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Aid convoys struggling to reach ‘encircled’ Ukrainian cities, UN claims

Samizdat | March 19, 2022

Aid agencies are struggling to reach civilians in Ukrainian cities blocked by the Russian military, Jakob Kern, an emergency coordinator with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Saturday.

“The challenge is to get to the cities that are encircled or about to be encircled,” Kern told the news agency AFP, describing the humanitarian situation on the ground as “dire.”

Ukraine’s food supply chain has effectively been broken amid the ongoing conflict, he said, with the WFP having to stock its warehouses “from zero.” He condemned what he described as Russia’s tactic of blocking cities, stating that it was “unacceptable in the 21st century.”

“The closer you go to these cities, the more worried [truck drivers] are about their safety,” Kern said. “And that means we’re not able to reach people in Mariupol, Sumy, Kharkiv… in the cities that are almost encircled by now – or completely, in the case of Mariupol.”

While Moscow and Kiev have agreed on efforts to organize humanitarian corridors out of those cities turned into combat zones, each side continues to accuse the other of targeting civilians and failing to uphold evacuees’ right of safe passage. Moscow said Kiev had refused to open routes for those seeking refuge in Russia or Russian-controlled territories.

Moscow launched a large-scale assault on its neighbor in late February, following a seven-year standoff over Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk ceasefire agreements, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. German- and French-brokered protocols had been designed to regularize the status of the breakaway regions within the Ukrainian state.

Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military alliance. Kiev says the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two rebellious republics by force.

March 19, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Canada has ‘exhausted’ its stock of weapons

Samizdat | March 19, 2022

Canada has depleted its stock of weapons in its bid to support Ukraine amid Russia’s military operation in the country, Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand has acknowledged.

“I believe that we have exhausted our inventory … to the extent that we are able to provide [more] weapons,” Anand said during a live appearance on CBC on Friday.

“There are capacity issues we need to make sure we are on top of for the purposes of ensuring the Canadian Armed Forces are well resourced,” she added.

Ottawa had been among Western capitals that have provided Kiev with so-called “lethal aid.” It has so far sent or is in the process of sending 4,500 rocket launchers, 7,500 hand grenades, 100 anti-tank launchers with 2,000 rounds, two C-130J tactical aircraft, and various other pieces of kit from Canada.

Russia sent its troops into Ukraine in late February, following a seven-year standoff over Kiev’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the breakaway Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

German- and French-brokered protocols were designed to regularize the status of those regions within the Ukrainian state.

Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc.

Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.

March 19, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Nasrallah Denies Hezbollah Fighting in Ukraine alongside Russian Forces

Al-Manar | March 18, 2022

Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah on Friday categorically denied the media reports which alleged that a number of Hezbollah fighters and military experts are fighting in Ukraine alongside the Russian Forces.

Addressing Al-Mahdi Scouts Anniversary Ceremony, Sayyed Nasrallah said that Arab Channels circulated rumors, alleged to be quoting Ukrainian Military Staff, claiming that Hezbollah dispatched fighters and military experts who are professional at street battles.

“I categorically deny such rumors. These are baseless lies and rumors. Hezbollah did not dispatch any fighter or expert to Ukraine.”

Sayyed Nasrallah warned against similar media rumors about the alleged Hezbollah participation in Ukraine war, confirming that they are false.

Meanwhile, Sayyed Nasrallah called on the Lebanese government to form an emergency committee to cope with the economic repercussions of the war in Ukraine, pertaining mainly the prices of the basic commodities.

March 19, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

U.S. outsourced dangerous infections studies to other countries: Lavrov

Pentagon-funded labs in nations bordering Russia and China need to be opened up for inspections, the Russian FM said

Samizdat | March 18, 2022

Russia suspects Pentagon-funded bioresearch laboratories in foreign nations, including those in Ukraine, may pose a threat because of the secrecy surrounding their work, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Washington apparently didn’t want to risk exposing its own people to the pathogenic threat, he suggested.

“The Americans some years ago decided that it was too dangerous to do [such research] on their own soil. So, they moved all these threatening and dangerous activities to other countries,” Lavrov claimed.

“More and more they concentrate their research and experiments around the borders of the Russian Federation and China,” he remarked.

Lavrov was referring to biolabs funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the existence of which was highlighted during Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The Russian military claims it has discovered evidence that the work in Ukrainian labs funded by the US Department of Defense had military applications.

Washington has denied the claims, which had reiterated Russia’s previous suspicions about research undertaken on foreign territory in return for American grants. The US government said the labs existed to study emerging infections throughout the world and served as an epidemic early warning system.

US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland last week testified under oath that there were “biological research facilities in Ukraine,” and that the US was assisting Kiev in destroying research materials so they would not get into Russia’s hands.

In his interview, Lavrov said that, in his assessment, there were more than 300 biolabs worldwide involved in research for the Pentagon. Such facilities should be subject to international monitoring for compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention, which bans any work related to germ warfare. There is no verification mechanism for the treaty – a lapse Moscow wants addressed, Lavrov said.

The UN Security Council is to convene later on Friday at Russia’s request to discuss a legally binding protocol to the convention, “which would require obligatory transparency measures by any participating state,” the minister said. The US stonewalled attempts to implement such a protocol throughout the 1990s before blocking it in 2001, therefore “the Americans … will be against it,” Lavrov predicted, branding the obstruction “not defensible.”

