Utah doctor claims federal indictment contains fundamental falsehood
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | March 7, 2023
A week ago I reported the story of Dr. Kirk Moore—a plastic surgeon who was recently indicted by a federal grand jury in Utah for conspiracy to defraud the US; conspiracy to convert, sell, convey, and dispose of government property; and conversion, sale, conveyance, and disposal of government property and aiding and abetting.
The government’s indictment and mainstream media are highlighting the assertion that Dr. Moore and his colleagues received $50 per procedure in which they disposed of a COVID-19 vaccine dose instead of injecting it into the patient, and then issued a fake vaccine card to the patient. This is deemed to prove that Dr. Moore—a plastic surgeon by trade—”benefitted” from his actions.
I initially assumed the federal investigators and prosecutors involved in the case must have found evidence to support their assertion in the indictment that Dr. Moore had “benefitted” from these transactions—that is, that HE received all or part of the $50 per procedure.
However, shortly after I posted my essay, I was contacted by people familiar with the matter who claimed that the indictment’s assertion is false. To check their assurance, I contacted Dr. Moore and conducted a long interview with him.
Dr. Moore insists that never received a single dollar for administering early treatments to COVID-19 patients or for issuing COVID-19 vaccine cards to patients who feared the mRNA gene transfer injections are not safe. A plastic surgeon by trade, he insists he administered early treatment and issued the cards solely as a charitable endeavor—that is, to help the sick stay out of hospital and to help his fellow citizens who were mandated to receive the injections in order to retain their student and job positions.
In other words, according to Dr. Moore, the federal indictment’s assertion that HE benefitted from the $50 per procedure is FALSE. Because most patients expressed their desire to pay him at least some fee for his invaluable service, he adopted the practice of instructing each to make a $50 donation to a medical freedom charity from which he received no funds. He assumed that keeping this practice strictly charitable would protect him from the charge that he received financial benefits for his actions. He claims the evidence presented in his forthcoming trial will prove that he received no benefit.
An especially intriguing detail he related in my interview is the strange fact that—though he knew he was under investigation because HHS and DHS agents visited him at his office and served him a search warrant to seize his cell phone—he was NOT subsequently served with notice that a federal prosecutor had impanelled a grand jury and secured an indictment.
He only learned about this alarming action in a press report, from which he also learned the date and time of his arraignment.
We encourage our Substack readers to learn more about Dr. Moore’s case by visiting his website: https://www.standformoore.com
CDC Falsely Claims To Major Media Outlet That the 7.7% Medical Care Figure Was Wrong!
By Aaron Siri | Injecting Freedom | March 6, 2023
After ICAN obtained the v-safe data and published to the world that 7.7% of v-safe users sought medical care (and that the CDC hid this number from the public for two years), Reuters reached out to my firm stating it had received comment from the CDC regarding this figure.
Incredibly, CDC told Reuters that the 7.7% figure was grossly inflated because it claimed there were 10 million records in v-safe, not 10 million users. Here is the exact email I received from Reuters:
“CDC says v-safe has 10 million records, not 10 million users, and that one person could submit multiple records of seeking medical care for the same adverse event. Which makes the 7.7% statistic problematic… Is that something ICAN was aware of or able to adjust for?”
Based on the CDC’s claim, the major news outlet asked if ICAN would be modifying its claim of 7.7%. But it was the CDC’s claim that was categorically false!
ICAN was correct: there were 10 million v-safe users, not 10 million records; and the 7.7% also did not double-count because it was the number of unique v-users who submitted one or more reports of seeking medical care.
The CDC was plainly pushing the major news to declare ICAN’s claim false and, hence, characterize it as misinformation.
Had Reuters just accepted the CDC’s claim, as typically occurs, it likely would have published a story declaring ICAN’s 7.7% figure to be false information.
Luckily, to its credit and because one of its reporters proceeded objectively and with integrity, this news outlet did not just take the CDC’s word for its claim. It actually gave us an opportunity to respond to this claim. (Albeit not by asking if ICAN believed it was wrong but by asking if it would adjust the figure it published.)
CDC Proven Wrong
Showing that the CDC was wrong was simple. All we had to do was use the CDC’s own data it provided to ICAN!
The data the CDC provided to ICAN clearly and without any doubt showed that ICAN was using the precise and correct number of v-safe users and the number of unique v-safe users who reported needing medical care. Meaning, the 7.7% was absolutely accurate – without any doubt.
We sent this proof and asked Reuters to please ask that CDC substantiate with actual proof, not just conclusory assertions, how ICAN was supposedly wrong and spreading misinformation. And again, to Reuter’s credit, because it demanded proof from the CDC, the CDC eventually relented!
The CDC finally conceded that v-safe did in fact have approximately 10 million users and, hence, the 7.7% figure of those who reported seeking medical care was accurate.
With that, I expected that interaction would be one heck of a story in and of itself! I foresaw a Reuters story that disclosed this CDC behavior – here was the CDC trying to get a major news outlet to publish false information! It was trying to get it to write that the 7.7% figure was incorrect.
That should have been its own major story. And although Reuters did publish a story about v-safe, thus far, these behind-the-scenes communications have not been published. I expect they never will, other than in this article.
CDC Asks Reuters to Ask ICAN for a Copy of CDC’s V-Safe Data
It gets even worse. Making plain that the CDC officials communicating with Reuters were not concerned about the facts, and instead were focused solely on pushing their “safe and effective” mantra which is typically not questioned, they further revealed the agency’s disfunction: the CDC officials asked Reuters if it could get a copy of the v-safe data from ICAN and send it back to the CDC representatives Reuters were dealing with so they can review that data. If that sounds nutty, it is because it is.
Just so you don’t think you misread the foregoing, let me repeat: CDC asked Reuters to get the v-safe data that CDC had given to ICAN days before, and then send that data back to the CDC to review.
You can’t make this stuff up. Mind you, the data had already all been made public on ICAN’s website.
What this shows is that these CDC officials were driving forward to push a major news outlet to claim to the world that ICAN’s claim of 7.7% was false without actually looking at the data to assure their claim was accurate. It also shows an incredible level of disfunction at the CDC; instead of getting the data internally, they had to ask a news outlet to get its own data produced to ICAN to then send it back to CDC.
And these are the folk that have effectively dictated what level of civil and individual rights most Americans would have over the last three years!
CDC Seeks to Deceive Again
When the foregoing gambit by the CDC did not work, it had a new gambit. It tried to get Reuters to publish that the 7.7% figure was misleading by claiming to Reuters that “[i]n the first week after vaccination, reports of seeking any medical care … range from 1-3% (depending on vaccine, age group and dose).”
But as we explained to Reuters, even this is not true. For example, 3.36% of those younger than 3 years old reported receiving medical care within one week of receiving the Moderna vaccine.
