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Norway’s atonement for Nord Stream sabotage

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | FEBRUARY 17, 2023

The meeting of the defence ministers of the Pentagon’s Ukraine Defence Contact Group in the “Ramstein” format in Brussels on January 14 failed to make any major announcement on the supply of offensive weapons to Kiev.

But the US President Joe Biden is expected in Poland early next week and may have another face-to-face meeting with Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky. Biden probably intends to make a splash before declaring his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election.

The Biden Administration hopes to push Germany to the war front in Ukraine but the meeting in Brussels ended up inconclusively. Later, the press conference by the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin had an air of vacuity, of empty-headedness, devoid of content.

Against this murky backdrop, all that the NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg would say was that the supply of military aircraft to Ukraine is being discussed, but this is not an urgent problem. According to him, the current conflict is a “struggle of logistics” and ammunition, so the alliance needs not so much to provide Ukraine with new weapons, as to make sure that everything that has already been delivered works. Stoltenberg stressed the need to deliver on the promises regarding German Marder infantry fighting vehicles, American Bradley, as well as Germany’s Leopard 2 tanks. 

The single biggest announcement by Austin on Tuesday was about a decision by the Norwegian government that it will provide 7.5 billion euros in military and civilian assistance to Ukraine over the coming five years. He called it “a very significant commitment.” 

Austin pretended it never occurred to him why Norway is making such a grand gesture, which is in reality a pathetic act of atonement for destroying the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Therein hangs a tale. 

Of course, the Ramstein meeting did not discuss the bombshell report by Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist with a track record of breaking major stories, on how the US reduced Germany’s Nord Stream gas pipelines to “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea” — to borrow the immortal words of Victoria Nuland, US Undersecretary of State — as the conflict in Ukraine was raging.  

According to Hersh’s source, the decision to sabotage the pipeline came directly from President Biden and the subsequent top secret debate within the US administration lasting some 9 months was on how to achieve the goal without getting caught.

Hersh’s report on February 8 disclosed that it was the Norwegian navy which finally found the optimal location for blowing up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. Thus, on September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane dropped a sonar buoy in a seemingly routine flight, triggering high-powered C4 explosives that had been planted on the pipelines.

Hersh has since explained to the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung that Norway was particularly interested in successfully pulling off the plot against the Nord Stream pipelines. 

In his words, “Norway was interested in income growth, and hence in increasing the volume of its energy supplies to the EU, to the same Germany. And what do we see after the mission? Norway has made it. It’s (energy) exports grew against the backdrop of significant hostility towards Russia.” 

Norway was attracted to Biden’s sabotage project like a fly to the honeypot, since it stood to gain fabulously in financial terms if it helped the US military to destroy Nord Stream pipelines near Danish waters, and replace Russia as Germany’s principal source of piped natural gas. 

To be sure, Norway has made a kill. The loot is estimated to be worth over $100 billion so far! Norway supplied 33 percent of Germany’s gas needs in 2022, making it the country’s largest supplier. 

Experts estimate that “Norway’s position as a key provider of energy to Germany is set to further increase in the years to come, including from new Arctic fields coming on line and new discoveries above the Arctic Circle… Expanded production above the Arctic Circle, arriving from the Irpa field 340 km west of Bodø scheduled to come online in 2026, as well as new discoveries in the Barents Sea including one made in 2022 adjacent to Goliat, will be key to maintaining peak production.

“With Germany largely disconnected from Russian pipeline gas, the door for Norway to further expand its market share and establish itself as the country’s primary gas supplier remains open.”

Ironically, at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in August 2022, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre claimed that “Norway delivers as much gas as possible to Germany.” Of course, what he didn’t tell Scholz was that Norway was about to execute a project to transform Germany, Europe’s largest consumer of natural gas, as a captive market for it very soon. Actually, Norway blew up the Nord Stream pipelines only a month later on September 22. 

Norway is now burnishing its image as a rich country capable of the milk of human kindness, which is generously sharing a whopping 7.5 billion euros (out of the windfall profit of $100 billion from the German loot) with Ukraine. And Austin announces it as a grand gesture to thwart Russian “aggression”!

This sordid pantomime provokes an incredulous gasp. One cannot but take pity on the German nation which is saddled in these tumultuous times with a mediocre government of inexperienced, dubious politicians who dare not defend their country’s core interests against American bullying. 

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was spot on when he spoke at length for the first time about the Nord Stream pipelines and Seymour Hersh’s article at a working meeting on February 15 with heads of foreign media bureaus accredited in Russia:

“The main goal was to prevent Germany from feeling comfortable in the energy sphere and from receiving gas via these two pipelines, which were financed by companies in Russia, Germany, Austria and Italy… Germany has not simply been humiliated; it has been put in its place as a satellite of the United States…”

Norway is not squeamish about giving away a tiny portion of its loot from Germany, a NATO partner. Maybe, it is indulging in an act of atonement over a fiendish crime perpetrated on a neighbour and ally. Maybe, the Biden team urged Norway to burnish its credentials as a Good Samaritan. And Austin hailed it as a solid outcome of the Ramstein meeting at Brussels.  

February 17, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

After 15 years of ‘independence’, it is clear that Kosovo was a stepping stone for NATO’s imperial goals

Serbia’s breakaway province is an exercise in the ‘rules-based order’, where rules are made up for the convenience of Western powers

By Aleksandar Pavic | RT | February 17, 2023

On February 17, 2008, a group of US-backed “democratic leaders” headed by a former Western-sponsored terrorist declared the independence of Serbia’s breakaway province of Kosovo and Metohija (its full legal name under Serbia’s constitution).

It seemed oh so simple and straightforward at the zenith of the “unipolar moment,” and Kosovo Albanians were “confidently awaiting Western recognition for their state despite the anger its secession provoked in Serbia and Russia’s warnings of fresh Balkan unrest,” as a Reuters report drily noted.

