The deliberate corruption of American politics by an irresponsible foreign state must end
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 25, 2023
One might think that since Honest Joe Biden declared his latest war entitled the US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism in May the media has certainly taken up the task of exposing evil in these United States by reporting every affront to Jewish groups or individuals and to the Jewish state, Israel. The purpose is to invent a narrative suggesting that the world’s richest and most powerful ethno-religious demographic is somehow a perpetual victim and that goes double for Israel, explaining and forgiving the apartheid state’s occupying army’s targeting and killing of 55 journalists and its murder of more than 150 Palestinian civilians so far this year, including the sniper shooting of a Palestinian two-year-old boy in the head. In spite of all that carnage, a wealthy Israel, which can afford to provide free health care and university education to its citizens, continues to receive nearly $4 billion in military aid plus billions more in trade and charitable benefits from the United States taxpayer annually, totaling more than $300 billion since the Jewish state was founded in 1948.
We have lately been treated to a massive propaganda campaign orchestrated by the likes of the notorious American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) hideous leader Jonathan Greenblatt. One wonders why organizations like that which work closely with the Israeli government are not required to register with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), but to question that relationship got John F. Kennedy killed, so it is probably best to look the other way.
The role of organizations like ADL and AIPAC, dedicated to spreading lies about the Middle East and the world in general, is in part to convince the American public that Israel is really a wonderful place that is threatened by the Arab “terrorists,” as they choose to put it for obvious reasons. This grants Israel blanket immunity whenever its government exercises the “right to defend itself” doing whatever it takes, including blowing up schools and hospitals and attacking its neighbors. An astonishing bill being promoted by extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir currently under consideration in Israel’s Knesset would grant complete immunity for soldiers and policemen who shoot dead Palestinians or foreigners, effectively granting “license to kill.” Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Tony Blinken might consider that as “self-defense” if asked and, oh yeah, so might our self-declared Zionist president Honest Joe.
And ADL and AIPAC and all the other groups constantly bleat how there is also a broader threat of surging antisemitism and even the abomination of holocaust denial wherever one chooses to look. Conveniently, Israel, without being held accountable, can imprison, beat, torture, and kill as many Palestinians as it wishes while also stealing their land and other property, depriving them of their livelihoods and of their very right to spend their own lives in peace. The persistent drive to make Israel into an all-Jewish apartheid state that is illegally incorporating what was supposed to have been a Palestinian state is hardly hidden, and, as it includes shooting and making homeless those under occupation who in any way resist, it is actually both a genocide and a war crime.
Virtually every international organization that has looked into the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, to include Israeli human rights groups, has denounced in the strongest terms the inhuman behavior that has become normal. So why don’t Congress and the American media get it since they are so ready to exploit the essentially bogus narratives of crimes against humanity that are being floated to justify going to war with Russia? If war crimes and crimes against humanity are the metric that one measures by in Biden’s “rules based international order” there is no country on earth that is more deserving of being invaded and sorted out than Israel, unless it is the warmongering United States itself.
Recently we Americans have been treated to several iterations of the “Israel is good” contrived narrative, a tale that includes how both the US and the Jewish state share an “unbreakable bond” because both nations were “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” And the two nations also are allegedly linked by the “shared values” nonsense, which does not apply if one is either a Red Indian, a black slave, or a Palestinian of either Christian or Muslim persuasion. Indeed, even observant Jews in Israel who are not practicing according to the Orthodox beliefs are subjected to various restrictions on their personal lives, including how they must conform to marry, and suffer from an inability to practice their religious choice openly.
We have recently experienced a visit to the White House and an address to a joint session of Congress by Israel’s head of state President Isaac Herzog which was preceded by a vote in Congress on a bill introduced by Republicans declaring that Israel “is not a racist or apartheid state” and adding that the United States “will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel.” The vote abjuring Israel of all misbehavior passed by an overwhelming 412-9-1 vote. The nine “no” votes and one abstention were from Progressive Caucus Democrats, which features Pramila Jayapal as the chairwoman: Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Andre Carson, Delia Ramirez and Ayanna Pressley. Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota, who has submitted a bill blocking US aid to Israel that is used to imprison Palestinian children, voted “present.”
Jayapal, who said recently accurately that “Israel is a racist state,” was rewarded with a torrent of criticism from her own party, to include a rare joint statement from House Democratic leadership rejecting her remarks plus also a separate statement signed by 43 Democratic Party colleagues who said they were “deeply concerned” about her “unacceptable” views. She consequently apologized effusively before flipping and supporting the resolution. And every other Democrat and all the Republicans voted “yes.” A day later, three House Republicans filed a censure motion against Jayapal for having the temerity to call Israel “racist.” That basically confirms the hypothesis that Israel could shit on the heads of the clowns in Congress and the recipients would applaud the act and beg for more. Jayapal is now focusing on more congenial issues like climate change.
Of course, the bill in Congress is a lie and a denial of reality. Israel is by self-definition legally a Jewish state which makes it both racist and apartheid in structure towards its non-Jewish citizens and also to the Palestinians who have the misfortune of living in areas under Israeli occupation. The recent atrocities against the Palestinian victims have not passed unnoticed even if the Jewish dominated US media has attempted to mitigate what is reported. In fact, many Democrats no longer buy into the Israel narrative. Mondoweiss reports how “A University of Maryland Critical Issues poll from earlier this year found that 44% of Democratic voters believe Israel is ‘a state with segregation similar to apartheid.’ That survey mirrors a number of public opinion studies that have been released recently… 49% of the Democratic voters polled said they sympathize with Palestinians, compared to just 38% who said they sympathize with Israelis.” Another recent poll indicated that 80% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans, in absence of a two-state solution to Israel-Palestine, “would choose a democratic Israel that’s no longer Jewish, over a Jewish Israel without full citizenship and equality for non-Jewish people living under its authority.”
Attempting to address the growing uneasiness of many Americans over the issue of Israel and Palestinian rights, Herzog basically told congress that criticism of Israel is a freedom of speech right but that it should not veer over into antisemitism. Unfortunately, his logic is a bit on the thin side as the definition of antisemitism used by the US government and the media coined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) includes criticism of Israel, making attacking Israeli regarding its ghastly behavior ipso facto antisemitism.
Herzog also lied his way through his preferred analysis of what drives the bilateral relationship with Washington as well as civil liberties and other rights in his own country, saying “We are proud to be the United States’ closest partner and friend. When the United States is strong, Israel is stronger. And when Israel is strong, the United States is more secure.” How exactly the US is made more secure by Israeli destabilizing of the Middle East was not made clear, but Herzog went on with another series of lies explaining how Israel “takes pride in its vibrant democracy, its protection of minorities, human rights and civil liberties, as laid down by its parliament, the Knesset, and safeguarded by its strong Supreme Court and independent judiciary.”
