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Joe Biden isn’t a foreign policy guru. He’s a Stepford wife repeating ‘War Party’ talking points

By Rachel Marsden | RT | September 25, 2020

There’s a trope emerging that credits Biden with being a bona fide foreign policy expert. Alongside this delusion is the expectation that he will eat Trump’s lunch during the upcoming election debates. I wouldn’t bank on that.

When it comes to foreign policy, Biden is little more than a Stepford wife who has simply repeated the talking points of the faction that truly runs Washington and American foreign policy. If this faction had an actual name, it might be called the War Party, and it would consist of both Republican and Democratic Party members.

It’s hardly surprising, for example, that the wife of late Senator John McCain, who rarely if ever encountered a war that he didn’t support (despite being taken prisoner and tortured himself during the Vietnam War), said that she would back Biden. The fact that Biden is a Democrat and McCain was a Republican is beside the point when their worldview is virtually identical.

Like a wind-up doll constantly spewing whatever its makers programmed into it, Biden tweeted this week: “As Juan Guaidó speaks about the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis and the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Maduro, I reaffirm my commitment to stand with the Venezuelan people. A Biden-Harris administration will always champion democracy and human rights around the world.”

How about starting with championing democracy in Venezuela by allowing the Venezuelan people to choose their own opposition to President Nicolas Maduro? Juan Guaido was simply handpicked by the US to play President of Venezuela in the hope that they’d fool the rest of the world into believing that it was true. It doesn’t seem to be getting the traction they had hoped. So now Guaido is resorting to doing online Zoom chats, in which he delivers a speech pretending to address the United Nations Assembly in parallel to President Maduro’s actual UN speech.

It wasn’t the first time that Biden had violated the democratic values that he purports to uphold by attempting to impose his worldview on the people of a foreign country. During his Democratic National Convention address last month, Biden said: “We cannot elect a man who belittles our closest allies while embracing dictators like Vladimir Putin.”

Well, actually, Joe, America could indeed feasibly re-elect Trump, in the same way that the Russian people have repeatedly chosen Putin over the main Communist Party opposition in Russia. A voting result that delegitimizes the worldview of Biden and fellow neoconservative global master planners isn’t a dictatorship. What is dictatorial is trying to impose a foreign agenda on the citizens of nations that happen to be led by officials who refuse to prostrate themselves before US interests.

And it’s not just America’s foes who bear the brunt of Biden’s policy self-centeredness. He even appears oblivious to the interests of US allies when they fall out of step. In an op-ed earlier this month, Biden had the audacity to dictate how he’d offer Iran a “credible path back to diplomacy” – by unilaterally adding a series of pre-conditions for Iran to rejoin a multilateral agreement that was breached not by Tehran but by Washington. It was the US that let down its allied partners in the deal – Britain, Germany, and France – all of which have been keen to see US sanctions dropped so they can finally normalize relations with Iran via increased commercial ties.

To be fair, Trump’s foreign policy has also left a lot to be desired. Many of his failures can be summed up in five words: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In the heat of a presidential campaign, Pompeo spent last week smack-talking Cuban and Venezuelan leaders in Latin America in an attempt to drum up votes for Trump among the Venezuelan and Cuban diaspora in Florida. Pompeo’s comedy routine consists of visiting foreign countries and meddling in their domestic affairs by telling them who they shouldn’t be doing business with  – all the while playing the victim of alleged foreign meddling in American affairs.

And it was Trump who hired regime change aficionado John Bolton as National Security Advisor – before calling Bolton a “wacko”, a “dope”, and a “disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war.”

Trump’s no angel, but unlike Biden, at least he’s denigrated a warmonger. By contrast, Biden outright supported wars in Syria, Libya, Serbia, and Iraq. If history is any indication, he risks blindly stumbling into yet another one.

The fact that Trump is peddling the notion that Biden is a Trojan horse for progressive leftists – who tend to be knee-jerk anti-war about as much as neoconservatives are for it – is laughable. Perhaps someone could give Biden a sharp tap. The kind that you’d give to a stubborn old model television set to get it to work when the picture doesn’t display properly. Because he’s stuck spewing neoconservative talking points and refuses to change his tune.

Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com

September 25, 2020 Posted by | Militarism | , , | 2 Comments

Hunter Biden’s conflict of interest silenced by ‘fake mainstream media’, but Trump’s own people are in on cover-up

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | September 25, 2020

While US President Donald Trump is correct that mainstream media outlets are duplicitously dismissing revelations about Joe and Hunter Biden, what about his own Treasury and intelligence community going full Russiagate?

