Victoria Nuland Alert
The foreign interventionists really hate Russia
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • June 23, 2020
It is difficult to find anything good to say about Donald Trump, but the reality is that he has not started any new wars, though he has come dangerously close in the cases of Venezuela and Iran and there would be considerable incentive in the next four months to begin something to bolster his “strong president” credentials and to serve as a distraction from coronavirus and black lives matter.
Be that as it may, Trump will have to run hard to catch up to the record set by his three predecessors Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bush was an out-and-out neoconservative, or at least someone who was easily led, including in his administration Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Reuel Gerecht, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Eliot Abrams, Dan Senor and Scooter Libby. He also had the misfortune of having to endure Vice President Dick Cheney, who thought he was actually the man in charge. All were hawks who believed that the United States had the right to do whatever it considered necessary to enhance its own security, to include invading other countries, which led to Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. still has forces stationed nearly twenty years later.
Clinton and Obama were so-called liberal interventionists who sought to export something called democracy to other countries in an attempt to make them more like Peoria. Clinton bombed Afghanistan and Sudan as a diversion when the press somehow caught wind of his arrangement with Monica Lewinsky and Obama, aided by Mrs. Clinton, chose to destroy Libya. Obama was also the first president to set up a regular Tuesday morning session to review a list of American citizens who would benefit from being killed by drone.
So the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance. And, by either yardstick all-in-all, Trump looks pretty good, but there has nevertheless been a resurgence of neocon-think in his administration. The America the exceptional mindset is best exemplified currently by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who personifies the belief that the United States is empowered by God to play only by its own rules when dealing with other nations. That would include following the advice that has been attributed to leading neocon Michael Ledeen, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
One of the first families within the neocon/liberal interventionist firmament is the Kagans, Robert and Frederick. Frederick is a Senior Fellow at the neocon American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly heads the bizarrely named Institute for the Study of War. Victoria Nuland, wife of Robert, is currently the Senior Counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. That means that Victoria aligns primarily as a liberal interventionist, as does her husband, who is also at Brookings. She is regarded as a protégé of Hillary Clinton and currently works with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once declared that killing 500,000 Iraqi children using sanctions was “worth it.” Nuland also has significant neocon connections through her having been a member of the staff assembled by Dick Cheney.
Nuland, many will recall, was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013-2014. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters.
Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. It is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget, but Washington has long believed in a global double standard for evaluating its own behavior.
Nuland is most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create in Ukraine. For Nuland, the replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with the real enemy, Moscow, over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.
And make no mistake about Nuland’s broader intention at that time to expand the conflict and directly confront Russia. In Senate testimony she cited how the administration was “providing support to other frontline states like Moldova and Georgia.” Her use of the word “frontline” is suggestive.
Victoria Nuland was playing with fire. Russia, as the only nation with the military capability to destroy the U.S., was and is not a sideshow like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Taliban’s Afghanistan. Backing Moscow into a corner with no way out by using threats and sanctions is not good policy. Washington has many excellent reasons to maintain a stable relationship with Moscow, including counter-terrorism efforts, and little to gain from moving in the opposite direction. Russia is not about to reconstitute the Warsaw Pact and there is no compelling reason to return to a Cold War footing by either arming Ukraine or permitting it to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Victoria Nuland has just written a long article for July/August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine on the proper way for the United States manage what she sees as the Russian “threat.” It is entitled “How a Confident America Should Deal With Russia.” Foreign Affairs, it should be observed, is an establishment house organ produced by the Council on Foreign Relations which provides a comfortable perch for both neocons and liberal interventionists.
Nuland’s view is that the United States lost confidence in its own “ability to change the game” against Vladimir Putin, who has been able to play “a weak hand well because the United States and its allies have let him, allowing Russia to violate arms control treaties, international law, the sovereignty of its neighbors, and the integrity of elections in the United States and Europe… Washington and its allies have forgotten the statecraft that won the Cold War and continued to yield results for many years after. That strategy required consistent U.S. leadership at the presidential level, unity with democratic allies and partners, and a shared resolve to deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the Kremlin. It also included incentives for Moscow to cooperate and, at times, direct appeals to the Russian people about the benefits of a better relationship. Yet that approach has fallen into disuse, even as Russia’s threat to the liberal world has grown.”
What Nuland writes would make perfect sense if one were to share her perception of Russia as a rogue state threatening the “liberal world.” She sees Russian rearmament under Putin as a threat even though it was dwarfed by the spending of NATO and the U.S. She shares her fear that Putin might seek “…reestablishing a Russian sphere of influence in eastern Europe and from vetoing the security arrangements of his neighbors. Here, a chasm soon opened between liberal democracies and the still very Soviet man leading Russia, especially on the subject of NATO enlargement. No matter how hard Washington and its allies tried to persuade Moscow that NATO was a purely defensive alliance that posed no threat to Russia, it continued to serve Putin’s agenda to see Europe in zero-sum terms.”
Nuland’s view of NATO enlargement is so wide of the mark that it borders on being a fantasy. Of course, Russia would consider a military alliance on its doorstep to be a threat, particularly as a U.S. Administration had provided assurances that expansion would not take place. She goes on to suggest utter nonsense, that Putin’s great fear over the NATO expansion derives from his having “…always understood that a belt of increasingly democratic, prosperous states around Russia would pose a direct challenge to his leadership model and risk re-infecting his own people with democratic aspirations.”
Nuland goes on and on in a similar vein, but her central theme is that Russia must be confronted to deter Vladimir Putin, a man that she clearly hates and depicts as if he were a comic book version of evil. Some of her analysis is ridiculous, as “Russian troops regularly test the few U.S. forces left in Syria to try to gain access to the country’s oil fields and smuggling routes. If these U.S. troops left, nothing would prevent Moscow and Tehran from financing their operations with Syrian oil or smuggled drugs and weapons.”
Like most zealots, Nuland is notably lacking in any sense of self-criticism. She conspired to overthrow a legitimately elected democratic government in Ukraine because it was considered too friendly to Russia. She accuses the Kremlin of having “seized” Crimea, but fails to see the heavy footprint of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq and as a regional enabler of Israeli and Saudi war crimes. One wonders if she is aware that Russia, which she sees as expansionistic, has only one overseas military base while the United States has more than a thousand.
Nuland clearly chooses not to notice the White House’s threats against countries that do not toe the American line, most recently Iran and Venezuela, but increasingly also China on top of perennial enemy Russia. None of those nations threaten the United States and all the kinetic activity and warnings are forthcoming from a gentleman named Mike Pompeo, speaking from Washington, not from “undemocratic” leaders in the Kremlin, Tehran, Caracas or Beijing.
Victoria Nuland recommends that “The challenge for the United States in 2021 will be to lead the democracies of the world in crafting a more effective approach to Russia—one that builds on their strengths and puts stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens.” Interestingly, that might be regarded as seeking to interfere in the workings of a foreign government, reminiscent of the phony case made against Russia in 2016. And it is precisely what Nuland did in fact do in Ukraine.
