Hey, did I mention that YouTube is involved in all-out warfare against independent news sources? Oh, I have? Multiple times? Well, here it is again. If you only get my info from ThemTube, please do check out the ThemTube alternatives out there.
Hillary Clinton has a new target to blame for her losing the 2016 presidential election and, surprisingly, this time it’s not the Russians. According to the Democrat, Facebook is behind her failure to win the White House.
The crux of the argument is that Facebook charged the Trump campaign team less for advertising on the platform and therefore seemed to favor his candidacy. However, this is exactly how Facebook – a commercial enterprise – works: the more impressions, clicks, interactions, shares and comments a post generates, the less Facebook relatively charges the advertiser to reach people. And this is where the Trump campaign succeeded.
Simply put, team Hillary was not as social media savvy as team Trump and was therefore charged more for advertising on the platform. Former Facebook advertising staffer Antonio García Martínez explained it all in a February 23 article for Wired entitled ‘How Trump Conquered Facebook – Without Russian Ads.’
“During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters,” Martinez writes. “But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social-media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook’s click model, effectively winning him more media for less money.”
Following publication of the Wired piece, Trump campaign advisor Brad Parscale tweeted to corroborate. He maintained that, due to Facebook’s cost effectiveness metrics, Trump posts were highly successful on the platform compared to Clinton’s.
I bet we were 100x to 200x her. We had CPMs that were pennies in some cases. This is why @realDonaldTrump was a perfect candidate for FaceBook.
According to Facebook, Cost Per 1,000 Impressions or CPM is “a common metric used by the online advertising industry to gauge the cost-effectiveness of an ad campaign. It’s often used to compare performance among different ad publishers and campaigns.”
Parscale’s message was then retweeted by Tech Crunch contributor Kim-Mai Cutler, and her tweet in turn was picked up and shared by Clinton herself, with the former presidential hopeful apparently calling for an overhaul of social media in election periods without elaborating on her own campaign’s use of such platforms.
I can’t believe this tweet isn’t going viral. Do people not really care that Facebook may have systematically charged the Clinton campaign an order of magnitude or two more than it was charging Trump to reach American voters? (Which is not allowed in other mediums by law.) https://t.co/S2OgxfgcGq
We should all care about how social media platforms play a part in our democratic process. Because unless it’s addressed it will happen again. The midterms are in 8 months. We owe it to our democracy to get this right, and fast. https://t.co/aM3pRrZW4J
Facebook is the latest in a growing string of who and what Clinton says derailed her chances of winning the presidency. In her post-election book ‘What Happened,’ the former candidate outlined diverse issues she felt negatively impacted her run, including the FBI investigation of her email server, supposed Russian election interference, and her fellow Democrat Bernie Sanders – for challenging her nomination.
The Pentagon will pump millions into a State Department center created to fight propaganda and disinformation campaigns waged by foreign nations, as it wants to be “on the offensive” and respond “aggressively” to attacks.
The State Department announced on Monday that it had signed a memorandum with the US Department of Defense to transfer $40 million to the State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), so it could up its game in countering malicious content online.
Part of these funds will be distributed between various civil rights groups, creators of media content, non-governmental organizations, as well as state-funded and private research entities. The grants would be awarded to those presenting the best ways to combat propaganda and disinformation. An Information Access Fund, to be set up for this purpose, will “support public and private partners working to expose and counter propaganda and disinformation from foreign nations.”
The @StateDept is pleased to announce a new partnership with the @DeptofDefense for initiatives to counter propaganda & disinformation from foreign nations. @UnderSecPD said the transfer of funds announced today reiterates the U.S. commitment to the fight. https://t.co/oT1ffDZU7R
According to Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Steve Goldstein, the funds earmarked by the Pentagon for what is slated to become a large-scale campaign are “critical” to ensure that Washington will “continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation.”
Goldstein hinted that protection from such attacks may become only one of many facets of the initiative, adding: “It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take, we also need to be on the offensive.”
The money has been transferred into State Department coffers after the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson requested the transfer of $40 million from the Department of Defense last year. The allocation of up to $60 million from the US defense budget to counter disinformation campaigns run by the foreign states, namely China, North Korea and Russia, was authorized by the Pentagon defense bill signed by Barack Obama as far back as in December 2016. The bill widened the scope of the center’s activities, which had previously focused exclusively on battling terrorist propaganda, and envisaged $60 million in funding from the Pentagon both for the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years. However, it was not before August last year when Tillerson asked for the funds to be unlocked, prompting speculation about him being reluctant to “anger” Moscow as “Russiagate” was gaining momentum.
At the first stage of the initiative, the State Department said it plans to distribute “an initial $5 million in grants” from the newly established fund, which would play “a key part” in the State Department’s co-operation with civil society, content providers and NGOs. In addition, the GEC will work on several “pilot projects,” details of which have not been revealed.
Political commentary throughout 2016 was filled with scary sound bytes by partisan opponents of the Republican party warning how dangerous and horrifying it would be if Donald Trump ever gained access to the nuclear codes. Here’s a March 2016 column from USA Today titled “Trump’s nuclear views are terrifying”. Here’s another March 2016 article from CNN titled “President Trump: A 6-year-old with nuclear weapons?” Here’s an August 2016 article from the Chicago Tribune titled “The terrifying prospect of Donald Trump with nuclear weapons”. Here’s an October 2016 article from Business Insider about how former nuclear launch officers had said Trump can’t be trusted with the launch codes. Here’s a November 2016 Bloombergarticle titled “Two Words to End All Consideration of Voting for Trump: Nuclear Holocaust”.
