which Sarout was a commander. “His martyrdom will give us a push to continue down the path he chose and to which he offered his soul and blood as sacrifice.”

Other mainstream outlets like BBC, The Daily Beast and Al Jazeera have contributed their own fawning hagiographies of the late Jaysh al-Izza commander.

“Formed in 2013, Jaysh al-Izza was one of the first Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups in northern Syria to benefit from U.S. support through the CIA’s ‘Timber Sycamore’ train and equip program, which had been approved by then U.S. President Barack Obama,” Southfront reports in the aforementioned article. “The group received loads of weapons from the U.S. including Grad rockets, as well as Fagot and TOW anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs).”

“Jaysh al-Izza received this support under the pretension of being a ‘moderate group’ led by a known Syrian Arab Army (SAA) defector, al-Saleh,” Southfront adds. “However, the group’s acts were not in line with these claims. Since its formation, Jaysh al-Izza has been deeply linked to al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the al-Nusra Front. The group became one of the main allies of al-Nusra when its changed its name to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in 2017.”

“Western thought leaders are lionizing Abdel Baset al-Sarout who was killed fighting the Syrian army,” tweeted journalist Dan Cohen of the mass media response to Sarout’s death. “They conveniently omit that he fought in a militia allied with al-Qaeda and pledged allegiance to ISIS.”

Cohen linked to an excerpt from his mini-documentary The Syria Deception featuring footage of Sarout holding an ISIS flag, leading chants calling for the extermination of the Alawite minority in Syria, and announcing his allegiance to ISIS.

Other publicly available video footage includes a speech by Sarout urging cooperation between his own faction, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise), saying “we know that these two groups are not politicized and have the same goals as us, and are working for God.”

“God willing we will work with them shoulder-to-shoulder when we leave here,” Sarout has been translated as saying in the speech. “And we are not Christians or Shiaa to be scared of suicide belts and car bombs. We consider these things as strengths of ours, and God willing they will be just that. This message is to the Islamic State and our brothers in Jabhat al-Nusra, that when we come out of here we will all be one hand to fight Christians and not to have internal fights among ourselves. We want to take back all the lands that have been filthied by the regime, that were entered and taken over by Shiaas and apostates.”

This bloodthirsty terrorist warmongering was taken by the aforementioned AP hagiography and twisted into the single sentence, “He repeatedly denounced rebel infighting and called on Syrians to unite against government forces.”

The Atlantic’s Hassan Hassan framed Sarout’s unconscionable agendas as mere “flaws” which actually add to his inspiring and heroic story, tweeting, “Some individuals celebrated as heroes make you doubt all stories of heroes in history books. Others, like Abdulbasit Sarout, not inspire of but despite his flaws, make those stories highly plausible. He’s a true legend & his story is well documented. May his soul rest in peace.”

Yeah, come on, everybody’s got flaws. Some people suck at parallel parking, some people team up with ISIS and Al-Qaeda on genocidal extermination campaigns. We’ve all got our quirky little foibles.

We can expect more and more of these mass media distortions as Syria and its allies draw closer to recapturing Syrian land from the extremist forces which nearly succeeded in toppling Damascus just a few short years ago.

As these distortions pour in, keep this in mind: all of the violence that is still happening in Syria is the fault of the US and its allies, who helped extremist jihadist factions like Jaysh al-Izza overrun the nation to advance the preexisting goal of effecting regime change. The blame for all the death, suffering and chaos which ensues from a sovereign nation fighting to reclaim its land from these bloodthirsty factions rests solely on the government bodies which inflicted their dominance over the region in the first place.

You will see continuing melodramatic garment-rending from the US State Department and its mass media stenographers about “war crimes” and “human rights violations” as though the responsibility for this violence rests somewhere other than on the US-centralized power alliance, but they will be lying. What these warmongering propagandists are doing is exactly the same as paying a bunch of violent thugs to break into a home and murder its owner, then standing by and sounding the alarm about the way the homeowner chooses to fight off their assailants.

After it was discovered that the US and its allies armed actual, literal terrorist factions in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, the only sane response would have been for the public to loudly and aggressively demand that all governments involved to take immediate action to completely rectify all damage done by this unforgivable war crime at any cost, and for there to be war crimes tribunals for every decision maker who was a part of it. Instead, because of propaganda circulated by the same mass media narrative management firms who are sanctifying the memory of Abdel-Basset al-Sarout today, the public remains asleep to the depravity of its rulers. This dynamic must change if we are to survive and thrive as a species.

