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Before the Bidens ‘Did’ Ukraine, There Was Iraq – and Serbia

By James George Jatras | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 16, 2020

The United States approaches the November 2020 election with growing apprehension, even dread.

Among the possibilities:

For those who have followed events outside the United States during the past few decades, much of this sounds familiar. We’ve seen it before – inflicted on other countries.

Now It’s Coming Home to the U.S.

As explained by Revolver News, what happens in America next to a great extent may be a form of blowback from a specific event: the U.S.-supported 2014 regime change operation in Ukraine:

‘A “Color Revolution” in this context refers to a specific type of coordinated attack that the United States government has been known to deploy against foreign regimes, particularly in Eastern Europe deemed to be “authoritarian” and hostile to American interests. Rather than using a direct military intervention to effect regime change as in Iraq, Color Revolutions attack a foreign regime by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to their agenda in the Western press.

‘It would be disturbing enough to note a coordinated effort to use these exact same strategies and tactics domestically to undermine or overthrow President Trump. The ominous nature of what we see unfolding before us only truly hits home when one realizes that the people who specialize in these Color Revolution regime change operations overseas are, literally, the very same people attempting to overthrow Trump by using the very same playbook. Given that the most famous Color Revolution was the [2004] “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine, and that Black Lives Matter is being used as a key component of the domestic Color Revolution against Trump, we can encapsulate our thesis at Revolver with the simple remark that “Black is the New Orange.”’

This hardly should come as a surprise. The same government agencies and their corporate, NGO, and think tank cronies that are now weaponizing Black Lives Matter, Antifa, other Wokesters, and military putsch plotters here at home to remove Trump have turned regime change abroad into an art form. Ukraine was one of their signal successes, featuring a cast of characters later key to the failed “Ukrainegate” impeachment.

Another consequence of regime change: corruption. As the old saying goes, any idiot can turn an aquarium into fish soup, but no one has yet figured out how to reverse the process. Once a country gets broken it tends to stay broken, whether the “breaking” is accomplished by military means (Serbia 1999, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011) or by a color revolution from the streets (Serbia 2000, Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2004-2005 and again in 2014, Kyrgyzstan 2005, Lebanon 2005, Armenia 2018, plus many others of varying degrees of success, and failures in Iran, Russia, Venezuela, China (Hong Kong), and Belarus). With the target nation’s institutions in shambles, the dregs take over – in Libya, for example, even to the point of reintroducing trade in sub-Saharan African slaves, whose black lives evidently don’t matter to anyone at all.

Iraq: Crush, Corrupt, Cash In

Finally, once regime change occurs and corruption is rampant, another shoe drops: foreign vultures descend on the carcass, profiteers who in many cases are the very same people that helped to create the chaos on which they are cashing in. Invariably, these carpetbaggers are well-connected individuals in the aggressor states and organizations positioned on the inside track both for the carve-up of the target country’s resources and (the word “hypocrisy” doesn’t begin to describe it) for funds to implement “reform” and “reconstruction” of the devastated target.

The showcase of this scam, pursuant to Colin Powell’s reported “Pottery Barn Rule” (You break it, you own it) was the money ostensibly spent on rebuilding Iraq, despite assurances from the war’s advocates that it would pay for itself. With the formal costs conservatively set at over $60 billion to $138 billion out of a tab for the war of over two trillion dollars, the lion’s share of it went to U.S. and other vendors, including the notorious $1.4 billion no-bid contract to Halliburton subsidiary KBR, of which then-Vice President Dick Cheney, a major proponent of the war, had been a top executive. (“Rand Paul Says Dick Cheney Pushed for the Iraq War So Halliburton Would Profit.”)

In Ukraine, Biden’s Son Also Rises

The predatory cronyism vignette most pertinent to the Black/Orange regime change op now unfolding before us with the intent of installing Joe Biden in the Oval Office is that of his son, Hunter, and a Ukrainian energy company with a sketchy reputation, Burisma Holdings. (Right at the outset, even some of Hunter’s associates though the gig with Burisma was too “toxic” and broke off ties with him.) Though ignored or dismissed as fake news and a conspiracy theory by Democrats and legacy media (or do I repeat myself?), the facts are well enough known and fit the Iraq pattern to a T: then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed for regime change in Ukraine, which succeeded in February 2014 with the ouster of the constitutionally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. In April 2014, Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was brought onto Burisma’s board (along with a fellow named Devon Archer, later convicted of unrelated fraud) at an exorbitant level of compensation that made little sense in light of Hunter’s nonexistent expertise in the energy business – but which made plenty of sense given that his dad was not only Veep but the Obama administration’s point man on policy toward Ukraine, including foreign assistance money. [NOTE: It now has come out that in 2015 Hunter put his dad, the U.S. Vice President, in direct contact with Burisma, news the giant tech firms sought to suppress on social media.]

When a troublesome Ukrainian prosecutor named Viktor Shokin seemed to be taking too much interest in Burisma, Papa Joe came to the rescue, openly threatening the western-dependent politicians installed after Ukraine’s 2014 color revolution with withholding of a billion dollars in U.S. aid until Shokin, whom Joe unironically alleged to be “corrupt,” got the heave-ho. As Tucker Carlson nails it, Shokin’s ouster followed a direct request from Burisma’s Clinton-connected PR firm, Blue Star Strategies, to Hunter to lobby his dad to get Shokin off their back. Joe did just what was asked. He later bragged: “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here [i.e., Kiev] in, I think it was about six hours.’ I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

But First There Was Serbia

Today many people remember Iraq, some have a clue about Ukraine. But Serbia, which preceded them, is off the radar screen of most Americans. To recap:

As a Senator in the 1990s, Joe Biden was one of the most militant advocates of U.S. military action against Serbs during the breakup of the Yugoslav federation, first in Croatia (1991-95), then in Bosnia (1992-95), and then in Serbia’s province of Kosovo (1998- 1999). (As has been said about others like Hillary Clinton and the late John McCain, Biden evidently has never met a war he didn’t like. Along with Hillary, in 2003 Biden helped to whip Senate Democrat votes for the Bush-Cheney Iraq war.) Channeling his inner John McCain, Biden continually called for the U.S. to bomb, bomb, bomb bomb the Serbs while (in a foreshadowing of the Obama-Biden administration’s support for jihad terrorists in Libya and Syria, which ultimately resulted in the appearance of ISIS) pushed successfully for sending weapons to the Islamist regime in Bosnia and then for the U.S. to arm the Islamo-narco-terrorist group known as the “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA).

Joe Biden was the primary sponsor of the March 1999 Kosovo war authorization for military action against Serbia and Montenegro, S. Con. Res. 21. (As a little remembered historical note, Biden’s resolution might be seen as the last nail in the coffin of Congress’s constitutional war power. While S. Con. Res 21 passed the Senate, it failed in the House on a 213-213 tie vote, with Republicans overwhelmingly voting Nay. It didn’t matter. Bill Clinton, reeling from the Lewinsky scandal, went ahead with the bombing campaign anyway.) The ensuing 78-day NATO air operation had little impact on Serbia’s military but devastated the country’s infrastructure and took hundreds of civilian lives. (Even now, more than 20 years later, Serbia suffers from elevated cancer levels attributed to depleted uranium munitions.) But for Jihad Joe even that wasn’t punishment enough for people he collectively demonized as “illiterate degenerates, baby killers, butchers, and rapists.” In May 1999, at the height of the NATO air assault, he called for the introduction of U.S. ground troops (“we should announce there’s going to be American casualties”) followed by “a Japanese-German style occupation.”

