A False Flag Is Biden’s Only Chance to Win
By Tom Luongo | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 4, 2020
The Black Revolution is in full swing in the U.S. Over the next sixty days we will be treated to the greatest political show on Earth as the Democrats and their handlers in The Davos Crowd pursue the biggest lie since Climate Change.
The events of 2020 are lining up for a climax to this story that ends with only one outcome, a contested election which fuels a coup attempt after the election results come in on November 3rd.
And because of this now obvious plan, setting up a false flag around the election is the most likely means to produce election results close enough to support this course of action.
I’m not the only one thinking in these terms at this point. Joaquin Flores, writing for Fort Russ, mused similarly last week. As the polls shift towards Donald Trump and the Democrats run around concocting fairy tales after allowing Joe Biden out of his gimp cellar long enough for people to see how far he has fallen mentally, I’m nearly convinced this is likely.
Color revolutions unfold in predictable stages. The first stage is destroying the local economy. Usually this means the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury pull back on available dollars through tight monetary policy and sanctions to create mass unemployment in the target nation.
Then foment violence from the youth who are disproportionately affected by the economic destruction after NGO’s lay the ideological foundation for revolution. Use the most convenient pretext. In the U.S. it means stoking racism and hatred of ‘the rich.’
Pick a color under which to unite them, in this case black and blame the leader for every single bad thing that happens, which is usually the work of agent provocateurs who amplify the organic frustration into targeted attacks which are then amped up by the media into a news story.
If the leader is stupid he acts like any garden-variety paranoid dictator by clamping down on the violence making him easy prey for the media to brand him a dictator.
Then bringing a mob to the capital is easy, because now there are too many people to be effectively policed and the potential for violence to boil the whole thing into a coup is very real.
All of this works if the oligarchs who run the political system of the target country are on board with this. In the U.S., it’s obvious from the response from all major corporations they approve this message. Note how it failed in Belarus recently for lack of this corporate sponsorship.
Looking at the way the Democrats have positioned themselves for this election it is clear that they are preparing the field for this outcome after election day.
They used the lockdowns to create an army of ready-made protestors with nothing else to do and little hope for the future.
They structured all aid to the middle class to run out during the height of the election campaign while blocking any further assistance even though the Treasury Dept. raised nearly $2 trillion to deploy as support and stimulus.
The media endlessly stoked fear over COVID-19 to push voters to consider mailing their votes in (or create the illusion that is what will happen) to delay certification of the election on election night.
But to his credit, President Trump hasn’t acted the way he was supposed to. He has governed this chaos exactly the way a majority of Americans want him to, as a Federalist. Even though he has the authority to do so, he’s refrained from sending Federal troops into rioting cities, laying bare just how much local authorities are aiding the violence.
He didn’t institute national lockdowns and draconian restrictions due to COVID-19, instead offering aid and allowing the data to eventually vindicate him to the point where even the CDC is now backtracking on how dangerous the virus actually is.
And his opponents in New York, for example, now look like out-of-touch, lying grandma murderers.
Eventually crisis fatigue sets in, people adjust to the new circumstances and the worst parts of their fear abate. And even if they don’t look at the new data, they realize enough costs have been born and it’s time to move on with our lives.
That’s what is now showing up in the polling data, even though it is still highly suspect. And this puts Trump in the driver’s seat for the election on November 3rd. As of today, the election looks like it is his to lose.
And yet the Democrats insist that the election will not be resolved on election day. In fact, it’s obvious they are prepping the narrative that Trump will only appear to win on election night but, in fact, the torrent of mail-in ballots will change the outcome of the election over the next few days.
Of course, this would fly in the face of decades of electoral statistics where the outcome of the election is almost certainly decided by the time 25% of the votes have been counted and a run-rate to completion can be calculated.
A report from Axios outlines what we can expect.
A top Democratic data and analytics firm told “Axios on HBO” it’s highly likely that President Trump will appear to have won — potentially in a landslide — on election night, even if he ultimately loses when all the votes are counted.
Why this matters: Way more Democrats will vote by mail than Republicans, due to fears of the coronavirus, and it will take days if not weeks to tally these. This means Trump, thanks to Republicans doing almost all of their voting in person, could hold big electoral college and popular vote leads on election night….
… By the numbers: Under one of the group’s modeling scenarios, Trump could hold a projected lead of 408-130 electoral votes on election night, if only 15% of the vote by mail (VBM) ballots had been counted.
And that’s what concerns me most. Because if all of this prep work has failed and Trump clearly wins an electoral college victory, but they are planning to harvest votes for days afterwards, how do they shift the dynamic back in Biden’s favor between now and then to keep the election close enough for them to steal?
More violence is how.
We are two weeks away from White House Siege beginning on September 17th. Organized by Adbusters, which is a front for George Soros’ partner in crime, David Brock and Media Matters For America, White House Siege is a planned 50-day protest in Lafayette Square in Washington D.C., ostensibly to protest President Trump ‘stealing the election.’
This is a ready-made recipe for a Maidan-like orgy of violence in the nation’s capital to create a false flag event which reflects badly on Trump. Think snipers on rooftops shooting both protestors and cops similar to what happened on the Maidan square in Kiev in 2014.
D.C. is not a state. It’s not governed by the same rules as the states, where the Governors are in charge.
Trump can, and in my mind should, as a matter of strategy, take control over D.C. to keep the possibility of violence to a minimum. D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser is trying to walk back her support of the protests after the violence after the Republican National Convention by urging U.S. Attorneys in D.C. to charge the people the police arrest.
This is Bowser trying to publicly keep Trump from doing exactly what I just said he should do. Because with cities looted and burned, with Democrat politicians losing the respect of their constituencies they have no political legs left to stand on.
Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York said in a press conference Trump better bring an army if he plans to set foot in his state. This is tantamount to sedition, for which a case can be made by nearly every major Democrat for statements made in the past six months.
“He better have an army if he thinks he’s gonna walk down the street in New York. New Yorkers don’t want to have anything to do with him,” the Democrat said, all but threatening the commander-in-chief.
Meanwhile Cuomo is now the target of a Dept. of Justice investigation into his handling of the COVID-19 crisis while Trump withholds Federal funds from the state, which prompted Cuomo’s bravado.
Between this and Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling Republicans “domestic enemies of the state” is the kind of language you don’t come back from. The Democrats and the U.S. Deep Stat are all in on removing Trump from office by any means necessary.
I don’t think the worst of the violence is behind us after Kenosha. I think the worst is still in front of us.
Stoltenberg to Convene NATO Meeting on Friday to Discuss Navalny Situation
Sputnik – 03.09.2020
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will convene an emergency meeting on Friday to discuss the situation involving Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, the alliance’s spokeswoman, Oana Lungescu, said on Thursday.
Navalny is currently undergoing treatment in a German hospital after suffering a medical emergency in late August. Berlin on Wednesday said that a German military laboratory possessed undeniable proof of the 44-year-old’s intoxication with a nerve agent from the Novichok group. The Russian Foreign Ministry noted in response that the German government’s claims of Navalny’s poisoning lacked evidence and added that it was perplexing why Berlin first addressed the EU, NATO and third parties, such as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, instead of contacting Russia directly.
Lungescu took to Twitter to announce the upcoming meeting.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier in the day that there had been no contacts between Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the issue of Navalny. He also noted that Russia was interested in shedding the light on the situation as much as anyone else, however, Germany did not provide any information.
EU Urges Russia to Cooperate With OPCW in Navalny Case for Impartial Probe, Borrell Says
The European Union urges Russia to cooperate with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the situation with Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny to ensure an impartial international investigation, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement.
“The European Union condemns in the strongest possible terms the assassination attempt on Alexei Navalny. … The European Union calls upon the Russian Federation to fully cooperate with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to ensure an impartial international investigation,” the statement says.
The EU is calling for an international response to the situation with Navalny and reserves the right to impose sanctions, Borrell added.
The EU will continue to closely monitor the situation and consider possible implications, he said.
Why is the GNA defunding the Lockerbie case despite it being close to a verdict of innocence?
Dr Mustafa Fetouri | MEMO | September 3, 2020
The only Lockerbie bombing convict is one step closer to his guilty verdict being overturned, however, posthumously. Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi died at home in Tripoli on 21 May, 2012, while protesting his innocence until his last breath. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) allowed the family to proceed with an appeal to clear his name. The case was sent to the High Court of Justiciary, Scotland’s highest criminal court, and a date for the final hearing has been scheduled to start on 24 November.
His 27-year-old son Ali, who is leading the family’s long and arduous fight to clear his father’s name, is certain that justice will prevail this time and that his late father’s verdict will be reversed. During a telephone conversation in Tripoli last Monday, he assured me: “My father’s name will certainly be cleared this time.”
The family’s lawyer Aamer Anwar, a distinguished Scottish lawyer who volunteered to take the case, in a series of emails confidently communicated to me: “We have a robust appeal.”
Winning this time seems certain. Professor Robert Black, a Scottish law authority, and the mind behind the first Lockerbie court setup in the Netherlands in May 2000, agrees with this analysis. He believes the Scottish court will “overturn the verdict” against Al-Megrahi, however, on the “narrower ground” of the crown prosecutor “withholding materials” from the defence team that could have helped establish Al-Megrahi’s innocence from the outset. Professor Black is “disappointed” that the court might not go as far as “to find that no reasonable court would have convicted Al-Megrahi.” He added, “I hope I’m wrong about this” – which would restore some of the Scottish judiciary’s reputation tarnished by the Lockerbie case and its aftermath.
The Lockerbie bombing, since 1988, became negatively synonymous with Libya, Gaddafi and its entire population. Gaddafi, firmly believing in their innocence, refused to hand over his accused citizens, Lamin Fhimah and Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, to stand trial in the UK. This led the United Nations (UN) to adopt a series of sanction resolutions, including Resolution 731, passed on 21 March, 1992, with harsh economic and political punitive measures that not only isolated Libya, but made life extremely difficult for its entire population.
The long-held belief that the late Gaddafi was behind the attack still echoes within Western mainstream media, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary emerging over the years.
Now, it can be disclosed that Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA), the only UN-recognised authority in the country, wants the mud to keep sticking to Gaddafi, Libya and its people too. The GNA is not enthusiastic about this latest development. The GNA have, illegally, cut the funding for the case over the last three years.
