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Zaluzhny Talking Peace With Russia Behind Zelensky and Biden’s Backs: Sy Hersh

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 01.12.2023

President Zelensky admitted this week that Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed to “achieve the desired results” and that Kiev is now in “a new phase” of the conflict with Russia. Meanwhile, Valery Zaluzhny, the general who enraged Zelensky by calling the crisis a “stalemate,” was absent from a Thursday meeting between the president and his generals.

Russia and Ukraine’s top generals have been holding secret discussions aimed at putting the Ukrainian crisis to bed, with Ukraine’s president, and the Biden administration, left out. That’s according to a new report by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh citing informed US sources.

The negotiations, said to be spearheaded by Russian Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov and Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny, still have “a lot of questions” left to be ironed out, one source, a US businessman with years of experience dealing with high-level Ukrainian diplomatic and military issues in the government, told Hersh. These include what to do about war criminals, matters of citizenship, ordnance disposal, and cross border economics, as well wrangling to assure “peace with honor,” according to a second source.

Russian officials have made no official statements on the matter, and Sputnik could not independently confirm the veracity of this information at the time of writing. Moscow has repeatedly said throughout the crisis that Ukrainian membership in NATO would constitute crossing its security “red lines.”

Hersh’s sources also told him that Zaluzhny’s bombshell interview in a British business magazine last month in which he admitted that Ukraine’s counteroffensive had reached a “stalemate” and that there would be no “deep and beautiful breakthrough” was “arranged” after Zaluzhny and Gerasimov had spoken several times.

The interview and accompanying op-ed written by Zaluzhny were “carefully orchestrated” by the Ukrainian commander to send a message to the Ukrainian government and the “madman who staked his life upon winning politically and militarily” at the helm that “the war is over and we want out,” according to a US official Hersh says was involved in the early stages of the general-to-general discussions.

“So the message that was sent to Zelensky is that we are going to have talks with the Russians with or without you and they are going to be military-to-military. Your neighbors are fed up with you, especially Poland and Hungary, and they want their Ukrainian refugees to go back to a peaceful country,” the official said. The state of Ukraine’s collapsed economy and the question of “how do you operate a country with no GNP?” was also driven home, the source added.

The US president and his foreign policy team have been left out of the talks, and “the White House is totally against the proposed agreement,” according to the US official who spoke to Hersh. “But it will happen. Putin has not disagreed,” the source said.

Zelensky has reportedly been told that “this is a military-to-military problem to solve and the talks will go on with or without you,” if need be. “We can finance his voyage to the Caribbean,” the official added.

Zelensky-Zaluzhny Spat

Hersh’s story comes after a month of escalating tensions between Zaluzhny and Zelensky after the publication of Zaluzhny’s interview and article in Western media on November 1, with Ukraine’s president first adamantly insisting that the conflict with Russia was “not a stalemate,” and emphasizing emphatically to US media that he would never negotiate with Moscow and Russian President Vladimir Putin under any circumstances.

The behind-the-scenes battle has come to include sackings of Zaluzhny allies, the mysterious bombing death attack of one of his aides, and a poisoning attack against Marianna Budanova, the wife of the Ukrainian military’s Main Intelligence Directorate chief.

On Thursday, Zelensky appeared to change his tune regarding the fate of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, saying it “did not achieve the desired results” as quickly as expected, that Kiev will be shifting to “a new phase of war” as winter sets in, and mobilize resources to build fortifications in Zaporozhye, Ukrainian-occupied areas of Donetsk, Kherson, Kharkov, Sumy, Chernigov, Kiev, Rovno and Volyn.

Meanwhile, Commander Zaluzhny was conspicuously absent from a meeting between Zelensky and his generals during a visit to a command post in Kharkov region.

One factor that the Hersh story did not account for is Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem. Veteran international relations expert Gilbert Doctorow told Sputnik this week that notwithstanding the political rivalries or conflicts in Kiev, they are just “a tempest in a teapot” given the power of the neo-Nazi street thug “grey cardinals” mobilized during the 2014 coup, who can and will do everything in their power to block any peace deal.

December 1, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Hamas: Israel made decision to resume its criminal aggression

Palestine Information Center – December 1, 2023

GAZA – The Hamas Movement said in a statement issued Friday that the Israeli occupation bore responsibility for the end of the truce for rejecting terms to free more hostages and extend it.

The Movement pointed out that Israel refused an offer to release more captives and the dead bodies of an Israeli family killed in Israeli air strikes.

“We offered to hand over the bodies of the Bibas family, release their father so that he can participate in their burial, and hand over two Israeli captives,” the group said in a statement.

Israel refused “all these offers because it had made a prior decision to resume its criminal aggression against the Gaza Strip,” it added.

Hamas held the US administration and its president, Biden, fully responsible for the continuation of Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip after its absolute support and the green light it gave it following its Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to Israel.

The group also stressed that the Palestinian people and resistance led by Al-Qassam Brigades are steadfast.

December 1, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Open Defiance

By William Schryver | imetatronink | November 30, 2023

In my view, the single most meaningful consequence of the NATO/Ukraine proxy war against Russia is that most of the major geopolitical players outside the imperial realm are suddenly in open defiance of the capricious “rules-based international order” and its rapacious monetary system.