Even if all combinations of vaccine, age group, and dose resulted in between 1% to 3% of infants, children, or adults seeking medical care within one week, that is not necessarily an insignificant figure! Why is this somehow comforting? Especially in the context of vaccinating the entire country.
And why should the reports of medical care on days 14 or 21 or 28 be ignored? Is it because the CDC thought it was not relevant information? And, if so, why in the world ask v-safe users to submit this information on these days? Or is it because the CDC did not like what the numbers showed? I will let you be the judge.
As noted above, and a sad irony, when medical care is sought during the first seven days, the CDC presumably attributes that to expected reactogenicity and tells the public to not be concerned. And if it occurs beyond seven days, it pretends as if that data does not exist – even though harms from COVID-19 vaccines, as the CDC well knows, can occur well after the first seven days, as discussed in depth in part 7 of this v-safe substack series.
Also, here, we are talking about a novel medical product, hence heightening the need for assessing its long-term safety – certainly beyond 7 days post-vaccination.
This shows how the sausage is made in mainstream media. But for the actual tenacity – I would even say courageous – pushback from a Reuters reporter, the story around ICAN’s v-safe claims could have ended very differently.
The real story I can only imagine this reporter would have liked to publish, the one I told above, however, would no doubt be a step too far for Reuters as an organization – at least for now, until brave journalists become the typical journalist.
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 6, 2023
Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA analyst, writes “I no longer hold clearances and have not had access to the classified intelligence assessments. However, I have heard that the finished intelligence being supplied to U.S. policymakers continues to declare that Russia is on the ropes – and their economy is crumbling. Also, analysts insist that the Ukrainians are beating the Russians”.
Johnson responds that – lacking valid human sources – “western agencies are almost wholly dependent today on ‘liaison reporting’” (i.e., from ‘friendly’ foreign intelligence services), without doing ‘due diligence’ by cross-checking discrepancies with other reporting.
In practice, this largely means western reporting simply replicates Kiev’s PR line. But there does occur a huge problem when marrying Kiev’s output (as Johnson says) to UK reports – for ‘corroboration’.
The reality is UK reporting itself is also based on what Ukraine is saying. This is known as false collateral – i.e., when that which is used for corroboration and validation actually derives from the same single source. It becomes – deliberately – a propaganda multiplier.
In plain words however, all these points are ‘red herrings’. Bluntly, so-called western ‘Intelligence’ is no longer the sincere attempt to understand a complex reality, but rather, it has become the tool to falsify a nuanced reality in order to attempt to manipulate the Russian psyche towards a collective defeatism (in respect not just to the Ukraine, but to the idea that Russia should remain as a sovereign whole).
And – to the extent that ‘lies’ are fabricated to accustom the Russian public to inevitable defeat – the obverse edge clearly is intended to train the western public towards the ‘groupthink’ that victory is inevitable. And that Russia is an ‘unreformed evil Empire’ which threatens all Europe.
This is no accident. It is highly purposeful. It is behavioural psychology at work. The ‘head-spinning’ disorientation created throughout the Covid pandemic; the constant rain of ‘data-driven’ model analysis, the labelling of anything critical of the ‘uniform messaging’ as anti-social disinformation – enabled western governments to persuade their citizens that ‘lockdown’ was the only rational answer to the virus. It was not true (as we now know), but the ‘pilot’ behavioural nudge-psychology trial worked better – better even than its own architects had imagined.
Professor of Clinical Psychology, Mattias Desmet, has explained that mass disorientation does not form in a vacuum. It arises, throughout history, from a collective psychosis that has followed a predictable script:
Just as with lockdown, governments have used behavioural psychology to instil fear and isolation to mass large groups of people into herds, where toxic sneering at any contrariness cold-shoulders all critical thinking or analysis. It is more comfortable being inside the herd, than out.
The dominant characteristic here is remaining loyal to the group – even when the policy is working badly and its consequences disturb the conscience of members. Loyalty to the group becomes the highest form of morality. That loyalty requires each member to avoid raising controversial issues, questioning weak arguments, or calling a halt to wishful thinking.
The ‘Groupthink’ allows some self-imagined reality to detach; to drift further and further from any connection to reality, and then to transit into delusion – always drawing on like-minded peer cheerleaders for its validation and extended radicalisation.
So, it’s ‘goodbye’ to traditional Intelligence! And ‘welcome’ to western Intelligence 101: Geo-Politics no longer revolves around a grasp on Reality. It is about the installation of ideological pseudo-realism – which is the universal installation of a singular groupthink, such that everyone lives passively by it, until it is far too late to change course.
Superficially, this may seem clever new psyops – even ‘cool’. It is not. It is dangerous. By deliberately working on deeply ingrained fears and trauma (i.e. the Great Patriotic War for Russians (WW2)), it awakens a type of multi-generational existential plight within the collective unconscious – that of total annihilation – which is a danger that America has never faced, and towards which there is zero American empathetic understanding.
Perhaps, by resurrecting long, collective memories of plague in European countries (such as Italy) western governments have found that they were able to mobilise their citizens around a policy of coercion, that otherwise ran wholly against their own interests. But nations have their own distinct myths and civilisational mores.
If that were the purpose (to acclimatise Russians to defeat and ultimate Balkanisation), Western propaganda has not only failed, but it has achieved the converse. Russians have coalesced closely together against an existential western threat – and are prepared to ‘go to the wall’, if necessary, in defeating it. (Let those implications sink in.)
On the other hand, falsely promoting a picture of inevitable success for the West inevitably has raised expectations of a political outcome that is not only not feasible, but which recedes further into the far horizon, as these fantastical claims of Russian setbacks persuade European leaders that Russia can accept an outcome in line with their constructed false reality.
Another ‘own goal’: The West now faces the task of de-fusing the landmine of their own electorate’s conviction of a Ukraine ‘win’, and of Russian humiliation and decomposition. There will be anger and further distrust for the Élites in the West to follow. Existential risk ensues when people believe nothing the élites say.
Plainly put, this resort to clever ‘nudge theories’ has succeeded only in toxifying the prospect for political discourse. Neither the U.S. nor Russia can now move directly to pure political discourse :
Firstly, the parties inevitably must come to some tacit psychological assimilation of two quite dis-connected realities, now hyped into palpable, vital beings through these psychological ‘Intelligence’ techniques. There will be no acceptance by either side of the validity or moral rightness of the Other Reality’s, yet its emotive contents must be acknowledged psychically – together with the traumas underlying them – if politics is to be unlocked.
In short, this western exaggerated psyops perversely is likely to lengthen the war until facts-on-the ground finally grind the contrasting expectations closer to what may be the ‘new possible’. Ultimately, when perceived realities cannot be ‘matched’ and nuanced, war rubs one or the other into more emollient form.
