By Uriel Araujo | June 7, 2023
President Andrzej Duda has signed a law which allows Warsaw to conduct political repression against the opposition, by creating a commission to “investigate Russian influence on Polish politics that could ban people from public office for a decade” – Duda and the the Law and Justice (PiS) party argue this is necessary to neutralize “Moscow agents”, but the opposition fear this could trigger a civil war, as journalist Wojciech Kość wrote for POLITICO. This could complicate Warsaw’s relations with Brussels, as well – “with the European Commission freezing billions in EU pandemic recovery cash over worries the Polish government is backsliding on the bloc’s democratic principles”, writes Kość.
Poland’s relations with the European bloc have been complicated for a while: in 2021, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which is part of the Council of Europe (not the EU) condemned the Central European country over the removal of judges from office and their arrest. Warsaw has been on a collision route with Brussels as well over a number of issues regarding the rule of law (from the European Commission perspective), and also free press, LGBT rights, and so on.
Poland’s diplomacy, since 1989, has been largely shaped by its aspiration to join both NATO and the EU. Since at least 2015, Warsaw has maintained its alliance with Washington, while becoming, on the other hand, increasingly isolated within Europe and becoming kind of adrift. In 2021, Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau urged the US to support the Three Seas Initiative (3SI) projects, arguing that it could become a strategic “American economic footprint” in the Adriatic, Baltic, and Black Sea region and a “counterweight to investments in critical infrastructure by actors who do not share our democratic value.”
Since 2022, the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian confrontation has opened a kind of window of opportunity for Warsaw. In December last year, Estonian Ambassador to the EU Aivo Orav, stated that the “political center of influence” in Europe no longer was “in Berlin and Paris” (only), but now “also lies in Eastern and Central European Countries as well, including the Baltic countries, together with U.S. support.” Such a possible outcome would be very much welcomed by Washington, especially considering how both France and Germany today flirt with the idea of strategic autonomy.
As I’ve written, Warsaw has been antagonizing Berlin while trying to project its own influence within the continent – clearly with Washington’s crucial support, as the US seems to be “fed up” with Germany. Poland’s legal campaign against Germany over WWII reparations and its attempts to absorb neighboring Ukraine in a confederacy should be seen as part of this larger agenda. The Polish renaming of Kaliningrad, as I also wrote, is yet another instance of the current memory war which haunts Europe today.
Germany, in turn, on May 8 this year banned Soviet and Russian flags during its “World War II commemorations”. The Allied Forces triumph over Nazi-Fascism has been celebrated for half a century as the fundamental victory of democracy and true Western values. This Western narrative is short-circuiting as the West has seen fit to rewrite History, by preposterously erasing Russia from it while white-washing the blatant neo-Nazism of Ukraine’s Azov regiment and its human rights infringements.
In Ukraine too “anti-Russian” measures have been advanced by the current regime to persecute the opposition and civil society. Since at least December last year Zelensky has been advancing moves to outlaw Orthodox communities, something which even Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych, head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, has denounced.
No less than 11 political parties have been banned there since 2022 over their “pro-Russia” stances. According to Volodymyr Ishchenko, a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies (Freie Universität Berlin), these measures have more to do with “post-Euromaidan polarization” than with “genuine security concerns”.
Since the ultranationalist 2014 Maidan Revolution, and the ongoing civil war in Donbass, “pro-Russia” has become an accusatory category to label and marginalize, according to Ishchenko, “anyone calling for Ukraine’s neutrality” as well as “state-developmentalist, anti-Western, illiberal, populist, left-wing, and many other discourses.” In the Eastern European nation, there has always been a political camp which calls for closer integration with neighboring Russia rather than the West – which is no wonder, considering that in this strongly bilingual nation, at least 34% of the population speaks Russian, with a high degree of intermarriage.
In short, in a kind of neo-McCarthyism, anti-Russia discourse and the re-writing of history is used today both by Kiev and Warsaw as a pretext to persecute and even outlaw dissent.
In other words, the problem is that being at war over the past (and at war with the past itself) can always backfire: Polish-Ukrainian bilateral relations and their ambitious plans towards a confederacy have always been hampered by differences precisely about World War II. How can there be strong ties of friendship between two nations when one of them today celebrates as heroes those who supported the genocide of the other?
Last February, while Ukrainian Parliament celebrated Stepan Bandera, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in turn expressed his disapproval of all who commemorate Bandera, describing as “genocide” the brutal murder of between 100,000 to 200,000 ethnic Poles. Here, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism clash. And both regimes clash with the democratic values which the Western bloc purportedly champions – while Europe now welcomes the specter of far-right nationalism and even neo-Nazism.
As non-alignmentism and multi-alignmentism are on the rise, the US-led Western global order has been in decline not just due to de-dollarization or to the potential end of the US-Saudi relationship – in a deeper level, its hypocritical weaponization of human rights is losing force as are its most cherished narratives and political myths.
June 7, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Russophobia | Poland, Ukraine |
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Some senior officers are retiring but who and what will replace them?
There are a lot of anonymous bureaucrats that man the offices in the nation’s capital. If one were to mention the name Wendy Sherman at a Washington DC cocktail gathering it is likely that few in the room will have ever heard of her, but she has long been one of the most important players in Democratic Party administrations when it comes to foreign policy in key parts of the world. Sherman, the Deputy Secretary of State, will be retiring this summer after more than thirty years with the Foreign Service. She has been a fixture in often controversial top level policy making since Bill Clinton was in the White House, where she served as a top adviser to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, also taking on the role of lead negotiator in the ultimately unsuccessful talks to stop North Korea’s ballistic missile program in the late 1990s. With a return to power of the Democrats in 2008, she served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs under Obama. To her credit, she was a lead negotiator with Iran on the 2015 nuclear agreement (JCPOA), which Donald Trump acting on bad advice subsequently withdrew from.
More recently, Sherman has been a key part of the Biden administration’s efforts to develop strategies to confront China in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere whenever Beijing has sought to develop trade relationships with key suppliers of essential raw materials. This has included putting pressure on allies like Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific to reject Chinese commercial initiatives, elevating what began as competitive trade policies into a perception that China was becoming a threat to American national security. Sherman also played a significant role in encouraging international diplomatic and military support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.
Sherman’s current position as State Department number two was bestowed on her by President Joe Biden. Her comments relating to her retirement reveal something of her own philosophy as well as the views of the current administration. She said “The arc of history will only bend toward justice if people of conscience steer it in the right direction. That it is our job to have courage, to collaborate with others and seek out common ground, to persist against the odds, to use our voice and our power for good—to keep faith with the promise of our democracy and to never, ever lose hope. Diplomacy is not for the faint of heart…”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken not surprisingly praised Sherman’s career, saying that “President Biden asked Wendy to serve in this role because he knew he could count on her to help revitalize America’s alliances and partnerships and manage our complex relationships with competitors.” Blinken described Sherman’s lengthy career as a diplomat in a statement after her resignation was announced, saying she has “helped lead our engagement in the Indo-Pacific, the region where the history of the 21st century will be written. She has deepened our bonds with our friends around the world, especially with the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the European Union. She has overseen our efforts to strengthen the Department’s capabilities to manage our relationship with the People’s Republic of China, and built greater convergence with allies and partners… Her remarkable career – which spans more than three decades, three presidents, and five secretaries of state – addressed some of the toughest foreign policy challenges of our time. Our nation is safer and more secure, and our partnerships more robust, due to her leadership.”
