Biden and US media lies about Ukraine are reminiscent of Vietnam War – American Conservative
By Ahmed Adel | February 23, 2024
The American Conservative published an article that parallels the Vietnam War, considered the greatest military humiliation in US history, with what they point out is a campaign of deception carried out by the current US Government, which will lead to a defeat for Kiev and NATO.
According to the author James W. Carden, who served as an advisor on US-Russian affairs at the State Department during the Obama administration, the media campaign regarding Ukraine carried out by the White House was a copy of the actions of successive US governments in Vietnam until the Nixon administration withdrew troops and concluded the intervention in 1973. He relates the Vietnam War with the lies with which President Joe Biden and his collaborators have tried to deceive citizens about the progress of the Ukraine conflict and its origin, among other issues.
These false narratives, the article notes, have been put in place and presented to Americans with the help of the “most dutiful accomplices,” such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, media outlets that, until recent times, published the triumphalist comments of Biden and his administration without any type of questioning, in addition to analysis columns where Russian President Vladimir Putin was demonised and falsely stated that Ukraine was on its way to victory.
This falsification of reality, in which all the complexity of the conflict was eliminated, and the responsibility of the US and NATO in inciting it, was omitted. Instead, they presented the war as a simple confrontation between good and evil, which is similar to the deception that Washington and the establishment media consummated in the 1960s to justify the US invasion of Vietnam, the article states.
Now, notes The American Conservative, as it is “too obvious to ignore” that Russian troops are prevailing in Ukraine, the American media is finally realising what is really happening on the battlefield after having helped prolong the conflict with their lies.
“If we are being lied to about the progress of the war—and we are—what do you suppose are the odds we are also being lied to about the causes of the war?” the author questions.
For US politicians and journalists, the expansion of NATO, Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan nationalist agenda, the refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements, or threats by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made in Munich in February 2022 to acquire nuclear weapons had nothing to do with the outbreak of war, the article ironically states.
“If we are being lied to about the causes of the war, are we also then being misled about what is at stake in eastern Ukraine? Probably. Here the parallel with the government’s mendacity during the war in Vietnam period becomes too obvious to ignore,” Carden continues.
“Recall in the first case that the template, that of the Cold War, is essentially unchanged, even in some of the particulars, not least in the comparisons of (the Vietnamese anti-communist leader) Ngo Dinh Diem and Volodymyr Zelensky to Winston Churchill. The South Vietnamese government (avaricious, corrupt) had the right to American arms by virtue of its right ‘to determine [the nation’s] future,’ the article says, recalling the argument used by the US to justify its war against North Vietnam, which was part of its global operation against what Washington perceived as an expansion of communism that could threaten its interests and hegemony.
The same thing is happening now with Ukraine: President Biden publicly justifies launching a proxy war with Russia with the excuse that it is necessary to stop Moscow, once again invoking the theory of the domino effect, the long-discredited thesis that drove the US interventionist policy during the second half of the 20th century.
Following the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed during the Vietnam War era that “the policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy… but was destined chiefly if not exclusively, for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress,” Carden warns.
He concludes his article by saying: “Two years on, we citizens have been serially lied to by the Biden administration and the media about the war’s causes, its stakes, and its progress. The question that should, but of course will not, be addressed in the aftermath of this latest American misadventure abroad is: Will we ever learn?”
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Space Nukes & Washing Machines: Western Media Prints ‘Anything’ to Paint Russia as Threat
Sputnik – 23.02.2024
Last week, House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) released a document with a cryptic warning that called on US President Joe Biden to declassify information on a “serious national security threat.” Within hours, the story spread like wildfire.
The recent media craze stemming from unfounded claims of a Russian nuclear space weapon exploded and stole headlines for days because “the media” will print anything it is told about Russia, Mark Sleboda, a foreign relations and security expert told Sputnik’s Fault Lines.
“Russia’s the gift that keeps on giving, propaganda-wise, because you can accuse Russia of anything, no matter what you said about them [before], about shovels, and microchips or washing machines. And, generally, people will believe it. Or at least the media will print it,” he said, referring to previous Western propaganda claims that Russian soldiers were fighting armed only with shovels and that their missiles used microchips from stolen Ukrainian washing machines.
“Then you accuse Russia of having space weapons, space nuclear weapons, or having plans to put nuclear weapons in space, or someone in Russia once thought technically about the contingency of putting weapons in space,” Sleboda scoffed.
