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The Taliban did in one year what Washington couldn’t in 20, sparking new panic

The ban on Afghan poppy cultivation is set to hit Europe’s heroin supplies

By Rachel Marsden | RT | April 11, 2023

It’s been nearly a year since the Taliban banned Afghan poppy farming used for the production of opioids. The impact of the move is set to hit global markets sometime soon, given the delay from farm to customer.

You’d think that would bring a welcome sigh of relief. Apparently not. Reports are now suggesting that a lack of Afghan heroin on the global market and a reduction of available natural opioids like heroin could lead to increased use of synthetic opioids like fentanyl. If that’s the case, then it’s only because Washington and the West are about as competent at curtailing skyrocketing drug overdose deaths as they were at tackling the cultivation of Afghan opioids back when they had control of the country. Synthetic opioids from China and Mexico are increasingly being used, as are those procured through prescriptions within America’s own healthcare system.

Over the course of the US-led Global War on Terror that kicked off in Afghanistan in 2001, heroin overdoses in the US and elsewhere spiked. Despite having control over the country and its government for two decades, Washington not only failed to curtail farming and exports of Afghan opium, but oversaw an increase.

In February 2004, then US Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Robert Charles, outlined a new policy for countering “narcoterrorism” in Afghanistan before Congress. He cited a desire to assist the US-backed Afghan government with its objective “to eliminate opium poppy cultivation and trade in 10 years.” The project would involve deploying CIA-linked USAID to poppy-growing areas to help find alternative farming solutions. But there have always been strong doubts over the sincerity of such efforts. A US Department of Justice policy paper from 1991 accused the CIA of “complicity in the narcotics trade” in Afghanistan, underscoring that “covert CIA operations in Afghanistan, for example, have transformed South Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market.”

The CIA would certainly be in a position to know, having backed Mujahideen jihadist fighters against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the Cold War while the trafficking occurred right under its nose. Apparently old habits die hard.

In 2010, Former Director of the Federal Drug Control Service of Russia, Viktor Ivanov, met with NATO officials to request a mandate for destroying the poppy fields, citing 30,000 opium-related deaths in Russia. “We cannot be in a situation where we remove the only source of income of people who live in the second poorest country in the world without being able to provide them with an alternative,” NATO spokesman James Appathurai replied, according to Reuters.

Clearly, they just weren’t that interested. It now seems that the US and NATO counter insurgency mission served in part as cover for safeguarding and protecting the opium fields from destruction – which the Taliban had already gone about doing before the 2001 US invasion. Propping up Western proxies doesn’t come cheap, and some things simply aren’t fit for the accounting books back home. It’s no secret that the CIA has a history of using narcotic trafficking to support US interests abroad while simultaneously accusing the local opposition of doing just that – from Nicaragua and Haiti to Southeast Asia, Indochina, and even France.

According to a State Department fact sheet from the pre-2001 archives, Taliban poppy cultivation bans “lacked credibility.” Yet it was Washington’s public proclamations of eradication that never came to fruition. Similarly, Washington laughably charged Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with “narco-terrorism partnership with the FARC for the past 20 years,” in March 2020. This was despite Washington’s unconditional backing of South American ally, Colombia – an actual narco-state whose cocaine production exploded under the leadership of former President Ivan Duque even as President Joe Biden introduced him at the White House in 2022 as “my friend.” Biden added: “We’ve known each other for a long while, and we were reminiscing about how far back we go… I’ve been deeply engaged with the relationship with Colombia for a long time, going back more than 20 years to that old Plan Colombia.”

Funny that Biden should mention Plan Colombia – a US-backed multi-billion dollar program to fight drugs and insurgency in the country, which is largely considered to be a counter narcotics failure. It didn’t even really provide lasting counterinsurgency results, according to members of former President Barack Obama’s own administration, concluding that “our collective failure to control either drug abuse or drug trafficking has exacted an enormous human toll.”

Washington has historically been both disingenuous and incompetent when it comes to fighting illicit drug use. The fact that the Taliban finally has an opportunity to do what Washington was never able or willing to do – despite claims to the contrary – closes one spigot. However, it won’t save Washington from its own failures on the drug front.

Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.

April 11, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

British ex-soldier turned journalist charged with spying in Afghanistan

The Cradle | April 9, 2023

The Afghan government detained three British nationals under suspicion of spying for their country; one of those accused was a former soldier stationed in Afghanistan, now supposedly working as a journalist, according to TOLOnews.

According to a source cited by the news site, the former soldier was stationed in the southern province of Helmand, a deeply contested area of Afghanistan, during the occupation.

“If they come here illegally, or violated the laws of Afghanistan or worked as spies for other countries, it is considered a crime, and any country has the right to detain such foreign nationals and introduce them to the relevant organizations,” said Sarwar Niazai, a military analyst.

The former soldier Kevin Cornwell and another British national were detained by the Taliban-led government on 11 January 2023, both supposedly carrying illegal firearms. A total of three UK citizens are currently detained in Afghanistan.

Toryalai Zazai, a Taliban combat veteran, told the Afghan news channel that “the country should be rescued from the spies, the country should be rescued from the intelligence circles. The Islamic Emirate should not allow these invader countries to send their intelligence representatives to our country.”

Meanwhile, UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman said, “If there are British citizens abroad, then the UK government is going to do whatever it takes to ensure that they are safe,” in response to the arrests.

Journalists around the world face increasing endangerment as the profession has become intertwined with foreign intelligence services to carry out their work.

Operation Mockingbird is perhaps the most well-known activity undertaken by the CIA during the cold war to manipulate news organizations to shape the coverage of events.

In addition, the CIA program aimed to collect intelligence via journalists by either infiltrating news organizations or bribing individuals.

Carl Bernstein unveiled the secret operation by the CIA in 1977, uncovering the depth of the program, which included the recruitment of journalists in various institutions around the world.

Following the damning revelations, the CIA admitted to having recruited at least 400 Journalists and 25 organizations worldwide.