One can expect kind words wrapped around positive government-speak both from Blinken and from Sherman herself after her admittedly long years of service, but there is something manifestly false about the euphoria over a US foreign policy that has during the Biden time in office eschewed diplomacy in favor of military threats and thousands of punitive Treasury Department sanctions. If anything, contradicting Blinken, the United States is in no way “safer and more secure” thanks to his and Wendy Sherman’s efforts, quite the contrary. It has, inter alia, converted major powers Russia and China, who were actively seeking normalized relations, into de facto enemies with all that implies, a result that, even if it does not turn into World War 3, might well mean the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency as the world moves towards increased financial and banking system multipolarity.
If Sherman and Blinken, acting on behalf of Joe Biden, have had a success it would consist of getting the allegedly defensive alliance NATO on board the China-phobia train, with Beijing joining Russia as one of the two great autocratic “threats to democracy.” At the end of June 2022, Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General, declared that China does represent “serious challenges” to the alliance, which, for the first time agreed to include “threats posed by Beijing” into plans for its “future strategy” concept (PDF), joining Russia as a threat to “NATO’s interests, security and values.” Stoltenberg explained how “We now face an era of strategic competition … China is substantially building up its forces, including in nuclear weapons, bullying its neighbors, including Taiwan. China is not [yet] our adversary but we must be clear-eyed about the serious challenges it represents.”
Antony Blinken also climbed on to the horse that Stoltenberg was riding, commenting in familiar terms how “One of the things that [China’s] doing is seeking to undermine the rules-based international order that we adhere to, that we believe in, that we helped build. And if China’s challenging it in one way or another, we will stand up to that.” That the rules-based order is little more than a contrivance to maintain political and military dominance by Washington and its friends is by now clear to everyone except the people sitting in and around the White House, most particularly to include Blinken and Sherman.
So what comes next as the featured act post Wendy Sherman? It should be noted that the State Department top level is completely staffed by Jewish Americans who are politically-speaking neocons with close ties to Israel who also believe that the maintenance of total military dominance by the United State is good both for them and good for the Jewish state. All of them are Russo-phobes for various reasons often related to the history of Jews in Russia. Sherman recently participated in discussions in Washington with her Israeli counterpart intended to “…further deepen and expand the US-Israel relationship.” Someone should tell her that it is already far deeper than it should be if one were to go by American interests.
The current third in line at State is the notorious Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland who started the problems in Eastern Europe when she worked with her colleagues to overthrow and replace the existing government in Ukraine in 2014. Nuland, who recently spilled the beans about direct US involvement in the Ukraine war, is married to leading neocon Robert Kagan. It has often been observed that neocon foreign policy, which originated with the Republican Party and is based on maintaining a US government monopoly on forms of international violence, has now come to dominate both parties.
If Biden chooses to pull a rabbit out of his hat and comes up with a replacement for Wendy Sherman who is actually in favor of active diplomacy as a mechanism to avoid war, I and many others will be pleasantly surprised and even astonished. More likely it will be Nuland or a Nuland clone or possibly someone having all the Democratic Party boxes checked, i.e. black, Jewish and a transexual who uses the right pronouns and pretends to be a woman. The fundamental problem is that the United States government is no longer run by people capable of acting in rational self-interest, which would mean doing things for the good of the country. The system is in reality broken and it is now clear that something has gone terribly wrong. The sad truth is that the United States is in decline, wallowing in debt and corruption, and Joe Biden and company have lost control, lying and misrepresenting nearly everything. So good bye Wendy! It was great having you at State where you and your friends turned competitors into enemies. It will be interesting to see what happens next!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
June 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Militarism, Russophobia, Wars for Israel | United States, Zionism |
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The North Atlantic alliance began military drills hosted by Finland just miles from the Russian border. An American defense official said the war games show the bloc’s commitment to the newest member of NATO.
US Army Major-General Gregory Anderson said on Tuesday, “We are here, we are committed. The US Army is here training with our newest NATO ally to build that capability, to help defend Finland if anything happened.”
About 7,500 NATO soldiers are participating in the exercises – dubbed “Northern Forest 23.” The drills are taking place just a two-hour drive from the Russian border in northern Finland and will run from May 27 to June 2. Reuters described the war games as “Finland’s biggest modern-time land force drill above the Arctic Circle.”
A Finnish Army press release detailed the multiple weapons systems allies will deploy for drills.” The equipment of the international forces will include, among others, Warrior infantry fighting vehicles [from the UK], MLRS rocket launcher systems [from the US and UK] and CV90 infantry fighting vehicles [from Sweden and Norway],” the statement said.
Helsinki is NATO’s newest member. When Finland became a member of the North Atlantic alliance, it doubled the bloc’s border with Russia. At over 800 miles, Helsinki has a longer border with Moscow than any other member of NATO.
Tensions between Brussels and Moscow have soared due to the alliance’s support for Kiev. However, the confrontation between Russia and the West has spread to other regions of Europe as well. Washington has increased its military presence in the Arctic as a show of force eyeing Moscow.
Last week, the USS Gerald Ford – the world’s largest aircraft carrier – made a port call in Norway. The Ford is the first American aircraft carrier to visit Oslo after six decades.
The warship will now travel into the Arctic Circle to conduct war games. A spokesperson for Oslo said, “This visit is an important signal of the close bilateral relationship between the US and Norway and a signal of the credibility of collective defense and deterrence.”
The Russian embassy in Norway denounced the Ford’s maneuvers as unnecessary. “There are no questions in the (Arctic) north that require a military solution, nor topics where outside intervention is needed,” the embassy posted on Facebook.
June 1, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Russophobia | Finland, NATO, Norway |
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UK counter-terrorism police detained journalist Kit Klarenberg upon his arrival in his home country from Belgrade, Serbia, on 17 May, subjecting him to an extended interrogation over his “political views” and his reporting.
Klarenberg has written extensively for The Cradle, exposing London’s many covert operations in West Asia.
According to The Grayzone, six plainclothes police were waiting for him outside his plane, promptly moving him to a back room and informing him of his detention under Schedule Three, Section Four of the 2019 Counter-Terrorism and Border Act.
Klarenberg was questioned for over five hours about his journalistic work, including “his personal opinion on everything from the current British political leadership to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
The counter-terrorism police seized his electronic devices and SD cards, took DNA swabs, fingerprinted him, and photographed him multiple times. He was threatened with arrest if he failed to comply.
Klarenberg’s most recent investigation for The Cradle exposed how UK government-affiliated contractors have been training Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces using US funding.
He made waves in recent months by exposing London’s use of Yemeni NGOs to covertly undermine the Ansarallah-led government in Sanaa as well as Jordan’s use of UK intel techniques known as “digital media exploitation … used to monitor, manipulate, and disrupt dissent in the kingdom.”
Klarenberg has also ruffled feathers in London with his reporting for The Grayzone, exposing “major British and US intelligence intrigues,” including a report on how at least two of the hijackers who carried out the 11 September attacks in New York had been recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation.
Another of his major exposés was a report revealing that journalist Paul Mason worked as a UK security state collaborator tasked with discrediting alternative media outlets, academics, and peace activists critical of NATO’s role in the Ukraine war.
Last year, The Cradle’s Arabic editor Radwan Mortada was sentenced in an irregular Lebanese military court hearing to one year and one month in prison for “the offense of insulting the military establishment.”
Moreover, one of our Turkish contributors, a former editor at Cum Hurriyet and a radio interview show personality, Ceyda Karan, has been eluding imprisonment for her journalism.
Another frequent correspondent, Hedwig Kuijpers, a Belgian national who often reports on contentious Kurdish issues in Iraq, Iran and Syria, has been missing for several months, sparking concerns about her safety.