I could go on and on, but you get the picture. Over and over and over again I encountered Democrats on social media in 2016 telling me I needed to support Hillary Clinton because Trump was going to get everyone nuked in a fit of stupid impulsiveness if elected, their fears stoked by partisan media reporting like the above day after day. Everyone lost their minds over Joe Scarborough’s claim on MSNBC that he knew someone who’d heard candidate Trump asking a foreign policy expert why nuclear weapons can’t be used, a claim Scarborough never substantiated. Trump’s political opponents made very, very sure that the American people were afraid that they and their loved ones would die in a nuclear holocaust if he was elected.
A couple of great articles have come out recently about the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review and other omnicidal cold war escalations with the only other nuclear superpower on the planet. The first is Anti-Media‘s “How Donald Trump’s Policies Have Brought Us to the Brink of World War 3“, and the second is titled “Normalizing Nukes, Pentagon-Style” by Rejan Menon and Tom Engelhart for Antiwar.com. Both provide good insight into the dangers inherent in further blurring the lines between when nuclear weapons use is and is not acceptable, and the completely illogical rationale for doing so. I think it’s wonderful that both of these essays have been written, and I think it’s very telling that such insightful takes on this issue of unparalleled importance are relegated to small alternative media outlets.
How aware would you say the average rank-and-file Democrat is that Trump has controversial views on immigration? How about the fact that he said “shit hole countries”? Or the fact that that he says offensive things on Twitter? I think it’s fair to say that due to the frenetic coverage these issues receive from Democrat-allied mainstream media, a very large percentage of registered Democrats are aware of them.
How about the fact that this administration is imperiling the life of every organism on earth with needless escalations against a nuclear superpower? How often do you see 2018 Joe Scarborough talking about that on MSNBC?
Nuclear holocaust is the worst thing that can possibly happen. There are many, many things to hate and criticize the current president for, but the fact that he has overseen steady escalations which increase the likelihood of nuclear holocaust is far and away the most urgently worthy of condemnation. If you were going to attack this president on one thing, this would be it. But Trump’s ostensible political opponents ignore it, because they ignore all despicable acts of warmongering.
And because Russia.
Democrats have been collaborating with Republicans to inflate the already staggering US military budget and exacerbate the new cold war, as well as expand Trump’s Orwellian spying powers and expand his unconstitutional war powers. Propaganda has been used to keep rank-and-file Democrats fixated on the more cosmetically awful aspects of this administration, as well as entirely fictional aspects like the baseless Russiagate conspiracy theories, while hiding its most horrific aspects from the spotlight. Fear Russia, fear Trump’s tweets, but pay no attention to the steadily mounting nuclear tensions behind the curtain.
The US-centralized empire is making an omnicidal gamble with its Russiagate vanity project as it attempts to maneuver Russia off the world stage to prevent the rise of any rival superpowers, already having killed Russians in Syria, expanded NATO, kept troops along Russia’s border, established a permanent military presence in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, forced Russian outlets to register as foreign agents, and allowed the sale of arms to Ukraine. Hot proxy conflicts and increasingly unclear lines could lead at any time to an inflammation in Syria, Ukraine or elsewhere which leads to a nuclear warhead being set off in the chaos and confusion, setting mutually assured destruction into motion and killing everything.
But sure, let’s talk about Trump’s fucking tweets instead.
The Democratic party does not resist Trump. Not in any meaningful way. If the most dangerous things about this administration are to be resisted, real resistance is going to have to come from ordinary human beings standing up and demanding change, and the Democratic party exists to prevent that from happening. The Democratic party exists to co-opt grassroots movements and divert their energy back towards the machine.
It is not Democrats versus Republicans. It is humanity versus the machine. Redraw the battle lines and fight the real war.
[This article is an edited and expanded version of a memorandum that I prepared for Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity which has been released separately on Consortium News ].
The deluge of recent reporting regarding possible conflict with nuclear armed North Korea has somewhat obscured consideration of the much higher probability that Israel or even Saudi Arabia will take steps that will lead to a war with Iran that will inevitably draw the United States in. Israel is particularly inclined to move aggressively, with potentially serious consequences for the U.S., in the wake of the recent incident involving an alleged Iranian drone and the shooting down of an Israeli aircraft. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeatedly warning about the alleged threat along his northern border and has pledged that Israel will not be in any way restrained if there are any hostile moves directed against it. The Israeli Transportation Minister Ysrael Katz has warned that Lebanon will be blasted back into the “stone age.”
There is also considerable anti-Iran rhetoric currently coming from sources in the United States, which might well be designed to prepare the American people for a transition from a cold war type situation to a new hot war involving U.S. forces. The growing hostility towards Iran is coming out of both the Donald Trump Administration and from the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster is warning that the “time to act is now” to thwart Iran’s allegedly aggressive regional ambitions while U.S. United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley sees a “wake-up” call in the recent shooting incident involving Syria and Israel. The hostility emanating from Washington is increasing in spite of the fact that the developments in the region impact on vital U.S. national interests, nor is Iran anything like an existential threat to the United States that would mandate sustained military action.
Iran’s alleged desire to stitch together a sphere of influence consisting of an arc of allied nations and proxy forces running from its western borders to the Mediterranean Sea has been frequently cited as justification for a more assertive policy against Tehran, but that concern is certainly greatly exaggerated. Iran, with a population of more than 80 million, is, to be sure, a major regional power but militarily, economically and politically it is highly vulnerable. Its economy is struggling and there is a small but growing protest movement regarding the choices being made for government spending.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is well armed and trained, but much of its “boots on the ground” force consists of militiamen of variable quality. Its Air Force is a “shadow” of what existed under the Shah and is significantly outgunned by its rivals in the Persian Gulf, not to mention Israel. Its navy is only “green water” capable in that it consists largely of smaller vessels responsible for coastal defense supplemented by swarms of Revolutionary Guard speedboats.
When Napoleon had conquered much of continental Europe and was contemplating invading Britain in 1804 it was widely believed that England was helpless before him. But Admiral Earl St Vincent was nonplussed. He said at the time: “I do not say the French can’t come, I only say they can’t come by sea.” In a similar fashion, Iran’s apparent threat to its neighbors is in reality decisively limited by its inability to project power across the water or through the air against other states in the region that have marked superiority in both respects.
