Intent, motive and means: People serving life sentences in U.S. prisons have been convicted on weaker grounds than the circumstantial evidence against Washington for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.
Circumstantial evidence, just like direct proof, can be used to prove the elements of a crime, the existence or completion of certain acts and the intent or mental state of a defendant. Generally speaking, a prosecutor, to obtain a conviction, needs to show beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant committed a certain act and that the defendant acted with specific intent.
Nord Stream 1 is a multi-national project operated by Swiss-based Nord Stream AG intended to supply some 55 billion cubic meters (bcm) of Russian natural gas annually to Europe by directly transporting it from Russia, through twin 1,224 kilometer-long pipelines laid beneath the Baltic Sea, to a German hub, from which the gas would be distributed to other European consumers.
The first of the twin pipelines was completed in June 2011 and began supplying gas in November 2011. The second was completed in April 2012 and began supplying gas in October 2012. Gazprom, the Russian gas giant, owns 51 percent interest in the Nord Stream 1 pipeline project.
Nord Stream 2 is a near clone of the Nord Stream 1 project, consisting of twin 1,220-kilometer pipelines laid beneath the Baltic Sea connecting Russia to Germany. Started in 2018, it was completed in September 2021. Like Nord Stream 1, the Nord Stream 2 is designed to deliver approximately 55 bcm of natural gas from Russia to Europe through Germany. Nord Stream 2, like Nord Stream 1, is operated by a multinational company in which Gazprom has 51 percent ownership.
Unlike Nord Stream 1, Nord Stream 2 was never allowed to begin supplying gas.
The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines are anathema to U.S. national security policy, which for decades has been sour on the degree to which Russian natural gas dominates the European energy market. This animus was perhaps best captured by a column published in the German newspaper DieWelt in July 2019.
The piece, co-authored by Richard Grenell, Carla Sands, Gordon Sondland (respectively, the U.S. ambassadors to Germany, Denmark and the European Union), was entitled “Europe must retain control of its energy security” and made the argument that the “Nord Stream 2 pipeline will drastically increase Russia’s energy leverage over the EU,” noting that “[s]uch a scenario is dangerous for the bloc and the West as a whole.”
Observing that “a dozen European countries rely on Russia for more than 75 percent of their natural gas needs,” the ambassadors concluded “This makes United States allies and partners vulnerable to having their gas shut off at Moscow’s whim.”
Moreover, the ambassadors claimed,
“European Union reliance on Russian gas presents risks for Europe and the West as a whole and makes U.S. allies less secure. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline will heighten Europe’s susceptibility to Russia’s energy blackmail tactics. Europe must retain control of its energy security.”
The ambassadors also wove in some critical geopolitical context as well, declaring
“Make no mistake: Nord Stream 2 will bring more than just Russian gas. Russian leverage and influence will also flow under the Baltic Sea and into Europe, and the pipeline will enable Moscow to further undermine Ukrainian sovereignty and stability.”
Russia’s “weaponization” of energy against Europe was the topic of a “debate” that Gary Peach and I carried out in December 2018 on the pages of Energy Intelligence, which monitors issues pertaining to global energy security. Gary, one of EI’s senior writers, covers Russian energy.
I argued that “Russia has never sought to use its status as a major supplier of energy to Europe as a vehicle of policy influence,” noting that:
“[t]he weaponization of Russian energy comes in the form of sanctions imposed against Moscow and the pursuit of policies designed to curtail development of Russia’s energy sector. It is far easier to make a case that the U.S. and Europe pose a threat to Russian energy security rather than vice versa.”
Gary, on the other hand, noted that
“Gazprom’s supply contracts exhibit the underlying economic threat from Moscow: The pricing formula is roughly the same for all countries, but those countries in Russia’s good graces receive an arbitrary ‘discount.’” He concluded that “when Gazprom is the only conceivable gas supplier, it has shamelessly abused the monopoly.”
In December 2019 the administration of President Donald Trump imposed sanctions in a desperate last-second bid to prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from being completed.
These sanctions were waived by the administration of President Joe Biden in May 2021 in an effort to be seen as repairing relations with Germany that had been severely frayed during the Trump administration. However, upon completion, Nord Stream 2 was prevented from operating by objections raised by German regulators regarding licensing issues, which were not expected to be resolved until mid-2022.
In the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration devised a plan to punish Russia by imposing severe economic sanctions which would target the Russian energy sector, including measures designed to halt the delivery of gas from Russia to Germany via the Nord Stream pipelines.
One of the issues confronting U.S. policy makers was finding the right mix of sanctions that would succeed in harming Russia without destroying the European economy in the process. Policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic, however, recognized that meaningful sanctions which targeted Russian energy contained collateral risk to the European economy which could not be avoided.
One of the mechanisms that U.S. and E.U. policy makers were hoping would alleviate the economic consequences of sanctioning Russian energy was to increase the supply of U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) to Europe. Since 2016 the amount of LNG supplied by the U.S. to Europe has increased, with more than 21 bcm delivered in 2021.
But 21 bcm couldn’t begin to offset the quantity of natural gas being shipped by Russia to Europe in case of any large-scale disruption of Russian energy supplies brought on by the imposition of economic sanctions that targeted the Russian energy sector.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine — and the realization that the energy disruption to Europe was going to be far greater than had been anticipated — Biden made good on his promise to increase the supply of U.S. LNG to Europe. But the quantities still fell far short of demand, and at prices that were, literally, bankrupting all of Europe.
The Victims
With Germany blocking the operation of Nord Stream 2 and sanctions precluding the repair of the Nord Stream 1, the German population began bearing the brunt of the sanctions on Russian energy.
Despite their government’s insistence that it would remain resolute in confronting what it perceived as Russian aggression against Ukraine, the German people had other plans. By Sept. 26 they began taking to the streets in large numbers to demand that their government open the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and provide the German people and economy with the energy needed to survive.
The Crime
On Sept. 26, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline reported a massive drop in pressure. The next day, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline reported the same. A Danish fighter jet, flying over the pipeline route, reported seeing a one-kilometer diameter disturbance in the water off the island of Bornholm, directly over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, created by the massive release of natural gas underwater. (Danish authorities have estimated that between the two pipelines the total amount of methane released into the atmosphere was around 500,000 metric tons.)
The incident took place in the exclusive economic zone of Sweden, and the Swedish Security Service took the lead in investigating what had happened. (Curiously, Russia was not invited to participate, despite having a vested economic and security interest in the matter.)
“After completing the crime scene investigation,” the Swedes reported, “the Swedish Security Service can conclude that there have been detonations at Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the Swedish economic zone,” noting that the blasts had caused “extensive damage” to the lines.
The Swedes also declared that they had retrieved some materials from the incident site, which were being analyzed to determine who was responsible. This evidence, the Swedes stated, “strengthened the suspicions of gross sabotage.”