Klarenberg’s detention sets a dangerous precedent for free speech in the UK, a country that since 2019 has kept Wikileaks founder Julian Assange locked up in a maximum security prison pending extradition to the US for reporting on the secret activities of western governments and their war crimes. US officials have even publicly encouraged his assassination.
Press TV
… Klarenberg has been a regular contributor to Press TV, with one of his major exposes revealing how Britain used ambulances during the conflict in Syria to aid foreign-backed terrorists.
Among Klarenberg’s notable contributions are his pieces on the role of Western governments in the 2022 foreign-backed riots in Iran.
Protests erupted in September last year over the death of a young Iranian woman Mahsa Amini first in her native province of Kordestan and later in several cities, including the capital.
The foreign-backed violent riots claimed dozens of lives from both security forces and innocent people as the Western media and Persian-language news networks continued to induce riots in Iran. … Full article
The Grayzone
… Among Klarenberg’s most consequential exposés was his June 2022 report unmasking British journalist Paul Mason as a UK security state collaborator hellbent on destroying The Grayzone and other media outlets, academics, and activists critical of NATO’s role in Ukraine.
Because Klarenberg’s reporting on Mason relied heavily on leaked emails, Mason falsely accused him of “assisting a Russian state-backed hack-and-leak disinformation campaign.” Mason has also reported the leak of his emails to the British police.
Emma Briant, a self-styled disinformation expert who participated in Mason’s campaign to sabotage NATO critics, dispatched lawyers to demand Klarenberg remove all of his articles that mention her from the internet. The lawyer letters also threatened costly super injunctions to prevent further reporting, and challenged the “authenticity” of the emails’ content.
The cease-and-desist letters additionally leveled false and defamatory allegations against Klarenberg, including that he was personally involved in hacking her email and Twitter account.
Did the bogus and obviously malicious complaints by Paul Mason or Emma Briant prompt the UK police to detain and investigate Klarenberg?
Klarenberg’s reports contain neither falsehoods nor anything approaching “disinformation,” which is precisely why intelligence-linked figures like Mason are so frustrated by their existence. Despite Mason and Briant’s allegations, there is not even hard evidence that Russian hackers were the source of the leaks.
While reporting on leaked material, Klarenberg engaged in the same journalistic practice that the West’s most prominent legacy newspapers, from The New York Times to The Washington Post, depend on to break news themselves. In fact, Thomas Rid, a self-styled disinformation expert and professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University, has stated that journalists “should not shy away” from covering the leaks first reported by Klarenberg.
It therefore appears that British authorities did not detain Klarenberg for any legal breaches, but because he reported factual stories that exposed the national security state’s own violations of both domestic and international law, as well as the malign plots of its media lackeys. … Full article
May 31, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | Human rights, UK |
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The Durham Report fails to identify the ringleader of the Russiagate fiasco, John Brennan. It was Brennan who first reported “contacts… between Russian officials and persons in the Trump campaign”. It was also Brennan who initially referred the case to the FBI. It was also Brennan who “hand-picked” the analysts who cobbled together the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which said that Putin was trying to swing the election in Trump’s favor. And, it was also Brennan who hijacked the “Trump-Russia-meme” from the Hillary campaign in order to prosecute his war on Trump. At every turn, Brennan was there, massaging the intelligence, pulling the strings, and micromanaging the entire operation from behind the scenes. So, while it might seem like the FBI was ‘leading the Russiagate charge’, it was actually Brennan who was calling the shots. This is from an article by Aaron Mate:
“…it is clear that Brennan’s role in propagating the collusion narrative went far beyond his work on the ICA. (Intelligence Community Assessment) A close review of facts that have slowly come to light reveals that he was a central architect and promoter of the conspiracy theory from its inception... Brennan stands apart for the outsized role he played in generating and spreading the (collusion) false narrative.” The Brennan Dossier: All About a Prime Mover of Russiagate, Aaron Mate, Real Clear Investigations
Mate is right, Brennan was “central architect and promoter” of the Russiagate fraud. The alleged Trump-Russia connection may have started with the Hillary campaign, but it was Brennan who transformed it into an expansive domestic counterintelligence operation aimed at regime change. That was Brennan’s doing; he was the backroom puppetmaster overseeing the action and guiding the project towards its final conclusion. What the Durham Report confirms, is that the plan was put into motion sometime after Brennan’s Oval Office meeting with Barack Obama in July, 2016. Check out this clip from an article by Lee Smith:
The only genuine piece of Russian intelligence that US spy services ever received about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia was intelligence that Russia knew Hillary Clinton backed a 2016 campaign plan to smear Trump as a Russian agent.
According to John Durham’s 300-page report, the information reached the CIA in late July 2016. Brennan told Durham that on August 3 he briefed President Barack Obama at the White House on what the special counsel refers to as the Clinton Plan intelligence. Others in attendance at the meeting were Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey.” The Durham Coverup, Lee Smith
So, now we know that Brennan told Obama, Biden, Lynch and Comey that the Russia-Trump nonsense was part of a smear campaign cooked up by the Hillary campaign to divert attention from her email problems. We also know that Brennan conducted the briefing on August 3, 2016.
So, if Brennan knew that the Russia-Trump claims were false back in July, then how do we explain the fact that Brennan went ahead and published a damning Intelligence agency report 5 months later strongly suggesting a link between Trump and the Kremlin?
Here’s a brief excerpt from Brennan’s Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which was released on January 6, 2017 and which clearly states the opposite of what Brennan told Obama five months earlier:
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump..…
Further, a body of reporting, to include different intelligence disciplines, open source reporting on Russian leadership policy preferences, and Russian media content, showed that Moscow sought to denigrate Secretary Clinton.
The ICA relies on public Russian leadership commentary, Russian state media reports, public examples of where Russian interests would have aligned with candidates’ policy statements, and a body of intelligence reporting to support the assessment that Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for Trump. The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)
Let’s summarize the findings in the report:
- Vladimir Putin was directly involved in the US 2016 presidential election
- Putin’s goal was to “denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability
- Putin and the Russian government supported Donald Trump
Brennan knew that none of this was true because , as we said earlier, he had already told Obama that the Russia-Trump smear was part of a “dirty tricks” operation generated by the Hillary campaign.
So, why would Brennan use Hillary’s spurious allegations against Trump when the election was already over? What did he hope to gain?
Three things:
- To call-into-question the results of the election thereby undermining Trump’s legitimacy as president
- To derail Trump’s political and foreign policy agenda
- (Most important) To build a case against Trump that could be used in impeachment proceedings.
This was an attempt to depose the president of the United States. There can be no doubt about that. Why else would a man in Brennan’s position try to frame Trump as a Russian agent?
To remove him from office, that’s why. And there’s more, too. Here’s what Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee during his testimony in 2017:
“I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”
We know now that Brennan had no “information or intelligence” that revealed contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia because there weren’t any. He lied. More importantly, Brennan delivered this testimony more than a year after he had told Obama that he knew the Trump-Russia theory was ‘Opposition Research’ concocted for the Hillary campaign. So, he knew what he was saying was false, but he said it anyway. In short, he lied to Congress which is a felony.
Check out this ‘smoking gun’ excerpt from page 86 of the Durham Report. According to the report, the CIA sent a Referral Memo to the FBI on September 7, 2016, in which they stated the following:
An exchange … discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server..…
The Office did not identify any further actions that the CIA or FBI took in response to this intelligence product as it related to the Clinton Plan intelligence. The Durham Report, Page 86
They knew. They all knew.
Durham merely confirmed what independent analysts have been saying from the start, that both the CIA and the FBI knew that the Trump-Russia allegation was a fraud from the get-go. But they decided to use it anyway in order to scupper Trump’s political agenda and pave the way for his impeachment. Isn’t that what we typically call a “regime change” operation?