Nothing Herzog said was actually true and he forgot to mention the political donations from Jewish sources and the friendly Jewish media coverage that binds most American politicians to Israel. In recent electoral cycles, Jewish donations dominated in both parties and candidates were rightfully fearful of not saying and doing enough when it comes to Israel. But to really appreciate the deep hole of corruption that the United States is in with Israel and its friends in The Lobby calling the shots even when the narrative is so transparently false, it is best to quote the New York Times account of the revelry in the House of Representatives Chamber as Herzog spoke: “The reception for Mr. Herzog in the packed House chamber was staunchly supportive, with frequent standing ovations by the assembled lawmakers, including when he decried Palestinians for destroying the prospects for peace by supporting terror attacks against Israel.” Another big lie and the inevitable standing ovations from the Congress critters. We are in deep trouble when our Solons on Capitol Hill cannot appear to discern a series of self- serving lies by a foreign leader which do nothing but impoverish and do damage to the United States and its people. Indeed, the clowns applaud what they are hearing. It is the tragedy of our times, perhaps the final tragedy.
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 Paul Robinson | Canadian Dimension | July 24, 2023
Few people came out of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan looking good. A rare exception was John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Sopko was the Cassandra of the American war effort, repeatedly revealing unwelcome truths only to be equally repeatedly ignored. In charge of auditing the vast sums of money that the US government spent on economic aid and reconstruction in Afghanistan, SIGAR’s office issued regular reports detailing waste, incompetence, and corruption on a scale that boggles the mind. Among other things, SIGAR published stories of how the US spent $6 million airlifting nine Italian goats to Afghanistan; spent $486 million buying aircraft for the Afghan airforce which were so dangerous to fly that they were never used and were turned into $32,000 of scrap metal; and spent $150 million building luxury villas to lodge staff of its economic development office. All this was just the tip of a very large iceberg.
The basic lesson of SIGAR’s many reports was that throwing vast sums of money into poor countries doesn’t promote economic development. Instead, it encourages corruption and inefficient economic practices. Formal institutions (laws, governments) depend upon informal ones, such as local customs and social structures, that foreigners do not understand, leading to misguided policies and misdirection of funds. Efforts to impose Western formal institutions on top of these very different informal ones, and then flooding the country with Western advisors and money, ends up being counterproductive. None of this, of course, is particularly revelatory. Critics of foreign aid programs have been saying much the same for years. Still, it is an important message.
Although the United States has left Afghanistan, Sopko is continuing his work. Last week, he published a letter written in response to a request from various US Senators. In this, he discussed how lessons from rebuilding Afghanistan could be applied to Ukraine. All wars come to an end. When that in Ukraine does so, there will no doubt be huge pressure on Western governments to flood that country with development assistance. SIGAR’s letter provides a dose of caution that is well worth listening to.
SIGAR notes that “many of the challenges US agencies faced in Afghanistan—coordinating efforts, dealing with corruption, and effectively monitoring and evaluating projects and programs—will be the same as the ones they will face in Ukraine.” He identifies seven particular lessons. These are:
Sopko makes a number of important points under these headings. One that is, “In Afghanistan, the US government spent too much money, too quickly, in a country that was unable to absorb it.” Yet estimates of how much money will be required to rebuild Ukraine far surpass what was spent in Afghanistan. The US (and by implication other Western states also) must take care not to provide more than Ukraine is able to effectively absorb or more than the donor states are able to effectively monitor. More is not necessarily better.
SIGAR also notes that “Under pressure to produce results quickly, agencies bypassed Afghan institutions and government channels when they encountered corruption, rather than slog through efforts at reform. When aid did flow through Afghan budgets and institutions, the United States prioritized the survival and short-term stability of the Afghan government over following through on anti-corruption efforts.” This is a problem that is likely to be repeated in Ukraine, where corruption is “likely to be a significant obstacle to the country’s recovery” given the country’s status as “the most corrupt country in Europe.”
Strangely, SIGAR misses a key fact, which is that this point and the previous one are connected—corruption feeds off excessive foreign aid. So does poor governance more generally. It is no coincidence that so-called “rentier” states (states that derive their income not from taxes on citizens but from what economists call “rents,” such as revenues from natural resource production or from foreign aid) tend to be corrupt, undemocratic, and generally unresponsive to citizens’ needs. When your revenues come from your citizens, you have to pay attention to what they want. When they don’t, you can afford to ignore them. A post-war Ukrainian government that is dependent on foreign assistance, maintains a huge military and security apparatus that is beyond its means, and has few sources of finance of its own, will have few incentives to listen to its own people or to act in an honest way.
A final point made by SIGAR is that in Afghanistan US agencies “often failed to measure programs and projects against the ultimate outcomes and impacts they sought to achieve. Instead, how much money was spent, and how quickly, became the measure of success, regardless of the actual result. This poured money into a fragile environment with no concept of whether projects achieved their intended goal, or even necessarily where all the money was going.” This is a perpetual problem in aid and development projects. Post-war, Western governments will no doubt feel a strong need to be seen to be “doing something” to help Ukraine. They will therefore be likely to throw money at the problem, publicizing their “success” in terms of funds expended and projects begun, but ignoring the actual outcomes.
SIGAR sees part of the solution as lying in better monitoring and evaluation. The problem with this is that there are generally few incentives to carry out such monitoring, because if one does there is a high possibility that one will come to the conclusion that one’s aid is failing, a conclusion that one cannot politically admit. In addition, the recipient of the aid is very possibly aware of this, and thus lacks incentives to use the aid appropriately. Confident that the donor is politically committed to supporting him come what may, he is free to act as irresponsibly as he wishes.
Simply put, giving money away in large quantities tends to produce perverse incentives that cause people to behave in ways that engender negative results. This isn’t a problem that can be fixed by better monitoring, anti-corruption efforts, and the like. It’s inherent in aid itself. If there is a weakness in Sopko’s reporting, it is that, as an auditor, it’s not his job to say whether aid should be given, just to point out whether it is being used effectively. Consequently, his reports end up consisting of lists of how things could be done better without ever challenging whether they should be done in the first place.
Still, they are vital reading for anybody who wants to think about how to reconstruct war-torn societies. What is clear is that if Western states want to produce better results in Ukraine than they did in Afghanistan, they will have to think a lot more intelligently about what sorts of aid they give and how they deliver it. But it’s not as if they weren’t previously aware of the problems mentioned above. SIGAR warned them repeatedly. Nobody listened. One must wonder if they are listening now.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 21, 2023
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday approved an anthrax vaccine for adults ages 18-65, according to Emergent BioSolutions, the vaccine’s maker.