While all parties involved with the Nord Stream pipeline “sabotage” concur that the cause was manmade, no nation outside Russia has named a suspect. (Russian President Vladimir Putin has attributed the attack, which Russia has labeled an act of “international terrorism,” on the “Anglo-Saxons” — the British and Americans.)
Biden dismissed the Russian claims. The pipeline attack “was a deliberate act of sabotage and the Russians are pumping out disinformation and lies,” the U.S. president said. “At the appropriate moment, when things calm down, we’re going to be sending divers down to find out exactly what happened. We don’t know that yet exactly.”
But we do know. Biden told us himself. So did Secretary of State Antony Blinken. So did the U.S. Navy. Between the three, we have incontrovertible evidence of intent, motive and means — more than enough needed to prove guilt beyond any reasonable doubt in a court of law.
Intent
Speaking to reporters on Feb. 7, Biden declared “If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
When a journalist asked how Biden could do such a thing, given that Germany was in control of the project, Biden retorted: “I promise you: We will be able to do it.”
No prosecutor has ever had a more concise statement of intent — a veritable confession before the event — than this. Joe Biden should be taken at his word.
Motive
When asked by reporters on Oct. 3 to comment on the Nord Stream pipeline attacks, Blinken responded in part by noting that the attack was “a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.”
Blinken further declared that the U.S. would work to alleviate the “consequences” of the pipeline attack on Europe, alluding to the provision of U.S. LNG at exorbitant profit margins for U.S. suppliers — another “opportunity.”
Prosecutors often speak of cui bono, a Latin phrase that means “who benefits,” when seeking to import motive for a crime committed, under the presumption that there is a high probability that those responsible for a specific crime are the ones who stand to gain from it.
Blinken. Tremendous opportunity.
Cui Bono.
Means
In early June, in support of a major NATO exercise known as BALTOPS (Baltic Operations) 2022, the U.S. Navy employed the latest advancements in unmanned underwater vehicle, or UUV, mine hunting technology to be tested in operational scenarios.
According to the U.S. Navy, it was able to evaluate “emerging mine hunting UUV technology,” focusing on “UUV navigation, teaming operations, and improvements in acoustic communications all while collecting critical environmental data sets to advance the automatic target recognition algorithms for mine detection.”
One of the UUV’s used by the U.S. Navy is the Seafox.
In September, specialized U.S. Navy helicopters — the MH-60R, capable of employing the Seafox UUV — were tracked flying off the Danish island of Bornholm, directly over the segments of the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines that were later damaged in the sabotage incidents.
“On November 6, 2015, the NATO Seafox mine disposal unmanned underwater vehicle was found during the scheduled visual inspection of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline. It lay in space between gas pipelines, clearly near one of strings. NATO said the underwater mine disposal vehicle was lost during exercises. Such NATO exercises when the combat explosive device turned out to be exactly under our gas pipeline. The explosive device was deactivated by Swedish Armed Forces at that time.”
Guilty Beyond Reasonable Doubt
The burden that exists to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt “is fully satisfied and entirely convinced to a moral certainty that the evidence presented proves the guilt of the defendant.” In the matter of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 attacks, this burden has been met when it comes to assigning blame to the United States.
Biden all but confessed the crime beforehand, and his secretary of state, Blinken, crowed about the “tremendous opportunity” that was created by the attack. Not only did the U.S. Navy actively rehearse the crime in June 2022, using the same weapon that had been previously discovered next to the pipeline, but employed the very means needed to use this weapon on the day of the attack, at the location of the attack.
Guilty as Charged
The problem is, outside of Russia, no one is charging the United States. Journalists run away from the evidence, citing “uncertainty.” Europe, afraid to wake up to the reality that its most important “ally” has committed an act of war against its critical energy infrastructure, condemning millions of Europeans to suffer the depravations of cold, hunger and unemployment —all the while gouging Europe with profit margins from the sale of LNG that redefine the notion of “windfall” — remains silent.
There is no doubt in any thinking person’s brain as to who is responsible for the attacks on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. The circumstantial case is overwhelming and fully capable of winning a conviction in any U.S. court of law.
But no one will bring the case, at least not at this moment.
Shame on American journalism for ignoring this flagrant attack on Europe.
Shame on Europe for not having the courage to publicly name their attacker.
But most of all, shame on the administration of Joe Biden, who has lowered the U.S. to the same standard of those it hunted down and killed for so many years — a simple international terrorist, and a state sponsor of terrorism.
Stockholm has rejected a plan to set up an official joint investigation team together with Germany and Denmark to look into the explosions that damaged the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in late September, Reuters reported, citing a Swedish investigator. Sweden reportedly argued that its own findings are too sensitive to share even with other EU nations.
The EU’s agency for criminal justice cooperation, Eurojust, recently came up with a proposal to establish a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) to launch a probe into the Nord Stream explosions, Reuters said, adding that Sweden blocked the initiative. On Friday, Mats Ljungqvist, a Swedish prosecutor involved in the nation’s probe into the incident, told the news agency that this development would impose unwanted obligations on his nation.
“This is because there is information in our investigation that is subject to confidentiality directly linked to national security,” Ljungqvist said, adding that his nation is already cooperating with Germany and Denmark on the matter anyway.
According to the prosecutor, establishing a JIT would involve signing a legally binding information-sharing agreement. Eurojust says on its website that a JIT mechanism indeed includes a legal agreement between the involved parties for the purposes of conducting criminal investigations.
Earlier, citing “security circles,” Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine said that Sweden considered the sensitivity level of its own probe’s findings to be “too high to share them with other countries.” News portal Tagesschau, owned by the German ARD broadcaster, also reported on Friday that Germany, Sweden, and Denmark initially wanted to investigate the incident together but “that’s not the case now.”
According to Tagesschau, Denmark also eventually opposed the idea of a joint probe. Now, all three nations will conduct their own separate investigations, it added. Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson denied the reports, however, adding that “we are working together with Germany and Denmark on this issue.”
Earlier, all three nations refused to grant Russia access to the probe, prompting Moscow to summon their ambassadors. Russia also said it would not recognize the results of any probe unless its specialists were allowed to participate. Andersson said on Monday that Stockholm would not share its investigation results with Moscow.
The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were damaged and rendered inoperable following a series of powerful underwater explosions off the Danish island of Bornholm. No nation conducting a probe into the incident has officially named any suspects that could have been involved in the alleged attacks on the pipelines.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously hinted at a potential “beneficiary.”
“One can now force the liquefied natural gas from the US on to European countries on a much larger scale,” he said earlier this week. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the incidents a “tremendous opportunity” for Europe “to once and for all remove dependence on Russian energy.”
Social media has been in an uproar since a member of European Parliament posted a video of a hearing in which a Pfizer director admitted the company never tested whether its Covid mRNA vaccine prevents transmission prior to its approval for emergency use.