“To this day, the CIA still attempts to monitor and manipulate public opinion through this despicable practice. The so-called truth that underpins a news story, from the perspective of the U.S. government, is not worth mentioning at all, with news media just being used as a tool to safeguard the country’s hegemony in the world,” writes the People’s Daily Online.

Meanwhile, a Russian court charged Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich with espionage on 7 April.

Gershkovich, who denied the charges, said he only maintained journalistic activities in Russia and did not work as a spy for a foreign intelligence service.

The White House commented on the situation, saying it will “do everything we can” to ensure his release.

Evan is not a spy; Evan has never been a spy,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday.

April 9, 2023 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Pentagon keeps secrets on cancer-causing toxins – lawsuit

RT | April 4, 2023

The Pentagon has hidden information on uranium, nerve gas and other hazardous materials that allegedly caused American troops to fall ill while stationed at an Uzbek military base in the early years of the war in Afghanistan, groups representing ex-soldiers have claimed in a lawsuit.

The federal court lawsuit was filed on Monday in Connecticut, demanding that the Pentagon turn over its records on the toxins to which troops were exposed at the Karshi-Khanabad Air Base, known as “K2,” during US operations there from 2001 to 2005. At least 15,777 US service members were deployed at the base, from which US troop transports and air strikes on targets in Afghanistan were staged.

“These K2 victims have been living with this truth inside their bodies for over 20 years, and many died as that toxic truth took them to their early graves,” Kim Brooks, a board member for the Stronghold Freedom Foundation, said on Monday at a press briefing in New Haven, Connecticut. “Yet we still do not know exactly what lurked in the air and water and the earth at K2. We do not know because the government refuses to release the records of the toxins found at K2.”

Brooks’ husband, US Army Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Brooks, died of a brain tumor at age 36 in 2004, less than three years after being stationed at K2. A preliminary study by the US Army found in 2015 that K2 veterans were five times more likely than other troops to develop cancer. The contaminants allegedly included pools of “black goo” that caused troops to pass out.

A US Department of Defense spokesman contacted by ABC News on Monday declined to comment on the lawsuit. The Pentagon has claimed that it’s doing a more in-depth investigation because the 2015 study was too limited to show a definitive link between K2 and serious illnesses.

US Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who joined the plaintiff groups at Monday’s press conference, said the lawsuit shows the government’s “neglect and disregard of our veterans.” He added that the list of hazardous materials to which troops were exposed at K2 is “staggering, and the neglect is stunning.”

The lawsuit marks just the latest controversy over exposure of US service members to carcinogens and other toxins. The Pentagon acknowledged last month that US military pilots and ground crew members have contracted various types of cancer at abnormally high rates. In February, the US Air Force expanded its investigation of cancer risks for troops stationed at the country’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) bases. Veterans have claimed high rates of cancer, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma, among people who worked at the ICBM bases.

April 4, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Biden’s Sham Summit Won’t Save World Democracy

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | April 3, 2023

President Joe Biden triumphantly saved world democracy last week (at least according to the White House scorecard). Biden co-hosted another Summit for Democracy, a repeat performance after the December 2021 test run. Biden sounded like a Quaalude Savior as he recycled his “inflection point of history” cliché. But the summit proved again that politicians are perils to freedom regardless of their prattle.

Biden promised that “we are seeing real indications that we are turning the tide” in favor of democracy around the globe. Practically no one who’s not on Biden’s payroll agrees. The president’s boast was like taking a victory lap around the deck of the Titanic.

Last year democracy “declined around the world for the 17th consecutive year,” according to Freedom House. Twice as many nations are veering “toward authoritarianism” as towards democracy, according to The Economist. Most shocking: the United States is now categorized as a less free nation than Mongolia, Mauritius, and 56 other nations says Freedom House (funded by the U.S. government, so they must be trustworthy). 

Team Biden believes a big problem with democracy is that politicians don’t have enough power: “Weak state capacity.” In reality, elected rulers around the globe are turning themselves into dictators who increasingly repress their citizens. Rather than representative governments, elected regimes have turned into Leviathan Democracies far superior to the citizenry.

Consider Biden’s record in the Oval Office. Federal judges and/or the Supreme Court have struck down Biden’s eviction moratorium for deadbeat renters, his $400 billion cancellation of federal student debt, his “climate change” decree shutting down power plants, his mask mandate for airline passengers, and his edict compelling all employees of large companies and all federal employees to get COVID vaccine injections. But all of Biden’s decrees are supposedly “pro-democracy” because he won the 2020 election.

“Democracy delivers” was a key talking point for Team Biden at the summit. Presumably, any increase in government handouts automatically increased government legitimacy. Unfortunately, “leashing politicians” is not on the Biden Bingo Card for Saving Democracy™. The American Bar Association recently warned that “the Rule of Law is in Decline Globally” but it is “not a central focus of the U.S. Government’s approach” on democracy. A top ABA official warned, “Discussing sustainable development in the absence of rule of law…is at best delusional and at worst dishonest.” Three-quarters of nations representing almost 85% of the world’s population recently “experienced declines in rule of law,” according to the World Justice Project. In lieu of “government under the law,” Team Biden offers “the People Centered Justice Multistakeholder Cohort’s Declaration and Call to Action.” Sloshing out more government handouts to activist groups who score media headlines was “close enough for government work” to the rule of law.

Rather than a system of informed consent, democracy is degenerating into regimes which blindfold citizens and demand unlimited submission. At the summit, government officials made it clear that freedom of speech is a luxury that democracy can no longer afford. Secretary of Anthony State Blinken declared, “The misuse of technology and the spread of digital authoritarianism must end. We must stand for an affirmative, values-driven, and rights-respecting vision of democracy in the digital era.” “Affirmative” and “values-driven” become code words to legitimize pervasive government censorship. Blinken “proposed a ‘delicate balance’ between ‘openness and security,’ ‘protecting speech and preventing incitement,’ and ‘fostering innovation and limiting the power of Big Tech,’” as Tom Parker observed for Reclaim the Net.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sermonized on a “Countering the Rise of Digital Authoritarianism” panel. He was joined by YouTube CEO Neil Mohan, who could have boasted of how Washington censors his channel. An internal DHS document reveals plans to crack down on “inaccurate” information on “the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.” Any facts which embarrass Team Biden are automatically “inaccurate’ and ripe for suppression. Federally-funded entities spearheaded the censorship of true information on COVID vaccine side effects to bolster Biden’s effort to inject every American.

