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Bolton’s Memoir Undercuts Hype as Impeachment’s Would-Be Star Witness

By Aaron Maté | Real Clear Investigations | June 23, 2020

In late January, John Bolton became the latest – and unlikeliest – official to enjoy a moment of Resistance glory. A New York Times report about Bolton’s forthcoming memoir fueled round-the-clock expectations that the former national security adviser would substantiate the core allegation at the heart of President Trump’s then-ongoing Senate impeachment trial – that the president tried to coerce Ukraine into opening an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden in a quid pro quo for military aid. Compelling his testimony was cast as a matter of national urgency. Bolton was never given the chance as Senate Republicans voted to block witnesses and acquit Trump on both impeachment counts.

In the publicity blitz for his new memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” Bolton has tried to keep the initial narrative alive. Speaking to ABC News, he claimed that Trump, at a meeting in August 2019, said he “wanted a probe of Joe Biden in exchange for delivering the security assistance.” That conversation, Bolton added, “was the crispest indication of the linkage. … The specificity of the linkage, I think, was unmistakable.”

His memoir, however, fails to substantiate that allegation.

In fact, Bolton offers new evidence that undermines it.

What he told Martha Raddatz is not what he writes in his book. Instead of a sharp demand of a quid pro quo, Bolton writes, Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending [Ukraine] anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to [Hillary] Clinton and Biden had been turned over.”

Bolton does not explain what he means by “materials” – and no interviewer has asked him to so far. RealClearInvestigations’ request to Bolton for comment, sent through a representative, was not immediately answered.

No Word on Burisma

Regardless, those were not at the heart of Trump’s impeachment. Trump was not impeached for trying to coerce Ukraine into handing over “Russia-investigation materials” to the U.S., but for allegedly trying to force Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to open a wholly separate investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, the gas company where Hunter was given a lucrative board seat while his father was running U.S. policy in Ukraine.

Yet Burisma is not even mentioned in Bolton’s book – and Hunter only in passing. This includes an acknowledgement that Bolton does not even remember if the younger Biden was actually discussed. At a May 8 meeting where Trump and his legal adviser Rudy Giuliani discuss the latter’s “desire to meet with President-Elect Zelensky,” Bolton cannot recall if the purpose is “to discuss [Ukraine’s] investigation of either Hillary Clinton’s efforts to influence the 2016 campaign or something having to do with Hunter Biden and the 2020 election, or maybe both.”

Son gets job on energy company board after father backs violent coup

Bolton says his recollections are not precise because the Ukraine-related theories floating around the Trump administration “always seemed intermingled and confused, one reason I did not pay them much heed. Even after they became public, I could barely separate the strands of the multiple conspiracy theories at work.”

Bolton’s words are also ambiguous. The fact that Trump allegedly “said he wasn’t in favor of sending [Ukraine] anything” is not an explicit linkage to military aid. And as for the “Russian-investigation materials,” Bolton does not specify what Trump was referring to. It seems likely Trump may have been referencing his reported theory that the Democratic National Committee server was somehow hacked with Ukrainian involvement.

Trump may also have been seeking information on the Ukrainians who openly admitted to interfering in the 2016 campaign with the aim of thwarting his candidacy, most notably by leaking allegations of illegal payments to Paul Manafort. It is highly plausible that these were Trump’s priorities. In his July 25 phone call with Zelensky, which sparked the whistleblower complaint behind Ukrainegate, Trump’s top issue – and the object of the “favor” he requested – was not the Bidens, but securing Zelensky’s assistance with the Justice Department’s ongoing review of how the Russia investigation began in 2016.

Whatever the case, for Bolton to write that Trump drew a link between these issues and the security aid – and not a link to a demand that Ukraine open an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma – contradicts the impeachment case that many expected him to validate.

Bolton, perhaps inadvertently, also lends credence to the Trump administration’s public defense of its freeze on security assistance to Ukraine, which Democrats cast as the linchpin of a politically motivated quid pro quo. In his July 25 call with Zelensky and subsequent public statements, Trump has said that he wanted NATO allies to spend more on Ukrainian military funding. Bolton recounts that on Aug. 30 – just days after an article in Politico made the aid freeze public, including to the Ukrainian government – Trump repeated his complaints about the U.S. burden, and proposed that NATO provide Ukraine with the security assistance instead of Washington:

Trump said, “I don’t give a shit about NATO. I am ready to say, ‘If you don’t pay, we won’t defend them.’ I want the three hundred million dollars [he meant two hundred fifty million dollars, one piece of the assistance earmarked for Ukraine] to be paid through NATO.” … He then said to Pence, “Call [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg and have him have NATO pay. Say ‘The President is for you, but the money should come from NATO,’” which still didn’t make any sense.

If Trump is freezing the military aid for the sole purpose of coercing a Ukrainian investigation, it would be incongruous for him to propose an outcome that delivers the money without the investigation he is supposedly trying to compel.

As a part of their impeachment case, Democrats argued that Trump released the aid to Ukraine only after getting caught through publicity surrounding the whistleblower complaint. Yet Bolton writes that after Ukraine conducted a successful prisoner swap with Russia on Sept. 7, “Trump had seemingly indicated” that the swap “might be enough to get him to release the security assistance.” The money was released four days later, on Sept. 11.

Says He Wanted Nothing to do With Ukraine

Bolton confirms national security aide Fiona Hill’s testimony that he told her he did not want to be “part of whatever drug deal Sondland and [White House Chief of Staff Mick] Mulvaney are cooking up.” But he offers context that makes that line far less explosive than it was initially received. Bolton was not referring to leveraging any military aid, but to Sondland’s attempt to push for a hasty meeting between Trump and Zelensky at the White House, where the “Giuliani issues” could be discussed before Ukraine’s parliamentary elections in July.

Bolton says he nixed the idea of a meeting because Trump had recently told him that “he didn’t want to have anything to do with Ukrainians of any stripe,” due to Ukrainian meddling against him in the 2016 campaign. Sondland, in Bolton’s view, was “freelancing.” According to Bolton, Trump had also “resolved the visit issue just before leaving for the United Kingdom in June,” by saying he would meet with Zelensky “not until the fall, the right outcome in my view.”

It is easy to forget why Bolton was initially cast as a savior figure in January by those hoping to remove Trump by impeachment. When news of his memoir emerged, 10 days after the Senate trial began, Democrats had failed to prove their case. Not a single witness in the House impeachment hearings had provided direct evidence of a quid pro quo. The only witness who even spoke to Trump about the Ukraine aid was the then-European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland. He reiterated multiple times that “nobody told me directly that the aid was tied to anything,” and that such a linkage was only his “presumption” and “personal, you know, guess.”

Sondland’s testimony was even more damaging to the impeachment case because, according to the impeachment narrative, he was the Trump official who purportedly relayed the alleged quid pro quo to the Ukrainian side. But Sondland revealed that he had only told Zelensky aide Andriy Yermak, in “a very, very brief pull-aside conversation,” that “I didn’t know exactly why” the aid has been frozen, but that a demand to open investigations “could be a reason.”

For his part, Yermak has said he does not even remember discussing the frozen aid with Sondland. That highlighted another problem with the Democrats’ quid pro quo allegation: Not a single Ukrainian official substantiates it. In addition to Yermak, President Zelensky and Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko also said that they saw no tie between the frozen military funding and pressure to open investigations. Even Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a staunch impeachment advocate, corroborates them: When they met in early September, Murphy recalled, Zelensky “did not make any connection between the aid that had been cut off and the requests that he was getting from Giuliani.”

The Ukrainians’ claims make sense in light of the fact that they only learned of the aid freeze, along with the rest of the world, with the Politico article published August 28. That would have meant that the supposed quid pro quo demand was made to them only after the issue became a matter of public controversy. That scenario was always implausible on its face. And now Bolton’s memoir has failed to change the picture. Bolton seems to grasp this fact. “I think the House Democrats built a cliff, they threw themselves off of it,” he told Raddatz of ABC News. “And halfway down, they looked up and saw me, and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come along?”