As the story made the rounds on the media circuit, US National Security Council John Kirby told reporters that the threat US Rep. Mike Turner raised was related to “an anti-satellite weapon that Russia is developing.” Soon after that, US media outlets began reporting that the mysterious weapon was nuclear.
Russia vehemently denied the accusation, saying it is only developing the same space capabilities that the US has. “Firstly, there are no such projects – nuclear weapons in space. Secondly, the United States knows that this does not exist,” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said during a televised discussion with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sleboda noted that for mainstream media, “the details aren’t important as much as the scaremongering factor.”
“It’s the same thing with this continual octogenarian fantasy about linking Trump and Russia… all the powers of the US investigative bodies were unable to prove any connection… but that doesn’t stop an enormous number of the American people from believing in it because they want to, and [US Rep.] Nancy Pelosi certainly knows that.”
The analyst further admitted that the latest anti-Russia rhetoric is part of a larger effort in preparation for the November presidential election in the US but that it also “does the double job of, you know, buttressing arguments for providing more US taxpayer dollars for weapons for the regime in Kiev.”
‘Conspiracy theorists’ threaten mainstream media, says Canadian PM
RT | February 21, 2024
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday blamed social media for preventing major news outlets from shaping public opinion the way they used to.
The Liberal Party leader took his message to the Conservative stronghold of Alberta, sitting down with radio host Ryan Jespersen for an exclusive 30-minute interview on his Real Talk podcast.
“There is out there a deliberate undermining of the mainstream media,” Trudeau said, answering a question towards the end of the interview. “There are the conspiracy theorists, there are the social media drivers who are trying to do everything they can to keep people in their little filter bubbles, to prevent people from actually agreeing on a common set of facts, the way CBC and CTV – when they were our only sources of news – used to project across the country, at least a common understanding of things.”
Earlier this month, Trudeau denounced the move by Bell Media to lay off many of its local journalists and sell 45 of its 103 regional radio stations, arguing that local journalism holds Canadian democracy together.
“There are massive changes that need to happen in our media landscape, and [the] government can try and create conditions and incentives for it to happen,” he told Jespersen on Wednesday.
“We’re putting money towards local independent media,” Trudeau added, having argued a moment earlier that such overt funding would compromise news outlets as mouthpieces of the government.
In June 2023, the Canadian parliament passed the Online News Act (ONA), under which search engines and social media platforms would have to compensate news outlets for posting their content. While Google has complied, Facebook is “choosing to be bad guys about this,” Trudeau told Jespersen. Meta has responded to ONA by blocking all news content by Canadian publishers on Facebook and Instagram.
Ultimately, it’s up to Canadians to declare they don’t want to accept the “encrapification of news,” Trudeau said, borrowing the phrase from British Columbia Premier David Eby.
Trudeau’s comments on the podcast also echoed those made by former US President Barack Obama in a May 2023 interview to CBS. Obama named “a divided media” as one of the things he was worried about, noting that the US once had “three TV stations … and people were getting a similar sense of what is true and what isn’t, what was real and what was not.”
“How do we return to that common conversation? How can we have a common set of facts?” the 44th US president wondered at the time.
Feeble BBC Hamas ‘exposé’ achieved one thing: obscuring genocide
By Jonathan Cook – February 20, 2024
Israel was put on trial for committing genocide in Gaza last month by the judges of the International Court of Justice. So far western governments have not only done nothing to intervene but are actively assisting in that slaughter. They have supplied arms and turned a blind eye to Israel’s denial of humanitarian aid. The people of Gaza are slowly being starved to death.
But it was at this moment, as the world watches in horror, that the BBC’s chief news investigation programme, Panorama, chose not to scrutinise that massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians but to hand the microphone over to the very military doing the killing.
On Monday it aired a programme titled “Hamas’s Secret Financial Empire” headed by reporter John Ware.
It leant heavily on Israel’s military spokesman, on documents that had almost certainly been supplied by Israeli military intelligence, on video footage from the Israeli military, and an Israeli survivor of the Hamas attack of October 7.
Ware and Panorama have worked together before, most notably on a special hour-long edition that doubtless equally delighted Israel.
Broadcast shortly before the 2019 general election, the programme served as little more than a hatchet job on Jeremy Corbyn, claiming that the then Labour leader had allowed antisemitism to run rampant in his party.