Eight governments, including Ukraine and Poland, issued a call for more censorship on the first day of the summit. They called for tech companies to take action “against disinformation that undermines our peace and stability” and to suppress posts that “weaken our support to Ukraine amid Russia’s war of aggression.” The letter asserted that “hostile foreign powers are using [social media] to spread false narratives that contradict reporting from fact-based news outlets,” especially the endless reports on the glorious victories of the Ukrainian army. Facebook responded by promising to ramp up its censorship, including relying on “a third-party fact-checking service to determine if posts contain false claims.” Some “third-party fact checking services” have been government fronts. As journalist Aaron Maté scoffed, “We are fueling a proxy war in Ukraine in order to defend freedom, such as the freedom to censor dissenting views on our proxy war in Ukraine.”

Is the “will of the people” so fragile that it can no longer survive exposure to any thoughts that officialdom disapproves? Does winning an election automatically convert tinhorn politicians into minor deities entitled to control the thoughts of any voter? Nullifying freedom of speech converts citizens into vassals that politicians can use and abuse as they please.

Throughout the summit proceedings, piety was thicker than hog slop at an Iowa slaughterhouse. Secretary Blinken declared on March 28, “No woman or girl should face harassment and abuse in-person or online.” The State Department’s effort on this score was propelled by its Global Engagement Center, which previously pressured Twitter to cancel hundreds of thousands of accounts, including vast numbers of hapless Americans. That Center is leading the fight against “gendered disinformation” and whooped up a report on “the need for more research to tackle this scourge.” According to the United Nations, a prime example of this “scourge” is “Zoom Bombing.” That atrocity occurs when uninvited people crash a Zoom meeting and make rude comments. Is it an international human rights crisis because boneheaded Zoom organizers fail to require pass codes to attend a meeting?

As part of its summit festivities, the Biden administration announced new crackdowns to make it “more difficult for corrupt actors to conceal their identities, assets, and criminal activities.” Despite reform promises at the first summit, there has been no worldwide progress. The U.S. ranks #24 on the international corruption index—even worse than France, according to Transparency International. And that score was calculated before the latest revelations of the Biden family pocketing vast sums from smarmy foreign companies.

Biden boasted that his administration plans to spend more than $9 billion to support democracy worldwide by the end of next year. But U.S. foreign aid programs obliterate the anti-corruption initiatives of the U.S. government. An American Economic Review analysis concluded that “increases in [foreign] aid are associated with contemporaneous increases in corruption,” and that “corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States.” As a Brookings Institution analysis observed, “The history of U.S. assistance is littered with tales of corrupt foreign officials using aid to line their own pockets, support military buildups, and pursue vanity projects.” Torrents of U.S. “aid” helped make Afghanistan one of the most corrupt places on Earth. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), observed, “We need to understand how U.S. policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption.” The U.S. has been “fighting corruption” in Ukraine since the end of the Cold War, and in those decades Ukraine became one of the most corrupt nations in Europe. Biden administration officials helped defeat a congressional proposal to create an Inspector General to audit and oversee the $100 billion the U.S. government has pledged to the government of Ukraine.

But another handout will fix that problem. The Biden administration is bankrolling foreign journalists to fight “kleptocracy”—government of thieves. There is even an aid program entitled “Empowering the Truth Tellers.” (Julian Assange need not apply.) The Biden administration claims to support “independent media” by effectively putting foreign journalists on the U.S. payroll. Those journalists are “independent” because the U.S. government says so, and anyone who disagrees will be labeled an enemy of democracy. Besides, the United States is no role model: it ranks a pathetic #42 in the World Press Freedom Index, worse than Moldova and Guyana, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Biden is “saving” democracy” with buckets of goofy new acronyms: SHE PERSISTS, one of the rallying cries for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, now stands for Supporting Her Empowerment: Political Engagement, Rights, Safety, and Inclusion Strategies to Succeed Investing. And then there was SHE WINS (Support Her Empowerment: Women’s Inclusion for New Security). The Agency for International Development is whooping up PxP—Powered by the People. Did the White House believe acronyms should look like drug prescriptions? ADD stands for Advancing Digital Democracy but policymakers should have worked in an ‘H’ to reflect their cluelessness. ACRF stands for the Anti-Corruption Response Fund. They should have tweaked that one to make it ARF-ARF, to symbolize officialdom’s cravenness to the powers that be.

To safeguard democracy, the Biden administration is creating “the Global Network for Securing Election Integrity [GNSEI], to align on standards and practices for supporting clean elections.” On that score, the Biden administration touts its ballot expanding efforts here at home. The White House “fact sheet” detailing progress on democracy touts the Biden proposal to spend $5 billion on the Postal Service to “support for vote-by-mail, including making ballots postage-free and reducing the cost of other election-related mail for jurisdictions and voters.” Ballot harvesting and unverified absentee ballots will save democracy everywhere! Who knew that the “will of the people” was so fragile that it could be blighted by requiring citizens to purchase one first-class stamp to send in their ballot?

Comic relief failed to redeem the summit. The State Department wanted Americans to make short videos with the hashtag #SummitForDemocracy whooping up “What has democracy made possible in your own life?” Such as falling living standards, soaring inflation, sporadic financial panic, and a befuddled commander-in-chief who doesn’t know if he is in Canada or China? A search on Twitter indicates that almost all the videos made with #SummitforDemocracy hashtags were done by governments or by government-funded entities. Biden’s democracy spiel can’t compete with cat videos.