Though the fact that Covid mRNA vaccines do not prevent transmission was, of course, abundantly clear from the data soon after their implementation, this myth was a primary justification for vaccine passes and a primary cause of the unprecedented venom launched at those who refused Covid vaccines throughout 2021 and continuing through today.
Not only did governments exert this pressure through policy, but in many cases politicians and officials used their office to deliberately stoke the social stigmatization of the unvaccinated. Here’s a look back at some of the unprecedented vitriol that was launched at those who refused Covid vaccines from 2021 and beyond.
Officials in many jurisdictions proposed making the unvaccinated pay more for healthcare.
In Victoria, Australia — where lockdowns were longer than in perhaps any other city in the world—one politician proposed cutting the unvaccinated out of the national health system entirely.
A particularly disturbing idea that began to gain serious traction among the elite commentariat was to have hospitals triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last, or even deny healthcare to the unvaccinated entirely—a fairly clear-cut crime against humanity.
One vocal proponent of the idea of triaging emergency care to disfavor the unvaccinated was David Frum, Senior Editor of the Atlantic, most famous for his outspoken support for the invasion of Iraq. When his infamous tweet on the subject sparked an uproar, Frum doubled down.
Piers Morgan agreed that the unvaccinated should be denied emergency care.
Shockingly, this appalling idea of triaging emergency care based on vaccination status is still being proposed to this day.
The demonization of the unvaccinated was, of course, far from limited to healthcare. Vilifying the unvaccinated became a kind of illiberal fad among the elite commentariat. The US CDC even paid screen writers and comedians to promote Covid vaccines, which in some cases involved paying them to mock the unvaccinated.
In a bout of recidivism to the early 20th century, Austria and Germany introduced the chilling concept of “lockdown for the unvaccinated.”
“Lockdown for the unvaccinated” gained traction in the English-speaking world as well.
Most countries, cities, and states across the western world introduced vaccine passes that their own citizens had to show in order to partake in daily life. The World Health Organization published an extensive document on implementing a digital vaccine-pass system, including an international vaccine status registry and instructions on how to later revoke someone’s vaccine pass.
The most dystopian of these vaccine pass systems was in Lithuania, where the unvaccinated were banned from nearly all public spaces and employment outside their homes; the few shops where they could purchase essentials had to post large red signs on their doors indicating that unvaccinated persons could be present.
And of course, who could forget Justin Trudeau’s classic fuhrer-style rant about having to share public transportation with the unvaccinated, despite government documents later revealing that he had no science to back any of these claims.
Like so much of the response to Covid, these vaccine passes and the illiberal fad of stigmatizing the unvaccinated were unscientific, unprecedented, ineffective, totalitarian, brutal, and dumb.
It was never remotely realistic for any government to expect every single person to get vaccinated, especially when the vaccine in question involved a novel genetic-based therapy. Thus, these proposals to impose draconian hardships on those who refused Covid vaccines would inevitably involve the state imposing draconian hardships on a sizable portion of the population.
According to Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, one of the most credible voices on the subject, Covid vaccines likely yielded benefits for the elderly and vulnerable, but it remains entirely unclear whether Covid vaccines have yielded any benefit at all for healthy adults and especially for children. Coupled with the still-unknown risks associated with mRNA technology and the now well-documented cases of death and serious injury from these vaccines, for governments across the world to have exerted extreme pressure on children and healthy adults to get these vaccines is absolutely sickening.
That some healthy young people were surely coerced into receiving an injection that led to their death or serious injury, when the data showed that the benefits did not outweigh the risks, is an unconscionable tragedy.
In early 2021, CDC director Rochelle Walensky had no problem going on national television and declaring to the world that if you took the covid-19 vaccine “you will not get or spread covid.” Within weeks, this was found to be entirely untrue.
Dr. Anthony Fauci also spread the exact same misinformation, telling Americans that they had nothing to worry about once they took the shots. Yet hundreds of thousands of people who took the shots, got sick and died.
Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and countless other Pfizer shills in the media waged a massive campaign to convince Americans and the world at large that taking the vaccine meant that you could not get or transmit COVID-19. And they were all dead wrong.
Instead of apologizing and admitting they were wrong, team Pfizer doubled down and claimed that getting “boosted” was the real protection. Again, this was proven wrong.
Now that tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have flowed into their coffers, Pfizer is admitting that they never even tested whether or not the vaccine prevented transmission before they released it. Read that again—Pfizer admitted that they never tested their vaccine’s ability to prevent the transmission of COVID-19 before its release.
During a hearing this week on the European Union’s COVID-19 response, Pfizer’s president of international developed markets, Janine Small, made this bombshell admission.
Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Robert “Rob” Roos asked Small if Pfizer tested whether or not the vaccine prevented transmission. Her answer was a resounding “no.”
“Regarding the question around did we know about stopping immunization before it entered the market…No.,” Small said.
Given this telling admission that the vaccine was never tested in this manner, it raises the question as to where all the blowhards in the video above received this information. Who was telling them that the vaccine prevented transmission if the manufacturer never tested it?
Where did Walensky, Biden, Fauci, Gates, Maddow and others get this information from when they launched their concerted effort to spread this misinformation? This is a question we must all be demanding an answer to immediately.
We should also be asking why not a single mainstream outlet is reporting on this admission. Literally, no one in corporate media has touched this new information despite its bombshell nature. Americans would probably like to know that they were forced to take a vaccine that was never tested for prevention of transmission despite the entirety of the establishment telling them otherwise. Yet corporate media, largely funded by Pfizer, is silent.
We must never forget that politicians—all claiming to “follow the science”—locked us down, destroyed the economy, decimated the middle class through inflation, forcibly medicated us, and muzzled our children over the last 2 years. All the while we were told that our only way out of this was to take the jab.
We have been constantly reminded that if you don’t follow “The Science,” you are a science-denying buffoon who wants grandma to die, doesn’t care about the children, were an alt-right Nazi, a white supremacist, extremist, and most likely a domestic terrorist.
Those who stood against unconstitutional vaccine mandates were scorned by the mainstream, labeled as “anti-vaxxers” and had people wishing for their deaths. Even people who took the jab but stood against mandates were labeled anti-vaxxers as definitions were altered to fit the narrative.
We the people were pitted against each other in one of the most divisive propaganda campaigns in human history. The middle ground was eliminated and logic and reason burned to the ground alongside the economy. And all of it was based on lies.
NABLUS – Three agricultural structures and one car were destroyed on Wednesday when extremist Jewish settlers launched arson attacks in Qusra village, south of Nablus City, under military protection.
The Palestinian civil defense said on Thursday that a crew of its firefighters dealt with a number of blazes that were started by settlers in Qusra village.
The civil defense added that the fires destroyed three poultry farms and killed 30,000 chickens, pointing out that the settlers burned a vehicle near the farms.
It also said that its firefighters faced obstacles as they were heading for the area to tackle the fires.