Nuland has a lot more to say in her article and those who are interested in the current state of interventionism in Washington should not ignore her. Confronting Russia as some kind of ideological enemy is a never-ending process that leaves both sides poorer and less free. It is appropriate for Moscow to have an interest in what goes on right on top of its border while the United States five thousand miles away and possessing both a vastly larger economy and armed forces can, one would think, relax a bit and unload the burden of being the world’s self-appointed policeman.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Bolton claims Iran had yellowcake uranium, echoing bogus claims that led to Iraq war
RT | June 22, 2020
Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton has claimed Israeli agents found “yellowcake uranium” in Iran in 2018, channeling the discredited intelligence used by the George W. Bush administration to justify invading Iraq.
Israel’s Mossad retrieved “human-processed uranium” that was “perhaps yellowcake (uranium oxide in solid form)” during a “daring raid on Iran’s nuclear archives” in 2018, the mustachioed warmonger declared in his controversial Trump administration memoir, ‘The Room Where It Happened’. The discovery, Bolton alleged, was substantiated when the International Atomic Energy Agency subsequently conducted an inspection of Iran’s Turquzabad site. Israeli media trumpeted the vague, unverified claim over the weekend, publishing selected quotes from the book.
Bolton insisted the discovery “could well be evidence that Iran kept alive its ‘Amad plan’ for nuclear weapons after it was supposedly ended in 2004.” However, despite the wild claims leveled against Tehran by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in his theatrical speech following the raid, the IAEA denied Tel Aviv had uncovered any evidence that would change the international understanding of Iran’s nuclear activities. Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, meanwhile, accused Netanyahu of deliberately tailoring his speech to give the Trump administration a rationale for withdrawing from the JCPOA nuclear deal – which it did, much to Bolton’s delight.
While the Trump administration has thus far stopped short of bombing Iran, hope springs eternal – Bolton has pushed for war with the Islamic Republic for years. So has Netanyahu, who has claimed since 1992 that Iran’s nuclear bomb was right around the corner and has been trying to convince the US to share his view ever since.
The former Trump official’s yellowcake claims – tellingly couched in qualifying words like “perhaps” and “could be” – carry disturbing echoes of the phony intelligence used by Bush’s administration to justify the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. Bolton himself had pushed to have unsubstantiated allegations that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger as part of a top-secret nuclear weapons program included in a ‘fact sheet’ on Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” drafted by the administration in 2002. Even after US diplomat Joseph Wilson traveled to the African nation and found no factual basis for the yellowcake claims – a conclusion backed by French intelligence, the CIA, and the US Embassy in Niger – the neoconservative core of the Bush administration, including Bolton, clung to the yellowcake story. No WMDs were found after the US invaded Iraq the following year – not that Bolton ever apologized.
The Iraqi yellowcake story is widely agreed to have been the result of a skilled forgery pushed by regime-change enthusiasts who wanted Iraq’s government toppled and didn’t care how much they had to mangle the truth to get it. Neocon hawks like Bolton and fellow Bush administration heavyweights Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle had been championing war with Iraq for over a decade, repeatedly and unsuccessfully pushing then-president Bill Clinton to invade before they finally got their wish with Bush in 2003.
As CIA analysts at the time explained, refining yellowcake into the material used in nuclear bombs requires extensive processing and sophisticated technology Iraq did not have – never mind the logistical difficulties inherent in moving the 500 tons Hussein was supposedly purchasing out of Niger. Additionally, Iraq was already sitting on over 550 tons of uranium oxide. So why, they wondered, would Baghdad risk arousing international suspicions by buying more if it was embarking on a clandestine nuclear program? But Bolton and his cohort were known for their persistence; “Stick that baby in there 47 times, and on the 47th time it will stay” was how the Pentagon’s Larry Wilkerson described their modus operandi to Vanity Fair. Even after the IAEA itself declared the Niger documents to be forgeries, the Bush administration plunged ahead with the war that has turned the Middle East into a chaotic quagmire of political instability, terrorism, and human suffering.
Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA deal has been repeatedly certified, even as Bolton and his fellow hawks attempted to discredit the inspection process. With the ink on the deal scarcely dry in 2015, Bolton was already claiming Iran was operating “secret nuclear facilities” and calling for the Obama administration to bomb the country. He then spent much of his time as Trump’s national security advisor advocating for a military response to any perceived slight – especially after the US exited the JCPOA. At the same time, Israel continues to push “bombshell” reports alleging violations of the deal, with the most recent coming earlier this month and based on data Tehran claims was supplied by Mossad.
Bolton has been industriously milking his 15 minutes of fame, heralded by the media as a #Resistance hero ever since his book skewering the Trump administration was copiously leaked to mainstream outlets, over the president’s protestations. The tome contains a number of questionable revelations, including that Trump thought Venezuela was “really part of the US” and invading it would be “cool” until Russian President Vladimir Putin bent his ear, discouraging the idea. Trump slammed the book as the fictional musings of a “sick puppy.”
Bolton’s statements on Trump-Kim summit are ‘distorted,’ Seoul says
RT | June 22, 2020
South Korea said on Monday that accounts by former US National Security Advisor John Bolton of discussions between leaders of the United States and the two Koreas in his upcoming book are inaccurate and distorted.
Reports have cited Bolton as writing that South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is keen to improve relations with Pyongyang, had raised unrealistic expectations with both the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and US President Donald Trump, for his own “unification” agenda.
“It does not reflect accurate facts and substantially distorts facts,” South Korea’s national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, said in a statement referring to Bolton’s description of the consultations.
Chung did not elaborate on specific areas but said the publication set a “dangerous” precedent. “Unilaterally publishing consultations made based on mutual trust violates the basic principles of diplomacy and could severely damage future negotiations,” Reuters quoted him as saying.
Epstein Case: Documentaries Won’t Touch Tales of Intel Ties
By Elizabeth Vos | Consortium News | June 17, 2020
Investigation Discovery premiered a three-hour special, “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” on May 31, the first segment in a three-part series, that focused on Epstein’s August 2019 death in federal custody. The series addresses Epstein’s alleged co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, his links with billionaire Leslie Wexner, founder of the Victoria Secrets clothing line, and others, as well as the non-prosecution deal he was given.
The special followed on the heels of Netflix’s release of “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich,” a mini-series that draws on a book of the same name by James Patterson.
Promotional material for “Who Killed Jeffery Epstein?” promises that: “… exclusive interviews and in-depth investigations reveal new clues about his seedy underworld, privileged life and controversial death. The three-hour special looks to answer the questions surrounding the death of this enigmatic figure.” Netflix billed its series this way: “Stories from survivors fuel this docuseries examining how convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein used his wealth and power to carry out his abuses.”
Neither documentary however deals at all with Epstein’s suspected ties to the world of intelligence.
Absent from both are Maxwell’s reported links to Israeli intelligence through her father, Robert Maxwell, former owner of The New York Daily News and The Mirror newspaper in London. Maxwell essentially received a state funeral in Israel and was buried on the Mount of Olives after he mysteriously fell off his yacht in 1991 in the Atlantic Ocean.
In an interview with Consortium News, former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe said Epstein did not work with Mossad. “Military intelligence was who he was working with,” said Ben-Menashe. “Big difference,” he said. “He never worked with Mossad, and Robert Maxwell never did, either. It was military intelligence.”
Ben-Menashe claimed Robert Maxwell was Epstein’s “tie over. Robert Maxwell was the conduit. The financial conduit.”