Joe Biden should “leave the campaign” because he “knew everything” about his son Hunter’s shady business dealings overseas, Trump said on Thursday in an exclusive interview with Fox News Radio. He was referring to the 87-page report, published Wednesday by Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees, which looked into Hunter Biden’s business dealings while his father was Barack Obama’s VP.

“I look at Hunter Biden today, where he stole millions of dollars, stole millions,” Trump told Brian Kilmeade, adding that “his father was in on it.” The “corrupt” Biden “knew his son was getting all this money from China, from Ukraine and other places,” Trump said.

In a follow-up tweet, Trump pointed out that Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire from a Russian billionaire. That would be Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia, and widow of the former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. The report says she sent Biden’s company Rosemont Seneca Thornton the wire transfer for unspecified consulting services in February 2014, citing confidential documents.

Trump is clearly infuriated that both Biden and the media are shrugging the whole story off, given the insane amount of scrutiny he has been subjected to since 2016 for alleged – but never substantiated – “Russian ties.” His campaign was even spied on, before and after the election, on the basis of a salacious “dossier” fabricated by a British spy working for the Democrats.

By contrast, Hunter Biden’s relationship with Burisma is well-documented, and Joe Biden was filmed boasting about getting an Ukrainian prosecutor fired – but to Democrats and the media, it’s a “conspiracy theory,” which they even tried to use to impeach Trump back in December.

To the surprise of precisely no one, the very same outlets pushing ‘Russiagate’ for years now scurried to spin the Biden report. Hunter’s Burisma job was “problematic” but the report “doesn’t show it changed US policy,” is how the Washington Post put it. The Daily Beast called the report a “hatchet job” and “politically motivated.” The New York Times said the report “Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing” and “appeared to be little more than a rehashing of unproven allegations that echoed a Russian disinformation campaign.” And so on, and so forth.

Even Fox, which aired Kilmeade’s show where Trump made the comments, made sure to extensively quote Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates, who called the report “a foreign attack against the sovereignty of our elections with taxpayer dollars – an attack founded on a long-disproven, hardcore rightwing conspiracy theory.”

While Trump is not wrong to argue he’s running not just against Biden and the Democrats, but the entire mainstream media backing them – much like in 2016 – there’s just one tiny glitch with that line of reasoning: his own administration is backing up the Democrats’ narrative!

First there was William Evanina, the ODNI official appointed to oversee all election intelligence briefings by acting DNI Richard Grenell, Trump’s trusted envoy. Evanina told Congress in August that “Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment.’”

Later that month, Trump’s primary rival and now supposed ally Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) signed off on a “bipartisan” Senate Intelligence report that was a rehash of every single discredited “Russiagate” talking point the committee’s real chair Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) could cram in there. The media had a field day with that one.

Then, on September 10, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin – one of his original cabinet picks – sanctioned Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, a major source for the Senate Republicans’ report, as a “Russian agent.”

It was Mnuchin, not the media or the Democrats, who described Derkach’s publication of alleged phone calls between Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko as “foreign interference in an attempt to undermine” the upcoming presidential elections. The recordings promoted “false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning US officials… with the intent to discredit” Biden, he added. None of this was actually substantiated, mind you, but US sanctions by definition don’t need to be.

So when Trump argues that the US mainstream media sides with the Democrats and cares about “Russian ties” only when they can be – and have been – weaponized against him, he definitely has a point. Yet when it comes to Mnuchin and Rubio siding with that narrative against him, he’s as silent as Joe Biden on the issue of Hunter. Seems like in post-facts America, the swamp drains you.

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

September 25, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | 1 Comment

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Under Federal Probe for Campaign Fund Theft

Former Republican congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen speaks with EFE during an interview in Miami, Florida. November 2, 2018.

teleSUR | September 25, 2020

According to a Miami CBS affiliate, several one-time staffers have been subpoenaed to provide records or testify before a grand jury on Ros-Lehtinen’s alleged misuse of campaign funds for personal expenses, vacations, and ornate meals—part of an investigation by the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section.

Announcing in April 2017 she would not be seeking re-election in 2018, Ros-Lehtinen transferred almost $180,000 from her re-election campaign fund to a political action committee (PAC) she ran, not an unusual move. However, personal use of these funds is illegal under federal law, even if transferred first to a PAC.

Expense reports from the PAC show Ros-Lehtinen indulged in a nearly $4,000 family trip to Walt Disney World in December 2017, a $3,100 dinner at Coral Gables restaurant Mesa Mar for New Years 2018, more than $10,000 in rooms at New York’s Lotte New York Palace and $28,000 at the W Hotel on South Beach, among many other expenditures.