Serial failures in the programme were exposed, including by me at the time.
Quotes and interviews had been edited misleadingly, including one that implied an antisemitic incident had happened inside the Labour party when it had not.
Basic fact-checking had not been carried out, which led to the complete misrepresentation of a key incident the programme wrongly claimed as antisemitic.
The programme concealed the identities of those claiming to have suffered antisemitism in Labour, when most were in fact members of a highly partisan, pro-Israel group openly committed to the ousting of Corbyn as leader for his pro-Palestininan views. One had trained with the Israeli army.
Another unnamed, tearful interviewee, Ella Rose, had previously worked for the Israeli embassy, though the audience was not told. The programme also did not refer to the fact that she had admitted to being a confidante of an Israeli undercover agent, Shai Masot, who was later exposed trying to bring down a British government minister for his critical views of Israel – views far less critical than Corbyn’s.
One might have assumed that, given this disastrous outing for Panorama by Ware and his producers, they would have been considered by the BBC as a very unwise pick indeed to follow up with an investigation into another issue so close to Israel’s heart. But such an assumption would be wrong.
Much as the Corbyn “investigation” presented a distorted picture of what was taking place in Labour, the latest Panorama “investigation” completely obscured the reality of what is taking place in Gaza. Not least, Monday’s audiences would have been barely aware that Israel is currently under investigation by the World Court after its panel of 17 judges accepted that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza.
The Panorama narrative, following the BBC’s usual script, suggested instead that this was simply another round of fighting in a long-standing “conflict” in which, the programme limply conceded, both sides are suffering.
The only non-official interviewed was an Israeli survivor of Hamas’s October 7 attack, a young woman present at the Nova festival. She felt betrayed that “people only look at the side of Hamas. We are invisible to them.”
Bizarrely, the BBC team took this patently preposterous view as the programme’s central premise. It was, said Ware, Hamas’s nefarious goal to “project itself as a resistance movement and Israel as a terrorist state”.
The BBC seemed to have forgotten that it was also the World Court, not just Hamas, seriously considering the idea that the Israeli military is flagrantly acting outside the laws of war. If, in the eyes of the BBC, a campaign of genocide does not constitute state terrorism – or worse – one has to wonder what does.
Former Foreign Office official Sir John Jenkins was given centre stage by Panorama to claim that Hamas, not the prolonged slaughter of children in Gaza, was fomenting the “delegitimisation of Israel”.
All of this served as the prelude to the programme’s efforts to delegitimise Hamas and any of its activities in creating a network of tunnels to resist Israel’s occupation and siege at a time when western capitals are more actively than ever assisting Israel in destroying Gaza.
If Israel posed no real threat to the people of Gaza, as the programme implied throughout, then Hamas apparently did not need to fortify the enclave to defend it from an Israeli attack. Its money could have been better used for the benefit of ordinary Palestinians.
The elephant in the room was genocide. Ware and the BBC had to keep treating Israel’s slaughter of at least 30,000 Palestinians over the past four months as an aberration – a reaction to the unprecedented events of October 7 – rather than as an intensification of Israel’s well-documented abuse of the Palestinian people spanning over decades.
The reference to Hamas’s “secret” financial empire was meant to sound sinister. But, as the programme-makers struggled to hide, there is nothing secret about Hamas’s funding.
After all, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally approved the flow of money to Hamas, wishing to keep the group just strong enough to ensure it could prevent the more compliant Palestinian Authority (PA), based in the West Bank, from re-establishing itself in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s goal – one he never concealed – was to keep the two rival Palestinian groups permanently feuding, the two territories split, and thereby undermine the case for any kind of Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.
Ware informed us that Hamas’s “financial empire” derived from various funding sources: directly from Iran and Qatar, but also from humanitarian aid provided by international donors. The programme concluded that these donors were effectively “subsidising Hamas’s war machine” by easing the economic burden on Hamas in providing – in so far as was possible given Israel’s siege – essentials such as food, water and power to Gaza’s civilians.
Predictably, Ware’s argument echoed one of the main claims made by Israel in its current campaign to intensify the genocide in Gaza by destroying the United Nations’ refugee body, UNRWA. The relief agency is the last lifeline to a population of 2.3 million people brought to the point of starvation by Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid.