June 10, 2019 Posted by | War Crimes | , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Abe’s mediatory mission to Tehran hangs in the balance

By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | June 10, 2019

With two days to go for the arrival of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tehran on a peace mission to promote US-Iran talks, a great deal of shadow boxing has been going on. Typically, there is much excitement in the media. Thus, western media in general hyped up the remarks of the commander of the US’ Lincoln strike group, Rear Adm. John F. G. Wade to make them sound belligerent and provocative.

However, Tehran has not fallen into that trap. The fact of the matter is that the US and Iranian militaries have deep experience in fathoming each other’s  intentions and working out ground rules of co-habitation in the crowded waters of the Persian Gulf. This arrangement has worked fine for past 4 decades and quite obviously, a ‘new normal’ has come to exist lately with the recent deployment of a US nuclear strike group in the region.

The Tehran Times carried a sober report on Adm. Wade’s remarks bringing out vividly what the admiral wished to convey (and Iran’s appreciation of it). The influential establishment daily highlighted Wade’s remark that “Since we’ve been operating in the region, we’ve had several interactions with Iranians. To this point all have been safe and professional — meaning, the Iranians have done nothing to impede our maneuverability or acted in a way which required us to take defensive measures.”

That just about sums up the state of play in the Persian Gulf. The facts are important. The Tehran Times reported: “One month after its arrival in the region, the Lincoln has not entered the Persian Gulf, and it’s not apparent that it will. The USS Gonzalez, a destroyer that is part of the Lincoln strike group, is operating in the Persian Gulf.”

“Last week, the Lincoln was some 320 kilometers (200 miles) off the eastern coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea. It would still need to pass through the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz before reaching the Persian Gulf.” Clearly, the ‘new normal’ is not so precarious as made out by some media reports (here , here and here.) Surely, a lot of grandstanding is going on, but, war? Not a chance. 

Meanwhile, the US has extended its sanctions on Iran’s oil industry to cover its largest petrochemical group. This appears to have been a decision in the pipeline but the timing of the announcement (on Friday) is intriguing — although it is a by-now familiar pattern of an inchoate Administration pulling in different directions. No doubt, Tehran has questioned the US’ true intentions by making such a move at this point in time when the air is full of talk about negotiations.

The Trump administration has taken a reckless step on the eve of Abe’s mission, which could have been avoided. It is a moot point whether Trump himself was aware of it or not. All the same, Tehran is approaching the talks with Abe calmly and purposely.

Unsurprisingly, Iran plays down the forthcoming talks. A commentary in the Tehran Times in the weekend cited Washington’s move on Friday in extending the sanctions to the petrochemical sector as confirming that the White House has no intentions to “retreat” from its “maximum pressure” strategy. The commentary sees two-fold pressures as working on Trump — aversion to war in the US public opinion and the lack of support from allies apropos his Iran policies.

Interestingly, the commentary weighs on Abe’s mission, assessing that its outcome depends on two factors — “the ‘real will’ and determination of the US and Iran to solve the ongoing problems, especially the US’ ‘real will’ ” and secondly, Japan’s ability to influence US decisions.

Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has welcomed Abe’s visit — “We will carefully listen to Abe’s views, and then will express ours in detail.” But he stressed that the US must stop its ‘economic war’. He disclosed that Tehran has already sensitised Abe in the matter.

Importantly, the Spokesman of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council has noted that the success of Abe’s visit could be guaranteed if only Japan has made efforts to “return the US to the JCOPA (2015 nuclear deal) and compensate (sic) the losses suffered by Iran (due to sanctions)” as well as to remove the US sanctions regime.

Abe’s visit to Tehran is a milestone in Japan-Iran bilateral relations insofar as this is the first such event since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, although the two countries have kept up friendly ties all through. Tehran pins hopes that Abe can win waivers from the US to be able to buy oil from Iran.

Quite obviously, the benchmark for the Iranian negotiators will be the remarks made by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on May 29 during an an address to a gathering of Iranian academicians, researchers and elites in Tehran. Khamenei said that the bottom line is, “We will not negotiate on the core issues of the Revolution. Negotiations on this issue imply trading; that is, they mean we give up on our defensive capabilities. We will not negotiate our military capability.”