Palestinian towns and villages in the southern countryside of Nablus, especially, Qusra, Jalud and Burin, are exposed to repeated attacks by Jewish settlers, who escalate their crimes during the olive harvest season.
I want to talk about Dr Aseem Malhotra. After the press conference on 27 September, there were concerns from some circles that World Council for Health was associating itself with Dr Malhotra. While some regard him as ‘controlled opposition’, others object to his lack of questioning vaccines in general, given Covid-19 “vaccine” and pharmaceutical industry corruption revelations.
We are living through interesting times. As the institutions entrusted with public service and care, reveal themselves to have betrayed our trust, as vaccine harms become ever harder to shove under the carpet, and as governments become ever more incompetent and unaccountable, we find ourselves apparently cast adrift on a turbulent sea, understandably wondering who is our enemy and who is our friend.
What helps me stay centred and free from fear, is the 7 Principles of A Better Way. They came out of the collective wisdom shared in May’s Better Way Conference, and they are a lodestar in these times of extreme pressure.
One of the Principles is:
We value different perspectives.
We celebrate respectful discussion as the means to ever more refined knowledge, compassion and wisdom.
It is in the spirit of this noble principle that we hosted Dr Malhotra’s press conference. Not all of us agree with his view that traditional vaccines are safe and effective. But we do agree that the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out should be halted immediately, and this is something that World Council for Health has been calling for almost since its inception. Dr Malhotra’s press conference has been viewed well over 100,000 times. Many wrote to us to say that they would be sharing it with their loved ones as it was just the thing that would reach them and get them thinking.
My hope is that his courageous efforts will, in particular, reach doctors and other medical professionals – those who are questioning the ‘safe and effective’ narrative but are afraid to speak up. They are certainly under the cosh: on Friday, California’s Governor Gavin Newsome signed a bill that means any doctor can lose their licence for sharing ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ about Covid-19. In Queensland, Australia, a similar bill is being presented to Parliament next week that goes even further, prohibiting doctors from giving any advice or opinion that goes against public health edict. Governments are going out of their way to shut doctors up, and while that may be terrifying for doctors – and their patients – it is also an indication of the power doctors hold. Governments know that if enough doctors speak up, the ‘safe and effective’ narrative will quickly crumble.
How we treat Dr Malhotra may be a deciding factor as to whether other doctors follow suit to stand up for medical ethics and their patients. Will we welcome them with gratitude and compassion, or shun them for not having spoken up sooner? This is a personal question for each of us, and one that we will all have to reckon with at some point. Is it for us to judge and does it serve the highest good of all to do so?
There are those who benefit from us dividing ourselves and each other into the binary camps of friend or foe. Of debating whether this or that person is controlled opposition, or bona fide. In this endless speculation we exhaust our precious life force, and find ourselves lacking the energy to create a better way.
If we can just relax and remember ourselves and why we are here, we can reclaim the broader view: that humanity is inherently fallible and yet capable of the most extraordinary acts of redemption. That we are all beings of light, but that we each have our own darkness as well. And, that we are all redeemed in the light of compassion for ourselves and each other.
This Saturday 15th October, we are holding a UK Doctors Conference in London. Our wish is for every doctor and health professional to feel they are welcome. It will be a safe and private space for people to ask questions, learn more about what’s really going on, and speak freely with each other. Please watch NHS Consultant Dr Julia Wilkens’ invitation (click on the image to view) – she could not have put the value of being there any better:
Please share this event widely: there is still space and we want as many people as possible to come together and realise that they are not a sole dissenter but one of many ready to question, to inquire, and understand.
‘Winning Doctors Back One at a Time’ Hearts of Oak podcast
I recently returned to the highly informative Heart of Oak podcast to speak about doctors, health, and of course the doctors conference. I really enjoyed our conversation – if you’d like to tune in, you’ll find it on the Hearts of Oak home page here.
Russia will not recognize the results of the ongoing investigation into the explosions at the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines in late September unless its experts are allowed to take part in the probe, Moscow has said. Russia’s foreign ministry revealed on Thursday it had summoned the representatives of Germany, Denmark and Sweden to convey its “bewilderment” over a lack of official reaction to a request for cooperation sent earlier this month by Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.
In its press statement, the ministry noted that while Russian authorities and the country’s energy giant, Gazprom, have still not been granted access to the investigation, reports have been appearing which suggest that Berlin, Copenhagen and Stockholm have been far more accommodating to similar requests made by other nations, including the US.
Russian diplomats emphasized that if its calls for cooperation are ignored, Moscow will assume that the three European countries “have something to hide or [that] they are covering up the perpetrators of these terrorist attacks.”
“Russia will, of course, not recognize any ‘pseudo-results’ of such an investigation, unless Russian experts take part in it,” the statement read.
The warning comes after Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson announced on Monday that Stockholm would not share with Moscow the results of its investigation into the explosions that severely damaged the two conduits created to pump gas from Russia to Europe.
“In Sweden, our preliminary investigations are confidential, and that, of course, also applies in this case,” she explained.
The premier added, however, that Russia may conduct its own probe at the site if it so wishes.
Meanwhile, Swedish authorities have said they’d found evidence that points to sabotage.
Also on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin hinted that despite the denial of access to the probe, “we all know well who the ultimate beneficiary of this crime is.” Earlier, he had publicly laid the blame for the attack at the doorstep of the “Anglo-Saxons,” a Russian colloquialism for the US-UK bond.
Commenting on the blasts, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had described them as a “tremendous opportunity” for Europe “to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy.”
The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were rendered inoperable on September 26 following a series of powerful underwater explosions off the Danish island of Bornholm.
The US-led NATO alliance has been very active in waters around Nord Stream and once even managed to “lose” an armed underwater drone right under the pipeline, a Gazprom spokesman has said.
“On November 6, 2015, a NATO underwater mine destroyer ‘Seafox’ was discovered during a scheduled visual inspection of the Nord Stream gas pipeline,” Sergey Kupriyanov told Rossiya 24 on Monday.
The device was found resting on the seabed at a depth of 40m between the Nord Stream pipelines, almost directly under one of them, Kupriyanov said. The incident, which received limited media coverage at the time, prompted a brief halt in gas deliveries, while the drone was ultimately recovered by the Swedish military.
Back then, the US-led bloc said it had “lost” the device during military drills, the spokesman claimed. The German-made drone carries a 1.4kg shaped-charge warhead, which is intended for destroying sunken unexploded munitions and mines, according to publicly available data.
“That’s NATO drills for you, when a military-grade explosive device ends up straight under our pipeline,” Kupriyanov concluded.
The remarks come in the aftermath of the apparent sabotage attacks on the Nord Stream pipeline system. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines both abruptly lost pressure on September 26, following a series of powerful underwater explosions off the Danish island of Bornholm. The ruptures caused massive gas leaks into the open sea and rendered the pipelines inoperable.