The degeneracy in western intelligence did not start with the recent collective ‘excitement’ at the possibilities of ‘nudge-psychology’. The first steps in this direction began with a shift in ethos reaching back to the Clinton/Thatcher era in which the intelligence services were ‘neo-liberalised’.
No longer was the role of ‘devil’s advocate’ – of bringing ‘bad news’ (i.e. hard-edged Realism) to the relevant political leadership valued; instead what was inserted was a radical shift towards ‘Business School’ practice of services being tasked with ‘adding value’ to existing government policies, and (even) of creating ‘a market’ system in Intelligence!
The politician-managers demanded ‘good news’. And to make ‘it stick’, funding was tied to the ‘value added’ – with administrators skilled at managing bureaucracy moved into leadership jobs. It marked the end to classical Intelligence – which always was an art, rather than science.
In short, it was the outset to fixing the intelligence around policies (to add value), rather than the traditional function of shaping policies to sound analysis.
In the U.S., the politicisation of intelligence reached its apex with Dick Cheney’s initiation of a Team ‘B’ intelligence unit reporting personally to him. It was intended to furnish the anti-intelligence to combat the intelligence service output. Of course, the Team ‘B’ initiative shook confidence amongst the analysts, and by-passed the work of the traditional cadre – just as Cheney had intended. (He had a war (the Iraq war) to justify).
But there were separately other structural shifts. Firstly, by 2000, woke narcissism had begun to eclipse strategic thought –creating its own novel groupthink. The West just could not shake off the sense of itself at the centre of the Universe (albeit no longer in a racial sense, but via its awakening to ‘victim politics’ – requiring endless redress and reparations – and such woke values serendipitously seemed to anoint the West with a renewed global ‘moral primacy’).
In a parallel shift, U.S. neo-cons piggy-backed on this new woke universalism to cement the meme of ‘Empire matters primordially’. The unspoken corollary to this, of course, is that original values of the American Republic or of Europe, cannot be re-conceived and brought forward into the present, as long as ‘liberal’ Empire groupthink configures them as a threat to western security. This conundrum and struggle lies at the heart of U.S. politics today.
Yet the question remains just how can the intelligence being supplied to U.S. policymakers insist that Russia is imploding economically, and that Ukraine is winning – against what can be easily observed facts on the ground?
Well, no problem; Washington think-tanks have big, big finance from the Military Industrial World, with the preponderance of these funds going to the neo-cons – and their insistence that Russia is a small ‘gas-station’ posing as a state, and not a power to be taken seriously.
Neo-con claws tear at anyone gain-saying their ‘line’ – and think-tanks employ an army of ‘analysts’ to turn out ‘academic’ reports suggesting that Russia’s industry – to the extent it exists at all – is imploding. Since last March, western military and economic experts have been regularly-as-clockwork, predicting that Russia has run out of missiles, drones, tanks and artillery shells – and is expending its manpower throwing human-waves of untrained troops upon the Ukrainian siege lines.
The logic is plain, but again flawed. If a combined NATO struggles to supply artillery shells, Russia with the economy the size of a small EU state (logically) must be worse off. And if only we (the U.S.) threaten China hard enough against supplying Russia, then the latter will ultimately run out of munitions – and NATO supported Ukraine ‘will win’.
The logic then is that a war prolonged (until the money runs out) must deliver a Russia bereft of munitions, and NATO-supplied Ukraine ‘wins’.
This framing is entirely wrong because of conceptual differences: Russian history is one of Total War that is fought in a long, ‘all-out’, uncompromising engagement against an overwhelming peer force. But inherent to this idea, is its all-important grounding in the conviction that such wars are fought over the course of years, with their outcomes conditioned by the capacity to surge military production.
Conceptually, the U.S. shifted in the 1980s away from its post-war military-industrial paradigm, to off-shore manufacturing to Asia and to ‘just-in-time’ supply lines. Effectively, the U.S. (and the West) shifted in the opposite direction to ‘surge capacity’, whereas Russia did not: It kept alive the notion of sustainment which had contributed to saving Russia during the Great Patriotic War.
So, western intelligence services again got it wrong; they misread the reality? No, they didn’t get it ‘wrong’. Their purpose was different.
The few who got it right were mercilessly caricatured as stooges to make them seem absurd. And Intelligence 101 was re-conceived as the purposeful denialism of all off-Team thinking, whilst the majority of western citizens would live passively in the embrace the groupthink – until too late for them to awaken, and to change the dangerous course on which their societies were embarked.
Unverified Ukrainian reports (liaison reporting) served up to western leaders therefore is not a ‘glitch’ – it is a ‘feature’ of the new Intelligence 101 paradigm intended to confuse and dull its electorate.
Regime change in store for cultural conservatives?
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MARCH 7, 2023
It is generally observed that imperial powers like the United States frequently interfere in foreign governments in support of economic or hard political reasons. To be sure, Washington has refined the process so it can plausibly deny that it is interfering at all, that the change is spontaneous and comes from the people and institutions in the country that is being targeted for change. One recalls how handing out cookies in Maidan Square in Kiev served as an incentive wrapped around a publicity stunt to bring about regime change in Ukraine in 2014 when Senator John McCain and the State Department’s Victoria Nuland were featured performers in a $5 billion investment by the US government to topple the friendly-to-Russia regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. Of course, change for the sake of a short-term objective might not always be the best way to go and one might suggest that the success in bringing in a new government acceptable to Nuland has not really turned out that well for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, nor for those Americans who understand that the Biden Administration’s pledge to arm Ukraine and stay in the fight against Russia “as long as it takes” just might not be very good for the United States either.
And the United States continues to be at it, meddling in what was once regarded as something like a war crime, though it now prefers to conceal what it is up to by preaching “democracy” and wrapping the message in “woke-ish progressivism” at every opportunity. An interesting recent trip by a senior government official that was not reported in the mainstream media suggests that the game is still afoot in Eastern Europe. The early February visitor was Samantha Power, currently head of USAID, and a familiar figure from the Barack Obama Administration, where she served as Ambassador to the United Nations and was a dedicated liberal interventionist involved in the Libya debacle as well as various other wars started by that estimable Nobel Peace Prize recipient after he had received his award. The Obama attack on Syria has been sustained until this day, with several American military bases continuing to function on Syrian territory, stealing the country’s oil and agricultural produce.
USAID was founded in 1961 and it was intended to serve as a vehicle for nurturing democratic government and associated civic institutions among nations that had little or no experience in popular government. That role has become less relevant as nation states have evolved and the organization itself has responded by becoming more assertive in its role, pushing policies that have coincided with US foreign policy objectives. This has led some host nations to close down USAID offices. Within the US government itself, participants in foreign policy formulation often observe that USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) now are largely in the business of doing what the CIA used to do, i.e. interfering in local politics by supporting opposition parties and other dissident or even terrorist groups. Both organizations were very active in Ukraine in 2014 and served as conduits for money transfers to the opposition parties and those who were hostile to Russia’s influence for “democracy building.”