Revealing all the levels of hypocrisy at the summit would be on par with peeling an onion. Mexico President López Obrador declared at the gathering, “Many of the great crimes against humanity have been committed in the name of God, or in the name of democracy.” Many of the nations showcased at the summit are dutiful U.S. allies, meaning that Washington ignores their oppression.

In his speech last Wednesday, Biden declared that “the power of these summits” is “not just to speak high-minded words.” But even U.S. government officials feared the summit would be an “inconsequential talk shop,” according to The Washington Post. Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass scoffed, “The summit for democracy is a bad idea that won’t go away… American democracy is hardly a model for others.”

Unfortunately, the Pentagon missed the memo on democracy. Since 2008, foreign soldiers who received training from the U.S. military “attempted at least nine coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries,” as journalist Nick Turse reported. The Pentagon denies responsibility for the debacles. But, as Antiwar.com reported, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) declared at a recent congressional hearing, “I think we should at least know how many countries we train the coup plotters.”

Biden concluded his spiel to the Summit, “The great strength of democracy is that it gives us all the tools we need for self-government and self-improvement.” But the tools are controlled by politicians who equate ever greater submission with the triumph of the “will of the people.” Self-government is being defined down to little more than coronating whichever of the rascal’s political parties can offer voters more stuff. With politicians openly championing censorship, Leviathan Democracy is dropping its mask and no longer pretending to give a damn about freedom.

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

April 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

High Stakes as Uncle Sam’s Days of Impunity Are Finally Over

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 28, 2023

Russia and China are determined to hold the American perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage to account. Uncle Sam’s days – indeed decades – of wanton criminality are over. There’s going to be hell to pay as the imperialist tyranny in Washington hits a wall of reality.

Several weeks have gone by with the United States and its Western lackeys stonewalling at the United Nations Security Council, squirming and resisting calls from Moscow and Beijing for an international criminal investigation into the sabotage of the Baltic Sea pipelines that were blown up in September.

A swathe of independent observers, such as American economics professor Jeffrey Sachs and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, have concurred with the investigative report published on February 8 by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh which claims that U.S. President Joe Biden and his senior White House staff ordered the Pentagon to take out the natural gas pipeline that runs along the Baltic Sea bed from Russia to Germany.

Russia and China are adamant about not letting this vital subject be ignored. They want a proper investigation, international accountability and criminal prosecution. Moscow and Beijing are right to insist on this. Washington and its Western allies’ presumption of impunity has gone on for too many decades. The buck stops here and both Russia and China are strong enough to ensure that the United States cannot threaten, blackmail, or arm-twist its way out of scrutiny.

The Nord Stream project is a major international civilian infrastructure, costing in excess of $20 billion to construct over more than a decade. At 1,200 kilometres in length under the Baltic Sea, it is an impressive feat of engineering, symbolizing the mutual benefits of good neighborliness and cooperative trading.

For the United States to blow this pipeline up in order to knock Russia out of the European energy market so that it could muscle in with its own more expensive gas supplies is a shocking act of state terrorism and criminality. It is also potentially an act of war against Russia and callous sabotage against supposed European allies whose citizens are now suffering economic misery from soaring energy bills. German workers have this week shut down the entire economy from industrial protests over collapsing businesses and unbearable cost of living.

Of course, the Nord Stream sabotage is an urgent matter of basic justice, accountability for an atrocious crime, as well as massive international financial reparations. It’s almost hilarious how the self-proclaimed American protagonist of “rules-based global order” is desperately procrastinating over a glaring incident of dereliction and chaos.

But more than the essential obligation of justice is the legacy of impunity. For the perpetrators of such a wanton terrorist act not to be held accountable sets a perilous precedent. Otherwise, what is stopping the state terrorists from repeating equally brazen acts of sabotage and warmongering? The very concept of international law and the United Nations Charter is demolished, not simply undermined.

The Nord Stream incident potentially opens an era of rampant lawlessness and state banditry – by a nuclear superpower, the United States, using its Western minions for cover. The Western news media, in their reluctance to investigate, are also exposed as nothing more than propaganda channels in the service of imperial masters.

The present is reminiscent of the 1930s during a time of fascist expansionism by Nazi Germany and other imperialist nations, including the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Japan, and others. Nazi Germany was not the unique culprit during that earlier time of barbarism, notwithstanding the official Western revisionism of history to absolve itself.

After the Second World War amid the ashes of international destruction and up to 85 million deaths, the United Nations and its Charter were founded to ostensibly enshrine the stricture that there would be no repetition of the 1930s-style lawlessness and state terrorism.

That lofty aspiration was always a pathetic illusion. The decades after WWII saw no halt to the imperialist warmongering and subterfuges carried out primarily by the United States and its Western allies, in particular Britain. What a mockery that the U.S. and Britain were afforded permanent member states of the UN Security Council given that these two rogue powers have been largely responsible for countless wars post-1945. The decades-long wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are but the most notorious war crimes of the Anglo-American “special relationship”.

During the Cold War decades, the Soviet Union provided a limited check on the worst depredations by Western imperialists. The People’s Republic of China was not strong enough to act as a deterrent force.

For about two decades after the Cold War officially ended in 1991 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States rulers perceived a license for “full-spectrum dominance”. Washington embarked on a frenzy of endless wars that up till recently have prevailed.

The first reality check on the unbridled violence of the U.S. imperialists and their NATO henchmen was Russia’s military intervention in Syria in late 2015 to put an end to the Western machinations for yet another regime-change operation. Washington and its accomplices failed in their nefarious goals in Syria, albeit the Americans persist in illegally occupying part of the Arab country and stealing its oil resources.

Ukraine is the full manifestation of the end to impunity for the United States.

Russia under Vladimir Putin has recovered the military strength that was lost with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In some ways, present-day Russia is even more formidable owing to the development of new forms of weapons, such as hypersonic missiles and S-500 air defenses. Also, Russia’s economy is on a sounder footing than the Soviet Union which relied excessively on militarism. Hence, Moscow has been able to withstand the economic assault that Washington and its allies have tried to mount over the Ukraine conflict.

Just as important, too, China has risen to economic and military superpower status. Together, Russia and China now present an invulnerable countervailing force to the United States and its Western allies.

For nearly eight decades after World War Two, the United States was relatively free to run amok, trashing international law and nations’ sovereignty, racking up death tolls by the millions, and terrorizing the planet with its “benign”, narcissistic tyranny.

The conflict in Ukraine, where Russia has said “enough is enough” to years of U.S.-led NATO aggression, is demonstrating that the days of impunity are finally over for the would-be American hegemon.

Washington has recklessly raised the stakes to an unsustainable height in Ukraine. It has bet the house – and farm – on subjugating Russia for its next insatiable imperial move against China. But Moscow and Beijing are calling Uncle Sam’s bluff. The buck stops here.

The edifice of American imperial power has never been challenged at its foundation. It is now.

March 29, 2023 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Brzezinski’s Confession

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | February 22, 2023

While American interventionists remain stone-cold silent about the way that the Pentagon, operating through its old Cold War dinosaur NATO, knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, it’s instructive to remind ourselves that this wasn’t the first time that the Pentagon provoked Russia into invading another country.

Let’s go back to 1979, when the Pentagon was still waging its old Cold War racket. That was the year that U.S. officials devised a successful plot to provoke the Soviets into invading Afghanistan. 

Now, before you exclaim, “Conspiracy theory, Jacob!” which is the standard official response whenever someone criticizes dark-side activities on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, permit me to disclose something important: There is a confession. 

Yes, you read that last part correctly. There is a confession on the part of the national-security establishment that that is precisely what they did. Even for those who are loath to ever acknowledge that the national-security establishment engages in evil, dark-side activity, a confession is rather persuasive evidence that takes matters out of the realm of “conspiracy theory” and places them squarely in the realm of an actual conspiracy.

The confessor was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as President Jimmy Carter’s national-security advisor in 1979. He confessed that the U.S. knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally provoked the Soviets into invading Afghanistan. 

Mind you, Brzezinski didn’t confess until 1998, some 20 years after the Soviet invasion. Therefore, it stands to reason that if anyone raised the possibility in 1979 that the U.S. provoked the invasion, the standard response would have been “Conspiracy theory!” This is especially true given that U.S. officials were playing the innocent after the invasion. With the same degree of indignation and outrage they are displaying with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they castigated and condemned the Russians for their act of aggression against Afghanistan. They even canceled U.S. participation in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Russia, as a way to punish the Russians for invading Afghanistan.

In 1998, Brzezinski gave an interview to a French newspaper in which he confessed all. You can read the interview here. (For a full context of Brzezinski’s confession, see an article at Aljazeera entitled “Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Vietnam.”) He stated that U.S. officials began arming extremist Muslim elements in Afghanistan who were attempting to oust the pro-Russia regime that was controlling Afghanistan. By doing this, the hope was that the Soviets would invade Afghanistan to put down the anti-Russia Jihadists. 

The planned worked. The Soviets invaded, and U.S. officials were ecstatic. Brzezinski proudly stated that the plan had now given the Soviets their own Vietnam. What he was referring to was the 10-year-plus U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which had sacrificed more than 58,000 American soldiers for nothing. U.S. officials were now celebrating the fact that thousands of Russians soldiers were also now going to get sacrificed for nothing. 

Just as U.S. officials had hoped, over the next 10 years more than 14,000 Soviet soldiers were killed. (Some estimates go as high as 26,000). Another 53,753 were wounded. 

Needless to say, the deaths of Russian soldiers made U.S. officials extremely happy because the deaths were degrading the Soviet regime.

What kind of regime does this sort of thing? What kind of regime provokes another regime into invading a country knowing that this will bring massive death and destruction on both sides? What kind of regime celebrates and revels in the fact that foreign soldiers, all of whom have families or friends back home, are being killed and wounded?

I’ll tell you what kind of regime engages in those sorts of things: An evil regime. There is no better way to describe it. 

When Brzezinski was asked about the potential consequences of arming extremist Jihadist groups in Afghanistan, he replied, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

February 22, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

‘No place’ for independent Russia in Western mindset – Moscow

RT | January 10, 2023

The secretary of Russia’s national security council has lashed out at the West, pointing to their habit of creating global threats, including numerous terrorist groups, in pursuit of their interests.

Nikolay Patrushev also claimed, in an interview published by news outlet Argumenti i Fakti, that Washington’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was a prelude to NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

“The events in Ukraine are not a confrontation between Moscow and Kiev. It’s a military confrontation of NATO – the US and England first and foremost – with Russia,” the top security official said in a newspaper interview. “They fear a direct standoff, so NATO instructors push Ukrainian guys toward their certain deaths.”

Patrushev argued that, while Western nations claim to be “defending civilization against barbarism” in Ukraine, they are actually motivated by selfish interests and won’t “save any lives at the expense of their enrichment and ambitions.”

He said there is an established pattern of the US creating threats that it later ostensibly fights against, he continued, citing terrorist organizations Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) as examples. Washington may occasionally show off the killing of individual terrorist leaders like Osama Bin Laden, but continue “training and arming a hundred others” at the same time, he added.

NATO’s mission in Afghanistan resulted “in the creation of multibillion-dollar corruption schemes” and a surge in illegal drug production, Patrushev claimed. And the US withdrawal from the country in 2019 was to a large degree about “focusing on Ukraine” and confrontation with Russia, he said.

The security official cited remarks made last month by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who admitted that, with the country’s military presence in Afghanistan finally ended, the administration of President Joe Biden had more opportunities to funnel arms to Kiev.

