The US and its Western allies are creating more international tensions and instability in a futile bid to carve the globe into “spheres of interest” and “exclusivity”. That’s the way Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov views it, and few objective observers of international relations could disagree with his admonishment.
Russia’s top diplomat says the only way forward is for multilateralism to prevail and for all states to abide by the principles of the United Nations’ Charter, to which they are signatories.
A prime example of the destructive US-led Western policy is seen in the Persian Gulf where tensions have reached an explosive pitch which could trigger an all-out war across the Middle East, possibly embroiling the entire world.
There can be little doubt that the precarious situation in the Gulf is extant because of Washington’s irresponsible provocations towards Iran. The unilateral abrogation of the landmark 2015 nuclear accord by the Trump administration and the militarization of an already dominant US presence in the Gulf over recent months is a brazen case of Washington going it alone in contravention of international law and norms. (Alas, has the US ever been different?, one might demur.)
In its unilateral initiative, the US has cobbled together a clique of nations to support its presumed military right to act as a policeman in the Persian Gulf: Britain, Australia and Saudi Arabia have indicated they are willing to join a US “coalition” to purportedly safeguard “freedom of navigation” through the vital chokepoint in global oil trade.
Declared intentions aside, the problem is Washington’s attempt to demarcate a “sphere of influence” in the strategically important Middle East. No matter, it seems, that this action is seriously aggravating tensions and instability in the region. Iran has every right to protest what it sees as a US-led campaign of aggression, piled on top of Washington’s bad faith regarding the UN-endorsed nuclear accord.
However, by contrast, a viable way out of the dead-end that Washington’s policy of unilateralism has created is the formation of a multilateral naval security system, which involves all nations in the Persian Gulf, including Iran, Saudi Arabia and others. Extra-regional nations can also be involved, including China, India, Japan, the European Union, as well as Russia and the US.
Such a proposal has been submitted to the UN by Russia earlier this year. This week during a meeting with Sergei Lavrov, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif gave his full support for such a multilateral security mechanism. The initiative is consistent with UN principles of respecting national sovereignties and non-aggression. It obviates the notion of nations presuming to have “spheres of influence”. The latter concept is a relic of colonialism and imperialism, and should be obsolete in today’s world.
Another contemporary example of destructive unilateralism is the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The country has been trapped in a nearly five-year war in which civilians in the eastern Donbass region have suffered greatly. Western governments and media accuse Russia of meddling in Ukraine. But the reality is that it was Washington and European states that interfered by illegally overthrowing an elected government in Kiev with a violent CIA-backed coup in February 2014.
Ukraine has been turned into a failed state because Washington and its Western allies wanted to impose a “sphere of influence” on Russia’s border.
It is patently obvious that such unilateral policy is a violation of international law and democratic principles. It is a criminal assertion of geopolitical “interests” and “objectives”. Moreover, such misconduct inevitably leads to a morass of conflict, destruction and immense human suffering.
The disgraceful irony is that while Russia is constantly accused, without evidence, of interfering in other countries, the abundant, irrefutable proof is the opposite: Washington and its Western allies have an incessant habit of violating and destabilizing nations and regions in presumed zero-sum geopolitical games.
For the sake of world peace and progressive development, all nations must adhere to the concept of multilateralism, mutual respect and genuine cooperation, free of stereotyping and demonizing others for propaganda gains.
The question is though: can US corporate capitalism and its militarist machine abide by that reasonable, minimal demand for international cooperation?
If not, then the American political system and its coterie of Western minions are driving the world into an abysmal dead-end.
October 4, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Middle East, United States |
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Another transcript has poked a hole in the narrative of House Democrats trying to impeach President Donald Trump, as former US special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker testified he never pushed Kiev for ‘dirt’ on former VP Joe Biden.
Volker was grilled for nine hours in a closed-doors session of the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight committees on Thursday. Democrats on the committees claimed that he was instrumental in pushing the Ukrainian government to reopen a corruption investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine.
House Intelligence chair Adam Schiff (D-California) – one of the loudest voices calling for impeachment on Capitol Hill – did not release a transcript of Volker’s testimony. Instead, the Democrats published a select few text messages provided by Volker, amid grim pronouncements that the envoy engaged in a “shadow shakedown,” and helped Trump pressure “a foreign power to investigate a political rival,” to quote Schiff and fellow Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California).
However, a transcript of Volker’s testimony was obtained by investigative reporter John Solomon and the The Federalist on Friday, and the document paints a rather different picture. In the transcript, Volker describes providing more text messages than those released by Schiff and co, in which “Vice President Biden was never a topic of discussion.”
Another Democrat claim – that Trump ordered military aid to Ukraine withheld in exchange for an investigation into the Bidens’ affairs – was also absent from Volker’s testimony, with the envoy stating that he was only made aware of the suspension of military aid through media reports.
Instead, he described facilitating talks between officials in Kiev and Washington to allow the Ukrainians a shot at refuting a “negative narrative” that had formed in the US on corruption in the country.
“I did so solely because I understood that the new Ukrainian leadership wanted to convince those… who believed such a negative narrative about Ukraine, that times have changed, and that, under President Zelensky, Ukraine is worthy of US support,” he told the hearing.
Volker abruptly resigned last week, after the Democrats announced they would be summoning him to testify.
Prior to the transcript’s release, House Republicans had called for it to be made public, and accused Schiff and his fellow Democrats of “releasing cherry-picked documents” to further his impeachment effort.
President Trump was more blunt, calling Schiff a “lowlife” and demanding he be “questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.”
The transcript is the second such document to cast doubt on the argument for impeachment. Democrats accused Trump of pressuring Zelensky into reopening the investigation in a July phone call, using military aid as leverage. When the White House released a transcript of the call revealing no quid-pro-quo arrangement, that argument too began to look shaky.
Nevertheless, the party has pushed ahead with an impeachment inquiry, albeit without a full vote in the House of Representatives to make it official. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s top prosecutor announced on Friday that his office will reopen the investigation into Burisma, an energy firm whose board Hunter Biden sat on, but denied that the investigation was politically motivated.
October 4, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Ukraine, United States |
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So here we go. Like a 1960s straight-to-drive-in Hammer Film Production, the 2020 campaign season has begun. Dig into your bucket of popcorn, pop the flap on your box of Good & Plenty, turn off your mind, and enjoy the show. From the looks of the trailer, it’s going to be a doozy.
That’s right, folks, it’s the final installment of the popular Trumpenstein horror movie series, TRUMPENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED! It will be playing, more or less around the clock, on more or less every screen in existence, until November 3, 2020 … or until Trump takes that lonely walk across the White House lawn to the Marine One chopper and flies off to Mar-a-Lago in disgrace.
Here’s a quick recap of the series so far, for those who may be joining us late.
When we last saw Trumpenstein he was out on the balcony of the White House South Portico in his Brioni boxers, ripped to the gills on Diet Coke and bellowing like a bull elephant seal. Having narrowly survived the Resistance’s attempts to expose him as a Russian intelligence asset (and the reanimated corpse of Adolf Hitler), he was pounding his chest and hollering angry gibberish at the liberal media like the Humongous in the second Mad Max movie.
The liberal mob was standing around with their torches and pitchforks in a state of shock. Doctor Mueller, the “monster hunter,” had let Trumpenstein slip through his fingers. The supposedly ironclad case against him had turned out to be a bunch of lies made up by the Intelligence Community, the Democratic Party, and the corporate media.
Russiagate was officially dead. The President of the United States was not a Russian secret agent. No one was blackmailing anyone with a videotape of Romanian prostitutes peeing on a bed where Obama once slept. All that had happened was, millions of liberals had been subjected to the most elaborate psyop in the history of elaborate deep state psyops … which, ironically, had only further strengthened Trumpenstein, who was out there on the Portico balcony, shotgunning Diet Cokes with one hand and shaking his junk at the mob with the other.
It wasn’t looking so good for “democracy.”
Fortunately, even though Russiagate had blown up in the Resistance’s faces and Trumpenstein could no longer be painted as a traitorous Russian intelligence asset (or as Vladimir Putin’s homosexual lover), he was still the reanimated corpse of Hitler, so they went balls out on the fascism hysteria, which kept the Resistance alive through the summer.