The vaccine, Cyfendus, is approved for use after suspected or confirmed exposure to Bacillus anthracis, also known as anthrax, but must be administered together with other antibacterial drugs, Reuters reported.
Emergent said it had been delivering Cyfendus to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) since 2019, under pre-emergency use authorization status.
The efficacy of Cyfendus for post-exposure prophylaxis was tested only on animals.
Dr. Meryl Nass, bioterrorism and anthrax expert, told The Defender she is skeptical about whether the vaccine offers any new substantive health benefit.
“Given the history of the company’s many failures, and the lack of proper safety or efficacy testing of prior anthrax vaccines, one can only expect problems,” Nass said.
“The fact that there is no label available, there is no information on how it was tested, what placebo was used, et cetera — that all adds to the consternation and concern people should have about the value of this product,” Nass added.
Emergent said the drug has been in development for 20 years in collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), formerly headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Paul Williams, senior vice president at Emergent, said anthrax “remains a high-priority national security threat.”
Cyfendus is comprised of Emergent’s anthrax vaccine adsorbed (AVA), marketed as Biothrax, plus an additional adjuvant, the name of which the company did not disclose.
Cyfendus is administered in two doses over 14 days to elicit an immune response that the company said: “can be especially important in response to a large-scale public health emergency involving anthrax.”
Nass said that during the 2001 anthrax scare, where politicians and media organizations across the country received anthrax in the mail, five people died — but “everyone who got antibiotics early did not come down with anthrax and none of them died.”
“So,” Nass said, “antibiotics worked.” Nass emphasized that after exposure to anthrax, one needs treatment immediately — not over the longer period of time it takes for a vaccine to work.
“The fact that it’s required to be given with antibiotics,” Nass said, “which is what you should have when exposed to anthrax, raises the question: What additional benefit are you gonna get from this vaccine? I don’t know.”
Emergent’s stock shares gained 16.2% in pre-market trading after it announced the FDA approval.
Benchmark analyst Robert Wasserman said the approval provides “greater assurance” the company will reach its projected 2023 earnings of $260-$280 million, Bloomberg Law reported.
The price spike comes on the heels of “a difficult few years,” financially for the company, FiercePharma reported.
The company, founded in 1998 as government contractor BioPort to distribute and produce the anthrax vaccine for the U.S. military, reached its financial zenith early in the pandemic after earning lucrative contracts to produce Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.
But a congressional report in 2021 revealed the company hid likely contamination problems at the plant from FDA inspectors and eventually had to destroy 400 million vaccine doses — which led its share price to fall from $133 to $7.
History of the anthrax vaccine
The anthrax vaccine was developed and in limited use in the military since 1970.
Biothrax has been produced by Emergent since 2002. Prior to Thursday’s announcement, it was the only anthrax vaccine licensed for humans in the U.S.
Nass explained that in 1997, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) made the vaccine compulsory as part of the Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program (AVIP) for all 2.5 million military service members — including active duty and reserve personnel and civilian contractors.
The DOD implemented the mass vaccination program in 1998.
Reports of adverse reactions and dissent on the part of service members led to congressional hearings and in early 2000, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform recommended halting the mandatory program, although it was not officially halted.
As of 2000, more than 500,000 service members had received at least one dose of the vaccine, which was designed to be administered in six doses.
The plant where the government produced the anthrax vaccine faced a series of regulatory issues and was closed in 1997, according to Nass.
BioPort acquired it from the state-owned Michigan Biologic Products Institute in 1998 and rebuilt it, but was not FDA-authorized to produce the vaccine. So for a period, the vaccines were unavailable.
Then, starting on Sept. 18, 2001 — a week after the 9/11 attacks — when Americans were in a state of fear or heightened concern, media outlets began reporting that a sophisticated, weaponized and fatal form of anthrax had been sent via mail to numerous news outlets and American politicians.
New letters continued to appear over the next six weeks and the media and the government implied they were somehow linked to the 9/11 attacks.
Later, the media and figures such as John McCain linked the anthrax to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 2008, the FBI accused U.S. Army scientist Bruce Ivins of being responsible for the attacks, although Ivins took his own life before he could be prosecuted and the FBI’s claims are widely doubted.
ProPublica, McClatchy and PBS Frontline, which did their own investigation, questioned the FBI’s evidence.
The Government Office of Accountability (GAO) and the National Academies of Science both also found that the FBI lacked data to back its claims.
But the hype created by the anthrax letters primed the American public to support draconian legislation such as the Patriot Act, Dr. Joseph Mercola argued.
It also became the primary justification for continuing to produce the vaccine and administer it to service people, Pam Long wrote in The Defender.
In 2002, shortly after the FDA approved BioPort’s new vaccine plant, the GAO issued a report to Congress on the AVIP.
The report enumerated a significant number of adverse reactions to the vaccine — more than double the rate reported by the manufacturer — along with the mass exodus of military pilots and other valuable military personnel who refused the mandate.
It also noted that anthrax adverse reactions were very similar to Gulf War syndrome symptoms and that many veterans reported the vaccine as the cause of this illness, which they also reported in congressional hearings, according to Nass.
From 2000 to 2018, the military anthrax mandate was challenged several times in court for lacking FDA approval and licensure, and for lacking proven potency against fatal inhalation of anthrax.
During this time, the DOD restricted the anthrax vaccine to a smaller group of “at-risk troops” and halted and resumed the program several times.
Prior to 2001, the DOD concluded that biological agents such as anthrax were not a threat for mass casualties due to the limited number of countries with the expertise and sophistication required to weaponize and disseminate anthrax.
According to an investigation by investigative journalist Whitney Webb, the 2001 anthrax attacks also rescued Emergent Biosolutions, then BioPort, from certain financial ruin.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – 21.07.2023
The POTUS and his son are investigated by the Republican-controlled House panel over allegations that they ran an illegal “pay-to-play” corruption scheme involving cash payments to Hunter Biden in exchange for access to his father while Biden was vice president.
Republicans have gone on Twitter to react to the release of an unclassified Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) document related to President Joe Biden’s alleged involvement in an international bribery scheme, with some GOP members calling for his impeachment.
They included Marjorie Taylor Greene, who called the 46th US president “a criminal, […] leading us into WW3.”
“Republicans can no longer delay, but we need 218 Republican votes to do it. I’ve been there since day one and so are the American people. IMPEACH BIDEN!!!” she added.
Greene was echoed by Anna Paulina Luna, who argued that Biden “needs to be impeached” because of the “evidence and testimony” that she had seen as a member of the House Oversight Committee investigating the Biden family finances. “He is compromised and his son is selling access to him,” Luna tweeted.
The same tone was struck by Lauren Boebert as she wrote that it’s necessary to “Read and understand just how deep the corruption goes,” and that “Biden should be thrown out of office. Impeach!”