Patrushev believes that, in the wider picture, the interests of the US as a nation state are subservient to the interests of transnational corporations, which ultimately dictate the policies of many governments. Those unaccountable forces have inherited the colonialist approach that allowed Western nations to become wealthy and powerful, but they are no longer vested in national interests, he said.

Russia “has no place” in their schemes, since it “irritates the handful of world masters because of its natural riches, vast territories, and smart, self-sufficient people who love their country, its traditions and history,” he added.

January 10, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

China invests millions in oil production in Afghanistan

Free West Media | January 9, 2023

While Western governments are trying to ignore or isolate the Taliban regime, which was able to take power in Afghanistan in August 2021, an Afghan-Chinese deal worth millions was concluded. China wants to develop an extensive oil field in Afghanistan. The Afghan mining minister and Chinese representatives signed a corresponding agreement in Kabul.

Accordingly, oil deposits are to be developed in three northern provinces in the Amu Darya Basin. The Chinese company CAPEIC plans to invest 150 million US dollars as a first move. The joint project aims to create around 3,000 jobs. The Taliban government will initially receive a 20 percent share of the profits. It is the largest planned economic project since they came to power.

Afghanistan has large deposits of raw materials that have hardly been tapped in the past four decades due to the ongoing military conflict. According to estimates, the total value could amount to one trillion dollars (around 940 billion euros) and more.

So far, however, the infrastructure such as roads, rails and sufficient power capacity has been missing to exploit the deposits on a large scale.

Afghanistan’s landlocked location and rugged landscape make mining and export difficult. However, the cooperation project with the Chinese should give Afghanistan access to the Chinese Silk Road transport network, which is intended to promote economic integration between China and the rest of the Eurasian-African landmass.

January 9, 2023 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

What foreign policy elites really think about you

If public opinion doesn’t match up with the Washington program then it must be wrong, misunderstood, or worse, irrelevant.

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | January 6, 2023

Tell us, Washington, how do you really feel about American public opinion?

For years now, Beltway establishmentarians have been trying desperately to countermand the idea that they are in fact, elites: out of touch, impervious to what regular Americans want and need, and slaves to conventional foreign policy doctrine and dogma.

But it is wartime again, and that’s when the masks slip. It began with the steady stream of Eliot Cohen and Anne Applebaum columns from the start of the Russian invasion, all demanding that Americans see the war in Ukraine as our fight, a struggle for democracy, the liberal world order. If Americans do not have the stomach for it, there is something wrong with us, a moral failing.

These ham-fisted approaches befit the neoconservatives who wield them, as they did the same in the Global War on Terror, and to a great extent, worked to keep the Iraq War going for almost a decade and the war in Afghanistan shambling on for a full 20 years.

In addition to the destruction of two countries, trillions of dollars, a massive refugee crisis, a new generation of U.S. veterans dependent on lifetime assistance, and countless dead and wounded, these “elites” are in great part responsible for the mistrust of Washington that has eaten away at the culture and politics here to the core.

Poll after poll show a plunging lack of faith in American institutions, including the once-vaunted military. That’s what going to war based on lies, distortions, and rhetorical bullying will do to an already strained and tribalized society. Add a financial collapse (2008) that Washington addressed with an unprecedented bank bailout, while homeowners and workers struggled to survive, and you have the basis for major populist movements — on the left, and the right.

The rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were buoyed in part by a continuing skepticism of the ongoing wars and of the elites at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, which had become as self-serving and disconnected from American interests as they were.

You would have thought they had learned their lesson.

But the war in Ukraine has given them new purpose and in that vein, to both patronize and ignore the wants and needs of the American public. A new commentary by Gian Gentile and Raphael S. Cohen, deputy director of the Rand Corporation’s Army Research Division, and Air Force Strategy and Doctrine Program, respectively, says it all. Clearly written for Beltway practitioners and politicians, the takeaway from “The Myth of America’s Ukraine Fatigue” is clear: don’t mind the polls, or even American public opinion. Ukraine’s (and in effect, Washington’s) long war will go on no matter what the hoi polloi is thinking, or feeling.

In war, from a purely political perspective, it’s usually safer for politicians to stay the course.

Perhaps this is why democracies’ track records of playing the long game in armed conflicts is actually pretty good. From the ancient Athenians during the Peloponnesian War on through to the present day, democracies have not usually been the fickle, shrinking violets their detractors make them out to be. In the United States, the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were all eventually deeply unpopular. Yet the United States fought for three years in Korea, almost nine years in Iraq (before going back in after the initial withdrawal), and almost 20 years in both Vietnam and Afghanistan. All these campaigns involved significantly more investment of American blood and treasure than the U.S. commitment to Ukraine has demanded thus far.

The authors are referring to a number of recent polls that would appear to show that Americans’ unconditional support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion has its limits and in some cases, may be flagging. To start, Cohen and Gentile say that isn’t true, that Americans support Ukrainian sovereignty and the fight for it. Absolutely. What the authors don’t say is that the polls indicate that Americans are also concerned about a protracted war that could lead to more death and a direct U.S. confrontation with the Russians. That they are less enthusiastic about supporting Ukraine “as long as it takes,” and have shown a growing interest in negotiations to end the war sooner than later, even if that ultimately means concessions for both sides.

Instead of recognizing the nuance and giving credit to Americans for understanding the implications of another long war (whether they are directly involved on the ground or not), the authors blame the media for hyping up what they believe is the negative messaging from the surveys. Furthermore, they suggest that — citing the cases of Vietnam and our recent wars — conflicts will go on (and rightly so!) no matter where public opinion is at.

“If past is precedent, and present trends continue, it could be years before any of the declines in the American public’s support actually result in a change of policy,” the authors contend. Cohen and Gentile (much like their counterparts in the Iraq and Afghanistan War eras, did) diminish those “amplifying the Ukraine fatigue narrative,” claiming they fit into neat little categories: 1) “America First” Republicans who’d rather focus on domestic issues 2) “knee-jerk” anti-war activists on the left, and 3) those who “may genuinely sympathize with Russian talking points” that Americans will tire of the war.