In “Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” a book published in December, Ben-Menashe is quoted as saying he worked with Robert Maxwell who introduced his daughter and Epstein to Israeli intelligence, after which they engaged in a blackmail operation for Israel. “[Epstein] was taking photos of politicians f**king fourteen-year-old girls — if you want to get it straight. They [Epstein and Maxwell] would just blackmail people, they would just blackmail people like that,” he says in the book.
Ben-Menashe also claims that Robert Maxwell had attempted to blackmail Mossad. “He really lost his compass once he started playing these games with people,” he told Consortium News.
Prince Andrew
About a week after both documentaries premiered, the U.S. Department of Justice approached the U.K.’s Home Office requesting that Prince Andrew answer questions in the U.K. over his links to Epstein, The Mirror reported. If he refuses, the paper said, U.S. prosecutors would ask that he be brought to a British court to respond to their questions. Andrew’s lawyers say he three times agreed to be questioned by U.S. authorities, but it is not known if Andrew attached conditions, such as immunity.
Both documentaries mention Prince Andrew in the context of allegations about him from one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre. But neither film goes into much detail about Andrew’s role in the Epstein operation, which Ben-Menashe said, was to lure powerful men into Epstein’s orbit.
“One of the things that are really key to this is that he [Epstein] befriended a very useful idiot called Prince Andrew,” Ben-Menashe told CN. “Now what really happened was that this Prince Andrew, with nothing to do, was having fun with this, and Prince Andrew brings in the fancy people, invites them to play golf with him, and then takes them out for fun. Then Epstein shows up, and these people are basically blackmailed.”
“The only person that can talk, that probably knows quite a bit, is the great prince,” Ben-Menashe said. “He was with him [Epstein] all the time. I really don’t know what his future is going to be like, either.”
Since a number of influential figures were named in a lawsuit filed by Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell the day before Epstein was found dead in his federal prison cell in New York, Ben-Menashe said: “I’m starting to think that lawsuit was his death sentence, because people didn’t want to be named. That’s my guess, it’s just a guess. Obviously, somebody decided that he had to go.”
Epstein’s death was ruled a “suicide” by New York’s chief medical examiner. A pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother said it was homicide.
An Angry Call
Just before Ben-Menashe spoke to Consortium News on Monday, he said he had received an angry telephone call from Israel’s Channel 13 television station.
“They called me, and they went wild: ‘What, you believe Israel would use little girls? You are saying that? You are insulting the nation, you are making us anathema around the world.’ I said, ‘The truth is the truth.’ And Jeffrey Epstein’s story is something that nobody wanted to hear. He was working with the Israelis, he was working with Maxwell,” Ben-Menashe said.
He added: “It’s a very bad story, and I can see why the Israelis are so concerned about it. I believe [Channel 13] were expressing anger, and I believe this was a message. I don’t like messages like that… it has to do with the timing and these stories coming out about Epstein. They [Israel] are starting to become anathema to the world, this adds to it — the Epstein story.”
Victims’ Voices
The Netflix and Investigation Discovery productions allow survivors to recount their experiences in interviews as well as taped police recordings and focus on the sweetheart plea deal provided to Epstein by former Trump Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta during Acosta’s tenure as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
Each series outlines Epstein’s relationships with Wexner, Maxwell, and a variety of elite figures. Investigation Discovery focuses on the controversy surrounding Epstein’s death while Netflix’s “Filthy Rich” examines the second attempt to prosecute Epstein in the context of the Me Too movement.
The Netflix series describes the initial investigation of Epstein as it shifted from the state to the federal level, and airs allegations that Florida journalists covering the story were threatened. Netflix also interviews psychologist Dr. Kathryn Stamoulis, a specialist in adolescent sexuality, who gives a description of Epstein’s targeting and grooming of young girls. Epstein survivor Giuffre later describes in the film being groomed to tolerate exploitation and sex trafficking as part of a “deranged family.”
The final section of the fourth episode in Netflix’s miniseries includes a survivor stating that this was not simply an Epstein operation, but an “international sex trafficking ring that reached all over the world.” Epstein is described as a “very small piece in a huge network.” But the documentary goes no further than that.
As in the Belgian Dutroux case, victims alleged that multiple abusers acted in concert with each other, using blackmail to keep each other in line. In both instances, authorities and the media portrayed the abuse as chiefly the product of an aberrant lone predator.
“This wouldn’t be the only time this happened, but this guy got way over his head,” Ben-Menashe told Consortium News. “He probably was blackmailing too many people, too many powerful people. And then, this is a story the Israelis wouldn’t want to come out, anyway.”
Thriving in Murky Waters
Another angle the documentaries did not approach was the environment in which Epstein thrived like an algae bloom in stagnant water, that is, within a long history of child trafficking rings linked with intelligence agencies, often with the aim of gathering blackmail material. It was within this reality that Epstein appeared to be rendered untouchable.
Omitting the intelligence aspect of Epstein’s history allows the Establishment media to portray his case as a mysterious and unsolvable aberration, rather than perhaps a continuation of business-as-usual amongst those in power.
The glaring refusal to address Epstein’s intelligence involvement becomes clear when Investigation Discovery and Netflix’s programs discuss the role of Acosta in securing Epstein’s “sweetheart” plea deal, but do not reference Acosta’s widely reported explanation as to why Acosta agreed to the deal. As reported by The Daily Beast, Acosta claimed that he cut the non-prosecution deal because he had been told that “Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”
Independent journalist Whitney Webb has reported on Epstein’s many ties with intelligence, telling CNLive! in August last year that there is evidence this included with the CIA.
Webb spoke about Iran-Contra links to Epstein via his and billionaire Wexner’s efforts to relocate Southern Air Transport (formerly the CIA’s Air America) from Florida to Ohio: “What’s significant here is that out of all the airlines in the United States, Wexner and Epstein choose the airline, the only airline that is outed, publicly known at the time, to be a CIA cut-out. Out of all the airlines that exist, that’s the one they go for,” she said.
Webb also cited reporting by Nigel Rosser, a British journalist, who wrote in the Evening Standard in 2001 that Epstein claimed he worked for the CIA in the 1990s.
Lip Service
Investigation Discovery and Netflix give lip service to Wexner’s ties with Epstein, omitting that Wexner gave Epstein the largest private residence in New York City — essentially for free. Investigation Discovery does not mention that the residence was extensively wired with surveillance equipment, per Webb and The New York Times.
“James Patterson, before writing his book on Epstein, ‘Filthy Rich,’ on which this documentary [by Netflix] is based, wrote a novel [‘The President is Missing’] with Bill Clinton , who is of course quite close to the Epstein scandal, so that definitely, in my opinion, raises some eyebrows,” Webb told Consortium News.
“I think that one of the goals of this [Netflix] documentary is to basically imply that Epstein was the head of the operation and that now that he is dead, all of that activity has ceased,” Webb said. “If they had actually bothered to explore the intelligence angle, in some of the more obvious facts about the case, like Leslie Wexner’s role, for example, it becomes clear that Epstein was really just more of a manager of this type of operation, [and] that these activities continue.”