Their confidence was more than justified, as 22 of 27 EU and 26 of 30 NATO member states eventually recognized this unilateral act of secession, pulling along many other smaller, mostly Western-dependent countries to follow suit. UN Security Council Resolution 1244, according to which the province is to remain an autonomous province of Serbia pending a mutually agreed final settlement, was ignored, just as the UN and international law were ignored in the spring of 1999, when NATO unilaterally engaged in a 78-day bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, under the familiar pretext of protecting “democracy, human rights and the rule of law.” This resulted in NATO’s military occupation of the province that lasts to this day.

The case of “independent Kosovo” is in many ways the perfect embodiment of the post-Cold War West’s “rules-based order.” In contrast to international law, which derives from the UN Charter and numerous universally accepted post-WWII treaties and agreements, the “rules-based order” is pretty much anything its propagators deem it to be in accordance with their political interests du jour. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it, these “rules” are “created from scratch for each particular case. They are written within a narrow circle of Western countries and palmed off as the ultimate truth.”

In the case of Kosovo and Metohija, the “rules” were to be tailored to the ambitions of the unipolar hegemon and its vassals. This formed the base of the collective West’s failed attempt to declare this instance sui generis, i.e., unique and incomparable to any other case, in order to prevent others from referring to it as a precedent – South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea, the Donbass, and the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, among others, begged to differ. And, no, the original goal of this unique “rule-setting” was not to protect “democracy, human rights and the rule of law” in Serbia’s historic province, which hosts not only the site of the legendary Battle of Kosovo of 1389, the only battle in which an Ottoman sultan was killed, but also hundreds of Serbian Orthodox medieval churches and monasteries. The true US interest was much bigger and less benevolent. And it was revealed in a document memory-holed by Western mainstream media, a May 2000 letter to then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder by Willy Wimmer, a member of the German Bundestag and vice president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE.

Wimmer’s letter contains a description of a security conference that he had attended in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava that was co-organized by the US State Department and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington-based think tank. A list of participants and the agenda could at one time be found on the AEI website but are no longer available at the time of writing. Almost all of the information available nowadays about it comes from Wimmer’s account. According to him, the conference not only exposed the true causes of NATO’s brutal attack on Yugoslavia and subsequent occupation of Kosovo and Metohija, but also the purpose behind NATO’s further enlargement toward the borders of Russia, and, most importantly from the aspect of global security, the US aim of undermining the international legal order as part of its drive for global domination. In essence, Wimmer’s report revealed the criminal plan that has brought the world to the brink of global, possibly nuclear, conflict.

According to senior US officials at the conference as cited by Wimmer, Yugoslavia was bombed “in order to rectify General Eisenhower’s erroneous decision during World War II,” when he failed to station US troops there. Naturally, as Wimmer recorded, no one at the conference disputed the claim that, having engaged in the bombing of a sovereign country, “NATO violated all international rules, and especially all the relevant provisions of international law.” Furthermore, NATO’s unilateral intervention outside its legal domain represented a deliberate “precedent, to be invoked by anyone at any time,” and “many others” in the future.

The ultimate imperial goals were clearly stated: “To restore the territorial situation in the area between the Baltic Sea and Anatolia such as existed during the Roman Empire, at the time of its greatest power and greatest territorial expansion. For this reason, Poland must be flanked to the north and to the south with democratic neighbor states, while Romania and Bulgaria are to secure a land connection with Turkey. Serbia (probably for the purposes of securing an unhindered US military presence) must be permanently excluded from European development. North of Poland, total control over St. Petersburg’s access to the Baltic Sea must be established. In all processes, peoples’ rights to self-determination should be favored over all other provisions or rules of international law.”

In short, the tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine today can be clearly traced back to NATO’s trampling of international law in the case of Kosovo and the “victorious” West’s building of a new (“rules-based”) order by expanding its military alliance all the way to Russia’s borders. If we were to apply the Nuremberg Principles of International Law formulated under UN General Assembly Resolution 177 on the basis of the post-WW II Nazi war crimes trials, NATO’s decision-makers would stand a very good chance of being found guilty of crimes against peace: “(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances,” and “(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).”

In other words, international law is inconvenient for today’s collective West not just for practical but for legal and moral reasons. Not to speak of the obvious historical parallels with a previous militaristic attempt at forming a “new order” that ended in a Berlin bunker after tens of millions of lives were extinguished. Wimmer’s (almost) forgotten correspondence is an indictment far deeper than the collective West’s current marriage of convenience with Kiev’s neo-Nazi element.

However, even as the Ukraine crisis continues to escalate, the new Battle of Kosovo is far from over. Because, 15 years on, the collective West still hasn’t been able to find a political accomplice in Belgrade ready to grant it retroactive amnesty by recognizing “independent Kosovo” and/or agreeing to its UN membership. That is why, even as they stubbornly press on with the latest Drang nach Osten on the military field, Western powers are also doubling down on their diplomatic pressure on Serbia, which not only refuses to formally recognize its own dismemberment but also to join the illegal sanctions against Russia. The latest ploy, informally called the Franco-German plan, is to try to force Serbia to recognize its province’s statehood in all but name, in return for foggy promises of financial aid and (distant) future EU membership. As a result, the current onslaught of Western diplomats on Belgrade is only slightly less intense than the parallel inflow of Western mercenaries to Kiev.

The problem for the collective West is that, despite its intense, decades-long pressure, substantial investment in the Serbian media and NGO sector, and threats of renewed international isolation, Serbian popular opinion remains stubbornly independent-minded. According to a recent report by the uber hawkish, London-based Henry Jackson Society, 53.3% of Serbian citizens wish their country to remain neutral in the Ukraine conflict (with a further 35.8% supporting an overtly pro-Russian stance), while 78.7% oppose sanctions against Russia and 54.1% think that Serbia should rely on Russia first when it comes to foreign policy (as opposed to 22.6% opting for reliance on the EU). Furthermore, the EU has definitely lost its luster, with 44.3% saying they would “definitely” or “probably” vote against EU membership (as opposed to 38.1% ready to vote for) if a referendum were to be held tomorrow. Finally, according to a recently released independent Serbian poll, 79.2% oppose EU membership as a “reward” for recognizing independence for Kosovo.