Nonpartisan watchdog group Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint against Ros-Lehtinen with the FEC in October 2019, claiming her PAC violated federal law by “converting contributions for personal use…none of which have any apparent connections to Rep. Ros-Lehtinen candidacy or duties as an officeholder.” It remains unclear if the FEC referred the case to the DOJ or whether the DOJ began its own investigation independently.

In a statement to CBS Miami, Ros-Lehtinen’s attorney Jeffrey Weiner said: “She and her former staff members and volunteers are cooperating fully with the Federal Elections Commission and the Department of Justice. We are gathering the information requested by the Department of Justice and are confident that, if bookkeeping errors were committed, they were due to negligence and not willful or intentional misconduct by the former congresswoman or anyone on her staff or her accountants.”

Weiner added: “As my team and I have investigated and studied the facts in this matter, we have not found any evidence whatsoever of intentional wrongdoing by Ileana or anyone on her behalf.”

Ros-Lehtinen, who represented Miami-Dade county from 1989-2019 and was the first Latina and Cuban-American elected to Congress, served as the Chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee from 2011-2013, widely known her punitive and interventionist positions towards Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

September 25, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , | 1 Comment

Israel and Italy Cement Military Ties, Massive Arms to Be Exchanged

Palestine Chronicle | September 24, 2020

The Israeli and Italian governments concluded a major arms deal, according to a statement issued Wednesday by the Israeli Defense Ministry.

According to Israeli sources, the deal would allow Israel to sell “Spike anti-tank guided missiles and aircraft simulators in exchange for training helicopters to replace the Israeli Air Force’s aging fleet”.

Intense talks, which led to the agreement, began last February.

The military exchange is estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars and its consequences are expected to last for at least two decades. According to the newly-signed agreement, Italian military contractor Leonardo will provide Israel with 20 years of aircraft maintenance.

“The agreement signed today is another expression of the close security and economic relations between Israel and Italy,” Israeli Defense Ministry Director-General Amir Eshel said in a statement, which was quoted in The Times of Israel.

Israel is currently the eighth leading weapons exporter in the world, and its military hardware, touted as ‘combat-proven’, is coveted by many countries.

September 25, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , | 1 Comment

Remembering Israel’s botched attempt to assassinate Khaled Meshaal

MEMO | September 25, 2020

What: On 25 September, 1997, Israelis from the Mossad spy agency attempted to assassinate Palestinian political leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman, the capital of Jordan. The brazen attempt on the life of the then 41-year-old head of the Hamas Political Bureau sparked a diplomatic row which threatened to wreck the newly-signed peace deal between Jordan and Israel. The crisis ended with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu making a number of humiliating concessions.

Where: Amman, Jordan.

When: 25 September, 1997.

What happened?

In an attempt to cripple the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, Netanyahu, then in his first term as prime minister, authorised the assassination of Meshaal. The little-known Palestinian leader was born in 1956 in Silwad, which was then in the Jordanian administered West Bank. In 1967, Meshaal’s family and 300,000 other Palestinians were expelled from their homes by Israeli occupation forces in a second wave of ethnic cleaning that came to be known as the Naksa (Setback). Netanyahu is said to have personally picked Meshaal from a number of Hamas operatives for Mossad agents to kill. The attempt on Meshaal’s life came in the wake of a series of suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

A six-member Mossad team arrived in Amman a week before the assassination using false Canadian passports. The plan was clear: kill the exiled Hamas leader using a lethal toxin without leaving any trace of the killers. The idea was that after the toxin had been administered covertly, Meshaal would go about the rest of his day as normal and then, when tiredness overcame him, he would take a nap, never to wake up again; he was expected to die within 48 hours.

On the morning of the assassination attempt, two of the six agents moved into position to deliver a lethal dose of toxin — identified later as fentanyl — as Meshaal entered his office. The other four Israeli agents are said to have been deployed around the block either as drivers or as lookouts.

The Mossad agents delivered the toxin using an aerosol device and fled from the scene. One of Meshaal’s bodyguards gave chase and managed to apprehend the assassins after some hand to hand combat. Their capture was to have major ramifications.

Khaled Meshaal, leader of Hamas political bureau

What happened next?

Hours after the arrest of the two agents by the Jordanian authorities, the Israelis hatched a plan to diffuse the situation. With the diplomatic consequence of his actions dawning on Netanyahu, he attempted to conceal the botched assassination attempt from the rest of the world. He dispatched Mossad head Danni Yatom to plead with King Hussain of Jordan for the agents’ release. Yatom’s pre-emptive disclosure and plea for help from the Jordanian monarch exploded in Israel’s face, sparking a diplomatic crisis with the Hashemite Kingdom, which had normalised relations with the Zionist state three years earlier.