Al-Megrahi’s son Ali and the family lawyer are puzzled as to why the GNA cut funding at this critical junction of the case – when winning seems all but certain.
Lawyer Anwar does not disqualify the assumption that the GNA came under pressure from both the UK and the US to steer away from the case. The British and American narrative of the Lockerbie tragedy has always been that Libya is responsible and “that narrative must be maintained”, Anwar informs me.
However, suspension of defanging goes much deeper within the GNA, where corruption is rampant. A Scottish consultant to the legal team, speaking on condition of anonymity, yesterday clarified: “I believe funding is still budgeted, but the money disappears before getting to its intended final destination.”
Despite writing several times to the GNA to resume funding to meet the substantial mounting legal fees, Anwar received no replies until a few months ago, when his consultant was told that the GNA did not receive any messages relating to the funding of the case.
However, the consultant strongly disputes this, asserting that she “personally” handed over the file to the “highest official in the GNA” in a December 2017 meeting in Tripoli. When asked if “the highest official” meant Fayez Al-Sarraj, the GNA’s prime minister, she replied: “You think about it.”
It is not wholly unusual for the GNA to take such a position. Part of the political legitimacy in new Libya rests on the claim that Gaddafi was a supporter of international terror, and the Lockerbie bombing must have been his evil work too.
In November of 2019, the GNA’s Minister of Justice Mohamed Lamlum, personally stood before the International Criminal Court (ICC) to ask Saif Al-Islam, Gaddafi’s son, to face trial before the ICC, tarnishing the very judiciary he is supposed to protect and defend. Gaddafi Junior is wanted by the ICC for his – broadly disputed – role in quelling the 2011 troubles that ended his father’s rule over Libya.
According to different legal experts, the Libyan state is obliged to help its citizens abroad by all means necessary, including through funding in the event of legal issues. The Lockerbie case is much more than a petty case about a Libyan citizen, but it concerns the entire nation, its history and its reputation. This should elevate the case to a “national cause” for all Libyans, according to Anwar.
Indeed, Libyans across the political spectrum now consider the Lockerbie case a national issue and that Libya must continue funding the legal team, just as it did before 2011.
During the Gaddafi era, the government even established a consulate in Glasgow to closely monitor the case, and to help Al-Megrahi’s family who had to relocate to Scotland to be near their father while in jail.
It is not clear if the GNA will honour its legal obligations towards its own citizen, Al-Megrahi, albeit posthumously, but the legal team is not surrendering. They have already established a liaising team inside Libya to follow up with the chaotic authorities in Tripoli.
A group of volunteers inside and outside Libya are gearing up to explore other funding avenues if the GNA continues to reject meeting its legal obligations. In any eventuality, Al-Megrahi’s reputation, and that of Libya, will soon be restored.
Head of Russian Intelligence Service on Navalny: Western Provocation Cannot Be Ruled Out
Sputnik – 03.09.2020
MOSCOW – A provocation of Western special services cannot be ruled out in the situation with Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Agency (SVR) Sergey Naryshkin said Thursday.
“This cannot be excluded,” Naryshkin said when asked if the situation with Navalny could be a provocation of Western special services.
Regarding the statement of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that Germany’s claim of Navalny’s poisoning was based on false information, the SVR head said that “if president Lukashenko said so, he had reasons to do so.”
Earlier in the day, Lukashenko said during a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mishustin that a phone call between Warsaw and Berlin was intercepted by Belarusian radar intelligence, showing that Merkel’s statements on Navalny were false in order to “make sure Putin won’t interfere in Belarusian affairs.”
“I for one, see this as a possibility,” Naryshkin said.
“Yesterday’s statement by the German authorities raises more questions than it gives answers,” Naryshkin said, stressing that Russian doctors had carried out all tests before Navalny was transferred to a clinic in Berlin and they found no poison in his system.
Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny remains at the Charite hospital in Berlin after he was flown there from Russia’s Omsk on 22 August. On Wednesday, German doctors said that Navalny’s health condition remains serious. “The symptoms triggered by what has been confirmed as poisoning with a cholinesterase inhibitor are waning. The reason for this is a gradual regeneration of cholinesterase activity,” the clinic said in a statement.
Navalny fell gravely ill during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on 20 August. Following an emergency landing in Omsk, he was taken to a local hospital where for the next 44 hours doctors fought for his life. According to Russian doctors, they did not rule out poisoning at the beginning but after multiple tests were conducted they found no traces of poisonous substances in Navalny’s system. They suggested that his condition was caused by an abrupt drop of glucose in his blood due to a metabolic imbalance.
German Chancellor Merkel Claims Navalny Case is ‘Attempted Murder With Use of Nerve Agent’
Sputnik – 02.09.2020
Germany is treating the Navalny case as an “attempted murder by poisoning,” and is waiting for Russia to explain its position and provide answers, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Wednesday.
Speaking to reporters shortly after Berlin’s announcement that a toxicology test had shown ‘undeniably’ that Navalny had been poisoned by “a chemical nerve agent of the Novichok group,” Merkel said that there are now “very serious questions that only the Russian government can answer and must answer.”Merkel confirmed that the Russian ambassador to Germany had been informed about the test results, and said that “we now expect that the Russian government will make a declaration on this incident.”
Calling the information about Navalny’s alleged poisoning “depressing,” Merkel added that her government would consult with its NATO allies and Germany’s European Union partners on how to respond.
“We will inform our partners in the EU and NATO on the results of the test. We will have a joint discussion… and make a decision on a proportionate [response] in a joint statement,” the chancellor said.
Russia Responds
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to the German government’s new allegations later Wednesday, saying that no traces of any poisonous substances were found in Navalny’s system before his transfer to Germany.
The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a separate statement, saying its diplomatic mission in Berlin hadn’t received any information or documents regarding Navalny, and accused Germany of making ‘loud statements’ without any evidence to back them up.
The ministry added that it made sense for Germany to appeal to the EU and NATO if its main goal was to substitute “some pre-prepared ‘response measures'” for normal cooperation.
Navalny’s Treatment in Germany
Navalny was flown to Germany from a hospital in Omsk, Russia, where he was hospitalized on August 20 after falling into a coma during a Moscow-bound flight from Tomsk. The politician and blogger, arguably the best-known Russian opposition figure in the West, was transfered to Berlin aboard a chartered jet on August 22 for further treatment, and granted the status of ‘chancellor’s guest’ by Merkel, ostensibly ‘for protection’.
Navalny’s spokesperson began speculating that he may have been poisoned almost immediately after he fell ill. However, doctors in Omsk said no traces of poison were present in the blood and urine samples they had taken. Later, doctors postulated that Navalny may have a metabolic condition which caused a severe drop in his blood sugar levels and led him to lose consciousness and go into a coma. Navalny reportedly didn’t eat or drink before boarding the flight or on the plane, apart from tea purchased for him at the cafe in Tomsk’s airport.
Novichok
The so-called ‘Novichok’ group of binary chemical weapons was developed in the USSR between the 1970s and early 1990s in an effort to maintain parity with the US chemical weapons programme. The agents were never called ‘Novichok’ by Soviet or Russian biowarfare specialists, and were given their names by Western experts after the USSR’s collapse.
‘Novichok’ made international headlines in March 2018, after former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury, southern England. The UK almost immediately blamed the Russian government of ‘poisoning’ the Skripals, and announced that ‘Novichok’ had been used in the attack. Moscow, categorically denied the allegations, asked for access to the investigation, and pointed out that it had destroyed the last of its Soviet-era chemical weapons stockpiles in 2017 under the supervision of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Russian officials and media also pointed out that the US and its allies, including Britain, have had access to ‘Novichok’s’ formulas since the late 1990s. Nevertheless, London and its allies responded to the alleged attack with new sanctions and expulsions of Russian diplomats, prompting Moscow to respond in a tit-for-tat fashion. The Skripals have since disappeared from public view, with UK media reporting that they may have fled to New Zealand. Viktoria Skripal, Sergei Skripal’s niece, said she had no information to corroborate these reports and has repeatedly asked to be allowed to contact her family members.
Biden’s chances rest on a John Podesta-Planned Military Coup, Ballot Harvesting, Police Shootings, and a False Flag
By Joaquin Flores | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 30, 2020
Our early August prognosis published by SCF on August 23rd, that Joe Biden would not concede the election even if Trump wins, was confirmed by Hillary Clinton herself on August 25th.
This piece will follow up on the strategy involved in that piece, and develop these in light of John Podesta’s election war-game and the situation in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In the Kenosha situation, we have armed groups on both sides, creating a volatile situation in what increasingly looks like a pre-civil war scenario. All together, we can now see the following is evident:
Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential bid now depends on a combination of a.) severe social media and search engine censorship of book-burning proportions, b.) signs from the military that they will back Biden (per John Podesta ) on the heels of c.) an inconclusive election (mailed-out blank ballots), and d.) (the Soros wing of) BLM’s ability engage in rioting and to pose as Trump-like supporters (QAnon and adjacent, such as ‘Save The Children’) in order to e.) conduct a dangerous or illegal public stunt (false flag).
Trump’s deep campaign has revolved around Christian, Gnostic, and New Age themes, which (with regard to the latter two) intersect themes of spirituality previously in the domain of the coastal left. These will form the substrate of a focus on this election being a contest of Good vs. Evil, of Light vs. Dark, of the champions of children against sexual predators, as well as anti-war and anti-vax themes; wherein ‘war mongers’ like ‘Hillary Clinton’, alleged child abusers like ‘John Podesta’, and regulatory capturers of healthcare like ‘Bill Gates’, serve as anthropomorphic reifications of unadulterated evil.
This is a novel phenomenon, and does not represent pre-Trump Republican tropes and organizing issues. Mainstream Republican tropes were represented at the RNC convention, and work to establish a continuity – even if ill fitted – between traditional conservatism (previously opposed to Trump) and Trump’s hardcore base.