Samantha Power, who is married to another Democratic Party affiliated power broker, lawyer Cass Sunstein, traveled to Hungary on her diplomatic passport but took pains to cover her travel as a routine bureaucratic visit to an overseas post. Hungary is undeniably a democracy, is a member of the European Union, and also of NATO, but Power reportedly did not clear the travel with the Hungarian government and apparently did not meet with any government officials, even as a courtesy. She tweeted that her visit was to reestablish USAID in the Hungarian capital, “Great to be here in Budapest with @USAmbHungary where @USAID just relaunched new, locally-driven initiatives to help independent media thrive and reach new audiences, take on corruption and increase civic engagement.”
By “independent media” Power clearly meant that the US will be directly supporting opposition press that is anti-government and which embraces the globalist-progressive view currently favored by the White House. A US Embassy press release on the visit revealed that Power was in town as part of a project to relaunch seven USAID programs throughout Eastern Europe. It did not elaborate on the “corruption” that Power intended to address, which, of course, would have been a direct insult to the local governments wherever she intended to visit, nor did the document reveal that many of the groups that will be supported are likely to be affiliated with “globalist” George Soros.
In Budapest, Samantha Power did indeed meet with opposition political figures and civil organizations and groups, with particular emphasis on the homosexual community including “Joined @divaDgiV, @andraslederer, and @viki radvanyi for lunch in Budapest where we spoke about their work to advocate for LGBTQI+ rights and dignity in Hungary and around the world @budapestpride” as described in one of her tweeted messages after arrival. Power was also accompanied throughout by the highly controversial US Ambassador David Pressman, who is openly homosexual, of course, married to a man, and who has been highly critical of the conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, which was reelected in 2022 by a landslide margin in a vote that was considered free and fair. Orban is disliked by Joe Biden’s Washington because he is conservative and a nationalist, not because he is incompetent or dishonest while Pressman was and is a perfect example of the Biden State Department sending a terrible fit as ambassador to an extremely conservative country just to make points with the gay community in the US. Pressman has persisted in telling Hungarians how to behave not only on foreign policy but also on sexual diversity and cultural issues and, for his efforts, was finally told to “shut up” by Hungary’s Foreign Minister.
To be sure, Hungary’s undeniably democratic government, which is politically and economically tied to Washington, does not support the United States-led strategy to prolong and even escalate the Russia-Ukraine war and will not contribute to arming Ukraine. It does not accept “globalist” open immigration that seeks to challenge the established national culture, and also opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds. It does not allow LGBTQ material to be presented to minors in state schools, which it considers to be morally correct anti-pedophilia legislation. For that reason, the time was clearly right, in the “woke” view of the Biden Administration, for Samantha Power to show up with a little dose of regime change in her portfolio. Hungarian officials had already expressed their concern over what they consider extreme pressure coming from the United States, largely because Hungary is a conservative country that values its culture and political independence. The visit by Power sent a signal to the Hungarian government and people that the pressure will likely increase and that Washington will not hesitate to use its embassies and overseas military bases to actively support groups that promote views that are not generally embraced by the local populations.
The Samantha Power story is of interest, to be sure, because it demonstrates that since the United States is the self-appointed enforcer of the “rules based international order” nothing in the world is off limits. Far too many US politicians and media pundits think that other states are not really sovereign and have to submit to US dictates in everything, and if they dare to step out of line they can be punished. If a conservative Christian country or leader – by which one might include Hungary, Russia or Brazil – believes that homosexuality or even abortion on demand are morally objectionable the US now believes that it has a mandate to use federal government resources to change that perception including by actively engaging with a foreign nation and its government on its own soil. To put it bluntly, the United States must certainly be considered the world leader in compelling all nations to conform to the political and moral values that it insists be adhered to.
So if one wants to learn why US Foreign Policy is so inept in terms of actually serving the interests of the American people, look no farther than was has happened and continues to roil in Ukraine as well as the implications of the Samantha Power visit to Hungary. For Foreign Service Posts, providing support for the agendas of the collection of freak shows that make up the Democratic Party has become manifestly as or even more important than promoting genuine national interests overseas or assisting American businesses and travelers.
What is perhaps most interesting is the way the “woke” foreign policy is being largely concealed from the American public and is being run as some kind of stealth operation. One initiative run by USAID in Macedonia in 2016 under President Obama included a $300,000 grant for “suitable” Macedonian applicants to “fund” a program entitled “LGBTI Inclusion” to counter how “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) persons continue to suffer discrimination and homophobic media content, both online and offline… Considerable efforts are still needed to raise awareness of and respect for diversity within society and to counter intolerance.” How many American taxpayers would be happy to learn that their hard-earned money has been going to support programs run in nonconsenting foreign democracies to make them more “woke?” Of course, no one in the Biden Administration is telling the public about it, nor is the story likely to appear in the mainstream media, so presumably no one will know!
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 RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • MARCH 6, 2023
We recently passed the first anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war and the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy review of the twelve months of the conflict, summarizing what had happened and describing future prospects, an article that attracted more than 2,500 comments.
Although hardly critical of our involvement, the writer noted that America and its allies had already provided Ukraine with an astonishing $120 billion in military equipment and money, a figure far larger than Russia’s entire defense budget, with further massive outlays still to come.
As the title of the piece indicated, the West had effectively now taken over control of the war, and if the effort to defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin failed, American global influence might be undermined and the future of the NATO alliance called into question. Indeed, such notable foreign policy luminaries as John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Douglas Macgregor, and Lawrence Wilkinson have all recently raised the possibility that NATO risks disintegration, especially in the wake of Seymour Hersh’s bombshell disclosure that President Biden had illegally destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, some of Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure.
So in effect, America is at war with Russia on Russia’s own border, and if we lose that war, the era of our global dominance that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union might come to an end. Since the earliest days of the fighting, our electronic and social media have functioned as unrestrained cheerleaders, hailing Ukrainian victories and Russian defeats, but this WSJ article could not avoid providing a much more sobering perspective.
Although this war has been of enormous world importance, I’ve actually written very little about the details of the conflict.
I lack any military expertise and doubted that I could contribute anything useful about the fighting, which was anyway obscured by the fog of war. America’s reigning Neocon establishment totally controls the Western mainstream media and over the last few decades they have made propaganda, dishonest or otherwise, one of their most frequently deployed political weapons. Indeed, no sooner had the war broken out than social media was awash with the heroic exploits of “the Ghost of Kyiv” and “the Martyrs of Snake Island,” outright hoaxes that were widely disseminated and believed at the time.