Eventually the bombing stopped in June 1999 when then-Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević acceded to temporary international occupation of Kosovo on the condition that the province would remain part of Serbia, as codified in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244. It was a promise the U.S. and NATO, not to mention their European Union (EU) concubine, had no intention of keeping. Under the nose of the NATO occupation, ostensibly demobilized KLA thugs were given virtually free rein to terrorize the Serbian population, two-thirds of whom were driven out along with Jews and Roma, the rest sheltering in enclaves where they remain to this day. Orthodox Christian churches and monasteries, many of them centuries old, were particular targets for destruction and desecration. KLA commanders – who were also kingpins in the Kosovo Albanian mafia dealing in sex slaves, drugs, weapons, and even human organs – were handed local administration.

In 2007 Senator Biden praised the new order as a “victory for Muslim democracy” and “a much-needed example of a successful U.S.-Muslim partnership.” A year later, the Bush administration sought to complete the job by ramming through Kosovo’s independence in barefaced violation of UNSCR 1244 and despite strong Russian objections. But instead of resolving anything the result was a frozen conflict that persists today, with about half of the United Nations’ member states recognizing Kosovo and half not. Touting itself as the most pro-American “country” [sic] in the world, the Kosovo pseudo-state became a prime recruiting ground for ISIS.

But hey, business was good! Just as in Iraq, the politically well-connected, including former officials instrumental in the attack on Serbia and occupying Kosovo, flocked to the province fueled by lavish aid subsidies from the U.S. and the EU, which for a while made Kosovo one of the biggest per capita foreign assistance recipient “countries” in the world. One such vulture – sorry, entrepreneur – was former Secretary of State Madeleine we-think-a-half-million-dead-Iraqi-children-is-worth-it Albright, a prominent driver of the Clinton administration’s hostile policy on top of her personal Serb-hatred. Albright sought to cash in to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on sale of the mobile telephone company PTK, originally a Yugoslav state-owned firm that was “privatized” (i.e., stolen) in 2005 as a joint stock company, but who later dropped her bid when it attracted unwanted publicity. Also in the hunt for Kosovo riches was former NATO Supreme Commander and operational chief of the Kosovo war General Wesley Clark, who reportedly cornered a major share of the occupied province’s coal resources under a sweetheart deal that seems to have vanished from public scrutiny since first reported in 2016.

At the moment there seems to be no smoking gun of a direct Biden family payout, à la Ukraine, but there is a possible trail via Hunter’s Burisma-buddy Devon Archer and Archer’s fellow-defendant John “Yanni” Galanis, who in turn is connected to top Kosovo Albanian politicians. In any case, the Biden clan seems to have paid a lot of attention to Kosovo for not having skin in the game. Joe’s late son and Delaware Attorney General, Beau, worked in Kosovo following the war to train local prosecutors as part of an OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) “rule of law” mission (admittedly a big task in a mafia-run pseudo-state), for which a road was named after him near the massive U.S. base Camp Bondsteel. With Hunter on hand for the naming ceremony, Joe Biden took the opportunity to express his “condolences” to Serbian families who lost loved ones in the NATO air assault – of which he was a primary advocate.

A ‘Shokin’ Demand  

Perhaps the best parallel between Biden’s handiwork in Ukraine and his interest in Kosovo also relates to getting rid of an inconvenient individual. But in this case, the person in question wasn’t a state official like Burisma prosecutor Viktor Shokin but a hierarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

In May 2009 Vice President Biden insisted on visiting one of Kosovo’s most venerable Serbian Orthodox Christian sites, the Visoki Dečani monastery. Ruling Bishop Artemije of the Eparchy of Raška and Prizren, which includes Kosovo and Metohija, refused to give his blessing for the visit, in effect telling Biden he was not welcome. Bishop Artemije long had been a bane of Biden and others advocating detachment of Kosovo from Serbia, starting with his first mission to Washington in 1997 as war clouds gathered. In 2004 Bishop Artemije sued the NATO powers in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg following their inaction to protect his flock during an anti-Serbian rampage by Muslim Albanian militants in March of that year. Then, in March 2006, as preparations were underway for a “final solution” to the Kosovo issue, Bishop Artemije launched an intensive multinational lobbying and public relations effort (in which Yours Truly was the lead professional) to try to derail the U.S. policy to which Biden had devoted so much attention. While the Bishop’s campaign was unsuccessful in reversing U.S. policy it was instrumental in delaying it for over a year – to howls of outrage from Biden’s associates in Washington. Thus, for Biden, the monastery visit snub by Bishop Artemije was adding insult to injury.

The end for Bishop Artemije came a few months later, at the beginning of 2010 at the time of two visits to Kosovo by U.S. Admiral Mark P. Fitzgerald, then Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa, and Commander, Allied Joint Force Command (JFC) Naples, (who retired later that year, becoming, unsurprisingly, a consultant “with numerous defense and commercial maritime and aviation contractors”). At that time, an unconfirmed report indicated that a high NATO officer (whether Admiral Fitzgerald or someone else is not specified) stated in the course of one of his local meetings (this is verbatim or a close paraphrase): “What we need here is a more cooperative bishop.” (More details are available here. Since that posting last year the NATO command in Naples seems to have scrubbed the items about Fitzgerald’s 2010 visits from their site.)

Shortly afterwards, Biden’s troublesome priest was forcibly removed by police and exiled from his see, without ecclesiastical trial, by Church authorities in Belgrade under pressure from compliant Serbian politicians installed after the October 2000 color revolution, in turn pressured by NATO. The pretext? Transparently baseless charges of financial wrongdoing. In other words, bogus accusations of “corruption” – like against Ukraine’s Shokin.

One could almost hear Joe Biden chortle: “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

But Look at the Bright Side…

Back to the incipient coup facing the United States, there should be no illusion that what’s at stake in the unfolding scenario for the removal of Donald Trump is not just his presidency but the survival of the historic American ethnos of which he is seen as an avatar by both his supporters and detractors. Remember, we’re dealing with predators and scavengers who are happy to burn the old, evil America down as long as they can achieve total power and continue to feather their cushy nests. Short of a blowout Trump victory by a margin too big to hijack, we’re headed for a dystopian state of affairs.

If they do manage to remove Trump, “by any means necessary,” and Joe Biden takes the helm, we can anticipate a bevy of globalist warmonger appointees that make Trump’s team look like disciples of Mahatma Gandhi. Among the names floated like Nicholas Burns, Antony Blinken, Michele Flournoy, Evelyn Farkas, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, all were on board with Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Syria … [NOTE: The Atlantic Council, known as NATO’s semi-official think tank in Washington and which will be instrumental in staffing a future Joe Biden administration, also has been the beneficiary of generous donations from Hunter Biden’s paymaster, Burisma.]

It’s a recipe for wars, regime changes, and color revolutions galore.

But to finish on a positive note, the potential future business opportunities will be endless!

October 16, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Twitter, Biden and the New York Post – Social Media Censorship Kicks up a Gear

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | October 15, 2020

Yesterday, the New York Post published several articles claiming to show evidence of corruption on the part of Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The charges are varied but not really surprising. One article claims Hunter introduced his father to a Ukrainian energy magnate who asked the family to use their influence to shut down an investigation into his company.

Another story suggests Hunter Biden used his family name to secure a high-paid job and stock interests in a Chinese company.

The NYP evidence these claims with emails and documents allegedly retrieved from a laptop left at a computer repair store in Delaware. The owner of the store alerted the FBI to the computer’s existence when no one came forward to pay for the repairs and he could not contact the owner.

According to the NYP, both the hard drive and laptop were then seized by the FBI. They have a copy of the grand jury subpoena, which is certainly solid evidence, if genuine.

The owner of the store claims he, prior to it being seized, made a copy of the hard drive and sent it to Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer.

While this is potentially intriguing, if true, it’s not really “news”. Biden’s corruption in Ukraine has been evident since his son was appointed to the board of the largest energy company in Ukraine within weeks of the US-backed coup in 2014 (a decision so obviously dodgy even the Guardian made a joke out of it). Joe Biden himself has even admitted to applying financial pressure to get a Ukrainian State Prosecutor removed from office.

None of this is really “big news”. Corruption is rampant in the halls of power, that is as certain as death and taxes, and will continue to be so, whether or not these specific allegations are accurate.