Which was all they really needed to do. Because these last three years were basically just a warm-up for the main event, which was always scheduled to begin this autumn. Russiagate, Hitlergate, and all the rest of it … it was all just a prelude to these impeachment hearings, and to the mass hysteria surrounding same, which the global capitalist ruling classes, the Intelligence Community, and the corporate media will be barraging us with until November 2020. The details don’t really matter that much. They were always going to impeach him for something, and they were always going to do it now, and throughout the 2020 campaign season.
You do not honestly believe they are going to let him serve a second term, do you? He took them by surprise in 2016. That isn’t going to happen again. Seriously, take a moment and reflect on everything we’ve been subjected to since Hillary Clinton lost the election … the unmitigated insanity of it all. The Russiagate hysteria. The Russian hacker hysteria. The Russian Facebook mind-control hysteria. The Hitler hysteria. The mass fascism hysteria. The anti-Semitism hysteria. The concentration camp hysteria. The white supremacist terrorism hysteria. Russian spy whales. Perfume assassins. The endless stream of fabricated “news” stories pumped out by the corporate media. Best-selling books, based on nothing. Comedians singing hymns to former FBI directors on national television. Celebrities demanding CIA coups. Papers of record like The New York Times coordinating blatant propaganda campaigns. The list goes on, and on, and on.
All of this because one billionaire ass clown won an election without their permission?
No, this was never just about Donald Trump, repulsive and corrupt as the man may be. The stakes have always been much higher than that. What we’ve witnessed over the the last three years (and what is about to reach its apogee) is a global capitalist counter-insurgency, the goal of which is (a) to put down the ongoing populist rebellion throughout the West, and (b) to crush any hope of resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism … in other words, a War on Populism.
Not that Donald Trump is a populist hero. Far from it. Trump is a narcissistic clown. He has always been a narcissistic clown. All he really cares about is seeing his face on television and plastering his name on everything in sight, preferably in huge gold letters. He got himself elected president by being cunning enough to recognize and ride the tsunami of populist anger that was building up in 2016, and that has continued to build throughout his presidency. It is not going away, that anger. The Western masses are no more thrilled about the global capitalist future today than they were when voted for Brexit, and Trump, and various other “populist” and reactionary figures.
Which is precisely why Trumpenstein must be destroyed, and why Brexit must not be allowed to happen … or, if it does, why the people of the United Kingdom must be mercilessly punished. It is also why the Gilets Jaunes are being brutally repressed by the French police, and disappeared by the corporate media (while the Hong Kong protesters garner daily headlines), and why Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party must be smeared as a hive of anti-Semites, and Tulsi Gabbard as an Assad-apologist, and why Julian Assange must be smeared and destroyed, and why Bernie Sanders must also be destroyed, and why anyone of any ilk (left, right, it doesn’t matter) riding that wave of populist anger or challenging the hegemony of global capitalism and its psychotic, smiley-face ideology in any other way must be destroyed.
2020 is for all the marbles. The global capitalist ruling classes either crush this ongoing populist insurgency or … God knows where we go from here. Try to see it through their eyes for a moment. Picture four more years of Trump … second-term Trump … Trump unleashed. Do you really believe they’re going to let that happen, that they are going to permit this populist insurgency to continue for another four years?
They are not. What they are going to do is use all their power to destroy the monster … not Trump the man, but Trump the symbol. They are going to drown us in impeachment minutiae, drip, drip, drip, for the next twelve months. The liberal corporate media are going to go full-Goebbels. They are going to whip up so much mass hysteria that people won’t be able to think. They are going to pit us one against the other, and force us onto one or the other side of a simulated conflict (Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis) to keep us from perceiving the actual conflict (Global Capitalism versus Populism). They are going to bring us to the brink of civil war in order to prevent civil war. And, if that doesn’t work, and Trump gets reelected (or if it looks like he’s going to get reelected), they’ll probably have to just go ahead and kill him.
One way or another, this is it. This is the part where the global capitalist ruling classes teach us all a lesson. The lesson they intend to teach us is the same old lesson that masters have been teaching slaves since the dawn of slavery. The lesson is, “abandon hope.” The lesson is, “resistance is futile.” The lesson is, “shut up, eat your tofu, get back to work at your three gig jobs, service your school loans and your credit card debt, vote for who and what we tell you, and be grateful we don’t fucking kill you. Oh, yeah … and if you want to rebel against something, feel free to take up identity politics, or to march around town with posters of Saint Greta demanding that we stop destroying the planet. We’ll get right on that, don’t you worry.”
What? You thought this had a happy ending, that Trumpenstein and the Bride of Trumpenstein were going to ride off into the orange sunrise at Mar-a-Lago in a Trump-branded golf cart, having made America great again … or that Bernie was going to storm the castle, vanquish Trumpenstein, and set up something resembling basic social democracy?
I told you it was a horror film, didn’t I?
October 4, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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To the undiscerning, the United Nations (UN) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) perform different roles in the international arena. Yet both organisations have a common aim – the promotion of foreign intervention. While the UN promotes its humanitarian façade, NATO provides the militarisation of the UN’s purported human rights agenda.
NATO’s participation at the 74th session of the UN General Assembly in September provided an overview of the current collaboration the organisation has with the UN. Jens Stoltelberg, NATO’s Secretary-General, mentioned the organisations’ collaboration in “working closely to support Afghanistan and Iraq”.
Since the 1990s, the UN and NATO cooperation was based on a framework which included decision-making and strategy on “crisis management and in the fight against terrorism.” In 2001, US President George W Bush launched his ‘War on Terror’ which eventually expanded to leave the Middle East and North Africa in perpetual turmoil, as the coined euphemism morphed into the so-called Arab Spring.
While the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were led by the US, it is worth remembering that the absence of the organisation at that time is not tantamount to the exclusion of warfare from NATO member states. Notably, the US invasion of Afghanistan invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which stipulates that an attack on a NATO member state constitutes an attack on all member states.
“For NATO-UN cooperation and dialogue to remain meaningful, it must continue to evolve.” The statement on NATO’s website is a bureaucratic approach which detaches itself from the human rights violations created and maintained by both parties, which form the premise of such collaboration.
UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001), upon which NATO based its collaboration with the UN, reaffirms, “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence as recognised by the Charter of the United Nations.” The resolution provides impunity for member-states and other collaborators with the UN, including NATO, to define what constitutes terrorism while eliminating foreign intervention as a terror act, despite the ramifications which last long after the aggression has been terminated or minimised.
The UN-NATO duplicity is exposed in Stoltenberg’s speech when he states, “NATO has also contributed to developing UN disposal standards to counter improvised explosive devices, which remain one of the greatest threats to peacekeepers.” Why are the UN and NATO selecting rudimentary forms of warfare over precision bombing which has killed thousands of civilians in the name of fighting terror or bringing democracy?
In 2011, the UNSC’s arms embargo was supposed to prevent the proliferation of weapons to the rebels in Libya – a contradiction given the UNSC’s authorisation for NATO to bomb Libya. France, however, defied the resolution by publicly declaring its proliferation of weapons to rebels in Libya, on the pretext of their necessity to protect Libyan civilians. NATO denied its involvement as an organisation in providing arms to the rebels, despite the fact that action was taken by a NATO member. With the UN endorsing foreign intervention and NATO implementing the atrocities, the UN can fall back on its alleged peace-building and humanitarian roles, of which there is never a decline due to the irreparable damage both organisations have wreaked upon exploited, colonised and ravaged countries. The cooperation lauded by NATO does not rest on a division of roles but rather on blurring the differentiation between war and humanitarianism, in order to generate both as a duplicitous agenda.
NATO maintains that the UNSC holds “primary responsibility” for maintaining international peace and security. What the statement evades is the individual interest of each member, as well as their collective framework as NATO members. To satisfy the UNSC, individual interests and NATO membership, a common denominator is imperative. For the perpetrators of foreign intervention, war constitutes the binding legacy.
October 4, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Afghanistan, France, Iraq, Libya, NATO, United Nations, United States |
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US Attorney General William Barr traveled to Rome last week as part of his investigation into the origins of Russiagate. Meanwhile, Democrats have tried to paint Barr’s probe as enlisting foreign support for US President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, but really the probe “has the intelligence community scared,” an expert told Sputnik.