We live in the era of smartphones, so video clips showing Russian tanks destroyed or Russian troops defeated and retreating were widely promoted by partisans of the Ukrainian side. But such anecdotal evidence seemed totally meaningless to me. In 1940 the French army suffered one of history’s most lop-sided defeats at the hands of the Germans, yet if smartphones had been around at the time, it would have been easy for pro-French activists to provide hundreds of clips showing destroyed German panzers or small German units suffering defeat. Such war-porn seems more like entertainment for political partisans than anything having serious value.
This obvious problem soon led some observers to search out a means of more objectively determining combat losses. Many of them began relying upon the Oryx website, run by a purportedly independent “open source” organization that organized and displayed images of destroyed tanks and other military vehicles, thereby allowing analysts to total up the losses suffered by each side in the conflict. Journalists and others soon used this photographic evidence to conclude that the Russians had suffered enormous, almost catastrophic losses, with the under-gunned but highly-motivated Ukrainian defenders destroying huge numbers of Russian tanks and other military vehicles, a result that also suggested very high Russian casualties.
The alleged loss of Russian hardware documented by Oryx seems absolutely staggering. One of the main website pages itemizes nearly 9,500 Russian armored vehicles lost, of which 6,000 were destroyed and nearly 2,800 captured. Those losses included nearly 1,800 tanks, with well over 500 of these captured by the plucky Ukrainians. Each of these listed items is linked to a photograph, most of them either being uploaded separately or contained within a Tweet. For example, 244 destroyed or captured T-72B tanks are listed, all individually numbered and linked to the photographic evidence. Obviously, not all destroyed Russian vehicles would have been swept up, so the true scale of Russia’s apparent losses must surely have been considerably greater. Ukraine’s hardware losses were also cataloged, but they only totaled about 3,000 armored vehicles.
Throughout most of the last year, our mainstream media outlets have been filled with stories of Ukrainian victories and Russian defeats, and surely the large compendium of factual material provided by the Oryx website has been an important reason for this. The Oryx Wikipedia entry runs only three short paragraphs, but explains that the website has been regularly cited by Reuters, the BBC, the Guardian, the Economist, Newsweek, CNN, and CBS, with Forbes hailing Oryx as “outstanding” and “the most reliable source in the conflict so far.” My impression is that many writers on military affairs are enthralled by such photos of heavy equipment, whether intact or destroyed, and Oryx provides many thousands of such striking images, thus capturing their rapt attention.
If the Russians had indeed suffered more than three times the Ukrainian losses in armored vehicles, with well over 500 of their tanks captured by the latter, a Ukrainian military triumph might have seemed very likely, so the Americans and their allies naturally rewarded their victorious proteges with a tidal wave of financial and military support that easily topped a hundred billion dollars.
The supposed Ukrainian achievement was certainly a remarkable one. According to Wikipedia, the largest land offensive in human history was Germany’s 1941 Operation Barbarossa, which involved fewer than 7,000 armored vehicles. But if we credit Oryx, over the last twelve months Ukraine’s doughty patriots have totally annihilated a far greater Russian mechanized force, while their own losses have been just a fraction of that. Individuals should decide for themselves how plausible such total numbers sound.
I only very recently looked at the Oryx website, and the first issue that came to mind was how anyone could possibly determine whether the images were real, faked, or duplicated. According to Wikipedia, the Ukrainian military possessed thousands of tanks, many of them being the same models used by the invading Russians. So if Ukrainian activists uploaded a photo of a destroyed T-72B to Oryx, how can we really be sure it was a Russian tank rather than one of their own? What if several different photos of the same wrecked vehicle were taken from different angles, and separately uploaded? The fighting in the Donbass began in 2014, and can we be sure that the photographs provided are from the current fighting rather than from battles fought years ago?
None of the military enthusiasts whom I asked had any ready answers to those questions, perhaps because they had never even previously considered such troubling possibilities.
During recent decades, Hollywood special effects wizards have displayed great technical skill in showing Spiderman swinging between skyscrapers and the Incredible Hulk undergoing a transformation. Surely producing simple photographs of destroyed military equipment would be a triviality, with the costs almost invisibly small compared to a movie budget. But consider that those simple photographs uploaded to a Dutch website have been a crucial factor in attracting many tens of billions of dollars of financial support from American and allied governments, giving each single image on the Oryx website a potential value of $10 million or more. Producing fake photographs is certainly much safer and easier than destroying Russian tanks in real life, and doing so on an industrial scale would seem a very cost-effective propaganda strategy, so it’s difficult to believe that neither the Ukrainians nor their Neocon/CIA/MI6 mentors ever decided to employ such methods.
Putting the issue in very crude terms, I doubt whether Russian losses may be accurately estimated by aggregating and analyzing what amounted to Ukrainian propaganda-Tweets.
Furthermore, an examination of Oryx’s origins raised other troubling issues.
From the Iraq War onward, the credibility of the American government has steadily deteriorated, considerably weakening the effectiveness of its international propaganda campaigns, a central pillar of its international influence.
Then in 2014 a British blogger named Eliot Higgins established Bellingcat, supposedly an independent research organization that relied upon the objective analysis of open source materials. However, in practice his efforts seemed to almost invariably produce conclusions closely aligned with American foreign policy interests in Syria, Ukraine, and other international flashpoints. This notably including the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and the alleged gas attack in Syria that Higgins himself had covered the previous year, always pinning the blame upon governments that were the targets of American hostility.
Numerous distinguished international journalists and other experts, notably including Seymour Hersh, Theodore Postol, and Karel van Wolferen often came to totally different conclusions, but their views were usually ignored by the media, while Bellingcat was heavily quoted in the Western outlets as fully confirming the accusations of the American government. As a consequence, there have been widespread suspicions that Bellingcat merely operated as a tool of Western intelligence services, very similar to how the CIA had established other such front-organizations for propaganda purposes during the original Cold War.
According to the Wikipedia page on Oryx, both its founders were Bellingcat alumni, raising serious questions about whether they are really as independent-minded as they claimed to be.
Meanwhile, other American military experts have provided very different assessments of the course of the war.
For decades, Col. Douglas Macgregor has been regarded as a leading conservative military strategist, authoring several well-regarded books and having many dozens of guest appearances on FoxNews. After having a long career in NATO, he had been a finalist for the position of National Security Advisor, served as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, and was nominated as U.S. Ambassador to Germany. He is obviously very well-connected in such establishment military circles, and based upon his Pentagon contacts, he has repeatedly stated that it is actually the Ukrainian forces that have suffered horrendous casualties, including as many as 160,000 combat deaths compared to far lower Russian losses of perhaps 20,000 or so. Other military experts such as Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson have expressed very similar views.
Across all of his numerous interviews, Macgregor comes across as quite persuasive and confident in his assessments of the military situation.