In general, Khamenei said the US has a history of targeting the assets of a country by pressurising it. In this, negotiation becomes a tactic to compel the interlocutor to trade its national assets. “They (US) pressure until the adversary gets tired, and then propose to negotiate. This negotiation is complementary to the pressure and aims to cash in on the pressures. They impose pressure and then propose to negotiate. This is what negotiation means to them. Their strategy is not negotiation. It is pressure. Negotiation is part of the pressure strategy.”

That is why, Khamenei underscored, Iran has had to resort to resistance as a “countermeasure.” To quote him, “The countermeasure for us (Iran) is to use our own means of pressures to contend their (US) pressure. However, if we are deceived by their call for negotiations and consider our means of pressures unnecessary, we would slip and that equals absolute defeat.” (Excerpts of Khomeini’s speech are here.)

June 10, 2019 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , | 1 Comment

Trump Is Not Extricating Himself on Iran. He Is Being ‘Dug in’

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | June 10, 2019

Little doubt: it was intentional, a tactical ploy. Trump initially appeared to distance himself from the hawkishness of his team on Iran, by saying that ‘no’, he didn’t want war: No – really, he only wanted the Iranians to call him. He even riffs Bolton for his propensity for war. Since then, the press has been full of stories of ‘channels’ to Iran opening, and of mediators aloft. And we are regaled too with hints of some potential rift between the President and Bolton.

Of course, it was all good PR, and pure Art of the Deal: Invite your counter-party to negotiate precisely at the moment it is experiencing maximum pressure, and is ‘weakened’. And the PR part worked as a charm. Hence the mediation hype in the media. So, why all this ‘hot and cold rhetoric’? Which is it? Is Trump having second thoughts about conflict, or not? Well, in a word: ‘not’. The tactics represent pressure: More pressure on Iran, that’s all.

Whilst all this plays out, the US military build-up against Iran persists, amidst mounting US claims of Iranian intent to threaten the US, and its allies (but absent any evidence). Yes, Pompeo did say, “we’re ready to sit down with them”. But, Pompeo then added, “the American effort to fundamentally reverse the malign activity of this Islamic republic, this revolutionary force, is going to continue”.

First, and foremost, Iran would have to begin behaving as “a normal country”, which as the WSJ observes, only comes about when Iran observes every one of the twelve conditions. “The US hasn’t dropped those demands,” the Journal writes, “and has increased pressure from economic sanctions as well as pursuing its military buildup in the region.”

Is it all bluster? Will Trump go all the way with his threats and pressures – but ultimately pull out, just short of war? That seems to be the general consensus today; but Team Trump’s view of Iran seems based in so many misconceptions, layered on other misconceptions, and on intelligence that amounts to no more than Mossad’s assessment of Iranian future intentions.

The consensus on ‘no conflict’ unfortunately, may turn out to have been overly sanguine. This is not because Trump consciously desires war, but because the hawks surrounding him, particularly Bolton, are painting him into a corner – from which he must either back down, or double down, if Iran does not first capitulate.

And here is the point: the main Trump misconception may be that he does believe that Iran wants, and ultimately, ‘will seek a deal’. Really?

It is quite difficult to imagine what President Rouhani’s response could be, if asked by the Iranian National Security Council: if you (i.e. Rouhani) were to enter talks with US, what precisely would you talk about; what would you say? The Trump Administration’s position is that Iran will not ‘be allowed’ to enrich uranium at all – which is to say that Iran would be precluded – contrary to the provisions of the NPT – from having nuclear generated electricity, as it has sought since the time of the Shah. (To suggest that the West would supply Iran with just enough uranium to work its reactors, but no more, is absurd. Iran would never place its industrial base in jeopardy, to some whimsical western decision to punish Iran for some one, or other, misdemeanor).

This has been the conundrum from the outset: Iran will not accept ‘zero enrichment’; and now Bolton and Pence will not allow it any enrichment. US policy has completed the circle, back to its positions of circa 2004: i.e. No Enrichment.

The Supreme Leader has said some days ago, that he only reluctantly agreed to talks with the Obama team on the assurance that Obama had indeed accepted the principle of Iranian in-country enrichment. With hindsight, Ayatollah Khamenei said, he made a mistake. He should never have allowed the talks to proceed.

Indeed, there is nothing to talk about – except how the US might revert to the status quo ante its JCPOA withdrawal, and how it might quietly re-enter the nuclear accord – without too much loss of face. But this is absolutely not an option for Bolton, or for his US Christian Zionist allies.