Israeli officials have consistently implied that the Palestinian population of Gaza may justifiably be starved to death as the price to be paid to avoid any risk that some of that aid ends up in the hands of Hamas fighters. Such a denial of assistance is not only patently immoral but constitutes a war crime.
If journalists are ever brought to the Hague accused of complicity in the current genocide, there should surely be a place reserved in the dock for Ware and his BBC team for breathing credibility into this monstrous argument.
Panorama’s central narrative was that Hamas had used parts of its revenues to build a network of resistance fortifications such as tunnels – money that, as Ware and his interviewees kept stressing, could have been spent on building schools and homes to aid the people of Gaza.
Ware omitted to mention, of course, that, more often than not, schools and homes actually needed rebuilding, not building, because Israel blew them up every few years with its bombs.
Again, all too predictably, the programme stripped out obvious context.
Hamas chose to build these fortifications, such as its extensive network of tunnels, because Israel is an offensive, occupying power that enjoys absolute control over Gaza’s borders, as well as its airspace and sea. Israel can bomb and invade Gaza any time it chooses. It can drag people off to “arrest” them – or take them hostage, as we would call it were the roles reversed.
Not only can it do those things, it did and does them regularly. And with complete impunity.
Pretending that Hamas had no reason to build a tunnel network, as Panorama does, is to rewrite history – to excise Israel’s decades of crimes against the Palestinians and their legitimate desire to struggle against that oppression.
It is to unthinkingly regurgitate Israel’s claim that these are simply “terror tunnels” rather than a way for Hamas to survive as a resistance organisation, as it is fully entitled to do under international law.
Hamas made it a priority to build a tunnel network to resist a violent, occupying army. Given limited resources and room to manoeuvre – after all, Gaza is a tiny territory and one of the most overcrowded places on the planet – Hamas had little choice but to move underground to avoid Israel’s sophisticated surveillance technology where it could build an arsenal of largely improvised, homegrown weapons.
Its historic popularity among ordinary Palestinians – at least compared to the supine, endlessly complicit PA in the West Bank – derives precisely from its refusal to submit to Israeli control. Panorama forgot to mention this too.
By contrast, and confounding Panorama’s thesis, the PA’s exclusive reliance on international diplomacy has won no tangible concessions from Israel – unless winning a reprieve from genocide, at least until this point, is considered such a concession.
Also inconveniently for Panorama, the PA’s standing with the Palestinian public continues to be dismal.
Bizarrely, Ware was equally troubled by the fact that Hamas raised import taxes on the limited goods that Israel did allow into Gaza.
That is all the stranger given that the programme’s implicit – and entirely bogus – assumption is that Gaza is not under a belligerent Israeli occupation. Hamas, it therefore suggested, should have behaved more like a normal country.
But raising taxes on the import of goods is precisely what normal countries do. Why would Ware expect Hamas to behave differently?
And why would it be strange or sinister for it to use some of those revenues to build Gaza’s defences, as best it could, against an aggressive occupier?
Does Britain not also spend the money it raises from taxes to buy weapons and “subsidise its war machine”? And it does so, even though the UK is not under belligerent occupation and is unlikely to be invaded any time soon.
In dramatic fashion, Ware declared ominously: “We have obtained documents that Israeli intelligence say are from inside Hamas and shine a light on how it makes some of its millions.”
It is hard not to conclude that those words mean Panorama was fed those documents by the Israeli intelligence services. Nonetheless, with utter credulity, the programme treated the papers as though they were infallible proof of Hamas’s wickedness.
What they actually showed, assuming they are real, is that Hamas had gained a modest income stream from investments in Middle Eastern companies and ventures. Should Hamas not make investments to raise income, as countries and funds do around the world? And if not, why?
Moving money out of Gaza and investing it overseas seems eminently sensible given that Israel has so regularly laid waste to the enclave – and is doing so once again and on an unprecedented scale.
In similar credulous fashion, Ware accepted unquestioningly the claim that Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was known to “hate Jews”. On what basis? Because a former Israeli security officer who proudly admitted that years ago he interrogated Sinwar for “between 150 and 180 hours” said so. Interrogation of Palestinians by Israel typically includes lengthy periods of torture.
All of this was depressingly familiar. The BBC and Panorama rarely dig into issues that might reflect badly on Israel and risk a backlash of criticism, including from the British government. That toothlessness when a genocide is unfolding in Gaza is especially egregious.
But the BBC is not just overlooking that horrifying crime but using its resources – funds provided by British taxpayers – to actively obscure Israel’s campaign of genocide and implicitly rationalise it as warranted.
A programme whose thesis is that Hamas misused public funds for nefarious purposes is, paradoxically, doing the very thing it condemns. It has misused British taxes to make a entirely bogus case that provides cover for the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.
They Think We Are Stupid, Volume 7
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | February 19, 2024
Everything you need to know about our ruling class’s opinion of you. As always, these headlines are presented without commentary.
Germany swims or sinks with NATO
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | FEBRUARY 17, 2024
There couldn’t be a better metaphor than what a Chinese analyst used to characterise NATO while commenting on its secretary general Jens Stoltenberg’s recent remark that the West does not seek war with Russia but should still “prepare ourselves for a confrontation that could last decades.”
The Chinese commentator compared Stoltenberg to a firm of undertakers, “a store owner of coffin and casket, which makes no money in peacetime. As an undertaker, NATO needs conflict, bloodshed for earnings. So it spreads fear and panic in order to ensure its member countries continue to contribute military funding.”
Stoltenberg’s remark appeared in an interview with German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag on Feb. 10, soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s famous interview with Tucker Carlson where the Kremlin signalled that Russia did not refuse and is not refusing negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Stoltenberg spoke for the Pentagon, no doubt.
Moscow, having reached an unassailable position in the war, is not interested in a full-scale war to realise its objectives, as eventually, the West will have to co-exist with Russia. Putin’s interview with Carlson was timed carefully — with hardly a fortnight left for the war to enter its third year.
Putin’s “message” that Russia is open to dialogue caught Washington off guard. For one thing, the bandwidth of the Biden Administration is dominated by the Israel-Palestine crisis. On the other hand, the two-year anniversary of the war is marked by a signal battlefield victory by Russian forces in the strategic eastern town of Avdiivka, a gateway to Donetsk city, and effectively on the front line ever since 2014 when the conflict in Donbass started.
All attempts by Russian troops to liquidate the big Ukrainian base in Avdiivka threatening Donetsk city had failed so far. Avdiivka is key to Russia’s aim of securing full control of the two eastern Donbass provinces — Donetsk and Luhansk. Its capture not only boosts the Russian morale but also consolidates Donetsk as a major Russian logistics hub for further westerly operations in the direction of the Dniepr river.
In political terms, it underscores that all along the almost 1000-km frontline, Russian forces are presently advancing. The Ukrainian military suffered a rout in Avdiivka.
Biden’s re-election bid will be bumpy if such distressing news keeps appearing from Ukraine highlighting the gravity of his foreign policy disaster, as NATO stares at another humiliating defeat after Afghanistan. Donald Trump is relentlessly challenging Biden on the issue of Russia-Ukraine and on NATO. Contrary to earlier prognosis, the US election has turned into one of the most influencing factors in the Ukraine conflict.
The path in the US Congress towards a military aid package for Ukraine is uncertain. The main obstacle all along was the House of Representatives, where Republicans have a majority. Apart from the Republican Speaker of the House being not in any hurry to table the bill passed by the Senate, the Congress is also about to shift back towards domestic fiscal policies, so that the foreign aid bill might simply fall down the list of priorities in the legislative agenda.
Meanwhile, the hearing in the Supreme Court on Trump’s candidacy signals that the talk that he might be debarred from running for the presidency is only wishful thinking. That means, if Trump maintains his lead in the South Carolina primaries on 24th February, the Republican race will be essentially over and he will be the party’s presumptive candidate. Trump has also widened his lead over Joe Biden in the polls.
The flow of finance to Ukraine is already ebbing and there is a pall of gloom among Ukraine’s cheerleaders in Europe after having discovered finally that Kiev is not winning the war. The West’s proxy war without a clearly set war goal means that there is no exit strategy, either.
A Trump victory would badly expose the European partners. Plugging the funding gap by Europe is going to be highly problematic. The US has so far committed €71.4 billion, more than half of it in the form of military aid. Number two is Germany with €21 billion, followed by the UK with €13.3 billion. Norway comes fourth. The paradox is, while the three largest European donors are all NATO members, it is only Germany who is a member of the European Union.
And Germany is not big enough to fill the gap left by the US on its own. But the biggest obstacle to a common European response is the lack of common ground between France and Germany. The special Franco-German relationship has largely become a historical artefact. The two EU giants are pursuing incompatible economic strategies — on fiscal policy and nuclear energy — and their economies are diverging, and so are their politics and defence strategies.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has reoriented German defence co-operation away from France and towards the US. The power struggle between the EU’s two biggest powers that had its origins in the lack of chemistry between French president Emmanuel Macron and Scholz has turned into an antagonism manifesting as two different visions of the world.
Macron’s concept of “strategic autonomy”, which calls for Europe not to rely on outside powers in vital areas that could give them political leverage, is rubbing against Germany’s historical reliance on the American military umbrella (which France does not require.)
After a meeting with Biden at the White House in Washington on February 9, Scholz said, “Let’s not beat about the bush: support from the United States is indispensable if Ukraine is to be capable of defending itself.” Scholz strongly advocated stepping up military aid to Ukraine, emphasising an imperative need to send out a “very clear signal” to Putin.
As he put it, “We need to show that he (Putin) can’t count on our support waning.” Scholz added: “The support we provide will be on a big enough scale and it will last long enough.” By hyping up the war-like atmosphere, Germany seeks to maintain the relevance and financial stability of NATO through the conflict in Ukraine.
Biden responded to Scholz purring like a cat showing pleasure. Biden will next host Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk for a meeting in Washington on March 12. The US is re-energising its coalition with Germany and Poland for the next phase of Ukraine war. France stands outside looking in, while Britain lies in coma.
Simply put, while Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s delusion is that he can win this war, NATO’s delusion is that it will do whatever it takes. But the undertaker’s money is running out and further business depends on prolonging the war.
The veil has come off the western narrative — this war was never about Ukraine. The enemy image of Russia has become the cornerstone of NATO’s very existence and function.
Certainly, taking orders from an undertaker is not in Germany’s interests. The noted German editor Wolfgang Münchau wrote recently about “a general disorientation in Germany that accompanies the geopolitical and social change” manifesting in the faltering economy, the de-industrialisation that is happening and the absence of a post-industrial strategy for the country as such.
Clearly, European interests lie in shouldering their own defence and making peace with Russia so as to focus attention on the economy. Germans themselves are conflicted over this war. Scholz is not a man of charisma or of big ideas, Münchau noted, and the German public no longer trusts him. But then, there is also “the deeper problem: it is not really Scholz. It is that Germany has become a lot harder to run.”
US spies behind ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy – report
US President Barack Obama and CIA Director John Brennan, December 14, 2012 in Washington, DC. © Pete Souza / The White House via Getty Images
RT | February 14, 2024
The US intelligence community inappropriately used foreign allies to target Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign to set up the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy ahead of the 2016 election, according to a trio of investigative journalists.
Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag – of ‘Twitter Files’ fame – published the first part of an investigation on Tuesday, in which they claim the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ were operationalized against Trump staffers, citing anonymous sources close to the House Intelligence Committee.
According to their report, President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had sent America’s partners – the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – a list of 26 Trump associates to target with data collection, misinformation and manipulation.
The Russiagate conspiracy involved multiple failures across western media networks to critically assess US intelligence claims that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. A 2018 Pulitzer prize was awarded to Washington Post and New York Times journalists for their reporting on what was later to exposed as a false story.
“They were making contacts and bumping Trump people going back to March 2016,” said a committee source. “They were sending people around the UK, Australia, Italy — the Mossad in Italy. MI6 was working at an intelligence school they had set up,” the journalists claim.
Officially, the FBI only started looking into the Trump campaign that summer, after an Australian diplomat reportedly overheard an aide mention Russia. If confirmed, these findings would demonstrate that the US intelligence community had worked for months before that to set up just such a pretext.
In a statement to the investigative journalists, the FBI said it had made “missteps” in the 2016 and 2017 investigation of the Trump campaign, but has since implemented reforms to prevent it from happening again.
“The allegations that GCHQ was asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense,” a spokesman for the British surveillance agency said. “They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.” Shellenberger, Taibbi and Gutentag said they had never asked the GCHQ about “wiretapping.”
According to Shellenberger, there is a “10-inch binder” containing previously unknown documents about the intelligence community’s surveillance of the Trump campaign. The 45th US president had ordered these documents declassified, but they went missing instead. In a Fox News appearance on Tuesday evening, Shellenberger suggested the FBI’s August 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort may have been related to the missing binder.
After the US intelligence community created a pretext for investigating Trump for ‘ties to Russia,’ they spied on his campaign – and then his presidency – using a falsely obtained FISA warrant. The warrant was based on the ‘Steele dossier,’ a file compiled by a British spy in the pay of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, through several intermediaries. The FBI knew the dossier was false as early as January 2017, but continued using the FISA warrant for almost a year thereafter.
The FBI lawyer who altered evidence to obtain the warrant, Kevin Clinesmith, ended up sentenced to probation and his law license has since been restored.
US ‘security threat’ revelations prompt panic
RT | February 14, 2024
The US is facing a “serious national security threat” that requires action from the White House, the head of the House Intelligence Committee said on Wednesday. The exact nature of the alleged threat has not been revealed.
Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, has sent a letter to all members of Congress about an urgent matter “with regard to a destabilizing foreign military capability.” The House Intelligence Committee voted on Tuesday to make certain information available to lawmakers between Wednesday and Friday this week, he said.
Turner also called on President Joe Biden to declassify “all information relating to this threat.”
What exactly the threat might entail, Turner did not say. CNN cited two anonymous sources and an unnamed US official to claim it was “related to Russia.” One of the sources, who has allegedly viewed the intelligence Turner provided, described it as “a highly concerning and destabilizing” Russian capability “that we were recently made aware of.”
A Fox News correspondent cited a Pentagon source to claim the threat “has to do with space.”
Answering questions from reporters on Wednesday afternoon, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said he had been trying to schedule a meeting of top lawmakers for Thursday when Turner went public with the existence of the “threat.”
“I’m not in a position to say anything further from this podium at this time,” Sullivan said when asked about the alleged threat.
Numerous social media commentators have pointed out the uncanny coincidence that the supposed “security threat” was announced just after the US Senate passed a $95 billion foreign aid bill – about two thirds of which was earmarked for Ukraine – and amid the pressure on the House of Representatives to do the same. Turner is a vocal proponent of funding Kiev.
The White House and most US media outlets have consistently denigrated Russia’s military capabilities and insisted that Ukraine is “winning” the conflict thanks to the ongoing support of the West.
According to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the alleged threat was announced because “the White House and Intel Committee felt a need to scare Members of Congress into line for a certain set of controversial pro-war and/or surveillance votes” that are coming up.
Blood on BoJo’s Hands
Putin’s claim that Boris Johnson scuttled peace deal confirmed by witnesses
BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | FEBRUARY 13, 2024
Former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and the mainstream media are hotly denying Vladimir Putin’s claim (in his recent Tucker Carlson interview) that Johnson derailed a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine just a couple of months after the war commenced.
And yet, Putin was merely confirming the statement of David Arahamiya, leader of Ukraine’s ruling party, that was reported in Newsweek on November 27, 2023: Russia Offered to End War if Ukraine Dropped NATO Bid: Kyiv Official.
The German analyst and Former United Nations Assistant Secretary General, Michael von der Schulenberg, also published a reconstruction of these events on November 14, 2023, titled How The Chance Was Lost For A Peace Settlement Of The Ukraine War.
The totality of circumstances and the statements of Arahamiya and von der Schulenberg indicate that an Austrian-style neutrality deal could have prevented this war to begin with, and then—had it been embraced by the the USA and Britain—ended it just two months later.
Since Churchill delivered his June 4, 1940, “We shall fight on the beaches” speech, many postwar heads of state have apparently fantasized that their opponents on the international stage are “just like Hitler” and that there can be no negotiated settlement with them.
In BoJo’s case, this shallow, sophomoric notion has apparently resulted in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian soldiers.
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From the Archives
Is America behind the massive surge in Kiev regime’s child trafficking?
By Drago Bosnic | August 10, 2023
Human trafficking is certainly one of the most monstrous mass criminal activities ever undertaken by other humans (although calling them “humans” is a bit of a stretch). And yet, there’s a special kind of this deeply repulsive crime that pushes it to diabolical proportions – child trafficking. Underage kids, particularly those who were abandoned, sold or have very poor/abusive family backgrounds, are by far the most vulnerable group. The depraved criminals who engage in such illicit activities specifically target unfortunate children and given there are millions of them all around the globe, particularly in war-torn areas, the “recruitment pool” is effectively endless. Unfortunately, the demand on the black market also seems to be constant and growing, making it a very lucrative and appealing prospect for criminals. … continue
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