Parody of a Statesman: Antony Blinken, Secretary of War
By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | July 8, 2024
For Halloween last year, the United States’ highest ranked diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, dressed his son and daughter up as Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian flag, respectively. At a White House event on that day, Blinken’s children were photographed soliciting candy from President Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Zelensky himself had been doing his usual media circuit, appearing progressively more desperate to extract a fresh supply of “candy” from U.S. taxpayers by way of their nonrepresentative elected officials, most of whom, it would seem, have little if any interest in what their voting constituents have to say. In one poignant performance, the embattled Ukrainian commander-in-chief and former professional dancer lamented that the crisis in Israel was drawing attention away from Ukraine. In another widely disseminated video clip, Zelensky implored the audience that, if they could not give him more money, then they should at least extend him some credit, which he promised Ukraine would pay back.
It seemed as though the end was nigh for Zelensky, who was looking more and more like would-have-been Venezuelan “president” Juan Guaidó. When, during one of the primary debates, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy characterized Zelensky as a “Nazi” and a “comedian in cargo pants,” he boldly articulated an impolite sentiment shared by at least some of the people who have grown weary of seeing the Ukrainian president parade around in mud-green garb and hobnobbing with the likes of Sean Penn, Greta Thunberg, Ursula von der Leyen, and every politician under the sun on the military-industrial complex gravy train. And yet, Zelensky clings on to power, having canceled what was supposed to be the 2024 presidential election with the full blessing of both halves of the War Party duopoly.
In a more recent performance, on May 14, 2024, Secretary Blinken belted out Neil Young’s ballad, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” at a basement bar in Kiev. Blinken displayed his prowess on the electric guitar while doing his best to demonstrate that he personally relates to the people of Ukraine, who have endured uncertainty regarding their future and prospects for a return to any semblance of normal life since the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022. Dead people have obviously lost all of their freedom, so Blinken’s audience comprised a select group among the survivors savoring their tenuous existence, and the fact that they are not currently being pursued, as many unfortunate draft dodgers are, by the conscription police—at least not for now. The government of Ukraine has lowered the requirements for and lifted restrictions on the military conscription of unwilling citizens, while postponing the presidential election indefinitely, on the grounds that “We are at war.” Martial law remains in place, with Ukrainians living in what is tantamount to a dictatorship under Zelensky, notwithstanding Blinken’s heartfelt crooning about freedom and democracy.
Before becoming secretary of state, while an advisor to Biden’s campaign, Antony Blinken appears to have earned the esteem of whoever would come to run the Biden administration by setting in motion the composition of the now-discredited letter signed by fifty-one members of the “intelligence community” expressing doubts about the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop. The computer in question, discovered before the 2020 election, contained a surprising array of photos of Hunter and, more importantly, what looked to be texts documenting shady backroom deals between foreign governments—Ukraine and China—and the Biden family. The FBI eventually acknowledged that the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop were genuine, not a “Trump campaign product,” as Nina Jankowicz, later slated to be Biden’s czarina of the Disinformation Governance Board, had so colorfully characterized it prior to the 2020 election. Ironically, the Steele dossier which served as the basis for allegations of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign had itself been a Clinton campaign product.
In the light of this history, Blinken’s appointment as secretary of state can be viewed as his reward for helping to maintain the markedly anti-Russia bias of U.S. citizens, including politicians, stoked for years by the media through the now-debunked Russiagate narrative, and which inclines self-styled liberals to support the prolongation rather than the resolution of the conflict in Ukraine.
Under ordinary circumstances, when two nation states are in conflict, the less powerful of the two tends to be more receptive to attempts to resolve the matter through peaceful negotiation, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent proposal, which was immediately and categorically rejected in a knee-jerk response by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, of all people. In the case of Ukraine, which has been artificially bolstered through a seemingly endless infusion of arms by the U.S. military behemoth, the war has no foreseeable limit—beyond the sacrifice of every able-bodied person in the land. (The case bears similarities to the artificial maintenance of the current U.S. president as head of state through the infusion of pharmaceutical products, even as rigor mortis appears to be setting in.) Reality in fact imposes limits, and they will be reached, sooner or later.
Those Ukrainians who comprehend the qualitative power disparity between nations in possession of nuclear warheads and those devoid of such means, have declined to volunteer to serve in the U.S.-maintained meatgrinder war, which is precisely why a policy of forced conscription was imposed. What good is a quasi-infinite supply of weapons, if no one is willing to fire them? Alas, any Ukrainian who has had enough of media-darling Zelensky’s panhandling from every wealthy nation on the planet is out of luck, for he remains in power, martial law firmly in place, and has indicated that he will stay there for so long as “it” takes, whatever his overlords construe that to mean.
It’s not just the U.S. government funding the war in which Ukrainian citizens are being chewed up and spit out by the insatiable war machine as military industry profits soar. NATO officials have naturally seized the opportunity to justify the existence of their institution, the source of their gainful employment, just as they have been scrambling to do since the fall of the Berlin Wall: Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine—there’s always something for NATO to destroy! That the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established to counteract the danger of a communist takeover of the world by the now non-existent USSR is brushed aside as somehow irrelevant by its ardent supporters and beneficiaries alike.
As the world becomes progressively more bellicose, following the infelicitous example of the U.S. military state, stentorian calls to shore up and consolidate military capacities have been heard from figures such as European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyden, with similar jingoistic rhetoric issued also by the president of France, Emmanuel Macron. On its face, this is a puzzling development, given the twenty-year catastrophe better known as the Global War on Terror, which in no way served democracy or freedom, but instead destroyed and/or severely degraded the lives of millions of human beings. In keeping with the United States’ muscular but myopic and amnesiac approach to foreign policy, leaders of the European Union agreed in February 2024 to provide yet another $54 billion of “aid” to Ukraine, with NATO throwing in another $40 billion more recently. There’s a lot of profit at stake, and all of the usual suspects want their piece of the pie, no matter how many hapless Ukrainians will have to die. That European, British and American leaders have no interest in resolving the conflict is nowhere better illustrated than by the “Summit on Peace in Ukraine,” held in Switzerland, in June 2024, to which Russia, one of the two parties to the dispute, was not invited.
Barring nuclear holocaust, the dispute between Ukraine and Russia can only end at a negotiation table, an outcome which any competent diplomat would have worked relentlessly from the beginning to realize rather than frustrate. Instead, Antony Blinken spends his time making public appearances and issuing one-sentence slogans for spam distribution across social media platforms in an effort to appease the citizens footing the bill for the human misery and massacre to which his failure as a diplomat has led. Unable or unwilling to process the obvious implications of a war between a nuclear power and a nonnuclear power (spoiler alert: the former will win, if only through a Pyrrhic victory), Blinken daftly persists in pretending that democracy is at stake, even as Ukrainians are enslaved to fight the U.S. proxy war. The thousands of young Ukrainian men being sacrificed are just the price that must be paid. Freedom is free, but weapons are not.
It should come as no surprise that the same “diplomat” talks out of both sides of his mouth in claiming to sympathize with both the Israeli government and the Palestinians, as though furnishing some of the very weapons being used to murder thousands of civilians is easily counterbalanced with promoting the “humanitarian” treatment of those being incessantly terrorized, so long as the survivors of razed neighborhoods are provided with a bit of food and water now and then. The Blinken-Biden approach to this vexed conflict can be summed up in a piece of commonsense folk wisdom: “If you try to be all things to everyone, you’ll end by being nothing to anyone.”