Meanwhile, “some Americans may really believe that they are paying more of a price for the conflict than they in fact are, but this is primarily based on perceptions—not facts.”

Right. That is exactly what Fred Kagan, the AEI neoconservative who helped to craft the Iraq War Surge plan said in this lengthy National Review piece in 2008, entitled “Why Iraq matters: Talking back to anti-war party talking points,” in which he deployed this fatuous bromide:

Americans have a right to be weary of this conflict and to desire to bring it to an end. But before we choose the easier and more comfortable wrong over the harder and more distasteful right, we should examine more closely the two core assumptions that underlie the current antiwar arguments: that we must lose this war because we cannot win it at any acceptable cost, and that it will be better to lose than to continue trying to win.

Which makes this all very ironic, since (Col.) Gian Gentile was one of the few brave souls in the active duty military who were openly speaking out against Fred Kagan’s “Surge” and the counterinsurgency craze that was rocking the Blob during that period. He was an arch critic of Washington’s hyper-message management and selective history machinations. It is head scratching that he would oversimplify the effects of public opinion on recent wars — and suggest its relative unimportance — while offering the thinnest of arguments for in essence, “staying the course.”

“The leaders of the free world need to remind their publics what is at stake in Ukraine—not just for European and global security, but for democracy at large,” Gentile exclaims in his recent piece with Cohen.

This, from an historian who in his 2013 book, “America’s Deadly Embrace of Counter-Insurgency,” not only took on what he called the “myths” of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the shibboleths of the U.S. counterinsurgency in Vietnam and the British military’s “success” in Malaya (1948-60) as well.

Gentile’s “Ukraine fatigue myth” article is elite thinking, which reads as a pep talk for Beltway insiders in the wake of recent polling. For the rest of us, it is a cogent reminder that the same people who did not want regular Americans to actually think about foreign policy during the Iraq War, are still out there, whether they want to call themselves “elites” or not.

January 6, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Prince Harry reveals how many people he killed in Afghanistan

“It’s a joy for me because I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think that I’m probably quite useful”

Press TV – January 6, 2023

The UK’s Prince Harry says he killed 25 people in Afghanistan when he was acting as an Apache helicopter pilot during the invasion of Afghanistan, noting that these killings do not “embarrass” him.

The Duke of Sussex acknowledged this in an autobiography that is set to be published in the UK on January 10. The Telegraph quoted extracts from the Spanish version of the autobiography it obtained after the book was mistakenly put on sale in bookshops on Thursday before being withdrawn.

Harry served as a forward air controller in Afghanistan’s Helmand province in 2007-8 and then as an Apache helicopter pilot in the British Army Air Corps deployed to Camp Bastion in the south of the country in 2012-13.

According to the soon-to-be-published book Spare, Harry undertook six missions as a pilot that led to him “taking human lives”.

The 38-year-old described killing the targets as removing “chess pieces”, noting that he was not ashamed of doing so.

“My number is 25. It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me,” he wrote.

He said he counted the number of people he killed by reviewing videos taken from the nose of his Apache helicopter.

The prince writes that he did not see the Taliban militants “as a person” because such a view would have made it impossible to kill them. The British Army, he writes, had “trained me to ‘other’ them, and they had trained me well.”

The prince also named his fondness for video games as one of the reasons behind his claimed effectiveness as an Apache gunner. “It’s a joy for me because I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think that I’m probably quite useful,” he said.

Harry also named the 9/11 attacks as one of the main reasons that he did not feel guilt over his killings. He had the thought that those responsible and their sympathizers were “enemies of humanity”.

The US-led foreign forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 with the claim of confronting Al-Qaeda. The military campaign killed at least 70,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians, living Afghanistan in a state of turmoil ever since.

There have been security concerns because of Harry’s military service, which are likely to increase after he revealed the number of people he has killed during that time.

Elsewhere in the book, Harry accused his brother William of knocking him to the floor during a 2019 argument about Harry’s wife Meghan.

William “grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and… knocked me to the floor,” he writes, according to a report in the Guardian.

January 6, 2023 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Scathing Report Blasts Finland’s Role in Afghanistan

By Igor Kuznetsov – Samizdat – 20.12.2022

The decades-long Afghanistan intervention, in which Finland played an active role, ultimately fueled large-scale corruption and resulted in the death of thousands of civilians, an august research institute established by the Finnish parliament has concluded in a gloomy assessment of the US’ longest war.

Finland’s involvement in Afghanistan has been slammed by a new scalding report by the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, a body largely funded by the parliament.

Not only was the Finnish role in the US-led intervention motivated by geopolitics rather than goodwill, it also had a limited efficacy because of a lack of long-term strategy, the report found.

Although Finnish involvement in Afghanistan was largely portrayed as a humanitarian act by politicians and media, in actual fact the Nordic country’s main interest was to strengthen its relationship with the US and NATO, as well as solidifying its decision-making clout within the UN, the report said.

“Finland’s actions in Afghanistan were guided primarily by the desire to maintain and deepen its international foreign and security policy partnerships. The aims related to Afghanistan’s development and the strategic monitoring of their attainment remained secondary concerns, and Finland’s actual efforts were not based on a comprehensive approach or a realistic analysis of the situation”, the Finnish Institute of International Affairs wrote.

As regards Afghanistan and its development, the objectives of the various activities remained “vague, unrealistic and unclear, and received insufficient attention”, the report said. Instead of critical analysis and strategic monitoring, attempts were made to meet the stated objectives, however vague, by highlighting the progress made and keeping silent about the combats and difficulties, it added.

At the same time, the report stressed that the intervention, in which Finland played an active role, ultimately led to large-scale corruption and resulted in the unnecessary death of thousands of civilians.

Some 2,500 Finnish soldiers and 140 crisis management experts served in Afghanistan with the total price tag of around 700 million euros (about $740 million).