Beijing has previously supported calls for greater transparency about American bioresearch, arguing that Washington would have nothing to hide if all work carried out in foreign labs was as benign as it claimed.

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Lawyer For Mother Of Hunter Biden’s Daughter Says He Expects President’s Son To Be Indicted

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | March 18, 2022

The past few weeks have been tough for Hunter Biden and, by extension, the rest of the Biden family. On March 1, news broke that Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner and friend Devon Archer was sentenced to a year in federal prison for defrauding a Native American tribe. Then just yesterday, the New York Times published an investigation revealing that although the younger Biden had paid his outstanding tax liability – which was reportedly greater than $1 million, and which required him to take out a loan to pay it off – a federal investigation into his failure to pay taxes on his earnings from overseas has continued.

Much lower in the NYT story, America’s “paper of record” mentioned the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that was reportedly abandoned at a computer repair shop, and subsequently became the heart of a NY Post story published shortly before the 2020 election (which was subsequently ignored by the MSM because of unfounded rumors that the materials had been stolen by Russian hackers, or that the laptop itself was some kind of plant). It didn’t only mention the laptop, but also confirmed that it was authentic. We previously reported on how the NYT sued to obtain copies of emails mentioning Biden and his exploits allegedly gleaned from Romanian embassy officials.

And in the latest blow to the reputation of the president’s perennially troubled son, a lawyer for the mother of Hunter Biden’s 3-year-old daughter (who was born out of wedlock to a woman who allegedly slept with the younger Biden while working as an exotic dancer) said during an interview with CNBC that he expects the younger Biden “to be indicted” for tax fraud.

Attorney Clint Lancaster told CNBC that his client, Lunden Roberts, had recently testified in Delaware before a federal grand jury in the criminal investigation into the 52-year-old presidential scion. The lawyer based his commentary on “what I saw” in Biden’s financial records.

Lancaster said he and Roberts were interviewed by an assistant U.S. attorney, an FBI agent and an IRS agent — “one that carries a badge and gun” — more than a year ago about Biden in Little Rock, Ark., where Lancaster practices law.

“I expect him to be indicted,” the lawyer said about Biden. “Just based on what I saw in his financial records, I would be surprised if he’s not indicted.”

Lancaster later added that neither he nor his client want Hunter Biden to go to jail.

“It’s not my goal, much to the unhappiness of many people in the Republican Party,” said Lancaster, a supporter of former President Donald Trump who in late 2020 worked on a legal challenge to results that showed Biden had won the state of Wisconsin that year.

He also confirmed that the younger Biden hadn’t visited his 3-year-old daughter with Roberts, “which is sad because the baby looks like him, with blonde hair.” He also explained that he had come into possession of a vast trove of the younger Biden’s financial records as part of his work on Roberts’ child-support suit. When asked about the number of records, Lancaster said it was around “10 gigs of data”.

“Oh, hell, it was a bunch,” said Lancaster when asked how many records there were related to Hunter Biden’s finances. The documents were part of the case file for an Arkansas court child-support lawsuit that Roberts filed against Biden in 2019 in connection with their daughter.

“They’re all in electronic form,” Lancaster said. “I would estimate it was anywhere from 10 gigs of data.”

“I saw a lot of information” that is “problematic” for Biden, he said.

Finally, Lancaster told CNBC that his client hadn’t received immunity before testifying because she hadn’t committed any crimes. The NYT on Thursday reported that Roberts had been questioned about the provenance of the child support payments she had received from Biden. Prosecutors were apparently investigating whether the same corporate entity from which she received the payments was also used by Biden to receive payments from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company from which he received a salary of $50K per month just for sitting on its board.

Given all the information on the investigation that’s just come to light, we wouldn’t be surprised if the grand jury hearing the evidence is soon asked to vote on whether federal charges should be brought against the younger Biden. His father, the president, has already recused himself from the case as his DoJ has continued with the investigation. If charges are brought and Hunter Biden is convicted (or pleads guilty), his father would then have the option of pardoning him. From this vantage point, it’s not too difficult to imagine a scenario where Biden pardons his son after deciding not to seek another term in office.

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Corruption | , | Leave a comment

Russia presents new evidence from US-funded Ukraine biolabs

Samizdat | March 17, 2022

Russia believes that laboratories in Ukraine funded by the US military were making biological weapons components, but that local staff was being kept in the dark about their research, a senior Russian general said on Thursday.

Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, who commands the Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces of Russia, presented documents and imagery showing why the military has come to such a conclusion.

“We believe that components of biological weapons were being made on the territory of Ukraine,” said Kirillov.

He noted that the documents he was presenting “have the signatures of real officials and are certified by the seals of organizations,” for those journalists and experts in the West doubting their veracity.

One document, dated March 6, 2015 confirms the “direct participation of the Pentagon in the financing of military biological projects in Ukraine,” Kirillov said. The US officially funded the projects through the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, according to the Agreement on Joint Biological Activities. However, the evidence shows that the real recipients of some $32 million in funds were Ukrainian Defense Ministry laboratories in Kiev, Odessa, Lvov and Kharkov.