And the concern over a possibly developing “Shi’ite land bridge,” also referred to as an “arc” or “crescent,” is likewise overstated for political reasons to make the threat more credible. It ignores the reality that Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon all have strong national identities and religiously mixed populations. They are influenced and sometimes more than that by Iran, but they are not puppet states and never will be. Even Lebanon’s Hezbollah, often cited as Iran’s fifth column in that country, is not considered a reliable proxy.
Majority Shi’a Iraq, for example, is generally considered to be very friendly to Iran but it has to deal with considerable Kurdish and Sunni minorities in its governance and in the direction of its foreign policy. It will not do Iran’s bidding on a number of key issues, including its relationship with Washington, and would be unwilling to become a proxy in Tehran’s conflicts with Israel and Saudi Arabia as such a move would be extremely unpopular. Iraqi Vice President Osama al-Nujaifi, the highest-ranking Sunni in the Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi government, has, for example, recently called for the demobilization of the Shi’ite Popular Mobilization Forces or militias that have been fighting ISIS because they “have their own political aspirations, their own [political] agendas. … They are very dangerous to the future of Iraq.”
A seemingly legitimate major concern driving much of the perception of an Iranian threat is the possibility that Tehran will develop a nuclear weapon somewhere down the road. Such a development is quite plausible if only from a defensive point of view as Iran has been repeatedly threatened by nuclear armed Israel and the United States, but the current Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action provides the best response to the possible proliferation problem. The U.N. inspections regime is rigorous and Iran is reported to be in compliance with the agreement. If the plan survives the attacks by the White House, there is every reason to believe that Iran will be unable to take the necessary precursor steps leading to a nuclear weapons program while the inspections continue. And it will be further limited in its options after the agreement expires in nine years because it will not be able to accumulate the necessary highly enriched uranium stocks to proceed if it should ever make the political and economic decisions to go ahead with such a program.
The recent incident involving the shoot-down of a drone alleged to be of Iranian provenance followed by the downing of an Israeli fighter by a Syrian air defense missile resulted in a sharp response from Tel Aviv, though reportedly mitigated by a warning from Russian President Vladimir Putin that anything more provocative might inadvertently involve Russia in the conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accordingly moderated his response but his government is clearly contemplating a more robust intervention to counter what he calls a developing Iranian presence in Syria. It is important to recall that Netanyahu’s prime objective in Syria and Lebanon is to have both nations in turmoil so they cannot threaten Israel. With that in mind, it is wise to be skeptical about Israeli claims regarding Iranian intentions to build bases and construct missiles in Syria. Those claims made by Israel’s Mossad have not been confirmed by any western intelligence service, not even by America’s totally corrupted and subservient CIA.
Netanyahu is also facing a trial on corruption charges and it would not be wildly off target to suggest that he might welcome a small war to change the narrative, just as Bill Clinton did when he launched cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan to deflect congressional and media criticism of his involvement with Monica Lewinsky. Unfortunately, if Netanyahu does wind up being charged and going to prison his successor will likely be even more hardline.
It must be understood that the mounting Iran hysteria evident in the U.S. media and as reflected in Beltway groupthink has largely been generated by allies in the region, most notably Saudi Arabia and Israel, who nurture their own aspirations for regional political and military supremacy. There are no actual American vital interests at stake and it is past time to pause and take a step backwards to consider what those interests actually are in a region that has seen nothing but U.S. missteps since 2003. Countering an assumed Iranian threat that is no threat at all and triggering a catastrophic war would be a major mistake that would lead to a breakdown in the current political alignment of the entire Middle East. And it would be costly for the United States. Iran is not militarily formidable, but its ability to fight on the defensive against U.S. Naval and air forces is likely to be considerable, producing high casualty levels on both sides. How would the U.S. public respond if an aircraft carrier were to be sunk by a barrage of Iranian shore-to-ship missiles? And Tehran would also be able to unleash terrorist resources throughout the region, particularly endangering U.S. military and diplomats based there as well as American travelers and businesses. The terror threat might easily extend beyond the Middle East, into Europe and also within the United States while the dollar costs of a major new conflict and its aftermath could also break the bank, literally. Promoting a robust U.S. role in “regime change” for Iran as a viable military option to support objectives largely fabricated by allies would be a phony war fought for bad reasons. It is not commensurate with the threat that the Mullahs actually pose, which is minimal, and is just not worth the price either in dollars or lives.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
So when police in Florida had to deal with a 19-year-old embarking on a shooting rampage inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., what did they do?
Nothing.
There were four armed police officers, including one cop who was assigned to the school as a resource officer, on campus during that shooting. All four cops stayed outside the school with their weapons drawn (three of them hid behind their police cars).
Not a single one of those cops, armed with deadly weapons and trained for exactly such a dangerous scenario, entered the school to confront the shooter.
Seventeen people, most of them teenagers, died while the cops opted not to intervene.
In other words, you can be outraged that cops in Florida did nothing to stop the school shooter, but technically, it wasn’t part of their job description.
This begs the question: if the police don’t have a duty to protect the public, what are we paying them for? And who exactly do they serve if not you and me?
Why do we have more than a million cops on the taxpayer-funded payroll in this country whose jobs do not entail protecting our safety, maintaining the peace in our communities, and upholding our liberties?
It’s the same reason why the Trump Administration has made a concerted effort to expand the police state’s power to search, strip, seize, raid, steal from, arrest and jail Americans for any infraction, no matter how insignificant.
This is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
It is fast becoming a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations,” and its rise to power is predicated on shackling the American taxpayer to a life of indentured servitude.
Cops in America may get paid by the citizenry, but they don’t work for us.
They don’t answer to us. They’re not loyal to us.
