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Nord Stream Sabotage Backfires With Historic Demolition of U.S. Image and Lies Over Ukraine War

Strategic Culture Foundation | February 17, 2023

The Hersh report is a devastating revelation of U.S. and NATO international terrorism as well as Western media complicity. It exposes the lawlessness of U.S. government, the total disregard by Washington for its so-called European allies, the supine nature of European governments, Germany in particular, and the real geopolitical reasons behind the war in Ukraine, and subsequently the shocking servility of Western media in refusing to cover what is an astounding act of criminality.

This is an explosive story in more ways than one and indeed in more ways than we can perhaps even calculate at this stage. Only one week after its publication, the fallout and reverberations continue to amplify. Such is the parlous and pathetic state of Western journalism, Hersh was obliged to publish his account on his resources, knowing that mainstream outlets would not touch it. That systematic media censorship and exposure of propaganda functioning is itself a huge scandal that will grow further. This is while the European Union sanctions and bans Russian media, even though Russian media have been vindicated by Hersh’s revelations while Western media is shown to be an utter disgrace.

On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. European states have since acknowledged that, albeit with muted reports. For its part, Russia has from the outset blamed Western powers for an act of terrorism. Washington initially made the preposterous claims that Russia had carried out the attacks in revenge against Europe. And Western media went along with the ridiculous ride.

There is no disputing that the damage was deliberate sabotage. The 1,222-kilometer undersea civilian infrastructure was the biggest of its kind in the world, involving a consortium of companies from Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands. It took more than a decade to construct at an estimated cost of over €12 billion. The enormous loss of natural gas volumes from the explosion could also be monetized in billions of euros.

State-Sponsored Terrorism

So, without even attributing specific culpability, this sabotage constitutes an egregious act of state-sponsored terrorism that violates international law on numerous counts. And yet Western media have acted like the proverbial monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.

At the time of the spectacular event, many critical observers immediately suspected foul play. In our Strategic Culture Foundation weekly editorial of September 30, the headline stated: “Blatantly Obvious Who Gains From Nord Stream Sabotage”.

We postulated back then only days after the incident that a plausible cause was “deliberate sabotage” by the United States and its NATO allies.

“If that’s the case, then it is an act of terrorism against civilian infrastructure and a grievous blow to Russia’s national interests. It could be construed as a criminal act of war,” we wrote.

Our editorial cited U.S. President Joe Biden’s own words of warning issued at a White House press conference when he spoke on February 7, 2022. Biden appeared to stray off script and cryptically asserted to reporters that the Nord Stream would be “brought to an end” if Russia were to intervene militarily in Ukraine, as Russia did two weeks later on February 24 (as a result of deadly NATO provocations, we should add).

“His [Biden’s] cryptic assertion, over-riding European governments, suggests that a contingency plan had already been authorized to take out the Nord Stream. And, it seems, the nefarious action duly went ahead this week,” we wrote.

(We modestly take pride in the objective perspicacity of our assessment. And yet this online journal is smeared and banned by the United States and European governments as a Russian propaganda tool.)

Seymour Hersh’s investigative report published last week corroborates what many observers had suspected at an early stage. The irrefutable fact is the Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up by U.S. military forces. Not only that, but the Americans were aided and abetted by NATO member Norway, and quite possibly by other NATO members including Poland, Denmark and Britain.

This is an earth-shattering scandal. The repercussions are going to keep cascading and cascading. Hersh has followed up with promises of more indicting details in forthcoming articles. Other journalists are now corroborating his details about U.S. navy divers planting explosives under the cover of NATO war games in the Baltic Sea last June. Hersh claims that some of the C4 bombs did not detonate as planned. That means there could still be evidence to be found on the seabed conclusively implicating the United States.

Then there was the earlier report by Swedish divers who had inspected the site in the aftermath of the explosions. Did they try to clean up the crime scene? The Swedish authorities have refused to disclose the contents of their report. They have a case to answer, as do the Danes, the Norwegians, the Brits and most of all the Americans.

Russia has called for a United Nations Security Council meeting to convene next week on the subject, based on the latest investigative report by Seymour Hersh. China has also called for an independent international commission to study the matter.

Questions are also urgently required from the German government on what it knew about the sabotage. As our columnist Martin Jay pointed out this week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in the White House on February 7 last year when Biden made his clumsy threat to take out the Nord Stream. The implication is that Scholz knew in advance of the demolition plan.

Western Media’s Damning Silence

We are talking here about multiple malfeasance and cardinal crimes. Terrorism, destruction of sovereign property, aggression and incitement of war, treason and an orchestrated media cover-up involving supposed bastions of Western journalism. The New York Times and Washington Post have so far ignored the Hersh report. Western media have stubbornly refused to investigate this urgent story. How damning is that?

Internationally renowned legal expert Professor Francis Boyle has assessed (in email correspondence with SCF) that a prosecution case can be brought against the United States over the Nord Stream incident under the auspices of the International Criminal Court. The U.S. is not a signatory to the foundational Rome Statute but the incident occurred in territory belonging to European states that are. Whether such a prosecution proceeds and whether the UN Security Council takes action later this week are moot points. But at the very least, the whole scandal is blowing up in the court of international public opinion.

Seymour Hersh (now aged 85) is to be commended for his journalistic service. We may quibble about some details in his report. Has he covered the full picture of all the actors involved? Perhaps not. His report is not a geopolitical analysis and some of his premises suggest he is not critical of the U.S. or NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine. These reservations are relatively minor to his main point of understanding what actually took place.

Those caveats aside, however, one can say that Hersh’s report is a blockbuster. His lifetime work is impeccable. He uncovered the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 when hundreds of men, women and children were murdered gratuitously by American troops. Hersh also exposed in 2004 the torture practices by the US military in Iraq at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

Historic Impact

Hersh’s reporting in the past has had a historic impact. It mobilized public understanding and opinion about the nefarious nature of U.S. wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

As many analysts and our own weekly editorials at SCF have repeatedly pointed out, the war in Ukraine is a bigger geopolitical cause than the absurd narrative put out by Western governments and news media about “defending Ukraine and Western freedom from Russia aggression”. We have consistently analyzed that the expansion of NATO, the weaponization of Ukraine, and the current conflict are all about the American imperialist ambition for hegemonic control. Destroying normal relations between Europe and Russia and most especially destruction of the strategically important energy trade are all part of the objective. Pursuing that objective has created a most dangerous war that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.