Finland’s involvement in NATO’s Afghanistan mission was seen as an early sign that the Nordic nation was slowly drifting towards the alliance and attempting to bolster its partner status. Earlier this year, Finland and its western neighbor Sweden both abandoned their historic military non-alignment and rushed to become members of NATO, citing Russia’s special operation in Ukraine and the ensuing “security situation” as a pretext.

The Costs of War project by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs estimated the total cost of the US involvement in Afghanistan since 2001 as part of the post 9/11 wars at $2.3 trillion, with funds spent on lifetime care of US veterans and future interest payments on money borrowed not included. The same project also estimated that at least 243,000 people have died as a direct result of this war.

In its aftermath, after the hasty retreat of the coalition forces, the Taliban surged back to power in 2021, two decades after US-led forces embarked on their longest war in history.

December 20, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

We Must Not Forget the U.S. War on Afghanistan

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 8, 2022

When the Pentagon used NATO to provoke Russia  into invading Ukraine, it had to know that one of the great benefits to such an invasion would be that it would enrich U.S. weapons manufacturers, who, of course, are an important, integral, and loyal part of America’s national-security state form of governmental structure. 

And sure enough, those weapons manufacturers now have a lot to be grateful for. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, 

The world’s biggest arms makers are scaling up production of rocket launchers, tanks and ammunition as the industry shifts to meet what executives expect to be sustained demand triggered by the war in Ukraine.

The Pentagon has committed more than $17 billion in weapons and services to Ukraine, most of it drawn from existing stocks. It has also awarded about $3.4 billion in new contracts to replenish domestic and allies’ stocks.

The Pentagon knew that when it was forced to exit Afghanistan, where it had used a massive amount of weaponry for some twenty years to wreak death and destruction on that impoverished Third World country, its loyal army of arms manufacturers might begin to suffer. The crisis that the Pentagon has ginned up in Ukraine has clearly helped to alleviate that suffering. 

But the Russian invasion of Ukraine had another beneficiary — the Pentagon itself. That’s because before Americans had a real opportunity to focus on the Pentagon’s 20-year deadly and destructive debacle in Afghanistan, everyone began focusing exclusively on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Thanks to the crisis in Ukraine, the entire Afghanistan misadventure has been relegated to a memory black hole.

But we really still need to do some serious soul-searching, examination, and analysis of the Afghanistan debacle. We cannot let the Pentagon use the crisis that it has ginned up in Ukraine as a way to shift our attention away from what happened in Afghanistan. It would be a grave mistake to just “move on” from Afghanistan and permit the Pentagon to focus our attention exclusively on the evil Russians and their invasion of Ukraine.

It is important to focus on the Constitution, the document that President Biden and the Democrats and even some Republicans have suddenly discovered and begun revering. It requires a congressional declaration of war before a president can legally wage war. There was never a congressional declaration of war against Afghanistan. That made the Pentagon’s war against Afghanistan an illegal one under our form of constitutional government.

Equally important, if President George W. Bush had sought a declaration of war from Congress, it is a virtual certainty that he would not have been able to secure it. That’s because Bush would not have been able to provide any evidence whatsoever of Taliban complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Without any evidence of such complicity, it is difficult to imagine Congress issuing a declaration of war against Afghanistan, especially knowing that such a war would inevitably wreak massive death and destruction on that impoverished Third World country.

Bush claimed that his invasion of Afghanistan was morally justified under the principle of “self-defense.” But that claim necessarily depended on showing that the Taliban regime was involved in the 9/11 attacks. No such evidence existed, and Bush knew it. Thus, if he had gone to Congress and sought a declaration of war based on “self-defense,” he would have gone there empty-handed insofar as evidence is concerned.

In fact, if Bush really believed that the Taliban regime had attacked the United States, he would never have gone to the United Nations seeking its approval to defend itself by invading Afghanistan. No president would do that. 

What about the “harboring” charge? Bush claimed that his invasion of Afghanistan was morally justified because Afghanistan was “harboring” Osama bin Laden. Bush’s claim is without validity. To warrant a “harboring” charge, Bush would have to provide evidence that the Taliban regime had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and was knowingly conspiring with bin Laden to provide him a base to plan the attacks. Bush knew that he had no evidence to support such a charge.

What Bush actually meant by his “harboring” charge was that the Taliban was refusing to comply with Bush’s unconditional extradition demand for bin Laden. But under international law, the Taliban regime had every right to refuse Bush’s extradition demand. That’s because there was no extradition treaty between Afghanistan and the United States. When there is no extradition treaty between two nations, neither one is required to comply with an extradition demand from the other.

What about the claim that the 9/11 attacks were an “act of war” and, therefore, the United States had the legitimate authority to invade Afghanistan to kill or capture bin Laden, who was living in Afghanistan?

It was a bogus justification for invading Afghanistan. Under U.S. law, terrorism is a criminal offense, not an act of war. That’s why terrorism prosecutions are brought in U.S. District Courts. No nation has the legitimate authority to invade another nation to kill or capture a suspected criminal who is residing in that country.

One of the most notorious terrorists was a CIA man named Jose Posada Carriles. He is widely considered to be one of the people who brought down a Cuban airline with a bomb over Venezuelan skies. He later safely ensconced himself in the United States.

When Venezuela demanded Posada’s extradition, U.S. officials protected him by refusing to comply, notwithstanding the fact that there was an extradition treaty between Venezuela and the United States.

Would interventionists who supported the deadly and destructive invasion of Afghanistan to kill or capture bin Laden have supported a similar deadly and destructive Venezuelan invasion of the United States to kill or capture Posada? I think not.

Using NATO to gin up the crisis in Ukraine is bad enough. While U.S. arms manufacturers are clearly a beneficiary of that crisis, so is the Pentagon because it has caused people to forget what the Pentagon did to the people of Afghanistan and to just “move” on to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We must not let that happen, especially given the massive death and destruction that the Pentagon wreaked in its immoral and illegal war against an impoverished Third World country.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

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