Blindness on Iraq War “Patriotism”
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF |July 10, 2020
An op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times by Democrat Tammy Ducksworth demonstrates that when it comes to “patriotism,” liberals are as morally blind as conservatives.
Duckworth’s op-ed goes after conservative Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, who recently questioned Duckworth’s patriotism by suggesting that she didn’t love her country. Naturally, Duckworth, who lost her legs while serving as a soldier in the U.S. military in Iraq, took umbrage over Carlson’s attack and responded quite vociferously in her op-ed.
Much of the controversy involves meaningless exchanges that regularly take place between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. That’s mostly because both leftists and rights believe in the welfare-warfare state way of life.
But there is one aspect of Duckworth’s op-ed that deserves addressing because it so clearly shows that when it comes to war, the left-wing is as morally obtuse as the right wing.
Duckworth writes:
Even knowing how my tour in Iraq would turn out, even knowing that I’d lose both my legs in a battlefield just north of Baghdad in late 2004, I would do it all over again. Because if there’s anything that my ancestors’ service taught me, it’s the importance of protecting our founding values, including every American’s right to speak out.
So while I would put on my old uniform and go to war all over again to protect the right of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump to say offensive things on TV and Twitter….
What Duckworth obviously still hasn’t come to the terms with is that her military service in Iraq had absolute nothing to do with protecting the right of freedom of speech of the American people. That’s because neither the Iraqi regime nor the Iraqi people were threatening the freedom of speech of the American people.
What Duckworth obviously still doesn’t recognize is that it was the U.S. government that was the aggressor in the Iraq War. She was part of a military force — the most powerful in history — that attacked and then occupied an impoverished Third World country that had never attacked and then occupied the United States or even threatened to do so.
Yes, I know, U.S. officials called the operation “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” But that was just propaganda. The operation had nothing to do with bringing freedom to Iraq, any more than it did with protecting the right to Americans to exercise freedom of speech. The purpose of the operation was to replace Iraqi dictator (and former U.S. partner and ally) Saddam Hussein with another U.S. stooge.”
Moreover, let’s not forget that every U.S. soldier who served in Iraq, including Duckworth, was serving in an illegal war. It was illegal given that there was no congressional declaration of war against Iraq, as the Constitution requires. It was also illegal under international law because it violated the principle against wars of aggression established by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal.
Let’s also not forget about the countless Iraqis who were killed in the process. By being deprived of their lives, they were also deprived of their right of freedom of speech.
Leftists and rightists can engage in their meaningless debates on “patriotism” all they want. Just leave out the part that holds that invading and occupying a country that has never attacked the United States protects the right of Americans to exercise freedom of speech because that just isn’t true.
Nuclear confrontation becomes likelier as US races for global domination, Russian FM says
RT – July 10, 2020
“I agree that the nuclear risks have increased substantially in the recent past,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told an audience at the high-profile Primakov Readings forum on Friday.
The reasons for that are “obvious,” the minister clarified. “The US wants to regain global dominance and achieve victory in what they call a great power competition.”
Lavrov said Washington refuses the notion of “strategic stability” and calls it “strategic rivalry” instead. “They want to win,” he added.
We are particularly worried about the US’ biennial refusal to reaffirm a fundamental principle: the premise that there can be no winners in a nuclear war, and, therefore, it should never be unleashed.
Continuing, the Russian FM suggested Washington wants to dismantle the entire arms control mechanism. The Trump administration pulled out last year from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which bans either side from stationing short- and intermediate-range, land-based missiles in Europe.
That withdrawal also threw the New START treaty, signed with Russia in 2010, into jeopardy. The milestone agreement saw the US and Russia reduce their warheads to 1,550 each and their launchers to 800. It is set to expire next year but Lavrov said on Friday he was not optimistic that it would be extended.
According to the foreign minister, the US decision not to renew the New START is already a done deal and the fate of the pact “is sealed.”
Washington insists that the renewal of talks be made trilateral, with China joining in on the discussions. Beijing has said it would “be happy” to take part in the negotiations – but only if the US was willing to reduce its nuclear arsenal to China’s level, which is about 20 times smaller.
India to buy Venezuela oil under swap deal amid US sanctions
Press TV – July 10, 2020
India has decided to receive a cargo of Venezuelan crude under a swap deal in the face of a US sanctions regime which has put the Latin American country in throes of a fuel crisis.
Mumbai-based Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) announced its plan to load its first cargo of Venezuelan crude after a three-month recess due to lower demands.
The Indian multinational conglomerate company is scheduled this week to receive a 1.9-million barrel cargo of crude at Venezuela’s main oil port of Jose, a Reuters report said.
Reliance said in exchange for the Venezuelan crude oil, it will deliver diesel fuel to the Venezuelan state-owned oil and natural gas company, PDVSA.
The Indian firm has previously stated that a fuel-for-crude swap deal with PDVSA will continue despite crippling economic sanctions imposed in 2019 by the United States on Caracas in an effort to drive down oil revenue to the government of President Nicolas Maduro.
Washington has imposed several rounds of paralyzing economic sanctions against the oil-rich South American country, aiming to oust Maduro and replace him with US-backed opposition leader Juan Guaido.
Maduro has denounced the US government for its continuous “criminal sanctions” against the suffering Latin American nation amid the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
Caracas, in response, has vowed to take legal action against Washington at the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the sanctions imposed on the nation.
Venezuela has a similar fuel-for-crude swap deal with Italy’s Eni and Spain’s Repsol, who take Venezuelan crude in exchange for diesel supplied as part of debt repayment deals.
Iran has sent five tankers since April to Venezuela, breaching a de facto American blockade. Last month, the United States imposed sanctions on five Iranian ship captains who delivered oil to Venezuela.
US prosecutors have filed a lawsuit to seize the gasoline aboard four tankers that are currently heading to Venezuela, the latest attempt by the Trump administration to increase economic pressure on Caracas.
US plans to invade Venezuela through Colombia
By Lucas Leiroz | July 10, 2020
Colombia is under a pro-Washington government. The country’s current president, Iván Duque Márquez, has been noted for a series of policies of alignment with the United States, continuing the legacy of his predecessor, former president Juan Manuel Santos, who has made Colombia a NATO “global partner”, allowing the country to participate in joint military operations of the Western military alliance. In general, the long scenario of crises and tensions in Colombia, marked by drug trafficking and the conflict between criminal factions and rebel parties, has driven its governments towards a policy of alignment with Washington in exchange for security, which has increased in recent years.
However, not all Colombian politicians approve these measures. Recently, the leftist senator Iván Cepeda asked Colombian Congressional President Lidio García to convene a session to investigate and legally control the government in its collaboration with the constant arrival of American soldiers in the country. According to Cepeda, the presence of these military personnel is hostile to Colombia, deeply affecting the maintenance of national sovereignty.
Cepeda claims that the government should consult the National Congress before allowing the American military to arrive. A recent decision by the Supreme Court of Cundinamarca proved Cepeda right. According to the judges of the Court, the unilateral decision to allow the entry of foreign troops violates the Colombian National Constitution, and the Executive Branch must previously submit the matter to the Congress. For this reason, the Court asked the government to send information about the joint operations in progress, with the aim of clarifying the reason for the arrival of American troops. The deadline for sending the report was July 6 and was not met by the government – which claims it will appeal the decision. Due to the non-compliance, Cepeda filed a request for the establishment of a special congressional session.
The exact number of US military personnel in the country is uncertain, which further raises suspicions about the case. Some sources say there are more than 800 Americans, while others say they are between 50 and 60 military personnel. No official note was given by the government to explain the reasons and the exact number of soldiers. On the other hand, the American Embassy in Colombia, under pressure, commented on the case, giving an unsatisfactory answer. According to American diplomats, military personnel are arriving in Colombia to carry out joint operations to combat drug trafficking. Apparently, these operations would aim to carry out a siege against Venezuela and Nicolás Maduro, who, according to Donald Trump, has links with drug trafficking in the region. It is important to remember that Trump’s accusations against Maduro were never substantiated nor has any evidence been provided of such links between the Venezuelan president and drug trafficking.
Recently, Colombian mercenaries invaded Venezuela by sea in American vessels. Venezuelan security forces neutralized the attack, but since then it has become clear that Colombia is willing to collaborate with the US to overthrow the government of Nicolás Maduro. Apparently, therefore, American troops arriving in the country are preparing for a next step in this old American project to occupy Venezuela.
The justification that the Venezuelan government has links with drug trafficking becomes even more curious when the American ally is precisely Colombia, a state that historically has structural links with organized crime and the illegal drug trade in South America, being considered by experts in the whole world as a true narco-state. Likewise, the United States is not innocent of scandals involving international trafficking. The CIA has repeatedly been accused of collaborating with criminal networks worldwide. The American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 guaranteed to the US the complete control of opium production in the region. In Mexico, in exchange for information and resources, American intelligence has collaborated several times with the activities of the so-called Guadalajara Cartel. Still, for years, American intelligence collaborated with Panamanian general Manuel Noriega, who has been publicly involved in drug trafficking since the 1960s, in exchange for military support against guerrillas in Nicaragua.
In fact, we can see that drug trafficking is a flawed and inconsistent justification for an invasion against Venezuela. Colombia and the United States have much more credible and notorious evidence of drug trafficking and are precisely the countries articulating this operation. We can imagine the real reasons behind this: unable to maintain its global hegemony, Washington desperately tries to guarantee its power in Latin America, and, for that, it tries to overthrow Maduro; Colombia provides support to the US in exchange for a mask for its own criminal activities, carried out in collusion by the government and criminal networks of drug trafficking groups – such activities will be falsely attributed to Maduro.
Anyway, what seems clear now is that the US plans to invade Venezuela through Colombia.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Pizzagate
By Alan Smithee | Counter-Currents | December 2, 2016
Beginning in 1997, in an English town of more than 100,000 people, eight Pakistani men stood at the core of a group involving as many as three hundred suspects who abused, gang-raped, pimped and trafficked, by the most conservative estimate, well over a thousand of the town’s young girls for years.
The police were eventually accused of not just turning a blind eye, but of participating in the abuse — even supplying the Pakistani gangs with drugs and tipping them off when they heard of colleagues searching for children they knew to be in the gangs’ possession.
Others were afraid of investigating the gangs or calling attention to their behavior because it would have been politically incorrect to accuse the town’s ethnic community of such a rampant and heinous crime — in the words of one English writer, “Fears of appearing racist trumped fears of more children being abused.”
But when this story first broke, guess where it appeared?
Here’s how a blogger writing under the name Mehrdad Amanpour tells the story of how the story first started reaching people:
Some years ago, a friend sent me a shocking article. It said hundreds of British girls were being systematically gang-raped by Muslim gangs. It claimed this was being covered-up.
I’ve never had time for conspiracy theories, especially when they look as hateful as those in the article. So I checked the links and sources in the piece. I found an American racist-far-right website and from there, saw the original source was a similarly unpleasant website in the UK.
I did a brief search for corroboration from reputable mainstream sources. I found none. So I wrote a curt reply to my friend: “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t send me made-up crap from neo–Nazi websites.”
Some months later, I read the seminal exposé of the (mainly) ethnic-Pakistani grooming gang phenomenon by Andrew Norfolk in The Sunday Times.
I was stunned and horrified — not just that these vile crimes were indeed happening and endemic, but that they really were being ignored and “covered-up” by public authorities and the mainstream media.
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal first “broke” in the far-right blogosphere. The accusation they made was that these gangs were being allowed to operate undisturbed because everyone was too afraid of “appearing racist” to properly investigate them . . . and nobody listened to the far-right bloggers who were breaking this story because they were afraid of “appearing racist” if they gave any credibility to those far-right sources, too. Never mind that it seemed paranoid to rely on bloggers to report truths like these when the allegations were so wide-reaching, involving a literal conspiracy within the police force.
And yet, years after no one was willing to take them seriously, the far-right blogosphere turned out to be right.
Well over a thousand (mostly) white young girls were being abused by (mostly) Pakistani gangs.
And the authorities were covering it up.
We are now, once again, in the stage of an evolving scandal that Mehrdad Amanpour described his experience with above. Just to be clear, I’m not going to commit myself to the idea that this is going to be as huge as Rotherham was. We should be careful: we don’t know what would or wouldn’t be confirmed with a proper investigation. The question here is not whether we’ve gotten to the bottom of this online. The question is whether there is enough here to justify thinking there should be a proper investigation.
And the parallel with Rotherham is that the relatively small number of people asking for that are mostly the loathsome kinds of people who run “racist far-right websites.” So, since the claims are inherently conspiratorial, and the mainstream doesn’t want to be associated with those people who are talking about it, it is once again all too easy to just dismiss the claims out of hand as paranoia run wild.
Again, the evolution of the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal was an extremely painful lesson that the mainstream can be wrong and the “paranoid racist far-right” can be right. And that lesson was far too expensive to simply let go to waste.
The name of this scandal is Pizzagate.
It gets the name for two reasons: first, because at the center of the scandal are high-level Washington insiders who own a handful of businesses in the DC area, including a couple of pizzerias (Comet Ping Pong and Besta Pizza), who have fallen under suspicion for involvement in a child sex abuse ring. Second, because the first questions arose in peoples’ minds as a result of some very bizarre emails revealed by Wikileaks in The Podesta Emails that, quite simply, just sound strange (and usually involve weird references to pizza). One of the strangest emails involves Joe Podesta being asked this question: “The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related). Is it yours?”
The evidence is of wildly varying levels of quality, ranging from the pareidolia of “Jesus is appearing to me in my toast” to “wait, that’s actually pretty damn creepy.” The mountain of claims and observations and speculations being compiled in places like Voat and Steemit are too overwhelming for any one person to hope to wade through sorting wheat from chaff, and while I don’t intend to try, I will summarize some just a little bit of it here.
While many of these claims are wild speculation over coincidences (though by no means all of them are), at some point I think a bunch of weird coincidences involving pedophilia and kids becomes sort of damning in and of itself. In one email, Podesta is among those being invited to a farm and the host says, “Bonnie will be Uber Service to transport Ruby, Emerson, and Maeve Luzzatto (11, 9, and almost 7) so you’ll have some further entertainment, and they will be in [the] pool for sure.”
Could that have an innocent explanation? Sure, maybe. But inviting a group of adult men to a gathering and calling young children “further entertainment” while listing their ages is weird, whether it ends up having an explanation or not.
If I was getting messages that listed the ages of young children that would be in a pool . . .
And it turned out that the logo for my business contained a symbol strikingly close to the “little boy lover” logo used by pedophiles to signify that their interest is in young boys rather than girls . . .
And the bands that showed up at my restaurant had albums called All the Children with images on the cover of a child putting phallic-shaped objects into his mouth . . .
. . . and were found making creepy jokes about pedophilia (in reference to Jared Fogle: “we all have our preferences . . .”) . . . and there were Instagram photos coming out of kids (“jokingly?”) taped to the tables in my restaurant . . .
. . . frankly, I would start asking questions about myself.
Here are just a few of the more “institutional” coincidences involved in the story: one of the men on the small list of people found “liking” photos like this one on these individuals’ Instagram accounts is Arun Rao, the U.S. Attorney Chief, charged with prosecuting cases of child pornography.
Besta Pizza, the business whose logo so closely resembled the “little boy lover” logo, is owned by Andrew Kline, who was one of four attorneys in the Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit of the Department of Justice. Isn’t it just a little unusual that someone that high up in a human trafficking division would fail to notice the symbolism?
For yet another coincidence, Lauren Silsby-Gayler is the former director of The New Life Children’s Refuge in Haiti. It is a matter of public record that she was caught, prosecuted, and sent to jail while in that role for trying to abduct dozens of children, most of whom had homes and families. The main lawyer paid to represent Silsby-Gayler, “President of the Sephardic Jewish community in the Dominican Republic,” was himself suspected of involvement in human trafficking.
When the Clintons gained influence in the region, one of their first acts was to work to get Silsby-Gayler off the hook. Among the Podesta Wikileaks are State Department emails discussing their case. Meanwhile, she now works on the executive board of AlertSense . . . which collaborates with IPAWS to send out nation-wide Amber Alerts.
While some of the supposed “codewords” people have claimed to have identified in Pizzagate appear to be made up, there is at least one unambiguous instance: here is an Instagrammed photo posted by James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong that appears innocent enough: a man carrying a young child with a beaded necklace draped around both of their necks.
The disturbing bit is that the photo uses the tag “#chickenlovers,” and “chicken lover” is in fact an established term to refer to a pedophile — someone who loves “chicken,” which is also unambiguously an established term to refer to underage children (you can see this in the gay slang dictionary subset of the Online Dictionary of Playground Slang).
Complain all you want about the “speculative” and “paranoid” online discussions of Pizzagate, but when you have clearer-cut cases like this one where James Alefantis absolutely, unquestionably did in fact post a photo of a man holding an infant and the one and only hashtag he used for the photo involved a term that unquestionably is a reference to pedophilia, in a context where it is clear that there is nothing else here that “chicken” could possibly have been referring to, the likelihood that more speculative claims might have truth to them is increased.
There is a 1994 documentary exposé on NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association) called Chicken Hawk. Here is yet another reference from a watchdog group from 2006, proving that this one existed well before Pizzagate surfaced. Another confirmed fact dug up by the paranoid right-wing conspiracy nuts on the Internet?
So here are a few more things we do know. We know that Bill Clinton has taken dozens of international flights on a plane colloquially known as the “Lolita Express” with Jeffrey Epstein, a man who spent 13 months in jail after being convicted of soliciting a 13-year-old prostitute. We know that Hillary Clinton’s staff knew that Anthony Weiner was sexting underage girls all the way back in 2011 — and covered it up. Guess whose laptop revealed evidence that Hillary Clinton went on flights on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express” along with Bill? That’s right: Anthony Weiner’s.
Now do you understand why the mainstream media was so eager to spin these emails as just a “distraction” during the election?
The staff that ignored Weiner’s sexting of young children included John Podesta himself, whose brother Tony is one of the very men at the center of Pizzagate. Tony Podesta has rather warped tastes in art. For instance, he owns a bronze statue of a decapitated man in a contorted position identical to a well-known photograph of one of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims:
Creepy Tony Podesta with bronze statue of Dahmer sex crime/cannibalism victim
(See here for the disturbing photo of the real victim.)
The same news story that features the image above also mentions the fact that John Podesta’s bedroom contains multiple images from a photographer “known for documentary-style pictures of naked teenagers in their parents’ suburban homes.”)
Furthermore, Tony Podesta’s favorite artist is Biljana Djurdjevic, whose art heavily features images of children in BDSM-esque positions in large showers. Here’s one with a row of young girls in a shower with their hands behind their backs in a position that suggests bondage:
Here’s one with a young boy in a shower tied up in the air with his hands over his head:
In addition to Jeffrey Epstein, the Podesta brothers are also friends with convicted sex offender Clement Freud as well as convicted serial child molester Dennis Hastert.
We do know that the New York Times, which is now dismissing Pizzagate in its entirety as a hoax, is run by Mark Thompson — who was credibly accused a few years back of lying to help cover up a scandal involving another high-profile public figure involved in child sex abuse, Jimmy Savile, during his time as head of the BBC.
And we do know that this has happened before.
Lawrence King
Lawrence King, the leader of the Black Republican Caucus, who sang the national anthem at the Republican convention in 1984, was accused by multiple claimed victims of trafficking and abusing boys out of the Boys Town charity for years. You can hear the chilling testimony from three people who claim to have been victimized by King in a documentary produced shortly after the events transpired.
You can hear the FBI, even after they received extensive testimony from victims, explain in their own words that they weren’t going to prosecute King because if anything were wrong with him, he would have been prosecuted by a lower authority already. Eventually, King was found “O. J. guilty” of abusing Paul Bonacci — convicted in civil court, acquitted in criminal court.
The best written source for information about the depths of corruption and cover-up involved in this scandal is Nick Bryant’s The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal (if you can’t find a free copy on your own, contact me through my website, www.zombiemeditations.com and I tell you where to find it).
Could all of this turn out to be nothing?
Of course it could.
But that’s not the question here. The question is how we should respond to the possibility.
Do we take the possibility seriously? History clearly indicates that we should. Even if it did turn out to be nothing at all, I would still be more proud to belong to a community willing to take the possibility seriously and call for investigation than I would to belong to a community that dismissed the possibility far too hastily and luckily turned out to be right — even as it did this and turned out to be wrong in so many cases like Rotherham before.
The real horror here would be to live in a society that responded as Reddit has — by shutting down the whole conversation entirely, banning r/pizzagate even while keeping subreddits like r/pedofriends, “a place for (non-offending) pedophiles and allies to make friends with each other!” alive.
Over on his blog, Scott Adams asks us to keep in mind cases where confirmation bias did lead to false allegations of institutional pedophilia, to caution against excessive confidence. (He hastens to add: “I want to be totally clear here that I’m not saying Pizzagate is false. I see the mountain of evidence too. And collectively it feels totally persuasive to me. It might even be true. I’m not debating the underlying truth of it. That part I don’t know.”)
But which is worse? If all the evidence coming out of Pizzagate is entirely false, what have we lost by spending time on it? On the other hand, if even five percent of the allegations that have been made surrounding the topic are true, what have we lost by ignoring them? Which is worse: spending too much time pursuing and thoroughly vetting false leads, or looking the other way while any amount of child abuse goes on?
According to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, nearly 470,000 children disappear in the United States alone each year. This number is dubious for a number of reasons [custody order violations?]. It looks like some number of runaways end up in the NCIC count, and to make matters worse, repeat offenders can make it into the data multiple times. So that would suggest that the real number must be lower than this tally; but on the other hand, we also know that many missing children are never reported in the first place, so it’s possible that that could boost the number back up. The bottom line, however, seems to be that there is no reliable way to determine how many total children are actually missing in the U.S.
Either way, though, even if correcting for these errors took out 90% of the disappearances in the NCIC database, and there were no unreported disappearances to account for at all, I think even the resulting 50,000 per year would still be enough to call the problem systematic and justify suspicion that these disappearances could well involve organized efforts—given that we already know of so many pedophile rings in so many powerful institutions.
In 2013, Canada busted a ring involving more than 300 adults, who had teachers, doctors, and nurses heavily represented among them. A pedophile ring has just been identified in the highest levels of UK football (Americans know the sport as soccer). Norwegian police also just uncovered a ring of 50 organized pedophiles mostly working in the tech sector, once again including elected officials, teachers, and lawyers. The Vatican scandals can practically go without mention — institutional involvement in child sex exploitation is nearly an a priori given.
And the children that are being raped and murdered in the photos passed around by these child porn rings are coming from somewhere. And when figures like politicians, teachers, and lawyers are involved in the rings, it’s hardly inconceivable that they could be involved in disappearances.
Have we identified one here?
Only time will tell. But we deserve to be paid attention. We deserve to have the matter taken seriously. And we deserve a media bringing the most relevant facts to our attention after having actually done some due diligence on the matter, which we do not currently have. The mainstream media has lied to us long enough about things like Trump having only a 1% chance of winning the election that the public has increasingly woken up to this fact — which is why Pizzagate is getting so much more attention than the Franklin scandal did. If Pizzagate turns out to have even a single-digit fraction of truth behind it, it may not just bring down the Clinton machine and Democratic Party, it may sound the death knell for the mainstream media as well.
How the Pentagon failed to sell Afghan government’s bunk ‘Bountygate’ story to US intelligence agencies
By Gareth Porter | The Grayzone | July 7, 2020
The New York Times dropped another Russiagate bombshell on June 26 with a sensational front-page story headlined, “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.” A predictable media and political frenzy followed, reviving the anti-Russian hysteria that has excited the Beltway establishment for the past four years.
But a closer look at the reporting by the Times and other mainstream outlets vying to confirm its coverage reveals another scandal not unlike Russiagate itself: the core elements of the story appear to have been fabricated by Afghan government intelligence to derail a potential US troop withdrawal from the country. And they were leaked to the Times and other outlets by US national security state officials who shared an agenda with their Afghan allies.
In the days following the story’s publication, the maneuvers of the Afghan regime and US national security bureaucracy encountered an unexpected political obstacle: US intelligence agencies began offering a series of low confidence assessments in the Afghan government’s self-interested intelligence claims, judging them to be highly suspect at best, and altogether bogus at worst.
In light of this dramatic development, the Times’ initial report appears to have been the product of a sensationalistic disinformation dump aimed at prolonging the failed Afghan war in the face of President Donald Trump’s plans to withdraw US troops from it.
The Times quietly reveals its own sources’ falsehoods
The Times not only broke the Bountygate story but commissioned squads of reporters comprising nine different correspondents to write eight articles hyping the supposed scandal in the course of eight days. Its coverage displayed the paper’s usual habit of regurgitating bits of dubious information furnished to its correspondents by faceless national security sources. In the days after the Times’ dramatic publication, its correspondent squads were forced to revise the story line to correct an account that ultimately turned out to be false on practically every important point.
The Bountygate saga began on June 26, with a Times report declaring, “The United States concluded months ago” that the Russians “had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.” The report suggested that US intelligence analysts had reached a firm conclusion on Russian bounties as early as January. A follow-up Times report portrayed the shocking discovery of the lurid Russian plot thanks to the recovery of a large amount of U.S. cash from a “raid on a Taliban outpost.” That article sourced its claim to the interrogations of “captured Afghan militants and criminals.”
However, subsequent reporting revealed that the “US intelligence reports” about a Russian plot to distribute bounties through Afghan middlemen were not generated by US intelligence at all.
The Times reported first on June 28, then again on June 30, that a large amount of cash found at a “Taliban outpost” or a “Taliban site” had led U.S. intelligence to suspect the Russian plot. But the Times had to walk that claim back, revealing on July 1 that the raid that turned up $500,000 in cash had in fact targeted the Kabul home of Rahmatullah Azizi, an Afghan businessmen said to have been involved in both drug trafficking and contracting for part of the billions of dollars the United States spent on construction projects.
The Times also disclosed that the information provided by “captured militants and criminals” under “interrogation” had been the main source of suspicion of a Russian bounty scheme in Afghanistan. But those “militants and criminals” turned out to be thirteen relatives and business associates of the businessman whose house was raided.
The Times reported that those detainees were arrested and interrogated following the January 2020 raids based on suspicions by Afghan intelligence that they belonged to a “ring of middlemen” operating between the Russian GRU and so-called “Taliban-linked militants,” as Afghan sources made clear.
Furthermore, contrary to the initial report by the Times, those raids had actually been carried out exclusively by the Afghan intelligence service known as the National Directorate of Security (NDS). The Times disclosed this on July 1. Indeed, the interrogation of those detained in the raids was carried out by the NDS, which explains why the Times reporting referred repeatedly to “interrogations” without ever explaining who actually did the questioning.
Given the notorious record of the NDS, it must be assumed that its interrogators used torture or at least the threat of it to obtain accounts from the detainees that would support the Afghan government’s narrative. Both the Toronto Globe and Mail and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) have documented as recently as 2019 the frequent use of torture by the NDS to obtain information from detainees. The primary objective of the NDS was to establish an air of plausibility around the claim that the fugitive businessman Azizi was the main “middleman” for a purported GRU scheme to offer bounties for killing Americans.
NDS clearly fashioned its story to suit the sensibilities of the U.S. national security state. The narrative echoed previous intelligence reports about Russian bounties in Afghanistan that circulated in early 2019, and which were even discussed at NSC meetings. Nothing was done about these reports, however, because nothing had been confirmed.
The idea that hardcore Taliban fighters needed or wanted foreign money to kill American invaders could have been dismissed on its face. So Afghan officials spun out claims that Russian bounties were paid to incentivize violence by “militants and criminals” supposedly “linked” to the Taliban.
These elements zeroed in on the April 2019 IED attack on a vehicle near the U.S. military base at Bagram in Parwan province that killed three US Marines, insisting that the Taliban had paid local criminal networks in the region to carry out attacks.
As former Parwan police chief Gen. Zaman Mamozai told the Times, Taliban commanders were based in only two of the province’s ten districts, forcing them to depend on a wider network of non-Taliban killers-for-hire to carry out attacks elsewhere in the province. These areas included the region around Bagram, according to the Afghan government’s argument.
But Dr. Thomas H. Johnson of the Naval Postgraduate School, a leading expert on insurgency and counter-insurgency in Afghanistan who has been researching war in the country for three decades, dismissed the idea that the Taliban would need a criminal network to operate effectively in Parwan.
“The Taliban are all over Parwan,” Johnson stated in an interview with The Grayzone, observing that its fighters had repeatedly carried out attacks on or near the Bagram base throughout the war.
With withdrawal looming, the national security state plays its Bountygate card
Senior U.S. national security officials had clear ulterior motives for embracing the dubious NDS narrative. More than anything, those officials were determined to scuttle Trump’s push for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. For Pentagon brass and civilian leadership, the fear of withdrawal became more acute in early 2020 as Trump began to demand an even more rapid timetable for a complete pullout than the 12-14 months being negotiated with the Taliban.
It was little surprise then that this element leapt at the opportunity to exploit the self-interested claims by the Afghan NDS to serve its own agenda, especially as the November election loomed. The Times even cited one “senior [US] official” musing that “the evidence about Russia could have threatened that [Afghanistan] deal, because it suggested that after eighteen year of war, Mr. Trump was letting Russia chase the last American troops out of the country.”
In fact, the intelligence reporting from the CIA Station in Kabul on the NDS Russia bounty claims was included in the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) on or about February 27 — just as the negotiation of the U.S. peace agreement with the Taliban was about to be signed. That was too late to prevent the signing but timed well enough to ratchet up pressure on Trump to back away from his threat to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan.
Trump may have been briefed orally on the issue at the time, but even if he had not been, the presence of a summary description of the intelligence in the PDB could obviously have been used to embarrass him on Afghanistan by leaking it to the media.
According to Ray McGovern, a former CIA official who was responsible for preparing the PDB for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the insertion of raw, unconfirmed intelligence from a self-interested Afghan intelligence agency into the PDB was a departure from normal practice.
Unless it was a two or three-sentence summary of a current intelligence report, McGovern explained, an item in the PDB normally involved only important intelligence that had been confirmed. Furthermore, according to McGovern, PDB items are normally shorter versions of items prepared the same day as part of the CIA’s “World Intelligence Review” or “WIRe.”
Information about the purported Russian bounty scheme, however, was not part of the WIRe until May 4, well over two months later, according to the Times. That discrepancy added weight to the suggestion that the CIA had political motivations for planting the raw NDS reporting in the PDB before it could be evaluated.
This June, Trump’s National Security Council (NSC) convened a meeting to discuss the intelligence report, officials told the Times. NSC members drew up a range of options in response to the alleged Russian plot, from a diplomatic protest to more forceful responses. Any public indication that US troops in Afghanistan had been targeted by Russian spies would have inevitably threatened Trump’s plan for withdrawal from Afghanistan.
At some point in the weeks that followed, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency each undertook evaluations of the Afghan intelligence claims. Once the Times began publishing stories about the issue, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe directed the National Intelligence Council, which is responsible for managing all common intelligence community assessments, to write a memorandum summarizing the intelligence organizations’ conclusions.
The memorandum revealed that the intelligence agencies were not impressed with what they’d seen. The CIA and National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) each gave the NDS intelligence an assessment of “moderate confidence,” according to memorandum.
An official guide to intelligence community terminology used by policymakers to determine how much they should rely on assessments indicates that “moderate confidence” generally indicates that “the information being used in the analysis may be interpreted in various ways….” It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the NDS intelligence when the CIA and NCTC arrived at this finding.
The assessment by the National Security Agency was even more important, given that it had obtained intercepts of electronic data on financial transfers “from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account,” according to the Times’ sources. But the NSA evidently had no idea what the transfers related to, and essentially disavowed the information from the Afghan intelligence agency.
The NIC memorandum reported that NSA gave the information from Afghan intelligence “low confidence” — the lowest of the three possible levels of confidence used in the intelligence community. According to the official guide to intelligence community terminology, that meant that “information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information.”
Other intelligence agencies reportedly assigned “low confidence” to the information as well, according to the memorandum. Even the Defense Intelligence Agency, known for its tendency to issue alarmist warnings about activities by US adversaries, found no evidence in the material linking the Kremlin to any bounty offers.
Less than two weeks after the Times rolled out its supposed bombshell on Russian bounties, relying entirely on national security officials pushing their own bureaucratic interests on Afghanistan, the story was effectively discredited by the intelligence community itself. In a healthy political climate, this would have produced a major setback for the elements determined to keep US troops entrenched in Afghanistan.
But the political hysteria generated by the Times and the hyper-partisan elements triggered by the appearance of another sordid Trump-Putin connection easily overwhelmed the countervailing facts. It was all the Pentagon and its bureaucratic allies needed to push back on plans for a speedy withdrawal from a long and costly war.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.
Judgement Day for Ghislaine Maxwell Finally Arrives. Or Maybe Not
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 9, 2020
That Ghislaine Maxwell is finally in custody is certainly satisfying for all of us who believed her completely complicit in the horrible crimes against young girls committed by her associate Jeffrey Epstein. The internet is already alive with speculation regarding how long she will last in prison given the alleged death by suicide that eliminated Epstein in a Manhattan maximum security prison back in August 2019. Before jumping to too many conclusions, however, there are a number of additional developments in her case that should be considered.
First of all, Maxwell’s arrest was not fortuitous. She clearly made some efforts to hide the bulk of her multi-million-dollar fortune, but she has been visible for those who knew where to look. She moved about freely, though keeping a low profile, and made “intentional efforts to avoid detection including moving locations at least twice, switching her primary phone number (which she registered under the name ‘G Max’) and email address, and ordering packages for delivery with a different person listed on the shipping label.”
The 18-page prosecutorial indictment stated that “The Government has identified more than 15 different bank accounts held by or associated with the defendant from 2016 to the present, and during that same period, the total balances of those accounts have ranged from a total of hundreds of thousands of dollars to more than $20 million.” Maxwell was charged with recruiting and “grooming” young women for Epstein to abuse, which could carry as much as a 35 year prison sentence.
As the 58-year old Maxwell, who has British citizenship as well as that of the United States, France and Israel, was considered to be a considerable flight risk she was not allowed bail after her arrest.
During the time while Maxwell was moving about freely, the FBI apparently did not even attempt to interview her. She spent a good deal of time with her lawyers and was reportedly seen having coffee in Los Angeles, shopping near her apartment in Paris, visiting Britain and also staying under protection in Israel. She was born in France and her father, the Israeli spy Robert, is presumed to have had citizenship in the Jewish state, which would have been transferrable to her. Both France and Israel are extremely difficult to deal with when it comes to extradition, so she presumably could have stayed in either country and would have avoided prosecution in the United States. One might also recall that Epstein had a genuine Austrian passport in a false name, a probable indicator of his intelligence agency ties. It is quite possible that Ghislaine also has some form of false identification.
When she was arrested, Ghislaine was living in a luxurious country house on 156 acres in a rural part of New Hampshire. She had bought the property in December for $1.07 million through a limited liability company that does not bear her name which was set up by one of her lawyers. Clearly the police knew exactly where she could be found. The house is a two-hour drive from the Canadian border, which might have been an intended refuge if she felt that the forces of law and order were moving in, but it begs the question as to why she would want to return to the U.S. at all. I rather suspect that she and her lawyers had actually been in touch with the authorities and some kind of plea bargain has been under consideration.
Why now? The timing would seem to relate to other developments. Only last week Federal judge Loretta Preska ruled that the documents relating to Epstein and Maxwell in the possession of litigant victim Virginia Giuffre had to be destroyed. Information about Epstein and Maxwell, extracted from a 2015 civil suit filed against Epstein by Giuffre, appear to have contained the names of individuals with whom Epstein had conducted business, both those he recorded in flagrante as well as his other clients and even his victims.
Preska ruled that Giuffre’s lawyers had obtained the documents improperly and ordered that all the materials in the files “shall be destroyed.” She also demanded proof that the material had been destroyed. The whereabouts of Epstein’s secret tapings is not definitely known, but the FBI did seize all of the papers and other data at the Manhattan mansion after he was arrested. Some believe, however, that Ghislaine has some of the tapes, presumably hidden or in the custody of her lawyers.
The loss of the Giuffre files will seriously damage the criminal case being made by the government against Maxwell as well as the lawsuit being pursued by the victims against the Epstein estate. Ghislaine has been charged with procuring young girls and “grooming” them for sex with Epstein and his prominent clients, all of which she has denied. The upcoming trial could easily end relatively quickly with a toothless admission of guilt by Maxwell and a plea-bargained minimum prison sentence. All documents relating to the case, including any recordings, would be sealed, which would inter alia protect other perceived government equities, namely the prominent individuals and the spy agencies that might have been involved either as victims or perpetrators.
There is every indication that the Justice Department aided and abetted by the media is seeking to bury certain aspects of the Epstein case. A recent documentary on Netflix “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich” carefully avoids any discussion of the likely Israeli espionage aspect of Epstein’s activities. Ghislaine’s father, who introduced Jeffrey to his daughter, was a prominent Mossad spy who received a state funeral in Israel after his mysterious death in 1991 which was attended by the prime minister as well as by all the former and serving heads of that country’s intelligence services.
Additional confirmation of the Israeli connection comes from a recent book by former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, who claims that Epstein and partner in crime Ghislaine Maxwell were engaged in blackmailing prominent politicians on behalf of Israel’s foreign intelligence service Mossad. According to Ben-Menashe, the two had been working directly for the Israeli government since the 1980’s and their operation, which was funded by Mossad and also by prominent American Jews, was a classic “honey-trap” which used underage girls as bait to attract well-known politicians from around the world. The politicians would be photographed and video recorded when they were in bed with the girls. Prince Andrew and both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were visitors to the Epstein New York City mansion where the recordings were made, while Clinton was a regular traveler on the “Lolita Express” airplane that Epstein used to transport his “friends” to his estate in Florida and his private Caribbean Island, referred to by locals as the “Pedophile Island.”
Concerning Maxwell and Epstein, no one in the Justice Department appears to want to ask one simple question that would provide significant clarity if it were to be answered honestly. Conclusive evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli or even American intelligence agent might well be derived from the former U.S. Attorney in Miami Alexander Acosta’s comments when being later cleared by the Trump transition team. He was asked “Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” … “Acosta testified that he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had ‘been told’ to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. ‘I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.’”
Why is no one in the various government investigative agencies or the mainstream media interested in what Acosta meant, even though it would be easy enough to ask him? Who told him to back off? And how did they explain it? The simple answer just might be that Epstein was in fact an Israeli spy preying on prominent figures and anything having to do with the Jewish state, no matter how malodorous, is a political hotwire and off limits to Democrats and Republicans alike. If all of that is true, we the public will not be seeing anything like a “show trial” of Ghislaine Maxwell that reveals all and names names. She will quietly disappear into the legal system and before too long she will be out and around again, taking her secrets with her.
The UN has found that the US killing of Soleimani broke international law. It’s right, but nothing will happen as a result
By Scott Ritter | RT | July 8, 2020
For America, international law has no meaning. In Washington’s view, it applies to other countries, but not to them. Sadly, this well-reasoned UN declaration is simply an exercise in frustration and irrelevance.
On paper, it sounds very copesetic: “… a single strike, one or two cars targeted, 10 individuals killed, in a non-belligerent country, surrounded by people unaware of and unprepared for an international armed conflict.”
With these words, Agnes Callamard, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, described the assassination of Qassem Soleimani in a report submitted to the Human Rights Council.
Callamard’s report covered the broad topic of ‘Extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions’, and focused in particular on the use of armed drones for targeted killing. She observed that such acts are carried out by conventional means, such as Special Operations Forces, and as such her report “contains findings applicable to all forms of targeted killings, no matter their method.”
In her report, Callamard singled out the assassination (i.e., “targeted killing”) of General Soleimani as “the first known incident in which a State [e.g., the US] invoked self-defense as a justification for an attack against a State-actor, in the territory of another state, thus implicating the prohibition on the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.” It declares that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
Callamard labeled the killing of Soleimani by a US drone strike an “arbitrary killing,” noting that while the US claimed that the strike was in response to an “escalating series of armed attacks in recent months” by Iran, the US claim “fails to describe even one ongoing attack.”
Instead, Callamard describes a series of separate and distinct attacks which are not, in and of themselves, escalating, related in time or at all. Moreover, by attacking Soleimani on Iraqi soil without the consent of Iraq, the US violated Iraq’s “territorial integrity.”
Callamard couches her case in the language of international law, noting that various international courts have “established that human rights treaty obligations can apply in principle to the conduct of a State outside its territory.” Moreover, as Callamard points out, the Human Rights Committee to whom she reports “has established that a State party has an obligation to respect and to ensure the right to life of all persons whose right to life is impacted by its military or other activities in a direct and reasonably foreseeable manner.” This obligation, Callamard argues, applies to drones strikes and their targets, which fall within the jurisdiction of the state operating the drone.
As Callamard notes, to date there is a refusal on the part of courts of jurisdiction to provide oversight regarding extra-territorial killings by armed drones, noting that “such matters are political, or relate to international relations between states and thus are non-justiciable.” Callamard rejects this excuse, noting that it “cannot be reconciled with recognized principles of international law, treaties, conventions, and protocols, and violates the rights to life and to a remedy.”
Callamard says that the US, in justifying the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, cites the self-defense clause of Article 51 of the UN Charter. But, as she points out, “even the legality of a strike under Art. 51 of the UN Charter does not preclude its wrongfulness under humanitarian or human rights law.”
International jurisprudence, as Callamard observes, suggests that self-defense could only be invoked against a threat that is already there. Void of such an imminent threat, the US action operates in violation of Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which prohibits “arbitrary deprivations of life.”
At the end of the day, however, the Special Rapporteur’s report is, for all practicalities and solid reasoning, an exercise in frustration and irrelevance.
For laws to have any effect, they must be enforceable, and to be enforceable there must be jurisdiction. To decide that the US, through its extrajudicial and extraterritorial assassination of Soleimani, was in violation of Article 6 of the ICCPR is one thing; turning that decision into anything other than an act of moralistic chest-thumping is another.
One would think it should not be this way. After all, Article VI, paragraph 2 of the US Constitution makes treaties the supreme law of the land on the same footing with acts of Congress. The US Senate provided its advice and consent to the ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which had been adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 16, 1966, and signed on behalf of the US on October 5, 1977. Simply put, Article 6 of the ICCPR is the law of the land.
Not so fast. Senate ratification was contingent upon a number of “Reservations, Understandings, Declarations and Proviso,” including one which declared that “the United States declares that the provisions of Articles 1 through 27 of the Covenant are not self-executing.”
As such, regardless of whether issues pertaining to the entry into and ratification of the ICCPR make it sufficient to imbue its provisions as the “law of the land,” the fact that the US Senate expressly indicated that certain provisions of the ICCPR not to be self-executing means that Article 6 of the ICCPR cannot be seen as standing alone as the equivalent to an act of the legislature, but rather requiring a subsequent act of Congress before its provisions can be put into effect.
As the US Supreme Court once observed, “A treaty is primarily a compact between independent nations. It depends for the enforcement of its provisions on the interest and the honor of the governments which are parties of it.”
The odds of the US Congress stepping up and enacting legislation that would confer legitimacy to the Special Rapporteur’s finding that the US acted in violation of Article 6 of the ICCPR when killing Soleimani are zero; it is not in the interest of Congress to do so, and anyone searching for a semblance of honor within Congress would have better odds canvassing a brothel.
International law, like the Constitution which imbues it with relevance as far as the US is concerned, only possesses the meaning and legitimacy that a society is willing to vest in it. The US, acting on legislation passed by Congress, has engaged in a whittling away of the rights and protections afforded to Americans and world citizens to the point that neither international law nor the Constitution have much meaning anymore.
It is not just the US Congress that has lost its voice when it comes to expressing moral outrage against the murder done in its name. “To date drones’ attacks and targeted killings are not the object of robust international debates and review,” Callamard concludes in her report. “The Security Council is missing in action; the international community, willingly or not, stands largely silent. That is not acceptable.”
Seen in this light, the words of Callamard take on a whole new level of urgency. “[T]he targeted killing of General Soleimani, coming in the wake of 20 years of distortions of international law, and repeated massive violations of humanitarian law, is not just a slippery slope. It is a cliff.”
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer. He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter
Russia, China keep the ‘dragon in the fog’
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | July 8, 2020
Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a phone conversation today with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin that Beijing will “continue to work” with Moscow in “firmly supporting” each other’s efforts “rejecting external sabotage and intervention” so as to “preserve their respective sovereignty, security and development rights, and well safeguard their shared interests.”
This signifies the consolidation of a new template in the Russian-Chinese alliance, which appeared in the most recent months — mutual support to push back at the covert operations by western intelligence agencies to destabilise the internal situation in the two countries.
An quasi-alliance rooted in dynamic economic partnership — trade touched $110 bn last year — and intensifying cooperation and coordination in the foreign policy arena takes a big leap forward, as the two countries join hands to strengthen their political systems. Beijing’s interest to highlight it speaks for itself.
Xi’s phone call to Putin took place in the backdrop of the Russian constitutional referendum and the law on ensuring security in Hong Kong last week. Prima facie, one metaphor is common to them — the “dragon in the fog”, a Chinese concept to portray a strong player in an incomprehensible space who can strike at his competitors at any moment from an unexpected angle.
The metaphor was recently used by a Russian political analyst Alexey Chesnakov (who previously served as a Kremlin aide) to sum up the quintessence of the Russian referendum, which allows Putin notionally to seek two more six-year terms. As Chesnakov put it, President Putin “wants to remain a ‘dragon in the fog’ until the end of his presidency.”
Chesnakov explained that the sheer prospect of Putin remaining in power beyond 2024 would also send an unmistakable signal to the international community that the Russian leader is confident about remaining at the helm of affairs in his country for at least the next decade.
Coming to the Hong Kong legislation too, the leitmotif is the ‘dragon in the fog’. The new law strengthens China’s national unity and territorial integrity. The four categories of criminal offence outlined in the law are: secession, subversion of state power, terrorist activities and collusion with foreign and external forces to endanger national security. In essence, the legislation will keep western intelligence guessing.
The western legal scholars’ principal argument is that the new law weakens the “one country, two systems” principle. But the paradox here is that while western critics put the accent on the “two-systems” part, Beijing estimates that it is the “one-country” leg that has dramatically weakened in the recent years due to the upheaval in Hong Kong.
Beijing had two options to bring about greater harmony — use of force to pull back the “two systems” concept from racing away or, alternatively, strengthen the “one country” part by providing security underpinnings. Beijing opted for the latter course after a great deal of deliberation.
The crux of the matter is that Beijing wants to keep Hong Kong as the financial hub of Asia, while at the same time strengthening the city’s security and stability. Of course, the interference of the western intelligence agencies — primarily British, Australian and American intelligence — to fuel the protests in Hong Kong formed the context.
Hong Kong has a long history of being the base camp of western intelligence agencies in the Asia-Pacific. Much has been written about the western intelligence agencies’ covert operations out of Hong Kong before, during and after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China.
In the case of Russia, too, western intelligence activities are showing signs of making another determined push for a post-Putin scenario in the Kremlin. The West’s calculation is that if Putin were to step down in 2024, he would very soon become a “lame duck”. Like in Hong Kong, western intelligence has developed extensive networks within Russia through which it is feasible to fuel unrest if political uncertainties coalesce with social and economic grievances. The Russian counter-intelligence is very well aware of this danger.
Putin has outwitted the western game plan to destabilise Russia. The constitutional amendment allows him to seek another two six-year terms and he intends to keep everyone guessing. Keeping the western adversaries guessing is also what the Chinese security law in Hong Kong hopes to achieve.
The western intelligence operating out of the city henceforth comes under direct scrutiny of Beijing. Recruitment of local agents, planning and mounting operations inside China, or inciting unrest in Hong Kong to weaken China — such covert operations become far more difficult and risky for the US, British and Australian intelligence. Interestingly, Xi used the expression “external sabotage and intervention” in his conversation with Putin today.
Beijing and Moscow have voiced strong support for each other’s moves to strengthen national security. On June 2, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said,
“We note that the national referendum on constitutional amendments, a major event in Russia’s political calendar, is going on smoothly. Results released by the Central Elections Commission reflect the Russian people’s choice. As Russia’s friendly neighbour and comprehensive strategic partner of coordination for a new era, China will always respect the development path independently chosen by the Russian people and support Russia’s efforts to realise lasting stability and promote socioeconomic development.
“We stand ready to work together with the Russian side to act on the consensus reached by our heads of state, deepen all-round strategic coordination and mutually-beneficial cooperation in various areas, and bring greater benefits to our two peoples.”
On the same day, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in Moscow, “We noted the entry into force of the law on ensuring national security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the PRC on July 1, 2020 by the decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China.
“In this context, we would like to reaffirm that Russia’s position of principle on the situation in Hong Kong remains unchanged. We respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the PRC and consider all issues pertaining to Hong Kong to be China’s domestic affair. We are against any attempts by external forces to interfere in relations between the central government and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the PRC.”
Cooperation between the Russian and Chinese security agencies in the realm of internal security can only stem from a high level of mutual understanding at the highest level. Significantly, on July 4, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov poured cold water on President Trump’s invitation to Putin to attend a G7 summit in the US, calling it a “flawed” idea.
Moscow has any number of legitimate reasons to distance itself from Trump’s invite, but what Ryabkov chose was very telling. He said, “The idea of the so-called expanded G7 summit is flawed, because it is unclear to us how the authors of that initiative plan to consider the Chinese factor. Without China, it is just impossible to discuss certain issues in the modern world.”
In effect, Rybakov thwarted Washington’s move to isolate China. Trump’s advisors were naive to estimate that Moscow could be baited to join its containment strategy against China. Ryabkov publicly administered the Kremlin’s snub.
China says will join arms control talks if US reduces nuclear arsenal
Press TV – July 8, 2020
China says it would be happy to participate in negotiations on arms control with the United States if Washington was willing to reduce its nuclear arsenal to the same level as Beijing.
“I can assure you that if the US says that they are ready to come down to the Chinese [nuclear arsenal] level, China would be happy to participate the next day,” Fu Cong, director general of the Arms Control Department at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said in a news conference in Beijing on Wednesday.
“But actually, we know that that’s not going to happen. We know the US policy. And we are more realistic, frankly speaking,” Fu added.
Approximately 91 percent of all nuclear warheads are owned by the United States and Russia, each having around 4,000 in their military stockpiles.
It is estimated that China has a stockpile of around 320 nuclear warheads.
Fu said Beijing had no interest in joining trilateral negotiations that involve both the US and Russia.
The US has been calling on China to join trilateral negotiations to extend a flagship nuclear arms treaty between Washington and Moscow that is due to expire in February next year.
China has refused to participate in the US-Russia talks but said it would take part in international nuclear disarmament efforts.
The negotiations in question were on the replacement of New START, a nuclear arms treaty between the US and Russia that has nothing to do with China. By inviting China and anticipating its refusal to participate, Washington had been planning to portray the Chinese government as reluctant to take part in any arms control treaty.
Washington itself, meanwhile, has unilaterally withdrawn from treaty after treaty under US President Donald Trump.
Iran and Syria sign agreement to boost military, security cooperation
Press TV – July 8, 2020
Iran will boost Syria’s air defenses, as part of a wider military security agreement between the two countries.
“We will strengthen Syria’s air defense systems within the framework of strengthening military cooperation between the two countries,” Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Baqeri said on Wednesday after signing a “comprehensive” agreement with Syrian Defense Minister Ali Abdullah Ayoub in Damascus to boost military and defense cooperation.
The agreement provides for the expansion of military and security cooperation and the continuation of coordination between the Armed Forces of the two countries.
Speaking after signing the agreement at the headquarters of the General Command of the Syrian Army and Armed Forces, the top Iranian commander said the signed deal “increases our will to work together in the face of US pressure.”
“The people and countries of the region do not welcome the presence of the United States, and our response to the American prattling will continue,” Baqeri added.
The Iranian commander said the military-security agreement also envisages boosting the Syrian air defenses.
On the Turkish military presence on Syrian soil, the Iranian commander said that Turkey is dragging its feet regarding the implementation of its commitments under the Astana agreements on the withdrawal of terrorist groups from Syria.
He said that Turkey must realize that the solution to any of its security problems is through negotiation with the Syrian side, and not through military deployment in the Arab country.
Ayoub, for his part, lauded Damascus-Tehran relations.
“If the American administrations had been able to subjugate Syria, Iran and the axis of resistance, they would not have hesitated for a moment,” the Lebanese al-Mayadeen television channel quoted the Syrian minister as saying.
He described Israel as a “powerful partner” of the US in the war against Syria, adding that terrorist groups constituted part of the Israeli aggression.
He also lambasted the so-called Caesar sanctions imposed by the US against his country, saying Syria will counter the bans barring the provision of foodstuff and medicine to its people.
He stressed that Syria that has maintained its government structure since 2011 and will undoubtedly emerge victorious out of the war.
The two sides also underlined the need for the withdrawal of foreign forces who have been “illegally” deployed to the Arab country in violation of international law and said the forces are the main obstacle to the complete cleansing of armed terrorist groups in some parts of Syria.
The heads of the senior military delegations of Iran and Syria also stressed that the agreement was the result of years of military, security and technical coordination and cooperation in various areas of joint fight against terrorism.
At the end of the talks, a joint statement was also issued by the high-ranking military delegations of the two countries, which said a continued battle against Takfiri terrorism supported by some regional and international powers is among the goals of the agreement.
They also stressed in the statement that the comprehensive military agreement was signed to implement the directives of the political and military leaders of the two countries to enhance their defense capabilities and promote self-reliance against any possible foreign aggression.
Iran and Syria have signed different military and defense cooperation over the past years.
Iran began providing Syria with advisory military assistance after numerous countries, at the head of them the US and its Western and regional allies, started funding and arming militants and terrorists with the aim of deposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
Despite initially losing considerable expanses of territory to Daesh and other terror outfits, the country, however, rallied with the help of Iran and Russia, another Damascus’ ally, and reversed the balance in favor of itself on the battleground.
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The Great Recycling Scam
By Dr. Vernon Coleman – 21st Century Wire – September 2, 2022
Recycling was introduced, worldwide, as a tool to teach citizens to become compliant.
Forcing citizens to sort their rubbish into up to nine separate bags or boxes every week had absolutely nothing to do with ‘saving the planet’ and everything to do with teaching citizens (through a mixture of fines and shame) to behave ‘responsibly’ i.e. to do as they were told without looking too closely at the rationale of what they were being told to do.
The recycling never had anything to do with protecting the planet, of course. Most of the rubbish sorted, washed and collected in the UK was taken abroad, by lorry or ship or train, and burnt or dumped. It was, quite simply, impractical and not cost effective to recycle the material that had been collected. And, of course, collecting the sorted rubbish involved massive costs in terms of cash and pollution.
Today, the recycling business has reached an apogee of lunacy. Councils introduce ever more complex rules and fees. They refuse to take away much of the waste that is collected. And those wanting to take their rubbish to a ‘recycling’ centre will probably have to make an appointment and answer a host of questions.
It is no surprise that fly-tipping has become a major problem. The biggest causes of plastic in the sea are dumped fishing gear and plastic waste (much of it officially designated as recycled) which has been dumped by ships.
The good news, however, is that in Britain, recycling rates are falling. More and more people have become aware that the whole recycling movement was just another piece of manipulative trickery.
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- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