[Image – Alleged Soros-BLM posing as a pro-Trump ‘Save the Children’ demonstration in what some fear foreshadows a false flag]
The Coup – Color Revolution and Arab Spring
Past political contests after the assassination of Kennedy appear to be based upon a consensus on key issues on international relations among elected officials, because the permanent administration had consensus on these themselves. But the rise of Trump, and the great lengths a part of the permanent administration has gone to frustrate his efforts, strongly indicate that there is now a political crisis and division so great, at the level of leadership, that all the soft-power and coup methods (used by the CIA abroad) are now being used within the U.S. against the executive branch.
A part of this permanent administration appears to back Trump, or rather Trump appears to be ‘their candidate’, and this may well in part explain his electoral success in 2016 despite what appeared as overwhelming odds to the contrary.
Perhaps the most visible permutation of this division and crisis were events in the deserts of Syria and Iraq, where Pentagon backed Kurdish YPG forces fought against CIA backed ISIS forces, with Americans in the employ of these institutions embedded on either side, firing at each other and taking losses. It would make sense that to military intelligence, such an incoherent and openly corrosive dynamic would need to be finally headed off.
Therefore, all of the lessons drawn from the Color Revolution, Fourth Generational Warfare (4GW), counter-insurgency and hybrid warfare, learned in our study of the events of Yugoslavia, Occupy Wall Street, BLM, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Ukraine, Brazil, Venezuela and lately Belarus, all become necessary reading in order to understand the absolutely destabilized position that the U.S. finds itself in as we approach the 2020 election.
We should expect, in line with the color-springs tactic, that police will engage in the killings of black men, orchestrated by police secret societies operating on behest of the permanent administration (known colloquially and hereafter as the ‘deep state’). These will be timed in such a way for maximum utility with regard to high/low points in the campaigns of the two candidates.
Kenosha On Fire
Such an incident just occurred on August 23rd in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake. Standard and divisive motifs followed: the event was not clear cut, and definitive aspects of the case are open to interpretation and subject to confirmation bias in the public’s eye. This will provoke reaction and polarization, with the nuances and facts of the situation and its context often traded in for political expedience. Pro law enforcement types more closely associated with conservative politics will say the shooting was justified prior to a hearing of the facts, and will include biographical information about Blake which demonstrates his past criminal offenses, while ignoring that these past offenses do not form the basis for legitimizing a ‘summary execution’. Likewise, anti-police liberals will condemn the shooting as racist and unjustified, without regard to the views on race of the police involved, and without a review of the actual facts that anti-Trump corporate media was reluctant to expose but which were contained in the police report. At the same time, there is a long history of police falsifying evidence and statements to justify shootings such as these.
Note that the governor of Wisconsin, the Democrat Tony Evers, is the one who declared a state of emergency for Covid-19 and an unpopular lockdown. He is a career government bureaucrat, and was met by a mobilization of armed citizens against those diktats. Yet the fall-out and riots in the aftermath of the Blake shooting, of which the Evers-mandated high unemployment (per lockdown) forms the substrate but yet expressed through BLM/Antifa riots, will be blamed on Trump, whose years in public service can be counted on a single hand, and whose general efforts have been to end the lockdown and ‘re-open the economy’. Evers will not call on rioters to observe social distancing, and will call the armed detachments involved in arson and looting, ‘protesters’, and the constitutionalist militias who deployed to protect the rights of both protestors (from police excess) and civilians (from protestor-arsonists) as ‘right wing’.
The increasing emergence of ‘armed peaceful protestors’, an Orwellian oxymoron as a phrase in itself, first appeared in the Syrian conflict, where American corporate media and fake-left publications like Counterpunch regularly referred to armed Al Qaeda/ISIS/FSA groups engaged in shootings and killings as ‘peaceful protesters’.
[Video, Photo – an ‘armed peaceful protestor’ stands off with an armored Sheriff vehicle.]
In our past pieces, we have explored the mechanisms that the DNC and the permanent administration will use to nullify or falsify the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election in November. This included the use of Democrat governors in certain states, as we previously wrote, to declare a state winner so that its electors go to Biden, in manufactured cases where the desired vote by state citizens could not be determined. It included the use of NGO employees, Labor/BLM/Antifa activists alongside contact tracers to use the coronavirus and social upheaval around manufactured racial justice issues to interfere with voters’ access to polls, and voters’ use of mailed-out ballots and ballot harvesting schemes.
In our last piece we disclosed that the DNC plans to have Biden declare himself the winner of the election, whatever the pending (inconclusive, tampered, stolen, etc.) outcome may be.
In a separate piece published on FRN, this author explained that for the Trump strategy against the riots to work, would require a plan that involved the co-opting of the BLM hashtag by his supporters. This would mean a separation of the BLM from Antifa, the latter being a designated terrorist group.
We explained there that this approach would be similar to that taken by Russia and Syria in the Syrian war, where certain Free Syrian Army (FSA) units had to be separated from ISIS, so that these FSA units could be considered ‘legitimate opposition’ (a change of tact in itself, previously all armed opposition were considered illegitimate by the Syrian government), and even incorporated into joint attacks with the Syrian Arab Army (SAA – Assad’s forces) against ISIS.
Of particular interest will be how the public and courts view the actions of Kenosha Guard militia member Kyle Rittenhouse. These two videos, the news commentary dubbed over and to the contrary, show Rittenhouse acting in self-defense. It also shows that those with him provided first responder assistance to the man who pulled a gun on Rittenhouse and who was subsequently shot in the arm.
Censorship
We now know, per the New York Times, that Facebook execs have been meeting to implement a strategy to censor information that Donald Trump has won the 2020 election, because of the working contingency plan (which appears to still be in operation) that Biden will declare victory regardless of a determinable outcome, as we previously wrote. This, however as we explained, would result in a vote in the Congress and Senate where it is likely that Nancy Pelosi may assume the presidency.
Simultaneously, Facebook execs have had a difficult time pushing against a terrified DNC which has been making irrational demands to further censorship.
Why are the DNC’s Censorship demands on Facebook irrational?
The DNC demands are fear-based and reactionary, and while Facebook execs have been happy to do the bidding of the DNC and pro-deep state Republicans (still a majority), they know the requests to further censor pro-Trump twitter accounts are known to produce the opposite effect. This is confirmed by the known science on the subject.
Studies of social revolutions and regime legitimacy show that further censorship in an environment where citizens have access to alternate informational lines, only erodes the legitimacy of the regime. Such a study was conducted on how the DDR tried to cover up the mass exodus of citizens into West Germany some thirty years ago [Sometimes Less Is More: Censorship, News Falsification, and Disapproval in 1989 East Germany . Christian Gläßel Katrin Paula , 2019].
Facebook execs called upon MIT to conduct a study to help establish their case, and a layman’s version of these conclusions were published in MIT’s online magazine Technology Review in a piece titled, It’s Too Late to Stop QAnon with Fact Checks and Account Bans.
In this article by MIT, it is reported that: “Friedberg, who has studied the movement deeply, says he believes it is “absolutely” too late for mainstream social-media platforms to stop QAnon, although there are some things they could do to, say, limit its adherents’ ability to evangelize on Twitter.”
Like the study of the DDR and regime legitimacy, the DNC finds that the more they push for censorship, the more popular the pro-Trump conspiracy theories grow.
What appears to be a work-around for this conundrum the deep state faces, is a new development, where the Soros wing of BLM has been instructed to stage at least one rally (so far) in Chicago that took place during the week of August 17th. In this, a group wearing what looked like Soros wing BLM uniforms actually carried placards associated with QAnon – such as WWG1WGA, #SaveTheChildren, #EndHumanTrafficking, and were replete with signs calling for ‘ending the pedophile Satanic cabal’.
Podesta’s Simulation Sees Public Looking to Military for a Sign
Of particular interest is that John Podesta recently ran a simulation on the DNC’s approach and response to election 2020, where he played the role of Biden. This war-game exercise was covered by David Frum for the Atlantic. Despite its counter-factual ‘facts’ and erroneous presumptions (poll based, etc.), the findings were startling.
Neither side would concede, courts would be too slow to act, Antifa and QAnon groups would clash in the streets, and the actions of the military, in either direction, or as with the National Guard – as deployed by the Justice Department under AG Barr, would be the deciding factor.
In that simulation there were a total of 67 players who met on Zoom in the first week of June 2020. This was composed of high-profile critics of President Donald Trump, including law professors, retired military officers, former senior U.S. officials, political strategists, attorneys, and cable news room editors.
We have to reiterate that Podesta, playing the role of Biden, understands that the real outcome of the election will therefore be the position that the military takes.
A wing of Trump’s supporters – Qanon – are adamant that military intelligence, or at least an operation within the NSA, will not only back Trump, but have been backing Trump since before the 2016 election. They believe this partly explains Trump’s victory despite what they see as an election ‘rigged’ by Clinton – thereby explaining Clinton’s otherwise unfounded confidence that she would win by a landslide in that fateful election now four years ago.
On the other side have been several notable members of the deep state, such as Colin Powell and former CIA chief John Brennan.
This all gels with the insider information that we have written about from SEIU, which as explained previously, forms the nexus between the Biden ground campaign and its GOTV, Bernie’s ‘Our Revolution’ and ‘Working Families Party’, Antifa, and BLM.
Conclusion
The likelihood that the 2020 election will not produce an agreed winner, barring effective active measures from Trump, is nearly certain. Based on the Northop/Standard model, Trump has an over 90% chance at winning an election if following the rules in place in the past dozen election cycles. This explains why the DNC has introduced as many X factors as possible – a politicized Covid-19 response, slanted news which riles up reliable protest movement assets towards rioting and looting, and a mailed-out ballots scheme which is indistinguishable in effect from known problem vote riggings techniques like ballot harvesting.
It is clear that the DNC wants to produce no clear winner, and use some combination of article XX, XII, and provisions as reinforced by related constitutional provisions for the continuation of government, and NSDP 51.
Because there are so many variables, possible counter measures, and new ‘X factors’ that can be introduced, this is a developing story with no clear outcome now estimable. If it is true that the NSA is backing Trump, then this provides strong reason to believe that this candidate will emerge the winner out of the fray. In either event, future X factors are almost certain.
The US contracts out its regime change operation in Nicaragua
By John Perry | COHA | August 4, 2020
Masaya, Nicaragua – An extraordinary leaked document gives a glimpse of the breadth and complexity of the US government’s plan to interfere in Nicaragua’s internal affairs up to and after its presidential election in 2021.