While Moscow has called for an international – with its own participation – probe into the incident, other parties appear to be reluctant to carry out such an investigation. Sweden, for instance, has already explicitly stated it will not share the results of its investigation into the explosion with Moscow.
“In Sweden, our preliminary investigations are confidential, and that, of course, also applies in this case,” Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson told reporters on Monday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has already blamed the “the Anglo-Saxons,” a Russian colloquialism for the US-UK alliance, of being behind the blasts, which Moscow described as an “act of international terrorism.” Speaking during a meeting of the Russian Security Council on Monday, Putin said that “we all know well who the ultimate beneficiary of this crime is.”
The details of Israel’s secret use of biological weapons and poison against Palestinians during the 1947/48 ethnic cleansing campaign has been revealed in a recent article by historians Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar. The 84-year-old Kedar is professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the more well-known Morris is famed for his work as one of Israel’s “New Historians”. This group of Israeli scholars, including Professors Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim, dismantled the occupation state’s official narrative about its creation in 1948 and the birth of the Palestinian refugee crisis. However, unlike his fellow historians, Morris went on to become a rather controversial figure for adopting morally questionable positions in defence of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
“I find myself as convinced as ever that the Israelis played a major role in ridding the country of tens of thousands of Arabs during the 1948 war,” said Morris in an article in the Los Angeles Times about the controversy surrounding his book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. “For unearthing that dark side of 1948,” Morris said that he was vilified by the “Zionist establishment.” He was accused of shattering the founding myths of the Israeli state and lending moral weight to the Palestinian cause. Morris rejected the claim as “untrue” and explained that he “was simply a historian seeking to describe what happened.”
Affirming his commitment to Zionism, however, Morris went on to defend Israel’s ethnic cleansing. “I also believe their [Israeli] actions were inevitable and made sense” said Morris before giving his justification for why Israel had to expel three quarters of the indigenous non-Jewish, Muslim and Christian Palestinians. “Had the belligerent Arab population inhabiting the areas destined for Jewish statehood not been uprooted, no Jewish state would have arisen, or it would have emerged so demographically and politically hobbled that it could not have survived. It was an ugly business. Such is history.”
Morris’s argument is typical of many Israelis who find themselves trapped between the truths about Israel’s creation and remaining committed to the Zionist cause. Some abandon the ideology which preserves a Jewish ethno-nationalist state in historic Palestine because of the moral dilemma it presents. Others continue to insist that the Zionist cause supersedes all moral and ethical considerations, even if that means justifying ethnic cleansing, racism and the crime of apartheid.
In light of his background, Morris’s take on Israel’s use of biological weapons and poison is all the more interesting. His article with Kedar – “‘Cast Thy Bread’: Israeli Biological Warfare during the 1948 War” – was published by Middle Eastern Studies. According to Haaretz, the article is a rarity because it was researched and published against the wishes of the Israeli security establishment, which has tried for years to block any embarrassing historical documents that expose war crimes against Arabs, such as murdering prisoners, ethnic cleansing and destroying villages. Moreover, the article is based on original documents stored in the Israel State Archive as well as other archives.
The article provides details of how scientists from the Scientific Corps, together with battlefield units, were involved in a systematic campaign to poison water wells and spread typhoid bacteria in Arab villages and cities as well as among the invading armies of Egypt and Jordan. The objective was to frighten the Arab-Palestinian population, to force them to leave and to weaken the Arab armies. It is claimed that the use of biological warfare was approved by the founder of the Israeli state and its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.
Among the examples of the use of poison discussed in the article is the deployment of typhoid germs sent in bottles to the southern front. Morris and Kedar shed light on the Israeli soldiers sent with the poison to Acre and the Galilee village of Ilabun. According to British, Arab and Red Cross documents, dozens of local residents of Acre were poisoned and became severely ill. An unknown number of them died.
The same method is also said to have been used in Gaza in May 1948, a week after Israel proclaimed its independence. Apparently two Jewish soldiers from a Special Forces unit posed as Arabs and infiltrated Gaza with tubes containing the typhoid germs. Their mission was to poison the local water supply to stop the advance of the Egyptian army. However, they were arrested and tortured, and then sentenced to death by an Egyptian military court in August 1948.
The use of biological weapons has been illegal for nearly a century, since the 1925 Geneva Protocol. This prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons in international armed conflicts. Although Israel, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea and Comoros have refused to commit to the protocol, 183 other states have done so.
While Israel has never publicly admitted to the use of chemical weapons it has been caught red-handed on several occasions. One such was the botched attempt to assassinate Palestinian political leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman, on 25 September, 1997. The brazen attempt on the life of the then 41-year-old head of the Hamas Political Bureau sparked a diplomatic row which threatened to wreck the peace deal between Jordan and Israel. The crisis ended with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu making a number of humiliating concessions.
A six-member Mossad team arrived in Amman a week before the assassination using false Canadian passports. The plan was clear: kill the exiled Hamas leader using a lethal toxin without leaving any trace of the killers. The idea was that after the toxin had been administered covertly, Meshaal would go about the rest of his day as normal and then, when tiredness overcame him, he would take a nap, never to wake up again; he was expected to die within 48 hours. Two of the Mossad agents delivered the toxin as planned but were captured by Meshaal’s bodyguard while trying to flee from the scene.
Hours after the arrest of the agents, the Israelis hatched a plan to diffuse the situation. With the diplomatic consequence of his actions dawning on him, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to conceal the botched assassination attempt from the rest of the world. He dispatched Mossad head Danni Yatom to plead with King Hussain of Jordan for the agents’ release. He failed to diffuse the situation and instead sparked a diplomatic crisis with the Hashemite Kingdom, which had normalised relations with the Zionist state three years earlier. The King had gone out on a limb to sign a peace treaty with Israel against the wishes of his people. Following pressure from the US and under the threat to the peace treaty, the Israelis delivered the antidote. Meshaal was saved with just hours to spare.
Nobody should be too surprised, therefore, at the fact that Israel used biological weapons against the Palestinians in 1948. The occupation state also has nuclear weapons, which it has never allowed to be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or anyone else for that matter. In short, the state is a depository for weapons of mass destruction and has used them against Palestinian civilians.
Has Israel been sanctioned, invaded and occupied by the West as a result? Of course not. Yet again, the West’s hypocrisy on such matters has been exposed, this time by an unlikely duo: Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar.
Attacking the strategically vital Crimean Bridge was clearly not a new idea for Ukraine and its anti-Russia allies. In fact, UK intelligence officials reportedly commissioned a study in April examining ways to blow up the key transportation link across the Kerch Strait.
The secret plot was drawn up at the request of senior British Army intelligence operative Chris Donnelly, the Grayzone reported on Tuesday, citing internal documents and correspondence that the investigative journalism outlet obtained from an unidentified source. The stated goal was to destroy the bridge to cut off a key Russian supply route, isolate military forces in Crimea and temporarily block maritime access to the Sea of Azov.