It is. Here’s more background from an article by Stephen Cohen at The Nation :
In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017, John Brennan, formerly Obama’s head of the CIA, strongly suggested that he and his agency were the first, as The Washington Post put it at the time, “in triggering an FBI probe.” Certainly both the Post and The New York Times interpreted his remarks in this way. Equally certain, Brennan played a central role in promoting the Russiagate narrative thereafter, briefing members of Congress privately and giving President Obama himself a top-secret envelope in early August 2016 that almost certainly contained Steele’s dossier…..
In short, if these reports and Brennan’s own testimony are to be believed, he, not the FBI, was the instigator and godfather of Russiagate.” “Russiagate or Intelgate?”, Stephen Cohen, The Nation
There it is in black and white; it all began with Brennan. Brennan is the “godfather of Russiagate” just as Cohen says.
Here’s more from Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton at artvoice.com :
“Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid reportedly believed then-Obama CIA Director Brennan was feeding him information about alleged links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in order to make public accusations:
According to ‘Russian Roulette,’ by Yahoo! News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff and David Corn… Brennan contacted Reid on Aug. 25, 2016, to brief him on the state of Russia’s interference in the presidential campaign. Brennan briefed other members of the so-called Gang of Eight, but Reid is the only who took direct action.
Two days after the briefing, Reid wrote a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey asserting that ‘evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount.’ Reid called on Comey to investigate the links ‘thoroughly and in a timely fashion.’
Reid saw Brennan’s outreach as ‘a sign of urgency,’ Isikoff and Corn wrote in the book. ‘Reid also had the impression that Brennan had an ulterior motive. He concluded the CIA chief believed the public needed to know about the Russian operation, including the information about the possible links to the Trump campaign.’
According to the book, Brennan told Reid that the intelligence community had determined that the Russian government was behind the hack and leak of Democratic emails and that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind it. Brennan also told Reid that there was evidence that Russian operatives were attempting to tamper with election results. Indeed, on August 27, 2016, Reid wrote a letter to Comey accusing President Trump’s campaign of colluding with the Russian government.” “The John Brennan-Harry Reid Collusion to ‘Get Trump’”, artvoice.com
Comey didn’t want to go along with the charade, but what choice did he have, after all, didn’t he open an investigation into Hillary’s emails 11 days before the November balloting which cost Clinton the election?
He did, which means they probably had him over a barrel. Either he did what they said, or he’d be driven from office in disgrace. Of course, I’m speculating here, but I find it hard to believe that an old-school bureaucrat like Comey suddenly decided to throw caution to the wind and agree to go along with a hairbrained scheme to frame the president of the United States as a Russian agent. That’s just too wacky to believe. I think it’s much more likely that he simply caved-in to the pressure he was getting from Brennan.
In any event, it’s clear that Brennan whipped Reid into a frenzy which prompted the credulous senator to urge Comey to open an investigation into Trump’s (fabricated) links to the Kremlin. The Durham Report confirms that the FBI opened the probe without sufficient hard evidence, but the report does not clarify the role that Brennan played in putting the wheels in motion. This is from an article at The Hill :
(Attorney General Bill) Barr will want to zero in on a particular area of concern: the use by the FBI of confidential human sources, whether its own or those offered up by the then-CIA director. …
… the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all appear to have their genesis as CIA sources (“assets,” in agency vernacular) shared at times with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher Steele, to Carter Page himself, and now a mysterious “government investigator” posing as Halper’s assistant and cited in The New York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more than an FBI counterintelligence case.” “James Comey is in trouble and he knows it”, The Hill
Repeat: “legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more than an FBI counterintelligence case.”
So, The Hill has arrived at the same conclusion that we have, that Comey was merely a pawn in Brennan’s sprawling regime change operation. In fact, according to former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi, Brennan’s tentacles may have extended all the way to the FISA courts that improperly issued the warrants to spy on members of the Trump campaign. Take a look:
“Brennan was the key to the operation because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court refused to approve several requests by the FBI to initiate taps on Trump associates and Trump Tower as there was no probable cause to do so but the British and other European intelligence services were legally able to intercept communications linked to American sources. Brennan was able to use his connections with those foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, to make it look like the concerns about Trump were coming from friendly and allied countries and therefore had to be responded to as part of routine intelligence sharing. As a result, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Gen. Michael Flynn were all wiretapped. And likely there were others. This all happened during the primaries and after Trump became the GOP nominee.” “The Conspiracy Against Trump”, Philip Giraldi, Unz Review
Giraldi’s piece makes Brennan look like the ultimate “fixer”. If you needed warrants, he’d get you warrants. If you needed spies, he’d get you spies. If you needed something planted in the media, or someone to start a rumor, or maybe even an “official-sounding” document that’s been dolled-up to look like ‘the consensus view of the entire US Intelligence Community’; he could do that too. He could do it all because he’s a virtuoso spymaster who knew the system from the ground-up. He understood how all the levers worked and which buttons to push to get things done. He also knew how easy it is to bamboozle the American people who trust whatever spurious accusations they read in the media or hear on the cable news channels. He had a keen grasp of that.
Brennan is the consummate uber-spook, a deft and capable professional who conducts his business mainly in the shadows and whose influence on events is never entirely known. That’s why I think Brennan played the key role in the Russiagate scam, because he’s a man of many talents who would not be opposed to using his power to advance his own leftist agenda by crushing a political rival that he viscerally despised.
THE DURHAM WHITEWASH
And, that’s my problem with the Durham Report, because even though it is a powerful indictment of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, it fails in its most important task, which is to identify the architect and ringleader of the Russiagate hoax. The report doesn’t do that, instead, it diverts attention away from the prime suspect to the footsoldiers who merely implemented his battleplan. That’s not just a bad outcome. That’s a whitewash.
May 31, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Russophobia | CIA, FBI, Hillary Clinton, United States |
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By Ahmed Adel | May 30, 2023
President Maia Sandu announced during a press briefing that a new tax-payer-funded institution intended to supervise and limit press freedom in Moldova would be established. Amid the economic meltdown in the country, Sandu is trying to control the media narrative while also attacking Russia.
“The best antidote against the information war is the development of citizens’ resistance to the real facts. Today I am announcing the legislative initiative to create an institution to combat propaganda and defend citizens from manipulation. I will propose to the Parliament the creation of the National Center for Information Defense and Combating Propaganda, called Patriot. The institution will have two basic responsibilities: to transmit truthful information to citizens and to identify, evaluate and combat disinformation,” Sandu said on May 29.
According to the president, the legislation initiative will be sent to the Parliament by the end of June.
“I know that this announcement will stir the hornet’s nest working against the Republic of Moldova. They will invoke the right to freedom of expression. But this right cannot be a screen for lying and intoxication. I have confidence in the Republic of Moldova, I am sure that we have a chance to build a European state, I want the citizens to have confidence in the Republic of Moldova,” Sandu added.
Her ambition to limit Russian-friendly media to impose a Western narrative monopoly in a dictatorial manner comes as the EU steps up its support for Moldova. 46 EU and European leaders will be in Chisinau on June 1 to offer financial and political solidarity with Moldova and show strength against Russia.
French President Emmanuel Macron initially envisaged the European Political Community (EPC) as a platform for unity across the wider European front. The EPC will meet for the second time in Chisinau, only eight months after its inaugural meeting. The meeting brings together the leaders of the 27 EU member states and Ukraine, Turkey, the UK, and other countries in the Balkans, but not Russia or Belarus.