The plan,[1] a 14-page extract from a much longer document, dates from March-April this year and sets the terms for a contract to be awarded by USAID (a “Request for Task Order Proposal”). It was revealed by reporter William Grigsby from Nicaragua’s independent Radio La Primerisima[2] and describes the task of creating what the document calls “the environment for Nicaragua’s transition to democracy.” The aim is to achieve “an orderly transition” from the current government of Daniel Ortega to “a government committed to the rule of law, civil liberties, and a free civil society.” The contractor will work with the “democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) sub-sectors” which in reality is an agglomeration of NGOs, think tanks, media organizations and so-called human rights bodies that depend on US funding and which – while claiming to be independent – are in practice an integral part of the opposition to the Ortega government.
To justify such blatant interference, a considerable rewriting of history is needed. For example, the document claims that the ruling Sandinista party manipulated “successive” past elections so as to win “without a majority of the votes.” Then after “manipulating the 2016 presidential elections” to similar effect, it was warned by the Organization of American States (OAS) that there had been various “impediments to free and fair elections” as a result of which the OAS requested “technical electoral reforms.” What the document omits, however, are the overall conclusions of the OAS on the last elections. Although it identified “weaknesses typical of all electoral processes,” the OAS explicitly said that these had “not affected substantially the popular will expressed through the vote.” In other words, the nature of Daniel Ortega’s victory (he gained 72% of the popular vote) made any minor irregularities irrelevant to the result: he won by an enormous margin. The leaked document makes clear that the US is worried that the same might happen again and aims to stop it.
Not surprisingly, the document also rewrites recent history, saying that the “uprising” in 2018 (which had strong US backing) was answered by “the government’s brutal repression” of demonstrations, while it ignores the wave of violence and destruction that the opposition itself unleashed. The economic disruption it caused is still damaging the country, even though (pre-pandemic) there were strong signs of recovery. USAID, however, has to paint a picture of a country in crisis “… broadening into an economic debacle with the potential to become a humanitarian emergency, depending on the impact of the COVID-19 contagion on Nicaragua’s weak healthcare system.” Someone casually reading the document, unaware of the real situation, might get the impression that, in Nicaragua’s “crisis environment,” regime change is not only desirable but urgently required. The reality – that Nicaragua is at peace, has so far coped with the COVID-19 pandemic reasonably well, and hasn’t suffered the severe economic problems experienced by its neighbors El Salvador and Honduras – is of course incompatible with the picture the US administration needs to present, in order to give some semblance of justification for its intervention.
A long history of US intervention
Given the long history of US interference in Nicaragua, going back at least as far as William Walker’s assault on its capital and usurption of the presidency in 1856, the existence of a plan of this kind is hardly surprising. What’s unusual is that someone has made it publicly available and we can now see the plan in detail. Of course, the US has long developed a tool box of regime change methods short of direct military intervention, such as when it sent in the marines in the 1920s and 1930s or illegally funded and provided logistical support for the “Contra” forces in the 1980s. It now has more sophisticated methods, using local proxies, which are deniable in the unlikely event that they will be exposed by the international media (which normally displays little interest, being much more interested in electoral interference by Russia than it is in Washington’s disruption of the democratic processes).
The latest escalation in intervention began under the Obama presidency and continued under Trump, although the motivation probably has more to do with the US administration’s ongoing concerns about the success of the Ortega government’s development model since it returned to power in 2007 and began a decade of renewed social investment. Oxfam summarized the problem in the memorable title it gave to a 1980s report about Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example. Between 2005 and 2016, poverty was reduced by almost half, from 48 percent to 25 percent according to World Bank data. Nicaragua had a low crime rate, limited drug-related violence, and community-based policing. Over the 11 years to 2017, Nicaragua’s per-capita GDP increased by 38 percent—more than for any of its neighbors. Its success contrasted sharply with the experience of the three “Northern Triangle” countries closely allied to the US. While Nicaragua became one of the safest countries in Latin America, neighboring Guatemala, El Salvador and particularly Honduras saw soaring crime levels, rampant corruption and rapid growth in the drug trade that prevented social progress and produced the “migrant caravans” that began to head north towards the US in 2017.
The US administration’s efforts in 2016 and 2017, building on long experience of manipulating Nicaraguan politics, appeared to produce results in April 2018. The first catalyst for action by US-funded groups was an out-of-control forest fire in a remote reserve, inaccessible by road.[3] The tactics were clear: take an incident with potential to get young people onto the streets, blame the government for inaction (even though the fire was almost impossible to control), whip up people’s anger via social media, organize protests, generate critical stories in the local press, enlist support from neighboring allies (in this case, Costa Rica) and secure hostile coverage in the international media. All of these tactics worked, but before the next stage could be reached (protesters being repressed by the Ortega “regime”) the forest fire was extinguished by a rainstorm.
A week later, the opposition forces were unexpectedly given a second opportunity. The government announced a package of modest social security reforms, and quickly faced new protests on the streets. The same tactics were deployed, this time with much greater success. Violence by protesters on April 19 (a police officer, a Sandinista supporter and a bystander were shot) brought inevitable attempts by the police to control the protests, leading to rapid escalation. Media messages proliferated about students being killed, many of them false. Only a few days later the government cancelled the social security reforms, but by now the protests had (as planned) moved on to demanding the government’s resignation. The full story of events in April-July 2018, and how the government eventually prevailed, is told in Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup?
A section of the report
Laying the groundwork for insurrection
How were the conditions for a coup created? The aims of US government funding in Nicaragua and the tactics they paid for in this period were made surprisingly clear in the online magazine Global Americans in 2018, which is partly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).[4] Arguing (in May 2018, at the height of the violence) that “Nicaragua is on the brink of a civic insurrection,” the author Ben Waddell, who was in Nicaragua at the time, pointed out that “US support has helped play a role in nurturing the current uprisings.”
His article’s title, Laying the groundwork for insurrection,[5] was starkly accurate in describing the ambitions behind the NED’s funding program, which had financed 54 projects in Nicaragua over the period 2014-17 and has continued to do so since then. What did the projects do? Like the recently leaked document, NED promotes ostensibly innocuous or even apparently beneficial activities like strengthening civil society, promoting democratic values, finding “a new generation of democratic youth leaders” and identifying “advocacy opportunities.” To get behind the jargon and clarify the NED’s role, Waddell quotes the New York Times (referring to the uprisings in Egypt, where NED had also been active):[6]
“… the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans in campaigning, organizing through new media tools and monitoring elections.”
In the case of Nicaragua, the NED’s funding of groups opposed to the Sandinista government began in 1984, giving the lie to their aim being to “promote democracy” since that was the year in which Nicaragua’s revolutionary government held the country’s first-ever democratic elections. Waddell makes it clear that the NED’s efforts continued, years later:
“… it is now quite evident that the U.S. government actively helped build the political space and capacity in Nicaraguan society for the social uprising that is currently unfolding.”
The NED is not the only non-covert source of US funding. Another is USAID, which describes its role in the 2018 uprising in similar terms to the NED. Not long before he exposed the new document, William Grigsby was able to publish lists of groups and projects in Nicaragua funded by USAID and by the National Democratic Institute (NDI).[7] He showed that upwards of $30 million was being distributed to a wide range of groups opposed to the government and involved in the violence of 2018, and that in the case of the NDI at least this funding continued into 2020.
Last year, Yorlis Gabriela Luna recounted for COHA her own experiences of how US-funded groups trained young people, in particular, and influenced their political beliefs in the build-up to 2018.[8] She explained how social networks and media outlets were “capable of fooling a significant portion of Nicaragua’s youth and general population.” She explained how the groups used scholarships to learn English, diploma programs, graduate studies, and courses with enticing names like “democratic values, social media activism, human rights and accountability” at private universities, “to attract and lure young people.” She went on to explain how exciting events were organised in expensive hotels or even involving trips abroad, so that young people who had never before been privileged in these ways developed a sense of “pride,” belonging, and “group identity,” and as a result “wound up aligning themselves with the foreign interests” of those who funded the courses and activities.
The new task during and after the pandemic
Two years after the failed coup attempt, what are the organizations that receive US funding now supposed to do? The new document is full of jargon, requiring the contractor (for example) to engage in “targeted short-term technical and analytical activities during Nicaragua’s transition that require rapid response programming support until other funds, mechanisms, and actors can be mobilized.” The work also requires “longer-term programs, which will be determined as the crisis evolves.” Preparation is required for the possibility that “transition [to a new government] does not happen in an orderly and timely manner.” The contractor will have to prepare “a roster of subject matter experts in Nicaragua” to provide short term technical assistance, “regardless of the result of the 2021 election, even in the event of the Sandinistas ‘winning fairly’.” The document is full of requirements like being able to offer “a rapid response” and “seize new opportunities,” emphasizing the urgency of the task. In other words, a fresh attempt is underway to destabilize Daniel Ortega’s government and, in the event that this doesn’t work, and even should the Sandinistas win the next election fairly, as the document admits is a possibility, US attempts at regime change are stepping up a gear.
Who will carry this out? The document places much emphasis on “maintaining” and “strengthening” civil society and improving its leadership, which appears to refer to the numerous NGOs, think tanks and “human rights” bodies which receive US funding. At one point the document asks “what should donor coordination, the opposition, civil society, and media focus on?” – clearly implying that the contractor has a role in influencing not just these civil society groups but also the media and political parties.
Not surprisingly, the document has been interpreted as a new plan to destabilize the country. Writing in La Primerísima, Wiston López argues that the plan’s purpose is “to create the conditions for a coup d’état in Nicaragua.”[9] Brian Wilson, the VietNam veteran severely injured in the 1980s when attempting to stop a freight train carrying supplies to the “Contra,” and who lives in Nicaragua, concludes that the US now realizes that Ortega will win the coming election.[10] In response, the “US has launched a brazen, criminal and arrogant plan to overthrow Nicaragua’s government.”