Given the enthusiastic, almost uniform support of powerful Western political, financial, and media interests for the Ukrainian side, I find it difficult to understand why Macgregor, Ritter, Johnson, and others would be taking such contrary positions unless they sincerely believed that they were correct. Indeed, a BBC research effort recently used social media and other open sources to identify 14,709 individual Russian service members killed in the war, a figure that seems quite consistent with Macgregor’s total estimate of 20,000.
So we have diametrically conflicting positions, with Ukrainian officials and the Oryx website claiming Russian losses have been several times greater than Ukrainian ones, while Macgregor and his allies put the ratio at perhaps 8-to-1 in the opposite direction.
I personally lean much more towards Macgregor’s perspective, but I actually doubt that the issue matters much in strategic terms. From the beginning, I’ve never regarded the operational-level details of the fighting in Ukraine as very interesting or important, and haven’t paid much attention to it. This explains why I had never looked at the Oryx website until just a few days ago.
If the Russian army were completely defeated by the Ukrainians and lost control of Crimea and the Donbass, that sort of military disaster for Russia would have major global consequences. But I consider that possibility exceptionally unlikely and doubt that anyone sensible thinks otherwise.
Instead, it seems almost certain that the war will either become roughly stalemated, as many Western analysts seem to believe, or that the Russians will eventually crush the Ukrainians, as predicted by Macgregor and some other Western experts. But unless the latter result draws in NATO forces and leads to a wider war, with possible risk of a nuclear confrontation, I don’t think the strategic consequences are much different in those two contrasting scenarios.
Before the war began, the Russians were widely expected to overwhelm Ukrainian resistance in a matter of weeks, and compared to those early expectations, the war has already been stalemated for a full year.
In hindsight, Russia’s failure to win a quick, decisive victory should not have been too surprising. For example, I’d been entirely unaware that Ukraine actually had an enormous regular army, more than three times the size of Germany’s, and far larger than that of any European NATO country. Much of Ukraine’s military was fully trained to NATO standards, and including reserves and the National Guard, Ukraine deployed more than a half-million ground troops, outnumbering the attacking Russian forces by around 3-to-1, with many of its best units heavily entrenched in strong defensive positions. Under such challenging circumstances, it’s quite understandable that the Russians have required a year of heavy fighting to gain ground against the stubborn Ukrainian defenders, with the latter heavily backed by supplies and assistance from America and the rest of NATO.
But although Russia’s operational progress on the battlefield has been slow and mixed, on the geostrategic level, the Russians have already won a series of major victories. China, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, and most of the other non-Western countries have clearly moved towards Russia, which also easily surmounted the unprecedented sanctions that most had expected would cripple her economy. The reckless American destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and the European energy crisis may eventually cause the collapse of NATO. Putin’s domestic approval rating is in the 80s, probably as high as it has ever been. And I don’t see any of these results changing if the military stalemate continues.
One year ago, just after the war broke out, I’d outlined my broader perspective in a long article:
For more than a hundred years, all of America’s many wars have been fought against totally outmatched adversaries, opponents that possessed merely a fraction of the human, industrial, and natural resources that we and our allies controlled. This massive advantage regularly compensated for many of our serious early mistakes in those conflicts. So the main difficulty our elected leaders faced was merely persuading the often very reluctant American citizenry to support a war, which is why many historians have alleged that such incidents as the sinkings of Maine and the Lusitania, and the attacks in Pearl Harbor and Tonkin Bay were orchestrated or manipulated for exactly that purpose.
This huge advantage in potential power was certainly the case when World War II broke out in Europe, and Schultze-Rhonof and others have emphasized that the British and French empires backed by America commanded potential military resources vastly superior to those of Germany, a mid-size country smaller than Texas. The surprise was that despite such overwhelming odds Germany proved highly successful for several years, before finally going down to defeat…
Consider the attitude taken during the current conflict with Russia, a severe Cold War confrontation that might conceivably turn hot. Despite its great military strength and enormous nuclear arsenal, Russia seems just as out-matched as any past American foe. Including the NATO countries and Japan, the American alliance commands a 6-to-1 advantage in population and 12-to-1 superiority in economic product, the key sinews of international power. Such an enormous disparity is implicit in the attitudes of our strategic planners and their media mouthpieces.
But this is a very unrealistic view of the true correlation of forces…just two weeks before the Russian attack on Ukraine, Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held their 39th personal meeting in Beijing and declared that their partnership had “no limits.” China will certainly support Russia in any global conflict.
Meanwhile, America’s endless attacks and vilification of Iran have gone on for decades, culminating in our assassination two years ago of the country’s top military commander, Qasem Soleimani, who had been mentioned as a leading candidate in Iran’s 2021 presidential elections. Together with our Israeli ally, we have also assassinated many of Iran’s top scientists over the last decade, and in 2020 Iran publicly accused America of having unleashed the Covid biowarfare weapon against their country, which infected much of their parliament and killed many members of their political elite. Iran would certainly side with Russia as well.
America, together with its NATO allies and Japan, does possess huge superiority in any test of global power against Russia alone. However, that would not be the case against a coalition consisting of Russia, China, and Iran, and indeed I think the latter group might actually have the upper hand, given its enormous weight of population, natural resources, and industrial strength.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, America has enjoyed a unipolar moment, reigning as the world’s sole hyperpower. But this status has fostered our overweening arrogance and international aggression against far weaker targets, finally leading to the creation of a powerful block of states willing to stand up against us.
Then last October, I’d updated my analysis and I think that the subsequent developments have generally confirmed my appraisal:
I wrote those words just two weeks after the war began, and as is inevitable in any conflict, various matters have gone differently than anyone originally predicted.
The Russians had been widely expected to sweep the Ukrainians before them, but instead they have encountered very determined resistance, suffering heavy casualties as they made slow progress. Generously resupplied with advanced weaponry from NATO stockpiles, the Ukrainians recently launched successful counter-attacks, forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to call up 300,000 reserves.
But although Russia’s military efforts have only been partially successful, on all other fronts, America and its allies have suffered a series of strategic geopolitical defeats.
At the start of the war, most observers believed that the unprecedented sanctions imposed by America and its NATO allies would deal a crippling blow to the Russian economy. Instead, Russia has escaped any serious damage, while the loss of cheap Russian energy has devastated the European economies and severely hurt our own, resulting in the highest inflation rates in forty years. The Russian Ruble was expected to collapse, but is now stronger than it was before.
Germany is the industrial engine of Europe and the sanctions imposed on Russia were so self-destructive that popular protests began demanding that they be lifted and the Nord Stream energy pipelines reopened. To forestall any such potential defection, those Russian-German pipelines were suddenly attacked and destroyed, almost certainly with the approval and involvement of the U.S. government. America is not legally at war with Russia let alone Germany, so this probably represented the greatest peacetime destruction of civilian infrastructure in the history of the world, inflicting enormous, lasting damage upon our European allies. Our total dominance over the global media has so far prevented most ordinary Europeans or Americans from recognizing what transpired, but as the energy crisis worsens and the truth gradually begins to emerge, NATO might have a hard time surviving. As I discussed in a recent article, America may have squandered three generations of European friendship by destroying those vital pipelines.