The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that Barr and US Attorney John Durham, who is heading the probe into why Trump’s 2016 campaign was watched by the FBI and CIA, had traveled to Rome last week as part of their investigation. At the Italian Ministry of Justice, they listened to a taped deposition given by Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud before he disappeared into police protection in 2017, explaining why people might want to harm him.
“Mifsud is the key to the whole Russiagate episode – and it’s a very strange episode … Mifsud is the guy who got the ball rolling,” Daniel Lazare, a journalist and the author of three books – “The Frozen Republic,” “The Velvet Coup” and “America’s Undeclared War” – told Radio Sputnik’s Loud and Clear Wednesday.
“Robert Mueller tried to paint Mifsud as apparently a Russian intelligence asset, but that is not true, because there is ample evidence … connecting Mifsud to Western intelligence. So it’s very important to get to Mifsud, to ask him who put him up to this, what they were thinking and why he did what he did. So apparently that is what Bill Barr is doing in Rome,” Lazare told hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou.
In March 2016, about eight months before the US presidential election, Mifsud met newly minted Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos at an event at Link University in Rome, a CIA spy school set up to train employees of Italian intelligence services. Papadopoulos told Sputnik this past April that Mifsud offered to become his window to Eurasian politicos, attempting to woo the adviser by telling him that the Russian government had “thousands” of emails belonging to Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic challenger to Trump.
What happened next is in dispute. US special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that a drunken Papadopoulos blabbed the information at a mixer to Alexander Downer, then the Australian high commissioner to the UK, who then tipped off the CIA, which began the Russiagate investigation. However, Papadopoulos maintained he never told Downer, being conscious of staying on his guard that night, since he didn’t trust the diplomat.
That said, Freedom of Information Act requests by Citizens United this past June revealed that the Steele Dossier, another piece of evidence wielded by US intelligence to claim Trump was colluding with Moscow to steal the election, was actually begun well before any such tip could’ve been given. The dossier, really an assemblage of unsubstantiated claims about Trump churned out by a Ukraine-based research firm contracted first by Democrats, then by the FBI, was compiled by an ex-MI6 agent named Christopher Steele. The documents revealed the FBI knew about the political biases of the dossier – something that “should have set off alarms,” Kevin Brock, the former FBI assistant director for intelligence, told The Hill – but pressed ahead in financing its compilation nonetheless.
However, when Mueller’s report was released this past March, it found no evidence of collusion, raising the question: why and how did several US intelligence agencies begin the Russiagate probe in the first place? In May, Barr set out to answer just that.
Lazare said he “strongly suspects” that the impeachment inquiry and attempts to stifle Barr’s investigation are part of a factional feud between two parts of the US ruling class.
The writer noted that “unlike [US Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo or Mueller, who are both dunderheads, Bill Barr’s a very, very smart guy, a very formidable guy. He seems to be … conducting a very serious investigation, and I think it’s reasonable to suspect that it has the intelligence community scared, and the intelligence community is, therefore, fighting back.”
“It seems that the most important part of this whistleblower’s report, which took … probably a couple weeks to compile with the approval of higher-ups in the intelligence community … it identified Bill Barr as part of Trump’s effort to enlist foreign support in his re-election campaign” for 2020, Lazare told Sputnik. “So it was really a strike against Barr, and I think that may be the most important part of this whole episode – that it’s sort of an attempt to stop Barr, to force him to back off, and to leave the CIA alone, which has a great deal to answer for, great deal, in this whole Russiagate episode.”
“Trump, and presumably Barr as well, are trying to zero in as to how this whole very weird episode got started. It seems that Barr is moving vigorously on this front, and it seems that tremors are being set off in the intelligence community, and I strongly suspect that this whole episode involving this strange whistleblower report is a manifestation – is one of those tremors going off,” Lazare said.
However, Lazare said he thought impeachment would ultimately “backfire” on the Democrats.
“First of all, the amazing incompetence of the Democrats just can’t be overestimated,” he said. “They’re amazing. And essentially what happened here is the CIA barked an order, and the Democrats snapped to attention.”
“But first of all, the first victim is going to be Joe Biden, I mean, Joe Biden is a dead man walking. This corruption involving his son is astonishing. It’s astonishing that Obama never stepped in, it’s a wonder the State Department didn’t raise any flags; they allowed this kind of nonsense to continue,” Lazare said.
“I think this will open up a huge can of worms. This will bring the infighting in the intelligence community up to the surface, and if Barr ever comes out with his report, which of course the Democrats will scramble to discredit, it won’t make the Democrats look good.”
October 3, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Deception | CIA, Obama, United States |
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Credit Image: © Pavlo_bagmut/Ukrinform via ZUMA Wire
By Padraig McGrath | October 3, 2019
Former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko failed to appear at the Kiev Research Institute of Forensic Expertise for a polygraph test on October 1st. The test was scheduled to be conducted by Ukraine’s National Bureau of Investigations, having been authorized by a Kiev court on August 13th. The polygraph test was scheduled to be conducted in connection with a tax-evasion investigation being carried out by NBI. Poroshenko is currently the focus of over a dozen criminal investigations which have been opened by multiple Ukrainian law-enforcement bodies since he lost the presidential election to Volodymyr Zelensky on a landslide in April. These investigations are in connection with indictments for tax-evasion, embezzlement, illegal abuse of authority, interference in judicial proceedings, forgery of documents and of lawmakers’ signatures, money-laundering, and other corruption-schemes.
The criminal exploits of the Yanukovich family seem quite modest by comparison.
On August 1st, the Vesti Ukraine newspaper reported that Poroshenko had made appeals to American lobbyists for protection from prosecution, including to the BGR Group, where former US Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker acts as a senior advisor. This is a shrewd move on Poroshenko’s part. Over the past 70 years, between the United States government and its myriad puppets, there has been an unspoken agreement.
If you do our dirty work for us, impunity is guaranteed.
And indeed Poroshenko did a lot of dirty work. As president, he was an extremely loyal servant of US foreign policy. Even if President Trump has consistently indicated that he has little interest in Ukraine, there will doubtlessly be voices in the State Department advising him that it sets an extremely unhelpful precedent for the future if the US fails to protect Poroshenko now.
This latest controversy involving Poroshenko is just one instance of a pattern which has emerged steadily in Ukraine, in particular over the past 5 years – the country has developed a love-affair with the polygraph. In January, Ukraine’s most senior military prosecutor, Anatoly Matios, announced that he planned to develop a “polygraph program” in order to identify Russian collaborators and “separatists.”
Used in this way, the technology’s express purpose will be to identify thought-criminals.
As it currently stands, polygraph tests have already been made standard components within job-interviews for many positions in banking, the tax-service, anti-corruption agencies and the military. In addition, polygraph-results are admissible as evidence in Ukrainian courts, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists and criminologists worldwide who are familiar with the methodology and theory behind polygraphy regard it as a pseudo-science. There is very little evidence that polygraph-results are reliable, and lots of empirical evidence to the contrary.
The legal codes of the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu and the Babylonian Hammurabi stipulated the practice of “trial by ordeal,” a practice which survived well into the medieval period in Europe. Polygraphy, which involves monitoring physiological reactions during a line of questioning, is obviously a less physically dangerous method of establishing a person’s innocence or guilt than trial by ordeal, but no less superstitious. Honestly, you may as well be attempting to determine a person’s truthfulness or deception by entrails-divination.
The Ukrainian psychotherapist Irina Muzychuk, a vocal critic of polygraphy, has argued that the proliferation of this pseudo-scientific fad has partially ideological and emotional roots. She argues that in what she calls “highly unstable societies” such as Ukraine, the polygraph offers “hope that the truth will be found.” In a society which has been mired in oligarchism and corruption since it untethered itself from the Soviet Union in 1991, with the result that trust has completely broken down not only on the societal level but also on the interpersonal level, the polygraph operates as a fetishistic, pseudo-scientific substitute for trust.
However, if we were to analyze the phenomenon genealogically, we might also admit that it had deeper roots. Every society, every distinct ideological order, has its own ideologically driven, privileged pseudo-sciences. For example, in the United States, the most privileged pseudo-sciences are psychology and macro-economics. In the post-Soviet space, many privileged or legally mandated pseudo-sciences are hangovers from the “scientism” (in Russian “naukoobrazye”) which inhered in “scientific communism.”