And some symbolic encounter, Trump – Kim Jong Un Singapore-style, is not an option for Iran. Nor, is a ‘freeze’ of the situation, as in North Korea. A freeze would mean that Iran continues under maximum US pressure, for as long as the freeze might last, and at no cost to the US.

Why then, is Trump heading down this ‘dead-end’ road that might trip him into an unwanted, and politically costly, conflict of some sort? Well, possibly because Trump has been ‘fed’ some nonsense ‘intelligence’ that Iran is on the cusp of an economic and political implosion – which is about to sweep away the Iranian Revolution into the dustbin of history. This is ‘the line’ currently being purveyed by Netanyahu and Mossad, and by others inside the US (based on the usual, suspect exile stories). Trump might conclude from such assessments that war is not a risk, since the imminent collapse of Iran would make acting out any military threats redundant. He can afford, in short, just to wait out the collapse. If you detect a whiff of Iraq in the run-up to 2003 about all this (i.e. the input of Curveball and Chalabi), you would be right, in more ways than one – it is more than just the part played by embittered exiles in framing the prospect for war.

There is a conception that Bolton, as National Security Adviser, has little clout over the Pentagon. But the American Conservative, in an article entitled ‘Amassing War Powers, Bolton Rips a Page Out of Cheney’s Playbook’, points out the misconception:

“The elevation of Patrick Shanahan to the secretary of defense position will likely make National Security Adviser John Bolton the most powerful voice inside President Donald Trump’s cabinet.

“So say defense analysts who spoke to TAC this week. Former US officials also said they fear that Shanahan’s relative lack of experience may set America on a path to war, and cited a New York Times report that Shanahan had delivered to Bolton a plan to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East. Subsequent reports indicate that the Pentagon might be making plans to send even more … Stephen Wertheim, assistant professor of history at Columbia University, added, “when senators ‘think Shanahan’ [at confirmation hearings], they should think Bolton. Because a vacuum at the top of DoD, means that the department becomes a rubber stamp for Bolton””.

But more than this, the America Conservative ‘Cheney Playbook’ tag is right in another way: Bolton chairs at the NSC, the regular and frequent strategic dialogue meetings with Israel – intended to develop a joint action plan, versus Iran. What this means is that the Israeli intelligence assessments are being stovepiped directly to Bolton (and therefore to Trump), without passing by the US intelligence services for assessment or comment on the credibility of the intelligence presented (shades of Cheney confronting the analysts down at Langley). And Bolton too, will represent Trump at the ‘security summit’ to be held later this month in Jerusalem with Russia and Israel. Yes, Bolton truly has all the reins in his hands: He is ‘Mr Iran’.

Daniel Larison writes: “The Trump administration is still chasing after the fantasy that Russia will help push Iranian forces out of Syria”:

“A senior White House official said in a conference call with reporters that the US plans to stress to Russia during its trilateral national security advisers summit in Jerusalem this month that Iranian forces and their proxies have to leave Syria.

“The administration has been seeking Russian cooperation on this front for the last year. It has never made sense. The Russian government has no reason to agree to the US plan. Why would Russia do the US the favor of supporting the administration’s anti-Iranian policy? The administration’s problem is that they wrongly believe that other governments share their opinion of Iran’s role in the region. Reuters quotes an administration official saying this:

“But beyond discussions to prevent any unintended military escalation, the US official said the goal of the talks would be “to see how we can potentially work together to get rid of the primary irritant in the Middle East, which is the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

“The US and Israel may consider Iran to be “the primary irritant,” but Russia doesn’t see things this way and it isn’t going to respond favorably to efforts to enlist them in an anti-Iranian pressure campaign. Russia wants to cultivate good relations with Israel, so they are participating in the meeting, but that participation shouldn’t be taken as a sign that they are interested in giving Bolton what he wants. All in all, this meeting in Jerusalem will make for a curious photo op, but it isn’t going to produce anything significant.”

Yes. Another misconception, it seems. But one that is hugely convenient for Bolton – for, if the US fails to achieve a commitment on the part of Russia to ensure the expulsion of Iran from Syria, then we are likely to witness escalation by Israel – backed by the US – against Iranian elements in Syria. Already, we have seen missiles landing in occupied Golan in recent days – as a signal that Syria and Iran may be ready to activate the Golan as a new front in the conflict with Israel.