Webb said a main reason for avoiding discussion of the intelligence angle is that mention of state sponsorship would lead to calls for accountability and open inquiry into a history of sexual blackmail by intelligence agencies. “So if they had given even superficial treatment of those ties, it would have exposed threads that if anyone had bothered to pull on a little bit, would start to unravel a lot of things that obviously these powerful people and institutions don’t want exposed,” Webb said.
More than nine months since Epstein’s death, no alleged Epstein co-conspirator has been arrested or charged with a crime despite reports of an active criminal investigation of Maxwell (who has disappeared), and multiple failed attempts of alleged Epstein victims to serve her with civil suits.
“The criminal case against him, and all the evidence that was gathered against him as part of that, will never be made public unless someone else is charged,” said Webb. “So, the fact that they’re not charging anyone else is quite telling, and the fact that the mainstream media isn’t pushing back against that, I think is telling as well.”
The omissions of major aspects of the Epstein case by the media, specifically its links with the intelligence community, seems to be yet another example of a buffer between justice and those responsible for rendering Epstein untouchable.
Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter and co-host of CN Live.
Pro-Palestine group wins legal battle against MailOnline over false anti-Semitism claim
MEMO | June 18, 2020
Key figures at the centre of the anti-Semitism row which rocked the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn have suffered an embarrassing legal defeat. Two British right-wing newspapers, the Mail on Sunday and MailOnline, have been ordered to pay full damages and issue a written apology for publishing “grotesque” allegations about the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC) in their serialisation of Tom Bower’s biography of Corbyn, Dangerous Mind.
In the unauthorised biography of the former Labour leader, Bower, an investigative journalist, alleged that the PRC, an advocacy group for Palestinian refugees with links to Corbyn, was an anti-Semitic group. The 73-year-old alleged that the PRC is “known to blame the Jews for the Holocaust,” in his Mail on Sunday and MailOnline serialisation which tries to convince readers that the former Labour leader is unfit for office. The book was published it 2019 prior to the UK general election presumably to inflict the most damage on Corbyn.
“The article (along with Mr Bower’s book) contained the grotesque, but utterly false, allegation that the PRC (and, it was implied, its Chairman) is a group ‘known to blame the Jews for the Holocaust’,” said the PRC in a statement following their victory yesterday mentioning its chairman Majed Al-Zeer. Both papers have “acknowledged, there was no truth whatsoever in this allegation.”
The fabricated comment attributed to the PRC, a UN accredited NGO, was made in the House of Lords by an individual from the audience speaking at an event hosted by the advocacy group in 2016. Although the remarks were “strongly condemned by the PRC at the time”, Bower misused this false allegation to paint the PRC as an anti-Semitic group in what seems to be a desperate attempt to make Corbyn guilty by association. Though the former Labour leader was not a speaker at the event, he has spoken in several conferences and parliamentary meetings hosted by the PRC and made a trip to refugee camps in the Middle East during cross party parliamentary delegations organised by the centre.
As well as publishing full apologies in the Mail on Sunday and MailOnline website, Associated Newspapers has been ordered to pay substantial damages and pay the Palestinian Return Centre’s legal costs.
PRC also confirmed that Harper Collins, the publisher of Corbyn’s biography, along with Bower will have to publish a full statement expressing their regret and confirming their unqualified withdrawal of the allegation while acknowledging that the PRC does not and never has blamed the Jews for the Holocaust. The false allegation will also be removed from all future editions and the paperback version of the book.
This is the second legal victory in under two years for the PRC. Last year its Chairman Majed Al-Zeer won a High Court battle in the UK after being falsely labelled a terrorist. The entire case centred on Israel’s designation of the PRC and its chairman as terrorists. World-Check, which supplies private information on potential clients for corporations, businesses and even governmental agencies, such as police and immigration, appears to have bypassed British authorities in its designation and used Israel’s false depiction of the PRC.
How an Internet ‘Persona’ Helped Birth Russiagate
By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | June 15, 2020
Four years ago today, on June 15, 2016, a shadowy Internet persona calling itself “Guccifer 2.0” appeared out of nowhere to claim credit for hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee on behalf of WikiLeaks and implicate Russia by dropping “telltale” but synthetically produced Russian “breadcrumbs” in his metadata.
Thanks largely to the corporate media, the highly damaging story actually found in those DNC emails — namely, that the DNC had stacked the cards against Bernie Sanders in the party’s 2016 primary— was successfully obscured.
The media was the message; and the message was that Russia had used G-2.0 to hack into the DNC, interfering in the November 2016 election to help Donald Trump win.
Almost everybody still “knows” that — from the man or woman in the street to the forlorn super sleuth, Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, who actually based indictments of Russian intelligence officers on Guccifer 2.0.
Blaming Russia was a magnificent distraction from the start and quickly became the vogue.
The soil had already been cultivated for “Russiagate” by Democratic PR gems like Donald Trump “kissing up” to former KGB officer Vladimir Putin and their “bromance” (bromides that former President Barack Obama is still using). Four years ago today, “Russian meddling” was off and running — on steroids — acquiring far more faux-reality than the evanescent Guccifer 2.0 persona is likely to get.
Here’s how it went down:
1 — June 12: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced he had “emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication.”
2 — June 14: DNC contractor CrowdStrike tells the media that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.
3 — June 15: Guccifer 2.0 arises from nowhere; affirms the DNC/CrowdStrike allegations of the day before; claims responsibility for hacking the DNC; claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that forensic examination shows was deliberately tainted with “Russian fingerprints.” This to “corroborate” claims made by CrowdStrike executives the day before.
Adding to other signs of fakery, there is hard evidence that G-2.0 was operating mostly in U.S. time zones and with local settings peculiar to a device configured for use within the U.S., as Tim Leonard reports here and here.)
Leonard is a software developer who started to catalog and archive evidence related to Guccifer 2.0 in 2017 and has issued detailed reports on digital forensic discoveries made by various independent researchers — as well as his own — over the past three years. Leonard points out that WikiLeaks said it did not use any of the emails G2.0 sent it, though it later published similar emails, opening the possibility that whoever created G2.0 knew what WikiLeaks had and sent it duplicates with the Russian fingerprints.
As Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) told President Trump in a memorandum of July 24, 2017, titled “Was the ‘Russian Hack’ an Inside Job?”:
“We do not think that the June 12, 14, & 15 timing was pure coincidence. Rather, it suggests the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been ready to publish and to ‘show’ that it came from a Russian hack.”
We added this about Guccifer 2.0 at the time:
“The recent forensic studies fill in a critical gap. Why the FBI neglected to perform any independent forensics on the original ‘Guccifer 2.0’ material remains a mystery – as does the lack of any sign that the ‘hand-picked analysts’ from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, who wrote the misnomered ‘Intelligence Community’ Assessment dated January 6, 2017, gave any attention to forensics.”
Guccifer 2.0 Seen As a Fraud
In our July 24, 2017 memorandum we also told President Trump that independent cyber investigators and VIPS had determined “that the purported ‘hack’ of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else. Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example) by an insider. Information was leaked to implicate Russia. We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI.” [Emphasis added.].