The attack roadmap was titled, ‘Audacious: Support for Ukraine Maritime Raiding Operations’, and it was produced by UK military veteran Hugh Ward, according to the documents obtained by Grayzone. Donnelly, who’s also a veteran NATO advisor, called the plans “very impressive indeed.”
Ward laid out multiple options for blowing up the $4 billion bridge, including a cruise missile attack targeting concrete pillars on each side of the central steel arch. He also examined using divers or underwater drones to attach limpet mines to pillars at the “weakest part” of the structure.
Although last week’s attack on the bridge was carried out using a truck bomb, rather than the options discussed in the UK analysis, there are indications that British spies had shared their findings with Ukraine’s government “at the highest levels,” Grayzone said. The outlet obtained an email in which Donnelly forwarded the plans to Lithuanian Defense Minister Audrius Butkevicius.
Reached by phone, Ward didn’t deny that he prepared the attack plans for Donnelly, Grayzone said. “I’m going to have a chat with Chris and confirm with him what he’s prepared for me to release,” Ward told the outlet.
Although the Crimean Bridge is crossed by thousands of civilians daily, the UK study included no reference to avoiding non-combatant casualties. Saturday’s bombing, as it turned out, killed at least four civilians. Russian President Vladimir Putin called the blast a terrorist attack and indicated that Monday’s air strikes against infrastructure targets in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities were carried out in response to the bridge incident.
Ukrainian media outlets reported that the attack was perpetrated by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Senior officials in Ukraine’s government celebrated the bombing and made jokes about it. The SBU posted a photo of the damaged bridge with a note saying, “The sun is rising, the bridge is burning beautifully.” Senior presidential aide Mikhail Podoliak posted a Twitter message calling the blast “just the beginning.”
I have been puzzling over the ever-augmenting Black Budget since about the time the U.S. government began openly assassinating suspects, including U.S. citizens, without indictment, much less conviction in a court of law, for capital crimes. Tim Weiner’s groundbreaking work Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990) explains how the means to commit crimes under cover of state secrets privilege all began with the Manhattan Project. Like so many other aspects of the sprawling defense and security apparatus which continues to expand like an amoeba, engulfing nearly every aspect of American culture, the Black Budget took on a life of its on during the Cold War.
The stakes were admittedly high: freedom or slavery? Put that way, it seemed eminently reasonable to policymakers at the time to devise intricate mechanisms shrouded from public view in order to do whatever needed to be done to keep the inhabitants of the Western world both safe and free. In their view, it was strategic; it was tactical; and it had to be secret, in order to succeed. Beginning with the Manhattan Project, through which atomic bombs were developed for the first time in human history, the perceived need to keep newly developed weapons systems shrouded in secrecy, for fear that the enemy might develop the same, arose out of a recognition of just how devastating those weapons could be. Little Boy and Fat Man were notoriously tested on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, and with the U.S. government’s demonstrated willingness to deploy such weapons, the nuclear arms race was on.
Once a chunk of the defense budget had been made black to keep new weapons technology secret, it did not take long for entire systems of clandestine operations, today known as “black ops,” to emerge and expand as well. Again, we have Tim Weiner to thank for having done us the service of documenting in his indispensable work Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007) at least some of what went on during the Cold War. Legacy of Ashes is based on a trove of some 50,000 CIA documents first declassified near the end of the twentieth century. But today, long after the Soviet Union collapsed, the secrecy apparatus put in place by well-meaning—if sometimes confused, inept, deluded and occasionally outright insane—bureaucrats has come to be a seemingly permanent fixture of our world. At more than $80 billion, the Black Budget now exceeds the entire military budget of nearly all other governments.
We may, if so inclined, most charitably explain the persistence of the Black Budget by appeal to bureaucratic habits (which do die hard…), even when the rational grounds for the secrecy no longer obtain. The strategic grounds originally used to justify the Black Budget disappeared with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., but so did the tactical grounds, given that advanced nuclear weapons systems are already possessed by several governments, and the technology has been shared with others as well—whether by spies, defectors or simple mercenaries. The secrets, then, remain secrets, ironically enough, only to the very citizens who pay for the systems, including nearly all of their elected representatives.
Legislators continue nonetheless reflexively to approve every new defense budget, along with any requests for funding which anyone cares to cast as a matter of national defense. Indeed, embedding controversial, non-defense measures within National Defense Authorization Acts (NDA) has become a tried-and-true technique of passing new laws which would never have been ratified on their own, as stand-alone bills. A notable and relevant example is the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, which was rolled into the NDA of 2013. This tactic works because any congressperson who votes against “national defense” becomes an instantly denounced target by the political opposition and the media.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower presciently warned in 1961 about the danger of perversely prioritizing state means of mass homicide over every other thing. How this ultimately came to fruition has been illuminated by Robert Higgs, author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987), who shows how historical crises invariably expand the power of the state, the agents of which are loath to give any of it back. Even when the originating crisis is somehow mitigated or resolved, the government does not retract in size. Instead, it continues to “ratchet up” in response to each new crisis, with the previous expansion regarded as the new baseline.
Everyone is aware of this dynamic on some level, whether or not they spend much time reflecting on foreign affairs. We all know, to take a considerably less grave example than the summary execution of persons deemed “suspicious” by anonymous analysts, that when we prepare to fly anywhere in the world from the United States, we are not permitted to transport in our carry-on luggage any liquids or gels in volumes greater than 100ml (~3.3 ounces). Why do we still have to remove our footwear to get through airport security, more than two decades after September 11, 2001? Because some incompetent dude thought that he could use explosives hidden in his shoes to blow up a plane.
The post-9/11 travel security measures seem unlikely ever to change, and we can also expect the structural features of the sprawling homeland defense apparatus, including mass surveillance of citizens not suspected of any crimes, to continue to grow, given the conservative nature of belief conjoined with the bet-hedging behavior of lawmakers. Setting what is arguably bribery by lobbyists to one side, the primary driving factor in the minds of politicians who wish to be reelected is plausibly that they want not to be blamed, should anything untoward happen after they vote to reduce the defense budget or eliminate any of the security-related laws already in place. And God forbid that unelected bureaucrats who dispense unaccountable Black Budget funds at their caprice should be “hobbled” through oversight!
The reasoning of opportunistic politicians appears to be that adding even more restrictions, filling the (feckless) defense department’s already overflowing coffers, and allowing off-the-leash bureaucrats to do whatever they may deem necessary in the name of national defense, will all be seen in a positive light by citizens who are counting on the government to serve as their protector. This fictional image is maintained, against all empirical evidence of the actual outcomes of every military intervention since World War II, because the populace is constantly “tutored” by the government-coopted mainstream media to support anything whatsoever labeled by anyone as “defense”. Examples include the “War on Terror”; the “humanitarian intervention” on behalf of the Libyan people; the empowerment of Saddam Hussein; the arming of radical Islamists in Afghanistan and, later, in Syria; the bombing of Kosovo; and the goading of Russian President Putin in 2022 to the point where he may opt to use nukes. Despite the human misery which these undertakings have caused, all have been “worth it,” according to mainstream media pundits, and as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright might say.