The big news, the part of this story that should concern everyone, is that Twitter has completely blocked this material on their platform.

And we’re not talking a “soft block”, we at OffG are more than familiar with twitter’s use of “warnings”, no they literally made it impossible to share the links, even in DMs. If you try, you get his warning:

We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.”

We’ve talked about twitter’s “partners” before, and they are suspect. As for being “potentially harmful”, well isn’t that subjective? Fire is vital at times, but certainly “potentially harmful” at others. Water, in sufficient quantity, is “potentially harmful”.

If you’re a liar, the truth is “potentially harmful”.

Facebook has followed suit, if in less sweeping fashion. The social media giant’s spokesperson Andy Stone announced that they would be:

“… reducing its distribution on our platform. This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation.

This decision is pending approval by their “independent fact-checkers”, which we have also covered in detail before.

*

So what are the social media companies’ excuses reasons for blocking this content?

Well, it depends who you ask.

Twitter claims that since the emails are potentially “hacked”, posting them violates their policy regarding illegally gathered material. (Interestingly this policy was never applied to Trump’s leaked tax returns.)

Facebook, on the other hand, claim to have blocked these stories because they might be “misinformation”. A truly ludicrous precedent to set. You can’t block something that might not be true, because that applies to literally almost everything.

You do have to admire the strategy though. The pincer movement is brilliant.

You see, one site is blocking them because they might not be real, the other because if they are real then they’re stolen. It’s a win-win situation.

Essentially, real or not, the tech giants have all the bases covered and there’s no way they are going to let people read those emails, or even stories about the emails. Twitter even blocked the account of the Whitehouse Spokesperson Kayleigh MacEnany for sharing the links.

Of course, moving forward this will not just apply to these emails, but anything they want.

More and more precedents are rolling out that social media companies can stop anyone from saying anything by applying their absurdly vague and subjective rules.

They have essentially given themselves license to block anything they want on a totally ad hoc basis, and because it’s being done in the name of “orange man bad” or combatting “hate speech”, an army of useful idiots are happy to go along with it. Even calling it a win for progressive values.

The mainstream cheered on twitter earlier this year when they started (incorrectly) “fact-checking” Donald Trump’s tweets concerning postal voting. We wrote then that it was a scary and potentially damaging idea. This is why.

We now have mega-corporations, who possess neither democratic mandate nor public accountability, controlling what elected officials can and cannot say in public. The political discourse of our society has become subject to the approval of “independent fact-checkers” created by billionaires and staffed by the Deep State.

Which is exactly what we’ve been warning about, for years.

*

It all makes you wonder – what exactly is the point of this story?

Are we just witnessing surface tremors of the deeper internal conflict in the Deep State, just as we saw in 2016?

Or is it meant to distract everyone with salacious details of a corruption scandal we all already knew about, while ever-more of our online freedoms are taken away?

This story probably isn’t going away any time soon. For one thing, we can expect that someone is going to accuse Russia of somehow being involved in the very near future.

… oh, they already did. I guess we’re in for Russiagate II then. Fun times.

October 15, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Imagine If MSM Consistently Applied The Evidentiary Standards It’s Applying To Hunter Biden’s Emails

By Caitlin Johnstone | October 14, 2020

Mainstream media and social media platforms are actively blacking out an October surprise published by The New York Post which purports to show “smoking gun” emails from the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Both Twitter and Facebook have censored the story on their platforms, the first time we’ve seen the powerful social media giants deplatform a mainstream news media article, both citing concerns about the origins of the emails and an uncertainty about the veracity of the claims.

“Facebook was limiting distribution of the story while its outside fact-checkers reviewed the story’s claims, spokesman Andy Stone said,” reports NPR, adding that “Twitter said it decided to block the story because it couldn’t be sure about the origins of the emails.”

Twitter claims it found the emails to be in violation of its policies banning content which contained private information and its rules against “hacked materials”, both of which would have forbidden all articles sharing the contents of the 2016 WikiLeaks drops if those rules had existed back then. As I warned could happen back in August, these rules have set the stage for the cross-platform censorship of a 2020 October surprise.

There’s a good thread going around Twitter compiling posts that mainstream media reporters have been making in objection to the circulation of Hunter Biden’s emails alongside posts made by those same reporters promoting far more ridiculous and insubstantial allegations, like MSNBC’s virulent Russia conspiracy theorist Kyle Griffin saying nobody should link to the New York Post report because if they do they’ll be “amplifying disinformation”.

A new Reason article discusses how the mass media are not just avoiding the story but actively discouraging it:

On Wednesday, The New York Post published an attention-catching original report: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.” In the previously unreleased email, which was allegedly sent on April 17, 2015, an executive with Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company, thanks Hunter Biden for “giving an opportunity” to meet Joe Biden, according to The NY Post.

It’s a story that merits the attention of other journalists, political operatives, national security experts, and also the public at large — not least of all because there are serious questions about its accuracy, reliability, and sourcing. And yet many in the media are choosing not just to ignore the story, but to actively encourage others to suppress any discussion of it.

Indeed, two mainstream reporters who acknowledged (and criticized) the Post’s scoop — The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Politico’s Jake Sherman — faced thunderous denunciation on Twitter from Democratic partisans simply for discussing the story. Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden accused Haberman of promoting disinformation, and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg told Sherman that he was helping nefarious conservative activists “launder this bullshit into the news cycle.” Historian Kevin Kruse asked why they were “amplifying” the story.

Indeed a scroll through today’s mainstream news reporting does appear to show some consensus among most news media that the topic of the emails should be avoided, with most MSM articles on the matter covering the after-effects of the New York Post release or explaining why readers should be dubious about its contents. A new Washington Post article titled “Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop: an explainer” takes great pains to outline how important it is to be very, very certain that this story is everything it purports to be before investing any credulity in it.

“How do we know the email is authentic? We do not,” WaPo tells us. “The New York Post posted PDF print-outs of several emails allegedly from the laptop, but for the ‘smoking gun’ email, it shows only a photo made the day before the story was posted, according to Thomas Rid, author of Active Measures, a book on disinformation. ‘There is no header information, no metadata.’ The Washington Post has been unable to independently verify or authenticate these emails, as requests to make the laptop hard drive available for inspection have not been granted.”

This would be the same Washington Post that has been circulating disinformation about Russia for years due to its disinterest in verifying information before reporting, and has alongside the rest of the mass media been promoting the narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election based solely on unproven assertions promoted by government agencies despite many gaping plot holes in that narrative. Where was the journalistic concern for seeing the data and inspecting the hard drives then?

In and of itself there is no problem at all with mainstream news media applying high evidentiary standards to its reporting and making sure readers are aware when political manipulators could be pulling the wool over their eyes. In and of itself this would be a good thing. The problem is that all this emphasis on verification and truth only comes up when it is politically convenient for these plutocratic media outlets, because only favoring truth when it’s convenient is the same as lying constantly.

Where were these high evidentiary standards when The Guardian reported without evidence and against all common sense that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been having secret meetings with Trump lackey Paul Manafort? That evidence never came out, because the story was ridiculous bullshit from the beginning, yet mass media outlets everywhere parroted it to their audiences like it was a fact. You can still post that bogus Guardian story on Twitter and Facebook to this very day without so much as a warning.

Where were these high evidentiary standards when Politico published the idiotic, nonsensical story that Iran was plotting to assassinate the American ambassador to South Africa? The report sparked many news reports and Twitter threats from the president, but when it was dismissed by the South African government itself there was barely a whisper about it. You are still free to share this bogus Politico article anywhere online you like.