While the Israelis tried frantically to keep a lid on the botched plot, Meshaal’s health deteriorated. The toxin had done its job and within 48 hours he would be dead. King Hussain warned Israel that if the Hamas leader died, the Mossad agents would be hanged as murderers. The King had gone out on a limb to sign a peace treaty with Israel against the wishes of his people, so he called US President Bill Clinton to enlist his support. It was said that US anger was such that no one within the normally pro-Israel White House was willing to make Netanyahu’s case for him. “This man is impossible,” Clinton is reported to have said upon hearing that the Israeli Prime Minister had authorised the assassination attempt with little regard for Jordanian sovereignty, and thus endangered the fragile peace treaty.

Having been stonewalled by Netanyahu for the antidote to the toxin at the first time of asking, an angry King Hussein relayed his message through Clinton, insisting that the Israelis must deliver a vial of the antidote, which was the only way to save Meshaal’s life. “If Meshaal dies, the peace treaty dies with him,” he insisted. With the US applying pressure, Israel had no choice but to comply. A light aircraft delivered the antidote.

The indignity for Netanyahu did not end there. The two Mossad agents were still under arrest facing a death sentence and the Israeli Embassy in Amman, in which the other four members of the six man Mossad team had taken refuge, was surrounded by Jordanian security forces. In exchange for allowing them to leave Jordan, King Hussain was determined to exact a heavy price. He demanded a prisoner exchange, which was agreed.

Under the deal, Israel released the ailing Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the quadriplegic founder and spiritual leader of Hamas who was one of the most notable Palestinians in its prisons, along with 70 other Palestinian prisoners.

Meshaal was saved with just hours to spare. His reputation grew within the Palestinian resistance movement as “the man who wouldn’t die”. He became the leader of Hamas when Israel assassinated Yassin in 2004.

Meanwhile, a chastened Netanyahu was forced to apologise. His act of contrition came two days later when he arrived in Amman to pledge that Israel would not make another attempt on Meshaal’s life. This was not the end for the humiliated Israeli Prime Minister. He lost his bid for re-election in 1999, after which he retired temporarily from politics.

September 25, 2020 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | 2 Comments

Putin offers US exchange of ‘guarantees’ that both countries won’t meddle in each other’s elections or wider domestic affairs

RT | September 25, 2020

Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed on Friday that Russia and the US prepare a formal agreement that they won’t interfere in each other’s domestic agendas and sign a pact on preventing “incidents in the information space.”

In a statement ahead of the forthcoming US American presidential election, Putin has offered Washington the chance to start an extensive dialogue on issues affecting both countries.

He suggested that Washington and Moscow exchange “guarantees of non-intervention into the internal affairs of each other, including into electoral processes” by using telecoms technology and other “high-tech methods.”

Numerous US officials have long accused Russia of using hackers, and waging online “propaganda” campaigns, in an effort to sway public opinion around American elections. Moscow has vehemently denied these allegations, arguing that they are baseless, or exaggerated.

Putin also said that Moscow and Washington must avoid confrontation in the digital field, by signing a bilateral treaty on preventing “incidents in the information space,” similar to the 1972 US-Soviet pact which laid out steps to reduce incidents at sea.

These measures are aimed at “building up trust between our states,” Putin noted, adding that the resumption of “high-level” dialogue on information security would mutually benefit both nations.

Washington has stepped up its attacks against Moscow as the US presidential race nears election day on November 3. FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the US House Homeland Security Committee earlier this month that Russia was trying to “sow divisiveness and discord,” primarily hoping to “denigrate” Donald Trump’s rival Joe Biden.

The Russian Foreign Ministry rebuffed these accusations as “absolutely evidence-free,” arguing that the US maligns Russia for political purposes. “We have repeatedly stated that we had not interfered in American domestic political processes and are not going to do so,” the ministry’s spokesperson Maria Zakharova said.

September 25, 2020 Posted by | Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

Much-hyped US-made Javelin missile FAILS during Ukrainian military drill attended by President Zelensky

RT | September 24, 2020

After all the ballyhoo about their supply to Kiev you think they’d at least work? A US-made Javelin anti-tank missile has malfunctioned during a major military exercise, in the presence of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Northern Command, Major General Valery Zaluzhny, confirmed the incident to local media on Wednesday.

“The Javelin didn’t work. The missile didn’t fly out. Maybe, it was a mistake by the operator. Maybe, it was something else. We have to figure it out,” Zaluzhny said.