Supposing that there is a clear Sandinista victory in 2021, will the US nevertheless refuse to accept the result? Having implied that the OAS had serious criticisms of the last election when this was not the case, the document implies that it will be pressured to take a different attitude next time, saying that “whether the OAS decides to pick up the pressure on electoral reform again will be an important international pressure point.” No doubt the US will try to insist that the OAS must be election observers, and if this is refused it will allow the legitimacy of the election to be called into question, if the result is unfavorable to US interests. Many question whether the OAS is even qualified to have an observer role any longer, however, after the serious harm it did to Bolivian democracy in 2019 by casting doubts on what experts considered a fair election and, in effect, instigating a coup.[11] This document creates legitimate concern that the US government would like to use the OAS to prevent another government that is not to its liking from winning an election, as it did so recently in Bolivia.
Not only must conditions be created to replace the current government, but once this is achieved the changes must extend to “rebuilding” the institutions of government, including the judicial system, police and armed forces. After the widespread persecution of government officials, state and municipal workers and Sandinista supporters that occurred in 2018, it is not surprising that this is interpreted as requiring a purge of all the institutions and personnel with Sandinista sympathies. As Wilson says, “the new government must immediately submit to the policies and guidelines established by the United States, including persecution of Sandinistas, dissolving the National Police and the Army, among other institutions.”
USAID makes it clear that it is internal pressure in Nicaragua that might eventually provoke a coup d’état, so it calls on its agents to deepen the political, economic and also the health crisis, taking into account the context of COVID-19. The US State Department recently awarded an extra $750,000 to Nicaraguan non-government bodies as part of its global response to COVID-19, and this includes “support for targeted communication and community engagement activities.”[12] As López points out in Popular Resistance, “Since March the US-directed opposition has focused 95% of their actions on attempting to discredit Nicaragua’s prevention, contention, and Covid treatment. However, this only had some success in the international media and is now backfiring since Nicaragua is the country with one of the lowest mortality rates in the continent.”[13] The Johns Hopkins University’s world map of coronavirus cases currently shows Nicaragua with 3,672 cases compared with 17,448 in El Salvador, 42,685 in Honduras and 51,306 in Guatemala.[14] Even though higher figures produced by Nicaragua’s so-called Citizens’ Observatory[15] are regularly cited in the international media, they currently show just 9,044 “suspected” cases, still far below the numbers in the “Northern triangle” countries.
What will the opposition do next?
COHA has already documented the disinformation campaign taking place against Nicaragua during the pandemic and how this has been repeated in the international media. So far, however, warnings of the health system’s collapse have proved to be unfounded.[16] If, as happened with the Indio Maíz fire and the social security protests in 2018, the opposition fails in its attempt to use the pandemic to destabilize the Ortega government, what will it do next? A recent incident shows that attempts to seize on events to spur a crisis will continue. On July 31, a fire occurred in Managua’s cathedral. The fire department responded quickly and put out the blaze within ten minutes, but a crucifix and the chapel where it stood were badly damaged. Within minutes opposition newspaper La Prensa reported that “an attack” had occurred involving a “Molotov cocktail” and that the government or its supporters were implicated.[17] This was echoed by other local and international media, opposition parties, the Archbishop of Managua, and by one of the NGOs which received USAID funding.[18] Despite the lack of any evidence to back up the media stories, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCR) also condemned the incident, obviously implying that it was an attack on human rights.[19]
Yet a police investigation quickly established that there was no evidence at all of any foul play, or that petrol or explosive materials were involved.[20] Their investigations pointed instead to a tragic accident involving lighted candles and the alcohol spray being used as a disinfectant as part of the cathedral’s anti-COVID-19 precautions. The Catholic Church has already announced that the damaged chapel will be restored to its former state. However, the damage that has been done to the government’s national and international reputation, and to its highly politicized relationship with the Catholic Church, will be more difficult to repair.
John Perry is a writer based in Nicaragua.
End notes
[1] Downloadable in English (pdf) at https://s3.amazonaws.com/rlp680/files/uploads/2020/07/31/aid-mayo-2020-ingles.pdf
[2] “EEUU lanza descarado plan intervencionista para tumbar al FSLN”, https://www.radiolaprimerisima.com/noticias/general/287264/eeuu-lanza-descarado-plan-intervencionista-A histotrypara-tumbar-al-fsln/
[3] “International Forces ‘Distorting’ Nicaragua’s Indio Maíz Fire,” https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/International-Forces-Distorting-Nicaraguas-Indio-Maiz-Fire-20180414-0019.html
[4] See details at https://www.ned.org/wp-content/themes/ned/search/grant-search.php (NED is nominally independent of the US administration, but is funded by Congress.)
[5] “Laying the groundwork for insurrection: A closer look at the U.S. role in Nicaragua’s social unrest,” https://theglobalamericans.org/2018/05/laying-groundwork-insurrection-closer-look-u-s-role-nicaraguas-social-unrest/
[6] “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html
[7] “Asi financia EEUU a los terroristas,” http://www.radiolaprimerisima.com/noticias/general/286068/asi-financia-eeuu-a-los-terroristas/
[8] “The Other Nicaragua, Empire and Resistance,” https://www.coha.org/the-other-nicaragua-empire-and-resistance/
[9] “EEUU lanza descarado plan intervencionista para tumbar al FSLN,” http://www.radiolaprimerisima.com/noticias/general/287264/eeuu-lanza-descarado-plan-intervencionista-para-tumbar-al-fsln/
[10] “NIcaragua targeted for US overthrow in 2020-21,” https://popularresistance.org/nicaragua-targeted-for-us-overthrow-in-2020-21/
[11] “Bolivia’s Struggle to Restore Democracy after OAS Instigated Coup,” https://www.coha.org/bolivias-struggle-to-restore-democracy-after-oas-instigated-coup/
[12] See https://www.state.gov/update-the-united-states-continues-to-lead-the-global-response-to-covid-19/
[13] “US Launches Brazen Interventionist Plan to Overthrow the FSLN,” https://popularresistance.org/us-launches-brazen-interventionist-plan-to-overthrow-the-fsln/
[14] See https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
[15] See https://observatorioni.org/
[16] “Experts Warn about Possible Health System Collapse in Nicaragua,” https://www.voanews.com/episode/experts-warn-about-possible-health-system-collapse-nicaragua-4320606
[17] See https://www.laprensa.com.ni/2020/07/31/nacionales/2702954-lanzan-bomba-molotov-adentro-de-la-capilla-de-la-catedral
[18] See for example https://confidencial.com.ni/atentado-con-bomba-molotov-en-la-catedral-de-managua/ and https://elpais.com/internacional/2020-07-31/un-atentado-con-bomba-molotov-incendia-la-capilla-de-la-catedral-metropolitana-de-managua.html
[19] See https://twitter.com/OACNUDH/status/1289574031159488514?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1289574031159488514%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.laprensa.com.ni%2F2020%2F08%2F01%2Fnacionales%2F2703388-organismos-de-derechos-humanos-condenan-ataque-a-la-catedral-de-managua
[20] “Esclarecimiento de incendio en Capilla de la Sangre de Cristo, Catedral de Managua”, https://www.el19digital.com/articulos/ver/titulo:105922-esclarecimiento-de-incendio-en-capilla-de-la-sangre-de-cristo-catedral-de-managua-presentacion
Beirut Devastated: The New Paradigm May Be Explosive
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 9, 2020
Sometimes the news cycle and the geo-political cycle simply part company. This is one such occasion – the devastation of Beirut Port. What happened there is destined to constitute a major geo-political event – whatever way its sequellae should cascade out and shape the future. There are good, historic reasons for this parting of the ways: One (which explains the regional silence), is that we have not yet had the forensics. Yes, satellite photos galore, but not the nitty-gritty from the ground. Not the forensics.
The main stream media is in a hurry to ‘shape’ its story of the explosion in advance of the Special Tribunal verdict on the death of Rafic Hariri (now due on 18 August), and which is expected to indict Hizbullah members. Yet there are still many unanswered questions. It will be a further few days until these forensics become available from the site. They will of course be contested, and may resolve very little.
Against this silence, awaiting word from key players, the western and Israeli media headlines are churning out ‘everything you need to know’, and their ‘wrap-ups’ from Beirut. It is however, far from wrapped-up. More questions arise as the days pass. And the region has a collective memory of such geo-political inflection points.
The ‘popular’ 1953 uprising against PM Mossadegh, which transpired to be an MI6/CIA coup, and which – subsequently – was to usher in the game-changing Iranian Revolution; the 2005 assassination of Rafic Hariri, which led to Syria’s exit from Lebanon – and on flimsy computer patterning of calls (of unknown content) on ‘families’ of cell phones – was institutionalised into shaping the culpability of Hizbullah, and concomitantly, the movement’s widespread terrorist designation. (Hizbullah has, from the outset, disputed the western/international narrative on the Hariri assassination).
Yet the truth is, that what happened to Rafic Hariri remains still obscured in the fog of partisan war (as maybe will be the fate of this week’s Beirut devastation). In Syria, the Chemical Weapons story for Douma became another ‘turning point’, amidst the roar of U.S. Tomahawk missiles (as Assad became a Chemical Weapons pariah). Yet, documents from the OPCW in last days show the chemical weapons claim was a fabrication.
Yes, the region has good cause to pause. On the one hand, we have not had the forensics on the Port explosion, and on the other, we have Trump’s assertion – later reiterated by him – that he was told by his military generals that what happened in Beirut was “an attack” (a bomb). The President did not “speculate” that it was an attack. He said plainly that his generals had told him so.
This statement cannot entirely be air-brushed out of the calculus. And nor can the exact mirroring of the strangely unified ‘shape’ and mushroom effect of the Beirut main explosion with a similar ‘unexplained explosion’ some months ago in Syria – be discounted. And finally, there is the question: Were there three explosions?
So, we await what is likely to be a perfectly binary outcome. Either the devastation resulted from culpable negligence by the port security authorities, or was a bold attempt to audaciously ‘explode’ the current regional dynamics; to re-shape narratives and radically to re-cast geopolitics. Both are possible.
What then? The Israeli narrative is that the destruction in Beirut will cause the Lebanese population to rise up against Hizballah, and will demand that its munitions be removed away from population centres. (Israel of course would welcome the visibility into Hizbullah’s arsenals that this would entail). The scheduling of an emergency UNSC meeting for Monday, and calls to place Lebanon under international supervision, suggest that western states will be seeking to use the crisis further to weaken and constrain Hizbullah.