Security and energy supplies, which have been part-funded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), are expected to be at the top of the agenda. The EBRD invested €525 million in Moldova in 2022, accounting for 4% of its GDP. The investment comes as Moldova struggles with high inflation and the economic repercussions of the war in neighbouring Ukraine, in addition to problems in Transnistria, a breakaway region and post-Soviet conflict zone with a majority Slavic (Russian-Ukrainian) population.
To assist Sandu’s ambition to sever Russian-Moldovan ties, the EU will provide financial muscle with the help of the EBRD and an €87 million EU contribution to so-called non-military logistical aid. This aid will include a mission in Chisinau, which will staff up to 50 officials. Opening on May 30, the office aims to build Moldova’s resilience against disinformation and cyber-attacks, with support at strategic and technical levels.
Sandu is expected to use the EPC summit to push for quicker EU access, which she claims is the only guarantee against becoming Russia’s next target, even though no such ambitions exist.
“We do believe that Russia will continue to be a big source of instability for the years to come and we need to protect ourselves,” said Sandu, on the sidelines of a Council of Europe summit in Iceland earlier in May. “We do believe that this [EU membership] is a realistic project for us and we are looking forward to see this happening as soon as possible.”
Although accession could take years to achieve, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia won official candidate status to join the EU. For this reason, Sandu is taking advantage of heightened Russophobia in the West to project it in Moldova, which has a high level of Russophilia. However, this path of serving Western interests to oppose Russia is significantly affecting the economy.
In May, Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean said that before the Ukraine war, his country was 100% dependent on Russia for its gas, but “Today Moldova can exist with absolutely no natural gas or electricity from Russia.”
Moldova is currently struggling to deal with the spillover effects of the war in Ukraine, which has significantly impacted households, the economy, and public finances. The war also oversees a considerable drop in Moldova’s GDP due to the disruptions in trade, remittances, and the energy crisis. Therefore, ordinary Moldovans suffer despite Recean’s boasting of cutting Russian gas.
As Valeriu Ostalep, former diplomat and ex-Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and European Integration for Moldova, said: “Sandu and her Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) are involved completely in the Western geopolitics of the region; they just copy and paste the West’s rhetoric. It would not be a problem (to take) a position like that, but Sandu and PAS have lost the connection to the real problems of Moldova and the population. They are concentrated exclusively on the ‘fight against Russia’.”
“So we have total support by the West for Sandu and PAS and a complete disaster in the realities on the ground in Moldova, including the growing disdain of the population against Sandu and PAS,” he added.
By establishing Patriot, Sandu attempts to control the media narrative and criticism against her government by inadvertently targeting Russophile media. In fact, for Sandu’s supposed defence of liberalism and universalism, it is proven beyond doubt that these are not values that she defends but only buzzwords used to secure funding and support from the West.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
May 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | European Union, Human rights, Moldova |
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Polish President Andrzej Duda from the ruling “Law & Justice” (PiS) party just signed into a law a bill mandating the creation of a commission for investing alleged “Russian influence” in the country from 2007-2022 according to Reuters. Associated Press added that this newly formed body will have “powers to ban people from public positions and to reverse administrative and business decisions”, which the “Civic Platform” (PO) opposition believes will be used against them.
Former Prime Minister and European Council President Donald Tusk hopes to return to office during this fall’s elections, but he and leading figures in his erstwhile government could potentially be barred from doing so if they’re implicated in an alleged “Russian influence” plot by this commission. Considering that PiS only narrowly won re-election in summer 2020 by just around 2%, it’s possible that they might exploit this latest law to carry out a witch hunt against PO in order to ensure that they don’t lose power.
This development represents their latest pre-election spectacle after seizing a Russian Embassy-run school in Warsaw in late April in an attempt to pressure Moscow into breaking off ties first, renaming Kaliningrad in early May, then pleading for Zelensky to condemn Bandera’s genocide of Poles. Each of these moves was aimed at boosting PiS’ electoral prospects in the face of the anti-establishment Confederation party’s rising popularity since they don’t want to enter into a coalition with them.
These moves only ever had the chance of appealing to PiS’ conservative-nationalist base, however, and not PO’s liberal–globalist one. Both parties are anti-Russian, but the former is much more so when compared to the latter, whose embrace of Western socio-cultural causes like abortion and LGBT+ takes precedence over their followers’ hatred of Russia. Moreover, PO is considered to be a German proxy whose return to power could resubordinate their country to its western neighbor.
Foreign policy rarely plays a major role in American or European elections, with Poland being no exception in this regard, which is why PiS should have focused more on the home front than on the regional one. The ruling party overlooked this due to its ideologically driven obsession with restoring Poland’s long-lost commonwealth in a modern form through the merger of it and Ukraine into a de facto confederation in parallel with participating in the NATO-Russian proxy war and destabilizing Belarus.
Their pollsters presumably only just realized that these policies and their recent stunts haven’t succeeded in giving PiS a comfortable edge over PO, but there isn’t enough time left to try changing the socio-cultural views of the latter’s base, which has always been a long shot anyhow. Out of desperation to remain in power, the ruling party therefore decided to devise the pretext for possibly banning the opposition, including its leader Tusk.
The only possible way of deflecting Western criticism from this is to claim that it’s directed against Russia, but even that might not be sufficient since PO is much more popular among Poland’s partners than PiS is and their media are already skeptical of the official reason behind this move. Had the ruling party realized long ago that they might have to resort to this form of election meddling to win, then they could have cooked up a more plausible reason for investigating and possibly banning Tusk if need be.
Implying that the period of comparatively better Russian-Polish relations under his tenure was the result of a conspiratorial Kremlin influence campaign ignores the political reality of practically every EU country following Germany’s lead to improve ties with Moscow around that time. If anything, Tusk was either going along with the latest trend since he and his team calculated that it was in their country’s best interests to do so or they were operating under some degree of German influence.
Whichever of these two explanations was the case, neither of them extends any credence to PiS’ innuendo that “Russian influence” was responsible for the renaissance in bilateral relations back then. The ruling party knows that declaring an investigation into German influence would immediately prompt unprecedented condemnation from the EU’s de facto leader and likely result in it leveraging all agents of influence across the continent to do their utmost to ensure that PiS loses this fall’s elections.
Even if they win, they’d probably then be shunned by the entire bloc and possibly even sanctioned on whatever pretext Berlin concocts since it would regard PiS as an adversarial political force that threatens the EU’s unity at its most decisive moment since conception. Aware of how strategically disadvantageous it could be to directly challenge Germany for leadership of Central & Eastern European amidst their heated rivalry over this region, PiS decided to persecute PO on a ridiculous anti-Russian basis instead.
It’s too early to tell whether the “Russian influence commission” will ban Tusk and his allies from politics, but it’s difficult to imagine any other practical reason why the ruling party created this body, let alone at this particular time. At the very least, PiS’ investigation into PO appears aimed at manipulating on-the-fence voters’ perceptions of the opposition. This spectacle risks backfiring, however, if undecided voters turn against PiS to protest their tactics and/or the EU doesn’t recognize the election if Tusk is banned.
May 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Russophobia | Germany, Poland |
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By Drago Bosnic | May 30, 2023
There’s hardly a shortage of Russophobia in the political West, whether it’s the previously latent one or the much more blatant hatred unashamedly demonstrated in recent times. In most countries dominated by the United States this has become the “new normal” since February 24, 2022. However, of all Washington DC’s allies and satellite states/vassals, there’s one that makes even such endemically Russophobic countries like Poland or the Baltic states seem “moderate” – the United Kingdom.