Similar messages were shared by Jim Banks, who described the Bidens as the “Most corrupt family to ever live in the White House,” also urging for Joe Biden’s impeachment.
The reaction comes after Republican Senator Chuck Grassley released the FBI’s FD-1023 form on Thursday, which focused on how Biden, along with his son Hunter Biden, ostensibly “coerced” chief executive of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Nikolai Zlochevsky to pay them $5 million each in exchange for their help in getting a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the firm fired.
The document pertains to the FBI’s interview with a “highly credible” confidential source who detailed multiple meetings and conversations he or she had with Zlochevsky over the course of several years starting in 2015. During those gatherings, the Burisma CEO at one point reportedly said that Joe Biden’s son “was stupid”, and that “his [Zlochevsky’s] dog was smarter.”
Hunter sat on the board of Burisma at the time while his father served as Barack Obama’s vice president.
Grassley, for his part, stressed that he released the document so that Americans can read it “for themselves without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats.” The senator acquired the form via legally protected disclosures by Justice Department whistleblowers, according to the senator’s office.
The FBI responded with a sharply worded statement, slamming GOP lawmakers for ignoring the bureau’s “significant concerns” about the dangers of releasing the material.
“We have repeatedly explained to Congress, in correspondence and in briefings, how critical it is to keep this source information confidential. […] Today’s release of the 1023 – at a minimum – unnecessarily risks the safety of a confidential source,” the FBI statement said.
The developments follow US Internal Revenue Service investigator Joseph Ziegler telling lawmakers he discovered Hunter Biden and his business associates received $17 million from foreign sources, including $7.3 million from Burisma, during a probe he described as hindered by senior Justice Department officials.
Ziegler had remained anonymous until his appearance at a House oversight committee hearing on Wednesday that was convened over Republican allegations that President Biden and his son Hunter were involved in a bribery scheme with Burisma.
Hunter Biden’s attorneys and the US Justice Department announced last month an agreement under which he will plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges and enter a pretrial diversionary agreement on a felony firearms offense in an effort to resolve the criminal probe against him and avoid prison time.
Since 2018, the First Son has been under a series of investigations into tax-related crimes, drug use, money laundering and illegal business dealings in foreign countries, including Ukraine and China. Investigators are specifically looking into the content of Hunter Biden’s so-called “laptop from Hell”, which purportedly included naked photos and graphic videos of the 46th president’s son.
The Cradle – July 22, 2023
The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed new legislation on 21 July to bolster normalization efforts between Israel and Arab countries, pledging nearly $120 million in funding and naming Saudi Arabia as a key candidate.
The Regional Integration and Normalization Act seeks to encourage the Arab world to solidify diplomatic ties with Israel.
US Senator Bob Menendez remarked that “this bill capitalizes on the dynamics that are profoundly reshaping the Middle East and North Africa,” adding, “Further integration in this region, one marked by conflict and disunity, must be a pillar of US foreign policy moving forward. It will remain a region that is critical to US strategic interests, and we should support efforts that increase stability and prosperity for our partners and the region’s citizens.”
This bill will create an ambassador-level official for the Abraham Accords, expand normalization and “integration, ”support the development of an Abraham Accords and Negev Forum Economic Partnership, and support joint cybersecurity training.
This development comes a few days after US President Joe Biden hosted Israeli President Isaac Herzog at the White House.
Since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took power last year, Biden has avoided meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister due to a controversial judicial overhaul.
By Gavin O’Reilly | OffGuardian | July 17, 2023
Over the past several weeks, Ireland has been rocked by a scandal related to the significant undeclared earnings of Ryan Tubridy, the most prominent presenter on the public broadcaster of the 26-County State, RTÉ, and the long-time host of its flagship talk show, The Late Late Show, until his departure earlier this year – prior to the revelations related to his salary becoming public knowledge.
In response, Director General of RTÉ Dee Forbes tendered her resignation, and both Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly have been brought before a government tribunal to account for the undeclared earnings, something that has received significant media coverage across Ireland, including OJ Simpson-style live television coverage of the proceedings.
What has been noticeable however is how this extensive media attention lies in stark contrast to the virtually non-existent mainstream media coverage of RTÉ’s endorsement of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset initiative over the past three years, intended to usher in a totalitarian global corporate dictatorship, where technology is used to stifle and censor debate.
From the outset of the ‘Covid Pandemic’ in March 2020, Ireland, like numerous other countries, introduced stringent lockdowns under the guise of preventing the spread of an alleged virus. In reality, the forced closure of vast swathes of society served the purpose of making it virtually impossible for smaller businesses to operate, thus creating a greater dependence on corporate outlets such as Amazon.
As a result, the global lockdowns saw the greatest upwards transfer of wealth from the working and middle-classes in history, with corporate elements receiving upwards of $1tn in profit.
With Taoiseach Leo Varadkar being a WEF ‘Young Global Leader’, RTÉ was fully complicit in endorsing the ‘Pandemic’ narrative, WEF-linked scientist Luke O’Neill being a regular guest on The Late Late Show under Ryan Tubridy in order to further its promotion.
The public broadcaster would also condemn Irish anti-lockdown protests as being ‘organised by the far-right’ in lock-step with similar mainstream media descriptions being ascribed to protests in New Zealand, France and Canada – each country also being under the respective rule of WEF ‘Young Global Leaders’, Jacinda Ardern, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau.
What would be perhaps the most sinister aspect of RTÉ’s two-year promotion of the ‘Pandemic’ narrative however, was the use of children to promote uptake of the ‘Covid’ Vaccine during the 2020 edition of The Late Late Toy Show, a seasonal edition of the programme used to showcase that Christmas’s latest toy selection, one that is traditionally very popular amongst families with young children.
Indeed, Ryan Tubridy himself would later double down on his promotion of the vaccine by infamously using his radio platform to encourage listeners to disinvite guests from weddings who had not been vaccinated, his incendiary remarks coming amidst a time when access to bars, restaurants, hairdressers and gyms in the southern Irish state, was forbidden to those who had not yet received a ‘Covid’ jab and the resulting digital QR code that would subsequently be placed on their smartphone.
This enforced segregation, in Ireland and further afield, served as a dry-run for the introduction of mandatory digital ID, a key part of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ that the WEF envisages will come about as a result of the Great Reset, with the ultimate goal being a cashless society. One where the corporate-government alliance has full control over its citizen’s financial transactions, and can easily impose sanctions against those it deems to be dissidents.
Indeed, this very situation would play out during last year’s Freedom Convoy in Canada, when Justin Trudeau would use emergency legislation to freeze the bank accounts of Truckers protesting against his decision to mandate that truck drivers re-entering Canada from the US had to be vaccinated. A truly dystopian move, and one that could be far more easily implemented in a society with no physical cash.