The Bolton squeeze with regard to Iran is in high gear. The aim, Col Pat Lang suggests, “is probably to pressure Iran until they lash out somewhere against US forces or interests”.

It may be, (or it may not be), that Trump is bluffing in his menaces to Iran. Trump may indeed be opposed to war – though, on the other hand, he has never missed an opportunity, over the years, to castigate and demonise Iran, whilst lauding Saudi Arabia in extravagant language. Bluffs do get called. And, does Trump really understand how improbable it is that Iran now will ‘lift the phone to call him’? Is he at all familiar with the complexities of more than a decade of nuclear negotiations with Iran?

No? Well Bolton and Netanyahu surely are – as they lead a willing President down the narrowing path, to the point where he has no alternative but either a humiliating retreat back down that path, or to double-down and go further.

So where is this taking us? Well, firstly, there will be Iranian push-back (to Bolton’s delight). For the present, Iran remains within the JCPOA; but it is limiting and curtailing its partial commitments (which is permitted, under the terms of the accord – when a signatory to the accord is not observing the deal). Iran has indeed started to accelerate enrichment, but has not breached the limits on its holding of uranium or heavy water – though it likely soon will. After 60 days, if the EU is not moving towards normalizing of its economic relations with Iran, we may see Iran increase the level of enrichment above 3.67%. And secondly, Iran has clearly signaled that US Gulf Allies who have urged, and supported the US attrition against Iran, will begin to experience pain, too. Iran has warned that any new ‘Gulf War’ would include the destruction of the energy infrastructure of some Gulf States. It would take twenty years for the Gulf to recover from such an event,

And whilst it is true that the US is not in a position to mount a full war on Iran, this does not mean that the US cannot escalate military pressures on Iran via Special Forces working with insurgent ethnic minorities inside the country to destabilize it, or to degrade Iranian infrastructure through missile or ‘bunker-buster’ attacks.

And when Iranian push-back starts, as the pressures escalates – and when it becomes clear that Russia will not act as America’s policeman in respect to Iran, Hizbullah or the Hash’d a-Shaibi, as Russia won’t – then the ‘war party’ will urge Trump to send Iran a painful ‘message’ of American ‘deterrence’ – and then what? Is it safe to conclude Trump will demur?

No. It is not possible to assert ‘there will be no conflict’. There is some risk. And Iran knows it.

June 10, 2019 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , | 1 Comment

Russian Aggression Comes From Media Racism

By Tim Kirby | Strategic Culture Foundation | June 10, 2019

As an American wouldn’t you want to live in a country with a powerful military that can prevent any invasion and backs up your foreign policy with some some muscle? Wouldn’t you want to make sure that America remains a cohesive nation that shuts down any attempts at succession and asserts a firm military, governmental and cultural presence all over its own territory? As an American wouldn’t you feel that America has the right to try to get back regions that it controlled for generations filled with Americans cut off from the bulk of the US if need be? And finally wouldn’t you think that it is fine for the USA to resist economic, military and cultural pressure from an aggressive foreign power while developing itself?

Unless you are some sort of self-hating SJW zealot then all of the above should seem perfectly reasonable to you… because it is. It is reasonable not just for America but for any great human civilization on our planet. So the question is why is it that when Russians follow these same normal patterns of behavior they are labeled as “aggression” and somehow immediately become horrible and unacceptable.

The Russian aggression trope has come up again as CBS brutally shoehorned the expression into the title of one of their videos. In the piece Senator Joe Manchin comments on a few different topics but the main one was his tour of Arctic nations and the climate issues related to them. All he had to say about Russia is that they are really putting their chips down on the Arctic and have invested massive amounts of money and resources into the region.

The topic of Russia came up after the presenter asked Mr. Manchin a bizarre conspiracy theory site style question related to Russians doing major nuclear tests in the Arctic for no clear reason other than Russians do bad things by default according to CBS’s editorial line. The presenter did not state where she got this nugget of fake news from, she just boldly asserted they are nuking snow and polar bears as Russians are known to do.

Thankfully Mr. Manchin bluntly said “no” ignoring this mad question to immediately go on to layout his opinion that the US could be really falling behind in terms of the Arctic due to the Russian surge in the great white north and that the US should be aware of this and try to catch up. He feels that America needs to catch up, overtake, or offset the Russians in the Arctic.