In recent announcements, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) said that it could completely cut diplomatic ties with the UK over its extremely escalatory actions such as the delivery of ever more advanced and longer-range weapons to the Kiev regime. In a statement for Russia’s RT, published on Friday, the Russian MFA cited London’s significant and ever-growing meddling in Ukraine, as well as other actions aimed against Russia, particularly when it comes to arming and directly assisting the Neo-Nazi junta forces. Although the MFA stated that cutting ties with the UK might be an “extreme measure”, it was left without virtually any other option, so this move is being considered very seriously.
“The severing of diplomatic ties with the UK would be an ‘extreme measure’, but [Russia] could end up taking the step considering London’s significant involvement in the Ukraine conflict,” the Russian MFA warned on Friday.
On May 18, The Wall Street Journal published a report claiming that “UK special forces from the British Army’s SAS [Special Air Service] and SRR [Special Reconnaissance Regiment] regiments and the Navy’s SBS [Special Boat Service] units are operating very close to the front lines in Ukraine”. The WSJ presented the report in a way that indicates these actions constitute a supposed “split” in policy with the US, as Washington DC has allegedly “held back sending special forces to directly assist the Ukrainians on the front lines of fighting”. However, such claims are rather laughable, especially when considering numerous reports about American special forces and intelligence assets operating in Ukraine.
Worse yet, intelligence sources are adamant that special services operators sent by the US are directly supporting the Kiev regime forces, including by directing their attacks on not just the Russian military, but also targets deep within Russia. The WSJ report implies that the only supposed difference between the US and UK special forces and intelligence assets is that those sent by London directly take part in hostilities on the frontlines while their American counterparts “only provide advisory services”. What’s more, the aforementioned UK special forces are believed to be directly involved in planning and assisting cross-border sabotage operations and terrorist attacks, including the latest one against civilians in the Belgorod oblast (region).
When asked by RT about these controversial (to say the least) reports, the Russian MFA stated: “[Moscow] is well aware of consistent efforts by London aimed at providing military assistance to the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.”
“The UK’s support includes the supply of domestically produced and foreign military hardware to Ukraine, the training of Ukrainian troops in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, intelligence sharing, consulting support and likely participation in the operational-tactical planning by the [Ukrainian] military, including sabotage, other operations, direct provision of cyber-security, [and] deployment of mercenaries,” the Russian MFA said in an official statement, further adding: “We can’t rule out that the British participated in the planning, organization and support of terrorist attacks carried out by the Kiev regime on the territory of Russia, including through the provision of intelligence information.”
Deborah Bronnert, the UK ambassador to Russia, has been summoned several times by the Russian government which demanded explanations of London’s unadulterated enmity. However, the policy of escalating confrontation with Moscow, started under former prime minister Boris Johnson, seems to be going on unabated. According to various sources, during the first several months of Russia’s counteroffensive against NATO aggression in Europe Johnson even actively worked to prevent peace talk initiatives between Russia and the Kiev regime, some of which could have stopped the conflict from escalating and causing further bloodshed. Worse yet, the former UK PM also personally and repeatedly urged the Neo-Nazi junta frontman Volodymyr Zelensky “not to give an inch of compromise with the Russians”.
Since then, regardless of who was at its helm, the UK has only escalated its already extensive military support for the Kiev regime. Apart from training the junta’s forces, London was also the first to pledge the deliveries of heavy armor and various missile systems, such as the “Brimstone” (against ground targets) and “Starstreak” MANPADS (man-portable air defense system).
More alarmingly, the UK also delivered depleted uranium munitions, as well as the stealthy “Storm Shadow” (also known as SCALP-EG in French service) air-launched cruise missiles. Reports indicate that the Russian military destroyed the depleted uranium munitions in a recent strike, while the transonic “Storm Shadow” missiles have been used in combat, but proven largely ineffective against Russia’s second-to-none air defense.
However, there’s no indication London will stop escalating, as it’s now at the forefront of the initiative to deliver F-16 fighter jets to the Neo-Nazi junta. Moscow is well aware of this and has made efforts to communicate with the UK, but to no avail. London’s rabid Russophobia seems to be clouding its judgment, leaving Russia with no other option but to just cut contact, which would be yet another step closer to a world-ending thermonuclear conflict between Moscow and the political West.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
May 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Russophobia | Russia, UK, Ukraine |
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By Lucas Leiroz | May 30, 2023
US Senator Lindsey Graham’s name has been trending on social media in recent days. As exposed in a video circulating on the internet, on May 26, during a trip to Ukraine, the Republican allegedly said that killing Russians was a good investment. Obviously, the statement generated controversy and all sorts of reactions, including state measures on the part of Russia. However, the lack of clarification on the case leaves many questions unanswered.
In the aforementioned video, the senator seems to say: “And the Russians are dying… it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.” At the time, Graham was personally speaking to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. It is known that Lindsey led an American delegation on an official trip to Kiev, in which topics of interest to both countries in the context of the current conflict would have been discussed. The meeting at which the controversial phrase was allegedly voiced took place during this trip.
There are no means to prove the veracity of the video. Some analysts have claimed that there is a media editing connecting Graham’s words. According to some experts, the mention of the death of Russians and the comment about money were not originally in the same sentence. However, as well as there is no proof to believe in the edited version that circulates on the networks, there is also no full and official version to verify what was actually said by the Senator. Therefore, there is no certainty about what happened at the meeting.
Graham responded to the allegations circulating on the networks by classifying them as “Russian propaganda“. He said in a letter to Reuters that he told Zelensky that “it has been a good investment by the United States to help liberate Ukraine”, with no mention on the murder of Russians. However, despite possible video editing, it is evident that at some point in the conversation there was such a mention, and Graham failed to clarify what he really thinks about killing Russians.
Regardless of the veracity of the video, Graham’s accusations that the case is related to some kind of “Russian propaganda” are absolutely unsubstantiated. The edited video was shared on the internet precisely by Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office. So, if there is any propaganda intent around the case, it is on the part of Kiev, not Russia. Russians just reacted to something that was posted on social media and generated outrage among netizens and ordinary people.
In addition to the strong responses on social networks, the US senator also suffered state sanctions for his possible declaration. Moscow’s authorities have added the politician to a list of wanted international criminals due to his Russophobic behavior. It is necessary to emphasize that the case comes amid a serious wave of anti-Russian intolerance fomented by the Collective West as a reaction to the special military operation on the borders with Ukraine. Moscow has done its best to combat anti-Russian mentality around the world, and, in this regard, measures are needed to sanction Russophobic hate-based behavior on the part of foreign officials.
In fact, there are two possibilities around the topic. On the one hand, it is possible that Graham was unconsciously used by Ukrainian propaganda. As well known, the Kiev regime maintains open neo-Nazi and anti-Russian rhetoric, publicly promoting every type of attack against Russian citizens. The government’s propaganda sectors, in this sense, could have deliberately edited the video, without the senator’s authorization, and published it to boost their racist campaigns and fuel the West’s Russophobic frenzy.
On the other hand, it is possible that the Americans themselves were involved in the case and consented to the misuse of Graham’s words for propaganda purposes. Considering that the politician failed to provide concrete clarification on the matter, limiting his response to vague accusations against Russia, the hypothesis of his direct involvement definitely cannot be ignored.
Furthermore, it is necessary to remember that Graham is already highly known for his Russophobic pronouncements, having even suggested the assassination of Vladimir Putin in March 2022. Being a fanatical supporter of American interventionism, advocating the death of Russians would not be something really new for him.
So, in order to clarify the situation once and for all and enable Moscow to reconsider its decision to include Graham on the wanted list, the Republican should make a public statement denying American interest in the death of Russians. Otherwise, even if there is video editing, the accusations against him will continue to be appropriate, given his omission.