- American Pravda: Of Pipelines and Plagues
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 3, 2022 • 3,900 WordsMeanwhile, many years of arrogant and oppressive American behavior towards so many other major countries has produced a powerful backlash of support for Russia. According to news reports, the Iranians have provided the Russians with large numbers of their advanced drones, which have been effectively deployed against the Ukrainians. Since World War II, our alliance with Saudi Arabia has been a linchpin of our Middle Eastern policy, but the Saudis have now repeatedly sided with the Russians on oil production issues, completely ignoring America’s demands despite threats of retaliation from Congress. Turkey has NATO’s largest military, but it is closely cooperating with Russia on natural gas shipments. India has also moved closer to Russia on crucial issues, ignoring the sanctions we have imposed on Russian oil. Except for our political vassal states, most major world powers seem to be lining up on Russia’s side.
Since World War II one of the central pillars of global American dominance has been the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and our associated control over the international banking system. Until recently we always presented our role as neutral and administrative, but we have increasingly begun weaponizing that power, using our position to punish those states we disliked, and this is naturally forcing other countries to seek alternatives. Perhaps the world could tolerate our freezing the financial assets of relatively small countries such as Venezuela or Afghanistan, but our seizure of Russia’s $300 billion in foreign reserves obviously tipped the balance, and major countries are increasingly seeking to shift their transactions away from the dollar and the banking network that we control. Although the economic decline of the EU has caused a corresponding fall in the Euro and driven up the dollar by default, the longer-term prospects for our continued currency hegemony hardly seem good. And given our horrendous budget and trade deficits, a flight from the dollar might easily collapse the US economy.
Soon after the outbreak of the Ukraine War, the eminent historian Alfred McCoy argued that we were witnessing the geopolitical birth of a new world order, one built around a Russia-China alliance that would dominate the Eurasian landmass. His discussion with Amy Goodman has been viewed nearly two million times.
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By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | March 6, 2023
China, Balloons, and Spying
On February 4, the U.S. military shot down a Chinese balloon they claim was a surveillance device spying on U.S. territory. The unprecedented “kinetic action against an airborne object… within United States or American airspace” was followed by three more objects being shot down by the U.S. and Canada over their airspace.
The conflict that followed derailed potential and necessary Sino-American diplomacy. But Washington knows three crucial things: the surveillance balloon was not intentionally sent over American airspace, the next three objects were not even spying, and even if they had been spying, China would only be doing what the U.S. does every day. There was never a need for the conflict.
Biden has admitted that the three later objects that were shot down “were most likely research balloons, not spy craft.” The U.S. “intelligence community’s assessment is that the three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific studies.”
As for the balloon the United States still believes was a spy balloon, they knew all along that China had not deliberately sent it over American airspace. Far from being taken by surprise, as they portrayed, “U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week, watching as it lifted off from its home base on Hainan Island near China’s south coast.”
And they knew the intended destination was never the United States. Officials “are now examining the possibility that China didn’t intend to penetrate the American heartland with their airborne surveillance device.” The U.S. monitored the flight path that was taking it to Guam when “strong winds… appear to have pushed the balloon south into the continental United States.”
The U.S. initiated a potentially dangerous conflict with a country for doing something they knew the country wasn’t doing.
And even if China did send a spy balloon over the United States, the government knows that they do that to China every day. Three times a day actually! Retired Ambassador Chas Freeman, who accompanied Nixon to China in 1972, told me that the U.S. “mount[s] about three reconnaissance missions a day by air or sea along China’s borders, staying just outside the 12-mile limit but alarming the Chinese, who routinely intercept our flights and protest our perceived provocations.”
The U.S. has, not balloons, but satellites that spy on China. NBC’s Robert Windrem calls Washington’s “appetite for China’s secrets” “insatiable” and says that “spying on the People’s Republic of China has been one of the National Security Agency’s top priorities since it was established in 1952.”
But they have balloons too. On February 13, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said “that the U.S. had flown high-altitude balloons through its airspace more than 10 times since the start of 2022.” He went on to say that “U.S. balloons regularly flew through other countries’ airspace without permission.”
And in February 2022, Politico revealed that the Pentagon is working on “high-altitude inflatables” that would fly “at between 60,000 and 90,000 feet [and] would be added to the Pentagon’s extensive surveillance network…” The Pentagon, which has spent millions on the project, hopes the balloons “may help track and deter hypersonic weapons being developed by China and Russia.”
Cuba and Sponsoring Terrorism
On October 3, 2022, Colombian President Gustavo Petro asked U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of international terrorism. At a press conference the same day, Blinken defended the Cuban listing, insisting that “When it comes to Cuba and when it comes to the state sponsor of terrorism designation, we have clear laws, clear criteria, clear requirements.” Petro disagreed, responding that “what has happened with Cuba is an injustice.”
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador agrees. In December, he said that the world must “unite and defend the independence and sovereignty of Cuba, and never, ever treat it as a ‘terrorist’ country, or put its profoundly humane people and government on a blacklist of supposed ‘terrorists.’”
The United States agrees. Though the Biden administration has insisted on keeping Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, they know that Cuba is not a sponsor of terrorism.
William LeoGrande, Professor of Government at American University and a specialist in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, told me that the region’s resistance to the American strangling of Cuba was “preventing Washington from engaging Latin American cooperation on a range of other issues.” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said U.S. policy on Cuba had become “an albatross” around the neck of the U.S., crippling their policy in the hemisphere.
So, President Obama ordered a review of the designation. In an act of extreme historical understatement, he told Congress that “the government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding six-month period” and “has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future.” After the State Department review, Secretary of State John Kerry declared that any remaining “concerns and disagreements” with Cuba “fall outside the criteria for designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.” The State Department issued an “assessment that Cuba meets the criteria established by Congress for rescission.” The U.S. intelligence community came to the same decision.
In May 2015, Obama removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Cuba’s Foreign Ministry announced that “The government of Cuba recognizes the just decision made by the President of the United States to remove Cuba” from the list, adding that “it never deserved to belong” on the list in the first place.
Cuba was placed on the list in 1982 in an act of hypocrisy and exceptionalism. President Reagan locked Cuba in the list for arming revolutionary left wing movements in Latin America, meanwhile Reagan was arming their right wing opponents. Reagan declared that supporting those groups was “self-defense” and waged secret proxy wars and armed and supported counter-revolutionary forces in El Salvador and Nicaragua. LeoGrande has said that the U.S. backed counter-revolutionary forces “guilty of far worse terrorist attacks against civilians” than the Cuban backed revolutionary forces.