This is a totally reasonable respectable and patriotic stance to have, which is probably why CBS had to force “aggression” into the title of the video. If all American politicians had the same rational view of competition between nations that Mr. Manchin does, then the pointless tension between the US and Russia would probably be very nominal right now.

Perhaps it is part of human nature to create lots of double standards in favor of one’s own group. Every political movement and every nation seems to forgive the sins of its own guys when they do things “for the greater good” and demonizes anyone who tries to stop them. Our soldiers are heroes, their soldiers are monsters, our way of life is good for everyone, their way of life is a threat to the world etc. This aspect of tribal mentality is part of who we are and something we need to be much more mindful of in our 21st century nuclear standoff, because the worst that could happen from this type of rhetoric is no longer just some kind of pogrom but total nuclear annihilation.

If the Pro-Diversity machine in the media would wake up to the fact that the geopolitical chessboard, is, was and always will be “diverse” and that all players have similar goals with similar means that would really help the entire world move forward and keep us all very far away from the potential of a WWIII nuclear scenario. This “good guy vs. bad guy” racist narrative that Russia is on the bad end is propping up an ultimately artificial conflict with the US. It is time to acknowledge the reality that there are numerous cultures on Earth that want to be powerful and prosperous and just because they look different from us doesn’t make them any more or less capable of doing great evil.

June 10, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

The War Crimes That Don’t Get Punished

By Ron Paul | June 10, 2019

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) found himself in hot water recently over comments he made in defense of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who faces war crimes charges over his alleged conduct while serving in combat overseas. Gallagher is charged with stabbing a 15 year old ISIS member while in custody, of taking photos posing with the corpse of the teen, and with killing several civilians.

Defending Gallagher recently, Hunter put his own record up next to the SEAL to suggest that he’s an elected Congressman who has done worse things in battle than Gallagher.

That’s where Hunter’s defense earned him some perhaps unwanted attention. While participating in the first “Battle of Fallujah” in early 2007, by Hunter’s own account he and his fellow soldiers killed hundreds of innocent civilians, including women and children. They fired mortars into the city and killed at random.

In the sanitized world of US mainstream media reporting on US wars overseas, we do not hear about non-combatants being killed by Americans. How many times has there been any reporting on the birth defects that Iraqis continue to suffer in the aftermath of US attacks with horrific weapons like depleted uranium and white phosphorus?

Rep. Hunter described his philosophy when fighting in Iraq:

“You go in fast and hard, you kill people, you hit them in the face and then you get out… We’re going to hurt you and then we’re going to leave. And if you want to be nice to America, we’ll be nice to you. If you don’t want to be nice to us, we’re going to slap you again.”

This shows how much Duncan Hunter does not understand about war. When he speaks of hitting people in the face until they are nice to America, he doesn’t seem to realize that the people of Fallujah – and all of Iraq – never did a thing to the US to deserve that hit in the face. The war was launched on the basis of lies and cooked-up intelligence by many of the people who are serving in the current Administration.

And that brings us to the real war criminals. Rep. Duncan Hunter and his fellow soldiers may have killed hundreds of innocent civilians and even felt justified. Their superior officers, after all, established the rules of engagement. Above those superior officers, going up and beyond to the policymakers, the lie was sold to the American people to justify a war of choice against a country that could not have threatened us if it wanted to.

Vice President Dick Cheney knew what he was doing when he kept returning to the CIA headquarters, strong-arming analysts to make the intelligence fit the chosen policy. John Bolton and the other neocons knew what they were doing when they made claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction they knew were false. The Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans played its role in selling the lie. So did the media.

Edward Gallagher will face trial and possibly jail for his actions. Rep. Duncan Hunter may even face punishment – though perhaps only at the ballot box – for his admitted crimes. But until those at the top who continue to lie and manipulate us into war for their own gain face justice, the real criminals will continue to go free and we will continue pursuing a suicidal neocon foreign policy.

June 10, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | 3 Comments

Leaked plot: Brazil’s Lula jailed in fabricated case to keep him from election

Press TV – June 10, 2019

Leaked documents reveal that the Brazilian justice minister has, in collaboration with prosecutors, fabricated a case against ex-president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and convicted him of corruption in a scheme meant to prevent the popular politician from running for the 2018 presidential election.

The Intercept website, citing the leaked documents, reported on Sunday that Moro was sharing information and giving advice to prosecutors working in a years-long anti-corruption probe, known as “Car Wash.”