And they certainly aren’t operating within the limits of the U.S. Constitution.
That “thin, blue line” of loyalty to one’s fellow cops has become a self-serving apparatus that sees nothing wrong with advancing the notion that the lives—and rights—of police should be valued more than citizens.
Cops are no more noble, no more self-sacrificing, no braver and certainly no more deserving of special attention or treatment than any other American citizen.
This misplaced patriotism about police and, by extension, the military—a dangerous re-shifting of the nation’s priorities that has been reinforced by President Trump with his unnerving knack for echoing past authoritarian tactics—paves the way for even more instability in the nation.
Welcome to the American police state, funded by Corporate America, policed by the military industrial complex, and empowered by politicians whose primary purpose is to remain in office.
It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from the police state we’re operating under right now to a full-blown totalitarian regime ruled with the iron fist of martial law.
The groundwork has already been laid.
The events of recent years have only served to desensitize the nation to violence, acclimate them to a militarized police presence in their communities, and persuade them that there is nothing they can do to alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.
The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.
Few seem to care about the government’s endless wars abroad that leave communities shattered, families devastated and our national security at greater risk of blowback. Indeed, there were no protests in the streets after U.S. military forces carried out air strikes on a Syrian settlement, killing 25 people, more than half of which were women and children.
And then there’s President Trump’s plans for a military parade on Veterans Day (costing between $10 million and $30 million) to showcase the nation’s military might. Other countries that feel the need to flex their military muscles to its citizens and the rest of the world include France, China, Russia and North Korea.
The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by the military industrial complex. That’s a done deal.
It’s astounding how convenient we’ve made it for the government to lock down the nation.
Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.
This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carroll – Alice Through the Looking-Glass
Lewis Carroll invented the White Queen as an absurdist emblem of a refusal to deal. But now that deluded lady would slot right in at the BBC, CNN, Guardian et al. In fact to live in the mainstream western culture of today we need to be able to believe a lot more than six impossible things before breakfast. We need to plug into an entire matrix of the unreal, never happened, never could happen and purely ridiculous.
There is now almost no point of contact between the world described in daily mainstream news and social commentary and the actual veridical experiential world in which real people really live. The most basic “facts” upon which they operate are almost completely false. They produce hours and hours of comment and analysis based on events that never occurred, words that were never said, a history that doesn’t exist. It’s not about explaining reality any more, it’s about making it up.
In this world Russia is an “outlaw” for helping to defend an elected government in Syria, and the US is an emblem of law-abiding decency while it has spent 70 years carving up the world and murdering people it doesn’t like – and moreover is currently enabling terrorists and illegally occupying a swathe of Syrian territory.
In this world Putin, having cleaned up a good deal of the lawless mafia-rule that characterised the Yeltsin years, is a “kleptocrat” and a “gangster” while Yeltsin was a “democrat.” Facing an election with 60-80% popular support, Putin is a “tyrant” who needs to fix the vote in order to win. With reckless disregard for even the basics of narrative consistency he is portrayed by turns as an ignorant “thug” and a political mastermind. So brilliant he swung the US election using 13 lowlife trolls and a restaurateur, and so mindbogglingly stupid he had Boris Nemstov, the political nobody, gunned down for no reason right outside the Kremlin so that even more stupid western analysts could say “Putin must have done it because it was right outside the Kremlin!”
In this world Navalny, another political nobody, polling 2% popular vote is “the opposition”, cruelly silenced by being ruthlessly convicted of the fraud he almost certainly actually committed, and sent to the Gulag given a suspended sentence and the freedom to bullhorn his remedial-level “anti-corruption” narrative (designed primarily for western consumption and TV soundbites btw) to all twelve of his regular followers.
In this world even mass-shootings are starting to look like movie versions of themselves, and the victims interview each other, exchanging cliché mass media talking points, and improbable personal narratives that sound like Facebook statuses, while waiting to die.
Because reality is something even those living it in its rawest form can no longer process or recognise for what it is.
So, we have to salute Mr Pozner for his refusal to partake in this increasingly macabre farce. Maybe we should all follow his example, be like Alice, just walk away from the Mad Hatter’s tea table and let the lunatics continue to sit there, babbling empty memes at one another. They probably won’t even notice we’ve gone.
(and yes I know the White Queen and the Mad Hatter are not in the same chapter or even in the same book)
One of the enduring legacies of my two diplomatic assignments in Moscow in the seventies and eighties has been my passion for ice hockey. Of course, ice hockey is not played in India and it was the thought of experiencing something startlingly new that one evening took me to the famous Dynamo Stadium in Moscow with some course mates in the Moscow University, friends who lured me with the promise of a spectacle unlike anything I’d have known before. Actually, I didn’t need to be encouraged, having watched on television that epic “3-3 game” on New Year’s Eve in 1975, which became the stuff of legends in the world of ice hockey, when the Montreal Canadians played CSKA Moscow (Soviet Red Army team).
The North Americans and the Russians played radically different systems of play. The Canadian (and the American) style was marked by ‘individualism’ even as the players aggressively moved the puck to the goal and fired it on net the moment they got a chance. Whereas, the Soviets weren’t so cavalier or aggressive – they circled like eagles and would keep passing the puck to one another to incessantly disorient the enemy while tightening the noose around him – and then in a sudden swoop would close in on the net like a tornado, but even then, only when he was confident of a reasonable scoring chance would the player take the shot lest his team lost possession of the puck wastefully.
Arguably, it was a metaphor for the Soviet DNA – be it in politics or in sports. No adventurism, no swagger or boastfulness — for god’s sake. Yet, by the way, the Soviet Red Army team was a top dog in world ice hockey. It was the European Champion not less than 20 times. Some of the CSKA players became iconic figures – Vladislav Tretiak as the unbeatable goalkeeper, peerless in ice hockey. Up front, my own favorites were Valerie Vasiliev and Alexander Maltsev (who previously played for Dynamo Moscow club before joining CSKA.)