It can thus be argued that, much as Hitler’s march into the Rhineland broke the post-WW I world order, NATO’s unprovoked attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 was a deliberate move to destroy the post-Cold War order, while the Western-inspired declaration of Kosovo’s independence 15 years ago was an attempt to legitimize a new, “rules-based” order, which is now reaching its ugly culmination in Ukraine. And, taking the parallels a bit further, just as the attempted new order may meet its military Stalingrad in Ukraine, it might meet its diplomatic Stalingrad in Kosovo, well before the 20th anniversary of that occupied territory’s purported independence.

February 17, 2023 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Moldova’s “football plot” highlights ridiculousness of anti-Russia hysteria

By Ahmed Adel | February 17, 2023

By accusing Moscow of planning a coup d’état in Moldova, President Maia Sandu is trying to divert public attention from the economic crisis in the country whilst also ingratiating herself with the anti-Russia West. In fact, her accusations reached such ridiculous levels that supporters of football club Partizan Belgrade were implicated in the supposed plot to overthrow the current government and install a pro-Russian regime.

Sandu said that Russia is allegedly planning to use foreign saboteurs to topple her country’s leadership, stop its accession to the European Union and use it in the conflict against Ukraine.

“The plan included sabotage and militarily trained people disguised as civilians to carry out violent actions, attacks on government buildings and taking hostages,” she told reporters on February 13.

She added, without providing the evidence, that citizens of Russia, Montenegro, Belarus and Serbia would be among those entering Moldova to try to spark protests in an attempt to “change the legitimate government to an illegitimate government, controlled by the Russian Federation to stop the EU integration process.”

Fans of Serbian football club Partizan Belgrade were banned from travelling to watch their team play Sheriff Tiraspol on February 16 in the first leg of their Europa Conference League knockout play-off tie. In fact, the game was played behind closed doors due to the supposed fears of the coup.

The match had been relocated to the Moldovan capital of Chisinau from Tiraspol, the capital of the self-declared independent country of Transnistria, which is internationally recognised as part of Moldova but is overwhelmingly Russian and Ukrainian in its ethnic makeup. It is more than likely that Sandu reached ridiculous levels of accusations, even to the point of banning football fans, because the supporters of Partizan Belgrade and Sheriff Tiraspol were likely to make pro-Russian statements – something she did not want to be broadcasted to international audiences.

Sandu’s statement is also connected with the economic crisis in Moldova. The country is not experiencing economic growth and is not receiving cheap gas and oil from Russia. Effectively, Sandu is scaring the Moldovan people by making them believe that war is on their doorstep. This serves to distract them from their economic hardships.

It is recalled that at the beginning of her political career, Sandu talked about economic growth, fighting crime, and reducing corruption. However, the level of corruption has increased, inflation is hovering at about 30% and the country is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Rather than deal with these issues, the Moldovan president is trying to please the West by implicating Russia in another scheme. This will not only further deteriorate Chisinau’s relations with Russia, but justify a tightening of domestic and foreign policy against dissidents. Sandu in this way demonstrates that she is useful for Washington and Brussels as she is stamping out pro-Russian sentiment in an authoritarian manner.

Moldova has long lost its constitutionally “ensured” neutral status and now depends on the Americans and Europeans as she sees the future of her country in NATO. Moldova’s parliament approved pro-Western Prime Minister Dorin Recean and his proposed Cabinet in a confidence vote on February 16.

Sixty-two MPs, all from the Sandu-founded Action and Solidarity Party (PAS), voted in favour of appointing the new Cabinet. PAS holds 63 out of 101 seats in the Moldovan parliament, and therefore comfortably passed the new cabinet, especially as the parliamentary opposition did not vote. In this way, Moldova is now firmly in the Western bloc despite constitutionally being neutral and not even being a member of NATO or the EU.

It is recalled that Sandu previously stated that attacks are being prepared in Moldova with the aim of overthrowing the constitutional order of the country. At the time, she called on the parliament to expand the powers of the security services.

Previously, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, when addressing the European Council, said that the Ukrainian intelligence services had intercepted Russia’s plan to overthrow the democratic order in Moldova and that the Ukrainian side informed the Moldovan leadership about it. In this light, Sandu asked Moldova’s parliament to adopt draconian draft laws to equip its Intelligence and Security Service, and the prosecutor’s office, “with the necessary tools to combat more effectively the risks” to the country’s security.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed Sandu’s claims on February 14 as “absolutely unfounded and unsubstantiated.”

“They are built in the spirit of classical techniques that are often used by the United States, other Western countries and Ukraine,” Zakharova said. “First, accusations are made with reference to purportedly classified intelligence information that cannot be verified, and then they are used to justify their own illegal actions.”

In this way, Sandu is making extremely desperate, but also humiliating justifications to introduce authoritarian laws to stamp out Russophilia in Moldova. To achieve this, she is also bulldozing Moldova’s neutral status, and it is all coming at a major economic cost.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

February 17, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

California Dreamin’/Napalm Death

February 17, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Critics of failed COVID policies call for pandemic reckoning

By Daniel Nuccio | Washington Examiner | February 15, 2023

Eight leading critics of the United States’s COVID-19 response have called for an investigation of the many failures of policy architects and key decision makers —  at institutions ranging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration to universities and hospitals — over their repeated mishandling of the pandemic.

Given the immense harm inflicted on our society by the follies of a ruling class and their expert advisers who never failed to make a wrong decision when presented with the opportunity, as well as the fact that lives are still being destroyed by their lingering policies, we can only hope this blueprint does not go ignored.

Dubbing themselves the “Norfolk Group,” the association of scholars includes such prominent names as Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, UCSF physician Tracy Beth Høeg, Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty Makary, and Indiana University School of Medicine immunologist Steven Templeton.

According to the Norfolk Group’s website, although initially organized by the Brownstone Institute in May 2022, the eight members of the group have since worked free from outside influence to draft the 80-page document they published earlier this year, “Questions for a COVID-19 Commission.”