These facilities were chosen by the US Department of Defense’s Threat Reduction Administration (DTRA), and the contractor Black and Veatch, to carry out the U-P-8 project, aimed at studying the pathogens of Crimea-Congo hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis, and hantaviruses, Kirillov said, pointing to a slide with the Pentagon’s request.

“From our point of view, the interest of US military biologists is due to the fact that these pathogens have natural foci both in Ukraine and in Russia, and their use can be disguised as natural disease outbreaks,” the general said.

According to the evidence, the labs isolated three bacterial pathogens (causing plague, brucellosis and leptospirosis) and six families of viruses, including coronaviruses, all of which were drug-resistant and spread rapidly from animals to humans. A number of documents confirmed the samples taken in Ukraine to other countries – Georgia, Germany, and the UK.

Kirillov showed official documents confirming the transfer of 5,000 samples of blood serum taken from Ukrainian citizens to the Pentagon-backed Richard Lugar center in Tbilisi, Georgia. Another 773 biological assays were transferred to the UK, while an agreement was signed for the transfer of “unlimited quantities” of infectious materials to the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, Germany’s leading center for animal diseases.

However, the analysis of the obtained evidence suggests that Ukrainian specialists were not aware of the potential risks of transferring these materials, and may have been kept in the dark about the true goal of the ongoing research, Kirillov noted.

Documents from Project P-781, a study of ways of transmitting diseases to humans through bats, showed it was carried out by the Kharkov laboratory and the Lugar Center in Georgia, but Ukraine received most of the $1.6 million grant for the project. Kirillov said that “systematic” research in this area has been carried out since 2009, under the supervision of US specialists – referencing projects P-382, P-444 and P-568.

As one of the key people involved, Kirillov named the head of the DTRA office at the US Embassy in Kiev, Joanna Wintrol.

“Maybe she’s worth talking to, journalists?” he said.

Wintrol left Kiev in August 2020. In her parting interview, she insisted no US scientists worked in Ukrainian biolabs and accused Russia of spreading “false information” about the program.

Kirillov pointed to mass outbreaks of avian flu in Russia and the EU in 2021, causing billions in damages, while the Kharkov Institute of Veterinary Medicine was studying wild birds as transmission vectors and assessing conditions under which the spread could cause economic damage and food insecurity. Evidence now shows the institute collected strains of avian flu capable of jumping species, Kirillov said, calling for an international investigation into the matter.

Some of the documents at the Kherson laboratory appear to be missing and may have been destroyed, Kirillov said, suggesting it was related to the 2018 outbreak of a mosquito-borne parasitic disease in that region, and a possible cover-up.

Four cases of dirofilariasis were detected in February that year, which is not typical for mosquito life cycles, the general said. Pentagon representatives visited the local hospitals in April, collecting medical records and getting briefed on the epidemiological investigation. However, “no documentary evidence regarding this outbreak has been found in the Kherson laboratory,” leading the Russian military to believe that “the urgency of destroying such documentary evidence is explained by the desire to prevent access to them by Russian specialists.”

There was also an outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis in 2018, among the citizens of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, with 70 cases detected around the village of Pesky – on the frontline with Ukrainian troops – alone.

“This may indicate a deliberate infection, or an accidental leakage of the pathogen from one of the biological laboratories located on the territory of Ukraine,” Kirillov said.

The Russian general brought up the long history of US conducting banned biological research in other countries, noting as an example that in 2010 Washington apologized for syphilis experiments in Guatemala.

“We will continue to examine the evidence and inform the global community about the illegal activities of the Pentagon and other US government agencies in Ukraine,” Kirillov said.

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop — Falsely Called “Russian Disinformation” — is Authentic

By Glenn Greenwald | March 17, 2022

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation’s oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA’s all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

These “former intel officials” did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.” Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this “suspicion” based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump’s defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were “Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.’s validly despised class of media employees.

Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation.”

This disinformation campaign about the Biden emails was then used by Big Tech to justify brute censorship of any reporting on or discussion of this story: easily the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history. Twitter locked The New York Post‘s Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter’s orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another. Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a “fact check[] by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.

The archive’s authenticity, as I documented in a video report from September, was clear from the start. Indeed, as I described in that report, I staked my career on its authenticity when I demanded that The Intercept publish my analysis of these revelations, and then resigned when its vehemently anti-Trump editors censored any discussion of those emails precisely because it was indisputable that the archive was authentic (The Intercept‘s former New York Times reporter James Risen was given the green light by these same editors to spread and endorse the CIA’s lie, as he insisted that the laptop should be ignored because “a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.”) I knew the archive was real because all the relevant journalistic metrics that one evaluates to verify large archives of this type — including the Snowden archive and the Brazil archive which I used to report a series of investigative exposés — left no doubt that it was genuine (that includes documented verification from third parties who were included in the email chains and who showed that the emails they had in their possession matched the ones in the archive word-for-word).

Any residual doubts that the Biden archive was genuine — and there should have been none — were shattered when a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book last September, entitled “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power,” in which his new reporting proved that the key emails on which The New York Post relied were entirely authentic. Among other things, Schreckinger interviewed several people included in the email chains who provided confirmation that the emails in their possession matched the ones in the Post‘s archive word for word. He also obtained documents from the Swedish government that were identical to key documents in the archive. His own outlet, Politico, was one of the few to even acknowledge his book. While ignoring the fact that they were the first to spread the lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation,” Politico editors — under the headline “Double Trouble for Biden”— admitted that the book “finds evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.”