Lucas Leiroz is an journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
May 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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The stability of oil supplies from Kazakhstan to the global market relies on transit through Russia, the country’s ambassador to the US, Yerzhan Ashikbayev, has stated. He added that any disruption to flows caused by sanctions could trigger a dire scenario.
“We proceed from the mutual interest of all parties, the interest in the stability of the global market, in the stability of supplies. This is vital both for the functioning of our [Kazakh] economy and for the entire global economy,” the envoy told RIA Novosti on Thursday on the sidelines of the Trans-Caspian Forum in Washington.
When asked whether he sees any risk that sanctions could make it difficult or impossible for Kazakhstan to transit oil, the diplomat described it as “some kind of apocalyptic scenario.”
Kazakhstan supplies oil to the global market via one of the world’s largest pipelines, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC).
A multinational project, the CPC involves Russia, Kazakhstan and a consortium of leading oil companies. The pipeline system mainly collects crude from the large oil fields of western Kazakhstan, but also from Russia. Its total capacity is over 1 million barrels of oil per day, which is 2.3% of global seaborne crude trade.
The CPC delivers around 1.2 million barrels of crude oil daily from Kazakhstan to Europe, and for subsequent shipment to the US. The pipeline’s operations were interrupted last year by storm damage to equipment at a Black Sea terminal, with the disruption sparking concerns of a global supply crisis.
According to Ashikbayev, the CPC remains an important project for Kazakhstan, accounting for 80% of the country’s crude oil exports.
Kazakhstan has strengthened its oil and gas ties with Russia despite the threat of secondary sanctions from the US and EU.
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Russophobia | European Union, Kazakhstan, United States |
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Suspected Pentagon documents leaker Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Dighton, Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, allegedly released classified documents without permission about the sobering U.S. intelligence assessment of Ukraine’s prospects in the Russo-Ukrainian War (i.e., Ukraine can’t win, despite public official pronouncements about their imminent battlefield victories). Those documents he allegedly leaked also revealed several dozen U.S. soldiers were operating in the war zone (the equivalent of two special ops teams), despite official denials, along with CIA operatives already known to be calling missile and artillery strikes in the war.
Just days after his April 13 arrest, local Boston television news stations were broadcasting Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record. He was suspended in high school for “threatening” language, don’t-cha know?
It’s like the old joke about the principal telling a kid that “this is going on your permanent record,” except it’s now reality. If only Teixeira could have cut a deal like Bart Simpson, we wouldn’t have to be having this discussion right now.
What does Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record have to do with his revelations about official lies and secrets about America’s involvement in a war with the world’s other nuclear superpower?
Nothing at all. Zip. Zero. Nada. A whole number between -1 and 1.
There’s no journalistic value in the story that Teixeira was suspended in high school for “threatening” language (he said he was describing a video game at the time). It has no relationship to the story about Ukrainian war lies, and has as much journalistic value as my own high school disciplinary record (or yours). Such dirty laundry in decades past used to be relegated to discussions of celebrity divorces in supermarket tabloids.
But it has a lot of value if your goal is to engage in a general character-assassination using compliant media.
So it brings up a couple of questions: Why is the news media reporting this? And how did they get this information?
The second question is the easiest to answer: The U.S. government’s executive branch careerists gave it directly to them. It was part of the official filing by (now former) U.S. Attorney Rachael S. Rollins asking the federal district court to keep Teixeira in jail until trial.
And one must wonder how that made it into the official filing. How is this relevant to the legal need to deny Teixeira bail and keep him in jail until trial, if the worry was that he wouldn’t return to court for his trial or would publicly reveal more official state secrets?
Again, it doesn’t. At all.
The purpose of including Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record—one that was confidential and which could only be obtained through court warrants or Intelligence Community (IC) surveillance—in the filing was to engage in a deliberate and planned public character-assassination of Teixeira through compliant media organs.
Rollins—or more likely, her handlers in Washington—wanted to destroy this young man publicly by unnecessarily releasing his private sins to the press in an attempt to distract the media from exposing the official lies that Ukraine can win its war against Russia and that U.S. combat troops are not present on the ground. Plus, as a bonus, it serves the double-purpose of poisoning the available pool of unbiased jurors in advance of trial and making a public example to deter future whistle-blowers.
Say what you will about Rollins, the Feds assigned this role to someone who has hands-on experience in this specific task. Rollins resigned Friday, May 19 from her role as U.S. District Attorney for Massachusetts because an Inspector-General Report by the U.S. Department of Justice revealed she’d done the same thing to a candidate for Suffolk County District Attorney (an elected state position). According to the Inspector General report on Rollins, “Rollins assisted a candidate in a partisan political election and sought to influence the election by, among other things, disclosing non-public, sensitive DOJ information to the press.”
In other words, she conspired to engage in a media smear of a public person using confidential, non-public information.
Sound familiar?
But there’s an important difference between both the Teixeira case (and the Trump-Russia collusion hoax) and the local candidate Rollins was accused of smearing. Disclosing private information to defame a candidate in a local election is a no-no, unless he is an enemy of the Deep State. But if the Deep State wants to character-assassinate someone, whether holder of the highest office in the land or all the way down to some lowly Air National Guard private, then that’s just spiffy.
Rollins suffered no negative consequences from smearing Teixeira. Only when smearing someone who wasn’t an enemy of the Deep State did she face an inquiry.
Now back to the original question about CBS-Boston and other media reporting that Teixeira was suspended during high school. Why are they reporting something that has no news value? Because word was put out to destroy his character in order to distract from his revelations about the Russo-Ukrainian War, and they used compliant media networks to do just that.
Some time after the defection of Soviet spy Anatoliy Golitsyn in 1962, the former KGB officer suggested to his CIA handler that National Review founder and syndicated columnist William F. Buckley help edit the book he was working on, and that it be serialized in Reader’s Digest. It was a logical request. Conservative icon Buckley was known to be a CIA veteran (and had formed National Review around his Langley friends), and with circulation in the millions Reader’s Digest was probably the highest circulation periodical with CIA assets on staff. The late 1960s and early 1970s were the height of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, where agents infiltrated and controlled hundreds of media corporations and journalists, respectively, toward the CIA’s stated goals of fighting the Cold War against the Soviet empire. Operation Mockingbird is a campaign still officially denied by the CIA, so its activities can be said to have never been completely shut down, even if they were suspended for a few years.
The reforms of the 1970s imposed some nominal restraints via executive order upon the rogue CIA (along with the FBI) in the reforms of the post-Vietnam era. After the contentious Church and Pike Committee hearings, CIA officials publicly promised they weren’t infiltrating media and poaching journalists as spies and influence-peddlers. But even by the mid-1980s, CIA chiefs were publicly stating they might have to do so again in the future.
The restraints came off the IC (“Intelligence Community”) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks with Congress passing the USA PATRIOT Act. It’s hard to say when the IC began to focus more upon the U.S. domestic media than foreign media, but it’s safe to say it was having a measurable impact upon domestic media by the early 2010s. It was at that point even media traditionally antagonistic to government power had been transformed from watchdogs into Deep State lapdogs.
The “Deep State” can be loosely defined as executive branch careerist bureaucrats and their nominally private sector but government-funded “NGO” contractors who don’t have to face elections or the voters, and who make policy outside of directives from elected officials in the legislative branch and the president.
During the Cold War, the U.S. government used to curate a list of the “Captive Nations” who were under the thrall of the Soviet empire based upon subservience to the Soviet imperial interests. Today, much of the U.S. corporate media is obviously captive to the American empire’s intelligence behemoth in its recent expansion of Operation Mockingbird. I’ve come to call it the “captive media,” in homage to the Cold War-era “Captive Nations” terminology.
The last hurrah of journalistic independence and antagonism to power for The Washington Post was the Edward Snowden affair in 2013. After Snowden’s revelations, the Post never seriously challenged the Deep State again, including its Big Pharma subsidiary, nor have they engaged in any significant actions against the government’s other alliances with giant corporations. The New York Times had been captured by the Deep State as early as 2002 when Judith Miller was acting as stenographer for lies about Iraqi WMDs. The Times and Post both became de facto state assets, along with the five giant U.S. media conglomerates (ABC-Disney, NBC-Comcast, CBS-Viacom, CNN-TimeWarner and Fox-Newscorp), and all today routinely condemn enemies of the national security state and Big Pharma rather than expose the excesses of those powerful special interest groups within the executive branch of government. Likewise, many social media and tech corporations have been revealed by the #TwitterFiles to be adjuncts of what journalist Matt Taibbi accurately labels the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”
One key “tell,” to use a poker term, to identify a likely captive media organ is to observe media character-assassination of a person threatening the primacy of the military-industrial complex. This label of captive media is all the more likely to be accurate when the character assassination doesn’t even address the newsworthy revelations or political positions of that person, and when all the other captive media organs are chiming in chorus with the same condemnation.
The Teixeira case is instructive on the Deep State’s penetration of U.S. media. The modus operandi of the Deep State is to distract from their own corruption by smearing anyone who exposes them or opposes them, and to publicly ruin someone in a key government position who expresses intolerable levels of heterodoxy from the official narrative. The latter was the reason for smearing presidential candidate Donald Trump with the gamut of their arsenal: he was an apex-level racist, a Russian asset, probably an anti-Semite, a threat to democracy, etc.
All this is not to say that Donald Trump was a good president. He wasn’t, and his politics were seriously deficient from a libertarian perspective on many fronts. But he wasn’t enough on “Team Deep State” to avoid the careerists in the executive branch conspiring with the Hillary Clinton campaign to bring him down with multiple lies, as the Durham Report makes eminently clear.
None of the Russia-collusion hoax lies against Trump were true, but truth—like the words coming out of Trump’s own mouth—was immaterial to the issue. One of my favorite podcasts used to be Unfilter, and one of the libertarian hosts revealingly noted back before the podcast went dark, “Trump is not a liar. He’s a bullshitter.” This distinction is highly significant. A liar expects you to believe his lies, but to a bullshitter both the truth and your level of belief in his lies are irrelevant. A bullshitter doesn’t care if you believe him; the only important thing is how you react to his lies. Trump was—and remains—an expert-level bullshitter. He can trigger the corporate media into giving him free press coverage constantly; the CNN Town Hall spectacle with Trump serves as the most recent hilarious example. Everything he says is to get a reaction, not to reveal some truth.
That’s the Deep State’s working model right now. They don’t care if you believe them. All that matters is your emotional reaction: to hate Donald Trump, to hate Jack Teixeira, and to hate anyone else they believe is a threat to their power and their agenda. They’re confident they can dig up dirt on every person with their surveillance panopticon, and can find enough sin on anyone to ruin any heterodox person publicly. They’ve taken the Orwellian “two minutes of hate” and perfected it, treating Nineteen Eighty-Four as a roadmap rather than a warning.
That’s why my working thesis on media corporations is that any company which focuses upon personal attacks rather than the relevant issues to journalism and public policy, especially if the personal attacks coincide with the official Deep State narrative (and they usually do), they’re likely among the captive media.
This also works to some degree for individuals, even if they’re not explicit agents of the Deep State. Anyone who hates a political figure—whether Donald Trump, Ron Paul, or Joe Biden—based upon personal characteristics rather than public positions and routinely resorts to baseless smears of being a racist, an anti-Semite or a foreign agent is probably compromised (or at the very least, a toxic person) whose opinions are worth ignoring entirely.
It should go without saying Americans can’t trust the captive media, of whom it could be accurately said that truth and factual accuracy are irrelevant. The long-running Russia-collusion hoax is but the latest example exposed. There’s a long list of official lies: cloth masks stop transmission of COVID-19, the vaccine stops transmission of the virus, gas attacks in Syria, Ghaddafi’s imminent genocide in Libya, all the way back to Judith Miller. And those are just a handful of hundreds of examples.
The good news is that The New York Times and Washington Post‘s circulation reach new lows every month, as do the ratings of CNN, Fox and MSNBC. CNN’s ratings hilariously fell below NewsMax last week.
Lies don’t sell well.
So look for the Deep State to infiltrate ever-more media outlets in the future as their lies and captive media platforms lose audience and, as a result, the impact of the captive legacy media wanes. Those of us opposing the surveillance panopticon and the perpetual warfare state will need to use both the patterns described above and leaked truths to reveal the captive media, as they are taken over.
The Jack Teixeira and #TwitterFiles revelations are but the latest in a line of exposures of official lies beginning with Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner. There will be others.
It’s also encouraging to hear the U.S. House of Representatives is holding at least some tentative hearings on the weaponization of the executive branch in the election cycle. Liberty-loving individuals need to encourage more of those hearings, and a much deeper-dive into revealing their secrets, followed by legislation that would (if not outright abolish) at least re-impose some limits upon the “Intelligence Community.”
Thomas R. Eddlem is a freelance writer published in more than twenty periodicals, holds a master degree in economics from Boston College and is communications director for the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts.
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, CNN, FBI, Hillary Clinton, New York Times, United States |
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A journalist with the British broadcaster’s new fact-checking spinoff BBC Verify has admitted to deploying multiple fake Twitter accounts to combat “disinformation.”
In a segment broadcast on Saturday, BBC “disinformation correspondent” Marianna Spring warned the audience that “mistruths can cause really serious harm to societies and the people in them.” She then revealed she had set up multiple “undercover accounts” on Twitter for the BBC’s Americast broadcast, each one representing different political views so as to better “interrogate” the viewpoints of the network’s target audience.
While the deception was portrayed as an attempt to “understand polarization online” by observing a cross-section of what kind of content social media platforms are recommending to different demographics, all three “characters” were white women. Emma, a 25-year-old atheist graphic designer with a “live-in partner” based in New York City, hails from the “progressive left.” Britney, a recently-divorced 50-year-old mother of three living in Houston, comes from the “populist right” and works as a school secretary. Gabriela, 44, a married mother of three who moonlights as a nanny, is cast as a “stressed sideliner.”
The graphics surrounding the fake profiles suggested a presence across Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, though the network stopped short of revealing its sock-puppets’ usernames. Twitter explicitly forbids using the platform to “artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience or platform manipulation defenses,” and most other social media platforms have similar policies.
According to the BBC, its Verify division consists of a team of 60 “forensic journalists and expert talent” from within the network, tasked with “fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analyzing data, and – crucially – explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth.”
The BBC got a £20 million ($24.13 million) shot in the arm from the UK government earlier this year specifically to “counter disinformation,” with Foreign Secretary James Cleverly hailing the network as “the world’s most trusted international broadcaster.”
However, critics have called out the BBC for putting out what they claim are heavily biased and outright fabricated stories, particularly with regard to the conflict in Ukraine, even while the network continues to portray “disinformation” as the exclusive province of Russian media.
The network has nurtured the careers of ‘Russian bot’ hunters like the Atlantic Council alumnus Ben Nimmo, who has made a livelihood out of reclassifying genuine political dissent as “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” and having its practitioners deplatformed as state operatives. The BBC has also hosted government-controlled journalists tasked with waging information warfare against Russia, while its “charitable” arm, BBC Media Action, engaged in covert operations designed to “weaken the Russian state’s influence” in the Balkans.
May 23, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | BBC, UK |
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