Where were these high evidentiary standards when leaks by anonymous spooks dominated headlines for days with their evidence-free allegation that the Russian government had been paying Taliban-linked fighters bounties on western occupying forces? We now know that story was completely baseless and would have been dismissed by news reporters who were actually doing their due diligence, yet it’s still being cited as fact on Twitter by sitting US senators and in a recent vice presidential debate by Kamala Harris. If news reporters had spent anywhere near as much energy cautioning their audiences to be skeptical about this story and educating them about its plot holes as they’re spending on Hunter Biden’s emails, this would not be happening.

The problem is not that there are high evidentiary standards for Hunter Biden’s emails, the problem is that there are virtually no evidentiary standards when the plutocratic media want to sell the world on a narrative which benefits the establishment upon which the media-owning class has built its kingdom. News reports will be waved through on a vague assertion by some anonymous government operative if they are damaging to Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Syria or any other US-targeted nation, and they are on a pretty much daily basis to greater or lesser degrees.

If a news report facilitates the national security state, all journalistic protocol goes out the window and nobody knows the meaning of the word evidence. As soon as a report becomes inconvenient for a friend of the national security state like Joe Biden, suddenly strict evidentiary standards and warnings against potential disinformation are of paramount importance. This is the same as lying all the time.

They lie because the mass media within the US-centralized empire are the propaganda engine for that empire. The drivers of empire understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world, so they ensure that all points of narrative influence are tightly controlled by them.

A world where all news stories are held to the same evidentiary standards as Hunter Biden’s emails are currently being held would be a world without empire. People would never consent to the insanity of imperialism and endless war if their consent wasn’t manufactured, and depriving them of the information that is inconvenient for that empire is essential in that manufacturing.

October 15, 2020 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Yugoslav Wars: Biden’s Belligerent Militarism Revisited

By Nauman Sadiq | Global Research | October 11, 2020

Ironically, while three US presidents have been accused of impeaching the Constitution for relatively minor offenses, including Bill Clinton for perjury and Donald Trump for using political influence to discredit opponents, no US president has ever been charged, let alone convicted, of waging devastating wars of aggression.

Unless impeachment proceedings are initiated against war criminals, including George Bush and Dick Cheney for invading Afghanistan and Iraq and Barack Obama and Joe Biden for waging proxy wars in Libya and Syria, the impeachment provisions in the US Constitution would serve as nothing more than a convenient tool for settling political scores.

The fact is not only the domestic law enforcement and judicial systems of the Western powers but also international institutions, such as International Criminal Court, have been used as tools of perception management for solely prosecuting alleged “war criminals” of former Yugoslavia and impoverished African nations and real war criminals have never been prosecuted for the crimes of destroying entire nations with their militarism and interventionism.

Before being elected as Obama’s vice president in 2008, as a longtime senator from Delaware and subsequently as the member and then the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, alongside inveterate hawk Senator Joe Lieberman, was one of the principal architects of the Bosnia War in the Clinton administration in the nineties.

Reflecting on first black American president Barack Obama’s memorable 2008 presidential campaign, with little-known senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, as his running-mate, Glenn Kessler wrote for the Washington Post [1] in October 2008:

“The moment when Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. looked Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the eye and called him a ‘damned war criminal’ has become the stuff of campaign legend.

“The Democratic vice presidential nominee brings up the 1993 confrontation on the campaign trial to whoops of delight from supporters. Senator Barack Obama mentioned it when he announced he had chosen Biden as his running mate.

“During vice presidential debate with his counterpart on the Republican ticket, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Biden twice gave himself credit for shifting US policy on Bosnia. The senator from Delaware declared that he ‘was the catalyst to change the circumstance in Bosnia led by President Clinton.’ At another point he noted: ‘My recommendations on Bosnia — I admit I was the first one to recommend it. They saved tens of thousands of lives.’”

Instead of “saving tens of thousands of lives,” the devastating Yugoslav Wars in the nineties in the aftermath of the break-up of the former Soviet Union and then the former Yugoslavia claimed over 130,000 fatalities, created a humanitarian crisis and unleashed a flood of millions of refugees for which nobody is to blame but the Clinton administration’s militarist policy of subjugating and forcibly integrating East European states into the Western capitalist bloc.

Regarding Washington’s modus operandi of waging proxy wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of master strategists at NATO to raise money [2] from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Kuwait; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms markets [3] in the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and guerilla warfare training to the disaffected population of the victim country by using the intelligence agencies of the latter’s regional adversaries. Whether it’s Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Libya or Syria, the same playbook was executed to the letter.

Raising funds for proxy wars from the Gulf Arab States allows the Western executives the freedom to evade congressional scrutiny; the benefit of buying weapons from unregulated arms markets of the Eastern Europe is that such weapons cannot be traced back to the Western capitals; and using jihadist proxies to achieve strategic objectives has the advantage of taking the plea of “plausible deniability” if the strategy backfires, which it often does. Remember that al-Qaeda and Taliban were the by-products of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, and the Islamic State and its global network of terrorists were the blowback of the proxy war in Syria.

Nevertheless, smugly oblivious to the death and destruction caused by Washington’s global domination agenda, national security shill Glenn Kessler further noted in the aforementioned Washington Post article:

“Biden focused on deficiencies in US policy toward Bosnia, he called for NATO expansion before it became fashionable and most recently prodded the Bush administration to back a $1 billion package to rebuild Georgia after the Russian invasion.

“As the incident with Milosevic shows, Biden is hardly shy about emphasizing his own role in world affairs. Biden’s book portrays him frequently confronting Clinton and bucking him up on Bosnia when the president had doubts about his own policy. But the hard legislative work was left to others. Biden did take an early stab at prodding action, writing an amendment in 1992 — opposed by George H.W. Bush’s administration — that authorized spending $50 million to arm the Bosnian Muslims.

“In April 1993, Biden spent a week traveling in the Balkans, meeting with key officials, including a three-hour session with Milosevic. The trip was detailed in 15 pages of the senator’s autobiography.

“By all accounts, the meeting was tense. Milosevic spent a lot of time poring over maps and expressing concerns with peace proposals crafted by a group of international mediators. Milosevic denied he had much influence over the Bosnian Serbs, but then immediately summoned Radovan Karadzic, their leader, with a curt phone call.

“According to Biden’s book, Milosevic asked the senator what he thought of him. ‘I think you’re a damn war criminal and you should be tried as one,’ Biden said he shot back. Milosevic, he said, did not react.

“Upon his return to the United States, Biden issued a 36-page report on the trip, laying out eight policy proposals, including airstrikes on Serb artillery and lifting the arms embargo on Bosnian Muslims.

“Biden continued to make fiery statements on Bosnia, demanding action. Richard C. Holbrooke recalled that when he was nominated as assistant secretary of state for Europe in late 1994, Biden ‘in no uncertain terms made it clear to me that the policy on Bosnia had to change and he would make sure it did. He believed in action, and history proved him right.’

“’When you look back, Senator Biden got Bosnia right earlier than anyone. He understood that a combination of force and diplomacy would revive American leadership and avoid a disaster in Europe,’ said James P. Rubin, a Biden aide at the time who later became spokesman for Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.”

It’s pertinent to mention that though touted as a “collective defense pact,” the trans-Atlantic military alliance NATO and its corollary economic alliance European Union were conceived during the Cold War to offset political and economic influence of the former Soviet Union which was geographically adjacent to Europe.

Historically, the NATO military alliance at least ostensibly was conceived as a defensive alliance in 1949 during the Cold War in order to offset conventional warfare superiority of the former Soviet Union. The US forged collective defense pact with the Western European nations after the Soviet Union reached the threshold to build its first atomic bomb in 1949 and achieved nuclear parity with the US.

But the trans-Atlantic military alliance has outlived its purpose following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and is now being used as an aggressive and expansionist military alliance meant to browbeat and coerce the Central and Eastern European states to join NATO and its corollary economic alliance, the European Union, or risk international isolation.

It was not a coincidence that the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991 and the Maastricht Treaty that consolidated the European Community and laid the groundwork for the European Union was signed in February 1992.