The vital revelations in Schreckinger’s book were almost completely ignored by the very same corporate media outlets that published the CIA’s now-debunked lies. They just pretended it never happened. Grappling with it would have forced them to acknowledge a fact quite devastating to whatever remaining credibility they have: namely, that they all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump. With strength in numbers, and knowing that they speak only to and for liberals who are happy if they lie to help Democrats, they all joined hands in an implicit vow of silence and simply ignored the new proof in Schreckinger’s book that, in the days leading up to the 2020 election, they all endorsed a disinformation campaign.

It will now be much harder to avoid confronting the reality of what they did, though it is highly likely that they will continue to do so. This morning, The New York Times published an article about the broad, ongoing FBI criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s international business and tax activities. Prior to the election, the Times, to their credit, was one of the few to apply skepticism to the CIA’s pre-election lie, noting on October 22 that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.” Because the activities of Hunter Biden now under FBI investigation directly pertain to the emails first revealed by The Post, the reporters needed to rely upon the laptop’s archive to amplify and inform their reporting. That, in turn, required The New York Times to verify the authenticity of this laptop and its origins — exactly what, according to their reporters, they successfully did:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

That this cache of emails was authentic was clear from the start. Any doubts were obliterated by publication of Schreckinger’s book six months ago. Now the Paper of Record itself explicitly states not only that the emails “were authenticated” but also that the original story from The Post about how they obtained these materials — they “come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop” — “appears” to be true.

What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post‘s reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate. It means that Big Tech monopolies, along with Twitter, censored this story based on a lie from “the intelligence community.” It means that Facebook’s promise from its DNC operative that it would suppress discussion of the reporting in order to conduct a “fact-check” of these documents was a fraud because, if one had been conducted, that no fact-check was even published because, if an honest one had been conducted, it would have proven that Facebook’s censorship decree was based on a lie. It means that millions of Americans were denied the ability to hear about reporting on the candidate leading all polls to become the next president, and instead were subjected to a barrage of lies about the provenance (Russia did it ) and authenticity (disinformation! ) of these documents.

The objections to noting all of this today are drearily predictable. Reporting on Hunter Biden is irrelevant since he was not himself a candidate (what made the reporting relevant was what it revealed about the involvement of Joe Biden in these deals). Given the war in Ukraine, now is not the time to discuss all of this (despite the fact that they are usually ignored, there are always horrific wars being waged even if the victims are not as sympathetic as European Ukrainians and the perpetrators are the film’s Good Guys and not the Bad Guys). The real reason most liberals and their media allies do not want to hear about any of this is because they believe that the means they used (deliberately lying to the public with CIA disinformation) are justified by their noble ends (defeating Trump).

Whatever else is true, both the CIA/media disinformation campaign in the weeks before the 2020 election and the resulting regime of brute censorship imposed by Big Tech are of historic significance. Democrats and their new allies in the establishment wing of the Republican Party may be more excited by war in Ukraine than the subversion of their own election by the unholy trinity of the intelligence community, the corporate press, and Big Tech. But today’s admission by The New York Times that this archive and the emails in them were real all along proves that a gigantic fraud was perpetrated by the country’s most powerful institutions. What matters far more than the interest level of various partisan factions is the core truths about U.S. democracy revealed by this tawdry spectacle.

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Cheerleader of NATO wars spotted in Ukraine

By Rachel Marsdon | Samizdat | March 17, 2022

French intellectual and philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy (“BHL”), has an odd propensity for appearing alongside western proxy fighters in war zones. And new reports now place him on the ground amid the conflict in Ukraine.

The day after the February 24 launch of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, France 2, the main state-owned television network, hosted a debate featuring, on one side, former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, perhaps best known worldwide for his role during the run up to the Iraq war in 2003. Back then, he served as the foreign minister and represented France’s opposition to the American efforts under then president Jacques Chirac at the United Nations Security Council.

After then US Secretary of State Colin Powell made his now infamous speech imploring the international community to back an invasion of Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein’s use of weapons of mass destruction, De Villepin argued in favor of inspections.

“Given this context, the use of force is not justified at this time. There is an alternative to war: Disarming Iraq via inspections. Moreover, premature recourse to the military option would be fraught with risks,” he said.

History has now proven him correct in his assessment.

De Villepin’s call for prudence and avoidance of military escalation in Ukraine was loaded with historical lessons learned. “Military interventions never yield the expected results,” recalled the former French prime minister. “History has taught us this in Libya, Iraq and the Sahel.”

On the other side of the France 2 debate table was BHL, who has a rather interesting relationship to some of the conflicts evoked by De Villepin. “[Russian President Vladimir Putin] launched this crazy war, without reason, against a people who had done nothing to him,” replied the philosopher.

It seems that in BHL’s world, wars start like magic with a need to protect completely innocent parties that just happen to be on NATO’s side, and not because of covert shenanigans that predate them — something that BHL should certainly know about.