RTÉ’s two-year endorsement of the introduction of such a totalitarian society has come in for little criticism since the sudden collapse of the ‘Pandemic’ narrative last January however, the undeclared earnings of its chief propagandist being a far more newsworthy item it would seem.
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.
RT | July 18, 2023
A parliamentary investigation into the collapse of Switzerland’s banking giant Credit Suisse will keep its files confidential for half a century, Reuters reported on Sunday, citing a parliamentary committee document.
According to the report, the investigating commission will hand over its files to the Swiss Federal Archives after longer than the usual 30 years to ensure confidentiality in the case, which focuses on the activities of the Swiss government, financial regulator, and central bank in the run up to the emergency takeover of Credit Suisse.
The announcement has raised concerns in the Swiss Society for History, with its president Sacha Zala reportedly writing to the commission that “Should researchers want to scientifically investigate the 2023 banking crisis, access to the CS files would be invaluable.”
At its first regular meeting in Bern last week, the committee was quoted by Reuters as saying that “all persons participating in the meetings and the questioning are subject to the duty of secrecy, not only the members of the commission, but also the interviewees themselves.”
It warned that “indiscretions complicate the work or damage the credibility of the commission and can have negative consequences for the Swiss financial center.”
Credit Suisse, the second-largest bank in Switzerland, faced a string of scandals, legal issues, and customer outflows in recent years. In 2022 the bank reported a net loss of 7.3 billion francs ($8.5 billion). This March, its biggest investor, Saudi National Bank, announced that it would not be able to provide financial assistance due to regulatory and statutory limits.
Later in the month, Credit Suisse’s rival UBS agreed to buy the struggling institution for the equivalent of $3.25 billion in a government-brokered deal. The merger, the biggest banking tie-up since the 2008 financial crisis, came amid growing fears of a broader contagion after several regional banks collapsed in the US. The acquisition ended Credit Suisse’s 167-year history while the whole affair has dealt a blow to Switzerland’s reputation as a stable global financial center.
By Drago Bosnic | July 18, 2023
In late November 2022, Washington DC admitted that it was unable to account for approximately $20 billion in weapons sent to the Kiev regime. At the time, the newly elected Republican-dominated Congress vowed to conduct “impending audits” as soon as they took over in January. Officially, the GOP wanted audits to determine and then release information on the massive weapons shipments from the United States to the Kiev regime and how much of that “aid” was ending up “where it’s supposed to be”. Republicans promised to “hold the government accountable” for spending US taxpayers’ dollars for the sake of the deeply corrupt Kiev regime.
At the time, major news media, such as Fox News, claimed that the Biden administration inspected only 10% of approximately 22,000 weapons sent to the Kiev regime from late February to November. However, oversight issues also extended to other “theaters of operation”, such as Taiwan, where approximately $19 billion in weapons sales for China’s breakaway island province were “missing”. In late August, a Defense News report claimed there was a $14 billion backlog in weapons sales to Taiwan. However, the November data indicated that the actual number was nearly $19 billion in delayed deliveries, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“US government and congressional officials fear the conflict in Ukraine is exacerbating a nearly $19 billion backlog of weapons bound for Taiwan, further delaying efforts to arm the island as tensions with China escalate,” the WSJ report claimed. “The US has pumped billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February, taxing the capacity of the government and defense industry to keep up with a sudden demand to arm Kiev in a conflict that isn’t expected to end soon,” the authors added in an admission rarely seen in mainstream media.
And yet, close to eight months since promising to conduct the aforementioned “impending audits”, the Republican-dominated Congress never did anything of sorts, while the so-called “aid” has swelled to over $170 billion, according to the data released by the Neo-Nazi junta itself. Strangely, the troubled Biden administration has been successful in preventing Congress from creating an inspector general’s office that would finally provide the much-needed oversight for the massive weapons shipments to the Kiev regime. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would create the inspector general office modeled after the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
The issues US government experienced during the existence of SIGAR is what likely caused the GOP-dominated Congress to keep postponing its “impeding audits”, despite clear promises it would conduct them. It can even be argued that much of the electorate voted for Republicans precisely because of their promises to heavily scrutinize the so far “unquestionable commitment” to provide the massive amount of “aid” to the Kiev regime. And indeed, the regular reports issued by SIGAR were a source of great embarrassment for any administration in Washington DC during America’s decades-long invasion of Afghanistan. These issues later greatly contributed to the humiliating US defeat in August 2021.
The Afghan-era inspector general John Sopko detailed the unchecked, all-present corruption that led to numerous failures during the truly unprovoked US aggression in Afghanistan. Sopko’s quarterly reports regularly embarrassed US and NATO officials who tried to present the supposed “improvement” of the operational situation as true. He has warned that “an inspector general’s official for the Ukraine war needed to be established to prevent a repeat of the situation American aid created in Afghanistan, which saw massive corruption”. Considering that the “Ukraine aid” is orders of magnitude greater than anything Afghanistan ever got, the scale of corruption in Kiev is virtually impossible to overstate.
“There is an understandable desire amid a crisis to focus on getting money out the door and to worry about oversight later, but too often that creates more problems than it solves,” he wrote in a report submitted to Congress earlier this year, adding: “Given the ongoing conflict and the unprecedented volume of weapons being transferred to Ukraine, the risk that some equipment ends up on the black market or in the wrong hands is likely unavoidable. You’re bound to get corrupt elements of not only the Ukrainian or the host government, but also of US government contractors or other third-party contractors to try to steal the money. There’s just so much money going in, and it’s hard to keep track of.”
Still, the troubled Biden administration keeps insisting that an inspector general for Ukraine would be an “unnecessary hurdle” as the Pentagon is “already monitoring transfers“.
“This expansion is both unnecessary and unprecedented, as oversight of US assistance for the benefit of a country’s people is already provided by the Inspectors General for the Department of State and United States Agency for International Development,” the White House stated.
And yet, according to a June report issued by the Pentagon inspector general, a number of issues with US weapons shipments to the Neo-Nazi junta were found.
“DoD [Department of Defense] personnel did not have the required accountability of the thousands of defense items that they received and transferred at Jasionka, [Poland],” the report claimed, adding: “We observed that DoD personnel did not fully implement their standard operating procedures to account for defense items and could not confirm the quantities of defense items received against the quantity of items shipped for three of five shipments we observed.”
The political West has sent tens of billions worth of weapons to the Kiev regime since before Russia launched its strategic counteroffensive against NATO aggression in Europe. This includes everything from small arms and tactical reconnaissance drones to heavy armor and very likely nuclear-capable fighter jets in the near future. And while Washington DC and its favorite puppet regime insist “all weapons are strictly and only being used on the battlefield”, dozens of countries in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere routinely complain that various extremely dangerous and violent criminal groups and terrorist organizations now possess advanced military-grade weapons that have been illegally acquired in Ukraine.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Harvard’s “Berkmen Klein Center for Internet & Society”
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | July 17, 2023
A friend recently sent me a flagrantly political New York Times Editorial by Kate Klonick, “an associate professor of law at St. John’s University who studies law and technology, including the governance of online speech by private platforms.”
In her Opinion, Professor Klonick asserts:
No feat of rhetoric could disguise the flagrantly political nature of the federal court ruling on July 4 that restricted the Biden administration’s communications with social media platforms — but Judge Terry A. Doughty, who wrote the opinion, did his best to cover his tracks. The 155-page opinion, which could hinder the government’s efforts to counter false and misleading online speech about issues like election interference and vaccine safety, is laced with lofty references to George Orwell and quotations from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, making it more reminiscent of a civics essay than a federal judicial opinion.
Two things immediately came to mind as I read this essay:
1). Gramsci’s “Long March Through the Institutions” is now complete, having now made its way through the law department as St. John’s University. Words can’t express how disheartening I found this.
2). Professor Klonick should spend less time pontificating about “online speech” and “vaccine safety” and more time studying civics.
The trouble with lawyers like her is that they don’t understand the SPIRIT of the First Amendment. Because humans are mortal and human affairs are unstable and subject to powerful external forces, the state can always point to innumerable threats (real, perceived, and exaggerated) against which it invokes Emergency Power to reduce or suspend constitutional rules in order “to protect” the citizenry from itself and from foreigners.
James Madison, the author of the U.S. Constitution, recognized that in the grand scheme of human affairs, an overgrown executive posed a greater threat to the citizenry than the unfettered expression of free speech, which will often contain errors.
After reading Professor Klonick’s flagrantly political editorial, I pondered the question: how does the New York Times go about curating columnists like her—that is, a person with a distinguished academic resume who is willing to advocate America’s baleful new censorship regime?
A little Googling revealed that she is is on leave from St. John’s for 2022-2023 serving as a Visiting Scholar at the Rebooting Social Media Institute at Harvard University. An examination of this Institute revealed that it’s a project of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, which recently announced that “Former New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern joins Berkman Klein Center as Knight Tech Governance Leadership Fellow.”
Her appointment is a notable example of how many prominent public figures who advocated or imposed COVID-19 vaccine mandates “fell upward” by landing plum positions at America’s most prestigious academic institutions after public backlash against their policies and conduct. During her tenure as New Zealand Prime Minister, Ardern imposed some of the most draconian lockdowns and vaccine mandates in the world. In the spring of this year, as New Zealanders grew weary of her tyranny, she resigned and was shortly thereafter offered a job a Harvard.
A little research of financial supports of the Berkman Klein center resulted in this list of donors, which includes the Gates Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, Microsoft, USAID, and the World Economic Forum.
And so we see how easy it is to capture men and women who have demonstrated great ambition, ability, and success in their careers, but who have no real interest in or understanding of Constitutional government.
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | July 17, 2023
This is the perfect opportunity for Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, to exit the stage. But he will not.
Abbas’ brief visit to the devastated Jenin refugee camp in the northern Occupied West Bank on 12 July demonstrated the absurdity and danger of the PA and its 87-year-old leader.
As he walked, Abbas struggled to keep his balance, in what was promoted as a ‘solidarity’ visit to the camp.
Thousands of frustrated Jenin residents took to the streets, hardly chanting Abbas’ name. Some looked on with disappointment; others asked where the President’s forces were when Israel invaded the camp, killing 12, wounding and arresting hundreds more.
The BBC reported on a “huge armed deployment” to secure Abbas’ visit, where “PA security forces joined a thousand-strong unit of Mr. Abbas’ elite presidential guard”. Their only job was to “clear a path” for Abbas into the camp.
On the initial and most deadly first day of the Israeli invasion of Jenin, Israeli media, citing military sources, said that 1,000 Israeli soldiers were taking part in the military operation.
Yet, it took more Palestinian soldiers to secure Abbas’ brief visit to Jenin.
Indeed, where were those well-dressed and equipped PA soldiers when Jenin was fighting and dying alone? And why does Abbas need to be protected from his own people?
To address these questions, it is important to examine recent contexts, three significant dates in particular:
On 5 July, Israel ended its military operation in Jenin.
On 9 July, despite protests by some of his security cabinet members, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared that Israel would do its utmost to prevent the collapse of the PA. He stated outright that the PA “works for us”.
And, finally, on 12 July, Abbas visited Jenin with a stern message to Palestinian Resistance groups.
These three dates are directly related: Israel’s failed raid on Jenin has heightened the significance of the PA in Israel’s eyes. Abbas visited Jenin to reassure Israel that his Authority is up for the task.
To live up to Israel’s expectations and to ensure its survival, the PA is willing to clash directly with Palestinians who refuse to toe the line.
“There will be one Authority and one security force,” Abbas declared angrily, only days following the burial of Jenin’s victims. “Anyone who seeks to undermine its unity and security will face the consequences,” he added, further promising that “Any hand that reaches out to harm the people and their stability shall be cut off.”
The hand in reference is not that of Israel, but any Palestinian who resists Israel.
Abbas knows that Palestinians outright despise him and his Authority. Just days earlier, Fatah party deputy Chairman, Mahmoud Aloul, was removed from Jenin by angry crowds.
The crowds chanted in unison, “get out”, to Aloul and two other PA officials.
They did, but Abbas returned to the same scene. He was flown in a Jordanian military helicopter. Waiting for him, below, was a small PA army that had taken over the streets and the high buildings – or whatever remained of them – in the destroyed camp.
All of this happened through logistical arrangements with the Israeli military.
But why is Netanyahu keen on the PA’s survival?
Netanyahu wants the PA to survive simply because he does not want the Israeli occupation administration and military to be fully responsible for the welfare of Palestinians in the West Bank and the security of the illegal settlers.
Despite its near complete failure, the Oslo Accords succeeded in one thing: it provided Israel with a Palestinian force whose main mission is to assist the Israeli occupation in its quest to maintain total control over the West Bank.
Abbas’ trip to Jenin was intended to reassure Tel Aviv that the PA is still committed to its obligations to Israel.
Another message was sent to US President Joe Biden, who has, in a recent interview, cast doubts on the PA’s ‘credibility’. “The PA is losing its credibility,” Biden told CNN, and that has “created a vacuum for extremism.”
The message to Washington was that the hands of the so-called ‘extremists’ will be “cut off”, and that there will be “consequences” for those who defy the PA’s will.
Abbas seemed to speak, not only on behalf of his Authority but that of Tel Aviv and Washington as well.
Even ordinary Palestinians understand this to be the case; in fact, they always have. The only difference now is that they feel strong and emboldened by a new generation of Resistance which has succeeded in reclaiming a degree of Palestinian unity, amid factional politics and PA corruption.