The CSKA would be in full war cry when it played an NHL team (from Canada or the United States) – something like an Indian cricket team encountering its Pakistani adversary. More than four decades later, ice hockey in Russia still remains the ultimate national sport. Cold War has ended, but an ice hockey match between Russia and the West is still invested with the halo of an inchoate power struggle, unspoken but deeply felt. National prestige comes into play.
So, when Russia won the men’s ice hockey title yesterday at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, it became for the victorious players a moment dripping with patriotism and national honor. They were forced to play under the rubric Olympic Athlete from Russia (OAR) – thanks to shenanigans of the US from behind the scenes to humiliate Russia. As per the agreed formula, Russian national anthem wouldn’t be allowed during the ceremonies and the victorious OAR athletes had to accept their medal with the Olympic song being played in the background.
However, when the actual moment came yesterday, the victorious Russian ice hockey team disregarded the understanding and sang their national anthem. A Russian player was quoted as saying, “We’re prohibited from having the flag so we had to do something at least. We sang because we’re Russian people and when you win, the anthem is played. It was in our souls and heart.”
Back home, the event had huge resonance. While reading President Vladimir Putin’s message congratulating the Russian ice hockey team, one could sense that he probably had a lump in the throat as he wrote it. The Russian people’s love for sports (or reading books or going to the theatre) can be seen as a legacy of Soviet culture. With the great social mobility that the October Revolution opened up, culture ceased to be the prerogative of the nobility or the leisurely class. Indeed, culture became ‘accessible’ to the ‘proletariat’ and the Soviet state encouraged the citizen to enrich himself from childhood. Seamless opportunities were provided to imbibe culture. It explains the staggering heights unparalleled in human history that the social formation scaled in the Soviet era.
Politics, inevitably, crept in. The Russian’s excellence in sports became an eyesore for the Americans who somehow took it as a slur on the capitalist world. The triumphalism in humiliating Russia is obvious even today in the western media reports when its athletes must perform under the Olympic flag and Russian national anthem will not be played even when they won medals.
A new report by Syrian media about the evacuation of Daesh militants adds to the growing evidence that the US is using its aviation to assist terrorists.
According to the Syrian state-run news agency SANA, the US has evacuated Daesh leaders from the Al-Shaddadah area in the northeastern al-Hasakah Governorate using its helicopters.
The extremists have been transported to Sabah al-Khair, a base located 20 km south of the city of al-Hasakah, which US forces use to train militants, the civilian sources said as cited by SANA.
The sources added that the helicopters dropped off four senior Daesh terrorists, including one holding Belgian nationality.
They also noted that the evacuation occurred amid reports on social media accounts held by terrorists that the militant called “Abu Qasim al-Iraqi” had disappeared along with his wife and a bodyguard as well as a large amount of money.
The reports of US collusion with extremists emerge on a regular basis. On February 21, an anonymous source from al-Hasakah told Sputnik that local residents had witnessed US helicopters landing on the territory of a local prison and then leaving; the source explained that the flights were for the evacuation of radicals.Earlier in November 2017, reports had emerged saying that “US military aviation” was used to take Daesh commanders from the town of al-Mayadin just before it was recaptured by the Syrian army.
The Russian Defense Ministry has said that the US-led coalition was engaged in the training of former Daesh and Nusra Front terrorists on a base near al-Hasakah in order to create the new militant formation called the “New Syrian Army.”
In the past, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) justified its militarization of large swaths of Eastern Europe by pointing to the omnipresent threat of terrorism, or some ‘rogue’ foreign state, inherently understood to be Iran. Today the mask has slipped and it is no longer denied that NATO’s primary target is Russia.
But first, a trip down nightmare lane. The road to ruin – at least as far as US-Russia relations were concerned – began immediately following the 9/11 terror attacks. Three months after that fateful day, in December 2001, George W. Bush informed Vladimir Putin that the US was withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a strange move considering that the treaty had kept the peace between the nuclear superpowers since 1972. This geopolitical “mistake,” as Putin rightly defined it, allowed the US to begin the process of deploying a missile defense system, smack on the border with Russia, allegedly to shield the continent against an attack by Iran. Never mind the fact that Tehran had absolutely no reason, not to mention the wherewithal, to carry out such a suicidal mission. But Washington has never been one to let facts get in the way of a forced move on the global chess board.
Thus, the Bush administration advocated on behalf of a land-based missile defense system with interceptors based in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic. However, due to serious objections from Russia, not to mention the apprehensive citizens of the host countries, the plan had reached an impasse in 2008 – just as Obama was replacing Bush in the White House. Some would call that impeccable timing. What happened next can only be described as a devious sleight of hand on the part of Washington.
In September 2009, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama, announced to great fanfare that the US would “shelve” the Bush plan. This announcement was received in Moscow and beyond as a sign that America’s first black president was truly the real deal when it came to working on behalf of global peace. Suddenly, it appeared that the Bush reign of error had been an ugly anomaly, a bad eight-year dream. That grand illusion lasted for about as long as it took to read that sentence.
Barack Obama, the man who had seduced the global masses with his velvety albeit teleprompted delivery, shifted gears the very next day, announcing that the US would be deploying, in four phases, sea-based SM-3 interceptor missiles in Eastern Europe instead. An opinion piece in the New York Times, penned by then Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, provided all the information to understand that the world had been hoodwinked.
“Steady technological advances in our missile defense program — from kill vehicles to the abilities to network radars and sensors — give us confidence in this plan,” Gates wrote. “The SM-3 has had eight successful tests since 2007, and we will continue to develop it to give it the capacity to intercept long-range missiles like ICBMs. It is now more than able to deal with the threat from multiple short- and medium-range missiles — a very real threat to our allies and some 80,000 American troops based in Europe that was not addressed by the previous plan.”