During the NATO-backed war in Yugoslavia — the war in Europe that those commenting on the current situation in Ukraine seem to forget — BHL, who just happened to be hanging out in the region, overtly backed the NATO proxy, then Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović, who, his opponents believed, was a Muslim fundmentalist. Izetbegović was allegedly used by western forces to helm Islamist fighters against Serbia and ultimately carve out a zone of influence and military control in the Balkans. Later, in a 2019 tweet, BHL referred to the al-Qaeda-linked Izetbegović as “one of the great, luminous figures of the 20th century.”

Then, in March 2011, ahead of the NATO invasion of Libya, which led to an overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi that October, BHL was spotted in Libya meeting with “Libyan rebels,” footage of which can be seen in BHL’s documentary, “The Oath of Tobruk.” It would be easy to chalk up Levy’s presence among the western-backed proxy fighters ahead of Gaddafi’s ultimate demise at their hands as just journalistic interest or intellectual curiosity. But that theory is betrayed by French reports of an activist role at the highest level of the French government.

BHL succeeded in bringing three members of the future Libyan government in waiting to meet with then French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysée Palace on March 10, 2011 — seven months before Gaddafi’s demise, according to Le Figaro. The newspaper also reported that BHL, who met with then US Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, at a Paris hotel and noted an American disinterest in military intervention, subsequently took to French airwaves to pressure Sarkozy into having the French take the lead in the invasion by telling the French audience that, “If Gaddafi takes Benghazi, the huge French flag flying on the Corniche will literally be spattered with the blood of the massacred Libyans.” Four days after the media appearance, NATO began its military intervention in Libya.

In 2012, as the NATO-led invasion of yet another country, Syria, raged in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad with “Syrian rebels” backed by CIA and Pentagon covert programs, BHL took to the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival with both Libyan and Syrian rebels, to symbolize “the passing of the torch of Liberty,” according to Le Point magazine. Just a few months later, BHL was calling for France to also send weapons to the western’s proxy “rebels” to fight the Syrian army, specifically, “cannons, anti-aircraft missiles, defensive weapons, for Aleppo, Homs and the rest of Free Syria.”

Then, in February 2013, BHL wrote on his blog, “La Règle du Jeu,” praising then French president Francois Hollande for launching French military operations in Mali, which were ultimately an unsurprising result of the destabilization of Libya caused by the earlier French-led, NATO-backed invasion cheered by BHL himself. “For the first time, in Mali and Libya, force was put at the explicit service of freedom and justice; for the first time – since Valmy!  – there is a desired link … between the exercise by France of its power and the defense of values that go beyond it.” In defense of the “values” of leaving countries in tatters for years after hopelessly destabilizing them because their leaders refuse to kowtow to the agenda of Washington and its allies, apparently.

And now, BHL — symbolic of a certain caviar leftist that sells wars and invasions of benefit to the military industrial complex from the lofty perch of humanitarianism — wants action in Ukraine. And after calling for it prominently via French mainstream media, he is hanging out in Odessa — coincidentally, just in time for the launch of the new “Ukraine fighters”, once again doing NATO’s dirty work, but this time comprised of foreign and domestic western-armed warriors, both regular troops and irregular combatants, cheered from the sidelines by the west against Russian troops.

A regular and welcome fixture all over English and foreign western establishment media from America to Europe, BHL tends to appear wherever there’s armed conflict between interests of the western establishment intent on clinging to the current unipolar world order, against those more representative of a more competitive multipolar alternative. His very presence in Odessa should give pause to anyone who still honestly believes that NATO isn’t a directly involved player, using Ukraine as a platform for its ongoing fight against an new and emerging world order over which it risks losing control.

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine Has First-Rate Satellite Intelligence Courtesy of Uncle Sam, Making Its Artillery Far Deadliner

Lawfully Russia would be entirely justified in shooting down US satellites

Anti-Empire | March 17, 2022

Ukrainian military publicized an artillery strike it conducted against a camp of the Russian 35th Combined Arms Army (accompanied by horribly cheezy music considering the occasion).

How does a strike like this happen?

Aside from counter-battery fire, such an installation is defenseless against enemy long-range artillery. What keeps it safe is that normally enemy wouldn’t know about it. The enemy can’t normally see tens of kilometers behind your front line.

On paper the Ukrainians have the capability to discover such camps by flying drones, either in a grid search or directing them to sources of intense radio chatter they might have detected.

But there is reason to believe their reconnaissance is far simpler than that. The New York Times reports:

In Washington and Germany, intelligence officials race to merge satellite photographs with electronic intercepts of Russian military units, strip them of hints of how they were gathered, and beam them to Ukrainian military units within an hour or two.

So the Americans are providing the Ukrainians with numerous satellite images of the battlefield and of the Russian rear.

So in fact the Ukrainians do not need to spend time and resources discovering the layout of the Russian rear. Something they would have only a limited ability to do.

Instead, the whole Russian rear is laid bare to them courtesy of American satellites.

Knowing exactly where the Russian camps are, they are easy enough to target. Whether with the help of drone surveillance for better precision or not. (Particularly by self-propelled artillery which can quickly change position after a few salvos to avoid potential Russian counter-fire.)

America is neck-deep in this war. This is yet one more aspect of its involvement.

(Or you could say that America launched a war vs Russia decades ago and Russia responded by opening a front in Ukraine. Ergo the daily Pentagon briefings on an ostensibly Russian-Ukrainian war.)

Actually, The New York Times tries to muddy the waters by saying that the US is not passing on “intelligence that would tell Ukrainian forces how to go after specific targets” but I don’t know what that is even supposed to mean.

And they say they are not passing on specific intelligence that would tell Ukrainian forces how to go after specific targets. The concern is that doing so would give Russia an excuse to say it is fighting the United States or NATO, not Ukraine.

They’re passing on images coupled with electronic intercepts within an hour but it’s not “specific intelligence” about “specific targets”. So what does that mean? That Americans will send an image of Russian forces and installations but they won’t circle them with a thick red marker? What kind of gaslighting is this? Of course, satellite images will help with targeting and long-range attacks.

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Russia Promises More Disclosures on Ukraine Biolabs

Al-Manar | March 17, 2022

The Russian Defense Ministry said on Thursday it will soon release additional documents pertaining to the operation of Pentagon-funded biolabs in Ukraine. Moscow believes they have been involved in bioweapons research.

Russian military specialists in weapons of mass destruction are analyzing documents obtained from staff members of the Ukrainian labs, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a daily briefing. He claimed they detailed “implementation by the US in Ukraine of a secret project to study the ways humans can be infected from bats,” which was done in Kharkov.

The official said the same Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine in the Ukrainian city worked for years to study under which conditions wild birds carrying flu could cause an epidemic in humans and to assess the damage that would result.

Konashenkov didn’t explain why such research should be considered military in nature, as assessed by the defense ministry.

The spokesman further said more Ukrainian documents will soon be released on the transfer of human samples from Ukraine to the UK and other European nations. The materials will be accompanied by Russian military assessments of the work they detail, he said.

The Pentagon sponsors dozens of labs around the world under the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The work they do, the US government claims, is benign and is meant to monitor emergence of new dangerous infections. Countries like Russia and China believe they may be more sinister in nature.

US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said under oath that labs in Ukraine have been destroying research materials to prevent Russia from seizing them. It was not clear why Washington saw the scenario as dangerous. US officials claimed that the pathogens in question were remnants of Soviet bioweapons programs, which Moscow would presumably already have access to.

Some American public figures, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, were attacked for asking questions about the Ukrainian labs, which supposedly amounts to repeating “Russian propaganda.”

Utah Senator Mitt Romney accused Gabbard of spreading “treasonous lies” with her concerns about the safety of pathogen samples in Ukraine. The hosts of The View television show suggested people asking such questions should be arrested and investigated as possible Russian agents.

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

“Stealth Omicron” reminds us the pandemic narrative isn’t dead… it’s just sleeping

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | March 16, 2022

This week has seen several timely reminders that the Covid narrative is not done. It may have lost its number 1 spot at the top of the “news” charts, but it’s not dead. It’s just resting.

While the big red numbers at the top of every front page are now casualties instead of “cases”, the pandemic is simmering on the backburner and can be brought back to boil at a moment’s notice.

In China they are reporting huge spikes in “cases”, numbers not seen since the halcyon days of March 2020. Millions of Chinese citizens are already back on lockdowns, many now need police permission to travel from one province to another.

Giant multinationals are halting production for the near future at least, with the BBC warning that:

The lockdowns have raised concerns that crucial supply chains may be disrupted.

Yes, more supply chain disruption. Just like the war.

Funny how that works out.

It’s not just China either, according to Bloomberg Europe is seeing a “Covid Resurgence” after a “rushed exit” from restrictions, with Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands all reporting spikes in cases.

Germany’s “Covid resurgence” comes just days before the government’s emergency powers are due to expire, and just as they are planning to ease all restrictions.

Funny how that works out.

The alleged “resurgence” is the work of a not one but two “new” variants.

Firstly, Deltacron is back. They’re calling it a “new variant”, but the truth is the recombinant virus was first “discovered” back in early January.

At the time, mainstream articles questioned whether it even existed or was just a lab error.

They’ve decided it definitely does exist now.

The Huffington Post covers this story with the headline:

Why Everyone’s Talking About The Deltacron Variant Again

Why indeed. It’s a real puzzler.

Perhaps aware that “Deltacron” sounds like a villain from Transformers, they’re also pushing another new variant: “Omicron BA.2”.

Now, while that name definitely isn’t silly, it also isn’t very catchy – so they’ve got a cool scary sounding name for it too: “Stealth Omicron”.

It’s called “stealth omicron”, because it’s lacks markers that can be picked up on by PCR tests, meaning testing positive for this strain of the virus will look just like testing positive for the other strains.

Oh, and this variant isn’t actually new either, it was first discovered back in December, to very little fanfare.

But that was then, and this is now, and now experts are “worried”, apparently.

The press are already reporting that it might be the “most infectious disease on Earth”

Meanwhile, Pfizer’s CEO has said that the new variants mean people will need a 4th shot of their vaccine.

Funny how that works out.

All this just serves as a reminder that the Covid story is still there, and they can (and probably will) bring it back whenever they want. Maybe the very moment Ukraine and Russia agree on a peace deal.