Right. Ask the FBI. At this stage, President Trump might have better luck asking Attorney General William Barr, to whom the FBI is accountable — at least in theory. As for Barr, VIPS informed him in a June 5, 2020 memorandum that the head of CrowdStrike had admitted under oath on Dec. 5, 2017 that CrowdStrike has no concrete evidence that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016 were hacked — by Russia or by anyone else. [Emphasis added.] This important revelation has so far escaped attention in the Russia-Russia-Russia “mainstream” media (surprise, surprise, surprise!).
Back to the Birth of G-2
It boggles the mind that so few Americans could see Russiagate for the farce it was. Most of the blame, I suppose, rests on a thoroughly complicit Establishment media. Recall: Assange’s announcement on June 12, 2016 that he had Hillary Clinton-related emails came just six weeks before the Democratic convention. I could almost hear the cry go up from the DNC: Houston, We Have a Problem!
Clinton at the 2016 convention. (Wikimedia Commons)
Here’s how bad the problem for the Democrats was. The DNC emails eventually published by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, just three days before the Democratic convention, had been stolen on May 23 and 25. This would have given the DNC time to learn that the stolen material included documents showing how the DNC and Clinton campaign had manipulated the primaries and created a host of other indignities, such that Sanders’ chances of winning the nomination amounted to those of a snowball’s chance in the netherworld.
To say this was an embarrassment would be the understatement of 2016. Worse still, given the documentary nature of the emails and WikiLeaks’ enviable track record for accuracy, there would be no way to challenge their authenticity. Nevertheless, with the media in full support of the DNC and Clinton, however, it turned out to be a piece of cake to divert attention from the content of the emails to the “act of war” (per John McCain) that the Russian “cyber attack” was said to represent.
The outcome speaks as much to the lack of sophistication on the part of American TV watchers, as it does to the sophistication of the Democrats-media complicity and cover-up. How come so few could figure out what was going down?
It was not hard for some experienced observers to sniff a rat. Among the first to speak out was fellow Consortium News columnist Patrick Lawrence, who immediately saw through the Magnificent Diversion. I do not know if he fancies duck hunting, but he shot the Russiagate canard quite dead — well before the Democratic convention was over.
Magnificent Diversion
Patrick Lawrence
In late July 2016, Lawrence was sickened, as he watched what he immediately recognized as a well planned, highly significant deflection. The Clinton-friendly media was excoriating Russia for “hacking” DNC emails and was glossing over what the emails showed; namely, that the Clinton Dems had pretty much stolen the nomination from Sanders.
It was already clear even then that the Democrats, with invaluable help from intelligence leaks and other prepping to the media, had made good use of those six weeks between Assange’s announcement that he had emails “related to Hillary Clinton” and the opening of the convention.
The media was primed to castigate the Russians for “hacking,” while taking a prime role in the deflection. It was a liminal event of historic significance, as we now know. The “Magnificent Diversion” worked like a charm — and then it grew like Topsy.
Lawrence said he had “fire in the belly” on the morning of July 25 as the Democratic convention began and wrote what follows pretty much “in one long, furious exhale” within 12 hours of when the media started really pushing the “the Russians-did-it” narrative.
Below is a slightly shortened text of his article:
“Now wait a minute, all you upper-case “D” Democrats. A flood light suddenly shines on your party apparatus, revealing its grossly corrupt machinations to fix the primary process and sink the Sanders campaign, and within a day you are on about the evil Russians having hacked into your computers to sabotage our elections …
Is this a joke? Are you kidding? Is nothing beneath your dignity? Is this how lowly you rate the intelligence of American voters? …
Clowns. Subversives. Do you know who you remind me of? I will tell you: Nixon, in his famously red-baiting campaign — a disgusting episode — … during his first run for the Senate, in 1950. Your political tricks are as transparent and anti-democratic as his, it is perfectly fair to say.
I confess to a heated reaction to events since last Friday [July 22] among the Democrats, specifically in the Democratic National Committee. I should briefly explain …
The Sanders people have long charged that the DNC has had its fingers on the scale, as one of them put it the other day, in favor of Hillary Clinton’s nomination. The prints were everywhere — many those of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has repeatedly been accused of anti-Sanders bias. Schultz, do not forget, co-chaired Clinton’s 2008 campaign against Barack Obama. That would be enough to disqualify her as the DNC’s chair in any society that takes ethics seriously, but it is not enough in our great country. Chairwoman she has been for the past five years.
Last Friday WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 DNC email messages providing abundant proof that Sanders and his staff were right all along. The worst of these, involving senior DNC officers, proposed Nixon-esque smears having to do with everything from ineptitude within the Sanders campaign to Sanders as a Jew in name only and an atheist by conviction.
Wasserman fell from grace on Monday. Other than this, Democrats from President Obama to Clinton and numerous others atop the party’s power structure have had nothing to say, as in nothing, about this unforgivable breach.They have, rather, been full of praise for Wasserman Schultz. Brad Marshall, the D.N.C.’s chief financial officer, now tries to deny that his Jew-baiting remark referred to Sanders. Good luck, Brad: Bernie is the only Jew in the room.
The caker came on Sunday, when Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and … CNN’s “State of the Union” to assert that the D.N.C.’s mail was hacked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.” He knows this — knows it in a matter of 24 hours — because “experts” — experts he will never name — have told him so. …
What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.
Is that what disturbs you, Robby? Interesting. Unsubstantiated hocus-pocus, not the implications of these events for the integrity of Democratic nominations and the American political process? The latter is the more pressing topic, Robby. You are far too long on anonymous experts for my taste, Robby. And what kind of expert, now that I think of it, is able to report to you as to the intentions of Russian hackers — assuming for a sec that this concocted narrative has substance?
Making lemonade out of a lemon, the Clinton campaign now goes for a twofer. Watch as it advances the Russians-did-it thesis on the basis of nothing, then shoots the messenger, then associates Trump with its own mess — and, finally, gets to ignore the nature of its transgression (which any paying-attention person must consider grave).
Preposterous, readers. Join me, please, in having absolutely none of it. There is no “Russian actor” at the bottom of this swamp, to put my position bluntly. You will never, ever be offered persuasive evidence otherwise.
Reluctantly, I credit the Clinton campaign and the DNC with reading American paranoia well enough such that they may make this junk stick. In a clear sign the entire crowd-control machine is up and running, The New York Times had a long, unprofessional piece about Russian culprits in its Monday editions. It followed Mook’s lead faithfully: not one properly supported fact, not one identified “expert,” and more conditional verbs than you’ve had hot dinners — everything cast as “could,” “might,” “appears,” “would,” “seems,” “may.” Nothing, once again, as to the very serious implications of this affair for the American political process.
Now comes the law. The FBI just announced that it will investigate — no, not the DNC’s fraudulent practices (which surely breach statutes), but “those who pose a threat in cyberspace.” … it is the invocation of the Russians that sends me over the edge. My bones grow weary …
We must take the last few days’ events as a signal of what Clinton’s policy toward Russia will look like should she prevail in November. … Turning her party’s latest disgrace into an occasion for another round of Russophobia is mere preface, but in it you can read her commitment to the new crusade.
Trump, to make this work, must be blamed for his willingness to negotiate with Moscow. This is now among his sins. Got that? Anyone who says he will talk to the Russians has transgressed the American code. … Does this not make Hillary Clinton more than a touch Nixonian?
I am developing nitrogen bends from watching the American political spectacle. One can hardly tell up from down. Which way for a breath of air?”