As eminent American commentator Jeffrey Sachs has noted, the criminal conduct of Washington regarding the blowing up of the Nord Stream is totally characteristic of U.S. criminal behavior that has been practiced over many decades since World War Two. The difference now is that this criminality directly impinges on many more people’s lives – from the danger of catastrophic war to the economic misery caused by wanton American aggression.

The Hersh article – despite the Western media shamefully ignoring it thereby exposing their own criminal complicity in U.S. terrorism – has made the world more aware than ever of the rogue state that is the United States and its capitalist, imperialist dynamics.

Inciting war in Europe, antagonizing a nuclear Russia with unprecedented aggression, inflicting mass poverty and hardship on European civilians, and lying about it all the time through its propaganda media. Washington is a war-criminal state par excellence along with its European Quislings.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked several weeks ago, the historic situation is revolutionary.

February 17, 2023 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Ex-CIA Analyst Says Mainstream Media Killed Nord Stream Bombing Story

By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 17.02.2023

The bombing of the Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines supplying Germany has directly benefitted business interests in the two countries now accused of the terrorist act: the US and Norway have both increased natural gas sales to Europe.

Western media suppressed the revelation that the White House ordered the bombing of two Russian gas pipelines, a former CIA expert has alleged.

Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published his bombshell exposé on his personal blog last week detailing how last September’s attack on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 submarine pipelines to Germany was organized.

Russia has requested a meeting of the UN Security Council on February 22 to discuss Hersh’s revelations, while China has called on the UN to investigate.

Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, told Sputnik the security council presidency, currently held by Malta, could block that request.

“It’s hard for the Russians to depend on the UN now since it has been pretty much co-opted by the US, but they still play by that rule,” McGovern said. “They prefer the old way to what the US calls the ‘rules-based international order’.”

He said the most interesting aspect of Hersh’s exposé was “the fact that US media, German media have been silent on all these things.”

“How long can the major media keep this quiet?” McGovern asked, pointing to the continued longevity of the ‘Russiagate’ hoax years after it was debunked. “It’s been over five years since the US government knew that there was no Russian hacking of the DNC. Five years plus. Does the American people know that?”

The intelligence expert said the American people had been “inculcated with a deep hatred of Russia and Putin personally” to drum up support for the proxy conflict in Ukraine. But now the wheels were coming off the Pentagon-orchestrated military campaign, the media narrative was crumbling.

“Things are coming to a head in the next month or two and how the US reacts to what is likely to be the abject defeat of Ukrainian forces,” McGovern said. “The people running our policy are naive. They’re arrogant. They think the US is exceptional. And Putin himself has said, you know, they think they can be completely immune to the consequences of their activities. That is no longer the case.”

Another who has been critical is former US marine and UN chemical weapons inspector Scott Ritter.

“There are lots of people that know how stupid and how unconstitutional this act of war was,” McGovern said. “So what we have is not only a lack of courage.”

The former CIA insider said government surveillance was now “so pervasive” that few sources would take the risk of tipping off reporters like Hersh.

“I imagine Sy Hersh, every stroke of his pen is recorded and they can trace back as they try to trace back to who the, quote, culprit, end quote, and reality, who the patriot was,” McGovern said.

He compared Hersh to persecuted whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Wikileaks founder Jullian Assange.

“They’ll double down on stupid for as long as they can,” McGovern said. “Next thing you can expect is to find out that Sy Hersh slept with some Swedish women.”

February 17, 2023 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

The Forgotten Terrorist Pretext of the Vietnam War

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | February 16, 2023

Since 9/11, terrorism has become the ultimate entitlement program for America’s political elite. Whether it is illegally spying on Americans or blowing Somali dissidents to pieces, invoking terrorism provides all the cover needed for Washington policymakers. But the disastrous results of granting politicians a blank check to fight terrorism should have been undeniable almost 60 years ago.

Back in the 1960s, terrorism was what the communists did. Anti-terrorist moral fervor and ideological blinders propelled the U.S. into its biggest foreign policy blunder since World War II.

As the French Foreign Legion struggled to reconquer Vietnam in the wake of World War II, the U.S. government constantly embellished the storyline to demonize the communist opposition. A CIA operative provided materials for a massive bomb that ripped through a main square in Saigon in 1952. A Life magazine photographer was waiting on the scene, and his resulting snap appeared with a caption blaming the carnage on Viet Minh Communists. The New York Times headlined its report: “Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center.” The bombing was touted as “one of the most spectacular and destructive single incidents in the long history of revolutionary terrorism” committed by “agents here of the Vietminh.” The press coverage boosted public support for U.S. government aid to the French army fighting the Communists. A Vietnamese warlord named General Trinh Minh Thé, a CIA collaborator, claimed credit for the bomb but the U.S. media ignored his statement.

In the wake of the French defeat in 1954, U.S. military advisors poured into Vietnam. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy declared: “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.” The Kennedy administration sought credibility by profoundly deceiving the American people and Congress regarding its Vietnam policy. JFK violated the limits on the number of American military advisors established in the 1954 Geneva peace treaty between the French and the Vietnamese communists. He also deceived the American public by mislabeling the growing U.S. contingent in South Vietnam as advisors at a time when they were becoming actively engaged in fighting.

The US government regarded the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem as corrupt, oppressive, and inept. The Pentagon Papers described a May 8, 1963 debacle in the city of Hue, South Vietnam: “Government troops fire on a Buddhist protest demonstration, killing nine and wounding fourteen. The incident triggers a nationwide Buddhist protest and a crisis of popular confidence for the Diem regime. [The Government of South Vietnam] maintains the incident was an act of [Viet Cong] terrorism.”