March 14th will seek to capitalise on what has happened to mobilise the Lebanese against Hizballah, but it is unlikely to get the domestic resonance that others may anticipate. The port of Beirut historically has been a Sunni patrimony. It has no single security structure, and these latter are no friend to Hizbullah. The port is also open to inspection by UNIFIL. If the management of the facility were to be characterised, it would be said to be one of decay and rampant venality. It is possible that this – culpable negligence leading to accident – was responsible fully or partially, for what happened.
If so, it would seem that public anger may focus more on the corrupt Za’im (the ‘capos’ of the system that have been ravaging the economic structure for their own enrichment for decades), than necessarily be directed at Hizbullah. Indeed, the present government may have a tough time to survive – even though it was not in office at the time any negligence may have occurred. That responsibility belongs to the Old Guard.
Were it to transpire that Trump was broadly correct, and that what occurred was an attack of some sort, it would not be hard to answer to the question cui bono? Israeli journalists are already preening themselves over the ‘event’s auspicious timing: That “Lebanon [now] is bound to implode”, and that the explosion’s ‘shockwaves’ will discomfort Hizbullah for a long time to come, but more especially in advance of the Special Tribunal report.
One Israeli journalist added that the explosion “at Lebanon’s main port sends a warning message to Iran, too, who only about a month ago said it would deploy ships and oil tankers to Lebanon. There were even talks of a vessel that would host a power station, which would give Beirut electricity … Israel and the United States in particular, fear these ships, if they do make it to Lebanon, would start a regular supply line not only of oil, flour and medicine, but also of weapons, ammunitions and missile parts”.
Much then, hangs on the forensics: Was this a bold ‘false flag’ initiative to upturn the strategic status quo (of the kind on which Israel once prided itself), hiding beneath, and making use of a publicly known vulnerability at the Beirut port – the storage of 2,700 kg of ammonium nitrate – in order to destroy Hizbullah’s strategic place in the region, and to shift politics in an unexpected new direction (favourable to Israel)?
Or, a further example of Lebanese élite lassitude and venality, caring only for themselves and nothing for the well-being of its people?
If the former, and events presage a renewed attempt to crush Hizbullah, the new regional paradigm indeed may be explosive.
Australia: Willing Pawn in US Struggle with China
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 07.08.2020
Upon reading Australia’s new defense strategy, one might think its authors believe they are surrounded by nations invaded and destroyed by China with Australia next in line.
News headlines declare, “Australia’s new defence strategy unveils a significant strategic shift in foreign policy to meet new threats from China,” “China the unspoken threat at centre of new defence strategy,” and “Australia to buy ship-killing missiles and shift focus to Indo-Pacific” to “to protect overseas forces, allies and the mainland against rising threats including China.”
The “threat” of China – the articles and the new defense strategy argue – requires Australia to spend billions on weapons bought from the United States and to depend more heavily on the US for Australia’s protection.
Yet in the same breath, Australia’s media openly admits that up until now, Australia’s military has spent much of its time contributing to America’s many and still-ongoing wars of aggression around the globe from Libya and Syria to Iraq and Afghanistan. Most recently, Washington has recruited Australia to help bolster its presence in the Strait of Hormuz in an effort to menace Iran as well.
In one of the above mentioned articles it’s admitted that:
For decades Australia has been quick to send troops, naval vessels and planes to help the United States wage wars on distant shores.
Despite all but admitting the US – not China – is engaged in a global campaign of armed aggression and that Australia is a willing accomplice – Australia’s new defense strategy points the finger at China as the ultimate global threat.
A likely explanation for this contradictory worldview among Australian policymakers is the possibility that deep-pocketed lobbyists from Washington still hold more sway over Australia’s political levers than Australian businesses and certainly the Australian public – and plan to collectively squeeze Australia for billions in arms sales for missiles and other weapon systems pointed at what is otherwise Australia’s largest and most important economic partner – China.
Not only does this fill up the coffers of corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others, but Australia’s apparently hostile posture toward China will most certainly taint relations between the two nations, creating further conflict, and requiring continued and increased weapon sales well into the future.
Should any conflict erupt between the US and China, Australia will find itself a much closer target than the US – a sacrificial pawn of sorts that will bear the full brunt and consequences of any potential US-Chinese hostilities.
Well-Timed “Cyber Attacks” Help Sell an Otherwise Unappealing Defense Strategy
The new defense strategy – long in the works – was unveiled only after a healthy dose of recent and mysterious “cyber attacks” Australian security agencies attributed with no evidence to China.
Again – the irony here is that the US has by far demonstrated itself to be as much a threat in cyberspace as it is to sovereign nations and their physical territory, and much more so than China.
Regarding Australia specifically, a 2013 Guardian article titled, “NSA considered spying on Australians ‘unilaterally’, leaked paper reveals,” would note that a:
The US National Security Agency has considered spying on Australian citizens without the knowledge or consent of the Australian intelligence organisations it partners with, according to a draft 2005 NSA directive kept secret from other countries.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been revealed to have compromised communications worldwide, hacked the phones of national leaders both friend and foe, infiltrated and created backdoors in Western-manufactured high tech hardware, and carried out offensive cyber attacks against nations around the globe.
There is also a growing body of evidence that suggests many attacks attributed to nations like Russia and China – like the one recently carried out against Australia – were either fabricated entirely, or in fact carried out by actors in the US itself.
But what better way is there to sell the otherwise unpopular idea of Australia buying billions of dollars of weapons from America and poisoning relations with China than to cite an alleged act of aggression from China that is nearly impossible to attribute one way or the other? The Western media’s clout has in the past and continues to be much more persuasive than fact or common sense in the short-term.
Other analysts have pointed out Australia’s new defense policy is out of touch with reality. It will also do much more to undermine Australia’s national security than underwrite it.
While it is sensible for nations to ensure they have a credible deterrence against all forms of aggression regardless of the nation of origin, Australia’s defense posture has it facing a nation clearly more interested in economics than conquest, and facing away from a nation not only openly and repeatedly carrying out aggression worldwide, but one increasingly turning on its own allies for not exhibiting enough zeal against its many and multiplying enemies.
While Australia commits billions to buying American weapons and buying into Washington’s continued and growing confrontation with China – in the end – Australia will need to pick between fading with the US economically or finally accepting China’s rise regionally and globally and Australia’s role as a partner with China rather than part of America’s “primacy” over it.
Again – the irony here is of course that the most likely threat to Australia’s national security will not be from a rising China eager to do business with Australia, but a scorned Washington seeking increasingly aggressive means to force Australia back into its traditional role of buttressing US primacy.
Boston Marathon Bombing Death Sentence Vacated by Federal Court of Appeals
By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | July 31, 2020
Today the Federal Court of Appeals for the First Circuit vacated the death sentence concocted for one of the alleged bombers of the alleged Boston Marathon bombing of April, 2013, seven years ago. Some years ago John Remington Graham and I demonstrated conclusively that the FBI’s own evidence proved conclusively that, even if there really was a bombing for which there is much exposed false evidence, the Tsarnaev brothers were not involved. You can find our analysis in my articles archive on my website.
We succeeded in getting our evidence of their innocence in front of the federal appeals court, and we were stunned when the court accepted it as part of the record. We have been hopeful ever since. Me less than John Remington Graham. As a retired defense attorney and public prosecutor and, undeniably, an expert on the US, Canadian, and unwritten British constitutions, Jack, as he is known, hoped that the judges would not accept our evidence of the Tsarnaev brothers’ innocence unless the judges intended to act on it. I myself did not see how they could possibly have the courage to blow up one of the hoaxes used to sustain the fabricated “terrorist threat.” Have you noticed how this “terrorist threat” went away? Why did it go away if it were real? It wasn’t real, and it served its purpose at the time. Now we have new threats, China, American white supremacy, Trump, and new hoaxes—Russiagate, George Floyd’s death at racist white police hands, etc.
The federal appeals court for the First Circuit has disappointed us by only vacating Dzhokhar’s death sentence and not his false conviction. Dzhokhar’s appointed attorney cooperated with the prosecution in convicting him. The lack of representation is sufficient to overturn his conviction. Dzhokhar’s appointed attorney did not raise the question of the FBI’s own evidence that the brothers were innocent. She entered the trial with a guilty plea on behalf of her client. In other words, a trial was not needed. A plea bargain could have been arranged instead. The unnecessary trial itself was a hoax for public relations purposes. The appointed attorney was part of the setup that convicted an innocent person for reasons of a hidden agenda. She put her career before truth. That is what people do in a society that has lost its way. We see it all around us. Truth is the greatest enemy of the ruling class. The presstitutes, professors, and corporations that serve the ruling class, in exchange, enjoy financially comfortable lives, unlike 80% of Americans. The way to succeed in America is to be a whore for the Establishment.
The First Circuit’s ruling does not free Dzhokhar. The ruling instructs the lower federal district court to hold a new trial to determine Dzhokhar’s punishment. I think that this is all the federal appeal court dared to do.
Nevertheless, the federal appeals court ruling opens a wedge by admitting that something was wrong, and Dzhokhar’s punishment has to be reconsidered in a new trial. If there were attorneys and bar associations that served justice rather than career and money, they could use the opening provided by the First Circuit to blow up the hoax conviction of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev together with the hoax false flag Boston Marathon Bombing. This, I think, is the message from the US Appeals Court of the First Circuit. The Appeals Court opens the opportunity, but if no one cares, the Appeals Court is not going to take the hit for declaring an innocent person innocent.
A country whose lawyers no longer will fight for justice, but only for money, is a lost and destroyed country.
Cybereason Announces New Plans to “Accelerate” Access to US Govt Networks Ahead of 2020 Election
By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | July 27, 2020
A cybersecurity firm tied to Israeli intelligence’s Unit 8200 that simulated a series of terrorist attacks occurring on the U.S. 2020 election has announced a new hire with deep ties to the U.S. intelligence and defense communities with the goal of gaining greater access to U.S. government networks.
A cybersecurity company tied to Israeli intelligence and a series of unnerving simulations regarding cyber-terrorist attacks on the upcoming U.S. elections has recently announced a new hire who plans to aid the company in further penetrating the U.S. public sector. Last Wednesday, the company Cybereason announced that it had hired Andrew Borene as its Managing Director for its recently launched U.S. public sector business. Borene, who boasts longstanding ties to the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon, “will accelerate Cybereason’s partner and customer presence in the U.S. public sector,” according to a Cybereason press release.