The catalyst for this rebellion was that Vladimir Putin’s Russia stood alone amongst the kings, princes, presidents, and prime ministers of a trembling world, turned to the masters of empire, and said, “Not an inch further. In fact, you must withdraw to your 1997 status, and take all your armaments with you, beginning with your missiles in Poland and Romania.”

The masters of empire laughed him to scorn, and then encouraged their #MotherOfAllProxyArmies in Ukraine to concentrate to the Donbass and the Azov pursuant to conquering Novorossiya and Crimea once and for all … then on to Moscow.

This war was anything but “unprovoked Russian aggression”. This war was spawned and nurtured for decades in the secret chambers of the imperial dark lords in London and Washington. It was a war the empire knew Russia would fight. The imperial suzerains simply deceived themselves into believing it was a war Russia could not win.

As was imperative, Russia did choose to fight — notwithstanding there were many reasons to suppose they were insufficiently prepared to win in the event the full weight of the NATO countries were thrown against them.

As it has turned out (and contrary to the fantastical western narratives of Russian humiliation and massive losses), the Russians have prosecuted a remarkably economical destruction of not one, but three successive iterations of increasingly NATO-armed and NATO-trained armies.

And they have done so while assembling, equipping, and thoroughly training a reserve army twice the size of the one they have used to methodically wreck the armies arrayed against them in Ukraine.

They have achieved the greatest industrial mobilization since the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Their massive increases in production of the implements of industrial-scale warfare dwarfs the combined capabilities of their adversaries.

They have also quickly adapted to changing battlefield realities, and are innovating and mass-producing new war tools previously seen only as novelties, but now acknowledged as essential.

In short, the Russians are not only winning this war in an impressively decisive fashion, but they will emerge from it as the single most formidable and battle-hardened military force on the planet.

Most significantly, Russia has exposed for all to see that the empire not only has limitations, but that it is vastly weaker and more vulnerable than hardly anyone had previously been willing to believe.

THAT is why so much of the rest of the world is now emboldened to defy imperial edicts.

THAT is the reason new alliances are solidifying between heretofore reluctant friends.

Nothing unites the human playground quite like one intrepid soul willing to stand, fight, and humble the bully.

The tripartite alliance of Russia, China, and Iran is an adversary more than adequate to roll back imperial rule by leaps and bounds, and in a relatively short span of time.

Many of the “middle powers” can also see which way the wind is blowing, and are positioning themselves accordingly. Spheres of influence are being aggressively pursued and secured in every quarter of the earth.

And perhaps most meaningful of all, they are cooperating to progressively repudiate the empire’s debt notes as the coin of the realm. They have come to understand that a prerequisite to “fixing the world” is to return its money system to a much more equitable and sustainable basis.

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

The empire of debt and lies has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. All that remains is to see if it will go gently into that good night, or in a fit of humiliated rage, set the world on fire.

December 1, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

X ordered to turn over info on users who interacted with Trump

RT | November 30, 2023

Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, ordered X (formerly Twitter) to turn over account information on any users who interacted with the former president, according to a heavily redacted search warrant released by the US Department of Justice on Monday.

The warrant requests “all information from the ‘Connect’ or ‘Notifications’ tab for [Trump’s] account, including all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by the account, as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account (i.e. ‘mentions’ or ‘replies’).” This is in addition to Trump’s own search history, direct messages, a list of every user he “followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked,” and “content of all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by the then-president from October 2020 to January 2021.

Even advertising information, topic preferences, communications with X’s support staff, and data that was deleted but remains available to the platform must be turned over to the prosecutor, according to the document.

“There is no benign or reasonable justification for that demand,” FBI whistleblower Steve Friend opined in a post on X on Tuesday. Many Trump supporters took to X to express their disdain for the order, denouncing Smith as an “enemy of the people” and calling on Congress to defund his investigation.

The Justice Department released the warrant and several other filings in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from media organizations objecting to the secrecy of the investigation. The existence of the warrant only became public in August with Trump’s indictment, even though Smith had ordered X to turn over the information in January, as the warrant included an order forbidding the company from informing Trump about the search.

While X initially refused to comply with the warrant due to the gag order, arguing it was a violation of the First Amendment, Smith countered that informing the ex-president would result in “statutorily cognizable harm,” resulting in “destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, or other serious jeopardy to an investigation or delaying of trial.” The platform ultimately agreed to release the data, but missed a court deadline, resulting in a $350,000 fine for contempt of court.

Trump was indicted in August on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructing a congressional proceeding and conspiracy against rights related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He pleaded not guilty to all charges. While the election-interference case is just one of many felony indictments filed against the Republican this year, he has recently inched ahead of incumbent Joe Biden in polls of likely 2024 voters.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

Sometimes they really are out to get you

Gatito Bueno – bad cattitude – November 27, 2023

Well that sure does maybe explain why so much of this felt like a milspec psyop…

Jeez, can you imagine if they did something like this in the US?

Because this sure seems like waging info-war on your own people…

Yikes.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

‘If We Get Away With It, It’s Legal’: Documents Reveal New Details on U.S. Government’s ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | November 29, 2023

Government agencies, private-sector firms, academia and nonprofits were collaborating to combat alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation” as far back as 2017, according to new documents released Tuesday.

The “CTIL Files” — which refer to the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTI League, a key player in the so-called “Censorship-Industrial Complex” — are based on documents received from an unnamed but “highly credible” whistleblower, according to investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi, who released the files.

The new documents rival or exceed the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” in “scale and importance,” according to the journalists, two of whom — Shellenberger and Taibbi — were instrumental in releasing many of the “Twitter Files” that first called attention to the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

A comprehensive picture of the birth of the ‘anti-disinformation’ sector

The documents, which the journalists detailed on Substack, center around the activities of the CTI League, which “officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).”

According to the journalists, the CTI League documents “offer the missing link … to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files” and “offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the ‘anti-disinformation’ sector.”

“The whistleblower’s documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques,” the journalists wrote.

Documents in the “CTIL Files” show members of the CTI League, DHS officials and key figures from social media companies “all working closely together in the censorship process.”

This “public-private model” laid the groundwork for “anti-misinformation” and “anti-disinformation” campaigns launched by the U.S. and U.K. governments in 2020 and 2021, the journalists wrote, including attempts to circumvent First Amendment protections against government censorship of speech in the U.S.

Such tactics included “masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral,” they added.

The CTI League went still further though, the journalists wrote, engaging “in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote ‘counter-messaging,’ co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups.”

Such censorship lies at the heart of Missouri et al. v. Biden et al., a First Amendment censorship case where injunctions were issued against several federal agencies and government officials, barring them from communicating with social media companies regarding user content. The injunctions are now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Former British intelligence analyst charged with creating counter-disinformation project

The journalists wrote that while previous releases of the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” revealed “overwhelming evidence of government-sponsored censorship,” they had not revealed “where the idea for such mass censorship came from.”

The whistleblower alleged that a key figure in the CTI League, “a ‘former’ British intelligence analyst, was ‘in the room’ at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a ‘repeat of 2016.’”

By 2019, this analyst, Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, had “developed the sweeping censorship framework,” leading a team of U.S. and U.K. “military and intelligence contractors” who “co-led CTIL.” Previously, in 2018, Terp attended a 10-day military exercise organized by the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, according to the journalists.

It was there that Terp met Pablo Breuer, a former U.S. Navy commander, who became a key figure in the CTI League. According to Wired, the two realized that misinformation “could be treated … as a cybersecurity problem.” This led to the development of CogSec, which soon housed the “MisinfoSec Working Group.”

“Terp’s plan, which she shared in presentations to information security and cybersecurity groups in 2019, was to create ‘Misinfosec communities’ that would include government,” the journalists wrote.

By spring 2020, it appears Terp achieved this plan, as the CTI League partnered with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has been implicated in prior releases of the “Twitter Files” for its role in the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

The MisinfoSec Working Group included Renee DiResta, a former CIA operative who worked for the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) — later renamed the Virality Project (VP). This group “created a censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategy called Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT).”

According to the journalists, AMITT adapted “a cybersecurity framework developed by MITRE, a major defense and intelligence contractor that has an annual budget of $1 to $2 billion in government funding.” MITRE is a backer of the Vaccination Credential Initiative and the SMART Health Card — a digital “vaccine passport.”

Terp used AMITT to develop the DISARM framework, which the World Health Organization (WHO) applied in “countering anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe.”

The same framework “has been formally adopted by the European Union and the United States as part of a ‘common standard for exchanging structured threat information on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference’” according to the journalists.

‘Can we get a troll on their bums?’

According to the journalists, MisinfoSec’s motivation for counter-misinformation was the “twin political earthquakes of 2016: Brexit and the election of Trump.”

“There’s something off kilter with our information landscape,” Terp and other CTI League members wrote, according to documents.

“The usual useful idiots and fifth columnists — now augmented by automated bots, cyborgs and human trolls — are busily engineering public opinion, stoking up outrage, sowing doubt and chipping away at trust in our institutions. And now it’s our brains that are being hacked,” they added.

In spring 2020, the CTI League set its sights on COVID-19-related narratives, targeting users who engaged in messaging that ran contrary to official policy.

“CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, such as anti-lockdown narratives like ‘all jobs are essential,’ ‘we won’t stay home,’ and ‘open America now,’” the journalists wrote.

“CTIL created a law enforcement channel for reporting content as part of these efforts. The organization also did research on individuals posting anti-lockdown hashtags … and kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios. The group also discussed requesting ‘takedowns’ and reporting website domains to registrars,” they added.

Regarding the “we won’t stay home” narrative, internal documents revealed by the whistleblower showed that CTI League members wrote, “Do we have enough to ask for the groups and/or accounts to be taken down or at a minimum reported and checked?” and “Can we get all troll on their bums if not?”

They also called posters circulating online promoting anti-lockdown posters “disinformation artifacts,” saying, “We should have seen this one coming” and asking “can we stop the spread, do we have enough evidence to stop superspreaders, and are there other things we can do (are there countermessagers we can ping etc).”

During CTI League brainstorming sessions to develop strategies for “counter-messaging for things like encouraging people to wear masks,” statements such as “Repetition is truth” were uttered by CTI League staff, the journalists noted.

The CTI League also sought to go “beyond simply urging Twitter to slap a warning label on Tweets, or to put individuals on blacklists.”

According to the journalists, “The AMITT framework calls for discrediting individuals as a necessary prerequisite of demanding censorship against them” and “trying to get banks to cut off financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events.”

As part of these efforts, even truthful information was targeted. In a 2019 podcast on “Disinformation, Cognitive Security, and Influence,” Terp admitted, “Most information is actually true … but set in the wrong context.”

“You’re not trying to get people to believe lies most of the time,” she said. “Most of the time, you’re trying to change their belief sets. And in fact, really deeper than that, you’re trying to change, to shift their internal narratives … the set of stories that are your baseline for your culture.”

Previous “Twitter Files” releases have revealed that true information was targeted for censorship by the U.S. government and social media platforms like Twitter if the information contradicted official policy regarding COVID-19 vaccines and restrictions.

‘Cognitive security’ a euphemism for censorship

In the same podcast, according to the journalists, Terp said, “Cognitive security is the thing you want to have. You want to protect that cognitive layer. It basically, it’s about pollution. Misinformation, disinformation is a form of pollution across the Internet.”

The journalists wrote, “A key component of Terp’s work through CTIL, MisinfoSec, and AMITT was to insert the concept of ‘cognitive security’ into the fields of cybersecurity and information security.”

Such “cognitive security” was seen as being threatened by the erosion of the mass media’s control on information and influence over public opinion.

Documents revealed by the whistleblower included a MisinfoSec report stating “For a long time, the ability to reach mass audiences belonged to the nation-state (e.g. in the USA via broadcast licensing through ABC, CBS and NBC).”

“Now, however, control of informational instruments has been allowed to devolve to large technology companies who have been blissfully complacent and complicit in facilitating access to the public for information operators at a fraction of what it would have cost them by other means,” the report said.

The same report also called for a form of “pre-bunking,” to “preemptively inoculate a vulnerable population against messaging,” suggesting that DHS-funded Information Sharing and Analysis Centers could be used to promote such pre-bunking.

‘If we get away with it, it’s legal’

Public-private partnerships were specifically sought out in an attempt to circumvent First Amendment free speech protections in the U.S., the documents revealed, even while Bloomberg, The Washington Post and Wired wrote glowing articles portraying the CTI League as a mere group of “volunteer” cybersecurity experts.

Yet, according to the journalists, “In just one month, from mid-March to mid-April [2020], the supposedly all-volunteer CTIL had grown to ‘1,400 vetted members in 76 countries’” and had “helped to take down 2,833 cybercriminal assets on the internet” including some which impersonated government organizations, the United Nations and WHO.

On the same 2019 podcast, according to the journalists, Breuer explained how the CTI League was getting around the First Amendment, by working to get “nontraditional partners into one room,” including “maybe somebody from one of the social media companies, maybe a few special forces operators, and some folks from Department of Homeland Security.”

Together, they would “talk in a non-attribution, open environment in an unclassified way so that we can collaborate better, more freely and really start to change the way that we address some of these issues,” Breuer said.

Breuer even likened these tactics to those employed by the Chinese government, saying “If you talk to the average Chinese citizen, they absolutely believe that the Great Firewall of China is not there for censorship. They believe that it’s there because the Chinese Communist Party wants to protect the citizenry and they absolutely believe that’s a good thing.”

“If the US government tried to sell that narrative, we would absolutely lose our minds and say, ‘No, no, this is a violation of our First Amendment rights.’ So, the in-group and out-group messaging have to be often different,” he said.

The whistleblower told the journalists that CTI League leaders did not discuss their potential violation of the First Amendment.

“The ethos was that if we get away with it, it’s legal, and there were no First Amendment concerns because we have a ‘public-private partnership’ — that’s the word they used to disguise those concerns. ‘Private people can do things public servants can’t do, and public servants can provide the leadership and coordination,’” the whistleblower said.

According to the journalists, the authors of the MisinfoSec report also “advocated for police, military, and intelligence involvement in censorship, across Five Eyes nations, and even suggested that Interpol should be involved.”

The CTI League documents also suggest that the organization was involved in a form of domestic spying, with one document noting that while censorship activities abroad are “typically” performed by “the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense,” such efforts “against Americans” necessitate the use of private partners because the government lacks the “legal authority” to do so.

According to the whistleblower, CTI League members also went to great lengths to conceal their activities, with a CTI League handbook recommending the use of burner phones, online pseudonyms and the generation of fake AI faces. One document advised, “Lock your s**t down … your spy disguise.”

One suggested list of questions to be posed to prospective CTI League members proposed asking whether those individuals had ever “worked with influence operations (e.g. disinformation, hate speech, other digital harms etc) previously” and whether those efforts included “active measures” and “psyops” (psychological operations).

Indeed, according to the documents, several CTI League members had worked for the military or intelligence agencies, while according to the whistleblower, “roughly 12-20 active people involved in CTIL worked at the FBI or CISA” — even, for a time, displaying their agency seals alongside their names on the CTI League’s internal Slack channel.

Terp, for instance, previously designed machine learning algorithms and unmanned vehicle systems for the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence.

According to the whistleblower, the CTI League sought “to become part of the federal government.”

Shellenberger, Taibbi to testify before Congress this week

According to the journalists, the FBI declined to comment, while CISA, Terp and other CTI League figures did not respond to requests for comment.

However, one CTI League member, Bonnie Smalley, did respond to the journalists’ request. She wrote, verbatim, “all i can comment on is that i joined cti league which is unaffiliated with any govt orgs because i wanted to combat the inject bleach nonsense online during covid. … i can assure you that we had nothing to do with the govt though.”

“CTIL appears to have generated publicity about itself in the Spring and Fall of 2020 for the same reason EIP did: to claim later that its work was all out in the open and that anybody who suggested it was secretive was engaging in a conspiracy theory,” the journalists wrote.

“But as internal messages have revealed, much of what EIP did was secret, as well as partisan, and demanding of censorship by social media platforms, contrary to its claims,” they said, adding that “EIP and VP, ostensibly, ended, but CTIL is apparently still active, based on the LinkedIn pages of its members.”

The journalists said the documents will be presented to Congressional investigators and made public, while protecting the identity of the whistleblower.

Shellenberger and Taibbi will testify at Thursday’s hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. They previously testified before the same committee in March.

On Tuesday, Taibbi appeared in a live YouTube webcast presenting some of the key revelations from the first release of the “CTIL Files.”

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NATO Chief Puts Hypocrisy on Full Display

By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | November 29, 2023

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg put NATO’s hypocrisy on display while talking to reporters ahead of the meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels on November 28.

Asked by a reporter about American and European struggles to continue providing Ukraine with weapons and ammunition, Stoltenberg replied, “It’s our obligation to ensure that we provide Ukraine with the weapons they need. Because it will be a tragedy for Ukrainians if President Putin wins.”

The tragedy for Ukrainians has already happened. Their infrastructure and economy are destroyed, their population is dispersed, their relatives are dead or injured and their land is lost. The greater tragedy to come is not the war ending, but the war continuing. In the first weeks of the war, Ukrainians could have kept almost all of their land and lost almost none of their lives for a promise not to join NATO. The political West ordered them to walk away from the negotiating table and onto the battlefield. They promised them—directly or indirectly—as much military and financial support as it takes for as long as it takes. Nearly two years later, Ukraine will likely have to make the same promise, but they have lost that land and they have lost those lives.

Russia brought tragedy to Ukraine; the United States, United Kingdom, and their NATO allies bloated and magnified that tragedy. The tragedy now would not be ending the war even if it means “Putin wins.” The tragedy now is that NATO is willing to continue feeding a war that they know Ukraine can’t win. “When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring,” The Wall Street Journal reported, “Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces.” Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny has said that the war has reached a “stalemate” that over time can only favor Russia.

The tragedy for Ukrainians would not be negotiating an end to the war, it would be NATO exercising the “obligation” to continue the war.

Stoltenberg gave a second reason for continuing to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need; so that Ukrainians can go on dying for NATO goals and NATO security. If the war ends now, “it will be dangerous for us,” Stoltenberg said. The United States “will continue to provide support” to Ukraine “because it is in the security interest of the United States to do so.” NATO must “stay the course” because “[t]his is about also about our security interests.”

Stoltenberg knows this war is not being fought because Russia wanted to conquer other territory; Stoltenberg knows this war is being fought because Russia wanted to defend its territory. This war did not happen because Russia was a threat to NATO territory, it happened because NATO was a threat to Russian territory. How do we know that Stoltenberg knows this? Because he said so.

Putin “sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg said on September 7, 2023. “That… was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine.” He then said that when “we didn’t sign that… he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”

“President Putin,” Stoltenberg concluded, “invaded a European country to prevent more NATO.”

Stoltenberg has publicly stated his awareness that this war was fought, not over American or NATO security concerns, but over Russian security concerns.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also recently said that the United States must go on supporting Ukraine or Russia would win and steamroll on over the Baltic countries, Poland, and beyond. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov mocked Austin, saying, “This comes from a man who holds a high-ranking position and cannot but receive expert views… and who cannot but understand what is going on in Ukraine and that Russia has never had and can never have any aggressive or expansionist plans.”

Ukraine’s chief negotiator in the Belarus and Istanbul talks with Russia has also recently said that stopping NATO from expanding to Ukraine and Russia’s borders was the “key point” for Russia and that “[e]verything else was simply rhetoric and political ‘seasoning.’”

Stoltenberg says that if Russia is allowed to win “the message to all authoritarian leaders—not only in Moscow, but also in Beijing—is that when they violate international law, when they invade another country when they use force, they get what they want. So this is about the whole idea of a rules-based international order, where territorial borders are respected.”

Stoltenberg transitions from “international law” to “rules-based order” because his case cannot be made without hypocrisy on the former. International law applies equally to everybody. But the United States or NATO have frequently invaded other countries by force and disrespected their territorial borders: Panama, Grenada, Libya, Kosovo, Iraq and Syria. Before Ukraine, modern Russia had not. But the rules-based order, unlike international law, allows Stoltenberg to make the case that Russia has violated the rules but the U.S. and NATO have not because the rules are made up as you go along so that the United States is always within them and Russia is always without. Under the unwritten rules-based order, rules are applied when they benefit the U.S. while the U.S. is exempt when they don’t.

American and NATO support for Ukraine may be about U.S. insistence on enforcing the rules-based system, but the United States is not an enforcer of international law.

Stoltenberg’s third reason for continuing to press the war in Ukraine is read right off the U.S. script; “… we need to continue to support them also knowing that the stronger Ukraine is on the battlefield, the stronger the handle will be on the negotiating table.” That point has passed. Ukraine is in a weaker position on the battlefield than they were before the counteroffensive. Russia is winning the war of land, the war of attrition on weapons, the war of attrition on lives, and the technological war. Ukraine had a better seat at the negotiating table in the first weeks after the invasion when the political West ordered them to stop negotiating. They were in a better position a year ago when they recaptured areas of Kherson before the counteroffensive. Far from strengthening Ukraine’s position on the battlefield or at the negotiating table, supporting the continuation of the war seems to be putting Ukraine in a weaker and weaker position. The terms that will be offered Ukraine today are likely much worse than the terms they were offered at the start of the war. And they will likely be worse tomorrow.

Stoltenberg says that “if you want a negotiated, peaceful solution, which ensures that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent nation, then the best way to get there is to continue to provide military support to Ukraine.” But it is not war that will guarantee Ukraine sovereignty. As Lavrov recently pointed out, Russia recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine based on a declaration of independence and a constitution that declared Ukraine’s neutrality and non-membership in NATO, and Russia will continue to when those conditions are reinstated. The best way to ensure Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty is not to help it fight for the right to be in NATO but to encourage it to promise not to join NATO.

Finally, Stoltenberg put NATO’s hypocrisy on display not only by what he said, but by what he did not say. If the words that Stoltenberg said were meant to rally Western ears, the words he did not say will be the loudest in Ukrainian ears. Though Ukraine is fighting, in part, for the right to be in NATO, that is the one thing that Stoltenberg, hypocritically, did not offer Ukraine. The “Allies have stated again and again the last time at the NATO Summit with all the leaders present in Vilnius” that they will “provide support to Ukraine,” that they “will step up” their support for Ukraine, that they will “help them… to modernize their army” and that they will “ensure full interoperability between the Ukrainian forces and the NATO forces.” The one thing Stoltenberg did not say that NATO has offered Ukraine is membership in NATO.

Ukraine should fight to defend NATO’s insistence on the right of a country to choose its own alliances and to join NATO without being offered membership in NATO. That is the final hypocrisy put on full display in Stoltenberg’s comments to reporters.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Russia: US played ‘destructive role’ in escalating Israeli war in Gaza

Press TV – November 29, 2023

Russia says the United States has escalated the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas by playing a “destructive role.”

Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Chumakov made the comment during a speech he delivered to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. He denounced Washington’s policies in West Asia.

“The policies of the US which meant that it kept turning a blind eye to the ongoing Israeli settlement construction in the occupied [Palestinian] territories and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, have played a destructive role in the current escalation,” he said.

According to Gaza government health officials, over 15,000 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children, were killed by Israeli aggression during the 49 days of war. Many more are feared to be buried under the rubble.

“As a result, we are now witnessing a conflict of unprecedented scope, which may spread to the entire Middle East,” Chumakov warned.

Washington has supported Tel Aviv’s relentless attacks on the Palestinian territory as an instance of “self-defense,” and has provided the regime with thousands of arms consignments since the onset of the war.

A four-day Qatari-brokered ceasefire between Tel Aviv and Hamas went into effect on Friday and was extended for two more days on Monday following mediation from Egypt and Qatar.

So far, under the truce deal, Hamas freed 69 hostages in return for 150 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

US fully responsible for situation in Gaza: Moscow

On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the US is fully responsible for the current situation in the war-ravaged Palestinian enclave, stressing that Washington’s policies have served as the primary sources of tension in the conflict zone.

“The entire current collapse on the territory [of the Gaza Strip], where a colossal tragedy related to the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation has unfolded, is completely and fully the responsibility of the United States, or, rather, I should say, [due to] the irresponsibility [of the US]. It is only they [who are responsible],” she said during an interview with the Sputnik radio station.

The Gaza health ministry says the Israeli regime keeps denying hospitals fuel for their generators in violation of the truce. The Israeli onslaught on Gaza has brought almost all vital infrastructure in the besieged strip to a standstill.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , | Leave a comment

US military aid to Ukraine may be postponed until after 2024 elections

By Ahmed Adel | November 29, 2023

Members of the US Congress fear that if a military and financial aid package for Ukraine cannot be agreed before Christmas, it could be delayed until after the 2024 presidential elections, which take place in the distant November. The Economist notes that due to this funding uncertainty, “now America has become one of Ukraine’s greatest worries” since Washington has been “Ukraine’s greatest saviour as it marshalled arms, money and more to help” to fight Russian forces.

According to the London-based outlet, “the longer the delay, the more the Republican and Democratic parties will “become consumed by election fever.”

“If there is no deal before Christmas, some in Congress worry, a fresh allocation of aid may be delayed until after the elections in November 2024,” the Economist reported, citing a source in the US Senate, who added that if Donald Trump was to be elected president, funding could stop completely.

Ukrainian officials fear that without American support, Kiev’s allies in Europe could lose heart, with the magazine highlighting that Ukraine is trying to boost its defence industry, which was famous during the Soviet era but has been badly neglected since.

“No matter how much we grow local production, we would be hugely dependent on Western partnerships,” admitted a senior official in Kiev.

Another Ukrainian source cited by the Economist said, “In the spring the flow of military supplies was a broad river. In the summer it was a stream. Now it is a few drops of tears.”

Without US and Western funding, Ukraine’s collapse would be imminent since this was the decisive factor in why the eastern European country’s military has survived for as long as it has. The situation is so dire that the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy and the National Bank believe that Ukraine’s GDP is expected to reach pre-crisis 2021 levels only in 2030.

Ukraine’s GDP dropped 29.1% last year, falling from 5.5 trillion hryvnia to 3.8 trillion hryvnia at constant prices, considering 2021 as the base year. With an average annual growth rate of 4.8%, the Ukrainian economy will reach pre-crisis levels only in 2030, when GDP will reach 5.6 trillion hryvnia at 2021 prices.

In comparison, the International Monetary Fund expects an average growth of 4.3% per year for the Ukrainian economy from 2025 to 2028.

Meanwhile, the Russian economy, which contracted 2.1% last year to 132.5 trillion rubles in 2021 prices, is forecast to grow 2.45% this year, reaching a GDP of 135.7 trillion rubles. Despite the sanctions, this value represents approximately 445 billion rubles more than recorded before the crisis.

Evidently, the sanctions against Russia have failed whilst Ukraine continues to struggle. Yet, despite this reality, the Biden administration is adamant about maintaining sanctions and financing Ukraine and is only blocked from doing so because of the strong opposition in Congress.

Biden’s unrelenting yet failed Ukraine policy will likely be his undoing since his popularity continues to plummet in the polls.

The latest Morning Consult poll, updated on November 27, had Biden’s approval rating at 38% and his disapproval rating at 55%. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of all polls, Biden’s approval rating sat at 39%, with 54.7% disapproving.

The New York Times/Siena College polls at the beginning of November showed Trump ahead of Biden in four of the six swing states. Still, more indicators of the president’s electoral peril soon followed. Biden’s popularity in head-to-head matchups with Trump is dwindling, as seen in the fact that among the latest surveys this month from 13 separate pollsters, Biden’s position is worse than their previous polls in all but two.

As Politico highlighted, “And while polls suggest most of the movement comes from voters abandoning Biden — who might become undecided but not swing to supporting Trump — the Republican has also started to gain steam. Trump’s vote share in the national polling average is higher now than at any point in the past year.”

A massive reason for the swing in popularity between Biden and Trump is their respective positions on the Ukraine war. Trump has claimed he can end the conflict in 24 hours, and even though this is doubtful, it points to the fact that he wants to wrap up this war quickly. Biden, on the other hand, not only instigated the start of the war but is attempting to continue it for as long as possible, even at the expense of the American taxpayers who are already struggling with the cost of living.

If funding of Ukraine is discontinued until at least November 2024, Moscow will likely have ended the war by then after achieving their goals and will be ready to start engaging in slow normalisation efforts with Washington – if Trump were to be elected. And even if Congress eventually approves a new aid package for Ukraine, it will only merely delay for a short duration Russia’s final victory.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

November 29, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Ex-Soviet state summons Western envoys over funding of local media

RT | November 29, 2023

Azerbaijan has filed complaints with the US, Germany and France over the illegal funding of a local media outlet, which has published investigations into government corruption. Three of its journalists were recently arrested on accusations of currency smuggling.

On Tuesday, the Azerbaijani foreign ministry issued a statement saying the ambassadors of the three Western countries had been summoned to a meeting. They were informed that the AbzasMedia portal was conducting unlawful financial operations with the participation of organizations registered in those states. They were also told that their embassies were involved in such activities.

Azerbaijani legislation prohibits the allocation of funds to unregistered projects. However, according to the foreign ministry, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), FreedomNow, New Democracy Foundation, and other organizations illegally transferred funds to the country, violating the rules of grant allocation and illegally facilitating the activities of the unregistered media portal AbzasMedia.

AbzasMedia said in a statement that, several days ago, three of its journalists were arrested on charges of “currency smuggling” and sentenced to four months in custody, linking the case to its corruption investigations. The outlet also reported that, according to police, €40,000 ($44,000) in cash was found in the office, and accused officers of “deliberately putting money in the office to justify arrests.”

Last month, the government of neighboring Georgia raised the alarm over the actions of the USAID-funded Center for Applied Nonviolent Strategies (CANVAS), saying it was planning to unleash a violent color revolution. The US Embassy in Tbilisi claimed the accusations against CANVAS were “false and fundamentally mischaracterize the goals of our assistance to Georgia.”

On its website, USAID states that it is “investing in democracy work to advance a free, peaceful, and prosperous world.”

USAID activities have been banned in Russia since 2012. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, this decision was mostly due to the fact that the nature of the agency’s work in the country did not always comply with the stated goals, including their “attempts to influence the political process” through the distribution of grants.