Now, given the tendency of government restrictions enacted in response to crises to expand, the power of government authorities in such circumstances to augment, and the natural resistance of human beings to relinquish any of that power, the persistence and expansion of the Black Budget may not seem puzzling in the least. Having been trained quite effectively to believe that “national defense” is always and everywhere good, few citizens would find it troubling even to learn that trillions of Pentagon dollars have been “lost track of”—creating what is in effect an enormous supplement to the Black Budget, which should perhaps be termed the Ultra Black Budget.
Albeit considerably less charitable than the “bureaucratic habit” explanation for the persistence and growth of the Black Budget, equally plausible is that it has created a class of people who now wear what is tantamount to the ring of Gyges (Plato’s Republic). They are capable of committing crimes invisibly, with no possible risk of being redressed, much less punished, for their morally dubious activities. Why would anyone in such a position ever renounce that privilege, the unassailable power to do anything at all to anyone at all for any reason at all and with complete impunity? To anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of human nature and the reality of corruption, it should be clear that the ongoing pretext of state secrets privilege has opened up the possibility of an entire criminal underworld operating under the aegis of the U.S. government and fully funded by taxpayers.
What it worse, far from serving either strategic or tactical roles in defending our waning republic, the Black Budget is arguably being used to undermine it. Let us take as a possible example the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines between Russia and Europe. If this intentional act of piracy was perpetrated by the United States, then it is equivalent to a declaration of war against Russia. As a Black Op, the secret need never be admitted to anyone, even if it leads to World War III and nuclear holocaust. And therein lies the irony: the means to destroy the United States in toto are now possessed by a few individuals with access to the Black Budget, even though all of what they do is paid for by citizens under the assumption that they are being protected. Such is the logic of the legislatively shielded Black Budget that, if in fact the Nord Stream sabotage was a U.S. operation, then anyone who knows what happened and who dares to go public with compelling evidence of the truth becomes guilty of espionage, if not treason, and subject to the federal death penalty, if convicted. Conviction?
One of the most significant expansions of federal power in the twenty-first century has been the executive’s elimination of the requirement of conviction in a court of law before state execution. This assault on the most basic principles of the republic came about in incremental steps, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, and was made possible by the technological development of the ability to kill by remote control.
The U.S. government’s first publicly vaunted execution of suspects by lethal drone outside a war zone was carried out under the authorization of President George W. Bush, on November 3, 2002, in Yemen, when a group of men were incinerated while driving down a road. Nearly twenty years later, President Joe Biden claimed to have terminated the life of alleged al Qaeda mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, Afghanistan, on July 31, 2022. For his part, President Donald Trump openly bragged about having used a lethal drone to eliminate Iranian Major General Qasem Soleiman on January 3, 2020, at Baghdad International Airport, as though this brazen act of premeditated, intentional homicide were somehow noble or courageous.
Before Biden and Trump, it was President Barack Obama who in 2011 summarily executed not only Osama bin Laden, when he could have been taken prisoner, but also Anwar al-Awlaki, which places Obama in a league all his own, having intentionally denied even a U.S. citizen his right to stand trial for whatever crimes he was believed to have committed. (Note that an American, Kamal Derwish, was killed by the Bush administration in its publicly vaunted drone strike on November 3, 2002, but this fact appears to have been discovered after, not before, the strike.) Had Anwar al-Awlaki been found guilty of treason in a federal court, he might have been sentenced to death. Obama opted instead to streamline the process, in the manner of every tyrant since time immemorial, by imposing the death penalty on the basis of what the president, a fallible human being, had been persuaded by bureaucrats to believe was evidence of the suspect’s guilt. John Brennan, Obama’s drone killing czar at the time, was promoted in 2013 to the directorship of the CIA.
Obama also authorized the execution of U.S. citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, for which no official explanation was ever offered by his killers. Being a male and having recently celebrated his sixteenth birthday, the younger al-Awlaki did satisfy the Obama administration’s scrupulous standard for classifying a corpse as an Enemy Killed in Action (EKIA). Yes, the label EKIA was applied to all men who found themselves at the receiving end of missiles launched by U.S. drones, whether inside or outside areas of active hostility, provided only that they were of military age. We have Daniel Hale to thank for having revealed to U.S. citizens the unsavory truth about the drone program, that the burden of proof was inverted by the drone killers, who defined their victims as guilty until proven innocent. Note that Hale was rewarded for his courageous act of whistleblowing with a federal prison sentence.
The longstanding international proscription to political assassination has been flouted throughout the twenty-first century, and the string of intentional acts of homicide perpetrated and openly acknowledged by four successive administrations together illustrate that the U.S. executive is no longer constrained in any way by the letter of international law. Once someone has been labeled a “terrorist” by appropriately situated bureaucrats, the U.S. executive grants the drone assassins the license to take him out. Given this normalization of assassination, what precisely is the Black Budget being used for, if people deemed dangerous by the U.S. government may be summarily executed without any sort of judicial process whatsoever?
No one privy to the details, the line items shrouded in secrecy, is permitted to share them publicly without risking harsh sanctions. But logic suggests that the Black Budget and the ancillary Ultra Black Budget (the trillions of dollars “lost track of” by the Pentagon) are being either siphoned off by mercenary criminals, in yet another version of the lobbyist kick-back scheme, or else used to commit crimes which are even worse than the summary execution of suspected criminals without trial. Assuming for the sake of argument the latter to be true, if government officials are now permitted premeditatedly and intentionally to assassinate human beings, including U.S. citizens, perceived of as potentially dangerous, then what is it that the Ring of Gyges wearers are not permitted to do and which must, for allegedly strategic and tactical reasons, be done secretly and beyond the reach of any form of accountability?
There is no proof that the U.S. government perpetrated the Nord Stream attack and thereby increased the likelihood of nuclear war, in which millions of Americans could be expected to die. But undermining democratically elected foreign governments, through inciting mass unrest and plotting coups are enterprises in which the U.S. government is known to have engaged repeatedly. Again, a great deal of that sort of activity went on during the Cold War, on the grounds that the evil Communists could not be allowed to spread their ideology around the world. But communism is no longer a threat, so it is unclear what the rationale for undermining democratically elected governments is supposed to be today, beyond maintaining U.S. global military hegemony.