Presented as a series of summaries and questions pertaining to key elements of U.S. COVID policy, the document, in effect, lays out a thorough indictment of the consistent incompetence of our ruling class while also raising concerns over the possible influence on policy by special interests such as teachers unions and drug companies.

Regarding natural immunity, the authors ask, “Why did the CDC downplay infection-acquired immunity, despite robust evidence for it?”

In respect to school closures, they ask, “Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence about the enormous age-gradient in COVID-19 mortality … and early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children and young adults?”

On that matter, they also wonder, “Why did the CDC incorporate policy language proposed by leaders of teachers unions on the scientific and public health aspects of school reopening without soliciting expertise of outside scientists in public health, infectious diseases, or other related fields?”

When discussing lockdowns, they inquire, “Why was so much influence on public health policy accorded to Drs. [Francis] Collins and [Anthony] Fauci? They control the largest source of infectious disease research funding in the world. How many infectious disease scientists, who should have been strong voices during the pandemic, kept quiet for fear of losing the research funding on which their livelihood depends?”

In their section on epidemiologic modeling, they demand, “Why did world leaders overly rely on models that made unverified assumptions about the pandemic’s trajectory rather than trying to verify these assumptions and their implications?”

When addressing COVID-19 vaccines, they raise questions such as, “Why did many organizations continue with mandates through summer and fall of 2021, despite data demonstrating both waning efficacy of symptomatic infection and reduced long term ability to curb viral spread?”

Regarding masks, they state, “Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the evidence that masks did little if anything to stop the spread of respiratory viruses was uncontroversial,” before summarizing a few studies demonstrating this and asking the obvious: “[W]hy did public health officials and agencies promote the idea that masks would be effective against SARS-CoV2?”

In its entirety, the Norfolk Group’s “Questions for a COVID-19 Commission” serves as a blueprint for the kind of investigation our country needs. Just don’t expect the Biden administration to do anything about it.

Daniel Nuccio holds master’s degrees in both psychology and biology. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in biology at Northern Illinois University studying host-microbe relationships. He is also a regular contributor to The College Fix where he writes about COVID, mental health, and other topics.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

Logically Unsound

Taxpayer cash used to carry out Stasi-style Government Covert Ops

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | February 16, 2023

Two weeks ago civil liberties group Big Brother Watch released a damning report – entitled ‘Ministry of Truth’, a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 – revealing highly questionable present day behaviour by shadowy UK Government agencies. The charge sheet includes the setting up of opaque surveillance squads to

  • monitor people who are “critical of the government”,
  • “tackle a range of harmful narratives online” and
  • outsource some of this dirty work – at taxpayer expense – to army units (the 77th brigade) and private (privateer?) companies such as Logically.ai (TheLogically Ltd), which claims to ‘intercept [misinformation and disinformation] threats before they become widespread’.

Picture credit: UK Column News

Reading this, you might be forgiven for thinking you had accidentally stumbled into the Science Fiction section of your local bookshop – despite the parallels, this is not a review of a rehashed version of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report.

No: this, unfortunately, is real. HART itself has been on the receiving end of some Logically’s shoddy – and shady – ‘threat interception’, and it is extremely disheartening to note that at the same time as carrying out its sinister actions, this entity was in receipt of more than £1 million of taxpayer cash to fund its operations.

HART’s experience with the disagreeable Logically.ai outfit came in the summer of 2021. Shortly after we had come together as a volunteer group to counter nonsensical government propaganda and policy, six months’ worth of our internal group messaging was leaked and made public. Logically.ai then gleefully dissected and publicised this ‘leak’, attempting to frame our activities as being somehow subversive by publishing out-of-context quotes from these informal chat logs. We reported this to the police, who agreed that this constituted an illegal hack. The police issued a URN number and one of the perpetrators was identified, but no prosecution ensued. We picked ourselves up, published this riposte to the mud-slingers, and carried on speaking out in the hope that balanced discourse might be resumed.

Though highly objectionable and disruptive to us – and very painful for a handful of our volunteer team who were subsequently targeted – ultimately these leaks only helped establish HART’s credentials – the worst any independent reader of the leaks could conclude is that (1) the grammar of our internal chat logs is not up the standard of our public output and (2) we were somewhat naïve in expressing our unadulterated views on some of the charlatans running the show.

Logically.ai pressed home their ‘threat interception’ mandate by smearing our work. Here are some extracts:

  • Apart from claims that the government is controlling the media, HART believes that the government is using “covert ‘nudges,” and psychological strategies to “increase compliance” with measures, as well as with vaccinations. “Several interventions of this type have been woven into the intensive communication campaign,” a member writes, alleging that fear, shame and peer-pressure are being weaponized by the government.
  • HART members are critical of policies such as lockdowns, mask-wearing, and vaccination.
  • HART members frequently recommend alternative treatments such as ivermectin and vitamin D.
  • The members [of HART] also repeatedly make claims about the media being controlled, social media censoring their views (a number of members have moved to Parler and Gab), often stating that journalists cannot be trusted.

Astute readers will notice that these statements have either been completely vindicated or can be deemed to have been a prudent assessment of the complex risk-reward profile of certain irreversible interventions. In summary, the UK Government used taxpayer money to pay a ‘threat interceptor’ to discredit HART’s correct statements and replace these with fictions of their own making.

It is therefore galling – to say the least – to note that Logically.ai, a government contractor, presented a Kafkaesque self-referenced submission to the House of Commons Joint Pre-legislative Scrutiny Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill by stating that its “investigation into the HART Group is just one example of how those pushing misinformation target legitimate public figures and media outlets to amplify and endorse their content. Without thoughtful safeguards in place, there is a clear risk we could see more of this kind of activity, particularly around elections and political campaigns”.

Well quite. It is frustrating that they didn’t just quote Orwell:

“Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary”.

For a bit of Walter Mitty light relief, it is worth perusing some of Logically.ai’s so-called ‘fact-checks’. With about 98% of humanity having cottoned on by now, in January of 2023 the keyboard warriors at the UK Government’s favourite ‘threat interceptor’ were still bravely wading into battle in defence of virus-defeating shreds of damp cotton worn over one’s breathing orifices — Logically.ai’s efforts are extremely weak fodder compared to the recently updated Cochrane review of these ‘physical interventions to disrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’.

All of this would be uproarious slapstick comedy if it wasn’t deadly serious. Logically.ai’s underhand disinformation campaigning has led to some of our voluntary senior clinician members who are full time nhs employees, facing long investigation processes, with threats to career and huge risk for their dependent families — this is nothing short of despicable, when these clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base, thus aiming to protect their patients and the public and fulfil their oath to first do no harm.

Shortly after its action against HART, Logically.ai appointed Brian Murphy, a senior Department of Homeland Security and former FBI executive as ‘Vice President of Strategic Operations’. We do not need to ask why.

By suppressing legitimate discourse, the reprehensible actions of Logically.ai and its shadowy handlers will undoubtedly have contributed to supporting vested interests and corporate greed. How else did an “adult-only vaccine, for people over 50” end up getting injected into young children? Setting aside the exorbitant cost of this exercise, every single death and adverse event in anyone up to the age of 49 could have been avoided but for these people and entities that executed these ‘black ops’ against legitimate and constructive dissent. Do not take our word for it: even those that were cheerleaders for so-called “extraordinary vaccine success” have come round to our point of view:

“The entire population was vaccinated or offered the vaccine, which now looks like a terrible idea when there were deaths among young people who really had no need to be vaccinated. They were not at risk from Covid. The mantra was it limited transmission. We hear less about that now. Parliament was shut down. Government colluded with social media giants to suppress legitimate questions about the origin of the virus and all manner of other policy debates”.

Neatly summarised. If only the checks and balances had been in place to allow rational and constructive discourse – and shadowy ‘black ops’ outfits hadn’t been paid by the UK Government to deploy guerrilla tactics as part of ‘threat interception’ – many lives could have been saved. Yet Logically.ai’s work will have helped frighten politicians and journalists off engaging with HART (and other professional groups) who were providing a much-needed critical voice and therefore slowed a return to common sense thinking. Furthermore, some of our members (all of whom are unpaid volunteers) faced long investigation processes with professional regulators or employers. Trying to silence professionals — who may have dependent families — by threatening their careers is nothing short of despicable. These clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base.  Their primary intention was to their oath to first do no harm, and protect their patients and the public.

For those minded to think of the UK civil service as a benign & mostly ‘good’ counterweight to a (perhaps corrupted and politicised) UK Government, Big Brother Watch’s Ministry of Truth report is a shocking read, covering appalling behaviour by various parts of the UK Government and the civil service. While it has been extensively covered in various alternative media outlets as well as Spectator and the Mail on Sunday (“Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we’ve obtained official records that prove they were right all along”), mainstream coverage has been relatively forgiving. Our experience tells us that much more is yet to come to light. The Ministry of Truth report quite correctly points out that “Whitehall officials are tasked to make a success of government policies – not to act as an authority on truth. These two roles clearly conflict”. These conflicts have not yet been resolved.

The key take-away for those who have hitherto believed that ‘the system’ might be acting in your best interests is a recognition that possibly – just possibly – historical precedent should encourage at least a modicum of scepticism when lapping up the Party Line from so-called ‘trusted’ sources. Statements from ‘saintly’ leaders along the lines of “We will continue to be your single source of truth… unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth” are giant red flags – why does the truth need to be controlled by government diktat? Why does Ofcom still prescribe what broadcasters can and cannot say on topics of critical importance such as these we are seeking to discuss?

For those who have been attempting to challenge the mainstream ‘official’ narrative since March 2020, the Ministry of Truth report is little more than confirmation of what is already well known – or at least suspected – and of course there is great suspicion that this is just a ‘Limited Hangout’ (a controlled minor admission before the ‘dead cat’ strategy is deployed to move the conversation on). On the plus side, it is heartening to see that this is an apolitical topic – it is noteworthy that people from the left and right of the political spectrum are voicing concerns.

The authorities – or actors within – have systematically neutered discourse and the freedom of speech that are so critically necessary for democracy to work properly. Subsequent non-denials and obfuscation – and lack of any sort of regret – give a clue that what Big Brother Watch has been able to publish is likely only the tip of the iceberg.

Let us hope that those controlling the mainstream narrative will find the growing cacophony of peaceful & rational protest harder and harder to ignore.

Call to action:

These investors have ethical responsibilities, and are regulated by the FCA. The industry association, the British Venture Capital Association, might also be interested.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

US State Department funds UK think tank that aids in censorship of Americans

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 16, 2023

The US State Department funds UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an organization that partners with platforms to flag misinformation and disinformation. The organization has been accused of classifying conservative viewpoints as hate and disinformation.

In September 2021, the State Department awarded ISD a grant to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in the UK and Europe after it won the US-Paris Tech Challenge. The challenge was also won by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization that has been accused of demonetizing conservative news websites by putting them on a blacklist used by advertisers, the Daily Caller reported.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) funded the ISD to research Russian disinformation tactics on Wikipedia. However, the department insisted that it does not engage in content moderation on social media.

ISD has several partnerships with social media platforms on content moderation decisions. The organization is a member of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council, which advises the platform on how to respond to misinformation.

ISD is also part of ’s Trusted Flagger program, whose members are tasked with improving the platform’s enforcement of its guidelines and can flag more content than other users.  said that it “prioritizes flags from Trusted Flaggers.”

The organization also has partnerships with Google to counter hate and extremism in the UK and Europe. It also partners with Amazon’s Audible, , and Microsoft.

ISD is mostly focused on extremism and terrorism. However, it has also been targeting what it deems misinformation and hate.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Ireland’s protests – will Varadkar go full Trudeau?

By Gavin O’Reilly | OffGuardian | February 15, 2023

Since Russia began its special military operation in Ukraine almost a year ago, one of the key features of the collective West’s response, alongside sanctions and the expulsion of Russian diplomats, has been the accommodation of refugees fleeing the conflict, with millions of Ukrainians being housed across Europe since last February, including 70,000+ in the 26-County Irish State.

The first question that springs to mind regarding this approach however, is that if it is being done out of genuine concern for those fleeing conflict in Ukraine, then why was it not implemented in 2014 when that war first began?

In April of that year, following five months of Western-instigated violence in response to then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to suspend an EU-trade deal in order to pursue closer ties with neighbouring Russia, the ethnic Russian Donbass region in the east of the country would break away to form the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, their residents having little choice lest they face genocide and ethnic cleansing at the hands of the anti-Russian neo-Nazi elements which composed the new Western-backed Kiev government.

A war on both Republics would follow, involving neo-Nazi paramilitaries such as Azov Battalion and Right Sector, which despite efforts to resolve the conflict peacefully via the federalisation solution offered by the Minsk Accords, would ultimately result in 14,000 deaths over the space of 8 years.

Despite this slaughter, no mainstream campaign existed in Ireland during the same period intended to expel Ukrainian diplomats or to welcome those fleeing conflict in the Donbass.

Likewise, no similar campaign has existed for those fleeing other conflicts such as that in Yemen, classed as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis by the United Nations, with a paltry 70 Yemenis being granted access to social services in the 26 Counties in the past year, in comparison to 72,609 Ukrainians in the same period following Russia’s intervention.

It must also me asked that if Leinster House genuinely cared about the plight of refugees fleeing conflict, then why contribute to the conflicts that created those refugees in the first place by allowing US warplanes to land in Shannon Airport over the past 20 years?

Since the Russian operation began in Ukraine last February, talks of the 26 County State joining an EU army have increased amongst establishment voices also, with the stated aim of such an alliance being to ‘act in complementarity’ with NATO, the coalition having been a key contributor to the refugee crisis over the past two decades by laying waste to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

With these facts established, it can safely be concluded that Leinster House’s ‘concern’ for refugees has little to do with helping those fleeing war, and much like the wider West’s support of Ukrainian ‘freedom fighters’ being a cover to use Ukraine as a proxy to tie Russia down in an Afghan-style military quagmire.

Further, the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil coalition is using emotive media coverage of the Ukrainian conflict as a means to swell the labour market and to keep wages stagnant on behalf of the corporate class.

Indeed, protests related to the effects of such a move would arise in late November, when upwards of 300 migrants were suddenly moved into a disused office block in East Wall, a working-class area of inner-city Dublin.

Residents would begin what would go on to become weekly demonstrations over the move, citing the lack of consultation with community officials beforehand, the suitability of the office block for accommodation, and the lack of transparency on whether those who had been moved into the office block had been vetted.

Despite these protests receiving support from residents of the office block themselves, the Irish mainstream media would, in lockstep, decry them as being ‘anti-refugee protests’ and ‘organised by the far-right’, a label that would also be applied to similar protests that emerged around Dublin and other locations in response to other wildly unsuitable locations chosen by Leinster House to accommodate adult migrants, including a school in Drimnagh, like East Wall, another working-class area of Dublin.

This dismissal of ordinary working class people’s concerns as ‘far-right’ bears a stark similarity to mainstream media descriptions of last year’s Freedom Convoy in Canada, when in response to a government mandate requiring all truck drivers re-entering from the US having to be vaccinated, a nationwide protest would begin in the second-largest country in the world.

The government of Justin Trudeau – like Leo Varadkar, another ‘Young Global leader’ of the World Economic Forum – would respond in an authoritarian fashion, freezing the bank accounts of protest organisers and attacking demonstrators with mounted Horses and teargas.

An approach, that with the head of the 26-County police force condemning the current protests and secretive police units monitoring organisers, may soon become a reality on the other side of the Atlantic.

Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook and supported on Patreon.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

The Forgotten Terrorist Pretext of the Vietnam War

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | February 16, 2023

Since 9/11, terrorism has become the ultimate entitlement program for America’s political elite. Whether it is illegally spying on Americans or blowing Somali dissidents to pieces, invoking terrorism provides all the cover needed for Washington policymakers. But the disastrous results of granting politicians a blank check to fight terrorism should have been undeniable almost 60 years ago.

Back in the 1960s, terrorism was what the communists did. Anti-terrorist moral fervor and ideological blinders propelled the U.S. into its biggest foreign policy blunder since World War II.

As the French Foreign Legion struggled to reconquer Vietnam in the wake of World War II, the U.S. government constantly embellished the storyline to demonize the communist opposition. A CIA operative provided materials for a massive bomb that ripped through a main square in Saigon in 1952. A Life magazine photographer was waiting on the scene, and his resulting snap appeared with a caption blaming the carnage on Viet Minh Communists. The New York Times headlined its report: “Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center.” The bombing was touted as “one of the most spectacular and destructive single incidents in the long history of revolutionary terrorism” committed by “agents here of the Vietminh.” The press coverage boosted public support for U.S. government aid to the French army fighting the Communists. A Vietnamese warlord named General Trinh Minh Thé, a CIA collaborator, claimed credit for the bomb but the U.S. media ignored his statement.

In the wake of the French defeat in 1954, U.S. military advisors poured into Vietnam. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy declared: “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.” The Kennedy administration sought credibility by profoundly deceiving the American people and Congress regarding its Vietnam policy. JFK violated the limits on the number of American military advisors established in the 1954 Geneva peace treaty between the French and the Vietnamese communists. He also deceived the American public by mislabeling the growing U.S. contingent in South Vietnam as advisors at a time when they were becoming actively engaged in fighting.

The US government regarded the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem as corrupt, oppressive, and inept. The Pentagon Papers described a May 8, 1963 debacle in the city of Hue, South Vietnam: “Government troops fire on a Buddhist protest demonstration, killing nine and wounding fourteen. The incident triggers a nationwide Buddhist protest and a crisis of popular confidence for the Diem regime. [The Government of South Vietnam] maintains the incident was an act of [Viet Cong] terrorism.”

The Diem government was outraged that the Buddhists demanded legal equality with Catholics and the right to fly the Buddhist flag. In August 1963, South Vietnamese Special Forces “carried out midnight raids against Buddhist pagodas throughout the country. More than 1,400 people, mostly monks were arrested and many of them were beaten,” according to the Pentagon Papers. The CIA was bankrolling these Special Forces, which were supposed to be used for covert operations against the Viet Cong or North Vietnam, not for religious repression. Diem’s terrorizing of the Buddhists swayed the U.S. to back a coup that led to his assassination a few months later.

The Lyndon Johnson administration exploited the terrorist label to sway Americans to support greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In a special message to Congress on May 18, 1964 seeking additional fund for Vietnam, LBJ declared, “the Viet Cong guerrillas, under orders from their Communist masters in the North, have intensified terrorist actions against the peaceful people of South Vietnam. This increased terrorism requires increased response.” Johnson scorned a proposal by French president Charles de Gaulle for a Geneva conference on the growing Vietnam conflict because LBJ declared the conference would “ratify terror.” In a June 23, 1964 press conference, LBJ declared that “our purpose is peace. Our people in South Viet-Nam are helping to protect people against terror.”

U.S. policymakers were hungry for a pretext to unleash bombing. On May 15, 1964, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge recommended planning for the South Vietnamese air force to hit “a specific target in North Vietnam,” carefully timed after a “terrorist act of proper magnitude beforehand by the North Vietnamese,” the Pentagon Papers revealed.

At that time, the U.S. was already carrying out an array of “non-attributable hit-and run” raids against North Vietnam, including “kidnappings of North Vietnamese citizens for intelligence information, parachuting sabotage and psychological warfare teams into the north, commando raids from the sea to blow up rail and highway bridges, and the bombardment of North Vietnamese coastal installations by PT boats,” according to the Pentagon Papers. Thai pilots flying American planes bombed and strafed North Vietnamese villages. But the Johnson administration denied that the U.S. was committing any provocations.

Johnson had already decided to attack North Vietnam to boost his election campaign. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer U.S.S. Maddox fired on North Vietnamese ships near the North Vietnamese coast. Two days later, the Maddox reported that it was under attack from North Vietnamese PT boats. Within hours, the ship’s commander wired Washington that the reports of an attack on his ship may have been wildly exaggerated: “Entire action leaves many doubts.” But the Maddox’s initial report was all LBJ needed to go on national television and announce that he had ordered immediate “retaliatory” airstrikes against North Vietnam. Johnson railroaded a resolution through Congress granting him unlimited authority to attack North Vietnam. The resolution was written months earlier and the administration was waiting for the right moment to unveil it.

Both the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese government were terrorizing people at the time the U.S. involvement rapidly expanded in 1965. But the U.S. government looked only at the Viet Cong’s terrorism to justify launching its own bombing campaign that killed far more civilians than did the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese army prior to the end of the war.

The American media endlessly recited the terrorist storyline that the U.S. government created to justify ramping up the Vietnam War. University of California Professor Daniel Hallin observed, “The theme of terrorism directed against civilians was central to television’s image of the enemy… Television coverage of the North Vietnamese… focused on terror to the almost total exclusion of politics. The American media also almost completely ignored attacks on Vietnamese civilians by the U.S. military.”

The political racketeering that spawned the Vietnam War should remind Americans to be wary of any salvation mission championed by their rulers. The U.S. government perennially claims to be an innocent bystander after its covert interventions unleash havoc abroad. There is no shortage of evil governments and evil factions that butcher innocent people. But foreign atrocities, real or imagined, don’t make Washington trustworthy.

Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Forensic Probe Reveals Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda Died of Poisoning, Family Says

By Igor Shapovalov – Sputnik -16.02.2023

The Government Junta of Chile was the highest organ of state power in the South American nation during the 1973-1990 military dictatorship. The period was characterized by repressive policies and extensive economic transformation. It is estimated that more than 3,000 people were killed, and tens of thousands disappeared during the military rule.

New research into the remains of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda has confirmed that poisoning was the cause of his death in 1973, the poet-diplomat’s nephew Rodolfo Reyes has said.

Following the court-approved exhumation of the body, international experts were called in to examine the remains of the Nobel laureate. According to Reyes, the results of the study confirmed he died not from cancer, as stated in official documents, but from poisoning.

Reyes has detailed that the final report outlined traces of the botulism agent had been found in the poet’s remains. Moreover, experts at McMaster University in Canada and the University of Copenhagen determined the bacteria had entered his body before death, thus confirming the idea of poisoning.

“We now know that there was no reason for the clostridium botulinum to have been there in his bones,” Reyes told Spanish media. “What does that mean? It means Neruda was murdered through the intervention of state agents in 1973.”

The report was released to Paola Plaza, a Chilean judge, on Wednesday; however, she has not made the findings public. It’s expected the report will be publicly released on March 7.

In Chile, Neruda is known not only as a poet but also as a diplomat and public figure. The Chilean Communist Party nominated him for president in 1970, although he later withdrew his candidacy in favor of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende, who would later go on to be overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet in a US-backed coup.

Neruda died on 23 September 1973, 12 days after the coup d’état that toppled the Allende government. He died at the Santa Maria Hospital in Santiago. Speculation on Neruda’s cause of death has remained a hot talking point for decades, with his body having been first exhumed under court order in 2017.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

NATO’s Unsustainable Bluff

By Scott Ritter – Sputnik – 16.02.2023

On November 16, 2022, the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley, at the conclusion of the seventh session of the Ukraine Contact Group (UCG) tasked with identifying and fulfilling military support requirements for Ukraine in its ongoing conflict with Russia, issued a very pessimistic assessment of the situation on the ground.

Noting that, for the moment, “Russia right now is on its back,” Milley warned that the Russian decision to incorporate nearly 20% of Ukrainian territory into its own borders, combined with the then-ongoing mobilization of 300,000 reserves, meant the conflict would not end any time soon. “[T]he probability of a Ukrainian military victory, defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine, to include what they claim is Crimea… is not high, militarily,” Milley noted.

What a difference three months make.