The basic purpose of the EU has been nothing more than to entice the former communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe into the folds of the Western capitalist bloc by offering financial incentives and inducements, particularly in the form of foreign direct investment and grants and loans to the tune of billions of dollars, and by abolishing internal border checks in the common European market, allowing free movement of workers from Eastern European nations seeking employment in prosperous Western European economies.

Naively giving credit to former Senator and Vice President Joe Biden for his supposed “humanitarian interventionism” and for creating a catastrophe in the Balkans in the nineties, Paul Richter and Noam N. Levey, writing for the LA Times [4] in August 2008, observed:

“Biden has frequently favored humanitarian interventions abroad and was an early and influential advocate for the US military action in the Balkans in the 1990s.

“Biden considers his most important foreign policy accomplishment to be his leadership on the Balkans in the mid-1990s. He pushed a reluctant Clinton administration first to arm Serbian Muslims and then to use U.S. air power to suppress conflict in Serbia and Kosovo.

“In his book, ‘Promises to Keep,’ Biden calls this one of his two ‘proudest moments in public life,’ along with the Violence Against Women Act that he championed.

“In 1998, he worked with McCain on a resolution to push the Clinton administration to use all available force to confront Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, a move designed to force the president to use ground troops if necessary against Serb forces in the former Yugoslavia, which was beset by fighting and ethnic cleansing.

“In addition, Biden, who claims close relationships with many foreign leaders, has demonstrated a readiness to cooperate with Senate Republicans in search of compromise — a trait that meshes with Obama’s pledge to reduce the level of partisan conflict and stalemate in Washington.

“He has called his new adversary, presumed Republican presidential nominee in the 2008 elections, Senator John McCain of Arizona, a ‘personal and close friend.’”

Birds of a feather flock together. Not only did Joe Biden collaborate with Joe Lieberman in the Clinton administration to create a humanitarian crisis in the Balkans in the nineties but he also shared the hawkish ideology of late Senator John McCain.

Though a decorated Vietnam War veteran who died battling cancer in 2018, McCain was a highly polarizing figure as a senator and was regarded by many Leftists as an inveterate neocon hawk, who vociferously exhorted Western military interventions not only in the Balkans in the nineties but also in Libya and Syria in 2011.

McCain was a vocal supporter of the 2011 military intervention in Libya. In April 2011, he visited the anti-Gaddafi forces and National Transitional Council in eastern Libyan city Benghazi, the highest-ranking American to do so, and said that the rebel forces were “my heroes.”

Regarding Syria’s proxy war that began in 2011, McCain repeatedly argued for the US intervening militarily in the conflict on the side of the anti-government forces. He staged a visit to rebel forces inside Syria in May 2013, the first senator to do so, and called for arming the Free Syrian Army with heavy weapons and for the establishment of a no-fly zone over Syria.

Following reports that two of the terrorists he posed for pictures with had been responsible for the kidnapping of eleven Lebanese Shia pilgrims the year before, McCain disputed one of the identifications and said he had not met directly with the other.

In the aftermath of a false-flag chemical weapons attack in Ghouta in 2013, McCain vehemently argued for strong American military action against the government of Bashar al-Assad, and in September 2013, cast a Foreign Relations Committee vote in favor of then-President Obama’s request to Congress that it authorize a military response, though the crisis was amicably resolved after seasoned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov staged a diplomatic coup by persuading Damascus to ship its alleged chemical weapons stockpiles out of Syria under Russian supervision.

***

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] Biden Played Second Fiddle to Joe Lieberman in Bosnia Legislation:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/06/AR2008100602681.html

[2] U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian Rebels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/world/middleeast/us-relies-heavily-on-saudi-money-to-support-syrian-rebels.html

[3] Billions of dollars weapons flowing from Eastern Europe to Middle East.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/27/weapons-flowing-eastern-europe-middle-east-revealed-arms-trade-syria

[4] On foreign policy, he’s willing to go his own way:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-aug-24-na-foreignpol24-story.html

October 12, 2020 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Joe Biden isn’t a foreign policy guru. He’s a Stepford wife repeating ‘War Party’ talking points

By Rachel Marsden | RT | September 25, 2020

There’s a trope emerging that credits Biden with being a bona fide foreign policy expert. Alongside this delusion is the expectation that he will eat Trump’s lunch during the upcoming election debates. I wouldn’t bank on that.

When it comes to foreign policy, Biden is little more than a Stepford wife who has simply repeated the talking points of the faction that truly runs Washington and American foreign policy. If this faction had an actual name, it might be called the War Party, and it would consist of both Republican and Democratic Party members.

It’s hardly surprising, for example, that the wife of late Senator John McCain, who rarely if ever encountered a war that he didn’t support (despite being taken prisoner and tortured himself during the Vietnam War), said that she would back Biden. The fact that Biden is a Democrat and McCain was a Republican is beside the point when their worldview is virtually identical.

Like a wind-up doll constantly spewing whatever its makers programmed into it, Biden tweeted this week: “As Juan Guaidó speaks about the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis and the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Maduro, I reaffirm my commitment to stand with the Venezuelan people. A Biden-Harris administration will always champion democracy and human rights around the world.”

How about starting with championing democracy in Venezuela by allowing the Venezuelan people to choose their own opposition to President Nicolas Maduro? Juan Guaido was simply handpicked by the US to play President of Venezuela in the hope that they’d fool the rest of the world into believing that it was true. It doesn’t seem to be getting the traction they had hoped. So now Guaido is resorting to doing online Zoom chats, in which he delivers a speech pretending to address the United Nations Assembly in parallel to President Maduro’s actual UN speech.

It wasn’t the first time that Biden had violated the democratic values that he purports to uphold by attempting to impose his worldview on the people of a foreign country. During his Democratic National Convention address last month, Biden said: “We cannot elect a man who belittles our closest allies while embracing dictators like Vladimir Putin.”

Well, actually, Joe, America could indeed feasibly re-elect Trump, in the same way that the Russian people have repeatedly chosen Putin over the main Communist Party opposition in Russia. A voting result that delegitimizes the worldview of Biden and fellow neoconservative global master planners isn’t a dictatorship. What is dictatorial is trying to impose a foreign agenda on the citizens of nations that happen to be led by officials who refuse to prostrate themselves before US interests.

And it’s not just America’s foes who bear the brunt of Biden’s policy self-centeredness. He even appears oblivious to the interests of US allies when they fall out of step. In an op-ed earlier this month, Biden had the audacity to dictate how he’d offer Iran a “credible path back to diplomacy” – by unilaterally adding a series of pre-conditions for Iran to rejoin a multilateral agreement that was breached not by Tehran but by Washington. It was the US that let down its allied partners in the deal – Britain, Germany, and France – all of which have been keen to see US sanctions dropped so they can finally normalize relations with Iran via increased commercial ties.

To be fair, Trump’s foreign policy has also left a lot to be desired. Many of his failures can be summed up in five words: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In the heat of a presidential campaign, Pompeo spent last week smack-talking Cuban and Venezuelan leaders in Latin America in an attempt to drum up votes for Trump among the Venezuelan and Cuban diaspora in Florida. Pompeo’s comedy routine consists of visiting foreign countries and meddling in their domestic affairs by telling them who they shouldn’t be doing business with  – all the while playing the victim of alleged foreign meddling in American affairs.

And it was Trump who hired regime change aficionado John Bolton as National Security Advisor – before calling Bolton a “wacko”, a “dope”, and a “disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war.”

Trump’s no angel, but unlike Biden, at least he’s denigrated a warmonger. By contrast, Biden outright supported wars in Syria, Libya, Serbia, and Iraq. If history is any indication, he risks blindly stumbling into yet another one.

The fact that Trump is peddling the notion that Biden is a Trojan horse for progressive leftists – who tend to be knee-jerk anti-war about as much as neoconservatives are for it – is laughable. Perhaps someone could give Biden a sharp tap. The kind that you’d give to a stubborn old model television set to get it to work when the picture doesn’t display properly. Because he’s stuck spewing neoconservative talking points and refuses to change his tune.

Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com

September 25, 2020 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Hunter Biden’s conflict of interest silenced by ‘fake mainstream media’, but Trump’s own people are in on cover-up

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | September 25, 2020

While US President Donald Trump is correct that mainstream media outlets are duplicitously dismissing revelations about Joe and Hunter Biden, what about his own Treasury and intelligence community going full Russiagate?

Joe Biden should “leave the campaign” because he “knew everything” about his son Hunter’s shady business dealings overseas, Trump said on Thursday in an exclusive interview with Fox News Radio. He was referring to the 87-page report, published Wednesday by Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees, which looked into Hunter Biden’s business dealings while his father was Barack Obama’s VP.

“I look at Hunter Biden today, where he stole millions of dollars, stole millions,” Trump told Brian Kilmeade, adding that “his father was in on it.” The “corrupt” Biden “knew his son was getting all this money from China, from Ukraine and other places,” Trump said.

In a follow-up tweet, Trump pointed out that Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire from a Russian billionaire. That would be Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia, and widow of the former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. The report says she sent Biden’s company Rosemont Seneca Thornton the wire transfer for unspecified consulting services in February 2014, citing confidential documents.

Trump is clearly infuriated that both Biden and the media are shrugging the whole story off, given the insane amount of scrutiny he has been subjected to since 2016 for alleged – but never substantiated – “Russian ties.” His campaign was even spied on, before and after the election, on the basis of a salacious “dossier” fabricated by a British spy working for the Democrats.

By contrast, Hunter Biden’s relationship with Burisma is well-documented, and Joe Biden was filmed boasting about getting an Ukrainian prosecutor fired – but to Democrats and the media, it’s a “conspiracy theory,” which they even tried to use to impeach Trump back in December.

To the surprise of precisely no one, the very same outlets pushing ‘Russiagate’ for years now scurried to spin the Biden report. Hunter’s Burisma job was “problematic” but the report “doesn’t show it changed US policy,” is how the Washington Post put it. The Daily Beast called the report a “hatchet job” and “politically motivated.” The New York Times said the report “Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing” and “appeared to be little more than a rehashing of unproven allegations that echoed a Russian disinformation campaign.” And so on, and so forth.

Even Fox, which aired Kilmeade’s show where Trump made the comments, made sure to extensively quote Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates, who called the report “a foreign attack against the sovereignty of our elections with taxpayer dollars – an attack founded on a long-disproven, hardcore rightwing conspiracy theory.”

While Trump is not wrong to argue he’s running not just against Biden and the Democrats, but the entire mainstream media backing them – much like in 2016 – there’s just one tiny glitch with that line of reasoning: his own administration is backing up the Democrats’ narrative!

First there was William Evanina, the ODNI official appointed to oversee all election intelligence briefings by acting DNI Richard Grenell, Trump’s trusted envoy. Evanina told Congress in August that “Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment.’”

Later that month, Trump’s primary rival and now supposed ally Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) signed off on a “bipartisan” Senate Intelligence report that was a rehash of every single discredited “Russiagate” talking point the committee’s real chair Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) could cram in there. The media had a field day with that one.

Then, on September 10, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin – one of his original cabinet picks – sanctioned Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, a major source for the Senate Republicans’ report, as a “Russian agent.”

It was Mnuchin, not the media or the Democrats, who described Derkach’s publication of alleged phone calls between Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko as “foreign interference in an attempt to undermine” the upcoming presidential elections. The recordings promoted “false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning US officials… with the intent to discredit” Biden, he added. None of this was actually substantiated, mind you, but US sanctions by definition don’t need to be.

So when Trump argues that the US mainstream media sides with the Democrats and cares about “Russian ties” only when they can be – and have been – weaponized against him, he definitely has a point. Yet when it comes to Mnuchin and Rubio siding with that narrative against him, he’s as silent as Joe Biden on the issue of Hunter. Seems like in post-facts America, the swamp drains you.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic

September 25, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Expert skeptical US would return to Iran nuclear deal under Biden

Press TV – September 15, 2020

A former American Senate foreign policy analyst has expressed skepticism that a Joe Biden administration would re-enter into the nuclear agreement with Iran.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has said that if elected he will return the United States to the Iran nuclear deal as a starting point for follow-on negotiations.

Biden said in a recent article for CNN’s website that the US will rejoin the 2015 deal if Iran returns to what he called “strict compliance” with the nuclear accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

James Jatras, a former Senate foreign policy adviser in Washington, told Press TV on Tuesday that “It’s hard to know how much we can make of Joe Biden’s claim that he would return to the JCPOA, if he is elected president.”

“I noticed that he caveats that with ‘Iran must return to full compliance.’ And of course, we know that Iran has taken certain steps that she feels to be necessary given the US pullout from the agreement and the fact that the Europeans have failed to follow through with their obligations under the agreement,” he added.

“So I don’t know what Biden or more importantly his advisors, like Nick Burns or Evelyn Farkas, have in mind of what would constitute full Iranian compliance such that Biden could say: ‘OK, fine now, we’ll enter into this plan,’” he noticed.

“He also talks about follow on negotiations, which raises the specter that additional demands would be placed on Tehran before even a Biden administration would be comfortable re-entering the agreement. So I am somewhat skeptical that he would actually do that,” he observed.

Biden’s Republican rival, President Donald Trump, withdrew the US from the Iran deal over two years ago. Trump said it was a bad deal that needs to be re-negotiated.

Iran has time and again said it will not renegotiate the existing accord or make a new one with the US as long as sanctions remain in place.

Since scrapping the JCPOA in May 2018, the Trump administration has unleashed its “toughest ever” sanctions to bring Iran’s economy to its knees, but it keeps humming and is getting back on its feet.

September 15, 2020 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Videos of Biden touching young girls flagged as ‘child sexual exploitation’ by Twitter despite being official public footage

C-Span footage of Joe Biden interacting with girls flagged by Twitter for violating their Child Sexual Exploitation Policy after popping up in discussion on the politician’s character.
RT | September 14, 2020

The dispute on social media saw Texan progressive activist Johnny Graz seeking to make a case that the Democratic presidential nominee should be investigated for sexual assault.

Another commenter, who goes by the name ‘Jake Koenig,’ sought to support Graz’s argument by posting a video compilation of Biden touching various young girls during photo ops at their parents’ congressional swear-in ceremonies in 2015.

However, the commenter was unable to post the official public footage of the proceedings because “Twitter flagged [him] for trying to post images of child molestation.”

Koenig’s claim was easily verifiable, as Twitter does indeed very quickly identify the video as “prohibited” content that “violates [their] Child Sexual Exploitation Policy.” Moreover, the website bans the poster’s account until they’ve deleted the footage.

The infamous footage shows the former vice president touching US legislators’ daughters and granddaughters. At a various points, he appears to be holding some girls in place and closely leaning in to say something in their ears.

The discussion around Biden’s behavior has largely been fueled by a string of accusations by several women that he “inappropriately” touched them. Most notably, back in March, the former senator’s staffer Tara Reid publicly came forward saying he sexually assaulted her back in 1993.

The claims did not attract much media attention, even though they coincided with the rise of the highly publicized ‘MeToo’ movement, self-tasked with bringing powerful men to account for sexual misbehavior against women. The organization’s largest personalities did not seem to be interested in Reid’s case, which led to infighting and accusations of partisanship.

Biden himself denied the allegations, saying that “nothing like this ever, ever happened,” and even added that he doesn’t remember the woman.

September 14, 2020 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

US sanctions Ukrainian lawmaker who published Biden-Poroshenko tapes for ‘Russian influence’ in presidential election

RT | September 10, 2020

Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Derkach has been sanctioned by the US, and his publication of alleged phone calls between the Ukrainian president and the US vice president declared ‘Russian interference’ in the US election.