A year later Lawrence interviewed several of us VIPS, including our two former NSA technical directors and on Aug. 9, 2017 published an article for The Nation titled, “A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack.”
Lawrence wrote, “Former NSA experts, now members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.”
And so it was. But, sadly, that cut across the grain of the acceptable Russia-gate narrative at The Nation at the time. Its staff, seriously struck by the HWHW (Hillary Would Have Won) virus, rose up in rebellion. A short time later, there was no more room at The Nation for his independent-minded writing.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst included preparing and briefing The President’s Daily Brief and leading the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
The Miracle of Salisbury
By Craig Murray | June 16, 2020
It turns out that the BBC really does believe that God is an Englishman. When the simple impossibility of the official story on the Skripals finally overwhelmed the dramatists, they resorted to Divine Intervention for an explanation – as propagandists have done for millennia.
This particular piece of script from Episode 2 of The Salisbury Poisonings deserves an induction in the Propaganda Hall of Fame:
Porton Down Man: I’ve got the reports from the Bailey house
Public Health Woman: Tell me, how many hits?
Porton Down Man: It was found in almost every room of the house. Kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedrooms. It was even on the light switches. We found it in the family car too. But his wife and children haven’t been affected. I like to think of myself as a man of science, but the only word for that is a miracle.
Well, it certainly would be a miracle that the family lived for a week in the house without touching a light switch. But miracle is not really the “only word for that”. Nonsense is a good word. Bullshit is a ruder version. Lie is entirely appropriate in these circumstances.
Because that was not the only miracle on display. We were told specifically that the Skripals had trailed novichok all over Zizzis and the Bishops Mill pub, leaving multiple deadly deposits, dozens of them in total, which miraculously nobody had touched. We were told that Detective Bailey was found to have left multiple deadly deposits of novichok on everything he touched in a busy police station, but over several days before it was closed down nobody had touched any of them, which must be an even bigger miracle than the Baileys’ home.
Perhaps even more amazingly, as the Skripals spread novichok all over the restaurant and the pub, nobody who served them had been harmed, nobody who took their payment. The man who went through Sergei’s wallet to learn his identity from his credit cards was not poisoned. The people giving first aid were not poisoned. The ducks Sergei fed were not poisoned. The little boy he fed the ducks with was not poisoned. So many miracles. If God were not an Englishman, Salisbury would have been in real trouble, evidently.
The conclusion of episode two showed Charlie Rowley fishing out the perfume bottle from the charity bin at least two months in the timeline before this really happened, thus neatly sidestepping one of the most glaring impossibilities in the entire official story. I think we can forgive the BBC that lie – there are only so many instances of divine intervention in the story the public can be expected to buy in one episode.
It is fascinating to see that the construction of this edifice of lies was a joint venture between the BBC and the security services’ house journal, the Guardian. Not only is all round pro-war propagandist “Colonel” Hamish De Bretton Gordon credited as Military Advisor, but Guardian journalists Caroline Bannock and Steven Morris are credited as Script Consultants, which I presume means they fed in the raw lies for the scriptwriters to shape into miracles.
Now here is an interesting ethical point for readers of the Guardian. The Guardian published in the last fortnight two articles by Morris and Bannock that purported to be reporting on the production of the drama and its authenticity, without revealing to the readers that these full time Guardian journalists were in fact a part of the BBC project. That is unethical and unprofessional in a number of quite startling ways. But then it is the Guardian.
[Full disclosure. I shared a flat with Caroline at university. She was an honest person in those days.]
Again, rather than pepper this article with links, I urge you to read this comprehensive article, which contains plenty of links and remains entirely unanswered.
“Putin’s Gonna Get Me”
By Craig Murray | June 15, 2020
Shakespeare’s heirs at the BBC produced this deathless and entirely convincing line as the climax of the first episode of “The Salisbury Poisonings”, a three part piece of state propaganda on the Skripal saga, of which I watched Part 1 as it was broadcast last night. The other two parts are to be broadcast today and tomorrow, which unusual scheduling reflects the importance our masters place on this stirring tale of the resilience of the great British nation under attack by devilish foreigners. You can watch all three episodes now on BBC iPlayer, but personally I suffer from overactive antibodies to bullshit and need a break.
The line about Putin was delivered by salty, ex-British military Ross Cassidy, so of course was entirely convincing. It may have been more so had he ever said it in public before this week, but there you are.
To judge by social media, an extraordinary proportion of the public find the official narrative entirely convincing. I find myself unable to pretend that does not fill me with despair at the future of democracy. That anybody could listen to the following dialogue without doubling up in laughter is completely beyond me. I do not quite understand how the actors managed to speak it.
Porton Down Man: “And it’s one of the deadliest synthetic substances on earth. It’s so toxic that a spoonful, with the right delivery mechanism, could kill thousands”.
Heroic Public Health Lady: “But if it’s so toxic, how come the Skripals are still alive?”
Porton Down Man: “The paramedics assumed that they had overdosed on fentanyl so they gave them a shot of Naloxone, which happens to combat nerve agent toxicity. Plus, it was cold, further inhibiting the speed with which the substance took effect.”
Aah yes, it was cold. A factor those pesky Russians had overlooked, because of course it is never cold in Russia. And everybody knows it is minus 40 inside Zizzis and inside the Bishops Mill pub. Once the nerve agent has entered the body, only in the most extreme conditions could exterior temperature have any kind of effect at all. Neither Sergei nor Yulia was anyway outdoors for any significant period after supposedly being poisoned by their door handle.
Many wildly improbable stories have been produced by the security services over the last three years to explain why this ultra deadly nerve agent did not kill the Skripals. Interestingly enough, the BBC drama left out a detail which the Daily Mail alleged came from a security service briefing, that:
“Completely by chance, doctors with specialist chemical weapons training were on duty at the hospital when the victims were admitted. They treated Sergei and Yulia Skripal with an atropine (antidote) and other medicines approved by scientists from Porton Down, the government’s top secret scientific research laboratory”
Which is very believable, I suppose, because it is no more of a coincidence than the Chief Nurse of the British Army being right there when they first collapsed on a bench.
Yet in all the multiple attempts to explain the non-deadly deadly nerve agent, “it was cold” appears to be a new one. It must have official approval, because all purpose security service shill, warmonger and chemical weapons expert, Lt Col Hamish De Bretton Gordon was listed in the credits as “military advisor” to this BBC production.
Let me offer you this tiny smidgeon of wisdom, for nothing: when the state broadcaster starts to make propaganda videos that credit a “military advisor”, you are well on the way to fascism.
Perhaps wisely, Part One at least of the BBC Drama made no attempt at all to portray how the alleged poisoning happened. How the Skripals went out that morning, caught widely on CCTV, to the cemetery according to this version, and then returned home without being caught coming back. How while they were back in their house two Russian agents walked up and, at midday in broad daylight on a very open estate, applied deadly nerve agent to the Skripals’ door handle, apparently without the benefit of personal protective equipment, and without being seen by anybody. How the Skripals then left again and contrived for both of them to touch the exterior door handle in closing the door. How, with this incredibly toxic nerve agent on them, they were out for three and a half hours, fed the ducks, went to the pub and went to Zizzis, eating heartily, before both collapsing on a park bench. How despite being different ages, sexes, body shapes and metabolisms they both collapsed, after this three hour plus delay, at exactly the same moment, so neither could call for help.