On February 14, 2023, on the eve of a 10th meeting of the UCG, Mark Milley seemed to have a change of heart, telling reporters that Russia has “lost” in the Ukraine conflict. As it approaches the one-year mark, Joint Chiefs chairman gen. singling out Russian President Vladimir Putin, Milley declared that Putin “thought he could defeat Ukraine quickly, fracture the NATO alliance, and act with impunity. He was wrong,” Milley said, adding that Russia has paid an “enormous price on the battlefield” as a result.

The American military chief continued. “Russia is now a global pariah and the world remains inspired by Ukrainian bravery and resilience. In short, Russia has lost—they’ve lost strategically, operationally, and tactically.”

Milley might want to consult with specialists the next time he opts to opine on matters pertaining to the conflict in Ukraine. Far from a “global pariah,” Russian diplomats are being welcomed with open arms in geopolitically vital regions of the world, such as Africa. This strong diplomatic showing, when combined with a strong Russian economy, which the International Monetary Fund expects to expand 0.3% in 2023 and 2.1% in 2024, despite stringent US and European-backed economic sanctions, points to a strategic victory by Russia.

As for Milley’s assessments regarding the state of play operationally and tactically, he would do well to heed recent comments by US Army General Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, to a Swedish defense conference this past January. Cavoli noted that both the scale and intensity of the combat ongoing in Ukraine made it clear that the NATO alliance was not prepared to fight a large-scale ground war in Europe.

“The magnitude of this war is incredible,” Cavoli said. “If we average out since the beginning of the war, the slow days and fast days, the Russians have expended on average well over 20,000 artillery rounds per day. The scale of this war is out of proportion with all of our recent thinking,” Cavoli noted, adding, “it is real, and we must contend with it.”

Cavoli’s emphasis on artillery is critical in parsing out Milley’s assertions that Ukraine had the upper hand operationally and tactically, given the major role played by artillery in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. While the intent of the 10th gathering of the UCG, convened on February 14, Saint Valentine’s Day, was to focus on the provision of high-value items to Ukraine, such as tanks and aircraft, the conference quickly diverted into the realm of reality, where the critical shortage of artillery ammunition arose as the primary problem facing Ukraine. While the United States had already delivered more than one million 155mm artillery shells to the Ukrainian Army, the scale of the fighting alluded to by General Cavoli means that Ukraine is firing off in a single day the total number of shells the US can produce in a month. At this rate, Ukraine is expected to run out of ammunition by the end of the summer.

Pro-hint to General Milley—if your opponent is firing many times the amount of artillery as you are, and you run out of ammunition, the operational and tactical advantage belongs to them, not you.

And while NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s recognition that Ukraine and NATO were facing an existential crisis when it came to artillery ammunition, there was no ready solution on the horizon the rectify the problem, especially in a time frame that would alter the dire logistical reality that come this summer, the Ukrainian Army will lose the ability to resist the Russian Army.

Two decades of singular focus on low-intensity combat in Iraq and Afghanistan has atrophied both US and European production lines for artillery ammunition. It would take years to start up new production lines, and even then, the private defense industries involved would be loath to do so without long-term contracts which, given the moment-by-moment aspect of NATO aid to Ukraine, is not forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Russia’s defense industry is chugging along on all cylinders, not only producing ammunition in sufficient quantities to meet its prodigious expenditure rates in Ukraine, but also build stocks sufficient to supply an expanding Russian military, expected to grow to over 1.5 million in the next several years.

Russia, unlike Ukraine, isn’t running out of ammunition any time soon, a fact which, in a war defined by artillery firepower, means it holds the operational and tactical edge over their Ukrainian opponents.

The issue is larger than simply the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. As General Cavoli alluded, not only has NATO stripped away its existing stockpile of artillery ammunition, it lacks the industrial capacity to replenish these stocks in the foreseeable future. According to former NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General Jamie Shea, the trans-Atlantic alliance has “largely used up the available stocks” in supplying Ukraine, and now must focus on replenishing its own depleted stocks before the issue of meeting Ukraine’s urgent demands can be addressed.

Ukraine rolled into the Saint Valentine’s Day meeting with high expectations, dreaming of tanks and fighter aircraft. Instead, it left a jilted lover, told by its NATO allies that the well has literally run dry.

And if this situation holds for the next several months, General Milley might have to eat his words, since Russia is apparently on the course to achieve a decisive strategic, operational, and tactical military victory over Ukraine and its NATO sponsors.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Russia issues space warning

RT | February 16, 2023

The US and its allies are exposing civilian space assets to potential attack by utilizing them for military purposes, a senior Russian diplomat has warned. The warning came after NATO unveiled plans for a space monitoring fleet that will use commercial and military satellites for its missions.

Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy director of the non-proliferation and weapons control directorate in the Russian Foreign Ministry, said on Thursday that the US is weaponizing space and blurring the boundaries between military and civilian infrastructure in orbit.

American use of spacecraft to benefit other nations on the battlefield “is in fact a form of participation in [conflicts] by proxy,” Vorontsov said, adding that “quasi-civilian space infrastructure” in particular could face “retaliation.”

“At the very least, such provocative use of civilian satellites is questionable under the [1967] Outer Space Treaty,” he stated.

Vorontsov’s warning came at a round table discussion in the Russian parliament which focused on the legacy of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, and how it influences current US military planning.

Ahead of the announcement of NATO’s new space project on Wednesday, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the US-led bloc will use commercial satellites as a military booster.

“This will improve our intelligence and surveillance, and support NATO missions and operations,” Stoltenberg said, adding that this would allow for “better navigation, communication, and early warning of missile launches.”

The NATO chief revealed the project as he reported on what the organization was doing to assist Ukrainian forces against Russia.

The fusion between civilian and military equipment in the Ukrainian conflict came to the forefront last week, when SpaceX announced that it was restricting the functionality of its Starlink space internet system, meaning Kiev’s troops could not use it to pilot drones.

CEO Elon Musk explained that Starlink was a commercial product not intended for military purposes, and that he did not want it to be used to escalate the hostilities, potentially unleashing a “third world war.”

The system remains available to the Ukrainian military for communication, even though SpaceX as a private company could simply switch off the terminals, he added.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

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