Notwithstanding the frankly frightening recent public appearances of “the leader of the free world” (at the G7 meetings and elsewhere, including the disastrous debate), President Biden’s progressively deteriorating poll numbers over the course of the past several months have probably had something to do with his repeated assertion that there would be no “pause” or “ceasefire” in Israel. From the protests on campuses all over the United States, it has become clear that the antiwar left has reawakened, after eight years of slumber under Barack Obama, to abandon Biden. From the beginning, Biden materially supported Israel’s modus operandi of firing missiles at schools and mosques, homes, hospitals, and refugee camps, in an ardent quest to “Finish Hamas,” even as they embedded themselves among nonviolent civilians. When four Israeli hostages were rescued on June 8, 2024, Biden & Co. celebrated the news while downplaying, when not entirely omitting, the unsavory truth that two hundred Palestinians were killed in the process. Some people are more equal than others.
Antony Blinken has appeared occasionally to issue sincere acknowledgments of the humanity of the Palestinian people from one side of his mouth, while insisting on the right of Israel to self-defense from the other, as though slaughtering thousands of children has made anyone safe. The circus acts of such pseudo-diplomats would be amusing, if they were not so pathetic—and if the consequences for real, live, sentient human beings were not so devastating. All of foreign policy is not, as figures such as Blinken appear to believe, merely a matter of theater. No, the worst part of all of the shameless performances and photo-ops is that they entirely ignore the human reality of the wars being prolonged and provoked by the U.S. military state, as though bombing victims were mere fictions, and the soldiers coerced to fight were the currency of elites to expend.
The peace plan for Gaza recently drawn up by the Biden administration (certainly not Biden himself, who often appears to be unaware of where he is) could have been proposed back in October 2023, and, conjoined with a firm refusal to arm the killers, might well have saved the lives of some 40,000 persons—nearly half of which have been children—and prevented the wounding of many times more Palestinians. The U.S. government instead continues to condone Israel’s decision to follow the post-9/11 template of annihilating multiple times the number of the criminals sought, dismissing all of the innocent victims as “collateral damage.”
Blinken’s atrocious failures in the Ukraine and Israel conflicts notwithstanding, I confess to have experienced a tinge of sympathy for him the day he was caught on film wincing as President Biden answered a reporter’s question about his previous characterization of Chinese president Xi Jinping. Biden replied, in an unedited and brash—dare I say?—Trump-like fashion, “Look, he is. He is a dictator…” Mind you, this proclamation occurred immediately subsequent to what had been billed Biden’s “historic” White House meeting with the Chinese leader, supposedly intended to ease tensions between the two nations.
Surely, given the diminished mental acuity of his boss, Blinken’s job is extraordinarily difficult to execute, as is that of Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who is constantly in the position of concocting extemporaneous word salad responses to incisive questions posed by White House journalists. (The press secretary dismissed some of the recent videoclips showcasing a zombie-like Biden on the world’s stage as “cheap fakes”.) But Blinken’s willingness to serve not as a diplomat but as a promoter of endless war, his refusal to work diligently toward peaceful solutions to conflict, is inexcusable.
Blinken apologists may counter that every previous secretary of state during his lifetime, too, served not the cause of diplomacy and peace but the war machine. In other words, Blinken has dutifully adopted some of his most prominent predecessors as mentors.
While serving as the CIA director under President Trump, Mike Pompeo reportedly went so far as to pursue the murder of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, denounced as a traitor and a spy, for exposing the ignoble comportment, including war crimes, of the U.S. government. Pompeo’s reward? Appointment as secretary of state, in which position Pompeo aggressively pushed for war with Iran.
Under President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton persuaded her boss to bomb Libya, chanting, “Gaddafi must go!” beforehand, and later cackling “We came, we saw, he died!” when the Libyan president was sodomized with a bayonet and murdered by an angry mob. Libya, which once boasted the best education and healthcare systems in Africa, is today a failed state, a place where people have been literally enslaved. With regard to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Secretary Clinton reportedly inquired during a November 23, 2010, meeting over which she presided, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
Moving a bit further back, Condoleezza Rice had already served in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, who initiated the forever wars in the Middle East with his Operation Desert Storm. In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, Bush Sr. bragged that he had “kicked” the “Vietnam syndrome”; that is, the disinclination of Americans to become embroiled in foreign wars in the years following the U.S. military’s retreat from Saigon. Rice came later to serve as national security advisor to President George W. Bush, during which tenure she went on a war-marketing blitz media circuit in which she repeatedly intoned, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Rice was rewarded for her war promotion efforts with an appointment as secretary of state.
Under President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright rallied to make the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo happen. In a conversation with General Colin Powell (relayed in his memoir), Albright once asked, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?”
Under President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed caution about invading Iraq when the idea was first proposed by Cheney & Co. But Powell abruptly changed his tune (for reasons which remain unclear to this day) and ended up being one of the most vocal supporters of the ill-fated 2003 invasion. Powell’s most notorious moment, and for which he has earned a place in the annals of history, was his attempt to persuade the UN General Assembly to support the second U.S. war on Iraq. In his presentation, Powell laid out all of the pretexts later debunked as bogus: the imminent threats of Saddam Hussein’s “mobile chemical labs” and the purchase of “yellow cake” from Niger, supposedly demonstrating the existence of a robust WMD program, among other ersatz evidence buttressing the claim that war had become a last resort. When it became clear that the United Nations would not support the invasion, Powell withdrew his resolution, and the war proceeded unimpeded, at which point Powell and others pivoted to insist that the war was permitted under previous U.N. resolutions allegedly violated by Saddam Hussein.
Last, but certainly not least, we would be remiss to omit the case of Henry Kissinger, the godfather of all warmongering secretaries of state, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, first as national security advisor and then as secretary of state. Kissinger’s savage foreign policies for southeast Asia culminated in the deaths of millions of human beings, not only in Vietnam, but also in Laos and Cambodia, the societies of which have not to this day recovered from what was done to them by the United States government in the name of democracy. Among those sacrificed were some 57,000 U.S. soldiers and the many veterans who returned home but whose lives were wrecked by their harrowing experiences in Vietnam.
Never one to insist on causation where correlation will suffice, I nonetheless feel compelled to observe that nearly all of these secretaries of state have derived a good part, if not all, of their personal wealth from having served on the boards of, or even established, defense-contracting and consulting firms. In Blinken’s case, in 2017, after a stint as deputy secretary of state (having previously served as deputy national security advisor, also under Obama), he and Michèle Flournoy, among other former employees of the federal government, launched WestExec Advisors, from which he derived $1.2 million. Blinken (along with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin) has also been a partner of private equity firm Pine Islands, which has invested heavily in military industries. When The New York Times, in an ever-more rare moment of critical journalism, dared to publish an editorial questioning Blinken’s seeming conflicts of interest, this was brushed aside by members of the War Party, who proceeded to approve his appointment as secretary of state.
Perhaps, then, in view of the long series of war promoters who have served as “top diplomat” for the United States, rather than take Antony Blinken to task, singling him out for criticism, the official title of his position should simply be emended from secretary of state to secretary of war, so as to reflect the reality of what such persons actually do.
“Our” Man in Israel
By Ted O’Keefe | The Occidental Observer | July 7, 2024
The issue of dual loyalty is an ancient one. As noted in a previous TOO article,
[Stephen] Walt points out that [Dennis] Ross has a long involvement with pro-Israel activist organizations, such as being director of WINEP [Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank headquartered in Washington, DC].
But Ross’s ties to Israel are even deeper than that. Until his appointment as Middle East envoy in the Obama Administration, from 2002–2009 Ross was Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. This organization has assumed the role of long term planning for the Jewish people, not only in Israel but also the Diaspora. The JPPPI is an independent think tank that reports to the Israeli government and has close ties with other Jewish organizations. Its mission is “to promote the thriving of the Jewish people via professional strategic thinking and planning on issues of primary concern to world Jewry. JPPPI’s work is based on deep commitment to the future of the Jewish people with Israel as its core state.”
The JPPPI’s report Facing Tomorrow 2008 is interesting because it focuses on the threat of Iran and but also because it sees people like Stephen Walt as a threat to Israel:
The Jewish people must, as the highest priority, develop an appropriate response to the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel and to global stability as a whole. While there is no ambiguity about the need to do so in Israel, it is necessary to mobilize Jewish opinion around the world as well. The American Jewish community cannot be intimidated either by a post Iraq syndrome in the United States, or by the false and pernicious allegations of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, or former President Carter.
In other words, Jews around the world are encouraged to mobilize to combat the threat to Israel represented by Iran. The assumption is that Jews have common interests as Jews no matter what country they happen to live in. Dennis Ross is doing his best to promote exactly this view within the Obama administration.
One might think that such a view would leave Jews in the Diaspora open to the charge of disloyalty, but the problem is easily finessed: Jews in the Diaspora are told to frame Israel’s concerns about Iran as a global threat, not simply as a threat to Israel.
Of course, that’s what we are seeing now. But we needn’t be naïve. Jews like Dennis Ross are clearly far more loyal to Israel than to the US. Speaking as a psychologist, they wouldn’t be able to see a conflict of interest between the US and Israel if it was staring them in the face. Indeed, as Gore Vidal said of Norman Podhoretz, they are unregistered agents of a foreign government.
In a sane society, there would be a huge groundswell of public opposition to Ross’s appointment–as there has been for a number of Obama’s appointments. But that won’t happen.
Since there has been no groundswell of media or public opposition to pro-Israel operatives like Ross at the highest levels of the U.S. government, it’s not surprising that the practice continues. Amos Hochstein is a good contemporary example. Israel and the powerful Lebanon-based Shiite Hezbollah militia are on the brink of open warfare, conflict that could trigger U.S. intervention and escalate to a regional or even a world war. To date these dangers have attracted little notice from the American mass media, ever eager to divert and dissemble from the direr consequences of the Washington regime’s one-sided support for Israel. Small wonder, then, that the media should evince the same reluctance in investigating the shadowy past and dubious allegiance of Hochstein, the emissary the U.S. recently dispatched to “mediate” between Hezbollah and Israel. The following is a brief foray into the workings of the Israel Lobby in the Biden Administration, as well as a primer on the perks of being Jewish in America.
Hochstein’s importance
To be sure, media reports have not slighted Hochstein’s great influence in the Biden White House or his meteoric career. He has been described as “one of President Biden’s closest confidantes [who] has worked with him for many years,” while another Washington insider calls Hochstein “the person who bridges State, Treasury, the White House and Energy”
Fittingly, one of Hochstein’s titles is “Special Presidential Coordinator.”
Yet the media have underplayed, and often ignored, a key fact about Hochstein in his role as an impartial arbiter between Hezbollah and Israel: his birth, youth, and military service in Israel.
Beyond those bare facts about his origins, Hochstein has been remarkably unforthcoming about his life before he arrived in the United States in 1974. While nearly every successful denizen of the D.C. is eager to brandish Ivy League/Seven Sisters (or the equivalent) educational credentials, one may scour the internet (including his page on the usually resume-rich LinkedIn job-hunting site) without finding anything about Hochstein’s education, college or secondary.
Just as murky are the circumstances by which Adam Hochstein, a 21-year-old immigrant with unknown credentials, became a congressional staffer within a year of his arrival in this country, working for Rep. Sam Gejdenson (D-CT) who, like Hochstein, is a Jew.
Despite his youth and inexperience, Hochstein carried out important assignments for Gejdenson. Not yet 25, he traveled to North Korea in 1997 to report on its economic and military situation; still in his twenties, he undertook negotiations with the Iraqi government (against the advice of the U.S. State Department) aimed at “resettling” thousands of Palestinians there in exchange for loosening some of the crippling sanctions then in force there.
Well before 9/11, Hochstein advocated acting against Iraq for harboring “weapons of mass destruction” in a press release issued by Congressman Gejdenson, and soon afterward he was serving as senior advisor to a senator and a governor. Like many members of the permanent government, Hochstein has used hiatuses between his party’s dominance to work in lobbying and industries close to government, in his case capitalizing on energy policy expertise that he seems to have acquired with no expertise in the field. He’s evidently done well, at some point becoming a partner in two D.C. restaurants and a movie theater.
Under Obama, Hochstein (without known diplomatic training or experience) rapidly climbed the ladder at the State Department to become America’s chief energy negotiator, deeply involved in efforts to block Russian natural gas from Europe and to facilitate Israeli access to energy.
During the Trump presidency, Hochstein served on the board of Ukraine’s natural gas company, Naftogaz.
Hochstein’s knowledge of the ins and outs of Ukraine’s shady corrupt energy industry is evidently considerable. In his testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives, Hunter Biden stated that Hochstein had advised him merely to be “very careful” in serving on the board of the notoriously corrupt Burisma corporation.
Hochstein also seems to have had a role in the “whistle blowing” that led to Trump’s first impeachment resulting from a phone call interpreted by Democrats as pressuring Zelensky to investigate Biden family corruption in Ukraine, and to have been advising Zelensky before his election.
It’s also interesting that there is a lack of definitive information on Hochstein’s current citizenship:
According to one report, a State Department source has claimed that he is “not a dual national,” but refused to state if he has renounced his Israeli citizenship, and in fact gave no [details as to Hochstein’s American citizenship.] So the question raised, unanswered— Hochstein’s citizenship is evidently a “carefully guarded secret.” Not acknowledging Hochstein’s Israeli citizenship would be useful because, for example, in Lebanon, where Hochstein has been involved as an American negotiator on the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah, “it is normally illegal for an Israeli” to visit Lebanon.
Even Hezbollah at the time did not comment on the mediator’s nationality or military past, with leader Hassan Nasrallah saying they will “not express an opinion or position related to the demarcation of borders”.
Given all this, it’s hard to disagree with this quote originally from Ha’aretz:
… the American brokerage farce, whose players are almost all American Jews, some of them former or future Israelis. If the United States is a side in the conflict, then it should say so and conduct the negotiation as though Israel is its protégé. And if it really wants to be an honest broker, then come on – Amos Hochstein?…
Houthi: US surprised by Yemen’s naval tactics, failed to stop retaliatory operations in Red Sea
Press TV – July 7, 2024
The leader of Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement says the Yemeni armed forces’ naval tactics in the Red Sea have taken the United States off guard, adding that Washington’s advanced military technology has failed to stop the Arab country’s retaliatory operations.
Abdul-Malik al-Houthi made the remarks during televised a speech on Sunday, where he praised Yemen’s advanced military and missile capabilities in confronting the coalition of the US, Britain, and Israel which he referred to as the “triangle of evil”.
Houthi went on to say that Yemen’s naval operations have frightened the enemies, noting that US aircraft carriers in the Red Sea are escaping rather than attacking and its MQ-9 Reaper drones are continuously shot down.
He also pointed out that many countries were not caught in the trap laid by the US-led coalition against Yemen and even had direct coordination with the Arab country instead.
“The biggest failure of the United States was that it could not include the countries neighboring the Red Sea in operations to support Israel. Washington also failed to force the Arab and neighboring countries to attack us from their soil,” he said.
The Ansarullah leader further said that the US is trying to use Saudi Arabia to exert pressure on Yemen, warning that any Saudi “hostile action” against Yemen will benefit Israel and the US.
“America intends to bring Saudi Arabia into an all-out war with us and return the situation to the peak of tension,” he said, while urging for Muslim unity and cooperation.
He also emphasized that Yemen will not remain idle in the face of aggression and will not watch the nation’s economy collapse.
Yemeni forces have repeatedly launched drones and missiles against Israeli and Israel-bound ships since mid-November last year, saying they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians against Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.
Back in January, the United States and Britain began striking Yemen in order to dissuade the country from targeting Israeli ships which carry arms and logistics for the onslaught on the besieged enclave.
Despite months of US-led airstrikes, Yemeni forces have continued their operations, drawing from an arsenal of increasingly advanced weapons to attack Israeli, US and UK vessels in and around the Red Sea.
Germany to Close Airbase in Niger After Negotiations on Soldiers Immunity Fail – Reports
Sputnik – 07.07.2024
The German armed forces will give up its airbase in Niger, which was used as a military transport hub, by August 31, as the sides failed to extend the agreement concerning the base, German media reported on Saturday, citing the German Defense Ministry.
The talks broke down after the new Nigerien authorities had refused to grant German soldiers with immunity from prosecution, the NTV news outlet reported, citing a document the ministry had presented before the parliament.
Germany expects to withdraw its troops from the country by the end of August as well.
The German military has used the base in Niger’s capital, Niamey since 2013 as a supply center for its armed forces in neighboring Mali, which were stationed there as part of a UN peacekeeping mission.
Nigerien authorities, which took power in a military takeover in July 2023, have since then also terminated military agreements with France and the United States, which led to the French and US forces’ withdrawal from the country.
American Exceptionalism: US Foreign Policy Advisors Urge Resumption of Nuclear Testing
By John Miles – Sputnik – 07.07.2024
As of 2024 the United States is still the only country to have deployed nuclear weapons in a military setting, killing over 150,000 people in nuclear attacks in Japan as the country was on the brink of surrender amid an looming Russian attack.
Prominent figures in the United States national security establishment are pushing a resumption of nuclear weapons testing as the country continues to move towards weakening international arms control frameworks.
Former US national security advisor Robert O’Brien and George W. Bush State Department adviser Christian Whiton are among the foreign policy luminaries pushing the policy.
The Heritage Foundation think tank is also urging immediate nuclear testing if former President Donald Trump wins the White House this fall; the organization urged a remediation of “former Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear material sites” in a recent policy blueprint, demonstrating the continued influence of neoconservative foreign policy advocacy in Republican Party politics.
The think tank also backed the development of “new nuclear weapons and naval nuclear reactors.” Spent fuel from US reactors has been used in depleted uranium weaponry that the United States has repeatedly deployed in theaters of war such as Iraq and NATO aggression in Serbia. Human rights groups have called for the weapons to be banned, noting their depraved use on civilian populations in Belgrade and Fallujah has continued to result in elevated rates of cancer and birth defects.
“Since 1992, the U.S. has refrained from explosive nuclear testing and opted for other techniques, including expert appraisals and sophisticated modeling generated by supercomputers, to calculate the efficacy of its long-term stockpile and its newer weapons,” wrote analyst Zeeshan Aleem.
“That policy has helped nudge other countries away from pursuing live testing,” he added.
The resumption of live testing could actually worsen US national security, some experts have claimed, because it would allow adversaries to directly observe the country’s nuclear capabilities during real-world trials.
“Resuming U.S. nuclear testing is technically and militarily unnecessary,” according to Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association. “Moreover, it would lead to a global chain reaction of nuclear testing, raise global tensions, and blow apart global nonproliferation efforts at a time of heightened nuclear danger.”
The United States has frequently weakened international arms control efforts and has moved to end long standing agreements between the US and Russia in particular. The George W. Bush administration ended the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, while the Obama administration moved to install missile interception facilities in Romania.
The offensive NATO military alliance continued to expand during the Democratic president’s administration, absorbing Albania and Croatia in 2009.
“The reality is the United States has commandeered NATO in the European Union as a proxy army, and a slave economic force, and made Europe to be puppets and pawns of American foreign policy,” noted former US Army psychological warfare officer and US State Department counterterrorism analyst Scott Bennett. “The American government’s agenda – and specifically the banks, globalists and military-industrial complex, and the CIA have – all pursued an agenda to drive the break-up of Russia and the theft of its resources since 1990.”
Bennett noted that the United States’ shredding of arms control treaties has forced Moscow to prepare for the possibility of a nuclear war launched by an increasingly irrational and Russophobic West.
“It is precisely because the United States has become so untrustworthy and unstable and indeed deceitful in everything it says and does, and in every document it claims to sign and promise, it has forced President Putin to act in certain ways,” said the analyst.
“In order to preserve and protect Russia Putin understands he must have the flexibility and maneuverability to guarantee the West does not attempt to secretly undermine or exploit the vulnerabilities that Russia might have as a result of its futile hope in the United States being honorable.”
The Prince And The Spy
By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | May 12, 2023
A TLAV investigation has found that Erik Prince, the man behind the Blackwater mercenary group, recently teamed up with an Israeli spy, creating a front company with her to help Israeli defense technology providers exploit loopholes and sell their products to the American military.
For years, Erik Prince – the founder of mercenary firm Blackwater (now Academi) – has been a major source of controversy. Ever since he left Blackwater over a decade ago, Prince has appeared in the news for pushing to privatize several wars, his ties to former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, his violation of international arms embargoes and his unusually close ties with Project Veritas, among other notable events and connections.
However, some of Prince’s antics in recent years have not yet made it into the news – namely his decision to team up with an Israeli spy to build a very secretive company that has – until now – evaded scrutiny. That company, Comframe Solutions, appears to operate as an intelligence front and explicitly targets parts of the American military involved in highly sensitive combat operations. As this investigation will show, Prince’s partner in Comframe – Lital Leshem – has been tied to a series of apparent, and admitted, Israeli intelligence front companies, several of which have a focus on technology. Yet Prince and his close associate Chris Burgess – Comframe’s supposed president – have done everything they can to hide their association with the incredibly secretive company. Why might that be and what exactly is Comframe up to?
From “Army Brat” to Cyber Spy
Lital Leshem was raised as an “army brat” in Reut, Israel and Pennsylvania, USA. She later enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as she was “truly devoted to safeguarding the State of Israel.” She quickly rose in the ranks, becoming Operations Officer in the IDF of the besieged Gaza Strip and later becoming a Major, a position she continues to hold to this date through her “reserve duty activities.” According to her LinkedIn, she served in Israeli military intelligence from 2005 to 2011 and, more specifically, served in its signals intelligence unit – Unit 8200. She later attended IDC Herzliya, an Israeli university deeply tied to its military and intelligence apparatus. There, she met Amir Elichai and the two would co-create the company Reporty, which later became Carbyne911 – today known only as Carbyne.
Carbyne was originally founded as Reporty in 2014 by Leshem, Elichai and Alex Dizengof. Leshem and Elichai are Unit 8200 veterans, while Dizengof previously worked for Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office. Before it was revealed that Jeffrey Epstein had poured at least 1 million dollars into the company at the behest of his close associate Ehud Barak, Cabryne’s board of directors – which Barak chaired – included the former commander of Unit 8200, Pinchas Buchris, as well as Epstein associate turned venture capitalist Nicole Junkermann. In the wake of the Epstein scandal, Buchris, Barak and Junkerman, among others, were removed from the board and were largely replaced with veterans and former heads of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Leshem had left the company in 2017, but has continued to own shares in the company.
Carbyne is a Next-Generation 9-11 (NG911) platform and the explicit goal of NG911 is for all 911 systems nationwide to become interconnected. It is currently active throughout the United States, its main target market. Its software has been criticized due to “serious privacy concerns” about the amount of information it harvests from smartphones that call a 911 call center running Carbyne’s software. For instance, Carbyne’s smartphone app extracts the following information from the phones on which it is installed:
“Device location, video live-streamed from the smartphone to the call center, text messages in a two-way chat window, any data from a user’s phone if they have the Carbyne app and ESInet, and any information that comes over a data link, which Carbyne opens in case the caller’s voice link drops out.”
The potential for Carbyne as a tool for mass surveillance has been extensively reported by Narativ, MintPress News and other outlets. In addition, Carbyne stores all data on past calls and events in order to “enabl[e] decision makers to accurately analyze the past and present behavior of their callers, react accordingly, and in time predict future patterns.” As a result, Carbyne – along with other Israeli intelligence-connected companies seeking to dominate the American “public safety” market – has the potential to facilitate controversial “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime, policies.
In addition to Carbyne, Leshem also worked for Black Cube, which has since been removed from her LinkedIn. There, she had been the firms Director of Marketing. Black Cube was specifically outed as an Israeli intelligence front organization in a 2019 article published by Calcalist Tech. That same article also contains the stunning revelation that many Israeli companies, including Black Cube, have been founded as fronts for intelligence operations since 2012. It states that “since 2012, cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that in some cases were built for this exact purpose.” The article also adds that:
“In some cases, managers of development projects in the Israeli military and intelligence arms were encouraged to form their own companies which then took over the [military and/or intelligence] project.”
With Leshem having worked for one company already known to be a product of this deliberate policy, it is worth scrutinizing Carbyne as being one such front, especially considering the common tie of Ehud Barak to both companies. In addition, Leshem has also worked for another company tied to Barak that has been described as worse than the NSO Group, which produced the notorious Pegasus software. Called Toka, its top executives – like Carbyne – are largely veterans of Israeli’s Unit 8200, where Leshem also served, or former commanders of Israeli military cyber operations.
Toka, which Ehud Barak founded in 2018, is very, very likely to be one of the front organizations produced as a result of the aforementioned 2012 Israeli intelligence policy. The company is directly partnered with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and other Israeli intelligence and security agencies since its founding and the company only sells its products to countries that are considered allies of Israel. It purports to be able to hack, not just smartphones, but any device with internet connectivity, such as doorbell cameras and other “smart” devices. As will be noted later in this article, Leshem herself has noted that Toka has a relationship with the CIA.
After being involved with a series of Israeli intelligence fronts and her enduring ties to Israeli military intelligence through her “reserve duty activities”, Leshem was courted by a surprising figure – Erik Prince, war profiteer and founder of the controversial mercenary outfit Blackwater.
Partnering with Prince
Leshem says that she met Prince after she “randomly stumbled across his path and joined his team.” There, per her website, she “managed his business portfolio and his global investments.” Her LinkedIn lists her as serving as the executive director of global business development of Frontier Resource Group (FRG) from 2018 to 2021. Frontier Resource Group was founded by Prince and is “an Africa-dedicated investment firm partnered with major Chinese enterprises, including at least one state-owned resource giant that is keen to pour money into the resource-rich continent,” according to the South China Post. It not only operates in Africa, but also other countries due to its contracts to support China’s One Belt One Road initiative, which were signed in 2019.
FRG is a subsidiary of Frontier Services Group (FSG), which Prince also founded. In 2013, he sold a majority share of FSG to the China International Trust Investment Corporation (CITIC), a state-owned Chinese investment company that is among the largest of the country’s state-run conglomerates. CITIC, during the mid-1990s, was chaired by Wang Jun, who doubled as China’s chief arms dealer and was a key figure in the “Chinagate” scandal of the Clinton White House. As detailed in One Nation Under Blackmail, that scandal involved the illicit transfer of American military technology to China and the illicit transfer of Chinese weapons, whose sale in the US was banned during this time, into the United States. Mark Middleton, a White House aide, and Jeffrey Epstein are some of the names apparently involved with those activities. “Chinagate” appears to have been a joint venture between factions of the CIA and Israeli intelligence and has never been properly investigated by federal authorities. It seems that Prince, who was (and may still be) a CIA asset, and Leshem have engaged in similar activities via FRG/FSG. For example, TRTWorld reported that Leshem is “speculated” to have transferred Carbyne’s technology to China via her role at FRG and her connection to Prince. China launched an app that was nearly analogous to Carbyne, but more explicitly focused on surveillance, at the same time that Carbyne launched its first 911 call system in the United States.
In addition, TRTWorld notes, the company DarkMatter, a UAE surveillance and intelligence group that employs former US intelligence operatives, attracted the attention of Chinese officials at a smart cities conference in 2015. DarkMatter, which was launched to modernize Emirati intelligence and military operations, signed a Global Strategic Memorandum of Understanding with Huawei, the Chinese tech giant. The middle man in this sale was none other than Erik Prince. Leshem and another Prince associate, Dorian Barak, also have business ties to the UAE via their prominent roles at the UAE-Israel Business Council.
As TRTWorld concluded:
“With similar technology being used, and the same mercenary middle-man between Carbyne and China who brought together UAE’s DarkMatter surveillance technology with China, indications point to a likely transfer of surveillance technology from Epstein’s Israeli company [Carbyne] to China.”
Comframe – Secretive Company or Intelligence Front?
Prince’s and Leshem’s joint activities after Leshem left FRG suggest that this pattern of behavior has not only continued, but deepened. According to Leshem’s website, a year and a half after she started working for Prince, she and Prince “joined forces to found Comframe, a company that takes the best of Israeli defense technology providers, and helps them penetrate the American market by bridging prevalent gaps.” Leshem also says Comframe was assisted by her “premier integrator and business development platform for deploying advanced military, special operations, public safety and HLS solutions in the United States, and a wide network of partnership, both government and civilian.”
In discussing Comframe elsewhere, Leshem writes that the company she co-founded with Prince “is led and staffed by Special Operations and defense procurement veterans with billions of dollars of successful sales to USG and foreign government to their names.” She says that Comframe has a “track-record of success implementing complex procurement and integrations programs from intelligence gathering & analysis, to contracting, program sales and personnel deployment, is exceptional.”
What Leshem says of the company clashes with Comframe’s threadbare public presence. For instance, its website, which is notably short on content, lists the following companies as partners – TomCar, BlueBird Aero Systems, General Robotics, SafeStrike, Ops-Core (now part of Gentex Corp) and Axon. On its partners page, Comframe says that this is “a small sampling of our current partners we have chosen to work with.” Most of these companies were created by Israeli military/military intelligence veterans.
Aside from the partners page, there is little other information available on the Comframe site. It describes its mission as “to source cutting-edge, innovative technologies that safely and securely solve articulated U.S. government problems” and touts its “get it done” commitment and how its employees “wake up every morning wanting to find solutions that keep the U.S. government safe and more lethal.” It lists the company’s president as Chris Burgess. Burgess, a former NAVY Seal who trained with Erik Prince, does not list Comframe on his LinkedIn or in any other site discussing his work history. He is currently the CEO of military contractor Regulus Global. Burgess previously ran a mercenary firm he founded, Greystone Ltd., that was previously affiliated with Prince’s Blackwater and was originally intended to be Blackwater’s “sister company.”
Both Blackwater (now Academi) and Greystone have been accused of sending mercenaries to fight in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Both companies deny this. The accusations came after Prince had planned to create a “private army” in Ukraine, something he has attempted to do (and sometimes succeeded) in various conflict zones, such as Afghanistan. Prince has also attempted to offer “lethal services” to Russia’s Wagner group.
Aside from Burgess’ apparent unwillingness to associate himself publicly with Comframe, there is also the fact that the only employee publicly associated with Comframe at all is Lital Leshem. Indeed, even Erik Prince has declined to publicly affiliate himself with the company. Another oddity is the fact that Comframe’s website has an “Industry News” page that contains several blog posts with titles discussing oil markets and geopolitics. However, the content of the posts themselves are all filler generated by WordPress. Was Comframe also intended to work in commodities markets? The odd and sparse nature of the website seems to clash with Leshem’s characterization of the company.
So, what is Comframe exactly and what is it intended to do? Why are the only people associated with the company two professional mercenaries, one of whom is a known CIA asset, and an Israeli spy? A 2020 article published in the Jerusalem Post seems to highlight Comframe’s mysterious inner workings and likely purpose.
That article notes that Comframe acted as a middleman in forging an agreement to create an assembly line in El Paso, TX in order for the Israeli company Tomcar to “offer its latest models to the US Armed Forces.” The agreement was made between Tomcar and Prince Manufacturing, a major contract manufacturing company that works with Ford, General Motors and Tesla, among others. Prince Manufacturing was notably founded and run for many years by Edgar Prince, Erik Prince’s father. Notably Tomcar, its founder – Yoram Zarchi – and his son (works for Tomcar) – Ram Zarchi – appear in the Panama Papers as does the former holding company that owned Tomcar from 2004 to 2011.
The article notes that Comframe “is focused on recognizing needs in the US defense industry and matching them to possible solutions, usually involving innovative Israeli companies.” However, the article notes, “to meet the demands of American security needs, one must have an American entity.” Leshem is then quoted as saying, “Ram [Zarchi of Tomcar] had been living in Phoenix for 15 years, but he can’t do that [sell to the American military because he is not a US citizen]. We can.”
In other words, per Leshem, Comframe utilizes Prince and presumably Burgess to sell Israeli defense technology and products to the American military that would otherwise not happen due to national security concerns around buying foreign-made products for sensitive defense and military operations. Leshem goes on to state Comframe sells “to the US Special Forces and other branches of the service [i.e. US military],” noting that Comframe is specifically targeting Special Ops. She also suggests that, aside from the US military, another intended market for the company is NATO – she told the Jerusalem Post that the US “controls 70% of NATO’s defense industry.”
The article ends by stating that, for Comframe, when sales are related to national security, one still has to have “boots on the ground,” suggesting why Comframe has such a minimal web and online presence. This is similar to another company Leshem has been working for while at Comframe, Ehud Barak’s Toka. Notably, at the end of this very article, Leshem uses Toka as an example regarding Comframe’s “boots on the ground” sales approach. She states:
“Hi-tech companies like Toka with clients like the CIA, can’t discuss what they do using Zoom.”
A New Pattern for Prince
Comframe is a very suspect company – it is highly, highly secretive, targets sensitive American military agencies with foreign technology, and its known employees are apparent spooks and intelligence-linked mercenaries. Not only that, but the history of Israeli espionage in the United States – from Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS to Comverse and beyond – shows a concerted effort to target the American military and security agencies, often with bugged or “backdoored” technology.
In addition to the above, Prince has also recently engaged in efforts to market a very suspect smartphone to MAGA Republicans as being “unhackable” and “unsurveillable.” That phone was “designed in Israel” and the company that produces it is called Unplugged. According to reports, Unplugged’s “day-to-day technology operations are run by Eran Karpen, a former employee of CommuniTake, the Israeli start-up that gave rise to the now infamous hacker-for-hire firm NSO Group.” Karpen, like Leshem, is also a veteran of Unit 8200.
Notably, DarkMatter, the UAE private intelligence company that was mentioned earlier due to its association with Prince, once marketed an “ultrasecure” phone called Katim, only to be later outed for hacking dissidents and journalists. In addition, Prince debuted Unplugged’s phone on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” program. Both Prince and Bannon have controversial relationships with exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, also known as Miles Guo.
That Prince would help market this phone specifically to MAGA Republicans is disturbing given that his associate Leshem and other Israeli intelligence veterans and operatives have played a major role in developing the infrastructure for the US’ “War on Domestic Terror,” which is mainly targeted at the political right and has already utilized mass surveillance through smartphones and other technologies to justify arrests, including “pre-crime” arrests. Given the content of this investigation, Prince’s ties to foreign governments and intelligence agencies should be heavily scrutinized, especially Comframe – whose secretive activities may be drastically undermining American national security.
SCOTUS ruling is about protecting the institution of the presidency
Sky News Australia | July 5, 2024
Lawyer Robert Barnes says the SCOTUS ruling is now the “only thing” preventing former presidents from being extradited to foreign countries to be prosecuted.
“Without it, you know, someone unhappy with Joe Biden’s policies, unhappy with Barack Obama’s policies, unhappy with George W. Bush or Bill Clinton’s policies, all of them could seek the extradition of someone over something that was done by the US military or the US government overseas,” he told Sky News Australia host James Morrow.
“This protects all of them, and primarily cares about protecting the institution of the presidency.”
What Will Iran’s Foreign Policy Be Under New President Pezeshkian?
Sputnik – 06.07.2024
Masoud Pezeshkian has emerged as the winner of the presidential runoff in Iran this week, receiving 54 percent of the votes.
The newly elected President of Iran Masoud Pezeshkian spoke to Sputnik on the eve of the election about the main priorities of Iran’s foreign policy, which include: strengthening relations with Russia and China; Iran’s active presence in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation; restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the lifting of sanctions.
“Russia is a friend and partner of Iran, and I consider it a priority to deepen and expand relations with Russia and China, as well as intensify foreign policy activities in the Asian direction in general,” Pezeshkian said. “And we, of course, at all levels – bilateral, regional and international – will continue our efforts to expand interaction with the Russian Federation.”
According to him, Iran “opposes the policy of unidirectionality” and supports “the principle of multipolarity.”
“One of the priorities of my foreign policy program is regional cooperation, and for this purpose, Iran will expand its presence in BRICS and the SCO, as well as strive for more active cooperation with the Eurasian Economic Union to more fully realize the potential of trade and economic relations with the member countries of these organizations,” Pezeshkian explained.
Regarding the JCPOA, Pezeshkian pointed out that it is “an international agreement approved by the UN,” and that the United States’ unilateral withdrawal from this agreement “caused serious damage to Iran and the Iranian people.”
“As the Russian side has repeatedly emphasized, Iran has fulfilled its obligations, and we see our task as returning the other participants to this agreement as soon as possible and achieving the lifting of sanctions. I am confident that the friendly governments of Russia and China will support Iran and assist it in resolving this issue,” he added.
US scraps military drills with Georgia
RT | July 6, 2024
The US has suspended this year’s ‘Noble Partner’ military exercise with Georgia due to a “comprehensive review” of bilateral relations by Washington. The maneuvers, which have previously involved troops from multiple NATO member states, had been held annually since 2015.
In early June, the legislation – officially known as the Transparency of Foreign Influence Act – came into force, after the ruling Georgian Dream party overrode a veto by President Salome Zourabichvili. The law requires NGOs, media outlets and individuals which receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as entities “promoting the interests of a foreign power” and disclose their donors. Failure to comply will result in a fine of up to $9,500.
Opponents of the bill, who denounce it as an attack on democracy, have held multiple protests. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze insists the legislation is similar to laws in several Western nations, and is meant to improve transparency.
The adoption of the law drew condemnation from the US and European Union. Washington has announced plans to restrict visas for Georgian politicians who supported the legislation.
In a press release on Friday, the US Department of Defense announced that the “United States will indefinitely postpone this iteration of exercise NOBLE PARTNER in Georgia, originally scheduled for July 25 – August 6, 2024.”
According to the statement, the decision was made “due to the Georgian government’s false accusations against the United States and other western entities.” The Pentagon cited several remarks made by Prime Minister Kobakhidze in recent months.
In early May, the official claimed that “two revolution attempts of 2020-2023 [were] supported by the former US ambassador.”
Later that month, he doubled down on the accusations, saying that “Georgian-American relations need to be reconsidered.”
Speaking to Georgia’s Channel 1 around the same time, Kobakhidze alleged that “some people want muddy water here… people want a second front [against Russia]. We don’t want a second front.”
In light of those allegations, “the United States Government has determined that this is an inappropriate time to hold a large-scale military exercise in Georgia,” the Pentagon’s press release concluded.
Commenting on the adoption of the ‘foreign agent’ law in Georgia in early June, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller warned that the developments “fundamentally alter the US relationship with” the South Caucasus nation, which has long been seeking to join the EU and NATO. The official stressed that Washington “would not hesitate to impose” sanctions on Tbilisi.
Former FBI and Twitter Lawyer Jim Baker Joins Election Task Force Advocating for Social Media Censorship
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 5, 2024
From presidential election to another election, to Covid – to another election. That is how members of particular, mostly flying-under-the-radar power centers in the US have been moving over the last decades.
From time to time, however, circumstances demand that they show their faces: one is James “Jim” Baker, a former FBI lawyer whose “censorship portfolio” includes the infamous case of endorsing the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression – while he was on Twitter’s payroll.
And while there – Baker also wanted to know how come President Trump was not censored for a post saying – “Don’t fear Covid.”
Well, Baker also seems to be staying true to himself – unfortunately, his “truth” appears to be to never miss the chance to support the wrong thing (the “RussiaGate” saga happens to be among them). Right now, he has joined something called “the National Task Force on Election Crises.”
It’s a crisis, alright. A crisis of online censorship that can, and does, produce multiple “election” crises and a rapid erosion of trust in legacy media and political institutions.
The group’s parent operation is the Protect Democracy Project.
There’s nothing particularly innovative about the group’s lobbying talking points: remove or downgrade “election misinformation” and make sure removing and labeling content (as false) is done ASAP by social and news media (time is clearly of the essence, at this point…)
As for the electoral process itself – which ended up highly and even dangerously contested perhaps for the first time in US democratic history in 2020 – the group Baker is now affiliated with seems to want the reasons by and large leading to that to remain intact.
Namely, things like “(preventing) cyber or other attacks by foreign adversaries or domestic disrupters, promot(ing) pre-canvassing of absentee ballots” – and working to discourage legal challenges to the election process.
Looks like Baker might be just the right man for the wrong job.
The Supreme Court’s Superb Dissenting Opinion
At least three justices understand what is at stake here
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | July 5, 2024
Three justices of the Supreme Court actually read and understood the record in our case. Justice Alito, joined by Gorsuch and Thomas, wrote an important dissenting opinion. I’d like to share a few highlights here, as it provides a roadmap to ultimately prevailing in our case.
The three dissenting justices clearly recognize that we the plaintiffs were victims of the government’s unconstitutional censorship activities:
Among these victims were two States, whose public health officials were hampered in their ability to share their expertise with state residents; distinguished professors of medicine at Stanford and Harvard; a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine; the owner and operator of a news website; and Jill Hines, the director of a consumer and human rights advocacy organization. All these victims simply wanted to speak out on a question of the utmost public importance.
Echoing the district court and circuit court opinions, the dissenting justices indicate the landmark importance of this free speech case:
If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years. Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government, and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts.
Unlike the majority opinion, which took the government’s claim to be combating “misinformation” at face value, the dissenting opinion recognized that much of the speech that the government suppressed was true:
The speech at issue falls squarely into those categories. It concerns the COVID–19 virus, which has killed more than a million Americans. Our country’s response to the COVID–19 pandemic was and remains a matter of enormous medical, social, political, geopolitical, and economic importance, and our dedication to a free marketplace of ideas demands that dissenting views on such matters be allowed. I assume that a fair portion of what social media users had to say about COVID–19 and the pandemic was of little lasting value. Some was undoubtedly untrue or misleading, and some may have been downright dangerous. But we now know that valuable speech was also suppressed. That is what inevitably happens when entry to the marketplace of ideas is restricted.
The majority opinion suggested, without evidence, that our censorship was the result of the actions of social media platforms, who may have censored us even in the absence of government coercion. The dissenting opinion explains the flaws with this unwarranted assumption:
Of course, purely private entities like newspapers are not subject to the First Amendment, and as a result, they may publish or decline to publish whatever they wish. But government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech, see National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, 602 U. S. 175 (2024), and that is what happened in this case.
The record before us is vast. It contains evidence of communications between many different government actors and a variety of internet platforms, as well as evidence regarding the effects of those interactions on the seven different plaintiffs.
Alito focuses on Facebook and co-plaintiff Jill Hines as the clearest example (though by no means the only example) to illustrate the nature of the problem:
Here is what the record plainly shows. For months in 2021 and 2022, a coterie of officials at the highest levels of the Federal Government continuously harried and implicitly threatened Facebook with potentially crippling consequences if it did not comply with their wishes about the suppression of certain COVID–19-related speech. Not surprisingly, Facebook repeatedly yielded. As a result Hines was indisputably injured, and due to the officials’ continuing efforts, she was threatened with more of the same when she brought suit. These past and threatened future injuries were caused by and traceable to censorship that the officials coerced, and the injunctive relief she sought was an available and suitable remedy.
It’s hard to know how much more harm the Supreme Court would need to see before agreeing that at least one of the plaintiffs has standing. These examples could be multiplied. By refusing to examine the record and rule on the merits, Alito suggests that the Court actually provides a roadmap for future government censorship efforts:
This evidence was more than sufficient to establish Hines’s standing to sue, and consequently, we are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case presents. The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.
That is regrettable. What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.
Alito then echoes arguments I published in The Federalist following oral arguments, regarding the key differences between newspapers and social media companies in terms of their interactions with government:
Internet platforms, although rich and powerful, are at the same time far more vulnerable to Government pressure than other news sources. If a President dislikes a particular newspaper, he (fortunately) lacks the ability to put the paper out of business. But for Facebook and many other social media platforms, the situation is fundamentally different. They are critically dependent on the protection provided by §230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, 47 U. S. C. §230, which shields them from civil liability for content they spread. They are vulnerable to antitrust actions; indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described a potential antitrust lawsuit as an “existential” threat to his company. And because their substantial overseas operations may be subjected to tough regulation in the European Union and other foreign jurisdictions, they rely on the Federal Government’s diplomatic efforts to protect their interests.
This dynamic sets social media companies up to be vulnerable to government coercion, in precisely the way we argued before the Court:
For these and other reasons, internet platforms have a powerful incentive to please important federal officials, and the record in this case shows that high-ranking officials skillfully exploited Facebook’s vulnerability. When Facebook did not heed their requests as quickly or as fully as the officials wanted, the platform was publicly accused of “killing people” and subtly threatened with retaliation.
Not surprisingly these efforts bore fruit. Facebook adopted new rules that better conformed to the officials’ wishes, and many users who expressed disapproved views about the pandemic or COVID–19 vaccines were “deplatformed” or otherwise injured.
Alito perfectly describes how this abusive Stockholm Syndrome dynamic played out between Facebook and the White House:
What these events show is that top federal officials continuously and persistently hectored Facebook to crack down on what the officials saw as unhelpful social media posts, including not only posts that they thought were false or misleading but also stories that they did not claim to be literally false but nevertheless wanted obscured. And Facebook’s reactions to these efforts were not what one would expect from an independent news source or a journalistic entity dedicated to holding the Government accountable for its actions. Instead, Facebook’s responses resembled that of a subservient entity determined to stay in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster. Facebook told White House officials that it would “work . . . to gain your trust.” When criticized, Facebook representatives whimpered that they “thought we were doing a better job” but promised to do more going forward. They pleaded to know how they could “get back to a good place” with the White House. And when denounced as “killing people,” Facebook responded by expressing a desire to “work together collaboratively” with its accuser. The picture is clear.
Here we have a major social media platform responding as though they are entirely subservient to government interests. The more they try to please the government by ramping up censorship, the more abusive and demanding the government becomes.
To the dubious claim that plaintiffs cannot allege potential future injuries because—on their word—the White House has backed off the social media companies, Alito (in contrast to the majority opinion) calls the government’s bluff:
The White House threats did not come with expiration dates, and it would be silly to assume that the threats lost their force merely because White House officials opted not to renew them on a regular basis.
As Alito later quips, “death threats can be very effective even if they are not delivered every day.”
Drawing an analogy to another free speech case (Vullo) that was heard on the same day as ours, Alito explains:
In Vullo, the alleged conduct was blunt. The head of the state commission with regulatory authority over insurance companies allegedly told executives at Lloyd’s directly and in no uncertain terms that she would be “‘less interested’” in punishing the company’s regulatory infractions if it ceased doing business with the National Rifle Association. The federal officials’ conduct here [in Murthy] was more subtle and sophisticated. The message was delivered piecemeal by various officials over a period of time in the form of aggressive questions, complaints, insistent requests, demands, and thinly veiled threats of potentially fatal reprisals. But the message was unmistakable, and it was duly received.
The Supreme Court majority was ready to knock down ham-fisted censorship (in Vullo) but gave a pass—at least for now—to sophisticated and debonair censorship (in Murthy).
The government’s defense of its behavior included the argument that it had the right to use the bully pulpit to “persuade” social media companies to do its bidding—”the government has free speech rights, too, don’t you see?” Alito sees right through this ruse:
This argument introduces a new understanding of the term “bully pulpit,” which was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt to denote a President’s excellent (i.e, “bully”) position (i.e., his “pulpit”) to persuade the public. But [Rob] Flaherty, [Andy] Slavitt, and other [White House] officials who emailed and telephoned Facebook were not speaking to the public from a figurative pulpit. On the contrary, they were engaged in a covert scheme of censorship that came to light only after the plaintiffs demanded their emails in discovery and a congressional Committee obtained them by subpoena. If these communications represented the exercise of the bully pulpit, then everything that top federal officials say behind closed doors to any private citizen must also represent the exercise of the President’s bully pulpit. That stretches the concept beyond the breaking point.
In any event, the Government is hard-pressed to find any prior example of the use of the bully pulpit to threaten censorship of private speech.
To repeat what I have said many times before: this case is not about constraining the government’s speech—as they falsely claim; it’s about stopping the government from constraining the speech of U.S. citizens.
The dissenting justices argue that the majority opinion applies a “new and heightened standard” of traceability in our case (p.20). Alito explains, again using the case of co-plaintiff Jill Hines, that she clearly has standing to bring the case (and we only need one plaintiff with standing to prevail):
Here, it is reasonable to infer (indeed, the inference leaps out from the record) that the efforts of the federal officials affected at least some of Facebook’s decisions to censor Hines. All of Facebook’s demotion, content-removal, and deplatforming decisions are governed by its policies. So when the White House pressured Facebook to amend some of the policies related to speech in which Hines engaged, those amendments necessarily impacted some of Facebook’s censorship decisions. Nothing more is needed. What the Court seems to want are a series of ironclad links—from a particular coercive communication to a particular change in Facebook’s rules or practice and then to a particular adverse action against Hines. No such chain was required in the Department of Commerce case, and neither should one be demanded here.
Furthermore, the Court’s majority opinion developed a novel, higher standard of repressibility of potential future harms to avoid ruling on the merits of our case:
As with traceability, the Court applies a new and elevated standard for redressability, which has never required plaintiffs to be “certain” that a court order would prevent future harm.
Having established that the Court should have found that we have standing, Alito proceeds to analyze the record on the merits, using the following legal framework:
The principle recognized in Bantam Books and Vullo requires a court to distinguish between permissible persuasion and unconstitutional coercion, and in Vullo, we looked to three leading factors that are helpful in making that determination: (1) the authority of the government officialswho are alleged to have engaged in coercion, (2) the natureof statements made by those officials, and (3) the reactions of the third party alleged to have been coerced. 602 U. S., at 189–190, and n. 4, 191–194. In this case, all three factors point to coercion.
Although the government tries to spin their interactions with social media platforms as fairly benign, examination of the record in this regard leaves no doubt: “The totality of this record—constant haranguing, dozens of demands for compliance, and references to potential consequences—evince ‘a scheme of state censorship.’” Lest there be any doubt in this regard, “Facebook’s responses to the officials’ persistent inquiries, criticisms, and threats show that the platform perceived the statements as something more than mere recommendations.” Alito concludes, “In sum, the officials wielded potent authority. Their communications with Facebook were virtual demands. And Facebook’s quavering responses to those demands show that it felt a strong need to yield.”
From here we return to the District Court in Louisiana for trial, where we have an excellent judge (Terry Doughty). We will be granted additional discovery, in which we anticipate getting enough additional “smoking guns” to cross the high standing bar set by the majority Supreme Court opinion. The District court has combined our case with an analogous case filed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is clearly named and targeted in several government censorship missives—so between Hines and Kennedy there should be no questions on the issue of standing, even under the novel and strict criteria that SCOTUS requires in this case.
In other words, we will prevail in the end. I anticipate being back at the Supreme Court in another year or two for the final ruling. At that point, SCOTUS will not be able to temporize or look away as they did this time. And when judges examine the record in our case, they have only reached one conclusion: the government engaged in unconstitutional censorship on a mass scale. And it has to stop.
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Aaron Siri’s Book: Vaccines, Amen
By Maryanne DemasiMaryanne Demasi | Brownstone Institute | June 15, 2026
For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile.
Aaron Siri makes it clear in Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines that the story we’ve been told about vaccine science rests far more on belief than proof.
“No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines,” Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America’s overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule.
I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I’ve spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was.
Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won’t save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn’t get to say “trust me” the way many doctors do. “I need to prove claims with real data.”
And he does. … continue
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