The massive Car Wash probe, which has swept through Brazil for the last five years, eventually resulted in the conviction of Lula for corruption and money laundering.

Lula has been serving a 12-year prison sentence since April, 2018. A second conviction was handed down to him by Moro in February for, which Lula was sentenced to almost 13 years.

The Intercept said an anonymous source had provided the online new publication with material, including private chats, audio recordings, videos and photos that show “serious wrongdoing, unethical behavior, and systematic deceit.”

“Moro secretly and unethically collaborated with the Car Wash prosecutors to help design the case against Lula,” it wrote.

“Car Wash prosecutors spoke openly of their desire to prevent the PT (Lula’s Workers’ Party) from winning the election and took steps to carry out that agenda,” The Intercept said.

In response to the report, Lula’s Twitter account posted a link to The Intercept stories, writing, “The truth will prevail.”

The leftist former leader, who ruled Brazil between 2003 and 2010, has denied all the corruption charges, saying they were politically motivated to prevent him from competing in the elections.

The justice minister denied wrongdoing in a statement on Sunday. He said the material obtained through the “criminal invasion of prosecutors’ cell phones had been “taken out of context.”

“Careful reading reveals that there is nothing there despite the sensational material,” Moro said on Twitter.

He became part of the cabinet of President Jair Bolsonaro, who had said during his campaign that he hoped Lula would “rot in prison.”

In a separate statement, Car Wash prosecutors also dismissed the allegations, saying they were victim of “a criminal action perpetrated by a hacker,” and that they are available to provide clarifications.

June 10, 2019 Posted by | Deception | | Leave a comment

The lessons of Chernobyl: It’s the West that now needs Glasnost

By Neil Clark | RT | June 10, 2019

The much-acclaimed series ‘Chernobyl’ tells the story of the 1986 nuclear disaster and the authorities’ attempts to play it down. Ironically, 33 years on, it’s Western leaders who need to learn how to be honest and transparent.

It was the accident which some think led directly to the fall of communism. “Reformers in the Soviet Union, and Mikhail Gorbachev himself, used Chernobyl as an argument for more accountability and greater frankness, because the initial reaction of the Soviet authorities was anything but transparent. It became a symbol of what was wrong with the Soviet system,” says Professor Archie Brown, author of ‘The Rise and Fall of Communism’, as cited in yesterday’s Sunday Express newspaper.

Just three-and-a-half years after Chernobyl, the Berlin Wall came down, and in 1991, the USSR itself ceased to exist.

Western ideologues were quick to gloat, saying that a system which kept telling people lies and trying to cover things up was always doomed to fail, but in terms of openness and telling the truth, are we really much better than the Soviet Union of the 1980s?

Consider the way a succession of illegal wars has been sold to the public. We were told in 2003 that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which could be assembled and launched within 45 minutes. It was false, patently so, yet the Chilcot Report was only published 13 years later, and even now, no one has been prosecuted in relation to a war which led to the deaths of one million and the rise of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS).

In 2011, we went to war again, against Libya. Once more, our politicians were less than honest with us. We were told that we had to bomb because Colonel Gaddafi was going to massacre the inhabitants of Benghazi. Only five-and-a-half years later were we allowed to know the truth. In September 2016, a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report held that “the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence… the Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element.”

Again, we were tricked into war. By ‘nice’ Western politicians, mark you, and not ‘lying’ Soviet ones. Once more, there’s been no accountability. Libya, a country which had the highest Human Development Index in the whole of Africa, was destroyed. It was a far worse disaster than Chernobyl, as indeed Iraq was. When will the HBO dramas on these catastrophes be screening?

It’s not just the illegal wars. There have been cover-ups of plenty of other things, too. Three years after Chernobyl, there was the Hillsborough disaster in which 96 Liverpool football fans were crushed to death. It was the worst disaster in British sporting history. To add insult to tragedy, the fans themselves were blamed. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun claimed on its front page that fans had urinated on policemen and picked the pockets of victims. It took nearly 30 years to get the record formally put right and achieve ‘Justice for the 96’ when a jury held that the fans were ‘unlawfully killed’. The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, which wants a public inquiry into the way striking miners in South Yorkshire were ‘brutalised’ by police in the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in 1984, are still waiting. In 2016, Home Secretary Amber Rudd said there would be no inquiry.

