Just don’t mention Ukraine or the economy
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 8, 2022
To be sure there is an election coming up today in the United States and President Joe Biden has clearly taken the low road in the lead up to it by speaking before friendly audiences and repeating over and over the bromides that cause the brain to go numb. During the past week it was all about saving “American democracy” from the MAGA barbarians. And Democracy is, inevitably, tied to the Democratic Party etymologically, which, in a sense, makes it the presumed sole possessor of the right stuff when it comes to delivering freedom to all, including most recently a truly delusional pledge by Biden to “free Iran.”
The problem for the president is that Bidenspeak is being seen by some as devoid of content, choosing to skip over any discussion of the actual policies that have benefitted or harmed the American people over the past two years. That omission is convenient as many voters look around and see high inflation, a struggling economy, surging crime rates and an open border that may have produced, according to Tucker Carlson, a tidal wave of as many as five million (newly arrived) illegal immigrants in the country. And, of course, there is also the war threatening to go nuclear over the Russian intervention in Ukraine, a conflict that threatens no American interest but which nevertheless has been elevated into a genuine saga of good versus evil through the combined efforts of the US and British governments ably assisted by the western mainstream media.
And it has become a real war, thanks to the joint UK-US bombing of one of the Nord Stream pipelines that connect Russia to northern Europe. Washington has warned repeatedly that it would take steps to shut down the pipeline, which it regards as a security threat in that it makes Europe dependent on Russia for energy, and it appears that the plucky Brits did the dirty work. Britain’s then Foreign Minister Liz Truss reportedly texted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken immediately after the pipeline blew up, telling him “It’s done!” Neither Truss nor Blinken were apparently aware that Russian intelligence had penetrated the security on the connection and recorded the communication.
And, of course, it is all about Ukraine even if the ultimate objective by the US is to weaken Russia militarily while also removing President Vladimir Putin. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has emerged as some kind of puppet master in his control of the White House, the US Congress and the mainstream media, drawing an estimated 60 billion dollars in economic and military aid from the US Treasury and also committing Washington to support his country until it “wins” against Putin. Zelensky, whose middle name must be Svengali, reportedly was involved recently in a phone call with Biden in which the US president expressed frustration over Zelensky’s frequently repeated demands for more money and weapons. Biden vented and even shouted but Zelensky wound up with the cash, some of which will certainly go to support the Ukrainian president’s various real estate holdings in Israel and Florida.
And then there is the “dirty bomb” story making the rounds. It has two components. First is the technology of a dirty bomb itself, which is a high explosive device that is seeded with radioactive waste that is lethal and contaminates a large area when it is detonated. A dirty bomb is considered a weapon of mass destruction and its use is categorized as a war crime, much like using a chemical or biological weapon. Second, there is the false flag aspect to the tale that is circulating. The Russian government, the source of the report, is claiming that Zelensky’s government is preparing to put together and detonate a dirty bomb somewhere inside Ukraine and before blaming the development on Putin and his government. That attribution of an action falsely to a country or government that was not involved is a false flag and the intention is to create a perception that someone is breaking the rules on what is allowed even during wartime.
False flags attacks were used most recently in the western supported insurgency in Syria, most notably at the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in 2013, where a chemical-weapons claimed attack that may have killed as many as 1700 people took place. The attack was inevitably attributed to the Syrian government by the United States but it was in fact, much more plausibly carried out by the rebels who controlled the area at that time.
So why would Zelensky detonate a dirty bomb within the area he controlled? Well, Zelensky has long sought increased and direct US and NATO involvement on his side in the fight against Russia. Being able to point to a major war crime that he would attribute to the Russians through a false flag operation might just be enough to do the trick and bring in larger scale western involvement. It is certainly something that Zelensky and his neocon advisers would consider an acceptable ruse de guerre. Given the effective neocon control over foreign policy and the media outlets in the US it would also in all likelihood involve the United States in a major war that was avoidable with devastating consequences for all parties involved.
So, if Joe Biden wants to talk about his achievements in the run-up to elections, why doesn’t he explain his reasons for enabling and expanding the war with Russia over Ukraine? That war has not only brought about a flow of billions of dollars in aid for the most corrupt country in Europe, it has also resulted in a worldwide energy crisis that has fueled inflation and disrupted trade. More to the point, it has led to a global movement to confront the United States over its presumption that it is the hegemonistic power that sets the rules for everyone else. That is also contributing to increasing rejection of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which will have an incalculable impact on the American economy and the country’s standard of living.
Has it all been worth it, Joe, to craft a narrative that ignores the real issues just so you can stay in power? The America that you and I were brought up in is sliding down into a deep dark hole, and you and your delusional neocon and neoliberal friends have been largely responsible for the descent even as you use your bully pulpit to cry about “democracy” at every opportunity.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
By Robert Bridge | RT | November 8, 2022
As US voters head to the polls for the much-anticipated Midterms, talk of Russian trolls monkeying with US democracy is back in the news. But does the country really need Russia’s help in “stoking anger” among the electorate?
If the hyper-liberal New York Times can be taken at face value just two days before an epic election, Russia’s underground army of trolls is, once again, attempting to seed the minds of malleable US voters to the Kremlin’s advantage. If those charges sounded outlandish in 2016, when the Democrats accused Russian ‘influencers’ of denying Hillary Clinton the presidency, they seem doubly so today.
The Times reported that the goal of the reactivated Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg is to “stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system.” Judging by the looks of things, the Russians are a bit late to the party. It would be hard to name another period in US politics when the level of anger and distrust has been so extreme, and that is something the Russian trolls, despite their supposed superhuman abilities, can’t take credit for.
Take inflation, for example, the single most pressing issue among US voters. It doesn’t require any sort of Russian mind-bending operation to inform Americans that the economic situation is deteriorating before their eyes, and has been ever since Biden entered office. They only need to look at their food and utility bills each month, and the price at the gas pump, to feel fury for what the Biden administration has done to the economy in a shockingly short period of time. Any effort to blame these negative sentiments on “the Russians” is just another way of the Democrats saying that soaring prices is “disinformation” and unworthy of your attention.
The Times mentions another point of contention among US voters, particularly the Republicans, and that is the blank-check powers that have been awarded to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. Citing the work of “cybersecurity researchers,” the article alleges that the Russian influence campaign “appears intended to undermine the Biden administration’s extensive military assistance to Ukraine.” Again, here is an issue that has already been undermined by the Republicans ever since the Democrats commenced with their proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, a massively hazardous venture where no expense is considered too great.
On this point, the Democrats are able to claim, much like in 2016, that the Russians and the Republicans are working in collusion, this time against Kiev. The Russians are anxious to see US military spending on Ukraine come to an end as all of those sophisticated weapons are only prolonging the conflict. Meanwhile, some of the Republicans campaigned on promises to terminate funding to the Zelensky regime and divert those billions of dollars to national security projects, like fortifying their own border and fighting crime.
It would be a mistake to think that Americans are not acutely aware of the issues now dividing the country. Every day, social media users can see for themselves everything they need to know about crime, inflation, transgender issues, and the border, to name just a few of the hot-button issues dividing the country. To suggest that Russian trolls are required to “stoke conservative anger” is to grossly underestimate the political intelligence of the average US voter, who appears better informed than ever before. The fact is, the Democrats are afraid of being wiped out in a landslide come Tuesday. Conjuring up the ghost of Russia interference at the 11th hour reveals their insecurity and will provide them some partial excuse in the event of a blowout.
With regards to these latest accusations of election interference, Moscow is understandably losing its patience. It requires either a certain lack of self-awareness, or an astonishing excess of arrogance, for the United States to lecture any country on the question of meddling. After all, in the case of Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election, we’re talking about a mere $150,000 spent on several thousand Facebook ads, many of which had no political message whatsoever. When it is considered that US presidential elections have turned into multi-billion-dollar pageants, with no expense spared on campaign attack ads, it is hard to imagine that Russia’s severely limited campaign had any effect whatsoever (it needs emphasis that not even Facebook is entirely sure where the posts originated from. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, would only say they “likely operated out of Russia”).
Now compare that to the way the United States “meddles” in the affairs of foreign countries, like Ukraine. In November 2013, after the government of President Viktor Yanukovich opted in favor of closer ties with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union instead of the EU, protests broke out in the country. How did the United States respond? Not with internet trolls, that’s for sure. It dispatched high-ranking US officials to Kiev, like Senator John McCain and Assistant US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, where they agitated the masses against the democratically elected government. On the question of who would ultimately govern the splintered country, Nuland was overheard in a phone call with the US ambassador to Ukraine handpicking the eligible candidates.
Once again, the United States proved that there are rules for itself and rules for the rest of the world, and increasingly it is the American people who must pay the price for that supreme arrogance.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.
By Drago Bosnic | November 8, 2022
The so-called “Russiagate” conspiracy theory has been the main go-to scapegoat for the failures of the DNC, be it the 2016 presidential or 2018 midterm elections. For six years the mainstream propaganda machine has been parroting the supposed “Russian election meddling” narrative.
Despite the official investigation giving no proof to support the claims that Moscow secured the United States presidency for Donald Trump, “Russiagate” persisted even after he left office. Several major events, such as the humiliating US defeat in Afghanistan and the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, pushed the debunked conspiracy theory out of the spotlight for some time. Still, just when the world forgot about “Russiagate”, the propaganda machine decided to resurrect it as a scapegoat once again, this time for the 2022 midterms.
On November 7, The New York Times published a report claiming that the Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, the alleged “true founder and financial backer” of the “Wagner” PMC (private military company), made a “sardonic” statement about the supposed Russian meddling in 2022 US midterms. The Western mainstream media regularly accuse Prigozhin of “having close ties” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and they’ve even given him a rather cliché “supervillain” nickname – “Putin’s Chef”. Despite holding no official position in the Russian government, he is accused of conducting “clandestine operations” for the Kremlin, including alleged election interference.
“Gentlemen, we have interfered, we do interfere and we will [continue to] interfere,” Prigozhin said in a statement in response to a question from a Russian news outlet. “We will do it carefully, precisely, surgically as we are capable of doing it. During our targeted operations, we will remove both kidneys and liver at once,” he concluded in what was quite obviously a sarcastic remark. Russian news agency RIA Novosti described the comments as such as well, but the US mainstream propaganda machine is adamant that the statement is “clear proof” that Russia will supposedly affect the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections.
In 2018, Prigozhin was even indicted by the US that he funded and organized the so-called “troll factory” to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections, which was one of the staples of the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory. Despite no clear evidence that he did any of this, in 2021 the FBI put Prigozhin on its most-wanted list, while the US Treasury imposed sanctions on him for allegedly “organizing disinformation campaigns” in elections in Asia, Europe and Africa. The Biden administration placed additional sanctions on Prigozhin in March, due to his supposed “crucial role” in Russia’s counteroffensive against NATO aggression in Europe.
The US State Department also commented on Prigozhin’s statement, with the spokesman Ned Price calling it “a bold confession”. She added that it was “clear that a person of Mr. Prigozhin’s stature would not be in a position to make such claims unless the Kremlin, at some level didn’t approve.”
According to The New York Times, the unnamed “researchers” have supposedly “detected a new, though more concentrated, campaign by Russia to try to influence Tuesday’s midterm elections.” The alleged goal is “to empower angry conservative voters with the aim of undermining faith in American democracy … at a time when soaring energy prices and inflation threaten to dent support for the war, the campaign also appears intent on undermining the Biden administration’s extensive financial and military support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.”
The report further claims that “the campaign — using accounts that pose as enraged Americans — has specifically targeted Democratic candidates in the most heated races, including the Senate seats being contested in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania.” The alleged “calculation appears to be that a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives could dent American support for the war in Ukraine.”
The claims are quite clearly yet another attempt to use foreign powers as scapegoats and an excuse between political opponents in the US. The New York Times is infamous for being one of the strongholds of the neoliberal portion of the US establishment. By accusing the “angry conservatives” of working with Russia, the outlet is obviously trying to discredit the GOP to help the Democrats and give them at least somewhat better chances in the midterms.
The Republicans themselves aren’t immune to this, as they also resort to it by accusing the DNC of working with China. However, in this particular case, the Democrats, terrified of the prospect of losing both the House of Representatives and the Senate, are trying everything in their power to sway public opinion toward supporting their policies, both domestic and foreign, the unpopularity of which has reached its peak in recent months.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
The Health Ministry sits on millions of doses that will never be administered
eugyppius: a plague chronicle – November 7, 2022
We are now two months into the bivalent booster vaccination campaign, and interest remains more lukewarm than ever:
Family physicians are seeing less interest in vaccination against Corona, according to data from a physicians’ professional organisation. “Vaccination is our best sword in the fight against severe outcomes. It’s therefore that much more regrettable that the vaccination campaign is currently stagnating,” the national chairman of the German General Practitioners’ Association, Markus Beier, said …
Doctors no longer receive nearly as many requests for vaccination from patients as the Standing Commission on Vaccination recommends be vaccinated, Beier said. “Of course, our doctors use every opportunity in their practices to educate patients about vaccination, but the results is now rather meagre.” The truth must be told: “The run on Corona vaccinations has now slowed to a crawl.”
This is rough news especially for the vaccinators in the German Health Ministry, who rolled out their truly dismal “Ich schütze mich” (“I protect myself”) ad campaign less than a month ago – to absolutely no effect whatsoever.
As with many of the most important stories, this one has been carefully downplayed by the press. The only commentary I can find is this tepid piece in FAZ, which complains about “the aggressive counter-campaign from the ranks of the antivaxxers.” Maybe vaccine critics have changed a few minds here or there, but it’s nothing in comparison to what the vaccinators have done to their own cause. Never before in history have Germans been so rapidly and so widely exposed to a new pharmaceutical as they have to the Corona vaccines, and now that personal experience of the jabs is at an all-time high, enthusiasm could hardly be lower. This is the final repudiation of the vaccinators, and the one that matters the most.
Malcolm Muggeridge, Walter Duranty, and the collision of ideology with evidence
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 7, 2022
Blinded by Ideology: Part 4 in a series on Willful Blindness
Malcolm Muggeridge was an exceptionally talented journalist who lived in Moscow in 1933, working for the Manchester Guardian. Though attracted to communism in his youth, the experience of being in Stalin’s Russia and observing what was going on in it caused him to become disillusioned. Especially disturbing was his realization that Stalin’s army and police were—as part of their collectivization program—starving millions of landowning peasants (known as kulaks) in the Ukraine by confiscating their grain. This massive organized crime—known as the Holodomor—resulted in the deaths of millions in the winter of 1933.
Muggeridge was the only western journalist to report what was going on. When his reports were published, many of his fellow writers—including George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre, Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb—refused to believe them and passionately asserted that Muggeridge was spreading falsehoods about Stalin’s regime. Muggeridge was related to the Webbs by marriage, and years later he told a funny story about Beatrice.
I remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person, an early member of the Fabian Society and so on, saying to me, ‘Yes, it’s true, people disappear in Russia.’ She said it with such great satisfaction that I couldn’t help thinking that there were a lot of people in England whose disappearance she would have liked to organize.”
For decades, Muggeridge’s accurate reporting of the Holodomor was denied and suppressed. The dominant narrative of Stalin’s Russia in the early thirties was that propagated by the New York Times Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, who vehemently denied the Holodomor. While Muggeridge’s true and courageous reporting was denied, Duranty won a Pulitzer Price for his concealment of one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century. It’s a testament to the power of Duranty’s mendacious work that most Americans have still never heard of the Holodomor.
Over the last two years I’ve often thought about Muggeridge and Duranty as I have watched courageous scholars like Dr. Peter McCullough persecuted and censored, while COVID-19 vaccine ideologues are rewarded. Most notable is the COVID-19 vaccine propagandist, Dr. Peter Hotez, who was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize.
One of the most bizarre features of our bizarre time is that an experimental, gene transfer technology has become an object of unshakable devotion. Among members of the COVID-19 Vaccine Cult, belief in the substance (about which they know nothing) is an article of faith.
In the 1930s, 40s, and even 50s, many of the most prominent journalists, writers, intellectuals, and artists believed in Stalin’s Cult of Personality. Muggeridge knew (from his own observations) that they weren’t seeing the reality of Stalin’s regime. Because they viewed the world through the highly distorting lens of ideology, they couldn’t see what was right in front of them.
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | NOVEMBER 6, 2022
Earlier this year, the Smile Free campaign wrote an open letter to the NHS Chief Executives of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland calling for the lifting of the face mask requirement for all staff, patients and visitors in healthcare settings. Signed by over 2,000 medical and healthcare professionals, the letter cited gold-standard RCT scientific evidence that highlighted both the ineffectiveness of masks as a viral barrier and the potential physical, social and psychological harms associated with their use. The attempts of Scotland and Wales to justify their hospital mask requirements were criticised in an earlier article in the Critic. Now NHS England has spoken, defending its endorsement of mass masking primarily on the basis of computer modelling. Dr. Gary Sidley takes the organisation to task in the Critic.
In a letter dated October 4th 2022, Dame Ruth May (Chief Nursing Officer and national lead for infection control), responding on behalf of Amanda Pritchard (NHS England Chief Executive), asserted that there was “strong” evidence that widespread use of face coverings achieved a “significant impact” on the prevention of COVID-19 transmission. To support this premise she cited a computational modelling study, posted in October 2021. This pre-print paper reported that, based on its model, “universal masking” would achieve a 46% reduction in infections among healthcare workers. Given the substantial amount of robust scientific evidence available, aggregating around the conclusion that – in the real world – masks constitute an ineffective viral barrier, it is astonishing that NHS England is relying on a modelling study to justify its blanket policies.
There appears to be little recognition of the inauspicious legacy of the epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson. In collaboration with his colleagues at Imperial College London, Ferguson deployed computer modelling to predict the doomsday scenarios of Covid killing 2.2 million Americans and 500,000 people in the U.K. Such inaccurate prophecies were largely responsible for spooking Western governments into lockdowns, an unprecedented public health policy that has led to extensive collateral harms. Now healthcare chiefs are citing a similar modelling study as a key reason for persisting with mask recommendations in our hospitals, health centres and GP practices.
An initial glance at the study highlighted in the NHS England response is sufficient to reveal that it falls well short of an evidential bar that would justify imposing masks on healthy people. As a pre-print paper, it has not been peer-reviewed, and it comes with an explicit cautionary note at the beginning of the article that “it should not be considered conclusive, used to inform clinical practice or referenced by the media as validated information”. Within the body of the article, there are further warnings about the dubious reliability of its findings – for example, references to its reported outcomes as “highly uncertain”.
The modelling preprint itself acknowledges there are “important gaps in the evidence base” and that “evidence around the efficacy of interventions such as wearing surgical masks… is severely lacking”. Yet by assuming mask efficacy in its model, the paper ‘finds’ face coverings will prevent 46,000 infections of healthcare staff.
Dr. Sidley concludes that policies requiring habitual face coverings are not based on solid empirical evidence: “A piece of ill-fitting cloth or plastic does not transform into an impermeable viral barrier by virtue of crossing the threshold of a hospital or health centre.”
Time to ditch the masks.
Worth reading in full.
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | November 7, 2022
The UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, has sent an open letter to Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk, asking him to ensure that Twitter respects human rights and monitors hate speech and misinformation.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
In the letter, Türk said he was writing with “concern and apprehension about our digital public square and Twitter’s role in it.”
Türk also said that there is a need to monitor hate speech and disinformation, noting that free speech should not be a “free pass.”
“Like all companies, Twitter needs to understand the harms associated with its platform and take steps to address them,” Türk wrote.
“Respect for our shared human rights should set the guardrails for the platform’s use and evolution. In short, I urge you to ensure human rights are central to the management of Twitter under your leadership.”
He also said that Twitter should respect people’s rights to “fullest extent possible under applicable laws” and to publish transparency reports on government pressure to infringe on people’s rights.
The UN official also warned about so-called misinformation and hate speech.
“Twitter has a responsibility to avoid amplifying content that results in harms to people’s rights,” Türk said. “There is no place for hatred that incites discrimination, hostility or violence on Twitter.
“Hate speech has spread like wildfire on social media … with horrific, life-threatening consequences.”
“Conversely, viral spread of harmful disinformation, such as we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to vaccines, results in real world harms. Twitter has a responsibility to avoid amplifying content that results in harms to people’s rights,” the high commissioner said.
By Ron Paul | November 7, 2022
Tomorrow is election day and polls suggest that Americans are going to overturn Democratic Party control of the House and Senate. Politicians and the media always say that this is the most important election ever, but all too often once the voting is over and the smoke has cleared, not much changes. The Washington uni-party takes over and makes sure the status quo is maintained.
It doesn’t have to be this way. An incoming Republican House and Senate, for example, could take early steps to reassure their supporters that their votes weren’t wasted on Tweedledee vs. Tweedledum in Washington. Here are three suggestions to get things off to a good start.
First, Republican Party Leadership must vow to end the massive money spigot opened by the last Congress for Ukraine. By some estimates some $60 billion dollars have been authorized for Ukraine to fight a proxy war between the US/NATO and Russia.
This would be a move strongly supported by the Republican base. A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed that only 37 percent of Republicans support sending more US aid to Ukraine. Republican firebrand Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene said recently that under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine. While I am skeptical that her party leadership would support such a move, it’s clear Republican voters would.
Plus, ending this proxy war would carry with it the benefit of reducing the dangerously high possibility of global nuclear war. That’s not a bad trade-off.
Second, Republicans can signal that they will de-fund the Department of Homeland Security. At the time this monstrosity was created, I said this on the House Floor:
“The list of dangerous and unconstitutional powers granted to the new Homeland Security department is lengthy. Warrantless searches, forced vaccinations of whole communities, federal neighborhood snitch programs, federal information databases, and a sinister new ‘Information Awareness Office’ at the Pentagon that uses military intelligence to spy on domestic citizens are just a few of the troubling aspects of the new legislation.”
Unfortunately all of these things came to pass…and more. As we recently learned, the DHS has been colluding with social media companies to try and prevent Americans from being able to say or post opinions the government doesn’t want others to hear.
They promised that a Department of Homeland Security would keep us safer, but there is nothing that makes us less safe than the destruction of our Constitution.
Finally, the third task an incoming Republican House and Senate can take is maybe the easiest one: pass the Audit the Fed bill. Ten years ago the US House voted in a bipartisan manner to pass my Audit the Fed legislation only to see it stall in the Senate. With Republican control of both houses of Congress there is no reason a broadly-supported bill to open the books at the Federal Reserve cannot find its way to President Biden’s desk. We all support transparency, right?
Inflation is out of control and causing real harm to the American middle class. The Biden Administration seems determined to lead us to a potentially life-ending war with Russia. The Department of Homeland Security has turned into a weapon mobilized against the American people and our Constitution.
A Republican-controlled House and Senate can actually do something to fix these problems and thus make us more safe and more free. Will they?
Press TV – November 6, 2022
Yemen’s popular resistance Ansarullah movement warns about the United States and the UK’s fresh malicious intentions in the war-ravaged country.
Ali al-Qahoum, a member of Ansarullah’s Political Bureau, raised the alarm during an exclusive interview with Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen television network on Sunday.
There is “a direct US military presence in Yemen, and an influx of US forces, specifically in Hadhramaut,” he said, referring to Yemen’s biggest province, which spans from the country’s center towards its eastern areas.
“There is also an influx of British forces into al-Mahrah,” he added, referring to Yemen’s second-largest province that neighbors Hadharamaut to the east.
The US and the UK were preparing for a fresh round of escalation in Yemen, he further warned without elaborating.
The Western countries have been contributing heavily and unabatedly to a war of aggression that a Saudi Arabia-led coalition has been waging against Yemen since 2015.
The coalition has been seeking, unsuccessfully though, to restore Yemen’s power to the country’s former Western- and Riyadh-aligned officials. The war has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and spawned the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Washington and London have been providing the coalition with direct arms, logistical, and political support, including through outfitting it with precision-guided ammunitions that the Saudi-led forces have been using amply against Yemen’s civilian population.
Al-Qahoum said new US and British military delegations had arrived in Yemen earlier this week.
Reporting on Wednesday, Yemen Press Agency cited informed local sources as saying that Hadhramaut’s Provincial Governor, Mabkhout bin Madi, had held a face-to-face meeting with the US delegation in his office.
The Ansarullah official, however, asserted that despite the Western states’ apparent preparations for a new flare-up in Yemen, “the Yemenis are ready to defend their dignity and every inch of their country.”
“Ansarullah has military capabilities that preserve Yemen’s sovereignty and independence,” he added.
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | NOVEMBER 7, 2022
The manner in which Tehran handled its drone deal with Russia has been somewhat clumsy. The fact that the first ‘leak’ on this topic originated from none other than President Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan should have alerted Tehran that something sinister was afoot.
Instead, for whatever reasons, Tehran went into a flat denial mode. And now in a turnaround, we are given to understand that Iran’s denial was factually correct, albeit not wholly true in content. Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian has acknowledged that the “drone part is true, and we provided Russia with a small number of drones months before the Ukraine war.”
The minister added the caveat that “This fuss made by some Western countries, that Iran has provided missiles and drones to Russia to help the war in Ukraine — the missile part is completely wrong.”
Howsoever good Iran’s drone technology might be, it has not been a game changer for Russia in the war in Ukraine. Russia’s own missile capability is surprising even the western experts who had predicted months ago that it was “running out” of its inventory. In fact, the missile strikes may continue until Ukraine collapses and the West has no meaningful interlocutor left in Kiev’s rubble.
Russia and Iran seem to have got mired in a controversy unnecessarily. What seems to have happened is that just as Iran did reverse engineering on US’ drone technology, Russians also did a good job to remake the Iranian kamikaze drones that were in its inventory prior to the special military operation in Ukraine. Kiev now says, after examining the debris of the Russian drones that it shot down, that they had Ukrainian parts, too!
It stand to reason that the Russian defence industry picked something from Iran’s technology, something else from Ukraine’s, and came up with a startling “Russian model”. That probably explains the sophistry in Moscow’ consistent stance that it didn’t use Iranian drones.
Amirabdollahian revealed that Iran offered to explain the situation to Ukrainian authorities and a meeting was even set up in Poland to clear the misunderstanding and restore Iran’s diplomatic ties with Kiev, but the Americans got it scuttled. Evidently, the US is not interested in a normalisation of Ukraine-Iran relations. Israel too would have an interest in keeping Iran at arm’s length from Kiev. The US and Israel would apprehend that a strong Iranian diplomatic presence in Kiev might work to Russia’s advantage.
Be that as it may, Amirabdollahian’s candid admission will have consequences. Iran possibly got carried away by the exhilarating feeling that a superpower stooped to source its military technology, and furthermore, relished the high publicity its drones received — not to mention the embarrassment caused to Ukraine’s western patrons who watched helplessly when the Russian drones created panic on such a scale.
However, belatedly, Iran realised the potential political and diplomatic fallout. In reality, all this “fuss,” as Amirabdollahian put it, stems from Tehran’s refusal to sign the EU draft nuclear agreement at Vienna, which infuriated Brussels and Washington, dashing their hopes that Iranian oil would come to the rescue of Europe by replacing the Russian oil imports that are being terminated w.e.f December 5.
Again, Iran’s increased oil production was what the US was counting on to introduce tensions within the OPEC and split the cartel.
According to a Spiegel report, Germany and eight other EU states have put together a new package of sanctions against Iran in Brussels on Wednesday, which contains 31 proposals targeting officials and entities in Iran connected with security affairs as well as companies, for their alleged “violence and repressions” in Iran. The alibi is human rights violations.
Evidently, the West has reverted to its bullying tactic. President Biden has pledged to “free Iran” from its present political system — although the Americans know from past experience that public protests are nothing unusual for Iran but regime change remains a pipe dream.
Why is the West resuscitating the “Iran question” at this point? There are two underlying reasons — perhaps, three. One is, Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory in the Israeli election last Sunday virtually guarantees that Israel’s existential rivalry with Iran is once again in the centre stage of West Asian politics. Without that happening, Netanyahu will come under pressure to address the core issue in West Asia, namely, the Palestinian problem.
As things stand, the “Iran question” will return to the centre stage of West Asian politics. There is a congruence of interests between Tel Aviv and Washington on that score at a time when there is going to be some friction inevitably in US-Israel relations, as the racist anti-Arab Religious Zionism alliance, Netanyahu’s latest coalition parters, contains elements that the US once regarded as terrorists. Whipping up a frenzy over Iran comes in handy for both Israel and the US.
But on the other hand, Netanyahu is realistic enough to know that it will be suicidal for Israel to attack Iran militarily without American support and second, that the Biden Administration has not yet entirely given up hope on a nuclear deal with Iran.
Therefore, in the event of the midterms radically changing the profile of Congress to the detriment of the Biden Administration, trust Netanyahu to insert the Iran nuclear issue as a key template of US domestic politics and the US-Israel relations.
A second factor is the trajectory of the war in Ukraine. Although the proxy war is in the home stretch and the US and NATO are staring at the defeat and destruction of Ukraine, the Biden Administration cannot simply walk away in humiliation, since this is Europe and not the Hindu Kush, and the fate of the western alliance system is at a crossroads.
Most certainly, US troops have appeared on Ukrainian soil and they can only be regarded as an “advance party.” Will Ukraine turn out to be another Syria, with the regions to the west of the Dnieper River — “the Rump” denuded of natural resources — coming under US occupation so that its NATO allies in the periphery do not jump into the fray of dormant ethnic tensions inherited from history to carve out their pieces out of the carcass? Or, will a US-led “coalition of the willing” be preparing to actually fight the Russian forces in eastern and southern Ukraine?
Either way, the point is, the strategic ties developing between Iran and Russia will remain a focal point for the West, Amirabdollahian’s “clarification” notwithstanding. It is only natural that in the conditions under sanctions, Russia’s external relations are in the cross-hairs of the US. Iran has a stellar record of rubbishing the “maximum pressure” strategy.
Put differently, having Iran as an ally will be a strategic asset for Russia in a multipolar setting. Iran and the Eurasian Economic Union have decided to negotiate a Free Trade Agreement while Tehran is also working out swap deals involving Russian oil. Simply put, Europeans can keep their SWIFT for whatever it is worth and that is not going to make any difference to Russia or Iran — and the rest of the world is watching this happening in real time, especially in Iran’s neighbourhood where oil is traded in dollars.
By now it is also clear to the US and its allies that JCPOA or no JCPOA, the overarching tilt toward Russia and China is Tehran’s version of the Israeli Iron Dome, in diplomacy. The bottom line is that Iran is becoming a role model for the Persian Gulf region, as is evident from the queue lengthening for membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, even as the parallel track of the Abraham Accords has disappeared in the endorheic basin of the Arabian Peninsula.
RT | November 7, 2022
One of the British Navy’s Vanguard-class nuclear submarines was forced to abort a “top secret mission” after it sustained fire damage, according to a Sunday article published by The Sun.
According to the outlet’s sources, it took the efforts of the entire 130-plus crew, including many who were off-duty, to put out an electrical fire aboard the HMS Victorious, which was carrying Trident 2 nuclear ICBMs at the time of the incident.
While the fire was reportedly contained relatively quickly, the emergency situation declared by the ship’s captain forced the ship to shoot to the surface at an undisclosed location in the North Atlantic to vent out toxic fumes.
A Navy source reportedly explained to The Sun that “every seagoing member of the Royal Navy is a qualified fire-fighter,” and that this ensured that British ships and submarines were able to quickly respond to such incidents without affecting operational outputs.
Nevertheless, the damage caused by the fire prompted the submarine’s captain to abandon an unspecified “top secret mission” and order the vessel to return to base at HMNB Clyde in Faslane, Scotland.
The Sun noted that the 30-year-old vessel, which cost over $3 billion, is one of the Royal Navy’s four non-stop nuclear deterrent patrols. A Royal Navy spokesperson told the paper that the incident has not affected the continuous at-sea deterrent, but declined to provide any further details on submarine operations.
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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. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