November 29, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Russian aircraft for Iran and multipolarity

By Drago Bosnic | November 29, 2023

After months of speculation whether Iran would acquire Russian weapons, particularly advanced fighter jets, on November 28, Deputy Defense Minister of Iran Mehdi Farahi dispelled previous rumors about the deal supposedly falling through and confirmed that Tehran had finally inked the contract to procure Su-35 air superiority/multirole fighters, Yak-130 light fighter/advanced trainer jets and Mi-28 attack helicopters from Russia. The announcement comes amid an enormous increase in the already massive American military presence in the Middle East, which includes everything from carrier strike groups (CSGs) to fighter jets and even strategic bombers. The tensions have escalated significantly in the context of the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict, prompting Iran to urgently modernize its aging fighter jet fleet.

Speculation about the acquisition has been ongoing since last year, specifically after Egypt withdrew from the deal to buy Russian jets. Cairo’s fear of getting on America’s bad side pushed it to stifle its sovereignty (and security), an opportunity that Tehran took to make a deal that would otherwise take years to finalize. Western sources have been speculating about the Su-35 deal with Iran even before the special military operation (SMO). Rumors about the acquisition continued throughout 2022, followed by speculation about the deal allegedly not going through. However, by September, it became clear that the military cooperation between Moscow and Tehran would include even more than Su-35 fighter jets, particularly after the Yak-130 light fighters/advanced trainers were spotted in Iran.

The Yak-130 can double as both attack jets and advanced trainer aircraft, but their primary role is the latter, meaning they were especially indicative of the deal going through. Namely, the Yak-130 is used as the stepping stone in flight training for pilots preparing to fly the Su-35. Getting advanced fighter jets for the Iranian Air Force (IRIAF) has been a point of contention for decades as the country was under a strict Western arms embargo that prevented any advanced weapons acquisitions. This had its perks, as it forced Tehran to develop a plethora of indigenous industries, including a very robust and highly cost-effective drone production, and now it’s clear that Tehran’s advanced military industry is perfectly capable of going toe to toe with the world’s most powerful countries in terms of developing and deploying unmanned systems.

However, despite these advances that also include a plethora of other weapons, such as surface combatants, transport aircraft and long-range SAM systems (mostly based on Russian designs), Iran is sorely lacking in the manned combat aviation compartment. This is hardly surprising, given that only a handful of countries in the world have fully indigenous aerospace industries. Even Asian giants such as China and India still rely heavily on Russia to acquire top-of-the-line aircraft, although their respective advances in this regard are certainly commendable. By getting the Su-35, Tehran is pushing the capabilities of the IRIAF well into the 21st century. Various reports indicate that at least 24 fighter jets have been ordered to replace the aging F-14 “Tomcats”, while there’s speculation that it would acquire over 60 in follow-up orders.

Almost the same could be said for the Mi-28 attack helicopter. The advanced Russian rotorcraft has very few equivalents abroad and would certainly revolutionize Iranian capabilities. Namely, Tehran currently relies on its ancient Vietnam War-era AH-1 “Super Cobra” attack helicopters which are decades behind technologically, even with the incremental upgrades and overhauls that the Iranian military has been applying. Reports indicate that Iranian forces operating in Syria were impressed by the performance of Iraqi and Russian Mi-28s in both Iraq and Syria, which was a major contributing factor to the decision to acquire them. The superb flight characteristics and armament of this Russian helicopter are rivaled only by the less conventional coaxial rotors-equipped Ka-52 “Alligator”.

It’s important to note that the ongoing procurement is of the utmost importance to the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) and BRICS+ frameworks. Namely, Iran is already a member of the former, while it’s poised to join the latter in just over a month. With the US escalating tensions in the region, the primary target of which is precisely Tehran, the belligerent thalassocracy is looking to disrupt multiple peace processes in the region. Attacking Iran seems to be a very tempting prospect for Washington DC, as it would effectively “kill two birds with one stone” by making both SCO and BRICS+ look “weak” and unable (or even unwilling) to defend their new members. The US very likely believes this could be a deadly blow to the rapidly emerging multipolar world that will inevitably dismantle the existing “rules-based world order.” By arming Iran, Russia is making sure that any such attack would not only be a costly endeavor, but also a failed one.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

November 29, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel lobby offers another candidate $20m to run against Rashida Tlaib in Michigan

MEMO | November 28, 2023

Nasser Beydoun revealed on social media that he had been contacted by the Israeli lobby group AIPAC and offered $20 million to run against Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in Michigan. Beydoun is the second candidate who has been offered funds to run against Tlaib, with Senate candidate Hill Harper speaking of a similar offer last week.

Taking to X, Beydoun wrote: “Even knowing where I stand on AIPAC’s influence on our elections and foreign policy, the pro-Israel lobby had the nerve to suggest that I would even consider taking a dime from them.”

Adding that he had been asked to “run against my friend Rashida Tlaib.”

“The pro-Israel lobby will go to any length to remove anybody from the US Congress that has any opposition to their agenda and their total unequivocal support for Israel, good, bad, or indifferent.”

Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 12th District in Congress, is the only Palestinian-American in the US House of Representatives. She is known for her criticism of Israel’s occupation and its invasion of Gaza.

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib for some statements that angered the Zionist lobby and the right-wing movement in the US, such as the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea.”

Politico first reported on 22 November that a Michigan businessman had offered Harper $20 million in campaign money if he stood against Tlaib in next year’s Democratic primary race, identifying Linden Nelson as the figure.

November 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

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