Game of Thrones famously used to alternate their season finales, in an odd-numbered season the show would end with a shocking plot twist, and in even numbered seasons it would be an epic battle.

Maybe this will be our new reality, lurching from pandemic to war to pandemic to war, and around and around.

A perpetual cycle of different grand narratives, linked only in their shared consequences: More power for them, less freedom for us.

Funny how that works out.

March 16, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Zelensky and the Zionist Plot To Provoke Russia

NAUMAN SADIQ | BLACKLISTED NEWS | MARCH 15, 2022

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky took to Twitter [1] Sunday to express heartfelt gratitude to Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg for taking a clear stand on the Ukraine crisis and letting users violate rules against hate speech: “War is not only a military opposition on UA land. It is also a fierce battle in the informational space. I want to thank @Meta and other platforms that have an active position that help and stand side by side with the Ukrainians.”

“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement [2] March 11.

It naturally piques the curiosity why the social media behemoth is bending over backwards to violate its own longstanding regulations against hate speech to let Zelensky win the propaganda war in “the informational space” unless one takes into account the obvious fact that both Zuckerberg and Zelensky are Zionist Jews and take orders from Israel’s clandestine security agencies.

Born to Oleksandr Zelensky and Rymma Zelenska, both Russian-speaking Jews, in Jan. 1978, Volodymyr Zelensky was groomed by covert Mossad operatives in Ukraine since his student life while he was studying law at the Kryvyi Rih National University.

Instead of pursuing legal career, he chose acting as a profession at the behest of his influential patrons to gain nationwide publicity, particularly through the comedy television series “Servant of the People” in which Zelensky “prophetically played” the role of the Ukrainian president.

In fact, his production company Kvartal 95, which produces films, cartoons and television shows, was generously funded by deep pockets of Zionist billionaires. Comically exposing corruption and sleazy dealings of Ukraine’s politicians and oligarchs, the series “Servant of the People” aired from 2015 to 2019 and struck a chord with Ukrainian masses.

Riding on the wave of media publicity, Zelensky won a landslide presidential election in 2019. Later, his political party, which he “coincidentally” named “Servant of the People,” won an overwhelming victory in a snap legislative election held shortly after his inauguration as president.

In the 2001 census, a third of Ukraine’s over 40 million population registered Russian as their first language. In fact, Russian speakers constitute a majority in urban areas of industrialized eastern Ukraine and socio-culturally identify with Russia. Ukrainian speakers are mainly found in sparsely populated western Ukraine and in rural areas of east Ukraine.

Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian together belong to the East Slavic family of languages and share a degree of mutual intelligibility. Thus, Russians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians are one nation and one country whose shared history and culture goes all the way back to the golden period of 10th century Kyivan Rus’.

What do Ukrainians have in common with NATO powers, their newfound patrons, besides the fact that humanitarian imperialists are attempting to douse fire by pouring gasoline on Ukraine’s proxy war by providing caches of lethal weapons to militant forces holding disenfranchised Ukrainian masses hostage.

Russians and Ukrainians share Byzantine heritage and their longstanding dispute with Zionist Jews goes back to the medieval era. Byzantine emperors regarded Jewish subjects as gentiles and were particularly wary of wealthy Jewish merchants maintaining a stranglehold over banking and commerce sectors of the empire.

In addition, Russians and Ukrainians together belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, one of the oldest Christian denominations whose history goes all the way back to Christ and his apostles. Protestantism and Catholicism are products of the second millennium after a Roman bishop of the Byzantine Empire declared himself pope following the 1054 schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

Since 2019, after being elected president through questionable methods, Zelensky has surreptitiously been working on a clandestine project to foment a crisis with Russia on a flimsy pretext. Any other political leader with an iota of rational faculties, even somebody as rogue as his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, would promptly have agreed to the Kremlin’s reasonable proposal that Kyiv must give a solemn pledge it won’t join the transatlantic NATO military alliance.

Not only did he scornfully rebuff the Russian proposal but he also let Ukraine’s security forces stage joint military exercises and naval drills alongside NATO forces in the Black Sea right under Russia’s nose. His reckless disregard for the suffering of Ukrainian masses with whom he does not identify being a Zionist himself and suicidally provoking Russia into an armed confrontation aside, he is merely a pawn in the grand scheme of things.

Israel’s Zionist regime, to whom not only Ukrainian but also American presidents bow, has a score to settle with Russia. Donald Trump literally forced four Arab states, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, to sign so-called Abraham Accords lending official recognition to Israel at the coaxing of his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner and in order to canvass Zionist lobbies for support in the run-up to Nov. 2020 presidential elections.

Washington’s principal objective in Syria’s proxy war was ensuring Israel’s regional security. The United States Defense Intelligence Agency’s declassified report [3] of 2012 clearly spelled out the imminent rise of a Salafist principality in northeastern Syria – in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor which were occupied by the Islamic State from 2014 to October 2017 – in the event of an outbreak of a civil war in Syria.

Under pressure from the Zionist lobbies in Washington, however, the Obama administration deliberately suppressed the report and also overlooked the view in general that a proxy war in Syria would give birth to radical Islamic jihadists.

The hawks in Washington were fully aware of the consequences of their actions in Syria, but they kept pursuing the ill-fated policy of nurturing militants in the training camps located in Syria’s border regions with Turkey and Jordan in order to weaken the anti-Zionist Bashar al-Assad government.

The single biggest threat to Israel’s regional security was posed by the Iranian resistance axis, comprising Iran, Syria and Lebanon-based Hezbollah. During the course of the 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into northern Israel and Israel’s defense community realized for the first time the nature of threat that Hezbollah posed to Israel’s regional security.

Those were only unguided rockets but it was a wakeup call for Israel’s military strategists that what would happen if Iran passed the guided missile technology to Hezbollah whose area of operations lies very close to the northern borders of Israel.

Therefore, the Zionist lobbies in Washington persuaded the Obama administration to orchestrate a proxy war against Damascus and Lebanon-based Hezbollah in order to dismantle the Iranian resistance axis against Israel.

But following the beginning of the Ukraine crisis in 2014 after Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and Washington imposed sanctions on Russia, the Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by General Qassem Soleimani, the slain commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force who was assassinated in an American airstrike on a tip-off from the Israeli intelligence at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.

When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington, the Zionist regime and their regional clients were on the verge of driving a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government.

With the help of Russia’s air power and long-range artillery, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington, the Zionist regime and their regional allies, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf States.

Over the years, Israel has not only provided material support to militant groups battling Damascus – particularly to various factions of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in Daraa and Quneitra bordering the Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s air force has virtually played the role of the air force of the terrorists and mounted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the decade-long conflict.

In an interview to the New York Times [4] in January 2019, Israel’s former Chief of Staff Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot confessed that the Netanyahu government approved his recommendations in January 2017 to step up airstrikes in Syria. Consequently, more than 200 Israeli airstrikes were launched on the Syrian targets in 2017 and 2018, as revealed [5] by Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz in September 2018.

In 2018 alone, Israel’s air force dropped 2,000 bombs in Syria. The purported rationale of the Israeli airstrikes in Syria has been to degrade Iran’s guided missile technology provided to Damascus and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which poses an existential threat to Israel’s regional security. However, after Russia provided S-300 air defense system to the Syrian military after a Russian surveillance aircraft was shot down by Syrian air defenses during an Israeli incursion into the Syrian airspace on September 2018, killing 15 Russians onboard, Israeli airstrikes in Syria have been significantly scaled down.

Following the friendly-fire incident, though Israel has mounted occasional airstrikes at the capital Damascus, in Daraa and Quneitra in southern Syria and Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria, Israeli airstrikes in northwest Syria, including Aleppo, Hamah and Homs, which is within the range of advanced missile defense systems deployed at Khmeimim Air Base near coastal Latakia, have almost entirely ceased.

Last month, the Kremlin issued an unequivocal condemnation [6] of recent Israeli airstrikes in Syria as “crude violation” of Syria’s sovereignty that up until now were reluctantly tolerated by the Russian forces based in Syria’s Tartus naval base and Khmeimim airbase southeast of Latakia, and also pledged that the Russian Air Force would conduct joint air patrols alongside the Syrian Air Force that would pre-empt the likelihood of further Israeli airstrikes.

“Israel’s continuing strikes against targets inside Syria cause deep concern,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. “They are a crude violation of Syria’s sovereignty and may trigger a sharp escalation of tensions. Also, such actions pose serious risks to international passenger flights.”

Although Israel claims its air campaign in Syria is meant to target Iran-backed militias, the airstrikes often kill Syrian soldiers. Syrian state media said one soldier was killed and five more were wounded in one of the latest Israeli attacks at Damascus, which occurred on Feb. 9.

Russia has held talks with Israel on Syria, and said last month it would begin joint air patrols with Syria. The patrols will include areas near the Golan Heights in southern Syria bordering Israel, a frequent site of the Israeli airstrikes, and Israel is said to be considering discontinuing the strikes altogether or slowing them down significantly.

The Times of Israel noted that this marked a momentous change in policy for Russia: “Following the patrol, Ynet reported that Israeli military officials were holding talks with Russian army officers to calm tensions.”

The report added, “Israeli officials were struggling to understand why Russia, which announced that such joint patrols were expected to be a regular occurrence moving forward, had apparently changed its policy toward Israel.” The report claimed that Israel might limit its air campaign in Syria as a result of Russia’s inexplicable policy reversal in Syria.

In conclusion, it favored Israel’s strategic objectives to escalate the conflict in Ukraine in order to divert Russia’s attention and military resources to Eastern Europe, as the Zionist regime would then get a free hand to mount airstrikes in Syria and Lebanon with impunity, and might even attempt to rekindle the decade-long proxy war alongside its Gulf Arab, Turkish and Jordanian allies in order to eliminate the security threat posed by the Iran-led resistance axis comprising Syria and Lebanon-based Hezbollah once and for all.

Citations:

[1] Zelensky tweet thanking Facebook for allowing hate speech:

[2] Facebook allows posts urging violence against Russian invaders:

[3] US Defense Intelligence Agency’s declassified report of 2012:

[4] An interview with Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s chief of staff:

[5] Israel Katz: Israel conducted 200 airstrikes in Syria in 2017 and 2018:

[6] Russia cites ‘deep concern’ over ongoing Israeli strikes in Syria:

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to alternative news media.

March 16, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

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