Hungary accuses US of election interference
RT | October 14, 2024
The US has “invested heavily” in attempting to remove the current Hungarian government, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has claimed. According to the diplomat, US interference involved funding the opposition in a bid to defeat the Fidesz-Christian Democratic People’s Party (Fidesz-KDNP) alliance, led by Prime Minister Victor Orban, in the country’s 2022 election.
In an interview with RIA Novosti published on Monday, Szijjarto alleged that “there were very serious attempts to interfere in our elections [in 2022]… Very heavy interference, many millions of dollars spent to throw the government out.”
“Millions of dollars have been spent by American entities during the Hungarian elections, invested in our opposition, invested in opposition media. This is still going on,” Szijjarto said. Despite this, the political opposition lost the elections, the diplomat noted, expressing hope that future attempts to interfere in Hungarian policies would be similarly unsuccessful.
The Fidesz-KDNP alliance won 135 seats out of 199 in the Hungarian National Assembly in 2022, maintaining a constitutional majority for the third election in a row. The coalition of six opposition parties led by Peter Marki-Zay secured only 57 seats. After the vote, the Hungarian parliament reelected Orban as prime minister for a fifth term.
Hungarian media first reported on illicit foreign funding of opposition party campaigns in late 2022. Citing an intelligence report prepared by Hungarian secret services, reports claimed that the opposition had received as much as $8 million from foreign entities. Marki-Zay later publicly admitted to receiving funding from the US-based ‘Action for Democracy’ NGO in a podcast for the Magyar Hang newspaper.
The US government has denied claims it attempted to interfere in the Hungarian electoral process. In a speech in Budapest earlier this year, US Ambassador David Pressman attempted to deflect attention from alleged meddling, insisting that Hungary has no right to “decry foreign interference” when it “advocates for electoral candidates around the world from Poland to Brazil.”
Relations between the US and Hungary have soured significantly in recent years, including over the Ukraine conflict. Washington has supported Kiev with financial and military aid, while Budapest has called for a diplomatic solution. Hungary has also refused to cut ties with Russia and has blocked numerous sanctions initiatives proposed by the West to pressure Moscow agree to Ukraine’s peace terms.
Placing THAAD in Israel is High-Stakes Poker Game the US Risks Losing: Here’s Why
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 14.10.2024
Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder confirmed on Sunday that President Biden and Pentagon chief Austin had signed off on the deployment of a US Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery and associated crew in Israel. The decision is fraught with a broad spectrum of risks for Washington. Here’s why.
THAAD’s deployment in Israel “underscores the United States’ ironclad commitment to the defense of Israel, and to defend Americans in Israel, from any further ballistic missile attacks by Iran. It is part of the broader adjustments the US military has made in recent months, to support the defense of Israel and protect Americans from attacks by Iran and Iranian-aligned militias,” Ryder assured in Sunday’s press release.
Tehran has made clear that it has no illusions about the deployment’s purpose. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi emphasized Sunday that along with its delivery of record quantities of weaponry to Israel, Washington is “now also putting the lives of its troops at risk by deploying them to operate US missile systems.”
“While we have made tremendous efforts in recent days to contain an all-out war in our region, I say it clearly that we have no red lines in defending our people and interests,” Araghchi warned, referencing Tehran’s commitment to respond to any further aggression by Tel Aviv following the retaliatory Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israeli military and intelligence sites on October 1.
Iranian media, meanwhile, have warned that the presence of the THAAD in Israel will make no difference in Tehran’s military strategy – with Iranian missiles proving capable of puncturing Israel’s sophisticated, mulitlayered air and missile defense shield, and able to do so again if necessary if and when the US missile defense system is deployed.
A PressTV explainer published Monday pointed to footage released late last week purportedly showing a Raytheon X-band radar like the one that’s part of the THAAD system being knocked out in an Iranian precision strike ahead of the broader missile barrage on October 1. If authenticated, the footage would help explain why – as footage posted to social media and satellite images appear to show – dozens of Iranian missiles managed to reach their target without interference from Israeli air defenses.
The explainer pointed out that Iran’s Kheibar Shekan (lit. ‘Castle Buster’ or ‘Fortress Buster’) series missiles “easily penetrated Israel’s much-touted air defenses,” including the David’s Sling and Arrow-3 interceptors, on October 1, and offered details on how they could pull off a similar triumph against THAAD.
“The Kheibar Shekan-1 evaded the Arrow-3 system, which operates only outside the atmosphere, by flying below its engagement envelope. By the time it came within range of the Arrow-2 system, it was already flying too low to be effectively intercepted,” the analysis indicated. Evasive maneuvering “allowed it to easily defeat David’s Sling,” the outlet added.
And while THAAD’s ability to engage targets at lower altitudes may potentially make it more effective against the Kheibar Shekan-1, the Kheibar Shekan-2’s longer range (1,800 km vs 1,450 km, respectively) and “more aerodynamic glide vehicle allows it to ‘trade’ its extended range for low-altitude gliding, keeping it below the THAAD system’s engagement envelope, particularly at altitudes below 35 km. This enables the missile to bypass THAAD entirely and effectively and reach its target,” the PressTV report noted.