Nonetheless, on January 11, 2021, as it was walking out the White House door, the Trump administration thrust Cuba back onto the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Biden promised, while campaigning for the presidency, that he would “promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” Instead, two months after Trump put Cuba back on the list, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki announced that a “Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.”
Cuba remains on the state sponsor of terrorism list even though Washington knows Havana is not a state sponsor of terrorism. The Obama administration liberated them from the list, knowing that “the government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism.” The Trump administration locked them back in the list, knowing the same, and the Biden administration has no immediate plans to reverse it.
Iran and Nuclear Bombs
The pattern is the same with Iran. The Obama administration signs the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran, paving the way to end the conflict, the Trump administration illegally pulls out of the deal, renewing the conflict, and Joe Biden continues Trump’s failed policies instead of returning to Obama’s promising policies.
The Biden administration knows that the Trump era policy they are keeping alive is a mistake. Blinken called the Trump administration’s “decision to pull out of the agreement” a “disastrous mistake.” Biden, while campaigning, said that Trump “recklessly tossed away a policy that was working to keep America safe and replaced it with one that has worsened the threat.” He promised to “offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy.” He hasn’t.
Instead, the State Department has said that the negotiations with Iran are “not our focus right now.” Robert Malley, the top U.S. diplomat for negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, said that “It is not on our agenda…we are not going to waste our time on it.”
So, Iran continues to be the recipient of American sanctions, threats, assassinations, and sabotage: all while the United States knows Iran is not building a nuclear bomb.
The 2007 and 2011 U.S. National Intelligence Estimates both concluded with “high confidence” that Iran was not building a bomb. But you don’t have to go back that far to find American admissions that they are continuing the conflict with Iran for doing things they know Iran is not doing.
The 2022 U.S. Department of Defense Nuclear Posture Review makes the stunning admission that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon nor has it even made a decision to pursue a nuclear weapon. The Nuclear Posture Review makes that admission, not once, but twice, and it is repeated again in the National Defense Strategy in which it is included.
The Nuclear Posture Review says that “Iran does not currently pose a nuclear threat but continues to develop capabilities that would enable it to produce a nuclear weapon should it make the decision to do so.” It then lays out the truth about Iran in the greatest clarity: “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.”
That was true four months ago, when the Nuclear Posture Review was released, and it remains true today. On February 25, CIA Director William Burns said that “[t]o the best of our knowledge, we don’t believe that the supreme leader in Iran has yet made a decision to resume the weaponization program.”
As with its Cuba policy, the United States continues to engage in conflict with Iran for doing something they know Iran is not doing. In the case of Iran, that escalating, self-defeating policy is potentially very dangerous.
In all three cases—China, Cuba and Iran–the United States has engaged in hostile, and sometimes dangerous, conflict with countries for doing what Washington knew all along they weren’t doing.
RT | March 4, 2023
More than six in ten Americans believe it’s at least “somewhat likely” that federal government agents helped provoke the January 2021 Capitol riot, a new poll has revealed, suggesting that legacy media outlets have largely failed to brand the incident as an insurrection incited by then-President Donald Trump.
The poll, released this week by Rasmussen Reports, shows that among the 61% of US voters who think the feds probably helped spur Trump supporters to breach the Capitol, most see that scenario as “very likely.” Just 30% of Americans believe it’s unlikely that undercover agents were involved in the riot, including 18% who say it’s “not at all likely.”
Rasmussen said its findings reflect a dramatic shift in public opinion in the two-plus years that have passed since the riot. For instance, a survey done during the week immediately after the incident found that half of Americans believed Trump should be removed from office and jailed for causing his supporters to storm Congress and disrupt certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory. By the end of 2021, 58% of voters believed the congressional panel appointed to investigate the riot had become a “partisan committee weaponized against innocent Americans.”
More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes for their alleged involvement in the riot. Many of the defendants have been held in jail, allegedly under harsh conditions, without being given the option of posting bail. Republican lawmakers have suggested that undercover government agents were involved in the riot and have questioned why an Arizona man named Ray Epps, who was seen on video urging Trump supporters to go into the Capitol, hasn’t been indicted.
The latest poll found that 70% of Republicans and 57% of both Democrats and independent voters now believe it’s likely that feds helped provoke the riot. Around 80% of all voters agree that all video footage of the riot should be released to the public. Earlier this week, US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, gave riot video footage that had been withheld by the congressional panel to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
A separate Rasmussen poll this week showed that 34% of US voters believe Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s idea of a “national divorce” between Republican- and Democrat-controlled states. Only one in three believes Biden is keeping his campaign promise to unite the country.
By Wyatt Reed | Sputnik | March 4, 2023
Britain’s Embassy in Sudan attempted to pay students who had studied abroad in Ukraine to participate in anti-Russian protests, a new report indicates.
Sudanese outlet Al-Rakoba wrote Friday that its staff spoke with an unnamed student who reports being approached by British embassy officials, who urged him to help put together an organization called the “Association of Sudanese Students in Ukrainian Universities” which would engage in anti-Russian provocations outside Sudan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The student in question, who “refused to reveal his name for security reasons” according to the report, reportedly said the Brits offered the students money as well as protection from Sudanese authorities if they participated in the alleged plot.
As some of those contacted by the UK’s diplomatic staff have participated in anti-government protests, they were told they would be shielded from prosecution, Al-Rakoba writes.
Just how successful the British embassy officials were in their apparent efforts is unclear — as is the identity of the culprits. But British intelligence officers are known to use diplomatic cover which employment at their embassy provides to carry out their clandestine activities.
If true, it wouldn’t be the first time the Brits organized chaos in the streets of a foreign land to effect their political will.
Decades ago, former MI6 officer Norman Darbyshire spilled the beans about his personal role in overseeing the bloody 1953 coup in Iran, which overthrew its democratically-elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh.
“My brief was very simple,” Darbyshire revealed. “Go out there, don’t inform the ambassador, and use the intelligence service for any money you might need to secure the overthrow of Mossadegh by legal or quasi-legal means.”
After bragging that he spent “vast sums of money, well over a million-and-a-half pounds,” Darbyshire added, “I was personally giving orders and directing the street uprising.”
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | March 2, 2023
Yet another narrative reversal sees parts of the U.S. Government now saying COVID came from a Chinese lab. The HighWire reveals who kept this information from the American public from the beginning and why the same players are back at it with bird flu.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | March 2, 2023
The great lies of COVID-19 pushed on the world by global health agencies and mainstream media are unraveling before our eyes. Del walks through the ‘10 Myths Told By Covid Experts’ published by Johns Hopkins Surgeon, Marty Makary, MD, pinpointing when and where The HighWire was brave enough to report on debunking each one, going all the way back to January of 2020.
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By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
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