The Diem government was outraged that the Buddhists demanded legal equality with Catholics and the right to fly the Buddhist flag. In August 1963, South Vietnamese Special Forces “carried out midnight raids against Buddhist pagodas throughout the country. More than 1,400 people, mostly monks were arrested and many of them were beaten,” according to the Pentagon Papers. The CIA was bankrolling these Special Forces, which were supposed to be used for covert operations against the Viet Cong or North Vietnam, not for religious repression. Diem’s terrorizing of the Buddhists swayed the U.S. to back a coup that led to his assassination a few months later.

The Lyndon Johnson administration exploited the terrorist label to sway Americans to support greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In a special message to Congress on May 18, 1964 seeking additional fund for Vietnam, LBJ declared, “the Viet Cong guerrillas, under orders from their Communist masters in the North, have intensified terrorist actions against the peaceful people of South Vietnam. This increased terrorism requires increased response.” Johnson scorned a proposal by French president Charles de Gaulle for a Geneva conference on the growing Vietnam conflict because LBJ declared the conference would “ratify terror.” In a June 23, 1964 press conference, LBJ declared that “our purpose is peace. Our people in South Viet-Nam are helping to protect people against terror.”

U.S. policymakers were hungry for a pretext to unleash bombing. On May 15, 1964, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge recommended planning for the South Vietnamese air force to hit “a specific target in North Vietnam,” carefully timed after a “terrorist act of proper magnitude beforehand by the North Vietnamese,” the Pentagon Papers revealed.

At that time, the U.S. was already carrying out an array of “non-attributable hit-and run” raids against North Vietnam, including “kidnappings of North Vietnamese citizens for intelligence information, parachuting sabotage and psychological warfare teams into the north, commando raids from the sea to blow up rail and highway bridges, and the bombardment of North Vietnamese coastal installations by PT boats,” according to the Pentagon Papers. Thai pilots flying American planes bombed and strafed North Vietnamese villages. But the Johnson administration denied that the U.S. was committing any provocations.

Johnson had already decided to attack North Vietnam to boost his election campaign. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer U.S.S. Maddox fired on North Vietnamese ships near the North Vietnamese coast. Two days later, the Maddox reported that it was under attack from North Vietnamese PT boats. Within hours, the ship’s commander wired Washington that the reports of an attack on his ship may have been wildly exaggerated: “Entire action leaves many doubts.” But the Maddox’s initial report was all LBJ needed to go on national television and announce that he had ordered immediate “retaliatory” airstrikes against North Vietnam. Johnson railroaded a resolution through Congress granting him unlimited authority to attack North Vietnam. The resolution was written months earlier and the administration was waiting for the right moment to unveil it.

Both the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese government were terrorizing people at the time the U.S. involvement rapidly expanded in 1965. But the U.S. government looked only at the Viet Cong’s terrorism to justify launching its own bombing campaign that killed far more civilians than did the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese army prior to the end of the war.

The American media endlessly recited the terrorist storyline that the U.S. government created to justify ramping up the Vietnam War. University of California Professor Daniel Hallin observed, “The theme of terrorism directed against civilians was central to television’s image of the enemy… Television coverage of the North Vietnamese… focused on terror to the almost total exclusion of politics. The American media also almost completely ignored attacks on Vietnamese civilians by the U.S. military.”

The political racketeering that spawned the Vietnam War should remind Americans to be wary of any salvation mission championed by their rulers. The U.S. government perennially claims to be an innocent bystander after its covert interventions unleash havoc abroad. There is no shortage of evil governments and evil factions that butcher innocent people. But foreign atrocities, real or imagined, don’t make Washington trustworthy.

Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Wartime Parallels: Iraq and Covid

By Ramesh Thakur | Brownstone Institute | February 15, 2023

At the time of the Iraq war, I was a senior UN official yet publicly critical of the drive to war before and during the war, including in the pages of the esteemed International Herald Tribune. (The demise of that paper was a sad loss to the world of high quality international journalism.)

The resort to emotional blackmail by the warmongers, where critics of the impending war were tarred for standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Butcher of Baghdad, was instructive. Of course, very soon “We, the critics” were amply vindicated.

The whole episode left me with two conclusions. First, the resort to emotional arguments and moral blackmail generally implies that they have little reasoned argument and evidence to support their case and are deflecting to bluster instead. Second, whenever we are presented with excitable exclamation marks (Saddam Hussein already has weapons of mass destruction (WMD)! He can hit us with WMD in just 45 minutes! Coronavirus could be more cataclysmic than the Spanish flu! The sky is falling!), it is a very good idea to substitute sceptical question marks instead:

  • Why would Saddam do that?
  • Where is your evidence?
  • What is your end goal?
  • Are the proposed means proportionate to that goal?
  • What will be the human and economic cost?
  • How long will this take?
  • Will you recognize success?
  • What is your exit strategy?
  • What are the checks against mission creep?

Instead of such healthy scepticism to force a dose of reality and calm down the agitated excitement, the coronavirus panic has also shown a remarkable triumph of the Henny Penny (or Chicken Little) tunnel vision. Thinking back to that as the coronavirus madness took hold of the world in 2020, I was surprised at how close the fit was to the Iraq war analogy once I thought the whole thing through. The lockdown, mask and vaccine mandates in particular revealed seven disturbing echoes of the 2003 Iraq War syndrome.

The first parallel is with respect to threat inflation. In the “Foreword” to the “dodgy dossier” of September 2002, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote: Saddam Hussein’s “military planning allows for some of the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” This turned out to be disinformation that was vital to rally the party, Parliament and the nation behind the decision to go to war.

British intelligence services had informed Blair in April 2002 (a year before the war) that Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons and any other WMD would be “very, very small.” The Chilcot Inquiry was told a decade later that Blair accepted this but converted to George W. Bush’s way of thinking after a subsequent visit to the US president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Similarly, to gain public backing for the degree of state intrusion into peoples’ private lives and control over nations’ economic activities without precedent even in wartime, the immediacy, gravity and magnitude of the coronavirus threat had to be made apocalyptic.

SARS-CoV-2 is not remotely as lethal as the Spanish flu of 1918–19 that killed the fit and young as virulently as the elderly and infirm. It infected 500 million people (one third of the world’s population) and killed 50 million, equivalent to around 250 million dead today. Our health systems are infinitely better than a century ago. Yet authorities did not close down whole societies and economies in 1918. In other deadly pandemic episodes also we suffered but endured.

To overcome these hesitations of history and experience, the threat from SARS-CoV-2 had to be inflated beyond all previous calamities in order to panic countries into drastic action. This was successfully done by Neil Ferguson’s catastrophist Imperial College London model of 16 March 2020 that is by now widely discredited. It deserves to acquire a notoriety equivalent to Iraq’s dodgy dossier and Ferguson’s mortality estimates should be judged to be the equivalent of Blair’s 45 minutes to Saddam’s WMD.

The second echo comes from the thinness of evidence. The infamous Downing Street Memorandum of 23 July 2002 made it clear that the US administration was determined to go to war and military action was inevitable. For their part, however, British officials did not believe there was sufficient legal justification: there was no recent evidence of Iraqi complicity with international terrorism, Saddam’s WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran, and he was not a threat to his neighbours. It was necessary to create the conditions that would make an invasion legal, hence “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” and the US “had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime.”

With Covid-19, similarly, instead of evidence-based policy, many governments resorted to policy-based evidence to justify lockdowns, masks and vaccines.

The third similarity is in the denigration of critics who had the temerity to query the evidence. Those who questioned the lack of evidence to invade Iraq were demonized as apologists for the Butcher of Baghdad. Those who asked for evidence to justify the biggest expansion of state power in Western political history were shamed as wanting to kill granny. Most recently we learnt of how a unit of British intelligence kept tabs on the writings of journalists like Toby Young and Peter Hitchens because of their critical stance on government policies.

The fourth parallel is in the dismissal of collateral harm as exaggerated, speculative, without evidence, motivated, etc. Yet evidence continues to mount on the many different pathways through which the Grim Reaper claims his growing mass of victims from the panicked responses to Covid.

The fifth echo is in the lack of a clear exit strategy. Instead of a quick victory in Iraq followed by consolidated democratic regimes in a stable region and an orderly withdrawal, the US found itself stuck in a quagmire and eventually went back home an exhausted and vanquished conqueror. Almost all lockdown governments are now struggling with public justifications to declare victory and lift the lockdown. Modellers still want none of it and the apocalyptic warnings keep coming back, despite mounting evidence of a policy-invariant gradual decline in the spike in cases and deaths around the world. Covid is now endemic. The cognitive dissonance in Covid policy has been starkly evident in the continuation of the travel ban on unvaccinated visitors to the US well after authorities had been compelled to concede vaccines had no appreciable impact on infection and transmission.

Another resemblance is mission creep. One big reason for the self-created exit trap is that the original mission of flattening the curve so the health system could cope with a slowed spread of the virus, steadily morphed into the more ambitious but impossible mission of eliminating the virus. Or, to change metaphors, the goalposts didn’t just keep shifting. They were dug out and replanted in an entirely new paddock in an altogether different location.

Seventh and finally, like the US media in 2003, most mainstream media commentators across the democratic West abandoned critical inquisitiveness in 2020 to become cheerleaders for the “war on corona.” Except the censorship and suppression of dissenting voices seems to have been far, far worse in the last three years than was the case in 2003, with possibly illegal collusion between governments and Big Tech.

Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.

February 15, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Media Ignores Evidence That West Opposed Ukraine Peace Deal

BY NOAH CARL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 14, 2023

As I noted in a previous article, the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett revealed in a recent interview that in March of last year Western leaders blocked a draft peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

There seems to be some disagreement over exactly what he said, as the interview was in Hebrew. Based on the English subtitles on YouTube, I quoted him as saying, “They blocked it.” But others insist he said, “They broke off negotiations.” Either way, he clearly implied that the West stymied negotiations that might have led to a peace deal.

What’s more telling is the reason he gave as to why the West did so, namely “to keep smashing Putin”. This tallies closely with Roman Romanyuk’s account of why Western leaders opposed negotiations in April:

Behind this visit and Johnson’s words lies much more than a simple reluctance to engage in agreements with Russia. The collective West, which back in February suggested that Zelenskyi surrender and run away, now felt that Putin is actually not as all-powerful as they imagined him to be. Moreover, right now there was a chance to “press him”. And the West wants to use it.

As Caitlin Johnstone points out, it also lines up with what the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on April 20th last year:

Following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it was the impression that … there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine.

So we now have a NATO Foreign Minister, a journalist with sources “close to Zelensky” and a former Israeli PM all saying that Western leaders opposed a peace deal because they wanted to “weaken”, “press” or “smash” Putin.

These seem like newsworthy revelations, don’t they? Not according to the mainstream media.

I checked whether the revelations have been mentioned by any of the following outlets: the BBC, CNN, the Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. With the exception of one op-ed in the New York Times which quoted Cavusoglu’s statement, they’ve been completely ignored.

The point here isn’t that there definitely would have been a peace deal if not for the actions of Western leaders. We can’t know that. The point is: there’s credible evidence that Western leaders stymied negotiations which might have led to a peace deal because they wanted to weaken Russia.

With the exception of Tucker Carlson and a few lesser-known outlets, why hasn’t the media covered this? One of the current headlines on the BBC News homepage is ‘Rihanna reveals pregnancy at Super Bowl show’. Which is more newsworthy: Rihanna’s personal life, or the revelation that Western leaders may have sabotaged peace? I’m reminded of this meme:

A few days ago, in fact, a BBC Ukraine journalist got up and hugged Zelensky at a press conference. However much you support a particular cause, as a journalist you’re supposed to show a modicum of impartiality. Based on this incident, I wouldn’t expect any dramatic shifts in coverage.

February 15, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Hersh Blasts US Mainstream Media for Ignoring Nord Stream Blasts Report

Sputnik – 15.02.2023

WASHINGTON – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh on Wednesday criticized US mainstream media for not running a word about his investigative piece on the Biden administration’s alleged sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines.

Last week, Hersh on his Substack account published an investigative report describing in detail how US deep-water divers had allegedly planted explosives under Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines. Hersh wrote, based on insider information from a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning, that the explosives were detonated remotely on September 26, 2022, on the order of President Joe Biden.

Known for exposing the mass murder of unarmed civilians by US troops during the Vietnam War and reporting on the US military’s torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Hersh in an article on Wednesday observed that over the years US administrations from both parties repeatedly tried to obstruct or denigrate what he was writing, labeling him “a known fabricator” and dismissing his stories as “crap.”

Still, the pieces he wrote eventually found their way to mainstream media in the US and around the world, the journalist noted. Hersh worked as a long-time reporter for The New York Times, and The Washington Post ran a long magazine profile of him more than two decades ago.

“Neither paper has run a word at this point about the pipeline story, not even to quote the White House’s denial of my reporting. Similarly, public calls by officials in Russia and China for a full investigation of the pipeline story have been ignored by the US media,” Hersh said.

The White House, Pentagon and State Department deny any US involvement in sabotaging the pipelines.

February 15, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Long on Covid, terrifyingly short on reason

By Niall McCrae | TCW Defending Freedom | February 14, 2023

As far as the mainstream media goes, the vaccine-injured are unicorns. Their symptoms are delusional or fabricated for ‘anti-vax’ activism. But the real fantasy is in the purported ‘miracle of science’ of the vaccine – novel mRNA technology that is proving to be anything but safe and effective. Any medical treatment has risks as well as benefits, which should have been properly assessed in clinical trials before mass vaccination began.

So strong is faith in heroic medicine that many recipients cannot begin to connect their subsequent maladies to the jabs. A classic of the genre is the latest column by Scottish journalist Emma Cowing in the Daily Mail. ‘A miserable way to find you CAN’T avoid Covid’ is the title of Cowing’s account of catching Covid-19 for the first time.

‘Aware I had recently been in the company of someone who had ended up with Covid, I decided to take a test, and watched with horror as that treacherous first line turned red . . . It wasn’t the first time I had been in contact with people who had tested positive, and yet each time I had got away scot free. I might have known that such pride comes before two lines on a plastic test kit.’

The lateral flow test taken by Cowing is as dubious as the concept of asymptomatic transmission, or indeed of the virus itself. Was there really a coronavirus with the same symptoms and mortality rate of influenza, which almost completely replaced influenza in the last three years? Despite such similarities, the approach taken to Covid-19 was unprecedented: lockdown, school closure, masks and universal vaccination, all pushed by propagandised fear. Just as Dr Mike Yeadon detailed at TCW’s Celebration of Dissent last Thursday. Cowing however believes that we let our guard down too early: ‘The truth is, we have all got pretty complacent. Just a fortnight ago I was in London, and, despite travelling everywhere by Tube, didn’t even think to wear a mask. I think nothing of hugging friends, or sitting in meetings with doors closed and no windows open.’

It’s always a trip to London, isn’t it? City of the medieval Great Plague, and now the Great Unwashed on public transport. As a journalist, Cowing was able to identify her pathogen with specificity: ‘A little research tells me that what I have is likely the relatively new “Kraken” strain, an Omicron sub-variant that took hold in the US and has now made its way over here. It is particularly contagious and fast-moving.’

I’m not sure that Cowing’s research went beyond the archives of her own newspaper. Kraken hasn’t caught the public imagination, a clear sign of Covid-19 fatigue. But for Cowing, the analogy is validated by her debilitation: ‘I have a range of symptoms that I never knew were features of Covid. Cramp in my legs and feet, excruciating pain in my lower back that saw me lying on the floor for an hour in search of relief, a burning pain in my arms and legs. Even my hair hurts.’

Hardly able to work at home, Cowing took days to write her short piece. She is trying to keep her nasty symptoms to herself. ‘All conversations with my husband, who is still testing negative, have taken place from behind a door and I have confined myself to one bedroom, with occasional trips to the kitchen for food and water while wearing a mask, careful to wash my hands and disinfect anything I touch.’

Ironically, the likes of Cowing would regard Covid-19 sceptics as delusional, and the claimed vaccine-injured as hypochondriacal. The latter would not doubt that Cowing’s apparently neurological symptoms are painful and distressing. But it’s a shame that this is not reciprocated. And more importantly for Cowing, she needs to break the spell that clouds her comprehension of why she is so ill. Instead, Cowing doubles down on Covid-19 narrative: ‘Yes, Covid-19, in 2023, even for the quadruple-vaxxed like myself, is no joke.’ Because of the vaccine, Cowing has less to fear than those afflicted by the initial outbreak, when there was no relief by needle, and ‘when many young, healthy individuals were ending up in intensive care’.

Like millions of others who believe that it is somehow a positive to contract the very illness that they were supposedly inoculated against, Cowing worships at the altar of the pharma gods. Her blind faith, her ‘doubling down’ and the cognitive dissonance it exposes, is terrifying.

‘Thank goodness for the scientists who created the vaccine. It is because of them that normal life has been able to go on at all. And as I pop some more painkillers and settle down for another nap, I have never felt more grateful.’

A rational response by the quadruple-jabbed Cowing would be to report her symptoms on the Yellow Card system, as these are not the effects normally expected of an endemic respiratory virus, but more likely adverse reaction to the injections. After all the hubris, it is time for belated backtracking by journalists who have failed in their fundamental role of investigating and telling the truth.

February 14, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

BBC’s Solar Power Misinformation

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 10, 2023

More disinformation from the BBC:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64553915

Amidst the backslapping about how wonderful solar power is, the BBC present this graph:

WOW!! Most people reading this would believe that electricity from fossil fuels is declining rapidly, while solar and wind power now claim a share well over 20%.

Most of those same readers would be unaware what the BBC mean by “capacity”, or that “capacity” and “generation” are two totally separate and different things.

And when we look at generation, we can see how badly misled those readers have been:

BP Energy Review

Far from being major players, wind and solar together only supply 10% of the world’s electricity. And since 2010, the increase in fossil fuel generation has exceeded that of wind and solar.

A rather different picture to the one the BBC would like you believe, I think you might agree!

February 11, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

German Lawmaker Condemns Scholz’s Telltale Silence on US Role in Nord Stream Sabotage

Sputnik – 09.02.2023

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s silence on the recent revelation by an American investigative journalist that US navy divers blew up Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipeline speaks volumes, Maximilian Krah of the German AfD party told Sputnik.

Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who blew the whistle on US atrocities in Vietnam War and more recently on prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that American deep-water divers had planted explosives under three of the four Nord Stream pipelines that were detonated remotely last September at the order of President Joe Biden.

NATO allies said in the wake of what Kremlin said was a “terrorist attack” that the scale of the explosions in the Swedish and Danish waters suggested that a state was involved. Sweden, Denmark along with Germany, the main beneficiary of Russian gas, opened separate probes into the blasts.

Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament, said lack of reaction from Scholz to the breakthrough report suggested that he must have been warned in advance about the covert sea operation, which was conducted under the cover of a NATO Baltic Sea exercise last summer.

“It is certain that the German government was informed of the sabotage beforehand by the Americans. This is the only explanation for Scholz’s awkward silence. With the addition of a woke and irresponsible warmonger like [Foreign Minister Annalena] Baerbock, who declares that Germany is at war with Russia, nothing surprises me,” he said.

Krah argued that the sabotage put an end to what had long been a headache for the Scholz government — the need to justify to Germans why the second leg of the natural gas pipeline had not been pumping cheap gas to his country.

“The problem is that this is tearing the German economy to pieces and significantly impoverishes Germany. Moreover, the billions spent by Germany in this gas project, which ensured us cheap energy, are lost, but the coalition which governs Germany does not care. Officially, Scholz knows nothing. Apparently, we live in a democracy,” he added.

Hersh wrote that cheap Russian gas had been a boon for the German economy, fueling its post-war rise to prosperity while diminishing Europe’s dependence on the United States. He cited a source with direct knowledge of the US operational planning as saying that Norway played a key role in helping the US organize the attack and keep the Swedish and Danish navies in the dark.

Both the United States and Norway dismissed the allegations as lies. Russia said it was no surprise that Hersh’s report was largely overlooked by Western mainstream media despite Biden and Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland outright warning Russia months before the attack that the pipeline would be dealt with if it launched a military operation in Ukraine.

Krah said it had been obvious to everyone in the German opposition that the sabotage of the crucial energy infrastructure was NATO’s doing. All attempts to point the finger at Russia were ridiculous and did not hold water. Hersh wrote that the White House tried to accuse Russia of self-sabotage in a string of calculated leaks but never suggested a clear motive, beyond retribution.

“The State Department and the White House categorically deny it, but I was in Washington two months ago and all my American political interlocutors, Democrats and Republicans alike, had no doubts: it was the United States that organized or sponsored the action by the British, and it was Biden who personally gave the green light,” Krah said.

“Democrats and Republicans in Congress disagree on everything, except on their willingness to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, especially toward China and Russia,” the lawmaker added.

February 9, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Kremlin reacts to Nord Stream sabotage claim

Sputnik – 09.02.2023

MOSCOW – The report of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on Washington’s involvement in the explosions at Nord Streams has once again pointed to the need for an open international investigation into the incidents and punishment for those responsible, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday.

On Wednesday, Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner, published a report saying that US Navy divers during NATO Baltops exercises in the summer of 2022 planted explosives to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, which Norway activated three months later. According to the report, US President Joe Biden decided to sabotage the Nord Streams after more than nine months of secret discussions with the national security team.

“The appearance of such materials once again shows the need for an open international investigation of this unprecedented attack on critical infrastructure, international critical infrastructure. It is impossible to leave this without revealing the perpetrators and without their punishment,” Peskov told reporters.

Some points of the report can be disputed, some points need proof, but it is remarkable for the depth of analysis, the official said, noting that it would be at least unfair to ignore it, especially for such a country as Germany, which, in fact, as a result of this terrorist act, was deprived of a very important energy facility.

Kremlin spokesman added that the report did not break in Western media, stressing that it is surprising.

“Unfortunately, the article was not widely disseminated in the Western media, which cannot but arouse our surprise,” Peskov rold reporters.

Moscow sees attempts to silently curtail the international investigation into the attacks, but this is a dangerous precedent, as those who committed the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines can repeat it anywhere in the world, the official said.

February 9, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

An Overblown Balloon Headline Inflates False Narrative on China

By Patrick Macfarlane | The Libertarian Institute | February 8, 2023

For several decades the American public has been instilled with an intrinsic fear of and hatred for China.

No singular event in this seemingly inevitable march to war is more emblematic of the American public’s warped psyche than the “Chinese Spy Balloon” narrative—perhaps due, in part, to its facial absurdity. The happening eclipses even similarly nonsensical yarns such as widespread TikTok paranoia (see the NSA’s PRISM program), China’s American farmland purchases (Chinese firms account for <.5% of all foreign-owned land in the U.S.), and the “invasion” of Chinese fentanyl through the Southern border (fentanyl trafficking is illegal in China).

Indeed, even the pervasive use of the term “Chinese Spy Balloon”—an utterly unsupported Pentagon accusation—is emblematic of the absolutely captured state of the American consciousness.

This narrative control is critical to Washington as it manufactures consent for its declared “great power competition” with Beijing.

The saga began on February 2, when an official spokesman announced the Pentagon was tracking the passage of a “high-altitude surveillance balloon” over the continental United States. The spokesman expressed confidence that the “surveillance balloon” belonged to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In this initial announcement, it was importantly noted “[i]nstances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years.”

On February 3, a PRC spokesperson confirmed the balloon originated from China, but said it was merely a civilian weather balloon on a research mission. The spokesperson apologized for the intrusion and explained the balloon entered the United States by accident due to unexpected wind currents. The statement stressed continued communication and diplomacy.

On the afternoon of February 4, American forces downed the balloon just off the coast of South Carolina. The next day, the Chinese foreign ministry called the response “a clear overreaction and a serious violation of international practice.”

In its press conference announcing the shootdown, a senior Pentagon official admitted that so-called “PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time.” Another official admitted that the Pentagon had tracked the balloon since it entered Alaskan airspace on January 28.

Although the Pentagon insists the balloon was a clandestine surveillance device, it has not tendered a shred of evidence to support that assertion.

It would make little sense for the PRC to launch surveillance balloons across the United States because, as stated during the Pentagon’s initial press briefing, “[the balloon] does not create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit.”

As the balloon made its way from Montana to South Carolina, the American people were whipped into predictable histrionics, with most politicians calling for the balloon to be shot down.

Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) stated on February 3, “[i]t wasn’t a good idea to have a spy balloon fly over our country, it must come down.”

Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) called the balloon a “Potemkin village attempting to conceal [China’s] malign ambitions toward our country and the global order.” He urged the Pentagon to shoot down the balloon, and later quipped “[a] big Chinese balloon in the sky and millions of Chinese Tik Tok balloons on our phones. Let’s shut them all down.”

True to form, the general Republican messaging maligned Joe Biden’s perceived weakness for not shooting the balloon down faster.

Establishment Republican mainstays, Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Marco Rubio (R-FL), and House Intelligence Committee chair, Representative Mike Turner, blasted the Biden administration’s inaction in separate TV interviews.

On February 4, Turner said on Meet the Press, “[t]his [balloon] should never have been allowed to enter the U.S., and it never should have been allowed to complete its mission,” adding “I think this administration lacks urgency.”

The same day Cruz told Face the Nation that Biden gave the PRC “a full week…to conduct spying operations over the U.S., over sensitive military installations,” and that “this entire episode telegraphed weakness.”

On February 5, Rubio betrayed the true intent of accusing Biden of weakness—to give cover for more extreme escalation. He told ABC “[t]hese guys [U.S. leadership] can’t even do anything about a balloon flying over U.S. airspace? How can you possibly count on them if something were to happen in the Indo-Pacific region? How are they gonna come to the aid of Taiwan?”

Rubio’s comments fly in the face of Washington’s long-standing Sino-American policy—that the U.S. acknowledges China’s dominion over Taiwan, but will not say what it would do if China were to use force to reconstitute the wayward island.

While some populist Republicans have bravely departed from the establishment’s support for Ukraine, many led the chorus of voices urging escalation—and not diplomacy.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) issued multiple tweets regarding the balloon. On February 3, he stated “[n]ow #China is OPENLY spying on us and the Biden Admin does nothing. China is trolling us. They know Biden is weak.” He later added, inter alia, “SHOOT IT DOWN.”

Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) tweeted on February 3, “[t]he Department of Defense would like to know the Balloon’s pronouns,” a comment that detracts from Washington’s objectively aggressive global posture by suggesting ineptitude. On February 5, he wrote, “I wonder how much the [Chinese Communist Party]-funded Biden Center at UPenn studied Balloon Theory.”

On February 3, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene issued a lengthy Twitter thread urging the Biden Administration to “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON!!” Taylor Greene further called the balloon’s presence “an act of aggression,” that she blamed on the Chinese Communist Party and Joe Biden’s inaction.

Surprisingly, the invective from populist Republicans surpassed even that of the ultra-hawkish architects of Washington’s fortress Taiwan policy, Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bob Menendez (R-NJ).

For his part, Bob Menendez neither Tweeted, nor issued a press release about the balloon.

Graham’s statement was much more measured than that of his populist colleagues. February 4, he thanked the military and the Biden administration for shooting down the balloon, but then stated: “[t]he next step is to recover the attached surveillance equipment to determine if the Chinese were lying about the balloons [sic] true purpose…Our intelligence community doubts the Chinese explanation […] but we will only know the true answer when the platform is recovered.”

The universal rejection of diplomacy in favor of an immediate and violent response to the balloon is deeply troubling—from the public to neoliberal Democrats, to the populist right. Surely a collision between U.S. and Chinese vessels in the South China Sea or aircraft in the Taiwan Strait would provoke a similar response. Some popular pundits even called for extreme escalation, such as urging the Pentagon to scramble jets from Guam, ostensibly to attack or threaten mainland China.

The banner narrative favored by mainline Republicans and the populist right alike—that Joe Biden is weak—is insidious, because it implies that Biden should be more aggressive. Furthermore, it excuses Biden’s objectively ultra-hawkish policy against China.

Just in the last few weeks, the Biden administration continued its redoubling of the Asia Pivot launched by Barack Obama and furthered by Donald Trump: the U.S. Marine Corps opened a new base in Guam as the U.S. opened an embassy in the Solomon Islands, furthered diplomatic measures meant to militarize Japan, announced the opening of new military installations in the Philippines and Palau, and furthered a deal that would secure it exclusive military access to Micronesia, an area of the Pacific Ocean as large as the continental U.S.—all with the express and stated aim of confronting China.

Furthermore, any discussion of Chinese surveillance of the United States must necessarily begin with our own surveillance of mainland China. In 2001, “[a] United States Navy spy plane on a routine surveillance mission near the Chinese coast collided with a Chinese fighter jet that was closely tailing it” causing the American plane to crash land in Chinese territory. These surveillance missions continue to this day, along with the at least monthly transit of American warships through the Taiwan Strait, a channel of water that separates Taiwan from mainland China by 110 miles at its widest point.

Meanwhile, the “Biden is weak” narrative enables the Biden administration’s ultra-hawkish policy by drawing attention away from it. While the nation’s imagination was captured by a white balloon, Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a rare diplomatic visit to China. That the Pentagon knew the balloon’s trajectory as soon as it entered Alaskan airspace suggests it may have been used as a convenient excuse to cancel the talks. This is further evidenced by the fact that similar balloons have entered the United States without public knowledge.

Furthermore, the timing of the balloon’s transit suggests it wasn’t purposely dispatched by China, as its incentive is likely to preserve Blinken’s visit. The long-planned trip would have seen Blinken meet with his Chinese counterpart and possibly with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. From the PRC perspective, such a visit is an opportunity to negotiate with a country that is encircling it militarily. A high-level meeting might have soothed its offense at yet another diplomatic envoy to Taiwan by an American House Speaker.

Unfortunately, the prevailing narrative won the day—while Americans’ heads were in the clouds, imagining a biowarfare attack, or falsely reporting the balloon carried explosives, Sino-American relations deteriorated even further. Distressingly, the American public exhibited its eagerness to rush to just about any conclusion concerning China.

That rush to judgment—and violent action—should concern us more than the specter of a wayward white spy balloon.

Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. He is the host of the Vital Dissent at http://www.vitaldissent.com, where he seeks to oppose calamitous escalation in US foreign policy by exposing establishment narratives with well-researched documentary content and insightful guest interviews. His work has appeared on antiwar.com, GlobalResearch.ca, and Zerohedge. He may be reached at patrick@libertarianinstitute.org

February 8, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Colin Powell’s anthrax vial taught the US a valuable lesson – that it can get away with any lie it wants

By Scott Ritter | RT | February 8, 2023

Twenty years ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now-infamous address before the United Nations Security Council, making the case for war against Iraq.

The presentation would later be revealed as lies. Sadly, it would also turn out that no one seemed to care.On February 5, 2003, I watched it all with a sense of boiling anger. The day before, I had made the following prediction to Japanese media:

“He’s [Powell] going to present circumstantial evidence that packaged together and presented will make a compelling case that [UN weapons] inspections don’t work, inspections can’t work, that Iraq is actively conspiring against inspections, thereby, denigrating the efficacy of inspections, while the world waits for inspectors to do their job. The purpose of Colin Powell’s presentation tomorrow is to destroy international trust and confidence in weapons inspections and that is a darn shame.”

I was 100% correct in my assessment.

I was in Japan at the invitation of Japanese activists to generate political opposition to America’s looming war on Iraq. I addressed the Japanese parliament and spoke with several major Japanese media outlets. Shortly after Powell finished speaking, I gave an interview with Kyodo News, where I dismissed Powell’s assertions that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction as “unsubstantiated.”

“There’s nothing here that’s conclusive proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,” I told Kyodo News. “Everything in here is circumstantial, everything in here mirrors the kind of allegations the US has made in the past in regard to Iraq’s weapons program,” I said. “He just hits you, hits you, hits you with circumstantial evidence, and he confuses people – and he lied, he lied to people, he misled people.”

Powell’s iconic moment was when he raised a vial of white powder – a proxy intended to simulate dry powder anthrax, a potent biological weapons agent, in an effort to link Iraq with the terrorist attacks in the US in October 2001 where dry powder anthrax was sent through the US postal system in envelopes. Ironically, the anthrax in question was actually produced by the US. Iraq is only known to have produced liquid bulk anthrax, which has a shelf life of only three years, and the last known batch of liquid bulk anthrax was produced in 1991 at a state-owned factory which was destroyed in 1996.

“Colin Powell holds up a vial of dry powder anthrax and he makes allusions to the attack in the United States through the letters. That was US government anthrax! It had nothing to do with Iraq,” I said. Powell, I explained, was engaging in “classic bait-and-switch” in his presentation. “Iraq, anthrax, vial, dry powder – what connection do they have? None!”

During my February 4 media event in Japan, I made the following prediction about the consequences of Powell’s UN presentation:

“The United States will seek to compel the Security Council into passing a new resolution, if the Security Council fails to do so the United States will go it alone with its narrow coalition and I see a massive aerial bombardment beginning by the end of February, I see ground troops in significant numbers crossing over into Iraq by early March, and I don’t see this war finishing anytime soon. While we may occupy Baghdad sometime in June, we’ll be occupying Iraq for months, if not years. It will be an occupation that will be carried out with the violent opposition of the Iraqi people, and I see an increase in the acts of anti-American terror abroad. I think an American invasion of Iraq is the best recruitment poster that Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda will ever have.”

I challenged Powell’s assertions until I was blue in the face, including at a public forum held at the University of Tokyo the day after Powell spoke, February 6.

It was to no avail.

“There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more,” Powell told the Security Council, “and he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction.”

All lies. But the US mainstream media repeated his words as gospel, and the American people ate it up as if it were Manna from heaven. My country went to war based upon a foundation of lies told by someone who, up until that moment, was seen as one of the most credible individuals in American public service ever.

The Powell presentation set a precedent of public lies which haunts the US and the world to this day. The United States, it seems, is incapable of telling the truth about anything, especially when it deals with national security and foreign policy.

The current manifestation of this precedent is playing out before the world when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. As was the case with Iraq and Anthrax, the US leads a coalition of compliant partners in spreading similar lies about Russia, whether to ignore history when labeling the Russian decision to intervene an “unprovoked act of aggression”, backing the Ukrainian version of the Bucha massacre, or misleading the Ukrainians and the world about the ability of US-led injections of military equipment to change the tide of battle against Russia – it won’t.

It is virtually impossible for Russia to even begin to contemplate negotiations when the party sitting at the other side of the table, the United States, incorporates lies into every aspect of its argument. The Powell Precedent is pure poison, and the world, especially Russia, would be foolish to accept any drink from a chalice offered by the United States.

Colin Powell may no longer be with us, but his legacy lives on in the bodyguard of lies he helped build around everything the US has said and done since that fateful day 20 years ago.

February 8, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

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