“We are strengthening — not scrapping — missile defense in Europe,” he concluded.
With the benefit of hindsight and common sense, it seems that Washington’s plan from the start was to move forward with the sophisticated SM-3 system; the bulky Bush initiative just provided the necessary distraction to usher in the advanced Obama plan, which presents a major threat to the global strategic balance.
But all that is ancient history compared to what is happening today. Under the guise of ‘Russia aggression,’ a concept that was peddled to the unsuspecting masses based on the fake news of a Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine and Crimea, compounded by claims that Russia somehow swayed the 2016 US presidential elections, US-led NATO has dropped all pretensions and declared open season on Russia. Combined with Donald Trump’s empty threat that the US would exit NATO if member states did not start spending more on defense (2 percent of annual GDP), Eastern Europe has become a veritable hothouse of paranoia-driven militarization.
In what the Kremlin has described as the greatest amassing of military assets on its border since World War II, NATO troops and hardware have set up camp from as far north as Estonia, down through Latvia and Lithuania, into Romania and Poland, where the rotation of US troops is now standard operating procedure.
Meanwhile, massive military games aimed at deterring the Russian bogeyman continue unabated on Russia’s border. In April, British journalist Neil Clark described just one of these exercises, dubbed Summer Shield. The NATO military exercises “got underway at the Adazi military base. Soldiers from Latvia, the US, Bulgaria, Estonia, Canada, Lithuania, the UK, Luxembourg, Romania, Slovakia, Germany and also non-NATO member Sweden are taking part in the drills,” Clark wrote.
He then went on to make a rather unsettling yet accurate observation: “Today’s mantra regarding ‘Russian aggression’ is the 2003 equivalent of ‘Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ to be repeated ad nauseum by anyone supporting NATO’s Drang nach Osten. And like the WMD claim, it’s based on zero evidence.”
Such reckless behavior would have been difficult to fathom less than a decade ago.
But these are brave new times, and American madness has settled upon the realm of foreign relations like a noxious cloud, forcing client states to crack open their tattered wallets or be left out in the cold when the big, bad Russian bear comes a knocking.
Consider the case of Romania, one of Europe’s poorest countries. Prompted by Donald Trump’s warning that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members must fork over 2 percent of their GDP on military spending, Bucharest just made a down payment on a $1 billion American-made M142 HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System), as well as four new multi-function corvettes.
Romanian Defence Minister Mihai Fifor told Jane’s that these exorbitant purchases would “improve Romania’s national and allied defense capability” and emphasized that Romania’s commitment to the 2% of GDP spending cap “for the next 10 years is strong”.
Prime Minister Viorica Dancila said, “We want those procurement programs to also strengthen our defence industry based on offset arrangements where possible”.
This was not the first American military incursion into Romania under the guise of guarding against Iran and other alleged rogue players.
In May 2016, the US activated its $800 million missile shield in Romania, which Russia obviously views as a direct threat.
“At the moment the interceptor missiles installed have a range of 500 kilometers, soon this will go up to 1000 kilometers, and worse than that, they can be rearmed with 2400km-range offensive missiles even today, and it can be done by simply switching the software, so that even the Romanians themselves won’t know,” Vladimir Putin told reporters during a visit to Greece in May 2016.
“We have been saying since the early 2000s that we will have to react somehow to your moves to undermine international security. No one is listening to us,” Putin warned.
It remains to be seen how long NATO tone deafness will continue before the militarization of Eastern Europe gets completely out of control and the situation becomes untenable. Or perhaps the point of no return has already come to pass and, fait accompli, we are merely enjoying an illusory calm before the storm.
It was refreshing to hear then aspirant to the GOP nomination for president Donald Trump tell a gathering of Republican Jews in New York City that he didn’t need their money. It was, of course, a lie, like so many other lies that came out of the electoral campaign, but it seemed to open the door on a new era for American foreign policy. Combined with Trump’s pledge that he would not rush headlong into any new wars in the Middle East, linked to a robust condemnation of what had gone wrong in Iraq, it seemed to indicate that the Israel Lobby would no longer be defining the playing field for U.S. engagement in the region and that a Trump presidency just might take office with considerable wariness about Jewish power in the United States. Or so it seemed.
Two years later, how things have changed. The real Donald Trump has emerged as a dedicated supporter of the most hardline elements in Israel, whose aspirations are fueled by the money flowing from American Jewish billionaires. And nowhere in sight is any actual American national interest.
Trump’s A-team in the Middle East is headed by his son-in-law Jared Kushner who is being advised by a group of Orthodox Jews. The Ambassador to Israel is David Friedman, a former bankruptcy lawyer, who is a passionate supporter of the illegal Israeli settlements and his chief “international negotiator” for the Middle East is Jason Greenblatt, the former Trump Organization lawyer. Both are Orthodox Jews with strong ties to Israel and Friedman has already distinguished himself by condemning the Palestinians at every opportunity.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing criminal charges for corruption, is reportedly delighted with Trump and his “team.” To be sure, Israel has benefited from the White House’s reconstruction of what might be referred to as U.S. Middle East policy to favor Israel even more strongly than did George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is a de facto affirmation of Israel’s “right” to annex and control of all of the city and its surroundings, a violation of the United Nations resolutions that established Israel in 1948. Having received what is perceived to be a green light from the White House, the expansion of Israel’s equally illegal settlements in the West Bank has been accelerating in expectation that Netanyahu will eventually move to incorporate nearly all of what might have become a Palestinian state.
Trump is also making Israel happy in other ways, to include Ambassador Nikki Haley’s Jeremiads at the United Nations and the withholding of U.S. funding to assist Palestinian refugees. Beyond that, the pressure on what Netanyahu perceives as his arch-enemy, the state of Iran, has been unrelenting both from Washington and Jerusalem, with Donald Trump repeatedly asserting that he will tear up the “terrible” nuclear agreement. Some pretext for war will surely follow with the United States having to bear much of the burden as well as most of the consequences, including what is likely to be a large casualty list as the Iranians will surely fight back.