“My goal is to build a strong business for Cybereason within the U.S. public sector and I am planning to recruit a group of direct support executives, veterans and alumni of the elite [U.S.] military units and agencies that have defended our nation in the information age. I’ll also work to establish a network of the best channel and delivery partners for federal, state and local governments,” Borene said per the press release.
Eric Appel, Cybereason’s General Manager for North American Sales, stated that “We’re excited about Andrew joining Cybereason and the opportunity in the U.S. public sector for Cybereason to make a profound impact on helping the nation’s federal civilian, military, state and local government agencies…”
Borene will likely be successful in his ability to recruit a sales team of prominent alumni from the U.S. intelligence and defense communities to market Cybereason’s products throughout the U.S. government. Prior to joining Cybereason, Borene was a senior advisor to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the intelligence community’s “DARPA” equivalent that is housed within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). He served in that capacity on behalf of intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Prior to that, Borene served as Associate Deputy General Counsel to the Pentagon and was previously a military intelligence officer for the U.S. Marine Corps.
Borene’s private sector experience is also significant, as he was a senior executive at IBM. Notably, the current Chief Information Officer for the CIA, Juliane Gallina, had served alongside Borene as a top IBM executive prior to taking her current position at the agency. In addition, Borene also boasts ties to Wall Street as a veteran of Wells Fargo’s investment banking division.
In addition, Borene has deep ties to Washington’s foreign policy establishment as a “life member” of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and to the national security-think tank nexus through his senior fellowship at the National Security Institute (NSI). NSI’s board includes former NSA directors, Keith Alexander and Michael Hayden (also a former CIA director); former Deputy Defense Secretary and “architect” of the Iraq War, Paul Wolfowitz; former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, David Shedd; and a variety of other former top intelligence and defense officials as well as Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists.
Notably, Borene is the latest addition to Cybereason with ties to the U.S. intelligence and defense communities as the company’s advisors include Robert Bigman, former Chief Information Security Officer for the CIA as well as Peter Sherlock, the former Chief Operating Officer of MITRE corporation, a major intelligence and defense contractor connected to the Ptech-9/11 controversy.
Cybereason: a front for Israeli Military Intelligence
Cybereason’s announcement of its hire of Andrew Borene coincided with its launch of its new “U.S. public sector business,” meaning that Cybereason now seeks to have its cybersecurity software running on even more of the U.S. government’s most classified networks. Cybereason, for years, has already been running on several sensitive U.S. government networks through its partnerships with IT contractors for intelligence and defense, such as Lockheed Martin (also a Cybereason investor), WWT and Leidos. However, Borene’s hire and this new publicly announced pivot towards the U.S. public sector clearly demonstrates the company’s interest in further deepening its presence on U.S. government networks.
Cybereason’s pivot is concerning for several reasons. First, its co-founders are alumni of Israel’s Unit 8200, an elite unit of the Israeli Intelligence corps that is part of the IDF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence and is involved mainly in signal intelligence, surveillance, cyberwarfare and code decryption. It is also well-known for its surveillance of Palestinian civilians and for using intercepted communications as blackmail in order to procure informants among Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank.
In addition, all three Cybereason co-founders, after leaving Unit 8200, went on to work for two private Israel-based tech/telecom companies with a notorious history of aggressive espionage against the U.S. government: Amdocs and Comverse Infosys (the latter is now known as Verint Systems Inc.). This raises the possibility that Cybereason software could potentially be used as a backdoor by unauthorized actors, given that the company’s co-founders all previously worked for firms that have a history of placing backdoors into U.S. telecommunications and electronic infrastructure as well as aggressively spying on U.S. federal agencies.
Also notable is the fact that the company’s current CEO and co-founder Lior Div was much more than the average Unit 8200 officer during his time in the unit, as he “served as a commander [in Unit 8200] and carried out some of the world’s largest cyber offensive campaigns against nations and cybercrime groups. For his achievements, he received the Medal of Honor, the highest honor bestowed upon Unit 8200 members,” according to his biography. Troublingly, in an interview that Div gave to TechCrunch last year, Div stated that his work at Cybereason is “the continuation of the six years of training and service he spent working with the Israeli army’s 8200 Unit.”
This is particularly noteworthy given that Israel’s government has openly admitted that an on-going intelligence operation, first initiated in 2012 – the year Cybereason was founded, involves Israeli military intelligence and intelligence operations that had previously done “in house” (i.e. as part of Unit 8200, Mossad, etc.) being spun off into private companies, specifically start-ups in the “cyber” realm.
This operation is part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “deliberate policy” to have former members of Israel’s “military and intelligence units … merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners” in order to make it all but impossible for major corporations and foreign governments to boycott Israel and to also to ensure that Israel becomes the world’s dominant “cyber power.”
One notable report on this policy, published by Israeli outlet Calcalist Tech, interviewed dozens of Israeli military, intelligence and government officials and noted that “since 2012, cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that in some cases were built for this exact purpose.” The article also states that beginning in 2012, Israel’s intelligence and military intelligence agencies began to outsource “activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber technologies.”
“Simulating” the Cancellation of the 2020 Election
In light of Cybereason’s background and the “acceleration” of their presence on U.S. government networks, the timing of their redoubled efforts to court the U.S. public sector add additional layers of concern given that it precedes the U.S. 2020 election by a matter of months. Since last year, Cybereason has conducted multiple simulations focused on the 2020 election, which were attended by federal officials from the FBI, DHS and the U.S. Secret Service and all of which ended in disaster. In those simulations, the 2020 election was ultimately canceled and martial law was then declared due to the chaos created by a group of hackers led by Cybereason employees.
Notably, Cybereason stood to gain nothing financially from the simulations given that their software could not have prevented the attacks waged against the U.S.’ electoral infrastructure in the exercise and the company framed their hosting of the simulations as merely “altruistic” because of their professed desire to help “protect” U.S. election infrastructure. The attacks conducted in the simulations by Cybereason employees included creating power grid blackouts, the use of deep fakes to sow confusion, creating havoc with municipal sewage systems and crashing self-driving cars into voters waiting in line to cast their ballots, killing 32 and injuring over a hundred people.
In the months since I first wrote about Cybereason and their 2020 “doomsday” simulations back in January, U.S. government officials and mass media alike have been warning that these same types of attacks that Cybereason simulated are likely to come to pass on this upcoming election day, scheduled for November 3rd of this year. More recently, in less than a week, headlines like “Election Security Experts Expect ‘Chaos’ Unless Action Taken,” “New York’s Pandemic Voting ‘Chaos’ Set to Go Nationwide in November,” and “Foreign adversaries ‘seeking to compromise’ presidential campaigns, intel warns,” among others, have been published in major U.S. media outlets.
While these narratives have asserted that China, Russia and/or Iran will be to blame for such attacks, it is worth noting that a tight-knit web of Israeli state-owned and private companies tied to Israeli military intelligence now run the software controlling key parts of the power grid in New York, California and elsewhere in the U.S.; are the main global producers of deep fakes; and the main providers of “security” software for self-driving and semi-self-driving cars, the quantity of which on U.S. streets has grown dramatically as a result of the coronavirus crisis.
With Cybereason’s newly announced push to run its software on critical U.S. government networks at both the federal and state levels, the company’s history of simulating terror attacks on critical U.S. infrastructure and their openly admitted and on-going ties to Israeli military intelligence deserve more scrutiny than ever as the U.S. election draws closer.
Israeli duplicity about 2014 invasion ‘Operation Brothers Keeper’
Operation Brothers Keeper, an Israeli initiative supposedly launched to rescue three Jewish Israeli teenagers who had been kidnapped.
By Kathryn Shihadah | If Americans Knew | July 15, 2020
“Operation Brothers Keeper” has a nice ring to it, but the name represents months of duplicity by Israeli leaders, not only toward their own people, but toward the world, in order to perpetrate injustices on the people of Palestine.
The summer of 2014, when Operation Brothers Keeper emerged, was an exceptionally violent season in a decades-long stretch of violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories – a conflict defined by the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and against confiscation of their land; a conflict that has consistently seen many times more Palestinian casualties than Israelis.
Palestinians took to the streets that summer for much the same reason they always had: to struggle against oppression. The Israeli military came out to defend Israel’s status as oppressors.
Some context
Operation Brothers Keeper (OBK) was an invasion of the Palestinian West Bank, launched after the kidnapping of three Jewish Israeli teenagers. (This presaged its massive July invasion of Gaza, “Operation Protective Edge.”)
Perhaps, in the Israeli consciousness, the West Bank invasion was an isolated event – but for Palestinians, OBK was another in a long line of oppressive tactics within a framework of illegal occupation and injustice.
Maps show Palestinian loss of land from Israel’s 1948 creation through the present
In the early 20th century, massive Jewish immigration had caused concern among the indigenous Palestinians in the land; by 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and land, most to never return as it became part of a new Jewish state. 1967 saw the occupation of all remaining Palestinian territories; 2008-9 had witnessed Israel’s devastating invasion of Gaza that killed 1,400 Palestinians (and 9 Israelis). In between these events, Israel had kept the Palestinian people under constant oppression – and the Palestinian people had resisted.
In late 2012, Israel had invaded the Palestinian Gaza Strip in a conflict that lasted 8 days before a ceasefire was put in place.
At that time, Israel promised to end its attacks on Gaza by land, sea, and air, stop assassinations of Gazan officials, and lift its blockade of Gaza, then in its 5th year; Hamas leaders in Gaza vowed to end rocket fire toward Israel (rockets that had killed 21 Israelis in 12 years).
Gaza held up its end of the deal: throughout 2013, rockets from Gaza were few and far between, and just one Israeli was killed in the vicinity. (5 more Israelis were killed elsewhere.)
Israel did not keep its promises: its military invaded Gaza and shot at Palestinian farmers and fishermen; the blockade remained in place, keeping food, medicine, and other staples out of the hands of those who needed them desperately. (Read here about the “period of calm” during the first 3 months after the 2012 ceasefire, during which Israelis experienced calm, but Palestinians were attacked on a daily basis.)