The BBC simply could not make a drama showing the purported actions that morning of the Skripals without it being blindingly obvious that the story is impossible. Luckily for them, we live in such a haze of British Nationalist fervor that much of the population, especially the mainstream media journalists and the Blairite warmongers, will simply overlook that. The omission of the actual “poisoning” from “The Salisbury Poisonings” is apparently just an artistic decision.
All those events happened before the timeline of this BBC Drama started. The BBC version started the moment people came to help the Skripals on the bench. However it omitted that the very first person to see them and come to help was, by an incredible coincidence, the Chief Nurse of the British Army. That the chief military nurse was on hand is such an amazing coincidence you would have thought the BBC would want to include it in their “drama”. Apparently not. Evidently another artistic decision.
The time from touching the door handle to the Skripals being attended by paramedics was about four hours. That Naloxone is effective four hours after contact with an ultra deadly nerve agent is remarkable.
I do not want to under-represent the personal suffering of policeman Nick Bailey nor his family. But he was shown in the drama as rubbing this “deadliest synthetic substance” directly into the soft tissues around his eye, but then not getting seriously ill for at least another 24 hours. Plainly all could not be what it seems.
The actual poisoning event, the specialist team coincidentally at the hospital and the Army Chief Nurse were not the only conspicuous omissions. Also missing was Skripal’s MI6 handler and Salisbury neighbour Pablo Miller, who did not rate so much as a mention. The other strange thing is that the drama constantly cut to newsreel coverage of actual events, but omitted the BBC’s own flagship news items on the Skripal event in those first three days, which were all presented by BBC Diplomatic Editor Mark Urban.
Now Mark Urban happens to have been in the Royal Tank Regiment with Skripal’s MI6 handler, Pablo Miller. Not distantly, but joining the regiment together at the same rank in the same officer intake on the same day. I do love a lot of good coincidences in a plot. Mark Urban had also met frequently with Sergei Skripal in the year before his death, to “research a book”. Yet when Urban fronted the BBC’s Skripal coverage those first few days, he kept both those highly pertinent facts hidden from the public. In fact he kept them hidden for four full months. I wonder why Mark Urban’s lead BBC coverage was not included in the newsreel footage of this BBC re-enactment?
There is much, much more that is wildly improbable about this gross propaganda product and I must save some scorn and some facts for the next two episodes. Do read this quick refresher in the meantime. How many of these ten questions has the BBC Drama addressed convincingly, and how many has it dodged or skated over?
A View From Afar
By Auslander for The Saker Blog | June 15, 2020
It is interesting to watch a full blown coup come to life. The responsibility for this coup can be laid directly at the feet of President Donald John Trump for having the absolute gall to defeat Hillary Diane Rodham in an open and free election in 2016. Of course the falsely defeated Rodham, ringed by her ever more strident and blindly faithful minions including the world wide media, immediately began to strike back even as the final vote counting was at hand. The rallying cry? “Impeach Trump!!!” This ‘impeach’ movement was ongoing for months before Donald Trump took the oath of office in 2017, but for me it was a head scratcher, how could he have done anything to warrant impeachment before he was even sworn in as President? Somehow no one in the feckless media had the brains to ask that question, ergo they have all been bought and paid for.
But scream they did, every day and all day, but behind the scenes they were planning and planning well. When they finally did manage to get an impeachment article against the president through Congress it didn’t fly, but that didn’t matter, the plans were well afoot and ready for one spark to go national and global. That ‘spark’ was the death of one man in police custody, actually in the process of being put in police custody, and his death became the cause for the coup to spring to life. As planned. It matters not what the spark was or who, if anyone, died, the fact is the well planned and financed coup grew exponentially in hours.
So, just as US was coming off the ‘Chinese pandemic’ and the country was in shut down with severe financial and cultural repercussions, the country exploded. As was planned. Having watched months of the debacle in Kiev in late ’13 through early ’14, I instantly recognized the tactics and organizations, just as I recognized them at the Krim Rada Riot on, if memory serves, 24 February ’14 when the orcs tried to take Rada. The same well organized units, readily identifiable ranks and easily identifiable units with various tasks. While the actors have morphed from ‘banderites’ to ‘antifa’, it’s the same tactics now well honed after the trial runs on the left coast two years ago. The media is in lock step with the coup participants and screaming bloody murder all day every day and now, as planned, the chaos has expanded to west Europe, albeit nothing like what is happening in US.
Make no mistake, this is an organized, violent and bloody coup d’etat against the sitting President of the United States of America. President Trump is being artfully hemmed in by ever increasing and ever more violent events and is to the point, if one listens to the ever patriotic media, damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. Case in point, the little area in Seattle which is now ‘liberated territory’. Liberated from what no one knows, but the mayor of Seattle and the governor of Washington State both seem to be in favor of this little dab of US territory owned by openly self identified fascists and devolving by the minute into ever deeper chaos and anarchy. No President can allow or condone these actions by armed insurgents, so President Trump will have to act. The problem is there are some problems in the upper echelon ranks of the US Armed Forces, a couple of whom don’t seem to remember who is the CiC of the Armed Forces of the United States of America and also seem to have forgotten their oath to defend USA from all attacks both foreign and domestic. So be it. A very few, read one or two, senior officers have openly disavowed their oaths and have turned against the President. This is not good, it will bring confusion and hesitation in the Field Grade and Company Grade officers if and when they are issued orders to quash this open and blatant attack in the Sovereign States of the United States of America. As planned. Any coup will find spineless upper echelon officers who can be bought or blackmailed, comes with the events.
As such, again make no mistake, the rank and file and company grade officers and NCO’s, the actual fighters, will stand with the President. The take down of that little spit of land in Seattle, and the other quasi ‘liberated’ areas in other states, will be violent and bloody. As planned. The political party in opposition to President Trump would rather bring civil war, real civil war with all it’s resultant death and destruction, to the United States of America rather than see President Trump win another election. This is typical of the ‘liberal’ and ‘woke’ echelons who consider themselves the elite and proper guiders of our country rather than what the voters will decide. It will not work and when the dust settles and the blood in the streets is washed down the gutters, the country we knew will be changed forever. I do not know that the ‘new’ United States of America will be, but I can assure I’m standing here in a peaceful and quiet community watching this organized and chaotic coup run it’s course with mouth agape. One can only hope the bloodshed will not be ‘too’ serious, but every life is precious and many more innocents, either misguided fools or true innocents, will die. As someone once said, damn their eyes, damn their souls, back to their lord Satan where they belong.
Auslander – http://rhauslander.com/
Reality Is Gradually Catching Up To Green Energy
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | June 8, 2020
If you dutifully read your U.S. mainstream media, you undoubtedly have the impression that “clean” and “green” energy is rapidly sweeping all before it, and soon will supplant fossil fuels in powering our economy. After all, many major states, including California and New York, have mandated some form of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, or in some cases even earlier. That’s only 30 years away. And reports are everywhere that investment in “renewables,” particularly wind and solar energy, continues to soar. For example, from Reuters in January we have “U.S. clean energy investment hits new record despite Trump administration views.” In the New York Times on May 13 it’s “In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse Coal in U.S.” The final victory of wind and solar over the evil fossil fuels must then be right around the corner.