The PA is now seen by most Palestinians as the obstacle in the face of full unity. That position is fully fathomable. While Israel was ramping up its deadly operations in Jenin and Nablus, the PA police was arresting Palestinian activists, angering Resistance groups in the West Bank and Gaza.
If this continues, a civil war in the West Bank is a real possibility, especially as Abbas’ potential successors are equally distrusted, even by Fatah’s own rank and file. These men were also in Jenin, standing shoulder to shoulder behind Abbas as he was frantically trying to lay out the new rules.
This time around, Palestinians are unlikely to listen. For the Resistance, the stakes are too high to back down now. For the PA, losing the West Bank means losing billions of dollars of Western financial handouts.
A clash between the Resistance and their popular support, on the one hand, and the West-Israel-backed PA forces, on the other, will prove very costly for Palestinians.
Yet, for Tel Aviv, it is a win-win. This is why Netanyahu is anxious to help Abbas keep his job, at least long enough to ensure that the post-Abbas transition goes through efficiently.
Palestinians must find a way to block such designs, preserve Palestinian blood and restructure their leadership, so that it represents them, not the interests of the Israeli occupation.
By Dmitry Orlov | July 15, 2023
I’ve been waiting for the hubbub to die down since the NATO conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 11-12 July 2023, waiting for someone — anyone — to point out the obvious reason for why the Ukraine’s cocaine-sniffing mascot-president Zelensky, having been lionized only a year ago, has suddenly fallen into disfavor with this organization. Yes, the Ukraine might still some day be invited to start the long and arduous process of joining NATO, but only after some undefined number of NATO members decide that it has done enough to comply with “NATO standards” (I’ll explain what those are later) and various other vague things. Keeping in mind that back on 20 September 2018 the Ukrainian parliament approved amendments to the constitution that would make the accession of the country to NATO and the EU a central goal and the main foreign policy objective, such a turn of events is most embarrassing for the mascot president and his backers and handlers.
Oh, the vicissitudes of fortune! Lots of analysis and commentators offered ready explanations for this turn of events. Yet not a single one of them saw it fit to dig just the tiniest bit and discover the glaringly obvious reason for this momentous shift. Perhaps all of them, for a variety of reasons, loathe to admit the reality of what NATO is, what it does, and why the Ukraine is suddenly a threat rather than a boon to its core mission. You may want to read all of that commentary at your leisure — if you have trouble falling asleep. The official NATO Summit Communiqué, fantastically verbose and filled with irrelevancies, makes for particularly somniferous reading.
So, what did the Ukraine do to fall into such disfavor? Perhaps it did something that jeopardized NATO’s core mission? That seems like a good guess. But then what is NATO’s core mission?
In the movie “Silence of the Lambs,” Hannibal Lecter refers to a quote by Marcus Aurelius when he says to Clarice Starling, “First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?” The quote is from Book Three of “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius, and it emphasizes the importance of understanding the essence of things.
NATO was formed on 4 April 1949 with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, more popularly known as the Washington Treaty, supposedly for the purpose of thwarting the Soviet Union in Europe. The USSR responded by forming the Warsaw Treaty Organization (also known as the Warsaw Pact) — a political and military alliance established on May 14, 1955 between the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries for the express purpose of defending them from NATO. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved on 1 July 1991 and, shortly thereafter, on 26 December 1991, the USSR itself followed suit, but NATO continues to exist. By this point, the Warsaw Pact had existed for slightly less than NATO has existed, and the USSR had existed for only slightly more than that. Clearly, the communist threat as a rationale for NATO’s existence was but a ruse, a smokescreen… a red herring.
So, what was NATO’s real purpose? There are many ways to answer this question, but the Ukraine’s sudden fall from grace offers what is perhaps the most graphic explanation.
• Was it that the war there was dragging on? No, a slow burn would be exactly what the Pentagon ordered, so that it would have a chance to keep up with Russia’s hectic pace of weapons and ammunition deliveries.
• Was it that the Ukraine was losing the war? No, the Ukraine wasn’t losing; it just wasn’t winning. In particular, its attacks on Russia’s defensive lines, which the Russian troops termed “meat attacks” because of the huge and useless losses they incurred on the Ukrainian side, seemed rather futile.
• Was it that the Ukraine was about to be defeated? Again, no, the Russians were happy to advance a few kilometers here and there, with their main objective the establishment of a buffer zone wide enough so that Ukrainian artillery would stop shelling what are now Russian civilian districts.
• Was it that NATO ran out of weapons and ammo to give to the Ukrainians? Again, no, there is still quite a lot of semi-obsolete junk that could be handed over to the Ukrainians.
So, what did the Ukrainians do to raise the ire of the Pentagon so suddenly, and as a direct consequence, fall into disfavor with NATO? In short, the Ukrainians demonstrated that NATO’s weapons are crap. Evidence of this built up slowly over time. First, it turned out that various bits of US-made shoulder-fired junk — anti-aircraft Stingers, anti-tank Javelins, etc — are rather worse than useless in modern combat. Next, it turned out that the M777 howitzer and the HIMARS rocket complex are rather fragile and aren’t field-maintainable.
The next wonder-weapon thrown at the Ukrainian problem was the Patriot missile battery. It was deployed near Kiev and the Russians quickly made a joke of it. They attacked it with their super-cheap Geranium 5 “flying moped” drones, causing it to turn on its active radar, thereby unmasking its position, and then fire off its entire load of rockets — a million dollars’ worth! — after which point it just sat there, unmasked and defenseless, and was taken out by a single Russian precision rocket strike.
This was sure to have seriously pissed off US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, whose major personal cash cow happens to be Raytheon, the maker of the Patriot. Yes, the Patriot proved useless using the First Gulf War, where it failed to protect Israel against ancient Iraqi Scud missiles; and it proved useless later on when it failed to protect Saudi oil installation against ancient Yemeni Scud missiles… but you aren’t supposed to advertise that fact. And now this!
And to top it all off, the German-donated Leopard 2 tanks and the US-donated Bradley infantry vehicles, not to mention the silly French wheeled non-tanks, performed absolutely miserably during the recent Ukrainian efforts to approach, never mind penetrate, Russia’s first line of defense. Rubbing salt into the wounds, Putin remarked off-the-cuff that Western armor burns rather more easily than the old Soviet-made stuff.
The latest desperate move would be to give the Ukrainian air force (which, by the way, no longer exists) some older F-16 fighter jets. These can be anywhere up to 50 years old and are peculiar in having an air intake that’s very close to the ground, making them very effective as runway vacuum cleaners during takeoff. They cannot operate from the dirty and pitted runways that are typical in the Ukraine because the debris would get sucked into the engine and destroy it. If the Ukrainians attempt to pave new runways for them, the Russians would instantly spot this from the geosynchronous satellite that is permanently pointed at Ukrainian territory. Rather than put some fresh bomb craters on these new runways, they could do something more subtle: use one of their super-cheap Geranium 2’s to spread metal shaving for the F-16’s engines to vacuum up… and burn up in flight. And since these are single-engine planes, there is no possibility of limping home on the remaining engine: the pilot would have to catapult and the plane would crash. But there is an even more important reason why the idea of giving F-16’s for the Ukraine is unworkable: these planes are able to carry nuclear bombs and Russia has already announced that it would see this step as a nuclear escalation. But provoking a nuclear conflict with Russia is verboten, so F-16’s are a no-go.
Why is the failure of relentlessly propagandized Western weaponry more important than just about anything else, including the increasingly dire state of Western finances, the ridiculous failure of anti-Russian sanctions, the obscenely huge numbers of Ukrainian casualties or the general Western fatigue with all things Ukrainian and especially with the flood of Ukrainian refugees that the West can no longer cope with?
The reason is simple: NATO is not a defensive organization (remember, USSR has been gone for over 30 years); nor is it an offensive organization (well, it did bomb Serbia and a few other relatively defenseless countries, but it can’t possibly think about facing off against Russia or any other well-armed nation).
Rather, NATO is a captive buyers’ club for US-made weapons. That is what vaunted NATO standards, with which the Ukraine must comply before it is deemed worthy to be invited to join NATO, are all about: to comply with these standards, your weapons have to be mostly US-made. That is also the reason for all of the various wars of choice, from Serbia to Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya and Syria: these were demonstration projects for US weapons, with the additional goal of using up the weapons and the munitions so that the Pentagon and the rest of NATO would have to reorder them. The geopolitical rationales for these military conflicts are mere rationalizations. For instance, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos during 580,000 bombing sorties—equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. What was the geopolitical rationale? Nobody can even remember if there ever was one. But those bombs were about to expire and needed to be used up and reordered to keep the money flowing.
In response to such strange inducements, US-made weapons tend to be overly complex (so that their makers can charge more for the useless extra features) and rather fragile (never tested against a peer adversary like Russia or China, or even against Iran), developed slowly (to clean up on R&D funding), built slowly (because what’s the rush?) and very high-maintenance (so that US defense contractors can get even richer delivering spare parts and service). These weapons were supposed to be tested ever so gently by giving hell to backward tribesmen armed with old Kalashnikovs and RPGs.
Ukraine is a different story altogether. There, the Ukrainians, with their mismatched hand-me-down Western armor, are being asked to penetrate three lines of hardened Russian defenses. After about a month of effort and staggering losses of men and equipment, they haven’t yet been able to reach the first defensive line. The sight of Western armor ablaze does not make good advertising. Consequently, the US defense contractors must be very eager to stop this steady stream of negative advertising for their products to stop right this second — before their reputations end up completely ruined; hence the unseemly haste with which the entire Ukrainian project is being orphaned.
The alternative to active warfare, now that that’s failed, is what in the West is usually called “negotiation” but in reality would involve acceding to Russian demands made in November of 2021 (which include NATO rolling back its weapons to where they were in 1997), plus more recent requirements, such as denazification, demilitarization and neutrality for what remains of the Ukraine, recognition of Russia’s new borders (which include Crimea, Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk and Lugansk regions) and prosecution for all of the Ukrainian war criminals, including all the ones that have been torturing prisoners of war and shelling civilians since 2014. Oh, and the lifting of all the insipid sanctions would be required as well.
But this is rather a lot to take in at a single sitting, and so NATO has decided to take lots of bite-sized pieces. The official NATO document linked above is maximally verbose and full of fluff, but a close reading of its turgid bureaucratese will reveal quite a number of concessions, or at least hints at concessions:
• “We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.” To use a vernacular Russian saying, this will happen “when a crawfish up on a mountain whistles” — i.e., never. That is, the Ukraine will never become part of NATO.
• “The circumstances in which NATO might have to use nuclear weapons are extremely remote.” Translation: We’re standing down! Please don’t kill us! Apparently, NATO heads have been briefed on the capabilities of Russia’s new strategic weapons, both offensive and defensive, and don’t want to even consider any sort of direct military confrontation with Russia.
• “We urge all countries not to provide any kind of assistance to Russia’s aggression…” Translation: we wish they would stop, although we’ve asked enough times already and they haven’t listened and so we aren’t holding out much hope that they will listen now.
• “The deepening strategic partnership between the PRC and Russia and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.” But the deepening strategic partnership is entirely congruent with both Russia’s and China’s values and interests and they aren’t about to ask anyone for permission. Yammering on about the “rules-based international order,” even though it no longer exists, is a bit pathetic, but what else is there left for them to do? Boo-hoo!
• “Russia’s deepening military integration with Belarus, including the deployment of advanced Russian military capabilities and military personnel in Belarus, has implications for regional stability and the defence of the Alliance.” Well, that’s exactly what that military integration was designed to accomplish and it’s good that they’ve noticed. The implication is that NATO will never mess with Belarus again.
• “We remain willing to keep open channels of communication with Moscow to manage and mitigate risks, prevent escalation, and increase transparency.” That’s welcome news indeed! Phone the Kremlin any time you want to hear a recitation of Russia’s security demands, to refresh your memory.
• “The People’s Republic of China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values.” And NATO’s interests and values challenge the PRC and its security, so we’re at an impasse. In other news, Russia just passed a law banning all sex change operations; how does that comply with “Western values”? Come on, shake your tiny fists in impotent rage!
• “NATO does not seek confrontation and poses no threat to Russia. In light of its hostile policies and actions, we cannot consider Russia to be our partner.” And in light of NATO’s hostile policies and actions, Russia considers NATO countries to be hostile nations (and certainly not partners). How does giving weapons to Ukrainian Nazis not pose a threat to Russia?
• “We reiterate our clear determination that Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon. We remain deeply concerned about Iran’s escalation of its nuclear programme.” So, Iran is the only country that toothless old NATO can still find the courage to bark at. That seems safe, since by now Iran can’t even hear them.
And that’s where it stands. Europe looks in horror at the US, which is still its weapons purveyor and security guarantor, but is headed by a barely functioning senile old man whose furious outbursts are causing his cabinet members to shy away from the Oval Office, and whose only possible replacement — the imbecilic, cackling Kamala — would hardly be any better. It may be slowly dawning on some of the more lucid European leaders that a way of backing out of the Russophobic cul-de-sac, of their own creation, in which they now find themselves, must somehow be found, but they see no way of achieving that without a massive loss of face. Let’s give it another year and see whether by then they still have a face to save.
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Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
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