Where’s the openness and transparency here?

Likewise with the cover-ups over suspected Establishment pedophiles and other high-up wrong-doers. We learnt only this year that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had, back in the 80s, personally protected a senior Conservative MP who allegedly had a “penchant for small boys.”

We don’t know whether a leading Soviet politician who was a child-abuser would have been prosecuted. Probably not. But we do know that in Britain in the 1980s, such cover-ups definitely occurred. And who really believes that’s still not the case today?

Bergson and Popper famously divided societies into ‘open’ and ‘closed’ ones, but Western ‘openness’ is not quite as ‘open’ as we’re led to believe. It does not extend to politicians frankly acknowledging the role that Western foreign policy has played in aiding, directly or indirectly, the very same terrorists who have gone on to target Western civilians. That’s a taboo subject, even after the Manchester Arena bombings and the bomber’s link to the MI5-‘sorted’ anti-Gaddafi LIFG, and the slaughter of tourists on the beach in Tunisia by a man who reportedly trained at an IS camp in neighboring ‘liberated’ Libya.

There are many more subjects too that are so taboo I dare not even mention them here. By contrast, dishonest or fact-lite narratives, such as ‘Russiagate’, or the one that holds that the UK Labour Party, an anti-racist party, is ‘awash with anti-Semitism’, hold sway. We CAN talk about these and indeed some commentators talk about little else.

It is the greatest of ironies that at the very same time that we are being told how HBO’s Chernobyl exposes the rottenness of the ‘closed’ Soviet system, a man who does believe in openness and transparency, a free press, and government accountability, is languishing in a maximum security prison in ‘open’ London, facing a possible extradition to the US and sentences of up to 175 years in jail. Julian Assange, whose only crime is wanting to show us what was behind the curtain, is no less persecuted than the Soviet dissidents about whom we heard an awful lot in the 1980s.

It’s been said that if you feud with someone long enough you end up being like them, or at least how you liked to portray them. When we think of the old Cold War and what’s going on today, that seems to have come true.

In its lack of transparency and openness, and the way in which lying has become the new normal, the West is now behaving the way the Soviet Union is supposed to have operated at the time of Chernobyl.

Who, I wonder, will be the equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev to introduce some much-needed Western Glasnost?

June 10, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Film Review, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Cuban Aid: What HBO Didn’t Mention In Their ‘Chernobyl’ Series

teleSUR | June 9, 2019

HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ has been criticised for being historically inaccurate, but on Sunday, Cuba pointed out that their crucial role in providing free treatment to the victims is being airbrushed out of history.

The recent HBO series takes a look at the events of the 1986 tragedy in Chernobyl, where an explosion at a nuclear facility in the former USSR caused huge damage in loss of life and radiation poisoning. The series, featuring entirely British actors, has been accused of being an anti-soviet smear piece aimed at portraying the Soviets as selfish and incompetent, one Russian outlet Rossiyskaya Gazeta said.

“The people are depicted as drunken lowlifes, to the extent that you find in some Hollywood movies, where Slavs show up as these disgusting, repulsive characters.”

Furthermore, Russian media has accused the show of multiple historical inaccuracies, journalist Alexander Kots says that a helicopter crash that appears in the series in fact happened at an entirely different time, and that the way the treatment of miners is depicted has no basis in historical fact.

However, Cuban media has now waded into the row, accusing HBO of airbrushing the socialist island’s role in providing free treatment to those affected by the disaster. Cuban outlet Cubadebate laid out the extent to which Cuba helped Chernobyl victims.

At the beaches of Tarara, 30 kilometres from Havana, Cuba had converted an elite holiday village into an enormous health center for children who had been affected by the nuclear disaster.

The health complex contained hospitals, schools and recreational areas, where children could recover in a holistic setting. Cubadebate reported on Sunday that over 25,000 children were treated for radiation poisoning between 1990 and 2011, mainly for cancer, deformations, muscle atrophy and other conditions related to radiation.

The comprehensive treatment that was provided also fell within Cuba’s ‘special period’ of intense economic hardship that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving Cuba without its main export customer.

Despite the economic difficulties of those years, the treatment center in Tarara continued to operate. One Cuban doctor spoke to teleSUR about the programme in 2017, saying, “Although Cuba went through economically difficult times, our state continued to offer specialized treatment to minors, fulfilling a commitment of solidarity.”

June 10, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment