Susan Rice has blood on her hands: Journalist
By Don DeBar | Press TV | November 15, 2020
Susan Rice is another one of the recycled Clinton people, and in fact the Democratic Party had her going back even before that.
Her mother has been around. She helped design Pell Grants. She had been with Brookings since ‘92 which is about when Susan graduated into the Clinton administration (in 1993) and went directly to the National Security Council.
She was with Bill Clinton for his administration. Obama had her – first at the UN, and then as his National Security Adviser (I think). She’s about as inside as it gets. She has blood on her hands in Africa, Rwanda.
The people’s understanding of the Rwandan genocide in the United States is exactly upside down. There was a genocide there, but it was the side that the US-backed, not surprisingly, and that was Susan Rice’s project. She was a member of the National Security Council to do international affairs and that was one big act of the Clinton administration – that move to pivot to Africa, around Rwanda.
It was also the enabling of their so-called humanitarian interventions, and in any way that’s her child.
At the United Nations, she helped bring us the destruction of Libya, enabled the situation in Syria to the extent that she could, and tried to sell authority for the US to bomb the hell out of Syria as well.
It’s going to be more war, really.
Let me remind people when Trump took office in January of 2017 the foreign policy that Susan Rice and Barack Obama and the Clintons, and John Kerry had set in motion had us where we were having war games at Russia and China’s borders from the Baltics to the Korean peninsula, on a constant basis, with a number of international incidents – including NATO members shooting down Russian pilots over Syria – any of which could have escalated, and really turning on a dime into a global thermonuclear war.
Trump for all the things he has done does not leave us – if he’s leaving – in that situation. But what they’re doing is installing the very people who created that condition to start from day one to bring us right back to the brink with Russia and China.
I think it’s very scary that Susan Rice is being considered for this. I don’t think it’s a surprise at all. Anyone who knows who Joe Biden is not surprised.
Don DeBar is an American journalist and political commentator based in New York.
‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state?
By Ramin Mazaheri | Press TV | November 15, 2020
For months the United States’ corporate-dominated media has terrified everyone with promises of right-wing militias taking to the streets, but here’s the thing: the pressures currently being put on 70 million Trump supporters is exponentially raising the possibility of that actually occurring, not reducing it.
It is ghastly illuminating to see just how quickly – and with such disregard for modern human rights – both the elite and the highly partisan citizens of the United States are attacking those who refuse to fall at the feet of Joe Biden, and even before all the votes are counted in a very narrow and highly-disputed election.
It is not an exaggeration, as I will list them below, but the tactics being used to push Biden into office are akin to wartime, yet the US is most emphatically not at war – all this derangement is over merely trying to vote as equals. I am not reporting from 1917 USSR, or 1949 China, or 1959 Cuba, or 1979 Iran – there are no foreign armed forces meddling in a revolution/civil war.
“Bidenism” is most emphatically not a revolutionary force. It is openly and proudly the exact opposite: a return to the “normalcy” embodied in the 2015 status quo. Nor is the US at civil war, but it seems some never-trumpets are actually hell-bent on starting one rather than do what every nation does: rely on a calm judicial review when there is a contested and very narrow vote. There is simply no other way out for the US than to follow normal democratic procedures, even if their electoral process is routinely called the worst among the Western core democracies by Harvard think-tanks.
(The US goes one step too far, as usual – other nations at least wait until the votes are actually mostly counted until a candidate declares victory, unlike Donald Trump and Joe Biden.)
If this does turn out to be the “Biden presidential(-elect) era” the world can easily grasp what a terrible, very Trumpian start it is. Americans, I think, cannot.
It’s just very unclear what Americans in 2020 truly believe in anymore?
We know that many American elite don’t truly believe in free press or free speech:
Part 1 of this article, “CNN’s Jake Tapper: The foreman/overseer keeping all journalists in line” discussed how one of the nation’s top news anchors threatened lesser-privileged journalists with blacklisting if they don’t side with Biden immediately. His intimidation went uncommented upon/tacitly condoned by his top colleagues, when his pathetic careerism amid social instability should cost him at least some of his privileges.
Censorship is one way to prevent dissenting journalism, but informal censorship is another: The US doesn’t need formal government censors when their own journalists enforce such obvious suppression informally.
The goal of censorship is conformity. The US media which is corporate dominated – from the (fake) left New York Times to right-wing Fox News – is producing coverage which seemingly exclusively conforms to the false idea that it’s good journalism to exclude the massive number of Americans who feel the vote was not “fair and free”.
Since this troubled election began that number includes a stunning 70% of Republicans, per recent polls, but also independents and leftists. Since the election I interviewed both the Party for Socialism & Liberation and the Socialist Alternative Party (you have never heard of them because of the duopoly which strangles American elections) and both of them said the same thing: this is a terribly antiquated system in America, but in any democracy you count all the votes and litigate any contentious problems.
We know that many Americans don’t believe in the right to an attorney:
The anti-Trump and totally mainstream PAC/think tank The Republican Project has been lauded from the (fake) left to the far-right Washington Post for successfully harassing Trump’s Pennsylvania election lawyers into abandoning their client. The tactics used were not rhetorical and moral but mere intimidation, harassment and doxxing (releasing private information about people into public).
Trump is appalling, but does he not even deserve a lawyer?
Do people who associate with Trump, such as his lawyers, deserve such treatment? How far does this go – that’s the question those engaged in a witch-hunt are too fanatical to ask themselves.
Trump’s legal grievance is obviously supported by too large a democratic minority to ignore without causing lasting damage to the integrity of the American system.
By denying the right to an attorney these rabid anti-Trumpers do not technically betray the letter of their 1776 Revolution, that anti-imperialist event, but they certainly do seem to betray the spirit. It seems to violate the spirit if not the letter of the 6th amendment (ratified in 1791), which guarantees a lawyer in all criminal prosecutions, as well as the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th amendment (ratified in 1868).
Congratulations to rabid anti-Trumpers for being so very progressive that they have made it to just past the slavery era?
1868 is a good place mark for the mentality of US Democrats, who remain obsessed with race and totally untouched by any of the anti-imperialist and class-based analyses which began to prevail worldwide since 1917.
We know that some American lawmakers don’t believe in open elections:
Earlier this month I reported on the blacklist of Iranian media by the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Democratic Socialists of America, so we shouldn’t have expected much from this fake-leftist faction openly committed to working within the Democratic Party.
But many Americans were shocked that DSA’s most powerful member, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, actually doubled down when a tweet of hers suggested that lists should be compiled of pro-Trumpers who have committed no crime other than supporting not her party.
When top elected officials vaguely threaten citizens with “the idea of being responsible for their behavior over last four years” and their behaviour is just working for a democratically-elected candidate, what else is this but massively undemocratic intimidation? That would make free elections in the future impossible.
AOC is seemingly advocating for a one-party state, without knowing it, perhaps, but incompetence is no excuse. It’s certainly another sign of the widespread hysteria of rabid anti-Trumpers.
Directly after AOC’s call sprang up the “Trump Accountability Project”, headed by former Democratic National Committee press secretary Hari Sevugan, which is seemingly looking to blacklist all those that worked for the (possibly) outgoing administration. Would Mr. Sevugan approve of a “Biden Accountability Project” in 2024 for Biden’s staff? Or is that a superfluous question because Democrats are preordained to rule in an unbroken, 1,000-year dynasty?
Why would anybody of merit want to go into public service anymore if they are just going to get blacklisted for doing so?
All the above: This is all wartime-era stuff.
And Chicago, where I am currently based, has been boarded up like it was wartime since the election. (And in August/September. And in May/June.)
It’s as if America can’t help but inexorably draw itself to conflict, because this is all totally self-imposed. This is not the 1960s – there is no peace movement here anymore.
America is acting like what it is: half-full of rabid imperialists
Of course, “neo-imperialism” means colonising your own nation for an international 1%, as the European Union – that supremely US-guided project; that project which is more American than even America – proves.
Of course America is in a state of xenophobia (hostility or fear towards different cultures or strangers) and witch-hunting: this is exactly what the Democratic Party has normalised via their failed Russophobia campaign since 2016.
Did they think they could just turn that off?
Many current Biden supporters failed to stand up against this phony campaign designed to deflect from the Democrats 2016 election failures (2020 saw an even bigger “Blue Wave” failure, but isn’t this anti-Trump supporter hysteria deflecting attention from that for now?), and the most vociferous of them are now aiming their pitchforks at the people who dared to vote differently. The problem is that there are so very many of such persons.
We should add that for four years on US social media this hate mongering has to be multiplied by millions, maybe even billions of time-wasting, venomous posts and spiteful “likes” about veritable political nonsense. It’s practically a justification for state-sponsored censorship, because what kind of society can be healthy towards their neighbors, much less foreigners, when there have these been daily witch-hunts in the phony online world?!
So these lists can go on and on, but our tolerance of such intimidation should not.
(And, yes, before Russophobia there was Islamophobia, and before that it was socialism-phobia, Blackphobia, Indianphobia, etc.)
What’s going on in America is that the most Trump-hating Democrats are acting exactly like what they are: not fascists, as is so often alleged of the other side in Western discourse, but imperialists, which is so rarely discussed in Western discourse.
Like Jake Tapper, they are not just careerists who aspire to outdo everyone in extremism in order to rule from atop the pyramid, they also want to believe they also have the moral high ground despite that. It is arrogance combined with a lust for power and a hysterical, unreasoning rage which comes from we know not where?
Half of the US is so hysterical about being doubted that they can’t recognise themselves in the mirror, but many of those they have colonised, blockaded, sanctioned, brutalised and impoverished sure can.
It’s absolutely appalling and the solution is not simply, “Say that Biden is the president.”
Any nation which has a culture willing to go to such lengths to get others to accept their view – rather than relying on reasoned, secure reflection and some sort of litigation or vetting process – is deeply messed up.
But, as the US proved with their murderous meddling in Iran’s 2009 election: many in the US don’t just not care about anyone’s else’s rules, judges or systems of conflict resolution – the 2020 election proves that many Americans don’t even care about their own.
They are the law-giver and the life-taker and the president-maker, because they say so. Better side with “they”, or else.
‘Forever war’ returns: Biden’s Pentagon team puts the military-industrial complex back in command
RT | November 14, 2020
Despite campaign-trail overtures to progressives, a Joe Biden presidency seems to spell a return to normalcy in the most time-honored American way: by placing the military-industrial complex in charge of the country’s defense.
Joe Biden’s campaign message focused almost entirely on Donald Trump, and on Biden’s supposed ability to “unify” a polarized electorate and “restore the soul of America.” Since he claimed victory last week, Biden’s prospective administration has begun to take shape, and the reality behind the rhetoric has started to emerge.
On matters of defense, restoring America’s “soul” apparently means placing weapons manufacturers back in charge of the Pentagon.
Biden announced his Department of Defense landing team on Tuesday. Of these 23 policy experts, one third have taken funding from arms manufacturers, according to a report published this week by Antiwar.com.
A knot of hawks
Leading the team is Kathleen Hicks, an undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, and an employee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank funded by a host of NATO governments, oil firms, and weapons makers Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Atomics. The latter firm produces the Predator drones used by the Obama administration to kill hundreds of civilians in at least four Middle-Eastern countries.
Hicks was a vocal opponent of President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw a number of US troops from Germany, claiming in August that such a move “benefits our adversaries.”
Two other members of Biden’s Pentagon team, Andrew Hunter and Melissa Dalton, work for CSIS and served under Obama in the Defense Department.
Also on the team are Susanna Blume and Ely Ratner, who work for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Another hawkish think-tank, CNAS is funded by Google, Facebook, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. Three more team members – Stacie Pettyjohn, Christine Wormuth and Terri Tanielian – were most recently employed by the RAND corporation, which draws funding from the US military, NATO, several Gulf states, and hundreds of state and corporate sources.
Michele Flournoy is widely tipped to lead the Pentagon under Biden. Flournoy would be the first woman in history to head the Defense Department, but her appointment would only be revolutionary on the surface. Flournoy is the co-founder of CNAS, and served in the Pentagon under Obama and Bill Clinton. As under secretary of defense for policy under Obama, Flournoy helped craft the 2010 troop surge in Afghanistan, a deployment of 100,000 US troops that led to a doubling in American deaths and made little measurable progress toward ending the war.
‘Forever war’ returns
President Trump, who campaigned on stopping the US’ “forever wars” in the Middle East and remains the first US president in 40 years not to start a new conflict, has nevertheless also staffed the Pentagon with hawkish officials. Recently ousted Defense Secretary Mark Esper was a top lobbyist for Raytheon, while his predecessor, Patrick Shanahan, worked for Boeing. Trump’s appointment this week of National Counterterrorism Center Director Christopher Miller as acting secretary of defense, coupled with combat veteran Col. Douglas MacGregor as senior adviser, looked set to buck that trend, given MacGregor’s vocal opposition to America’s Middle Eastern wars.
Yet Miller and MacGregor may not be in office for long, if Trump’s legal challenges against Biden’s apparent victory fail. Should that happen, Biden’s progressive voters may be in for a rude reawakening when the former vice president returns to the White House.
Many of these progressives were supporters of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries, while others likely held their nose and voted for Biden out of opposition to Trump. Reps. Barbara Lee (California) and Mark Pocan (Wisconsin), two notable progressives, wrote to Biden on Tuesday asking him not to nominate a defense secretary linked to the weapons industry.
Lee and Pocan cited President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address, in which he warned of the “disastrous rise” of the “military-industrial complex.”
Given Biden’s fondness for Flournoy, whom he tapped in 2016 to head the Pentagon under a potential Hillary Clinton administration, the former vice president appears unconcerned about curtailing the influence of the armaments industry.
The industry apparently roots for Joe, too. As Donald Trump surged ahead of Biden on election night, stocks in Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and the Carlyle Group all plummeted. Only when counting in swing states stopped and resumed, giving Biden the advantage, did they climb again.
It’s probably fine that all the big arms contractor stocks plummeted when it looked like Trump won but then skyrocketed once it became clear Biden would be the one to take office. pic.twitter.com/CKEZNS53Gx
— Hillary Fan (@HillaryFan420) November 7, 2020
Should a Biden administration make good on running mate Kamala Harris’ post-election promise to return to regime-change operations in Syria, these firms and their supporters in the Pentagon stand to make a killing.
However, anti-war leftists, progressives, and Bernie Sanders supporters may soon realize that voting for a Democrat who supported the Iraq War, instead of a Republican who called it “the worst single mistake ever made in the history of our country,” might just benefit the military-industrial complex more than the “soul of America.”
New Pentagon Top Adviser Wants US Troops Out Of Syria “Immediately”
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 11/12/2020
With Esper out the door, Trump’s newly in office acting Secretary of Defense is already making waves given who he’s just brought on board.
The new acting Pentagon chief, Christopher Miller, has just brought on as his senior adviser Ret. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor. Crucially Macgregor is on record as wanting American troops out of Syria immediately (gasp, the horror!), and further wants a rapid draw down in Afghanistan as well as in places like the Korean Peninsula.
“President Trump’s newly installed acting Pentagon chief is bringing on a senior adviser in a sign the administration wants to accelerate the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East before the end of his presidency in January, three people familiar with the move told Axios,” Jonathan Swan writes.
It appears Trump has finally and much belatedly put someone at the helm whose own views reflect those of the 2016 Trump campaign trail. He had been the first Republican nominee in history to lambast Bush’s Iraq War as a huge “disaster” while running on a ‘bring the troops home’ non-interventionist message.
Of course critics then and now have mischaracterized the president as “isolationist” – which has long become a negative slur in establishment foreign policy circles.
Currently it’s believed there’s anywhere from 800 to possibly up to 2,000 US personnel in northeast Syria, where according to past Trump statements they are there to “secure the oil” and ensure the permanent defeat of ISIS. Increasingly they’ve been bumping up against both Russian and Syrian Army patrols in a mission that doesn’t seem to have a defined end goal or exit strategy.
Here’s how Axios presented the supposedly “worrisome” and “divisive” views of Macgregor:
In a 2019 interview with Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Macgregor said he would advise the president to get out of Afghanistan “as soon as possible,” including removing the U.S. embassy from Kabul, and that talking to the Taliban was unnecessary.
- Macgregor also said the U.S. needs to pull its troops out of Syria immediately and America had no national interest there.
- He said, “We need to listen very carefully to the Iranians … find out what their interests are and look for areas where we can cooperate” and that the U.S. needs to “turn the operational control of the [Korean] Peninsula militarily over to President Moon and the Koreans.”
Already Biden’s transition team is strongly signaling it would reverse course on some Trump draw downs, most notably the reduction of about 12,000 US soldiers from Germany.
Meanwhile The Intercept published a story on Wednesday citing an unnamed administration official who said the latest Pentagon shake-up was preparation for significant troop draw downs across various hotspots.
“The president is taking back control of DoD. It’s a rebirth of foreign policy. This is Trump foreign policy,” the official said.
Lee Fang at The Intercept underscored that “The personnel changes, the official claimed, would help clear the way for a more loyal Pentagon apparatus to carry out Trump’s goals, including the last-minute withdrawal of troops from foreign conflicts.”
Trump’s anti-ISIS envoy admits he MISLED president about US troop numbers in Syria to keep them there
RT | November 13, 2020
When President Donald Trump ordered all but a few hundred US troops withdrawn from Syria, his own diplomats hid the true number of American forces from the president, envoy Jim Jeffrey has revealed in a new interview.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey, envoy to the global coalition against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) told Defense One on Thursday. Jeffrey added that the actual number of troops in northeastern Syria is “a lot more” than the 200-400 that Trump agreed to leave behind last year.
Trump’s withdrawal appeared to make good on his campaign-trail promise to extricate the US from its “forever wars” in the Middle East. Trump, who referred to Syria in 2018 as “sand and death,” angered a host of Pentagon chiefs and diplomats when he announced the near-total pullout from the country last October. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in protest when Trump first announced withdrawal plans in 2018, and Jeffrey said on Thursday that the decision was “the most controversial thing in my fifty years in government.”
Jeffrey’s predecessor, Brett McGurk, also handed in his notice when Trump revealed the pullout. Taking over from McGurk, Jeffrey and his team routinely misled the president to ensure that “there was never a Syria withdrawal.”
Even before he signed up to work for the Trump administration, Jeffrey’s opposition to the president was well known. Shortly after Trump was named as the Republican candidate in 2016, Jeffrey signed a letter declaring that the businessman and TV host “would be the most reckless president in American history.” The letter’s other signatories included a host of Bush administration security officials, who helped shape the policies that destabilized the Middle East and gave rise to Islamic State.
Despite his open and secret opposition to Trump’s policies, Jeffrey told Defense One that the president’s “modest” approach to the Middle East has yielded better results than George Bush’s military interventionism or Barack Obama’s apologetic overtures to Muslim leaders while arming extremist militias in Syria.
Trump, by contrast, has managed to put together a political alliance between Israel and a number of Gulf states, while maintaining relations with Iraq and focusing pressure on Iran. Conflict in the region is frozen in a “stalemate,” Jeffrey noted.
“Nobody really wants to see President Trump go, among all our allies,” he said. “The truth is President Trump and his policies are quite popular among all of our popular states in the region. Name me one that’s not happy.”
Trump’s withdrawal plans throughout the region have earned him the scorn of policy hawks in Washington. When the New York Times published an anonymously sourced report in June accusing Russia of paying Taliban fighters to kill American troops in Afghanistan, the Democrat-controlled House Armed Services Committee voted to deny Trump the funding for a withdrawal from the war-torn country. Before the Times’ report was published, Trump signed a deal with the Taliban to end the 19-year conflict, and White House plans for a withdrawal by fall were leaked. The report was later debunked by the Pentagon itself.
Trump has since moved to withdraw from Afghanistan again, tweeting last month that “we should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas!”
A number of rapid-fire personnel changes at the Pentagon seem to confirm that Trump intends to withdraw further from the Middle East. Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor – a long-time proponent of ending the war in Afghanistan – was appointed on Wednesday to serve under new Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. CNN reported that departing Defense Secretary Mark Esper had been pushing back against Trump’s withdrawal plans, calling them “premature.”
However, the results of this month’s election are still unclear, and Trump’s tenure in the White House may be coming to an end. Should Joe Biden eventually be declared president, Jeffrey advised the Democrat to stick to the Trump doctrine in the Middle East. “I think the stalemate we’ve put together is a step forward and I would advocate it,” Jeffrey said.
‘Coup’ preparation, or move to stop endless wars? What’s behind Trump’s Pentagon purge
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | November 11, 2020
Democrats and their allies are alarmed that President Donald Trump’s firing of top Pentagon officials could be preparation for a military coup. What looks more likely is that US troops might finally pull out from Afghanistan.
In addition to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, whom Trump “terminated” on Monday, Esper’s chief of staff Jennifer Stewart, acting policy chief James Anderson, and intelligence undersecretary Joseph Kernan have also been shown the door. They were replaced by National Security Council counter-terrorist chief Christopher Miller, former NSC aide Kash Patel, General Anthony Tata, and another former NSC aide Ezra Cohen-Watnick, respectively.
The purge and the appointment of the officials widely described in mainstream media as “Trump loyalists” has led to Democrats and neoconservatives warning that a “coup” might be in the works against Joe Biden, who has claimed victory in the November 3 election.
4. Who knows whether intentions are mostly petty, or domestic election interference, or unimpeded decisions in foreign policy (latter could range from military force to military withdrawals, and from pro-Putin to pro-MBS). But, I’m told, both Esper and Milley are truly worried.
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) November 11, 2020
Allowing for the possibility that Trump could just be acting out of spite against people who were disloyal to him, The Nation’s Michael Klare noted that Miller had been involved in covert operations in urban settings of Iraq and Afghanistan with US Special Forces.
Democrats should look for any evidence that the Pentagon purge “signals a covert White House plan to use the US military in support of an illegal drive to subvert democracy and install Trump as dictator,” Klare warned.
Wednesday’s appointment of retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor as Miller’s senior adviser, however, points in an entirely different direction. First reported by Axios, it was confirmed by the Pentagon later in the day, with a statement noting that Macgregor’s “decades of military experience will be used to assist in the continued implementation of the President’s national security priorities.”
While that sounds like properly vague Pentagonese, Macgregor is well known for his advocacy of a speedy US withdrawal from Afghanistan – something Trump said last month he wished to see by Christmas this year, ahead of the 2021 timeline envisioned in the peace agreement the US have struck with the Taliban.
The Intercept’s Lee Fang quoted an anonymous Pentagon official who basically confirmed that the Pentagon purge is aimed at overcoming resistance by career bureaucrats and the military-industrial complex to Trump’s policies.
Trump official claims the rapid personnel changes are designed to end the “forever wars” in Afghanistan, withdraw troops by Christmas, which many Pentagon leaders opposed. Others argue moves are designed only to award loyalty and punish dissent.
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) November 11, 2020
“The president is taking back control of DOD. It’s a rebirth of foreign policy. This is Trump foreign policy,” said the official.
“This is happening because the president feels that neoconservatism has failed the American people,” he added.
Trump campaigned in 2016 on ending the ‘endless wars’ in the Middle East. Within a few months, however, he allowed himself to be persuaded by the Pentagon to ramp them up instead, bombing Afghanistan and launching missiles at Syria. Once all the territory held by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorists was liberated, however, he pushed hard for withdrawal from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq – running into resistance from the Pentagon.
His first Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned over Syria at the end of 2018. Most US troops there were withdrawn by October 2019. Some troops were also pulled out of Iraq this year, citing concerns over the coronavirus, though many still remain. A peace treaty with the Taliban was signed in February this year, after nearly 20 years of war that perfectly defined “mission creep.”
There is no denying that the present political situation in Washington, with Biden claiming he won the election and Trump disputing that citing irregularities in key states, is fraught with peril. Whatever the outcome, unless everything is handled above board and with transparency, half the country is going to feel cheated and disenfranchised.
There are two things to keep in mind, however. Whatever one thinks of him, Trump has kept his word, implementing his electoral promises – by working through the system – despite the obstacles thrown before him by the administrative apparatus, legislators and the courts. So far, the current flurry of activity at the Pentagon seems to point towards a withdrawal from the Middle East, rather than a coup at home.
Secondly, it was actually the Democrats – Joe Biden himself – who first brought up the notion of using the US military to forcibly remove Trump from the White House, should he lose but refuse to concede. That was in June, long before the election and its controversies. What did Biden know at the time to make him say that, nobody knows – because nobody in the mainstream US media has bothered to ask, preferring to entertain partisan fantasies based on conjecture instead.
A Biden Administration Makes the Lessons of WWI Newly Relevant
Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | November 11, 2020
It’s November the 11th again. The poppies are all out, worn by TV personalities (as instructed by their PR department), and politicians who have long forgotten what it was supposed to mean.
“Never Again”, that was the intention. But it happened again. And again and again and again and again.
The wars never stopped, not because of religion or racism or humanity’s bloodthirsty nature… but because of money. Money and power for the very few – the driving force behind almost every war, no matter the thin ideological veneer.
“War is a racket”, that’s how Major General Smedley D. Butler, put it:
I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
This message is more important than ever now, with a Biden administration being crow-barred into power at the cost of even the facade of democracy. Biden is not “progressive”, no matter what they call him or how many rainbow flags they wave. He is not new. He is old, in more ways than one.
The Warhawks in politics and the press are already salivating at the idea. The BBC is putting out a new “documentary” series about Syria. The Guardian is writing about “US leadership on the world stage”. One year on from his death, the press has decided that Russia is to blame for James Le Mesurier’s “suicide”.
Back in September, Josh Rogin writing in the Washington Post was even more flagrant, demanding Biden:
… increase pressure on President Bashar al-Assad to secure some dignity, safety and justice for the Syrian people.”
It’s not to hard to see where this is going. Whatever Trump may be, there’s no denying he’s been the least militarily aggressive president in recent memory. For the first time in nearly 40 years, a President did not start a new war in his term.
That is likely to change. They will begin drip-feeding propaganda on some “enemy” state soon enough – most likely Syria. The war drums will bang softly at first, they always do, but they will build.
That’s when the lessons of World War I need to be foremost in our minds. When the old lies are busy being given new life.
I leave you with this excellent passage from All Quiet on the Western Front. Read, and remember what was true 106 years ago is still true today:
Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started.
“Mostly by one country badly offending another,” answers Albert with a slight air of superiority.
Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. “A country? I don’t follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat.”
“Are you really as stupid as that, or are you just pulling my leg?” growls Kropp, “I don’t mean that at all. One people offends the other
“Then I haven’t any business here at all,” replies Tjaden, “I don’t feel myself offended.”
“Well, let me tell you,” says Albert sourly, “it doesn’t apply to tramps like you.”
“Then I can be going home right away,” retorts Tjaden, and we all laugh, “Ach, man! he means the people as a whole, the State” exclaims Müller.
“State, State” Tjaden snaps his fingers contemptuously, “Gendarmes, police, taxes, that’s your State; if that’s what you are talking about, no, thank you.”
“That’s right,” says Kat, “you’ve said something for once, Tjaden. State and home country, there’s a big difference.”
“But they go together,” insists Kropp, “without the State there wouldn’t be any home country.”
“True, but just you consider, almost all of us are simple folk. And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers, workmen, or poor clerks. Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is merely the rulers. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us. They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.”“Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden.
Kat shrugs his shoulders. “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.”
“Well, I’m not one of them,” grins Tjaden.
“Not you, nor anybody else here.”
“Who are they then?” persists Tjaden. “It isn’t any use to the Kaiser either. He has everything he can want already.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” contradicts Kat, “he has not had a war up till now. And every full-grown emperor requires at least one war, otherwise he would not become famous. You look in your school books.”
“And generals too,” adds Detering, “they become famous through war.”
“Even more famous than emperors,” adds Kat.
“There are other people back behind there who profit by the war, that’s certain,” growls Detering.
Joe Biden is no empty sheet, may well return US to warmaking – former OSCE vice-president
RT | November 8, 2020
There’s a ‘good chance’ that the US will return to the policy of foreign wars under Joe Biden, which will make its reconciliation with the EU impossible, Willy Wimmer, former vice-president of the OSCE, warned.
The main reasons why the Americans voted for Donald Trump four years ago were their tiredness of constant wars waged by their country and collapsing economy and infrastructure in the US, Wimmer told RT.
Trump has kept his promise and didn’t start any new foreign conflict, but that may well change if a member of the Democratic Party is in the White House, former Vice President of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly said.
“Joe Biden isn’t an empty white sheet – he represents the Democratic Party, who in the 1990s destroyed the Charter of the UN.”
The German political veteran recalled the US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia under Democratic President, Bill Clinton, in 1999. He also pointed out that “in the presidency of [Barack] Obama, Biden was Vice President and he was in absolute accordance with Obama’s drone wars and the wars in the Middle East, therefore there’s a good chance that Joe Biden continues in the same way as the Democratic Party did it in the 1990s and under Obama” before 2016.
“And going back to before 2016 means going back to war” for the US, Wimmer argued.
Relations between Washington and Brussels have deteriorated under Trump over his demands for the EU nations to make larger financial contributions to NATO as well as political and economic pressure on the block to stop dealing with Russia and China.
Hopes that things would improve under Biden will be dashed, “as long as the US and NATO don’t return to the Charter of the UN,” the 77-year-old, who also served as State Secretary to Germany’s Defense Minister, said.
However, he pointed out that it remains a question if the current US economy, which was heavily hit by the coronavirus, would even allow Biden to return to the aggressive policy, which the Democrats used to pursue.
Unlike German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who already congratulated Biden over beating incumbent Trump in the US presidential election, Wimmer believes that others “should be very-very careful with congratulations.”
The Democratic candidate declared himself the winner on Saturday after several major television networks projected that he was on a path to take more than 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency after four days of tense vote counts in several battleground states.
“It’s quite unusual… that the result of an election is announced by a news agency or a news channel. We’re used… in all our countries, which belong to the OSCE, that we have Election Committees, who announce results. And this hasn’t been done yet in the US,” he pointed out, describing the events surrounding the American election as “unbelievable.”
With an Eye on China, India Cuts Iran Loose & Embraces the US
By Salman Rafi Sheikh – New Eastern Outlook – 06.11.2020
India, tied as it to the US apron strings, has suffered a major strategic set-back in Iran where not only has it potentially lost exclusive development rights and control of the strategically important port of Chabahar, but has also been kicked out of Farzad-B gas field project. This has potentially meant a physical death of the ambitious 2013 ‘Tehran Declaration’, which had supposedly tied India and Iran in a strong strategic relationship. While India’s deliberate move away from Iran has taken place against the backdrop of US sanctions on Iran, imposed in the wake of Trump’s decision to force-scrap the JCPOA, these moves are fundamentally rooted in a strategic consensus with the US over Iran. It is for this reason that India has not pumped enough money even into the Chabahar port, which otherwise is exempted from US sanctions.
For India, getting close to the US was/is more important in the wake of its on-going military tensions with China than pursuing relatively low-level strategic interests in Iran. The path that the Indian policy makers chose to confront China at a broader level required sacrificing their interests in Iran. As it stands, Indian companies previously involved in Farzad-B are now engaged in a similar gas exploration project in Israel, indicating how India has largely moved to the anti-Iran camp.
India’s move away from Iran has allowed it to deepen its strategic relations with the US. Indeed, the immediate result has been the signing of “Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement” (BECA), the third so-called “foundational pact” after the “Logistics Exchange Memorandum Of Agreement” (LEMOA) and “Communication Compatibility and Security Agreement” (COMCASA) which collectively improve these countries’ military interoperability.
As an Indian news report explained, the BECA will help India get real-time access to American geospatial intelligence that will enhance the accuracy of automated systems and weapons like missiles and armed drones. Through the sharing of information on maps and satellite images, it will help India access topographical and aeronautical data, and advanced products that will aid in navigation and targeting.
While one may think that India’s close ties with the US have roots in Trump’s own aggressive China policy, the US policy towards India and India’s relevance for the US against China are unlikely to change even if Trump loses and Biden wins. Let’s not forget that Biden, when he was Obama’s vice president, was one of the main architects of the so-called “Asia Pivot” policy. India was as relevant to the “Asia Pivot” as it is to Trump’s “Indo-Pacific” strategy. “Indo-pacific” strategy is very much a continuation of “Asia Pivot” in as much as it aims at confronting and containing China and Russia in Asia and beyond.
According to Indian defense experts, the agreement signed will directly help India fight China in Ladakh, and Pakistan in Kashmir. Indian experts have been reported to have said that if the deal had been signed earlier, the situation at the Northern border of India could have been different.
Indeed, Mark Esper said that defense agreements between the US and India call for military cooperation and is a check on ‘Chinese aggression’, adding that “Based on our shared values and common interests, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific for all, particularly in light of increased aggression and destabilizing activities by China.”
“Our leaders and our citizens see with increasing clarity that the [Chinese Communist Party] is no friend to democracy, the rule of law, transparency, nor to freedom of navigation, the foundation of a free and open and prosperous Indo-Pacific,” said Pompeo.
Pompeo further categorically said that America would “stand by India” in the fight against China, and paid tribute to the soldiers killed in Ladakh.
With China, rather than Modi-Trump bromance, being the central pillar of US-India strategic relations, it is, therefore, unlikely that the prevalent spirit of deep direct defense ties will die out even if Trump is voted out of the White House.
As India’s former army chief General Nirmal Chander Vij explained, “Over this period we have realized that Indian interests and American interests are [going] in the same direction and for the same purpose – and for that very reason, India has gone ahead and signed the foundational military agreements.”
What is more important for India in the wake of its on-going military tensions with the US is the realization about its lack of military preparedness vis-à-vis China. With no significant arms industry at home, the Indian policy makers see in the US a natural anti-China ally, one they would not find in Russia or anywhere else, and a key source of advanced military hardware.
To maintain and even deepen this alliance and to further the scope of the so-called 2+2 dialogue, Indian policy makers were not reluctant to tell Iran that their country wouldn’t be able to maintain the spirit of the ‘Tehran Declaration.’ It is for this reason that two consecutive visits of India’s foreign and defense ministers to Iran were quickly followed by Iran’s decision to kick India out of the Farzad-B gas project, realizing that India’s strategic realities are clearly at odds with its previously widely propagated and ambitious ‘look East’ policy, an idea that imagined a greater Indian reach to Central Asia and Afghanistan via Iran.
Salman Rafi Sheikh is a research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs.
Angelina Jolie’s MI6 Interview Shows Just How Connected Hollywood Is To the Deep State
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | November 4, 2020
With election fever still gripping the U.S., talk of rigging or interference in the democratic process is reaching new levels, high enough that even Hollywood legend Angelina Jolie is talking about it. In an extraordinary interview in Time magazine, the star of “Wanted, Maleficent, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” sat down with the former head of the UK’s MI6 spy network, Sir Alex Younger, to ask how worrying the threat from Russia or China really is.
“Russia feels threatened by the quality of our alliances and, even in the current environment, the quality of our democratic institutions. It sets out to denigrate them, and it uses intelligence services to that end. It is a serious problem, and we should organize to prevent it,” the British spook told the actress.
Younger also went on to discuss the rise of China, and how the West must act to challenge the supposed threat Beijing poses. “We are going to have two sharply different value systems in operation on the same planet for the foreseeable future. We mustn’t be naïve. We need to retain the capacity to defend ourselves,” he told Jolie.
Never challenging him, Jolie even asked the head of perhaps the world’s most notorious spying agency how we can protect ourselves from fake information.
To some, the pairing of a Hollywood star and a veteran spymaster might seem strange. But, in reality, the silver screen and the national security state have always been intimately intertwined. And as much as Jolie presents herself as a leading humanitarian, even being appointed as a Special Envoy for the UN Commission for Refugees, she has spent an inordinate amount of her free time rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s worst human rights abusers.
At World Refugee Day in 2005, Jolie shared a stage with then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice was a key player in the Bush administration, responsible for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, two of the world’s worst humanitarian and refugee crises that continue to plague the planet to this day.
Jolie herself has slowly become a leading member of the U.S. national security apparatus, joining the influential and well-endowed Council on Foreign Relations think tank in 2007, and penning a joint op-ed in The New York Times with John McCain two years ago calling for U.S. intervention in Syria and Myanmar. “Around the world, there is profound concern that America is giving up the mantle of global leadership,” they questionably asserted, decrying America’s “steady retreat over the past decade” that has, “dangerously eroded the rule of law,” and condemned the Trump administration’s inaction in Syria that could have “deterred mass atrocities,” and reduced the refugee crisis.
Salt
Jolie’s collaboration with high-level government officials is not limited to her personal life, however. The 45-year-old Californian has also worked closely, and openly, with CIA officials as part of her movies. A case in point is the 2010 blockbuster Salt, where Jolie plays a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy. The movie was released at the same time as the real-life Anna Chapman scandal, where the Russian national was caught spying for her country inside the U.S., and marked the beginning of hardening American relations with Moscow, ending up at the point where some have declared the beginning of a new Cold War.
“Salt was the first big cultural product reflecting this geopolitical change, for most of the 2000s Hollywood had no interest in evil Russians,” Tom Secker, an investigative journalist with SpyCulture.com told MintPress. “If you watch the film the Russian politicians are clearly based on Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.”
Jolie, playing an evil Russian spy in Salt, chokes out an NYPD officer
“We talked to a lot of the women in the CIA,” said Jolie of her experiences preparing for her role. She appeared to have nothing but admiration for the organization; “One after the other, they are just these lovely, sweet women that you can’t imagine being put in a dangerous situation, but they really are,” she added. Salt even hired a former CIA officer to be an on-set technical advisor.
A CIA document Secker shared with MintPress highlights the extent of CIA involvement in Hollywood and their reasons for doing so. “In an effort to ensure an accurate portrayal of the men and women of the CIA,” it reads. “For years the Agency has worked with creative artists from across the entertainment industry. [The CIA Office of Public Affairs] interacts with directors, producers, screenwriters, authors, documentarians, actors and others to help debunk myths and provide authenticity, and of course to protect Agency equities,” it adds. But perhaps the most important reason stated is, “to help prevent inappropriate negative depictions of the Agency,” in mass media.
Propaganda on an enormous scale
The level of state involvement in Salt is far from abnormal. In fact, Alford and Secker’s book “National Security Cinema” details how, since 2005, documents they obtained showed that the Department of Defense alone had closely collaborated in the production of over 1,000 movies or TV shows. This includes many of the largest film franchises, such as “Iron Man,” “Transformers,” “James Bond,” and “Mission: Impossible,” and hit TV shows like “The Biggest Loser,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Master Chef” and “The Price is Right.”
In general, the military or the CIA will offer free services to productions, such as the use of prohibitively expensive military equipment, or technical direction, in exchange for editorial control over scripts. This allows the agencies to make sure the power, prestige, and integrity of these organizations are not challenged. Sometimes entire movies are radically rewritten.
“The Department of Defense actually apologized in their covering letter to the producers of “Hulk” (2003), since the changes they required were so extensive,” Dr. Matthew Alford of the University of Bath told MintPress.
“But really the disturbing thing here is the pattern and the scale… What I suggest is that we focus on the deliberate, major, secretive pressures that rewrite scripts — and we find they’re all on the side of the national security state. Systematically scrubbed from the screen is an unsavoury century of military history including war crimes, illegal arms sales, racism and sexual assault, torture, coups, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction. It amounts to the airbrushing of an entire mediated culture.”
Thus, the large majority of big-budget productions featuring military or intelligence services have been greenlighted by the national security state, who have negotiated for control over the message in order to better propagandize both Americans and the global public. However, serious antiwar content rarely makes it to network TV or Hollywood drawing boards, so wholescale interference is usually unnecessary.
In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, wrote that his organization “has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors.” Many of America’s most familiar faces have visited the organization’s headquarters in Langley, VA, including Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Bryan Cranston, and Tom Cruise.
In recent years, collaboration has become even more overt. The Department of Defense even tweeted out during the Oscars how proud it is to work so closely with Hollywood to further its own image.
Meanwhile, the latest series of the hit spy show “Jack Ryan,” for instance, has the eponymous CIA hero travel to Venezuela to help overthrow tyrannical dictator Nicolas Reyes (a clear allusion to current president Nicolas Maduro). John Krasinski, who plays Ryan, said that he worked closely with the Agency in order to make the show more realistic. Krasinski also described the CIA as amazingly “apolitical.” “They’re always trying to do the right thing,” he said of them, claiming they “care about the country in a bigger, more idealistic way.”
Last month, a real CIA agent, Matthew John Heath, was arrested outside Venezuela’s largest oil refinery carrying explosives, a grenade launcher, a submachine gun, and stacks of U.S. dollars.
“Probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents and we just don’t know it. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all to discover that this was extremely common,” said “Batman” star Ben Affleck in 2012, before going to describe himself, perhaps jokingly, as a CIA agent himself.
Propaganda works
The effect of years of propaganda has been to improve the standing of the deep state and make the American public more conducive to supporting the tactics of the CIA and the military. One academic study found that showing torture scenes from the hit spy series “24” to liberal college students made them far more likely to support the use of it against anyone deemed an enemy of the state.
Democrat-aligned voters’ opinion of the FBI has been steadily rising over the last decade, to the point that 77% hold a favorable view of the institution (and almost two-thirds of the country supports the CIA).
Thus, while the entertainment industry might be liberal in that it largely opposes Trump and donates to the Democratic Party, it works closely to support and uphold the national security state, promotes ultra-patriotism and American aggression throughout the world. While Jolie might present herself as a champion of human rights, working with the very institutions responsible for destroying those rights around the globe undermines this assertion.
Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent.
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From the Archives
A short history of British torture
ICC | December 2005
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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