President Zelensky attended the ongoing ‘Joint Efforts 2020’ drill in the country’s Nikolaev region. Around 12,000 service personnel are participating in the exercise from September 22-25.

The drill was described by Zelensky’s website as “the first exercise conducted in accordance with the standards of NATO after Ukraine had received NATO’s Enhanced Opportunities Partner status.”

Ukraine received the first batch of Javelin missiles in June 2020. The second shipment is expected in 2021-22.

September 25, 2020 Posted by | Militarism | , | 1 Comment

Hack reveals UK’s propaganda campaign to drive Syrian regime change

By Johanna Ross | September 25, 2020

When I reported on the leak of Integrity Initiative documents back in 2018/19 which exposed the extent of the UK’s propaganda war against Russia, I didn’t think it could get much more organised and coordinated than it was. Involving hundreds of journalists and academics across the globe to spin disinformation about Russia and paint the country in as negative a light as possible in the mainstream media, the UK government-funded campaign was as sophisticated as the information war gets. But here we are in 2020, still uncovering the true scope of western government influence on the narrative plugged by the mainstream media. And it doesn’t speak well for our ‘democracy’.

On 8th September the hacker group Anonymous published shocking revelations of how a concerted and organised campaign has been waged to support the anti-government rebels in Syria. One set of documents relates to the NGO ARK, which although brands itself as a humanitarian organisation, effectively functions as a vehicle for western-led regime change. In one of the papers it states:

‘ARK’s focus since 2012 has been delivering highly effective, politically- and conflict-sensitive Syria programming for the governments of the United Kingdom, United States, Denmark, Canada, Japan and the European Union.’

This is a somewhat different picture from the mission statement on their website:

‘ARK was created in order to assist the most vulnerable, particularly refugees, the displaced and those impacted by conflict and instability.’

Sounds lovely doesn’t it? But this organisation is far from charitable. In the last few years it has received $66 million from western governments to drive regime change in Syria. It boasts of relationships with Syrian opposition members that have been built up ‘over the years’, and we know that they date as far back as 2011, if not before, as its  documents read ‘ARK staff are in regular contact with activists and civil society actors whom they initially met during the outbreak of protests in spring 2011’.

ARK also had a targeted propaganda campaign package for Syrian media. In the documents it is discussed how best to reach Syrian audiences to promote the regime change narrative, with success being achieved it is said, on digital media such as Facebook, but also through broadcast media. If there was ever any evidence that the mainstream media was bought, this is it:

‘To achieve a strong digital presence, ARK/Accadian will draw on its existing relationships with media organisations… Using its existing networks and connections, ARK/Accadian would target key Syrian satellite TV networks (Orient TV, Souria al-Shaab, Souria al-Ghad, Barada) and regional Arabic networks and primary international channels.’

What is extraordinary is the repeated use of the word ‘independent’ to describe the media outlets being promoted by ARK. The authors are clearly blissfully unaware that by interfering in the media of this sovereign state to promote the overthrow of the government, the media can hardly be termed ‘independent’ but instead an arm of the British state and its own particular political aims and objectives. The document reads:

‘Since ARK first began training citizen journalists in 2012, as part of HMG’s efforts to develop professional, 2 independent and self-sufficient local Syrian media organisations, it has trained more than 200 journalists and has been a key implementer of a multi-donor effort to develop media platforms inside Syria, maintaining close links with these organisations’.

It boasts having produced over 2000 news reports for various mainstream Arabic channels, including Orient, Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera and Sky Arabic which it says are ‘broadcast almost every day’. Some of the statements are pure, straightforward admissions of propaganda:

‘ARK has also facilitated contact between the Syrian opposition and international media, seeking to address the perception of an uncoordinated opposition by fostering the image of a united front.’

It is extraordinary the sheer brassneck with which this author writes about manipulating the Syrian public through propaganda. It has the stated goal of creating the impression of a united Syrian opposition, which of course there never was.

These documents contrast with the UK government’s website on ‘what it is doing in Syria’. There we are told that British involvement is limited to humanitarian aid as it ‘suspended all services of the British Embassy in Damascus and withdrew all diplomatic personnel from Syria in 2012’. The Anonymous hack shows that this is far from the truth. There has clearly been considerable British involvement in fostering regime change in Syria. If it weren’t for these leaked documents, the UK taxpayer would remain completely ignorant as to what foreign meddling is being carried out in his or her name.

For more detailed analysis and context of the hacked documents, please see Ben Norton’s report on The GrayZone.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

September 25, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | 2 Comments