Derkach “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services,” the US Treasury Department declared on Thursday, sanctioning the member of parliament for “foreign interference in an attempt to undermine” the upcoming presidential elections. In addition, three alleged employees of the Internet Research Agency, also referred to as the St. Petersburg ‘troll factory,’ were placed on the sanctions list.

The move against “four Kremlin-linked officials” was hailed by the State Department as “a clear signal that the United States will not tolerate interference or influence” in the upcoming vote.

No evidence was offered for the allegation that either Derkach, or the IRA trio – identified as Artem Lifshits, Anton Andreyev and Darya Aslanova – were actually in any way connected to the Russian government.

Instead, the Treasury claimed that Derkach had “waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning US officials.” Between May and July this year, he released “edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit” US officials, they allege.

Derkach released several hours worth of audio tapes purporting to be conversations between former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and former US Vice President Joe Biden from 2014-2016, including references to investigations of the gas company Burisma, which had given Biden’s son Hunter a lavishly compensated seat on its board.

Poroshenko has denounced the revelations as “fabrications” and “part of a large-scale hybrid war” by Russia, and it appears the US Treasury has taken his word at face value. There was no indication any of Derkach’s claims, the tapes, or the documents he offered to the press have been investigated; instead, the Treasury simply asserts that everything he said was “unsubstantiated.”

Similarly, Derkach’s “reliance on US platforms” is taken as proof that he “almost certainly targeted the US voting populace, prominent US persons, and members of the US government.”

The Treasury’s explanation of why Derkach was sanctioned basically claims that any effort to investigate Biden – now the Democratic presidential nominee – or his son amounts to “interference” in US elections, which was the main premise of the Democrat-led effort to impeach President Donald Trump back in September 2019.

September 10, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Pro-Israel Kamala Harris pledges not to condition US aid to Israel on human rights

MEMO | August 27, 2020

Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president, has eased the concerns of pro-Israel Jewish donors to her party, by pledging not to condition aid to Israel on its human rights record if Joe Biden is elected President.

“Joe has made it clear he will not tie security assistance to any political decisions that Israel makes, and I couldn’t agree more,” Harris is reported saying in a virtual event held with Jewish donors by the Jerusalem Post.

“As vice president, Joe Biden helped ensure unwavering support for Israel’s security,” she continued. “During the Obama-Biden administration, he was a key advocate in securing support for life-saving technologies, which I have seen.”

Vowing to put Israel first, Harris added: “I pledge to you the Biden-Harris administration will sustain our unbreakable commitment to Israel’s security, including the unprecedented military and intelligence cooperation pioneered during the Obama-Biden administration and the guarantee that Israel will always maintain its qualitative military edge.”

The threat of conditioning aid to Israel was suggested by a number of Democrat lawmakers. In July the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders signed a letter calling for the $3.8 billion annual aid given to Israel to be made conditional on the Zionist state ending its violation of Palestinian human rights.

August 27, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Senate chairman subpoenas FBI Director, ex-State official as Russia-Ukraine probe intensifies

John Solomon Reports | August 17, 2020

A powerful Senate committee chairman has subpoenaed FBI Director Chris Wray and a former State Department official in an intensifying investigation into possible U.S. corruption in Russia and Ukraine and declared there is evidence Joe Biden’s family engaged in a “glaring conflict of interest.”

Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson announced the actions Monday, strongly accusing Democrats of levying false allegations against him and other GOP investigators to distract from the evidence his committee has gathered about Joe and Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine.

“We didn’t target Joe and Hunter Biden for investigation; their previous actions had put them in the middle of it,” Johnson wrote in a letter released Monday that provided a detailed timeline of Joe Biden’s Ukraine policy actions and his son’s hiring with the Ukraine natural gas company Burisma Holdings.

“Many in the media, in an ongoing attempt to provide cover for former Vice President Biden, continue to repeat the mantra that there is ‘no evidence of wrongdoing or illegal activity’ related to Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board,” the senator wrote. “I could not disagree more.”

Johnson noted evidence gathered by his committee showed Joe Biden met with his son’s business partner, Devon Archer, in April 2014 and within a month the vice president then visited Ukraine and both his son Hunter and the business partner were put on the Burisma board as the firm faced multiple corruption investigations.

“Isn’t it obvious what message Hunter’s position on Burisma’s board sent to Ukrainian officials?” Johnson asked. “The answer: If you want U.S. support, don’t touch Burisma. It also raised a host of questions, including: 1) How could former Vice President Biden look any Ukrainian official (or any other world leader) in the face and demand action to fight corruption? 2) Did this glaring conflict of interest affect the work and efforts of other U.S. officials who worked on anti-corruption measures?”

You can read Johnson’s letter here:

File 2020-08-09 RHJ letter re Investigation history purpose goals 1805.pdf

Sources familiar with Johnson’s investigation say the committee has secured testimony from at least one State Department official who worked in Ukraine saying the Bidens’ conduct created the appearance of a conflict of interest and undercut U.S. efforts to fight corruption in Kiev.

Johnson also divulged that late last week he issued a formal subpoena to Wray demanding he immediately surrender records from the Russia collusion probe that the committee has been seeking for months.

The subpoena gives Wray until 5 p.m. on Aug. 20 to comply and demands all records from the probe known as Crossfire Hurricane, including those provided for a damning report by the Justice Department inspector general.

You can view the subpoena here:

File FBI Subpoena 20200806.pdf

Johnson also announced his committee has prepared a subpoena for Jonathan Winer, a former Obama State Department official who had extensive contact with British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, the author of a flawed dossier that helped propel the FBI probe into now disproven Trump-Russia collusion.

“Mr Winers counsel has not responded since Thursday as to whether he would accept service of the subpoena,” Johnson said. “If he does not respond by tomorrow, we will be forced to effect service through the U.S. Marshals. More subpoenas can be expected to be issued in the coming days and weeks.”

Johnson and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley have been pursuing a two-track investigation for more than two years, examining both failures and corruption in the FBI’s Russia probe as well as the issue of the Bidens’ conflicts in Ukraine.

As the 2020 election draws nearer and the committee’s evidence mounts in the Biden portion of the probe, Democrats have repeatedly attacked Johnson and Grassley accusing them of accepting evidence with Ukrainian officials tied to Russia.

In his letter, Johnson adamantly denies he has talked with or received documents from the Russian-tied Ukrainians, accusing Democrats like Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut of knowingly fomenting disinformation.

“The only problem with their overblown handwringing is that they all knew full well that we have been briefed repeatedly, and we had already told them that we had NOT received the alleged Russian disinformation,” Johnson wrote. “The very transparent goal of their own disinformation campaign and feigned concern is to attack our character in order to marginalize the eventual findings of our investigation.”

Johnson’s letter identifies 14 questions he believes Joe Biden should answer and said the dealings documented by his committee — all from U.S. government documents — follow a larger pattern of family members appearing to cash in on the vice president’s policymaking.

“The appearance of family profiteering off of Vice President Biden’s official responsibilities is not unique to the circumstances involving Ukraine and Burisma,” the senator wrote. “Public reporting has also shown Hunter Biden following his father into China and coincidentally landing lucrative business deals and investments there.

“Additionally, the former vice president’s brothers and sister-in-law, Frank, James and Sara Biden, also are reported to have benefited financially from his work as well. We have not had the resources to devote investigatory time to these other allegations, but I point them out to underscore that Ukraine and Burisma seem more of a pattern of conduct than an aberration.”

Johnson’s announcement follows one day after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham released a document Sunday he says shows the FBI misled senators on the Intelligence Committee during the Russia probe by falsely suggesting Steele’s dossier was backed up by one of his key sources.

“Somebody needs to go to jail for this,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) the panel’s chairman, told the Fox News program Sunday Futures with Maria Bartiromo. “This is a second lie. This is a second crime. They lied to the FISA court. They got rebuked, the FBI did, in 2019 by the FISA court, putting in doubt all FISA applications.”