For example, the disciplines which we call “political science” (in Russian “politologia”) and “geo-politics” are pseudo-sciences, insofar as they do not have methodologies which essentially distinguish them from the study of history. Their methodologies essentially centre on making historically-grounded comparisons. Nothing essentially wrong with that in itself – this would make “politologia” essentially a sub-discipline within the venerable study of history. The problem is that most political scientists don’t think as deeply or as long-term as historians. They compensate for this by maintaining scientific pretensions.
In the post-Soviet world, most high-profile purveyors of “politologia” are people who managed to crawl from the epistemological wreckage of “scientific communism” 30 years ago.
I would contend that the widespread use of the polygraph in Ukraine’s juridical process is another clear example of a particular type of “scientism,” this naïve trust in methodologies which purport to be “scientific.” As previously stated, almost every ideological order has its own privileged pseudo-sciences. “Scientism” is certainly not unique to the post-communist world. In the case of Ukraine’s contemporary polygraphy-craze, rather than “scientific communism,” it would count as an example of “pseudo-scientific post-communism.” For those under criminal investigation in Ukraine today, this is a somewhat brutal irony, when we consider the spate of “anti-communization” statutes which have been signed into law in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d’etat. Ukrainian society is just the flip-side of everything it thinks it’s reacting against.
You see, just like religions, secular ideologies cannot simply be erased or surgically removed. They can only morph or mutate. In spite of “secularization,” religion never really culturally disappears – it simply morphs into some post-religious form.
Precisely the same point holds for ostensibly secular ideologies such as communism or liberalism.
October 3, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | Scientism, Ukraine, United States |
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By Sarah Abed | October 3, 2019
Last week’s United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, presented the perfect opportunity for dialogue and diplomacy between the United States and Iran, in what would have been a historical meeting, the first of its kind between American and Iranian leadership, since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979. World leaders from France, Germany, Britain, among others attempted to bring the two world leaders together, to no avail.
President Rouhani has said that he is ready to end a nuclear standoff with the United States, if they follow through with lifting sanctions. Last year, President Trump unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a multilateral nuclear deal and imposed harsh sanctions on Iran under its “maximum pressure” campaign.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron prepared a four-point document which both sides agreed to in principle, whereby Iran would renounce their nuclear ambitions in return for the United States lifting sanctions since 2017 and allowing the immediate resumption of Iranian oil exports and free use of revenues.
President Macron made numerous attempts during the UNGA to facilitate a meeting and even set up a confidential phone call so that both President Trump and President Rouhani could speak about his four-point plan, however that same day President Trump contradicted the message that President Rouhani had received from his French counterpart, when he mentioned to media plans to increase sanctions against Iran.
In addition to the attempts made during the UNGA, President Macron has tried to mediate for a few months and bring both leaders back to the table. He even proposed a 15 billion dollar line of credit to Iran, if the United States approved, but the United States has not shown much interest in this or other sanctions relief options and sees them as contradictory to its “maximum pressure” campaign.
The conditions stated in President Macron’s deal include Iran agreeing to never acquire a nuclear weapon, fully complying with its nuclear obligations and commitments under the JCPOA, accepting to negotiate the long-term framework for its nuclear activities, also refraining from aggression and seeking genuine peace and respect in the region through negotiations.
Iran has said that even though these conditions do not fully reflect Iran’s position and there would need to be some adjustments to the wording, that they would have accepted the trade-off and are still interested in the plan. Iran blames the US for being a roadblock in this deal by not publicly stating that they are willing to lift sanctions.
It’s an unlevel playing field…while the United States decides when or if they are ready to re-negotiate a nuclear deal, Iranian civilians are paying the price. Sanctions have made it hard for the most vulnerable members of society to afford medicine and food.
The main reason why President Rouhani refused to speak with his American counterpart at the UNGA was because he does not trust that the United States is sincere about their desire to re-negotiate a nuclear deal, they have already completely disregarded the current multilateral deal that was agreed upon under the previous administration and signed by former president Barack Obama. When said agreement was put into place, after a decade of negotiations and countless meetings through diplomatic channels, it was meant to outlive the previous president and continue through future administrations.
Iran is not interested in a meaningless photo-op or another one of President Trump’s publicity stunts where he meets with a “controversial” world leader simply to bolster public opinion. Iran wants action, and that begins with lifting crippling sanctions. Without establishing trust through sanctions relief, they do not see progress as possible.
While speaking at his weekly cabinet meeting on Wednesday, President Rouhani said that Iran supports the general framework of the plan being pushed by European countries that are part of the JCPOA.
Iran’s allies such as China and Russia have ignored threats by the United States to sanction them if they continue doing business with Iran. While the United States shuns Iran, its leadership has been making strides in increasing diplomatic relations with South and Central American countries, as well as Asian countries with Pakistan even offering to mediate between the United States and Iran.
Iran is set to take its fourth step towards reducing its commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) next month if European brokered diplomacy with the United States does not yield favorable results. Every sixty days a step has been publicly stated and then taken since May by Iran. Iran has stated that they are willing to be in full compliance with the JCPOA if sanctions are lifted.
Iran has said that these measures are within the framework of the JCPOA and in compliance with articles 26 and 36 of the Iran nuclear deal. Iran has also said that the IAEA can still access its nuclear sites while it reduces its commitments under the JCPOA. These reductions are in response to the United States’ “extensive and regular” violations of the JCPOA.
It’s seemingly evident that Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign which includes oil and banking embargos has not broken Iran to the point where they are forced to fold on important stances. The Iranian government has called out the United States on their aim to bring Iranian oil exports to zero.
Washington’s on-going attempt at regime-change in Iran has also been noted. Iran hasn’t been shy about exposing the role Washington has played in the Middle East and shining a light on their support for terrorist groups which they claim to be supposedly fighting, while Iran, Russia, Syria and regional partners defeat terrorists.
Iran has called on US troops to leave the Middle East. Washington’s long-term intentions in northeastern Syria and their use of Kurdish militias revolves around protecting Israel, while keeping a watchful eye on Iran.
October 3, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Wars for Israel | Middle East, Sanctions against Iran, United States, Zionism |
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The controversy swirling around the phone conversation between the US President Donald Trump and Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky regarding the business interests of former vice-president Joe Biden’s son is having a salutary effect on the conflict in Ukraine.
The US Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker has resigned from his official position once it transpired that his name appeared in the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s dealings with Zelensky. (Meanwhile, Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, also implicated Volker saying that the latter encouraged him to speak to Ukrainian officials regarding Biden and his son Hunter Biden.) Volker is expected to testify in the Congress’ impeachment inquiry on Thursday.
Now, Volker also enjoys an impeccable reputation as a Russia hawk with extensive diplomatic experience on that front in NATO previously. He recently said that “there is a long way to go before there would be any normalisation between the two countries (Russia and Ukraine). Russia’s invasion, occupation, and claimed annexation of Crimea will never be accepted by Ukraine.”
Volker’s exit is the surest sign that for the foreseeable future, US-Ukraine relations have become toxic. Put differently, for the first time after the “regime change” in Ukraine in 2014, no US official worth his salt will want to risk hobnobbing with the powers that be in Kiev.
This “hands-off” phase gives Zelensky a free hand to handle his country’s relations with Russia. The same holds good for Moscow which gets an opportunity to deal with Kiev without the Americans breathing over the neck of the Ukrainian president.
It is in this backdrop that we need to asses the outcome of the meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine – Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe — in Minsk on October 1. The meeting agreed to a peace process known as the “Steinmeier Formula,” green-lighting local elections in the Russian-controlled regions of Donbas.
The meeting agreed that the warring parties will withdraw their military and equipment in Donbas, dismantle fortifications, and conduct de-mining. The agreement envisages that the separatist regions will get a special self-governing status after they hold local elections. (The pro-Russia separatists are seeking a special status allowing for self-governance in the Donbas region, large parts of which have been under their control since April 2014.)
In preparation for the election, the Ukrainian government and separatist leaders will withdraw troops from two locations in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions next week. No doubt, this development signifies a major step by Zelensky toward resolution of the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
The “Steinmeier Formula” is a concept attributed to then German Foreign Minister (presently president of Germany), Frank-Walter Steinmeier dating back to 2015-2016, designed to implement the political clauses of the Minsk “accords” (2014 and 2015) to settle the conflict in Donbas.
However, the concept could not be implemented due to Kiev’s reservations (under American pressure.) Washington persuaded Kiev that Steinmeier’s Formula in effect served to legitimise Russia’s “proxies” in the separatist regions by means of staging local elections, which in turn aimed at allowing Russia’s de facto control of that territory, even if the territory were to be notionally reinserted into Ukraine.
The former pro-US Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko simply refused to work with Russia, Germany and France to codify Steinmeier’s Formula. Indeed, the US strategy aimed at preventing any “thaw” between Kiev and Moscow.
Poroshenko maintained that holding democratically valid elections in Donbas under the shadow of a Russian presence there was unthinkable. Volker too repeatedly articulated this stance. In early September, Volker was quoted as saying that a secure environment would have to be established in Donbas before implementing the political and technical procedures for holding elections.
Volker underscored that as minimal preconditions to a secure environment, the Russian military must withdraw from Donbas, the Russian-backed separatist forces must be dissolved, and the Ukrainian side of the border has to be brought under non-Russian control.
The Russian interpretation of the Minsk accords has been that all solutions (special status, elections, border control, etc.) be negotiated between Kiev and the separatist leaders in Donbas. Germany and France do not challenge the Russian interpretation.
Therefore, the breakthrough on Tuesday must be equally attributed to the political transition in Kiev leading to the election of Zelensky (on a mandate of resolving the conflict in Donbas and normalising relations with Russia) as well as the elbow room he is getting lately to shake off American pressure. Volker’s exit will do a world of good for resolving the Donbas conflict.
The agreement on October 1 paves the way for a summit between Zelensky and the leaders of Russia, France and Germany within the ambit of the “Normandy Four” (France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine). Russia had previously refused such a meeting, unless Ukraine agreed to hold local election in the Donbas region.
On Tuesday, Zelensky said that nothing should stand in the way of the summit, and that a date would be announced soon. The French President Emmanuel Macron said he expected the summit in the coming weeks.
Germany, which authored the Steinmeier Formula, feels gratified. The German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said, “I am glad that the constructive atmosphere at the session of the Contact Group in Minsk has led to long-awaited progress. This makes way for the Normandy Four summit and further steps in the implementation of the Minsk Agreements.”
The Kremlin concurs, too.
The “big picture” is that Russia’s relations with the European powers are looking up, finally. The close consultations between Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the recent weeks and months are resulting in a determined effort to address the frozen conflict in Ukraine, which had led to the EU sanctions against Russia. (See my blog Eurasian politics on the cusp of change.)
On the other hand, liberated from the clutches of manipulative American diplomats, especially following Volker’s exit, Zelensky can be expected to advance his strategy to improve relations with Russia. In fact, Zelensky has lost no time to initiate the first steps to introduce legislation giving “special status” to Donbas.
“We will have a new law, that will be drafted by the parliament in close cooperation with the public after a public discussion. No red lines will be crossed in it, and that is why there will be no capitulation,” Zelensky said on Tuesday.
October 3, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Ukraine, United States |
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Graphic by Claudio Cabrera
A recent interview given by a former high-ranking official in Israeli military intelligence has claimed that Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual blackmail enterprise was an Israel intelligence operation run for the purpose of entrapping powerful individuals and politicians in the United States and abroad.
Since the apparent death by suicide of Jeffrey Epstein in a Manhattan prison, much has come to light about his depraved activities and methods used to sexually abuse underage girls and entrap the rich and powerful for the purposes of blackmail. Epstein’s ties to intelligence, described in-depth in a recent MintPress investigative series, have continued to receive minimal mainstream media coverage, which has essentially moved on from the Epstein scandal despite the fact that his many co-conspirators remain on the loose.
For those who have examined Epstein’s ties to intelligence, there are clear links to both U.S. intelligence and Israeli intelligence, leaving it somewhat open to debate as to which country’s intelligence apparatus was closest to Epstein and most involved in his blackmail/sex-trafficking activities. A recent interview given by a former high-ranking official in Israeli military intelligence has claimed that Epstein’s sexual blackmail enterprise was an Israel intelligence operation run for the purpose of entrapping powerful individuals and politicians in the United States and abroad.
In an interview with Zev Shalev, former CBS News executive producer and award-winning investigative journalist for Narativ, the former senior executive for Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, Ari Ben-Menashe, claimed not only to have met Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, back in the 1980s, but that both Epstein and Maxwell were already working with Israeli intelligence during that time period.
“They found a niche”
In an interview last week with the independent outlet Narativ, Ben-Menashe, who himself was involved in Iran-Contra arms deals, told his interviewer Zev Shalev that he had been introduced to Jeffrey Epstein by Robert Maxwell in the mid-1980s while Maxwell’s and Ben-Menashe’s involvement with Iran-Contra was ongoing. Ben-Menashe did not specify the year he met Epstein.
Ben-Menashe told Shalev that “he [Maxwell] wanted us to accept him [Epstein] as part of our group …. I’m not denying that we were at the time a group that it was Nick Davies [Foreign Editor of the Maxwell-Owned Daily Mirror], it was Maxwell, it was myself and our team from Israel, we were doing what we were doing.” Past reporting by Seymour Hersh and others revealed that Maxwell, Davies and Ben-Menashe were involved in the transfer and sale of military equipment and weapons from Israel to Iran on behalf of Israeli intelligence during this time period.
He then added that Maxwell had stated during the introduction that “your Israeli bosses have already approved” of Epstein. Shalev later noted that Maxwell “had an extensive network in Israel at the time, which included the then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, according to Ben-Menashe.”
Ben-Menashe went on to say that he had “met him [Epstein] a few times in Maxwell’s office, that was it.” He also said he was not aware of Epstein being involved in arms deals for anyone else he knew at the time, but that Maxwell wanted to involve Epstein in the arms transfer in which he, Davies and Ben-Menashe were engaged on Israel’s behalf.
Ariel Sharon (right) meets with Robert Maxwell in Jerusalem on Feb. 20, 1990. Photo | AP
However, as MintPress reported in Part IV of the investigative series “Inside the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: Too Big to Fail,” Epstein was involved with several arms dealers during this period of time, some of whom were directly involved in Iran-Contra arms deals between Israel and Iran. For instance, after leaving Bear Stearns in 1981, Epstein began working in the realms of shadow finance as a self-described “financial bounty hunter,” where he would both hunt down and hide money for powerful people. One of these powerful individuals was Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi arms dealer with close ties to both Israeli and U.S. intelligence and one of the main brokers of Iran-Contra arms deals between Israel and Iran. Epstein would later forge a business relationship with a CIA front company involved in another aspect of Iran-Contra, the airline Southern Air Transport, on behalf of Leslie Wexner’s company, The Limited.
During this period, it is also known that Epstein became well acquainted with the British arms dealer Sir Douglas Leese, who collaborated with Khashoggi on at least one British-Saudi arms deal in the 1980s. Leese would later introduce Epstein to Steven Hoffenberg, calling Epstein a “genius” and describing his lack of morals during that introduction. Thus, there are indications that Epstein was involved with Middle Eastern arms deals, including some related to Iran-Contra, during this period. In addition, Epstein would later claim (and then subsequently deny) having worked for the CIA during this period.
After having been introduced to Epstein, Ben-Menashe claimed that neither he nor Davies were impressed with Epstein and considered him “not very competent.” He added that Ghislaine Maxwell had “fallen for” Epstein and that he believed that the romantic relationship between his daughter and Epstein led Robert Maxwell to work to bring the latter into the “family business” — i.e., Maxwell’s dealings with Israeli intelligence. This information is very revealing, given that the narrative, until now at least, has been that Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein did not meet and begin their relationship until after Robert Maxwell’s death in 1991, after which Ghislaine moved to New York.
Ben-Menashe says that well after the introduction, though again he does not specify what year, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein began a sexual blackmail operation with the purpose of extorting U.S. political and public figures on behalf of Israeli military intelligence. He stated:
In this case what really happened, my take on it, in the later thing, is that these guys were seen as agents. They weren’t really competent to do very much. And so they found a niche for themselves — blackmailing American and other political figures.”
He then confirmed, when prompted, that they were blackmailing Americans on behalf of Israeli intelligence.
In response to his statement, Zev Shalev replied, “But, you know, for most people it’s hard for them to think of Israel as being … blackmailing their leaders in the United States, it’s a very …” at which point, Ben-Menashe interrupted and the following exchange took place:
Ari Ben-Menashe: You’re kidding? [laughs]…. It was quite their M.O. Sleeping around is not a crime, it may be embarrassing, but it’s not a crime, but sleeping with underage girls is a crime.
Shalev: It was a crime in 2000 as well, but they let him off that…
Ben-Menashe: And that it is [why] always so he [Epstein] made sure these girls were underage.
In addition, when Shalev asked Ben-Menashe about the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Ben-Menashe stated “After a while, you know, what Mr. Epstein was doing was collecting intelligence on people in the United States. And so if you want to go to the U.S. if you’re a high-profile politician you want to know information about people.” Ben-Menashe subsequently stated that Barak was obtaining compromising information (i.e., blackmail) that Epstein had acquired on powerful people in the United States.
PROMIS, sex, and blackmail
If Robert Maxwell did recruit Epstein and bring him into the “family business” and the world of Israeli intelligence, as Ben-Menashe has claimed, it provides supporting evidence for information provided to MintPress by a former U.S. intelligence official, who chose to remain anonymous in light of the sensitivity of the claim.
This source, who has direct knowledge of the unauthorized use of PROMIS to support covert U.S. and Israeli intelligence projects, told MintPress that “some of the proceeds from the illicit sales of PROMIS were made available to Jeffrey Epstein for use in compromising targets of political blackmail.” As was noted in a Mintpress series on the Epstein scandal, much of Epstein’s funding also came from Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner, who has documented ties to both organized crime and U.S. and Israeli intelligence.
After the PROMIS software was stolen from its rightful owner and developer, Inslaw Inc., through the collusion of both U.S. and Israeli officials, it was marketed mainly by two men: Earl Brian, a close aide to Ronald Reagan, later U.S. envoy to Iran and close friend of Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan; and Robert Maxwell. Brian sold the bugged software through his company, Hadron Inc., while Maxwell sold it through an Israeli company he acquired called Degem. Before and following Maxwell’s acquisition of Degem, the company was a known front for Mossad operations and Mossad operatives in Latin America often posed as Degem employees.
With Maxwell — Epstein’s alleged recruiter and father of Epstein’s alleged madam — having been one of the main salespeople involved in selling PROMIS software on behalf of intelligence, he would have been in a key position to furnish Epstein’s nascent sexual blackmail operation with the proceeds from the sale of PROMIS.
This link between Epstein’s sexual blackmail operation and the PROMIS software scandal is notable given that the illicit use of PROMIS by U.S. and Israeli intelligence has been for blackmail purposes on U.S. public figures and politicians, as was described in a recent MintPress report.
Can an ex-spy be trusted?
When dealing in the world of deception and intrigue that defines intelligence operations, it is often difficult to determine whether any individual linked to an intelligence agency is telling the truth. Indeed, in the United States, there are examples of elected intelligence officials committing perjury and lying to Congress on several occasions with no consequences, and of intelligence officials feeding politically motivated and untrue information to agency assets in the media.
So, are Ari Ben-Menashe’s claims regarding Epstein and the Maxwells trustworthy? In addition to the aforementioned, corroborating information for his claims, a review of Ben-Menashe’s post-intelligence career suggests this is the case.
Ari Ben-Menashe arrives at Harare International Airport, in Zimbabwe, Feb. 22, 2002. Photo | AP
Prior to his arrest in November 1989, Ben-Menashe was a high-ranking officer in a special unit of Israeli military intelligence. He would later claim that his arrest for attempting to sell American-made weapons to Iran was politically motivated, as he had threatened to expose what the U.S. government had done with the stolen PROMIS software if the U.S. did not cease providing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with chemical weapons. Ben-Menashe was later acquitted when a U.S. court determined that his involvement in the attempted sale of military equipment to Iran was done on behalf of the Israeli state.
After his arrest, Ben-Menashe was visited in prison by Robert Parry, the former Newsweek contributor and Associated Press reporter who would later found and run Consortium News until his recent passing last year. Parry remembered that, during that interview, “Ben-Menashe offered me startling new information about the Iran-Contra scandal, which I thought that I knew quite well.”
Israel’s government immediately began to attack Ben-Menashe’s credibility following his interview with Parry, and claimed that Ben-Menashe had never worked for Israeli intelligence. When Parry soon found evidence that Ben-Menashe had indeed served in Israeli military intelligence, Israel’s government was then forced to admit that he had worked for military intelligence, but only as a “low-level translator.” Yet, the documentation Parry had uncovered described Ben-Menashe as having served in “key positions” and performed “complex and sensitive assignments.”
A year later, Ben-Menashe would be interviewed by another journalist, Seymour Hersh. It would be Ben-Menashe who first revealed to Hersh secrets about Israel’s nuclear program and the fact that British media mogul Robert Maxwell was an Israeli spy, revelations that Hersh would not only independently corroborate but include in his book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Hersh was then sued by Robert Maxwell and the Maxwell-owned Mirror Group for libel. The case was later settled in Hersh’s favor, as the claims Hersh had made were true and not libelous. As a result, the Mirror Group paid Hersh for damages, covered his legal costs, and issued him a formal apology.
After Ben-Menashe’s interviews by Hersh and Parry, Israel’s government was apparently concerned enough about what Ben-Menashe would tell congressional investigators that it attempted to kidnap him and bring him back to Israel to face state charges, much like Israeli intelligence had done to Israel’s nuclear-weapons whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. The plan was foiled largely thanks to Parry.
Parry, who broke many key stories related to the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and beyond, was tipped off by a U.S. intelligence source about a joint U.S.-Israel plan to have Ben-Menashe be denied entry to the United States on his planned trip to give congressional testimony. Per the plan, Ben-Menashe would be denied entry to the U.S. in Los Angeles and then be deported to Israel, where he would have stood trial for “exposing state secrets.” Parry called Ben-Menashe and convinced him to delay his flight until he secured a guarantee for safe passage from the U.S. government.
Ben-Menashe subsequently gave a sworn statement to the House Judiciary Committee that mostly focused on U.S.-Israel collusion regarding the theft and creation of a “backdoor” into the PROMIS software. Ben-Menashe offered to name names and provide corroborating evidence for several of his claims if he was offered immunity by the committee, which, for whatever reason declined that request.
Prior to the conclusion of the Hersh “libel” trial, which would later uphold Ben-Menashe’s claims regarding Robert Maxwell’s Mossad activities as true, there was a concerted effort in the U.S. press to downplay Ben-Menashe’s credibility. For instance, Newsweek — in an article on Ben-Menashe entitled “One Man, Many Tales” — claimed that “inconsistencies may undermine Ben-Menashe’s testimony in the British courtroom proceedings,” citing inconsistencies from sources in Israel’s government and Israeli intelligence as well as Ben-Menashe’s ex-wife and Israeli journalist Shmuel (or Samuel) Segev, a former IDF colonel. It goes without saying that such sources had much to gain from any effort to discredit Ben-Menashe’s claims.
According to Parry, this media campaign, which employed American journalists with close ties to Israel’s government and intelligence agencies, was very successful “in marginalizing Ben-Menashe by 1993, at least in the eyes of the Washington Establishment.” After a years-long media campaign to discredit Ben-Menashe, “the Israelis seemed to view him as a declining threat, best left alone. He was able to pick up the pieces of his life, creating a second act as an international political consultant and businessman arranging sales of grain.” The effort to marginalize Ben-Menashe has continued well into recent years, with mainstream news outlets still referring to him as a “self-described ex-Israeli spy” — despite the well-documented fact that Ben-Menashe worked for Israeli intelligence — as a means of downplaying his claims regarding his time in Israel’s intelligence service.
After the conclusion of the Hersh libel trial, Ben-Menashe became an international political consultant who “surrounded his far-flung business activities in secrecy and got involved with some controversial international figures, such as Zimbabwe’s leader Robert Mugabe,” and “conducted his international consulting business … in a wide variety of global hotspots, including conflict zones,” according to Parry. In addition to Mugabe, Ben-Menashe has also recently come under fire for his consulting work on behalf of Sudan’s military junta and Venezuelan opposition politician Henri Falcón.
Ben-Menashe has also maintained ties to several different intelligence services and eventually became a controversial whistleblower whose information led to the arrest of the former head of Canada’s Security Intelligence Review Committee, Arthur Porter.
As far as his character is concerned, Parry noted that Ben-Menashe could often be “his own worst enemy” and that, even though Parry considered his information regarding Iran-Contra and PROMIS reliable and noted that much of it was later corroborated, he “often compound[ed] his media problem by treating journalists in a high-handed manner, either due to his suspicions of them or his arrogance.”
Bill Hamilton, the original developer of the PROMIS software and head of Inslaw Inc., also found Ben-Menashe’s claims regarding the illicit use of PROMIS by U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies to be credible, though he expressed doubts about Ben-Menashe’s character.
Hamilton told MintPress the following about Ben-Menashe:
Ari Ben Menashe was the first source to tell us reliable information about the role of Rafi Eitan and Israeli intelligence vis-a-vis PROMIS but, in the end, of course, he was a clandestine services-type guy whose official duties include the ability and willingness to lie, cheat, and steal.”
A threat revived
While Ben-Menashe may have been viewed as a “declining threat” after the early 1990s, his plans to meet with Robert Parry of Consortium News years later in 2012 to discuss Iran-Contra and other covert dealings of the 1980s appeared to change that. Right before he planned to travel from Canada to the United States to meet with Parry and “finally prove” the truthfulness of his past claims, a fire-bomb was thrown into his Montreal home, destroying it.
Ari Ben-Menashe surveys the damage to his home after it was mysteriously firebombed. Photos | Robert Parry
Though Canadian media referred to the incendiary device as a “molotov cocktail,” Consortium News reported that “the arson squad’s initial assessment is said to be that the flammable agent was beyond the sort of accelerant used by common criminals,” leading to speculation that the accelerant was military-grade.
Had it not been for the bomb, the origins of which Canadian police failed to determine, Ben-Menashe would have traveled to the U.S. alongside a “senior Israeli intelligence figure” to be interviewed by Parry. The other intelligence-linked individual, according to Parry, “concluded that the attack was meant as a message from Israeli authorities to stay silent about the historical events that he was expected to discuss.”
Though neither Ben-Menashe nor Parry directly blamed Israel’s government for the destruction of Ben-Menashe’s home, Parry noted that the bombing did succeed in “intimidating Ben-Menashe, shutting down possible new disclosures of Israeli misconduct from the other intelligence veteran, and destroying records that would have helped Ben-Menashe prove whatever statements he might make.”
While Ben-Menashe’s post-intelligence associations with controversial governments and individuals have given plenty of fodder to the still thriving media campaign to discredit his claims about covert U.S.-Israel operations in the 1980s, there remain troubling indications that the Israeli government sees his information on decades-old events as a threat.
Now, with the major efforts by powerful Americans and Israelis to distance themselves from Jeffrey Epstein and other figures associated with his depraved sex trafficking operation, Ben-Menashe may soon again find his reputation — and perhaps more — under fire.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
October 2, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular | CIA, Israel, Middle East, Mossad, United States, Zionism |
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To hide the fact they amplified another race hate hoax
After a 12-year-old African-American girl admitted she lied about a group of white boys cutting off her dreadlocks, the New York Times decided to strip the fact that the accused were “white” from its follow up headline.
The global mainstream media, as well as lawmakers like Rashida Tlaib, amplified Amari Allen’s falsehood after she claimed that three white male classmates had pinned her down, called her “nappy” and “ugly” and cut her hair.
This prompted a wave of sympathy for Allen, a lucrative GoFundMe, and a volley of resentment towards young white men.
In the vast majority of these media reports, the fact that the boys were white was included in the headline.
It subsequently emerged that Allen had faked the entire story, with her grandparents today apologizing to those falsely accused.
However, in the media reports that carried the update to the story, the fact that the entire narrative was predicated on the incident being a racist hate crime was stripped from the story.
In its initial report on the issue, the New York Times headline read ‘Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks on Playground’.
However, in the follow up story, the headline read ‘Virginia Girl Recants Story of Boys Cutting Off Her Dreadlocks’.
The media seems very keen to obscure the fact that they helped inflate yet another race hate hoax that turned out to be nothing but hot air.
“The most noteworthy part of this story is this girl allegedly getting a bit of her hair cut off made international news while the murder of John Weed was ignored,” comments Chris Menahan.
October 2, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | New York Times, United States |
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Last January, the Washington Post carried an interesting article by a person named Asha Rangappa, who is a former FBI agent. The article explored what would happen if a U.S. president became a threat to national security. She wrote her article in the context of suspicions that President Trump might be acting as a covert agent for Russia. She began her article as follows:
In the opening sentence of her article, she pointed out, “When President Trump fired then-FBI Director James B. Comey in 2017, the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump was secretly working on behalf of Russia. As a former FBI agent who conducted investigations against foreign intelligence services, I know that the bureau would have had to possess strong evidence that Trump posed a national security threat to meet the threshold for opening such an investigation.”
Rangappa pointed out that the FBI has methods that address a suspected threat to national security within the federal bureaucracy, such as cutting off a person’s access to secret information. But she observed, “Unfortunately, none of these are feasible options if the national security threat is the president of the United States.”
She concludes that the only feasible option for a president who becomes a threat to national security is “exposure,” followed by impeachment, conviction, and removal from office.
While Rangappa raises an important issue, unfortunately she fails to understand that under our system of government, there is another way to deal with a president who becomes a threat to national security. It isn’t a method that is outlined in the Constitution. Nonetheless, owing to the governmental structure under which we live, it is a de facto means of dealing with any president, both foreign and domestic, who becomes a threat to national security.
Our country was founded on a type of governmental structure called a limited-government republic. While there was a relatively small army, there was no vast military establishment, CIA, NSA, and FBI. Governmental operations were for the most part transparent. For more than 150 years, there was no concept of “national security.”
All that changed after World War II. The U.S. government was converted into a governmental structure known a “national-security state.” It consists of a gigantic, permanent, powerful, and ever-growing military-intelligence establishment. America’s national-security state is composed of the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, the CIA, the NSA and, to a certain extent, the FBI.
A national-security state is a type of totalitarian governmental structure. North Korea is a national-security state. So is China. Egypt. Russia. And post-WW2 United States.
Why did U.S. officials convert the federal government to a national-security state? After World War II, they said that America now faced an enemy that was an even bigger threat than Nazi Germany. That enemy was the Soviet Union, which, ironically, had been America’s wartime partner and ally.
U.S. officials maintained that there was an international communist conspiracy based in Moscow, Russia. The aim of the conspiracy, they said, was to take over the world, including the United States.
America’s limited-government structure, they believed, was insufficient to prevent the communists from taking over America. To prevail in this new Cold War, it would be necessary, they believed, to have a governmental structure similar to that of communist regimes, one that could wield the same totalitarian-like powers wielded by communist regimes, including assassination.
The overriding principle of a national-security state is, needless to say, “national security.” The idea is that anything can and should be done to eradicate threats to national security.
But who decides what “national security” means? More important, who decides what constitutes a threat to national security? The Constitution doesn’t speak to those issues because the Constitution never called a national-security state type of governmental structure into existence.
By default and sheer force of power, the national-security branch of the federal government became the final arbiter for determining threats to national security and taking the necessary measures to eradicate them.
The assumption of such power was acceded to early on by both Congress and the Supreme Court, both of which decided that they would defer to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA on matters relating to “national security.” These other two branches had the perfect justification for making that decision: it is the national-security branch that naturally possesses the particular expertise for ascertaining threats to national security.
Ordinarily, the president, who represents the executive branch, and the national-security branch work together to protect national security and to eradicate threats to national security. If we consider, for example, the regime-change operations in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, and Chile in the 1960s and ’70s, we see both the executive branch and the national security branch working together to oust foreign leaders, including democratically elected presidents, from office through coup, invasion, or assassination because they were considered to be threats to U.S. national security. We also find a steadfast policy in the federal judiciary to not interfere with those operations.
But the question naturally arises, the one that Rangappa raises in her Washington Post article: What happens if the national-security branch concludes that the president himself is a threat to national security?
There is no question about the answer: Even though the Constitution doesn’t provide for it, the fact is that, as a practical matter, the national-security branch is the final arbiter of the issue. That is not only because of its particular expertise on matters relating to national security, it’s also because, as a practical matter, the other branches of the government lack the power to interfere with operations to protect national security carried out by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
Rangappa raises the prospect of a president who becomes a conscious agent of a foreign power. Unfortunately, she fails to recognize another possibility: a president whose philosophy and policies take America in a direction that the national-security branch considers a threat to national security.
Suppose, for example, that a U.S. president at the height of the Cold War decided that the Cold War was a bunch of baloney. What if he decided that the national-security state type of governmental structure was itself a bigger threat to America than international communism? What if he entered into secret negotiations with the leaders of the Soviet Union and Cuba to bring an end to hostilities and to establish friendly and peaceful relations, just as the ousted leaders of Guatemala, Cuba, and Chile did?
What if the national-security branch concluded that this different direction would spell the end of the United States as an independent, sovereign, and free country? What if the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA were absolutely certain that such policies would bring about a communist takeover of the United States?
What then? Rangappa’s solution of exposure, followed by impeachment and conviction obviously wouldn’t work because the president wouldn’t be doing anything illegal that would justify impeachment and removal from office. Moreover, waiting for the next election would be too late to prevent the catastrophe. Following the Constitution by simply letting the president lead the nation into disaster would be national suicide.
What would the national-security branch do? There is no question about it. It would do what it is charged with doing. It would do what was necessary to protect national security. And the nation would be exhorted to move on.
October 2, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | CIA, FBI, NSA, United States |
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Like a dog hearing he’s going for a car ride, with that first leak the Dems couldn’t wait to hang their heads out the window for another ride around the block.
There are few hard facts: a leak claims a whistleblower in the intelligence community believes during a July 25 phone call Trump made unspecified “promises” to the Ukrainian president in return for his investigating Biden family corruption. The whistleblower did not have direct knowledge of what was said, and may have read a transcript or summary. Trump knew the call was monitored by multiple people and said whatever he said anyway.
Despite the lack of real information, the story blossomed like chlamydia at band camp to soon say Trump illegally withheld $391 million in military aid from the Ukraine in a direct quid pro quo for the Ukrainians finding dirt on Biden. Correlation was turned into causation and a narrative was created in mid-air. That was then crowd-refined into a tweetable “Trump is again inviting foreigners into our democratic process.” From there it took the New York Times only 48 hours to question whether the “president can get away with weaponizing the federal government to punish political opponents.” Impeachment was called for, and one nominal Trump challenger literally demanded on MSNBC execution be considered.
Democrats also decided all sorts of procedural and legal stuff the public will not pay attention to has been trod upon because the whistleblower complaint has not been handed over to them. In sum, “many elements are murky, but something clearly stinks” said the NYT, suggesting that’s good enough as a standard for demanding regime change in the middle of an election.
The big difference this time around is there’s no holy grail pee tape to quest after for three years. A transcript of the call between Trump and the Ukrainian president exists. What did Trump say? The Ukrainian government version, which is as close as we have to an actual fact at present, has been quietly online for two months now and reads “Donald Trump is convinced that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve image of Ukraine, complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA. [sic]”
For whatever Trump said to fulfill the headlines stating he pressured/extorted/bribed the Ukrainian leader, or manipulated U.S. foreign policy to (again?!?) bring a foreign government into the 2020 election, the actual words matter a lot. If this whole thing turns out to be shoehorning some broad or flippant statement by the president about investigating corruption which may involve the Biden family into a quid pro quo accusation, it will fail spectacularly with voters. If we all have to become whistleblower law experts the same way we all were obstruction experts just a few weeks ago for this to matter, it fails. The Dems might as well bring Congressman Wile E. Coyote onto the floor with his Acme Impeachment Kit.
And yet while the actual words matter, it should not be lost that none of what Trump was supposed to have really done — using military aid to get dirt on Biden — happened. We’re talking about talking about maybe burning the Reichstag, just not in so many words.
No one claims the Ukrainians investigated Biden at Trump’s demand (and Dems insist there was no wrongdoing anyway so an investigation would be for naught anyway.) It is thus a big problem in this narrative that the long-promised military aid to the Ukraine was only delayed and then paid out, as if the bribe was given for nothing in return, which hardly makes it a bribe. Trump is apparently bad at bribing; even though he made the decision to temporarily withhold the aid for some reason, the Ukrainians were never even told about it until weeks after the “extortion” phone call, meaning nobody’s arm got knowingly twisted. So no bribe was given, or to the Ukrainians’ knowledge, no money withheld.
As with all the souls Trump supposedly sold to get his Moscow hotel but then there was no Moscow hotel, the Dems claim they see a smoking gun but there is no body on the ground under the muzzle. So will this devolve into another complicated thought crime, another “conspiracy” to commit without the committal? “No explicit quid pro quo is necessary to betray your country,” helpfully tweeted Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Three years ago “almost” might have worked but we are far too cynical now following the collapse of Russiagate. The gray areas will fall to Trump in the court of public opinion.
Sigh. This will drag on for a while anyway. So the next step is for someone to see the actual whistleblower complaint, or, better, the transcript of the call itself. Because absolutely everything swirling around Washington otherwise today is just based on a leak.
Prying things loose if Trump wants to keep them from Congress will not be easy. The law sets conditions for disclosure of the whistleblower compliant itself, based on the specific legal definitions of credible and urgent; the media is mangling this part of the story by using vernacular definitions. How to apply those criteria can be argued over to Kiev and back. For example, the complaint itself seems to have nothing to do with intelligence operations except that it was allegedly filed by an intelligence staffer. That could make it not an “urgent” matter in the definition of the law and thus not available to Congress.
Trump’s withholding of the whistleblower complaint is also consistent with the stance taken by both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Bill Clinton, in a signing statement accompanying the original 1998 Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, wrote this “does not constrain my constitutional authority to review and, if appropriate, control certain classified information to Congress.”
Obama also reserved the right to withhold information from Congress “in [undefined] exceptional circumstances” when the original Act was updated as Congress created the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General in 2010. Trump is thus the third president to assert a whistleblower complaint does not grant the filer the right to force classified, privileged information into the public sphere. That right rests with the president — Clinton, Obama, Trump, as well as the next one. Citing long precedent, the courts would likely agree if asked.
While there is room to argue over the release of the complaint to Congress, there is nothing to compel the release of the presidential call transcript itself. What presidents say to other world leaders with the expectation of privacy is at the core of conducting foreign policy. No world leader is willing to interact frankly with the American president today wondering if the conversation will be on CNN tomorrow. That was one of the arguments used to assess the damage whistleblower Chelsea Manning did revealing State Department documents containing such conversations. So, never mind the Ukraine, no president would readily turn over a transcript without a fight, a fight he’ll likely win given the long standing unitary role of the executive in foreign policy.
Law and precedent are thus on Trump’s side if he chooses to withhold the complaint and transcript from Congress. If no one can see those documents, there is no means to move any investigation decisively forward, though theatrical hearings are always possible. A full leak of those specific, highly classified materials would be unprecedented. It would then be a true Constitutional crisis if illegally obtained, leaked docs were used at the heart of an impeachment process.
There’s more. As a whistleblower myself I know well the personal cost of telling the truth. It requires enormous courage to place yourself at odds with the full power of the government. You risk your job, your life as you knew it, and your freedom. Our democracy requires such people to come forward despite all that. So it is with some mixed feeling I record my skepticism here. At the core whistleblowers are different solely in motive; whistleblowers act because conscience tells them they must. They understand their allegiance is to The People, not a party (leakers) or self-interest (traitors.)
If the whistleblower here is someone who wrapped themselves in hard-fought legal protections to score points snitching over a difference in partisan politics, it will contribute to ending what little faith the public has in the vital process of revealing the truth at whatever cost, and will cause someone with legitimate concerns now trying to decide what to do to sit down. I hope with all of my soul, and with respect for those like Ellsberg, Manning, and Snowden, that this whistleblower proves worthy to stand next to them. And God help his soul and our country if not.
October 2, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Deception | CIA, United States |
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