In this post-Communist world, examples of crimes worse than the summary execution of terrorist suspects (some of whom are in fact innocent) could be the summary execution (or attempted elimination) of persons whose outspoken opposition to the U.S. hegemon is perceived of as threatening to the defense apparatus itself. Such figures may have included Julian Assange, Michael Hastings, John McAfee, et al.—anyone who has dared to reject in an effective way the reigning narrative that “We are good, and they are evil,” which has been used to rationalize mass homicide and destruction wherever and whenever the current crop of U.S. elites happen to please.
Consider the plans reportedly drawn up to assassinate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange while he was living under asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It is undeniable that this sort of initiative is both illegal and criminal, and yet it is, one gathers, fully funded by taxpayers. Less clear examples of the same phenomenon may or may not include the fate suffered by a long list of other “annoying” persons who came to tragic ends either by their own or someone else’s hand. The case of Julian Assange is especially troubling because he quite successfully exposed U.S. war crimes, and for his efforts he has been discredited and criminalized as though he were a mass murderer. It is true that Assange is still among the living, which cannot be said of the many other arguably less fortunate nonviolent dissidents eliminated by governments throughout history. But Assange has by now been incapacitated to the point where it can be said without hyperbole that he no longer is the person who he once was. His power to express dissent has been stripped entirely away. The Nord Stream sabotage “mystery” is in fact just the sort of event which Assange, if not shackled and muffled, might have been able to illuminate with the aid of whistleblowers.
Needless to say, this schema does not bode well for the future of free people, and least of all dissidents who criticize the government, pointing out its crimes and contradictions. President Biden recently announced that “domestic extremists” currently constitute the gravest danger to the republic, an allegation which he claims is based on reports from “our very own intelligence agencies,” presumably including the CIA and the FBI. Both of these organizations have evinced a morally unsavory “scorecard” mentality in recent years, attempting to rack up as many EKIA (in the case of the CIA) or federal convictions (in the case of the FBI) as possible—by all means necessary.
In the drone killing program run throughout the Middle East by the CIA in the twenty-first century, analysts have been generously remunerated for finding potential future terrorists to kill, with ever-lengthening hit lists of targets created through bribing informants on the ground while mining the cellphone data of persons previously suspected of terrorism. Meanwhile, in the homeland, FBI agents have gone to great lengths to identify potential future members of factional terrorist groups, and even to lure them into complicity in conspiracies to commit violent plots which were in fact masterminded by government officials and informants, who provided funding to hundreds of hapless losers who ended up being convicted and are now serving sentences in federal penitentiaries. It sounds preposterous, if not impossible, but such techniques of entrapment have been well-documented by Trevor Aaronson in his extremely disturbing exposé, Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism (2013).
Given the ways in which suspected potential terrorists were targeted and ensnared by the CIA and the FBI throughout the “War on Terror,” we should be very wary of anyone who maintains that persons in the homeland who reject the current administration’s narratives are properly labeled “extremists”. “Extremism” is a concept by now wed to the notion of “terrorism,” and by calling dissenters at home “extremists,” the path is paved for bureaucrats to deploy the very same “tools” against them.
By stripping our civil liberties away and propelling the nation toward World War III, the bureaucrats currently protected by state secrets privilege are on track, and indeed seem determined, to destroy what remains of the republic. Nowhere is the danger before us more evident than in the shockingly reckless handling of the crisis in Ukraine by war propagandists posing as diplomats. It has become abundantly clear that the only way to rein in what has transmogrified into tyrannical rule by an unaccountable oligarchic bureaucracy is to abolish the Black Budget and cease funding any of the network of activities being perpetrated under cover of a spurious and obsolete need for secrecy.
Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters.
“Putin is a legitimate military target… he needs to know that he’s on our target list at this point,” Bolton stated.
By Drago Bosnic | October 10, 2022
Just as the world thought that the lack of basic etiquette (diplomatic or any other) in the United States establishment couldn’t possibly get worse, that same establishment goes beyond anyone’s imagination (or worst nightmares in this particular case). On Friday, October 7, during an interview on CBS, former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, infamous for his insistence on starting wars against Venezuela, Iran and North Korea or escalating the ongoing ones (such as Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc), said Russian President Vladimir Putin is on the US target list and threatened he might be assassinated.
“I think we should make it clear publicly so that not just Putin but that all the top Russian leadership… that if Putin authorizes the use of a nuclear weapon he’s signing his own suicide note,” the infamous neoconservative war-hawk said.
Bolton insisted that Putin is “a legitimate military target” since he heads the command and control structure of all Russian strategic forces. Bolton further stated that this should be official US policy.
“He’s a legitimate military target… he needs to know that he’s on our target list at this point,” he concluded.
Bolton’s comments effectively boil down to calls for the US to use any opportunity to assassinate the president of Russia. It cannot possibly be overstated just how dangerous, destabilizing and irresponsible such rhetoric is, especially coming from high-ranking officials, whether they currently hold office or not. However, Bolton’s statements are simply a continuation of a string of his recent provocative actions. He also discussed an op-ed he recently authored for the online military journal 1945, where he openly called for a coup in Russia.
“There is no long-term prospect for peace and security in Europe without regime change in Russia. Russians are already discussing it, quietly, for obvious reasons. For the United States and others pretending that the issue is not before will do far more harm than good,” Bolton wrote in the aforementioned op-ed.
“To avoid the war simply grinding along indefinitely, we must alter today’s calculus. Carefully assisting Russian dissidents to pursue regime change might just be the answer,” he continued.
Bolton stated that a color revolution-style coup (or “regime change” as he calls it) was necessary, or at least an attempt to sabotage and cause division in the Russian establishment from the inside.
“Actually effecting regime change is doubtless the hardest problem, but it does not require foreign military forces. The key is for Russians themselves to exacerbate divisions among those with real authority, the siloviki, the ‘men of power.’ Disagreements and animosities already exist, as in all authoritarian regimes, exploitable as dissidents set their minds to it. Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank outside the Russian White House in 1991 evidenced the fracturing of the Soviet ruling class. Once regime coherence and solidarity shatter, change is possible,” Bolton wrote.
Although Bolton’s comments may be dismissed or ignored altogether, they will surely not go unnoticed in Moscow, as Russia is faced with increasingly aggressive actions and warlike rhetoric coming from the political West, particularly the US. Such statements come at a time when tensions are escalating by the day, especially as other US officials, both former and current, have been commenting in a similar fashion. This also includes US President Joe Biden himself, whose “nuclear apocalypse” remarks stunned the world in recent days.
It is also not the first time the US has called for a coup in Russia. In late March, President Biden stated the same during a speech in Warsaw, when he said that “Putin cannot remain in power“, which later prompted many White House spokespeople to try and distort the remarks. In contrast, Russia and its top brass have exercised restraint. There have been no reciprocal comments or actions in response to such blatant threats, but there have been warnings that Russia will defend itself by any means necessary. However, even these statements have been taken out of context and then turned into supposed “threats” by the mainstream propaganda machine of the political West.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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