Nine Gazans were killed in 2013, over 30 other Palestinians were killed elsewhere. In the first 5 months of 2014 – before the Israeli teens were kidnapped – dozens of Palestinians, some of them teens, and 2 Israelis, were killed.
The Israeli blockade of Gaza remained in place (it is still in place today).
Kidnapping
On June 12th, the three Israelis, aged 16 – 19, were kidnapped while hitchhiking.
All three were yeshiva (Jewish religious school) students, and would have almost certainly become soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Israel practices universal conscription of both males and females at age 18 – although it is possible to delay or even avoid military service by continuing religious education after high school, as was likely the case with the older kidnapping victim. (Go here to read about religious extremism in some Israeli yeshivot.)
One of the teens called an emergency number for help. Along with his voice, the call also recorded shouting in Arabic and several gunshots.
Several hours later, parents of one of the boys reported him missing, at which point the police began to make the connection with the emergency call, which they originally believed to be a prank.
Netanyahu at press conference with DM Moshe Ya’alon during Operation Brothers Keeper (AFP)
Deception and brutality
The Forward reports that the Israeli government “had known almost from the beginning that the boys were dead. It maintained the fiction that it hoped to find them alive as a pretext to dismantle Hamas’ West Bank operations.”
The prime suspects, Palestinians, were identified within hours of the incident, and known to be rogue, with “a reputation for attacking Israeli civilian targets” and regularly acting “counter to the policies being advocated by [Hamas].” Their family disclosed within a day of the kidnapping that the men had disappeared.
Instead of broadcasting photos of the suspects and preparing the country for the inevitable locating of bodies rather than hostages, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu immediately imposed a gag order on the media.
Even the parents of the kidnapped teens were led to believe that the boys were still alive.
Publicly, Netanyahu consistently claimed that he knew “for a fact” that Hamas was behind the kidnapping – in fact, at no point did any evidence point to Hamas’ participation in the incident; its leaders consistently denied involvement.
Meanwhile, ironically, the Israeli police cautioned the public against “spreading rumors on social media.”
On June 15th, Netanyahu launched Operation Brothers Keeper, characterizing it as a “hostage rescue operation.” Behind the scenes, however, he commissioned 2,500 Israeli soldiers, plus special forces, on a rampage through the West Bank in search not of hostages, but of Hamas members. According to The Nation :
Israel arrested approximately 800 Palestinians without charge or trial, killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings.
The operation kept 300,000 Palestinians under curfew; movement was restricted for another 600,000 – a form of illegal collective punishment.
A Palestinian woman cries in her home after a raid by Israeli troops as part of Operation Brothers Keeper, Sunday, June 22,2014. (AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh)
As far as Israeli citizens knew, the killers could be anyone, anywhere; the vast majority were therefore supportive of whatever measures their leaders chose to take. All over Israel, and in Jewish communities around the world, rallies and prayer meetings sought – in vain – the boys’ safe return – even while the Israeli government knew they were already dead.
In Gaza – where Hamas is the duly elected governing party – Hamas leaders watched as Israel used them as a pretext for the spate of arrests. Hamas had restrained itself and other resistance factions since the end of the 2012 conflict, waiting for Israel to fulfill its promise to end the blockade. But now, Israel was blaming Hamas for the kidnappings, re-arresting Hamas prisoners who had been freed, and maintaining the blockade. Hamas began allowing rockets to fly out of Gaza again.
United Nations
On June 17th, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, spoke to the Security Council. In his speech, he blamed Hamas for the kidnapping (without proof) and demanded international pressure on Hamas to release the boys. Prosor displayed the hashtag that Israel and its partisans all over the world were using to draw attention to the fabricated crisis: #BringBackOurBoys.
On June 21st, Netanyahu repeated his canard to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: “the information in Israel’s hands unequivocally indicates that Hamas is responsible for the abduction of the youths”; Netanyahu went on to falsely link the Palestinian resistance with ISIS when he said “we are witnessing the unrestrained brutality of Islamic terrorism, both in Israel and around us.”
On June 23rd, the U.N. Security Council attempted unsuccessfully to pass a resolution condemning the kidnapping of the Israeli teens: some countries wanted to add strong language condemning Israel’s violent security sweep; the US insisted that it would not sign any statement that included a reference to Israeli actions.
On June 24th, the mother of one of the kidnapped boys addressed the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), pleading for international assistance in bringing the boys back. (Her trip was paid for by UN Watch, a group that monitors what it calls “the continuing discriminatory treatment of Israel in the UN system” and pushes for “the removal of UN personnel who are considered critical of Israel.”)
In the same UNHRC session, many delegates and representatives from human rights organizations criticized Israel’s human rights record, especially its recent crackdown.
Then IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz visits soldiers as they take part in Operation Brothers Keeper to locate three kidnapped Israeli teens, June 24, 2014. (IDF Spokesperson/Flash90)
Kidnapped boys’ bodies found
On June 30th, 15 days after the Israeli leadership started its deceptive “campaign” to bring the boys back alive, the bodies were located ten minutes away from where they had last been seen.
The discovery was made not by the thousands of Israeli military or police – they were as much as 130 miles away, still ransacking Palestinian homes and arresting Palestinians – but by a volunteer search party.
The shallow grave was on the property of one of the suspects, whose identity had also been known for weeks, and whose property should have been considered suspect.
Within hours, Israeli forces demolished the family homes of the two suspects, an illegal but common practice in Israel.
The next day, July 1st, a funeral was held for the three teens. PM Netanyahu eulogized,
A deep and wide moral abyss separates us from our enemies. They sanctify death while we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty while we sanctify compassion. This is the secret of our strength; it is the foundation of our unity.
This fraudulent profession of Israeli innocence flew in the face of facts that Mr. Netanyahu surely knew: the Israeli army had killed 19 Palestinians in the first quarter of 2014, and more in May and June. (Before the deaths of the three teens, two Israelis had been killed in 2014.)
Netanyahu’s eulogy also ignored the fact that Palestinians – specifically, Hamas – had been relatively subdued since 2012. As The Forward stated in “How Politics and Lies Triggered an Unintended War,” “The staged agony of the kidnap search created, probably unintentionally, what amounts to a mass, worldwide attack of post-traumatic stress flashback.”
Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) reported that late on July 1st, after the bodies were found, several Palestinians were killed. Israeli settlers also started constructing two new illegal outposts. Some settlers (and politicians) believe “the settlement enterprise is the most appropriate response to Palestinian terror… Our enemies will incite and we will establish” – not making the connection that building on stolen Palestinian land is incitement itself.
Incitement
From the moment the bodies of the missing teens were discovered, Israeli leaders incited their people to revenge, as described by Electronic Intifada :
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led the pack, calling the killers of the youths “human animals” and stating “Hamas is responsible. Hamas will pay.”
Former Israeli lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari posted a video and a statement…”We are living in a “jungle,” Ben-Ari said, calling Palestinian children “little terrorists”…
(Elsewhere, Ben-Ari called on Israel to “kill terrorists in public hangings.”)
Housing minister Uri Ariel called for the extrajudicial executions of leaders of Hamas and for Israel to “start a wave of construction in the settlements in response to the murder of the abductees”…
Tzipi Hotovely, another Likud lawmaker and deputy minister, wrote that “Israel must declare a war of annihilation of Hamas, which is responsible for the murder, and return to the assassination policy.”
Economy minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the ultra-anti-Palestinian Jewish Home party, declared “Murderers of children and those who direct them cannot be forgiven. Now is a time for actions, not words.”
With this highly visible incitement, it came as no surprise that after the funeral, crowds of Israelis – including young children – chanted “Death to the Arabs.” Mobs marched through the streets, attacking Palestinians as they went.
Mohammad Abukhdeir was killed by Jewish Israelis on July 2, 2014. (Facebook)
Revenge killing
On July 2nd, a Palestinian teenager named Mohammad Abukhdeir was kidnapped and burned alive near Jerusalem.
At first, Israel’s leaders imposed another gag order; meanwhile, Israeli police started rumors that Abukhdeir had been killed by his own family for being gay.
It wasn’t long before the truth had to come out: the torture/murder had been committed by three Jewish Israelis – two of them teenagers themselves. They eventually faced trial and in 2016 received sentences from 21 years to life. Their family homes were not demolished.
PM Netanyahu’s condolences to the Abukhdeir family condemned the murder and promised justice; then he went on to address his constituents, again claiming Israeli innocence:
I know that in our society, the society of Israel, there is no place for such murderers. And that’s the difference between us and our neighbors. They consider murderers to be heroes. They name public squares after them. We don’t. [editor’s note: this is false.] We condemn them and we put them on trial and we’ll put them in prison.
Al Jazeera reminded its readers that Abukhdeir’s abduction was not an isolated incident: “for Palestinians, the detention of their children, running into thousands, is experienced as kidnapping at an Israeli-state level.” The vast majority of these events – which frequently include torture – go unpunished.
In 2014, Israel’s military kidnapped 6,059 Palestinians. A spokesman for the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees stated on December 29th, 2014,
“There hasn’t been a single day that did not witness the abduction of Palestinians. On average, the army has kidnapped 505 Palestinians each month; approximately 17 a day.”
Since 1967, Israel has detained more than 50,000 Palestinian children; the Palestinian government has never detained an Israeli child. Additionally, a total of over 2,400 Palestinian children and 139 Israeli children have been killed since 2000.
Israeli teens’ killers tracked down
On August 5th, one suspect in the kidnapping and killing of the Israeli teens was arrested.
On September 23rd, the primary suspects were surrounded by Israeli military forces in a building in Hebron. An IDF spokesperson later stated, “We opened fire, they returned fire and they were killed in the exchange.”
At that point, Operation Brothers Keeper was officially closed.
Stay tuned for “war”
On July 8th, the Israel launched an incursion into Gaza, which in 50 days would bring about the deaths of 73 Israelis (9% civilians) and 2,250 Palestinians (65% civilians, 501 children). This travesty will be discussed in an upcoming post.
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Major rabbi says non-Jews are donkeys, created to serve Jews
By Khalid Amayreh, in occupied East Jerusalem | The People’s Voice | October 18, 2010
A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”
Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers. … continue
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