The explainer pointed out that even the Kheibar Shekan-1 stands a chance of defeating THAAD if it targets sites “near the edge” of the American system’s range. That’s not to mention the fact that THAAD, while advanced, is also extremely costly, which means “limits [to] the number of available interceptors, especially compared to the sheer volume and size of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal,” which could theoretically just saturate Israeli/US defenses.
Losing prestige associated with the THAAD would pose serious military and geopolitical risks for Washington, not only given the dangers associated with the loss of American troops’ lives if Iran struck the missile defense system itself, but the loss of prestige associated with the $1 billion piece of American military equipment proving helpless against an adversary. The US and its allies have already faced a reality check regarding the much-touted ‘superiority’ of their weapons in the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. An Iranian strike overwhelming America’s most sophisticated and pricey missile defense system could drive the final nail into the coffin of global attitudes about the supremacy of Western arms, including among its allies.
Geopolitical Risks, Domestic Risks
Then there are risks to the Biden administration’s foreign and domestic policy.
“The Americans deployed THAAD as part of preparation for an Iranian response to an upcoming Israeli attack,” Yeghia Tashjian, political analyst, regional and international affairs cluster coordinator at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, American University of Beirut, told Sputnik.
The THAAD plans signal that the US is now firmly “stuck” in the war in the Middle East, even though this is “something that most probably the Biden administration doesn’t want,” Tashjian explained, saying he wouldn’t be surprised if the US military deployment in Israel now expands further.
The White House has every reason to want to avoid further involvement, the observer stressed, pointing to the upcoming presidential elections and the power of the Arab voting bloc, crucial for Democrats in the swing state of Michigan, not to mention the general lack of public interest in US involvement in a new misadventure in the Middle East.
As far as US foreign policy goals are concerned, an escalation of the Mideast crisis could delay further US and NATO arms deliveries to Ukraine, Tashjian pointed out, highlighting the recent cancelation of a planned Ramstein Format meeting on Ukraine aid.
“The West cannot fight on multiple fronts,” the observer emphasized, pointing out that besides Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine, the US may soon have its hands full against a rising China, and see a new escalation in long-standing tensions in the Korean Peninsula.
A War Not Meant to Be Won?
The US would prefer a “managed conflict” between Israel and Hezbollah or Israel and Iran, Tashjian believes. Washington’s ability to achieve this goal is another matter, since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is not in favor of managing this war or even engaging in a ceasefire,” but prolonging it and getting the US directly involved, the observer said.
“The main intention of Israel is to involve the Americans directly into this war, because Netanyahu has made it clear that he wants to change and establish a ‘new Middle East’. And in this attempt, he needs American, British and other European help because he cannot fight on multiple fronts and especially against Iran,” which proved on October 1 that it “has capabilities to attack and inflict some damage against Israel. Israel does not want to feel vulnerable or alone in its fight against Iran,” Tashjian summed up.
Americans Must End Israel’s Serial Slaughter of Gaza’s Children
By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | October 14, 2024
It’s time for the American people to stand up to Washington and demand an immediate end to the endless support the United States has provided to apartheid Israel for its killing spree during the past year.
For fifty-seven years, Israel has subjected millions of Palestinian Muslims and Christians to a totalitarian, foreign military occupation. The Palestinian people have been systematically deprived of the ability to vote as well as their natural rights to life, liberty, freedom of movement, and property. With Israeli army protection and participation, for decades, the illegal Jewish settler movement has been stealing Palestinian property, demolishing homes, seizing agricultural land, terrorizing towns, villages, and refugee camps. This process has been mercilessly accelerated in the occupied West Bank during the last two years.
Concurrently, with full backing from the U.S. government, the Israeli military has now seized at least 26% of Gaza, comprehensively demolishing the Strip’s infrastructure, slaughtering Palestinians en masse, and making the enclave uninhabitable. It is no longer in doubt that under the rule of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his radical Jewish supremacist ministers, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Occupation Governor Bezalel Smotrich, of the Jewish Power and Religious Zionism parties respectively, Tel Aviv is implementing its final solution regarding historic Palestine’s indigenous population.
In the besieged Gaza Strip, Tel Aviv has murdered, mutilated, and maimed roughly 215,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children. Those figures do not include countless thousands of Palestinians missing or presumed dead beneath the 40 million tons of rubble Israel’s war has generated.
With Washington’s support—including over 50,000 tons of weapons and artificial intelligence platforms reportedly furnished by military-industrial complex giants like Palantir—Israel is openly exterminating an entire nation.
Last month, the Gaza Health Ministry published a 649-page document providing information regarding 34,344 murdered Palestinians identified thus far.
Antiwar.com news editor Dave DeCamp reported that, “The document lists 11,355 children, including 710 infants under the age of one, as Palestinian babies have been killed throughout the genocidal campaign. The infants are listed on the first 14 pages of the document…Out of the 34,344 people who have been identified, 60% are children, women, and elderly. The remaining 40% are men ranging in age from 18 to 59.” Currently, the total number of Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza is approximately 16,800.
Vice president of the International College of Surgeons, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon based in North Carolina, volunteered his services in Gaza between April and May this year. In July, he lamented to CBS News unequivocally that “[of] all of the disasters I’ve seen, combined—40 mission trips, 30 years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined—doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.”
He bluntly described Tel Aviv killing children on an unprecedented scale, warning Israeli military snipers were deliberately shooting children and murdering toddlers:
“I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week…missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of eight-year-olds. And then there’s sniper bullets. I have children that were shot twice.”
After being asked to clarify his statement, Perlmutter said, “I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head, in the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the ‘world’s best sniper.’ And they’re dead-center shots.”
CBS noted that over twenty doctors had recounted similar child slayings. One American doctor reportedly felt compelled to review CT scans to confirm what he saw with his own eyes because he “didn’t believe that this many children could be admitted to a single hospital with gunshot wounds to the head.”
In April, Dr. Fozia Alvi, a Canadian physician, described her experience treating two children shot in the brain by Israeli snipers during her last day volunteering at southern Gaza’s European hospital. Alvi told The Guardian, “I asked the nurse, what’s the history? She said that they were brought in a couple of hours ago. They had sniper shots to the brain. They were seven or eight years old.”
She elaborated, “They were not able to talk, paraplegic. They were literally lying down as vegetables on those beds. They were not the only ones. I saw even small children with direct sniper shot wounds to the head as well as in the chest. They were not combatants, they were small children.”
Scores of American doctors, surgeons, nurses, and emergency room physicians have confirmed these accounts, writing multiple open letters to the White House urging the Joe Biden administration to cease support for the Israeli genocide and warning that the true death toll already includes more than 118,000 Palestinians, vastly exceeding Palestinian Health Ministry estimates.
One July letter features Asma Taha, a pediatric nurse practitioner based in Oregon, describing the nightmare of living as a pregnant mother, newborn infant, or fetus trapped and under siege in the Gaza death camp. “Every day I saw babies die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed them, so they starved,” she wrote.
Another open letter sent to the White House was signed this month by ninety-nine American physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, surgeons, and midwives who’ve spent a combined 254 weeks volunteering in Gaza. “This letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population,” it reads.
The medics continue, describing the devastating toll that the genocidal campaign has taken on the entire civilian population:
“With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”
Israel’s brutal siege warfare, combined with constant bombing of civilian infrastructure including water systems, is designed to spread diseases by systematically liquidating and infecting Palestinian children, newborns, and babies.
As the American medical volunteers have thoroughly detailed:
“Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhea. We found cases of jaundice (indicating hepatitis A infection under such conditions) in nearly every room of the hospitals in which we served, and in many of our healthcare colleagues in Gaza. An astonishingly high percentage of our surgical incisions became infected from the combination of malnutrition, impossible operating conditions, lack of basic sanitation supplies such as soap, and lack of surgical supplies and medications, including antibiotics.
“Malnutrition led to widespread spontaneous abortions, underweight newborns, and an inability of new mothers to breastfeed. This left their newborns at high risk of death given the lack of access to potable water anywhere in Gaza. Many of those infants died. In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies…
We urge you to realize that epidemics are raging in Gaza. Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas without running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking. It was and remains guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonias, particularly in children under the age of five. Indeed, even the dreaded polio virus has reemerged in Gaza due to a combination of systematic destruction of the sanitation infrastructure, widespread malnutrition weakening immune systems, and young children having missed routine vaccinations for nearly an entire year. We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.”
These doctors reaffirmed the claims from the previous letters and testimonies from medical volunteers that Israeli snipers are relentlessly targeting children as young as toddlers with head shots:
“Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis,” the letter states. The American medical professionals insist, “It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.”
Perlmutter is quoted again, emphasizing, “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.”
It is absolutely clear that supporting Israel, quite literally, means mass murdering children every day in our name and on our dime. Since October 2023, the AIPAC-owned Congress has robbed over $22 billion of Americans’ hard-earned money, amidst crippling inflation, to facilitate and underwrite this genocide. Now, Tel Aviv wants to take our kids to war with Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine simultaneously.
Americans are lectured incessantly, including by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that this is all obligatory and essential. We are told Americans must fight and die on the side of Israeli “civilization” against Middle Eastern “barbarism.” This author defies anyone to try to make a case for our “shared values” with the Israelis after reading these American doctors’ testimonies.
CIA personnel land in Lebanon, ramp up intel gathering to support Israel’s war
Photo credit: US Embassy Beirut
The Cradle | October 14, 2024
The CIA has sent additional agents to Lebanon and has increased its communications with Lebanese military, security, and political officials in an effort to obtain information about Hezbollah, and may have played a role in Israel’s recent attempt to assassinate a Hezbollah political leader, Al-Akhbar reported on 14 October.
Three senior officials in the official security services acknowledged that Western parties, primarily the US, have initiated intensive daily communication with all Lebanese military and security forces since the outbreak of the open war between Lebanon and Israel, Al-Akhbar editor Ibrahim al-Amin wrote.
The officials told Amin that the content of the communications had nothing to do with obtaining information about threats to western interests. Instead, they wish to obtain information about changes in Hezbollah’s political and military leadership structure after the recent assassination of the party’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah.
US intelligence officials were very interested in whether Hezbollah leaders are “still communicating with the military, security and executive forces in Lebanon after the war, with questions about the form and content of the communication,” one official told Amin.
The same official revealed that a security team of 15 CIA officers arrived at Beirut airport last Thursday, 10 October, and moved in a convoy of armored cars without license plates to the headquarters of the American embassy in Awkar.
He explained that the team “joined the work cell based in one of the embassy wings in Beirut, to help manage the Beirut station, which includes 12 main officers, in addition to others with different specialties, including recruiting and managing agents, collecting information through technical means, and analyzing data.”
Another official told Amin that a new director for the CIA’s Beirut station, Sherry Baker, had been appointed and that Baker had previously participated in meetings with Lebanese security officials during visits to Washington.
The official said he knew of “five working visits by Lebanese officers of various levels to the United States, who held meetings with American intelligence officials at their headquarters in Langley.”
In this context, Amin reports that these contacts between the CIA and Lebanese security officials may have played a role in Israel’s recent attempt to assassinate a Hezbollah political leader, Wafiq Safa.
On 10 October, Israeli airstrikes leveled a residential building in central Beirut, killing 22 people. Israel stated that Safa was the target of the attack. However, they were unsuccessful in killing him.
One of the three officials revealed to Amin that just prior to the assassination attempt, the leadership of Hezbollah had asked Safa, in his capacity as head of the resistance movement’s Liaison and Coordination Committee, to communicate with a number of Lebanese security officials on matters related to the ongoing war.
The official explained that “the contacts took place despite the fact that the resistance knew that the mere occurrence of the phone call would constitute a security threat to Safa.”
These fears were confirmed when Israel carried out the bombing in Beirut and leaked news that the target was Safa.
The same official said that Hezbollah “estimates that American intelligence had a direct role in the attempt to assassinate Safa” and that “the operation was carried out based on information provided by the Americans.”
The official stated that the US wanted to kill Safa, who has no military role in Hezbollah, as part of a campaign launched by the US Ambassador to Beirut, Lisa Johnson, who recently “called on Lebanese political and non-political forces to begin working to establish the stage of “post-Hezbollah Lebanon.”
Do They Want American Troops to Die?
By Dan McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | October 14, 2024
Biden administration mismanagement—or worse—from day one of the latest Israeli multi-front war in the Middle East has led us to where we are today, at the brink of an all-out regional war with some 40,000 U.S. troops and multiple U.S. military bases in the region with targets on their back.
Biden’s blank check to Israel after the attacks of October 7, 2023, to launch multiple wars against its neighbors and carry out the mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has drawn the U.S. right into the middle of a bubbling cauldron of [World War III]. And rather than take a sober look at actual U.S. national security interests, Biden and his neocon incompetents are busy adding fuel to the fire hanging on to the pipe dream that they could do what they failed to do so many times before: remake the Middle East in their neocon image.
According to an article in Politico this past week, while Biden administration officials publicly urged restraint and a reduction in violence, they privately were working with the Israeli government to encourage a widening of Israel’s military operations to include its northern neighbor, Lebanon. Two top Biden administration officials, Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift Israel’s military focus from the already-flattened Gaza northward to Lebanon.
As Politico reports:
“Behind the scenes, Hochstein, McGurk and other top U.S. national security officials are describing Israel’s Lebanon operations as a history-defining moment—one that will reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.”
Where have we heard this kind of “let’s do war to re-shape the Middle East” argument before? As Wikileaks reminds us, appearing before the U.S. Congress in 2002 and urging the U.S. to attack Iraq, Netanyahu himself promised that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
Yeah, Bibi. How’d that work out for us?
So why is it that 22 years later senior U.S. officials are echoing Netanyahu’s bogus 2002 lies to draw the U.S. into another “history-defining” catastrophe in the Middle East? For Hochstein it might be that he is not the unbiased “honest broker” we need to keep us out of unnecessary war. After all, as The New York Times reminds us, Hochstein was born in Israel, had/has Israeli citizenship, and even served in the Israeli Defense Forces!
Now he is serving as President Biden’s top advisor for the Middle East—a position where it is critical to bring no personal biases to the table.
This should not automatically disqualify him from the position, of course, but just as with concerns over Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken’s Ukrainian background, neocons pushing for war in the “old country” from which they should have left old allegiances behind should raise a few eyebrows.
McGurk is similarly compromised, as he is another Victoria Nuland/Zelig-like character [creature] who has spent his career weaseling into Republican and Democratic administrations as an “expert,” while his actual expertise comprises solely his adherence to the neocon ideology of all war all the time. He was on board for [George W.] Bush’s “remaking of the Middle East” to [Barack] Obama’s fake “Arab Spring to remake the Middle East” to [Donald] Trump’s “trash the Iran deal to remake the Middle East.”
The guy is a loser who has been wrong his whole career, with a trail of failures that would sink a normal person. But like the Energizer Bunny he just keeps on ticking and ticking toward yet another disaster.
As Politico goes on to note, the Hochstein/McGurk plan to urge Israeli attacks on Lebanon was not widely accepted among actual experts in the administration:
“The decision to focus on Hezbollah sparked division within the U.S. government, drawing opposition from people inside the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.”
Of course there is built into the Politico article the assumption that Hochstein and McGurk were at all concerned about “dragging American forces” into Israel’s regional war. In fact, their intent was the opposite. They no doubt yearned to draw the U.S. government into Israel’s regional war.
Which brings us to where we are today, with the Biden Administration committing more U.S. weapons systems and more U.S. military personnel to serve on the ground in Israel in its war against Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. All at once. How’s that for neocon ambition?
As Pentagon Press Secretary Patrick Ryder announced [yesterday]: “At the direction of the President, @SecDef authorized the deployment of a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery and associated crew of U.S. military personnel to Israel to help bolster Israel’s air defenses.”
With today’s [October 13] news that Lebanon successfully counter-attacked Israel—hitting an Israeli military base and taking out dozens of IDF soldiers—it appears certain that President Biden and his neocon-dominated foreign policy team are setting up U.S. military members to be killed in Israel to manufacture consent for a full-on US war against all of Israel’s enemies in the region.
They want American soldiers killed in Israel because they know the enormous propaganda value, particularly among a U.S. population that is increasingly against U.S. involvement in Israel’s wars and in favor of ending them instead.
With Kamala tanking in the eyes of a voting public increasingly unappetized by wilted word salads, an old-fashioned war might be just what the Biden brigades are cooking up to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
With their track record of failure, it is time for those of us who are sane to be very, very worried.
This is going to get really bad really fast if we cannot get the attention of a slumbering—or worse—Congress.
Steadfast Noon Risking Noon Twilight: What are the Risks of NATO’s ‘Nuclear Sharing’ Drills?
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 14.10.2024
NATO kicked off its annual Steadfast Noon nuclear exercises this week. What’s important to know about them? What military assets could they involve? What are the dangers associated with them? Sputnik explores.
NATO’s Steadfast Noon nuclear drills began on Monday and will run over the next two weeks, involving some 2,000 personnel from eight bases and over 60 aircraft from 13 bloc countries. The bulk of the drilling is expected to take place over the North Sea (about 900 km from the Russian border), as well as Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK.
Central to the exercises is drilling the concept of ‘nuclear sharing’ – which allows designated NATO allies’ jets to simulate combat missions using US nukes stored on their territory.
NATO’s nuclear sharing concept goes back to the Cold War, when the US deployed thousands of surface-to-surface, surface-to-air, air-tor-air and air-to-surface weapons with nuclear payloads to allied countries, including Canada, the UK, Greece, Turkiye, Italy, and West Germany. Guarded by US Air Force or Army personnel, the arms remained (and still remain) under the control of the US military, which has the codes needed to arm them.
By 1991, the USSR removed all its nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe, and urged the US to do the same. Washington never did, and today, keeps 100-150 B61 nukes in Europe and Turkiye, including:
- 10-15 bombs at Belgium’s Kleine Brogel Air Base – deliverable by F-16 MLU and F-35A jets.
- 10-15 B61s at Germany’s Buchel Air Base – carried by PA-200 Tornado jets and eventually, F-35As.
- Up to 45 B61s at Italy’s Aviano and Ghedi air bases, deliverable by F-16 C/Ds, Tornados, and F-35As.
- About 20 bombs at the Netherlands’ Volkel Air Base, delivered by F-16 MLUs and F-35As.
- Up to 50 B61s at Turkiye’s Incirlik Air Base, deployed by unspecified US military aircraft.
Poland has expressed readiness to host US nukes under the Nuclear Sharing program. It’s likely the bombs would be deployed at Lask Air Base, central Poland, where the US Air Force has a forward presence, and has already participated in nuclear drilling.
The B61 has been in production since the 1960s, with over 3,000 bombs of 13 different variants created. Today, the arsenal consists mostly of B61 Mod 3 and Mod 4 gravity bombs, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Produced since 1979, these weapons have a yield between 0.3-170 kt (Mod 3) and 0.3-45 kt (Mod 4). A Mod 7 variant also exists, with a yield between 10-340 kt.
Work is underway to replace all three with the Mod 12, which has a 0.3-50 kt yield. Production began in 2021, and 400-500 bombs are expected, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
What are the Risks Associated With Nuclear Sharing?
While B61s are tactical weapons, that doesn’t make them less dangerous than their strategic cousins, in light of the US nuclear doctrine’s allowance for nuke use in a first strike, even against “non-nuclear weapons states,” in certain circumstances. The bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 had yields of 15 and 21 kt, respectively.
The deployment of US nuclear weapons abroad frees the Pentagon’s hands for nuclear aggression involving tactical weaponry far beyond America’s home shores.
Nuclear Sharing program nukes are stored in so-called ‘Weapons Storage and Security System’ (WS3) facilities, situated in underground vaults. While info about the facilities, and even basic details on the nukes’ placement is ordinarily kept in strict secrecy, details about risks associated with hosting the weapons do occasionally leak out.
In 2023, the Federation of American Scientists published a photo of a damaged B61 at Volkel Air Base, showing the misshapen nuke on a trolley with one of its stabilizer fins missing. Neither US nor Dutch authorities informed the public of any incidents involving nukes at the base.
FAS researcher Hans M. Kristensen speculated at the time that the weapon was hit with “significant force,” possibly by a vehicle in transit, or “bent out of shape by the weapons elevator of the underground storage vault.” In any event, the incident constituted “the first publicly known case of a recent nuclear weapons accident at an airbase in Europe,” the observer noted.
FAS stressed that while the risks of an accidental detonation was extremely minute, such an eventuality would have risked widespread nuclear contamination.
Nuclear Sharing is also risk for another reason: heightened nuclear danger.
In the 1980s, when the US placed nuclear-armed Pershing and cruise missiles in Western Europe, it sparked the largest mass protests in modern European history, with three million people in Western Europe, and two million elsewhere, protesting the weapons, and for good reason: the deployment forced the USSR to put its nuclear forces on hair trigger alert, nearly sparking an all-out nuclear war in 1983.
They Think You Are Stupid, Volume 12
Everything you need to know about our ruling class’s opinion of you
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | October 14, 2024
French MEP backs Medvedev’s attack on NATO
RT | October 14, 2024
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was stating the “absolute truth” when he took aim at NATO countries and their support for Ukraine in a scathing recent social media post, French MEP Florian Philippot has said.
The European Parliament member was commenting on a post published by Medvedev on Sunday, in which he pointed to the problems that Ukraine’s Western backers are facing with their economies.
“The West has no money to clean up Florida after Hurricane Milton, no money for French farmers, no money to revive the German industry,” Medvedev, who now serves as deputy head of the Russian Security Council, wrote on Telegram.
These countries, however, still have funds to bankroll “a bunch of drunk and crazy” Ukrainians and to produce weapons “to exterminate the Slavs in the military conflict,” he added.
In a post on X, Philippot, who is leader of the Patriots party, wrote that Medvedev “just smashed the NATO countries by throwing absolute truths at them.” Philippot also took aim at French President Emmanuel Macron, saying he is “also taking a beating” for his recent pledge of a “new check for 3 billion to Zelensky.”
Philippot called on Macron to “stop these checks and these arms shipments,” arguing that Medvedev’s remarks are “factually terribly true!”
During a visit last week to a military camp in eastern France to inspect the training of Ukrainian troops, Macron pledged some €3 billion ($3.3 billion) worth of military aid for Kiev this year. Earlier in 2024, French farmers staged massive protests across the country, demanding that preferential trade rules granted to Kiev be lifted and calling for more government support.
In the US, former President Donald Trump last week accused the administration of President Joe Biden of neglecting the survivors of Hurricane Helene in the southeastern part of the country while sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Germany, which has emerged as one of Kiev’s top backers, is facing a new recession and its economy is set to contract for a second straight year due to shrinking industrial output, high energy prices, and weak foreign demand, according to reports.
Between Russia and Iran all is well that ends well
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | October 14, 2024
The mystery about the hastily-arranged ‘working meeting’ between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian at Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, on Friday has only deepened after the event. This was their first-ever meeting. Putin didn’t even have the post-event presser.
Why such a meeting was considered necessary becomes an intriguing thought, as the two leaders are to meet in Kazan within days on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit on October 22-24.
Russia and Iran have had a difficult relationship through centuries. It still remains complicated, as the protracted negotiations over their strategic partnership treaty show. They have serious conflict of interests, as the controversial idea of Zangezur Corridor makes plain.
The two countries are potential competitors in Europe’s energy market. Both are tough practitioners of strategic autonomy. And their partnership in a future multipolar post-American century will have too many imponderables for an overall prediction.
At Ashgabat, Pezeshkian pointedly suggested to Putin that the signing of their proposed strategic treaty should be speeded up. Putin is known to have approved the draft agreement as far back as September 18. What is holding back the signing ceremony begs an explanation. Pezeshkian proposed that the ceremony could take place in Kazan. But the Russian side is dragging its feet.
Such ambivalence is reminiscent of the inordinate delay some years ago in Russia’s transfer of S-300 mobile surface-to-air missile system to Iran even after Tehran had made payment for the system. In sheer exasperation, Iran filed a $4 billion lawsuit against Russia’s defence export agency and embarked on the manufacture of its own long-range, mobile air defence system, the Bavar-373.
Russia was known to have come under US-Israeli pressure. Geopolitical considerations continue to prevail in Russia’s arms transfers with Iran. Pezeshkian, after his return to Tehran disclosed to the media that he had told Putin that Russia should “act more effectively in relation to the crimes committed by the Zionist regime in Gaza and Lebanon.”
Apparently, the tense exchange at Ashgabat provoked a frank remark later by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov to Tass, the state news agency. Ryabkov said: “We are closely and anxiously following the events [in the Israel-Iran standoff], the risk of a large-scale conflict is indeed high. The tendency to escalate into a full-scale conflict is a real danger. We call on all parties to exercise restraint. We are in intensive dialogue with the countries of the region. And once again — a major war can be avoided, but everyone must show restraint.” [Emphasis added.]
Indeed, Moscow is pragmatically continuing with its ‘neutrality,’ which of course does not help Tehran. At the same time, Putin reportedly did not take a call recently from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu! Presumably, Russian-Israeli cogitations have gone underground.
That is understandable, as Russia keenly monitors the trajectory of the US-Israeli relationship. The paradox is, while powerful strikes on Iran’s infrastructure is impossible without US help and any Israeli plan to attack Iran would require preliminary discussions with the Pentagon, the Biden Administration is hoping with bated breath that Netanyahu keeps it in the loop about planned military actions.
On the other hand, the US’ willingness to assist in planning an offensive against Iran is also iffy. Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper quoted a Russian analyst Vladimir Frolov last week who used to be an employee of the Russian Embassy in the US: “I think Biden and company do not want an escalation [with Iran.] Israel’s relations with Biden are irreparably damaged. Netanyahu is just lying to him… Netanyahu is waiting for Donald Trump.”
That makes it twosome. Like the duo in the Samuel Beckett existential play Waiting for Godot, Putin and Netanyahu are waiting for Trump who may not even come at the end of the day. Committing one hundred percent to Iran, therefore, becomes problematic for the Kremlin. Then, there is the angst in Moscow about the intentions of the Pezeshkian government, which has prioritised the resumption of negotiations with the West.
Tehran noted carefully last week that the US officials went out of the way to affirm that despite tensions with Israel, Tehran is not ‘upgrading’ its nuclear doctrine. A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in Washington added to the public remarks earlier in the week by CIA Director William Burns, who said the US had not seen any evidence of Iran’s Supreme Leader reversing his 2003 decision to suspend the [alleged] weaponisation programme.
Interestingly, Nournews, which is identified with the establishment, commented that the US intelligence assessment “could help explain the US opposition to any Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program in retaliation” — put differently, the US could still be keeping an eye on future nuclear negotiations with Iran.
At the Ashgabat meeting, Pezeshkian told Putin that Iran and Russia have good mutual and complementary potentials and can help each other. Pezeshkian stressed that Iran’s ties with Russia are “sincere and strategic.” He added, “Our positions on global matters are much closer to each other than to those of many other countries.”
According to the Kremlin transcript, Putin told Pezeshkian, “Our relationship with Iran is a priority for us, and it is developing very successfully… We are actively cooperating on the international arena, and often share close or even converging assessments of the ongoing developments.”
However, on his part, Pezeshkian remarked that “we must ensure that our relations improve and become stronger moving forward. We have many opportunities to achieve this objective, and it is our duty to assist one another in these efforts. We share similar visions, and there are many similarities in terms of our respective international standing.”
When it comes to the Ukraine conflict, Tehran’s stance is similar to India’s approach. Interestingly, in a post on X in the weekend, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi wrote that in his recent interactions in New York with top EU officials, he categorically told them “Iran-Russia military cooperation is not new; it has a history, long before the Ukrainian crisis began… I clearly said, and reiterate once again: we’ve NOT provided ballistic missiles to Russia. If Europe needs a case to appease Israel’s blackmail, better find another story.”
At the Ashgabat meeting, neither Putin nor Pezeshkian claimed a strategic convergence in their respective foreign policies. Pezeshkian, nonetheless, assured Putin that he looks forward to attending the upcoming BRICS summit and “we will do everything needed to approve and sign the documents on its agenda.”
EU Leaders Face Grim Reality: How Did Bloc Seal Status as Wilting Geopolitical Power?
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 13.10.2024
Back in the spring of 2022, Russia’s president warned that the European Union’s “suicidal” and “absolutely political” decision to wean itself off of cheap and dependable Russian pipeline energy would culminate in the serious and “perhaps irreversible” loss of competitiveness against other world powers.
“The European project is approaching a tipping point” and threatens to fall into “apathy” and geopolitical irrelevance thanks to internal “political paralysis, external threats and economic malaise,” Bloomberg European Politics & Economics managing editor Ben Sills has suggested in a wistful ode to the EU’s unenviable political and economic prospects in the years to come.
“After decades of warnings and sub-par growth, the region’s leaders are suddenly confronting a barrage of evidence that decline is becoming unstoppable,” Sills’ piece, appearing on the NY-headquartered business news agency’s front page on Sunday, warned.
Pointing to a string of political and economic ‘bad news’ for Europe’s Europhile forces, from gains by the populist right in France to German carmaker giant Volkswagen’s threats to close factories, to Silicon Valley’s exit from European markets over stringent AI rules, the observer suggested that the developments demonstrate “the EU’s failure to act as a cohesive and dynamic economic bloc” against both adversaries and potentially, its allies across the Atlantic.
“If you wanted to be a geopolitical power, then economic might is the key ingredient,” Free University in Brussels professor Guntram Wolff told the outlet, stressing that in Europe, “productivity growth has just been a disaster,” and that while the region “is still rich… these differentials over 20 years have massive implications.”
“Something is changing very dramatically and very, very deeply in this world,” ex-Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski said. “We can’t react correctly, because we are too slow,” he warned.
By comparison, while the US and China – Europe’s major competitors, face problems of their own, they at least have institutions for centralized decision-making, and the ability to “generate vast amounts of private or public capital for defense and investment in cutting-edge technology” – something that’s not the case in the EU’s case.
Sills pointed to surprisingly frank comments by Emmanuel Macron at a panel in Germany earlier this month, where the French president highlighted the “risk” the bloc faces of finding itself “out of the market” if it continues its classic strategies, and pointed to the loss of cheap Russian energy supplies after 2022, combined with the Biden administration’s moves to lure European industries out of the bloc via cheap energy and subsidies, as central to undermining the EU’s export-centered economies’ competitiveness.
“That adds to pre-existing challenges posed by the rise of China and its own vast manufacturing machine, and the global leap forward in technology innovation that has largely bypassed the region,” Sills suggested, warning that “the result threatens to cause damage that goes beyond simply lagging in investment and productivity,” causing EU leaders to ‘lose faith’ in the European project itself.
“It’s not just Eurosceptics like Hungary’s Victor Orban, a perennial thorn in the bloc’s side. Officials in core European countries are starting to view the EU as an obstacle they need to get around – rather than the source of prosperity and protection it has represented until now,” the observer stressed, pointing, for example, to Paris’s talk of integration with a smaller bloc of Western European economies, and divisions on issues like defense and Chinese investment inflows.
But the EU’s woes have been a longtime coming, Sills stressed, pointing out that the bloc has been in “relative decline” going as far back as the euro monetary union in the late 1990s, and citing a Bloomberg analysis estimating that the bloc would be €3 trillion richer “if it had kept pace with the US – enough to boost the income of the average worker by about €13,000 a year.”
Instead, after 2008 and particularly since 2022, many of the region’s traditional powerhouse economies, including Germany, have been teetering on the brink of and occasionally slipping into recession, and facing deindustrialization amid self-inflicted, unsustainably high energy prices, loss of markets and increasingly potent foreign competition.
“Today we see that for absolutely political reasons, due to their own ambitions and under pressure from their American overlords, European countries are imposing more and more sanctions on the oil and gas market,” President Putin said in May 2022 as Brussels announced plans to wean itself off of cheap and dependable pipeline-delivered Russian oil and gas.
“Rejection of Russian energy resources means Europe will systematically become the region with the highest energy costs in the world… This will seriously – and according to some experts irrevocably – undermine the competitiveness of a significant part of European industry, which is already losing the competition to companies in other regions of the world,” Putin said at the time. “One gets the impression that our Western colleagues, politicians and economists have simply forgotten the foundations of the elementary laws of economics, or, to their detriment, prefer to deliberately ignore them,” he added.
No Ramstein Summit of Ukraine’s Arms Donors Set for Near Future – Reports
Sputnik – 13.10.2024
The Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG) is not expected to reconvene in Germany in the near future despite US President Joe Biden’s planned visit to Berlin in the coming week, German media have reported.
Der Spiegel magazine reported Sunday that Biden would travel to Berlin and meet with the top German officials Friday, more than a week after postponing a planned visit to the country to monitor the arrival of Hurricane Milton in Florida.
However, no Ramstein format meeting will be held in the near future, the ZDF broadcaster reported. Instead, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a new standalone military aid package for Ukraine, which he initially planned to reveal at a Ramstein summit, while hosting Volodymyr Zelensky for talks last week.
Biden was originally due to come to US Air Force Base Ramstein on October 12 for a meeting of Ukraine’s donors from the United Kingdom, Germany and France, but the summit was canceled after Biden scrapped the visit.
The Ukraine Defense Contact Group, also known as the Ramstein group, is an informal bloc of 57 nations (including all 32 NATO members, plus EU, G7 members and other US allies providing military equipment and other aid to Ukraine) was formed in April 2022, after the West moved to sabotage a potential Russia-Ukraine peace deal. The group has met well over a dozen times since its creation, coordinating in the delivery of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of aid to Kiev for the ongoing NATO proxy war against Russia.
The Ramstein group is named after the massive US airbase in southwestern Germany where the group has held some of its meetings, with others held at NATO’s Brussels-based headquarters, or virtually.
The contact group’s main goal has been to facilitate lobbying for more weapons deliveries, and formulate plans for new transfers.
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From the Archives
Britain’s secret role in the brutal US war in Vietnam
By Mark Curtis | MintPress News | November 16, 2022
There is a myth the UK did not support Washington’s war against Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, Labour and Conservative governments backed every phase of US military escalation and played secret roles in the conflict, declassified files show.
- UK sent SAS team to Vietnam in 1962, flew secret RAF missions to deliver arms, and provided intelligence to US
- UK governments lied to parliament they were not providing military advice to South Vietnam’s brutal regime
- Labour government secretly gave arms to US for use in Vietnam, stressing need for “no publicity”
- It also connived with Washington to deceive UK public over its support for US
- UK governments knew of atrocities against civilians but backed US war aims
- Whitehall only started to advocate a peaceful solution, on US terms, once the war became unwinnable
During its war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s the US dropped more bombs than in the whole of World War Two, in a conflict that killed over two million people. The wholesale destruction of villages and killing of innocent people was a permanent feature of the US war from the beginning, along with widespread indiscriminate bombing.
Britain’s role in the war has been largely buried and must be almost completely unknown to the public. When the UK media mentions the war now, reports often simply reference the refusal by Harold Wilson’s government to agree to US requests to openly deploy British troops.
Although this was certainly a public rebuff to Washington, Britain did virtually everything else to back the US war over more than a decade, the declassified documents show. … continue
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