And then there is Syria, where the U.S. looks the other way as Israel bombs targets that it claims to be Iranian or Hezbollah based on alleged intelligence that only it seems to have obtained, while Washington maintains an active presence on the ground to further destabilize the country, a major Israeli objective.
But all of the above pales beside the recent news coming from the bought-and-paid-for politician front, a congenital feature of American democracy capitalist style that Donald Trump promised to end. Jewish- Israeli mega billionaire and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who contributed $25 million to the Trump campaign and $5 million to his inauguration ceremony, is calling in his markers. It is widely believed that Adelson is the man who pressured the White House into making the embassy shift in the first place, and now he is offering to help pay for the new building, which will take several years to construct, to accelerate and institutionalize the process. The White House has folded, declaring that a temporary embassy will now be opening in May, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel and the dispossession and scattering of the Palestinians. Trump had previously declared that the opening of the embassy would take some time, but money talks, apparently.
Even the New York Times, citing some “Adelson allies,” expressed concern that the gesture “could be seen as a well-heeled financial contributor effectively privatizing – and politicizing – American foreign policy.” Bingo.
For those who are unfamiliar with Adelson and his obsession with Israel, it is possible to gain some insights from the following reports concerning his views and behavior. Adelson served in the U.S. Army in World War 2 but has since declared that he is ashamed of that service and would much prefer having served in the Israel Defense Forces. He and his wife Miriam, an IDF veteran, have stated that they would like to raise a son who would become an Israeli sniper. Adelson has declared that his primary goal in life is to obtain 100% U.S. support for Israel, to include annexation of all of historic Palestine and expulsion of its Arab inhabitants. He has referred to Palestinians as “fake people.” Regarding Iran, Adelson has recommended that Washington drop a nuclear bomb on it in a desert area with a warning that the next one would be in the middle of Tehran.
So, it turns out that Donald Trump was not so rich that he could not be bought by Adelson, worth an estimated $40 billion, who had to spend less than one-thousandth of that to ensnare an American president. It was a bargain for Israel but a very bad deal for those of us who wish to see a United States government promoting policies that benefit the American people rather than a badly-behaved tiny client-state five thousand miles away.
As President Donald Trump prepares to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week, a group of U.S. intelligence veterans offers corrections to a number of false accusations that have been levelled against Iran.
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: War With Iran
INTRODUCTION
In our December 21st Memorandum to you, we cautioned that the claim that Iran is currently the world’s top sponsor of terrorism is unsupported by hard evidence. Meanwhile, other false accusations against Iran have intensified. Thus, we feel obliged to alert you to the virtually inevitable consequences of war with Iran, just as we warned President George W. Bush six weeks before the U.S. attack on Iraq 15 years ago.
In our first Memorandum in this genre we told then-President Bush that we saw “no compelling reason” to attack Iraq, and warned “the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.” The consequences will be far worse, should the U.S. become drawn into war with Iran. We fear that you are not getting the straight story on this from your intelligence and national security officials.
After choosing “War With Iran” for the subject-line of this Memo, we were reminded that we had used it before, namely, for a Memorandum to President Obama on August 3, 2010 in similar circumstances. You may wish to ask your staff to give you that one to read and ponder. It included a startling quote from then-Chairman of President Bush Jr.’s Intelligence Advisory Board (and former national security adviser to Bush Sr.) Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who told the Financial Times on October 14, 2004 that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had George W. Bush “mesmerized;” that “Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger.” We wanted to remind you of that history, as you prepare to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week.
* * *
Rhetoric vs. Reality
We believe that the recent reporting regarding possible conflict with nuclear-armed North Korea has somewhat obscured consideration of the significantly higher probability that Israel or even Saudi Arabia will take steps that will lead to a war with Iran that will inevitably draw the United States in. Israel is particularly inclined to move aggressively, with potentially serious consequences for the U.S., in the wake of the recent incident involving an alleged Iranian drone and the shooting down of an Israeli aircraft.
There is also considerable anti-Iran rhetoric in U.S. media, which might well facilitate a transition from a cold war-type situation to a hot war involving U.S. forces. We have for some time been observing with some concern the growing hostility towards Iran coming out of Washington and from the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster is warning that the “time to act is now” to thwart Iran’s aggressive regional ambitions while U.S. United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley sees a “wake-up” call in the recent shooting incident involving Syria and Israel. Particular concern has been expressed by the White House that Iran is exploiting Shi’a minorities in neighboring Sunni dominated states to create unrest and is also expanding its role in neighboring Iraq and Syria.
While we share concerns over the Iranian government’s intentions vis-à-vis its neighbors, we do not believe that the developments in the region, many of which came about through American missteps, have a major impact on vital U.S. national interests. Nor is Iran, which often sees itself as acting defensively against surrounding Sunni states, anything like an existential threat to the United States that would mandate the sustained military action that would inevitably result if Iran is attacked.
Iran’s alleged desire to stitch together a sphere of influence consisting of an arc of allied nations and proxy forces running from its western borders to the Mediterranean Sea has been frequently cited as justification for a more assertive policy against Tehran, but we believe this concern to be greatly exaggerated. Iran, with a population of more than 80 million, is, to be sure, a major regional power but militarily, economically and politically it is highly vulnerable.
Limited Military Capability
Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard is well armed and trained, but much of its “boots on the ground” army consists of militiamen of variable quality. Its Air Force is a “shadow” of what existed under the Shah and is significantly outgunned by its rivals in the Persian Gulf, not to mention Israel. Its navy is only “green water” capable in that it consists largely of smaller vessels responsible for coastal defense supplemented by the swarming of Revolutionary Guard small speedboats.
When Napoleon had conquered much of continental Europe and was contemplating invading Britain it was widely believed that England was helpless before him. British Admiral Earl St Vincent was unperturbed: “I do not say the French can’t come, I only say they can’t come by sea.” We likewise believe that Iran’s apparent threat is in reality decisively limited by its inability to project power across the water or through the air against neighboring states that have marked superiority in both respects.
The concern over a possibly developing “Shi’ite land bridge,” also referred to as an “arc” or “crescent,” is likewise overstated. It ignores the reality that Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon all have strong national identities and religiously mixed populations. They are influenced — some of them strongly — by Iran but they are not puppet states. And there is also an ethnic division that the neighboring states’ populations are very conscious of– they are Arabs and Iran is Persian, which is also true of the Shi’a populations in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
Majority Shi’a Iraq, for example, is now very friendly to Iran but it has to deal with considerable Kurdish and Sunni minorities in its governance and in the direction of its foreign policy. It will not do Iran’s bidding on a number of key issues, including Baghdad’s relationship with Washington, and would be unwilling to become a proxy in Tehran’s conflicts with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Iraqi Vice President Osama al-Nujaifi, the highest-ranking Sunni in the Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi government, has, for example, recently called for the demobilization of the Shi’ite Popular Mobilization Forces or militias that have been fighting ISIS because they “have their own political aspirations, their own [political] agendas. … They are very dangerous to the future of Iraq.”
Nuclear Weapons Thwarted
A major concern that has undergirded much of the perception of an Iranian threat is the possibility that Tehran will develop a nuclear weapon somewhere down the road. We believe that the current Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, even if imperfect, provides the best response to that Iranian proliferation problem. The U.N. inspections regime is strict and, if the agreement stands, there is every reason to believe that Iran will be unable to take the necessary precursor steps leading to a nuclear weapons program. Iran will be further limited in its options after the agreement expires in nine years. Experts believe that, at that point, Iran its not likely to choose to accumulate the necessary highly enriched uranium stocks to proceed.
The recent incident involving the shoot-down of a drone alleged to be Iranian, followed by the downing of an Israeli fighter by a Syrian air defense missile, resulted in a sharp response from Tel Aviv, though reportedly mitigated by a warning from Russian President Vladimir Putin that anything more provocative might inadvertently involve Russia in the conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is said to have moderated his response but his government is clearly contemplating a more robust intervention to counter what he describes as a developing Iranian presence in Syria.
In addition, Netanyahu may be indicted on corruption charges, and it is conceivable that he might welcome a “small war” to deflect attention from mounting political problems at home.
Getting Snookered Into War
We believe that the mounting Iran hysteria evident in the U.S. media and reflected in Beltway groupthink has largely been generated by Saudi Arabia and Israel, who nurture their own aspirations for regional political and military supremacy. There are no actual American vital interests at stake and it is past time to pause and take a step backwards to consider what those interests actually are in a region that has seen nothing but disaster since 2003. Countering an assumed Iranian threat that is minimal and triggering a war would be catastrophic and would exacerbate instability, likely leading to a breakdown in the current political alignment of the entire Middle East. It would be costly for the United States.
Iran is not militarily formidable, but its ability to fight on the defensive against U.S. naval and air forces is considerable and can cause high casualties. There appears to be a perception in the Defense Department that Iran could be defeated in a matter of days, but we would warn that such predictions tend to be based on overly optimistic projections, witness the outcomes in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, Tehran would be able again to unleash terrorist resources throughout the region, endangering U.S. military and diplomats based there as well as American travelers and businesses. The terrorist threat might easily extend beyond the Middle East into Europe and also the United States, while the dollar costs of a major new conflict and its aftermath could break the bank, literally.
Another major consideration before ratcheting up hostilities should be that a war with Iran might not be containable. As the warning from President Vladimir Putin to Netanyahu made clear, other major powers have interests in what goes on in the Persian Gulf, and there is a real danger that a regional war could have global consequences.
In sum, we see a growing risk that the U.S. will become drawn into hostilities on pretexts fabricated by Israel and Saudi Arabia for their actual common objective (“regime change” in Iran). A confluence of factors and misconceptions about what is at stake and how such a conflict is likely to develop, coming from both inside and outside the Administration have, unfortunately, made such an outcome increasingly likely.
We have seen this picture before, just 15 years ago in Iraq, which should serve as a warning. The prevailing perception of threat that the Mullahs of Iran allegedly pose directly against the security of the U.S. is largely contrived. Even if all the allegations were true, they would not justify an Iraq-style “preventive war” violating national as well as international law. An ill-considered U.S. intervention in Iran is surely not worth the horrific humanitarian, military, economic, and political cost to be paid if Washington allows itself to become part of an armed attack.
FOR THE STEERING GROUP, VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY
William Binney, former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (ret.)
Kathleen Christison, CIA, Senior Analyst on Middle East (ret.)
Graham E. Fuller, Vice-Chair, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC Iraq; Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry C. Johnson, former CIA and State Department Counter Terrorism officer
Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF; ex-Master SERE Instructor for Strategic Reconnaissance Operations (NSA/DIA) and Special Mission Units (JSOC) (ret.)
John Brady Kiesling, Foreign Service Officer; resigned Feb. 27, 2003 as Political Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Athens, in protest against the U.S. attack on Iraq (ret.)
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Edward Loomis, Jr., former NSA Technical Director for the Office of Signals Processing (ret.)
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council, National Intelligence Estimates Officer (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Near East (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Greg Thielmann, former Director of the Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs Office, State Department Bureau of Intelligence & Research (INR), and former senior staffer on Senate Intelligence Committee (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA ret.)
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel (USA, ret.), former Chief of Staff for Secretary of State; Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate VIPS)
Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)
Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright, Colonel, US Army (ret.); also Foreign Service Officer who, like Political Counselor John Brady Kiesling, resigned in opposition to the war on Iraq
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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