June 24, 2020 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Joe Biden, John Bolton, United States | Leave a comment

UK Foot and Mouth Disease

By Larry Romanoff | Moon of Shanghai | June 24, 2020

In 2001, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease ravaged the British farming industry. Exports from the UK of live animals, meat and dairy products were banned by other nations, as was the movement of animals from the infected area, and the government ordered a mass slaughter of millions of animals. The losses to British farmers were nearly incalculable, with a great many farmers going bankrupt or otherwise put out of business, and some farmers committing suicide in anguish over their losses. Within six months, almost 4 million animals had been slaughtered and their carcasses burned. Oddly, in the face of this enormous disaster, the government refused to hold a public inquiry into the outbreak, announcing instead three small separate investigations, the results of which would not be made public.

The UK government initially blamed the disease outbreak on “animal activists“, but not everyone believed the official story. At the time, the Sunday Express reported that the outbreak had been attributed to some vials containing foot and mouth virus, which had gone mysteriously missing from the laboratories at Porton Down, which location is a top-secret government bioweapons research facility housing such agents as TB, anthrax, smallpox, Ebola and the foot-and-mouth viruses. The report stated that “Authorities tried to play down the report by suggesting that “animal rights activists” had stolen and released the samples from the maximum-security government laboratory, though the same authorities failed to explain how animal rights activists would believe they were promoting animal rights by releasing a biological agent that would result in the destruction of millions of animals, or how they were able to penetrate the multiple layers of defenses in the heavily-secured laboratory.

No ragtag collection of anybody from anywhere would ever have access to such a facility, much less know how to deal with it. Neither terrorists nor animal-rights activists are renowned Ph.Ds with high-level security clearances and access to the top-secret and impossibly-secured facilities that contain these pathogens. And even if they did obtain access, the chances of any of them knowing what to search for, what to take, and what to do with it – and exiting alive – are somewhat less than zero. Given all of this, what do we make of the UK government’s claims that “activists” entered such a P-4 facility, stole many vials of foot and mouth virus, then apparently walked out of the facility unchallenged and proceeded to inoculate cattle and other farm animals by the hundreds of thousands? The accomplishment of such a feat might require more animal activists than exist in England, possibly by orders of magnitude.

As well, one media report in 2001 stated that “An eminent scientist with thirty years experience of infectious diseases challenged [UK Prime Minister] Blair in a prominent Sunday newspaper to “come clean and tell the truth about the foot-and-mouth epidemic“. The scientist testified that the virus which devastated Britain’s livestock “was not active in any other part of the world and could only have come from a UK laboratory.” And indeed the UK government bio-warfare labs at both Pirbright and Porton Down have been confirmed by the UK Minister of Health as containing more than 5,000 different strains of this particular virus, and in the end it did indeed appear the virus had originated in the UK government’s bio-warfare labs at Porton Down.

Then, the Sunday Express reported that a routine audit of Porton Down’s bio-warfare labs revealed that a container of several vials of foot-and-mouth virus had gone missing two months before the first outbreak of the disease, stating that “There are very persistent rumors over missing phials from Porton Down linked to animal rights activists”. The government of course desperately denied such a possibility, stating that “… only the Institute of Animal Health Laboratory and the Merial Biological Laboratory at Pirbright are licensed to hold FMD virus”, and that tales of the virus being stolen from Porton Down were inaccurate and impossible. But then, a senior military source at Porton Down stated publicly that vials “appear to have gone missing from one of the labs [at Porton Down] following a routine audit last year.”

The government then admitted that such a thing did happen after all and, right on cue, the government blamed the usual “animal rights activists” for the theft and release of the deadly pathogen, the media dutifully reporting that “Ministry officials were informed immediately and an investigation was launched initially by Special Branch and then by MI5, who are interested in the activities of animal rights protesters.” Unfortunately, those animal activists and protestors were somehow never found.

This scenario was repeated in 2007 with another outbreak in the UK, the source of which was determined to have been another UK government bio-weapons lab, this time at Pirbright. At the time, the Guardian published an article stating that, according to the authorities, “A leaky drain allowed the disease to escape”. The Guardian reported that, according to government sources, there had been a “probable” new leak of foot and mouth disease virus from the Merial Animal Health facility at Pirbright, the virus believed to have escaped through a leaking valve, “allowing an unintended probable release of live FMD virus into the drainage system“. The government claimed in a written statement to have received Merial’s assurances that “the live virus had not been released to the environment”, though in fact it had been. A spokesman for Merial apparently told the Guardian that he was “surprised by the fuss”. Both the government Health Service and Merial shared the source of this outbreak, the “broken drainage system” which served both sets of laboratories, though apparently “investigators were strangely unable to determine which lab was actually responsible for the leakage and outbreak”.

What do we make of the claim that perhaps thousands of liters of foot and mouth virus escaped through “a leaky drain” at Pirbright? I have had some experience with things that leak from drains or similar, and in all cases the leaks simply pool on the ground, filling the depressions while waiting to evaporate. But then this is England and maybe things are different there, which would account for the leaked pathogens winding their way through English hill and dale, visiting and somehow infecting millions of animals, for hundreds of kilometers in all directions from the biolab. In my world, viruses are not renowned for their motive ability to travel a countryside, nor for the necessary tracking radar to hunt down thousands of animal herds, nor for the aggressive disposition that would lead them to attack and infect every animal they found. That would almost require an intelligence – and a vehicle.

In June of 2008, soon after the second major outbreak of foot and mouth disease, the UK media ran a series of articles stating that “Security at British laboratories working with some of the world’s deadliest pathogens (that included anthrax, hemorrhagic fever and smallpox viruses), was undermined by a lack of investment and poor maintenance“. The media articles were in response to a report produced by some government MPs which claimed that the labs were “so dilapidated” and “run down” it was “not acceptable” that scientists were asked to work there. These facilities, the MPs claimed, had “outlived their usefulness”, and were in such ruinous condition they were “quite likely to experience” yet another leakage of deadly pathogens such as those of the foot and mouth virus that necessitated the slaughter of millions of animals. The committee of MPs especially singled out the labs at Pirbright and the secretive bio-warfare lab installations at Porton Down which, the media reported, were “Britain’s frontline defense against infectious diseases”.

It needs to be noted here that neither Pirbright nor Porton Down, but especially Porton Down, are a ‘frontline defense’ against anything and are in fact bio-weapons labs with a well-deserved evil reputation and a long and malicious history. This may have been the CIA’s version of a joke, but when anthrax spores were mailed to some US government and media representatives in 2001, CIA officials publicly speculated that Porton Down may have been their origin. In the end, the origin was determined to be (quite possibly courtesy of the same CIA) the US military’s bio-weapons labs at Fort Detrick, so perhaps a small false flag. Porton Down and the CIA have been close friends for many decades.It was to Porton Down that the CIA outsourced many of its “terminal interrogations”, i.e. questioning people until they died from the questioning methods. It was here that CIA biochemist Frank Olson witnessed firsthand the results of his ‘biochemistry’, began to suffer unbearable pangs of conscience, then suddenly met his death in most unusual circumstances, the result of an apparent suicide – as they almost always are. It was eventually revealed that Olson had been ordered killed by CIA Director Allen Dulles, that his death was neither an accident nor a suicide, but a deliberate murder to prevent the man from disclosing to the media the secret crimes of the CIA and Porton Down. Then-US President Johnson apologised to the family and paid $750,000 in compensation. So let’s not pretend Porton Down provides defense against infectious diseases.

According to an “independent” report, the buildings housing the lab facilities that contained the foot and mouth viruses were apparently “visibly substandard”, were suffering from a “creeping degradation of standards”, and were “poorly managed and regulated”. As Dr. Iain Anderson, who led a similar inquiry into the larger similar outbreak in 2001, was quoted as saying, “This virus should never have got out. [No argument there] Everything was wrong around Pirbright; the regulatory system was poor, the risk management was poor“. He further stated, “… the facilities … fall well short of internationally recognised standards, and the governance and funding arrangements are muddled and ineffective”. As well, his report described the laboratories as “shabby and dilapidated”, thus leading to the deadly virus “probably leaking from faulty pipes”. One British MP was quoted as saying, “When you think about how important biosecurity is, [… this] is staggering”. No kidding. I would have to agree.

At the time of the release of these so-called independent reports, the media were uniformly frightening us with claims that “Many scientists believe” that “climate change and terrorism” would now “bring many new diseases” and cause many pathogens such as anthrax to be “deliberately released in public places”, though it wasn’t immediately clear how climate change might deliberately release anthrax in a public park. The only scientists who believe that are the same people planning the next release. Those reports were not meant as either an apology or explanation for past disease outbreaks, but to create fear because a fearful public is malleable and will easily surrender civil rights to a fascist government in exchange for protection – most often from that same government. It was also a political statement to justify to the public the planned expense of a new, and quite massive, bio-warfare pathogen facility in the UK, one that would of course be “necessary to combat whatever our enemies throw at us”. Or to produce whatever we might want to throw at ourselves.

Aside from the implausibility inherent in the official narratives of these disease outbreaks, there are three other curious items I would bring to your attention.

The UK Government appeared to have prepared precisely for the epidemic of 2001. From an article by Dr. Mae-Wan Hoin an Institute of Science in Society Report dated September 24, 2001, entitled “Foot & Mouth Outbreak, GM Vaccine and Bio-warfare”:

“Investigations by the ‘Evening Chronicle‘ uncovered that the United States, Canada and Mexico began preparing for ‘a simulated outbreak of foot and mouth disease’ last October. According to papers leaked from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the exercise – which took place between November 6 and 9 – was ‘for the purpose of emergency planning.’ The papers reportedly state: ‘This exercise is the first of its kind and provides all three countries with a unique opportunity to apply their emergency response plans in the event of a real disease outbreak.’ At the same time, the UK Government was reported to be preparing its own ‘contingency plans’ for a foot and mouth outbreak. The Evening Chronicle reported that officials from the Agriculture Ministry began telephoning timber merchants as early as December asking if they could supply wood for pyres, should foot and mouth strike.”

UK farms appeared to have been targeted in advance, each marked with yellow tapes, for a visitation from unannounced and unidentified “government animal inspectors”, those farms being unfortunate enough to earn an “inspection” apparently coinciding with those suffering an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, with all livestock being destroyed.

According to one report that appeared credible, and there were others, a local resident named Martin Grant, who lived in Hatherleigh, Devon, described events he observed while cycling through the countryside in the Spring and Summer of 2001. Grant claims to have seen yellow tapes tied to fences, hedges, and trees on the roadside at the entrances to farms in the area. He, and others, later noted that these same locations were those “inspected” by staff claiming to be government agricultural workers. Though Grant was not conducting a scientific survey, he later stated that these locations appeared to coincide not only with the so-called inspections but also with the specific appearances of foot and mouth disease. He said it all occurred “generally just about the same time … this seemed to coincide that anyone that got a tape got foot-and-mouth. As if somebody had deliberately done something.” He was asked if his impression was that the yellow tapes were, “In other words, to ear-mark the farm for possible infection?” His response was to say, “Yes. That was the impression that I got… yes.” He added further that at the time, fragments of the yellow tapes were still hanging on many of the fences.

Another report was from a family named Bratton who lived in the area in question. Mrs. Bratton reported that she “encountered two men in white overalls outside the cattle shed” while walking to the buildings on her farm. She had no idea who they were or why they were on her property and, upon inquiring, was told they were UK Ministry of Agriculture officials “who had every right to inspect agricultural premises”, and ordered her to go inside her house because she was not permitted to witness their “inspections”. Mrs. Bratton said she called the local police several times, was assured they would investigate and contact her. She claimed she received no response, and was later informed the police had no record of her prior calls. Shortly thereafter, all her farm’s livestock was discovered to be infected and were subsequently destroyed. I have not seen much of the documentation, but there were many apparently many similar reports of animal inspections from farms suffering the same fate.

Perhaps the most curious of all was the well-documented activity by staff from the office of the UK Minister of Agriculture inquiring about the supply of lumber (for burning infected livestock) and the requisitioning of it, prior to any apparent need. There were at least several published accounts of various government officials or their representatives inquiring about “combustible materials”, as well as stockpiling them, and of the issuing of contracts to trucking companies and machinery operators for ground excavation and for the hauling of dead livestock, several months prior to the disease outbreak in February of 2001.

One headline stated, “Timber merchants around Britain say that in early February they were approached by the ministry for wood supplies to burn animals with foot-and-mouth. Timber merchants say they were approached by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in early February, before the outbreak was confirmed, to supply wood for the pyres which are used to burn the diseased animals that have been killed.” UK Agriculture minister Nick Brown insisted this was part of a “regular contingency planning exercise”, and added, “There are a number of urban legends doing the rounds that the ministry knew about this disease before. That is not true.”

Mr. Brown was pointedly questioned about the contacts made by his office with suppliers – many months prior to the disease outbreak – “to establish the availability of timber, suitable for use in pyres for burning dead livestock.” The Minister’s reply was to say that “Information on all the timber stockists contacted by the Ministry over the last year is not held centrally and could be provided only at a disproportionate cost.” If that isn’t clear, the Minister effectively stated that his staff created no accessible records of their approaches to lumber dealers, purchases made and contracts signed, that any records that did exist were widely dispersed and couldn’t be collated. That might be true if 50,000 lumber dealers were approached by several thousand different staff members in a wholly uncoordinated fashion but, if the number of dealers were only in the tens, which is likely, the Minister’s statements beg some questions.

There is one final matter I would bring to your attention, one on which I have no commentary. There were many rumors, some articles, and several letters to the Editor at the time, dealing with what was called a “planned rationalisation” of UK animal farms, ‘rationalisation’ in this sense referring to the elimination of small farmers and the concentration of livestock production in the hands of Big Agra. This would have included, according to these people, increased and prohibitively costly new regulations which small operators would find onerous or impossible to implement, preparing the way for small agra to be “eventually absorbed by the multi-national food processing corporations“. Writers claimed this was one of the ambitions of then Prime Minister Blair. I do not know if this was the intent, but it certainly was the result. According to my information, many thousands of small farmers have disappeared from the UK, driven out by unrecoverable losses, poor compensation and new regulations. And Big Agra has apparently indeed proliferated in the aftermath.

I do not know the totality of truths for these outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, nor specifically how the virus was removed from the secure P-4 facilities and spread around the entire country. It certainly was not the result of either accidents or activists, and had to be done deliberately. I think we can be forgiven for suspicions that the deep state that controls so many Western governments is the most vicious criminal enterprise in the world today.

Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com.

Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai, 2020

June 24, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | CIA, UK, United States | Leave a comment

‘Russiagate’ case against ex-Trump adviser Michael Flynn effectively OVER, as DC appeals court orders to close it

RT | June 24, 2020

An appeals court in Washington, DC, ruled that the case against President Trump’s one-time national security adviser, Michael Flynn, must end. The Justice Department had dropped charges against Flynn, but his case remained open.

In a ruling issued on Wednesday, the Washington DC Circuit Court of Appeals effectively ended the case against Flynn, ordering federal judge Emmet Sullivan to heed the Justice Department’s advice and close the case. Sullivan had attempted to keep the case active, even though the Justice Department dropped its charges against Flynn last month.

The appeals battle was a last-ditch showdown between Flynn and the Justice Department on one side, and Sullivan on the other. Though reporters as recently as last week reckoned the appeals court would side with Sullivan, they were proven wrong on Wednesday morning.

Of course, Sullivan may appeal again, but with the government and prosecution in agreement, his chances of breathing life into the Flynn case – ongoing for more than two years – is slim.

Appointed national security advisor following Trump’s election win in 2016, Flynn quickly became the first and most prominent White House official caught up in the FBI’s ‘Russiagate’ investigation. He was fired in early 2017 and later pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

However, the case was dropped last month, after it emerged that the charges against him were baseless.

Before he was interviewed by FBI agents in January 2017, FBI brass knew they had “no derogatory information” on the retired General, yet then-FBI Director James Comey ordered the interview to proceed regardless, breaching agency protocol. Disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok urged his superiors to keep the case against Flynn open, and plotted with other agents to “get him to lie” during the interview. Furthermore, Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page edited the transcript of the interview to incriminate Flynn.

All of this information was revealed last month, when acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell declassified a trove of ‘Russiagate’ documents. According to the document dump, a host of Obama administration officials dug into Flynn’s intelligence records as the FBI were attempting to entrap him in the interview.

President Trump, who has long accused the FBI and Obama administration of orchestrating a plot to take down his presidency, retweeted a call from his son last week for Flynn to “sue the FBI and it’s corrupt actors for all they’re worth.”

June 24, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | FBI, United States | Leave a comment

NATO 2030: How to Make a Bad Idea Worse

By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | June 23, 2020

Just when you thought the leaders of NATO could not push the limits of insanity any further, something like NATO 2030 is announced.

After helping blow up the Middle East and North Africa, dividing the Balkans into zones of war and tension, turning Ukraine upside down using armadas of neo Nazis, and encircling Russia with a ballistic missile shield, the leaders of this Cold War relic have decided that the best way to deal with instability of the world is… more NATO.

In a June 8th online event co-sponsored by the Atlantic Council, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the launch of a planning project to reform NATO called NATO 2030. Stoltenberg told his audience that in order to deal with Russia and China’s strategic partnership which is transforming the global balance of power, “we must resist the temptation of national solutions and we must live up to our values: freedom, democracy and the rule of law. To do this, we must stay strong militarily, be more united politically and take a broader approach globally.”

In the mind of Stoltenberg, this means expanding NATO’s membership into the Pacific with a high priority on the absorption of Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea into NATO’s dysfunctional family. It also means extending NATO’s jurisdiction beyond a military alliance to include a wider political and environmental dimension (the war on climate change is apparently just as serious as the war on terrorism and should thus be incorporated into NATO’s operating system).

Analyzing China’s intentions through the most Hobbesian dark age lens on the market, Stoltenberg stated “they are investing heavily in modern military capabilities, including missiles that can reach all NATO allied countries. They are coming closer to us in cyberspace. We see them in the Arctic, in Africa… and they are working more and more together with Russia.”

In spite of NATO’s Cold War thinking, Russia and China have continuously presented olive branches to the west over the years- offering to cooperate on such matters as counter-terrorism, space exploration, asteroid defense, and global infrastructure projects in the Arctic and broader Belt and Road Initiative. In all instances, these offers have been met with a nearly unanimous cold shoulder by the western military industrial complex ruling NATO and the Atlantic alliance.

The Engine of War Heats Up

As Stoltenberg spoke these words, the 49th Baltic Operations running from June 1-16th were underway as the largest NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea featuring “30 ships and submarines, and 30 aircraft, conducting air defence, anti-submarine warfare, maritime interdiction and mine countermeasure operations.” In response Moscow reinforced its armored forces facing Europe.

Meanwhile in China’s backyard, three aircraft carriers all arrived in the Pacific (the USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz) with a senate Armed Services Committee approval of $6 billion in funds for the Pacific Defense Initiative which Defense News stated will “send a strong signal to the Chinese Communist Party that America is deeply committed to defending our interests in the Indo-Pacific”. The committee also approved a U.S. Airforce operating location in the Indo-Pacific for F-35A jets in order to “prioritize the protection of the air bases that might be under attack from current or emerging cruise missiles and advanced hypersonic missiles, specifically from China.”

Another inflammatory precursor for confrontation came from a House Republican Study Committee report co-authored by Secretary of State Pompeo calling for sanctioning China’s leadership, listing Russia as a state sponsor of terror and authorizing the use of military force against anyone on a Foreign Terrorist Organization list. When one holds in mind that large sections of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard happen to be on this list, it is not hard to see how quickly nations doing business with Iran can be considered “state sponsors of terror”, justifying a use of military force from America.

With this level of explicit antagonism and duplicity, it is no wonder that China’s foreign ministry announced on June 10th that it would not participate in joint three-way arms talks between the USA and Russia. If America demonstrated a coherent intention to shift its foreign policy doctrine towards a genuine pro-cooperation perspective, then it is undoubtably the case that China would enthusiastically embrace such proposals. But until then, China is obviously unwilling to lose any part of its already small nuclear deterrent of 300 warheads (compared to Russia and the USA, who each own 6000).

The Resistance to the Warhawks

I have said it many times before, but there is currently not one but two opposing American military doctrines at war with each other and no assessment of American foreign policy is complete without a sensitivity to that fact.

On the one hand, there is the sociopathic doctrine which I outlined summarily above, but on the other hand, there exists a genuine intention to stop the “forever wars”, pull out of the Middle East, disengage with NATO and realign with a multipolar system of sovereign nation states.

This more positive America expressed itself in Trump’s June 7th counter-attack on former Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis who had fueled the American Maidan now unfolding by stating his belief that solutions can happen without the President. Trump had fired Mattis earlier over the Cold Warrior’s commitment to endless military enmeshment in Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. In this Oval Office interview, the President called out the Military industrial complex which Mattis represents saying “The military-industrial complex is unbelievably powerful… You have no idea. Some legit, and some non-legit.”

Another aspect of Trump’s resistance to the neo-cons running the Pentagon and CIA is reflected in the June 11 joint U.S.-Iraq statement after the Strategic Dialogues summit of American and Iraqi delegates which committed to a continued reduction of troops in Iraq stating:

“Over the coming months, the U.S. would continue reducing forces from Iraq and discuss with the government of Iraq the status of remaining forces as both countries turn their focus towards developing a bilateral security relationship based on strong mutual interests”.

This statement coincides with Trump’s May 2020 call to accelerate U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan which has seen a fall from 12000 troops in February to under 9,000 as of this writing.

Most enraging to the NATO-philes of London, Brussels and Washington was Trump’s surprising call to pull 9,500 American troops out of Germany hours before Stoltenberg gave his loony NATO 2030 speech with Johann Wadephul (Deputy head of the CDU) saying “these plans demonstrate once again that the Trump administration neglects a central element of leadership: the involvement of alliance partners in the decision-making process”. In his next breath, Wadephul made his anti-Eurasian delusion transparent saying “Europe gains from the Alliance being unified. Only Russia and China gain from strife.”

Just a few months earlier, the President showed his disdain for the NATO bureaucracy by unilaterally pulling 3,000 American military personnel out of the Trident Juncture exercise held annually every March.

In Defense of President Trump

In spite of all of his problems, Trump’s resistance to the dark age/neocon faction which has been running a virtually independent military-industrial-intelligence complex since FDR’s death in 1945 demonstrates a high degree of courage unseen in American presidents for many decades.

Most importantly, this flawed President represents a type of America which is genuinely compatible with the pro-nation state paradigm now being led by Russia and China.

Trump’s recent attempt to reform the G7 into a G11 (incorporating Russia, India, South Korea and Australia) is a nice step in that direction but his exclusion of China has made it an unworkable idea.

To solve this problem, American University in Moscow President Edward Lozansky stated in his recent Washington Times column that adding China to the list making it a G12 would be a saving grace to the idea and one of the best flanking maneuvers possible during this moment of crisis. Lozansky’s concept is so important that I wish to end with a larger citation from his article:

“Both Russia and China got the message a long time ago that they need to stay together to withstand the efforts to destroy them in sequence… The G-7 indeed is an obsolete group and it definitely needs a fresh blood. Therefore, a G-12 meeting in New York in late September during the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly would be a perfect place and timing since Mr. Trump had already announced that he is willing to hold a G-5 summit with the leaders of Russia, China, Britain and France — the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — to discuss nuclear security issues. China so far is reluctant to join these talks, arguing that its smaller nuclear force is defensive and poses no threat. However, for the discussion in the G-12 format Mr. Putin might be able to convince his pal Xi to accept Mr. Trump’s invitation. This would be a huge achievement for the world’s peace and at the same time allow Mr. Trump to score lots of political points not only from his electoral base but from undecided and even from his opponents who want to save their families from nuclear holocaust.”

Unless world citizens who genuinely wish to avoid the danger of a nuclear holocaust learn how to embrace the idea of a G-12, and let the NATO/Cold War paradigm rot in the obsolete trash bin of history where it rightfully belongs, then I think it is safe to say that the future will not be something to look forward to.

For the next installment, we will take a look at the British Imperial origins of NATO and the American deep state in order to help shed greater light on the nature of the “two Americas” which I noted above, have been at war with each other since 1776.

June 24, 2020 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | CIA, NATO, United States | Leave a comment

Iran ready for coop with IAEA as long as it retains independence: Rouhani

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani

Press TV – June 24, 2020

President Hassan Rouhani says Iran is prepared, as before, to continue its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as long as the UN nuclear watchdog does not deviate from the legal frameworks and does not fall under Israeli and American influence.

“Iran is prepared to take the agency’s legal inspections and engage in close cooperation with it within the framework of the [standing] regulations,” Rouhani said, addressing a cabinet session in Tehran on Wednesday.

“For us, cooperation with the agency has always formed the basis,” he said, adding, “We will maintain this [principle] today too.”

He said the Islamic Republic has invariably enjoyed a “friendly” relationship with the watchdog, whose inspectors have examined the country’s nuclear facilities regularly and confirmed its non-diversion from a 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and world countries in more than a dozen reports.

The president, however, cautioned that “the agency too should pay attention not to deviate from its legal path.”

On Friday, the IAEA’s Board of Governors adopted a resolution — drawn up by the UK, France, and Germany — that called on Iran to allow access to two sites that Israeli intelligence services claim are related to Tehran’s nuclear program. Tehran has condemned the resolution, rebuffed the allegations, and reminded the agency that it cannot request inspections based on accusations made up by intelligence agencies.

“I fear these charlatans may tarnish the agency,” Rouhani said, referring to the Israeli regime and the United States that changelessly backs the regime’s stances and allegations. “They dupe the agency and push it away from its course.”

“The agency’s task consists of reporting on the manner of application of nuclear materials. That is what the agency is supposed to do,” the president said.

He, accordingly, urged the IAEA to act justly in its assessments and retain its independence.

Rouhani, meanwhile, berated the European trio for their falling under Tel Aviv and Washington’s pressure in devising of the anti-Iranian resolution, while praising Russia and China for their decisive stance against the resolution.

On US offer of talks

Separately, the chief executive referred to the United States’ new offer of talks with Iran.

The Islamic Republic is always prepared for negotiations as soon as the US renews commitment to the international regulations, he said, adding that it was Washington that left the negotiation table in the first place by reneging on its commitments.

Washington left the nuclear deal in 2018, although the accord has been endorsed by the UN Security Council as a resolution.

“They were the ones, who created trouble, broke the negotiation table, and tyrannized the Iranian nation,” Rouhani said.

He also urged that the US apologize to the Iranian people for the economic damage that it has tried to afflict on them through the sanctions that it reinstated after leaving the deal, and compensate the nation.

June 24, 2020 Posted by aletho | Wars for Israel | IAEA, Iran, Israel, Sanctions against Iran, United States | Leave a comment

Iran has ‘no problem’ talking to US if it apologizes & offers refund over nuclear deal – President Rouhani

RT – June 24, 2020

Nothing is preventing Tehran from engaging in talks with Washington, provided that it comes up with apologies – and reimbursement – for losses in the 2015 nuclear pact America walked out on, President Hassan Rouhani has said.

“We have no problem with talking to the US,” Rouhani declared, in a nationally-broadcast speech on Wednesday. The only condition is that “Washington meets its obligations under the nuclear deal, apologizes and compensates Tehran for its withdrawal from the 2015 pact,” the president said, as quoted by Reuters.

Rouhani made it clear, however, that “these calls for talks with Tehran are just words and lies.” US President Donald Trump has previously offered to negotiate with Iran without any preconditions and to meet with Rouhani in person.

Washington repeated the offer of “serious talks” this January – but the timing of this couldn’t have been more questionable, as it came on the heels of the death of Qassem Soleimani, a renowned Iranian military leader, in an American missile strike.

Tehran, for its part, has consistently ruled out dealing with Washington under pressure, or trading vital national interests.

Last year, however, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif announced that he pitched a suggestion to the US, under which Iran would permanently accept international inspections of its nuclear program, in return for the lifting of US sanctions.

Following his pattern of being suspicious towards Iran, Trump green-lighted the pullout from the hard-earned nuclear pact in 2018. Shortly after the US formally ceased to be a member, it slapped Iran’s oil trade, finances, investment activities, and other crucial sectors with sweeping penalties under the so-called “maximum policy pressure.”

This week, Washington will try to secure a UN backing for an indefinite extension of an embargo that bans countries from selling or transferring arms to Iran unless approved by the Security Council. In order to pass, their draft resolution requires nine votes in favor and no vetoes from China, Russia, Britain or France – a quartet of countries still adhering to the 2015 nuclear deal.

June 24, 2020 Posted by aletho | Aletho News | Iran, Sanctions against Iran, United States | Leave a comment

Ukrainian MP reveals new ‘Biden-Poroshenko’ tapes, claims VP’s son was paid ‘protection money’ by Burisma

RT | June 23, 2020

More tapes of what appear to be Joe Biden’s phone calls with the former president of Ukraine have surfaced, along with documents showing how much his son Hunter was paid by Burisma, a gas company desperate to avoid prosecution.

Ledgers show payments of $3.4 million from Burisma to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, the company co-founded by Hunter Biden, for “consulting services,” former prosecutor Konstantin Kulyk and Ukrainian MP Andrii Derkach revealed on Monday in Kiev.

Kulyk added that these services clearly amounted to “political protection of Burisma” and its owner Mykola Zlochevsky by US vice president at the time, Joe Biden.

Kulyk also told reporters that his office had evidence of Burisma’s lawyers offering $50 million to the government to make the case against the company and its founder go away – and not $6 million as was reported earlier.

The reason Burisma’s activities stood out from the white noise of general corruption in Ukraine following the US-backed coup in 2014 is that Zlochevsky sought to shield himself from scrutiny by hiring Hunter Biden as a board member, for a reported salary of $50,000 a month. Biden had no qualifications for the job, other than father being the top US official in charge of Ukraine.

Last month, Derkach released a batch of audio recordings of what sounded like Biden and then-President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, discussing everything from sacking a prosecutor looking into Burisma to what Kiev needed to do to qualify for an IMF bailout loan. He revealed more tapes on Monday.

The new recordings show ‘Biden’ micro-managing Ukraine’s internal affairs, asking ‘Poroshenko’ for a “favor,” discussing personnel appointments in the prosecutor-general’s office, assuring Poroshenko the FBI is not looking into claims of a Ukrainian MP who blew the whistle on massive corruption and vote-buying schemes, and so on.

The recordings have not been authenticated and Derkach himself was careful to say the voices “sound like” Poroshenko and Biden. He has turned the materials over to the prosecutor-general’s office, which is reportedly looking into charges of treason and abuse of power against the former president.

Poroshenko’s corruption and Hunter Biden’s job have had a major impact on US politics. Last year, Democrats accused President Donald Trump of soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election by bringing up Burisma on a phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky and threatening to withhold US military aid to Kiev. The House of Representatives actually impeached Trump on those charges, though he was acquitted in the Senate.

One of the witnesses in the process was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs George Kent. On Monday, Derkach named Kent as the liaison between Biden and Poroshenko, used to keep them informed of any developments regarding Burisma.

Poroshenko responded to the revelations by claiming they were a “fabrication” by Russia as “part of a large-scale hybrid war” intended to “undermine the Ukrainian-American strategic partnership that underlies the international coalition in support for Ukraine.”

He said the same exact thing about last month’s revelations, though on that occasion he also accused someone from Zelensky’s office of handing over “raw materials” to investigative journalists who then gave the recordings to Derkach.

June 23, 2020 Posted by aletho | Corruption | Joe Biden, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment

Democrat Rep. calls for police after being attacked in short-lived ‘autonomous zone’ near White House

RT | June 23, 2020

A Democrat lawmaker and an MSNBC reporter have been left wondering where the police were, after they were apparently attacked in a fledgling ‘autonomous zone’ near the White House.

Perhaps spurred on by activists in Seattle’s ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’, a group of protesters in Washington, DC occupied a street near the White House this weekend, declaring it the ‘Black House Autonomous Zone’. Though police cleared the street of tents and trash on Tuesday, a large crowd remained, and Democrat Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton was on the street to talk to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

The interview was cut short when what appeared to be a bikini-clad man made a dash for the pair. He got within several feet of Norton and Mitchell before a private security team collared him and pulled him aside. Earlier, the man was seen on a segway scooter shouting profanities.

“Where’s the police when you need them?” Norton exclaimed as her security detail led the would-be attacker away. Curiously, Norton introduced a bill earlier this month that would prevent the president assuming control of Washington, DC’s police force in an emergency. At the time, Mayor Muriel Bowser had just declared the streets around the White House a celebratory space for protests, going as far as renaming the street Norton was nearly attacked on “Black Lives Matter Plaza.”

Hours before the attempted attack, Trump again threatened to meet the protesters with “serious force.” Norton criticized the president’s threat, declaring that the police should not be used to clear a “peaceful protest.”

It is still unclear whether her own experience has changed her mind on this.

June 23, 2020 Posted by aletho | Progressive Hypocrite | Eleanor Holmes Norton, Muriel Bowser, United States | Leave a comment

US uses arms control summit with Russia for China-bashing, derails talks needed to prevent new arms race

By Scott Ritter | RT | June 22, 2020

While promoting the possibility of bilateral agreements with Russia, the US was only interested in staging a cheap propaganda photo-op attacking China, making the prospects for New START look bleak.

Hope sprang eternal when, less than two weeks ago, the United States and Russia agreed to engage in much-needed arms control negotiations to be held in Vienna, Austria on June 22. Senior delegations of the two countries were led by Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control Marshall Billingslea and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. Two issues pertinent to global security were anticipated to be on the agenda—stability in Europe in a post-INF world (the foundational agreement for modern arms control, signed in December 1987 and which remained in force until the US withdrew in August 2019), and the extension of the New START treaty, the last remaining arms control agreement between the US and Russia which is set to expire in February 2021.)

However, while the New START treaty is a bilateral agreement between the US and Russia, the US made it clear that any extension must take into account China’s strategic nuclear forces. It’s a condition that all but kills any chance of the New START treaty being extended, since a completely new treaty vehicle would need to be negotiated on a trilateral basis. The insistence on a trilateral framework played a major role in the decision by the Trump administration to withdraw from the INF Treaty as well, something that does not portent well for the future of New START.

Even before the June 22 arms control summit, China made it clear that it would not be participating in talks, making any discussion of the extension of the New START treaty appear dead on arrival. The US, however, insisted that the talks go forward, raising the prospects that at least some progress could be made bilaterally between it and Russia.

In the end, however, cheap propaganda trumped substantive discussions, with the US, knowing full well China was not attending, setting out Chinese flags along an empty conference table for a photo that was later tweeted out by Billingslea, accompanied by a caption that read, “Vienna talks about to start. China is a no-show. Beijing still hiding behind #GreatWallofSecrecy on its crash nuclear build-up, and so many other things. We will proceed with #Russia, notwithstanding.”

The flag incident quickly drew the ire of the Russians. Ambassador to Austria Dmitry Lyubinsky said there “could not have been any Chinese flags at Russian-American consultations on strategic stability,” posting a flag-less picture on Facebook.

Billingslea’s tweet was countered by one from prominent Chinese journalist Chen Weihua, who criticized the US predilection for withdrawing from multilateral agreements such as the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris Climate accords, before pointing out that “China has 300 nukes in contrast to 6,000 by US and Russia. So unless you agree to come down to 300 or even 500, you’re not making sense.” While not a Chinese official per se, Chen’s viewpoints are considered to closely track with official policy.

In the end, the Vienna summit was a bust, a one-day exchange of previously-held views which resolved no outstanding issues and left little hope for any breakthrough in the future. So long as the Trump administration continues to insist on Chinese presence at the negotiating table as a precondition for any new agreements, there is zero chance for progress in arms control talks with Russia, or China. This makes any extension of the New START treaty impossible, and a new nuclear arms race with Russia and China inevitable.

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

June 23, 2020 Posted by aletho | Militarism | INF treaty, New START Treaty, United States | Leave a comment

The Problem With How the Regime-Change American Left Sees the World and Themselves

By Joaquin Flores | Strategic Culture Foundation | June 22, 2020

Imagine believing that you know what is in the best interests of others, and worse, ones you have never even met, and worse still, believing you have a right to improve their situation in the manner and timeline you see fit. The belief that one has the right to save the world is termed ‘communal narcissism’. Therein lies the first problem with progressive imperialism.

The American left in the realm of foreign policy suffers from a type of prosocial communal narcissism, based in their own self-appraisal that their best intentions will be realized in the best outcomes for others, as the narcissist has themself defined it.

But the American left is significantly more dangerous and grotesque compared to standard justifications of imperialism, because it frames the discourse in such a way that it is blind to its own chauvinism, and believes itself to speak for the world.

What in other countries is viewed as quite ugly – believing oneself so enlightened and righteous that they can force others into their own image – has become a quintessential aspect of American culture post 1960’s.

We arrive then at our problem; the leftist approach has relied on soft-power tactics which require a lot more imagination, and yet also hubris, to justify. It is based overtly in telling other countries how to manage themselves as being both philosophically and categorically its proclaimed mandate.

It is the most overt form of imperialism, couched in the language of the left’s understanding of human rights and universalism. It rests gently on the ears and upon the conscience if left unexamined, but in actual fact it is far more malignant. Perhaps because they are so over-used, and perhaps here because they appear to be benign, because American society accepts these as just. But the specter of Dunning-Kruger will always rear its ugly head, and the expected outcomes will almost never materialize.

And in typical gas-lighting fashion, the failure of the subject nation to live up to the vision of the narcissist will be blamed upon the subject.

Most dangerously, soft-power tactics situate themselves outside of the founding principles of national self-determination and sovereignty that the UN was established upon in the post-war years, and yet exploits the various corrupt alphabet soup of organizations and agencies that operate under the UN’s umbrella.

Soft-power tactics were born out of a cultural shift within the U.S.., the development of media and later new media, as a form of propaganda and manufactured consent. The role of television media reporting on Vietnam left an American public taken aback by raw images of the terrorism and horror that is war.

Gone forever was the myth of purity of arms. And so a new myth, the myth of soft-power towards regime change, had to be built.

While soft-power tactics may at first appear to be less harmful to the target, because ‘military’ is not used, the socio-economic outcome of such an approach is the very definition of collective punishment and civilian targets, targets which if zeroed in on by the military would qualify as war crimes and crimes against humanity by any reasonable measure.

Enter the Save the World Generation of 1968

The ‘save the world’ generation in America that emerged from the utopian leanings of 1968, in part also out of opposition to the Vietnam War, came to define the left-wing version of American foreign policy.

The popular opposition to the war in Vietnam signaled the need for a new era in American foreign policy development. Richard Falk – the preeminent American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University – wrote for Foreign Policy Magazine in an article titled ‘What We Should Learn from Vietnam’ published in 1970 or ‘71:

“Where there is no formidable radical challenge on the domestic scene, as in India or Japan, the American preference is clearly for moderate democracy, indeed the kind of political orientation that the United States imposed upon Japan during the military occupation after World War II. However, where an Asian society is beset by struggle between a rightist incumbent regime and a leftist insurgent challenger, then American policy throws its support, sometimes strongly, to the counterrevolutionary side.

As a result, there has been virtually no disposition to question the American decision to support the repressive and reactionary Saigon regime provided that support could have led to victory in Vietnam at a reasonable cost.”

In establishing this as a problem, Falk proposes what he terms a ‘Fourth Position’, one which would end America’s pre-occupation with supporting counter-revolutionary forces in Asia.

We can extrapolate from Falk’s thesis an historical parallel: It was forward looking Gauls inspired by their Roman neighbors who established the infrastructure of roads which Roman legionaries would later march in on under Cesar.

Likewise, allow modernizing and technology oriented communist regimes to flourish in Asia as these would ultimately create the interface with which the U.S. could pursue its interests in the region.

In Falk’s work we find the kernel of contemporary U.S. foreign policy and the leftoid soft-power approach, and indeed almost predicts the Nixon-Mao meeting a year or two later.

By now, everyone is familiar with Nye and Ferguson’s ideas on soft-power. By the 1990’s, left-overs from the Cold War’s Radio Free Europe were transformed into more covert projects towards soft-power, outside of the more obvious Radio Liberty and the Atlantic Council’s array of projects. USAID and the NED combined with private philanthropy of the likes of George Soros to establish a ‘legal, peaceful’ mechanism by exploiting international law and the UN’s bodies, known now as the NGO industrial complex.

But what will confound and confuse future historians of the American empire is the mindset of the mainstream left which supports foreign interventionism.

So this is how we have to understand it. If the 70’s was the ‘We’ generation, the 80’s was the ‘Me’ generation – and in came a toxic combination of noble intentions for others taken from the 60’s and 70’s, alongside a particular mission-individualism that gives a person a sense that they are exceptional.

The result was the self-improvement craze of the 80’s and 90’s. And just as self-improvement for individuals becomes a collective norm that others must also be pressured to accept or face ridicule and shunning for being ‘backwards’, the contemporary psychology of human rights (soft power) imperialism is understood.

In short, it opposed American exceptionalism but promoted an exceptionalism of the enlightened community, almost always a liberal of the left, a model that everyone else must also follow.

Something appropriated from Marxism and Christianity, the left has substituted the idea that the nation should rule or that the nation has legitimacy, with the idea that the party with the right values and ideas should rule.

And here is where our final point rests. Alongside the communal narcissism of human rights imperialism which we see in the left’s preference for soft power, we also find this: a belief that just as they as individuals are evolving towards an ever greater enlightenment, so too is America.

This is probably the most complex and dynamic aspect of the problem of the American left’s psychology in foreign policy.

If nations shouldn’t rule others, perhaps they shouldn’t rule themselves, for in each nation are ‘others’ – minorities, historically oppressed identity groups, and so on. America shouldn’t rule them either, the belief goes, but the enlightened ideas which conveniently are determined by an enlightened yoga-practicing vegan community who happen to be American, should indeed rule.

They think this: Assad may not be a threat to his neighbors, but the fact that Syria is a nation and is ruled by a man who exemplifies numerous hetero cis-gendered patriarchal norms, probably means that the U.S. (not acting as a nation but rather a ‘vehicle of values’) should use soft-power to support any method to remove him.

Other countries are viewed as static, unmoving, non-dynamic ‘regimes’. From the outside looking in, and being a poor cultural anthropologist, all societies appear monolithic and in contemporary parlance, that means ‘totalitarian’. Commonly held beliefs and customs among a foreign people are transformed into top-down mandated values that are imposed upon an unwilling population.

America has deep problems, the liberal soft power imperialist reckons, but the fact that America can overcome and indeed is overcoming them, means that other countries can overcome them too, if they emulate America.

This is perhaps the only way to get on board with something that otherwise would be a flagrant contradiction: America, land of deep problems, ought to be emulated.

It also means imposing American narratives on the rest of the world. If America had a particular problem of racism, land theft, and never ending foreign wars, then suddenly America is nevertheless ‘alright’ since it is in some dynamic process of changing this. Other countries, being governed by static and monolithic caricatures, must have their whole societies uprooted and their governments overthrown in order to overcome the same problems.

America therefore is the ‘expert’ at solving these problems for other countries, not because it has solved them, but because it has developed a model for resistance.

Never mind these are often not problems other countries have. To the hammer of American soft power, all the world is a human rights nail.

Now we see that the U.S. can intervene everywhere in the world so long as it can paint that foreign land as having American problems. Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya – ethnic conflict, patriarchy, rape culture and a popular uprising (which CNN will color left) means a justified soft power intervention.

There is a saying, ‘All’s well that ends well’. By establishing a conflict thesis of American history, America – in the view of the left – can rectify its past wrongs by righting the same wrongs around the world.

Never mind that these past wrongs aren’t, by their own measure, solved in America. These left Americans see themselves not as Americans acting in America’s interests, but as enlightened people with a right to fix other country’s problems, whether or not those problems really exist and regardless of whether those lowly and unevolved people actually want it. After they are uplifted and re-educated, they will look back and thank us.

This in a nutshell is the mindset of the imperial progressive. This is the sort of thinking that has no place in an international community based on mutual respect and sovereignty.

June 23, 2020 Posted by aletho | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | United States | Leave a comment

Victoria Nuland Alert

The foreign interventionists really hate Russia

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • June 23, 2020

It is difficult to find anything good to say about Donald Trump, but the reality is that he has not started any new wars, though he has come dangerously close in the cases of Venezuela and Iran and there would be considerable incentive in the next four months to begin something to bolster his “strong president” credentials and to serve as a distraction from coronavirus and black lives matter.

Be that as it may, Trump will have to run hard to catch up to the record set by his three predecessors Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bush was an out-and-out neoconservative, or at least someone who was easily led, including in his administration Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Reuel Gerecht, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Eliot Abrams, Dan Senor and Scooter Libby. He also had the misfortune of having to endure Vice President Dick Cheney, who thought he was actually the man in charge. All were hawks who believed that the United States had the right to do whatever it considered necessary to enhance its own security, to include invading other countries, which led to Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. still has forces stationed nearly twenty years later.

Clinton and Obama were so-called liberal interventionists who sought to export something called democracy to other countries in an attempt to make them more like Peoria. Clinton bombed Afghanistan and Sudan as a diversion when the press somehow caught wind of his arrangement with Monica Lewinsky and Obama, aided by Mrs. Clinton, chose to destroy Libya. Obama was also the first president to set up a regular Tuesday morning session to review a list of American citizens who would benefit from being killed by drone.

So the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance. And, by either yardstick all-in-all, Trump looks pretty good, but there has nevertheless been a resurgence of neocon-think in his administration. The America the exceptional mindset is best exemplified currently by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who personifies the belief that the United States is empowered by God to play only by its own rules when dealing with other nations. That would include following the advice that has been attributed to leading neocon Michael Ledeen, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

One of the first families within the neocon/liberal interventionist firmament is the Kagans, Robert and Frederick. Frederick is a Senior Fellow at the neocon American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly heads the bizarrely named Institute for the Study of War. Victoria Nuland, wife of Robert, is currently the Senior Counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. That means that Victoria aligns primarily as a liberal interventionist, as does her husband, who is also at Brookings. She is regarded as a protégé of Hillary Clinton and currently works with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once declared that killing 500,000 Iraqi children using sanctions was “worth it.” Nuland also has significant neocon connections through her having been a member of the staff assembled by Dick Cheney.

Nuland, many will recall, was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013-2014. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters.

Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. It is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget, but Washington has long believed in a global double standard for evaluating its own behavior.

Nuland is most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create in Ukraine. For Nuland, the replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with the real enemy, Moscow, over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.

And make no mistake about Nuland’s broader intention at that time to expand the conflict and directly confront Russia. In Senate testimony she cited how the administration was “providing support to other frontline states like Moldova and Georgia.” Her use of the word “frontline” is suggestive.

Victoria Nuland was playing with fire. Russia, as the only nation with the military capability to destroy the U.S., was and is not a sideshow like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Taliban’s Afghanistan. Backing Moscow into a corner with no way out by using threats and sanctions is not good policy. Washington has many excellent reasons to maintain a stable relationship with Moscow, including counter-terrorism efforts, and little to gain from moving in the opposite direction. Russia is not about to reconstitute the Warsaw Pact and there is no compelling reason to return to a Cold War footing by either arming Ukraine or permitting it to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Victoria Nuland has just written a long article for July/August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine on the proper way for the United States manage what she sees as the Russian “threat.” It is entitled “How a Confident America Should Deal With Russia.” Foreign Affairs, it should be observed, is an establishment house organ produced by the Council on Foreign Relations which provides a comfortable perch for both neocons and liberal interventionists.

Nuland’s view is that the United States lost confidence in its own “ability to change the game” against Vladimir Putin, who has been able to play “a weak hand well because the United States and its allies have let him, allowing Russia to violate arms control treaties, international law, the sovereignty of its neighbors, and the integrity of elections in the United States and Europe… Washington and its allies have forgotten the statecraft that won the Cold War and continued to yield results for many years after. That strategy required consistent U.S. leadership at the presidential level, unity with democratic allies and partners, and a shared resolve to deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the Kremlin. It also included incentives for Moscow to cooperate and, at times, direct appeals to the Russian people about the benefits of a better relationship. Yet that approach has fallen into disuse, even as Russia’s threat to the liberal world has grown.”

What Nuland writes would make perfect sense if one were to share her perception of Russia as a rogue state threatening the “liberal world.” She sees Russian rearmament under Putin as a threat even though it was dwarfed by the spending of NATO and the U.S. She shares her fear that Putin might seek “…reestablishing a Russian sphere of influence in eastern Europe and from vetoing the security arrangements of his neighbors. Here, a chasm soon opened between liberal democracies and the still very Soviet man leading Russia, especially on the subject of NATO enlargement. No matter how hard Washington and its allies tried to persuade Moscow that NATO was a purely defensive alliance that posed no threat to Russia, it continued to serve Putin’s agenda to see Europe in zero-sum terms.”

Nuland’s view of NATO enlargement is so wide of the mark that it borders on being a fantasy. Of course, Russia would consider a military alliance on its doorstep to be a threat, particularly as a U.S. Administration had provided assurances that expansion would not take place. She goes on to suggest utter nonsense, that Putin’s great fear over the NATO expansion derives from his having “…always understood that a belt of increasingly democratic, prosperous states around Russia would pose a direct challenge to his leadership model and risk re-infecting his own people with democratic aspirations.”

Nuland goes on and on in a similar vein, but her central theme is that Russia must be confronted to deter Vladimir Putin, a man that she clearly hates and depicts as if he were a comic book version of evil. Some of her analysis is ridiculous, as “Russian troops regularly test the few U.S. forces left in Syria to try to gain access to the country’s oil fields and smuggling routes. If these U.S. troops left, nothing would prevent Moscow and Tehran from financing their operations with Syrian oil or smuggled drugs and weapons.”

Like most zealots, Nuland is notably lacking in any sense of self-criticism. She conspired to overthrow a legitimately elected democratic government in Ukraine because it was considered too friendly to Russia. She accuses the Kremlin of having “seized” Crimea, but fails to see the heavy footprint of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq and as a regional enabler of Israeli and Saudi war crimes. One wonders if she is aware that Russia, which she sees as expansionistic, has only one overseas military base while the United States has more than a thousand.

Nuland clearly chooses not to notice the White House’s threats against countries that do not toe the American line, most recently Iran and Venezuela, but increasingly also China on top of perennial enemy Russia. None of those nations threaten the United States and all the kinetic activity and warnings are forthcoming from a gentleman named Mike Pompeo, speaking from Washington, not from “undemocratic” leaders in the Kremlin, Tehran, Caracas or Beijing.

Victoria Nuland recommends that “The challenge for the United States in 2021 will be to lead the democracies of the world in crafting a more effective approach to Russia—one that builds on their strengths and puts stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens.” Interestingly, that might be regarded as seeking to interfere in the workings of a foreign government, reminiscent of the phony case made against Russia in 2016. And it is precisely what Nuland did in fact do in Ukraine.

Nuland has a lot more to say in her article and those who are interested in the current state of interventionism in Washington should not ignore her. Confronting Russia as some kind of ideological enemy is a never-ending process that leaves both sides poorer and less free. It is appropriate for Moscow to have an interest in what goes on right on top of its border while the United States five thousand miles away and possessing both a vastly larger economy and armed forces can, one would think, relax a bit and unload the burden of being the world’s self-appointed policeman.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

June 23, 2020 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | United States | Leave a comment

Bolton claims Iran had yellowcake uranium, echoing bogus claims that led to Iraq war

RT | June 22, 2020

Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton has claimed Israeli agents found “yellowcake uranium” in Iran in 2018, channeling the discredited intelligence used by the George W. Bush administration to justify invading Iraq.

Israel’s Mossad retrieved “human-processed uranium” that was “perhaps yellowcake (uranium oxide in solid form)” during a “daring raid on Iran’s nuclear archives” in 2018, the mustachioed warmonger declared in his controversial Trump administration memoir, ‘The Room Where It Happened’. The discovery, Bolton alleged, was substantiated when the International Atomic Energy Agency subsequently conducted an inspection of Iran’s Turquzabad site. Israeli media trumpeted the vague, unverified claim over the weekend, publishing selected quotes from the book.

Bolton insisted the discovery “could well be evidence that Iran kept alive its ‘Amad plan’ for nuclear weapons after it was supposedly ended in 2004.” However, despite the wild claims leveled against Tehran by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in his theatrical speech following the raid, the IAEA denied Tel Aviv had uncovered any evidence that would change the international understanding of Iran’s nuclear activities. Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, meanwhile, accused Netanyahu of deliberately tailoring his speech to give the Trump administration a rationale for withdrawing from the JCPOA nuclear deal – which it did, much to Bolton’s delight.

While the Trump administration has thus far stopped short of bombing Iran, hope springs eternal – Bolton has pushed for war with the Islamic Republic for years. So has Netanyahu, who has claimed since 1992 that Iran’s nuclear bomb was right around the corner and has been trying to convince the US to share his view ever since.

The former Trump official’s yellowcake claims – tellingly couched in qualifying words like “perhaps” and “could be” – carry disturbing echoes of the phony intelligence used by Bush’s administration to justify the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. Bolton himself had pushed to have unsubstantiated allegations that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger as part of a top-secret nuclear weapons program included in a ‘fact sheet’ on Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” drafted by the administration in 2002. Even after US diplomat Joseph Wilson traveled to the African nation and found no factual basis for the yellowcake claims – a conclusion backed by French intelligence, the CIA, and the US Embassy in Niger – the neoconservative core of the Bush administration, including Bolton, clung to the yellowcake story. No WMDs were found after the US invaded Iraq the following year – not that Bolton ever apologized.

The Iraqi yellowcake story is widely agreed to have been the result of a skilled forgery pushed by regime-change enthusiasts who wanted Iraq’s government toppled and didn’t care how much they had to mangle the truth to get it. Neocon hawks like Bolton and fellow Bush administration heavyweights Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle had been championing war with Iraq for over a decade, repeatedly and unsuccessfully pushing then-president Bill Clinton to invade before they finally got their wish with Bush in 2003.

As CIA analysts at the time explained, refining yellowcake into the material used in nuclear bombs requires extensive processing and sophisticated technology Iraq did not have – never mind the logistical difficulties inherent in moving the 500 tons Hussein was supposedly purchasing out of Niger. Additionally, Iraq was already sitting on over 550 tons of uranium oxide. So why, they wondered, would Baghdad risk arousing international suspicions by buying more if it was embarking on a clandestine nuclear program? But Bolton and his cohort were known for their persistence; “Stick that baby in there 47 times, and on the 47th time it will stay” was how the Pentagon’s Larry Wilkerson described their modus operandi to Vanity Fair. Even after the IAEA itself declared the Niger documents to be forgeries, the Bush administration plunged ahead with the war that has turned the Middle East into a chaotic quagmire of political instability, terrorism, and human suffering.

Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA deal has been repeatedly certified, even as Bolton and his fellow hawks attempted to discredit the inspection process. With the ink on the deal scarcely dry in 2015, Bolton was already claiming Iran was operating “secret nuclear facilities” and calling for the Obama administration to bomb the country. He then spent much of his time as Trump’s national security advisor advocating for a military response to any perceived slight – especially after the US exited the JCPOA. At the same time, Israel continues to push “bombshell” reports alleging violations of the deal, with the most recent coming earlier this month and based on data Tehran claims was supplied by Mossad.

Bolton has been industriously milking his 15 minutes of fame, heralded by the media as a #Resistance hero ever since his book skewering the Trump administration was copiously leaked to mainstream outlets, over the president’s protestations. The tome contains a number of questionable revelations, including that Trump thought Venezuela was “really part of the US” and invading it would be “cool” until Russian President Vladimir Putin bent his ear, discouraging the idea. Trump slammed the book as the fictional musings of a “sick puppy.”

June 22, 2020 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Middle East, Sanctions against Iran, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

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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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