Actually, that’s all a myth. The inherent high cost and unreliability of wind and solar energy mean that they are highly unlikely ever to be more than niche players in the overall energy picture. Politicians claim progressive virtue by commissioning vast farms of wind turbines and solar panels, at taxpayer or ratepayer expense, without anyone ever figuring out — or even addressing — how these things can run a fully functioning electrical grid without complete fossil fuel backup. And the electrical grid is the easy part. How about airplanes? How about steel mills? I’m looking for someone to demonstrate that this “net zero” thing is something more than a ridiculous fantasy, but I can’t find it.
To stay grounded in reality, there is no better source than the multiple-times-weekly email from the Global Warming Policy Foundation. If you do not already receive these emails, you can go here to subscribe. As is typical, today’s email searches out back pages and specialized sources to bring us multiple pieces showing green energy running into its inevitable wall, with no known way to get past. (Full disclosure: I am on the Board of the GWPF’s American affiliate.)
We go first to green energy champion Germany, where Bloomberg reports on June 5 that “Germany’s Green Power Finance Is Becoming Unaffordable.” Excerpt:
The German program that’s spurred the nation’s switch to green power is buckling under the weight of surging costs and needs an urgent fix. That’s the assessment of one of the scheme’s chief designers, Hans Josef Fell. . . . Yet the system’s increasing costs have become glaring during the coronavirus pandemic, the veteran Green Party lawmaker said. High and guaranteed payments made to investors in clean power plants are the problem Fell said in an interview.
It seems that to get its wind and solar facilities built, Germany put in place guaranteed payments to producers that would kick in if market prices for power were insufficient. The guaranteed payments are divvied up and added to consumer electricity bills. This year, with prices for alternative fossil fuels plummeting, the guaranteed payments are projected to come in at some 26 billion euros — which is around $100 per month for every German household, on top of electricity prices that were already about triple the U.S. average. Of course, Chancellor Merkel is proposing a “fix,” which is a government bailout as part of a supposed coronavirus relief package. That may work for a little while. Then what?
Also from Germany, we have a piece from the Financial Times of June 8 with the headline “Environmentalists on back foot as Germany’s newest coal plant opens.” What?? — Opening a new coal power plant right in the midst of a transition away from fossil fuels?? What happened here is that they are closing all their nuclear plants, and they need something that works all the time, unlike the wind and the solar. Just in January, Germany enacted legislation to completely phase out coal power generation by 2038; and then in May, they went right ahead and opened this new Dateln 4 coal plant. The Financial Times piece quotes Greenpeace activist Lisa Göldner as calling the new plant a “climate crime.” Meanwhile, the crew members of a barge bringing coal to the plant are described as “whooping and whistling in mockery” at environmental protesters seeking to block the opening of the plant.
The fact is that Germany has nowhere further to go by building more wind and solar facilities. When the wind blows on a sunny day, they already have more power than they can use, and they are forced to give it away to Poland (or even pay the Poles to take it). On a calm night, no matter how much wind and solar they build, it all produces nothing. Without the coal plant, the lights go out. Talk about climate virtue all they want, but no one has yet even begun to work on a solution to get past this hurdle.
Which brings me to the most important piece in the GWPF email, from Cambridge Professor Michael Kelly, appearing in something called CapX on June 8, with the headline “Until we get a proper roadmap, Net Zero is a goal without a plan.” Kelly makes the point that seems to me obvious, but that somehow has slipped past the New York Times and all the rest of the MSM, which is that if wind and solar energy are ever going to surpass niche status, there is a gigantic engineering problem to solve. Somebody has to engineer an electrical system based on the intermittent sources that works 24/7/365. But in fact, even as major states and countries have piously proclaimed commitment to “net zero” energy, nobody has even started the engineering project. And as soon as you start to consider the question, you quickly realize that the whole endeavor is almost certainly impossible. As an example, Kelly addresses batteries:
Take batteries. It is estimated that current battery manufacturing capabilities will need to be in the order of 500-700 times bigger than now to support an all-electric global transport system. The materials needed just to allow the UK to transition to all electric transport involve amounts of materials equal to 200% the annual global production of cobalt, 75% of lithium carbonate, 100% of neodymium and 50% of copper. Scaling by a factor of 50 for the world transport, and you see what is now a showstopper. The materials demands just for batteries are beyond known reserves. Would one be prepared to dredge the ocean floor at very large scale for some of the material? Should securing the reserves not be a first priority?
And that’s just one of the issues. Others include vast costs constituting a multiple of current energy costs; the environmental impact of mining and transporting huge amounts of materials; need for vast amounts of rare elements, far beyond known world reserves; incredibly huge amounts of material to recycle when facilities wear out; and on and on.
Read enough of this stuff and you gradually realize that almost everything you read about supposed solutions to climate change is completely delusional.
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From the Archives
The 9/11 “Double-Cross” Conspiracy Theory
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 6, 2022
Is it true that “9/11 was an inside job”? Yes, insofar as Israel is “inside” the U.S. But for the 9/11 truthers who have identified Israel as the main perpetrators, “9/11 was an inside job” is at best a half-truth, and at worst an integral part of the Zionist operation, like a secondary flag sewn as a lining under the false flag of Islamism. Victor Thorn (1963-2017) wrote in his book 9/11 made in Israel: The Plot Against America (2011): “In essence, the ‘9-11 truth movement’ was created prior to Sept. 11, 2001 as a means of suppressing news relating to Israeli complicity. . . . The slogan ‘9-11 was an inside job’ was quite possibly the greatest example of Israeli propaganda ever devised.” In milder terms, it is “controlled opposition”.
A genuine truth movement would have pointed to Israel as the prime suspect from the start. From day one, it was obvious who would benefit. … continue
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- The Search for Truth: Charlie Kirk’s Assassination One Year Later
- ‘Harsh reality’: Iran says France seeks monopoly on power and intimidation, not peace for all
- When Will This White House Madness End?
- Huckabee aide goes to ‘unusual lengths’ to portray ‘Israel’ positively
- Trump Announces Diesel Supply Deal With Putin Following Phone Call
- MEP blasts ‘Euro-Gestapo’ for lecturing Russia on democracy
- Syria May Send Troops to Saudi Arabia Amid War with Ansar Allah
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli forces kill another child in Gaza – Daily Update
- Gaza ceasefire exists in name only, say more than 100 organizations
- Nearly 2 Million in Gaza Need Urgent Shelter Assistance as Winter Looms: IOM Chief Warns
- Suppressing Palestinian resistance: US charity under fire for AI monitoring of Gaza classrooms
- Thousands Are Held in Israeli Torture Camps. This Is What Happens Inside
- Israel puts Gaza’s sick, injured, newborn in peril – Daily Update
- Report claimed Mark Levin used by Israeli government to influence Trump
- Over 2,000 Gazans have died awaiting medical evacuation amid Israel’s continued siege
- How a U.S. Diplomat Suppressed and Altered Reports Critical of Israel
- 5 Palestinians Die from Israeli Strikes in Gaza as Relentless Attacks Continue
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