The document in question contains the draft talking points the FBI used to brief the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2018, including an assessment that the primary sub-source of the information contained in the Steele dossier had backed up the former MI-6 agent’s reporting.

The primary sub-source “did not cite any significant concerns with the way his reporting was characterized in the dossier to the extent he could identify it,” the FBI memo claimed. “… At minimum, our discussions with [the Primary Sub-source] confirm that the dossier was not fabricated by Steele.”

In fact, by the time the FBI provided senators the briefing, agents had already interviewed Steele’s primary sub-source, who disavowed much of what was attributed to him in the dossier as in “jest” or containing uncorroborated allegations.

You can read the FBI memo Graham released here:

File FBI SSCI Briefing Document 2018.pdf

August 18, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Narrative control tightens as panicked anti-Trump aristocrats crank up media gaslight machines

By Mitchell Feierstein | RT | August 17, 2020

Orange Man Bad. It’s a narrative that is being made harder to question every day, even as Democrat-controlled cities descend into chaos and Americans are being fed the same old status quo from the Obama and Clinton era.

The middle and lower classes have been eviscerated, and America’s big cities have been decimated and destroyed by the mob. And who is the mob? They are Antifa, BLM, ideologues (aka Democratic elites) and their multi-million-dollar-a-year media propaganda mouthpieces. The mob and its supporters are creating extreme tribalism that is ripping America apart.

Disgracefully, Democratic Party members of the US Congress are actively calling for “unrest in the streets” and the Democratic Party’s presidential dream team of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris condone this anarchy, chaos and violence by their silence, as they dance to the mob’s tune saying and doing anything to grab power through instilling more fear, terror and uncertainty amongst the voters. Democrats have not denounced the surge in murders, looting, and violence infecting America’s biggest cities, but many are instead actively working to defund the police during a massive crime wave. People have to “shoplift some bread,” as New York City’s member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explains.

The Democratic cabal headed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from California and New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the Congressional Judiciary Committee, have actively denied the murders, arson, looting, and violent crime as buildings burn and jobs disappear (here). It’s all because of America’s systemic racism and white privilege – but don’t believe me, just ask the intelligentsia.

To throw petrol on the arsonists’ blaze, the media have whipped up more unnecessary fear and panic by disproportionately sensationalizing everything as being part of Covid even if their ‘fake facts’ directly contradict the science. This falls perfectly in line with the psyops alleged in the scandalous Millie Weaver documentary ‘Shadowgate’, and before that in Patrick Bergy’s book ‘Victim of the Swamp’ – a fear-based narrative control operation called Interactive Internet Activities, or IIA. It’s your call to what extent you want to believe them, but the expedience with which Shadowgate was censored online (for ‘hate speech’ of all things) and Weaver reportedly got arrested certainly is telling.

Last week, project fear version 2.0 for election 2020 was kicked off by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris demanding that all “patriotic” Americans wear masks for the next three months, claiming it will save 40,000 lives. Biden and Harris refused to cite even a scintilla of scientific evidence or answer any questions. Their policy? Just shut up and obey.

I have discussed at length and how Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Netflix and YouTube could manipulate the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The US two-party system looks content to sit silently and allow the Wall Street-financed Silicon Valley oligarchs to rig the 2020 election and implement a cancel culture with fear and obedience as its main features. Freedom of speech, democracy and liberty will be vaporized. Congratulations, Wall Street – Biden/Harris are ready to do whatever you command.

The rule of law has already been cast aside, along with statues and history, as a ‘racist relic’ created by old white men. In the minds of the mob, the United States is being transformed into a virtue-signaling utopia, which, in reality, has become a lawless banana republic run by a small shrieking violent minority of coastal elites funded by plutocrats with IIA to solidify their rule. Welcome to Wokeistan and its cult-like indoctrination run by omnipotent ‘diversity trainers’.

New York’s ‘Gray Lady’ the New York Times is a prime example, having now morphed into a liberal left echo chamber that tells its readers what to think. It has dropped all journalistic neutrality and has ‘evolved’ into a biased editorial paper that displaces critical analysis, reason, logic and facts. The Times now claims a monopoly on ‘progressive thought’ that is veering sharply from any journalistic integrity and heading down a dark path of ‘woke ideologies’ that distort the truth and include insane platforms such as censorship-based ‘cancel culture’ and ‘abolishing the police’. In conjunction with Hollywood billionaire Oprah Winfrey’s production company Lionsgate, the ‘Narrative Lady’ seeks to put a dishonest spin on history and cancel anyone who dares resist. Why is America’s broken judicial system allowing a dialogue that will enable ANYONE to criticize, discriminate or attack people for the way they were born? Discrimination law is clear – it is illegal to treat people differently based upon their immutable characteristics of skin color, sex, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or political inclination.

The overthrow began 30 years ago when the Clintons came into power and academics became more interested in indoctrination than in education. Education has been overrun by cultural Marxism. As George Orwell warned: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.” Today’s mantra is ‘Diversity is our strength’. If you dispute this, you are racist, sexist, homophobic and a despicable person who the mob will ensure is censored, fired, humiliated, shunned from society and permanently canceled for not subscribing to the dictates.

The left demanded that Joe Biden’s VP pick be a woman of color – not the most qualified person for the job, but a woman of color because of Biden’s Senate record and history on race. In advance of Biden’s capitulation, left-leaning groups crafted and sent all major news outlets 32 pages of guidelines with veiled threats of cancelation if anyone dared question the narrative. If you step over the line, you will be considered racist, sexist and a slew of ‘ists’ too many to name.

Following Harris’s nomination, there was even more magical thinking from coastal academic elites and purveyors of fake news. The New York Times was widely mocked for its rebirth of Kamala Harris and for its revisionist history when it called Kamala Harris a pragmatic moderate. GovTrack rated Harris as the fourth most liberal US senator in the 115th Congress. Harris’ track record as a California prosecutor shows her to be anything but a progressive prosecutor. Harris did not protect victims of sexual predators. Harris failed to prosecute alleged pedophile priests. However, Harris did accept a $50,950 campaign contribution from “board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members,” as well as lucrative pay-to-play board appointments. Nothing to see here, look away.

Senator Kamala Harris will do or say anything in her quest for power. Before determining any factual basis for Jussie Smollett’s fake ‘hate crime’, Harris had no problem posting the divisive, inflammatory race-baiting tweet below.

When overwhelming evidence revealed how Jussie Smollett faked this ‘hate crime’, Harris refused to retract her statements and remove this incendiary tweet. Is that leadership? Where is the condemnation? Is Harris someone we want a heartbeat away from the presidency?

This presidential election will be the most consequential for the survival of the republic.

The US is no longer a democracy; it is an oligarchy. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media propagandists and the coastal elites demand regime and societal change as well as a cultural shift. Let the book burning begin! Is this what the majority of America wants? Does either political party care about the people they represent?

‘Orange man bad’ is the totality of the Biden/Harris ticket. No questions allowed and any debates are unlikely. Forget the facts that Democrat-controlled cities are currently infested with crime and are borderline uninhabitable, that the wealth inequality gap has never been wider, that tens of thousands of Americans die yearly from opioid addiction, that about 40 million Americans are unemployed and that the Federal Reserve keeps bailing out bankers with a debt tsunami while the bread and circuses of the empire in decline hits a fever pitch. These are minor details because: ORANGE MAN BAD! Rinse, repeat ORANGE MAN BAD!

A Biden/Harris ticket ensures the oligarchy’s agenda will be accelerated, the rich will get richer and everyone else will get screwed – again.

Mitchell Feierstein is the CEO of Glacier Environmental Fund and author of ‘Planet Ponzi: How the World Got into This Mess, What Happens Next, and How to Protect Yourself.’ He spends his time between London and Manhattan. Join Mitch on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook – @Planetponzi

August 17, 2020 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment