US deploying more troops to West Asia amid Israeli escalation of violence
Press TV – September 23, 2024
The US Department of Defense has decided to deploy more boots to West Asia amid the Israeli escalation of war in the region.
Additional US troops will be deployed to the Middle East in response to a sharp spike in violence between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon that has raised the risk of a greater regional war, the Pentagon spokesperson said on Monday.
Gen. Pat Ryder announced the new deployment without providing details on how many additional forces would be needed or what they would be tasked to do.
“In light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional US military personnel forward to augment our forces that are already in the region. But for operational security reasons, I’m not going to comment on or provide specifics.”
The United Nations has sounded the alarm, warning that the escalating violence between the Israeli regime forces and the Hezbollah resistance movement in Lebanon was catapulting the Middle East conflict “to another level”.
Prior to the latest escalation of violence, the Pentagon had announced that the approximately 40,000 US troops deployed in the region were “enough to protect Israel.”
In addition to tens of thousands of troops in the Middle East region, the Pentagon has warships, fighter jets, and air defense systems deployed to protect both its forces and the Israeli regime.
Ryder warned of the potential for the Israel-Hezbollah violence to escalate, calling for a diplomatic solution.
“Clearly there is the potential for these tit-for-tat operations between Israel and Hezbollah to escalate and to potentially spiral out of control into a wider regional war, which is why it’s so important that we resolve… the situation through diplomacy,” Ryder said.
Middle East tensions rose sharply after the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah commander Fuad Shakr in Beirut at the end of July, prompting the Pentagon to begin sending additional US troops to the region. The US military claimed the additional American troops would not be engaged by the Israeli forces for “offensive” operations against Hezbollah.
Pentagon’s announcement comes as fears of a broader regional war grow, with Israel striking hundreds of targets in Lebanon following Israel’s communication devices terror attacks which targeted Hezbollah cadre and civilians with exploding pagers earlier this week. The attacks killed 37 Lebanese and injured thousands more.
World powers have called on the Israeli regime and Hezbollah to pull back from the brink of an all-out war, with the focus of violence shifting sharply in recent days from Israel’s southern front with Gaza to its northern border with Lebanon.
Hezbollah, a powerful political and military force in Lebanon, has exchanged near-daily fire with the Israeli regime forces in support of the defenseless Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI) and the Ansarallah-led government of Yemen stand alongside Hamas and Hezbollah, targeting US and Israeli positions in the region in an effort to oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The occupying zionist regime forces launched the genocidal war on helpless Palestinians trapped in Gaza almost a year ago in early October, which has claimed the lives of more than 41,400 people, most of them innocent women and children.
Will Israel “recklessly” seize the day? “Have the doors to a war without limits been opened?”
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 23, 2024
“After today [the day of the pager simultaneous explosions], there can be no talk about settlement and solutions”, writes Ibrahim Amine, Editor of Al-Akhbar, known for his close contacts with the Hizbullah leadership:
“In just one minute, the enemy succeeded in delivering its harshest blows to the body of the Islamic Resistance … [Furthermore] through yesterday’s operation, the enemy confirmed that it doesn’t want to abide by the rules of engagement. Have the doors to a war [then] been opened: a war without any limits, ceilings, or borders”?
“After today, it [i.e. the Israeli enemy] will make no distinction between a fighter operating on the front and an individual working in some distant office”, Amine noted.
For the last year, both Israel and Hizbullah have avoided major escalation by observing unwritten rules of engagement or ‘equations’ between the parties, such as not targeting civilians. That is now over.
In his first speech since the devices blew up on Tuesday and Wednesday, Sayed Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader, conceded that his group had “endured a severe and cruel blow”. He accused Israel of breaking “all conventions and laws” and said that it would “face just retribution and a bitter reckoning”. But he did not describe how Hezbollah might retaliate; “nor did he discuss the time, nor manner, nor place” of it ocurring.
Nasrallah warned:
“The enemy declares as its official goal to return the settlers to the North. We accept the challenge: You will not be able to return to the North. In fact, we will displace more Israelis from their homes. We hope Israel enters Lebanon, we are waiting for their tanks day and night: We say, ‘welcome!’”.
There is some point to this remark. From the outset, Hizbullah was configured militarily more for all-out war with Israel, than the limited tit-for-tat, calibrated war – which never played best to Hizbullah’s strengths.
Clearly, a new phase of war has begun, and to underline this point, Israel began one of its heaviest strikes on Israel after Nasrallah’s speech on Thursday night. U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin reportedly informed leaders of Congress that evening about his fear of an imminent Israeli offensive into Lebanon.
Nasrallah’s assessment of coming war is fully shared by at least some senior Israeli military commanders, albeit by no means all. Several profess the belief that war with Hizbullah could extend into a regional war – and lead to the collapse of Israel.
However … “You don’t do something like that, hit thousands of people, and think war is not coming”, said retired Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi, who leads the Israel Defence and Security Forum, a group of hawkish former military commanders. “Why didn’t we do it for 11 months? Because we were not willing to go to war yet. What’s happening now? Israel is ready for war”.
“There’s a lot of pressure from the society to go to war and win”, said Avivi, the retired general. “Unless Hezbollah tomorrow morning says, ‘OK, we got the message. We’re pulling out of south Lebanon’ – war is imminent”.
A poll in late August by the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank, found that 67% of Jewish respondents thought Israel should intensify its response to Hizbullah. That includes 46% who believed that Israel should launch a deep offensive striking Lebanese infrastructure, and 21% who seek an intensified response that only strikes on Hezbollah’s infrastructure.
General Avivi’s remarks likely reflect an underlying reality that had become only too clear: Amos Hochstein, the U.S. Envoy, has failed to achieve any ‘diplomatic’ progress towards a Hizbullah withdrawal from the south of Lebanon. In parallel, U.S. officials, (according to the WSJ ) now concede that a Gaza ceasefire is ‘out of reach’ for Biden; and that, equally, Israel’s military attrition on southern Lebanon that had resulted in the displacement of 80% of its inhabitants had achieved nothing. Israel’s northern residents also remain displaced.
It seems, therefore, that Israel is set on a path to wider conflict. A taster has already been given: On 17 September, the Houthis fired a missile at a target close to Ben Gurion airport. The missile covered 1,300 miles in less than 12 min, which is to say, it flew at hypersonic speed, approaching Mach 9 – untouchable by air defences – and struck its target.
It is probable that we shall see more such hypersonic missiles flying – immune to air defences – should this war escalate, and Iran intervene.
What is paradoxical (as so often in conflict) is that the exploding pager operation seemingly was entirely fortuitous in terms of the timing. It was not planned specifically to move Israel to a new phase in the Lebanese conflict:
“High-level regional intelligence sources told Al-Monitor that the decision to carry out the operation was “forced” on Israel following an intelligence lapse … The Israeli military’s original plan was to explode the devices in the event of a full-blown war with Hezbollah in order to gain a strategic edge – but not to detonate them on Tuesday”, the sources added.
“However suspicions from at least two Hezbollah members caused the Israeli security establishment to agree to a premature execution of the plan. After a Hezbollah member in Lebanon suspected foul play with the pagers several days ago – that person was killed, the sources said … [and the plan was] ultimately executed. The subsequent decision to trigger the radios to explode was said to be driven by the expectation that after the pager detonations the radios would fall under suspicion”.
With the weather due to change within a few weeks, curtailing – or even halting – air operations, Israel was faced with having to choose between two alternative courses: Military action within weeks, or to wait until next Spring to exert more pressure on Hizbullah to shift its stance. The political future in Israel going into next year however, is extremely opaque. (Netayahu’s court appearances are due to resume in December).
The Hizbullah member’s unforeseen suspicions about the pagers ‘cast the die’ – taking us to a new level of war.
Unsurprisingly, the chatter in Israel is that the pager operation has resulted in a major blow to Hizbullah’s communication system that will cripple the movement’s military capability, offering Israel the ‘window’ to press home an invasion to establish a ‘buffer zone’ in southern Lebanon – one that might facilitate the return of Israeli residents to the north. Nasrallah promises the opposite: More Israelis will be displaced from their homes in northern Israel.
The notion that Hizbullah’s communications are crippled is wishful thinking that fails to distinguish between what may be called civil-society Hizbullah, and its military arm.
Hizbullah is a civil movement, as well as a military power. It is the Authority over a significant slice of Beirut and a country – a responsibility that requires the Movement to provide civil order and security. The pagers and radios were used primarily by its civil security forces (effectively a civil police managing security and order in Hizbullah-controlled parts of Lebanon), as well as used by its logistics and support branches. Since these personnel are not combat forces, they were not seen to require truly secure communications.
Even before the 2006 war, Hizbullah ended all cellphone and landline communications in favour of their own dedicated optic cable system and hand-courier messaging for the military cadres. In short, Hizbullah’s communications at the civil level took a major hit, but this will not unduly impact upon its military forces. For years, the Movement has operated on the basis that units could continue with combat, even in the event of a complete rupture of optic communications, or the loss of a HQ.
What comes next? Several scenarios are possible: The key is that Netanyahu is now back in “his comfort zone”. The talk about hostages has subsided, and the plans for the stealth, calibrated expulsion of the Palestinian population are unfolding under the supervision of ministers Ben Gvir, Smotrich and others on the Right. Defence Minister Gallant has even declared military ‘victory’ in Gaza.
And it seems that Gallant too, has bowed to the inevitable: Netanyahu, it would seem, has got his way – bypassing Gallant and senior IDF officers’ objections to escalation versus Hizbullah, without having to sack the popular Gallant as defence minister, and without having to take in the troublesome Gideon Saar into his government!
Defence Minister Gallant, IDF chief Halevi and other IDF officials all issued statements on Wednesday evening which appeared to suggest a full-on war with Hizbullah was brewing, hours after the wave of explosions of communications devices across Lebanon.
From Netanyahu’s perspective, the U.S. – however grudgingly – is committed to supporting Israel in this war, and in a wider war, should Iran enter the fray. The U.S. hints its support is not open-ended, but Netanyahu probably counts on its engagement inexorably ratchetting up as events unfold, pulling the U.S. further in. (The Israel-supporting power-structures would never countenance any abandonment of an Israel in danger, in any case).
Judging by the statements out of Israel, the consensus is that Hizbullah will retaliate, but in a way that is different from the way it has responded until now. Will it make do with a limited response? That is unclear. But anything it does do could lead to an exchange of blows that, in turn, will precipitate a large-scale war.
Senior officials in the IDF and in other parts of the security establishment warn openly against ‘reckless steps being planned by their government in the north’. On the one hand, these steps carry a very tangible danger of flaring up a general state of war, not only on the border with Lebanon, but in the entire region; and on the other hand, they do not promise a solution that will allow the residents of the north to return to their homes, or that the Gaza hostages will ever be released.
Victoria Nuland Counters Her Own State Propaganda

By James Wile | The Libertarian Institute | September 23, 2024
Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland gave an interview with exiled Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar that was published to YouTube on September 3 and the conversation deserves more attention than it received. While an interview from three weeks ago might seem like old news, it contained an astonishing admission from Nuland that seemed to slip under the radar of many listeners.
The part of the conversation that received the most coverage was Nuland saying the United States government persuaded Ukraine to walk away from peace negotiations with Russia in the early weeks of their war. People who get their news from sources outside the corporate media were already aware the West had almost certainly talked Ukraine out of accepting a peace deal, but it was still shocking to see a former U.S. State official smile as she acknowledged that her government had acted as an obstacle to peace.
But there was another part of the interview that was equally damning and of greater relevance to the current threat of global war.
Almost an hour into the interview, Nuland was describing the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and said, “But it was also really interesting to see how bad the Russian military was. I mean in the United States it really completely dispelled this myth of this massive superpower military that could roll across Europe any time it felt like it.”
My eyes nearly popped out of my skull when I heard this statement. The fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin is hell-bent on conquering a new Russian Empire has been a constant justification for American support for this proxy war. But according to Nuland, the United States government has known Russia is not powerful enough to “roll across Europe” since early 2022. Nuland said this as if she were merely adding an interesting factoid to her interview, unaware that she was contradicting years of propaganda designed to keep the West afraid that the Soviet Union could rise from the dead at any moment.
This fear of a new Russian Empire has not been a secondary point in the pro-war position. It has been the cornerstone on which the entire argument is built. If the world does not unite to resist this Russian aggression against Ukraine, then it will only be a matter of time until Russia does the same to the rest of Eastern Europe. Nations will fall under the thumb of Putin one by one until half of Europe finds itself once again living behind an iron curtain of tyranny.
This new domino theory of Russian ambition has been the subject of countless headlines, articles, and interviews meant to keep the faucet of American support for Ukraine open and running.
In April, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison claimed that Putin’s “goal is to recreate the Soviet Union so that means he will have to go into NATO countries.”
Headlines in 2022 included “Restoration of empire is the endgame for Russia’s Vladimir Putin,” and “Putin’s dark designs: Restore the pre-1917 Russian empire.”
You can even find articles from ten years ago associating Putin with “The rebuilding of ‘Soviet’ Russia.”
But in twenty seconds of an interview, Victoria Nuland revealed that for over two years the United States government has known Russia is not powerful enough to recreate the Russian Empire. So, any corporate media outlet or government mouthpiece who used this threat as a legitimate reason to continue funding the proxy war was either lying or being a useful idiot.
Antiwar voices have been arguing for years that the fear of Putin reconstituting an empire from Siberia to Central Europe is ridiculous, but Nuland is not some antiwar dove. She has been among the most hawkish voices in the United States when it comes to the situation in Eastern Europe.
Nuland, of course, would describe herself differently. According to her, Putin has overstated the part she played in Ukraine. Despite being an assistant secretary of State, she was “a nobody,” and Putin’s exaggeration of her role was a “bizarre act of desperation” that demonstrated his “own insecurity about losing Ukraine,” but there is no doubt her fingerprints can be found all over the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The most infamous example is the phone call leaked in 2014 where Nuland can be heard talking openly about the United States meddling in the government of Ukraine. In the call, she said, “I don’t think Klitsch [Ukrainian politician Vitali Klitschko] should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think it’s a good idea.” She was talking about who should be a part of a foreign government as casually as she would discuss which intern in her department should be considered for a permanent position. You do not need to be an expert in Ukrainian politics to be taken aback by such shamelessness.
Nuland has also called for the continuation of U.S. support for the war. In February 2024 she gave a speech at the Center for Strategic & International Studies where she said, “With the sixty billion dollar supplemental that the administration has requested of Congress, we can ensure that Ukraine not only survives, but she thrives.” If she wants to ensure Ukraine continues to receive U.S. funding, she has no incentive to downplay the threat posed by the Russian military. This makes it even more unbelievable that she admitted the United States knows the threat of a new Russian Empire is nonexistent.
One of the U.S. regime’s chief actors has fact-checked her own regime’s propaganda. This would be like Colin Powell giving an interview in 2003 saying the United States knew that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
For readers who did not live through the deluge of propaganda leading up to the Iraq War, Colin Powell was the secretary of State under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005. He gave a speech at the United Nations on February 5, 2003 in which he used Hussien’s WMDs as justification for invading Iraq. The invasion uncovered no evidence of WMDs, but the threat of these weapons had been enough to get the U.S. government the invasion of Iraq that they were after.
If Powell had given an interview a few weeks later equivalent to Nuland’s, the entire pretext for war with Iraq would have evaporated.
It is difficult to believe a majority of the American public would have supported invading Iraq if Powell had made such an admission. Nuland’s concession should be equally impactful, but the world has continued moving forward as if the interview never happened. Kamala Harris and other war hawks continue to repeat the “myth” that Putin is going to march through Europe unless we stop him here and now.
Maybe Nuland’s shocking rebuttal of her own State Department’s propaganda was overshadowed by other stories. Maybe the corporate media was happy to keep the interview buried and out of the spotlight. One way or another, the American people need to wake up to the fact that the war in Ukraine is just another war sold on lies.
Hillary Clinton’s Sordid History of Secrecy and Censorship

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | September 23, 2024
“You could drop Hillary into any trouble spot, come back in a month and… she will have made it better,” former President Bill Clinton declared in a 2016 speech championing his wife’s presidential candidacy. But Hillary’s entry into the brawls surrounding the 2024 presidential election will leave many Americans wishing to drop her elsewhere.
As the race enters the home stretch, Hillary Clinton is riding in like Joan of Arc to rescue truth—or at least to call for hammering government critics. But Hillary has been a triple threat to American democracy for fifteen years.
Last Monday evening, Hillary declared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC talk show that the federal government should criminally prosecute Americans who share “propaganda”—which she made no effort to define.
Hillary has long been one of America’s foremost censorship advocates. In 2021, she announced that there must be “a global reckoning with the disinformation, with the monopolistic power and control, with the lack of accountability that the [social media] platforms currently enjoy.” Hillary made her utterance at a time when freedom in much of the world had been obliterated by governments responding to a pandemic that occurred as a result of U.S. government funding reckless experiments in Chinese government labs. The U.S. denial of its role in the lab leak was perhaps the biggest deceit of the decade but Hillary never kvetched about that scam regarding a program that contributed to millions of deaths. But that wasn’t disinformation—that was public service.
In 2022, Hillary wailed that “tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability” and endorsed European Union legislation to obliterate free speech. But “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.
That awkward fact didn’t deter Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz from declaring last month, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Who knew the Minnesota version of the First Amendment has a loophole bigger than Duluth?
After the New York Post shot down Joe Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as chief of a White House disinformation task force to find ways to protect women and LGBTQI+ politicians and journalists from vigorous criticism on the Internet (“online harassment and abuse”). Harris declared that such criticism could “preclude women from political decision-making about their own lives and communities, undermine the functioning of democracy.” To save democracy, the government must suppress criticism of women.
Five years ago, at an NAACP Detroit “Freedom Fund” dinner, Harris proclaimed, “We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.” She did not specify the precise degree of alleged rancor required to nullify a speaker’s constitutional rights. Based on Harris’s prior comments, she will likely sharply increase repression of her critics on social media if she wins in November.
Biden administration censorship schemes have been denounced by federal courts and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), chair of the House Cybersecurity Subcommittee, sent the White House a letter last week noting that the Biden administration always “advertised its willingness to manipulate the content of social media sites” and called for a cessation of all federal censorship tainting the 2024 election. Mace requested copies of all official “communications with social media companies…concerning the concealment or suppression of information on their sites.” At last report, nobody on Capitol Hill was sitting on the edge of their chair waiting for an informative White House response.
Hillary’s own career exemplifies a political elitist righteously blindfolding all other Americans.
When she was secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Clinton exempted herself from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), setting up a private server in her New York mansion to handle her official email. The State Department ignored seventeen FOIA requests for her emails and said it needed seventy-five years to comply with a FOIA request for Hillary’s aides’ emails. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shrugged off Hillary’s aides using a program called BleachBit to destroy 30,000 of her emails under subpoena by a congressional committee. Federal Judge Royce Lamberth labeled the Clinton email coverup “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.” An Inspector General report slammed FBI investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the discovery of key evidence. The IG report “questioned whether the use of a subpoena or search warrant might have encouraged Clinton, her lawyers… or others to search harder for the missing devices (containing email), or ensured that they were being honest that they could not find them.” The FBI’s treatment of Hillary Clinton vivified how far federal law enforcement will twist the law to absolve the nation’s political elite, or at least those tied to the Democratic Party.
During Clinton’s tenure, the State Department gave grants to promote investigative journalism in numerous developing nations as part of its “good governance” programs. But exposing abuses was only a virtue outside U.S. territorial limits. Clinton vigorously covered up debacles in the $200 billion in foreign aid she shoveled out. From 2011 onward, AID’s acting inspector general massively deleted information on foreign aid debacles in audit reports, as The Washington Post reported in 2014. Clinton’s machinations helped delude Washington policymakers and Congress about the profound failures of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.
Pirouetting as a champion of candor is a novel role for the former secretary of State. Shortly before the 2016 election, a Gallup poll found that only 33% of voters believed Hillary was honest and trustworthy, and only 35% trusted Donald Trump. The Clinton-Trump tag team made “post-truth” the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year.
Hillary believes that the lesson of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is that good citizens should shut up and grovel. In her 2017 memoir, Hillary claimed that Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed the peril of critics who “sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.” Did Hillary think Orwell dedicated the novel to Stalin? Hillary’s book noted that the regime in Orwell’s novel had physically tortured its victims to delude them. Hillary is comparatively humane, since she only wants to leave people forever in the dark—well, except for the scumbags who undermine the official storyline.
Hillary was a key player in the Barack Obama administration that believed that Americans had no right to learn the facts of the torture committed by the CIA after 9/11. When she was secretary of State in 2012, she declared, “Lack of transparency eats away like a cancer at the trust people should have in their government.” But the more secrets politicians keep, the less trust they deserve.
Hillary’s vision of democracy permits only token interference by underlings. She believes that poohbahs like her have the right to rig elections to sanctify their power. In 2015, when she was running for the presidency, she condemned voter identification requirements as part of a “sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people.” A Washington Post headline aptly summarized her message: “Hillary Clinton Declares War on Voter ID.” This is the bargain Hillary offered; voters didn’t have to identify themselves and she didn’t disclose what she did in office. Subsequent Democratic Party attacks on Voter ID were more successful, leading to sixty million ballots for Biden, millions of which were counted but not verified.
To sanctify censorship, Hillary is again invoking the Russian peril. A 316-page report last year by Special Counsel John Durham noted that in mid-2016, after the shellacking she suffered from her email scandal, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” President Barack Obama was briefed on the Clinton proposal “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign even though no FBI personnel apparently took “any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence.”
The first three years of Trump’s presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. In 2019, an Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and persistently deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign.
Hillary’s scams were even too much for federal scorekeepers. The Federal Election Commission last year levied a $113,000 fine on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in the Steele dossier, which spurred the FBI’s illegal surveillance of Trump campaign officials.
In Hillary’s new improved version of the Constitution, there is no free speech for “deplorables”—the vast swath of Americans she openly condemned in 2016. But this is the same mindset being shown by the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. Harris has scorned almost every opportunity to explain how she would use the power she is seeking to capture over American citizens. Instead, she is entitled to the Oval Office by acclamation of the mainstream media and all decent folks—or at least those who drive electric vehicles and donate to her campaign.
Is “disinformation” becoming simply another stick for rulers to use to flog uppity citizens? Denouncing disinformation sounds better than “shut up, peasants!” But if politicians have no obligation to disclose how they use their power and can persecute citizen who expose their abuses, how in Hades can American freedom survive? How can we permit our rulers to selectively squelch citizens based on alleged hateful comments when, as historian Henry Adams pointed out a century ago, politics “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
Ambitious politicians never lack pious pretenses for destroying freedom. But will censorship by the Biden administration steal the 2024 election for Harris? Unfortunately, according to Hillary Clinton, you are not worthy of knowing the answer.
America in collapse plays world leader
By Lorenzo Maria Pacini | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 23, 2024
American officials have sacrificed national security for decades in pursuit of national superiority. Further arms supplies to Ukraine will not guarantee victory for Kiev, but will only lead to escalation. This is not in the interest of the U.S., which should first and foremost take care of its own population.
A generational political problem
Some might ask the American political leadership – of whatever faction it is – whether they have realised that the U.S. is no longer the boss of the world. If the answer is no, an extensive update dossier would be needed, to be delivered very quickly to the desk of the president on duty.
There is no more time. We repeat: there is no more time.
The United States is in the midst of a political crisis afflicting the entire West (which happens to be directly influenced by the USA) and has not yet managed to resolve it. This poses a major disadvantage internationally, because all around there is a world that is moving forward, in a multipolar key, with a large number of governments and peoples who no longer want to remain under the heel of the invader and who are rebelling, some through markets, some through partnerships, some through revolutions.
In all of this, the U.S. is in the midst of a social crisis that mirrors the unprecedented political one. The demise of the West, as Oswald Spengler put it, is louder than people think. Nobody cares about Americans any more, because there are basically no politicians who have America at heart any more, while they rather have their own interests at heart. This process of separation of governance-representation-people is one of the most delicate points of a transition phase that will lead the whole of humanity to have to rethink the political processes through which societies organise themselves. The problem is that the U.S. is still an imperialist political system with tentacles all over the world, and the dollar has been the main currency dominating the planet for almost a century, so the consequences of this debacle will be equally unprecedented. The final metastasis of a sick society cannot be avoided.
The American generational problem is very much reflected in the country’s foreign policy: while it is true that there is a masterful consistency with the long-term planning that was established at the beginning of the 20th century, it is equally true that things have not gone as strategists and analysts expected. Reality must now be reckoned with. The U.S. has a very exclusive, lobbying, elitist education system linked to a few power groups, whose dependence on the ‘matrices’ of London and Tel Aviv makes the success of candidates complex. Many are called but few are elected, to paraphrase the well-known gospel verse. Instead, the masses have been fed an education that has resulted in a general impoverishment, a sudden lowering of skills and irreparable cultural damage, starting a process that is self-perpetuating through its own successes (which are actually failures). Who will think about Americans in the future? Not even the current election candidates have managed to find the minimum number of successors.
While the belligerent rhetoric continues, the U.S. is being destabilised by an unprecedented illegal immigration, settling social protests with violence or a few doses of new cheap psychotropic drugs, producing some new mass entertainment to keep the protest within tolerable limits. Perhaps nobody really cares what will happen in the ‘New World’ across the Atlantic Ocean. Or perhaps they care enough to let the murderer die his own death.
Sacrifice must be worth the victory
From a strategic point of view, the situation is quite well-known. The Western Front, ça va sans dire, has never gained any real military advantage. An incalculable amount of money has been spent on supplying Ukraine with weapons of all kinds, from the older ones that were pulled out of the post-Soviet arsenals to the more recently manufactured ones, hand in hand with the (still ongoing) training of Ukrainian commanding officers and special units, which, let us remember, have not yet come into play in the conflict, where instead conscripts and reserves have been sent.
The countries that supported the conflict on the western side came to have to change their state budgets in order to meet Zelensky’s demands and turn their economies into war economies, where it was more or less possible and convenient. The whole of Europe, at the behest of the United States of America, entered a slow phase of rearmament such as has not happened since the Second World War.
The colourful industrial arms machine has given billions of dollars to arms companies. How many F-16s have been supplied to Ukraine? How many F-35s are being prepared? How many ATACMS are being discussed in Congress these days? And from the European Parliament, a perfect obedient vassal, which missile models are on the agenda? We have become accustomed to hearing about weapons as if we were talking about sporting matches with our favourite athletes, cheering and getting excited as we hear the cost of a device capable of killing thousands of people. But war is not a game, not a joke.
Although the possibility of striking further and harder in Russia may lift the morale of the Ukrainians, it is the battle on the ground that will determine the outcome of the conflict, and there Kiev is losing. Even in terms of info-warfare, there are no longer any special results, and by now even the mainstream media realise that something is wrong. The rhetoric of the ideal battle for Ukraine has been rehashed in all sorts of ways, without bringing any meaningful results other than to entice a few young men to go to the front to become cannon fodder.
Even if additional Western weapons would not lead to victory for Kiev, they could expand or intensify the war, and this is not in America’s interest. The allies’ sympathies are understandably with Ukraine, despite NATO’s ill-considered push towards the Russian border. However, their first responsibility is to their own nations, which is why they never kept their infamous 2008 promise to bring Ukraine and Georgia into the transatlantic alliance. No one was willing to go to war with Russia over either country.
The proxy war is blurring the delicate line between war and peace.
How much longer will the patience of other international actors who are watching have to be abused? The conflict will not remain only within the borders of Europe, and if it does, the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War taught us, decades ago, that no war is ‘national’ and confineable any more. European countries have relations with numerous other non-European states, which have every interest in protecting their own affairs and not losing out from an extended conflict at the behest of the overbearing U.S. Lady.
And how would the U.S. benefit from this? The prospect is that of a global escalation in which the majority is no longer on the side of the Americans, and this is now an indisputable fact.
The U.S. faces a number of very serious risks and if it does not take them into account, the damage will be irreparable.
A very serious question: what will be left afterwards?
While it is true that the armaments and manpower provided have managed to slow down, at least partially, the Russian reconquest, it is equally true that there has been no victory. This is understandable if one keeps in mind that the Special Military Operation is not a conventional war and that it was deliberately fought according to the strategic criteria of total hybrid warfare from the very beginning. The Americans never wanted to try to win the conflict immediately, otherwise they would have followed another strategy, more militarily aggressive and involving the European countries in a flash-war from the outset.
What has been done, instead, is a slow work of rearranging the entire West in an anti-multipolar key, going against the initiatives already advanced before February 2022 by Russia, China and other countries that were freeing themselves from Anglo-American hegemony. The U.S. has led Europe into an abyss, more so than before, after almost a century of military occupation, political subservience, economic enslavement and cultural devastation. Now there is no choice: either total revolution or participation in the last act of this macabre theatre, the direction of which will in any case make profits, no matter whether in the short or long term. A very important strategic principle is never to sacrifice something or someone unless you have something to gain from it. And the U.S. knows this very well.
At the time of the U.S. election campaign, we keep hearing about ‘diplomacy’ to try to resolve the conflict in Ukraine… or, perhaps, in truth it is to try to resolve the internal U.S. war? Because to be honest, without a stable nation, no diplomacy makes sense. Who would ever sit at the table with an enemy about to succumb to implosion? With what credibility does the U.S. still allow itself to raise its voice against the ‘rest of the world’?
The question then is: what will be left afterwards? It is a question we are perhaps asking ourselves too late.
Proud to Be Suing Hospitals and Doctors That Inject Hep B Vaccines Into Newborns Without Parental Consent
Injecting Freedom by Aaron Siri | September 21, 2024
Informed Consent Action Network is supporting an initiative that is long overdue: suing doctors and hospitals that inject newborns with a hepatitis B vaccine without parental consent.
The hepatitis B vaccine is a case study in agency capture. The target for this product was sex workers and intravenous drug users, and the rare pregnant mother who was hepatitis B positive. The problem was that CDC could not get the sex workers and intravenous drug users to take this product. The story would have ended there if pharma didn’t stand to earn billions through a wider mandate of this product.
With those billions at stake, an argument was made that if all newborns were vaccinated (not just the tiny number whose mothers were hepatitis B positive) then we could catch these babies before they became prostitutes or heroin addicts. CDC’s advisory committee, stacked with individuals receiving funding from pharma, added it to the routine childhood schedule in 1995.
Parents who decide not to inject their babies with this product have varying reasons. Some simply conclude that their baby won’t be having sex or sharing dirty needles with drug addicts—usually a safe assumption. Others are horrified that the two hepatitis B vaccines available for babies were licensed based on clinical trials with only 5 days of safety monitoring.
Let me repeat: 5 days. If that sounds incredible and shocking, it is because it is incredible and shocking. But that is the simple, cold hard truth. See for yourself in Section 6.1 of the package insert for Engerix-B and Recombivax HB, the only hep B vaccines licensed in the U.S. for use in newborns. ICAN has even formally petitioned FDA to withdraw license of this vaccine until a proper clinical trial is conducted.
(In that petition you can read about all the related legal work our firm has done on behalf of ICAN, including confirming that this ridiculously inadequate safety review period is, in fact, true.)
There are also other reasons parents choose not to inject this product into their babies, including the anemic post-licensure safety studies, harms suffered by an older sibling from this product, or religious beliefs.
All that said, we are proud to be bringing lawsuits against doctors and hospitals across the country that vaccinate newborns with this product without parental consent. You can read more about this on ICAN’s page, our firm’s page, or stay tuned for a segment about this on The HighWire.
US Media Cover Up Their Own People Setting Themselves on Fire to Stop the Gaza Genocide

US citizen Matt Nelson set himself ablaze in solidarity protest of his country’s support of the genocide in Gaza. (Photo: video grab)
By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | September 22, 2024
So far, three US citizens have self-immolated in protest of their government’s support for Israel’s ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza.
However, in two of the cases, American media actively worked to cover up that it even happened, and the most prominent example they deflected, trying to hint at mental illness being the reason.
On September 11, a man named Matt Nelson set himself ablaze across the street from the Israeli consulate in Boston.
“My name is Matt Nelson and I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” echoing the speech delivered by Aaron Bushnell who also self-immolated on February 24.
Matt Nelson went on to say that “we are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care,” adding that “we are all culpable in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
He then stated:
“The protest I’m about to engage in is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians, to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, and to support the (International Criminal Court) indictment of (Israeli Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government.”
There can be no mistaking the intentions of Matt Nelson’s actions and even without the video, the fact that he was positioned right across from the road from the Israeli consulate when he self-immolated is enough of an indicator that this was a political act. However, not for the likes of NBC Boston who ran the headline “Man sets himself on fire outside Four Seasons hotel in Boston, witnesses say”.
Even Israeli media outlets like The Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel covered the story with correct headlines, but not Western corporate media. In the US media, they either ignored it altogether or decided to twist it to make it seem like a random act of suicide.
On December 1, a similar instance occurred when a woman – whose name still has not been released to the public – self-immolated in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia.
While the Atlanta Police Department publicly stated that what happened was an “act of extreme political protest”, the story was completely ignored in Western Corporate media.
The only exception to the story was the self-immolation of 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell, who was an active-duty airman, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington this February.
While the coverage began with a similarly biased slant, where his act was depicted as a man lighting himself on fire, without any reason being presented, the truth could not be ignored in the end after it went viral on social media.
Aaron Bushnell had live-streamed the whole event, giving his very clearly stated reason for his actions that day and providing the world with a video of him burning alive while screaming “free Palestine” literally until his dying breath. Everyone who watched the video, either with blur over his body as he burned, or without it, was similarly in shock.
The fact that a young American man would put on his military uniform, cover himself with flammable liquid and scream the words “free Palestine” until he literally couldn’t speak anymore, should have been enough to shock the world. However, the corporate media decided to try and paint him as being mentally ill, later burying the story.
Instead of being praised as heroes who sacrificed themselves in order to try and prevent a genocide from continuing, the US media has put the interests of Israel ahead of its own people, hiding the truth, and actively participating in blocking their voices from being heard. Luckily, however, in the era of social media, their words still remain free for those who seek to hear them.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
TikTok Likely Coerced Into Scrubbing Sputnik Ahead of Pivotal US Vote to ‘Get Feds Off Their Back’
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 21.09.2024
Hugely popular video-sharing platform TikTak removed Sputnik International’s account without warning on Saturday, providing no explanation for its decision. Sputnik asked a leading US military and intelligence analyst and former Washington insider about the likely motive of the move.
While it has no legal leg to stand on and an utter lack of domestic support for a ban on TikTok, what the US State Department does have is “unlimited resources with which to prosecute TikTok as a company,” and the latter may have chosen to cooperate with the state by scrubbing Sputnik’s channel to try to “get the feds off their backs,” retired Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski told Sputnik.
“Of course, the better choice for Americans would be for TikTok to refuse to cooperate, forcing the federal government’s hand. If the incredibly popular and useful TikTok were to be banned in response to their refusal to remove selected overseas media, it would wake up the masses to the diminished state of their liberty,” she suggested.
Citing the ability of alternative news sources to break through establishment narratives using social media, including to provide an alternative, outsider’s take on US politics and candidates’ respective foreign policy positions, Kwiatkowski predicted that “any reversal of this unwarranted ban” on Sputnik will happen only after the vote, with the restrictions thus serving as “a direct example of the DoJ interfering with the election, and undermining the concept of an informed citizenry prior to an election.”
The deep state needs total “hegemony in the information arena, just as with financial and military power,” Kwiatkowski explained. “The US leadership team believes they can manage all narratives, and limit the flow of evidence that contradicts the current narrative. Domestically, this has worked well, as we saw with the instant domestic media reversal on the health and performance of Joe Biden. Internationally, this control is more of a challenge.”
Furthermore, the state actually has little choice but to continue its attempts to control the narrative and suppress the harmful impacts of its actions both at home and abroad, according to the observer, since the United States today is more and more coming to resemble a “failed state” – suffering from ballooning debt, an electoral system and government lacking transparency, and a leadership taking huge risks with the economy and Americans’ security through their foreign and domestic policies.
“Lastly, the CIA and the surveillance sector of government, which has long specialized in the manipulation of information abroad, and to a significant extent domestically, is more powerful than ever. Its world very much requires the suppression of information and the shaping of ‘truth’ in order to ‘succeed’,” Kwiatkowski stressed.
The federal government and the Justice Department operate using a legally dubious, unwritten code of conduct, Kwiatkowski said, pointing out there’s no legal requirement to ban foreign news sources, and that virtually all of the executive branch’s various bans, boycotts, embargos and other restrictions are unlawful under the Constitution.
“Likewise, the modern US surveillance state uses IT, telecommunications and social media companies as their extra-constitutional tool to directly violate the 1st and 4th Amendments that do not allow federal interference in the conduct of speech, movement, beliefs, assembly, redress of government, and security of body, property and communications. This is the world that TikTok and all social media companies operate in – do what the government tells you or face market losses, and criminal prosecution that while ultimately winnable, can bankrupt most businesses,” Kwiatkowski summed up.
Could Bird Flu Be the October Surprise?
By Clayton J. Baker, MD | Brownstone Institute | September 21, 2024
Bird flu was the hot topic in pandemic fear-mongering until very recently. Just a few months ago, former CDC director Robert Redfield publicly described Bird flu (also known as H5N1 Influenza A or Avian Influenza virus) as the likely next pandemic – predicting a laboratory-leaked virus as the cause. Meanwhile, Deborah Birx, aka the “Scarf Lady” of Covid infamy, was making the TV news, promoting an unrealistic and excessive program of testing farm animals and humans for Bird flu.
At present, bird flu seems to have been put on the back burner by the authorities. Monkeypox has since taken center stage, with the World Health Organization declaring a state of emergency over that virus. Furthermore, the “experts” have trotted out numerous other viruses with which to terrify the public. Examples include West Nile virus – who no less than Anthony Fauci himself supposedly contracted – and even the exotic “Sloth virus” (also known as Oropouche virus).
The first step in dealing with these continual reports of horrific pathogens is recognizing the vital importance of living in knowledge rather than in fear. “Fear porn” is a real psychological weapon and one that is being used against us on a daily basis. As we painfully learned during Covid, a terrified population is easily manipulated, controlled, and exploited. As free citizens, we must remain mindful and knowledgeable, rather than fearful, about the flood of information and propaganda that is hurled at us.
Regarding bird flu, we should remain mindful of the following. In its current iteration, bird flu has caused no widespread human illness, no human deaths, and sporadic outbreaks in farm animal populations. However, there is much evidence that bird flu could be used as a bioweapon. Furthermore, it could also be applied to disrupt the November 5 US Presidential election.
Here are 3 reasons why bird flu may still be weaponized to alter the election:
- Multiple bio labs in the United States and abroad – such as the lab run by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, PhD at the University of Wisconsin – perform alarming Gain-of-Function research on the H5N1 virus, making variants of the virus that are much more dangerous to humans than variants that occur in nature. These labs have had leaks with alarming frequency. The current strains of bird flu in the US show strong genetic evidence of having originated in a laboratory. A laboratory leak of a new strain of the virus, manipulated to be highly transmissible and/or pathogenic in humans, remains a real possibility.
- The “International Bird Flu Summit” will be held on October 2-4, 2024 at the Hilton Fairfax in Fairfax, VA – just outside Washington, DC – exactly one month prior to the election. Listed topics include “Command, Control and Management,” “Emergency Response Management,” and “Surveillance and Data Management.” If this sounds eerily reminiscent to you of the Covid lockdowns – which were also closely preceded by government-based planning exercises – your memory serves you well.
- The infrastructure is already in place for a “pandemic” of bird flu, much more than it is for other potential pathogens. Already, widespread testing of farms is underway. The development of bird flu vaccines has increased dramatically. The FDA has already approved vaccines made by Sanofi, GSK subsidiary ID Biomedical Corporation of Quebec, and CSL Seqirus, while Moderna recently received a $176 million government grant for its mRNA-based bird flu injection, which is in development.
In the bigger picture, a number of viruses could potentially be employed as an “October Surprise” to disrupt the election. Bird flu appears to be a leading candidate (pun intended), but it is not the only one.
We, as citizens, must remain vigilant to this threat to our electoral process. We should contact our local and state officials now, before anything is attempted, and express our absolute insistence on fair, legal, and regular elections. We should share this information widely with others so that all are aware of what might be attempted. Over the longer term, we must work to end Gain-of-Function research.
With Covid, we experienced first-hand what can be done to our civil rights and to our Constitutionally guaranteed electoral and governmental processes when a fear-driven, emergency-based takeover of society occurs. As free citizens, we must never allow this to happen again. From now on, we must live in knowledge, not in fear.
C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

